what I've been listening to lately
Tuesday, 26 August 2008

I just found The Moth—a not-for-profit storytelling organization along the lines of SpeakeasyDC—and its associated podcast, and I've been gobbling up available episodes like a kid with a tub of Cool Whip.

I've also been listening to audio from talks at The Last HOPE that I missed in person last month. I have many yet to hear, so this is not a complete list, but here are a few of the talks I thought were particularly interesting and useful:

Packing the Friendly Skies - Why Transporting Firearms May Be the Best Way to Safeguard Your Tech When You Fly [slides]

After a particularly horrible episode of airport theft, Deviant made the decision to never again travel by air with unlocked luggage. Because of this he now flies with firearms all the time. Federal law allows (in fact, it requires) passengers to lock firearm-bearing luggage with non-TSA-approved padlocks and does not permit any airport staffer to open such bags once they have left the owner's possession. In this talk, you will learn the relevant laws and policies concerning travel with weapons. It's easier than you think, often adds little to no extra time to your schedule (indeed, it can expedite the check-in process sometimes), and may actually be the best way to prevent tampering and theft of bags during air travel.

A Hacker's View of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

As part of his book on the history of phone phreaking, Phil submitted hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to various three-letter government agencies. In this talk he will give an overview of how FOIA works, describe the type of documents you can get via FOIA, and discuss some of the typical FOIA stumbling blocks and workarounds to them. He will then focus on FOIA from a "hacker's perspective" and will examine the recent launch of several FOIA/hacker related websites such as GetGrandpasFBIFile.Com, GetMyFBIFile.Com., TvShowComplaints.Org, UnsecureFlight.Com, WhatDoTheyKnow.Com, and GovernmentAttic.Com.

Home is Where the Heart Is? The Question of Jurisdiction

A presentation on the subject of corporate legal jurisdictions and related topics. While this sounds boring on the surface, it's actually not - and is more and more relevant every year for those in the tech game. As physical human beings, we do in fact have a "home jurisdiction" in the legal sense, which is wherever we are living at present. However, corporations are also "people" in the legal sense but have a flexibility of where they call home. This ties into areas of international legal issues, corporate governance, privacy of company information, financial systems/banking, personal versus corporate liability, and so on. Basically, for anyone from a coder who wants "a company" to bill his clients through, all the way up to major tech projects that span multiple jurisdictions in a sophisticated way, few of us who play the tech game are not directly impacted by the question of where a company lives, where it calls home.

Who knew law could be so interesting?

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the sound of aerogel
Wednesday, 20 August 2008

For any of you samplers out there, here's something potentially interesting: a recording I made (3.1 MB flac format, 49 sec) of the sound of a chunk of silica aerogel clattering and bouncing on a hard surface after being dropped from a few inches' height, repeatedly. Weird, eh? Feel free to use it according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. I'd love to hear about any uses you make of it.

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seen at a fair last weekend
Monday, 18 August 2008

snoozin' goats
Originally uploaded by MissionControl.

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any Neal Stephenson / historical fiction fans?
Wednesday, 13 August 2008

Anyone interested in a free hardback copy of Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson (the first book in his series The Baroque Cycle)? I'm trying to pare down my bookshelves, and although I'm hoping to expend minimal effort—the recycle bin would be a last resort, but I don't care about getting any money for them—I thought this one in particular might be desirable to some of my friends.

Update: Taken!

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quack
Wednesday, 30 July 2008

resident duck
Originally uploaded by MissionControl.

Quack.

That is all.

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for DC/MD/VA-area peeps
Monday, 28 July 2008

Looks like I'm going to have some free time next Sunday, 3 August.

Weather permitting, are any of you interested in getting together to visit the Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens (where I expect the lotus will be in bloom, as in the photo) or perhaps Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens?

