A two hour long Final Fantasy (X, XII, XIII) cutscene, but uninterrupted by the need for level grinding. All the major motifs are present: good but actually evil churches that are actually governments, coverups and double crosses, dead but not dead people, ancient technology, preposterously ineffective battle tactics, collect all the MacGuffins quest, family squabbles, life in the shadow of the great war of the before times.

In Los Últimos Días, English title The Last Days, an extreme agoraphobia pandemic has swept the planet. Nobody can go outside without experiencing a fatal seizure. The movie doesn’t spend any time trying to explain the cause (which is good; better than a terrible explanation), but the Panic, as it is known, starts with a few cases and then affects more people over time until eventually everybody is trapped in whatever building they were last in. This sets us up for a story in a post apocalyptic world that’s a little different than the typical zombie virus plague outbreak.

It’s not a great movie (relies too much on flashbacks for my taste), but the concept is intriguing. Different spaces (office building, subway station, apartment building, indoor mall) all follow their own Lord of the Flies trajectory based on their occupant mix.

A few thoughts reflecting on Sen. Wyden’s not quite proposal. As noted on HN there’s some question of exactly what your data is. Is it information you created (or otherwise control) or is it information about you? Is it an email you composed by typing on a keyboard or is it a log entry created by an autonomous system of whose existence you are unaware? The thornier issues of what the government can or cannot do are best deferred until this basic question is answered.

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On the wall at Sketch.

I’ve always been a secret admirer (and occasional not so secret advocate) of opportunistic encryption. Sometimes less flatteringly called unauthenticated encryption. Or even less flatteringly “not encrypted”. I’ve slowly come around, on the uselessness of unauthenticated encryption, but with the caveat that many times it’s not that bad. Here are a few notes on how I made self signed certs work for me. One could always go with one of those free certs, but seriously, fuck the CAbal.

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A while back, I observed that https is a sign of serious business. Google recently decided something similar. At the time, it was mostly a curiosity. “Hey, you got your not serious lolcats in my serious dogecoins!” After a few recent developments, I’ve been thinking about it a bit more.

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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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