Spying is Everywhere

While it looks like the privacy conversation that Obama promised in the wake of the NSA spying scandals will be superseded by the absurd run up to a Syrian war (how convenient!), the revelations of corrupt NSA efforts just keep on coming. These are my favorites from the last few weeks:

1. Good to know that there isn't a national domestic spying program, and that safeguards are in place to protect us from it's misuse. Oh wait:

"National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said. The practice isn't frequent—one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade—but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT."

Because everyone knows that giving people secret powers with little to no oversight doesn't possibly incentivize misbehavior.

2. The NSA bugged not only the United Nations' New York headquarters, but also...

"...spied upon the European Union's legation in New York, and included "plans of the EU mission, its IT infrastructure and servers." In addition, the NSA monitored the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The documents also detail bugging programs in more than 80 embassies and consulates called "Special Collection Service." Der Spiegel writes of the program that the "surveillance is intensive and well organised and has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists."

And big media wonders why we have problems getting international support these days.

3. More recently, we found out that the NSA has compromised many internet encryption standards in the interests of making it easier for them to spy on everyone:

"The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.
The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – “the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet”.
Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with “brute force”, and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves.
Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software."

This last one is the most worrying because if a "back door" exists, it will soon be discovered and utilized by malevolent forces - that is, people more malevolent than the NSA.

As if it wasn't clear, everything about the NSA leaves a horrible taste in my mouth. As we learn more and more about the NSA's unconstitutional, illegal, and cynical tactics, it makes me sad to know that all of these deeds are being performed in our name. How far our once idealistic nation has fallen. At least people are aware of the problem now, even if the solution appears to be as daunting as "rebuilding the internet." In the meantime, here are five ways that you can use to try and regain your privacy. Aside from, you know, going offline completely.

It Only Happens Once

"In a computer, everything is recallable all the time, but life is a succession of events that only happen once."

- Thomas Bangalter, of Daft Punk

Why RSS Matters

With the discontinuation of Google Reader have come many proclamations of the death of RSS. Even though I use the My Yahoo page as my RSS feed, I’ve been bothered by the insinuation that RSS is dying, but haven’t really been able to put my finger on it. Luckily, io9 does a good job of summarizing the issue at stake: RSS gave the consumer the power to dis-aggregate content from a content provider, and as it fades away, reading habits are being controlled again by corporations.  A few quotes are in order. First, an explanation of why RSS was so appealing:

[RSS readers] ...let you take information from everywhere and organize it however you like. Your Wired stories were filed in the same place as your Entertainment Weekly stories. Everything was mixed together in an information jumble. Of course it was your information jumble, but it was still often confusing, and required a modicum of technical proficiency to organize and cultivate.

See I like this jumble! Using RSS was like making a mix tape of all of your favorite content sources  saving you the time of having to go to multiple websites – everything you wanted was in one place. Losing this capability is a problem because

"We are returning to a world where what you read online comes to you in silos. Instead of a feed reader, you can get an app that organizes your app subscriptions on a nice digital bookshelf where they look just like a bunch of paper magazines in a bookstore. But unlike an RSS reader, this app doesn't ever mix the content of these magazines up into a single stream. It keeps them separate. You have to jump out of one app and into another to read the next magazine on your shelf.
We are also moving toward a reading style that requires you to visit a specific site in order to read, instead of pulling all the articles you want into one piece of software. You go out into Tumblr and Facebook. You don't aggregate all your favorite Tumblrs and magazine articles into, one, unified reader. Everything is separate and out there, in the cloud."

 This is sad for a number of reasons, but the strongest reason against this method of reading is that you concede power in what you see to the corporations that generate that content. I like to believe that content is content regardless of its context, while Facebook and company want control (and monetize) the way in which you consume content, adding “value” in the form of targeted ads, etc.

The good news is that many companies have announced efforts to replicate Google Reader’s RSS API so that this method of reading will not die out. For me, My Yahoo tends to work okay, although I’m finding more and more RSS feeds simply don’t work within it, so I imagine I’ll be moving on sometime soon. Here’s hoping that the RSS model continues to thrive in the years to come!

