Scripting News
Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution...
Jay Rosen is asking his readers to de-cloak in the comments section of his blog on its tenth anniversary. I started to write something but found the space too confining, so I decided to write what I have to say here and will post a link to it over there.
I am a struggling programmer, the way some people are struggling artists.
At least I'm not a starving artist.
The work is getting harder not easier.
Tired today, but maybe tomorrow is better. I'm pretty much an in-the-moment guy when it comes to Who I Am.
It varies from year to year.
When I first met you at BloggerCon in 2003, I was delighted to meet someone from the world of journalism who didn't see what we were doing as a threat and didn't talk about blogging in a dismissive way. You actually predicted what we were doing, but from a wholly different perspective. I found this both validating and illuminating. You don't expect to see your own work in a different light, you don't not expect it either. But it's great when it happens, so thanks.
Over the years, I've paid more or less attention to the struggles of journalism. Some years I'm paying close attention, some years I don't even want to look. This is one of those years when I'm not looking.
But reading your blog posts at least keeps me current enough to know what someone with my world view, if they were paying attention, would think.
That's the point. Today, ten years later, we now share the same world view. We more or less come from the same place. And I enjoy your writing, and humor and appreciate what you do.
Here's to many more years blogging and innovating!
A light-hearted use-case for encryption
Mary Jones, programmer, is dating Joe Smith, a sysadmin at the NSA.
On the side, Mary is secretly seeing entrepreneur Paul Morris, and is keeping a diary of her feelings in Fargo. Of course she doesn't want Joe to see the diary, but she's heard that he can access any documents stored on the Internet. So she turns on encryption for her diary, and therefore is reasonably certain that Joe's prying eyes will not be able to read her innermost thoughts.
Confident in her privacy, she dumps both of them, and moves to Venezuela.
This morning Fargo has an exciting new feature, encryption.
Encryption is important in a Dropbox-based notetaking tool because, like every hugely popular web service, Dropbox has had security issues.
And recent revelations about the power of the NSA to access our online data makes encryption an important feature no matter where you're storing your data.
Where we're at with encryption.
This is a new feature, so at first you should be careful using it, in case there are any security issues. In the early testing we found one serious issue. There may be others.
We're using a standard JavaScript encryption library created at Stanford. It was so incredibly easy to use. Thanks to the team at Stanford that created this excellent library.
Now you can use Fargo for new applications that require security. For example, storing passwords and confidential documents.
It's even worse than it appears. © 1997-2013 Scripting News, Inc.
