WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR, So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is.

Posted on August 19, 2013 by bluedepth

WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR, So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is..

This post by Wil Wheaton is a really great reminder that when you are traveling, and I wouldn’t necessarily just put this as international to Britain but even when visiting the next town or crossing state lines even. Rights are being trampled everywhere you go, wether it be from a out-of-control cop, a bloodthirsty Sheriffs deputy or even a sticky-fingered TSA agent there is no lack of potential thugs, enemies, and thieves in your midst.

There are ways to secure your data and keep it handy as well. Store everything in an encrypted disk image or TrueCrypt archive on a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive and duplicate the same things in your memory sticks. If the thugs take your devices then you can rest assured that all you lost was the material itself, but no content.

I’m surprised that journalists and people who know journalists don’t all use GPG to secure their communications. I would think that if you were a whistleblower or had contact with a whistleblower that these little checkboxes would be foremost on your mind and already checked off.

You can’t trust any government, any cop, or any Vampire to keep their word. This goes for everyone as well, including your carrier and service providers. What should Verizon know? Shit. How about Dropbox? The same. Trust nobody and you’ll be safer than someone who trusted someone else. Trust is earned and right now, very very few people have it.

Encrypt Everything

Posted on August 18, 2013 by bluedepth

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.

Google Authenticator

Posted on July 9, 2013 by bluedepth

Over the long Fourth of July holiday weekend I received an email from WordPress.com detailing news that they were now fully compatible with the Google Authenticator Two-Factor security system. I haven’t thought of Two-Factor in a long while and decided to look into how Google had cornered the market in this particular security market.

First a little background. The term Two-Factor security means that when you want to prove who you are to some service, called authentication, you usually just have to present two pieces of information, a username and a password. This combination not only identifies who you are and proves your identity through the shared secret of the password, but allows systems to remain as open as possible to all clients who want to connect – assuming that everyone is playing by the rules and nobody is trying to be sneaky or clever. Passwords are notoriously wimpy things, most people give up on complexity because they can’t readily remember the password and it’s not convenient so they select simple passwords like “12345”, “password”, or “secret” and leave it at that. The problem with passwords is that people who make them up are either lazy or don’t care about entropy or complexity and since a lot of your work and identity is being controlled using these systems, using these simple passwords is begging for disaster. Another issue that plagues a lot of people, and goes in with how naturally lazy many of us are, is that people will use one poor password on every site they go to and keep their usernames the same as well. The risk here is that when one service is compromised, all the other services are compromised as well and it’s a huge upward climb to get out of that mess if you find yourself trapped in it.

Cleverness works both against people in general, with thieves, phishers, and hackers as well as for people in general, with things like hashapass or applications like 1Password. Hashapass is a free service that combines the web address of a service with one single complicated password to generate a hash, which is to say, a value that is easily calculated from the combination of the single complicated password and the web address but done so in a way that going backwards is very difficult to do. If any piece of the puzzle is missing, it’s technically unsolvable. As an alternative to this there is 1Password, an application that I have become very fond of, and it uses a similar approach to hashapass. In 1Password one master password unlocks a database of all the sites and their individual passwords so you don’t have to remember a constellation of passwords, all you need is to remember one very good secure password and you are all set. There are a few other nice features to 1Password that I like, being able to generate very long random passwords and store them for me allows me to establish plausible deniability when it comes to my online identities. Because 1Password randomly selected a 32-character password for Facebook, I cannot be compelled, even under torture to reveal that password to anyone else. I just don’t know it. I know 1Password, but that’s not the right question so my account remains secure.

All of this I have collected and use, and I use it everywhere. On my MacBook Pro, my iMac at work, my iPad and my iPhone. 1Password makes it very easy to manage the security database and I’m quite sure that it’s secure. In my life, any more security is rather like putting more padlocks on a firmly locked jail cell, it’s rather silly and feels a lot like overkill. Then again, more security is always better, especially if it’s really clever and somewhat convenient.

