Tuesday Miscellany!

[maxomai]

• Congress has passed a two-year budget deal, which means that we don't have to worry about a government shutdown until 2015. Mind you, this budget deal basically takes all the sequester cuts and locks them in. So, yeah, almost everyone is getting screwed in the name of austerity.


• The West is telling Syria's rebels that Assad is going to have to stay in place. Like I said yesterday, Assad can thank Putin for saving his ass.


• Bruce Schneier, briefly, on how the "Harvard Bomber's" use of Tor made it easy to find him.


• If you use GnuPG, do it outside the presence of microphones and mobile phones. Yes, seriously. It turns out that an attacker can figure out your 4096-bit private key just by listening to the noise the CPU makes. I wouldn't be surprised if PGP was also vulnerable to this sort of attack.


• Am I the only one who cheered when I saw that Obama appointed an all-gay delegation to the Sochi Olympics, apparently in an attempt to send a signal to Russia's tacitly anti-gay government?