I have two recreational programming projects active now.
The first is a deterministic password generator [1] which is designed to be easy to use and manage. I've been using it myself for a couple months and have a couple UX improvements in my head that need to be done before I'd recommend it to anyone else.
[1] https://bitbucket.org/nealtucker/whose/
The second is an infrastructure project which my brother and I are building as an opportunity for him to learn about automated infrastructure and security. Terraform starts by instantiating an automated private CA for the purpose of securely issuing certificates to all instances, and then all other instances come up with an agent that generates keys and calls the CA (along with a signed auth blob provided by the terraform run) to obtain certs. Nomad server also comes up, using the same certs, and controls all the other nodes. All communication is MTLS from the start and I'm in the process of adding ssh hostkey signing to the CA so at the same time the instances get certs, they get their hostkeys signed so we don't have to TOFU the ssh hostkeys. We have no idea what we'll do with it, but it's fun to build and teaching both of us a lot.
I love this kind of stuff. The fact that we (people in our field; not me specifically) had to and could do stuff like this must seem crazy ancient to the younger folks here. I did boot my first computer from a cassette tape, and I can still remember what it sounded like and it's so, so very nostalgic. And many of us did get our first internet access via these crazy noises as well. I'm sure I could also listen to a modem connecting and tell you what speed it had negotiated from 1200baud all the way up to 56k, since each new sound was, at one point, the pinnacle of excitement since I'd just upgraded to something new (and then I heard it thousands of times).
This is a great observation about the home inspector being more likely to give you an impartial diagnosis. There's an old guy who's a semi-retired home inspector down the block from me and it makes me think I should hire him for consultation when thinking about big projects.
The original goal of PDF was to create documents that could "view and print anywhere" (literally the original tagline of the Acrobat project), substantially the same as how the document creator intended them. What Adobe was trying to solve was the problem of sending someone a document that looked a particular way and when they rendered it on their printer or display, it looked different, e.g. having a different number of pages because subtle font differences caused word-wrapping to change the number of lines and thus the page flow. It wasn't about it being "pretty," it was about having functional differences due to local rendering and font availability. In this regard, the format is an emphatic success.
I do wish they had focused a bit more on non-visual aspects such as screen-reader data, but to say the whole point is "because it's pretty" is a bit uncharitable. The format doesn't solve the problem you wish it solved, but it does solve a problem other than making things "pretty."
> I do trust the team of 1Password to be competent and not evil, but there are many things that can go wrong anyway.
Very much this. I don't benefit in any way from having a copy of my sensitive data in their cloud, so as a very basic security principle, I don't want them to have it.
And that's just for my personal use. If they drop support for local vaults, I have to stop using it for work, too, because my employer prohibits password managers that store passwords in the cloud. My understanding is that these policies are specifically designed to keep us in compliance for government contracts, so I don't think they're changing.
Please tell me local support is coming. I'm a longtime 1Password user who only uses local vaults and I feel like 1Password is increasingly showing me they aren't interested in me as a customer.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "the real crime," but I wholeheartedly agree that zoom should share some responsibility here. If we're going to routinely put children in a virtual space, that virtual space should be able to be secured for them. If an after-school children's program put children in a position where, say, sexual predators easily had access to them, we'd not only blame the sexual predators, but also the system that put the kids within reach to them.
I've always been very surprised zoom has an easily-guessable meeting ID namespace. It's a user experience tradeoff, but in my opinion, either the meeting IDs should be sparse and hard to guess, or there should be passwords (or possibly both).
For what it's worth, I knew immediately what this was for but read your entire page looking for some kind of explicit confirmation and/or clear description of the use cases. The info given almost seems intentionally coy, as if you're even trying to maintain plausible deniability on the website.
I want photoshop about once a year and I am literally still using photoshop 6 on windows. It's over 20 years old. Works fine, installs in about 5 seconds.
Yes, but attached much more solidly than a traditional one. They slide onto the pegs and stay put perfectly without any sort of adhesive and are actually tricky to remove due to the precision with which they snap in.
I effectively have an "all-on-4" situation but where the 4 are my natural teeth. I have a genetic condition which caused very few of my adult teeth to grow, so the ones that did grow in nice and solid have been capped with machined gold cylinders and used as the receivers for a full denture (google "telescopic copings"), which fits perfectly on them and also acts as a retainer for those teeth. It's actually quite nice and comfortable and my teeth went from being a painful horror show to functional and trouble-free in a relatively short timeframe.
The really interesting thing about point 1 is that with encryption, there's really extremely little personal risk to being unlawful when it comes to encryption. That's why this is a losing game of chess for them. Encryption is just math, and you don't need anybody's permission to do math. You can take a system that the government has mandated be broken and you can do good encryption inside that system by layering it. And good people who simply want to be safe will do this. And so will terrorists. Outlaw good encryption and a whole sub-industry of deniable encryption tools will emerge. And they will have achieved nothing except that our companies won't be allowed to officially support strong encryption, so they'll be disadvantaged in the marketplace. It's a really backwards move.
Since the spread between the strike price and the current market value gets a tax treatment like income, it can pay off to exercise options early if you want to hold the stock and are confident the price is going to go up. He just paid $3.5M for stock that is worth $102M, so he's got to pay taxes on about $98M of something income-ish.* If hypothetically he waited and the stock doubled, he'd have to pay tax on a much larger spread.
* I say something income-ish because whether it's actually called income depends on the option type and AMT complexities that I can't really rattle off off the top of my head, but suffice it to say the spread is taxed in a very income-like way.