Greg Leib on Software

There's been some buzz recently about Hillary Clinton using a personal email server for official state business. The Wired piece is an interesting read: http://www.wired.com/2015/03/clintons-email-server-vulnerable/ Probably the most surprising thing in the article for me is not about Hillary's email server at all. In discussing Hillary's invalid SSL certificate, the article casually mentions that the State Department uses a self-signed certificate, implying that their email could be compromised by a man-in-the-middle attack similar to what could target Hillary's email server. Here's a link that illustrates the invalid certificate: https://www.state.gov/ At time of writing, the certificate belongs to Akamei, and not not to the State Department. The certificate was issued by Cybertrust and will expire in June 2015. Does this imply that the State Department's email could be compromised? Probably not. It's unlikely they are using this certificate for ...

As a senior-level software engineer, I work with political systems every day. When I design a software system, relationships between people drive system requirements - the needs of the stakeholders need to be balanced so that the company can create value. The right system can improve how people work together and reduce infighting. This may include by coordinating user activities or surfacing new analytical information. Usually the kinds of systems I work with and am most interested in involve business activities like extracting data from websites, publishing news articles, selling products or tracking resource allocations. I don't normally blog about government politics. The occasion for this post is the reopening of the federal government after over two weeks of shutdown and the last-minute aversion of a default on US sovereign debt. On the one hand the crisis was created by a populist movement with some important ideas - but on the other hand the current political system wasn...