David Newgas
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Life with Crypto Backdoors: Stingrays, Government Surveillance and Crime
Playing out today is a debate about the control of future of technology. After revelations of massive government surveillance programs, new applications deploy strong encryption, touting privacy as a key feature. The authorities, afraid they will not be able to access communications, are attempting to mandate weaknesses in these applications to ensure they can gather…
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Make bash show the return code
When using a command line interface, I like to see all the output a program makes. The standard out and error are already dumped to my console, but there is one piece of information usually hidden from the user: the return code. Add the following to your .bashrc to get a nice notification if a…
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NSA Puzzle
The NSA recently declassified their Cryptolog internal magazine. I would like to share one gem from Cryptolog XIV, No. 1 – 1st Issue 1987: “NSA” PUZZLE The occurrence of “NSA” as a letter sequence in English words is rather uncommon. Some of the rare examples are show below. Fill in the blanks to reconstruct the…
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The Ablogalypse Already Happened
xkcd predicted that “The Ablogalypse” would occur in October 2012, it actually occurred in November. Pretty neat prediction though!
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How Domains Became Backwards
Internet URLs, file system paths and IP addresses usually get more specific as you move towards the right hand side. This is a clearly a byproduct of the left-to-right language of the designers of these systems. So why is it that this website is david.newgas.net and not net.newgas.david? The familiar hierarchical naming is part of…