Information on Bruno Pedro

Mirror Worlds

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:34:48 +0000

A comment to my recent post “Streamnets” caught my attention to dig further because it mentioned the concept of Mirror Worlds, a written work by David Gelernter. It’s a fascinating book, quite ahead of its time – it was published back in 1993.

According to Gelernter, “[Mirror Worlds] are software models of some chunk of reality, some piece of the real world going on outside your window”. These pieces of the real world can be of diverse natures:

Streamnets

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:43:36 +0000

IDEA

The Internet is the infrastructure needed to interconnect machines to one another and guarantee that they’re online most of the time. According to Wikipedia, the Internet “is a network of networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and other technologies.”

Then, Streamnets are ad-hoc networks created by Spimes or other sensor based machines in order to advertise their activity streams onto the Internet. These networks don’t need to be online all the time, don’t require high bandwidth, and will use any existing communications technology, most probably wireless through GSM or even other types of RF for shorter or longer distances.

How to share a secret

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:15:38 +0000

“How to Share a Secret” is the title of paper written in 1979 by Adi Shamir (best known for his work on the RSA algorithm). The paper describes a method for dividing information in smaller pieces so that the knowledge of all but one of the pieces gives absolutely no information about the original information. Quoting the author:

This technique enables the construction of robust key management schemes for cryptographic systems that can function securely and reliably even when misfortunes destroy half the pieces and security breaches expose all but one of the remaining pieces.