Vendredi Voltaire: On the Little Committee

Another of my dad’s friends and colleagues was one Peter Gay, who was an immigrant whose family fled to the US during WWII, carrying all their wealth in the form of rare postage stamps, pasted to a postcard collection that Peter carried. They boarded the ill-fated St. Louis, a refugee-ship that cruised up and down the US East Coast being denied landing rights because the US didn’t want any jewish refugees.[wik] The family managed to sneak off the boat in Cuba and later got a ride to the US. He was a stamp collector until his death in 2015. He was a great expert on Voltaire, and wrote a seminal text Voltaire’s Politics, the Poet as Realist [amzn].

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It’s Worse Than You Think: Tracking Apps

The currency of computer security is Trust – the degree to which you can believe that your system is doing what you expect it to. There are a lot of properties that comprise trust, including integrity, reliability, etc., each of which is made up of smaller properties like non-repudiation, auditability, resistance to replay attacks, ad infinitum. We talk about trust loosely; it’s like Liberty or Good Cinematography – it’s a useful concept for describing the relationship between ourselves and the systems we use – whether they work right for any given notion of “right.”

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Old to New III: Wiring

I’m in a bit of a gumption trap over at the studio right now. For a while, things were proceeding nicely, but then I had problems with the electricity. For someone who hates doing painting and wiring as much as I do, I sure seem to like starting projects that involve painting or wiring!

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