Any peo­ple any­where being inclined and hav­ing the power have the right to rise up and shake off the exist­ing gov­ern­ment, and form a new one that suits them bet­ter. This is a most valu­able, a most sacred right–a right which we hope and believe is to lib­er­ate the world. Nor is this right con­fined to cases in which the whole peo­ple of an exist­ing gov­ern­ment may choose to exer­cise it. Any por­tion of such peo­ple that can may rev­o­lu­tion­ize and make their own of so much of the ter­ri­tory as they inhabit.

Abra­ham Lin­coln, 1848

Since I’ll be in Austin all week, I took the pre­cau­tion of reserv­ing a hotel room with a nice view.

An Analy­sis of Apple’s Fil­e­Vault 2.

This is an analy­sis of Apple’s disk encryp­tion pro­gram, Fil­e­Vault 2, that first appeared in the Lion oper­at­ing sys­tem. Short sum­mary: they couldn’t break it. (Pre­sum­ably, the ver­sion in Moun­tain Lion isn’t any different.)

[Schneier on Secu­rity]

This is good news, but of course it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that Fil­e­Vault 2 secu­rity can be com­pro­mised by accept­ing the option (on by default, as I recall) to send a recov­ery key to Apple. The best secu­rity in the world is use­less if you give the keys to some­one who will give them up the first time some thug points a gun at him.

‘Plain Jane Ban­dit’ Con­tin­ues to Rob Banks Despite Unkind Nick­name. The woman who has been some­what unkindly nick­named the “Plain Jane Ban­dit” by the press isn’t let­ting her new­found moniker deter her from her cho­sen line of work: She was recently spot­ted rob­bing a Chase bank in Cer­ri­tos, her eighth SoCal rob­bery in about a month. [LAist]

From the story:

ABC 7 reports that she used the same method in the Cer­ri­tos rob­bery that she always uses, whereby she sim­ply walks in, shows a teller a note ask­ing for money, and leaves. She report­edly has never been armed or shown a teller a weapon, but she does some­times say that she has an accom­plice wait­ing for her outside.

How exactly does this con­sti­tute “rob­bery?” It sounds more like unusu­ally suc­cess­ful pan­han­dling to me. If banks want to put a stop to this woman’s “crime” spree, I sug­gest the fol­low­ing approach: on being handed a note ask­ing for money, deter­mine whether the woman has an account with that bank with suf­fi­cient funds. If not, tell her “no” and call for the next customer.