OddThinking

An anonymous war-story about the dangers of relying on GNU Privacy Guard to protect your anonymity as well as your privacy.

Conclusion this week: Not only is my life more dependent on crappy software than ever before, but there is no hope that the software I depend on will ever improve.

When I moved to Sweden, I was a little inexperienced with manual gearboxes. So my first day driving to work alone was a challenge.

During a training course on Ada and the Rational 1000, we wrote an absurdly simple email client.

When it was my turn to demonstrate my software, it wasn’t very well received.

I propose that we produce a Mock-Phish web-site, which will have a goal of helping security professionals to train their co-workers, family and friends to avoid falling for phishing scams.

Once this site has been running for a while , is getting lots of hits, and has gained the trust of security professionals, Phase B comes into play.

This is the excerpt of a report that I submitted in November 1994 as part of a post-graduate university course on Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures.

It is an analysis of several algorithms used to compare strings.

This is far more academically geeky than most posts on this blog. It may not be of interest to the lay reader.

About an hour after I started the check-in process, a horrid thought occurred to me…

I remember the days of using a terminal over a modem on a DOS machine.

It wasn’t that long after these dark ages that I started to use a Rational 1000.

The Rational 1000 didn’t have a Save command. Well, it did, but it wasn’t called Save, and I didn’t really need it, and it didn’t really Save. Well I did need it once, but… well let me start at the beginning.

One of the more interesting concepts on a Rational 1000 was the way it pushed your code through stages on the way to compilation.