Our new little kitten, Ysabel crashed hard-core and slept for six hours! When she woke up she was famished. I made a plate of food for her and she polished it off. Then she ran around the room like a crazy kitten and started to meow. Her incision looks perfect still, and the store on her tongue is progressively getting better and better. I think she has integrated in the flow of the house, next it’s to meet Bailey and Keeley. Step by step.
Looks like there are absolutely zero parasites so we can drop quarantine! Still getting used to the house, then migrate to wet food, then introductions. The loonies are on the path!
The last time I was logged into Facebook was June 9th at 11:45pm. I was scrolling along the wall feed and I distinctly felt ill that I was on Facebook. It wasn’t making me happy, it wasn’t rewarding, it was a chore. More than that, it was an unpleasant chore, and at the time it felt repulsive. The kind of repulsion that makes your stomach go sour, hurk a little and the metallic acid tang at the back of your throat, that sort of raw physical displeasure. I closed the tab, and wrote a little in my journal.
It’s been 200 hours and a few since that moment. I haven’t logged on once since. I don’t feel like I am missing anything, except when I have something to cheer or gripe about. There are a few things that I could have posted on Facebook, and thanks to Yelp, some of that has made its way on to Facebook, but that was automation doing the sharing, not me.
I made a break with Facebook. I’m not going to close anything or remove anything, that would require more exposure to their platform. I simply won’t be there. I’ve got this blog, where I can share things, and of course my journal. Almost everything ends up in the journal anyways, the important things in the blog, and I will leave Facebook and Twitter to the machines, let them suffer it. The universal answer to “Did you see on…?” will default to no. I didn’t see it. I don’t really want to see it, but you’ll show it to me anyways. There may never be freedom, true freedom from Facebook, because it leaks in around the edges and is in the news a lot, so it will become something like a persistent fungal infection. Nothing that actually hurts me, but it makes my toenails ugly. Just leave the socks on.
Facebook, and Google both have contributed to the death of smalltalk. What’s the point of saying anything when nobody believes you and they tell you that you are wrong, up until they read it on the platform and then you hear in a small voice, “Oh, yeah… there it is.” So, whatever. It’s best to just leave everything to the platform, it has in so many ways replaced so much for us. The matter of record, truth, facts, and even basic conversation. The only thing left is to pretend to be a dullard. You don’t know anything, you have nothing to say, and everything is a mystery novelty.
The platform is very interesting. We created something we can’t control, it’s bad for us, but we don’t really care. We’re throwing flowers at Frankenstein’s Monster and celebrating it with daily parades, despite the fact that it rampages and burns down random buildings and causes such conflict and suffering. Hooray for the Monster.
I won’t see it on Facebook. Save your bus fare. Keep whatever it is to yourself. Whats the point of talking about it anyways? All the possible conversations are there, up on that platform, go there, knock yourself out. The Monster loves daisies.
Tis the season for us to unpack all the holiday crazy that comes with the post-Halloween holiday adventure. Thanksgiving and Christmas. Cooking, planning, setting up, and a lot of decking of the halls!
So we start with Thanksgiving. Weeks ago we took advantage of the 50% discount deal at our local supermarket and made room for the frozen Turkey in our basement fridge. Then we slowly accumulated all the other ingredients to our “feeding an army for two people” style of Thanksgiving. On that Monday, November 23rd. I caught a little video from a television and network cooking personality, Mr. Alton Brown. He recommended that people could defrost and brine a turkey at the same time. So I had a frozen Turkey in my freezer and I had never brined a Turkey before and didn’t know how it would turn out. Following Mr. Browns advice, I hauled out the twenty-pound bird and found that my biggest stock pot fit it like a glove. The directions couldn’t have been more direct and simple. Strip the Turkey of it’s webbing and plastic wrap, then put a cup of Kosher Salt in the vessel along with 2L of hot tap water in the vessel and stir until the salt is dissolved. Then add 4L more cold water to the vessel and then put the turkey in. I put it so that the main cavity was pointed up at me, so as I added more water (water to fill all the way around the turkey) it wasn’t going into the cavity, so I poured into the cavity until the entire bird was submerged. Then I wrapped the top in plastic wrap and put it in the basement, behind locked doors. No refrigeration required! As the turkey defrosted itself, it also brined itself. When I temped out the bird two days later it was at about 45 degrees and then I stowed it in the fridge until we were ready to cook it. When I was set, I poured the water off and then rinsed it with fresh cold tap water, all the cavities and everything. Then I put it in the roasting pan.
The oven was set at 350 degrees, however, it was running hot for about twenty minutes, so the first shot was at about 400 degrees. I knew something wasn’t right because the turkey was making a lot of snap, crackle, and pop noises. When I checked the temperature I noticed the temperature disparity and corrected the dial, which brought the oven back into calibration.
There were two competing schools of thought during the cooking process. The first one was that I had accidentally turned our turkey into Lot’s Turkey, a solid pillar of salt. The other school was “it defrosted and it didn’t amount to crap.” and that the salt was pretty much just a silly affectation. I held out hope, mostly because of the sage words of Mr. Brown, whom I trust when it comes to food preparation and cooking.
We were a little taken aback when the temperature probe indicated that every part of the turkey had reached about 170 degrees, it was well and truly done. I asked, “How much juice is in the pan?” and the answer was “Not very much, if any. Only what it was basted with.” We had made enough of our own with the basting juices made with turkey broth concentrate and sauteeing the neck. I let the turkey settle for about ten minutes and then carved into it.
The meat was so moist and juicy that it fell apart as I carved into it. The entire dinner was spent marvelling at just how amazing it all was and how we’ll never do a turkey any other way than this. So simple, a saltwater bath for three days changes so much about a turkey! And just like Mr. Brown promised, the brine really shines for leftovers. The turkey is usually tough and dry as cardboard by the time its leftovers, but with the brined turkey it is nearly as amazing each time we take little out of the fridge for dinner it’s still amazing!
