It seems there is no end to the number of quotes through history that go something like this: "Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it." It's been variously attributed to Edmund Burke, Sara Shepard, Santayana... this is not to say that there is no truth to it. Far from it.

I haven't said much about the election of 2016, in part because my personal life has been upside down and inside out for weeks now, in part due to work, and in part due to the fact that there is so much fucked up stuff going …

Someone in Italy has a real German Enigma machine from World War II up for auction on eBay. The Enigma machines were the mechanism used to implement the famous cryptosystem that protected German radio communications up until Allied cryptographers were able to figure out how it worked. With today's technology (in particular, programming languages) it isn't too difficult to implement one yourself once you know the principle, but if this is legit, it's a real piece of World War II and crypto history. Not many Enigma machines survived after the war was over; the few that are left are in …