A summary of this blog to date
I consider terseness a virtue. For your reading convenience, let me condsense the tens of thousands of words in this blog to date into a few bullet points.
- PGP will never take off in a mainstream way. It’s too difficult to use correctly, easy to use incorrectly, and has no way to draw users from existing popular communications software.
- Have password manager software auto-generate and remember all passwords. You only need to remember your email password, PC password and phone PIN. Anything else should be 22+ chars alphanumeric or 28+ chars lowercase. Enable two-factor auth where available.
- The government in Britain is taking seriously worrying steps to abolish human rights legislation and expand the mass surveillance of all citizens. I don’t understand why citizens aren’t rioting over this.
- All websites should run HTTPS as standard. There’s a bad pattern right now of HTTPS-capable servers forcing users onto HTTP, either for legacy reasons or for compatibility with ad networks.
- It’s a real shame a system like OpenID never became ubiquitous. Humans tend to pick weak passwords and re-use those passwords.
- In the Star Trek episode “Brothers”, when Data simulates Captain Picard’s voice to take over the ship, the long numeric password he uses doesnt contain the digit ‘5’. It is likely to have been generated by someone typing in circular patterns on the numeric keypad without hitting the ‘5’ in the middle.
Update (August 2025): This only describes articles from 2015 and 2016. A list of subsequent articles on science fiction, computing, video games and tabletop roleplaying games can be found from the main index.