I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t brine their turkey. We’ll brine ours from now on, fresh and leftovers are just the tip of how amazing this is. The turkey probably was fully thawed in a little over a day! The three days just added to the brine’s power to make the bird juicy and amazingly flavorful.
Just for the record, the turkey wasn’t related to Lot at all, it wasn’t salty. It was amazing.
I’ve found myself taking little diversions into geek town. There’s always been this pervasive suspicion that privacy is dead, but since Edward Snowden came out and said, “Yes, everything you feared is real and it’s much worse than you know and far worse than you could ever imagine.” That statement only added fuel to the fire for me.
How did I spend my spare time? Exploring digital security measures. After a while I started to sense that I was very much on my own, the technology of privacy is a desert. I accepted that I would never likely be able to put all of this into actual practice, so it became a kind of exploration into digital privacy for the geek thrill of finding something new and watching it work. Kind of like getting a complex rube-goldberg machine and using it just to watch it clink and clank away.
Diving into privacy has had some remarkable side-effects. It is very easy to quickly slide into paranoia. The idea that everyone is out for what you know and what you are talking about, measuring you and evaluating the things you communicate and the data you create and store. Honestly speaking, that’s a mirage — it only seems that way because you have new toys to make it all super secure, so in a way, creating super secure methods invites the notion that Eve is out to get you. Who is Eve? In crypto circles whenever people want to discuss how a crypto system works, they need names to give people to humanize the interaction and make it more relevant for people. Alice is always the initiator of the secret communications, Bob is always her recipient or contact, and Eve (which I have always mused stands for “Eavesdropper” sits in between Alice and Bob wanting their secrets and breaking through their veil of privacy.
I started with PKI, Public Key Infrastructure. It’s a fully fleshed out system which uses a pair of keys to secure anything digital, from files, to text, to even entire telephone conversations. This system has two parts, a Public Key and a Private Key. When you create your key, and key generation is actually laughably trivial, you keep your Private Key held close to your bosom and you send your Public Key to everyone you know who is using PKI. They tried to address this by creating things called Keyservers. These are systems that are run by various places that you can post your Public Key to and they’ll keep it in their database. You and anyone else can use these services to look up others and get their Public Keys. These Public Keys have fingerprints, so you can verify that the keys aren’t mangled, damaged, or shanghai’ed by some nefarious other party (Eve). So, Alice would seek out Bob’s Public Key and cast her message using the key to encrypt it. Once that’s done, the data is complete gobbledegook to everything in the Universe except Bob’s Private Key. Bob gets the message, because he has his Private Key, he can decode the message and benefit from it’s contents. Eve could of course get her hands on the secure message herself by wiretap or eavesdropping, but the message will only unlock to a very specific Private Key, so without it, Eve just has so much noise. Alas, this system only works when everyone is using the infrastructure. Everyone needs to have a keypair, otherwise there is no way to address your message, because there is an absolute lack of Public Keys to be had for anyone! And this is my headache. Even if I wanted to use PKI, it’s worthless because nobody I want to communicate with has a Public Key. This PKI, this one thing, is currently one of a handful of things that Eve cannot actually break into. And when I say Eve, I really mean the nebulous fog of the Men In Black, so the FBI, the NSA, GCHQ, those types. They are always in black suits and black sunglasses and we hope they are nice and mean us no harm, ahem, sure.
If PKI won’t work, which boggles my mind since it costs nothing at all to actually use any part of it, the next step is exploring conventional cryptography. There are algorithms that go by codenames that everyone can use. There are two different realms for these sorts of tools. There are the trade names of the tools like Rigndael, Serpent, Twofish, Blowfish, Threefish, and so on. These are the mechanical parts that make conventional cryptography possible. Alice and Bob have a secret only they know, a nice long password. They can use these tools to make their sensitive data useless for anyone who doesn’t have their password. It’s somewhat like PKI, only that both Alice and Bob need to share that secret ahead of time for any of this to work. These tools are all submitted to the government for their consideration and when a tool is submitted and chosen, like Rigndael it loses it’s authors name and picks up a big impressive name from the government, in this case AES. Advanced Encryption Standard. As a curious sidelight, Serpent was a competitor for AES with Rigndael, one won, the other did not. All of these tools have a number associated with them, these are the key length measurements and in a general way can be equated with the strength of the encryption. AES-128 is “weaker” than AES-256. These numbers indicate the number of bits used to form the secret key used in the encryption. The longer the key, the harder it is to attack the encrypted message with brute force attacking it. Having the message is easy, guessing every possible key combination when there are 256 bits in play? That’s a huge keyspace! A keyspace is an imaginary construct that tries to tie physical size to the sheer number of combinations that a key can have. A key with one bit has only two possible values, either zero or one, so it’s keyspace is 2^1, or two. If it isn’t zero, it’s one. The keyspace for AES-256? It’s 2^256, or 1 with 77 zeroes after it. That’s an insanely huge keyspace, so the idea of being able to brute force it is laughably meaningless. It’s worthless to try. The nice thing about these tools is they can be used solitarily. Yes, you could use them to share secrets with other people, but a more useful approach is to use these tools to keep your data secure while it’s stored somewhere. If you don’t have that somewhere always under your conscious control, you really need these tools to make sure it’s secure from Eve and her minions. This starts an arms race of a sort. The tools themselves compete along with their key lengths, and cryptologists, fueled by paranoia perhaps are always trying to come up with clever ways to break these tools. To prove the strength of your tools, you push them until they break, then you know what kind of pressure they can withstand. Where we are now, AES-256 is considered secure, even against Eve, but that is eroding with time. Why? It comes down to that keyspace I mentioned earlier. There is another batch of tools called hashers, they convert something into something else and that conversion is one way only. You can hash a phrase “This is a secret” using a hash and it spits out a long strip of character data. These hashers can be used to turn your password into a key that the tools use to make your data secure. Currently we have much like the encryption tools, a series of named tools from their creators and the government’s renamed tools. What used to be MD5 became SHA-1, SHA standing for “Secure Hashing Algorithm”. The problem is that hashes can sometimes collide. If you put in “something A” and get a hash, the only way you can feel truly safe is if there is nothing else that works to create that result. A collision is when something else also works. When the hash of “something A” and “something B” are the same is a collision. When you have a hash that is a victim of collisions, the keyspace that hash can help you create is decimated. Much like a burning barn, whenever there is talk of a detected collision, people flee the old tools because they broke. Eve and her minions are onto us! This is why SHA-0 was abandoned for SHA-1, and that was abandoned for SHA-2, and now Keccak was chosen for SHA-3, that’s where we are now.
