A Peculiar Blog

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In today’s world, one of *THE* biggest things is fuel prices and the need to save money on fuel and also just plain be nicer to the environment by not using so much. After all, to hear some people talk, you’d think that if the Earth were to be looking for a health insurance quote, no agency in the galaxy would take it as a client (thoughI personally think that while being environmentally friendly is a good idea, we’re not in “global warming” either.) Anyway, one of the things that people are doing about this is carpooling in greater numbers than ever before.

There’s even a web startup, PickupPal that describes itself as “an intelligent route matching system which enables users to easily find like-minded, connected people who are going the same way.”

Sound like a good idea? Yeah, I thought so too. I don’t have any need to carpool myself but if I lived in a major city and had to commute all over the place I’d give it a shot.

Unfortunately, the bus companies in Ontario have a problem with it. [click to hear the Ontario bus company reaction as I see it (wav file)] They took the site to court, and actually won. As a result, the site was fined (?!?!?!) and a really restrictive set of rules put in place to “define” carpooling and make it harder for people to use the site in Ontario.

Fortunately, the rest of us don’t have to live with *quite* so restrictive a set of rules… for the time being anyway. How long before big business takes over the world or has it already made too much progress?

Technorati Tags: restrictive rules, ontario, pickuppal, carpooling, stupid law, lawsuit, carpooling rules, ridiculous decision

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I saw a question recently from somebody who was looking for a secure Instant Messaging client that was both open source and could be implemented across several platforms. While I haven’t had a whole lot of need for Instant Messaging and I have no idea why most people would need secure IM except for planning those Orlando vacations getaways where you leave the (presumeably grown) kids at home (or send them someplace else for their vacation), I’ve done a bit of reading and checked out some software.

The big winner that answers all of the stated requirements is to use a Jabber server and Pidgin clients with the OTR plugin.

Jabber is an open source IM server that’s been gaining in popularity in the last year or more, enough so that Jabber has been bought by Cisco. While that means that there’s no doubt all sorts of changes going on, including the fact that a casual look at Cisco’s site didn’t turn up an easy to find section about Jabber, there are plenty of open source implementations of the Jabber protocol.

Openfire (formerly know as Wildfire) is an Open Source freeware package that’s not only stable and reportedly easy to use, it’s also under active development which usually means it’s here to stay.

Pidgin is an IM client that has the ability to connect to accounts on a variety of servers such as AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, MySpaceIM and of course, XMPP (also known as Jabber). There is quite a number of plugins available for it to customise it for your needs.

Pidgin is also available in a Portable Apps version that can be installed on a flash drive.

One of these is the OTR pluggin. The OTR plugin, which is also available for several other IM clients including Miranda, KDE’s Kopete, mICQ, and several others.

Like I said earlier, I don’t have much, if any need for Secure IM these days but if I did then this is the solution that I’d use.

Technorati Tags: jabber, im, secure im, otr encryption, instant messaging, secure instant messaging, pidgin, otr

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I see that the Labor department has released new figures concerning unemployment and that according to their figures, unemployment is at a fourteen year high of 6.5% as of October ‘08. There’s a problem with this figure however. I believe that it’s a lot lower than the actual number of people unemployed.

It’s actually quite simple really, the figures that the Labor department is working with are based on statistics of how many people are drawing unemployment. So if you add to that figure the people who can no longer draw unemployment because they’ve exhausted it without coming up with work, you end up with a much higher figure.

While I guess it doesn’t matter in a way because that sort of reporting is just relative anyway, a benchmark that can be used to compare one point with another, I think that it’s also a disservice to those people in that condition. In a way, by reaching the point of having used up all resources, they’ve been dropped off of the radar and are now effectively invisible.

For a very long time we Americans thought of ours as the greatest country on Earth and there are still yet some who believe this. If we’d like others to believe that we’re the great nation that we want to believe ourselves to be, then people falling through the cracks wouldn’t make such a large percentage of the population.

Unemployment is only one way in which people manage to fall through the cracks in the system, finding others is actually pretty easy. One good way is to spend some time finding out how many people are buried in an avalanche of medical bills that they cannot avoid or pay.

