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. . . But I Repeat Myself

Once again, MSNBC comes through with an incredulous bit on the TSA. Can you spot the threats? Letting even one threat by would get a fully trained screener fired.” Then why are there any TSA screeners left?

MSNBC as Government Shills (as usual)

I was listening to an MSNBC podcast and the reporter said:

"As much as airline security has been tightened since 9/11, this attempt to bomb a plane bound for the US demonstrates this: that determined terrorists are constantly looking for gaps to exploit."

Clearly, this is ridiculous. This incident has shown us many things, but that is not one of them. Among the things it shows us:

1) The government is as incompetent at performing basic security as it is at providing anything else of value.

2) In light of 1), Al Qaeda and its allies are not terribly interested in launching attacks on US soil. It would not, apparently be terribly difficult to do so if they actually had much desire.

3) Considering the attacks seen overseas, Islamic militants are mostly interested in attacking soldiers in Muslim areas and civilians who are living in occupied areas.

4) It is difficult to get someone who is both competent and smart to sign up for a suicide bombing mission.

Odd Secunia PSI Result

I did a Secunia PSI scan on my Windows 7 laptop. It found no insecure programs, but gave this strange result:

Security Threats:
0
Secunia System Score: [?]
100%
Secunia PSI WorldMap:
Your Secunia System Score of 100% is 5% HIGHER than the average user from Georgia, United States.
Compared to users WITHOUT the Secunia PSI installed, your Secunia System Score is 85% WORSE - install patches now!
Last Full System Scan: [?]
3 minutes ago
How could a 100% rating be 85% worse than anything? What an odd bug. Still, I highly recommend the tool for those interested in keeping a Windows PC up to date.

Running Windows 7 as a Truecrypt Hidden Operating System

My favorite whole drive encryption system, hands down, is Truecrypt. One of the interesting features is the notion of plausible deniability. One of the ways this deniability may be accomplished in through a hidden operating system. I don’t really need the deniability features, but I have found that the hidden operating system is useful in allowing me to keep Windows XP on my laptop, but being able to seamlessly boot into Windows 7 (I have also set up Windows 2008 Server in the same way).

I have a 160GB hard drive, which I divided into a 40 GB partition and another 120 GB partition. I have XP installed on the 40GB partition, which is my C: drive. I have another D: drive where I keep data. That’s the 120GB partition. It is important to have a similarly partitioned hard drive. It is also vital that the 120GB partition have enough space to hold all of C:, i.e., 40GB. Do a full sector level backup on the drive. I use Knoppix, then use the dd command to copy the entire /dev/sda drive to a file on a USB hard drive. You should be able to access the individual files on D:. Use ntbackup to run a backup from within Windows XP on the D: drive. Once you have all this done, you can install Windows 7 from scratch, reformatting all the partitions, but only installing on the 40GB one. Leave the 120GB partition empty.

After installing Windows 7, run Truecrypt, pull down on the system menu and select “Create Hidden Operating System . . .” Follow the prompts to create it as normal. After you delete the original partition (the last step in Truecrypt’s hidden OS creation sequence), you should then restore the boot sectors and the first partition from your backup. If you used dd, this just means booting into Knoppix and running something like:

dd if=/path/to/backup/file of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=<number of the last sector of the /dev/sda1 partition, which you can determine by running fdisk –l –u /dev/sda>

This will write over the hard drive up to the point where our outer volume which holds the hidden partition starts. When you reboot, you will boot back into your old Windows XP. It will probably freak out about not being able to get to D. Just install Truecrypt, then mount the outer volume using the outer volume password. You can then restore your backup into that volume.

Finally, encrypt the XP system. This will install the Truecrypt boot loader, where you will be able to provide either the XP decryption password or the Windows 7 decryption password in order to choose which operating system you wish to run.

This allows me to run two versions of Windows with no fear whatsoever that they will interfere with one another. Also, it gets me into the habit of performing disaster recovery backups on my laptop.

Cory Maye Granted New Trial

Radley Balko has been calling attention to this horrible crime against an innocent man by my home state of Mississippi. Finally, Maye has been granted a new trial.

Lawyers Write Law, And Then Are The Only Ones To Make Millions

Of course, I am sure this was merely a by-product of sincere efforts to assist the poor and oppressed.

