Interesting reads, 18 June 2018

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week

• How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain — Verisart are presumably better at raising venture capital than understanding the problem of art fraud.

• Standard Notes — A Simple And Private Notes App — I really like these folks, their philosophy and their business model. Thanks to Francis for the tip.

• Why did Continental order its mobile workforce to stop using WhatsApp? — The answer: they don’t know how WhatsApp handles your contacts, which contain very personal information.

• Apple quietly banned developers from selling and sharing users’ contacts — I really hope they’re working on some clever API changes too.

• skskeyserver / sks-keyserver / issues / #57 : Anyone can make any PGP key unimportable — Bitbucket — A researcher crafted and pushed a seriously broken PGP key. It propagated and is still causing problems for keyservers, including my own. We need to figure out how to make sks more accessible to a wider developer community since it’s so widely depended upon. Hockeypuck looks good.

• Confessions of a Disk Cracker: the secrets of 4am. — Cool, cracking old software for future preservation. “I’ve had several authors find their own software and thank me for preserving it.”

• Dark Web Drug Vendor Pleads Guilty After Feds Traced His Bitcoin Transactions — I somehow expected drug dealers to be less incompetent than this. Always great reading the official scoop of how folks like this get caught.

• Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization that the World Forgot (or: a Better Alternative to Integer Modulo) — This went a bit over my head, but was awesome nonetheless, especially Vi Hart’s explainer video.