Terminally Incoherent

This is possibly the scariest thing that you will read this Halloween: Bush just signed a provision which will remove any limits over military involvement in domestic law enforcement effectively allowing him to declare martial law at any time and for any reason.

In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which (…) will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law. It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.

Step by step we are getting closer and closer to becoming a totalitarian fascist state. We really need to get these idiots out of the government. Come on people - vote Democrat. Elect some people who can start fixing up this mess. Stop this descent into madness now.

Oh, and if your district is using diebold machines just do the absentee ballot instead - the machines in swing states are bound to be rigged. After all it only takes 20-30 seconds to flash the firmware of that thing.

This is a most awesome Lego creation I have seen in my life!

found on the internets; author unknown

I wonder if it is up to scale. I would figure that it would be a little bigger than a standard dread.

Btw, if you have any idea who made this can you please post a link to the original source in the comments? I would love to give the creator of this thing all the credit he deserves.

User Friendly comic shows us how to defeat Apple’s DRM scheme using a high-tech toolkit:

img © User Friendly; click to see the original

It’s funny because it’s true. The thing about DRM is that it can never be effective. If you can listen to it or watch it, you can copy it. The only way you can circumvent this is by implanting everyone with encryption chips and pipe the data directly into their brains… And even then, someone is bound to invent a device that will collect the signal based on your electromagnetic brain activity when it leaves the chip. DRM will never, ever work. No matter how effective and hard to break you make it - at some point you must transmit the data in plaintext - otherwise we can’t watch or hear it. And that’s where we can collect it and copy it.

Here is a story for you:

1. In 2003 a security researcher Bruce Sheiner pointed out that the anyone can print a fake boarding pass at home
2. In February of 2005 the Slate magazine published an article describing the same security problem in detail
3. In April of 2006, NY Senator Charles E. Shumer mentioned these security issues on his website and sent multiple letters about the issue to TSA.
4. In October of this year, Christopher Soghoian a PHD student at Indiana U created a web application allowing people to print fake passes directly from his website
5. Finally, after 3 years someone in the government notices the issue. Congressman Edward Markey totally freaks out and… demands that Christopher Soghoian to be immediately arrested.
6. Today, FBI paid Christopher a visit and politely told him to take down his site.
7. Boarding passes remain insecure…

Apparently, Christopher was not labeled an enemy combatant, and he was not sent to a secret torture prison without a sentence. But he came very close to it. The next person who implements an application that exploits known vulnerabilities in the airport security systems may not be so lucky.

Can someone explain to me how in the hell did we manage to make airline travel 90% less convenient in the last few years, but we haven’t fixed the most fundamental, rudimentary security issues that have been publicaly known since 2003?

The sad part here is that if Christopher’s app would not end up on the front page of digg, slashdot and boingboing and in the wired magazine no one would care about this. The only reason anything has been done is because some jackass in congress felt embarrassed that the story of the gigantic failure to secure our airports is making rounds in the tech news networks.

The response to the problem is also a classic - punish the security researcher, make his findings inaccessible to general public and then just hope that no other programmer in the world can figure out how to exploit the same vulnerability.

With an attitude like that, we will never have good airport security.

Update Sun Oct 29 22:14:53 EST 2006 → apparently FBI busted Christoper’s door in the dead of the night, ransacked his house, confiscated all his computers and other personal belongings. This is after he took down the website, and was interrogated. This sucks. Sigh…

tags: security, airports, flying, boarding pass, fbi, stupid, government, tsa, politics

It appears that YouTube is getting worse, and worse. Apparently they have started bulk deleting clips of Comedy Central shows such as The Daily Show, Colbert Report and South Park. Heh… Maybe they got scared when Colbert said they owe him $700 mill.

Strangely enough I can still find many working Colbert videos, but most of John Stewart vids are dead.

This just plain sucks. And it is a huge disservice to Steward and Colbert who’se popularity stems largely to huge internet following they have. YouTube drives in more for these two shows than any other source and both comedians admitted it. At many occasions they claimed that they did not mind short video clips from their shows being posted online.

But then again John and Steven most likely do not own copyrights to their own stuff - their studio does, and it probably decided to send DMCA lawyergrams as a part of some sort of collective “let’s screw google” initiative.

I wonder how long will it take for the YouTube community to rebuild these collections…