Maybe, once upon a time, security questions made a kind of sense. If so, it was back in a much more innocenttime before a ton of information about people was available to befound and searched through. These days, almost any question that'seasy for people to remember the answer to is also too easy for otherpeople to find out. None of this is news to security researchers,but people keep using security questions (and security consciouspeople keep making up random answers and then having to

Years ago, I wrote about the peculiar case of people who spam uswith conference announcements . Thishasn't stopped in the time since then, of course, but the behaviorof various clusters of these people have mutated since then as theymove around network areas and spam methods and so on. Lately, oneparticular group has adopted some habits that make it absolutely,totally clear that they are active spammers and they know it.

For at least the past few months, these people have been sendingtheir message from

Part of setting up and using Let's Encrypt is creating an account, which is really just a public keypair. WhenI was just starting out with LE and using it on test machines, I wascareful to save (and restore) the account information when I reinstalledmachines, and I worried about things like how to arrange it so that we'duse the same account on multiple machines. This seemed like the rightthing to do and it's certainly what you do with many other services; you

Up until quite recently, I would have confidently told you that Iunderstood the broad flow of how Let's Encrypt 's authorization process for gettingcertificates worked (although not the fine details). It went somethinglike this:

1. you registered an account with Let's Encrypt, giving them apublic key along with your ritual agreement to their TOS and perhaps an email address for eg account recovery.

2. using your registered account, you asked Let's Encrypt for acertificate for host or domain X.
3. Let'

In the Vi(m) community, it's an article of received and reveredwisdom that you should use vi's powerful collection of movementcommands as efficiently as possible, by which people mean theshortest command sequence that will do the job. I have seen morethan one person write that you should (clearly) not repeat a command;instead of typing something like 'kkkk', you should clearly use'4k', and so on. Leaning on keyboard autorepeat? You're doingsomething

Naftali Harris recently wrote Why I'm Making Python 2.8 ,which served to also announce his 'Python 2.8' project (which hassubsequently been renamed until the dust settles). His goalsare straightforward:

[...] because I want to give all the people who use Python 2 accessto the Python 3 language features, which I think are actually prettycool. [...]

His opinions on the whole situation and evolutionary process ofPython 3 are a fairly good match with

Right now, I'm in a mood where I'm disgruntled with Fedora on mydesktop and more broadly with systemd'srecent evolution .When I'm in these sorts of moods, my mind turns towards making realchanges in what my personal machines run, and if I'm going to dothat, why, maybe I should not just change Linux distributions butgo all of the way to FreeBSD. After all I run a completely customwindow manager environment using programsI build myself, and things

As I write this, it is early in December 11th, my time. CVE-2016-8655 wasannounced in public on Monday December 5th my time (and Linuxdistributors informed earlier) and an exploit wasreleased a day later as promised, on Tuesday December 6th. As Inoted on Twitter ,Fedora did not release updates in anything like a timely manner.Right now as I write this, Bodhi's kernel updates page and thepackages linked from it

In a comment on this entry , Claire mentioned, well, I'll just quote:

It's perfectly possible to use a laptop as your main machine with anice display, keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals. [...]

This is true. As Claire notes from personal experience, modernlaptops can have displays, keyboards, and mice plugged into them.In fact, they can generally have exactly the same collection ofkeyboards, mice, and so on that you (or I) would