The paranoia doesn’t stop with Alice, Bob, and Eve. The paranoia snakes its way into the government. Ever since Edward Snowden shared his Pandoras Box with us all, the arbiter of national standards, NIST, is now just as suspect as Eve and her minions are. NIST is the organization that adopts tools into their formal-sounding government rebranded tool names. Rigndael became AES through NIST. Do we really trust AES? NIST has their hands in it, and we don’t trust NIST, so… thankfully when these competitions are held for the vaunted position of NIST winner, the other competitors don’t simply disappear. This led me from AES to Serpent, which was not selected by NIST. Honestly I think AES-256 is still trustworthy, but there is a part of me that prefers Serpent-256 more.
These algorithms are all eventually going to break. Every tool has it’s breaking point. Even Serpent-256 will eventually fail when some clever person figures out an attack that works against it. There is only one algorithm in the entire Universe that is perfect and cannot possibly fail, and that is the one time pad. Cryptology started there and oddly enough created its pinnacle first. The requirements for the one time pad are really steep and its incredibly inconvenient to use. The first thing is to create the pad, and you need a truly random key. If the key has some pattern or design to it, your key can be derived later and it’s worthless. Also, you need enough key-meat to cover your entire message – and if your message is big, you need a lot of key-meat. Plus with big keys there is another problem, how to share that sucker! The key for the one time pad is everything, so you have to do it person to person and you have to make sure that the key doesn’t leak out or get stolen. That’s the danger of the one time pad, the key is a thing not a calculation. What makes it immune from attack opens it up for theft. If you are certain that your key is safe and sound and truly random then the data you encode with the key will adopt the randomness from the underlying key and be impossible to attack using any method, cleverness or brute force. My explorations took me down the path of the one time pad, but it only works to secure data solitarily, sharing data? You need to have the key in multiple places and you can’t be in two places at the same time to make sure that the key is always secure, and you can’t stay awake and vigilant to ensure it either. So what is perfect is ironically total crap. In the end, you are back to the algorithms themselves and until someone can fix the problems with the one time pad, we’re always going to be in an arms race over the strength of our toolkits.
After all this data security geeking that I got myself wound up with I started to branch out and looked into places where cryptography intersects other parts of life. One of the most compelling and frustrating places where this is occurring is cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto. Who is Satoshi? Nobody knows. He may be real or he may be a group of people or he may be an alias. What he created though is amazing. Bitcoin is a currency, you can use it like money, store value, transmit it, and it appears to have all the conditions to be equivalent to fiat, which is a codeword for “cash”. The US Dollar is fiat, Bitcoin is not fiat. Bitcoin is not like the US Dollar, it isn’t based on faith but rather on mathematics. The US Dollar used to be linked to gold, called the gold standard. For every dollar that was in existence it was tied to so much physical gold that you could in theory exchange whenever you wanted to do so. In October 1976 the US Government abandoned the gold standard and US Dollars were then simply an instrument of faith that the US Government was “worth it”. It also helped that everyone here uses the dollar for everything, so it’s natural to use it and not think too hard about what value lies behind it – because the only thing behind it is a big group of old white men smiling and staring at you.
The way Bitcoin works is both involved and really quite elegant. There is a central record of all transactions that have occurred since the currency was invented and that public ledger is called the blockchain. It is a list of transactions in blocks and those blocks are in a way, chained together. As people use Bitcoin, they create new lines in the ledger and share that with every Bitcoin node. A node is the full Bitcoin client, it’s run by anyone and everyone, you can run one too. What keeps the blockchain authentic and honest lies in its ubiquity. It’s in copies worldwide on hundreds of thousands of machines. It transcends national borders, gender, race, creed, orientation, and economic class. Because there are so many perfect identical copies, any “wrong” copy, made that way by trying to be clever gets rejected. As people use Bitcoin, the transactions pile up in the blockchain, and it’s the job of Bitcoin miners to calculate hashes of all the transactions, a feat that is made hard-to-accomplish so as to create a valuable proof-of-work. The Bitcoin miners have to sweat it out to get their reward. When a miner succeeds in adding a new block of transactions to the blockchain they get a reward of 25 bitcoins. This is how the currency injects new “bitcoin matter” into the trading space. Miners secure and codify the blockchain, the blockchain rewards them with value and the miners then use that value in the marketplace. Over time this reward will be halved, so it’ll be 12.5 bitcoins, and then after a time this will be halved again until all the Bitcoins that will be created through mining are expressed into the marketplace by miners. Bitcoin will have this mining subsidy in place up until 2140, but by that time the protocol may change, so it might end then or it may never end. Another thread of value for miners is the transaction fee. When you issue a payment in terms of bitcoin you pay what you owe plus a customary transaction fee payment as well. This fee is 0.1 millibits or roughly 3¢ USD. This transaction fee is a static fee no matter how big the bitcoin transaction is.
