News Archive 8

Minor changes, e.g. pairing_is_symmetric() function.

The pbc/pbc test program can convert strings to elements of any group. This should make it more effective as outputs from previous runs can now be reused. This also allows some pairing-based cryptosystems to be built using shell scripts.

The PBC library now has a logo, a result of an attempt to liven up these otherwise text-only pages.

I had thought that releasing version 0.4.0 and two new libraries during the Thanksgiving holiday would give me ample time to fix a few things and release the successor before too many people noticed. After all, who does any work during this time?

I was wrong. I have already received two emails pointing out a number of issues, mainly to do with documentation and the organization of files. This release should address these problems.

I removed the gitweb link. I belatedly realized that a web spider could harvest email addresses buried in PBC code and documentation files via the interface. (How do other projects deal with this? Perhaps there are options I can enable to mangle email addresses?) I also removed all email addresses from the AUTHORS file for good measure. They probably should not have been there in the first place.

I wrote a simple script that automatically chunks five news items per page and generates navigation links. This is much better than the manual editing I was doing before. The oldest items appear their own page and not here.

I’m trying to hype up PBC. The "About" page now looks more like a sales pitch, and I started a list of projects that use the PBC library. If you’re using PBC for something please let me know!