Simple Nomad's Blog
sep 2005 | oct 2005 | nov 2005 | dec 2005 | jan 2006 | feb 2006 | mar 2006 | apr06 | may 2006 | jun 2006 | jul 2006 | aug 2006
30Jun2006 - Sadness and Weirdness While Traveling
I was at Vernier HQ this week, while at home our oldest cat -- 17 years old -- decided he'd lived long enough and stopped eating after slumping off substantially on his diet before I left. The wife took him to the vet, and they couldn't do anything, and he'd lost about half is body weight. Since he was starving himself, the humane thing to do was put him to sleep. The last few months we'd kept him separated from the other cats (he was on special food) so he was in the office with me all day. It is weird typing this up in here without him around.
The cat funeral is tomorrow, should be plenty depressing. In some ways, losing a pet could be worse than losing a human being that is close. At least the human being can say things like "I'll be better off" and "give me morphine" or whatever -- you can talk with them and get a feel for what is going on. Animals you have no idea. However as a Wiccan who is basically into nature worship, I can respect when a creature of nature says "time to go" and does just that.
As for the weirdness on my trip, it happened at SFO airport. To beat traffic I left for the airport early, and arrived at the gate a mere 2 1/2 hours early, so I sat in a bar, got out the laptop, and started working on a few things. There was this father and son that came in for a couple of drinks, sat down and started having this odd conversation I was tuning out. The conversation was odd because the son -- probably in his twenties, yuppie type -- was an obvious republican and the dad was fairly left wing, and they were discussing politics.
Now I had considered getting out the noise cancellation headphones and cranking up some Tool or Static-X or something, but I am always afraid if I do that they will change my departure gate or something, and while I wasn't exactly looking forward to heading home to a household with 6 instead of 7 cats, I did want to get home to the family. So I just tried to turn out the goofy conversation, taking comfort that these guys arguing about the Bush Administration's policies would probably be leaving soon.
So they start to leave, and the son is getting the bill, and the dad is trying to give him $20. Now son looked like he had money, and Dad seemed to have that relaxed retired look, and since Dad had been bitching about how Bush was so fucking him over financially, the son probably thought Dad needed the $20 more than he did. Both were as stubborn as fuck, and there was this pathetic argument going on -- "keep the money, Dad" "no son I insist" back and forth for at least, well, it seemed like 10 minutes but was probably just 2 minutes, and seemed like 10. So to shut them up, I mean they were right next to me, I said "I'll take the money".
I figured that they would realize their stupid argument was bothering others and stop it. Instead the Dad hands me the $20, and since I look like a hippy Dad probably thought it would piss off his son even more. Dad says, "spend it in good health", glares as his son for a second, then storms off. Son trails after him saying something like "Dad that was a complete stranger, are you nuts?". The guy two barstools down from me kind of looked at me weird, and I say to him "well, they shut up".
I spent it on liquor and toasted Hamlet, my recently deceased pet cat.
27Jun2006 - My Tin Foil Hat
I replied to an email on a mailing list I am on, part in response to a question about whether the U.S. Government is monitoring another individual on yet another mailing list, but also partly in response to the various NSA spying revelations that have been coming out. Anyway, here is what I said:
Over in Germany a few decades ago, the U.S. had a listening station at one of the bases that a friend of mine was stationed at. Each station monitor (multi-lingual operator) would listen to roughly 6 phone conversations in real time, all spread out in the stereo spectrum through custom headphones designed to fit into the individual's ear canal perfectly (each set was handmade for each operator). They could pick out "good" conversation pairs between individuals to monitor which would be later monitored in detail by others. Apparently it was not hard to train the brain to handle this.
Now it is not uncommon for businesses to have decent voice recognition software that works over phone lines (i.e. 1-800 help lines for the airlines), and it would seem that for computers to process recorded phone conversations (uploaded in real time to Maryland) this would not be a real complex task. Throw in some "stress detection" and other types of profiling, and now process it at fast speeds because hey, it's computers and not humans, and you could design a system that could handle huge amounts of traffic. A bit of backend magic using social mapping and a few other techniques to adjust the priorities, and you could monitor huge amounts of phone calls.
Using Internet data would be even easier, as you are dealing with a large amount of data that is in clear text with only a small amount encrypted, and again, you can process huge volumes. And as for the encrypted data, well we've debated the strengths of publicly available algorithms in the face of "nation state" strength to break it, and a lot of us think most if not all algorithms are probably breakable, and in fact broken.
The Nazis thought Enigma was safe because it would take a building full of crypto guys to break the ciphertext, and yet that is exactly what the Allies did. You have to ask yourself, what would it take to monitor the traffic? Secret rooms in various telecom companies for sure. Check. Massive computer systems to process it. Well, we have entire agencies who do nothing but listen and process using massive computers. Check. Experience in monitoring huge amounts of data. Check.
The question isn't whether they are. The question in this day and age is why shouldn't they? They have the means, had the backing of several past administrations including the current one, and they even have a motive -- the War on Terror.
This goes back to a similar issue with that monitoring station in Germany. What conversations and what "keywords" trigger such monitoring? The keyword could be something in Arabic, the name of a non-public government employee, a particular person as sender or recipient, or even a particular person's friend as sender or recipient.
Just remember, whatever you do, DOUBLE WRAP your head with that tin foil....