I have published a fourth update to my series on digital privacy for the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coaltion. This installment deals with securing your WiFi connection at home and on the road. It includes a dicusssion of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and the Tor Project.
Privacy Series Update - Passwords
I have just posted a third update in my series Protect Your Digital Privacy for the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition. This post deals with choosing passwords wisely, keeping them safe, and also some currrent and developing alternatives to passwords. There is also a brief discussion of the legal debate over whether and when people can be compelled to divulge their passwords.
Privacy Series Update
I have just posted my second update in my series Protect Your Digital Privacy for the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition. My second post deals with ways to make your websurfing a little less vulnerable to prying eyes. This is the perspective of an average computer user, not an expert, but it seems to be a way to share what I have picked up about computers.
Jumping Ship
If the topic were anything more serious than blogging software, the dramatic and innovative rise, peak, and uitimate fall of Six Apart would have an Aristotelian quality to it. Six Apart revolutionized the blogging world in 2001 with its sophisticated, Perl scripted, individual blogging software, which was the dominant individual blogging software until it was overtaken by Wordpress later in the decade. The story of Movable type's demise is a complex one involving both design misjudgments and marketing errors, but by earlier this year Six Apart had been taken over by Say Media and Movable Type spun off to the a Japanese developer.
Last week, I jumped ship after using Movable Type for about eight years. I ported my blog to SquareSpace, a move that entails its own challenges, and shut down my Movable Type site. Despite my nostalgia for Movable Type's powerful and flexible platorm, despite my seduction by the idea of running an individual site independently of a big company, I was just too tired of running a site where I had been hacked, was constantly fighting a losing battle with comment spam, and was unable to implement design changes more suited to the mobile Internet. I'd like to express my appreciation to Ben and Mena Trott, the founders of Six Apart, for their innovative contribution to the web and their support for my blogging itch for many years. At this point, however, it's farewell Movable Type, hello SquareSpace.
Road Kill on the Internet Superhighway
I like the independence and illusion of freedom that comes from publishing an individual blog on an independent host. To a point I even like tinkering with my Movable Type blog software. (No, I don't need to hear from WordPress users how declasse this makes me.) I enjoy the idea that if somehow something I said offended the powers that be who provide me an Internet platform, I could just pick up my data and move on, without being locked into a Facebook, Google, Wordpress.com, Blogger, whatever.
But the illusion of freedom and the appearance of independence come at a price. On Friday, I learned that my little blog had been ingeniously hacked, thanks to a tip from John Grillot of White Fir Design, which runs an anti-hacking operation. When one visited the site, it was to all appearances working perfectly normally. However, unbeknownst to me, it was spewing volumes of c1alis ads and other unsavory spam into Google's search engine, presumably in an effort to attract attention to the spammers' sites. I would have been collateral damage when Google decided to shutdown and blacklist my site as a spam factory, were it not for Mr. Grillot's timely tip.
At this point, having rebuilt the site and changed the passwords, I am still not sure how I invited these cockroaches of the Internet in, but I suppose any site, particularly one that is small and under amateur management, may have a thousand vulnerabilities despite reasonable diligence. I find the experience suggests several implications for how I think about the Internet. On the one hand, I am sure that big providers who manage thousands of blogs are better defended against this kind of attack than I am. On the other hand, although the attack was an inconvenience for me, attacking little sites like mine cannot offer much in the way of economies of scale to the spammers. Moreover, a little differentiation might generate further inefficiencies for the spambots, despite their fiendish ingenuity.
In the end, I remain in favor of more decentralization of the Internet and more individual independence, but paradoxically this can only work through better collaboration and communication to hold the malign influences of the Internet at bay.
Scotland's James Bond in the 16th Century
The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
When Sir Walter Scott invented the historical novel in 1814 with the publication of Waverley, he took Europe by storm. As Georg Lukacs later pointed out, Scott also pioneered the technique of introducing a mediocre fictional character in the midst of the great actors on the historical stage, and used his protagonist to organize the action against the backdrop of major historical events.
Scott's technique has endured, but with the modification in modern historical fiction that the protagonist has become progressively less mediocre and progressively more superhuman. This is evident in such characters as Stephen Maturin in Patrick O'Brian's well-regarded series of nautical novels, and it is apparent in Francis Crawford of Lymond in the Game of Kings, the first book of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. In other words, despite the apparent scrupulous historical accuracy of the novel regarding larger historical events, this novel has to be taken with a whopping suspension of disbelief.
