Monthly Archives: September 2012

Password Cracking

There’s a great article over at Ars Technica about password cracking and how easy it’s become. The ease with which passwords can be cracked are the result of two things: Improved hardware using GPU processors, and Huge lists of real … Continue reading

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Daniel Weinreb

As most of you have heard by now, Daniel Weinreb, one of the Lispers’ Tribal Elders and user/beta tester of the original Emacs, died on September 7. The Boston Globe and Xconomy have obituaries but surprisingly Weinreb had some interaction … Continue reading

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Cracking WiFi Passwords

Dan Goodin over at Ars Technica has an interesting and scary article about cracking his neighbors’ WiFi network passwords. Sadly, this turns out to be a lot easier than it should be. The general process is Capture the authentication handshake … Continue reading

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Cabbage

For those looking for a prepackaged Emacs configuration, there is another option available: Cabbage. The configuration is meant to be flexible and extensible and the hope is that a community will emerge around it. If you’re not enthusiastic about dedicating … Continue reading

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HBO GO: Setting New Standards in Customer Satisfaction

Fred Wilson over at AVC has a post about the new HBO GO iPad app. It seems that the app has an Airplay button that allows the user, one would think, to stream the content to a TV. It turns … Continue reading

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Concurrency with ChanL

Stephen Goss over at the zero bit stream has a great post on concurrency in Common Lisp using ChanL. ChanL is a Common Lisp library that implements the Newsqueak concurrency paradigm. Newsqueak was developed by Rob Pike and is described … Continue reading

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How I Know I’m a Curmudgeon

I agree with every one of these 20 controversial programming opinions. Aside: Does anyone else find it astounding that “vetted” interviewees could not write code to calculate the area of a circle in any language? Or is astounding too weak … Continue reading

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PPTP and MS-CHAP

Just in case there’s anyone left out there who’s still using PPTP as a VPN solution, H-Online has an article warning about serious security problems with PPTP when used with MS-CHAP. Even Microsoft is warning users about the issue. It’s … Continue reading

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Emacs and Bignums

Nic Ferrier has a great post on using bignums with Emacs Lisp. Elisp, of course, does not support bignums but Ferrier has a trick: use the Elisp interface to calc, which does support bignums, to make the necessary calculations. Ferrier … Continue reading

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Five Lessons From Being Hacked

Every since having Irreal suffer a malware exploit, I’ve been on the lookout for articles that will help me avoid another successful attack. I’ve already posted about several of these and today’s post is another. Since these posts have become … Continue reading

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