The Life of Lou Ruppert

Arabic was brutal today, and the teacher actually assigned more homework for the coming week than I struggled with last week. And you know what? I love it. Everyone needs a seemingly hopeless challenge to struggle against, and I’m lucky enough to have one that won’t impact me personally if I fail at it. But if I succeed, I’ll have the tools for a cheap Mediterranean retirement, and the means to write notes to myself that nobody will be able to read. That’s a pretty good tradeoff.

I am trying not to talk about work here on my blog, but since the subject is in the news, I have to say “told you so” about the Conficker thing. The virus and the botnet it connects to are an extremely impressive technical feat, but nobody’s going to do something that would jeopardize the spam-sending credit-card-stealing cash cow they already have.

Speaking of notes nobody can read, does anyone recommend any good web resources for explaining things like public key cryptography and filesystem encryption to fairly non-technical people? It dawned on me that I might save some time next time I do a privacy consultation for a client if I don’t have to translate the geekastani into normalish on the fly. Normally I’d mention Schneier’s book, but it’s a lot to read for one small segment, and might still be more in-depth than average people would understand.