It’s not enough that Net Neutrality be enforced. That’s just a basic requirement to keep corporations from completely exploiting their customers.

Wireguard is a new open source VPN system being initially developed on Linux. I have two major use cases for such a thing: site-to-site protection, and backhauling traffic from a laptop or phone to my house.

If you have a Mac and DNS resolution seems really, really slow – like, five seconds or more per lookup – check to see if you have an IPv6 address. You probably do.

For any given technology, there will exist at least one point in time in which people are simultaneously not trusting it for being too new and unproven, and other people are depending on it in production.

The resiliency of a system is proven by its behavior in an emergency.

Ken MacLeod writes science fiction. His job to write stories that entertain us while, perhaps, presenting some interesting ideas. He doesn’t have to be a prognosticator. Nobody really thinks that the future of humanity will be to separate into fast-thinking, fast-evolving AIs in Jovian orbit versus nanotech-equipped paranoid biological humans in the inner system. That’s just a fun story.

People are overwhelmed with email.

Definitions:

I was about to ask the mutt-users mailing list a question, when it occurred to me that I should really google it first. Indeed, my question had been answered about 3 years previously. And it’s really useful.

In farming, monoculture is the practice of raising a single crop over and over again. You can figure out exactly what fertilizers it needs, how much water, and predict your yield accurately, year after year.

I have a Sansa Clip+. It’s an MP3 player. Remember those?

The essence of the UNIX philosophy is not “make small utilities that can be fitted together with pipes” but to assume that at any moment, a user might decide to be a developer or a sysadmin and should have the tools to do that.

Nobody wants backups. Everybody wants restores.

You might recall way back when I wrote not interested in cybercoders. That was not quite a year ago.

Nobody likes you when you’re 23 / And are still more amused by prank phone calls / What the hell is caller ID?