Peter Gutmann on the "[Cryptography]" mailing list wrote some thoughts about the impending crypto monoculture of all-things-Bernstein that seems to be currently sweeping the crypto world. In his post, he mentions the following (emphasis mine): The remaining mode is OCB, which I'd consider the best AEAD mode out there (it shares CBC's graceful-degradation property in […]
I'm not sure who I should be more disappointed in- Mozilla or Debian. Iceweasel 43 recently arrived in Debian unstable, and with it, Pocket. For those who are not familiar, Pocket is a 3rd party service that allows users to save sites they want to read or visit for later. Provided the extension is installed, […]
With all the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth about Google killing Reader, I figured I'd blog something productive. Rather than piss and moan, here is a valid solution you can build for at most two bucks, using entirely Free Software, running on your own server, under your control. The solution is to install Tiny […]
I've been reading up on how to actually create physical QR Codes, complete with error correction. It's been very enlightening, and has grown a deeper fascination on the symbology of barcodes in general for me. While I'm not in 100% agreement with how they are currently being used (marketing, mailing lists, coupons, etc.), I do […]
This is my first open source project that I've started and maintained, so I'm pretty excited about it. I was upset at the current offerings of Hashcash for the various MUAs, so I set out to do something about it. You've already read on my blog about my solutions for minting and verifying Hashcash tokens […]
This is something that has been on my mind for quite some time (think years), but I've refused to blog it, because it goes against the beliefs of many of my friends. In short, this post is going to hurt, but I just can't hold out on it any longer. Question: Are you one that […]
With all the whoo hah about why GNote sucks for Tomboy, mono is patent encumbered software by Microsoft, people eating FUD for breakfast, and other things, one argument I've failed to read is this: GNote can bring Tomboy to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as Red Hat will not ship mono with its flagship product. Whatever […]
Chuck, I read your post regarding Jono and the EFF choosing Twitter over Identi.ca, and ask the same questions you are: "If you're about Freedom and Liberty, then why choose a proprietary standard when an open one exists?" However, at the bottom of your post, you mention that you don't mind proprietary software, saying that […]
Goodbye Twitter and your buggy service. Goodbye Jaiku and your spammy bot. Goodbye Pownce and your 20 users. Hello Identi.ca and Free Software. Reasons for switching to Identi.ca for my microblogging service: The code powering the service is Free Software, licensed under the GNU Affero GPL. Create an account and login to the account using […]
I just caught up on my feeds, and read Carthik Sharma's post, Installing Vista Fonts In Ubuntu. From a completely Free Software standpoint, I'm going to argue why you would not want to do this. First, is the license itself, which should always be looked at when dealing with fonts, media, codecs or software. These […]
Guess who I just got off the phone with? Well, if you read my blog, and read my last post, I bet you can take a good guess. At 20:23 pm, just 1 hour ago, I got off the phone with Rob Bishop, my congressional representative. First off, I would like to thank Congressman Bishop […]
Fundamentalism: Movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles. Fanatic: An emotion of being filled with excessive, uncritical zeal, particularly for an extreme religious or political cause, or with an obsessive enthusiasm for a pastime or hobby. You can call me a fundamentalist fanatic when it comes to music, […]
You're treated like a criminal out the door. I won't go into WPA, the patent policies with Novell and Xandros, or the fact that you have to enter a serial number every time you want to install the operating system. In other words, the average Joe and your grandma aren't the subjects of this post. […]
There are only 9 days left, until Open Discussion Day, and I am posting this to remind you of the event and the purpose. Open Discussion Day is May 19th, every year, and it's a day where you drop your legacy IM protocols in favor of open protocols, such as Jabber/XMMP. I blogged about this […]
This image will circumvent Digital Restrictions Management on HD-DVD AACS disks. I have licensed this image under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license. Enjoy! UPDATE Feb 9, 2011: Added a QR Code to the mix. It too is licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 U.S. license.