Two-Factor security adds another component to the process of authentication. It augments the username and password combination. A password is something I know (or store using 1Password) and the second factor is something called a Time-Based One Time Password (TOTP). This is where the free iPhone app called Google Authenticator comes in. The app records a secret key from a site I wish to prove my identity to in the future, for example, Google itself. I set up two-factor, request a security token for Google Authenticator and set it up in the app. The key is transmitted by QR code, which means you can quickly acquire the long complicated random (hard to type) secret key using the camera in your phone. Once this process is complete the Google Authenticator app displays a six digit number that will work to prove your identity to the site associated with that particular entry and this entry only exists for 30 seconds at a time. This six digit password exists only once in any one 30-second period and there is no way to divine this password without having the Google Authenticator application with it’s stored secret code.

Having two-factor enabled in this way means that my username and password are no longer as important as they once were. Even if my username and password are revealed or compromised without my knowledge, the secret key that I have in my Google Authenticator app remains secure with me and the 30-second-long one-time-password additions remain a secret with me. What I know may be compromised, but what I have (the Google Authenticator) most likely won’t be unless someone steals my phone and finds a way to best the security on that device before I have a chance to wipe it remotely. If in the case my Google Authenticator becomes compromised, my passwords will likely not be because they are uncrackable, and so I am still secure.

Practically how does this work? When I want to log into Google Mail using two-factor, this is what I do. I open a web browser, I type in the address “gmail.com” and press enter. Then I enter my username and my password and then in the third field under the password is a box labeled “Google Authenticator Token” and then I grab my phone, start my Google Authenticator application and then read the six-digit number from my phone and type it in. The service logs me right on and after a few seconds, that six-digit password is no longer valid and is meaningless. I’m authenticated and the system did as it was designed to do. One of the nice parts of Google Authenticator is that the entire app is a mathematical operation, it doesn’t require the network at all to generate these numbers, so this would be a good solution for people who may not have a reliable connection to the network or have a data quota on their phone.

Of course, online authentication is just the beginning. I found a way, yesterday, to embed the Google Authenticator system into my Mac OSX Mountain Lion installation so that when I want to login to my computer at work or my laptop I have to type in my username, my password, and read the six-digit code from my Google Authenticator application. The setup isn’t difficult to get it to work. You need a compiled PAM module which I have (just ask if you want a copy) and an application which you use to create the secret key on your computer. With it all set up, and a slight adjustment to a settings file, even if I were to lose security on my password at work nobody could login to my account without my username, password, and GA token.

This arrangement works quite well and I’ve set it up for my Google accounts, my WordPress.com and .org blogs, Facebook, Evernote, and Dropbox accounts as well. Everything is secure, obnoxiously secure. 🙂

photo by: MoneyBlogNewz

All Set Now

Posted on July 7, 2013 by bluedepth

Earlier today, around 5pm in the afternoon I decided to swing by the Portage Barnes & Nobles Bookstore and get a snack and something to drink from the Cafe. I sat down with my Nook HD and was enjoying my drink and my snack and everything was going just fine until this one fellow came into the Cafe. He seemed like an average guy and I only briefly glanced at him, I half think because he was sitting adjacent to me and instinctually you just want to see who’s near you. I noticed that he was carrying a 9mm handgun in a holster attached to his belt. This was extraordinarily provocative and I couldn’t not notice it even though I tried.

I have talked at length about this very situation in a hypothetical sense with a loved one and I am fully aware of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution and I’m aware that Michigan has a fully respectable non-concealed carry law on the books. Nothing about this was a crime, illegal, or anything like that. It was however provocative, worrisome, and ultimately repellent.