However, if one can master one's disbelief, it is quite easy to seduced by Lymond, the master wit, clever polyglot, indomitable swordsman, incomparable strategist, and irresistible ladies man, whose self deprecating wit, charm, and occasional misstep render him engaging rather than obnoxious.
Moreover, the story is cleverly and tightly plotted, revealing a fascinating complexity but never revealing so much that one is not drawn to turn the next page. A bonus for those with an interest in the history of Scotland is the rich political interplay between the Scots and their larger and more powerful neighbors, England and France, during the infancy of Mary Queen of Scots.
In returning to the historical Scotland that gave birth to the historical novel, Dorothy Dunnett proves herself worthy of her great progenitor.
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
Anyone with an interest in my review of Scotland: The Story of a Nation might also find their interest piqued by the Corries' collection of Scottish ballads Scots Wha Hae, which takes its title from the rather sanguine Robert Burns' poem celebrating the exploits of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. The Corries were noteworthy as one of Scotland's leading folk groups in recent decades, and are known particularly for such songs as Flower of Scotland, which in some quarters has superseded Scots Wha Hae as a de facto national anthem. This album runs the gamut of Scottish history from Wallace's victory at Stirling Bridge to the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, and the hokey nature of the commentary should not obscure the beauty and poignancy of the ballads.
Scotland the Brave
Scotland: The Story of a Nation by Magnus Magnusson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
My ancestry does not include much in the way of ethnic color, but the Scots provide most of what there is. Indeed, in the past century the Scottish branch of the family, at some remove, has included a fighter pilot and war hero, a celebrated poet, and two successful movie stars. So it's with a nod to our Caledonian ancestors that we toast each other on the holidays, and I seized on the opportunity to take my bride to Scotland when I got married.
So it was with some surprise that I discovered that, despite Scotland's disproportionate contribution to the modern world, it is not particularly easy to find a good general history of Scotland. Fortunately, Magnus Magnusson's engaging history of Scotland from its early history through the Act of Union makes up in verve what it lacks in sophistication. It vividly recounts the intrigues, murders, and battles of the Royal Court throughout the Stewart Dynasty, explores in some detail the history of the Covenanters and of Cromwell, and limns the portraits of a number of colorful figures in Scottish history such as Viscount Dundee, Rob Roy MacGregor, and Sir Walter Scott. Indeed, the history is loosely structured around Scott's earlier history, Tales of a Grandfather.
The popular tone of the work is often emphasized by a certain guidebook quality, as Magnusson points out the location of current monuments and motor routes, but ultimately this does little to detract from the narrative. At the same time, while the book does give a good general overview of the political forces at work in Scotland, which spent a great deal of time trying to play the French off against the English, one might need to look elsewhere for a theoretical explication of the progress of Scottish history.
In addition, except for a brief coda on the new Scottish parliament, the book effectively ends with the Act of Union and does not address the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century history of the Scottish people after Scotland was no longer an independent country. While it is not really fair to criticize a book for not doing what it doesn't intend to do, it seems a shame in some ways that this very rich and often turbulent era in the history of the Scottish people is not addressed.
Stereotyping Our Sisters
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa V. Harris-Perry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I picked up Sister Citizen because I am interested from a legal perspective in the implications that stereotyping of African American women has in the workplace. The book more than rewarded my interest.
The book is a pastiche of literary excerpts, critical essays, news analysis, focus group reporting, and statistical surveys that covers everything from the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the success of Michelle Obama and the shaming of Shirley Sherrod. In between it packs powerful statistical analyses of the attitudes of African American women toward everything from themselves to God.
Unifying the work are several potent themes. One is the way in which the expectation that African American women will live up to the image of the "Strong Black Woman" is both a source of strength for African American women and an obstacle to full political involvement in the community. The obverse of self-reliance is inhibition about seeking help from others. A second is that the way in which women are treated is often determined by which of several stereotypes are imposed on them. A third is the way in which community solidarity can turn into community shame.
A particularly valuable contribution of Ms. Harris-Perry's opus is that not only does it reveal the results of introspection on the part of the women it studies, but it also reflects their attitudes toward the larger white community. As such, it shines a spotlight on some common ground between the two, but also reveals significant gulfs in understanding.
