hackademix.net

Some weeks ago I read on Forbes’ technology blog that

Access Now, a non-profit that’s focused on digital civil liberties in the Middle East, has published a concise guide to staying safe online, aimed at “citizens in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond.”
[…]
Aside from the usual advice about running antivirus, using strong passwords, and staying wary of USB drives, it delves into a few less obvious practices:

• Run the NoScript plug-in for Firefox, which can block scripts on Web pages that you don’t authorize.

I don’t know if this puts me in any middle-eastern dictator’s blacklist, but it seems “internet security guides” with various political spins are flourishing, and they obviously share most of their endorsements, no matter the ideology.

USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) is doing its part as well, as I found out yesterday: look at page 7 (“Enhanced Protection Recommendations”) of this Best Practices for Keeping Your Home Network Secure PDF…

Amazing coincidence, just a few hours earlier my own NSA project had exited “stealth mode” to official become NoScript 3.0a1 for Firefox Mobile.
Adventurous Android Alpha (AAA) testers are welcome :)

I’m quite surprised (albeit happy) to see a capitalist corporation actually contributing to social progress, and with a politically bold move, rather than with the usual hairy tax-deductible alms.

But after all Mozilla itself is a foundation, but a corporation too, isn’t it?

Interesting times we’re living in…

I’ve always considered myself a quiet non-believer, because atheism as a public militancy seemed useless to me, but now I’m changing my mind. The reactionary insolence of the catholic church needs to be answered with the insolence of lively intelligence, of reason, of the responsible word. We can’t let the truth to be offended everyday by the self-proclaimed representatives of god on earth, whose only real interest is power. The church doesn’t care about the destiny of souls, what it has always pursued is control over the bodies. Reason can be an ethics. Let’s use it.”

José Saramago, interviewed by Paolo Flores D’Arcais on the October 14th 2009 issue of “Il Fatto Quotidiano”.

Davide had no better stuff to do, so here I am (hating him), abiding to these rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

7 Facts

1. I don’t consider myself a bearded guy: I shave my face whenever I find 10 spare minutes to do it. That’s once per month on average, therefore for most people I meet I am a bearded guy nonetheless.
2. I received a fifteen years long salesian catholic education (7 years with nuns, while I was 4-10, and 8 years with priests, 11-18). I suspect this had a big part both in the depth/breadth of my scriptural/doctrinal knowledge, and in my ultimate (consequential?) militant atheism. Which prompts an interesting paradoxical question: what should I better do to raise my soon to be released child as a free thinker?
3. My first computer was a Commodore 64… wait, you might know this one… OK, but you may not know that when I was 12 I wrote a trilogy of C64 school-themed video-games depicting my priest-teachers as flying horned devils. I sold them among my schoolmates with some good financial success (that was a so called “elite” school).
4. My first web page, established on Geocities back in the past century and entirely built with Amiga technologies, was the Marxism-Leninism-Prodism-Gargarism home page. I lost my credentials, and even if I did try several times to make Yahoo pull it down I’m afraid it will persist as an indelible stain on my past. It was somehow prophetic about the dissolution of any serious left-wing in Italy, though…
5. I met my wife, a teacher of Greek and Latin and a published author of school textbooks, when we both were 15, and we’ve been good friends albeit living in two different towns for more than ten years, meeting once every two years or so. Then I had to teach a short course in her town, staying there for a couple of weeks, and when I was about to leave I suddenly asked her to marry me. She just exploded in a loud laughter. But after less than of one month, she relocated to live with me. I punished her offensive initial reaction by making us “live as public sinners” for another ten years, until I decided it was time to perpetuate our genes :)
6. Both my thumbs can bend backwards by 90 degrees (much like in Andrès Segovia’s right hand).
7. Since I was 18 I wear an hammer and sickle-shaped piercing on my left earlobe.

7 people I’d like to inflict the same agony

• Gareth Heyes, because he blogs too much.
• Robert “RSnake” Hansen, because he almost doesn’t blog anymore.
• Eduardo “Sirdarckcat” Vela, before he stops blogging for ever (he knows why).
• Billy Rios, so he can take a break from the impossible mission of securing Microsoft’s stuff.
• Wladimir Palant, so he can take a break from his efforts to make Adblock Plus supersede NoScript.
• Giuliano Masseroni, because Mozilla is spelled “Mozilla” in Italian too.
• Jeremiah Grossman, because he’s such a fan of NoScript.