Anyway, it’s about time that I start following my own advice and try out some specific types of writing on my blog in order to help find my voice. I’ve always been into technology and recently I’ve been into politics. So, I’m going to go ahead focus on these two topics. Some things I write will deal exclusively with politics and some with technology. But occasionally I’m going to mix the two into what I like to call “Technololitics”. I’ll let you figure out how I came up with that one.

This is not to say, however, that if I have something interesting to say on another topic, then I won’t post it here. This is my outlet to the rest of the world and I hope that this blog evolves into something that is interesting for everyone.

Let’s say that you wanted to access my email account by guessing my password. What would you guess? “babyKittens35″? “2Hot2HanDoH!”? “zW4fa23s”? Without having any clues to help you start guessing mine, or any one’s password is impractically difficult. Even using a modern computer to guess for you, it could take literally millions of years to try all the possibilities (that seems like a lot, but amazingly it’s true!). It’s pretty safe to say that you will never guess my password. (Note: That is not a challenge. If you do somehow manage to guess my password, please do not do anything malicious, and please let me know so that I can change it. Thanks.)

There is another aspect to this situation. Given any password, it’s relatively easy to know if it’s the right one. Simply attempt to log into my email account with your guess, and if you succeed, then you know its right.

These two problems are at the heart of the one of the most famous problems in mathematics – the P vs. NP question. (It’s so famous, that there’s a million dollar prize available to the first person who can solve it). I won’t go into all of the details, but it concerns the complexity of certain types of problems. It basically boils down to whether or not there exist algorithms to solve the first problem (finding an unknown password) that are as simple as the method used in the second (verifying a password).

As of now, no one knows the answer to the P vs NP question. Most mathematicians and computer scientist believe it to be false, that is, the problems of the first type are inherently more difficult than those of the second. Hopefully they are right. As you might be able to discern from from the example above, all current methods of Internet security rely on the fact that it is false. It’s a scary thought to think that something so important to modern society could be based on something unknown.

I’ll digress into the world of athletics for a bit. At one point in time, most of the world thought it impossible for a human being to run a mile in less than four minutes. Almost immediately after Roger Bannister did it in 1954, people began breaking through this barrier one after another. Human history is filled with examples where once something is proved possible, it’s effects propagate throughout society.

Although, most experts think it unlikely, let’s consider the possibility that the P vs. NP question is true. It would be only a small matter of time until someone found a way to use it to their advantage and crack Internet security. This is particularly disturbing as there is a current trend toward cloud computing. More and more, people are entrusting their personal and professional lives to Internet services rather than their own personal computers. If Internet security were to fail due to this, it would be a complete disaster as information would no longer be safe at all. It would be impossible to protect your own identity. Email, on-line banking, and even Facebook (Dear Lord No!) would be compromised. We’d either have to rethink the way we handle Internet security, or we’d have to return to the dark ages of having to tear ourselves away from our computers and actually have to leave our homes to shop. All joking aside, these are some serious issues to think about. Even if the P vs. NP problem is proven false, scientist are now working on quantum computers that can break encryption using other, less traditional methods. If theses computers see the light of day anytime soon, we will definitely have to find a new way of securing our data on-line, and anywhere else for that matter.

Here’s another possibility: it could have very well already happened. There maybe people out there who can get into your on-line accounts as easily as you can and do all sorts of unspeakable things – and you wouldn’t even know it. It’s even possible that the powers that be are sitting on this secret in order to protect their own interests. I don’t consider myself a conspiracy theorist, but there is an ongoing discussion about the suppression of security issues with RFID credit cards, so maybe, just maybe this isn’t so far fetched?

I write this article as somewhat of a warning, not specifically about Internet security, but about trusting what we don’t understand in general. These days, we put so much trust in technology without really understanding it. We see it as a sort of magical cure all for all of our ails, but we take for granted that into which we put our faith. If these things somehow fail us in unexpected ways we could end up in a whole world of trouble, so we should do well to take the time to know how things work.

… Well, sort of. Anybody in the web design industry knows that no project is ever truly complete. There are always little tweaks that could be made or small bugs that need to be fixed. So perhaps “Complete” isn’t the right term. Maybe the phrase “Good Enough for Show” is a bit more appropriate.

Anywho, with WordPress 3.0 as it’s back-end, my new website is now live and ready for the world to see. Hooray! But, I’m sure that some of you may be wondering why I made the transition in the first place? Well, there are a number of reasons…

As much as I love to have complete control over every aspect of  my site, that just isn’t practical.  Originally, I had created a rudimentary content management system from the ground up using PHP and MySQL, but this turned out to be cumbersome and I didn’t  feel like I had the resources to maintain it and keep it secure. It’s better to have a platform that someone else maintains and allows me to use freely.

I considered a few other CMSs such as Joomla and Drupal, but at this point, they seem to be overkill for what I’m doing. I don’t have a lot of other people that update the content of my site, and for the moment, I kind of just want to write. Nothing fancy. And WordPress is primarily a blogging platform, it seems the most appropriate. I also feel that if there’s is anything beyond its scope that I want or need to do, I have the web-design skills needed to take care of it. In fact, you’ll notice that I took the default theme, Twenty Ten, them and tweaked the PHP and CSS to make it better suit my needs. If at any point I feel like I need more, then I will definitely look into some of the more complicated Content Management Systems, but until then, WordPress is working pretty well for me.

One thing that I thought I’d throw out there is this article: How to Create a WordPress Theme From Scratch. While not completely up to date, it did help me to gain a good understanding of the code behind the CMS. I suggest that anyone wanting to learn about customizing their own word press installation should read it.