African American women occupy a unique place in the Black Community and in society at large. They are among our most vulnerable citizens both in terms of resources and negative stereotyping, At the same time, the word they used most often to describe themselves was "strong," and they are pillars of their families, churches, communities, and society at large. The aim of this book is to point the way toward their fuller integration into American society, both so that their contributions will be more fully realized and so that they can lay claim to the broad support of the society to which they contribute.
Whither Edwardiana?
When I was a boy, I was haunted by the uneasy specter of the notion that there was a thing called a gentleman, and that one ought to behave like one. It seemed to have something to do with the notion that one ought to be nice to girls, a notion whose merits I did not really begin to appreciate until about sixth grade. But it also seemed to be rooted in the idea that one should subscribe to good manners and fair play, despite the fact that other people did not always do so. At the very least, the idea was pregnant with some invidious classist assumptions and a certain amount of hypocrisy. But maybe in the twentieth century's headlong rush to abandon it, we lost something along the way.
Mens Sana in Corpore Sano
There is relatively little one can do about the crumbling of one's civilization. The yapping of the Right's hyenas, the ineffectual twittering of the Left's mice, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the country goes to hell fifty different ways. But one still has to face the day.
I find much more often now that I start the day exhausted. I drag myself into consciousness gradually, and by the time I refresh myself with a cafe au lait, I am at least nominally ready to move forward with the day. After a couple of hours, however, I tend to find my energy and endurance fading. I lack the exuberant energy of my youth.
I learned recently that when the kidneys go, everything else follows in rapid succession. It's common to the think of the body's being subject to physical injury, less common to contemplate the delicate biochemical balance that must be maintained to keep us alive. Homeostasis or bust.
My father at eighty is a rock. He's run well over 30 marathons, the last one just a couple of months ago. His younger brother and sister are both dead, along with a wide swath of his friends, many of whom crept rather than vaulted to the grave. I'd never take Dad's good health for granted, lest I somehow jinx it, but I look at it as a testament to sensible living and good luck.
There's not much that can be said about luck. But sensible living is not a goal out of reach of most people, even if it can seem elusive. With a little luck and perseverance, it's something over which each of us can exercise some control, unlike say the Dow or the War in Afghanistan. So for me, I have come to the conclusion that if I am going to make any difference at all, it has to start with more and better sleep, a healthier diet, and a little exercise. Three small steps, so easy and so difficult.
The Moral Blindness of Michele Bachmann
The most disturbing portion of Ryan Lizza's lengthy profile of Michele Bachmann comes almost at the end, when he describes her "must-read" list. Third on the list is a biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins, which Lizza characterizes as a celebration of the godly antebellum South versus the godless abolitionist North. Admittedly, I have not personally read Mr. Wilkins' biography, but if Lizza is accurate, the book essentially echoes John C. Calhoun's argument that "slavery is a positive good" with a "Christian" twist. Lizza's article includes the following damning quotation:
Slavery, as it operated in the pervasively Christian society which was the old South, was not an adversarial relationship founded upon racial animosity. In fact, it bred on the whole, not contempt, but, over time, mutual respect. This produced a mutual esteem of the sort that always results when men give themselves to a common cause. The credit for this startling reality must go to the Christian faith. . . . The unity and companionship that existed between the races in the South prior to the war was the fruit of a common faith.
[Read more]
When Bachmann or Sarah Palin make such minor historical slips as confusing the birthplaces of John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy or claiming that Paul Revere was warning the British, it simply makes one wonder whether they have a sufficient education and grasp of detail to lead their local Rotary Club, much less the United States. But espousing a "Christian" ideology that obliterates our country's central moral struggle with a "Big Lie" is a far more serious matter. This is not merely carelessness born of ignorance, it is indifference in the service of oppression.
Romney Gets It Half Right
In an Iowa campaign appearance today, Mitt Romney defended his corporatist politics with the claim that "Corporations are people, my friend."
Romney is half right, and his statement is superficially plausible. After all, corporations are a way to organize people into groups, and the money they allocate eventually does go to people, as Romney claims.
However, groups of people are not the same as individuals. Ultimately, the experience of life is at the individual level. Hope, fear, love, hunger, and pain, for example, are all experienced by individuals as individuals, and even in groups every individual's experience is more or less different.
The interests of the group and the individual are never perfectly aligned, even in the most harmonious group, whether a corporation or a family. There are invariably individual interests which diverge from or conflict with the group. In a successful group, those interests are either subordinated to the group or accommodated by it, and in any case are outweighed by common interests.
