News You Can Bruise for 2004 March 23

Read the Books that Will Impeach Bush & Sign the Petition

Them are talented books!

Idea follows. Compute a one-way hash of your email address. For instance, "8zhkqqkZ.A9tg" is a crypted version of "leonardr@segfault.org". "b83aaa5e5c8129987c8c54f2974e84d3" is the MD5 sum of "leonardr@segfault.org". You get the picture. Then give out "b83aaa5e5c8129987c8c54f2974e84d3-whatever@mysecretemail.com" to someone from whom you want to hide your true email address. When you want to see if they sent you mail, go to mysecretemail.com and say "Hey, I'm leonardr@segfault.org". mysecretemail.com thinks "Oh, that's good old b83aaa5e5c8129987c8c54f2974e84d3.*@mysecretemail.com," and forwards you all the accumulated mail.

It's cool and secret-agent-ish, but like I said I can't think of a real use for it. Also you could break it if you had a way of generating a specific hash collision, which you kind of do.

PS: more useful, less cool variant: leonardr-at-segfault.org-whatever@mymyriademails.com. This lets you get get infinitely many forwarding accounts for one email address.

One day, robot asked the head monk how to find kitten.

"The kitten that can be found is not the true kitten," said the head monk.

"Then why do we search for kitten?" asked robot.

"Why did you drop kitten?" asked the head monk.

At that moment, robot found kitten.