The New York Times Proves My Point

Posted on 2019-09-17 by jcs

Last week, I reminded everyone that Irreal doesn’t hold journalists in high regard and that Apple, in particular, appears to bring out the worst in tech reporters. The Paper of Record must have been feeling left out because they published a column by Charlie Warzel that combines what I consider the two worst aspects of the modern web:

  1. The ascendancy of the New Luddites with their constant carping about how technology is destroying civilization and the world, and
  2. The inexorable need to drag jejune politics into every damn discussion on the Internet.

The ostensible point of the column was that Apple should stop holding its Keynote Events but it quickly devolved into the usual “we’re killing gaia” nonsense and the assertion that we have more important things, like income inequality, to worry about than new iPhones.

Being famously curmudgeonly, Irreal’s inclination is to dismiss this nonsense with words best omitted from a blog that might be read by women or children but you don’t have to depend on me to take down this silliness. Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber delivers a long and excellent rant on how vacuous Warzel’s column really is. It’s a righteous takedown and you should definitely read it even if you aren’t an Apple user or fan.

The worst thing about Warzel’s fatuous column is that it appeared not in Joe’s Fishing and Tech Webzine but in the freaking New York Times. If you had any remaining respect for the Times, you can let it go. This column is one more example of how they’ve forfeited that respect.

Added in editing: The Macalope weighs in.

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The Google Nest Hub Max

Posted on 2019-09-16 by jcs

I don’t know about you but I couldn’t help thinking of telescreens from Nineteen Eighty-four when I read this article about Google’s always on Nest Hub Max. The similarities are striking. The camera is always watching so that it can match your face and figure out what to show you. The microphone, needless to say, is also always on.

Google is not, of course, the Thought Police but who in their right mind would grant 24 by 7 surveillance access to a company like Google that makes its money from vacuuming up every possible bit of information about you so they can sell it? I don’t care how convenient those devices are, they’re not getting into my home.

It is, I suppose, easy to dismiss those who use them as clueless folks hurting no one but themselves but devices like the Next Hub Max normalize devices like telescreens. They move the Overton window towards more surveillance and habituate us to having someone always watching. Today they’re just a voluntary way of helping you turn on the lights or whatever. We don’t want a tomorrow where they’ve morphed into mandatory telescreens in the name of “keeping us safe” and from having inappropriate thoughts.

If you care about your privacy and don’t want constant surveillance to become the norm, just say no to the Nest Hub Max and all its evil siblings.

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Exporting Only the Contents of An Org Subtree

Posted on 2019-09-15 by jcs

Here’s a short Org-mode tip that, although quite old, I just learned about. Suppose you want to export an Org subtree but you want only the contents and not the header. This emacs-reddit question, which alerted me to the solution, gives a typical use case for such a capability.

It turns out that there are lots of ways of doing this but the easiest is to require ox-extra as explained here. Once you’ve gotten the proper packages loaded and configured, you need only add an :ignore tag to the header that you don’t want to export. This differs from using the (typical) :noexport tag in that the contents will still be exported.

Notice that the package you need to install is org-plus-contrib not ox-extra. Also note that you’ll need to have the Org repository in your list of ELPA repositories. You can do that with something like

(add-to-list 'package-archives '("org" . "https://orgmode.org/elpa/") t)

if you don’t already have it included.

I haven’t needed something like this very often but it’s nice to know how to do it when I do have the need.

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Bad Password Policies

Posted on 2019-09-14 by jcs

It seems like I’ve been shouting into the wind forever about password policies and it hasn’t made a bit of difference. There’s probably little anyone can do about users choosing really dumb passwords—like password or 123456 and so forth—but you’d think that Web sites would at least implement sensible password policies.

Alas, no. Dumb Password Rules is a crowd-sourced GitHub repository of, well, dumb password rules. It’s late 2019 and there really is no excuse for a site insisting on rules like passwords must be between 6 and 8 letters/numbers long with no special characters. Yet there are an astounding number of sites doing just that. These aren’t just Joe’s Online Fish Market, either. They’re banks, big retail organizations and even the government.

Scroll through as much of the site as you can stand. Even the Irreal minions refused to read the whole thing claiming it was just too painful.

I’ve said it many times before but it bears repeating: avoid sites that have any1 restrictions on what your password can look like. If they’re doing it right, those passwords are going to be salted and hashed with something like bcrypt or one of its brethren and it won’t matter what characters they contain or how long they are. If they insist on some arbitrary restrictions you can be sure that your passwords aren’t being hashed and that when the site is inevitably broken into, your password will be exposed.

Sometimes you can’t avoid those sites. After all, We have to deal with our banks (they’re among the worst offenders, ironically), wireless providers, and similar institutions but in those cases you should make an extra effort to use a password as complicated as their rules allow.

It’s pretty clear that passwords aren’t going away anytime soon so sites should take the situation seriously, start salting and hashing our passwords, and stop insisting on arbitrary and dumb rules on what they can be.

Footnotes:

1

Other than a large—1024 characters, say—maximum size.

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Dumb-jump 0.5.3

Posted on 2019-09-13 by jcs

Back in 2017, I started using dumb-jump after seeing Mike Zamansky’s video demonstrating it. As I said at the time, it really hit the sweet spot for me. I have tried many times over my career to warm up to TAGS-based systems and I never could. They were always too fussy and required maintaining the TAGS file.

