Author Archives: kevin.mccurley

Why do we restrict the length on publications?

I recently saw a suggestion from Bo-Yin Yang on eliminating the references as counting toward a page limit on publications from IACR conferences. That strikes me as a great idea, and consistent with what other societies are doing. On the … Continue reading

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Experimenting with the fediverse

I continue to experiment with using the fediverse, but I haven’t hit on one that I like. The discoverability of content in mastodon is – well – miserable. The lack of federated search strikes me as a case of the … Continue reading

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On peer review in academic publications

A friend of mine recently reviewed a number theory paper that is over 100 pages long. He found a critical error on page 52 that may invalidate the main result of the paper. This raises the question of what the … Continue reading

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ActivityPub

I’ve been reading a bit about ActivityPub and fiddling around with implementing some things. In doing so I’ve discovered that the standard was unfinished. There is a client-to-server part that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and a lot … Continue reading

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An attempt at getting back to blogging

Once social networks took off, the concept of blogging seemed less compelling. Now that the birdsite has descended into hell, I figured I’d investigate ActivityPub as an alternative. There are many ways to try this, including directly using mastodon or … Continue reading

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Another proposition 13?

I was amused to hear from my daughter that King county in Seattle is experiencing large increases in property taxes – in much the same way that California was experiencing rapidly rising property taxes during the 1970, which led to … Continue reading

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An analysis of why Trump was elected

Summary of a long post: politics to follow. Move on if it isn’t your thing. In trying to understand how the USA arrived at the shitshow that Donald Trump and the Republican Party represent, I’ve started reading alternative news sources … Continue reading

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Time until Linux desktop failure measured in minutes

It took less than an hour of usage. The error was in bluetooth, which is not surprising I guess.

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The year of the Linux desktop (not)

There is an old joke in computer science that “This is the year of the Linux desktop.” It’s a joke because every year people say that, and every year there is a colossal fail in delivering a usable desktop. This … Continue reading

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Democrats may have found a new way to lose

When the Hillary Clinton email story broke, I predicted at the time that it would lead to her downfall. In the end I think it was a variety of factors, but that was the one that she couldn’t bring herself … Continue reading

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