Category Archives: Privacy

The Graveyard of Good Ideas

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Earlier today I wrote an email to one of my recruiters who is helping me find gainful employment as best as he can. During this composition it occurred to me that there is definite value in some of these “Really Big Ideas” that I have from time to time. I’ve written about this subject before, but this time I started to consider if there was any way to sell this skill that I have, and that it would be a good thing to write about it and perhaps doing so would ‘seed the clouds’ and maybe help me somehow in the future.

It’s an odd skill with an elusive name. What could it be called? It was something that I only started to understand myself late last year after my 38th birthday. There are a lot of things that go into this particular knack, there is brainstorming, mind-mapping, and extensive applications of imagination. I love the notion of a “Thought Palace” which I picked up from reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes stories and for me, it’s not as structural as it might have been for the protagonist of those stories but the metaphor really rings true for me. It all starts with a problem statement. As I look back on my life I find that this pattern has been with me for a very long time and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to put a finger on it and approach the task of devising what it actually is all about. These problems sometimes are very deep, and sometimes not; sometimes they are filled with deep personal importance and sometimes not. The procedure, if there could be something procedural to it tends to follow the same overall pattern, brainstorming leads to a froth of ideas, images, opening up like a sea of possibilities before me. My mental landscape is littered with all of this material, laying about in boxes and just resting on the metaphorical mental ground. This seems to work even if I don’t brainstorm first, but it seems to hasten the entire operation if I do. The key for me is to quite literally sleep on it. I keep the problem firmly in mind, I’ve got a field of mental raw material littered about my consciousness and then I turn my back on all of it. In a few days, and as oddly as it seems, during a relaxing hot shower or bath usually, the end product arrives in my mind. It is an unusual sensation, just standing under the flow of water and a tightly coiled spring appears in my mind and then uncoils. The problem stands solved before me, and all I have to do is write it all down. I know it will work, and there are indelible certainties that any rough spots couldn’t possibly be show-stoppers.

Examples of these great ideas then get written down. And here is the rub for me personally, that I’ve got what amounts to a rather full suburban graveyard filled with these marvelous and certain to be successful ideas. I have to write them out, and then bury them alive because they are too valuable to actually share. It comes down to idea ownership, to actually make good on all this work that I’ve done for people who never asked me to do the work in the first place. These ideas could be very lucrative to me personally and in my current stage of life, having any of these ideas get stolen and benefitting someone else chills me right to the core.

Some of these ideas I can characterize without having to expose them, because without copyright to protect all this work, I would be exposed, and I can’t stand that risk. The first one was the most elegant and most important to me personally. It took elements that I had picked up in the non-profit philanthropic space that I have been orbiting for the last fifteen years and synthesized a complete plan that could be put into action by any institution of higher learning which would have the effect of integrating admissions, student retention, development and advancement, and also directly harness young alumni engagement. During my time speaking to people in that sphere of influence in Austin Texas last November, I was asked many times especially about young alumni engagement, and it was all I could do to resist not sharing my great design. I can’t trust that my work would benefit me, so the only people I could share it with are my blood kin, who are the only people who would never betray me for greedy purposes. Once I did share my grand design with my kin, the response was very gratifying. It could be a really great way to “have your cake and eat it too” when it came to encouraging and keeping students in higher education and quite possibly also address the giant mountain of student debt that these students are accruing during their time studying in these institutions. The idea that a student could possibly walk away from their Bachelors of Arts and only have to pay $125 for the entire experience was something that took my breath away. The ability to start your life without being chained to a giant millstone of educational debt keeps this particular idea alive, deep underground in a coffin, but alive still.

Then most recently I had the opportunity to interview for a local “hypermarket” style company that has business throughout the region. Quite by accident while reading the background material I had assembled for this interview experience I accidentally began “priming the machine” and the day before my interview with the company I had another one of these spring-loaded epiphanies strike me square in the head. Again it came during a hot shower, and I found myself speed-talking through the entire package of work, as I find that sometimes self-talk helps me retain all the details, sometimes these ideas can evaporate like the memories of dreams. I discovered that I had everything, mental images of whiteboards, hardware lists, procedure binders, business plans, project visions, even so far as to create marketing and a jingle. It would have led the “Point Of Sale” experience to it’s most extreme limit in terms of speed and convenience. It could have been a Holy Grail for this particular company. Alas, the company did not want me for my baser skills and so the idea was boxed up and buried.