 

 

Sent to you by Robert A. Wicks via Google Reader:

 

 

Lawyers Write Law, And Then Are The Only Ones To Make Millions Directly Off Of It

via Techdirt by Mike Masnick on 11/17/09

It's difficult not to become even more cynical when you read stories like the following one. Sent in by Eric Goldman, it's about a state law in California that was mainly written by two lawyers: Joaquin Avila, a law professor from Seattle, and Robert Rubin, the "legal director" for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. So, here's the interesting thing: since this state law has been put in place (seven years ago), the only lawsuits have been brought by Rubin's committee or Avila and they've made themselves over $4 million with a few more lawsuits pending and a bunch more threatened (again, all from either Avila or Rubin's committee).

What a great deal: write a law, and then be the only lawyers to use the law to make millions.

As for the law itself, it was a law that apparently very few people were asking for -- requiring that state courts carve out specific districts that favor minority groups, so they are not excluded from local elections. Here's how the AP describes it:

The California statute targets commonly used "at-large" elections -- those in which candidates run citywide or across an entire school district. Avila said that method can result in discrimination because whatever group constitutes the majority of voters can dominate the ballot box and block minorities from winning representation. As a remedy, the law empowers state courts to create smaller election districts favoring minority candidates.

Officials in several California communities said they never heard complaints of voter discrimination until the lawyers stepped forward. In one case, the Tulare Local Healthcare District, now known as Tulare Regional Medical Center, was sued even though its five-member governing board is a rainbow of diversity -- two emigres from India, a Hispanic, a black and a white. The lawsuit argues Hispanics, who make up about a third of local voters, have been shortchanged.

Of course, there are many reasons why the exact makeup of a governing board might not match the exact percentage of the population (including the simple fact that most people vote on issues, not the ethnicity of the people they're voting for). But, even if there was a problem it seems highly questionable that the two lawyers who wrote the bill are now profiting tremendously from it and appear to be the only ones who do so.

It's stories like this one that make us so nervous about so much legislation. This is the type of law they create: it maysound good (who's going to argue against diversity?). But, the actual law appears to have been nothing more than a way for these lawyers to go around collecting millions, while disrupting communities and schoolboards, and sending their taxpayer money to these lawyers.

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David E. Davis, Jr. on Cash for Clunkers

In the December 2009 issue of Car and Driver (article not available online), David E. Davis, Jr. lambasts the wildly popular "cash for clunkers" program:

Not until the government got involved was anyone stupid enough to pour sodium silicate into the engines of the trade-ins on used-car lots and render them useless except as junk to be sold by the pound.

A fleet of American used cars like, say, 1977 Chevrolet Caprices could be shipped to any country in the Third and Fourth Worlds and would revolutionize the way people live. Women with sick children would not be hitchhiking 50 miles to clinics.

Of course, the environment is far more important than a few million poor foreigners. The government bureaucrats, in their seemingly never ending quest to absolutely perfect their abilities to do evil, work tirelessly to minimize any actually good secondary effects from their actions.

Failing the Irony Test

The UK House of Lords is considering new laws banning forced labor and involuntary servitude. In a shocking oversight, these laws are not expected to cover the huge amounts of labor required of Britons to pay the taxes levied on them by the government. Clearly, private slavery is the only bad kind of slavery.

Ukraine's Got Talent - Kseniya Simonova

My Favorite Collard Greens

Ingredients:

A bunch of collard greens. I literally mean a bunch, as in how they are sold fresh in a grocery store, or an entire plant, if you are one to pick your own.

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

3-4 smoked turkey necks or fatback or strickalean, if that’s your cup of tea. Cut the oil in half if you use either of those.

Large pot with lid (3 gallons or so)

Water

Salt

2 packets of Sazón Goya

Cut and wash the greens in the sink. Wash them at least twice to get all the grit out. Heat the pot on medium heat. Add the oil to the pot and allow it to heat for a minute or so. Put enough greens in the pot to fill it to about 4 inches from the top. They should sizzle. Stir the greens into the oil, steadily adding greens until the entire bunch is in the pot. Stir them to coat them in the olive oil. Add enough water to completely cover the greens. Add the turkey necks, the Sazón Goya, and a tablespoon or more of salt to taste. The amount of salt that different people like in greens varies tremendously, so don’t be surprised if you use much more salt than this. Stir everything up, set the heat to low, then cover it and let it simmer. The traditional way would be to simmer them for about 40 minutes. You could use far less water and simmer them for only 20 minutes for a different sort of dish. I tend to go for the long simmer, which is how my family always did it. Serve with hoecakes (also called hot water cornbread).

