No, not an angry rant about proper gTLD usage. Instead, this is more of a Public Service Announcement: silenceisdefeat, my favorite provider of life-long free shell accounts, has had their domain name taken hostage. silenceisdefeat.org now redirects to an ebay auction for the domain name. As a result, they can now be found at:
I have updated my previous link to their site (in this article) to reflect the change as well.
Total knowledge games are games in which all players involved have equal knowledge of the current state of the game, and the only factor that influences the game’s future state is the actions of the players. Chess, Go, and tafl are three such games that I play periodically.
Recently, I pondered a fairly simple question: which of these games is the most complex? All of them are complex enough that new players have room to become stronger over time. Skill in these games has been traditionally praised as a virtue by each game’s culture of origin. So, which game provides the greatest depth as a topic of study?
Recently, I was describing the personal setup I use to connect to my home machine over on watchingback (a group that has gone unfortunately silent). This setup combines port-knocking (with one-time sequences), disk encryption, and passphrase-protected rsa keys. Here’s a basic rundown of how it works from an end-user perspective (i.e., once everything is set up):
First, the user (me) inserts a USB flash drive with an encrypted partition. He mounts up the encrypted disk on a local machine (I’ll call this machine the ‘client’ throughout this article), providing the necessary password, and runs a script called ‘callhome’. He is prompted for his passphrase, and then gets a terminal session on his home machine (we’ll call this one the ‘server’).
Read on for details about this setup, and how to do it.
