Sending Encrypted Text (SMS) Messages

In the times of WhatsApp, iMessage and others, text messages are not as sexy as they once were. With internet connectivity being available almost anywhere, people tend to resort to methods to message each other.

Still, the SMS is not dead and it is the go to choice for those who don't trust the application makers. That is specially the case of professional who need to exchange information quickly in their line of work.

The problem with text messages is that their common protocol does not provide sufficient protection for the its contents: the messages are sent in plain text, which means an eavesdropper could intercept what's being sent and received with relatively ease.

It's not a surprise that amidst so much concern with privacy and security that applications specialized in secure exchange of text messages exist. 

One application that guarantees text messages can be exchanged security is Chat Safe. This free application utilizes strong asymmetric encryption to protect the contents of messages sent and received by anyone using the app.

It not only permits to safely send and receive text content but also guarantees that the identities of the sender and recipient of the message, making it virtually impossible to spoof SMS messages, forging authors or recipients.

Brute Force Cryptographic Attack

Breaking encryption is not that easy these days.

Here are some resources that may help you getting familiar with the subject.

A brute force attack against a cipher consists of breaking a cipher by trying all possible keys. Statistically, if the keys were originally chosen randomly, the plaintext will become available after about half of the possible keys are tried. The underlying assumption is, of course, that the cipher is known. Since A. Kerckoffs first published it, a fundamental maxim of cryptography has been that security must reside only in the key. As Claude E. Shannon said a few decades later, 'the enemy knows the system'. In practice, it has been excellent advice.
Full article


More resources:
A Mathematical Theory of Communication (PDF paper)
Brute-Force Attacks Explained: How All Encryption is Vulnerable 
How secure is AES against brute force attacks?
Information theory (Wikipedia)

Passing points or by reference in C - Stackoverflow

Another great set of observations about pointers in C.

"

To elaborate a little more. Whatever you pass as an argument to c functions, it is passed by values only. Whether it be a variable's value or the variable address.

What makes the difference is what you are sending.

When we pass-by-value we are passing the value of the variable to a function. When we pass-by-reference we are passing an alias of the variable to a function. C can pass a pointer into a function but that is still pass-by-value. It is copying the value of the pointer, the address, into the function.

---

• If you are sending the value of a variable, then only the value will be received by the function, and changing that won't effect the original value.
• If you are sending the address of a variable, then also only the value(the address in this case) is sent, but since you have the address of a variable it can be used to change the original value.

"

See full entry here.

Article - Answering Your Questions on Work-Life Balance

Answering Your Questions on Work-Life Balance
"Before taking off on Virgin America’s inaugural flight from San Francisco to Honolulu to work hard and Hawaii hard, I took some time out to answer your questions on work-life balance.

My first answers were to questions all about taking a step back, convincing management to allow working from home and encouraging leaders to take time off. You can watch them all over here, and read some tips on how to be a better boss too.

Next up, I answered some questions about how technology has affected down-time, how to deal with guilt about flexible working, and how to educate youngsters about work-life balance."

Watch this video to see his answers.

Logical operators || and ! are all you need for every possible logical expression

I saw this on StackOverflow and thought it was a something we all ought to know!!!

Are || and ! operators sufficient to make every possible logical expression?

"

[...] the set of operators comprising of || and ! isfunctionally complete. Here's a constructive proof of that, showing how to use them to express all sixteen possible logical connectives between the boolean variables A and B:

• True: A || !A
• A NAND B: !A || !B
• B implies A: !B || A
• A implies B: !A || B
• A OR B: A || B
• Not B: !B
• Not A: !A
• A XOR B: !(!A || B) || !(A || !B)
• A XNOR B: !(!A || !B) || !(A || B)
• A: A
• B: B
• A NOR B: !(A || B)
• A does not imply B: !(!A || B)
• B does not imply A: !(!B || A)
• A AND B: !(!A || !B)
• False: !(A || !A)

"

See the fill answer here

The Ex-CEO Of Evernote Isn’t Really Interested In Investing - LinkedIn

The Ex-CEO Of Evernote Isn’t Really Interested In Investing. Here’s Why He Just Became A VC

"The co-founder and recently ex-CEO of Evernote, Libin made his name by creating a program that helps people organize their lives. Yet he professes to be one of the most disorganized people he knows and is quite bad at responding to emails. He stayed at Evernote in the CEO role for nearly nine years -- growing the company from 20 employees to 400 with nearly $300 million in funding -- but claims to have no real appetite for scaling businesses.

And now, after leaving his startup’s C-suite to assume the role of executive chairman, Libin is taking his first full-time gig in venture capital. The contradiction there? He doesn’t really find traditional VC work interesting."

Read the full article.

The Story Behind Siri and The Man Who Made Her - LinkedIn

“If I were to anthropomorphize Siri, I would imagine that it would think of me somewhat like a father: someone who wants the best for them, who teaches them, who is occasionally demanding, annoying, or embarrassing, but who loves them and is proud when they do well.”


Read the full article on LinkedIn