Tag Archives: rant

TIME magizine chose Mark Zuckerberg as person of the year, despite a reader poll that put Zukerberg in 10th place, and Julian Assange in first, by a large margin. More importantly, Assange has done something in 2010, while Zukerberg is just riding out the natural life-cycle of a not particularly novel technological fad. In a few years, the social networking totem pole will iterate again, and we’ll be making friendster jokes about myspace, myspace jokes about facebook, and facebook jokes about the next social network service to gain precedence, even though they all provide roughly the same functionality as a web page and XMPP. I can only hope the next iteration will be open, decentralized, user controlled, and generally managed in a less repulsive manner, so I don’t find it too objectionable to participate in again.

In contrast, Assange has overseen (and taken the heat for) the release of documentation exposing large scale governmental misbehavior and deceit regarding the wars the US initiated in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now a large swatch of our International Diplomacy. The information itself isn’t even the important factor; the game changer is the way in which it propagated. The business of secrecy is going to be permanently changed by the large scale demonstration of the reality that a single point source of information can now be amplified and propagated indefinitely, outside the control of any entity. This means it no longer requires a conspiracy to reveal secrets;one individual with access to a secret making the decision to release it is adequate. This is a paradigm shift for secrecy, with ramifications years down the line as large organizations with secrets they wish to defend are forced to make a move toward least privlige systems (in a broader sense, also note from the article “In practice, true least privilege is neither definable nor possible to enforce.”), and work with the knowledge that any single individual with access to a secret can make it public, a threat which can not reasonably be secured against.

Also note that this position doesn’t make a value judgement on WikiLeaks’ actions; it isn’t necessary for their significance. This also leaves aside arguments about Assange and Zukerberg as individuals – they both seem to be rather horrible people personally, and being a decent person is in no way necessary to change the world.

I understand that it would be politically charged to select Assange, particularly with polls indicating that most Americans have chosen a “Head in the sand” approach to hearing about the shitty behavior of our government, but there were eight more interesting choices on the top 10 reader voted, and about 6.8 billion others.

This is pretty much a re-blog, which I don’t usually like doing, but the story is so mind-bendingly stupid it bears hating on in as many venues as possible.

Story Here. Reblogging from boingboing.

The short version is, Trijicon, who make (apparently very nice) gun optics, took it upon themselves to emboss references to bible verses into the ends of the serial numbers of the ones they are selling to the US military (as part of very large contracts). That are going into combat in the middle east. In that conflict where the most important thing we can do is win the PR war with a skeptical populace. A linchpin of doing so is demonstrating that there is no religious motivation, to avoid invoking centuries of violence and hatred, and legitimizing the arguments of the other side that we are invading crusaders (although even dumber presidents have trouble keeping that straight).

The most obnoxious part is that, rather than playing it down and claiming the sequences are just part of the identifier (optics nomenclature is easily confusing enough to make something convincing up), Trijicon went ahead and confirmed that they had intentionally added bible verses, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that it might be a Bad Thing. At least they were clever enough to to choose verses having to do with light.

Any attempt to play down the degree to which this is stupid should be met with consideration of the media/public shitstorm that would occur if someone were found attacking Americans with a weapon engraved with quranic references. I’ve always read that humans were supposed to develop a theory of mind that supports this kind of reasoning around 4 years of age, but sometimes I wonder.

With stupid behavior like the above, supplanted by things like groups thinking it is a good idea to send audio bibles as aid to Haiti, it’s no wonder there is such suspicion of (Christian) religious motivation in US foreign policy. When reading the audio bibles article, I couldn’t help but picture those propaganda-spewing eyebots from Fallout 3, but the pictures on the organization’s website just show a cheap self-powered boombox with a flash card. At least they have useful parts in them, solar panels and hand-crank generators to keep personal communication devices powered are pretty high on the list of things I would want in a large scale disaster, and since Haiti has been in one sort of disaster or another pretty much continuously since the late 1400s when the first Europeans showed up, I imagine there are plenty of folks around who know how to improvise.

There was another half-baked terrorist plot over the holidays.
To summarize, some moron went for a kooky religion, got on a US-bound plane in Amsterdam with a not-even-in-theory level nonfunctional bomb, tried to set it off shortly before landing, and failed miserably when it just caught fire and he was disabled by the passengers and crew. This in turn managed to cause panic and increase the expense and indignity in air travel in and out of the US for the foreseeable future. That is pretty damn successful, and the suicide bomber didn’t even have to die to get the job done.

Ordinarily I would say using the same foiled plot (put a suspicious guy on a plane, with a bomb that isn’t likely to work, and have him get caught) over and over is a bad plan… but because of the absolutely retarded responses, it continues to be incredibly effective. Over and over, the bomb gets on the plane, because existing measures that should catch it aren’t applied effectively, and over and over, it makes life harder for everyone else… because the new security measures that get put in place after each one don’t make any gods damn sense.

It was apparently a PETN bomb, again. PETN is one of those explosives that is fairly hard to make correctly, and just burns if not properly detonated… and a proper detonator would most likely be caught by “pre-9/11” security measures.

And on that thought, one of my least favorite things right now is the perception that 9/11 is the start of modern terrorism in the minds of the public. It wasn’t. It was when terrorism started working. There were plenty of previous plots just like the current bunch, some even by the same people. But those plots weren’t terribly effective, because the aggrieved party dusted off, gave the terrorists the finger, and quietly implemented some reasonable measures to keep it from happening again, instead of knee-jerking so hard they’re going to need a ladder and crowbar to get Gale Rossides’ patella out of the ceiling.

This round of measures is rumored to include “Passengers not allowed out of seats for last 45|60|?? Minutes of flight”(the “damp, smelly, screaming chidren” rule), “Nothing in passengers laps during last hour of flight” (Can you imagine flying without a book/handheld game/etc.), and additional restrictions on electronics (people already ignore the “turn off your mp3 player during takeoff and landing routine to avoid hearing the goings on in the plane. This will go well.). It also sounds like there will be some additional ineffective, time consuming indignities during check-in and boarding, to make sure the airline industry is completely eviscerated.

Another front I know is about to come up when people object is that the TSA “Can’t talk about their successes for security reasons” (in various wordings). The options here are bad and worse: Either they are lying, and have been totally useless outside of a few high profile incidents, or they are doing something completely outside the carefully transparent judicial system with the people they catch, which implies they’ve totally given up on the US constitution. I prefer to imagine they’re just inept and trying to hide it, because the idea of these morons shipping people to secret prisons is terrifying. For additional fun, it looks like they’re using this argument for the rules themselves too, in a nice literal catch-22 situation.

Bruce Schnier, my usual favorite security guy, has his reaction here replete with a several-year-old quote describing this attack as likely, and my favorite quote on aircraft security “Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.”