This situation, now that I’ve been faced with it – and I’ve seen people carry weapons like these before, mostly state cops in their uniforms who stop at the bookstore Cafe for some coffee on their way along I–94, has created a new personal rule for me. None of this touches on honest police officers in their uniforms – it’s a part of their job and they have strict rules and extensive training on the conditions where they can access their sidearm. You don’t get bent at your appointed Gunslinger, Jake. But it has created a new rule for regular folk (or out of uniform police, carrying) that if I see that I will leave. I don’t have to remain anywhere I don’t feel safe, I have a car, I have feet, hell, I had my bike in my car. I could have pedaled away if the car wasn’t going to hack it. It isn’t against the law, and it wasn’t a crime, but it was definitely against my sense of safety and the risk was a bright throbbing red cloud around that gun.

How do you know that a situation won’t come up? Mistakes can be made. People can get weapons who shouldn’t have them and people can get permits to carry who really shouldn’t have them – how do you know? The uniform, or if not that, a displayed badge is enough to settle folk, but just a regular guy with a gun? It’s time to leave. So this is my new rule, it’s just for me and not necessarily for anyone else but if I see someone with a gun I will leave. I don’t have to be anywhere – my liberty guarantees me that and it’s all quite humdrum when you get right down to it. It doesn’t have to upset anyone, think of it as “I have to wash my hair” if it makes you feel any better. Just because people are allowed to do something doesn’t also mean that I have to stay where I do not feel safe. A bookstore is the last place where a gun should be, but that’s my personal opinion and the law is quite clear that the fellow carrying the weapon was in his rights to do such a thing, just as much as it was my right to get up and leave.

I know guns. I was trained by a competent marksman on how to handle various weapons and even how to load ammunition. I have read the Second Amendment and I know the law in Michigan. I would suggest that other people heed their surroundings with more consciousness and see people like the fellow I saw and do what they feel comfortable in doing. Each of us has to behave according to the dictates of our conscience and our morality. For me? Staying in a place where I don’t have to be (like the Barnes & Nobles Bookstore) makes it a snap. I just walk away calmly and quietly. I fully understand that the probability of gunplay is quite on the same level of being struck by lightning or winning the lottery, but what I know of a gun and what I know about the fragility of the human psyche – I’m all set now – Time to go.

I just wish there was a provision for private landowners, or in this case tenants of buildings like Barnes & Nobles to establish a Gun-Free Zone. Why have a gun in a bookstore? The people at a bookstore are not stupid, at least that’s the last thing one would expect, and they’ll likely be quiet introverted types who are averse to danger, risk, or doing something stupid. I look in the mirror for that. I know guns, I know people, and I know that the two really shouldn’t be mixed together – especially in public situations. How can you be sure that someone who has a permit to carry a weapon won’t have a spontaneous psychotic break, a stroke, or even temporal lobe epilepsy? What if they suddenly hallucinate danger? It comes down to risk. If you don’t care, then fine – but I do. People are a mess, on their own they are trouble, but with a gun? Now they are even worse trouble. Trouble waiting to happen.

And that’s what it comes down to. A gun is murder waiting to happen. What point is there in even having a weapon if you aren’t going to kill? It serves no other purpose, especially in a bookstore. You aren’t going to hunt a wild volume of Sherlock Holmes bargain book, it just sits there. It’s people you’ll be hunting instead. I often times wish I didn’t know, that I wasn’t so sensitive, that I could just get along and shrug and pay it no mind – but I just can’t.

So, I move along. All set now. Time to go.

photo by: storem

Voting

Posted on April 19, 2013 by bluedepth

Watching gun nuts trying to use logic, even their own warped logic and watching their points being used against them is both highly entertaining and deeply upsetting. I saw the clip on the Daily Show where John Oliver talks to that gun nut and demonstrates this very point. The way he looked, the way he dismissed everything single-mindedly reminds me of my gun-loving family members. Nothing matters so much as keeping the Second Amendment from being violated. I don’t think they have basic human empathy and I think it works much like how conservatives change their minds when their children come out as gay, when it comes to gay marriage. Perhaps, and I don’t actively wish this on anyone, but there is a part of me that wonders if these gun nuts would be so intensely resistant to gun control if someone they loved died in a massacre where a background check would have revealed that a mentally ill shooter bought one gun online and the other at a gun show. Their dead child would still be alive if they had learned to compromise on at least background checks. Alas, it’s too late for their dead imaginary child.

