A new perspective of an old friend, Argiope aurantia. I have also reposted an egg sac that the spider made earlier in the summer because it fits the theme. She's variously in a bush or under my eaves.
JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are the new thing. Blog after blog and book after book tell you how to generate them and use them to authorize access to web services. But there is one little detail that everyone is leaving out: it is much harder to secure a server that generates JWTs than a server that generates session IDs. This is because the JWT signing key must be protected, whereas there is little need to secure session IDs, and session IDs are easily secured by hashing, anyway. As a consequence, the push to use JWTs for local authentication is making sites more vulnerable. Here you might dismiss me as a random loon for questioning the JWT love, but I do have years of experience professionally evaluating systems to assess and document their security. I've performed IV&Vs for NSA, evaluated NetWare's file system for a TNI Class C2 rating, and developed a reputation for being able to quickly identify security flaws in large software systems. Mind you, that was COMPUSEC, not
I hunkered down in the garden and uprooted a weed. "Unh!" A root nearly two inches thick! An adjacent weed had unbelievable two-foot leaves. I tugged and tugged and up it came, revealing a dozen weeds underneath. I yanked and yanked and yanked. Still more monstrous weeds! Heaving, heaving, they came up one by one. But now there were baby weeds and sister weeds and even grandfather weeds. I pulled and yanked and tugged. "Hmph! Bluh! Hargh!" I didn't see the morning go, and I didn't notice the long shadows drawing. Instead I squatted and lifted and grabbed and shovelled and tugged and jumped. Spitting dirt and raining dirt, I watched arms and legs flail. I watched weeds fly. "Ahg! Unh! Grr!" Unbelievable! This weed had a stalk eight inches thick and it was covered in bark. I whacked at it with the side of my trough. I whacked and whacked and whacked, my grunting now as frenzied as a chainsaw. Finally the behemoth fell. Thunk . The ground shoo
In the woods there are webs. Some we know well, like the orb webs that spiral to the center. Some surprise us on the forest floor, gauzy sheetwebs that taper to a funnel. Some are messy constructs like the cobwebs in the nooks of the trees. But everywhere, everywhere, strands glint rainbows in the sunlight. Stretching from branch to branch, leaf to leaf, twig to twig, they are the trails of passing spiders. Here is a spider now. She raises her abdomen and releases a line into the air. She waits. The line catches. She pulls the line taut, anchors her end, and climbs across. Once across, she ambles on. Behind her the line reads, "A spider was here." So reads the line before, and the line before that. So reads every line in the forest. The forest is a book written by spiders. It reads, "We spiders are everywhere." (Written on the morning of October 18th, 2009, in the woods of Gus Fruh Park, Austin, Texas)
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