They are my oldest and deadliest enemy. You cannot trust them.
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.
Sunday, January 18
Charge Of The Rights Brigade
Fascists to right of them,
Fascists to left of them,
Fascists in front of them
Splutter'd and blunder'd;
Storm'd at with speech and spell,
Boldly they code and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the cryptographers.
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Let One Hundred Fascists Bloom
The leader of the free world weighs in on the debate:
The leader of the free world weighs in on the debate:
"If we find evidence of a terrorist plot… and despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address, we can’t penetrate that, that’s a problem,†Obama said. He said he believes Silicon Valley companies also want to solve the problem. "They’re patriots.â€They may be patriots, Mr Obama. You are not.
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Friday, January 16
In Other News...
The Oxford University Press issued a guideline to authors not to mention bacon for fear of offending unspecified parties, possibly Presbyterians.
The Oxford University Press issued a guideline to authors not to mention bacon for fear of offending unspecified parties, possibly Presbyterians.
The publisher didn't specify whether they were referring to Roger, Francis, or Kevin.
(If this is a joke, then it's a very widely sourced one.)
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Standing On The Doorstep, Leaning On The Bell
Reactions to the appalling murder of the staff at Charlie Hebdo have been, shall we say, mixed. The culprits have been chased down and shot, which is only as it should be. Millions of people and dozens of world leaders have turned out in support. The first issue published since the attack sold out immediately - and the print run has been scaled up from sixty thousand to five million to meet demand.
Meanwhile, major media outlets reporting on the events have taken great care to censor the images of the cartoons at the centre of all this, which makes one think that they have forgotten what journalism is. Pope Francis has said "One cannot make fun of faith." Which is odd, because it's actually pretty easy. And the usual assemblage of useful idiots has come crawling out of the woodwork to say "Of course I support freedom of speech, but -" To paraphrase Robert Heinlein's character Lazarus Long:
The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: "Of course I support freedom of speech, but -" is to place a period after the word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about.But - sorry.
In all this the most shameful response so far - and I hope the most shameful response ever - has been that of British Prime Minister David Cameron.
And let me now address very directly this issue of how we have the right legal framework to intercept the communications of potential terrorists. There are two issues here. One is what is called communications data. That is not the content of a phone call; it is just who made which call to which person, and when. As everybody knows, this vital communications data is absolutely crucial, not just in terrorism, but in finding missing people; it's vital in murder investigations; it's used in almost every single serious crime investigation.(I couldn't find a transcript of this speech online, so I transcribed it myself. I apologise for any errors I may have introduced.)
And what matters, in simple terms, is that we can access this communications data whether people are using a fixed phone, a mobile phone, or more modern ways of communicating via the internet. We have already legislated in this parliament to safeguard this vital data, because it was under threat from a particular European directive. But it is important in the future that we make sure we can get this data when people are using the more modern forms of communication that are being made possible through the internet. So that is one piece of additional legislation that will be necessary.
The second thing, which is more contentious, is about accessing the content of a telephone call, or another form of communication. And here again the same problem exists. Will we be able to access the content as the internet and new ways of communicating develop?
Now I have a very simple principle to apply here, which should be at the heart of the legislation that will be necessary. The simple principle is this:
In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people, which, even in extremis, with a signed warrant from the Home Secretary personally, that we cannot read?
Now, up until now, governments of this country have said no; we must not have such a means of communication.
That is why, in extremis, it's been possible to read someone's letter. That is why, in extremis, it's been possible to listen in to someone's telephone call. That is why the same applies with mobile communications.
Now, let me stress again, this cannot happen unless the Home Secretary personally signs a warrant. We have a better system for safeguarding this very this very intrusive power than probably any other country I can think of.
But the question remains, are we going to allow a means of communication where it simply isn't possible to do that?
And my answer to that question is no we must not.
Now there are a number of things I need to say about this. In order:
Mr Cameron, you have no right to dictate the means of communication available to the British public.
My outrage at your position is only slight tempered by the fact that you have no power to dictate the means of communication available to the British public. Encryption is mathematics, and you cannot legislate mathematics.
You seem to believe that all you need to do is contact a small number of major companies and insist that they install back doors in their software for your spies, and that will be the end of it. If that is indeed your belief, then, Mr Cameron, you have been quite remarkably poorly advised, and should fire everyone, immediately.
First, back doors in communications systems are security breaches. Security breaches get exploited. That's simply what happens. Those major companies are not going to talk to you.
Second, any competent programmer can deploy an unbreakably secure communications system in a day. Making it user-friendly, making it attractive, making it scale, making the idiot users select sane passwords, those are the hard problems. Encryption we've solved.
To actually implement your proposed legislation would mean prohibiting computers from the United Kingdom entirely. Not even North Korea has gone that far.
The first duty of any government is to keep our country and our people safe.No, Mr Cameron. The first duty of any government is to not become a threat to the very people it serves. All else comes after that.
If you read the United States' Bill of Rights, you will notice that it does not specify what the government can do. It specifies what the government cannot do. It says, Congress shall make no law...
George Orwell wrote us a powerful warning in 1984. Mr Cameron, what he was warning us about was you. Orwell didn't warn us against attackers from outside, but against our own principles leading us into disaster. The death of the soul of a nation comes not from invasion, but from a thousand cuts to the freedom of its people.
Even the NSA, in its blatant breaches of fundamental human rights and the US Constitution, had the grace to be embarrassed, and to carry out its acts in secret.
