The H. P. Lovecraft Institute of Software Design

How many times have you heard a product architecture referred to as “sheer insanity?”

How many times have you rolled out a product and wiped out an entire knowledge structure?

Have you heard software developers use words that are clearly unpronounceable by human tongues?

If, during a post-mortem, you’ve heard someone shout, “Ygnailh… ygnaiih… thflthkh’ngha…. Yog-Sothoth …HELP! HELP! …ff – ff – ff – FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!..”

… perhaps it’s time to admit that what you’re trying to create isn’t so much “software” as “a portal to another dimension, filled with beings eager to devour your essence.” And maybe you’ve already opened that door a little bit wider than you’d like to.

Management thinks what we do at the H.P. Lovecraft Institute of Software Development is build customer relationship management software, but once you’re on the inside you’ll know you should never boot up our software unless you’ve got a monkey’s paw dangling from your neck and a line of salt between you and the hard drive.

Sound familiar?

Via The Register, NIST has chosen a winner in its competition to select a new secure hash algorithm, SHA-3. The winner, Keccak, was apparently selected at least in part because it doesn’t belong to the MD5 family of hash algorithms that SHA-1 and the four SHA-2 algorithms belong to. One of the four authors of this algorithm, Joan Daemen, was also a coauthor of the Rijndael algorithm that was selected for AES.

Also, NIST seems to be saying that SHA-3 should supplement but not replace SHA-2, which is still considered quite secure. (Cryptography guru Bruce Schneider, whose Skein algorithm was one of the five finalists for SHA-3, said last week that he hoped NIST would decide not to pick a new algorithm, because “We didn’t know [in 2006 when the SHA-3 contest was announced] how long the various SHA-2 variants would remain secure. But it’s 2012, and SHA-512 is still looking good.” He seems OK with the result, though.)