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Institutional secrecy culture is antidemocratic
For the past several weeks a chunk of the news has been all about how the NSA in conjunction with various other US government agencies, defense contractors, telcos, etc. has, for at least seven years...
View Articlesome trivia about the Alexa 1M
Alexa publishes a list of the top 1,000,000 sites on the web. Here is some trivia about this list (as it was on September 27, 2013):No entries contain an URL scheme.Only 247 entries contain the string...
View ArticleSecure channels are like immunization
For a while now, when people ask me how they can improve their websites’ security, I tell them: Start by turning on HTTPS for everything. Run a separate server on port 80 that issues nothing but...
View Articlea small dispatch from the coalface
td:first-child { text-align: left } category count % total 5 838 383 100.000 ok 2 212 565 37.897 ok (redirected) 1 999 341 34.245 network or protocol error 798 231 13.672 timeout 412 759 7.070 hostname...
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another small dispatch from the coalface
For all countries for which Herdict contains enough reports to be credible (concretely, such that the error bars below cover less than 10% of the range), the estimated probability that a webpage will...
View ArticlePETS rump session talk
I spoke briefly at PETS 2014 about which websites are censored in which countries, and what we can learn just from the lists.
View ArticleBootstrapping trust in compilers
The other week, an acquaintance of mine was kvetching on Twitter about how the Rust compiler is written in Rust, and so to get started with the language you have to download a binary, and there’s no...
View ArticleCall for Volunteers: Active Geolocation
For the past few months I’ve been working on a research study of active geolocation algorithms. These attempt to determine where in the world a computer is, by measuring how long it takes network...
View ArticleOpen beta for ICLab TagTeam
I’m pleased to announce the open beta test of ICLab’s clearinghouse for data about censored websites. This site will aggregate manual and automated test reports, facilitate more efficient use of...
View ArticleI Didn’t Learn Unix By Reading All The Manpages
Originally drafted as a thread on hackers.town, after Abbie Normal asked me to expand on a side comment in a discussion of documentation.There’s a story old Unix beards tell about how they learned...
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