Update: I have installed SSL certificates for all of my sites which have images on this site. All of the side bar images are back up.
One of the reasons I migrated from Typepad to another hosting provider, was so I could enable SSL on my site. Making sure your site supports SSL is the one of the basic efforts you can do to support encrypting the web.
I set it up for my main domain a few weeks ago, but since some of the images I use are on sites that didn’t use https, my blog did not appear to be completely secure.
I have adding SSL to two of my (sub-)sites, and will finish the rest tomorrow. I have removed the non-SSL widgets so the site shows a nice green lock and will add them back then they are all set. As an added bonus, I removed a bunch of tracking javascript that Typepad adds to their photo galleries that I don’t need.
One up shot of this effort is that I have a nice set of instructions that work for my setup which will help speed the process in the future.
Cory Doctorow and others spoke at the Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University on Oct. 13, 2015. The talk was The Remote-Controlled Society. It was a pleasure to work with Suffolk and the Boston University Computer Science department to make this talk happen.
I gave a brief talk on the state of government and corporate surveillance at today’s Boston Security Meetup. My slide deck is available in PDF and Open Document Format. Thanks to Akshat, Will, Ryan, Alex, Max, Chris, Lucy and everyone else who made this meetup possible. Thanks also to LogMeIn for hosting.
You can sign up for the Massachusetts Cryptoparty email list. The next cryptoparty will be Wednesday, Feb. 24th, 6-9pm, at Parts & Crafts, 577 Somerville Ave, Somerville.
I only got to meet Aaron Swartz once. It was a great conversation and I feel lucky to have had that brief time to talk with him.
When I heard he died nearly a year ago, like many I was shocked and saddened. His death was not only a loss for his family and friends, but was our loss.
Yet, I feel I have a special bond with Aaron. You see on that January day, I realized that his death was on the birthday of one of my children. Later I discovered that his birth date was the same as that of my other child. That realization comforted me for when I look at my kids I will always remember him.
On Monday, January 13 starting at 3pm, Pirates will join with others to honor the memory of Aaron Swartz. We hope you will join us.
We will gather in front of the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, One Courthouse Way in Boston. To get there by MBTA, take the Silver line to the Courthouse Station, or the Red line to South Station and walk.
The memorial will last from 3:00pm until 7:00pm.
There is a Facebook event with more details as well as demanding Carmen Ortiz’s job.
And an equally basic essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all Nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want. – FDR
Iain (M.) Banks announced yesterday that he has terminal bladder cancer and has less than a year to live. In less than a day 3800 people (including me) signed his guest book/condolence page. Had he announced three days ago during April Fools Day, I would have had a chuckle and rubbed my hands in anticipation of the many more novels he would gift to us. Sadly that joke was not to be.
I finished Against a Dark Background in February, and The Hydrogen Sonata shortly after it came out in October of last year. These two novels brought the number of his books I have read to eleven, which is probably the most of any other author I have read. By far it is his Culture novels I adore.
For me, his Culture novels describe a post-scarcity anarcho-communist society where everyone can choose his, her or its own purpose and is able to live a full, rich life of play. A short fan video directed by Jon Rennie goes far in describing what that life is like:
In our current world of violence, austerity and inequality, the future the Culture offers is immensely liberating.
Certainly the Culture is guided by its Minds, the god-like artificial intelligences (AI) who are fond of their generally mentally and logically inferior pan-human and drone fellow citizens and wish to keep such “interesting companions” around. One cannot ignore the Culture’s (or is it the Mind’s) propensity to meddle in the affairs of other societies less technologically advanced than they are either overtly or covertly via its Special Circumstances adhoc grouping. All for the good of course.
That the Culture has contradictions and problems is evident in his novels and certainly what makes them interesting stories. Banks has not crafted a perfect utopia, even if it is a desirable one.
Sadly no one has adaptated any of Banks’ science fiction novels for film or tv, though some have talked of it. The complexity of the stories and their many characters make it difficult to adapt, certainly. His first two Culture novels, Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games are probably the ones that could be most easily adapted. Perhaps some enterprising person will write a screen play for them and ask for funding on Kickstarter. I would certainly give to such an endeavor.
Banks’ impending demise will prevent us from reading future books from his pen. Yet there is no reason others should not be allowed to create in his sandbox. Let his wife and family have the books he created for the next seventy years (the term of copyright in the US). By opening up the worlds and galaxies he created for others to use and adapt, he would give us a truly wonderful gift.
Yesterday the Supreme Court killed our 4th Amendment right to privacy on-line. In a 5-4 vote, they ruled that the ACLU and other plaintiffs did not have standing to bring their case challenging the FISA Amendments Act that allowed warrantless wiretapping. Since they concluded that “a fear of surveillance does not give rise to standing” and such warrantless government surveillance is secret, no one can challenge the Constitutionality of such surveillance. This Catch-22 is a recipe for unchecked government power.
We now know that the NSA’s secret domestic intelligence program has a name: Ragtime. According to a new book, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, about three dozen NSA officials have access to Ragtime’s surveillance
data. Additionally, a small number of people in the NSA’s general counsel’s office review the list of citizens surveilled to make sure they have connections to al-Qaeda. While Ragtime may only be able to process 50 different data sets at one time, the facility
that the NSA is building in Utah will likely increase that number as well as allow the NSA to store larger amounts of our communications for increasingly longer periods of time.
Doubtless some will say that the existing NSA safeguards are enough to protect innocent people from getting caught up in a government dragnet. However, recent surveillance of the Occupy movement, COINTELPRO and Watergate show government officials will use their power to go after even peaceful dissent. The 4th Amendment was a check on that power. A check that five members of the Supreme Court, many of whom claim to want to return the Constitution to the original intent of the Founding Fathers, feel we don’t need on-line.
It is up us to protect our privacy and overturn such unjust and undemocratic laws. We cannot trust those in power to do it.
I caught the tail end of the Enemies of the State talk from this year's Chaos Communications Congress 29C3 Panel. US Department of Justice ethics advisor Jesselyn Radack, as well as Thomas Drake and William Binney, who had significant positions in the NSA, talked about being whistleblowers and the increase of the US surveillance state.
In light of the recent Senate vote to allow the US government, basically the National Security Agency (NSA), to secretly spy on everyone (including anyone in the US) without judicial oversight, I highly recommend that you watch it. We can pretty much kiss our 4th Amendment rights good bye for the next five years. Better start to encrypt everything you send out on the Internet.
The Boston CryptoParty was a success with over 50 people
participating in it. We recorded most of the talks, but haven't
processed them all. The following are done:
The Albert Einstein Institution has released an iPad app to accompany the How to Start a Revolution film about nonviolent revolution and Gene Sharp they released last year. Not having an iPad, I cannot get it, but it looks interesting. Sadly no Android app, yet.
The musings of Jamie O'Keefe: pirate party activist, geek, father and gamer.
