GPG/PGP Best Practices

Posted on 2013-11-20 by jcs

The Privacy and Authenticity Outreach Workgroup of we.riseup.net have published an excellent list of OpenPGP Best Practices. Most Irreal readers, I trust, have already installed and configured GPG/PGP even if most of their usual correspondents haven’t.

I’ve written before that installing and setting up a default configuration of GPG is not, as often claimed by the press, difficult and that even your Mom could do it. What these best practices do is tell you what you should do after installation to make sure you’re getting as much security as possible. I learned a couple of things I didn’t know so it’s a worthwhile read even if you’re an experienced GPG/PGP user.

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The Iron Law of Data Collection Confirmed

Posted on 2013-11-19 by jcs

Just in case you needed more proof of the iron law of data collection, consider this McClatchyDC story about how almost 5000 people had their personal information swept up and shared with nearly 30 federal agencies because they ordered a book.

The book was about how to beat lie detectors and the government was not amused. Apparently they were a little confused about the First Amendment and worried that maybe some of their employees had used the information to beat their employment polygraph tests. Let’s put aside, for the moment, that the diversion techniques—let alone polygraphs themselves—have yet to be proven effective or reliable.

Many of the 4,904 people on the list had nothing to do with the Federal Government so you would think their names would have been deleted and their personal information expunged. Just kidding. Of course you wouldn’t think that and, of course, their information wasn’t deleted. Instead, the government has decided to hold onto it “just in case.” To understand how illegal this probably is, consider the rationale for the Department of Defense’s retention of the data: the DOD Inspector General says that they can retain information on non-DOD personnel “when their activities have directly threatened the functions, property or personnel of the Department of Defense.” When they have to stretch the facts this far, you know you’ve caught them with their hands in the cookie jar—remember, we’re talking about purchasing a perfectly legal book.

There’s little doubt that this data will be further abused and it’s entirely likely that it will find new uses, just as the iron law demands.

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What Does It Take?

Posted on 2013-11-18 by jcs

Are you angry yet?

How about now?1

Footnotes:

1

To be fair, there’s some controversy associated with this claim and it doesn’t even seem possible—given that Linux is open source—until you remember the greatest hack of all time.

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On Open Space Offices and Idiots

Posted on 2013-11-17 by jcs

A few days ago, Michael Flowersky wrote a blog post that asked the question, What’s the difference between an advocate of open space office and an Idiot? It was an amusing read but I wasn’t going to comment on it until I saw that it kept popping up in my feed. I wasn’t going to comment because it’s hard to see where the controversy lies.

It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that Flowersky’s answer is “none.” Really, what else could it be? There’s really only one positive thing you can say for open space offices: they’re cheaper. Any other justification you hear is nonsense. “Oh, but it will improve communication and help team building.” Translation: “They’re cheaper.” You can be sure that anyone spouting the improved communication silliness has never had to work in one.

Many small startups have this type of office, of course, but that’s because they’re, you know, cheaper and these companies are barely Ramen profitable. Once they have sufficient income and, more importantly, once their team grows beyond the founders and one or two hires they pretty much have to do something different. That may be a conventional office arrangement or remote working or something similar. As Flowersky says, you can’t get much creative work done in an environment that guarantees continual interruptions and noise.

The ideal office arrangement for our type of work is, of course, private offices with a door. They’re definitely not cheaper. That’s especially true if the company is in, say, San Francisco with hideously large office rents. Perhaps the best solution is to maintain, if you need it, a small office for people to come to and for the occasional in-person staff meeting and otherwise let people work when and where they are most comfortable.

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Delay Update

Posted on 2013-11-16 by jcs

Just a quick note to bring you up to date on my efforts to fix the slow page loading that’s been plaguing Irreal lately. As I mentioned in my last update, the problem appears to be page generation not server response. Watching the transfer with tcpdump, I see that the server response and actual transfer of data is very snappy. It’s the time between the GET and when the transfer starts that the delay happens.

To deal with this I installed the W3 Total Cache but visitors were still seeing the delay. I tuned the cache a bit and now it seems to be working pretty well for me. Right after I push a new post, I’ve been loading the home page to get it into the cache but it occurs to me that many of you are coming to Irreal through RSS or Planet Emacsen and going directly to a single page. Therefore, I will also load each new page alone to get it into the cache as well.

If you are still consistently seeing a delay of over 20 seconds for the home or current page please let me know and I’ll try something else. Thanks for your patience and for those of you who have taken the time to let me know about the site performance that you are seeing.

