The Netscape/Microsoft browser wars in the mid-90's were really vicious and competitive. They really had it out for each other. Netscape had developed the SSL protocol. The initial version had cryptographic flaws and was broken pretty quickly, and never released. The first production version was SSL 2, which was in use for a few years. (I don't know the exact versions of Navigator it shipped in.)…
Here's a comment I wrote in response to this post on Facebook from Mike Hudack : As long as an ad impression on a "serious story" pays as much as an ad impression on a listicle and people are more interested in viewing listicles than real news, this will likely continue. Facebook accelerates the problem, but is not its core source. And the media outlets that produce this crap are just following…
Google Now is awesome. You can search for an address in Google Maps and automatically get that destination transported to your phone for super-easy directions, etc. Unless, of course, it doesn't work for some reason. And there’s no indication of why the address you searched for isn’t on your phone; could be a lot of things—sync problems, maybe Google didn’t think it important enough to surface,…
I get a lot of email, and sometimes I miss something, or I don't notice something urgent right away. Here's how to configure Gmail on your Android phone to alert you distinctively when you get an urgent email. First, identify what is important. It might be emails from someone in particular, or with a particular topic, etc. Most recently, I configured a special alert for emails from a particular…
There are a lot of standards out there for password quality, usually something like "at least 6 characters, with both upper and lower case and a digit or alphabetic character". These are horrible rules. They mean that a password like "Passw0rd" is thought to be better than "Y1&j)" or "cork-bairn-meson-most-ago". However, it is not. Clever password crackers will, first thing, try a large dictionary…
I just needed to determine endianness from Javascript; this is needed because ArrayBuffer and associated classes operate directly upon memory buffers, which is great when you want to slurp in some binary data without the overhead of JSON-conversion, but does imply an endianness dependency. I probably could have just ignored the question (at the expense of all my Alpha-powered users), but I'm OCD…
I started posting Adam's status to this blog because I needed a way to communicate with family and friends, and I abandoned it when his situation didn't really require it. But, having dropped it mid-situation, I left an uncertain status for anyone who came across the blog without knowing the family. Sorry about that! Adam is doing great. He came home for visits starting at Christmas, and we had a…
Just like Lindsay Lohan , we're back in rehab. Rusk is the top facility for rehab in NYC and one of the best in the country, and it’s absolutely the right place for Adam to be right now. In fact, I made a bit of a problem on Friday night and over the weekend when the administrators at NewYork-Presbyterian and Rusk failed to get him down here on Friday. The climax of that fuss was when they told me…
Here's two photos of Adam this morning, showing his now un-swollen noggin.
On Tuesday, Adam came back to NewYork-Presbyterian to have an MRI and to have a shunt put in to drain the bubble under his scalp. It’s done wonders for his looks (sorry, I don't have a picture right now). The MRI looked fine; the doctors say he’s doing great and they expect him to have a really strong recovery. He had the shunt put in Thursday afternoon. It is a bit of tubing (with an anti-siphon…
It’s three weeks since Adam’s surgery, and he’s in the hospital for the 27th day. Last Tuesday, Adam went from the hospital (NewYork Presbyterian) to the Rusk Institute, a hospital devoted to rehabilitation. We’ve gone from having a view of the East River to having a view of the Empire State Building. He’s an inpatient there, and he’s in various therapies each day: physical therapy, occupational…
By my calculus, it’s our 18th day here, but hopefully Adam will leave in the next day or two. Since my last update, it’s been a stretch of recovery for Adam: general progress, but with a number of smaller challenges or setbacks. He moved to the general pediatric ward last week. For a period of time, he was quite weak on his left side, and couldn’t look to that side; later, he had some small…
Adam is doing well. Of course, brain surgery is a Big Deal, and one doesn’t bounce out of bed the next morning. He’s feeling pretty crummy, but he’s recovering. The surgery involved cutting a hole in the top-right of his skull, and they had to go past the right side of his brain, so his left side has been worse than his right, but it’s improving: on Tuesday, he couldn’t look left at all and his…
Adam was in surgery for about 6 hours yesterday. Afterwards, his surgeon said that it went very well: he was able to remove all the tumor very cleanly, and there was very little bleeding: in fact, Adam didn’t need a transfusion, either during the operation or afterwards—the surgeon said that it’s the first time he’s done such an operation without the patient needing any blood at all. The initial…
Yesterday, Adam had a procedure where they did an angiogram and embolization of the tumor. They threaded a catheter through his arteries up to his brain and used x-rays and injected dye to map the blood supply of the tumor, then they injected a polymer which closed off the selected blood vessels and blocked about half of the blood supply to the tumor. The procedure lasted about an hour and a half;…
Some bad news: we found out on Thursday that Adam has a serious brain tumor. He’s in the hospital now and is going to have at least two operations in the next few days. Some background: when we adopted Adam in Ethiopia last June, he was somewhat delayed, due to being in orphanages for about a year. At the time, he could barely crawl. After bringing him home, he advanced quite quickly, and was…
We adopted a son, Adam Abera, from Ethiopia this year. He's a gift and a delight, and our good fortune in adding him to our family is far greater than his good fortune in being added to ours. However, it is true that we brought him home to material support, comfort, security, and opportunity far greater than what he left behind, and of Ethiopia's five million orphans, only a tiny fraction can or…
Benjamin Black has a service called the tls report that grades web sites based on the quality of their SSL configuration: points are taken off for SSL 2 support, support for shorter keys, etc. While I respect the effort and I value the concern for better security, this is just silly. Extending cryptographic key length is the least valuable thing any site can do to improve the security of people's…
What's the most important skill in playing poker, if you're looking to make the most money? When I ask other poker players this, I get answers like "bluffing", "reading other players" or "knowing the probabilities". They're all wrong. The most important skill is table selection—choosing what game to play and who to play against. You could be the 20th best poker player in the world, but if you…
This password generator picks random passwords for you. It runs entirely on your computer, inside your browser--the generated passwords do not travel over the Internet and are not known by my server. The passwords are generated by picking words at random from a dictionary. I like to find a randomly generated password where the words bring to mind a memorable image--these passwords are easy for me…