MIT indefinitely removes online physics lectures and courses by Walter Lewin
MIT is indefinitely removing retired physics faculty member Walter Lewin’s online lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare and online MITx courses from edX, the online learning platform co-founded by MIT, following a determination that Dr. Lewin engaged in online sexual harassment in violation of MIT policies.
What's left of NoSQL?
What’s left of NoSQL if they start adding ACID and SQL support?
Microservices for the Grumpy Neckbeard
Recently microservices have been getting a lot of attention, both positive and negative. Articles about them tend to fall into two camps, which I'll affectionately label the hipster camp and the neckbeard camp. The hipster camp tends to strongly favor microservices, due to the excellent benefits they provide regarding…
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2014
The Nobel Peace Prize 2014 was awarded jointly to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education"
How “Legal” Are Seed Libraries?
After the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture cracked down on a community seed library, hundreds of seed libraries in the U.S. are suddenly wondering if they are breaking the law. According to PA regulators, in order to give out member-donated seeds, the Simpson Seed Library in Cumberland County would have to put…
Bye Bye JavaScript Promises
In my previous post , I explored how programming with promises can be made close to programming with values. After some more work on it, and some learning from bluebird , I came to conclude that my brain doesn’t think well with promises. So I wrote a macro for Javascript that expands “tasks” into async state machines…
Letter to MIT community regarding support of students behind ‘Tidbit’
The following email was sent this evening to the MIT community by President L. Rafael Reif.
My OpenBSD Story
Michael W Lucas writes books explaining exactly how computers were a mistake. Michael Warren Lucas writes random novels. They both live in the same body. If you’re looking for a specific title, please check the Title Index . To find out when he releases a book, sign up for my topic-specific mailing list .
Orchard and Fig are joining Docker
Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
Bitcoin mining the hard way: the algorithms, protocols, and bytes
This article explains Bitcoin mining in details, right down to the hex data and network traffic. If you've ever wondered what really happe...
Fun with Shellshock
This is great work. Though I must confess I’m more interested (and far more uneasy) about the other side of the coin — people developing projects like these involving machine learning to find and exploit the vulnerabilities in a fully automated fashion. This is related to, but not quite the same as, attempts at…
Google Fit: An effortless, comprehensive view of your fitness
When it comes to improving our fitness, every little effort counts. That’s why we’ve created Google Fit – a fitness app that helps you to...
TrueCrypt Master Key Extraction And Volume Identification
One of the disclosed pitfalls of TrueCrypt disk encryption is that the master keys must remain in RAM in order to provide fully transparent...
Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
Recent news headlines have made a big deal of Apple encrypting more of the storage on their handsets, and claiming to not have a key. Depend...
Running ASP.NET vNext on OS X and Linux
So what is ASP.NET vNext ? Microsoft have recently released a preview of the next iteration of their ASP.NET platform. I’m not going to go into …
Libtls – New TLS API from LibreSSL
tls_init , tls_config_new , tls_config_free , tls_config_error — initialize TLS client and server API
Building the Firefox browser for Firefox OS
As soon as the Boot to Gecko (B2G) project was announced in July 2011 I knew it something I wanted to contribute to. I'd already been working on the idea ...