When It's Time To Stop Flying

Airbus has applied for a patent for sardine seats. The fact that increasing the number of seats is achieved to the detriment of the comfort of the passengers, is widely known. What isn't so obvious is that the reduced comfort remains tolerable for only one or a few hours. The definition of a short haul flight is apparently not clear cut. At least one airline defines it as up to three hours. Airbus must have a pretty loose definition of tolerable. It must mean that passengers will grouse, snapchat photos of sardine seats, and tweet their misery. Hang on to your $6 beer because the seat back tray is no more.

Interesting Letter To The Editor

In todays' Spokesman Review a gentlemen writes about how unsafe our information is on computers and networks.

I have personally been forced off the Internet by a local technician who stole proprietary database information and has breached security in organizations that should know better (including the Spokane County Library network where I write this). As a longtime programmer and Web veteran, I can assure you that no computer, regardless of brand or technology, is safe from the bad guys. (bolding mine)

He couldn't write a letter?

I Almost Made A New Friend

This morning I got a phone call from someone who sounded like he was from India and in a room of other guys who sounded like they were from India telling me he was with the Windows Technical Department.

We had a nice long conversation.

This is a cold call scam in which the caller tries to convince the target, me, that my computer has been infected with all sorts of malware, which is threatening to divulge my personal information.

Here's how he tried to establish his credibility. He walked me through opening the Run command box and typing in the command "assoc".

Of course, this took 20 minutes because I repeated things back incorrectly, when he started to talk I would interrupt with a question or comment about all the background noise, I would misunderstand the simplest instructions, and did what I think was a successful job at making this a most frustrating experience for the scammer.

Back to establishing credibility.

The "assoc" command simply lists the file associations on the Windows computer. They all go scrolling by and one of the last entries is this:

.ZFSendToTarget=CLSID{888DCA60-FC0A-11CF-8F0F-00C04FD7D062}

This entry is identical on every Windows PC. So he was trying to make me believe he was on the up and up by reading the CLSID number to me and verifying that it matched the one on my computer. Hence, it would be infected and need to be cleaned up.

It took five minutes of him rattling off characters and me interrupting:

"You said O. Mine looks like a zero? Are you sure that matches?"

"Wait, this one kind of looks like an O, but you said zero."

"I couldn't understand you because there's a lot of noise in the background."

"Mine has a bunch of dashes in between. You didn't say any of the dashes."

"Mine has a D there and it sounded like you said B. Oh, that's a D? Okay, that was 888..."

"Was that an F or an S? It sounded like S. How many S's are supposed to be there?"

And me repeating each of the above statements and talking over him each time he tried to respond.

He finally got fed up and told me to hang on while he transferred me to a senior technical advisor. I had enough fun for the morning and hung up.

I forgot to ask his name.

A Recently Learned Behavior

A couple of times now I've caught myself trying to zoom in on photos while reading the newspaper.

The Annual Shining Star Exam

Here's an interesting article over at The Atlantic. Computer games have the potential to help determine if you're the right person for the job, assess your potential for promotion, or if you're truly a shining star.

Consider Knack, a tiny start-up based in Silicon Valley. Knack makes app-based video games, among them Dungeon Scrawl, a quest game requiring the player to navigate a maze and solve puzzles, and Wasabi Waiter, which involves delivering the right sushi to the right customer at an increasingly crowded happy hour. These games aren’t just for play: they’ve been designed by a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, and data scientists to suss out human potential. Play one of them for just 20 minutes, says Guy Halfteck, Knack’s founder, and you’ll generate several megabytes of data, exponentially more than what’s collected by the SAT or a personality test. How long you hesitate before taking every action, the sequence of actions you take, how you solve problems—all of these factors and many more are logged as you play, and then are used to analyze your creativity, your persistence, your capacity to learn quickly from mistakes, your ability to prioritize, and even your social intelligence and personality. The end result, Halfteck says, is a high-resolution portrait of your psyche and intellect, and an assessment of your potential as a leader or an innovator. 

It's not necessarily all bad in that it can remove biases from the equation. But still, I wonder if someone who didn't score very well could learn to do better and improve their score over time. And would it be easier to determine when an employee is just one step away from their level of incompetence?

Froma Harrop Doesn't Get It

In today's Sokesman Review we have an op-ed piece by Froma Harrop who essentially has no problem with secret government surveillance of Americans.

