What was I reading in August 2016?

August was one of "those" months, serendipity causing my schedule to be hopelessly jammed (2 courses, surgery, weddings, etc.). Coupled with multiple equipment failures and starting up yet another class, I was actually "in" my office for about 6 of the month's 20 workdays. I was able to get some reading done but it was done mostly while waiting in line or while battling a bout of insomnia. Proving that I still haven't learned my lesson, I'm considering adding an OCaml class to my workload.

I managed to complete a course in Security for Virtual Environments and another for Industrial Controls Security. I won a challenge coin in the latter by being overly "detail oriented" while reviewing a packet capture with Wireshark and strings. Also from the latter class: I'm the owner of "yet another Raspberry Pi". It turns out that you can actually have too many of them. Current count: 8, down from 12 (I've been giving them away to interested locals).

The Linux class is shaping up. It got off to a rough start because the school waffled on using Red Hat Academy. The last minute decision was to use the RHA, so Dave and I had to scramble to get things set up (I'm spending part of this 3-day weekend building CentOS boxes).

I've had a serious infestation of gremlins. Only a few hours apart, the CPU fan on the vSphere box quit, followed by a hard drive failure on the Xen box. A few days later, a laptop (provided by my employer, for use in one of the aforementioned classes) breathed it's last, right in the middle of the first-day-of-class for the aforementioned ICS class. I managed to do all 5 day's worth of labs in four days by working through breaks, lunches, and evening surfing times. The class was interesting and I now have hands-on experience with some new (to me) ICS monitoring and malware analysis tools. Pics of the coin are at the bottom of this post.

In any case, August's readings included:

2016-08-01

- On the boundaries of GPL enforcement [LWN.net]
- Lambda Calculus Live Tutorial with Klipse: Boolean Algebra

2016-08-02

- Google's QUIC protocol: moving the web from TCP to UDP
- The Jeep Hackers Are Back to Prove Car Hacking Can Get Much Worse
- Meet Moxie Marlinspike the Anarchist Bringing Encryption to All of Us

2016-08-05

- Moonshine Master Toys With String Theory Quanta Magazine
- How to Listen When You Disagree: A Lesson from the Republican National Convention
- Profanity is pretty f king good for us actually
- The Human Cost of Tech Debt - DaedTech
- The Headless Web - Tales of a Developer Advocate

2016-08-07

- DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) Bindings for OpenPGP

2016-08-08

- Frequent Password Changes Is a Bad Security Idea
- I Have No Confidence... So This Is What I Do - Altucher Confidential
- Looking Into a Cyber-Attack Facilitator in the Netherlands
- How to kill yourself in Python
- The Lost Art of C Structure Packing

2016-08-09

- How Teletext and Ceefax are coming back from the dead
- Reverse Engineering a Quadcopter RC or: How to not miss the needle while throwing the haystack in the air Part 1
- Fear and Loathing in Debian^H^H^H^H^H^H/Ubuntu or: who needs /etc/motd
- A Letter to My Daughter About Young Men

2016-08-10

- Internet Archive Posted 10 000 Browser-Playable Amiga Titles
- The 39th Root of 92
- Bungling Microsoft singlehandedly proves that golden backdoor keys are a terrible idea The Register

2016-08-11

- Evidence Mounts that Rembrandt Used Optics to Paint Self-Portraits

2016-08-12

- How do we build encryption backdoors?
- Intelligent people tend to be messy stay awake longer and swear more
- Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered

2016-08-14

- Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

2016-08-16

- My Text in Your Handwriting
- Surprise! Scans Suggest Hackers Put IMSI-Catchers All Over Defcon

2016-08-20

- 15 Page Tutorial for R

2016-08-21

- 25 Phrases That Kill Workplace Relationships [The one that sets me off: "It's not my problem." Grr...]
- Fuzzing Perl: A Tale of Two American Fuzzy Lops
- Hold On... We May Actually Be In For A THIRD Oracle/Google API Copyright Trial Techdirt
- How To Enable Ubuntu on Bash on Windows 10 Anniversary Update

2016-08-25

- The Macaroni in 'Yankee Doodle' is Not What You Think
- Massimo Pigliucci recommends the best books on Stoicism

2016-08-26

- Why Software Patents are Bad Period.

2016-08-28

- The New Rules of Form Design UX Booth

2016-08-31

- A Brief History of the College Textbook Pricing Racket. [It's not just the pricing rackets. Some of the books we're forced to use are absolute crap. It's why Open Texbook is highly supported (high-priced text book, written by poorly trained author vs. free text book, written by volunteers).]
- The Dropbox hack is real

Above was generated by a homegrown bolt-on script for Wallabag, which is a free utility for capturing web content so that it can be read later.