Category Archives: General

GPG/PGP Best Practices

Posted on 2013-11-20 by jcs

The Privacy and Authenticity Outreach Workgroup of we.riseup.net have published an excellent list of OpenPGP Best Practices. Most Irreal readers, I trust, have already installed and configured GPG/PGP even if most of their usual correspondents haven’t. I’ve written before that … Continue reading →

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The Iron Law of Data Collection Confirmed

Posted on 2013-11-19 by jcs

Just in case you needed more proof of the iron law of data collection, consider this McClatchyDC story about how almost 5000 people had their personal information swept up and shared with nearly 30 federal agencies because they ordered a … Continue reading →

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What Does It Take?

Posted on 2013-11-18 by jcs

Are you angry yet? How about now?1 Footnotes: 1 To be fair, there’s some controversy associated with this claim and it doesn’t even seem possible—given that Linux is open source—until you remember the greatest hack of all time.

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On Open Space Offices and Idiots

Posted on 2013-11-17 by jcs

A few days ago, Michael Flowersky wrote a blog post that asked the question, What’s the difference between an advocate of open space office and an Idiot? It was an amusing read but I wasn’t going to comment on it … Continue reading →

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List Character Sets

Posted on 2013-11-15 by jcs

I picked up a useful Emacs command from Xah Lee’s Emacs Blog. It’s from a comment by Stef on Lee’s Emacs & Unicode Tips page. It’s the list-character-sets command. When you call it, you get a list of all the … Continue reading →

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Cursive Coda

Posted on 2013-11-14 by jcs

I’ve written quite a few posts about the horror that is cursive handwriting. The gist of those posts were that I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I could Cursive handwriting is dying out Those posts stand up pretty … Continue reading →

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Ten Steps You Can Take to Protect Yourself from Surveillance

Posted on 2013-11-12 by jcs

The EFF has a list of ten steps you can take to protect yourself from surveillance. There’s nothing there that will come as news to the always informed Irreal reader but it’s a nice summary and worth passing on to … Continue reading →

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Gnus Video Part 3

Posted on 2013-11-11 by jcs

Noufal Ibrahim over at EmacsMovies.org has his latest video up. It’s the third on his series about Gnus. In this episode, Ibrahim discusses the scoring and sorting of articles. Like almost everything in Gnus it’s extraordinarily configurable and therefore complex. … Continue reading →

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The Dark Mail Alliance

Posted on 2013-11-10 by jcs

Here’s some rare good news from the NSA front: the Lavabit and Silent Circle teams have joined forces to form the Dark Mail Alliance. There are quite a few stories on the Internet about the alliance and what they are … Continue reading →

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The New Apple Mail App and GPGTools

Posted on 2013-11-09 by jcs

The other day I got a popup telling me that a new version of the OS X mail app was available to download and install. I like to keep everything up-to-date as much as possible so I clicked on “Install.” … Continue reading →

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