Using bitcoin itself can be a little bit daunting, because the public address for bitcoin is a rather ugly long string of characters, such as this one, which is one of mine: 1KxM4U6Q5hYdfi9aSEeS7vj9cBZyrnADJJ. Typing this in manually is an epic pain in the ass, however there is another technology that already exists called QR codes. These graphical representations can represent these long strings of characters in a single easily printable symbol:
Bitcoin is formed much like PKI conducts business, there are Public Keys and Private Keys. The code above is a Public Key address for a Bitcoin account. This address can hold value, it can receive value and I can look up its value in the blockchain and see how much value is there expressed in Bitcoin. If I want to move the value somewhere else or use the value stored there for any purpose, I need that codes companion Private Key. When you have a software wallet, one of its core features is the creation of these accounts. They are free and easy, as they are calculated from the pseudorandom number generator in all contemporary computers. The core of a Bitcoin account is based singly on the Private Key. That is created first using pseudorandom sources and then the Public Key is calculated from the Private Key, it’s a hash, so you can’t reverse the Public Key and derive the Private Key. Modern smartphones are where Bitcoin really shines, iPhone or Android devices have apps that can manage these wallet codes, both Public Keys and Private Keys, so they operate just like a real wallet. You can get money using them and you can pay using them too. It’s in the QR code that makes the transactions simple. Your device takes a picture of the QR and decodes it and then acts on that data. You don’t need to (but you could) hammer out the Public Key address to make everything work the way you expect it to.
I spent a while exploring Bitcoin, and playing with various wallets. There are online wallets, there are device-based wallets, and there are paper wallets. The online sites are a crapshoot, some of them work okay, and others are bitcoin roach motels. I don’t like the hosted online wallets, they are just too fragile and sketchy for my tastes. On device wallets are really quite good, iOS more than Android only because iOS is a really well secured platform. You can also download the client for Bitcoin, the reference client and download a copy of the entire blockchain and use that to record bitcoin transactions if you like, but the blockchain was about 20GB the last I saw it, and that was too big for a machine like my Macbook Pro to store. Some wallets that are for computers use a variant of transaction confirmation called SPV, which depends on a reliable string of confirmations to ensure that the current shape of the blockchain is correct. The nice thing about SPV wallets, or thin wallets as they are called in comparison to the fat wallets of the reference client of Bitcoin is that the sheer size of the blockchain doesn’t need to be stored locally, it scales better with less storage space required. Even these computer-based wallets have their vulnerabilities and that’s why there are paper wallets. Paper wallets have their Private Key printed out as a QR code and hidden behind folded paper, with the Public Key publicly visible. These paper based wallets are really convenient for storing the value of bitcoins off of computer equipment. The value itself is still in the blockchain, in the ledger itself, but the security of the Private Key is now just on a slip of paper. If the paper is destroyed, the Private Key is lost forever and the value associated with it is lost. The value is still in the blockchain, but since nobody can get at it, the Public Keys can’t be converted into Private Keys, the value is completely inaccessible, and really lost forever. As I explored paper wallets I also got to thinking about one of the core assumptions of a lot of hosted and online wallet systems. They all depend on pseudorandom data to forge the Private Key. These generators create random-looking data but there is always a slim chance that someone could figure out the way the numbers were created and make the pseudorandom deterministic. If you could do that, you could simply replay how the pseudorandom generator did its work and replay out the supposedly random Private Key and then your security is down the toilet. All the value associated with that Private Key is vulnerable and your money could just evaporate, poof. Bitcoin Private Keys are forged from 32 bytes of random data. That key length is familiar, I’ve spoken about it before. 32 bytes with 8 bits per byte is a Private Key composed of 256 bits. That’s 2^256, a keyspace that (like we saw before) is 1 with 77 zeroes after it. So I started to think about ways to create truly random bytes to use in my own paper wallets, I wanted it to be pure from the get go. If I could accept an online answer, there are many sources including one of my favorites, which is Hotbits (which creates randomness from radioactive decay). What I wanted was a somewhat convenient way to create my own random bytes without having to use a computer at all. I discovered Hexidice online from a gaming store. These dice have sixteen values on them, 0-9 and A-F. One die is 1 nibble, or half a byte. That means that two dice are 1 byte, and 8 dice are 4 bytes. If I throw eight dice eight times that creates 64 nibbles or 32 bytes. I could technically do the mathematics myself to convert this pure random Private Key into a valid Public Key, but for that part I’m actually okay with using an offline copy of Bitcoinpaperwallet.com on my Macbook Pro. I just turn off the Wifi, start the offline copy of the site and type in my forged Private Key, the system then helps me calculate the Public Key and then make a very attractive paper-based wallet with fold lines and neat graphics and everything. When I want to add value to the paper wallet all I need to do is scan the QR code printed on the front as the Public Key and I can add money to that in a snap. If I want to use the money or move it somewhere else, I need to unfold my wallet and add it to my phone temporarily. That actually is a bad thing, because it would then technically expose my previously Private Key to the world through my phone. If I wanted to be really careful I would prepare a new paper wallet, then use the old one, buy something with it and the remaining value would then need to be immediately sent to the Public Key on my new paper wallet. Then the old paper wallet could be burned.
Once I figured out the storage mechanisms for Bitcoin I got to thinking about how to exchange fiat currency for Bitcoin. There are two distinct ways to go about this with some blurry spots in-between. The one way is to use a regulated exchange, these companies allow you to buy Bitcoin by opening up access to your bank account or debit card and prove your identity to the exchange. The other way is through Localbitcoins which connects you to people who are willing to exchange fiat for bitcoin over-the-counter using cash. The first way is okay, but it irks me because you have to reveal your identity in order to move forward. The second way is more secure and anonymous, but you have to put up with people who may or may not be trustworthy. They may make off with your cash and not give you any bitcoin, it’s a risk. The blurry spots in between? Those companies operate somewhat like the regulated exchanges except they depend on the US Postal Service to be the money mule. You buy a postal money order for the bitcoin you want, mail it to the exchange, and they transfer the bitcoins that you purchased to the Public Key you provided them.
