# Ryan Brooks
> Thoughts, stories and ideas.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).

## Pages
- [About Ryan](https://ryanbrooks.net/about-me.md) - Ryan Brooks LinkedIn I work as a security administrator for Charter Communications' Information Security team. I graduated from the University of Missouri - Saint Louis in Spring 2017 with a B.S. in Economics, a minor in Information Systems, and a certificate from the Pierre Laclede Honors College.…
- [Home](https://ryanbrooks.net/home.md) - Hi. I'm Ryan Brooks. I'm an economics student at the University of Missouri — Saint Louis. You can read all about me here.
- [Ryan's Outdoor Movie Nights](https://ryanbrooks.net/ryans-outdoor-movie-nights.md) - Come join my outdoor movie nights! Since projected movies are only visible after dark, all movies start at or about 8pm. The exact time will vary somewhat depending on ambient light levels, but shortly after 8pm is the target. You're welcome to show up starting at 6:30pm. I'll supply popcorn, and m…

## Posts
- [Coming soon](https://ryanbrooks.net/coming-soon.md) - This is Ryan Brooks, a brand new site by Ryan that's just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!
- [Looking at More Blackmail Spam](https://ryanbrooks.net/looking-at-more-blackmail-spam.md) - I recently published a post about blackmail spam in which the spammer was (as far as I could tell) unsuccessful in their efforts to scam people. Unfortunately, another campaign dropped into my inbox over the last couple of days where the spammer has been much more successful. I'm not going to do th…
- [Taking a look at blackmail spam](https://ryanbrooks.net/taking-a-look-at-blackmail-spam.md) - Introduction Like many people, I receive quite a lot of spam email. Unlike most, I actually read it, because it's often interesting. I've had a number of email addresses, and between them I think at least one of my email addresses has been included in most of the big website breaches over the last…
- [We Live In The Future](https://ryanbrooks.net/we-live-in-the-future.md) - I grew up on science fiction. I loved reading stories of The Future, where space travel was commonplace, where all energy was generated cleanly, and where we worked side-by-side with machine intelligences to accomplish tasks. Of course, that wasn't what most of the books were about; space travel, c…
- [Moving to Ubiquiti Unifi](https://ryanbrooks.net/moving-to-ubiquiti-unifi.md) - It's no secret that I enjoy working with new technology and figuring out better ways to do things. For the last couple of years I've been dissatisfied with how my internal network was configured; I was using a basic, off-the-shelf, all-in-one consumer-grade router/wireless access point, and while i…
- [It's always DNS](https://ryanbrooks.net/its-always-dns.md) - I host a few websites for myself and family on DigitalOcean. Up until recently, I've always just spun up a new droplet for each site, so they were all fully independent from each other; this was the easiest and most convenient way to get a new site up and running without jeopardizing uptime on othe…
- [Memcached abuse opens door to massive DDoS attacks](https://ryanbrooks.net/memcached-abuse-opens-door-to-massive-ddos-attacks.md) - A new reflection attack was unveiled today which can increase the size of a DDoS attack by 51,000-fold. It uses memcached, an object caching system designed to speed up web applications, to amplify attacks against a target. This represents a substantial increase from previous attacks, which have us…
- [New Apache Web Server bug can reveal server memory to attackers](https://ryanbrooks.net/new-apache-web-server-bug-can-reveal-server-memory-to-attackers.md) - Another day, another vulnerability in a widely-used software package. Today's bug (dubbed Optionsbleed by Hanno Böck, the journalist who documented the vulnerability) can reveal passwords and other pieces of vital information to attackers. While not as big of a threat as Heartbleed, a similar bug w…
- [New WordPress Vulnerability Results in ~2 Million Defaced Sites](https://ryanbrooks.net/new-wordpress-vulnerability-results-in-2-million-defaced-sites.md) - The vulnerability was patched in WordPress v4.7.2 two weeks ago, but millions of sites haven't yet updated. This leaves them open to a vulnerability in the WordPress REST API, which can allow malicious actors to edit any post on a site. Ars Technica has a very nice writeup on the effects of the exp…
- [Is it time to abandon antivirus software?](https://ryanbrooks.net/is-it-time-to-abandon-antivirus-software.md) - I've noticed a growing trend in more advanced computer users lately: some of them have begun advocating against using antivirus software. Instead, they suggest using browser extensions like uBlock Origin (which I use and recommend), combined with safe browsing practices, to remove the need for anti…
