borg.org

borg.org, the nobody reads it blog.

  • I Killed a Russian Troll

    I called him on it, that is not how a Bostonian talks.

  • Python is a Great Prototyping Language…but One Should Never Ship a Prototype

    I really like how Python lets me start to get things working before everything is working. I can fire up an interactive debugger and immediately start playing with some library I Googled up and think I might need, quickly get it doing stuff, plug it in to other code and quickly get the whole doing […]

  • Patron Saint of Ham Radio?

    Today, 19 May 2020, is Oliver Heaviside’ 170th birthday. Hurray! Who? Okay this post will be a bit technical…but only a bit. One of the giants of science is James Clerk Maxwell, he figured out the science behind how radio waves work. Pretty important stuff. He is immortalized in the famous four Maxwell Equations. Maybe […]

  • Why Do They Deny?

    Why are the people who strenuously argue Hitler’s death camps never existed, also seem to argue they should have existed?

  • Inviting Phishing: Stop Training People to Be Fooled

    As we try to tighten up our computer systems, in 2018, phishing feels like one of the most dangerous things. Sure, getting someone to open a dangerous attachment that exploits a PDF bug (is there an infinite supply?) is a problem, but let’s imagine users running on such tight systems that dangerous attachments are no […]

  • Why Trump Grovels so to Putin, I Figured it Out, Now That it is Obvious

    I have wondered what Putin has on Trump to get such deference. For a very long time I was deeply puzzled. Until a week or so ago when I realized that John Brennen nailed it a year ago May!     “Frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do      not know they are […]

  • We Are Really Unhappy with Our Operating Systems, and Don't Know It

    Linux has won. It is taking over everything, from tiny devices to the biggest super-computers. Apple’s operating systems are all pretty much on the same model, and Microsoft always seems to be trotting along in roughly this direction, too. The idea is pretty cool: Give each program a uniform view of the machine, keep them […]

  • Kent's Super-Simple, Excellent Password Advice

    This excellent advice is simple, in fact its excellence depends upon being simple. Complicated is the enemy of security. If you follow this advice you will be among a very rare elite in how secure your passwords will be. Four parts: 1. Write down your passwords. On real paper, with a real pen or pencil, […]

  • Snowden, the Movie

    I went to one of the first Boston matinees of the movie Snowden today. It was all very familiar territory: it could have been boring or–as with any subject I know a lot about–it could have been excruciating in its errors. It was neither. It held my attention, it did not disappoint. But was it […]

  • Why We Got Ourselves a Trump: 4 Crazy Tricks

    Four things came together to give us Donald J. Trump as the all-but-official GOP nominee. First, the so-called cable news channels in the US are, indeed, for-profit businesses, looking for ratings, looking for an edge. Thump was ratings gold for them. He got enormous free publicity in exchange for supplying viewers. He did a very […]