1) Admit that we are powerless to stop this new technology. (We don’t have to like it.)

It's not the technology we're powerless against. It is secret, unchecked programs. It is government doing as it pleases to target people. It's about government using this secretly gathered information and lying about it.

2) Stop confusing capabilities with actions. The U.S. government is capable of leveling Mount Rushmore. That does not mean it has any intention of launching drone attacks on South Dakota, no matter what your local tea party chapter says.

It's the actions we don't know about that are the problem and Edward Snowden has shown a light on them. We have an administration and political leaders who have lied about what has been happening only to be exposed by later revelations.

3) Recognize that this surveillance is key to national security. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller was not alone in warning that a cyberthreat will “equal or even eclipse the terrorist threat.” Other governments and bad people are racing for domination.

Whether we trust government, don’t trust government or simply want more oversight, this is serious business. It’s hard to count how many bloggers have likened the sort of information being culled today with the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s collecting nudie photos of political leaders in compromising situations. Those were relatively innocent days.

Here's she's conflating secret government surveillance of American citizens with terrorism. The national security trump card is well worn. Those "innocent days" included using information for blackmail and targeting innocent citizens.

4) Appreciate that we do have safeguards. When the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court berates the National Security Agency for violating the rules, that’s an example of checks and balances in action.

The FISA court may be able to chastise the NSA and other government agencies, but it cannot force them to do anything. Only Congress and the President can and they have failed miserably.

5) Admit that commercial spying is a privacy matter, as well. Retailers follow your cellphone around the mall. Macy’s knows how much time you spent in the shoe department. Amazon.com knows all about your interest in socialism and passion for manga cartoons.  

Of course, the telecom companies know whom you called and for how long. If the issue is privacy, what makes a business conglomerate more honorable than the government? 

We as citizens have more enforced laws protecting us from commercial monitoring of our phone and Internet use than we do from government intrusion. We have learned that commercial companies have acted as surrogates for the NSA and other agencies, providing them with access and data on a wide ranging scale. Plus, data was being gathered in violation of the law.

6) Call out media sources hurling thunderbolts at NSA spying while spying on you.  

The New York Times recently ran a red-hot editorial railing over the agency’s “inexhaustible appetite for delving into the communications of Americans.” On the right side of the editorial’s Web page was a list of article links labeled “Recommended for You.” Now, how would the New York Times know what Froma might want to read?

Again, whether lawful or unlawful, it's the secret surveillance of Americans and the secret use of that information that's the issue. Not the browser cookies.

7) In assessing government surveillance activities, distinguish between a “who” and an “it.” A computer is an “it.” The fact that it is ruffling through all the metadata – phone numbers, email addresses, Internet searches – or even keeping the content of such communications in a vault for five years should not overly concern us.

When an actual human being takes a look, then it’s time for questions. When the system works properly, the NSA still needs a warrant to look at content.

A computer may be an "it", but it's ruffling through all the metadata because it can do so quickly and efficiently. Whether "it" or "she" looks at the data, there should still be controls over what data can be gathered, how it can be gathered, and what it can be used for.

I hope these seven steps help. We recently learned that the NSA has cracked the encryption tools protecting the privacy of Internet communications. Two responses: 1) Now we know it can be done. 2) Better us than them.

The NSA didn't crack Internet encryption tools. It broke them from the start and made everyone vulnerable for their purposes.

Better us than them?

Replacing The Web

This from the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

There's usually at least one Y Combinator startup that surprises the prestigious accelerator's co-founder, Paul Graham, and at this week's Demo Day it was Floobits. 

The company founded by Geoff Greer and Matt Kaniaris has introduced a way for two people to write software at the same time on the same code. But they have a much bigger goal in mind — replacing the Web.
...
"Those guys are kind of quiet hacker types and I was wondering whether they would be able to withstand Demo Day and what kind of presentation they would be able to make," Graham told me when the dust settled on Tuesday. 

"They are reticent hacker types and they don't like talking. I encouraged them to give people the full breadth of their ambition and they did it." "It's something insanely ambitious. Replacing the Web? Sheesh!" Graham said. "But I think investors liked them and they were able to get across what they are doing."

I'm hoping that when Geoff replaces the web he creates a simulator for the old web for his mother and I so we don't have to change. I still think vi and notepad are useful tools.

