A bat conservationist thinks bats are blamed for viruses because they're sampled more often than other mammals:

"Since 2005, when coronaviruses in horseshoe bats were first hypothesized to be the ancestors of the coronavirus that caused SARS, bats have received far more scrutiny than any other group of animals. For example, in the study on which the scariest headlines were based, researchers sampled nearly twice as many bats as rodents, shrews, and nonhuman primates combined and didn’t even include carnivores or ungulates."

https://issues.org/a-viral-witch-hunt-bats/

On the positive side, the focus on bats has led to a lot of research into their genomics. For example:

* "Comparative Analysis of Bat Genomes Provides Insight into the Evolution of Flight and Immunity": https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1230835

Bats are believed to be the reservoir species for a number of nasty viruses, though. As the abstract of the above paper says, bats are the "reservoir hosts for some of the world's most highly pathogenic viruses, including Nipah, Hendra, Ebola, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)."

I haven't heard any virologists who study bats call for the eradication of bats. In fact, the Ecohealth Alliance, which coordinates a lot of the fieldwork to gather data on viruses in bat populations, says that conservation measures would help reduce the risk of spillover.

GE makes in-wall Z-wave light switches that work wonderfully. No cloud dependency, and you can control them with open source software like HomeAssistant.

I'd like to see how one of the oldest package managers, Perl's CPAN, stacks up.

It's in the list, and does better than basically everything else.

  The current version of titus is 0.2, released on 2014-08-17.

I'd be wary of using any piece of security software that hasn't had a release in over a year.

(Author here.) I'd be more wary of using security software that changes frequently, since every code change is an opportunity for a new security vulnerability to be introduced. I'm very cautious with changes to titus.

That said, 0.3 will be released any day now. It's pending testing of the new FreeBSD support.

Is there a roadmap to reach 1.0 release? I wondered because of this statement in your web site: "it has not yet undergone serious testing or performance optimization. Additionally, we may make backwards-incompatible changes to the behavior before titus reaches version 1.0"

This looks great. Any tips on how to terminate mixed-mode protocols like MySQL's SSL mode and IMAP's STARTTLS? Vanilla unwrapper daemons generally don't handle the case of initial unencrypted bit twiddling, and then SSL negotiation.

Unfortunately not. STARTTLS is the bane of standalone TLS terminators like titus, which is one of the reasons I really dislike STARTTLS. I won't rule out titus supporting STARTTLS some day, but the idea of integrating parsers for a bunch of different protocols into titus is really unappealing.

Any program that is constantly being updated and/or re-released is, for me, the one I'm more wary about trusting. As an example, look at djb's software. After a period in the beginning, you do not see the constant releases and updates.

To me, trustworthy software is software that is "correct", if that is even attainable.

Ideally, if the author is truly careful, it should be close to "correct" when it initially released.

Numerous releases and updates year after year to me suggests the software was not very close to correct when the author decided it was time to release. Or that the author is pandering to feature requests.

As with the parent comment, this is only an opinion.

NaCl and CurveCP have not been updated in years. But I feel it's more trustworthy than TLS.

I'm just a fool I guess.

I did exactly this over the holidays to get into a deceased family member's computer.

There's a growing open source keyboard community built around keyboards like the ErgoDox using the Teensy Microcontroller. Keyboards are surprisingly easy to build from scratch by hand.

Do you have node.js installed and in your $PATH?

That looks very nice. Much more comprehensive than my tool. If all my tool accomplished was to prompt you to release your better tool, then I'm a happy camper. Yay open source!

This tool helps you stay distributed by keeping a server somewhere that constantly backs up all your repos. With this you can't accidentally forget to make a copy if you make a quick repo in a coffee shop somewhere, and delete the local copy days later when you're cleaning up.

Or you could mirror to multiple repositories with one push. I write about how to use Github & Bitbucket simultaneously here: http://deanclatworthy.com/2013/01/how-to-avoid-relying-on-gi...

Wow, that's a pretty neat approach! How well does that work with multiple people?

I can't imagine it would be that difficult with multiple people.

Even if they pulled from one or the other, so long as someone merges the changes from the missing repo, everyone will be good to go.

This is a pretty unique approach to multiple git servers.

Not when you use several different computers, or when you're done with an old project and delete your local copy.

Plus, you can use this to backup someone else's repos in case they delete them.