I died and turned into a Roman. It’s very distracting.
Doctor Who
Women priest law ‘a slap in face’. The Vatican’s decision to make the ordination of women a “grave crime” - the same term it uses to describe sexual abuse - is condemned by women’s church groups. [BBC News]
But if the Vatican regards women priests the same way they do sexual abuse, doesn’t that mean that women are free to be priests whenever they want and the Vatican will either ignore them or cover it up (or both)?
New at Reason: John Stossel on Government Attacks on Freedom.
Something’s happened to America, writes John Stossel, and it isn’t good. It’s become easier to get into trouble. We’ve become a nation of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. The problem is top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives.
View this article.
[Hit and Run]
Here’s another quote from the end of the article:
Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more—so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible. This is a bad trend. As Lao Tsu said, “The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”
Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more—so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible.
This is a bad trend. As Lao Tsu said, “The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”
I remember when I was a kid there was a saying: “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” but I haven’t heard anyone say that in years (another one from the same time that’s also now dead was “it’s a free country”). Today ignorance of the law is still no excuse from a legal standpoint, but at the same time knowledge of the law is an impossibility.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Let’s keep this one short and sweet. According to the official government statistics, the US economy shed another 125,000 jobs in June. Wouldn’t it then be reasonable for the unemployment rate to climb? You would think so, right? You’d be wrong. See, in addition to the terrible news about job losses, there’s horrific news that […] [Mike Makes Right]
According to Shadow Government Statistics, the true unemployment rate is around 22%. This number includes those people who have given up on ever finding a job, who have been officially ignored by the government since 1994 because it made the government look bad.
Cryptography Success Story. From Brazil: the moral, of course, is to choose a strong key and to encrypt the entire drive, not just key files. [Schneier on Security]
The files were encrypted using Truecrypt and an unnamed algorithm, reportedly based on the 256-bit AES standard. In the UK, Dantas would be compelled to reveal his passphrase under threat of imprisonment, but no such law exists in Brazil. The Brazilian National Institute of Criminology (INC) tried for five months to obtain access to the encrypted data without success before turning over the job to code-breakers at the FBI in early 2009. US computer specialists also drew a blank even after 12 months of efforts to crack the code, Brazil’s Globo newspaper reports.
The files were encrypted using Truecrypt and an unnamed algorithm, reportedly based on the 256-bit AES standard. In the UK, Dantas would be compelled to reveal his passphrase under threat of imprisonment, but no such law exists in Brazil.
The Brazilian National Institute of Criminology (INC) tried for five months to obtain access to the encrypted data without success before turning over the job to code-breakers at the FBI in early 2009. US computer specialists also drew a blank even after 12 months of efforts to crack the code, Brazil’s Globo newspaper reports.
I use TrueCrypt to protect the Windows laptop I use for work. Unfortunately, the Mac version doesn’t support whole disk encryption.
After using Dropbox long enough to be satisfied that its performance would remain good and my files wouldn’t spontaneously disappear, I decided to try using it in conjunction with Calibre. Calibre is an open-source and cross-platform ebook management program which organizes ebooks in all different formats and can convert between most of them. I use it to keep track of all the ebooks I’ve downloaded for my Kindle from sources other than Amazon — which is actually the majority of them. Like most open-source projects it has a ghastly user interface, but it works well despite that handicap.
Kindles are recharged through the USB cable that connects them to a computer, and I’ve been connecting mine to the Mac Pro I use for working with photos — it’s easy to plug it in and set it out of the way to recharge when sitting on a desk. However, I actually download ebooks fairly often on my laptop or generate them using Fanfiction Downloader on my PC. In the past I’ve then moved the ebooks over to my Mac Pro via iDisk, but as I’ve mentioned before iDisk doesn’t perform all that well.
Calibre lets you specify where you want your ebook library to be located in its preferences, so I moved the folder it had been using on the Mac Pro into my Dropbox and pointed Calibre to the new location. I then installed Calibre on the other two computers, and now I’ve got access to my library from three different computers. When I download an ebook on my laptop I can stick it in Calibre there, add any metadata I like, and the next time I plug my Kindle in to my Mac Pro it’s there already, waiting to be copied over to the Kindle. So far this has worked out very well.
To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
‘Microsoft We Don’t Feel So Good About’.
David Gelles and Richard Waters, in a piece titled “Google Ditches Windows on Security Concerns” in the Financial Times:
New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. “Linux is open source and we feel good about it,” said one employee. “Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”
[Daring Fireball]
I wish the “security” company I worked for had that much sense. Unfortunately, they make it as hard to get Mac (or Linux) machines as Google has made it to get Windows. And since the Powers That Be decided to “outsource” our entire IT department to a company that manufactures Windows PCs, I don’t expect that to change any time soon.
Most of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for your liberty never knew they would. They died just going about their own lives as they saw fit. People like Kathryn Johnston, Oscar Grant, Aiyana Jones, Isaac Singletary, and Sean Bell. In fact, their biggest connection to your liberty is that they were killed, murdered, by those who are the sworn enemies of liberty in all its forms. Their sacrifice is defined more by their enemy than it is by any other connection to those of us who strive for true justice and liberty for ALL.
Kent McManigal
End-to-End Encrypted Cell Phone Calls.
Android app. (Slashdot thread.)
[Schneier on Security]
From the article:
RedPhone uses ZRTP, an open source Internet voice cryptography scheme created by Phil Zimmermann, inventor of the widely-used Pretty Good Privacy or PGP encryption. […] TextSecure uses a similar scheme developed by cryptographers Ian Goldberg and Nikita Borisov known as “Off The Record” to exchange scrambled text messages.
RedPhone uses ZRTP, an open source Internet voice cryptography scheme created by Phil Zimmermann, inventor of the widely-used Pretty Good Privacy or PGP encryption.
[…]
TextSecure uses a similar scheme developed by cryptographers Ian Goldberg and Nikita Borisov known as “Off The Record” to exchange scrambled text messages.
This means that you could talk securely to anyone using Zfone on a computer, and IM securely to anyone with Adium or another app that supports the OTR protocol.
There’s also this rather important distinction from Skype, the “security” of which I’ve criticized before:
Whisper Systems’ apps aren’t the first to bring encrypted VoIP to smartphones. But apps like Skype and Vonage don’t publish their source code, leaving the rigor of their security largely a matter of speculation.
