The Talos Principle was released in December 2014 and attempted to answer the AI alignment question at a time where the existence of AI alignment as a field was a foreign concept to the vast majority of the population, including technologists. It was ahead of its time.| Etienne Perot's blog
This is an image-heavy post.| Etienne Perot's blog
Mozilla has recently announced that Firefox will block mixed "active" content by default in Firefox 23, after Chromium and even Internet Explorer implemented similar measures. "Mixed content" refers to content being served over HTTP (i.e. plaintext) from within an HTTPS (i.e. HTTP-over-TLS) webpage. "Active" content refers to content which can modify the DOM of a webpage, i.e. any resource which, once loaded, modifies the way the page it is included in is rendered. Blocking mixed content is a...| Etienne Perot's blog
With the recent announcement that Ubuntu would be switching to Canonical's new Mir display server, Ubuntu is increasingly distancing itself from other Linux distributions on various levels. In order to approach the subject, we first need to define what a Linux distribution really is.| Etienne Perot's blog
MAC addresses are a unique identifier associated to every network interface, wired or wireless. They are used to identify devices on a physical network.| Etienne Perot's blog
First, some context: There have been quite a few complaints and concerns about Ubuntu's attempt to include advertisements in their operating system, in the form of Amazon-affiliate-tracked results showing up in Unity's Dash interface by default. There has also been some attempts to do some damage control over this PR disaster, including one by Mark Shuttleworth himself, Ubuntu's Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life (SABDFL).| Etienne Perot's blog
One of the issues with SSH is the lack of public-key infrastructure. This causes two kinds of potential problems. Fingerprint verification problem Fingerprint verification is the technique SSH uses to check if it is connecting to the correct server, to ensure that the connection being not tampered with and not wiretappable. In practice, this means that when you connect to a new SSH server, you're usually presented with something like this: $sshperot.me The authenticity of host 'perot.me (2600...| Etienne Perot
After reliability, security is perhaps the second most important aspect of a mail server. I was looking for solutions to encrypt all incoming emails (that were not already encrypted) with my PGP key as soon as they arrive on my mail server. This way, even if an attacker gains access to the system, (s)he will not be able to read the contents of emails that are already stored on disk.| Etienne Perot