Another Difference between Public and Private

I drove through a Walmart parking lot and noticed how well the drainage system they have works. It takes some serious flooding to damage a Walmart to the extent that roads, schools, and government buildings have been damaged during the recent flooding in the Atlanta area. I snapped a pic of it. It was doing a very good job of keeping that parking lot clear. That’s very different from what we see of government “services,” where the need to please the customer is lacking, to say the least.

Rangel’s no Angel

Charles Rangel, the first black man to head the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and Congress’s foremost proponent of slavery, has perhaps topped all of his peers at displaying contempt for those he supposedly serves. In response to reporters’ questions about hidden personal assets, Rangel responded:

I recognize that all of you have an obligation to ask questions knowing that there's none of you smart enough to frame it in such a way that I'm going to respond.

Well, at least he actually does give an accurate assessment of the press. Truth in politics is such a refreshing change of pace.

The Open Source Future

One of the major factors which will fuel Linux and other open source projects' development will be the developing world. I was listening to a podcast about Ardour, an open source digital audio workstation. One of the interesting things which was mentioned was the ability of members of the community to sponsor code. That is, a person can offer a bounty to have bugs fixed or features added. The fact that incomes vary very widely across the globe can actually help a lot here. Most of the consumers of this software are located in the developed world and have higher incomes than the developing world. As people in areas which have very low average incomes become more technically savvy in software development using free software, some of them will be able to earn nice incomes using their knowledge. This is outsourcing writ large.

Solid State Ubuntu

I decided to install Ubuntu 9.04 to my 2GB CF card. I wanted to avoid wearing out the CF with writes, so I settled on this method. I installed the server to one partition, so /usr/local is in the root filesystem. You can create the script anywhere in the root filesystem, but i used /usr/local.

Create a /usr/local/bin/mounttmpfs.sh file with the contents below:

#!/bin/sh
rsync -a /var.perm/ /var/
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs -o mode=1777 /var
rsync -a /var.perm/ /var/

Make a soft link from it to /etc/rcS.d with:

ln –s /usr/local/bin/mounttmpfs.sh /etc/rcS.d/S23mounttmpfs.sh

This will cause it to run right after the filesystems are mounted, before any services which write to /var are running.

Add a cron.hourly script to rsync from /var to /var.perm, and you are all set!

I modified this a bit after the inital post. I changed the mounttmpfs.sh script:

#!/bin/sh
find /var/ -type f -exec rm -f {} \;
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs -o mode=1777 /var
rsync -a /var.perm/ /var/
mount -o relatime /dev/vgraid/lv_squid /var/spool/squid3

The find line is actually only needed once. I just deleted the files from the underlying (flash) filesystems, leaving the directory structure. No need to waste space. After that, I mount the /var manually, then copy the permanent files into it. Finally, since I run squid on this server, I mount the squid cache directories after /var. All the other local filesystems get loaded from the scripts in the /etc/rcS.d directory. I also have an hourly cron job which runs the following:

#!/bin/shrsync --delete-excluded --delete-after --exclude=*.pid \
--exclude=spool/squid3/??/??/* --exclude=cache/apt/archives/*.deb\
-av /var/ /var.perm/

This copies all the directory structure, and most files, from /var to the flash card. I skip the squid cache files, since they take up too much space.

Calling it what it is

A friend of mine, who has a young child, has begun to replace a certain concept with the word “socialism.” For example, “my son just took a massive socialism in his diaper.” Could there be any better description of the nature of the thing than that? It is easily applicable to any number of situations. Something really disgusts you? Scream “socialism” in complete disgust. It works well in some common phrases. “Socialism happens.” “Same Socialism, Different Day.” But I think it works nowhere quite so well as in a phrase used by the older folk during my childhood: “you don’t socialism where you eat.” That one works whether or not you do the mental substitution.

Parents Scaring Daughter

My wife decided she wanted to pay our 10 year old daughter back for always trying to scare people.

Private Security

The heroic Norman Horn interviews private security expert Gil Guillory about security without the state.
Listen to the Podcast.

Starbucks

At Starbucks, the baristas (as if) usually ask you if you want room for cream. I always say no, since I noticed that if you say yes, they leave a good inch and a half clearance in the cup. That much milk/cream in coffee really changes the nature of the drink for me. Apart from the change in taste, the drastic change in temperature spoils the thing for me. If I wanted a latte, I'd order a latte. But, I actually sometimes see people pouring coffee off the top so they can pour a half cup of milk into the cup.

BTW, Starbucks' lattes use way too much milk. The ratios are all wrong. And they do Italian roasts, which is a bit dark, compared to what I typically like (half city to full city roasts). But they are better than the convenient alternatives. I do wish they offered more variety in roasts, though.