Linux. ( 1991 — 2018. )

No disrespect is intended for Stepan Mitrofanovich Gudimov (1913 – 1941), died heroically in aerial ramming maneuver… whose beautiful tomb I stole here. But IMHO a dead project of Linux’s stature deserves a tomb, even if only an imaginary and stolen one. Especially a stolen project…

Stay classy, YCombinator.

The thought began, as many good things begin, in #trilema.
Users of the WOT, of V, and other systems where your cryptographic identity is wholly in your own hands1 live with a certain risk of “cryptographic death” – i.e. the compromise of one’s signing key. A conscientious user of public key crypto might keep the thought [...]

Phuctored SSH Public Keys to date.
Keys were obtained from a scan of the complete IPv4 space. We have gone approximately 20% of the way through the data set at the time of this writing.
Click on the IP addresses to view a key in Phuctor, or on the SSH hello string to view pertinent discussions.
A snapshot [...]

The WWW of Brian Krebs, perhaps the second-most-worshiped1 patron saint to all English-speaking “computer security” charlatans — is sitting sadly offline today on account of a ~TB/sec DDOS flood.2
His titanic bandwidth, it turns out, was provided gratis by Akamai – spamatronicists par excellence and industrial-scale enablers of everything that makes the modern-day WWW a rancid [...]

Once upon a time (in August of ‘15, to be exact) I wrote a very simple versionatron called ‘V‘.
Edit: See also Ben Vulpes’s excellent introduction to V.
V is a carefully-designed poison against the scurrying little vermin who feed on the proverbial ‘fear, uncertainty, and doubt.’
For readers who are not in the little circle of folks [...]

But, of course – it won’t.
But let’s imagine that it were in someone’s financial – hell, geopolitical! interest – to convince the public that it will. The New York Times editorial might go like this: ‘you may have heard of tungsten, a metal, just like gallium; the latter, a favourite among stage magicians for melting at body temperature…’
Now, it [...]

I had the honour of being invited to Trilema 2014 in Timișoara - where I exhibited a few completed gadgets.
More pictures at Mr. P’s site.

From the ‘Dear Idiots, ‘1984′ is Not a How-To Guide’ department:

He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What [...]

A reader recently asked me to comment on the demise of MtGox and its implications for Bitcoin enthusiasts.
I refused to do so, on account of the MtGox scam having been thoroughly beaten to death elsewhere – long before the recent and final convulsive fit people erroneously describe as ‘its demise.’ – The unwashed masses, eager [...]