read me

a list of stuff i'm reading. writing/ contains things i'm writing; most of it ends up on the blog.

technical papers and books

• efficient gossip protocols for verifying the consistency of certificate logs (started 11/9/15)
• intel x86 considered harmful (started 10/15/15)
• an empirical analysis of email delivery security (finished 10/15/15): notable/belated research on the failure of STARTTLS opportunistic security. particularly scary: hotels, airports, and airlines have been found to perform STARTTLS stripping. i would like to see a follow-up scan estimating the percentage of STARTTLS connections with fradulent certificates.
• getting started with bluetooth low energy (started 10/15/15)
• advanced programming in the unix environment (started 8/15): taught me a lot of fundamental things about UNIX. i put this in the "really dry bedtime reading" category though.

other nonfiction

• trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violence (in progress): reading this for book club
• midwestern nice: a tribute to a sincere and suffocating way of life: literally couldn't make it through this in one sitting because it brought up so many overwhelming memories of growing up in the midwest.
• attached (finished 11/11/15): recommended by a friend. i think it's alright. i find myself applying attachment theory to all sorts of social situations now that i've read half of it. although it is frustratingly geared towards classical relationship arcs (monogamous, marriage-centric, equating escalation of closeness with positive progress), it's taught me a lot about how i compare to other people. it's repetitive and says a lot of obvious things. i liked the section about effective communication near the end; however, having finished it, i think i got 90% of the actionable lessons from the first 20% of the book.
• POC||GTFO 0x08: my first poc||gtfo. i loved it dearly. inspired a couple of my recent projects.
• 9/11: the view from the midwest: i reread this every 9/11.
• david lynch keeps his head: one of my favorite david foster wallace articles. has a lot of immensely reusable quotes like "a good 65 percent of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures-grotesque, enfeebled, flamboyantly unappealing, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances ... a class of public-place humans I've privately classed, via Lynch, as 'insistently fucked up.'"
• zami: a new spelling of my name: audre lorde is an incredible and highly underrated writer. a painful autobiography that ends happily despite the odds.

fiction

• little brother (in progress): my first doctorow book. some parts are confusingly close to reality in SF.
• valencia: i wish i lived in this version of san francisco.
• the panopticon: one of the best novels i've ever read. i am in awe of the main character.
• the cloud atlas: confusingly, this is not the same book as "Cloud Atlas." i, like many readers, read all of it before realizing that I read the wrong book. it was good though. super sad.