Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again.
Gandhi admitted to beating his wife. He was a great man, but not a saint.” He swallowed. “No one mentions that Gandhi had all that violence inside him. I think it makes him better, because it means that his way wasn’t just some natural instinct he was born with. It was something he battled for, in his own mind, every day.
Any complex system is sport for a hacker;.
They’re kids. If they understood risks, they wouldn’t join uprisings and march in the streets and the world would be a simpler place. Not a better one, of course. But simpler.
When I was an activist in the 1980s, ninety-eight percent of my time was spent stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on them. The remaining two percent was the time we spent figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today, we get those envelopes and stamps and address books for free. This is so fantastically, hugely different and weird that we haven’t even begun to feel the first tendrils of it.
Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.
He’s a sucking chest wound of a human being.
But now I think that there’s no reason that Mrs. Dotta’s job is more important than my mother’s job. Mamaji wouldn’t have a job without Mrs. Dotta’s factory, but Mrs. Dotta wouldn’t have a factory without Mamaji’s work, right?
Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.
She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn’t afford to anger them. She wouldn’t do it.
I’m suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with ‘step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,’ especially if you can’t do anything else until step one is done.
I’m not magic. You lead yourselves.
I felt one hundred feet tall, made of solid gold, and on fire.
Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it’s impossible to win by doing nothing.
It was the fact that there was all this terrible stuff and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it.
These guys are the world’s biggest welfare queens, after all – suck up government money in military contracts, use it to issue bonds, get the government to pass laws that make your bonds into safer bets, then go after even bigger and better laws. I’m guessing they never spend a penny if they can get Uncle Sucker to foot the bill.
Marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. He’s always looking for ways a security system fails.
That’s why you never hear politicians talking about ‘citizens,’ it’s all ‘taxpayers,’ as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care.
Sysadmins are the unsung heroes of the century, and if they’re not busting you for sending racy IMs or engaging in unprofessional email conduct, it’s purely out of their own goodwill.
Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even more stupid.