Schneier on Security: The War on the Unexpected
bq. We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.
In particular:
* “Fathers can’t hold daughters’ hands”:http://www.bloggernews.net/18108 (Grr. Grr! this is appalling.)
* “iPod terror”:http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11211166&pageNo=1&sid=1 (yes, it happens here in Canada too)
I noticed at my son’s hockey arena recently that the anti-photography signs have changed; now in addition to reporting to building staff that I’m using a camera, the sign claims that I’m only allowed to photograph the people I came to the arena with. Why is this relevant? Because policies like this are both driven by, and feeding into, the societal paranoia that defines this decade.
Several years ago at Niagara Falls I saw a child who was climbing, on the wrong side of a safety fence, on the rocks near the river. I told her it wasn’t safe to be over there, and that she should come back. One of her parents finally noticed and came over to scold the child; not for being in a dangerous place, but for talking to a stranger! (She hadn’t actually said anything to me, for what it’s worth :).
I’m sure I could come up with more stories, personal and on the Internet; it’s too easy this days…
Ugh. Refuse to be afraid, people!
posted at 3:34 pm on Wednesday, December 05, 2007 in Current Events | Comments (6)
* take boy to hockey
* get potable antifreeze from Canadian Tire
* extract trailer from garage
* fend off numerous assault strikes by lady bugs
* winterize trailer plumbing system
* remove trailer battery
* move all winter stuff to the front of the garage
* re-insert trailer into garage
* replace the contents of the garage in front of trailer
* mow the lawn
* weed-wack the lawn
Things not done today:
* finish getting all the junk out of the dining room
* Maple Story :)
posted at 5:02 pm on Sunday, October 21, 2007 in Personal | Comments Off on things done today
I’ve been a big fan of computer automation for as long as I’ve been computing. Computers are partcularly well suited for repetitive, mundane tasks. I used to have a system set up at Alias, based on “track”:ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/track.README, that would automatically keep all of the system software and configuration files up-to-date, long before HP Software bought Radia :-). My PVR is probably my current ultimate example; it automatically downloads TV listings from the source, searches those listings for my favourite shows, resolves conflicts, etc.; all without my input!
Anyway, it always surprises me when I power on an infrastructure server, and the LDAP server or Perforce server or whatever isn’t configured to start automatically! I mean really; who runs around manually starting essential services after a power outage? I thought we stopped doing that in the 1970s…
(We had to power down our labs over the weekend, because the A/C cooling tower on the roof was being refurbished. It took me all day today to get everything running properly again…)
posted at 5:35 pm on Tuesday, October 09, 2007 in Programming, Science and Technology | Comments Off on automation
computer rooms are eerie when you turn everything (including the UPSes) off for the weekend…
posted at 5:42 pm on Friday, October 05, 2007 in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on quiet
I scored 55 out of 70 on CBC’s “Test the Nation”:http://www.cbc.ca/testthenation/ quiz. I suck at Canadiana, apparently… :)
posted at 8:29 am on Tuesday, September 18, 2007 in Personal | Comments Off on test the nation
For posterity, the resolutions and bitrates I’m now using for recording shows with the PVR-250 on my MythTV box. The “Low Quality” setting is definitely degraded, but watchable; probably because of the reduced resolution more than the reduced bitrate. The “High Quality” setting looks to be good enough for DVD transfers. “Default” produces files that are about 1.5G/hour (my old settings were producing 2.2G/hour, so this will let me record more stuff). I may change them some more, of course…
| *profile* | *resolution* | *bitrate* (avg/max) | *audio sample* | *audio bitrate* |
| Default | 720×480 | 4000/5000 | 48K | 224K |
| High Quality | 720×480 | 6000/6500 | 48K | 384K |
| Low Quality | 320×480 | 2000/2200 | 32K | 192K |
| Default | 720×480 | 4000/5000 | 48K | 224K |
| Old Default | 480×480 | 4500/6000 | 32K | 320K |
I’ve read that the audio settings don’t make any difference with the PVR-250, only the “master” bitrate. Whatever :)
posted at 10:48 am on Sunday, September 09, 2007 in Personal, Science and Technology | Comments (1)
“zap2it”:http://www.zap2it.com/ decided to get out of the free TV listings business (and I’d like to thank them for maintaining free listings for as long as they did!). There’s a replacement, subscription-based service called for MythTV users “Schedules Direct”:http://www.schedulesdirect.org/, but converting to it requires some database changes, which essentially meant “upgrade!”. So I did; to “KnoppMyth R5F1”:http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html.
