Why You Shouldn’t Trust the Government to Collect Information About You

Posted on 2014-03-04 by jcs

This is why you shouldn’t trust the government to build databases about their citizens. At the link, Charlie Stross talks about the growing scandal in the UK concerning the NHS medical records of every citizen in the United Kingdom.

Read Charlie’s post and see if you’d be comfortable with your government having this sort of information on you. Oh, wait. If you’re a UK citizen (and soon, a US citizen) they already do. The same, I’m sure, is true of most other developed nations. Remember, the scandal isn’t that there aren’t laws and regulations forbidding this sort of thing; there are. The scandal is they didn’t do a thing to stop it.

The NSA assures us that the private information they collect about us (wherever “us” happens to live) is closely guarded and safe. Except when it isn’t. What does it take to get people angry about this?

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Outage

Posted on 2014-03-03 by jcs

And, we’re back. Sorry for the outage. Apparently my hosting provider had a series of drive failures that overwhelmed their RAID system. One of the servers affected runs the database for Irreal. My provider is very proactive and has been working to resolve the problem since 4am on Sunday. If you’re looking for an inexpensive and reliable (current problems notwithstanding) hosting provider that can also handle your domain registration, be sure to give IXWebhosting a look.

Barring any further problems, Irreal should be back to business as normal.

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SBCL 1.1.16 Released

Posted on 2014-03-03 by jcs

The latest monthly release of Steel Bank Common Lisp is out. As usual, I had no problems building and installing the new release. You can download binaries or source at the usual place.

After last month’s major enhancement of the register allocator, this release was mostly bug fixes. You can see the exact changes in the NEWS file. One interesting thing about this release is that at least part of the process was performed in the air. Christophe Rhodes talks about that in this post about the release.

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A Sunday Treat

Posted on 2014-03-02 by jcs

This really tickled me:

Oddly, I was all set to click but I couldn’t find a link.

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Keys to the Internet

Posted on 2014-03-01 by jcs

The Guardian has an interesting story on the Seven People Who Hold the Keys to the Internet. Actually, there are 21 people but only 14 hold keys, the other seven hold code that can be used to recreate the key generation machine.

What’s going on here, really? The key in question is the private key to the DNS system that authenticates the database. If you’re like me, you think, “Well, what’s so difficult? You generate a random key pair and publish the public key while signing the database with the private key.” As usual, the problem is mostly political. How can we trust person X or country Y not to mess with DNS and route connections somewhere other than where the user intended. In view of Snowden’s revelations, these concerns seem less tin-foil-hat than they would have a year ago.

To make everyone feel more comfortable, the seven keyholders have access to smartcards that are used to generate a new master key every 3 months. The key holders come from multiple countries representing a cross section of the world. Read the article to see how complicated the protocol is to ensure that no one can corrupt the process.

I’ve spent most of my professional life dealing with computer communications and the Internet but I’ve never heard of this before. If you’re interested in how the Internet actually works or if you’re a James Bond fan, give this article a read. You won’t be disappointed. Also be sure the watch the video.

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Git Stash

Posted on 2014-02-28 by jcs

Over at softwarecave there’s a nice post on using git stash. In git, the stash is basically a stack on which you can push your current changes while you so something else. Maybe you want to change branches without committing your changes or perhaps you need to get rid of your current changes and work on something else in the current branch.

The post covers how to manipulate the stash. It turns out that it’s remarkably flexible. If you’re an Emacs/Magit user, the stash is usable from the magit-status buffer. If you’re a git user, and especially if you’re a Magit user, you should check this post out. It will make your life and work flow easier.

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Variable Pitch Mode

Posted on 2014-02-27 by jcs

Today I ran across a tweet that recommends the use of variable-pitch-mode when writing prose instead of code:

That mode gives you proportional fonts in the buffer, which, the tweet claims, is a big help when writing plain text.

It certainly looks nicer but I’m not sure that it helps all that much. The nice thing, though, is that it’s merely a display option and you can switch back and forth at will. Although the lines look a bit shorter because of the proportional fonts, Emacs is maintaining the proper fill column as you can see by switching back to normal display.