The wonderful thing about dumb-jump is that it just works and requires little or no configuration and no index files to keep up to date. It does its magic by leveraging one of the grep siblings to search for what you need. That sounds as if it could be slow and it might be for very large projects but by using a fast grep (ripgrep) I found it to be instantaneous while browsing the Unix v10 kernel sources.

Jack Angers has just released Version 0.5.3 of dumb-jump and added support for 10 more languages. That means that you can use dumb-jump with more than 40 languages. Unless you’re using something fairly obscure, dumb-jump will probably support it.

I was a little skeptical at first due to my bad experiences with trying to use TAGS but I’ve been delighted with dumb-jump and it’s now one of my favorite packages. If you’re an Emacs user you should give it a try. It doesn’t take any effort at all to install it and you can easily delete it if it doesn’t meet your needs.

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Mozilla Talks About Its Plans for DoH

Posted on 2019-09-12 by jcs

You may recall that back in July I wrote about Google’s and Mozilla’s plans for DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and the furor it caused among the nannies in the UK who resented having their ability to spy on their users made more difficult. I was a little skeptical that Google and Mozilla would stick to their guns in the face of the opposition but Mozilla, at least, is moving forward with their plans.

In a post entitled What’s next in making Encrypted DNS-over-HTTPS the Default, Mozilla details the results of experiments with a beta version and their plans for rolling out the system to everyone. There are two problems to solve:

  1. What to do when DoH returns erroneous results
  2. How to interoperate with parental controls

Mozilla has solutions for both of these and plans to partially roll out the system starting in late September. DoH will be enabled by default but will be opt-in in the sense that users will be notified of the change and given a chance to disable it. If the test deployment goes well, Mozilla will enable the service for everyone in the U.S.

I applaud all this and welcome one more way of keeping the busybodies’ noses out of what I do on the Internet. The other advantage is that it also prevents DNS hijacking where users are surreptitiously directed to bogus and potentially harmful sites. It’s a win for everyone. Except the busybodies.

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Saving the Planet With Smartphones

Posted on 2019-09-11 by jcs

When the New Luddites aren’t hectoring us about our debilitating addiction to our phones, the loss of our ability to read maps or do arithmetic, or the extreme disservice we’re doing to our children by allowing them to use smartphones, they fall back on the technique most favored by all reformers: guilt. They tell us that our crack-addled-monkey-like addiction to smartphones and other technology is stripping the earth bare of its resources. Our smartphone addiction is killing Gaia.

Except it isn’t so. According to a very interesting article in Wired, electricity use has been flat for the last decade and plastic use has gone from growing faster than the economy to lagging it by 15 per cent. In fact, they say, consumption for most natural resources has gone negative. How can this be?

While it’s true that significant resources are consumed to build those smartphones, even more resources are saved by no longer building other devices to do the things that smartphones do. The Wired article has a revealing vignette of someone seeing a Radio Shack (remember them?) ad from 1991 that showed 15 electronic “gadgets” for sale and realizing that he carried 13 of those gadgets in his pocket everyday. Actually, smartphones replace far more than 13 other devices. Take a look at your phone’s screen and look at all the functions it provides. That’s why, among other things, the camera market is collapsing, it’s hard to find a standalone GPS unit, and no one buys general purpose calculators anymore. They’re all built into our phones.

None of this will have the slightest impact on the New Luddites, of course. They’ll go right on detailing our many shortcomings and predicting the end of the world but the Wired article shows us what we’ve always known: they’re full of malarkey.

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Using R With Emacs and ESS

Posted on 2019-09-10 by jcs

With the rise of big data, the R programming language has become one of the most popular languages. Indeed, the IEEE has it rated as number 5 in 2019. Probably the most popular environment for R is RStudio, an IDE for working with R. Of course, it’s also possible to use Emacs for this. Way back in 2011, I showed how to combine R and Org Babel to do some basic statistics.

That was just me fooling around, though. If you want to Combine R and Emacs seriously, there’s a bit more involved. Peter Prevos has a nice post that shows how he uses Emacs and ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) to provide an excellent environment for writing R programs and including the results in documents. Included in his post is an example of a paper he wrote with the system1. You can see the Org source file at his GitHub repository along with the part of his Emacs configuration that supports the environment.

Prevos’ post is written from the point of view of someone in the social sciences who is not necessarily an engineer. The post even gives a brief account of how to get Emacs installed so it should be useful to anyone who’d like to use Emacs for R and doesn’t mind the learning curve involved.

Footnotes:

1

Actually, it was a rewrite of a paper he originally wrote using LaTeX and Sweave.

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Opening Images in Emacs

Posted on 2019-09-09 by jcs

These tweets:

reminded me that not everyone is aware that you can open image files in Emacs so I thought I’d share the knowledge. If you like, it’s easy to switch back and forth to a hex representation.

Of course, this works only with GUI Emacs although you should almost certainly be using GUI Emacs instead of the terminal version anyway (but see Phil’s comment for a situation where terminal Emacs makes sense).

It’s just another reminder of how powerful Emacs is for most text-based tasks and even some tasks that aren’t text-based.

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Curl Recipes

Posted on 2019-09-08 by jcs

There’s not much going on today so I thought I’d share this small list of Curl recipes that I recently stumbled on. If you’re like me, your first reaction when facing a problem like those on this list is to throw together a bespoke solution rather than leveraging the tools you already have. That’s just crazy, of course, so cookbooks like this one can be really useful.

Take a look and maybe bookmark it for the day you need it.

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