Once you get fiat exchanged into bitcoin you can buy things with bitcoin. Shops could accept bitcoin by simply downloading a Bitcoin wallet and creating a Public Key, making it visible to customers and payment would be the capture of a QR code and the speed of the blockchain makes payment verification easy within 10-15 seconds of the initiation of the payment cycle. Bitcoin can also be used to move value from one place to another instantly without having to endure regulations or custom controls. If you are in a foreign country and need money, you could use bitcoin as a money mule. There are so many ways bitcoin could be used, the applications are just as many as exist with fiat currency.
All these explorations with bitcoin were occupying my spare time and I got a chance to read more of what Edward Snowden had to say. In one message he expressed interest and promise in a program called BitMessage. So of course, I went looking. BitMessage is structured a lot like Bitcoin, except instead of money the “currency” is messages. You can download the BitMessage client for free and start using it. With the BitMessage client, you can create a BitMessage address – such as BM-2cWAk99gBxdAQAKYQGC5Gbskon21GdT29X. If you had BitMessage and sent me a message with this address, I would get it. The neat part about this system is that it encrypts the message and the identity of those in the conversation. This is done very much the same way it is with bitcoins blockchain. Alice posts a message for Bob, it’s encrypted and then sent to everyone, sent to BitMessages “blockchain”. Bob can see this data store and because he has the Private Key that is associated with the BitMessage Public Key that Alice used to send him a message he can actually decrypt this section of the Bitmessage “blockchain” and read it. The message itself cannot be traced to where it comes from or where it goes off to, it shifts that sense around. Everyone has copies of all the encrypted traffic on the system, and only those with the proper private keys can read the appropriate parts and communicate securely. Bitmessage is neat because it bakes PKI into one simple program. As I started to fiddle around with Bitmessage I thought that adding PKI on top of Bitmessage could prove useful as an added layer of security. The only thing you have to watch out for with standard PKI is that the key generation process really wants you to put in a true reliable email. You don’t have to if you don’t want, you can create a keypair without an email, in that case you could be nobody@noemail.com, if you like.
I started to think about the practical applications of Bitmessage and PKI. If you had to get some super-secure message out of one place and you were paranoid about privacy you could go to a website on TOR and get your contacts Public Key and anonymous Bitmessage address, use the Public Key to encode your message, open up Bitmessage and post the information to the BM address and send it knowing that your transmission and their reception could not be tracked and the contents of the message could only be opened by the person with the right Private Key.
What then for all of this? Nobody using PKI, no locals using Bitcoin and no shops accepting it, and nobody but curious lookeyloos using BitMessage? At least I’ll be prepared for Eve and her minions. If you would like to regain some of your own privacy, just let me know and I would be very happy to help you navigate the technology and see how neat all these tools are to use.
On September 9th, 2014 Apple unveiled their iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Pay and Apple Watch to the world. It was a really poorly kept secret that Apple was working on a wristwatch, so nobody was really surprised when Apple came out with their new designs. All we didn’t know what to what extent Apple was going to go with the technology.
They released more details on Apple Watch. The more I learned about the device the less I found myself thinking it was a good idea. There are so many places where this new watch is a problem.
Humans Have Limited Attention
We haven’t learned how to properly cope with the iPhone and now Apple is going to release an even more disruptive and attention-stealing device on the population. I’ve heard stories of crackdowns in Chicago where the police were pulling over people who were using their mobile devices while they should be driving their motor vehicles, and then learn that on the heels of the crackdown that the police recorded nearly everyone was breaking the law. Pulling over those people would have effectively shut down the entire highway! We just do not have the proper respect for all the technology in our lives, we cannot cope with these bright shiny attention-stealing devices while we are in command of an even larger device that requires our undivided attention at all times. So now Apple is going to put something even brighter and shinier on our wrists and we’re going to have what little attention that is left between our vehicles and our mobile devices divided again by this cleverness strapped to our wrists.
The tight integration between iPhones and Apple Watch will make our addictions to these devices even more challenging to master as well. Many people I know have a very hard time disconnecting from their devices anyways, now that there is an intimate extension of that device that we wear? I can only see this getting worse for those people who want others attention when we are all physically together. I’ve heard anecdotal stories where entire families sit in one room but nobody talks to anyone else because they are all besotted with their technology. What will this mean when the technology is always with us and on our wrists?
Haptics
The Apple Watch, a wearable device includes technology that includes haptics, or the sense of motion or vibration, both in the user interface with the light tap versus the deep press and the vibrating device buried deep into the watch itself. This will only worsen our abilities to control our attention and in itself is a place where we are going to have trouble. The watch can be paired to another watch and send heartbeats across the network, it’s Apple’s romantic notion of intimate communication. I can foresee a paired watch between a married couple and the husband feels his wifes pulse quicken, he worries that she’s having a stroke or a heart attack and rushes home to find a strange car in his driveway and a strange man in his bed. Cheating spouses is just the tip of the iceberg, this watch could be used to cheat in so many other places – cheat at the Casino with a complicated card-counting or odds-calculating routine piped into the players Apple Watch, or exam cheating by looking at the watch and seeing the letters for the answers appear as drawings on the Apple Watches screen.
How will these situations play out? For cheating spouses, there are the courts, so that’s rather a dull thing, but for the others I could see a new no-watch policy being extended to driving vehicles, entry into a casino, and standardized testing events like the SAT.