I vaguely remember using this in Aquamacs when I first started with Emacs because Aquamacs enabled it by default on text files. As I recall, I found it a bit distracting even then. The problem, for me, is that I don’t find the proportional font any easier to read and it’s not really WYSIWYG so there doesn’t seem to be a point. Of course, others disagree and find it helpful. Being Emacs, you can have it your way and even try it out at no cost. If you don’t like it, just turn it off and your buffer goes back to displaying normally. If you do like it, you can set a hook function to turn it on for text or Org or whatever. If you want more control, you can use the mode line.

If you haven’t seen this before, just call variable-pitch-mode to see what it looks like. Calling variable-pitch-mode again will turn it off.

Afterthought:

On the other hand, if you do turn on variable-pitch-mode, maybe the government won’t think you’re a cybercriminal like Manning, Snowden, and Assange.

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Open Space Offices (Again)

Posted on 2014-02-26 by jcs

Nathan, over at thoughts from the red planet, blogs about The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies. I’ve long been puzzled about this myself and have written about it before, most recently in my The Insanity of Open Space Offices post.

I like Nathan’s post because he crunches the numbers to show that it doesn’t make economic sense. That’s significant because the only honest excuse for having an open space office is that it’s cheaper. Except that it’s not. Not when you factor in loss of productivity. It turns out that it’s not even close. Nathan originally estimated office space at $36/ft2/month and made a strong case against open space offices. It turns out, though, that it’s actually $36/ft2/year, which makes his case stronger by a factor of 12.

One can argue about Nathan’s estimated loss of productivity but not, I think, convincingly. Those of us who actually do development know the truth of this cartoon about the cost of interrupting a programmer. If you’re running a development shop and care about getting things done, be sure to read Nathan’s post. If you’re a developer suffering under an open plan office regime, you should read it too. Perhaps it will give you some ammunition.

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1000

Posted on 2014-02-25 by jcs

Today is a milestone of sorts. This is the one thousandth post at (this inception of) Irreal. As I wrote after publishing a post everyday for a year, it’s one of those things that doesn’t seem like much until you try to do it. I remember reading blogs that are updated several times a day and that have thousands of posts in the archive and didn’t think much of it. I wrote my first post for Irreal in April 2011 so it’s taken me almost 3 years to get here.

I write Irreal mostly to amuse myself and, as Daniel Boorstin famously said, “to learn what I think1”. Still, I appreciate my readers and want to make Irreal valuable for you too so if there are some Irreal-like topics you’d like me to explore, use the comments to let me know.

Footnotes:

1

The actual quote is, “I write to learn what I think. After all, the bars aren’t open that early.”

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Breaking Up the NSA

Posted on 2014-02-24 by jcs

Bruce Schneier has a provocative article on CNN Opinion about breaking up the NSA. He begins by pointing out that the NSA has three types of surveillance programs:

  1. Targeted Surveillance as exemplified by the actions of the Targeted Access Operations (TCO) group.
  2. Bulk surveillance in which they vacuum up as much information as possible. The poster child of these operations is the bulk phone metadata collection.
  3. Sabotaging of security by working to install vulnerabilities into crypto primitives and equipment. The reported insertion of a backdoor into the NIST certified Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator is the most notorious example of this type of program.

Schneier proposes breaking up these three functions into different organizations. Under his plan, the first program would be transferred to the U.S. Cyber Command, which would be separated from the NSA. The second, surveillance of Americans, would be moved to the FBI, which has traditionally performed this task and is subject to legal safeguards that the NSA routinely avoids or ignores. Finally, the NSA would no longer work to subvert security but would, instead, work to increase the security of our crypto and IT infrastructure, its traditional function before 911.

Schneier understands that none of this is apt to happen anytime soon but that something along these lines needs to be done to increase our security and reinstate trust in the NSA. It’s an interesting post and well worth a couple minutes of your time.

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