Going rogue - noun phrase - Ignoring the directions Google Maps (or whatever map navigation application you have on your phone) gives you in favor of using the knowledge inside your head and local area expertise.  The thing about map navigation applications is that so many people use them, the moment you deviate from the main course you have almost entirely empty streets, with a significant reduction in travel time.

Well, I'm finally back from Defcon 25 and writing up my notes while in the throes of con drop before too much of the experience fades from memory.  Suffice it to say that I have opinions about last weekend, which I will attempt to write as concisely as I can.  I don't like being negative about things because my experience is my own, and I much prefer that people have their own experiences and make up their own minds about things.  However, I would be lying if I painted a rosy picture of my attendence of the largest hacker convention …

The field of artificial intelligence has taken many twists and turns on the journey toward its as-yet unrealized goal of building a human-equivalent machine intelligence. We're not there yet, but we've found lots of interesting things along the way. One of the things that has been discovered is that, if you understand it well enough (and there are degrees of approximation, to be sure) it's possible to use what you know to build logic circuits that work the same way - neuromorphic processing. The company AeroVironment recently test-flew a miniature drone which had as its spatial navigation system a prototype neuromorphic …

Not long after moving to DC I gave up on the concept of going to gathers organized by users of meetup.com for a variety of reasons. Most of them involved never being able to find the agreed-upon locations of things that I'm interested in, though a few factor in getting there so late that everybody'd already gone home. Needless to say, after a few such fuckups I decided that it was more interesting to do other things. A couple of years later (but about two weeks ago) Jason asked in passing that he'd found a meetup called Chaos In …

For unknown reasons, I just lost the previous draft of this post, and so have had to start over. That includes a number of edits that made the text more coherent to read. Please bear wth me.

The reason I haven't been writing much lately is because what little time I have that isn't taken up by work has been spent running hither and yon, having what are popularly termed 'wacky adventures'. Things haven't slowed down much for Lyssa and I since we got married; in fact it's rare that we have an evening at home to ourselves that isn't …

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 …