Born in 1967 (just a few months before I was), Rosemary's baby, the son of Satan, is a Gen-Xer. (Coolness.)
When I logged into the server at university one morning, the Message of the Day (MotD) said that, at 9 mebibytes, Gnu emacs was the single largest application on the system, so if someone wanted to view a text file (just view it), please use "more" or "less" to do so. (That was 1989 or 1990 at a college in California's Bay Area.)
In 2026, I notice that Gnu emacs is about 55 mebibytes, Firefox is 444 mebibytes, & some Java application is 563 mebibytes.
What do you value about a story? What it tells you or what it coaxes you to imagine?
I re-wrote my web server again. Well, sort of. I took it off the home-made web server I had written & moved it to S3 + Cloud Front.
I re-wrote my web server.
I also reviewed it & did a little analysis. tpy75.html
People are misusing the term API. d2h10.html
The two most powerful tools of humans are language and organized collective action.
We invented language. Nobody in the world uses language the way we do. Be proud.
These tools are so powerful that they tend to use us.
In 2007, I printed copies of some Wikipedia pages about Silent Hill. Now I've scanned them to PDF. They are at silent_hill_wikipedia_2007.pdf
I guess they are not up to the editorial standards of modern Wikipedia, but they are full of insights & are fun to read. So here they are.
You've noticed how cyber-security events are becoming more frequent & more severe? How the “cloud” could be considered part of the foundation of civilization now, & cyber-security events threaten that?
What will we do?
The problem is severe, but I predict it'll wash out similarly to what happened with virii & worms infecting stand-alone computers in the early 2000s. The problem got worse & worse back then until there was a period — maybe a whole year but probably less than 6 months, I don't remember for sure — when a virus of the week would take significant portions of the Internet offline for half a day or more.
We solved that problem to the extent that, while virii & worms are a problem, they interfere with few of us daily.
I predict that the increasingly severe & frequent security problems we see now will be solved similarly. We'll beat them down until, while the problems are there, they'll be under enough control that they won't affect few of us daily.
But it sure sucks now, & it's gonna keep sucking for a while to come.
Someone told me that encryption is “useless” without authentication. I disagree, & I wrote my thoughts in 7f1a7.html
a brief rant: 4dvts.html
I watched “The Net” (1995) (not for the first time). We all know that it ain't the greatest, but it doesn't suck. A few interesting things about the film this time this time include:
According to Kaspersky, even as late as the year 2020, most of the incidents they ivestigated involved brute force password attacks.[kaspersky]
Reminds me of telling someone to use a password manager & not to “have a system” for making memorable passwords. Even in the year 2020, they reply “I have a good system” which they then describe to you because it's so clever[sarcasm].
This is why your router offers a guest wifi network & why even your {girl, boy, whatever}friend gets that passcode, not the one to your real network.
Don't ask “When should I use the Tor browser?” That's the wrong question. f2byk.html
Nothing to see here unless it's an error message. Move along (but thank you for peeking).
Let's reorganize this, my ancient web site. Short blog(?) entries that say short things or link to longer things. And longer things in their own files (as they already are).