So, there's this guy named James O'Keefe.

He's got this problem: He likes trying to play Mission: Impossible and wreck the careers and lives of people he doesn't like by pulling scams, editing videos in interesting ways to set people up, and generally being the sort of person you'd eject from the party for being such a huge asshole that the Alpha Betas would throw him out on his ear.  He spent all of Election Day in 2016 tailing buses taking people to the polls in an attempt to intimidate them into not voting.  He's cost a couple of people …

Last week an article broke in the LA TImes that the insurance company Blue Cross of California was asking doctors to report medical conditions to them that could be used as grounds to cancel customers' insurance. It is true that under certain circumstances insurance companies are legally permitted to terminate insurance contracts if the customer doesn't report certain pre-existing medical conditions on the forms, but this particular arm of Blue Cross was fined last year for cutting people left and right from their rolls, to begin with. Since the California Medial Association, the public, and the government of the state …

The BitTorrent tracker search engine Torrentspy, which has been coming under fire increasingly in the past few months has taken a shot broadside, leaving the future of the site uncertain. A federal judge in the state of California ruled that the admins of the site lied under oath and destroyed evidence demanded by the MPAA for their prosecution. It was asserted that the admins of the forum also run by the search engine edited posts to conceal the subject matter and set up hidden forums for the discussion of privacy once it became clear that they were under scrutiny. The …

If you turn on the Xscreensaver module called Sonar while you're running a packet monitoring application (such as TCPdump), people are less likely to think you're doing anything shady, because "Only hacker tools don't have GUIs." Always hack your shell's personal configuration file (~/.bash_profile, for example) to change your shellprompt if you use GNU screen. That way you can tell what shells you've left open are single-access shells and which shells are multiplexed through a single connection with screen. It can get confusing sometimes. Because a shell run inside a GNU screen metaterminal sets an environment variable called $WINDOW, you …