This was a major upgrade; kernel 2.4 to 2.6, and MythTV from 0.16 to 0.20, so I was expecting trouble. I made a complete disk2disk copy of my PVRs harddrive, and then ran the KnoppMyth backup utilities also.
As it turns out, KnoppMyth is suprisingly easy to upgrade. All of my important settings were copied over intact, and the box did sort of work after the reboots. However, I had to do a number of things manually:
* convert my tv listings source from zap2it to schedulesdirect. Unfortunately, this required re-building MythTV from source, which took all day.
* Recompile the kernel without the vesafb driver (which I remembered thanks to my old posting: “PVR 250 and MythTV”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2004/11/02/pvr-250/)
* get my Matrox G400 tv-out working, which was basically copy over my old scripts that would sync the framebuffers and adjust the video output
* fix the audio volumes, again
* rebuild the lirc modules, since the kernel source I grabbed from mysettopbox.tv didn’t have these modules already
That was about it. It dig take all day (kernel and myth rebuilds are slow on a PIII-933), but the box seems to be working ok; playback of TV and DivX works, I can record TV shows, and (the reason for the upgrade!) I have TV listings again…
One issue: the console is totally useless until X starts; something is setting the framebuffer to a very strange mode. That’s a problem for another day…
posted at 9:30 pm on Saturday, September 08, 2007 in Personal, Science and Technology | Comments Off on mythtv upgrade
I decided to try out “Linode”:http://www.linode.com (300Mb RAM, 8Gb disk space for $20/month), since they support Ubuntu 7.04 and have a better memory model and kernel support. So far so good; persephone.cfrq.net has been a virtual server since Wednesday! The migration was trivial; I bought a new linode installation, booted it up, and used rsync to copy files from the old server to the new one. It took about 6 hours altogether. Then I shutdown all the services on the old box, did one final rsync, and updated the DNS to point to the new server. Everything came up right away; I’m not sure if anyone even noticed the change :).
I haven’t decided if I’m going to keep it here or not yet, but I’ve bought myself some procrastination time!
posted at 11:39 am on Friday, September 07, 2007 in Site News | Comments Off on server update
It’s been 5 long and blissfully problem-free years, but now it’s time to find a new host for persephone.cfrq.net. For various unimportant reasons, my server needs to move out of the server room it’s been hiding in. I have a few options:
* see if I can find another free host. Unlikely.
* follow Reid’s footsteps and switch home ISPs to one that allows servers. He’s had a lot of problems with that over the years, but I’ll consider it.
* Move to a virtual server provider (e.g. Linode or Tektonic). I already have a Tektonic VPS, but now we’re talking about real money ($15-$20 per month).
I may have to evict some of my high-resource tenants in the process, which sucks… Still, I can hardly complain, having found free hosting in one place or another for about 15 years now!!!
posted at 8:12 pm on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 in Site News | Comments (2)
back from vacation. House still in one piece, thanks to Pene!
* trailer: awesome!
* altantic canada: awesome!
* two kiting events: fabulous!
* 3.5 weeks with the family: The Best!
More later :)
posted at 1:39 pm on Tuesday, August 28, 2007 in Personal | Comments Off on back!
It’s August? Already? How the hell did that happen?
posted at 10:50 am on Wednesday, August 01, 2007 in Personal | Comments (2)
What does 120 calories look like?