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The Last HOPE
Monday, 21 July 2008

I took the train up to New York City to attend The Last HOPE this past weekend. It was a smooth, comfortable ride to Penn Station, right across the street from the hotel where I shared a room with a couple other HacDC folks. One thing I did not do was spent much time at the hackersmart run by HacDC; when there's so much exciting stuff going on—and I've paid good money to participate—it just didn't seem like a good use of my time to try to sell vintage linesman's handsets to random passersby.

My preparations for this trip: instead of making a point to leave behind my pocket knife and any liquids of greater than three ounces as I would on a plane trip, I strategically removed any RFID tags and read up on using a SOCKS proxy to foil eavesdropping on my websurfing traffic. (I even filed a bug on that topic as I was testing it out.) I arrived too late on Thursday to register that evening, so after getting a bite to eat at Tic Toc Diner and trying unsuccessfully to use wifi from my hotel room (dozens of wifi networks were visible, but I couldn't successfully connect to any of them), I hit the sack.

On Friday morning I sat in the back of a few talks and realized I'd need to be more aggressive in beating the hordes of fellow attendees to decent seats. I think I can now appreciate why the ShmooCon organizers insist on capping the number of registrations. I did spend some time hanging out with other HacDC people, pretty much all of whom were more dedicated in their running of the hackersmart than I was. On Friday afternoon I attended The Attendee Meta-Data Project where we learned what would be done with the data collected from the RFID tags many of us chose to wear. amd.hope.net may be (back) up in the near future with more information on that. The team managed to barely scratch the surface of applications for that system, and I'm happy that they're being so open with the platform and the (non-personal-information) data collected on it. I hope they open up some public discussion area on it.

Next I attended Monumental Women Who Influenced Today's Technology. I found it rather disappointing because of the speaker's encyclopedic style of reciting names, dates, and facts supplemented by bullet-point-filled slides. Ugh. Weirder was that the second half of her talk was about "Women of the Phone", which profiled some voice actresses who were "famous" for being the voice of the date/time announcement or the voice menu on your provider's voicemail system. To me, these profiles just didn't make sense in a discussion of technical women. During the question-and-answer period, some audience members enlivened the hour with questions and comments about women in the IT sector today. I was surprised that the speaker hadn't even read Unlocking the Clubhouse, and I suspect the hour would have been more enlightening if it had been entirely based on audience participation.

After a short nap (yay for staying at the con hotel despite its dinginess), I went to Hacker Space Design Patterns and then A Collaborative Approach to Hardware Hacking: NYCResistor. The latter was an awesome panel talk that made me excited about HacDC and likely to hang out there more in the near future, in the hopes that HacDC can be half as cool as NYCResistor. I wandered back down to the hackersmart, picked up my spiffy black HacDC lab coat, and caught up with Andrew and friends for dinner at Soul Fixins'. On our way back, we randomly passed an historical plaque marking the place where Nikola Tesla died and picked up an impressively-constructed fake television sporting "Yo! MTV Raps!" on the screen. The latter was set out in the trash on the sidewalk, the volume of which piled up every evening was impressive, but not in a good way. I intended to check out digital music night, but I was feeling sleepy again—I should've tried a bottle of the Club-Mate they were selling.

On Saturday morning, I started out with Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM)-A Brief Primer on the Arcane Art and Science of Electronics Surveillance and Bug Detection by Marty Kaiser, the kind of old character who could tell you all kinds of fascinating stories from his life if you sit down to listen. I learned more about FBI politics than about surveillance countermeasures (which are apparently quite expensive), but it was a worthwhile talk. Next up was "Off the Grid" Voice/Data Communications, sort of an overview of two-way radio technologies. Incidentally, amateur radio is a sizable presence at HOPE, with a special event station on the air and all levels of license exams being offered. In such a privacy-conscious crowd, I'm surprised I've never heard any grumblings about the fact that getting an amateur radio license (in the US, anyway) means having your name and address added to a public domain database run by the FCC.

