<p>Some security researchers from UCSD <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/08/hackers-cut-corvettes-brakes-via-common-car-gadget/">showed a proof of concept exploit via one of the dongles</a> that appears to be also used by car insurance companies to monitor your driving “to give you discounts for good driving”. I’m not really a fully paid up subscriber of the tin foil hat brigade but stuff like this makes me glad that I’m still opting for the old-fashioned way of paying…
<p>Another metablogging post, but this may come in handy for people who like to produce blog posts in bulk and schedule them for publication in WordPress at a later date.</p>
<p>I’ve recently blogged about <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2015/08/01/adding-tls-support-to-emacs-24-5-on-windows/">adding TLS support to Emacs 24.5 on Windows</a> and <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2015/08/04/improve-git-performance-on-windows-without-patching-your-git-install/">improving git performance on Windows by installing an alternative git command line client</a>. The reason I ended up investigating how to add SSL and TLS support to Emacs is that when…
<p>Looks like <a href="http://global.samsungtomorrow.com/samsung-announces-an-android-security-update-process-to-ensure-timely-protection-from-security-vulnerabilities/">Samsung</a> and <a href="http://officialandroid.blogspot.de/2015/08/an-update-to-nexus-devices.html">Google</a> recognise that much like any other computing device, the smartphone in your pocket needs very regular security updates.</p>
<p>I’ve blogged about <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2014/03/12/improving-the-performance-of-git-for-windows/">improving the performance of Git on Windows</a> in the past and rightly labelled the suggested solution as a bad hack because it requires you to manually replace binaries that are part of the installation. For people who tend to use DVCSs from the command line, manually replacing binaries is unlikely to be a big deal but it’s clunky and should really be a wakeup…
<p>The Windows build of Emacs 24.5 doesn’t ship with SSL and TLS support out of the box. Normally that’s not that much of a problem until you are trying to access marmalade-repo or have <a href="https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog">org2blog</a> talk to your own blog via SSL/TLS.</p>
<p>tl;dr - avast’s web shield functionality appears to insert itself into SSL connections using a self signed trusted root certificate and a simple kind of man-in-the middle “attack” on SSL. I would recommend you turn off web shield’s https scanning or choose another virus scanner.</p>
<p>As mentioned in <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2015/03/02/improving-my-blogging-workflow-using-emacs-of-course/">an earlier post</a>, I changed my blogging workflow to org2blog for writing and editing posts in Emacs and only push them up to my WordPress blog when the posts are almost done. I still do the final editing in WordPress so I can tweak the SEO settings and all that, but the majority of the work happens in <a href="http://orgmode.org/">org-mode</a> now.</p>
<p>Yes, I know <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu</a> and <a href="http://xubuntu.org/">Xubuntu</a> already come with Chromium in their official package repositories, but sometimes it does help to have the official/commercial version installed in addition to the Open Source one. I actually both installed right now, plus Firefox and <a href="https://vivaldi.com/">Vivaldi</a>. You could almost think I’m some sort of web developer or something.</p>
<p>I’ve recently been working in <a href="http://clojure.org/">Clojure</a> on some code that really benefits from parallelization but doesn’t need to squeeze the last available cycle out of the machine.</p>
