Rêves doux…

Posted on May 17, 2013, 9:15 pm

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Strongbox

Posted on May 15, 2013, 11:49 am

NEW YORK (WNBTv) - In a move that undoubtedly had [snark] absolutely no relationship to the DoJ’s recent violation of journalists’ civil liberties [/snark], The New Yorker today unveiled Strongbox, a Tor-enabled dead drop as a means of providing you, the Citizenry, with a reliable, anonymous means to -

 “…share information, messages, and files with our writers and editors and is designed to provide you with a greater degree of anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail.“

Senior Editor  made the announcement: “This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented.” (link)

The New York Times, when apprised of Strongbox’s deployment by The New Yorker, responded: “Shit…wish we had thought of that.”

A source at the Kansas City Star, speaking anonymously since no one at the Star is allowed to say anything, ever, to anyone about internal Star operations, did say “Well..it’s nice and all, but we won’t use it. Fact of the matter is some local blogs do far more meaningful investigative journalism than the Star has for at least a decade – why would anyone send US stuff?”

The DoJ’s Eric Holder issued the following statement:

“I am not sure how many times the Justice Department will attempt to “hack” The New Yorker’ new ‘Strongbox’ system and snoop among the documents sent to them. All I can say at this point is that that number will be greater than one (1), though probably less than one million (1,000,000). Unless we automate the system, in which case there will be no upper limit to our egregiously unconstitutional endeavors. Thank you.”
 

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From Here To There

Posted on May 15, 2013, 11:01 am

“When I am speaking to students, I like to show them a still from the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street in which the masterful financier Gordon Gekko is talking on his cell phone, a Motorola DynaTac 8000X. The students always — always — laugh: The ridiculous thing is more than a foot long and weighs a couple of pounds. But the revelatory fact that takes a while to sink in is this: You had to be a millionaire to have one. The phone cost the equivalent of nearly $10,000, it cost about $1,000 a month to operate, and you couldn’t text or play Angry Birds on it. When the first DynaTac showed up in a movie — it was Sixteen Candles, a few years before Wall Street — it was located in the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, which is where such things were found 25 or 30 years ago. By comparison, an iPhone 5 is a wonder, a commonplace miracle. My question for the students is: How is it that the cell phones in your pockets get better and cheaper every year, but your schools get more expensive and less effective? (Or, if you live in one of the better school districts, get much more expensive and stagnate?) How is it that Gordon Gekko’s ultimate status symbol looks to our eyes as ridiculous as Molly Ringwald’s Reagan-era wardrobe and asymmetrical hairdos? That didn’t just happen.”

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Sequester Day 67

Posted on May 14, 2013, 10:08 am

Hagel will announce later today that DOD will furlough civilian employees for 11 days this year.

At a “town hall” meeting at the Pentagon later today, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will announce that after trying to find a way to eliminate furloughs altogether, he will have to force defense civilians on unpaid leave for 11 days. But he will give the services the option of exempting some employees from the furloughs as needed. That will be welcome news for the Navy, which had complained that it was having to force shipyard workers on unpaid leave even though the service could save the money in other ways. “He’s reducing the number of furlough days from 14 to 11 and tried to reduce the number even more,” a senior defense official told Situation Report, confirming an AP story that popped earlier this morning. “But after several rounds of meetings on sequestration and asking for different furlough scenarios, he decided that we really don’t have a choice but to save money for the remainder of FY13 to support military readiness, operations, and training,” the official said. “No one is happy with having to make this tough decision, especially him.”

 - FP: The Situation Report

 

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Westeros is England?

Posted on May 14, 2013, 8:21 am
Westeros...or England?

Westeros…or England?

From the nerds at Foreign Policy, who finally found a way to mix their Game of Thrones obsession with work:

George R.R. Martin’s world did not start with a map, however. The author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of books adapted for TV as Game of Thrones, envisaged the opening scene of the first book, and from there on, as Martin liked to say, borrowing from J.R.R. Tolkien, “the tale grew in the telling.”

One of many similarities with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle is not just the reliance on maps as guides to the story, but even the look and feel of them. Like Tolkien, who created the maps that illustrated The Hobbit and the Ring trilogy, Martin himself assumed the role of First Cartographer, and his own maps appear in the books. Even though Martin is a Bayonne-born New Jersey boy, his anglophilia is evident in his reverence for Tolkien’s trailblazing tale — maps and all — and the inspiration by certain key moments in British history.

Most of the action takes place on the continent of Westeros, which looks a bit like Great Britain. Some fans protest this, and they’re right if you compare Westeros with the actual island; but place it next to a mirrored version of Britain, and it’s a good fit. The main man-made feature of the island-continent is the Wall in the North, at 700 feet high and 300 miles long clearly an extrapolation of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England (itself, a mere 73 miles long, and never higher than 20 feet).

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