Technorati Tags: unemployment, government statistics, socially invisible, system failures

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With growing concerns about privacy a lot of people and businesses are doing more to secure their data. Everything from locking the drawers on computer desks to having secure passwords in use on everything.

The problem is that even then it’s sometimes possible to retrieve this information by reading the Windows page file. This file contains the virtual memory used by Windows. This means that it will almost certainly contain sensitive information including passwords and copies of recently edited or viewed files.

Fortunately the fix is easy, you just need to have Windows clear the page file during shutdown. Doing this involves editing your registry. It’s an easy enough edit to do but it’s still a good idea to use a registry tool like RegSeeker to make a backup copy of your current registry before editing anything.

Once you’ve backed it up, find this value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Locate the key: ClearPageFileAtShutdown and change it to 1

Save and quit the editor. Now when you shut down or reboot, the page file will be deleted every time. It means taking a bit longer to shut down or reboot but the benefit is that there is less chance that there will be a page file with copies of important documents and passwords in it.

Technorati Tags: security, edit registry, delete page file, how to, pagefile, passwords

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There’s a story on New Scientist that’s just a bit un-nerving.

The Pentagon is seeking contractors to set them up with a “Multi-Robot Pursuit System”. This would essentially be a pack of robots under remote control, going after a human target.

Given their previously shown efforts involving armed military robots, I can’t help thinking just how dumb an idea this can be.

Kinda along the lines of “I-Robot” meets “1984″.

No Thanks.

Technorati Tags: pentagon, robot hunt, robot persuit system, military robots

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There’s an article on the Washington Post site that I think everybody should read and think about.

It talks about some of the details of the capability to mount visual surveillance from orbiting satellites and other sources. For one thing, lets not make any mistake about just what these things can see. How does a resolution of from four inches to one foot sound?

With that kind of resolution they could read the headlines off of the morning newspaper while you’re outside picking it up. The thing is that with all the video they’re able to get, once they come up with a way to index all of this material handling it and searching it will become really fast.

Does this sound a bit like Big Brother’s dream toy? Yeah, I thought so too. The question is “How do we pull the plug on it?”. This growing trend of allowing more surveillance, censorship and government control of our lives in the name of things that on the surface, sound like good causes is really alarming.

Yeah, I get it. The big argument in favor of asinine nonsense like this is the “war on terror” that we keep being told about. Now I don’t discount the fact that there are terrorists out there that would be only too happy to die in the process of killing as many of us as they could. However I’ve come to have some really serious doubts as to whether the terrorism problem is *quite* as bad as it’s being painted. I doubt seriously that it is.

Just like the growing internet censorship that’s being allowed to happen in the name of stopping child pornography. I know that stuff like that is out there, I’m also pretty sure that it’s not nearly as widespread as government, law enforcement and the media would have us all believe. If it was, most people could probably expect to accidentally surf into a child porn site at least a couple of times and / or occasionally receive email spam with graphic images.

I’ve absolutely never heard of either thing happening in over a decade of being online.

Not once.

Ever.

I think that’s telling all by itself.

It’s past time for the sheeple to wake up and reclaim their humanity and human rights.

Technorati Tags: human rights, misuse of authority, war on terror, excuse to control, domestic spying, abuse of authority, civil liberties, video surveillance, darpa, surveillance, child porn, bogus threats, internet censorship, spying, satellite surveillance, censorship

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Once again I’m catching up on old Slashdot mail and I ran across a headline that declared: “FBI warns of sweeping global threat to U.S. cybersecurity”

Then in the article itself I read:

The FBI’s newly appointed chief of cyber security
warned today that ‘a couple dozen’ countries are eager to hack US
government, corporate, and military networks. While he refused to provide
country-specific details

I got as far as “While he refused to provide country-specific details” and lost interest in the rest of the article. Why? Because it’s yet another government entity that’s all too willing to blatt off with all this scary sounding but really quite empty threats to our security in order to justify yet another program that’s going to invade our privacy or give the government more authority that it shouldn’t have.

