yon Leveron blog

I’ll reiterate to folks, I’m software agnostic.  Open source and on Linux?  Grand.  Often closed source, straight from that-supposed-devil company Microsoft?  Nifty.  OSX and whatever you want to run there?  Sure enough.

I’m just looking to get the job done well.  There really are times when one choice is better in my work, and times for the others also.  Each of us may have reasons to choose a ‘preferred’ system, or package type.  This is fine – live and let live, and all that. (your day will go better if you start to adopt that; I’m sure trying!)

I’d like to briefly hit a fave topic – cryptography. I suppose it all started with reading books too early, but that’s another story and I won’t bore you with my vice.  Suffice it to say, I was interested in simple transposition ciphers by the age of six or so, pencil and paper style.

Now we have other options.  Which is good, as my writing is terrible.  PGP commercial style.  GPG open source style.  Phil Zimmermann, with two N’s please! (kudos to Phil for making the world a better place)

Hushmail for secure email.  Full disk encryption by TrueCrypt, among others.  Much more secure VoIP that most other implementations.

Be careful of snake oil; noted security folks tend to frown on this and generally have a “doghouse” category for things that just aren’t right.  If something relies on security through obscurity, it automatically fails in my estimate.