Unless of course those people happen to be any of the thousands who have lost loved ones to gun violence and gun massacres.

The shame comes when a change of heart that comes after such an imaginary event that might come to pass comes too late for everyone else. That’s why America is upset with the Senate. That’s why our government has let us down. We don’t have the time for them to lose their loved ones for them to wake up in time to keep our loved ones from dying. The people are suffering, and Congress would rather ignore the will of the people. That’s a clear case of a government that has ceased representing the people and are, to borrow a word from the gun nuts, a tyranny.

photo by: paljoakim

Louisiana, USA: GOP Rep Wants to Legalize Employment Discrimination Against Gays

Posted on April 17, 2013 by bluedepth

Louisiana, USA: GOP Rep Wants to Legalize Employment Discrimination Against Gays.

I’ve been to Louisiana. What value does it have? There is some economic concern there, as the Mississippi River empties there, it’s where a lot of gasoline is refined and shipped across the country. I doubt that would attract many people to that state, let alone gay people. What else does Louisiana have?

Deep South – Conservative Christian charm right up to their collective necks. What a delight!
Fire Ants – Their bites tickle.
Killer Bees – Their stings are simply nuzzles of love, with venom.
Hurricanes, oppressively hot weather, intense rain – Oh lordy! Hold me back! I gotta get me some of that action!
Delightful Inequality – I’m not really a person in that state, so hey, what does anything matter to a nobody like me?
Overwhelming Obesity in local population – Loving men is easier when they can’t leave the house because they can’t fit through the doorways. Need flour and a while to find wet spots.

All in all, I can see why everyone is beating a path to Louisiana to bask in their delightful wonderfulness.

Connecticut Gun Control Bill

Posted on April 4, 2013 by bluedepth

I noticed in the endless stream of AP news items that Connecticut has passed a wide-ranging gun control bill that places important controls on gun ownership. I was looking for links to news stories and I refuse to link to Fox News, any New York City toilet rag, or the New York Times only because their links aren’t durable and so there is no point to link to them in a blog, historically the links just bellyflop years later. CNN articles from 2006? Good luck with that. So, Connecticut has new gun safety laws. This makes Connecticut more attractive option to migration for me. The law makes the state safer than the other states, and that opens up a new line of pressure for the states to decide on their gun laws. It’ll be less about personal liberties and the overworked 2nd Amendment and more about population dynamics and taxpayers. If all your taxpayers decide to move to a state where their children won’t be shot randomly, then they will be paying taxes to that state and not the more dangerous ones. These bills could become new tools for state tourism authorities to promote their states when it comes to safety. “Come and visit Connecticut, we are safer.” If it becomes an actual population pressure, then I bet more states will start adopting gun control laws in order to retain their populations. The only thing that a state really fears is negative migration. Perhaps it’s time to stop talking about guns, ammunition and magazines and start talking about public safety issues. It’s subterfuge of course, but really it’s not. It’s got more to do with living children than dead ones.

The image of a dead toddler is the one thing that the NRA cannot blot out. That image sears itself into anyone who looks on it. All your arguments mean nothing when launched over a 3 foot long coffin! It’s a wretched commentary on American life that it takes dead children to force adults to cut the shit and take things like guns seriously.

These aren’t fun little toys, they are tools of death.

photo by: InAweofGod'sCreation

North Carolina May Declare Official State Religion Under New Bill

Posted on April 3, 2013 by bluedepth

North Carolina May Declare Official State Religion Under New Bill.

There is something absolutely magical about stories like these. They are thrumming with the excitement and promise of what the Civil War was all about. Rebel states filled with rebels convinced that States were above Union. We started this on April 12, 1861 and we concluded it on May 9th, 1865. So here is North Carolina, a previous rebellious state pushing the buttons on the Union, again.

