UPDATE - 20170228 - Added more stuff I've discovered about KBFS.

A couple of years ago you probably heard about this thing called Keybase launching with a private beta, and it purported itself to be a new form of public key encryption for the masses, blah blah blah, whatever.. but what's this thing good for, exactly?  I mean, it was pretty easy to request an invite from the service and either never get one, or eventually receive an e-mail and promptly forget about it.  I've been using it off and on for a while, and I recently sat down to really mess …

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

As of 1818 EST5EDT on 17 August 2011, I ran the gpg --refresh-keys command
on my primary workstation. In the process of downloading and uploading new
signatures and keys, GnuPG suggested that I change my preferences;
specifically, the message digest and encryption algorithms that it defaults to
whenever it runs. I accepted the changes and was forced to re-export and
re-upload my public key. The size of the key has changed (due to being
re-exported and saved to a file) but the key itself has not. The key ID and
fingerprint are still the …

Medical doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered that hydrogen sulfide gas can cause the metabolic processes of mammalian cells to drop drastically, thus approximating a state of suspended animation. By breathing a low concentration of the gas the heart rates of experimental animals plummeted rapidly without a corresponding drop in blood pressure or the need for refrigeration; moreover, the state appears to be reversible. This means that the organism requires less oxygen in the depressed state, which means that cells remain viable much longer. The surgical applications should be obvious.

The Internet Storm Center reported not too long ago …

I can't say that I'm wild about the circumstances behind this (in fact, it's taken two days to calm down sufficiently to write about it without ranting), but the ramifications of this ruling are far-reaching and not a bit relevant these days.

In 2006, a Canadian citizen named Sebastien Boucher crossed the border into the United States and was stopped. His laptop was searched by US Customs agents. Allegedly, thousands of images related to child pornography were found on the drive (in case you haven't heard, US ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) reserves the right to examine and make disk …

For years, the webmail service provided by Hushmail has been an example of weak anonymity and privacy: They don't ask for much to set up an account, they will happily auto-generate an e-mail address for you, users connect via SSL, and they will encrypt and digitally sign any messages a user sends through their service. They also claim that all messages are stored in encrypted form on their disk arrays, so that even if someone did demand a copy of a message from a certain address it would be worthless to them (ostensibly, public key encryption is used on the …

Some time on Monday, the Bastille Linux project was notified that someone had hijacked their domain, namely, a domain squatter named Mykhaylo Perebiynis who is willing to return use of the domain name for the paltry sum of $10kus. The official announcement can be read here. However, because the Bastille security system has been running on more than just Linux for a few years now (vis a vis HP-UX and Mac OSX), Jay Beale has decided to rename the project to Bastille Unix and acquire a new domain name while his lawyers fight it out with Perebiynis.

Beale is also …

Coding with a teddy bear in your lap helps immensely.