Stephen Checkoway
stevecheckoway.bsky.social
Stephen Checkoway
@stevecheckoway.bsky.social
380 followers 420 following 580 posts
Associate Professor of Computer Science at Oberlin College. No kings, no nazis.
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In grad school, we called up Fry’s to ask if they had it and the guy laughed at us. I honestly cannot recall if we were looking for the version with aliens or not. Eventually, we found Los Imortales 2 on DVD (from eBay, maybe?) which had the English audio track. Good times.
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
Geordi was a deepfake AI girlfriend pioneer
I realize it’s probably too late for this advice to be useful this year but nevertheless: If you are applying to an academic job, write your own materials. Do not use generative AI tools at all.
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
The personal details of all F1 and other drivers could have been stolen via an FIA web portal

ian.sh/fia
6, I think. But 4 of them are PlayStations.
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
We are giving a tech talk at @hackadayofficial.bsky.social Supercon with @dr.supersat.phd in a few weeks 🩷
What happens when your body is the dev board? Dive into the wild world of biohacking, rogue experiments, and deeply questionable decisions in the name of science, curiosity, and chaos.
After the game, I asked why they did that and they sent me a long, salty DM about how I needed to learn how to play chess and know when to resign.
I played a 150+ move chess game in the 1 minute with 1 second increment time control. In the end, I had a king vs. a king, knight, and five pawns. My opponent under promoted four pawns into knights and bishops and then gave away/blundered everything except 2 knights and then eventually flagged.
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
Continued (mis)use of National Guard in DC for no purpose in the third week of a shutdown.

The Trump at work. (Doing nothing.)
I have _almost_ written a hobby project in Rust several times. But then I realize that hitting the REST API is just gonna be easier to do with curl and a shell script. But then I start thinking about using jq to parse the response to craft the subsequent API calls…and then I go play chess instead.
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
* Josh Aas, Richard Barnes, Peter Eckersley (RIP), J. Alex Halderman, & Eric Rescorla: For Democratizing the Availability of Encryption Certificates with Let’s Encrypt

secdev.ieee.org/2025/home/
Home-SecDev2025 - IEEE Secure Development Conference
secdev.ieee.org
I was scrolling through the common questions in Beej's Guide to Network Programming (a portion of which I've assigned as reading in my course) and ran across this gem.

"My favorite solution to this involves a goto statement. You know this irritates your professors to no end, so go for it!"
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
ICE Detains Leaves as They Turn Brown: tinyurl.com/37euaejk
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
/3 But a huge plurality, at least, of the modern GOP is of the opinion that noticing bigoted trash is more un-American and destructive than BEING bigoted trash: that dehumanizing fellow Americans based on immutable characteristics is morally superior to criticizing anyone for doing that.
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
This is amazing research by Nadia Heninger and her co-authors Wenyi Morty Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin and Aaron Schulman. TL;DR a huge number of satellite links over our heads are totally unencrypted. satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu
🛰️ SATCOM Security
Research project homepage for SATCOM Security: papers, source code, and recent satellite communications vulnerabilities.
satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
Also: if you work for ICE, even if you’re not one of the ones arresting citizens or tackling 15-year-olds or zip-tying kids together and segregating them by race, you’re part of the mechanism making it happen, and you should suffer long-term social and post-regime-change consequences.
Some weirdo on Twitter has been absolutely melting down for like 36 straight hours because I posted:

When this is over, do not forget what ICE did, and what ICE is. And do not make room for them in society. Make sure they know that they are, and will continue to be, reviled and beneath contempt.
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
Let's make a promise here, friends... we ARE going to abolish ICE. Not REFORM it. ABOLISH it. And we're going to put that massive budget back into funding all the things that actually HELP people.
The old ratings were very silly. But notice ahead of time would have been nice. It was quite surprising to have a streak of 30 and then discover my rating had gone down. They must be getting so many customer service reports from people who didn’t see the news.
"And we're going to be doing _______ about it." You guys always forget that part.
Chesscom changed their puzzle ratings. support.chess.com/en/articles/... This is probably a good thing. But boy was this surprising to discover.
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
This is nightmarish and every Dem politician, every media figure who is silent is complicit. This is not supposed to happen here. Masked thugs with guns dragging moms away in front of their screaming children. Trump’s government must be destroyed and his accomplices must rot in prison
CHICAGO — Outside an elementary school during dismissal… horrifying. What have we become?
Reposted by Stephen Checkoway
These people are evil. Never stop saying so. Don’t be intimidated into shutting up.
Here’s video of the incident