“We believe in this policy,” Charest said. “This policy is going to go ahead.” “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein... Read More
Introduction With the student protests in Québec now approaching their fourth month, it seems that there have been very few reasonable proposals from either side as to how to address this issue in a way that would satisfy the economic concerns of the administration and the social concerns of the protesters (although, this isn’t to […]... Read More
Unlike some readers, I wouldn’t call Sam Harris a ‘racist’ (religions or ideologies aren’t races) or even a bigot. He thinks he’s actually got a good argument when he calls for profiling by the TSA. On face value, his arguments might seem sound, perhaps even nearly convincing – even though there’s a nagging feeling that […]... Read More
I stubled across this from a colleague at my new gig: #!/bin/bash if uname -r | { IFS=.- read -r a b c _; [ "$((a*10000+b*100+c))" -lt 20622 ]; }; then echo 'Your kernel is too old!'; else echo 'Your kernel is 2.6.22 or newer!' fi... Read More
So, I was logging in to an account with my registrar today, and there was a notice saying that ‘.in’ domains were on sale for $2.48. I couldn’t resist, it is the best $3 I’ve ever wasted.... Read More
It’s been a while since I posted anything here, I blame winter plus a host of all sorts of things that have been keeping me busy. Since the last blog post, there have been a number of things. Delano and I released One-Time Secret, along with Ruby, PHP and (thanks to Kyle Dawkins) Perl client […]... Read More
In my previous blog post, I wrote about choosing good passwords. However, most hack attempts don’t involve password hacking/guessing at all. Even dictionary attacks — which are far more common that brute force attacks — are not the most common way that criminals get at your account information and private data. In this blog post, I’ll […]... Read More
One of my pet peeves about security are people who advocate for ‘strong’ passwords. Everyone knows these people, they’re the tech support person who tells you your password must have a minimum number of characters that you only use when censoring expletives. Even worse, some of them use a random password generator to assign a […]... Read More