The cool thing to do is encrypt all your network traffic. This used to be cool, but it’s even cooler now. I don’t really see much point to encrypting your nytimes.com visits, but I guess some people don’t like others knowing what kinds of news articles they read. (We all know you just read the gossip columns.) Anyway, the downside is minimal to non-existent, so go for it.

But wait! I was reading about The Dictionary of Numbers and got to the downside mentioned at the end. The browser extension was also modifying the text of a bank statement. Ordinarily, I’d say the easy thing is to only use amusing extensions on http, but not https, sites. How does that work in the brave new world of all https all the time?

Used to be https served a dual role as a signifier of serious business. Now it doesn’t, but we haven’t really replaced it. True enough, it was never a reliable signifier, and maybe the best thing to do if running with a dozen funny extensions is use a different browser (profile) for serious business.

I wonder how this affects phishing. When “https is secure, make sure your bank uses https” permeates into the general conscience, does it become “if everything is https, everything is secure“? Does the prevalence of https inspire false confidence in the web or will people learn that https was never a good signal for determining the legitimacy of a (possibly forged) web site?

I’m not sure what trickery LinkedIn uses to trick my connections into endorsing me, since they don’t seem like the kinds of people who would do so voluntarily, but LinkedIn never fails to notify me of my ever growing reputation. (I wonder if and how many people I’ve endorsed.) Today’s email was pretty sweet:

I've just endorsed you for new skills & expertise!

Amp expertise is definitely going on the resume.

Quoting from Celiac Power, “They tested the blood for gluten antibodies, expecting to see the current 1 percent rate of disease. Instead, only 0.002 percent of the airmen tested positive. Further tests showed today’s young men were 41/2 times more likely to have the illness.”

Puzzle: Arrange the numbers 0.01, 0.00002, and 20.5 in a sensible equation.

Google Glass facial recognition. “I think that makes conversation far more efficient.” For all those times I’ve had an inefficient conversation with somebody because I couldn’t read their Wikipedia article out of the corner of my eye.

From Ars.

There’s an article Change the World in the May 27th New Yorker. (Two kids with weird looking lollipops or something on the cover.) Covers the intersection and interaction between Silicon Valley and the world of politics. It’s an awesome article because it confirms all my opinions of the Web 2.0 tech scene. Worth reading the whole thing online, but here’s some highlights and scattered thoughts of my own.

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Everything that is wrong with the rest of this country, succinctly represented on one map. This one is also pretty good. I can absolutely confirm this one as well. Some people just don’t know how to talk.

Nothing too surprising for anyone who’s talked to people from different parts of the country, but this is the best visual representation I’ve seen.

Interactive version by NY Times.

A long time ago, OpenBSD added bcrypt, a function to securely (slowly) hash a password. Sometime later, a similar but more general standardized password -> hash function was developed, PKCS #5 PBKDF2. How that winner of a name caught on but bcrypt didn’t is a mystery to me.

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While working on boehm-gc, kurt ran into a threaded test case that sometimes got stuck, spinning on the sched_yield system call. In theory, yielding allows other processes to run, but on an otherwise idle machine, it just ends up using all the CPU itself, in a futile effort to not run. This initially looked like a case of trying to recursively acquire a spinlock (not supported) somewhere in the guts of librthread. Peering at the test case, this seemed a reasonable explanation (it was doing some twisty stuff, creating a new thread in a dying thread’s thread specific data destructor), but further inspection revealed that librthread is careful to release its internal locks before calling the destructor. The bug remains a mystery.

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We keep remaking old movies. Why doesn’t anybody rewrite old books?

novel

AP English was like 900 years ago. Whatever The Great Gatsby is supposed to be about, I’m sure I didn’t care. And if I had cared, I lacked the perspective to appreciate it. Does anybody in high school care about somebody who forgets it’s his 30th birthday?

1974

Before Sam Waterston was a big deal district attorney, he was a lowly bond salesman trying to make it in the big city. Follows the book fairly closely as far as I can tell.

2013

Leonardo DiCaprio. Great Gatsby or Greatest Gatsby? I honestly think he’s better cast than Redford (more urbane than folksy charm). However, Redford played the part with more cool confidence, which is how I’d like to think of Gatsby, but DiCaprio may be closer to the book? Hard to tell.

Don’t think I’ve seen a more anachronistic movie. If it’s necessary to freshen things up, then just go for the full effect as in Romeo + Juliet, but don’t overlay a 1920s period piece with Jay-Z and electronic beats. Or completely tacky Moet product placement. If you need an original soundtrack, I think sticking with Lana Del Rey wouldn’t have been so bad, and then I could overlook lesser transgressions (I find it unlikely that Carraway would be unpacking Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, even if he did have aspirations as an author).

Complaints aside, probably close enough to the book to pass English class, too.

modern take

Apparently Gatsby didn’t sell well in Fitzgerald’s life. Would a modern rewrite do better today, when the only decent character in the story is selling bonds on Wall St.? Yeah, right. Maybe The Bonfire of the Vanities is that rewrite.

Mr. Ripley

Regarding Mr. Ripley and morality, a point of view about the meaning of evil from BBC Magazine.

This was a great issue with more than a few worthy articles. A strong technology focus (apparently the “Innovators Issue“). Gears and conveyor belts and falling apples on the cover.

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