Ter­ror­ist Pianos of Doom!. Toward the end of last month, a note­wor­thy inci­dent occurred in the clas­si­cal music life of Los Ange­les:

Pol­ish pianist Krys­t­ian Zimer­man, who is widely admired for his vir­tu­osic per­for­mances and who famously tours with his own custom-altered Stein­way, cre­ated a furor at Dis­ney Hall on Sun­day night when he stopped his recital to announce that this would be his last Amer­i­can appear­ance — in protest of the nation’s mil­i­tary poli­cies overseas.

In a low voice that could not be heard through­out the audi­to­rium, Zimer­man, uni­ver­sally con­sid­ered among the world’s finest pianists, made ref­er­ence to Guan­tanamo Bay and U.S. mil­i­tary poli­cies toward Poland.

“Get your hands off my coun­try,” he said.

Then he turned to the piano and played Szymanowski’s “Vari­a­tions on a Pol­ish Folk Theme” with such pas­sion and inten­sity that the stunned audi­ence gave him mul­ti­ple ovations.

Ear­lier, about 30 or 40 peo­ple in the audi­ence had walked out after Zimerman’s dec­la­ra­tion, some shout­ing obscen­i­ties. “Yes,” the pianist, known in Poland as “King Krys­t­ian the Glo­ri­ous,” answered, “some peo­ple, when they hear the word mil­i­tary, start marching.”

[Once Upon a Time…]

The whole post is worth reading.

It’s amaz­ing how much the boss being on vaca­tion does to improve pro­duc­tiv­ity. If only he’d stay that way…

Cal­cu­lat­ing Pass­word Pol­icy Strength Vs. Crack­ing. sny­deq writes “InfoWorld’s Roger Grimes offers a spreadsheet-based cal­cu­la­tor in which you can key in your cur­rent pass­word pol­icy and see how your organization’s pass­words might hold up against the num­ber of guesses an attacker can make in a given minute. The cal­cu­la­tor includes results for four dif­fer­ent pass­word entropy mod­els, and is based on length, char­ac­ter set, max­i­mum age, whether com­plex­ity is enabled, and the num­ber of guesses per minute an attacker can attempt. As an exam­ple, Grimes assumes an eight-character pass­word, with com­plex­ity enabled, a 94-symbol char­ac­ter set, and 90 days between pass­word changes. Such a pol­icy, typ­i­cal for many orga­ni­za­tions, would require attack­ers to make only 65 guesses per minute to break — not at all hard to accom­plish, Grimes writes.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slash­dot]

I have some expe­ri­ence with fool­ish pass­word poli­cies like that. They’re actu­ally even worse than this arti­cle sug­gests, because a pol­icy requir­ing hard to mem­o­rize pass­words that change reg­u­larly mean that users gen­er­ally can’t mem­o­rize their pass­words, and as a result with either write them down next to their com­puter or fol­low some pre­dictable pat­tern such as “password1!,” “password2!,” etc.

Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles — Why It Died. brum­grunt writes “Sarah Con­nor was a non-populist, med­i­ta­tive, com­plex piece of tele­vi­sion on a smash-bang, show-me-the-ratings kind of net­work. The two were never going to get on. Plus: how the Ter­mi­na­tor name proved more hin­drance than aid.“

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slash­dot]

It was def­i­nitely one of those “too good for tele­vi­sion” shows. Too bad it wasn’t on a cable chan­nel, where good sto­ries can survive–for exam­ple, Bat­tlestar Galac­tica made it all the way to the end of its run on the Sci Fi Chan­nel, which (despite the name) doesn’t actu­ally have much sci-fi on it.

From a mail­ing list for music photographers:

What do pho­tog­ra­phers make?
*Salary data is from PayScale.com. Salaries listed are for full time work­ers with 5–8 years of expe­ri­ence and include any bonuses or profit sharing.

Free­lance pho­tog­ra­pher — $35,728
Pho­to­jour­nal­ist — $37,403
News pho­tog­ra­pher — $43,001
Fash­ion pho­tog­ra­pher — $48,710
Sports pho­tog­ra­pher — $44,686

And peo­ple ask me why I don’t want to be a pro­fes­sional photographer…

After try­ing it for three weeks with­out prob­lems, I bought the lat­est ver­sion of PGP Desk­top Pro­fes­sional, which includes whole disk encryp­tion. Both my Mac­Book Pro’s inter­nal hard drive and the exter­nal drive I use for Time Machine back­ups have got­ten along with it just fine, even through the sys­tem update to 10.5.7. For the most part there’s no notice­able impact on per­for­mance, but then my lap­top doesn’t do any­thing really disk intensive–all my pho­tog­ra­phy work hap­pens on a dif­fer­ent com­puter which I will not be encrypt­ing. There did seem to be a slow­down in Time Machine back­ups, but that’s not an area where per­for­mance is really rel­e­vant. I would really pre­fer to use True­Crypt, but as it cur­rently can only do whole disk encryp­tion on Win­dows (where I have been using it for some time), that wasn’t an option.

