Tag Archive for: remembering

Remembering Dave Covey, a man of benevolence, bikes and technical wizardry


When Dave Covey walked up with a smile, your day was about to become calmer. And then he fixed your irritating computer problem in 10 seconds.

He left us last week — a quiet exit that was totally Dave. He died at 64 of cancer he told few people about.

Dave worked a quarter-century at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, lastly as a computer security guy at the Geophysical Institute.

I used to think that’s all he was. Then I learned he was on the UAF running and ski teams, we had stomped some of the same ground in New York, he did computational physics on glaciers and the ionosphere and he once won a marathon in Anchorage.

In the wedge of the boreal forest in which he made his home, the Equinox Marathon is a 26.2-mile run up and over Ester Dome each September. Dave earned more than 30 triangular knit patches for finishing, several times in the top 10.

I saw him on that hill a few times. One was at the peak of my arc and the slight downslope of his. We finished close to one another; he handed me a cup of sugar water. Another time, later in our running careers, I was pushing my daughter along the course in a Chariot, a stroller with pneumatic tires. Dave was walking along with a woman and her poodle. We chatted while hotfooting the homestretch, that wry smile busting across his face.

He rode his bicycle to work at the university for a few decades straight. Not to save gas, just because he loved to ride. He toured on bikes with friends through Europe, Australia and Mexico. He always wore one of those cycling caps that Tour de France riders fancied before they used helmets. He really loved beer. And brewing mead.

His voice was soft, laid-back, always punctuated with his laugh. He was from Torrance, California, and first came to Alaska in 1975 as a runner on the UAF cross-country team.

In Fairbanks, he met and married Kelly Drew, a UAF scientist who studies how ground squirrels can do so many amazing things during hibernation, when their bodies get colder than an…

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DataDownload: Remembering Dan Kaminsky, the digital Paul Revere | by NYC Media Lab | May, 2021


NYC Media Lab

DataDownload: Remembering Dan Kaminsky, the digital Paul Revere A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

Daniel Kaminsky died this week. He was an internet innovator, and he was 42. What isn’t as widely known is that he died from diabetes. It was, as we now so often hear, a ‘preexisting condition.’ That phrase was used to explain early deaths from COVID-19, and to battle get American’s decent health care coverage. But the simple fact is, most everyone you know has something. It’s time to acknowledge that improving heath care is a national priority for everyone.

Then we have good news — lots of it in fact. A great piece on the innovations at Spotify. The growth of Crypto among migrant workers. Congress getting schooled on algorithmic misinformation. And some surprising data in who’s reading news platforms (hint, Google isn’t at the top of the list).

This week, don’t miss our Podcast recommendation — This American Life’s episode called: The Herd. It’s a brilliant, chilling look at vaccine hesitancy — and how hard it is to combat it.

And, the big news is our amazing panel on NFTs and the future of Art and Artists. It’s a can’t miss event. And we’re co-sponsoring the WSJ Future of Everything Festival. We have tix, so grab ’em fast.

That’s this week. It’s May — already. So buckle up for a busy spring and summer.

Steve

Steven Rosenbaum
[email protected]
Executive Director
The NYC Media Lab Must-Read Daniel Kaminsky, Internet Security Savior, Dies at 42

It’s sad that the unsung heroes of the internet are really only sung about when they’ve passed on. Daniel Kaminsky, who had taught himself how to code by the age of 5 and got through the Pentagon’s defenses by 11, recently died at the age of 42. In 2008, Kaminsky alerted the Department of Homeland Security, executives at Microsoft and Cisco, and other internet security experts about a fundamental flaw of the internet. He discovered that the Domain Name System, or DNS, protocol had a flaw that would allow hackers to manipulate traffic so that “a person typing the website for a bank would instead be redirected to an impostor site that could steal…

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Technostalgia: Remembering our first computers

Being a bunch of technology journalists who make our living on the Web, we at Ars all have a fairly intimate relationship with computers dating back to our childhood—even if for some of us, that childhood is a bit more distant than others. And our technological careers and interests are at least partially shaped by the devices we started with.

So when Cyborgology’s David Banks recently offered up an autobiography of himself based on the computing devices he grew up with, it started a conversation among us about our first computing experiences. And being the most (chronologically) senior of Ars’ senior editors, the lot fell to me to pull these recollections together—since, in theory, I have the longest view of the bunch.

Considering the first computer I used was a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-10, that theory is probably correct.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab

Obama, Biden and Napolitano lead the nation in remembering 9/11

Jacob Goodwin

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law_enforcement_first_responders

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President Obama
at the World Trade
Center site

President Obama spent less than two minutes reading a 197-word passage from Psalm 46 from the Old Testament during a solemn ceremony at the World Trade Center site in New York City on Sunday commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,” said the president, before an anguished nation. “Therefore, we will not fear, even though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”

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