The humor of all of this is not lost on me. What a foolish thing, to be struck with amazing work that was totally unbidden, unexpected, and not-asked-for. I seriously doubt there are ways to even approach unveiling these ideas because they come from so far afield that it’s doubtful they are even standing in the same ballpark. What sort of communication channel exists where you can chat up a company and lay all this out on them all at once? It’s impossible without sounding like you are a lunatic crank. Nobody volunteers such work out of the blue, it just isn’t done. It’s a small bit of entertainment imagining a world where this sort of thing is if not expected not ruled out before it can begin. What would such a world look like? People like me who have what amounts to having accidental revelations just wandering in off the street and changing entire market segments and entire industries, blowing up higher education affordability problems and revolutionizing POS systems willy-nilly.

So that leads to the graveyard of good ideas. I wonder how many other people are out there who have similar experiences. How many other life-changing, utterly disruptive epiphanies are buried in shallow graves? Then I get to wondering if all of this is a flash in the pan or if it is like I suspect, a new talent of mine that will be with me for the rest of my life. How many more holes will I have to dig?

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.

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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

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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.

The Troll Takes The Toll

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I’ve held true to the concept that all outsider groups need to pay an admission in order to enter mainstream society. Germans, Japanese, the worthless Irish… They all needed to pay to play. From “No *** need apply” to forced internment camps all the way to dying of malaria while building a canal. Each group gets the short end of the pointy stick before they are admitted. A group that doesn’t pay never really earns it. Sometimes the payment is made in lives, sometimes it’s violent and is paid with blood, but always it is paid.

What about gay equality? Not just marriage, but that is a part of it. All are equal under the law. At least that’s the goal. But what I want to know is what is the price for this goal? I mean, did we bleed enough in the Halocaust (gays got it just like the Jews), how about the Stonewall Riots? We have adorable parades where we dress up and entertain everybody with our harmless antics, but is that payment enough? How much to be taken seriously. How much is that respect, in the window, the one with the consequential tail?

Perhaps this is the first time when we can pay using a more refined and evolved currency. Not being segregated, special bus seats, separate but equal *amenities*… Something classier, more stylish, more bitchy? Here’s a capital idea, come out of the closet. Announce your true self to everyone and damn the torpedoes of bigotry and ignorance, full speed ahead! If everyone came out who was gay, gay wouldn’t be so much of a big deal. Perhaps we could be as plain and uninteresting as to lose the word gay altogether and we can hand it back to Christmas where it belongs. There is nothing special about us, were plain folk who do plain things. We’re just picky about dangly bits.

These red equality symbols have a great meaning and I’m plugging in more meaning than probably was intended, so, deal with it. The extended meaning is this, once you pull the skin off anyone, no matter if they are a man, a woman, an Asian, a black, or a gay man or lesbian you have the exact same thing each and every time. A bloody screaming mess that looks indistinguishable from any other bloody screaming mess. Deep down, skinless, aren’t we all the same? Aren’t we all bloody screaming messes? So with that inspiration, what is different about getting any service rendered that other people can take advantage of? Think of it this way, with our skins on we don’t make such a mess, we don’t scream in agony, and we’re just like everyone else. Its better if you just let us lead our lives — skin-on.

This comparison is at the heart of the sadness and ineffable ignorance that is bigotry. Why does it bother bigots so much? It bothers bigots because they are in a fight-to-the-death battle with their mirrors. What is gay marriage to you? Why is it so important that we have to fight over it, that we have to have the highest court in the land decide on it? Look in the mirror and see your enemy. That which you hate you see when you look in the mirror. Once the bigots understand their fight is with a mirror, everything else becomes thoughtlessly simple, obvious in fact. Embarrassingly so.

Friday Flashback – March 8th

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2004 – I got my IRS return back from the Feds, $1700, a part of that went to GenCon. Boy, were those the days. Since GenCon went to Indianapolis, and I don’t travel through Indiana unless driven by a myrddraal, that won’t be happening again. Some funny Andy-abuses-popsong-lyrics humor and the almost daily work issues, which at this point are at the focus where irritation and cliché meet. Moving along…

2006 – The big thing on this day was Project Runway was concluded. The most important bit from this show happened this year, “Where’s Andre?” Yes. Where.