Y Combinator Demo Day

Geoff did his presentation in front of hundreds of possible investors yesterday and he was very happy with the results. Paul Graham, Y Combinator co-founder, said he did great. He must have since Floobits was one of the companies mentioned in the press report about yesterday's Demo Day. He and his partner, Matt, have been working their asses off getting their company going. It's awesome to see their work paying off. They have a committed investor now!

My Kids Are Awesome

Here is what one of them is up to. From a TechCrunch article today.

Y Combinator-backed Floobits, a new startup allowing two people to write software at the same time on the same codebase — known as pair programming — is officially launching today to help better connect remote developers and distributed teams.  

What makes this company’s implementation interesting, however, is that instead of requiring developers to use a web-based editor as many pair programming solutions today do, Floobits users can pair program directly within the text editors they’re already comfortable using through the installation of plug-ins.  

And for those who do prefer to work via an online editor instead of a native one, Floobits has integrated its web-based editor with one-click access to Google Hangouts for chat, audio and video conferencing.

Floobits was officially founded this February by former Rackspace engineers Geoff Greer (who came in via the Cloudkick acquisition, and who built this) and Matt Kaniaris. But in reality, they’ve been working on the idea since last August — and yes, often via pair programming.

The ending makes it sound like Geoff and Matt aren't ready for prime time, but I know better.

Military Computer Problems

From a Reuters article about problems with military pay.

A review of individuals’ military pay records, government reports and other documents, along with interviews with dozens of current and former soldiers and other military personnel, confirms Aiken’s case is hardly isolated. Pay errors in the military are widespread. And as Aiken and many other soldiers have found, once mistakes are detected, getting them corrected - or just explained - can test even the most persistent soldiers.  

Reuters found multiple examples of pay mistakes affecting active-duty personnel and discharged soldiers. Some are erroneously shortchanged on pay. Others are mistakenly overpaid and then see their earnings drastically cut as DFAS recoups the money, or, like Aiken, they are forced to pay money that was rightfully theirs.  

Precise totals on the extent and cost of these mistakes are impossible to come by, and for the very reason the errors plague the military in the first place: the Defense Department’s jury-rigged network of mostly incompatible computer systems for payroll and accounting, many of them decades old, long obsolete, and unable to communicate with each other. The DFAS accounting system still uses a half-century-old computer language that is largely unable to communicate with the equally outmoded personnel management systems employed by each of the military services. 

Ah, COBOL. That was a fun language. Back in 1988, I was a programmer stationed at the Standard Systems Center at Gunter Air Force Station in Montgomery, Alabama. I was working in the database shop where we supported Air Force bases with database problems on their Unisys mainframes. Patching pointers over a 300 baud modem was high tech at the time and we were high tech gods.

All the programs that ran against those databases on the mainframe were written in COBOL. Not long after I arrived there, someone complained that the civilian pay program was running too slow. Being the new guy, I was given the task of tracing the code. (I don't know why this ended up in our shop and not with the people responsible for writing and maintaing the code.) Surprisingly, I found that something like 60% of the code wasn't even being used. As the program was updated over time, people left unused chunks of code in the Procedure Division. Since the syntax was correct it still compiled. To my knowledge, nothing I did made the program run any faster. And I don't know if the responsible shop ever cleaned it up. I only bring this up because it fits within my confirmation bias.

I remember that when I left in 1994, a big push was starting to move off the Unisys mainframes and onto more modern hardware. Also, Ada was touted as the language of choice for converting many of the COBOL programs. I never heard what became of the modernization effort. Twenty years later it's apparently a work in progress.

Oh, and DFAS handles my retired pay.

Sign Of The Times

Even Navin Johnson would agree.

 The new phone book is here!

...and it's gone.

Reducing The Bill Of Rights

In today's New York Times we learn the Obama administration is attempting to erode the Fourth Amendment. 

The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, has argued that the bureau’s ability to carry out court-approved eavesdropping on suspects is “going dark” as communications technology evolves, and since 2010 has pushed for a legal mandate requiring companies like Facebook and Google to build into their instant-messaging and other such systems a capacity to comply with wiretap orders. That proposal, however, bogged down amid concerns by other agencies, like the Commerce Department, about quashing Silicon Valley innovation.  

