Author Archives: jcs

Hating Apple

Posted on 2013-09-25 by jcs

My friend Watts has a perspicacious tweet concerning those who hate Apple: At times I suspect hating Apple is at least as much of a fashion statement as buying them is. That’s right, I think. How else to reconcile the … Continue reading →

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The New York Times on Encryption Backdoors

Posted on 2013-09-24 by jcs

In a bit of good news, The New York Times has published an editorial Calling on the NSA to close their backdoors. There’s nothing in the editorial that will be news to Irreal readers but it’s useful because it educates … Continue reading →

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Code Snippets in Org Mode

Posted on 2013-09-23 by jcs

Everyone who’s hung around Irreal for a while knows that I’m a big fan of Org mode and that I use it to, among other things, write all my blog posts. One of the really nice things about it is … Continue reading →

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Safe Password Hashing

Posted on 2013-09-22 by jcs

I have written several times about the absolute necessity to properly hash passwords. The tricky part is that properly. It’s a bit subtle to get it right. Happily the folks over at Defuse Security have an excellent guide that Tells … Continue reading →

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Dual_EC_DRBG

Posted on 2013-09-21 by jcs

One of the recently released Snowden documents mentions the NSA’s success at weakening a 2006 NIST encryption standard and getting it accepted as an international ISO standard. While the standard isn’t named, it is widely assumed to be NIST Special … Continue reading →

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Tracking Emacs Packages

Posted on 2013-09-20 by jcs

Via Xah Lee’s blog, I came across a really interesting project. Artur Malabarba’s EAT (Emacs Archive Tracker) project checks the Gnu, Marmalade, and Melpa archives every couple of hours and displays a graph showing the number of packages added recently. … Continue reading →

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Emacs Startup Packages

Posted on 2013-09-19 by jcs

Xah Lee has a roundup of emacs Starter Kits on his blog. He’s got a list of 5 such kits so there’s a lot to choose from. Lee also notes that you can just install Emacs and add things as … Continue reading →

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Apple and Fingerprints

Posted on 2013-09-18 by jcs

Anyone who’s been following Irreal lately is painfully aware that the NSA scandals have kicked my paranoia into hyperdrive. Still, there are limits. Apple’s recent announcement of their fingerprint reader on the iPhone 5S has provoked those poor souls even … Continue reading →

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Trusting Microsoft

Posted on 2013-09-17 by jcs

If you’re a Microsoft user and at all concerned about the security of your computers, you need to read this BoingBoing story about Microsoft’s cooperation with numerous 3-letter government agencies. If ever there were an argument for open source, here … Continue reading →

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Bastien Guerry on Org Mode

Posted on 2013-09-16 by jcs

I just stumbled across this video by Bastien Guerry on Org Mode. It’s a couple of years old but is an excellent introduction to Org Mode and pretty much up to date. If you’re wondering what Org Mode is all … Continue reading →

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