You’ve probably heard the old story that ends with, “The Russians were faced with the same dilemma. They used a pencil.” As is always the case, the story is a lot more interesting and complex than is usually portrayed. Jason Kottke has the details.
Today I spent some time going through the huge number of unread emails in my inbox and found that most of them were from a bunch of mailing lists that I’ve been subscribed to for donating money, buying things, or otherwise submitting forms on the Internet that happened to have my email address in them. I then went about unsubscribing from dozens of marketing email lists and had some thoughts on the experience. ...
Mike Ash: ARM64 and You I’m linking to this, because it’s first class nerdery, giving real insight into CPU design and performance. I always operate many layers of abstraction above this, but I find it absolutely fascinating. By the way, the comments on this post are a tonic against the general pessimism about blog comments.
Today’s big news is that the Chaos Computer Club has broken Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint security feature on the iPhone 5s. First, you have to define broken. They have shown that you can unlock the phone using a copy of an authorized fingerprint. How do you do it? Take a 2400 DPI image of the fingerprint, print it out at 1200 DPI, and then use glue to create a model of the fingerprint. ...
What’s the meaning of life? I really liked the suggestion from Samuel Scheffler in today’s New York Times that it is furthering the human project. He focuses on our belief that human life will continue once we are gone: Yet I think that this belief plays an extremely important role in our lives, quietly but critically shaping our values, commitments and sense of what is worth doing. Astonishing though it may seem, there are ways in which the continuing existence of other people after our deaths — even that of complete strangers — matters more to us than does our own survival and that of our loved ones. ...
I am in the process of writing a post about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog that I was going to share with some friends who don’t read it. I started thinking about points he’d made that I wanted to include, and tried to find the posts where he made those points by way of Google. Then I started going through his old posts page by page, and I realized that the whole is far more than the sum of the parts. He’s written some great sentences, and great paragraphs, and great posts, but the blog is a body of work that reinforces, illuminates, and colors the parts that one might want to pick out and share. This may be the first time I’ve had a real sense that blogs really are a new form of writing, different than even a regular column. People may appreciate the posts I select, but they won’t have the same relationship I have with the writing, having read it as it was published over a number of years. ...
IETF chairman Jari Arkko and Stephen Farrell, IETF Security Area Director, comment on how future Internet standards will respond to the threat of pervasive monitoring (a.k.a. the NSA). The fact that they openly refer to pervasive monitoring as a threat to be countered is a very good sign.
All of this is a long way of saying that I was totally unprepared for today’s bombshell revelations describing the NSA’s efforts to defeat encryption. Not only does the worst possible hypothetical I discussed appear to be true, but it’s true on a scale I couldn’t even imagine. I’m no longer the crank. I wasn’t even close to cranky enough. Matthew Green: On the NSA. Click through for a good overview of the likely methods and vectors for attack in the SSL ecosystem. ...
There have been many depressing if not altogether unexpected revelations since Glenn Greenwald broke the story of Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. Reporters have been working overtime to dig into NSA programs for snooping on electronic conversations. Today’s New York Times story on the NSA compromising SSL is perhaps the biggest. SSL is the secure protocol browsers use to communicate with Web servers. It is the foundation of secure commerce on the Web. ...
The biggest pushback I got for my Seven Signs of Dysfunctional Engineering Teams post was in response to my point that dysfunctional teams favor process over tools. They argue that it’s easier to change a process as opposed to a tool, and that the more important distinction is in creating a “good process” rather than a “bad process.” Creating processes is the default in any organization. Creating process starts out simply by reminding people of things, “Make sure you turn out the lights before you leave the room.” Or, “Please email the international team before you launch any features on the UK site.” The establishment of new processes is normal and completely expected. ...