Unfortunately, I had to shut down my open wireless network experiment. That is because I found three people within the span of two days who were both (a) criminal and (b) very stupid.
One thing to remember: if you are going to use open wireless networks to download illegal things, make sure you aren’t sharing your [...]

I must admit, I find the ongoing debate about knives in the UK somewhat perplexing. The leader of the Conservative Party wants mandatory jail time for anyone caught carrying one. Editors at the BBC argue that the problem may be overblown. To me, it seems like what people are missing is the fundamental difference between [...]

Bruce Schneier has an interesting post about man-in-the-middle attacks. These are situations in which party A and party B are trying to exchange sensitive information privately (for instance, credit card numbers or orders for moving hostages) without realizing that party E is in between them, pretending to be party A to party B, and vice [...]

Bletchley Park, the English manor where codebreaking was undertaken during the Second World War, has been falling into disrepair due to lack of funds. This seems especially ungrateful, given the extremely important role the signals intelligence developed there played in the war. In particular, the decipherments helped to clear the Atlantic of U-boats, keep the [...]

In environmental discussions, I frequently see people deriding ‘hair shirt’ environmentalism: basically, the idea that a sustainable society should involve self-sacrifice. There are libertarian sorts who assert their right to live as they wish, without interference. There are also strategic environmentalists who believe that (a) personal sacrifice is not strictly necessary and (b) only approaches [...]

Reading Wallace Broecker’s new book on paleoclimatology, I realized that a statistical technique from cryptanalysis could be useful in that field as well. Just as the index of coincidence can be used to match up different ciphertexts partially or completely enciphred with the same key and polyalphabetic cryptosystem, the same basic statistics could be used [...]