While the F.B.I.’s original proposal would have required Internet communications services to each build in a wiretapping capacity, the revised one, which must now be reviewed by the White House, focuses on fining companies that do not comply with wiretap orders. The difference, officials say, means that start-ups with a small number of users would have fewer worries about wiretapping issues unless the companies became popular enough to come to the Justice Department’s attention.  

How fortunate for startups not to have any worries until they become popular. If only we shared the same concern for the Fourth Amendment that we have for Silicon Valley innovation.  

Sounds like a pretty good reason to use Pretty Good Privacy...which, in today's world, could be a red flag in itself. Why are you encrypting your communications? What do you have to hide?

Oh Jeez

Changes in the technology we use can be smooth, disruptive, hardly noticeable, or irritating.

When I opened Google Reader a few days ago and saw the pop-up, I thought it was a hack. "Google Reader will no longer be available after July 1, 2013." Yeah, right, I thought. Then Reader displayed all my unread articles, several of which concerned the upcoming demise of Reader.

Bummer. Now I have to find a replacement that will work on my iPad and my Droid.

Speaking of Droid, my carrier just updated mine. The update changed the settings of one of my email accounts so that when I deleted an email from my Droid it also deleted it from the server. Before the update it only deleted the local copy. I always use a mail client for that account and when I checked my account settings on the server, I learned that deleted items in my Trash folder get to exist one day before they are permanently deleted. So I lost a whole day of email. I think a couple of them seemed mildly important.

Computers make our lives so much easier, right? Excuse me. I'm just having a little whine with my jeez.

What If Your Battery Is Dead?

I recently used the word "sacrilege" in front of Steph and she asked me what the word meant. I pointed towards the dictionary at my desk, spelled the word for her, and told her to look it up. Instead she pulls out her iPhone and speaks to it.

What does sacrilege mean?

Up pops a web page with the definition, origin, and use in a sentence. 

The forlorn look from my dictionary said it all.

Sacrilege!

Back In Operational Status

I did not intend to go shopping on Black Friday, but a crashed hard drive forced me to go to the store. After returning home from the Black Friday Bike Ride, I headed out and picked up a 2TB replacement drive. While having a hard drive crash is a bad thing, it was fortunate for me that Geoff was home. He replaced my hard drive three years ago and is far more familiar with the innards of my iMac than I am. He swapped out the drive and Time Machine took over after booting up. I don't care that it took almost seven hours to restore my system. It's such a relief that when the restore is complete, I am right back to where I left off when the other drive crashed. No loss of data or applications.

Here is what it looked like when Geoff swapped out the hard drive three years ago. Same as yesterday. Thank you, Geoff!

No Posting For A Bit

The hard drive on my computer went bad tonight. Looks like I'm going shopping on Friday after the Black Friday Bike Ride.

Another Reason To Ride A Bike

Between 4:40 and 9:10 in the video, Avi Ruben discusses the techniques of hacking the modern car.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

In case you haven't heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act and how it would work, here's a pretty good explanation of how this legislation could change the Internet for us all.

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future.

Perhaps we think we're competing with China.

Now That's Customer Service

I was looking for businesses who convert VHS and film to digital format and found a site I could not navigate. Down at the bottom of the page I found this notice.

Created with Microsoft Publisher 2007 and Vista and optimized for the IE9 browser, with which it works perfectly.

If some pages look strange with other browsers we are sorry but we have no clue how to fix it.

We have been told that none of our links work when you are using some versions of Firefox, and we have no clue how to fix that either.

For Firefox users: Phone (number removed by me) or email (email address removed by me) and we will try to answer your questions until you can download an improved browser that is compatible with the new industry standard IE9.
I'm using Firefox on a Mac. No specific browser is considered the industry standard. Whether the arrogance is intentional or not, right back atcha Mr More Clueless Than You Know.

High Likelihood Of Fail

Today I had to create an account on a certain telecommunications giant's web site. I had three security questions to set answers to. These are great examples of poor security questions.
Three out of the four questions can easily change with time. There's always new restaurants, actors and singers. The first question is somewhat vague.
Here we have two decent questions out of five. Again, there are always new hobbies, films, and authors.
Two for five again. So for nine out of fourteen questions your answer could change in a year or two. Not good. If nothing else this highlights the need for password management software. Something you can not only keep your logins and passwords, but also the answers to your security questions. Why would you need the security question answers if you are properly logged in? Because some sites ask you a question or two when you want to change your account information.