Writing and commentary by Kadin2048.
After yet another mysterious Perl-related SNAFU, I decided that it s time to say goodbye to the venerable Blosxom engine. As of this entry, I don t plan to add any new entries to this blog, and I have kludged blosxom.cgi into working, however temporarily, just so that I can do one last final static HTML rendering of all the posts. The result is that all the existing content should stay where it…
It has been widely reported this week that Google has formally announced plans to kill off Google Talk, its original popular IM product which (for most of us) was supplanted by Hangouts a few years back. I still think that Google Talk was the high-water mark for Google s over the top (OTT) chat efforts; it was reliable, standards-based, interoperable with third-party clients and servers,…
Well, another month has gone by, and I still haven t migrated this pile of bits to a better blog engine. And yet again, Perl + Blosxom + the plugins I m using shit the bed. The issue this time, for future reference, was: File is not a perl storable at /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.24.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi/Storable.pm line 383, <FILE> line 628, at /blosxom-plugins/calendar line 322. The…
Related to yesterday s post about the AP article confirming that, in fact, modern cryptography is pretty good , there s a reasonably decent discussion going on at Hacker News in response, with a mixture of the usual fearmongering / unjustified pessimism but also some very good information. This post , by HN user colordrops , is particularly worth discussing, despite falling a bit on the…
Way back in 2013, I wrote about the NSA leaks and how I didn t think that they signified any fundamental change in the balance of power between cryptographers and cryptanalysts that has been going on for centuries. It would seem that the New York Times has finally worked through their backlog and more or less agrees . (The article in question comes from the AP , so if the NYT website doesn t want…
I realized today that this blog had crashed, again. It s becoming obvious that I m going to need to find some other hosting / server-side engine solution, because the downtime and associated maintenance (mostly due to Perl s constant non-backwards-compatible changes, from what I can tell) are really not working for me anymore. I will try, as a Good Internet Citizen, to keep all the posts up and…
For all the stupidity of the current Presidential election, one interesting discussion that it has prompted is a resurrection of the old debate over nuclear strategy, and particularly the strategy of launch under attack (aka and better known as Launch On Warning ). Jeffrey Lewis has an article, Our Nuclear Procedures Are Crazier Than Trump , in Foreign Policy which ties this into current events,…
At some point, Yahoo started sticking a really annoying popup on basically every single Flickr page, if you aren t logged in with a Yahoo ID. Blocking these popups is reasonably straightforward with uBlock or ABP, but it took me slightly longer than it should have to figure it out. As usual, here s the tl;dr version. Add this to your uBlock My filters : ! Block annoying Flickr login popups…
Everyone s favorite security analyst Bruce Schneier seems to think that somebody is learning how to take down the Internet by repeatedly probing key pieces of basic infrastructure exactly what s being probed isn t stated, but the smart money is on the DNS root servers . Naturally, who is doing this is left unsaid as well, although Schneier does at least hazard the obvious guess at China and…
If you can only bear to read one 9/11 retrospective or tribute piece this year, I d humbly suggest if you are not already familiar reading the story of Rick Rescorla, one of the many heroes of the WTC evacuation. The Real Heroes Are Dead , written by James B. Stewart in The New Yorker , from February 2002, is worth the read.