2007 – Owning an American Made Car made the headlines on this day. Getting screwed over by General Motors makes 2013 a laugh-fest. We saved GM, Quist-ler, and Ford. Oh hooray. $1200 for replacement bearings and fourth set of brakes. It’s one of the reasons why I’ll never own another American made piece of shit car again. American auto companies can fail – hah – or not. wry smile The start of my debt was this awful car, one small little golden brick of it at least.

2009 – The beginning of the end for my odd benign cyst that was on my leg for years and years and years. This was when that whole thing started on the path to the end. Now I’m delightfully symmetrical and ever so daintily scarred. In the movies? Watchmen. Those were the days.

2010 – Wireless carriers still mattered. Sprint was good for highways, Verizon was slow but everywhere and AT&T was shit. This also was when AT&T bought Centennial wireless. So, whatever. Little did these carriers know but they were on the path to becoming commodity carriers. Nobody cares about their products or their employees, just their towers. In other news, I was hopeful that La Palma would break off, hit the ocean and several hours later erase New York City with a megatsunami. Alas, my hopes were for naught. New York City still exists. Blah. I started to blog and lauded how I could link dump automatically on Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, social networks as whores, take it bitches. It was at this point I realized that Apple Sales are whores. If you approach them and jingle money at them, they’ll do anything for you, but after the sale? You’re full of Santorum and the beer goggles have worn off. I also wished for Fax Machines to disappear. I didn’t get my wish.

2011 – A bit of Sage love as an email brought me great joy. I still thought Daniel Tosh was pretty neat, before the rape jokes and general wretchedness set in. WMU rolled out the Bronco Transit Mobile GPS and I thought it was neat, then I stopped using the system. I started thinking about how awkward it must be for Christians when Easter isn’t a fixed date but based off a calculation on the moon after the vernal equinox, lulz. Extra special work-fun and I started talking about AES–256 and how smart people look it up and take advantage of it.

2013 – Reality TV and Contest TV kind of suck. I decided to make a change to what I do at home, after dinner and cleanup are done. A very old friend and I shared a special moment, but they have no idea because it was just a dream. My daily tarot card readings pretty much jive with my horoscopes and so, I do my best to not go all “Hulk Angry/Hulk Smash”. I dealt with work issues, did things I’m not proud of, found FBackup which was okay, and generally felt that the day was best forgotten. I laughed heartily at the foibles of folken, they don’t, so I do, and it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters to me, which is why I do it. What is it? Ah, yes. Work stuff… you’ll never be knowing. Trust Issues. Dangly Bits. LOL.

Tagging

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I’ve been blogging actively on and off for years. Much of it started in LiveJournal and when SixApart, the company that wrote LiveJournal were sold to a russian company it was time for me to leave. I left for a few reasons, one was because I didn’t trust my writings to a company that was owned by a foreign country – the laws get murky once your thoughts and opinions leave the USA; the other reason was a general eroding of english users as more cyrillic users started to appear on LiveJournal. The language barrier between english and russian was the little push that I needed to leave that and get on with WordPress.

My use of WordPress continued a-pace until one of my work blogs was tagged as suspect by a WordPress.com robot and the company deactivated my blog. After explaining what I was using the blog for, they re-enabled it however that identified a problem for me, mostly that my blog was being measured – if not by a person then by an automatic process and as such, it had a definite stink of censorship about it. At work, and in my private life I already had a separate hosting company and that’s when I discovered WordPress.org, the DIY blog platform based on the technology that powers WordPress.com. I installed a constellation of new blogs both for work and for personal use and that had a bunch of added extras – specifically unlimited storage of rich media which I would have otherwise had to pay for with WordPress.com as well as direct control of the content. There were no robots or censors wandering around turning off accounts willy-nilly in this other arrangement. Also, and more to the point of this blog entry, the shift over to WordPress.org also enabled the use of plugins which really extend the WordPress platform even further than the nice presentation that the WordPress.com system provides. I’ve been having a devil of a time remembering to tag my WordPress blog posts. I went fishing for a new plugin to maybe help with tags and I found the WP Calais Auto Tagger and so far I’m quite impressed with it’s quality. Now when I make a post, the post is sent to OpenCalais where it is processed for relevant tags and I get a list of possibilities that I can elect to use or not. I take the category part of my blog posts very seriously and now I can rely on this bit of technology to help me with the tags as well. If you run WordPress blogs, I suggest you look into this.

