Category: technology
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The problem with tech companies
Part of the problem with tech companies in general is that they don’t actually have to exist and I think everyone knows it, like in their soul. Tech, particularly Silicon Valley tech, is not actually valuable in any intrinsic way, and so if the Internet were to suddenly vanish, and everyone who knows how to…
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taxonomy of the data landscape
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The only safe computer
The only safe computer is a computer that has no electricity. The rest of the time you are just counting on probability to be on your side, which is an inherently horrible strategy to manage risk because it conveys the illusion of safety while also affording zero agency in that safety. E.g.: We probably won’t…
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Rule: Naming things
There is a trend to give a project or effort a catchy name. This isn’t always a great idea, because when that name gets in the hands of the customer, and it will, it becomes a hook for conversations that don’t lead to providing your chosen value. Naming is hard, and you need a symbol…
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Identity is what’s missing
Neither the Internet nor the Web have an Identity model. This means they also don’t have a Trust model. And from this fact flows nearly all the insecurity issues that are inherent to the Internet or the Web (as opposed to those coming from defective software). “What is identity?” is one of those bottomless questions…
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Intellectually dishonest apply within
The CEO of Comcast is making the rounds talking about how his cosmically disliked unregulated monopoly should be getting less heat about their deployment of data caps on residential broadband Internet connections because “the more bits you use, the more you pay“, comparing data use to electricity or gasoline use. Except it is nothing like…
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Picking your new from the world’s old
In some cases, this might be brilliant. In the case of the redditor who says, “I’m a new programmer and I chose PHP as my language”, it just seems misguided.
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Its stateful all the way down.
Statefulness is a pain in the ass. But it brings with it enough value to keep people interested in maintaining state. And really, everything is stateful, even things that claim to be stateless. How so? There are two kinds of state: peer state and configuration state. Peer-state is what you hold in your arp and…
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Internet mass surveillance shenanigans have one obvious outcome:
the widespread proliferation and use of IPSec AH headers and ESP in transport mode. First one with an easy-to-use solution for the masses wins the Kewpie doll.
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Some computer/technology things that annoy me
In no particular order: Browsers that don’t have rules based cookie managers Exchange/Outlook calendar being incompatible with everything else in the ‘verse The Voodoo ritual that is Linux + Keepass2-Firefox integration Ubuntu system logging defaults Virtual hosting services that hobble iptables in the guest javascript and the fact that it is everywhere When openssh tells…