Monthly Archives: December 2013

Phone Tracking

Posted on 2013-12-21 by jcs

Matt Blaze over at Exhaustive Search has an interesting post on how law enforcement agencies track phone calls. Blaze is discussing law enforcement targeting individuals in support of criminal investigations not the wholesale dragnet surveillance of the type that the … Continue reading →

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Two Stories on the NSA

Posted on 2013-12-20 by jcs

This week there were two stories that can’t make the NSA happy. In the first, Rick Falkvinge reports that Brazil, upset over NSA spying, ditched their plans to buy Boeing jets and went with Gripen instead. This despite the fact … Continue reading →

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The Five Word Tech Horrors Meme

Posted on 2013-12-19 by jcs

Via Jean-Philippe Paradis, I was led to the Twitter meme/thread/hashtag #FiveWordTechHorrors. The idea is identify an especially egregious tech issue in five words. Some of my favorites: It’s a standard, like Windows We emailed you your password Congress is drafting … Continue reading →

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The Real Edward Snowden

Posted on 2013-12-18 by jcs

When speaking of Edward Snowden, the government can’t seem to make up its mind. Sometimes he’s a high school dropout and misfit who couldn’t pass elementary computer classes and cheated on his NSA entrance exam. Other times he’s an evil … Continue reading →

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NSA Phone Metadata Collection Ruled Illegal

Posted on 2013-12-17 by jcs

In a bit of good news a federal judge has ruled that the NSA’s collection of phonecall metadata violates the fourth amendent. This is by no means the end of the story. The ruling is at the District Court level … Continue reading →

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A Problem with Magit

Posted on 2013-12-16 by jcs

Two or three weeks ago I noticed a problem with Magit. When I executed magit-status, I no longer got a list of the untracked files. That meant that I couldn’t add new files to a repository with Magit. The thing … Continue reading →

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Obama and the NSA

Posted on 2013-12-15 by jcs

Over at The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza has a fascinating article on the history of the NSA’s latest extra-legal surveillance on Americans. These programs all started under the Bush administration as a reaction to 9-11 and, significantly, over the strenuous … Continue reading →

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Uncommon Lisp Functions

Posted on 2013-12-14 by jcs

Over at WordPress on cneufeld.ca, Christopher Neufeld is writing a nice series on the less familiar Common Lisp functions. The idea is to give Lisp beginners an idea of how to leverage the power of some of the less commonly … Continue reading →

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Your Government at Work

Posted on 2013-12-13 by jcs

Here in the U.S. we have something called the Federal Register. It’s the official journal of the U.S. Government in which are published public notices and other routine publications of the various government agencies. It’s published daily except for holidays … Continue reading →

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A Simple EmacsGolf Challenge

Posted on 2013-12-12 by jcs

We haven’t had an EmacsGolf challenge for a while so here’s something simple that was suggested by Xah Lee based on a Stack Overflow question. The Stack Overflow questioner wanted a solution in Vim so the whole thing fits right … Continue reading →

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