Matthew Daly reminds us of something that’s easy to forget:
it turns out that compiling #emacs from source is much easier than I anticipated. one more thing to love about this amazing software!
— Matthew Daly (@nodezsh) August 28, 2015
Here’s how to do it on OS X. Follow the link on that post if you want to compile in eww.
The SANS NewsBites newsletter is reporting that Seagate’s wireless hard drives has a hardcoded password to a Telnet server in the drive’s firmware. Really? In 2015?
This is really just unbelievable. It’s like Seagate’s engineers missed the last 20 years’ security news. Maybe Seagate thought it was safe because the Telnet server was undocumented. Jeez!
A week or two ago I wrote about Eric James Michael Ritz’s post on using pages in Emacs. If you haven’t already, be sure to follow the link to Ritz’s post. Now the estimable Artur Malabarba continues the theme with a post of his own on how to navigate among pages with minimal friction.
Malabarba likes to have easy key bindings for command he uses a lot so he remaps the forward-page and backward-page commands to 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+n】 and 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+p】. To take care of edge cases, he also recenters the page.
Malabarba points out that some languages don’t like ^L characters so he modifies the page-delimiter variable to make it ;;; instead. That still works for the Emacs source files and doesn’t interfere with languages like Clojure.
Finally, be sure to read the comment by Ben Maughan on how he combines page navigation with a hydra. That’s also very useful.
Ben Maughan has posted the third installment of his series on Org mode basics. This time he considers adding links and images to Org files. As usual, the majority of the presentation is in the form of an Org file so that you can see how the text is entered.
If you’re using Org mode for writing—especially if you are going to export it to HTML—being able to easily add links is a very useful thing to be able to do. Most of my posts have multiple links so being able to add then quickly is a real win.
Another nice thing about Emacs and Org mode is that they can display images. Thus, if I want a picture in one of my posts, I can add a link to it in the Org file, type 【Ctrl+c Ctrl+x Ctrl+v】 and have it displayed right in the Org file.
Like the other posts in the series, this one is short so take a couple of minutes to give it a read.
I’ve written before about Howard Abrams’ posts on Literate DevOps and his very nice video illustrating the techniques. As I mentioned in the video post, we can all benefit from these ideas in our day-to-day work.
Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder offers a fine example of this. He has taken the long and error prone process of provisioning a development machine and turned it into a Literate DevOps process. You can, if you like, download his complete setup from GitHub but his process is necessarily idiosyncratic. In the first place, it’s for OS X. In the second, it’s targeted, as it must be, at the type of applications that he needs for his work.
Even if you aren’t using a Mac and your workflow is completely different from Rettke’s, you can use his file as a framework for your own. Besides setting up your own machine(s), Rettke’s ideas would be very useful for setting up standard development machines for your shop. Individual engineers would doubtless want to tweak things to their liking but at least everyone will have the same base system and all the needed tools.
I really like these kind of articles. They always give me ideas for simplifying my own work and indulging my innate laziness. Read over his file and take away what works for you. Org mode is a wonderful thing and we should leverage it as much as we can.
I.F. Stone famously told us that “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” It’s easy to write that off as tin foil hat fodder but, in truth, the facts support him. The latest such facts involve the Boston Police Department. Recently, investigative reporter Kenneth Lipp reported that despite promising to end the program, the BPD was continuing their liscense plate scanning program.
Fortunately, the liars are usually as incompetent as they are dishonest. In this case the BPD’s deception was discovered because they had the plates in a publicly facing data base. The police like to say that driving your car on public roads mean that you are part of an investigation. Those who are not members of the thought police are inclined to demur. Regardless, the police promised to end the program but continued to collect the data by other means.
Remember this when they tell you that you can trust them when they come asking for authority to stick their noses into your business. Don’t give it to them because they will abuse your trust. Always.
The government continues to press the tech sector to give them “golden” keys that they can use to decrypt our communications. One of the main arguments against these proposals is that they will inevitably be compromised and make us less safe.
Now we have a dramatic demonstration of just that. In locksmithing, golden keys are called master keys because they can be used to open many different locks. A few years ago when the TSA was merely annoying they persuaded luggage manufacturers and travelers to use locks for which the TSA had master keys. Recently, the TSA allowed the Washington Post to take a picture of the keys. But once you have a picture of a key it’s trivial to make a copy (and, indeed, that has already happened) so now no one’s baggage is safe from, say, a dishonest baggage handler1.
Does anyone doubt that some equally incompetent government agent will similarly reveal the golden keys that the FBI so fervently desires? If you do, how much do you think criminals or unfriendly nation states would be willing to pay for those keys? As Bruce Schneier says in the post linked above, the problem with backdoors, whether cryptographic or physical, is that they’re fragile.
Matt Blaze’s point about the safety of these locks
As a practical matter, the photos of the TSA keys isn't such a big deal. Using a key is actually *slower* than picking those locks.
— matt blaze (@mattblaze) September 8, 2015
is beside the point. What matters here is that the government asked for special access and then was careless with safeguarding it.
I don’t really believe this but it is funny:
using #emacs keybindings pic.twitter.com/2I1g1YAvZt
— Satyajit Ranjeev (@sat_ran) September 6, 2015
I’ve always liked the RC4 cipher. It’s easy to understand and implement and has been in wide use for almost 30 years. Sadly, RC4’s run is over. It’s long been suspected that the NSA could break it and recent attacks are able to break RC4 in a matter of days or even hours.
Now Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla have announced their browsers will stop supporting RC4 in early 2016. The good news is that most servers support other cipher suites so RC4’s demise will go mostly unnoticed. There are, apparently, a few servers that support only RC4. These servers will stop working once the browsers refuse to negotiate its use.
I’m sad to see it go but RC4’s usefulness has clearly come to an end. If you have any apps still using it, it’s time to upgrade or replace those apps.
This seems familiar
The best part about sitting down to write is cleaning my entire apartment.
— Caira Conner (@CairaConner) November 18, 2014