Steven Brokaw

I’ve been moving around from one hosting provider to another, and a lot of my links have grown stale. Links to my own content were broken because they used URLs from the old site. If you looked at older photos, you probably would have seen a 404 if you clicked through to see the larger image. I spent some time with wp search-replace and hopefully fixed those issues.

This post was written in BBEdit and rendered from Markdown to HTML using a custom script. It’s still manual in that I have to copy and paste the HTML into a WordPress edit form. I have scripts in progress that can read YAML front-matter and create a new post using the Title, date, category, etc. from the front-matter. So as a text-publishing solution, BBEdit is pretty complete. Or will be once I finish those scripts. The problem is with images. I don’t have a good solution for images, and I don’t have a good plan on how to deal with them.

One possible solution is MarsEdit. I’ve been a registered owner for years and have always wanted it to work for me. MarsEdit allows for a custom script to render markdown into HTML. The difficulty I’m coming against now is getting my Python markdown scripts to work. MarsEdit executes its scripts in a restricted environment, so it can’t load the libraries.

Bloomberg published a big article last year about Chinese infiltration of American computer hardware. Reportedly, servers at Amazon and Apple were manufactured with a covert chip that could report back to China anything that passed through the server. It was explosive and widely publicized, but also a little suspect. Now it seeems Bloomberg has sent another reporter to follow up on the story.

From Eric Wemple at the Washington Post:

According to informed sources, Bloomberg has continued reporting the blockbuster story that it broke on Oct. 4, including a very recent round of inquiries from a Bloomberg News/Bloomberg Businessweek investigative reporter. In emails to employees at Apple, Bloomberg’s Ben Elgin has requested “discreet” input on the alleged hack. “My colleagues’ story from last month (Super Micro) has sparked a lot of pushback,” Elgin wrote on Nov. 19 to one Apple employee. “I’ve been asked to join the research effort here to do more digging on this … and I would value hearing your thoughts (whatever they may be) and guidance, as I get my bearings.”

One person who spoke with Elgin told the Erik Wemple Blog that the Bloomberg reporter made clear that he wasn’t part of the reporting team that produced “The Big Hack.” The goal of this effort, Elgin told the potential source, was to get to “ground truth”; if Elgin heard from 10 or so sources that “The Big Hack” was itself a piece of hackery, he would send that message up his chain of command. The potential source told Elgin that the denials of “The Big Hack” were “100 percent right.”