Randomness in cryptography - the devil's in the details
Kiwicon opened with a software engineering talk which was intensely focused - a case study of a single-line bug in a single source file in a single module in a 70MBbyte programming language distro.
The talk, by Kiwi-turned-Northern-Californian coder Geoff Cant, was entitled The Erlang SSH story: from bug to key recovery. Geoff works for ngmoko:), a platform for building social networking interactions into your online games. (The smiley is part of the company name.)
Erlang - short for Ericsson Language, or in remembrance of Danish mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang, depending on whom you ask - is an open-source programming language developed by Ericsson in Sweden. Erlang isn't widely known - unlike, say, Java, C, Perl and Python - but it has been enthusiastically embraced by many companies which run server farms handling huge numbers of users at the same time: Facebook, for example, and Geoff's own employer, ngmoko:).
