TIME quotes me about DOGE and VA, gets stuff wrong
The TIME article contains two substantive errors, several minor errors, and a curious omission.
Category Archives: Computers
Mar. 13 NPR “Consider This” talks about risks of DOGE data access, with cameo by me
NPR’s Ailsa Chang; Elizabeth Lair of the Equity and Civic Technology Project at the Center For Democracy and Technology; Jonathan Kamens, late of the Department of Veterans Affairs; and University of Virginia law professor Danielle Citron, talk about the risks of DOGE having access to federal government data and how the Privacy Act of 1974 is being used to push back on it.
Comcast attempts to intimidate me into taking down a blog post
Comcast sent me two intimidating letters and a bogus DMCA takedown notice in a misguided effort to get me to take down content they didn’t like because it has Comcast executive email addresses in it.
Online privacy protection for people in the resistance: DeleteMe, Block Party
If you can make it go from taking 30 seconds to 30 minutes for a bad actor to find something private about you online, you’ll dramatically decrease the number of people willing to go through the effort. Think of it like putting an alarm-system sign on your lawn to encourage burglars to skip your house.
Feb. 26 live CNN interview about VA.gov cybersecurity
I did a brief press appearance on CNN this afternoon to talk about my firing from the VA and what that means for VA.gov cybersecurity. Here’s the video, with a transcript below it. Transcript Jessica Dean: A warning from a fired cybersecurity official for the department of veterans affairs. He sounded the alarm, saying sensitive… Read More »
Astoundingly good “WIRED” article about my firing from VA and what it means
Author Lily Hay Newman does an incredible job capturing the high stakes of compromising the security of VA.gov.
Hack of the day: CGI script for temporary download bandwidth throttling
I wrote a self-service way for my family to tell my computer to stop hogging all the download bandwidth so they can do their online meetings or gaming.
Tampermonkey script: no, Newegg, I don’t freakin’ want to subscribe
Script to prevent Newegg from subscribing me to their spam against my will.
Tampermonkey script to un-Gmail Google Contacts
When you click on a contact’s email address in the Google Contacts web app, instead of opening a new draft in your default email app with the “To” field populated with that email address, which is what it should do, Google Contacts opens a Gmail compose window. I hate this behavior. While I do have… Read More »
Lessons learned from setting up a Linux desktop VM on a Windows 11 Home host
VirtualBox is more functional than Hyper-V Manager but much slower. There are a lot of tricks for getting this right. If you turn off Secure Boot you might permanently lock yourself out of Windows.