From Garden & Gun: “It is nearing midnight on an unpaved road bordering the Florida Everglades when Donna Kalil slams on the brakes. Light from her blue F-150 floods the scene along the road, where, within the grass, a sheen of iridescent skin glints, and the sinuous shape and inkblot pattern of a Burmese python leap into focus. Kalil jumps from the truck, long braid swinging, and moves in on her quarry. At sixty-two years old, Kalil is a full-time, year-round professional python hunter, and the original python huntress: She is the first woman to hold this job, not that gender crosses anyone’s mind out here in the living, breathing wilderness of the Everglades. Kalil positions herself between the python and the endless black reach of swamp beyond it. Then she pounces, angling for a strong grip just behind the head. This brief fight represents the 876th time Kalil has pitted herself against a Burmese python and won.”
He cracked a 30-year-old encrypted file that helped end apartheid in South Africa
From Wired: “John Graham-Cumming’s day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a historian of technology. He might be best known for leading a campaign to force the UK government to apologize to the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing for prosecuting him for homosexuality and harassing him to death. The story he shared centers around Tim Jenkin, a former anti-apartheid activist. It was the early 1980s, and the ANC’s efforts were flagging. The problem was communications. Using a Toshiba T1000 PC running an early version of MS-DOS, Jenkin wrote a system using the most secure form of crypto, a one-time pad, which scrambles messages character by character using a shared key. When Jenkin returned to South Africa in 1992, he took his tools with him — but then years later, he had forgotten the password.”
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “She’s one of Florida’s most lethal python hunters”