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On RushTok and algorithms
September 22, 2023
Thinking It's been about a month since the conclusion of sorority rush at the University of Alabama, aka #RushTok, but I still find myself thinking about it....
Officially PhDone
July 19, 2023
Well, 2023 is more than half over, and I'm finally sending a second newsletter out. But it comes with good news: I successfully defended my PhD dissertation...
Forward progress
February 14, 2023
Thinking It's the fifth--no, seventh--week of 2023 and I'm just now getting around to writing about my word for the year. Last year it was PRACTICE, in an...
Why study the history of cryptography?
December 12, 2022
Welcome to the doldrums of the year between Thanksgiving and The Holidays, where if you are anything like me your brain feels like molasses that you'd rather...
Historian detective work: tracking down "crypto wars"
November 17, 2022
Like half my twitter timeline, I've set up a mastodon account as insurance against a sudden collapse of the birdsite. You can find me at...
Infodumping in history writing
October 28, 2022
Thinking
The stories we tell about ourselves
October 21, 2022
Thinking Last week on the SIGCIS listserv, someone circulated a new-ish collection of oral histories out of Stanford's engineering school, which includes...
Edges and Ends
October 7, 2022
Thinking We left off last week with the idea of connecting time-sharing networks. To make a very long story short: the Arpanet and subsequent development of...
Security before the internet
September 30, 2022
As promised, I'm writing a bit more about the history of internet (in)security. This week is part 1, covering the basics of early computer security and what...
The internet has never been secure
September 23, 2022
Thinking Last week, Twitter's former head of security, Pieter Zatko, aka Mudge, testified before the US House Judiciary Committee about his allegations of...
Oh no, I have to write it
September 9, 2022
We just got back from a nine-day trip and I am tired. But one of the goals of this newsletter is forcing me to write even when I don't want to, so here we...
Escaping a narrative
August 26, 2022
Thinking I've been reading and rambling my way into the last part of my dissertation lately, while simultaneously trying to think through how I want to...
When incremental progress doesn't work
August 19, 2022
Welcome to my experiment in keeping up with writing and thinking and getting better at both. Thinking The first draft of a project (or a chapter, etc) is...
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