Author: dssstrkl

Now we have a second crypto-fascist state politician promoting themselves and their pet cause over everyone’s privacy and security. Unlike the NY State Senator, ASM Jim Cooper just came out and said “Human trafficking trumps privacy”.

Well, if that’s the case, ASM Cooper, why not just introduce a bill to put a full surveillance suite into every private residence in California? After all, most of the human trafficking busts that occur in California seem to be of brothels operating out of private residences. If human trafficking trumps privacy, that should be OK, right?

I’m not going to go into how you can’t outlaw math, or how the issue is more about security than privacy, or any of the other countless arguments in favor of strong, universal end to end encryption. At this point, there’s really only one way to get through to these asshole politicians, since they don’t seem to be responding to reason:

We just need to use Larry Lessig’s idea and kick the bums out. If every legislator who introduces a fascist bill like this gets primaried or actually loses their seat, they’ll think twice about making everyone less safe in the name of law enforcement.

This may just be me getting into the old man yells at cloud phase of my life, but if there’s one thing I don’t need in my house, it’s an internet-connected “smart fridge.” It’s bad enough that pretty much every every smart TV or IoT thing either has shit security or straight-up spies on you, now Samsung apparently wants to know what and how often I eat.

The worst thing is, I’m pretty sure this is just the beginning. Every asshole megacorp in CES is probably going going to be pushing shit like this and then how long will it be until you can’t buy a new fridge or microwave or whatever without the thing wanting my wifi password? How long until they require my wifi password to work?

The worst thing is, its not even about the corporate spying, which leads to the government spying, its that I have absolutely zero faith these things will ship with decent security, and given these companies’ track records with supporting their phones, will bother offering security patches if when holes are found. In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy my dumb appliances not spying on me.

According to the rumor mill, that is. God, I hope not; I’ve been holding my breath for the Skylake 15s to land in early 2016, I really don’t want to keep hanging on to my 2011 MBP for that long. If that rumor’s true, and let’s face it, with Intel’s track records of late, it probably is, at least I’ll have a few more months to save my pennies. And since I’m writing this, I might as well jot down my wish list for this beast:

• High-res option (probably 4K. If Apple could squeeze 5K in there, it’ll be a miracle)
• Moar RAMs! I wants 32 or 64GB
• Moar storage. Start at 1TB and go to 3
• Real all-day battery
• Lighter would be nice
• High-end discrete graphics card
• I’d love the MacBook color options; silver’s gotten a bit stale

I assume the thing will have Thunderbolt 3, and am ambivalent about keeping MagSafe. I’m one of those digital nomads who has a desktop setup at work and home and can set up a temporary desktop pretty much anywhere, so the idea of plugging in a single cable is tempting. Hope those Thunderbolt 3 docks come down in price a bit though.

Basically, I need a workhorse that will chew through Modo, Unreal, Xcode, and Steam without breaking a sweat.

Welp, I done fucked up. It was mostly when I changed my website password and apparently managed to not update the entry in 1Password. Dur. But then there was the minor detail that I hadn’t installed the fucker correctly in the first place and couldn’t complete a password reset. FML. (And no, I hadn’t done any backups, because I’d get around to it at some point, right?  -_-)

Since in order to import a WordPress blog, you need the export XML file (which requires you to be able to log into the damn thing), I just just said fuck it and rebuild everything from scratch. Luckily, my Fever install has a separate database, so I didn’t have to rebuild my RSS feeds, which was really nice.

While it is annoying to lose all that has gone before, I don’t really care all that much and it is nice to be able to wipe the slate clean and start over. Hopefully with less stupid this time…

This is possibly the most perfect movie ever made:

USB-C is an open standard, so anyone can make USB-C accessories and cables, not just Apple. More than that, Monoprice’s $35 USB-C to HDMI adaptor makes Apple’s USB-C to USB-C, HDMI, and USB-A adaptor look pretty damn reasonable, doesn’t it?

George Lucas, via Ars: 

“The [story ideas] I sold to Disney, they [made] the decision that they didn’t really want to do those, so they made up their own,” Lucas said in an interview with Cinema Blend. “It’s not the ones I originally wrote.”

He says that like its a bad thing.

From The Independent:

David Cameron is a right-wing reactionary neocon in the same mold as Darth Cheny and Bush II, so this isn’t surprising. At all.

The Prime Minister said today that he would stop the use of methods of communication that cannot be read by the security services even if they have a warrant. But that could include popular chat and social apps that encrypt their data, such as WhatsApp.Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime also encrypt their data, and could fall under the ban along with other encrypted chat apps like Telegram.

This next one, probably meant to be rhetorical, actually has a real answer:

“In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which […] we cannot read?”

Yes, we do.

Between this and the noises that US law enforcement have been making over Apple’s and Google’sencryption by default, 2015 should be a very interesting time in the new crypto war.

Update: WhatsApp is bigger than SMS, and iMessage, being huge, might also be.