De Cock en de geur van rottend hout by A.C. Baantjer
A woman wearing a heady perfume reports that her husband, who runs an export firm, has disappeared. De Cock and Vledder soon meet the hard reality of the crime.
Books
Blog
Privacy Roundup #0086 • September 2013
The Snowden disclosures reached their peak as the NSA was shown to undermine encryption itself, while leaders abroad and watchdogs at home pushed back.
Privacy
Eurobloat #0040 • August 2013
The month Brussels carved up its own solar market for Beijing, declared the recession over by a third of a percent, and sent a fact-finding team to Gibraltar to discover that Spain was being difficult.
Eurobloat
The Kill List by Frederick Forsyth
In Frederick Forsyth’s The Kill List, a gripping espionage thriller, a mysterious U.S. agency called TOSA is on a mission to hunt down threats to national security.
Books
De Cock en moord bij maanlicht by A.C. Baantjer
A sect moves into a former printing works in Amsterdam. Soon after, a psychiatrist is killed on the Kalkmarkt. De Cock must find out if the two are connected.
Books
Privacy Roundup #0085 • August 2013
August 2013 belonged to the Snowden fallout, as fresh leaks, an audit of thousands of NSA violations and the shutdown of encrypted email services laid bare the cost of mass surveillance.
Privacy
Monthly update #0280 • August 2013
Monthly update 280 • August 2013 • 2013-08-01 - 2013-08-31
Monthly Updates
Eurobloat #0039 • July 2013
The month Brussels swallowed Croatia, drafted its own prosecutor, lectured Washington about snooping while building a snooping directive of its own, and approved a tax its own lawyers said was illegal.
Eurobloat
NSHashTable & NSMapTable
NSHashTable acts as a general version of NSSet. It is mutable, holds weak references, can copy items on input, and handles arbitrary pointers using pointer identity for equality and hashing.
Development
Useful macOS defaults: System Preferences
Handy defaults write commands for com.apple.systempreferences, controlling the legacy System Preferences app.
Mac
What are the coredisplay and corestorage processes?
If you see coredisplay or corestorage processes on your Mac, here is what they do.
Mac
What is TrustEvaluationAgent?
If you see TrustEvaluationAgent running on your Mac, here is what this certificate trust process does.
Mac
The Utopia Experiment by Robert Ludlum
In Robert Ludlum’s The Utopia Experiment, co-authored with Kyle Mills, Covert-One's Jon Smith looks into a new brain-computer device that may not be the gift its inventor claims.
Books
De Cock en het roodzijden nachthemd by A.C. Baantjer
De Cock and Vledder try to find the person who has murdered several women, each dressed in a red silk nightgown.
Books
Monthly update #0279 • July 2013
Monthly update 279 • July 2013 • 2013-07-01 - 2013-07-31
Monthly Updates
Privacy Roundup #0084 • July 2013
The Snowden disclosures reached full flood in July 2013, as fresh leaks exposed XKeyscore and corporate complicity while courts, lawmakers and breached websites scrambled to respond.
Privacy
Eurobloat #0038 • June 2013
The month Brussels discovered it was being spied on, decided the answer was more Brussels, and locked twenty-five sleepless ministers in a room to invent new ways to seize your savings.
Eurobloat
World War Z
World War Z (2013), directed by Marc Forster, shows a fast zombie plague. Brad Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a former UN worker pulled back to help. He flies from city to city. Mireille Enos acts as his wife Karin, who waits at home.
Movies
NSPredicate
NSPredicate is a Foundation class that defines logical conditions to fetch or filter data. Its syntax mixes SQL WHERE clauses with regex for expressive queries on collections.
Development
NSExpression
NSExpression is a class in Cocoa that simplifies complex data tasks. It evaluates mathematical expressions, such as 4 + 5 - 2**3, which gives 1.
Development
What is startupdiskhelper?
If you see startupdiskhelper on your Mac, here is what this boot disk helper process does.
Mac
Monthly update #0278 • June 2013
Monthly update 278 • June 2013 • 2013-06-01 - 2013-06-30
Monthly Updates
De Cock en 't wassend kwaad by A.C. Baantjer
Several hardened criminals are murdered, and a line of verse by the poet Vondel seems to be linked to the killings.
Books
Privacy Roundup #0083 • June 2013
June 2013 was the month the Snowden documents broke, exposing NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance and triggering a wave of lawsuits, corporate denials and diplomatic fury.
Privacy
NSEnumerator / NSFastEnumeration
Enumeration makes computation powerful by applying logic to collections.
Development