Colonial Williamsburg is basically a theme park about colonial days in America, the time in the 18th century before and around the establishment of the United States. It can be somewhat kitschy^[1], but it can also provide a good bit of education about U.S. history.

John Levine notes that using secure branding can be an effective way to combat phishing. “Secure“ branding, in this sense, means using trusted authorities to verify the credentials of a web site or email sender, and then displaying branding information, such as a logo, in a trusted area of the application window, done in a way that would be hard to attack.

John is certain right, in principle, but the difficulty is that principle doesn’t necessarily translate into reality, for a number of reasons.

In 2007, I had a series in my personal blog about technology in Star Trek. I remembered that series the other day, when I read an article in New Scientist about the science in Battlestar Galactica.^[1]

The New Scientist article focuses on human physiology and psychology, and on gravity and g-forces. It doesn’t look at power, speed, computers, astronomical issues, or any of a number of other things that would have been fun to see covered. Oh, well.

In his “Practical Security” column in the May/June issue of IEEE Internet Computing magazine, Stephen Farrell talks about strength of cipher-suites, and the fact that the overall strength is not simply measured by the key length of which the user is aware. It’s a useful thing to understand if you’re responsible for implementing encryption, and it’s something that we often get wrong, using strong asymmetric encryption up front, but weaker symmetric encryption behind it, or the other way around.