Assorted Nerdery

Blog posts - hastily written with poor grammar.

I’m an engineer living in a small city north of Boston with my wife, two kids and two cats.

My webdesign-fu is pretty weak, but I’m aiming for a adequately readable experience with minimal cruft. I recently discovered the Zen Hugo theme and have modified it here. Any suggestions are very welcome!

Letter to the White House regarding cryptography.

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Back in December, Ed Felten and the White House asked for public comment on the EFF’s pro-cryptography petition. This is the letter that I had sent. I urge you to file a comment.

Dr. Felten and President Obama,

I strongly urge you to support the unfettered deployment of strong encryption without compromise or backdoors.

The fact of the matter is that people have a right to be secure in their persons, papers and effects. The UN Declaration of Human Rights, to which the United States is a signatory specifies in Article 12 that “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.” In today’s world, strong encryption is a necessary component to prevent arbitrary interference with our privacy and communications – by both state and commercial actors.

Vizio Privacy Policies

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I recently came into possession of a nice new Vizio Smart TV. It’s pretty nice - 1080p, Netflix, etc. As part of the process for connecting the television to the internet, they made you agree to a number of different license agreements and privacy policies. In a fit of UX mastery, they did not show the privacy and license agreements on the television, instead instructing you to type a long URL into your web browser and reading the policies there. Nevertheless, they insisted upon your agreement before connecting to the Internet.

Notmuch of mail a setup Part 2 - notmuch and Emacs

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In my previous post on this topic, I tried to detail the way that I fetch and send email using my laptop using a combination of mbsync and systemd. This has been working extremely well – it runs in the background and does the right thing when I am connected to the Internet. The only issue with this setup is that I’ll occasionally need to clear a lockfile out of the .msmtp-queue directory. This is quite rare, however.

New SSL Certificate

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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

My SSL certificate expired on 11/1. I replaced it with a new
certificate today. The SHA256 fingerprint of the new certificate is:

27:88:83:BF:22:D3:55:62:1C:2D:26:B2:8B:C9:AD:32:E3:C2:A6:BD:B7:C8:41:53:F9:38:D8:C6:AA:63:88:B1

This is going to expire in February 2016. I will likely replace it
with one from [Let's Encrypt](https://www.letsencrypt.org) by then.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iQEcBAEBCgAGBQJWOUgKAAoJEKtJwDCg2HMhXj0H/icGRxNn7cnlFUlEZ4Y5hujc
LlBOigcCT/A7HVmTSYq++7icj2J/XOw/CL2wVNok1oMe4KVT6VmLH3rs68BSzusB
arGSFAz4Lu1MPPmBlmp2L3l2Gc8eWPzvfDS9S1pD0tO63ISVGAzj0rMwtMlogPV2
ePd/lOIuICU8tUpWxNRt8LLrsOfMNYzuTV+5a6NVQS8OUpck/k3x6cYCpujXhXi3
APTT2o7s0VbvZP60iHZfMNzg6dQHEuywhmwmQuyyAy5LbefLyd+M8lN+4b/yzfw5
XVUIHx1Y/k5h5x9IFP//o6Y4fCRgMs0xhIAGWo0JZrwd8aQijjQx22qy+jBvfdg=
=WjLO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Getting Rid of Comments

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I’m disabling comments on this blog as of today. I’ve only received a small handful of comments in the year or so that this has been up – certainly not enough to justify the user needing to download over 1 megabyte of javascript from Disqus when they load the page.

Feel free to email me - john at johnbyrnes.info if you have any comment.