(hat tip: “Jeremy Zawodny”:http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/)
posted at 5:07 pm on Monday, July 30, 2007 in Links | Comments Off on 120 calories
The no-corn-syrup diet | overstated
I love the venn diagram! (hat tip: “Jeremy Zawodny”:http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/)
posted at 5:06 pm on Monday, July 30, 2007 in Links | Comments Off on no corn syrup
I’m not sure if this is irony or hypocrisy. The Carpenter’s Union is outsourcing its picket lines to random people off the street, paying them $1 above minimum wage ($8/hr) to protest … low wages.
Outsourcing the Picket Line – washingtonpost.com
posted at 2:18 pm on Wednesday, July 25, 2007 in Current Events, Links | Comments Off on Outsourcing the Picket Line – washingtonpost.com
Megan McArdle: Harry Potter: the economics
bq. The low opportunity cost attached to magic spills over into the thoroughly unbelievable wizard economy. Why are the Weasleys poor? Why would any wizard be? Anything they need, except scarce magical objects, can be obtained by ordering a house elf to do it, or casting a spell, or, in a pinch, making objects like dinner, or a house, assemble themselves. Yet the Weasleys are poor not just by wizard standards, but by ours: they lack things like new clothes and textbooks that should be easily obtainable with a few magic words. Why?
An interesting touch on the subject. It seems true that in the Potterverse, magic is free, something that never works very well for story telling. C.S. Friedman just published _Feast of Souls_, the first book in a trilogy based on the opposite extreme; the source (and cost) of magic is life force. in _The Magic Goes Away_, Larry Niven deals with magic as a finite resource, to interesting effect. There are lots of other examples in SF&F literature.
So why don’t we care about this inconsistency in Rowling’s work?
posted at 1:22 pm on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 in Current Events, Links | Comments (2)
Did the google crawler just hack up a furball or something?
Bandwidth use on all of my hosted sites (except controlledflight.ca, for some reason) spiked in the last 24 hours. The culprit was always 66.249.72.114 (crawl-66-249-72-114.googlebot.com.), which seems to have fetched every page on all of the sites in the last 24 hours. This is much more aggressive than normal for google…
I’m not complaining; I like my google juice! Just wondering if anyone else has seen this…
Update: the flood has subsided. I note, with amusement, that the same crawler fetched this page at 12:27:27 today, a mere 3 hours after I wrote it :)
posted at 9:27 am on Thursday, July 19, 2007 in Site News | Comments Off on googlebot hiccup?
From Bruce Schneier’s security weblog:
bq. Here’s a “clip”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs3SfNANtig from an Australian TV programme called “The Chaser”. A Trojan Horse (full of appropriately attired soldiers) finds its way past security everywhere except the Turkish consulate.
bq. At least they remember their history.
“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs3SfNANtig”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs3SfNANtig
posted at 7:30 pm on Monday, July 16, 2007 in Current Events, Humour, Links | Comments Off on lessons of history
This sounds familiar:
“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_attention_fatigue”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_attention_fatigue
posted at 10:58 am on Monday, July 16, 2007 in Links, Personal | Comments (1)
Not worth blogging individually, here is a bunch of links that I wanted to share:
* “Binary marble adding machine”:http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/index.html – watch the video!
* “Chore Buster”:http://www.chorebuster.net/ – Web 2.0! enter people and chores, and it will automatically generate a ‘fair’ schedule and email it to you weekly!
* “flotsam”:http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/05/28/coolsc.oceansecrets/index.html – rubber duckies travel from the pacific to the atlantic via the arctic ocean! – see also “Beach Comber’s Alert”:http://www.beachcombers.org/
* “War on Clutter”:http://www.43folders.com/2007/07/02/war-on-clutter/
* “Teach Your Kids to Clean Their Own Rooms”:http://www.curbly.com/badbadivy/posts/1058-Teach-your-kids-to-clean-their-own-rooms
posted at 3:03 pm on Wednesday, July 04, 2007 in Links, Personal | Comments (2)
Star Trek meets “Steampunk”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk.
