By
Thanh Christopher Nguyen
27 Jul 2004
I work constantly. CONSTANTLY. I get up at 2am, shower, and get into the news room by 3am, to work a six and a half hour shift. Then, I get home by 10-10:30, to get four-4&1/2 hours of sleep so I can work another six and a half hour shift managing a convenience store. So… When I get a call when I’m not at work, I’m not happy, because if I’m not at work, I’m in bed.
<p>My sister called me in the middle of the night. Her “friends” called her at work, and offered to pick her up. They were to hang out for the evening. She thus went out with them, and at some point in the night they informed her that she would need her own ride home. This was long after hours for parents to come pick up a fully grown woman some thirty miles away. She waited it out as one of the “friends” said he would take her home, reluctantly. They went into a pizza parlor around midnight, two hours past when she said she should be home by. After their first meal, they decided to get more food, which they said they would not do. Then, all of them proceeded to pound back beer after beer, leaving no-one fit to drive home except my sister.</p>
<p>Finally, around one in the morning, they stagger out of the pizza joint, arguing with her, bitching at her for being a pest, and wanting to be manly men and drive their own drunk asses home. After a big yelling and pissing contest, my sister is in the driver’s seat, and they begin toking it up in the car. My sister and I have very strict rules when it comes to drugs and alcohol concerning vehicles. I don’t care if you’re free-basing next to me, but if we’re in a car, and especially if I am driving, you’re a fucking dillhole. So.. To make this long thing as short as I can from here on out… The cops tail my sister for some time, then I get a call from her.</p>
<p>Luckily, my sister did not go to prison, nor incur any fines. The cop gave her no trouble, but she did find herself stranded far from home. I had to be late to work, after getting no sleep to begin with because some pricks don’t understand the concept of “tact.”</p>
<p>If you offer to pick someone up, you’re offering to take that person home.<br />
If you are not driving the vehicle, even if you are the owner of the vehicle, you should be subscribing to the comfort zones of the driver – <span class=”caps”>ESPECIALLY</span> when the driver is doing you a <span class=”caps”>HUGE</span> favor and driving your drunk ass home because you are too adolescent to drink responsibly.<br />
If you fuck with my sister, you’re going to find your car exploding when you hit a hefty speed-bump because I have deflated your tires and refilled them with hydrogen.</p>
<p>I’m not angry about the phone call. I am very glad my sister called, that I could help her out, and that she looks to me for help and advice. I’m angry, as you can see, about this S.O.B. that has no tact, commom sense, or dignity. I swear I would be a much more violent man if it were not illegal to be so. But, I suppose a couple of punches won’t get me in too much trouble. And it will make me, and my sister, feel better.</p>
By
tuck
16 Jul 2004
The mystical crossover caught me off guard, leaving me standing there, arms hanging, in a silent battle to keep my composure. The experience was caused by a particular piece of Mr. Hu Youyi’s collection of antique pianos in his museum on Gulongyu.
The piece, an automatic piano, was made in 1928 by the Haines Bros. company of New York. Its mint condition and warm sound denotes an instrument well loved through the years. Of the 70-plus pieces in the museum, our guide revealed that this unit, which rests in a private section off-limits to the public, has the best sound of them all. He wanted us to hear for ourselves. As it began its soft chords, I felt the distinctive pang of homesickness suddenly creep into my throat.
Unlike a normal automatic, this piano uses a particular kind of playing mechanism called “Ampico” and is categorized as a “Reproducing Piano”. They’re called such because they not only play the individual notes of whatever song has been inserted (the medium being a roll of grooved paper), but they actually reproduce the “keyboard touch” of the person who originally recorded the sheet, including the intensity with which each note was struck. This allows for perfect replication of the player’s individual sound and tonal nuances. In a sense, it’s not really a replication at all; nor is it a reproduction: it’s the actual sound of a person playing a song on that piano at the time of recording. In this case, it was an American named J. Milton Delcamp playing his song in the late 1920s, and as he gently struck those keys, his notes struck me nearly 76 years later, on the other side of the world. Rather than sound, however, it was location that caused the mystical to occur.
The people and places of my China life belong to their own segment of my reality–one that seems non-transferable, unable to cross over to my American life. As far as its notes could reach, however, this piano was able to bridge into Gulongyu, forming a bubble of New York around itself. Upon entering there, I pleasantly ached for that place and wondered whether the player, in that far-away time, ever imagined that someday his sound would be immortalized in China. It was then that I realized the mystical effect of “place” on this listening: only by standing in that room here in China could the Haines Bros. piano, that song, and the ghost of Delcamp create what they had for me. The beauty of the moment was that the song needed China to exist as it was. In any other place, it simply would have been a different song.
The old Antico is in a marvelous setting on Gulongyu–a piano heaven–and its one warm, melancholic tune, “Salut D’Amour”, will live on, sharing a kind of beauty it never could have achieved at home.
