By now most people understand that there’s a serious problem with the news, but I’m not sure how many know how fundamental it is. Here’s the underlying issue: The companies that make the news we consume are for-profit businesses. These companies aren’t just pressured to increase profits, but will go out of business if they don’t constantly adapt…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 153
🛡️ Security News Ukraine has found another nasty piece of malware targetting their government systems. It’s a Windows backdoor called Pterodo. Link China has turned on their social credit system that was basically a Black Mirror episode, and it’s resulted in the blacklisting of millions of Chinese from booking flights. Their scores were too low. Unreal. Link The US…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 152
This is a member-only even episode. Members get the newsletter every week, as well as access to all previous episodes, while free subscribers only get odd episodes every other week. Become a member to get access immediately
Some of My Favorite Shell Aliases From Over the Years
Aliases are one of those things that follow you, from laptop to laptop, and server to server—like snippets of your educational DNA. Here are some of mine that have followed me for two decades: Type f to find things by name using find $ alias f="find . -name" A super quick speed test You can do this with…
The Few Are Winning, The Many Are Losing
I was just watching the mid-term results come in this evening and was struck with an idea: even in our democratic republic, it’s the few elites that seem to be winning. Trump won by electoral college, and he lost the popular vote. The electoral college is a collection of a few super influential people. The people are—well—the people.…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 151
Security News 👋 We’re preparing to release the 2018 version of the OWASP IoT Top 10, and we would love your feedback! Updated to include a feedback form. Form Link 🛑 Check your Facebook account to see if it was hacked. Link The company that owns Fortnite has purchased a company focused on stopping cheaters. Link A government report…
Building Your Own Dedicated IPSEC VPN in Less Than 10 Minutes
There are tons of VPN options out there, and the field is confusing enough that I did a post on the topic a while back to help people pick one of the better ones and avoid the scams. But if you look at the considerations for making a good choice, they mostly reduce to the following: Privacy Log…
What If Corporations Provided For Their Customers?
I was talking about books with my friend Jon Robinson the other day, and he said something offhand that I’ve not been able to chase out of my brain. It sounds like a silly idea until you realize that what we’re doing now is not likely to work for much longer. Corporations are becoming more powerful. They’re buying…
Entropy and Security
I’ve been obsessed with entropy since I learned about it in high school. It’s highly depressing, but it’s awesome at the same time given how inevitable it is, and how it’s happening all the time and all around us. I was just reading The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian, and it reminded me that I’ve wanted to…
Falling Testosterone, Poverty, and Violence, and How That Will Combine With Rising Inequality
It’s interesting to think about all the different trends happening at the same time right now: This is obviously not a complete list. Testosterone has been falling in men for decades Link Global violence is at an all-time low Link Global poverty is at an all-time low Link Income inequality is the worst it’s been in over a…