Category Archives: General

NSA Recap

Posted on 2013-11-06 by jcs

The Guardian, which has done almost all the heavy lifting on the ongoing NSA story, has an excellent recapitulation of the story so far and what it means for us. The page is interactive and has snippets of video interviews … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Magnar Sveen

Posted on 2013-11-05 by jcs

Sacha Chua continues her series of chats with Emacs luminaries by interviewing Magnar Sveen. Sveen, of course, is the producer of the highly regarded Emacs Rocks! videos as well as the author of such Emacs packages as Expand Region, Multiple … Continue reading →

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From the Department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Posted on 2013-11-04 by jcs

How could they think this was acceptable?

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Real Time Internet Monitoring

Posted on 2013-11-03 by jcs

If you’re like me, you probably enjoyed the spectacle of Tom Matzzie live-tweeting an overheard off-the-record conversation between Ex NSA Director Michael Hayden and a reporter. The hilarity was terminated when a colleague of Hayden called him to warn of … Continue reading →

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The Third Way

Posted on 2013-11-02 by jcs

If you’ve been paying attention lately you’ve probably noticed the raging dispute concerning how many spaces are appropriate at the end of a sentence. If you learned to type on an actual typewriter you were taught the hard and fast … Continue reading →

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Full Screen Magit Status

Posted on 2013-11-01 by jcs

Ever since he posted it last December, I’ve been a huge fan of Magnar Sveen’s hack to display magit-status in full screen and then restore the previous window configuration upon quitting. It’s nice because you can commit a file and … Continue reading →

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Building Password Lists

Posted on 2013-10-30 by jcs

A little while ago Ars Technica published an interesting article on how password crackers build their lists of trial passwords. The TL;DR is that they scan Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, news websites, song lyrics, IRC logs, Twitter, and other sources of … Continue reading →

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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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