Do something  Tags: programming, software.
I'm running GNU/Linux right now. For free. I can do pretty much everything Windows users can, and it's all free of charge and open source. According to Wikipedia, the kernel alone is worth billions of euros in development costs, let alone the three thousand other packages I have installed. Or the hosting costs of providing me with all these packages plus updates.

Every time I pause to look at what I'm running and realize it's all done by others for free, I feel like I'm in their debt. They wrote millions upon millions of lines of code and everyone can use it for free.

Using Tor as a sysadmin tool  Tags: networking, software.
It's not every day that I get to combine the tags "networking" and "software". Using Tor as a sysadmin tool (system administration tool) is really neat and changes the way I can work with networks. Instead of having a bunch of firewalled and unreachable systems, I can now configure Tor and happily connect to any place I damn well please. Within computers that I own, of course, but at least I'm no longer bothered by routers and portforwarding.

Tor, in this way, works like a virtual network.

The sneakier way of violating net neutrality  Tags: networking, websites.

Net Neutrality

It's not just a good idea,
it ought to be the law.

— Kurt Griffith

I think many have seen this image already:

Encrypting passwords  Tags: security, webdevelopment, programming, websites.
It's so easy to bash Adobe for encrypting passwords instead of hashing them. The entire security community did, and of course they were right. Encryption is by definition reversible, so it was stupid of Adobe to encrypt passwords instead of hashing them, right? Right?

Or maybe not. As time passes and not a single password from an Adobe user has been leaked, aside from the ones solved in crossword puzzles, I was starting to doubt our judgment.

Now that I've actually had an SSD for a while...  Tags: computers, hardware.
Since I have an SSD, I'm never going to go back. The voice in the back of my head that's telling me I am expending write cycles every time I copy an iso is totally worth it.

An SSD is not just faster, it's an order of magnitude faster.

No, not by any benchmarks. Harddrives hit over 125MB/s and my SSD gets about 475MB/s, so at 3.8x faster it's by no means an order of magnitude. However, we're forgetting that you hit the maximum harddrive's throughput about, what, 0.001% of the time? The rest of the time, we are waiting for this thing called a "read-write head" to move and the thing called "platter" to turn around.