Month: December 2013

Open Carry Sensationalism

Have you heard the news? Us gun owners have discovered a new way to instill fear into the hearts of men! How? By advocating for the ability to openly carry a firearm. OK, it’s not a new strategy. Some of us have been open carrying for quite some time now. And it’s not a strategy meant to instill fear. But if you read Salon’s latest gun control article, and knew nothing about open carry laws, you would be lead to believe that gun owners are fighting for open carry laws so they can scare grandmothers and little children:

The debate over open carry is the new front line in the battle over gun rights and public safety in American culture. In Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, gun rights activists have been staging protests, demanding broader liberty to display their guns in public rather than keep them concealed under clothing. Major candidates in statewide elections have voiced support for open carry, asserting that the conspicuous display of firepower will deter crime. For decades, though, social scientists have studied the way people behave around guns, and they’ve found that all of us — not just criminals — will be affected by seeing guns in our everyday environment.

This is pure sensationalism. We already live in a society where guns are openly carried by people. These people are called cops and they’re responsible for killing eight times as many people as terrorists. In fact the number of Americans killed by cops has surpassed the number of Americans killed in the Iraq War. We’re not only exposed to people carrying firearms every day but those people have a rather violent history.

Let’s discuss carry permit holders for a second. Compared to carry permit holders cops are three times more likely to murder somebody. Here in Minnesota the rate of murder and manslaughter committed by carry permit holders is .542 per 100,000 whereas the rate for the general population is 1.78 per 100,000. So people should actually feel less threatened by permit holders openly carrying firearms than by the general population sans firearms.

If seeing a person openly carrying a firearm instills fear or aggression I haven’t noticed it even though I’m always openly carrying a firearm while biking. Nobody cares nor have people made any attempt at avoiding me on the trail (in fact I get asked for directions with notable frequency).

Open carry is already normalized in American society thanks to the police. The article sites a 1967 study to argue that people act more aggressively when in the presence of a gun:

Even when you’re not holding a gun, you can be psychologically affected by seeing one. Since 1967, researchers have been observing the “weapons effect,” a phenomenon in which the mere presence of a weapon can stimulate aggressive behavior. Of course, a person doesn’t respond to a gun the way a cartoon bull reacts to the matador’s cape; we aren’t spontaneously enraged every time we notice a firearm. But empirical research has repeatedly shown that when people are already aggravated, seeing a gun will motivate them to behave more aggressively.

Imagine you’ve volunteered to participate in a study on a college campus. You arrive to find the lab somewhat cluttered: There’s a badminton racquet and some shuttlecocks on a table. The researchers tell you to ignore that stuff — it’s for a different study. They hook you up to a machine that administers electric shocks, and hand the controls to another participant like yourself. He zaps you. Repeatedly. (He’s secretly part of the research team, following specific instructions — but as far as you know he’s just being a jerk.) Now it’s your turn to zap him. How many shocks will you administer?

Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage repeated this experiment with 100 male students at the University of Wisconsin, sometimes replacing the badminton equipment with a revolver and shotgun (or no stimulus at all). They found that participants administered more electric shocks when in the presence of guns. According to Berkowitz and LePage, the weapons were “aggressive cues.”

There’s a major flaw in that study’s methodology. How a person perceives a gun sitting on a table is likely to differ from how he or she perceives a gun carried on a person. If this weren’t the case then police officers would find themselves constantly dealing with more aggressive than average behavior. Most people, when dealing with a police officers, tend to act less than aggressive. The primarily reason for that likely stems from the fact that aggression is unwise when the other person has the ability to defend him or herself. As Robert Heinlein wrote in Beyond This Horizon, “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” A good example of this may have been a time period often cited by gun control advocates: the Old West. Unlike portrayals in Hollywood and claims by gun control advocates indicate, the Old West was quite peaceful (at least until the federal government started grabbing for more power in the region). Openly carrying firearms during that time period wasn’t uncommon yet the rate of violence was quite low.

Openly carrying a firearm isn’t anymore dangerous for a society than secretly carrying a firearm. The manner of carry isn’t important, the people carrying are. In our society firearms are openly carried by law enforcement agents, who have higher rate of violence than the average carry permit holder. Our civilization hasn’t collapsed due to this. Civilization also hasn’t collapse in states where open carry is legal. Advocating to legalize open carry in other states isn’t a dangerous new strategy being used by us gun nuts. It’s an acknowledgement that legalized open carry hasn’t negatively impacted any state so there is no justifiable reason to prohibit the act elsewhere.

Acoustic Cryptanalysis

Can you extract an encryption key by listening to a computer? As it turns out you can:

Many computers emit a high-pitched noise during operation, due to vibration in some of their electronic components. These acoustic emanations are more than a nuisance: they can convey information about the software running on the computer, and in particular leak sensitive information about security-related computations. In a preliminary presentation, we have shown that different RSA keys induce different sound patterns, but it was not clear how to extract individual key bits. The main problem was that the acoustic side channel has a very low bandwidth (under 20 kHz using common microphones, and a few hundred kHz using ultrasound microphones), many orders of magnitude below the GHz-scale clock rates of the attacked computers.

