This Morning’s Interesting Conversation

I answer a soft knock on the front door a few minutes ago, still in my houserobe because the recent blizzard has driven me into semi-hibernation, to find two soft-spoken and well-dressed men at the door. One is in his late twenties, the other maybe forty, and each carries a handful of literature and a …

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Cross-Platform GUI Programming

Over the last week or so, I’ve been working on a test program for Project X. The requirements pretty much dictated a GUI solution, but while I work primarily under Linux, the other developer on it works primarily in Windows, and we use both C++ and Lisp for this project. Any programmer who’s tried to …

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“Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions”

Interesting interview with one of my favorite computer security writers, especially (to me) the part about how he handles passwords: Q: How do you remember all of your passwords? A: I can’t. No one can; there are simply too many. But I have a few strategies. One, I choose the same password for all low-security …

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Secure Remote Backups, Part III

At the end of the previous entry in this series, I mentioned that there were still some things that made the backup system I’d developed less than optimal: The backup files aren’t compressed; Backups should always be read-only, even when the media is mounted, so it’s a lot harder for a virus or user-error to …

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“TV, film and game violence seen as a threat”

The CMAA probably seemed like a good idea in 1954, providing only wholesome American values to impressionable young minds. But new research suggests that, while the main idea behind it (limiting the exposure of young minds to violence) was correct, the implementation was way off the mark: The findings, which are reported in the Journal …

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