Nothing for the Sinister
The one thing that I noticed after discussing the Apple Watch with someone I know who is left-handed, that the device completely abandons functionality for the left-handed amongst us. It’s a hard choice Apple has made. Either you build a right-handed watch and a left-handed watch, or include handedness configurability in your design. It’s obvious after looking at the demo pieces that Apple has nothing set aside for the left-handed of us and have left a significant part of the population out in the cold. They could still use the device, but it will be much more awkward for them to actually use the device. I can see the detraction of non-handedness to be a compelling reason to not go ahead and purchase an Apple Watch.
Another Power Hungry Device
The Apple Watch is power hungry. It needs to charge nightly in order to continue to function. I find myself looking at the function of my wristwatch, a Seiko 5 Analog Automatic and immediately find what I have on the end of my arm, this watch, to be much more useful and compelling than this Apple Watch. My Seiko, if I care for it properly will never need winding as the mechanical automatic winder will never wear down or degrade or stop working. My motions feed the watch, and as long as I wear it every day, just living my life means that my watch will continue to count out seconds and sweep out the minutes and hours. My Seiko cannot do all the things that the Apple Watch can, but it can do the one thing a wristwatch should do very well and that is keep track of time. So far my Seiko has retained proper time for the few months I’ve had it. There is no technology in there that is synchronizing it to atomic time, and there is no need for that precision in my life. A watch that is bound to the power grid seems to be a risk to me, and since the most recent power outage, which for me was last night, the idea that my fancy Apple Watch could run down and just be a chunk of expensive metal and glass really concerns me.
Welcome to the Apple Silo, Penthouse Level
The Apple Watch creates an entire new floor to the Apple lifestyle silo. People are usually drawn in with a consumer device, like an iPod Nano or an iPhone, and then they are buying Macs and now the Apple Watch. I have to admit that Apple has a very good compelling company story, and they are leveraging this story magnificently well. They know that one Apple device usually turns into another, and before you know it you are knee-deep in the Apple Digital Lifestyle. The watch requires the iPhone to function, this is a very bold and possibly hazardous step for Apple to take. All the rest of their devices are independent devices, but this one, this Watch, is utterly dependent on an iPhone to function. I think this is the first fundamental break with the legacy of Steve Jobs and represents a really dangerous case for Apple. They are betting sales on pre-existing devices. That is either very ballsy or really stupid. This will only reinforce the cultural divide between people who flaunt this luxury versus people who do not. If you have an Apple Watch, then you necessarily have an iPhone. I can see this becoming a new and really upsetting hazard in big cities. Before it was a mystery what was plugged into a pair of headphones, it could have been anything from a cheap transistor radio, to a cassette Walkman to an iPod or iPhone. Now it’s really something quite different. If you see someone with an Apple Watch, you know that their iPhone isn’t far away. You are advertising that you have an iPhone to everyone who notices your watch. In small communities where theft and robbery isn’t a problem this won’t even show up on the map, but I foresee in bigger cities like Chicago and New York, that this will take on a new life all its own. A new spate of “Apple Watch” theft events. People getting mugged because of what they have on their wrists marks them out as being ripe for the plucking.
Price
The Apple Watch comes in three editions. There is the plain edition, the sports edition, and the luxury edition. The different editions put an embarrassing irony to the features that the phones are sold around, the replaceable wristbands most specifically. Why couldn’t it have just been one watch with different bands for different editions? Make the initial purchase for the core device and then let people swap out wristbands for the luxury components of the deal, if you want a canvas strap, a rubber one or a gold one, let those be options. Instead of that, there are three distinct Apple Watch varieties.
Then there is the price. $349 for the Apple Watch! In our society, what middle-class person would dangle such an expensive bit of technology on their wrists? Again I’m drawn back to my Seiko 5. The comparison of prices for what I need in a watch is all the reason enough to turn my back on the Apple Watch. My Seiko 5 cost me $70, that’s five times cheaper than the Apple Watch for a device that will never run out of power for as long as I don’t run out of power! It blew my mind, when I saw the price tag on the Apple Watch. I figured this could have been a jubilee celebration from Apple, they have billions of dollars buried in their company treasury, they could have made the Apple Watch a loss-leader for their iPhones, priced it at $70 and it would fly out the doors. Apple would lose money on each unit, but they’d make it up on the back side with all the cultural silo’ing that comes with using a device like an Apple Watch which necessitates an iPhone to go along with it.
Apple is betting that their Apple Watch will play as much as their iPads and iPhones did, selling millions of units. It may sell, and it very well may sell well, but I don’t think that $349 is worth this sort of technology. If it could do more, or if it was independent of the iPhone that might have helped, but it’s expensive, hazardous, and risky. I can’t see it really shining in sales numbers like the other devices did. Apple should have set it’s very lofty estimates for sales of the Apple Watch much lower. It’ll likely have the same sales numbers as the iPod Touch or iPod Nano.
I won’t be buying the Apple Watch. I have everything that I need already. The iPhone I have is enough, and my Seiko 5 does a magnificent job and you can’t beat the features or the price. I can’t imagine anyone I know actually going ahead and buying this thing, but we will see how that all pans out next year when it’s available for sale. This is going to be a hurdle that Apple doesn’t jump over gracefully.
Safe inside, toasty warm, while water pitter-patters on the roof… describe your perfect, rainy afternoon.
It’s a split between the slow romance of a rainy afternoon or the quiet snuggliness of a blizzard. Either event always carries within it the possibility of power outage and since the last great outage I’ve found myself both challenged and strangely engaged. Without technology, without all of the noise I found it much easier to live and carry on. The nighttime is pitch, refrigeration is a commodity and cooking becomes more challenging with the loss of an oven, but being cut off from the trappings of technology let you get back to what really matters.