Here, we describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG’s current implementation of RSA. The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of some chosen ciphertexts. We experimentally demonstrate that such attacks can be carried out, using either a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer, or a more sensitive microphone placed 4 meters away.

Beyond acoustics, we demonstrate that a similar low-bandwidth attack can be performed by measuring the electric potential of a computer chassis. A suitably-equipped attacker need merely touch the target computer with his bare hand, or get the required leakage information from the ground wires at the remote end of VGA, USB or Ethernet cables.

It should be noted that GnuPG has fixed this vulnerability. But the method of attack described in this paper is fascinating to read. It also shows that technology still hasn’t surpassed human creativity.

Scott Adams: Possible Future Anarchist

I work in an office environment so it should go without saying that I’m a fan of the Dilbert comic. In a strange but positive turn of events, a recent post by Dilbert’s author, Scott Adams, leads me to believe he’s traveling down the road to anarchism:

I have a hundred-year plan to eliminate government.

The key to making this work is picking one element of government at a time and using technology to eliminate it. Remember, we have a hundred years to develop and test lots of little plans. So we won’t permanently eliminate any part of government until citizens have seen proof it can work on a state level, or for a brief test period nationally, or in another country.

He gives several examples of how technology could be used to replace government functions. If you’re a neophile anarchist, such as myself, what he’s saying is nothing new. I’ve been advocating the use of technology to eliminate the state by providing competition and alternatives to its programs. One of the state’s greatest weaknesses is its inability to adapt to long term changes. We see this whenever the state moves to regulate a new technology, often before the ramifications of that technology are understood.

Its regulations are seldom sensible and usually take the form of outright prohibitions or licensing. My favorite example of this is Wisconsin’s ban using electromagnetic weapons for hunting. Electromagnetic weapons, as far as hunting goes, are still fantasy but the Wisconsin government has already banned such usage even though we have no understanding of how such technology would effect hunting.

I theorize that the state’s hatred of new technologies stems from its fear of being supplanted by them.

The War on Unpatented Drugs Claims Another Victim

Another person was killed in the state’s war on unpatentable drugs. This time the death was caused by a negligently discharged round fired by a cop performing a heavily armed raid:

At about 10:30 p.m. on December 11th, a group of cops calling themselves the U.S. 23 Task Force swarmed the residence and prepared to break in and capture people for possessing drugs.   One of the officers, Sgt. Brett McKnight, an 11-year-veteran of the Ross County Sheriff’s Office, negligently handled his weapon and fired a round through the exterior wall of the mobile home.

The bullet traveled into the residence and struck a woman sitting on a couch. Krystal Marie Barrows, 35, of Chillicothe, was “in critical condition” and flown by helicopter to Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, where she died the following day.

No one inside the home fired back, the Chillicothe Gazette reported. Six individuals were arrested for prohibition crimes.

This is ridiculous. The police murdered somebody yet still had the gall to arrest six people for engaging in a victimless activity. That’s pretty sick. But this does go to show the dangers involved in not having a dog these days. It seems that police are satisfied with killing a dog in place of a person when one is available but when one isn’t available the police seem to escalate to killing people. Let this be a lesson. If you partake in verboten substances or don’t and think your dwelling may be targeted by a wrong address no-knock raid get yourself a dog and name it Bullet Catcher. It may save your life.

Giving the Corporate Partners a Cut

A few days ago the state’s corporate partners in surveillance were getting uppidy because their profits were being threatened by the National Security Agency’s (NSA) fast and loose strategy to spy on everybody. The primary mistake made by the NSA is not cutting its corporate partners in on the game. It sounds like the White House is no longer going to standby and allow this mistake to continue:

A White House panel has recommended significant curbs on the National Security Agency’s sweeping electronic surveillance programmes.

Among its 46 recommendations, the five-member panel said the NSA should cease storing vast amounts of data on calls processed by US phone companies.

We’re supposed to read that and believe that the White House has moved in to curtail the NSA’s surveillance apparatus. But what its recommendation really means is that the spying will continue but the corporate partners will get a piece of the action by storing the data and, almost certainly, charging the NSA for access.

If the White House continues pushing this strategy and includes companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple it will almost certainly satisfy its corporate partners.

Understand the Tools You’re Using

When people first become interested in computer security they have a habit of downloading and using tools before they understand how they work. This is a major mistake as a Harvard University student recently learned when he attempted to use Tor to make an anonymous bomb threat:

A Harvard student was charged Tuesday with making a hoax bomb threat just so he could get out of a final exam.

Eldo Kim, 20, of Cambridge, Mass., was scheduled for a hearing Wednesday in U.S. District Court. He could face as long as five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine if convicted of communicating the bomb threat that cleared four large buildings Monday.

[…]

Kim took several steps to hide his identity, but in the end, it was the WiFi that got him, the FBI said.

Kim said he sent his messages using a temporary, anonymous email account routed through the worldwide anonymizing network Tor, according to the affidavit.

