Mine still are. I use an HP48gx, and run HP48gx emulators on my Mac and my iThings when my real 48gx isn't within easy reach.

Sorry, my IOT-rant mode engages pretty easily. :)

I don't need my freezer to have a network connection for that. An old water bottle and a little bit of water will do the trick just fine. I can't think of any reason that I'd want my refrigerator, thermostat, laundry machines, etc. to have network connectivity. The real winners in the "Internet Of Things" game are the makers of networking hardware.

Thank you.

eBay and PayPal used to offer security tokens to provide one-time PINs to be used at login. They were offered as either physical tokens or as smartphone apps. I just tried to look for them on the eBay and PayPal sites, but I no longer see any mention of them. Have they stopped supporting the tokens?

PayPal now just appears to offer something called PayPal Security Key in which they send OTPs via SMS, and I don't see anything like that on the eBay site.

I recall seeing many Usenet posts ending with "NSA Line Eater Food" followed by lists of naughty keywords back in 1986 when I started college. The only differences are that now we have confirmation of what we took for granted back then (and probably before), and the scope is beyond what even the tinfoil hat guys believed.

I'm still waiting for a meat-based vegetable substitute.

I think VR is a great idea, but now that FB has bought Oculus VR, Oculus VR is dead to me. I will not buy their products now or in the future, and if I already had one, I'd smash it. That's how much I love FB.

Indeed. Now I'm glad that I didn't act on my brief curiosity about applying for work at Oculus VR when I heard about some interesting engineering job openings that they posted a while back. I wouldn't want to work for Zuckerberg. Now that FB owns them, I have lost all interest in ever buying their products. Oculus VR is dead to me now.

Just to be pedantic, a fake key may also be signed by a real, correctly-identified individual who had no intention of subterfuge, but who isn't careful about whose keys he or she signs. Of course, once discovered, that person should from then on be distrusted to validate other keys just as much as somebody who deliberately tried to deceive others.

A scarier but less likely possibility would be a malicious actor who creates a forged key for some other person, and then attends key-signing parties where they present forged identification in order to receive legitimate signings of their forged key. It'd be hard to get away with this if the target is an individual with a well-known appearance, like a Schneier or a Wozniak. But if the target is somebody who is just known online by name and not by their physical appearance, then it might not be hard to get legitimate signatures on the forged key by real, well-trusted individuals who simply had no prior knowledge of the target's real appearance. I wouldn't know "the" Gavin Andresen who maintains Bitcoin code from "a" random person named Gavin Andresen, or even an impostor with a good forgery of a government-issued ID card. I've never seen a picture of Gavin that I can recall, so I have no idea of what he looks like.

Very true! If I meet a person face-to-face, they hand me their PGP/GPG public key, and they show me plausible-looking picture ID that matches the identity that their key claims to represent, then I can mark their key in my keychain as one that I'm confident is not a forgery. If they are otherwise a stranger to me with no well-known reputation, then I can register in my keychain that their signature on somebody else's key doesn't count for much. Or if they are a well-known person with a reputation of being very careful about whose keys they sign, I may register in my keychain that I tend to trust keys that they have signed. The web of trust system is pretty well configurable.

I may also sign their key with mine to let other people know that "I, NF6X, consider this key to belong to the individual it claims to belong to". You may or may not consider that to be of value, depending on how well you know me and what you think of me.

This seems to be a reasonable model to me, and I think it's better than the "one CA to rule them all" model used for things like SSL certificates. It's difficult to scale the model well, though. I don't know of any other PGP/GPG users near me and I began using these systems long after I graduated from college where I might have had many more opportunities to sign others' keys and have mine signed. So, I'm not part of the web of trust, and I'm unlikely to become one unless I go out of my way to travel to a key-signing party to meet some well-known and reputable people. The few people with whom I exchange PGP/GPG-encrypted traffic are strangers to me, and I have no way of being strongly confident that they are who they say they are.

And no, I don't want to buy an extended service plan for the audio patch cord that I'm going to cut one end off of and mount a different connector on as soon as I get home, thank you very much. No, really, I'm positive.

In my opinion and experience, that was true back in the 1980s, too. I bought components there at the time because I didn't know of any better option near me, and I didn't even know that I should be searching for a better option. It's not like I could order parts online from Digi-Key. I didn't know that it's possible to buy hookup wire whose crappy insulation doesn't flee in terror from an approaching soldering iron. I didn't know about ring lugs whose plastic insulation is tough enough to survive crimping without breaking off. I had one of the cool TI sound generator chips they carried, but one of the functional blocks never worked right. I thought that the way to buy capacitors was in a bulk pack of 50 random values.

They did have some excellent products like the set of Minimus 7 speakers that I still have, and my first exposure to computers and programming was my TRS-80 Color Computer. Radio Shack played an important part in my earliest experiences with electronics and computers, but I began looking elsewhere for most electronic components and supplies once I learned how to find higher-quality parts. Now I only shop for components there when I want something Right Now.

Very interesting. I used to use MH with an emacs front end for email, before I grudgingly switched to flashy bloated graphical email readers since nobody seems to be able to send plain text email like civilized gentlemen any more.