Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 5

It is not far-fetched to say that most (if not all) CR readers have been subjected to some sort of phishing attack–and even more likely if we consider the wide taxonomy of activities that Sonowal’s book covers. Can we as individuals identify them before falling prey? Can we as systems administrators detect them before our users are delivered potentially harmful content? Can we as application programmers write secure code that thwarts the most common attacks? Are there nontechnical resources that can be applied to combat phishing? And, above all, what is phishing? It is a generic term that can be...

The command-line interface (CLI) scares many newcomers to the computing field. It is, however, a most powerful way to interact with the computer, allowing the user a command composition richness that cannot be matched via graphical interfaces. As a long-time power user, I have often been asked how one should go about learning to use it–and have often been at a loss answering that question. I learned long ago that I cannot really give pointers, and this is what first got me interested in reading this book. This book should be seen as a collection of three works, not as...

In Mexico, we have the great luck to live among vestiges of long-gone cultures, some that were conquered and in some way got adapted and survived into our modern, mostly-West-Europan-derived society, and some that thrived but disappeared many more centuries ago. And although not everybody feels the same way, in my family we have always enjoyed visiting archaeological sites — when I was a child and today. Some of the regulars that follow this blog (or its syndicators) will remember Xochicalco, as it was the destination we chose for the daytrip back in the day, in DebConf6 (May 2006). This...

So, it’s this weird time of year where we make a balance and share with the world some ideas about the future. And… yes, it’s time to take care of this blog, as its activity has dropped once again. So… maybe it’d be nice to start this post by checking how much have I blogged over the years: 2004: 27 2005: 92 2006: 65 2007: 83 2008: 64 2009: 62 2010: 48 2011: 25 2012: 27 2013: 29 2014: 37 2015: 18 2016: 19 2017: 20 2018: 19 2019: 19 2020: 14 2021: 11 2022: 10 (yes, this is an...

A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog post by former Debian Developer Lars Wirzenius offering a free basic (6hr) course on the Rust language to interested free software and open source software programmers. I know Lars offers training courses in programming, and besides knowing him for ~20 years and being proud to consider us to be friends, have worked with him in a couple of projects (i.e. he is upstream for vmdb2, which I maintain in Debian and use for generating the Raspberry Pi Debian images) — He is a talented programmer, and a fun guy to be...

Years ago, it was customary that some of us stated publicly the way we think in time of Debian General Resolutions (GRs). And even if we didn’t, vote lists were open (except when voting for people, i.e. when electing a DPL), so if interested we could understand what our different peers thought. This is the first vote, though, where a Debian vote is protected under voting secrecy. I think it is sad we chose that path, as I liken a GR vote more with a voting process within a general assembly of a cooperative than with a countrywide voting one;...

Nowadays, we can assume readers of Computing Reviews are familiar with the ideas behind machine learning, where neural networks are trained with large training sets so that they “learn” to recognize patterns within said dataset; some of those patterns are readily identifiable by a human observer, but some might be deep, very subtle, and impossible for us to understand. Neural networks usually keep learning (and thus adjusting their behaviors) from further data they receive in production. This short article deals with the problem termed as “machine unlearning”: how can we ensure all traces of a given problematic case can be...

Intellectual work draws a lot from communication between collaborating parties. Speed and ease of communication have enormously improved–both qualitatively and quantitatively–in the course of the last decades. So, how come the day-to-day life of intellectual workers (be it in corporate settings or in academic environments) amounts to so much stress? Cal Newport wrote this book based on what he terms “the hyperactive hive mind”: given the ease with which haphazard, unstructured communications flow into our different inboxes every day, with thematically unrelated requests, questions, opinions, personal issues, and so on, our slightly evolved primate brains deal very badly with context...

Last Wednesday my father, Kurt Bernardo Wolf Bogner, took the steps towards his next journey, the last that would start in this life. I cannot put words to this… so just sharing this with the world will have to suffice. Goodbye to my teacher, my friend, the person I have always looked up to. Some of his friends were able to put in words more than what I can come up with. If you can read Spanish, you can read the eulogy from the Science Academy of Morelos. His last project, enjoyable by anybody who reads Spanish, is the book...

I have been a bearded subject since I was 18, back in 1994. Yes, during 1999-2000, I shaved for my military service, and I briefly tried the goatee look in 2008… Few people nowadays can imagine my face without a forest of hair. But sometimes, life happens. And, unlike my good friend Bdale, I didn’t get Linus to do the honors… But, all in all, here I am: Turns out, I have been suffering from quite bad skin infections for a couple of years already. Last Friday, I checked in to the hospital, with an ugly, swollen face (I won’t...