Generally speaking, if you are a friend of mine and would like a WordPress.org blog for your own, I’m more than happy to help you out. I can set it up quickly and support it even – if you are interested, just drop me a line. Those that know me know how to reach me. I suppose everyone else could leave a comment. This offer isn’t valid for anyone at Western, sorry.

Empty Nests

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I’ve given up on Twitter. I won’t be removing my account as Twitter still has some use to for browsing the stream but there really isn’t any compelling interactions on that service for me any longer. The only things that will end up on Twitter really are links to blog posts and maybe the one-off comment.

Ever since Twitter enabled the data download feature on my account, I took advantage of it. I downloaded the entire archive and discovered to my pleasure that Twitter stored all my tweets as plain text in a CSV file. I spent the last months migrating my old Tweets into my Day One application. I will hand one thing to Twitter, it did keep me “logging” along for a long time. I’m switching that impulse over to Day One. It’s impressive just how much of my past I have recorded. It turns out to be about 2600 days, or about 7 years of my past – recorded and in some ways with a lot of resolution. For that I will always be thankful for Twitter. However…

The reason why I am leaving Twitter is because it is too exposed. I didn’t feel it was useful to have a private Twitter account, so I left it public and this decision was made with a devil-may-care attitude, that anything I tweeted wouldn’t matter. As it turns out, it does. Mostly this is because of my workplace, in that I do not trust them or anyone who works there. It’s not really anything meant to be hurtful or anything, but I can’t risk my job and I certainly feel that sharing on Twitter threatens my employment. For as far as I trust Western Michigan University, it starts and ends with the partitioned, compartmentalized version of me that works there professionally. Not the true honest authentic me. Being honest and sharing freely would just upset everyone and lead to needless drama at work, so I unfollowed a bunch of coworkers and people whose tweets would have gone to waste on an ignored account.

Another problem with Twitter is the loss of engagement and dimensionality. Everyone on Twitter is a three-dimensional person with all the complexities that come with being alive. Twitter’s relationships seem stuck in a one-sided mode of conversation. This very thing struck me most powerfully as I was migrating Tweets into my Day One app. I caught out of the corner of my eye tweets that I had made to people who were popular or famous. They were wasted messages. At first this concerned me, but then I realized that what was really going on was that the people who had thousands and thousands of followers were so far beyond their social horizon (that 150 limit I’ve written about before) that they simply cannot socially relate to anyone beyond their subset coterie of social contacts. It’s not that they are mean or being ignorant, but they just cannot process that level of interaction – it’s more about how our biology is colliding with our technology. So for the really famous, the really popular, that’s where the dimensionality comes in. A regular person is three-dimensional. The others are one-dimensional. They are human billboards. They stand there and output information and you stop thinking of them as individuals and start relating to them as “sources” instead. Robbing them of their inherent humanity. They don’t have feelings, as billboards don’t have feelings.

So, we’re all done with that. Twitter will still be a link-dump for my blog. Most of my actual sharing will start in Byword, then be copied to Day One, then from there shared to Facebook under my “Sharing” security model. If you don’t see lots of things on my Facebook wall, that’s because you aren’t in “Sharing”, and mostly that’s because I can’t allow my honest self to interfere with my work. — Gosh, writing that out felt wrong, but at least I’m honest.

If you follow me on Twitter and want to keep your lists tidy and unfollow me, I won’t even notice you leaving. So go in peace.

 

 

Administrator’s Eyes

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Working in IT in Higher Education for the past 14 years has taught me many key survival tactics. Life in Higher Education is special because of the unique specialness of the needs that many of my coworkers have. I don’t want to call anything specific out, I’m not here to hurt anyones feelings.

One of the first things you learn is that no matter what the patina is that people do their level best to project, right underneath it is some of the most kinky, clever, sneaky freaks you will ever meet. I hate to be picky but there is quite literally a 10 out of 10 chance that the truly kinky will be the boys. Perhaps this is higher education, perhaps not, but gentlemen, you are filthy. Damn.