That you could even present your position in public tells the world that something is very, very rotten in the state of Britain.
Mr Cameron, you are not just taking the first steps down the road to fascism; you are standing on fascism's doorstep, leaning on the bell, peering in the window to see if anyone is home.
There is still time to step back. But the sand is running out of the hourglass very quickly.
Update: The Guardian has something worthwhile to say on this. That's twice in one week. Remarkable.
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Saturday, January 10
They're Not Wrong ALL The Time
Nowhere in Farago's pro-censorship argument does he address, or even fleetingly consider, the possibility that the ideas that the state will forcibly suppress will be ideas that he likes, rather than ideas that he dislikes. People who want the state to punish the expression of certain ideas are so convinced of their core goodness, the unchallengeable rightness of their views, that they cannot even conceive that the ideas they like will, at some point, end up on the Prohibited List.Glenn Greenwald, of all people, writing in The Guardian, of all places. Even a blind pig finds a self-evident truth now and then.
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Friday, January 09
A Very Modest Proposal
The greatest satire of modern "liberal" thought you'll read all year.
The greatest satire of modern "liberal" thought you'll read all year.
This new human rights law will set up state surveillance of intolerant citizens, including those who voice anti-feminist views and those who voice overt approval of a totalitarian ideology. Intolerant citizens will not only be arrested, but will also be sent to special re-education facilities designed to instill values of tolerance, and the law will also require all media outlets to promote a climate of tolerance. The law carefully takes freedom of expression into account.The only question is whether this is intended as satire.
Update: The 21st century's answer to Jonathan Swift insists that she's serious.
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Monday, January 05
Next Problem
Most of my remaining errors were being caused by Windows Error Reporting.
Most of my remaining errors were being caused by Windows Error Reporting.
This thing is awful if you're trying to run older software. Turn it off and suddenly things work again.
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Sunday, January 04
Ticket #12350 (New Defect)
Hardware Virtualisation support not detected if Hyper-V installed.
Hardware Virtualisation support not detected if Hyper-V installed.
Which means I can't create 64-bit virtual machines in VirtualBox, which was kind of the point. (And CentOS 7 is 64-bit only.)
It's something of a relief, though, as my first thought was a hardware or BIOS issue.
Update: So I turned off Hyper-V (which required two reboots, but was easy enough) and now it works.
And that's the hardest problem I've had with this install so far.
Why haven't I run into this before? Because Hyper-V is only included in Windows 8 Pro, and I've only used Unpro before now.
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How Did We Cope?
Steam.
Steam.
Library.
Click. Scroll scroll scroll. Shift-click.
Right-click.
Install.
Disk Space Required: 406849 MB
Disk Space Available: 3131066 MB
OK.
more...
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Saturday, January 03
Kei
So, my New Year's Resolution was to set up Kei, my shiny new Windows PC that has been waiting to be assembled and installed for... More than two years.
So, my New Year's Resolution was to set up Kei, my shiny new Windows PC that has been waiting to be assembled and installed for... More than two years.
And done. Not perfect, but done.* Finished about 3AM today.
Since I had a lot of parts to play with, even though many are two years old, the result is pretty good: 8-core 3.6GHz CPU, Radeon 7950, 32GB RAM, 2 x 960GB SSDs, 5 x 2TB disks, and a Blu-Ray burner for burning all my Blu-Rays. 22 USB ports (8 x USB 3 and 14 x USB 2), and 12 x 1/8" audio ports for that perfect 16.2 mix.
Currently Kei is hooked up to a spare 1600x1200 monitor and I'm sharing the keyboard and mouse via Synergy, which works perfectly except that the Windows Do you want to allow this program to do stuff? dialog flicks me to the primary monitor on Nagi every time. (Update: The solution for this is the obvious one - plug the keyboard into Kei and share in the opposite direction. Works great now.)
Now I have a bit of an install party going on. I built Nagi late in 2008 when the original Kei went flaky due to faulty memory. So Nagi has everything installed. Despite a few hiccups over the years, that adds up to 841 applications.
I'm hoping to whittle that down a bit. Really, I just need my JetBrains IDEs, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, Visual Studio, Sony's creative software, Notepad++, Cygwin, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, Firefox DE, iTunes, Clementine, Steam, Origin, Xshell, Xftp, Zoom Player, Python and Ruby and about a hundred libraries for each, uTorrent, Bryce, Carrara, Hexagon, Poser, virtual machines running CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 14.04...
Hmm. This might take a while.
The other thing I need to do is decide on a new monitor; my Dell U2711 is visibly declining. Right now, my short list is either the Philips 40" 3840x2160 monitor or a couple of Dell's new U2515H 2560x1440 screens. The Dell is about half the price of the Philips and has about half the pixel count, so it all balances out. The only real problem with the Philips monitor is that it has a static television-type stand, where the Dell is height adjustable and rotates on all three axes. Well, that and 40" is huge.
* As usual, the disk layout isn't what I wanted. Windows 8.1 denies the existence of my motherboard's RAID functions, and it also denies the existence of either my Adaptec RAID card or my cheap dual-port SATA card, so after much messing around I'm left with RAID-0 for the local drives and one drive not doing anything at all. Plus the SSDs aren't on the first two SATA ports, so it seems that Windows put a boot partition on one of the disk drives, so if that ever dies Kei won't boot any more.
But those minor issues aside, the dual SSDs, eight cores, and 32GB of RAM really makes a difference.
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