Lately, I found myself unable to resist the temptation to translate this very pertinent classic of science fiction to English. If you, reader, know of a better translation, do not hesitate to write in. Meanwhile, here goes:

“The Star Diaries of Ijon Tichy: The Advantages of a Dragon.”
Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006).

Until now, I’ve said nothing about my [...]

In the spam trap today, I turned up this piece of “fan mail”:

Good afternoon there,

I became even more concerned about our future after reading your http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1299 page.

Our government continues to use surveillance technologies to collect sensitive data and then there’s a real risk that this data can be leaked. Did you know that over 7.9 [...]

This article is a continuation of the dig into the key schedule of the Serpent cipher.

For clarity, we will omit the routines already given in the previous article.

Let’s visualize the Serpent [...]

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…

Edit: Step-by-step replication instructions for the skeptical experimenter.

This article is a review of what I have been able to discover regarding the Google H1, aka Cr50, aka the “G Chip”, found in all Chromebooks of recent manufacture, including the Asus C101PA, my current candidate for a full delousing attempt.
To my knowledge, there has been no [...]

Apr. 26 update: This article is obsolete, the pill — was found; if you have this machine, scroll to the end.

The Asus C101PA Chromebook is a very interesting device: it contains a Rockchip CPU, for which we already have a working deloused Gentoo; it also contains such marvels as a non-blobulous Marvell 802.11 card, a [...]

Yes, that familiar little PC peripheral. The one that toggles a single keyboard/mouse/display ensemble between two or more connected machines.
They’ve quietly vanished from the market. And the fact appears to be discussed nowhere on the Net, at all. So I have seen it fit to make a note of it here.
What’s this, you say, they [...]

Stay classy, YCombinator.

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 [...]

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 [...]