I’ve for the longest time felt that technology has shrunk the world and made everything knowable. Even the things that should always remain hidden and unknown. Some people share too much, and we’ve devolved into fetishizing worry and concern over things that we have no ability to affect. Ever since I killed my television, effectively walking away from broadcast TV and all the awfulness that comes with it I’ve found my life in flux, rebalancing and having more access to happiness as a result. The mood of a rainstorm or a blizzard is a perfect setting for considering where I am in life, it’s the perfect moment for introspection and reflection. It doesn’t escape me that both of these conditions glorify the home, things that surround the home are always going to make me happier.
When the power fails, when technology recedes you find yourself sitting alone with your thoughts, if you are with other people you start to struggle for activities to occupy your time. Telling stories, talking, reading books, playing games – the things we all did before all this technology came and made everything “better” are sometimes the very things that we need to get back to. I have always carried a special reverence for old things, older technology that has been supplanted by newer technology. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s better. My analog wristwatch and my fountain pen are personal testaments to that very thing. The rain and the snow lend encouragement to the things in our lives that none of us should stray very far away from. I’ve found myself actually fantasizing about turning off the house power to have new oases of freedom from electricity and the trappings of technology. It’s not actually practical as turning off the house mains would shut down my refrigerator and that would make living significantly more difficult and increase misery if I lost all that safety in the box-that-stays-cold.
I think more people should at least play pretend that the power has gone out. Try to reconnect to each other without technology, without social networking and all these little gadgets that have filled up our lives. Break out the lanterns and play card games, play board games, talk, tell stories, relate to one another again without all the structure that we’ve surrounded ourselves with. The irony isn’t lost on me, that I am advocating breaks from technology while typing on the very pinnacle of such technology and eventually posting it into the very thing I rail against. I think it comes to a sense of balance. Not being completely embedded, obsessed, and reliant on technology on one hand and not being a Luddite in the other. There’s a time and place for both and keeping both alive in your life feels important somehow. Electricity isn’t like sunshine, it isn’t guaranteed. It’s important to figure out life without electricity and to be prepared. This balance and respect for older things makes a lot of sense to me.
It’s far afield from where this daily post started – a description of a rainy day and how it makes you feel turning into a pleading that you can see better represented in Koyaanisqatsi. Funny what a little rain will bring.
I read this article about restaurants and their corkage fees. Mostly out of dull curiosity I found myself satisfied that I don't agree and there are delightful ways to avoid this entire argument.
But to the vex, paying a corkage fee is a custom where diners who supply their own wine pay the establishment money for the privilege. You have a choice, either pay the insane markup (feels a lot like a mugging) on restaurant wine or pay to bring your own. Either way you'll pay. The linked article even goes so far to comment that bringing your own wine is shaming the sommelier, because you don't like his offerings. So, you quibble with the quality of truncheon that you are mugged with. Ah. I suppose I've never found a use for a sommelier, and that's likely because it's a class warfare thing, sommeliers are great if you're a 17th century royal, otherwise be your own sommelier. Anyhow, the word indicates the servant who ran ahead and prepared a meal. In the United States, nobody runs ahead, unless it's a mugger waiting for you in an alley. So, sommelier, great. The article states that if you really want to be nice you should offer the sommelier a taste. This is amazing. The guy who marks up his swill 1000% gets honor? How about chased out with torches and pitchforks?
Yeah yeah yeah. Be nice. Don't be so grumpy. But why should a meal out spiral out of control and cost you way more than the “food” you are purchasing? The experience is usually the answer. You pay for the experience. So when it comes to wine, you are paying to “enjoy the services of a fine sommelier” or, really, paying for the opportunity to be screwed on price for a bottle of swill and think it's honorable – and defensible.
Partially this comes down to palate. You are paying a sommelier, and his palate to guide you. Because each palate is unique, like a fingerprint, what if you've paid 300 dollars for wine you detest? Instead you've brought a 3 dollar bottle of wine that you love. The sommelier is angry. They charge you a 85 dollar corkage fee as a matter of revenge for not being able to tear the alimentary canal out of the sommelier and staple it to your central nervous system. I mean really, this screams palate bigotry.
So the way out? Water. Fuck you and your worthless overpriced swilly “wines”. No corkage fee, no mugging, no obnoxious useless mugger behaving like a chimpy King Louis XIV court fop being all pretentious and galling over reprehensible palate bigotry. I never asked anyone to run ahead. So, screw off.
But then there is the setting too. “Fine Dining” is a euphemism for “Food Poisoning”, so in many ways that too is just so much of a waste of time and valuable resources. These self-puffed joints get grumpy and bent if you bring your own wine and so either pay their mugger to sulk in the corner or get your food to go and enjoy it at home with your own wine. Alas, you'll need a roll of TP too, so it's not like there is a win condition here anyways.
At least the water is chlorinated, so you at least have that basic thing to go on… Always remember to tip the angry sulking mugger too. He really wanted to bash your brains out and rifle through your pockets for loose change.
I'm honestly surprised they don't have a $50 charge for a glass of water. Seems like they've followed a theme and left out a gloriously glaring exception. After all, this is Fine Dining! LOL.
Write about evil: how you understand it (or don’t), what you think it means, or a way it’s manifested, either in the world at large or in your life.
Throughout my life I’ve been refining my faith and morality. There are a lot of systems in our world that you can toss in with if you wish and I don’t begrudge anyone their subscription to those models. For myself, I’ve found the best morality to be expressed in The Golden Rule. It’s from this particular framework that I draw my understanding of evil. The rule itself is simple: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” and concludes there. No prohibitions, no strictures, no exceptions. I find this to be very similar to the Bantu concept of Ubuntu. To express your humanity in your relationships with others. I find this to be delightfully and elegantly terse. Nothing longwinded, nothing complicated to understand.
