I’ve been paying quite a bit of attention to the story of Edward Snowden — the former CIA contractor who leaked classified information to the American public about how the government is spying on us through acronym-laden programs known as “PRISM” and “MUSCULAR”. Allow me to be your tour guide as we uncover just a few of the ways in which the NSA has broken the law and spied on American citizens. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978) It all started in 1978 with the passage of FISA:

My friend Michelle recently explained to me that password is a perfectly valid password to use. Her reason? “People always say not to use it. So now that nobody uses it anymore, it’s totally secure again!” How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords In this case, Michelle made a fatal assumption. She assumed that human beings would be manually typing in guessed passwords. What she failed to understand is that it’s really, really easy for any off-the-shelf computer to chew through possible passwords at an incredible pace.

Last month, when writing about Apple’s Fall 2013 Product Announcement, I’d guessed at a few announcements that they didn’t end up making. Today, Apple announced all of those things and more. OS X Mavericks OS X 10.9 ”Mavericks”. Available today. Free (down from $19.99 last year). MacBook Air Lighter and faster than the last model. Faster 802.11ac wireless networking, Bluetooth 4.0 and Thunderbolt 2. Available today. Starting at $999. MacBook Pro with Retina Display Lighter and faster than the last model.

I’ve been spending time with iOS 7 since WWDC this year, and I wanted to post a few notes. I installed Beta 1 on my iPhone 5 the day it was available at WWDC. I toyed with it for an hour before returning to 6.1.4. It was appallingly ugly and very, very slow. The icons looked garish, and the typography was unrefined. Not surprising for a Beta 1, but it was still pretty bad. I installed Beta 2 on my iPad mini, just so that I had one device that was running the latest beta.

Apple’s fall product announcement begins at 10am PST; 1pm EST. My guesses? Definitely: Next-gen iPhone 5S, iOS 7, OS X Mavericks, iTunes 11 (with iTunes Radio), updated MacBook Pro. Maybe: New iPads (though I’d bet on spring instead), lower unsubsidized-cost iPhone for other (non-American) countries, updated iMac, updated Thunderbolt 2 display (with USB 3.0). Not a chance: An HDTV, a wrist-watch, a pull-string-to-talk Steve Jobs doll. How’d I do? How good were my predictions?

“Microsoft to acquire Nokia’s devices & services business, license Nokia’s patents and mapping services.” From the press release: Microsoft Corporation and Nokia Corporation today announced that the Boards of Directors for both companies have decided to enter into a transaction whereby Microsoft will purchase substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business, license Nokia’s patents, and license and use Nokia’s mapping services. So, in other words, most of Nokia. Phones, mapping services and intellectual property. Building on the partnership with Nokia announced in February 2011 and the increasing success of Nokia’s Lumia smartphones, Microsoft aims to accelerate the growth of its share and profit in mobile devices through faster innovation, increased synergies, and unified branding and marketing.

This is one of a few quick tutorials I’ve had sitting around on my hard drive for a while. I’m posting it now for the sake of anyone who may find these instructions useful. It’s important to note that these are the instructions you’d use for a standalone EC2 instance. If your app is low-traffic enough to only need a single server, a better option would be to leverage a single-instance Elastic Beanstalk environment which gives you more, better and simpler deployment options.

I recently wrote about the work I did to change every single password I had into ones that were unique for every site, and far more difficult to brute-force due to their long and randomized nature. As part of this exercise, I was essentially trying to change 250 passwords on 250 websites as quickly as possible. When you do this, you end up seeing trends and patterns across unrelated sites that you might not have noticed otherwise. Observations Here are some of the patterns I observed about how websites manage passwords:

I learned at a relatively young age what makes a good password versus a bad password, and I’ve tried to always use these qualities in the passwords that I choose. The Problem Unfortunately, even with the best intentions, you inevitably end up re-using one or a few passwords across every single website you log into. Some people do things as dumb as using the name of their significant other. Or their pet. Or a birthdate. Or something else equally guessable by one of the many supercomputers that exist (whereby “supercomputer”, I mean pretty much any computer invented in the past 5–7 years).

Not long ago, I read an blog post by Leah Culver about how she got into running. I decided that I wanted something similar. 10 years In high school, I could run a 6-minute mile without breaking a sweat. When I graduated in 1998, I weighed 145 lbs. Then came college, marriage, a desk job, two kids, a dog, and a slowing metabolism that caught up with me before I’d had a chance to realize it. By January 1, 2008, I weighed almost 250 lbs.