Josh Wieder

Way back in 1993, the Internet was a very different place. SSL would not be released for another two years; it would take some time after that until it was used commonly. The Clipper Chip project had just been announced, threatening to offer an explicit, physical back door to all electronic communications devices for the US Justice Department and anyone with a basic understanding of computer science. In 1993, Encryption was a weapon . Washington viewed encryption's only function as a wartime tool to protect military and intelligence communications. The notion that encryption could or should be used as a foundation of protecting online commerce and banking simply did not occur to Big Brother. Into this situation came Phil Zimmerman. Phil had designed and programmed an encryption application called Pretty Good Privacy in 1991. Before that time, cryptography tools were almost entirely the purview of those with the biggest of Smarty Pants: mathematicians, logicians, researchers,

UPDATE (7/27/2015): I created a Google CSE instead of using the miserable and useless utility described below. Unlike the Blogger tool, the CSE works. Hazaa! I actually got around to using Google's little search tool for Blogger. And you know what? It sucks. I searched for articles using the name of the article, nothing found. I searched for articles using keywords that I had used repeatedly as Blogger "Labels" - nothing found. With actual production projects I have been vehement about removing search tools from Google. Sometimes I've lost, and I've worked with companies that have bought those outrageously priced yellow servers running Googles cute, branded version of BSD. A $30,000 back door to your intranet for regulators and competitors. Brilliant. Better to do the responsible thing and buy yourself a Lexus with petty cash. Anyway, this was different, I thought. The site is hosted on Blogspot, so my users have already been sucked into the freakishly-plas

LinkedIn is always good for a laugh. Here was their recent job recommendation for me: Lol, what? I admit, I find it exceedingly difficult to "Picture Myself" at the National Security Agency. LinkedIn, maybe you need to work a little bit more on your creepy career stalking software. Still needs some work.

Big drama today re: the popular messaging app Whisper. Whisper markets itself as anonymous, calling itself “the safest place on the internet”. But The Guardian disagrees. This morning the influential British newspaper published a story alleging that whisper tracks the geographic location of users who have requested that such tracking be disabled - even more alarming, the Guardian claims that Whisper provides location data to the US Department of Defense about Whisper messages sent from military bases, ostensibly to identify whistleblowers. The Guardian also stated that Whisper sends user data to the FBI and MI5. Whisper's terms of service changed after they found out that the Guardian was moving to publish. Now their TOS explicitly allows user tracking regardless of settings. Neetzan Zimmerman , speaking for the Whisper corporate office, has responded with a series of online pronouncements that were full of sound and fury; calling the story a "pack of lies" that w

Getting an opportunity to play with OpenStack effectively can be cost-prohibitive. Particularly for developers looking to integrate Keystone API functionality into their applications - you shouldn't have to build your own OpenStack deployment, or cough up boku bucks. Even if you have the resources, time is irreplaceable. That's where TryStack can come into play. To get going, start by joining the TryStack Facebook group . This is the only down-side to TryStack to my mind. I absolutely *despise* Facebook and everything it stands for. Still, even I managed to reset my long-unused F-Book login to join (they should be rolling out other auth capabilities soon - GitHub is supposed to be next). Within a day Dan Radez with Red Hat had activated my account, and I was able to spin up a couple of servers and got them routing out to the big bad world. Dan has put together a very easy-to-understand instructional video to help with new users: I should make clear that this is on

I try to keep on my toes when it comes to latest distributions of Operating Systems that I use. While I don't use anything bleeding edge that I haven't built with my own hands in production, I like to stay abreast of the latest and greatest.  Windows in in recent years become a drag in this respect. Later iterations have ditched interface features that add nothing to functionality, making adoption a pain, especially for someone in my position that frequently administers servers with a variety of different Windows versions. Thats whats so great about shells - it stays a shell. New features are usually actual features and not visual gimmicks.  So I got myself an early copy of Windows 10. I joined the  Windows Insider Program. I downloaded the  Windows Technical Preview ISO , which you can download by following that link and using the tester  Product Key: NKJFK-GPHP7-G8C3J-P6JXR-HQRJR. I started digging around for some documentation before firing up a VM. And thats when I paus

A few years back - around 2011, Redhat released a Free Cloud server tier to compete with Amazon EC2's offering (IMHO this was an attempt by the big boys to try to annihilate the downside of the market). While EC2 continues to offer free tiny servers, Rackspace bowed out; their minimum offering these days is somewhere around $16 / month. I came across some references to Rackspace continuing to offer free services, b ut this time only to OSS developers . The benefits are great for those who qualify; while it sounds somewhat flexible no doubt depending on the marketing gains to attracting a big name project, even somewhat niche projects are being offered $2000/month in free services . That buys a lot of muscle for the smart consumer. Jesse Noller is the man with the hookup. Send him an email to see what you can get if you meet the requirements.