Big City Political Machines Most large cities in America have been under the control of bureaucratic political entities since the end of the 19th century in the case of our oldest cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago. In nearly every case in the United States, the machines were local Democratic parties. The nascent machine organizations were aptly characterized as highly inefficient, corrupt, and undemocratic. People grew predictably acrimonious at the presence of political machines stymieing progress and lessening the influence of those lacking political clout.

Server Hardening This last part of my security and privacy guide is focused on server infrastructure. In particular, I’ll be covering the securing of common services as well as various steps to take that will prevent intruders from easily gaining access. Some of the things mentioned in here can be applied to desktop machines as well. Common Vulnerable Services It’s often the case that people don’t do their basic diligence in fully securing system daemons that are network facing.

Overview File formats specify how content is encoded to a file and tells software applications how to display/handle the encoded bits. They are usually identified by a file extension that is appended to the file name. Sometimes, file types are denoted by metadata, typically stored as a header at the beginning of the file or as a magic number (in this case, some pre-determined value that denotes the file type). A rudimentary example of this is the shebang at the beginning of a script (i.