Starting Points These observations were made over the course of two weeks as a tourist in Syria. None of these observations are absolute. I hope these observations can form a starting point for a conversation that helps us all get a more accurate vision of the status of tech in Syria. General Observations Consumer technology in Syria is relatively advanced considering the overall situation,…
Today, most people use LLMs as an information lookup and generation system. Develop a personalized workout plan for me. Summarize and respond to this email. Give me some recipes I can make with these ingredients. Without some new breakthrough in AI that opens the door to AGI, we probably won’t get any novel answers when we ask ChatGPT how to monetize it.
What is Big Data My personal definition of Big Data is: Any Data Processing that requires special considerations to overcome time and/or space limitations. Yours Truly Which lines up pretty closely with Wikipedia’s definition of Big Data: Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software. Wikipedia In essence…
By the time you are reading this you’ve probably already heard of “The Fediverse”, or at least Mastodon. At the time I am writing this post, the Fediverse is the fastest growing social media platform. At the same time, most people don’t know what the Fediverse is or what makes it different from Facebook, TikTok or X, formerly Twitter. Lets start with what the Fediverse is. Wikipedia defines the…
DNS security has been getting a lot of attention these past couple of years. This has lead to a number of DNS security-enhancing standards to be proposed, with the three big ones being DNS-over-TLS, DNSSEC and DNS-over-HTTPS. In this article we will discuss all three of those standards, the threat model they assume and what protection the provide.
Here is a link to the slides to the a presentation I gave at DevComo describing Bitcoin Transactions and how they work: The Anatomy of Bitcoin Transactions
With the internet having become an integral part of our Americans lives, it is necessary to protect and preserve free, open and nondiscriminatory internet access for all of us. Internet Service Providers are tasked with connecting users with the content and services available on the internet, not with regulating and managing what content users are able to connect to and how they connect. It would…
Introduction Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin There has been a recent push by governments and government agencies to ban End-to-End Strong Encryption, all under the guise of stopping terrorists and pedophiles. My hope here is to provide simple arguments in layman’s terms as to why banning strong…
Introduction A Markov Chain is a set of transitions from one state to the next; Such that the transition from the current state to the next depends only on the current state, the previous and future states do not effect the probability of the transition. A transitions independence from future and past sates is called the Markov Property. What we are going to do is explore Markov Chains through a…
What it is Lets start this post of with some techno-babble. Minimax is a depth-first search algorithm to find the least-lost strategy for zero-sum two person turn based games. A zero-sum game is a game where, if one player loses, than another player must win the same number of points and vice-versa. For example chess is a zero-sum game because if one player wins (Lets say winning a score of +1)…
The other day I was playing with my Tor node’s configuration when I found out that with absolutely no trickery you can get Tor to log some interesting addresses. One of the things Tor logs is the address of edge (aka. exit) connections, which tells you what the node is connecting to but not who the connection is for. Naturally it would be interesting to know what other people are using Tor for, so…
The Problem I’ve been running Ubuntu as my main OS for pretty much a couple of years now and I have to say I LOVE it. The hardware support is great, tons of apps, and its free. Well “free” as in beer for sure, but not really “free” as in freedom. This past summer I moved back to Syria, where, as you all know, the US has restricted the imports on software products for “National Security” reasons.…
It sure seems easy to make a table. Anyone can do it, right? Get 1 large flat rectangular piece of wood, 4 equally tall wooden poles, 4 nails and a hammer. Nail the 4 poles to each corner of the flat rectangular bit, and you have a table. Ta daaa!
So I’m reading InfoWorld the other day and on the side of the page ther is that annoying “Share This” toolbar. Now I have AdBlock installed but it skipped this one for some reason and AdBlock can’t removes div’s AFAIK. The solution I came up with was Greasemonkey