The Jihadi Hunters →
These gushers of highly useful information were not coming from inside a formal intelligence operation, or even from the Middle East. Instead, they were being run by ordinary American civilians out of their own homes.
How Apple Pay Really Works →
One of the best plain-spoken articles on the technology underlying Apple Pay.
Welcome to Colon, Magic Capital of the World →
[...] Colon, Michigan, a sleepy, one-streetlight town somewhere between Detroit and Chicago [...] proudly bills itself as "The Magic Capital of the World." It's home to around 1,000 residents and holds at least 30 dead magicians in its single small graveyard. The Colon High School mascot is a giant bunny rabbit. Though it lacks the soaring Gothic cathedrals of Hogwarts, it just might be the most magical place in the United States.
The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times →
The Krakatoa explosion registered 172 decibels at 100 miles from the source. This is so astonishingly loud, that it's inching up against the limits of what we mean by "sound."
The Days They Changed the Gauge →
A fun little bit of railroad history.
Gigabytes of files. The whole Internet, guys!
(via Opening an Internet time capsule—Internet in a Box for Win95 | Ars Technica)
When a Pastor Resigns Abruptly →
John Ortberg on Marc Driscoll's resignation:
I was struck, too, by the language quoted in news reports yesterday to describe this situation. The pastor, the board said, had been guilty of arrogance—along with other attitudes and behaviors associated with arrogance. But had not been charged with "immorality." When did arrogance cease to be immoral?
NSA Core Secrets: Sentry Eagle →
Some more disturbing stuff in the latest set of NSA leaks. Given, the fact that the NSA works with foreign and domestic companies and gained physical access to infrastructure isn't new, but the stuff that is is scary and the list of ECI program descriptions is telling:
In addition to so-called "close access" operations, the NSA's "core secrets" include the fact that the agency works with U.S. and foreign companies to weaken their encryption systems; the fact that the NSA spends "hundreds of millions of dollars" on technology to defeat commercial encryption; and the fact that the agency works with U.S. and foreign companies to penetrate computer networks, possibly without the knowledge of the host countries. Many of the NSA's core secrets concern its relationships to domestic and foreign corporations.
SSL Broken, Again, in POODLE Attack →
Props for something that compromises the security of the Internet almost sounding cute.
