Time had an article I liked about Kentucky’s healthcare exchange, Kynect. A similar piece with some of the highlights is in LA Times.

Mostly, I’m fascinated by McConnell’s attempts at threading the political needle now that people seem to like the law that he promised them they’d hate. “Hey, this law made us do something we never would have done, but now that we have and we like the result, that still doesn’t change anything. I’m always right.” Of course, voters seem equally confused about the name and nature of the law that was passed, so he still has some wiggle room.

Nothing new, people have always filtered reality through ideology, but in this case some of the facts are going to be hard for voters to ignore. Wonder how this will play out. In five years, will people be celebrating the (actually unchanged) healthcare law that “we should have had all along” after a few more rebranding exercises?

Tangential post on Bounded Rationality.

From the New Yorker, Money Talks - Learning the language of finance. For a little while I thought this article was going somewhere, but as I read more I decided I don’t like it much at all. It positions itself as piercing the veil of obscurity surrounding financial and economic jargon, but then ultimately contributes even more confusion to the field.

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As noted elsewhere, I removed the compression option from LibreSSL. The commit message of “decompress libssl” didn’t explain why. Here’s a longer rationale to expand upon “a simpler feature set overall”.

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Some experiments with trying to extract strings from a Lua process via timing attacks.

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Walked by an old man on the street who repeatedly asked me, “Are you the one who’s watching me?” I tried to deny it, but he didn’t believe my lies! Was briefly tempted to tell him, “We’re all watching you,” but he was clearly operating marble free and already seemed to have that impression. A strange encounter.

All the g2k14 summary reports from the OpenBSD Journal, plus a few relevant extras.

beck

henning

mpi

espie

zhuk

pelikan

deraadt

miod

bcook

pirofti

jsg

jasper

benno

schwarze

encrypted hibernation

florian

stsp

krw

matthieu

interview with bcook

landry

afresh1

tedu

naddy

phessler

undeadly roundup

ajacoutot

Watched Snowpiercer. Some parts were good, some parts were bad, but the whole is sadly no better than the worst parts. The abstract concept of all of humanity being stuck in one metal can is great, but this implementation is a failure. (Haven’t read the comic.)

We start by setting up what life is like in the back of the train. It sucks. Then comes the revolt and we move forward through the train to first class, where everything is wonderful and lovely. I think we’re supposed to imagine a privileged few living at the expense of many poor, but the illusion falls apart when you realize there are more first class passengers dancing at a rave than huddled masses living in the back. There was an opportunity here to do something with class lifestyles, but it’s squandered for a few moments of cinematography.

There’s a few plot twists, but the characters don’t seem to adjust. The relentless Terminator style evil henchman remains hellbent on death and dismemberment long after the bad guys turned into good guys faced with hard choices. Other characters’ hidden objectives could have been easily resolved earlier. Perhaps this was some sort of political parable, but it really falls flat.

I enjoyed Pandorum much more, which got terrible reviews compared to the absurdly great reviews for Snowpiercer. In that case, it’s a spaceship that contains the last of humanity, but general outline is the same. A small group of heroes has to get from point A to point B in the giant metal can they call home, all the while battling enemies through a sequence of strange environments. What makes one movie “brilliant and fearless” and the other “lazily derivative” I cannot imagine. At least the Pandorum ship was conceivably large enough to house all its occupants; I have no idea where an entire car full of jackbooted thugs materialized from on the train.

Many years ago I read The Dark Beyond the Stars, which I think is the best take on the concept.

It’s been a week and change since the first LibreSSL portable release was announced to much sturm und drang. (To quote WP, “extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism”. Not be to taken too literally.) I’m not directly involved, but a few thoughts and reflections on the release and its reception. (Deliberately missing some links; do your own digging if you care.)

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The phrase responsible disclosure doesn’t have a precise definition. Instead, it can only be understood in terms of its opposite, irresponsible disclosure, which is defined as “any disclosure I don’t like”.

Instead of using a phrase that encodes a value judgment in place of a description, let’s pick a technical term that describes what’s happening: selective disclosure. This phrase is then neatly contrasted with its opposite, full disclosure.

Some people like the term coordinated disclosure, although in practice it often isn’t.

Also: regarding embargoes.

One of the great things about the animated GIF format, despite its many other deficiencies, is that it works everywhere. Even stodgy old browsers can display it. Naturally, this fact means that whenever an animated GIF is uploaded to twitter, they convert it to a format that fewer browsers can display.

The “Download File” text floating towards the bottom left links to an MP4 file of what was once the GIF. Just one more way developers are working to make the web a better place. Thanks guys!