News & Comment

From the guardian:

Revealed: US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet

• NSA and GCHQ unlock encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records
• $250m-a-year US program works covertly with tech companies to insert weaknesses into products
• Security experts say programs 'undermine the fabric of the internet'

3046 comments

$250 million? Is that all? Must be a slow news day. I've always been dubious about using powerful computers to crack encrypted messages. There is so much encrypted data being sent, and even powerful, high-speed computers take time to crack an encrypted message, I doubt they would be able to decrypt it all, and if you didn't, how would you know you got the important stuff? How would you know you didn't miss the one key message? Seems like using a shotgun on a swarm of mosquitos. Even if each shotgun pellet takes out a mosquito, it's not really going to have any effect on the swarm.
    The key piece of news here is that our sooper-secret spy agencies don't need their sooper-dooper computers, not when the outfits doing the encrypting install backdoors which allow access to the original, unencrypted data. The BBC comments:

But some experts argue that such efforts could actually undermine national security, noting that any back doors inserted into encryption programs can be exploited by those outside the government.

The thing that really gets me though is 3046 comments. I understand a lot of people have something to say about this, but who is going to read 3000 comments?

Sazan Island

The Brits are running some kind of military exercise on Sazan Island  I had never heard of it, so I had to look it up. I was surprised to find that it is not in the British Isles, but on the coast of Albania. It is outside the city of Vlore and just across the Strait of Otranto from the boot heel of Italy.  It's not very big, only two square miles in area, but its position has made it important to the military since forever. Not much to see, but I did find this picture by iglipustina. What I don't understand is how he got a picture that is half underwater without getting any water droplets on the top half of the image. Good trick, that.
   I also found a page of Albanian mountain scenes that are pretty amazing. Fairy tales got nothing on this place.

Weedman Nullification

More info at the Fully Informed Jury Association

Oh! I like this:

"I should be 10 months into a 10-year prison sentence," says Ed Forchion aka NJ Weedman. 'The only reason I'm standing here is because I happened to know about jury nullification. And I used it.'"

No word on what this raggedy brown man's jury looked like. I shouldn't say raggedy, it's just those dang dreadlocks are so friggin' ugly. I guess some people like that stuff. Via Dustbury and Ann Althouse, who I thought might be a nutcase, but evidently I mixed her up with somebody else.

Golden Warrior God

U.S. soldiers of B Troop, 1st squadron of 4th US Cavalry prepare for a night foot patrol in a COP (Combat outpost) Sar Howza in Paktika province October 26, 2012. Photo: Goran Tomasevic

Shaper

Helping Jack move some stuff out of his mom's house yesterday and I noticed this baby shaper* sitting in the corner of the basement. Kinda cute, in a machiny kind of way. Shapers are the original stupid machine tool. I've never understood the rationale behind them. What they do is shave a strip of metal off the top of a block. The top part, the one with the red label on it, is the ram and it just goes back and forth all day long. The cutting bit is fastened to the end (left, in this picture). All the brains, such as they are, are in the table, which moves over just a hair after every stroke of the ram. The idea is you can clamp a block of metal to the table, turn the machine on, and it will plane your block of metal down to the thickness you desire. Eventually. Turn it on and let it run all day long. Here's a YouTube video of one in action.
    Seems to me a band saw and a milling machine would be quicker, but maybe I'm missing something, like you don't need any fancy rotary cutters with a shaper. You can just sharpen up a single tooth and clamp it to the front of the ram and away you go.
    The only time I saw a shaper at work it was working on a two foot thick piece of steel, intent on taking it down to one foot. It was considerable bigger than this one.

*that's a baby-sized shaper, not a machine for shaping babies.

Sellwood Bridge

Stopped at the old ferry landing to check on the progress of the Sellwood Bridge replacement project. This thing is a little nuts. The bridge is old and scored a negative value on the official bridge integrity scale, so it needed to be replaced. It's the only bridge between Ross Island (2 miles downstream) and Oregon City (8 miles upstream). It is kind of crucial, so they didn't want to just knock it down and then build a new one because it would put a real crimp in traffic for the year or however long it will take to build the new bridge. For some reason the new bridge needed to go in the same place as the old one, so they moved the old bridge over and built new temporary ramps on either end. You can see one of the concrete piers that used to hold up the old bridge is not holding up anything anymore. All the black steel girder work is temporary stuff built to hold up the old bridge and facilitate building the new one.
    Since the old bridge is only two lanes you might think that they might make the new one four lanes, but you'd be wrong. A four lane bridge could really use a four lane road connected to it, and Sellwood, you see, an established community, doesn't want some four lane freeway built through the center of their town.
    This bridge was built at the same time, and under the same bond measure as the Burnside bridge. The Burnside bridge is a six lane draw bridge in downtown Portland and it got the lion's share of the bond money. The Sellwood bridge was built with what money was left over.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Red Eyes And Tears

I was playing 30 Days in the Hole so much I was afraid I was going to burn out on it, so I started looking around for something else, and I remembered this group and A Place to Bury Strangers. This morning this song was running through my head, so I had to dig it up. I looked at a couple-three YouTube videos to see if there was one with a good video. I found one with footage from a concert, but high pitched guitar riff that starts the chorus at the 55 second mark in this one was missing. WTF? Did someone kill the high frequencies? Or is it just a fact of life with live recordings? The video on this one is certainly psychedelic, but it doesn't do much for me.