I sat in on some of the Debian OpenSSL Debacle talk, but I failed at getting a decent seat, so I couldn't really see the slides or follow the discussion. I left to wander the neighborhood for lunch. When I returned, I was determined to get a better seat at the next talk I wanted to attend, so in order to get a good seat for the Port Knocking and Single Packet Authorization talk, I showed up to the panel on Reprimand, an e-zine of which I'd never heard. It wasn't bad, but I wasn't really engaged with it. By the time the talk I'd really come for rolled around, I was feeling like—guess what!—taking a nap. If I felt the need for so much sleep on a regular basis I might be alarmed, but I suspect I was feeling exhausted by the sheer crush of people. I ended up sleeping through elwing2000's talk (sorry!). I felt pretty refreshed, though, for the dinner at Ninja I'd organized with a bunch of friends, including but not limited to elwing2000, princessleia2, and sfllaw. Sorry we missed you, searchingbuddha and secretsoflife! We had our own private ~~dungeon~~ dining room with ninja waiters and all. Okay, maybe they weren't real ninjas. The lighting was too dim for my camera (at least without the flash that I think makes most photos look awful), so I'm hoping to see some of the shots from those of us with snazzier cameras. I had a flight of Hanzo sakes, Clam Bombshells, a negitoro roll, and sashimi perched over a bowl of mist. Oh, and part of a "Ninja Star" for dessert, but I won't spoil the surprise by telling you what it is. :) I agreed with the consensus that the food wasn't great—this place is more about flash than about awesome food. The visit by a magician to our table toward the end of dinner underscored that point. It was entertaining, and I'm glad I went, but I wouldn't make any particular effort to return. Afterward we wandered TriBeCa, eventually settling down in Cowgirl and inadvertently crashing a birthday party. Wacky western fun ensued. :)

On Sunday, I wasn't sure whether to regret the few drinks at Cowgirl or the clams at Ninja (almost everyone had sushi too, so that's not high on my suspect list), but my stomach protested violently. We scrambled to check out even as I asked myself whether I should be giving up the only well air-conditioned place I could lay down and recover in proximity to a restroom. Everyone else had checked out of their rooms, too, yet the festivities wouldn't end until 7 p.m. or later. Resting on the floor of the anteroom to the ladies' restroom will not go on record as a high point in my life, but I felt much less queasy when I got up and caught the second half of Johnny Long's No-Tech Hacking talk. He walks a thin line between profiling and stereotyping in some of his "hacking", and it's inevitably based on the assumption that he's the only dissembler in a given situation. It irks me to see cases of social profiling that are smugly presented as successful without any evidence of their accuracy. That said, much of his work is solid.

I also caught the Attendee Meta-Data and Network summary parts of the closing ceremonies. I left early to enjoy my first real food of the day, a shepherd's pie, over at Stout before catching the train home.

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three cats in a boat
Monday, 30 June 2008

three cats in a boat
Originally uploaded by MissionControl.

This isn't a very good photo, but I wanted to share this moment. At the lake there was briefly an intense thunderstorm on Saturday afternoon. My brother and sister-in-law's three cats don't normally hang out together, but when the wind drove the rain against the windows and the thunderclaps sounded uncomfortably close, they spontaneously made for the basement and settled into an inflatable boat. When the floodwaters come, you'll see these three kitties floating to safety, probably with a store of tuna aboard.

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sound in Ubuntu
Thursday, 26 June 2008
Music: LCD Soundsystem - Tribulations

This is mostly a note to my future self, or to some googling Ubuntu user in a similar situation. When I upgraded my Sony Vaio PCG-TR3A laptop recently from Feisty Fawn (7.04) to Hardy Heron (8.04) with a fresh install, most things just worked with no tweaking, but sound did not. After trying some of the suggestions at the Ubuntu wiki's Debugging Sound Problems page, I fixed the sound by installing gnome-alsamixer, launching it, and de-selecting the External Amplifier switch.

katie