Global Reset

A whitepaper of mine that explains how the recent SHA-1 attacks from the Chinese research team don’t affect DalSemi’s SHA-1 devices was just published.

Whitepaper 9: Are SHA-1 Devices Still Secure?

After I got the edits on my original doc back from our publishing group, I realized that I have no freaking idea how to use indefinite pronouns. Or, at least, I use them in technical writing the same way I use them in conversation. E.g., I just used “them” twice in the last sentence. Apparently, that can be confusing in technical writing. If the subject is not in your usual conversational lingo, like it is in mine, it was apparently impossible to follow what I meant by “it”, “them”, “those”, etc… I had to re-write a large chunk of the document, in most cases restructuring paragraphs so that indefinite pronouns weren’t necessary. For example, I changed this:

“When reading from the SHA-1 memory devices, it responds with a MAC…”

To this:

“During a read operation, the SHA-1 memory devices respond with a MAC…”

Overall, I think the readability of the whitepaper increased greatly when I got rid of most of the indefinite pronouns. I’ll probably keep the original whitepaper I wrote and the editor’s comments right next to my monitor when I work on my next application note or whitepaper.