Unlike many societies, America has always been premised on the idea that individual rights are paramount, that government should flow from the will of individuals, and that individual liberty should be constrained as little as possible. It is why we have a Bill of Rights.
Corporations, as a means of social organization, are hierarchical and autocratic. In the interests of fostering initiative and creativity, they may be benevolent dictatorships, but they are dictatorships nonetheless. And dictatorships tend to favor most the welfare of the dictators, although they must provide enough benefit to the other members of the organization to retain their loyalty and their services. We may tolerate this as a system of incentives, but that does not mean that it is a good basis for a fair and just social polity.
And while corporations are groups of people, they are more than that. They represent a system of organizing capital to create wealth. This single-minded priority is the most salient difference between corporations and people (as my old law school professor Lawrence Mitchell has pointed out many times). People have multiple priorities, but corporations have only one, the acquisition of money. They are therefore indifferent to considerations of kindness, humanity, or aesthetics, except insofar as any one of these things may affect the bottom line. It is so evident that corporations do not behave the way individuals do that it almost seems ludicrous to point it out.
Unfortunately, despite corporations' single-minded and often antisocial behavior, the Supreme Court has repeatedly decided these aggregations of capital (including human capital) should be accorded the same rights as people. In a political sense, corporations are (and hopefully always will be) deficient in one key respect: they cannot vote. Only individual citizens can do that. But why should we stop there? If corporations are organizations of capital that cannot and should not be citizens, why should they be accorded any rights at all, or at most minimal privileges necessary to do business?
The March to the Sea
The March by E.L. Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This brilliant but flawed work of historical fiction chronicles William Tecumseh Sherman's storied march to the sea and its aftermath until the end of the Civil War. The book is brilliant in its insight but flawed by an almost Dickensian sentimentality at times; for example, the noble African American photographer Calvin Harper is afflicted by blindness after he tries to foil an assassination attempt. Although there is death aplenty in this story, the way it is meted out suggests a poetic justice that seems out of place in a modern novel about war, where death takes both the just and the unjust indiscriminately.
The novel does convey admirably however the sense in which the fairy tale life of the Southern planters was sustained by an engine of terrible cruelty and oppression, along with Sherman's sense that the only way to end the War the South had started was to irrevocably smash not only its means for making war but the ties that held the society together. In the wake of the maelstrom that was Sherman's march, neither person, property, nor place survived. Those who were not killed were bereft; it was not so much that they lost their place in society, but that they lost the society in which they had formerly held a place.
The liberation of the slaves was of course an equally important part of the attempt to eradicate the South's institution of oppression, but it seems here to have been carried out with little forethought. Former slaves followed the Army in large numbers, while the Army was constantly trying to shake them off. Some of Doctorow's best writing deals with sentiments of the former slaves and their struggle to find a place for themselves in the postwar wasteland. They were free, for the moment, but they were also on their own.
Good Books and Last Meals (Well Read and Well Fed)
I suppose that I am like many other people in that as I get older, I read fewer books, choose them more carefully, and finish a smaller number. Youth has the luxury of reading indiscriminately and the opportunity to do so. As one gets older, there is not only less time to read, but there will be less time to enjoy what one has read. So one might as well choose carefully, because the universe of books that one could profitably read will always dwarf the number of books one actually can read.
If I am granted free choice of my last meal, it will be a sushi starter, harira, lobster and caviar, filet and foie gras, artichokes, mechoui, tajine dial djej ma zaitoun, and creme brulee, washed down with good red wine, followed by mint tea, espresso, and laphroaig.
NOT a cold glass of wheat grass juice.
I aspire to a literary banquet just as rich and varied.
Terrorism Is Not The Enemy
As we approach the tenth anniversary of the most devastating terrorist
attack in American history, a moment of quiet reflection for the dead
will be in order. For there will be no end of cacophony over the
meaning of the event and its implications for American's future. I do
not know if there is consolation for the horrible deaths of those who
were murdered on that September morning almost ten years ago.
I would not want myself or my loved ones to perish in a conflagration
like the one that took down the Towers, or for that matter in the wall
of water that eliminated the coast of Japan, or the earthquake that
shattered Haiti. Any horrible, painful death — whether through the
agency of man or nature — should be averted wherever foresight,
preparation, or quick action can do so.
I think, however, that the psychological impact of the 9/11 terror
attacks has had the intended effect of shifting our perspective and our
resources to our detriment. We have exhausted our economy, curtailed
our liberties, and wreaked havoc in the world, and yet how many people
believe that we are a stronger, more secure, more prosperous, more
hopeful nation than we were on that fatal day in 2001?
