Monthly Archives: April 2014

The Iron Law of Data Collection Strikes the UK

Posted on 2014-04-20 by jcs

I’ve written before about the Iron Law of Data Collection, the idea that no matter the rationale given for the collection of the data or the promises made about its confidentiality there will always be mission creep that finds new … Continue reading →

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Cyberterrorism

Posted on 2014-04-19 by jcs

An excellent suggestion from Ryan Paul (via Jean-Philippe Paradis) Let’s start describing NSA’s activities as “state-sponsored cyberterrorism” because that’s what the US would call it if anybody else did it. — Ryan Paul (@segphault) April 11, 2014

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Encrypt Everything?

Posted on 2014-04-18 by jcs

Klint Finley over at Wired has an article that discusses the pros and cons of encrypting the Internet. By that he means using SSL/TLS instead of plain HTTP for every connection. It’s not a new idea. For example, the EFF … Continue reading →

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An Emacs Lisp Based Common Lisp

Posted on 2014-04-17 by jcs

Lars Brinkhoff has a really interesting project up at GitHub. It’s emacs-cl, a Common Lisp implemented in Emacs Lisp. This probably isn’t all that useful but it sure is awesome. As far as I can tell, it’s a pretty complete. … Continue reading →

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Emacs 24.4 Pretest

Posted on 2014-04-16 by jcs

The first pretest of Emacs 24.4, Emacs 24.3.90, is available via FTP at the GNU Emacs archive. This the first of an expected 6 or so pretest releases leading up to Emacs 24.4. The Emacs devs are now in bug … Continue reading →

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Handling Password Fields

Posted on 2014-04-15 by jcs

With the advent of the heartbleed debacle you’ve probably spent a bunch of time changing your passwords. I know I have. Having to update several passwords has opened an old wound: the really really stupid policies and coding behind password … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Tom Marble

Posted on 2014-04-14 by jcs

Sacha Chua has posted another interesting episode in her series of video chats with Emacs users. This time it’s with Tom Marble who talks about and demonstrates his Emacs-based invoicing system. Marble is a consultant and wrote the system to … Continue reading →

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The NSA and Heartbleed

Posted on 2014-04-13 by jcs

Bloomberg is reporting that the NSA knew about and exploited the heartbleed bug for years. The NSA is, of course, denying that but if you’ve been keeping score it’s pretty easy to figure out who to believe. If it’s true … Continue reading →

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Mickey on Running Shell Commands with Dired

Posted on 2014-04-12 by jcs

The essential Mickey over at Mastering Emacs has another post in his series on dired. This time it’s about running shell commands on multiple files from within Emacs. If you’re a Unix user and used to using find and xargs … Continue reading →

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Latency

Posted on 2014-04-11 by jcs

Every programmer understands, at least in a general way, the relative latency of various computer operations. For example, we all know that accessing a value from a CPU register is faster than accessing that value from an L1 cache is … Continue reading →

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