Extracting Audio from Pictures of Gramophone Recordings
Three years ago, a survey team identified a staggering 569,148 time-based media objects on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University—that’s over half a million sound recordings, video recordings…
Thrown Off a United Airlines Flight for Taking Pictures
You’ve changed almost everything. So why do the same problems keep coming back? Explore the rules, responses, and results with UPGRD®.
Domain Knowledge or a Lack Thereof
I believe that a lack of domain knowledge is the root cause of a lot of very bad software that gets developed and I think that it is up to computer programmers and their managers to deal with this. Acquiring domain knowledge is an essential component in the development of software that really works well for its users…
Civil Liberties Groups Speak Out Against CISPA in Lead Up to Hearings
On Monday, EFF and over 30 other Internet rights organizations sent a letter to members of Congress demanding they vote no on the "cybersecurity" bill known as CISPA. The letter starts off a week in which Congress will hold three different hearings about CISPA and computer and network security. In...
The IIT Entrance Exam
This is the story of India's Joint Entrance Examination, the yearly attempt to pick out the ten thousand most intelligent students in a country of 1.2 billion people.
Blackmail fail
In which the author receives surprising offers from kind strangers
Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth
To celebrate the sunny days of summer (in the northern hemisphere at least), we're unveiling new satellite imagery for all Google mapping p...
SecureDrop
SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower support system, originally written by Aaron Swartz and now run by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The first instance of this system was named StrongBox and is being run by The New Yorker. To further add to the naming confusion, Aaron Swartz called the system DeadDrop…
Let’s help Airbnb rebuild the bridge it just burned
[Trieste, Italy, 12:02am Friday 21 May 2013 — As I say in the comments here, Airbnb has responded to this post, explaining that a bug in the system was involved. While that might patch Airbnb’…
The Positive Programmer
My thoughts on the negativity in the tech community, how I went from a miserable, negative programmer to a happy one, and small steps to get there.
Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”
Data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte relates how he came to defend Aaron Swartz in the JSTOR incident and how he, Tufte, was a hacker himself.
An update on Truecrypt
Several people have been asking for an update on our public audit of the Truecrypt disk encryption software. I’m happy to say that the project is on track and proceeding apace. Here I wanted …
JQuery 1.9 has been released
jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library
A Moment Before Dying
There is a moment, immediately before life becomes no longer worth living, when the world appears to slow down and all its myriad details suddenly become brightly, achingly apparent.
Bitcoin and positive vs. normative economics
There’s an agenda there, and it’s a bad one.
64 GB Surface Pro will only have 23 GB free
A company spokesperson has confirmed to The Verge that the 64GB edition of Surface Pro will have 23GB of free storage out of the box. The 128GB model will have 83GB of free storage. It appears that the Windows 8 install, built-in apps, and a recovery partition will make up the 41GB total on the base Surface Pro model.
ZeroMQ is just sockets
Kim: Yeah, right. It's just sockets . Course, it's totally portable so you don't have to handle all the weird stuff different operating systems ask you to do.
GPGMail 2 is finally here
GPG Mail 8 beta for macOS Golden Gate. Read the latest status, installation instructions, known issues and support plan information.
The NSA Is Breaking Most Encryption on the Internet
The new Snowden revelations are explosive. Basically, the NSA is able to decrypt most of the Internet. They’re doing it primarily by cheating, not by mathematics. It’s joint reporting between the Guardian, the New York Times, and ProPublica. I have been working with Glenn Greenwald on the Snowden documents, and I have…
0 A.D. Alpha 15 - Osiris
Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of “0 A.D. Alpha 15 Osiris”, the fifteenth alpha version of 0 …