- [New Host!](https://ryanbrooks.net/new-host.md) - I've finally moved to a VPS on DigitalOcean, from my previous (free) shared hosting. I did this for a couple of reasons: first, while my hosting was free for a year with my domain name, that year was almost up. To renew my hosting for the second+ year, I would have needed to pay $38.88/year; while…
- [Clinton's Email Server](https://ryanbrooks.net/clintons-email-server.md) - Ars Technica did a nice job of creating an impartial write-up on why Hillary Clinton used an external email server, and how it was actually used. It sounds to me like there's an institutional history of using private email to conduct business, largely due to obstructive or incompetent IT services (…
- [Uncertainty, the Fed, and the Economy](https://ryanbrooks.net/uncertainty-fed-economy.md) - The New York Times published this opinion piece recently, discussing the Fed's continuing decision to delay raising rates. While the entire article is interesting, I believe that the final paragraph is the most insightful: Adding to the frustration is that Fed policy is not to blame for the economy…
- [Hacking the Hackers](https://ryanbrooks.net/hacking-the-hackers.md) - Have you ever heard of Hacking Team? It's an Italian company specializing in "digital infiltration" products for governments, law enforcement agencies, and large corporations. Simply put, they sell hacking tools. You might think, given their business model, that they would monitor their own securit…
- [Orchids at the Missouri Botanical Garden](https://ryanbrooks.net/orchids-missouri-botanical-garden.md) - The Missouri Botanical Garden's Orchid Show ended today. I went on a date there yesterday to visit the Garden and see the show. ((Luckily, my girlfriend didn't mind my bringing my camera along.)) I honestly didn't know that there were this many different types of orchid; there were one or two hundr…
- [What is asymmetric cryptography?](https://ryanbrooks.net/what-is-asymmetric-cryptography.md) - Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman were jointly awarded the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award today. Their 1976 paper, New Directions in Cryptography, essentially created asymmetric cryptography. Today, asymmetric cryptography secures our online communications—from PGP-secured texts, emails, and files, t…
- [Email server admins are underappreciated](https://ryanbrooks.net/server-admins-are-underappreciated.md) - Today I reconfigured a server I maintain for the Office of Residential Life and Housing. It broke yesterday because of a database issue, but I've taken this as an opportunity to rebuild and improve it with an included email server. I have it mostly up and running now, but it's been a long, slow pro…
- [How Stories Drive the Stock Market](https://ryanbrooks.net/how-stories-drive-the-stock-market.md) - I came across this article today in The New York Times written by Robert Shiller. Shiller is a Sterling Professor at Yale University who studies macroeconomics, behavioral economics, and public attitudes regarding markets, so he's very qualified to discuss the role of stories in our economy. The ge…
- [The Panic of 1907](https://ryanbrooks.net/the1907panic.md) - The Panic of 1907 crippled the financial markets, brought ruin to banks and trust companies, all but bankrupted the Treasury of the United States of America, and required the intervention of J.P. Morgan to end. And it directly led to the founding of the Federal Reserve System in the United States,…
- [Controlling and Ending Inflation](https://ryanbrooks.net/controlling-ending-inflation.md) - This is another adapted essay from my classes. This particular essay was my paper for my Monetary Policy class in the spring of 2015. I've cleaned it up a little, and adapted it for a blog format, but it is largely as it was in the spring of 2015. Inflation and hyperinflation is a topic that isn’t…
- [Do Nuclear Reactors Lower Housing Prices?](https://ryanbrooks.net/do-nuclear-reactors-lower-housing-prices.md) - The Perceived Risk of Nuclear Power Does risk play a factor in the housing market? Obviously it does—if it didn’t, Detroit wouldn’t be in trouble right now, prices in high-crime areas would be the same as everywhere else, and we’d have subdivisions built on top of active volcanoes (at least in plac…
- [Of MOOCs and Learning](https://ryanbrooks.net/of-moocs-and-learning.md) - Decades ago, dreamers imagined a world where the resources and tools for learning anything could be used by anyone. Where colleges, universities, and even ordinary people could share information and ideas, collaborate and learn. With the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, many people thought…

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