Nathan Toups has an interesting set of suggestions for a dumber smartphone, intended to retain utility while reducing their potential for addiction. They’re good ideas, but I do have a few quibbles. I think that it’s fine to retain non-addictive entertainment, in order to use the phone with e.g. a Chromecast. Thus it’s okay to have YouTube, Hulu or Netflix, but it’s still good to get rid of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram &c.
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Paragon Initiative Enterprises wrote a nice blog entry on how to
generate secure random numbers in various languages awhile back. They
did leave out Common Lisp, but it’s easy to do there, too:
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Ten hours of white noise on YouTube received five copyright-infringement claims. The claims were imposed in order to attempt to steal ad revenue. Why isn’t this considered a form of piracy or barratry?
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Eric Law has an interesting piece on HTTPS. Short version: it’s not a panacæa.
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Happy Groundhog Day!
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Way back in 2003 I started a blog; I kept at it for nine years, but eventually trailed off and let it expire. Looking back through my archives is a bit embarrassing: I’ve changed a lot in 15 years. But there is some good stuff in there; I’ve decided to separate the wheat from the chaff and repost the bits which are still interesting — and maybe I’ll even get back to blogging some more, mostly on software topics.
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Noöne runs Linux, right? Well, not quite: here’s a list of fifty Linux users you might not expect. From our own government, to foreign states, to aircraft, to some of your favourite websites, Linux is everywhere.
Why not give Ubuntu a spin today?
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I just discovered Lightweight Portable Security, a Linux distribution released by the US Air Force. The idea is that it’s a system which boots from a CD or flash drive and works entirely in volatile memory — thus any malware is unable to survive a reboot.
They even have an LPS-Remote Access which is the only way to access government systems without government-furnished equipment. That’s pretty cool!
It’s a nifty idea, particularly for folks who have to travel and use unknown hardware a lot.
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One of the few things I miss about Fedora when using Ubuntu and related GNU/Linux distributions is the ease of setting up fairly complex disk partitioning schemes. I’m a big believer in disk mirroring (to protect against hard drive failure) and in encryption (to protect against data loss due to hardware theft), and Ubuntu requires use of an alternate, text-based installer while Linux Mint doesn’t even do that much.
Fortunately, this is Linux, which means I have all the tools I need to get this to work.
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Here’s a list of 97 essays for programmers, each written by a different author. They look pretty interesting, and the ones I’ve read seem pretty smart.
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My acquaintances know that I work in computers; my friends may know that I’m a Unix developer & sysadmin; my close friends might actually know that Unix is a computer operating system. What few if any of them know is why I use Unix, why I love using it and why I will not own a computing device without it. It boils down to the fact that I do not merely use computers; I wield them to some end — and there has not been an OS which has combined mainstream success and wieldability like Unix has.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation have a neat tool out: the Panopticlick. Many folks don’t know this, but every time you visit a web page your web browser sends lots of information to the web server you’re talking to — stuff like what web browser you’re using, what sort of pages you can read, which plugins you have installed and so forth. This is necessary in order for the remote web server to answer you appropriately.
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