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A Twitter thread on trolls brought up mention of trolls on Usenet . The reason they were so hard to deal with, even then, has some lessons for today; besides, the history is interesting. (Aside: this is, I think, the first longish thing I’ve ever written about any of the early design decisions for Usenet. I should…
Facebook just announced support for PGP, an encrypted email standard, for email from them to you. It’s an interesting move on many levels, albeit one that raises some interesting questions. The answers, and Facebook’s possible follow-on moves, are even more interesting.
Usenet—Netnews—was conceived almost exactly 40 years ago this month. To understand where it came from and why certain decisions were made the way they were, it’s important to understand the technological constraints of the time.
Microsoft is shipping a patch to eliminate SHA-1 hashes from its update process. There’s nothing wrong with eliminating SHA-1—but their reasoning may be very interesting.
There are many news reports of a ransomware worm . Much of the National Health Service in the UK has been hit; so has FedEx . The patch for the flaw exploited by this malware has been out for a while, but many companies haven’t installed it. Naturally, this has prompted a lot of victim-blaming: they should have…