Apparently London has elected a new Lord Mayor, which is a completely different office from the Mayor of London. Because England (which isn’t quite the same as the UK or Great Britain) is determined to be hopelessly confusing.
Granted, we have Manhattan, which is the same as New York County and which has its own President, which is a not the same as New York City, which has a Mayor, except that the Governor of New York State (a different thing) sort of runs the NYC subway for some reason.
And East New York is in New York City and New York State but not New York County, and not to be confused with West New York, which is in none of those.
I redid my informal tests of various cellphone-sized Faraday pouches, to measure the amount of attenuation they actually provide. Tl;dr: the expensive commercial ones generally work well. Cheap makeshift ones generally don’t.
First, what’s a Faraday pouch and why would you need one? A Faraday cage severely attenuates radio signals going in or out. It can be used to assure that an untrustworthy device (like a cellphone) isn’t transmitting or receiving signals when it shouldn’t be. Paranoid? Yes.
A Faraday cage is simple in principle: solid conducive container that completely enclosed the signal source. But actually constructing one that works well can be challenging. Any opening can create a junction that acts as an RF feed. There are pricey (~$50) products for this.
Email that starts “I know you’re busy” and proceeds to ask me to spend time doing something to save them time.
So, were they lying when they said they know I’m busy? Or are they flexing how much more valuable I should think their time is compared with mine?
People who genuinely need help almost never use the “I know you’re busy, but” template. It seems to be reserved for people who know they’re asking for something unreasonable, but want to appear reasonable.
Cue the parade of people telling me I should be more generous with my time. Maybe I should smile more, too?
For the record, I will not be offering my election integrity course at the University of Austin.
Even imagining doing that makes me want to hide under the bed.
I’m considering, however, a course in computation theory, covering such topics as Gödel’s completeness theorem, Turing’s Halting Solution, and why they don’t want you to know whether P=NP.
The thing about The Power Broker is that when you first see it you think, oh god, this is one of those impossibly long books people claim to have read but never actually do. But then once you actually crack it open, you’re just hooked.
It’s ostensibly a biography of Robert Moses, but it’s actually a political history of New York and the power of infrastructure.
If you’re a computer scientist and you’ve not read this seminal work, you owe it to yourself to do so. (Un)fortunately, it’s become hard to find platforms on which the attack can be reproduced in the form described, but it’s a transformative experience when you do.
Mastery of the buffer overflow attack - not just understanding it conceptually, but actually being able to execute it - is like developing a terrible superpower. You start to understand the problem of security in an entirely different way. @aleph_one’s paper made that accessible.
Anyway, @aleph_one’s paper, and an exercise based on it, is assignment #1 in every security course I teach.