The rest of the PGP Desk­top pack­age gets a mixed review. I had looked at PGP last sum­mer and dis­missed it as unac­cept­able because of the hor­ri­bly designed proxy it relies on for encrypt­ing email, but this time around I dis­cov­ered that there is also an offi­cially unsup­ported plu­gin avail­able for Mail. The plu­gin works the same way as the GPG­Mail plu­gin, but with fewer fea­tures. This is not sur­pris­ing, as they have the same author. Appar­ently some brain­less prod­uct man­ager at PGP Cor­po­ra­tion had decided to kill the plu­gin (pre­sum­ably to force users into using their worth­less proxy), and it was brought back by pop­u­lar demand.

Since the last time I looked at PGP, it’s lost the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with pub­lic key servers other than the one actu­ally run by PGP Cor­po­ra­tion, which very few peo­ple use. Accord­ing to a thread on the PGP sup­port forum, the devel­op­ers know about this bug and just don’t care about fix­ing it. Well, nobody will ever accuse the PGP Cor­po­ra­tion of hav­ing good cus­tomer ser­vice or QA! For­tu­nately the key­servers have web inter­faces so the prob­lem can be worked around as long as you’re using the “unsup­ported” Mail plu­gin. Any­one fool­ish enough to use the proxy will be out of luck, though.

I ulti­mately decided to switch from GPG to PGP for my email needs, at least for the moment, because while both of them have huge prob­lems on the Mac, PGP’s refusal to work with key­servers that aren’t owned by the PGP Cor­po­ra­tion is less of a prob­lem than the hideously unus­able key­chain man­age­ment that GPG inflicts.

No War­rant Required in U.S. for GPS Track­ing.

At least, accord­ing to a U.S. Dis­trict Court rul­ing:

As the law cur­rently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track peo­ple with­out vio­lat­ing their con­sti­tu­tional rights — even if the dri­vers aren’t suspects.

Offi­cers do not need to get war­rants before­hand because GPS track­ing does not involve a search or a seizure, Judge Paul Lund­sten wrote for the unan­i­mous three-judge panel based in Madison.

That means “police are seem­ingly free to secretly track anyone’s pub­lic move­ments with a GPS device,” he wrote.

The court wants the leg­is­la­ture to fix it:

How­ever, the Dis­trict 4 Court of Appeals said it was “more than a lit­tle trou­bled” by that con­clu­sion and asked Wis­con­sin law­mak­ers to reg­u­late GPS use to pro­tect against abuse by police and pri­vate individuals.

I think the odds of that hap­pen­ing are approx­i­mately zero.

[Schneier on Secu­rity]

I agree. Also note that this really only applies to cops spy­ing on dri­vers who don’t have cell phones. If you’ve got a cell phone, it’s sim­pler and cheaper for the cops to spy on you using the track­ing device you paid for and vol­un­teered to carry around rather than going to the trou­ble of bug­ging your car.

Train­ing the Police State’s Next Gen­er­a­tion.

Remem­ber when the Boy Scouts were merely about help­ing old ladies across the street, learn­ing how to tie a decent knot, and exclud­ing gay people?

Meet the post-9/11 Scouts.

The Explor­ers pro­gram, a coed­u­ca­tional affil­i­ate of the Boy Scouts of Amer­ica that began 60 years ago, is train­ing thou­sands of young peo­ple in skills used to con­front ter­ror­ism, ille­gal immi­gra­tion and esca­lat­ing bor­der vio­lence — an intense ratch­et­ing up of one of the group’s long­time mis­sions to pre­pare youths for more tra­di­tional jobs as police offi­cers and firefighters.

“This is about being a true-blooded Amer­i­can guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowen­thal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Impe­r­ial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explor­ers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and brav­ery of the Boy Scouts.”

The train­ing, which lead­ers say is not intended to be applied out­side the sim­u­lated Explorer set­ting, can involve chas­ing down ille­gal bor­der crossers as well as more dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions that include fac­ing down ter­ror­ists and tak­ing out “active shoot­ers,” like those who bring gun­fire and death to col­lege cam­puses. In a sim­u­la­tion here of a raid on a mar­i­juana field, sev­eral Explor­ers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreper­ous lookout.

“Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Bor­der Patrol agent explained. “I guar­an­tee that he’ll shut up.”

This is really despi­ca­ble stuff.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

It’s not at all sur­pris­ing, though. It’s nat­ural for any oppres­sive police state to cre­ate its own ana­log to the Hitler Youth and Young Pio­neers.

@sethdill I just got the same thing.

Argu­ing with anony­mous strangers on the Inter­net is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be–or to be indis­tin­guish­able from–self-righteous sixteen-year-olds pos­sess­ing infi­nite amounts of free time.

Neal Stephen­son, “Cryptonomicon”