[An old article I forgot to publish.]
The UK government wants to effectively ban end-to-end encryption for messaging. Even if this was desirable, it is not usefully possible. The effort wasted on this futile and stupid attempt to do the impossible would be better spent elsewhere.
Making computer systems secure is very difficult. The consequences of insecure systems are already extremely serious and will be catastrophic in future if they are not already. Malignant people, often sponsored by malignant states, are actively attacking computer systems and have had considerable success doing so.
So it is surprising that companies whose stated aims are to increase security are effectively working to make their customers’ systems less secure.
The authors of the Signal messaging system are acting as useful idiots for state security and police services: while they are almost certainly not working for them or funded by them, what they are doing is extremely convenient for them.
After WhatsApp’s threatened change to their terms of service, which may allow them to leak information to Facebook, many people are moving to Signal, a tool which purports to be more secure. If you want security which is not at least partly theatrical you should not use Signal.
Duplicacy is a backup tool. It may possibly have good uses, but if you are using it on a Mac it is probably not actually making backups.
What polkit is, why you should worry about it, some ways to defang it.
Clarke’s third law is that
any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
It does not apply to organisations who want to intercept communications: if it’s claimed that they can do something which requires magic, then in fact they can’t do that.
A recent article in The Economist talks about a plausible attack on the financial system: If financial systems were hacked: Joker in the pack. I liked this article, although I think it was a little naïve in two ways.
Or: why password strength checkers are useless.
Fog computing is like cloud computing except that no-one can see what you are doing.