Author Archives: jcs

What Foiled Terrorist Plots?

Posted on 2013-10-28 by jcs

Rick Falkvinge has a great article that makes an obvious point. We can know for sure that government surveillance has foiled exactly zero terror plots. We know this because planning, let alone carrying out, terror plots is a crime but … Continue reading →

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The End of Journalism

Posted on 2013-10-27 by jcs

Many of you know that I’m not a fan of newspapers or most journalists. When reporters aren’t pursuing an agenda or otherwise abdicating their journalistic responsibilities, they run around chasing trivia and sideshows like the seemingly never ending series of … Continue reading →

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CrptoSeal Shuts Down

Posted on 2013-10-26 by jcs

The U.S. Government’s overreaching has claimed another victim. The CryptoSeal VPN service has pulled the plug. These are good guys who did everything possible to provide a secure, private VPN service. They didn’t keep logs and could provide authorities only … Continue reading →

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Update on OS X Emacs Battery Status

Posted on 2013-10-25 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about the problems I had with Emacs when I updated to OS X Mavericks. The problem was that the call to display-battery-mode failed. For OS X, Emacs uses pmset to get the battery status data. With Maverics, … Continue reading →

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Mavericks and Battery Status

Posted on 2013-10-24 by jcs

I just upgraded my iMac and MacBook Pro to the new OS X, Mavericks. The upgrade went flawlessly—everything should work as well—and my iMac came up without a problem. I spend most of my time in Emacs, of course, so … Continue reading →

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The Aaron Swartz Legacy

Posted on 2013-10-23 by jcs

I’ve written before about Aaron Swartz’s last project, software to enable whistle blowers to communicate with news organizations anonymously. The New Yorker was the first to implement the system. Those with information about government misdeeds finally had a secure way … Continue reading →

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List of Free Programming Books

Posted on 2013-10-22 by jcs

Victor Felder has an excellent list of free programming books over at Github. The list is indexed in several ways so it’s pretty easy to find books in the area you’re interested in. Among other things, I learned that there … Continue reading →

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Specifying Indent Rules for Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2013-10-21 by jcs

Eric J.M. Ritz has an excellent post on indenting Elisp code. Say what? Isn’t that what Emacs is for? Yes but there’s a corner case when you’re writing macros. Here’s a macro that I use to make my Elisp code … Continue reading →

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Emacs Rocks at WebRebels 4

Posted on 2013-10-20 by jcs

The fourth episode of Magnar Sveen’s cleaned up WebRebels talk is available. This section continues the demonstration of his JavaScript refactoring tools. He’s able to select a code snippet and turn it into a function with a single call. He … Continue reading →

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NIST and Keccak

Posted on 2013-10-19 by jcs

I’m a bit of a crypto nerd—though far from a practitioner or expert—so I’m on NIST‘s SHA-3 mailing list. The mailing list’s main purpose was to keep the contestant teams and other interested observers up to date on the competition. … Continue reading →

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