When I started working in my profession I made some basic decisions which have saved my bacon more times than I care to even contemplate. First and foremost of those is cultivating “Administrator’s Eyes” which is the very state that I enter into when I help anyone with their technology. I started it as a habit and now it’s become a perception-altering meditative practice, nearly. When I am helping a client (I don’t call them customers, that’s inappropriate, they are clients) and I am sitting down where they normally sit I will focus my entire attention on the parts of the screen that contain only those pieces that enable me to render assistance. I do not let my eyes wander. It’s not out of some lofty sense of propriety that I picked up over time but more specifically battle-earned knowledge. I cannot, I will not handle the kinky freakish things that my fellow human beings get themselves into. Often times people will say “Oh, certainly nobody does that in a professional setting!” and I point them to teenage boys that spend way too much time in the bathroom with flimsy Scientific American magazines that appear to be on their last legs to keep their covers from falling off… these boys grew up into men and being a boy who grew up to be a man, I can say with authority that the only thing that honestly changed was that our hair started to thin or fall out.

It’s a habit that I recommend every IT professional adopt. It saves you from social embarrassment, even by proxy, and at the core of it stands this central question which each one of us in the IT field must eventually answer: “Can you handle the answers?” This is the first thing I consider before I even allow the questions to occur to me. Almost always the answer is no. A huge orchestra-blaring no. I can’t handle knowing anything. I can’t handle knowing usernames, passwords, websites, or anything at all beyond the thin border of a web browser. It’s not that knowing would endanger my professional life, but it would change my relationship with my clients and I simply cannot risk that. I have relationships that I must preserve, beyond everything else. I cannot perceive porn webpages, anything blah-Tube, even if it’s just online banking, trips to Amazon.com, or the stray Solitaire game being played. I have a deeply rooted and vested interest in knowing as little about my clients as I can manage beyond their presentation to me in the professional setting at work. It really is self-preservation. I do not perceive anything that would naturally be upsetting to anyone else so that the material in question does not change the fundamental relationship between IT professional and client. I suppose in a way, medical doctors take a “Do No Harm” oath, and I suppose I am advocating for IT professionals to take a similar oath “Do Not See”. Help with getting whatever it is up and working properly with sample data or bogus Lorem Ipsum if you can manage it, and even if you can’t and you have to look directly at the entire screen, once you engage the habit of “Do Not See” hard enough you might be able to pull off maintaining this state of blissful ignorance the entire way through your day.

This is something I encourage in all my assistants and people who work with me on IT tasks. I try to impress upon them that their coworkers may not be as pure as the driven snow and that through the adoption of Administrator’s Eyes they can learn a way to avoid the awkwardness that comes when you accidentally stumble onto a terabyte of stored data that people ought to keep at home, under a blanket, probably with a hot shower at the ready. It saves you from ever having to ask yourself that most torturous question “Can you handle the answers?” because I know I cannot. Therefore not only do I not ask the questions, but I don’t even consciously perceive anything that would lead me down that dark alley.

If there are any IT admins that read my blog, what are your thoughts on Administrator’s Eyes? Do you agree or do you think differently? Please comment here or on Facebook, I would love to know, as long as you’ve washed your hands in hot soapy water for a count of twenty. 🙂

Fake installer malware makes its way to Mac | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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Fake installer malware makes its way to Mac | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

When it comes to installing things on your Macs I often times advocate a rather carefree attitude. One thing that has always been true, and this article just nails home the point, is that even the most secure system can fall if the person holding the keys is tricked or cheated into opening the door.

I have said to many people whom I’ve given computer advice, if you have doubts, please contact me and I can look at it and give you advice. It’s free, and I’d rather help in the vein of “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Every Sperm Is Sacred

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So I was wandering Facebook, as I do, and I found a great image – but I can’t really link to where I found it because Facebook is a PITA. So, here’s the image:

And then of course on Facebook I left some comments, as only I could:

  • Technically life begins at spermatogenesis. If body temperature kills sperm, and men who wear clothing usually keep their body temperature high in the region where these cells are being grown, then any man who is currently wearing pants is a mass murderer?