By
emile
16 Jul 2004
From the Center for Democracy and Technology:
The Senate Commerce Committee may decide on Tuesday, July 20, whether to extend to VOIP and the Internet the FBI design mandates contained in a law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). That law required traditional phone companies to meet certain design standards to allow phone calls to be wiretapped easily, but when it was passed in 1994 Congress recognized the unique architecture of the Internet and explicitly excluded the Internet from the scope of its surveillance design mandates. Congress should not extend CALEA to VOIP and the Internet -- it would be bad for innovation, cost, privacy and security. Everyone should tell their Senator that CALEA is a straightjacket, ill-suited to the Internet. While there may be legitimate law enforcement concerns with regard to wiretapping the Internet, they must be addressed in a way appropriate to the Internet. See http://www.cdt.org/action/voip/ for more information.
By
Miguel Diaz
16 Jul 2004
A couple of new things I’ve noticed about the site…
<ul>
<li>You can’t edit your comments! I think (at least) if I’m logged in when I add a comment I should be able to edit it after the fact…that way people would know the conference I have in <span class="caps">NYC</span> is the week of the 16th…</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Ummm…there was something else that just bugged me but it got lost in my attention span void…</li>
</ul>
By
anders pearson
05 Jul 2004
since i digitally sign all of my outgoing email, i’m often put in the position of having to explain what digital signatures are and why one might want to use them. i’ve tried to find a good explanation on the web aimed at the layperson, but i haven’t found anything decent yet, so here’s my best shot at it.
summary: digital signatures are a way of ensuring that a document (such as an email) is from who it says it is and hasn’t been tampered with along the way.
the first thing that you should understand is that email is not at all secure. email protocols were designed back when the internet was used almost exclusively by the military and academic communities. it was a trusting environment and there wasn’t much thought given to malicious hackers. the result is that it is trivially easy to forge email. any clever 12 year old could probably show you how. ie, just because the ‘From:’ line of an email says the message is from grandma, doesn’t mean that it is. many of the Outlook worms that are floating around trick people into opening them by forging the ‘From:’ field so it looks like a message from a friend.
it’s also not very difficult for someone in the right position to change the contents of an email. as an email travels from the sender to the recipient, it usually passes through several different mail servers. anyone with administrative access (legitimate or not) to any of the servers on the path could substitute their own message and no one would be the wiser. another consequence of the insecure design of email systems is that there is no privacy. along the way there are many chances for nefarious people to read the email that you send. you should never write anything in an email that you wouldn’t be comfortable writing on the back of a postcard.
i shouldn’t really have to explain why this can be dangerous. there are an endless number of bad things that a criminal can do when they can impersonate someone. use your imagination or just google for “identity theft”.
now, perhaps you can see the need for some way of being sure that an email really is from who it says it is. this is what digital signatures do. i won’t try to bore you with too much explanation of how it works, but at a surface level, it’s fairly straightforward.
when you sign a message, it makes use of a ‘key’ that is unique to you. actually the key has two parts, both just extremely large numbers; one public, which anyone in the world can look at, and one private which only you can see and should be kept as a carefully guarded secret. the two parts are related to each other with a special mathematical relationship, but knowing the public key won’t give away any clues about the private key. indeed, to be useful, you need to make your public key widely available. mine is online here and there are servers on the web that just host public keys. my public key could also be downloaded from one of them here.
when a message is signed, it’s converted to a number (on a computer, everything is stored as a number at some level anyway, so this is a no-brainer) and a mathematical operation is performed using the message’s number and the sender’s private key. the result is the ‘signature’ of the message and it gets sent along with the message. if even a single byte of the message changes, the signature would be entirely different. since the private key was involved in the operation, no one else could generate the same signature for the message without stealing your private key. the actual math involved is fairly advanced and i won’t try to explain it here. the important part is that there is a similar operation that anyone else can perform using the message, the signature, and the public part of your key that will tell them whether the signature was really generated using the public key’s private counterpart (remember that there is a special mathematical relationship between the public and private keys). ie, they can use the signature and your public key to verify that it was signed with a particular key and hasn’t been modified since it was signed.
that’s a very rough sketch of the theory behind it. if you really want to understand more, read this introduction to cryptography and then just start googling. now for some more practical information. there are two main approaches to digitally signing email: PGP and S/MIME. both have their strengths and weaknesses. PGP is more ubiquitous and it’s what i use, so that’s what i’ll explain and recommend. both also let you encrypt email (solving the privacy problem), but for that, both the sender and recipient need to have keys. actually, the primary purpose of both is encryption, but i think that for most people, handling signatures is a more pressing need.
