I was going to post something about this Saturday night or Sunday morning but it suddenly became a bit more relevant, now that the US has attacked Syria. You probably should know that the US invaded Syria back in November of last year.
This piece at Ars Technica [ars] ought to make you delete your Uber app, if you haven’t yet. If you thought Uber was maybe a little bit bad, it turns out that was the tip of the iceberg.
I lose track of the number of times someone has called me a “leftist” because of my views on social justice, privacy, demilitarization, and opposition to weapons of mass destruction. And I have no idea how many times I’ve been referred to as a “right winger” because I own firearms and am generally suspicious of authority. But actually my suspicion of authority is suspicion of everyone, and it’s only authority that I worry about – and it all gets complicated. When I was in college and someone asked me to label myself, I sometimes would say “I am a radical righto-leftist.” That’s the sort of thing that seems funny when you’re a sophomore (hence the label: sophomoric) but, like most other labels, it wears out.
Suddenly there is news and talk about ISIS and Egypt.
And Egypt’s dictator has come to Washington to bend knee at the little feet of power. Coincidence?
Thursday afternoon, I went over to my studio, which is about 10 miles from my house. Normally, I never see cops on the road, so I was a bit surprised that there was one clearly following me.
I recently made a comment about The Best And The Brightest and went to amazon to get a link to the book.
Who needs infrastructure, arts and culture, or medical care – when you can have an F-35!? It’s stealthy!
Kinda.
It’s a great fighter!!
Not really.
It does VTOL off the deck of support ships!
Sorry.
I keep loose tabs on what’s going on regarding the US’ “no boots on the ground” deployment in Syria. And, frankly, it’s really hard to tell: the US media is suspiciously quiet about it (I assume they have been told to shut up) – when I go to outside sources, it gets confusing, fast. The overall impression I come away with is that Turkey is shooting at everyone, the US Air Force has a terrorist organization (the PKK – Kurdistan Worker’s Party, a leftist revolutionary group listed as a terrorist organization by NATO and the US) directing air strikes, and ISIS is cropping up in places that the media hasn’t been talking about.
I came late to this particular party, since I had my head up in the clouds of my own cyber-despair. I don’t know how you are collectively feeling, but I feel like there’s plenty of despair to go around. And, living up here in the deep dark south, like I do, Transgender Visibility [wikipedia] is definitely a problem. So let me tell you about something that happened in 2004, which made me feel so good about a few of my fellow human beings. I can only hope it was a positive moment for them, too, but I didn’t spoil it by asking.
LastPass is, right now, “scrambling to fix another vulnerability” [ars] but I’m going to talk about it anyway. The unfortunate reality of how software is written nowadays is that it’s practically impossible to write reliable code – there are too many layers of abstraction and somewhere down in the bowels of something you embedded from someplace else, there are bugs.
I’m going to explain things a bit then I’ll drop into a nice easy workflow you can use to get this problem taken care of and have passwords off your plate, forever.