Cloud Security Fail

Mat Honan was hacked recently, and notes a huge problem in some of the cloud based security systems: the systems offered by separate vendors don't always work nicely together:

What happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification.

Scary stuff. h/t Boing Boing.

Crappy Google Searches

Is it me or have Google searches been more ineffective ever since they started prioritizing more recent news in their search algorithm? It certainly seems like i'm getting a higher percentage of crap in my search results over the last few months.

Time for another Tab Dump!

I'm laid up today, recovering from a minor surgerical operation, and you benefit because it's gives me the time to present you with another tab dump! As always, i'd love to write more about these items but just haven't been able to scrape together the time.

• Like TNC, I'd love for the iPad to have a real competitor, if only so that the prices might drop enough so that I could afford one. Alas, Jakob Nielsen, one of the best usability experts out there (highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter!) "denounced the [amazon] Fire, saying it offered 'a disappointingly poor' experience. For users whose fingers are not as slender as toothpicks, he warned, the screen could be particularly frustrating to manipulate. "I feel the Fire is going to be a failure," Mr. Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said in an interview. "I can't recommend buying it."
• Not that I’d ever watch the show, but pulling adverts from the All-American Muslim "reality" show just because the conservative Florida Family Association says that the show is “...propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values” is just madness. Shame on Lowes for succumbing to the bigots.
• Never underestimate the power of money when it comes to stealing personal and public property for private profit when natural resources are involved. Case in point: Pennsylvania. As Atrios says: “My first thought when I heard about the natural gas discoveries in PA was,'uh oh, we're fucked.'”
• Harvard physicist Lisa Randall talks about extra dimensions: “There could be more to the universe than the three dimensions we are familiar with. They are hidden from us in some way, perhaps because they're tiny or warped. But even if they're invisible, they could affect what we actually observe in the universe. There are lots of things we cannot see with the naked eye that turn out to be based in reality. ... our idea is there's an extra dimension that's so warped, the masses would be big in one place and small in another. In other words, gravity could be weaker in one place and stronger in another. If so, it could be a natural explanation both for why particles masses are what they are, and why gravity is so much weaker than the other elementary forces we observe.”
• How animals see color. The most interesting are birds:
  “Birds… possess rich color vision, in many cases better than our own. Most birds have four cone visual pigments, although this varies. In general, birds have an additional ultraviolet pigment in their cones and many more cones than we have. Furthermore the visual pigments that would be similar to ours span different wavelengths. Their visual experience is richer than our own in ways impossible to describe or understand. Not only do they see more colors, but the interpretation of colors would be different. Think of combining different colors of paint—if you combine more colors radiating from the same object, like a flower, you will see different colors. A hummingbird, then, would see a red flower as a different color because of the ultraviolet channel input.
  You may ask what good are these extra color channels in birds? Of course, it’s hard to know completely since we can’t even understand the perception of the color “ultraviolet,” but here is an example. When a mouse is being hunted by a hawk, it will often urinate out of fear and to make itself as light as possible for escape. Mouse urine radiates ultraviolet and that actually helps the hawk follow the mouse trail. Fresher urine radiates more ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet arrow will point to lunch for the hawk.”
• Sounds Good to Me Too - one of the best music blogs out there - have started to post their best albums of the year. 
• Why we invented monsters. This article is one big slice of awesome, combining a treasure trove of bizarre myths ("In Aboriginal myth, there is a creature with the body of a human, the head of a snake, and the suckers of an octopus") with an analysis of the best monster of all - the dragon. In short, "anthropologist David E. Jones argues that the image of the dragon is composed of the salient body parts of three predator species that hunted and killed our tree-dwelling African primate ancestors for about sixty million years ... the leopard, the python, and the eagle. ... ancient primates evolved alarm calls to identify each of the three predators, with each call triggering the defensive response appropriate to the nature of the attack mode of the specific predator. ... [these creatures] were merged into a hybrid creature that had the salient predatory features of each: the face of a feline, the body of a snake, and the talons of a raptor. ...Because the image combined features from three dominant predators, it could quickly send the neural message very dangerous animal."