PGP stands for ‘Pretty Good Privacy’ and is pretty well known. it can be downloaded from pgpi.org for free. there are also commercial versions available and the open source GnuPG, which is what i use. if you want to sign your emails or verify the signatures of others’, download one of those and read its manual to see how you go about setting it up. if you plan on using it very frequently (which you should), you’ll want to figure out how to integrate it with your email client. i can’t possibly cover every possible combination of mail client + PGP implementation. usually doing a google search for “your mail client + PGP” or something will lead you to a plugin and tutorial. eg, this page covers PGP + MS Outlook and enigmail is a plugin that will let you use PGP with mozilla thunderbird. if you use web-based mail like hotmail or yahoo, you’re pretty much out of luck. sorry.
one important point that i should also make is that if you start signing your email, you should get in the habit of signing all of it. if your correspondents get used to receiving unsigned email from you, they’ll have no reason to be suspicious if they get something forged. if you sign everything and they receive an unsigned email claiming to be from you, they might think twice before trusting its validity. i sign every email i send (with the exception of posts to a particular mailing list that blocks all attachments). if you get an email from me that isn’t signed, assume that it’s not really from me and verify things through some other channel.
i should also mention that some email clients (particularly Outlook) don’t always handle signed messages very gracefully. the signature shows up as a small plaintext attachment with a ‘application/pgp’ content-type. this can appear quite mysterious. Outlook even warns the user that since it doesn’t know what it is, it might be a virus (of course, had it actually been a virus, Outlook would have just infected itself and not said anything, but that’s a different rant). this is why i find myself having to explain digital signatures on a pretty regular basis.
as an added incentive to start signing your mail, keep in mind that if everyone always signed their mail and it was expected, spam could be pretty much totally eliminated.
By
anders pearson
01 Jul 2004
it’s gone on long enough. looking through the logs for this site, i can see that a lot of you are still using Microsoft Internet Explorer as your web browser.
stop it.
(if you’re not, pat yourself on the back and feel free to skip the rest of this)
i could talk about its poor support of web standards and how that makes life hard on web designers and programmers and threatens the wonderful openness of the web and probably none of you care. i don’t blame you. i could talk about how microsoft has stopped IE development (aside from the constant stream of security patches) and there hasn’t been a new release since IE 6 (which was only a minor improvement over 5.5) came out around 3 years ago (a lifetime in software).
anyone who’s been paying attention for the last few years should know that IE is horribly insecure. new major vulnerabilities seem to come out every couple months that expose IE users to worms, viruses, and spyware that damage and slows down their computers.
finally, there at least seem to be some journalists who are putting two and two together. maybe a good scare about having your bank account broken into will get everyone’s attention. or how about going to jail?
now that i’ve got your attention, perhaps i may be able to persuade you to try out an alternative.
firefox is my strongest recommendation. it’s small, fast, FREE, blocks popup windows by default, has a nice google search box right on the taskbar, and has a bunch of other nifty features like tabbed browsing and browser extensions. firefox is a better browser than IE for pretty much every value of “better”. it also has the best standards support of any browser out there and is open source, but you probably don’t care about that kind of thing (though you should).
if firefox is too “open-source commie” for you, maybe you’d prefer opera, which is $39 or free with ads. it’s got more features than any one person could ever use and is ridiculously fast.
if you’re on a Mac and you aren’t using Safari or firefox yet, you get no sympathy from me.
please. it’s time to switch to a better browser. if you’re using IE, go download firefox or opera now and at least try them out. if you’ve already switched go find any of your friends who haven’t switched yet and help them out. if you care about them, you owe it to them.
By
Miguel Diaz
01 Jul 2004
…that all of the comments on old (pre-new version) posts say exactly the same thing? (Not from one post to another…but within each post)
By
Thanh Christopher Nguyen
01 Jul 2004
So… Now Japan is working on a new cellphone that has no speaker. Instead, it has a miniature vibrator that vibrates the tendons in the arm and resonated through the bones of the hand. To answer the phone, you simply click your fingers together, and to talk, you simply raise your hand to your head, and stick your finger on or in your ear. The phone is a wrist watch with a tiny module for the vibrator on the back side of the wrist. What I want to know is: How long before we see those inside the vending machines?
<p>In addendum: Beyond this technology, the phone maker is researching fiber optic technology that will allow him to create tiny video screens, and phones that can be sewn into the cuffs of shirts, and just as thin as the thick starchy cuff itself. He already has several uses for this phone, as his current ones allow you to dispense dog food, open and close curtains, activate lighting, and even broadcast live video to the burglar stealing your TV, should your home alarm go off.</p>
By
anders pearson
27 Jun 2004
and maine is still cold and miserable.
<p>the only day of my vacation that the sun came out for any decent amount of time was today as i was travelling back to new york.</p>
By
Thanh Christopher Nguyen
25 Jun 2004
Oh my freak’n God, no sleep. No sleep. I’ve gone very long periods without sleep before, but I was young, and I had nowhere to be each day. This is rediculous! It’s been four days. Four days! I don’t know if I’m going to make it through the last two hours of work. But here’s the kicker… (Kicker… ha… God-damned news jargon.) … the kicker… If I do make it through, which I know I will because I’m just that kind of worker.. When I get home, after almost passing out at the wheel… I’ll be completely awake! And then, when I want to be completely awake tonight for a date with a hot model, back from Madrid… I’m won’t be able to keep my eyes on her, because I won’t be able to keep them open. Good God, why is there no sleep? Do I need to get to Brooklyn? Must I assemble the rest of the Warriors and make it back to Coney Island? What the hell, man? WHAT THE HELL?!!