This week’s Nerds on Draft welcomes our first guest and of course that person is my old Technical Difficulties co-host Erik Hess. Erik talks about how he built a daddy-bot as a way to connect with his family while deployed overseas for a year. We all had a few different beverages and some fun discussions.

Quincy Larson has a pretty reasonable approach to encrypting your data: And when I use the terms “private” or “secure”, I mean reasonably so. The reality is that — as long as humans are involved — no system will ever be 100% private or 100% secure. His list is short and pretty unobtrusive. For normal people, it’s key to balance the mental cost verses the potential benefit of encrypting everything.

I know many people that are fascinated by the hack of San Francisco’s MUNI. I’m far more fascinated by the white-hat battles against the hacker, which may have resulted in breaching the miscreant’s email accounts. From Brian Krebs: On Monday, KrebsOnSecurity was contacted by a security researcher who said he hacked this very same cryptom27@yandex.com inbox after reading a news article about the SFMTA incident. The researcher, who has asked to remain anonymous, said he compromised the extortionist’s inbox by guessing the answer to his secret question, which then allowed him to reset the attacker’s email password.

Brian Krebs continues to follow the analysis of the biggest Botnet attacks the world has ever seen. Tell me this doesn’t sound like a William Gibson plot writing itself: “This is an interesting development because a lot of the response to Mirai lately has been to find a Mirai controller and take it down,” Nixon said. “Right now, the amount of redundant infrastructure these Mirai actors have is pretty significant, and it suggests they’re trying to make their botnets more difficult to take down.

Sam Harris has an excellent and deeply intellectual podcast. This week’s episode features an interview with Professor Stuart Russell about the current and future state of A.I. and it’s potential impact on society.

Derek Lowe writing at Science: One way to deal with such nonsense is to go after it head-on, pulling up evidence to show that no, these things don’t appear to be true, and here are a bunch of quite plausible reasons why they’re not. If someone is wavering or wondering, that might be enough. But it’s certainly not going to be enough for anyone who’s really invested in such thoughts (see that expertise link above for more thoughts on this as well).

Akamai was the DDoS protection service used by security researcher Brian Krebs. At least until last September when they couldn’t offer pro-bono protection under the weight of new massive attacks. Their latest report details the specific attack on Krebs. As detailed here in several previous posts, KrebsOnSecurity.com was a pro-bono customer of Akamai, beginning in August 2012 with Prolexic before Akamai acquired them. Akamai mentions this as well in explaining its decision to terminate our pro-bono arrangement.

One of my biggest concerns about Apple reducing their commitment to Mac automation is that we will no longer get these fabulous posts by Dr. Drang.

I recently enjoyed a new form of spam: iCloud calendar spam. No, it wasn’t a calendar invitation attached to an email. It appears to be from a source other than email. Here’s the fact pattern: A new event alarm was created in my primary iCloud calendar without my consent. I did not accept the invitation. There was no record of an email invitation in any of my mail folders, including spam.

I’ve been enjoying my free time quite a bit while I workout a new framework for understanding other humans. I’ve made specific efforts to avoid “news” in all of its grotesque forms. It’s a challenge partially alleviated by finding other mental outlets. Two outlets I’ve enjoyed are Hardbound and Timeline. Hardbound presents a series of simple slides to illustrate a broad topic with attractive graphics and video clips. Examples of topics include Magnetism, The Electoral College, and How Explosions Work.