Steve Jobs Legacy

I enjoyed this NYTimes retrospective of the impact of Steve Jobs and what he accomplished with Apple. Money quote:

Again and again, [Jobs] would step up to entrenched players in the media with calcified business models and explain their business to them in ways they did not recognize from the inside. ... In the case of music, many of us wanted the ease and portability of MP3 files, but didn’t want to become mouse-enabled criminals taking the music we wanted. From that perspective, 99 cents seemed like a small price to pay.

An Obsession, Revisited

So Kelly found a copy of Civilization III (originally released in 2001) at the dollar store and picked me up a copy for Xmas. Ruh-row. I had bought this computer game when it originally came out and spent WAY too much time playing it. I'm talking multiple hours at a stretch. But now I just don't have too many spare hours!
I did find myself with a day off a few days ago. I had just come out of a long, dark tunnel of illness and decided to (mainly) devote the day to me. So what did I do? What you might expect - went for a run, relaxed with a good book - but I also spent a few hours playing Civilization.
Essentially, Civilization is a world domination game. It’s like Risk on crack. You build cities, distribute your armies, control how your resources are spent, and negotiate (and fight!) with other civilizations. It's fun, time-consuming and addicting.
But why is it so addicting? I suspect that part of it is the element of control - you have complete control over your world. The other part of is that there are so many little things going on – cities growing and building resources, armies traveling from one place to another, scientific advances being made – that each turn brings something new, so it’s hard to find a stopping point. There are probably other reasons, but I can’t think of them now – I’ve been spending too much time on the computer!

Changing the Color of Table Borders in PowerPoint

Don't know about you, but I spend a majority of my time at work using Microsoft PowerPoint 2007. This morning, I was attempting to change the color of the borders in a PowerPoint table - I wanted the borders for the border cells to have a different color then the table's main body (to match the different fill colors). Well, this task was incredibly difficult and unintuitive, and there was no information on how to perform this task in the PowerPoint help system.

Luckily, there’s the internet! I found this MSMVPs site that detailed how to change table borders. If you're one of the lucky few who might find this useful: enjoy!

15 Facts About Net Neutrality

Via: Online MBA Programs

Thought from a Boring Meeting

When i'm frustrated or bored while on one of the many, many virtual meetings I have to attend for my job, I find the temptation to use my iPhone almost irresistible. I suspect this is because using my iPhone lets me assume control of my situation and choose the data that I want to see rather then being dependent upon the boring presentation on my computer screen. In other words, iPhone = control, while Meeting = confusion/boredom. It's a dangerous situation, and one I attempt to nullify by putting my phone away in my bag.

Balancing Design and Usability

Jörn Bodemann with e-spirit thinks that the Mac way of presenting your computer's shutdown screen isn't as usable as the old XP way of selecting your shutdown method from a drop-down list because:

What at first appears to be an improvement in functionality – a more organized layout – turns out on closer inspection to be an improvement of design at the expense of functionality. This is because the “uncool” drop-down menu previously used by Windows users to shut down the PC would always “remember” the last action selected and suggest it to the user at the next startup – since the average user will always want to do the same thing here, in this case shut down the computer, and thus all they had to do was confirm their previous choice. For the average user it is not necessary – and makes little sense – to have to view all the available options lined up all at once side by side. In this case, the drop-down menu is much more user-friendly than the new window, which is generally perceived to be “prettier” but where you have to enter a selection each time.

I understand what he's saying, but I'm not sure I agree. Having all of the options in front of you sure seems to be the best way to go in this instance, even more so when you consider that when you're looking at the shutdown screen for either OS the rest of the computer screen is grayed out. In addition, if we assume that you don't need to make another selection from the drop-down list, both methods require the same amount of clicks: OK for Windows and your shutdown option for Apple. In my opinion, the Apple method offers you greater flexibility since all of your options are right out in the open, rather than hidden behind a drop-down list.
(Note, however, that the Apple version is still superior, because it lets you hit Enter for the Shut Down option, while Windows doesn't remember your last chose and requires you to learn a keystroke combination to Shut Down with the keyboard.)