Category: English

Objectively subjective

What is truth?

This question is being asked with increasingly frequency these days, and I’m sure some of you winced when you read it. However, it was very much on my mind when I stepped out of the shower this morning, owing to the fact that my 50 l water heater does not allow me to shower long enough to get warm after a night in a chilly room.

What does that have to do with epistemology? Well, it led me to reflect on the semantics of the following statements:

  1. I am cold.
  2. I feel cold.

Setting aside their truthfulness, which of these statements is objective, and which is subjective? Continue reading “Objectively subjective”

Three things

you need to watch now if you haven’t seen them already. None of them are new, they just happen to speak strongly to me right now.

1. Easy A. The actual movie is at least as funny as and far more serious than the trailer.

After you’ve watched it, go rent (or buy) all the classics Olive references: Say Anything, Can’t Buy Me Love, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (sorry, can’t be bothered to add links). Did I miss any? Then put this on repeat on the stereo:

2. P!nk: Fuckin’ perfect. The original version, not the “family-friendly” shit they show on VH1.

3. It Gets Better. There are hundreds of clips, but you can start with Barack Obama:

Compare and contrast with whoever that guy was that P!nk sings about here:

Don’t read too much into this, I’m not coming out or anything.

OpenBSD IPSec backdoor allegations: update

I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone what this is about…

The latest news: Theo now says that it is probable that NetSec was indeed contracted to insert backdoor code into OpenBSD, but after a month of review and changelog archeology, there is still no sign that they succeeded or even attempted to push tainted code into the tree.

The audit (which is still ongoing) did uncover one serious bug, but there is no reason to believe that it was planted deliberately. This relates to CBC mode, an encryption protocol in which each block of plaintext is combined with the ciphertext of the previous block before encryption to make it harder to attack ciphertext blocks individually. Continue reading “OpenBSD IPSec backdoor allegations: update”