One great concern of volunteering to work on friends’ cars is the possibility of accidentally making things worse, and last month I very nearly did just that. [The image above features the control arms (the big long pieces), the left and right engine mounts (in the opposite order), the “dogbone” mount, and the toasted caliper […]
Adversarial Software
I mentioned in my last post that it’s entirely possible for modern IoT devices to include wifi bruteforcing code in their firmware, and use this as a covert channel to communicate back to company servers without showing the user had ever connected the device to the internet. It would not at all surprise me if […]
Not Nearly Paranoid Enough
I recently started reading a book describing the surveillance dragnet constructed in a very large East-Asian country. I thought the book would focus specifically on that dragnet, but was surprised to find that the dragnet was largely constructed to shutdown dissent among minorities in the western portions of that country, no doubt a trial-run for […]
The Challenges of Open-Source Ecosystems
Once upon a time, open-source software was passed around on floppy drives and copied to user systems. In the later years, you could order a CD for programs like the Linux operating system, before web servers made these files easier to download. I imagine the early years of open-source were quite exciting. You put in […]
Diet Religions, Part 6: Reflections on Heresy
I’m going to make up a series of fictional health claims which I will put in quotes below to begin a discussion on pseudoscience. “Smoking is actually good for you. Doctors used to recommend it, until the government realized that demonizing tobacco would allow them to charge exorbitant taxes on cigarettes. It is a well-known […]
The Never-Ending Maw of Cybersecurity Certifications
As the months pass by and my retirement savings dwindle, I have to say I’ve at least been enjoying everything that I’ve learned over the past 2+ years. But I really needed to take a moment to criticize some of the activity I’ve been seeing in the certification space, because it’s truly bizarre. First of […]
Experimenting with a De-Googled Phone
Last month, I made the effort to find an older Pixel so I could install an alternative operating system on it. I’m a little bit of a privacy nut, but not nearly as nutty as I could be, so although I write a lot about my life in this blog (which has its own risks), […]
Brief Thoughts on Workers vs. Consumers
I’ve recently been reading the book “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry”, and this is now the second time I’ve bumped up against the history of food oligopolies, in which policy changes in the 1970s are often summarized as “get big or get out”, which led to the elimination of many […]
Elitism and Food
Due to the their rarity or cost of production, some foods used to be eaten exclusively by the wealthy, but industrial agriculture has dramatically leveled the playing field. Humans, though, are often keen to distinguish themselves, and so the emphasis has shifted from the exclusivity of foods to their supposed “health” benefits. In essence, the […]
Diet Religions, Part 5: False Prophets and Miracle Cures
The idea that one perfect, universal diet exists and can be followed by everybody is highly problematic and is entirely unlikely to be true, but that hasn’t stopped various diets from making the outrageous claim that they have super secret access to the Divine. One thing that really troubles me is how specific diet ideologies […]