Why Biden: Principle over Party

There exist many #NeverTrump Republicans who agree that while Trump would best achieve their Party's policies, that he must nonetheless be opposed on Principle. The Principle at question isn't about character flaws, such as being a liar, a misogynist, or a racist. The Principle isn't about political policies, such as how to hand the coronavirus pandemic,...

Oct 2020

No, that's not how warrantee expiration works

The NYPost Hunter Biden story has triggered a lot of sleuths obsessing on technical details trying to prove it's a hoax. So far, these claims are wrong. The story is certainly bad journalism aiming to misinform readers, but it has not yet been shown to be a hoax.In this post, we look at claim the timelines don't match up with the manufacturing dates...

Oct 2020

No, font errors mean nothing in that NYPost article

The NYPost has an article on Hunter Biden emails. Critics claim that these don't look like emails, and that there are errors with the fonts, thus showing they are forgeries. This is false. This is how Apple's "Mail" app prints emails to a PDF file. The font errors are due to viewing PDF files within a web browser -- you don't see them in a PDF app.In...

Oct 2020

Yes, we can validate leaked emails

When emails leak, we can know whether they are authenticate or forged. It's the first question we should ask of today's leak of emails of Hunter Biden. It has a definitive answer.Today's emails have "cryptographic signatures" inside the metadata. Such signatures have been common for the past decade as one way of controlling spam, to verify the sender...

Oct 2020

Factcheck: Regeneron's use of embryonic stem cells

This week, Trump's opponents misunderstood a Regeneron press release to conclude that the REG-COV2 treatment (which may have saved his life) was created from stem cells. When that was proven false, his opponents nonetheless deliberately misinterpreted events to conclude there was still an ethical paradox. I've read the scientific papers and it seems...

Oct 2020

Cliché: Security through obscurity (yet again)

Infosec is a largely non-technical field. People learn a topic only as far as they need to regurgitate the right answer on a certification test. Over time, they start to believe misconceptions about that topic that they never learned. Eventually, these misconceptions displace the original concept in the community.A good demonstration is this discussion of...

Sep 2020

How CEOs think

Recently, Twitter was hacked. CEOs who read about this in the news ask how they can protect themselves from similar threats. The following tweet expresses our frustration with CEOs, that they don't listen to their own people, but instead want to buy a magic pill (a product) or listen to outside consultants (like Gartner). In this post, I describe how...

Jul 2020

In defense of open debate

Recently, Harper's published a Letter on Justice and Open Debate. It's a rather boring defense of liberalism and the norm of tolerating differing points of view. Mike Masnick wrote rebuttal on Techdirt. In this post, I'm going to rebut his rebuttal, writing a counter-counter-argument.The Letter said that the norms of liberalism tolerate disagreement,...

Jul 2020

Apple ARM Mac rumors

The latest rumor is that Apple is going to announce Macintoshes based on ARM processors at their developer conference. I thought I'd write up some perspectives on this.It's different this timeThis would be Apple's fourth transition. Their original Macintoshes in 1984 used Motorola 68000 microprocessors. They moved to IBM's PowerPC in 1994, then to Intel's...

Jun 2020

What is Boolean?

My mother asks the following question, so I'm writing up a blogpost in response.I am watching a George Boole bio on Prime but still don’t get it.I started watching the first few minutes of the "Genius of George Boole" on Amazon Prime, and it was garbage. It's the typical content that's been dumbed-down so much that any useful content has been removed....

Jun 2020