So far, so good. But to get to Tor, he had to go through Harvard’s wireless network — and university technicians were able to detect that it was Kim who was trying to get to Tor, according to the affidavit.

Had Mr. Kim invested 15 minutes of reading time on Tor he would have learned that Tor doesn’t attempt to conceal the fact that you’re using Tor. Anybody monitoring the network you’re using can detect that you have a connection to the Tor network. With that knowledge in hand Mr. Kim would have been able to understand that being one of the few, if not the only, Tor users on the campus Wi-Fi would be a red flag when the campus received a bomb threat sent over Tor. This is especially true when his Tor connection times closely correlate to the time the bomb threat was sent.

So today’s lesson is this: make sure you fully understand the workings of any tools you use to enhance your security. Failing to do so will leave you vulnerable and often no better, and sometimes even worse, then you would have been if you hadn’t used the tool at all.

Enough with the Political Grandstanding

I haven’t spent much time writing about the shooting in Colorado because, frankly, there isn’t much to say. The event is still too recent for any solid facts to be available. But there is something I do feel the need to bring up. Whenever a heinous act like a school shooting or a bombing occurs there seems to be a need for people to hit the Internet and write about the perpetrator’s political viewpoints as a criticism against everybody who shares them.

When a perpetrator holds “conservative” (quotes necessary because the term has been bastardized beyond recognition) beliefs the “liberals” (quotes used for the same reason) run to their keyboards and post about it. They treat it as an “Ah ha!” moment, a correlation that proves that “conservatives” are violent psychopaths. After the shooting in Colorado I saw many “conservatives” posting this story:

In one Facebook post, Pierson attacks the philosophies of economist Adam Smith, who through his invisible-hand theory pushed the notion that the free market was self-regulating. In another post, he describes himself as “Keynesian.”

“I was wondering to all the neoclassicals and neoliberals, why isn’t the market correcting itself?” he wrote. “If the invisible hand is so strong, shouldn’t it be able to overpower regulations?”

Pierson also appears to mock Republicans on another Facebook post, writing “you republicans are so cute” and posting an image that reads: “The Republican Party: Health Care: Let ’em Die, Climate Change: Let ’em Die, Gun Violence: Let ’em Die, Women’s Rights: Let ’em Die, More War: Let ’em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?”

Apparently the Colorado shooter held “liberal” beliefs and that is proof that “liberals” are violent psychopaths.

Here’s the thing, nut jobs exist in all political philosophies. Just because a perpetrator of a heinous act held “conservative”, “liberal”, libertarian, communist, or anarchist beliefs doesn’t prove anything about anybody else who holds similar beliefs. Bringing up a perpetrator’s political beliefs as a serious criticism against everybody else who holds similar beliefs is fucking retarded.

With that said, this is aimed at the people who bring up a perpetrator’s political beliefs as a serious criticism. If you’re doing it for LULZ you get a pass.

Everybody is Sick of Obama

I try not to focus too much on individual politicians unless they’ve done something especially egregious. It wouldn’t matter to me who occupied the White House, I would oppose that person. But I find it amusing how Obama has gone from the beloved celebrity to an irritant in the eyes of the public. This continuously dwindling public imagine isn’t surprising considering the number of scandals that has befallen his administration. From Fast and Furious to the ongoing National Security Agency (NSA) fiasco we have seen Obama receive and ever growing slew of negative publicity. What makes this downfall even more entertaining is the constant attempts by Obama to divert peoples’ attention.

Obama met with the higher ups of several major technology companies. During this meeting the representatives of the technology companies had to prevent Obama from diverting the meeting topic from the NSA fiasco to the Healthcare.gov fiasco:

The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.

Senior executives from the companies whose bosses were present at the meeting said they were determined to keep the discussion focused on the NSA, despite the White House declaring in advance that it would focus on ways of improving the functionality of the troubled health insurance website, healthcare.gov, among other matters.

I have no love for the leaders of the present technology companies either. From my point of view most of them are merely lower level oligarchs in the great state/industry marriage. But it’s entertaining to watch the lower tier oligarchs rebel against the upper tier oligarchs. The NSA fiasco has cause users to question most major technology companies, which threatens profits. If there’s one thing the lower oligarchs won’t stand for it’s the potential to lose profits. Such a threat is enough to get them to become restless and even go against the desires of higher oligarchs. In this instance the lower oligarchs weren’t willing to let the upper oligarchs sweep the NSA fiasco under the table.

Nothing to See Here

Once again I spent my night working on WristCoin. It turns out that doing asynchronous lookups of Bitcoin prices and sending them to the Pebble as they come in is a recipe for bad times. The Pebble can only handle a single incoming message, which it must process before it will accept another incoming message. There is no way that I’ve found to check from the phone side whether or not the Pebble is ready to accept another message so I had to switch over to synchronous lookups, which is not ideal in my book (I like firing and forgetting as opposed to waiting around for each price to arrive before looking up the next price). Considering how resource constrained the Pebble is I do understand this design decision but it’s a pain in my ass.