“The problems we found in the code were far more pervasive, and much more easily exploitable, than I had ever imagined they would be. … Our hard work notwithstanding, unearthing exploitable deficiencies was surprisingly — and disturbingly — easy.”

“the fallacy of the linguists’ argument … lies in the idea that construction should imply definite relationships. … the idea that some neologisms are ‘more appropriate’ than others stems from the mistaken assumption that causality matters in language change.”

Inspired.

Interesting discussion of how to use public-key encryption tools to create software serial numbers (and, incidentally, another object lesson in why SHA-1 being broken is important).

Security researchers, commissioned by the state of California, report that they can compromise each of three major e-voting systems in a number of different ways, including overwriting firmware and bypassing server clients to directly access the vote database.