So, what does this bill do? It ignores the deaths of 625,000 Americans who died during the Civil War all so North Carolina can whine petulantly and act out.

There has always been a simmering discontent between the North and the South. The war was concluded but the problem was never really resolved and you see the worm turn in stories like these. North Carolina is still a rebel state filled with rebels. Apparently LOSING THE WAR didn’t impress upon them their pecking order in things.

Not that there will be another Civil War, or at least not shaped like the last one. The next one will be polarized between liberals and conservatives. Neither side is listening so we’re eventually going to have to go to war again to resolve these issues. All anyone has to do is wait. The South will rise again, and with them, the seeds of their defeat, again. We could skip all of this fun, but since North Carolina didn’t learn their lesson the first time, perhaps we need a reprise.

photo by: Ron Cogswell

SmashBurger Bigotry

Posted on March 29, 2013 by bluedepth

Back in 2010 there was a new hamburger shop opening up to much fanfare. The place was called SmashBurger and I wrote a review of the establishment. I didn’t like their food and now I have reason to not like them for anything else. According to this article the owners of our local SmashBurger are homophobic bigots.

So, wretched food and hate?! Golly, missing that will be a joy! If you like this place, I seriously ask you to think about where you buy things, and who you support with your money. Culvers is just a few miles down the road, you can get better food, cheaper, without the hate.

Crumbling

Posted on March 26, 2013 by bluedepth

Since I had all the Twitter traffic from @MichiganDOT and @MDOT_Southwest automatically sent to my phone via SMS I’ve been able to catch various things that they post on their Twitter stream. One of those things is a political advertisement from Michigan farmers and their campaign “Just Fix The Roads”.

I stand behind the farmers for improved maintenance of our roads and I certainly support Michigan DOT in their efforts to raise awareness of our crumbling infrastructure problem. Every day I have to dodge potholes, wide cracks, poor drainage, and bridges that I really don’t trust completely. Every day I cross many bridges, across train tracks, across the Kalamazoo River, those sorts, and I have faith, weak as it is, that my trips across the bridges and over these roads won’t put me in danger. It’s faith, have to have it that way because our infrastructure has been ignored for so very long that what once was new and strong is now weak and crumbling.

After watching that video on YouTube, I can’t help but think back to around 2003 when we, as a nation, decided that declaring war on Iraq and Afghanistan was a really great idea. Back then it was before the housing bubble broke and before the criminal banks were unmasked for being as corrupt as we eventually discovered – and we thought two unfunded wars would be just neat as hell. Well, now that we have made our bed, it is time to sleep in it. I sympathize with the Michigan farmers, and I certainly support infrastructure repair, but what money do any of us plan to assign to such an expensive endeavor? It’s going to take a whole lot of cash to do correctly what must be done. Where will that money come from? The Federal Government can’t help – they just beat out the sequester, the federal budget is a rotten mess, congress is idle, filled with backbiting idle celebrities behaving poorly. So it’s up to the state to fix it’s roads, again, where is the money?

So this is what two unfunded wars get us. Awesome cosmic military powers come at a cost and surprise! This is what many of us on the left were trying to say while the right was busy getting it’s patriotic on. There is a lot of blame to go around, most certainly, but in the end it does the rest of us no good. Not only do the farmers struggle with our crumbling roads, but also the rest of us who have no choice but to dare the paths that Michigan calls roads and to dare our rusted out bridges. It was going to be expensive before the unfunded wars, now it might actually kill us. Either the roads will kill us (slowly, by a billion paper cuts) or financial apocalypse will because we’ve saddled our government with prosecuting wars when we should have been directing them to work on internal matters, like roads.

So, feel good about our proud military. They’ll have the funds and resources to do their job. Their incredibly important, more-important-than-everything-else job in Iraq and Afghanistan. Feel good, wrap yourself up in the flag, and be the proudest chief patriot when the bridge your car was on failed, the roadway crumbled and you ended up with the front-end of your very expensive SUV stuck in the mire of the filthy Kalamazoo River.

photo by: Kecko

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