“http://slumbering.lungfish.com/?p=417”:http://slumbering.lungfish.com/?p=417
If I knew more about 19th century Science Fiction I could use this as a campaign seed… :-)
posted at 10:19 am on Saturday, June 09, 2007 in Gaming, Humour, Links | Comments Off on steam trek
wjr 
Helge Koch 
You don’t really need to do anything at all to attract scorn. After the Trans Siberian Orchestra performance at ACC, I sat watching the roadies take apart the stage for 5 minutes or so and was approached by security and told I should go home. I had been watching the security guard’s behaviour earlier in the evening. He was obviously a mental case. He probably thought the same of me, in his eyes there was nothing left to watch so my behaviour did not make logic sense to his limited mind.
He probably didn’t even hear the lead guitarist announce that band members would come out into the stands after the show.
He probably reported seeing a suspicious person to his management for all I know, and some bureaucrap is busy writing up a sign to cover the infraction right now. Something like “last person out at each performance will be shot.”…
I get lost of grief for not blindly following the “teach children stranger danger”. fear of things that should be feared, fine. Fear for it’s own sake? I call bull.
Had another one today! The cashier at Costco asked me for my membership card, so I stepped up and handed it over assuming the tendering of the previous transaction was drawing to its usual conclusion. Alas, the lady ahead of me was paying for her purchase in $10 bills. Augh, I thought, a waste of another 10 seconds of my life. But then… she glanced at me. So I said “Hello.”. She then continued, by my estimation, on the 60th $10 bill, and glanced at me again. Now I thought, uh-oh, she must be paranoid about something, but I saw a child wandering close by and wondered if she glanced at him. ..but then after $10 bill #70 she glanced at me again and said “I would like you to move away from me, I have a lot of money in my hands, and I do not know who you are.”
I was aghast, so I said, “What? I made $15,000 on IMAX on Friday, you think I care about a $10 bill in your purse?”… and stepped back.
She said, “I’M NOT INTERESTED! I WANT SOME SPACE!”.
To which I said, “This is the most ridiculous conversation I’ve had in a long while..” (that would be since the security guard asked me to leave the ACC after the show last week).
After the 80th $10 bill found its way out of her purse and she received her bill and was off to pick up her ever so valuable merchandise at the counter, I said to her, “Buy IMAX…”, to which she turned and glared, and then said nothing.
Anyway, wish me luck, I’m taking the heavy equipment to a Skate-Canada event today. Nikon D200 with IS/ED 400 f/5.6 glass. Come bail me out after the show, I’ll give you a free stock tip.
Here, I’ll pay in advance: Stay the hell away from CIBC shares.
Yep, I was harassed. I actually decided to put the 85mm f/1.4 lens on, its better for such a venue. The first security lady said I could not bring a camera like that in, but I thought I’d ask the lady right behind her who was selling tickets and sitting under a sign with 30 point letters that said that cameras with lenses “200mm and less” *were* permitted. After some discussion it turned out that she did in fact know she was sitting under the sign. Once this fact was discovered, some unwritten rules were mentioned about how I could only take pictures of my skater. I simply said “Okay”, and it appeared to be the correct answer. Unfortunately, I was not told which one was my skater, so I had to take pictures of all of them so I did not miss her. Now I’m stuck sorting out hundreds of pictures.
My elder daughter asked me on the way to our seats, “Daddy, why did the first lady say the camera was not allowed, the second one did not know that 85 was less than 200 (duhhh) and the sign on the wall doesn’t say anything about which skaters you can take pictures of?”.
…oh well.
I’m pretty sure that Parks & Rec has no legal basis for the photography claim, and I’ve been planning for a while now to give them a call and find out what’s going on….
Hm, some (persons) apparently unloaded 1000 April put options on CIBC today for about a $300,000 profit on CIBC’s wonderous 5% drop this morning. Thus expireth my stock tips. You are now on your own. Keep the $300,000, maybe we’ll sue the camera-nazis next time.