Here is a short presentation I’ve done about congestion control in computer networks. Some thoughts:

• Things usually are simpler than they look. For example the TCP congestion control algorithm. Still, they can be very powerful (this is similar with DES for example – which I’ve had to reimplement for “educational purposes”, and found that, at the core, it was surprisingly simple).

• It is very interesting to “peek behind the curtains”. Reading about the TCP congestion control made me better understand the “TCP DoS vulnerabilities” talk from 25C3. You can look at the presentation online. It is the case IMHO that during 2009 someone will release a “library” to perform these types of DoS attacks and it will get incorporated in every *bot out there, making it the “SYN flood” of 2009 (what do you know? a free 2009 prediction ;-)).

PS. As this blog post points out you can get the CC logos in vector format from the CC Logo Download page (there are little links under each image with different fileformats). OpenOffice 3.0 still can’t import SVG. WTF? Luckily I had Inkscape installed and exported it as a high-resolution PNG.