Yeah, I’m a day late on my links. It’s not that there isn’t much interesting going on, but I’ve been a little busy.

Uh oh, what’s that burning smell?

Google’s AppEngine has been having problems today.

Health is a pain

• Basic painkillers like Tylenol could be banned due to the liver damage they can cause.

Technology, smells like fish

• Japan is looking to breed a super tuna that grows faster and tastes better.

• Viral Patel has a really great and simple to understand writeup on double brace initialization in Java along with some example code. If you write Java, check it out.

• Bruce Schneier spreads word of a new attack against AES. While this doesn’t mean much for the continued security of your data it does remind us that nothing in technology (especially cryptography) is ever static. Be vigilant. That’s good advice, isn’t it?

  As Schneier states:

  While this attack is better than brute force — and some cryptographers will describe the algorithm as “broken” because of it — it is still far, far beyond our capabilities of computation.

  I love his articles.

• I was going through some backup CDs of mine from years ago (we’re talking 1999–so about 10 years or older) and stumbled across some .ZIPs I had password protected. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the password. Take my advice: If you’re going to password protect some stupid documents that don’t matter a darn to anyone else, make sure it’s something you can easily remember. Maybe even consider writing down the password and stuffing it under the carpet–anything. ‘Cause the fact is, after 10 years, those backups won’t be readable because you won’t be able to remember the password. Plus, you’ll have to look into cracking the password. Fortunately, none of the stuff contained in my passworded .ZIPs is all that interesting to me now. Plus, somewhat humorously, those same files are duplicated elsewhere. At the very least, it’ll give me an excuse to learn plain text attacks against ciphers if I have some time. I’m really curious what password I chose.

• I neglected to mention that Eclipse Galileo is out. This is probably the most exciting news of the week! I’ve been using it for about four days now, and I’m impressed. It’s a lot more responsive than Ganymede. If you’re going to grab it, consider downloading it from Eclipse Srouce’s Yoxos on-demand installer. Using Yoxos, you can build your own Eclipse distribution complete with the plugins you want. It’s so much easier than hunting plugins down by hand.