Practical Vulnerabilities of the Tor Anonymity Network
Lesson one is that Tor guards against traffic analysis not traffic confirmation. If there is reason to suspect that a client is talking to a destination over Tor, it is trivial to confirm this by watching them both.
Good to know.
Don’t know how well it works.
Since starting to study philosophy, for a period of maybe four years, I thought that religion was pretty unimportant intellectually; of course its sociological effects are huge and far-reaching, but among my friends I didn’t worry too much about their atheism or otherwise, since I thought it was just a matter of some metaphysics which I didn’t buy, but didn’t think mattered too much. I dismissed hardcore atheism as just a replacement for religion that, again, wasn’t too interesting.
Having now met several hardcore Christians I find myself falling back into something like militant atheism because it upsets me just how much Christianity damages people. It encourages the belief that they are never good enough, and piles on the guilt. It involves grasping at some permanent and unchanging deity rather than accepting that their imperfect and everchanging (and incredibly short) selves and lives are already enough. People can’t flourish under these conditions.
I still think that the metaphysical issues are at the root of responding to the religious person. Realising that the world doesn’t care about you frees you up to get on with creating your own meaning. And realising this is the only intellectually responsible option. It still seems to me that any appeals to the moral status of the world and to personal noumenal experiences is rendered irrelevant once one accepts that we all get tempted by strange ideas, and the only responsible thing to do is to be brave enough to throw it all out. Intuitions can’t be trusted. Induction’s basically all we’ve got for fundamental questions like these.
Edit 25/iv/2013: By “moral state of the world” I mean the way people are with each other; I’m not talking about moral realism.
I just got back from submitting my three five-thousand word “extended essays” which form 25% of the grade for my master’s degree this year. Taking the rest of today and tomorrow off from work before starting revision; I’ll have a little over four weeks to revise for my three exams worth the other 75%. These three essays represent my first attempt at doing some real philosophy: though the nature of the subject means that you can’t be expected to do produce anything truly original for at least three or four years from where I am now, there are a few maybe-original ideas in each of the three essays and the way I have put the essays together is original. So it’s worth reflecting on the process.
Deprogramming From the Academic Cult | The Chronicle
Is Graduate School a Cult? | The Chronicle
Selling Out | The Unemployed Philosopher’s Blog
(my entry point into the above: What is to be done? | The Philosophers’ Cocoon)
I am someone who wants to do graduate philosophy but envisages not wanting to try to get work in higher education after finishing a doctorate since there is so little, and I’m not sure it’s worth the struggle. The articles linked to above argue that this plan can’t work because one risks getting indoctrinated into the academic cult to the extent that it’s impossible to leave at the end of a PhD without going through enormous suffering. The doctrines of the academic cult mean that wanting to leave is “giving up” and “selling out”.
The Academy has very many flaws and while studying within it is a good way to come to an understanding of the human condition, I am no longer convinced that it is the only way. So the feeling that if/when you leave you’re giving up on something special and magical that ordinary people can’t have is unjustified, because it’s just false that the modern Academy has any claim to any of this. I think that graduate school will be “safe” for me if I keep this in mind.
Why feed reading is an open web problem, and what browsers could do about it | Luis Villa
… [D]espite what some perceive as the “failure” of RSS, there is obviously a demand by readers to consume web content as an automatically updated stream, rather than as traditional pages. Google Reader users are extreme examples of this, but Facebook users are examples too: they’re no longer just following friends, but companies, celebrities, etc. In other words, once people have identified a news source they are interested in, we know many of them like doing something to “follow” that source, and get updated in some sort of stream of updates.
Why should browsers treat RSS as a first-class web citizen in a way they don’t treat other things? I think that the difference is that if closed platforms (not just web sites, but platforms) begins to the only (or even best) way to experience “reading streams of web content”, that is a problem for the web. If my browser doesn’t tightly integrate email, the open web doesn’t suffer. If my browser doesn’t tightly integrate feed discovery and subscription, well, we get exactly what is happening: a mass migration away from consuming (and publishing!) news through the open web, and instead it being channeled into closed, integrated publishing and subscribing stacks like FB and Twitter that give users a good subscribing and reading experience.
I wish to defend changes to my vegetarianism which I think I should make when I move to Korea in October. The charge that I need to defend such changes from is, I take it, that I’m giving up ethical principles on the grounds of convenience. These ideas came to me today so very unpolished.