We must guard against terrorism, but it is only one of the many things
we must guard against. Disaster, accident, disease, and poverty all claim more
deaths than terrorism, and yet neither disaster relief, medical research,
development aid, nor anti-poverty efforts can grab the headlines the way
terrorism does. It is conceptually easy to kill a terrorist; it is
conceptually very difficult to run an economy. One should not conclude,
however, that the former is worthy of more attention than the latter.
The failure to manage the economy in a manner that creates prosperity
and opportunity for all Americans is the single greatest
existential threat to America today, for without that prosperity and
opportunity, we can neither care for our citizens at home nor repel our
enemies abroad. Close behind is the threat that we will sacrifice our
liberty in a false bargain to purchase greater security. After that we
might consider the ongoing challenge of relations with hostile states
such as Iran and North Korea and great powers such as China and India.
Terror is a priority somewhere down the list: we can save more lives at
the National Institutes of Health than at the Department of Homeland Security.
And we must be creative in our approach. It is too early to tell, but
the peaceful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia may go farther in
discrediting Al Qaeda and bringing peace to the Middle East than all our
wars. For all our blood-soaked history, we do better in the world
forging alliances and supporting democracy — as a matter of policy
— than we do unleashing the daunting — but expensive —
power of the United States military.
The lure of world dominance is a seductive but ultimately disastrous
chimera. We need a military that can discourage aggression and defeat
it when it is not discouraged. We do not need to send expeditions to
little countries all around the world. We also need to have an economy
that can sustain our military. As it stands, the level of our military
expenditures is undermining the strength of the economy that pays for
the military in the long term. We need to cut the military now to save
it, and ourselves. We can do better in the war on terror with a smaller
military and a stronger diplomatic corps, and doing so will also allow
us to focus on the biggest threats to our lives, liberty, and property in
the coming decade: the erosion of our economy and the disenfrachisement
and impoverishment of our people.
Cognitive Dissonance of the American Right
The American Right has reigned triumphant in American politics for at least a decade. Other than the blip of the crippled Obama presidency and two years of an ineffectual Democratic majority in Congress, the Right has had a virtual lock on all branches of the American political system. To this day, they have a resurgent majority in the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court rules as though it were the American Enterprise Institute. One would think that the Right would be basking in assurance that it is the real force in American politics.
Oddly enough, however, it seems the rhetoric of the American Right often reflects a defensiveness and paranoia more appropriate to 1936 or 1964, years in which it seemed that a triumphant liberalism had put the continued survival of the conservative movement into question. Possibly, were it not for the intransigence of the Solid South and the disaster of the Vietnam War, it would have. I actually read a post today in which one conservative was arguing that American liberals had an "exterminationist" attitude toward the Christian Right. Critical, certainly; hostile, possibly, but exterminationist? Hardly. The Democratic Party is hardly going to set up a gulag if they were actually able to take and wield power. But to read some conservative rhetoric, one would think that it what is at stake. And that irrational attitude might explain such phenomena as the American Right's willingness to wreck the country's credit rather that compromise on revenues. Unfortunately, they do not have a Franklin Delano Roosevelt or a Lyndon Baines Johnson to reckon with.
Distractions
Hemingway famously posited that only bullfighters live their life all the way up. Yet even those of us who do not assiduously court danger might live more richly with a little more forethought, Live fast, die young holds no appeal for me, but neither does a life of vacuity. In the brief moment we are given before we are extinguished and forgotten in the eternal void, can we not strive to make optimum use of every second we are vouchsafed? If so, would we not shun the better part of the idle distractions in our lives that tempt but do not satisfy? And yet the frailty of human nature is such that the better part of our time is spent on stupidities and banalities.
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More Bad Metro
Metro has announced that it is rehabbing or replacing 80 percent of its bus fleet. The fact that this is happening is cause for celebration. The fact that it is necessary is not.
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Metro: From Cursed to Worst
As Congressional leaders display the feckless nature of American government to the world, Washington's Metro subway system demonstrates once again that it is equally ill-managed. Ongoing track repair resulting from decades of neglect has slowed weekend traffic to a crawl. Red line trains in the direction of Glenmont are 15 to 20 minutes apart, and the last two trains have been traveling truncated routes terminating at Fort Totten. It beats walking, but truly this is the long way home.
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Location:Farragut North Station,E St NW,Washington D.C.,United States