So then evil, it would be the opposite of good and good is defined by the rules of morality. In my case it would be to stray from the Golden Rule, to treat others without any concern for how they treat you. It’s really a matter of spiritual inequality, and I see it as a matter of the grossest ignorance. There are differing levels of evil, there’s the simple kind where people are selfish and ignorant about how their behavior impacts those around them, they spend their lives without any seriously close relationships because they simply cannot be trusted. They can’t form any bond beyond a power relationship and once that relationship is broken, they are shunned worse than if they were just strangers passing on the street. Then there is the more complex form of evil, the type with the full commission of the will. I think of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, especially when he settles as being the villain of the tale. It’s in the planning and plotting of evil acts that this form describes for me. I think one of the most poignant forms of evil, in the complex reckoning is that of betrayal. When you’ve invested in someone else, when you have done your level best according to your morality to treat them with Ubuntu, to behave according to the Golden Rule, when you imbue them with trust and hand a part of yourself to them with that trust and then they perform an evil act by ruining that trust and damaging you in the process, there are few true expressions of evil that rise above this. For me, it’s colored by the will. Being simply barbarous is a mindless evil, but when you apply a personal level of willpower and it’s between individuals then it takes on a more unique and deep sense than simply being a rampaging monster.
My understanding of evil is colored by my recent experiences with betrayal. I think that’s why I select betrayal as one of the pinnacle evils, because it cuts so deep. During that experience the sheer number of corrupted souls was breathtaking. It actually caused a crisis of faith, that people could be so wretched, so nasty, and so powerfully evil to another person. I have retained my optimism through these trials because not a day goes by when I can’t find one instance of people following the Golden Rule. So the awfulness in people isn’t pervasive, it’s localized. It’s this fact that helps me retain my faith in humanity.
Then we get to why evil is stupid. Not simply dumb, which indicates a kind of unknowing ignorance, but actively spurning the best option to pursue ends that are powered by selfishness or bigotry. There is an infinitely greater return on investment when everyone conducts themselves well, in my case, according to the Golden Rule. If you retain your moral center and act rightly, you find yourself cultivating the very best of yourself and others and applying that laser focused will towards whatever goal it is that you and in the workplace, your group, is striving after. The world rewards right action, it rewards honesty and goodness and selflessness and it punishes the evil, the selfish, the dishonest and the betrayers. It is not that a few small acts of evil will ruin your life, but that your behaviors of evil will eventually tint your reputation, in how others see you. It ruins relationships and severs connections and makes you less persuasive and powerful because of all of that. Generally those who have been wronged seek revenge but once they have proceeded through the stages of grief for what was done to them, they settle on a nebulous notion that a nameless and faceless force of the Universe will step in at some point to mete out justice. I quite enjoy the name the Hindu faith places on this force, Karma. For those that are wronged, the destination is simply having faith that Karma will eventually mete out the punishment that is right and appropriate. If nothing else, the understanding of this force, named Karma, offers consolation to the wronged. It also provides the wronged a balm which is far better than revenge, which just leads the victim to be exactly like their transgressors, turning the will of the victim against The Golden Rule, for example. That is why revenge is impossible. To satisfy this deep urge to mete out personal justice you break your own moral code and therefore you are no better than those who wronged you.
Those that are evil reap what they sow. They are eventually recognized as their corrupt souls shine through and they wear that mein as their relationships falter and flag. Evil serves nobody. It leaves both the victim and the perpetrator bereft, lesser than they were before and it does nothing to forward any purpose or goals that anyone has. In a certain Darwinian sense, evil does not serve evolutions design, it does not make you strong, it makes you weak, it lessens you. There is no path that evil illuminates which leads to success or strength. It only leads to a downward spiral of corruption and solitude. Instead of being a wholesome part of a greater whole, you are a malformed clattery piece that simply does not fit and eventually you will jog yourself off your pinion and fall on the floor to be swept up in the dustbin of time.
I have faith that those that wronged me, the betrayers that I have had the misfortune to know professionally will eventually reap what they have sown. It won’t be by my hand, but it will be by fate, or Karma, or whatever you call that force. Misfortune will surround them as they reduce themselves. In many ways, that’s what evil really is, it’s the path of reducing yourself, which goes against the natural order of expanding yourself. You are unwanted, unloved, shunned because you eventually wear your evil, the chains you forge in life you wear afterwards.
Lavabit and Silent Circle have given up when it comes to providing encrypted email communications. Mega plans on providing something to cover the gap and in general the only real way to deal with privacy-in-email is end-to-end encryption. There was talk that at some point email might give way to writing letters and using the US Postal Service but there as well you’ve got Postmasters writing commands taped to mail about how everything has to be photocopied and stored – so even the US Postal Service is full of spies, the only thing the US Postal Service can be trusted to carry is junk mail.
What is the answer? Pretty Good Privacy. PGP, or rather, the non-Symantec version of it which is the GNU one, the GPG. If you really want to keep what you write private when you send it to someone else, the only way to do that is for everyone to have GPG installed on their email system so you can write email using their public key, which converts your email to cyphertext, secure from even the NSA’s prying eyes, and requires your recipient to unlock the message using their secret key, which they have.
I’ve been playing with PGP and GPG now for a very long time and I decided I would at least make a route available if anyone wanted to contact me with privacy intact – my public keys are on my blog, they are also on all the keyservers including the one hosted and run by MIT and the GPG Keyserver as well. To send me a private message via email all you need to do is get GPG, set it up, create your secret and public key, get my public key, use it to write me an email and only I’ll be able to read it. The NSA will just flag the encrypted contents for later analysis and thanks to AES–256, they’ll be hard pressed to get to the plaintext in your message.
That’s the way around all of this. GPG for everything. GPG public keys for email, for chat, for VPN, for files, and HTTP-in-GPG. Everything pumped through GPG. Since the government won’t stop spying on us, it’s our duty as citizens to secure our own effects against illegal search and siezure, and technology exists to do so.
Encrypt everything.