I am not a lawyer, much less a cyber lawyer, but I was recently wondering “are there any laws—especially federal ones—that cover just plain old Hacking per se?” Say someone breaks into your blog, maybe they look at your drafts, maybe they deface the front page… is that, in and of itself, a crime no matter where in the United States your attacker is? The answer is—Yes! 18 USC …
[DRAFT] "PROTON_USE_WINED3D" explained
Explaining why the Steam launch option “PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%” sometimes fixes things, and whether YOU are cargo-culting or genuinely need it
Transcript: Vanessa Vokey Livestream Jan '22
Archiving because I saw some online trolls trying to take down the video with a brigade of false reports; content not endorsed.
This post covers some highly sensitive material that will not be palatable to normal readers of my blog. Unless you are exceedingly bored and have popcorn prepared, or have (or care to have) a horse in the great "radfems vs transgenders" twitter race, you will not gain anything by reading this document.
Most efficient random integer generator by random bits consumed
Discovered in 2013 by then-UPMC-student Jérémie Lumbroso, and independently re-discovered by an Apple programmer last Fall (with much ado on Twitter and Hacker News), the basic idea is as follows: Take your (infinite) random bitstream as the binary digits of random $r\in\left[0,1\right)$…
A very tiny bitmap font
Could be useful for very small LCD displays, or for fitting an entire movie script on your monitor at once. TODO: convert to OpenType Bitmap…
X25519 original specification
Adapted from the original specification
Old-school new-school: Optical Tape Archives
I had come up with this "cursed technique" a while back at work, when I needed to transfer a ~1GB file onto a quite old Linux machine that, for "security reasons" had USB mass storage access as well as the UDF kernel drivers disabled (and I was unable to access it over the network)…
[DRAFT] WHOIS: look up ASN from the command-line
Since Marco d'Itri's whois(1) v5.5.0 released in July 2019, most sysadmins no longer need to do trial-and-error or detectivework to guess which of the 5 RIRs controls the IP attacking you and then hunt down the appropriate WHOIS server—the -I flag will now do that annoying accounting on your behalf
Switching to Picom (Compton) on the MATE desktop
You may have read some convoluted (and outdated—Compton was abandoned in 2017) tutorials on the matter like MakeTechEasier's, or perused the excellent Arch Wiki article's page on it to some despair, but if you are just a layperson who installed the MATE desktop for e.g. Ubuntu 20.04 (Fossa) and wants a slightly faster (i.e. GPU-accelerated) environment, there is a workaround that doesn't take too long to set up: …
[DRAFT] U.S. Obscenity Ban: Name & Blame
An 1873 federal bill to ban smut, abortion pamphlets, and sex toys was never found unconstitutional; instead, only the clauses that meaningfully impacted the ability of the American public to be sexually promiscuous were overturned, piecemeal, under the banner of "civil rights". I will attempt to give a breakdown (including partisan affiliation) of the people behind this bill's tortured history.