Saying things that amount to “the bad guys don’t like us and will try to do bad things to us” is right up there with saying a really overweight person might be interested in trying Fenphedra to help them lose weight. It’s what in our house is called a “DUH Moment”. Something that really goes without saying, so obvious that anybody with even one pair of working neurons can figure out without any help at all.

I think it’s way past time that these various agencies are required to provide sufficient details so that we can have some idea of WHY they think they need this or that extra special authority (that no righteous agency actually needs in a free society).

The days when vague threats and hollow warnings are good enough reason to get more power need to end. It’s time to start requiring these agencies to put up or shut up.

Technorati Tags: fbi, government agencies, too much authority, big government, security, cybersecurity

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… To take a moment for a bit of bragging.

You see, not long ago we got a new camcorder and I’m sure that everybody agrees that getting something like that means that you MUST do a new video with it a.s.a.p.. That’s what I’ve done.

It’s not my first video or anything like that but it’s easily the best one I’ve done so far. I even got to use an sfx trick in it that I recently learned how to do.

Here’s the result:

… and now back to our regularly scheduled opinions

Technorati Tags: video, sfx, video effects

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As if Briton wasn’t already one of, if not actually THE most surveilled nation on the planet, their government has decided to spend billions on a program that is intended to monitor every phone call, email and all internet usage.

And I thought WE had a problem with domestic spying here in the US!

As you can easily predict, the reason for doing all this is not to provide work to unemployed drivers of moving trucks. They’re of course waving the very tired, worn out flag of the war on terrorism to justify this wholesale invasion of privacy by a government.

It’s things like this that are part of the reason that governments need to be not only watched, but held in check by their citizens. They seem to have a bad habit of forgetting that the only reason they exist is to serve the citizens.

How long before they not only spy on everybody, but start censoring anything that’s contrary to what the government likes?

This kind of thing is also a good reason why everybody should have and regularly use the strongest encryption, privacy and anonymity tools available. It’s not about having anything to hide, it’s about some things in life are none of the government’s flippin business!

Technorati Tags: war on terror, monitor internet, monitor email, monitor phone, domestic spying, privacy

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There’s a piece on PCPro about “Windows Cloud” being released soon. There’s all the usual Microsoft company line stuff about how innovative and wonderful they are for pushing windows into “cloud computing”.. yada yada yada PHHHHBBBBBT!

It’s kinda funny really, to read about Ballmer talking about computing security in nearly the same breath as “cloud computing”. That whole concept is fraught with potential security problems. I’ll admit to not knowing a whole heck of a lot about it, but to me “cloud computing” is like saying that foods with tons of sugar are the best fat burners because they amp up the metabolism in the “sugar high”. It’s BS.

Putting your computing tasks out into “the cloud” is just ASKING somebody to find a way to mess with your stuff.

Part of what Ballmer was quoted as saying was downright offensive:

Asked if the company had learned anything from Vista’s turbulent release, Ballmer ruefully responded: “The biggest trade off we made was sacrificing security for compatibility. I’m not sure the end-users really appreciated that trade off.”

I’m not sure Ballmer really appreciates the end users that would cheerfully make him eat a printout of the source code for his precious vista.

What the article is saying says to me that not only did Vista break a bunch of stuff, the next version is going to break anything that Vista didn’t. Oh yeah, Ballmer did say something about that:

“so with Windows 7 it’s not ‘a let’s break everything in Vista’, it’s ‘let’s take everything to the next level’.”

Note that while he’s talking about not breaking anything in Vista, he hasn’t said a thing about not breaking more stuff from anything prior to Vista.

By the way, I had occasion to speak to a guy at a computer shop about a problem with a Vista laptop and when I made a crack about how my next machine is going to be a linux box he said that he’s been hearing a lot of that kind of talk in the last few months.

Gee, I wonder if Ballmer really appreciated his end users while he had them? With the migration to Linux increasing the way it seems to be, I’d have to say no, he probably didn’t.

Technorati Tags: windows vista, cloud computing, security, compatibility, microsoft, ballmer, windows 7

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