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List Character Sets

Posted on 2013-11-15 by jcs

I picked up a useful Emacs command from Xah Lee’s Emacs Blog. It’s from a comment by Stef on Lee’s Emacs & Unicode Tips page. It’s the list-character-sets command. When you call it, you get a list of all the character sets known to Emacs. If you select one of the sets you get a list of those characters and their hex code. Just the thing when you want to insert a little used character and can’t remember its codepoint.

It can only display one and two dimensional character sets (see the help page for more information on that) but as Stef points out unicode-bmp and unicode-sip display without problems even if unicode doesn’t. As Stef also points out, it’s very handy to figure out the font capabilities of your Emacs installation.

The never-ending Emacs adventure: there’s always something new to learn.

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Cursive Coda

Posted on 2013-11-14 by jcs

I’ve written quite a few posts about the horror that is cursive handwriting. The gist of those posts were that

  1. I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I could
  2. Cursive handwriting is dying out

Those posts stand up pretty well, I think, and now I have some company. Sacha Chua has a nice post that echos some of the same themes I wrote about in my posts. Like me, her cursive is, um, not the best and being a pragmatic woman she simply stopped using it. When she writes, as she does a lot in her sketchnotes for instance, she prints.

What’s noteworthy is that people think her handwriting is excellent. I’ve seen the same thing: people think I have excellent penmanship but that’s because I print. If they saw my cursive, they’d run screaming from the room. In a great comment to one of my posts, Kate Gladstone notes that the fastest and most legible handwriters avoid cursive. Instead, they use what she describes as “semi-cursive” where only some letters are joined and the printed letter forms are used.

Gladstone runs a handwriting improvement service and has a lot of useful and interesting things to say about handwriting. As I’ve mentioned in my posts, the question of cursive or not invokes vehement and hostile reactions on both sides. Gladstone, unlike most people commenting on the controversy, has documentable facts on her side.

Here in the U.S., school systems are abandoning cursive in increasing numbers. I don’t know what the situation is in the Philippines where Chua learned to write but I’d be surprised if the situation is much different.

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Update on Slow Loading of Irreal

Posted on 2013-11-13 by jcs

A quick update on the Irreal loading problems. I ran a tcpdump on a typical page load of Irreal and discovered the following:

  • The initial three-way handshake with the server completes almost immediately.
  • Immediately afterwards the GET from the browser is received and the server ACKs the request.
  • Nothing happens for about 22 seconds after which the Irreal home page starts to download. The download completes within 340 ms.

Phil wrote to say that he was seeing the same thing so I’m pretty confident that the problem is in generating the content for the home page. The same thing appears to happen anytime dynamic output is generated. I don’t understand why this suddenly started happening. Some people, such as Xah Lee, say that this has been happening for a while but it’s only recently that I’ve been seeing it. The only recent change is an automatic update to the WordPress software.

In any event, my next step was to install the W3 Total Cache plugin. I’m hoping this will make things better. If you are still seeing a 20 second or more delay on downloading the home page please let me know in the comments.

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Ten Steps You Can Take to Protect Yourself from Surveillance

Posted on 2013-11-12 by jcs

The EFF has a list of ten steps you can take to protect yourself from surveillance. There’s nothing there that will come as news to the always informed Irreal reader but it’s a nice summary and worth passing on to some of your less informed friends and family.

Most of the steps are easy and something that everyone should be doing. To me, the hardest part is encrypting all your communications. The problem there is your interlocutors. It’s easy for us geeks to use GPG/PGP and some sort of secure chat but when we want to talk to Aunt Millie (or, really, most of our friends) we’re out of luck because all of that crypto stuff is too hard for them. The crucial need is for someone to figure out a way to get everyone using GPG. It’s a hard problem but I’m sure that riches and glory await the person who solves it. This is why I find the Dark Mail Alliance that I wrote about a couple of days ago such a hopeful development. They may or may not succeed but at least the problem is being worked on.

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Gnus Video Part 3

Posted on 2013-11-11 by jcs

Noufal Ibrahim over at EmacsMovies.org has his latest video up. It’s the third on his series about Gnus. In this episode, Ibrahim discusses the scoring and sorting of articles. Like almost everything in Gnus it’s extraordinarily configurable and therefore complex. As in the previous two episodes in the series, the intent is not to serve as a tutorial as much as to give us a flavor of what’s available and how it works.

The video is about 24 minutes long so you’ll need to block out some time. If you’ve been wondering what the excitement—and sometimes fear and loathing—over Gnus is about this series is definitely worth watching.

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