harlows_monkeys

Heed the lesson of what happened to Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio. She was a blogger/tweeter in Mexico working to expose the drug cartels. She kept this work anonymous for obvious reasons.

She was also a doctor. The kid of someone connected to the cartels had an unexpected bad reaction to a medicine she administered and died, and she was kidnapped for that. It's not known if she would have been killed over that or not. We never found out because the kidnappers looked through her phone and found out that she controlled the twitter account of that anonymous tweeter that had been exposing them.

They tweeted from her account a warning to others to not follow in her footsteps, shot her in the head, and posted a photo to her account.

One of the lessons here is that even though the cartels never suspected her of being the troublesome anonymous blogger/tweeter, that didn't mean she would never be picked up the cartels for some other reason.

The second lesson is that you have to compartmentalize your activist/rebel/subversive life away from the life you present to the public as a doctor/student/tradesperson (or in your case sysadmin). There should be nothing in your public facing life that connects to your other role as subversive.

If you tweet or blog, do it from a burner phone or tablet not in any way connected on the record to you, rather than from your normal phone or tablet. Do not carry the burner on you--it should be hidden somewhere that you can get to it, but that if it is discovered you can plausibly deny knowing about.

Keep knowledge of your anonymous activity to only those who NEED to know about it. Even friends who agree with your writings and tweets usually do not need to know that you are the anonymous writer.

The role you are seeking to play is, from the point of view of those you are going against, no different than that of a spy or saboteur, and you need to think and act like one. That you are a sysadmin with knowledge of computer security is a good start, but it is just a start when you adversary is your government.

On chess.com, there is a mysterious GM Phoenix who has a very high rating, with much speculation as to his identity. The main guess was that it was you. When you officially showed up on chess.com, Phoenix stopped showing up, furthering that speculation.

Were you GM Phoenix?

When you visualize a chess position, such as during a blindfold game, or when going over a score without a board present, what do you see? Do you see a full board and pieces, just like you were actually looking at a real board, or do you have some kind of abstract representation in your mind (such as a list of pieces and key squares and their attack/defense relationships)?

If you see a board, is it a 3D board, or is it like a diagram from a book? If a 3D board, is it some particular set you like, or something generic?

I don't understand why professors don't pick useful books more often.

My freshman year, almost 40 years ago, used Apostol's "Calculus" for math, and a mix of the Berkeley physics series and the Feynman lectures for physics. Not only were the books very useful for the classes, they are still on my shelves and I still turn to them on occasion to refresh/relearn or for reference.

BTW, Apostol is still in use at a few top schools, and they use the exact same edition we used when I was a freshman, the second edition published in the late '60s. Calculus books do not need a new edition every few years.

Yes. There were a large number of rockets fired from Gaza in the days preceding the assassination. List here.