Category: News You Need to Know

Body Banks

I’m guessing most people reading this site don’t remember the ’80’s cyberpunk T.V. show Max Headroom. It was a great, although very short lived, show dealing with all sorts of technological issues. One thing that was prominent in the future were body banks. Body banks were where dead people were shipped to and their organs sold off for sale.

Well Uncle informs us that New York may be going that route. If Assemblyman Brodsky has his way you will become state property upon death and your organs will be dispersed.

Now I’m all for donating your organs upon death but this is outrageous. The state would be laying claim to your body making you property of the government. I’m sorry but if somebody doesn’t want to donate their organs when they die that’s their own damned business.

Boy Scouts of Video Gaming

I admit I don’t know much about the Boy Scouts of America. I never had a desire to be in it and hence wasn’t. Besides pushing religious agendas I understand the Boy Scouts spend most of their time teaching children practical skills including survival. Well apparently they’ve now developed a belt loop and academics pin for video games. Here are the requirements for the belt loop:

1. Explain why it is important to have a rating system for video games. Check your video games to be sure they are right for your age.

2. With an adult, create a schedule for you to do things that includes your chores, homework, and video gaming. Do your best to follow this schedule.

3. Learn to play a new video game that is approved by your parent, guardian, or teacher.

So you have to explain why the rating system is important (which it isn’t). And then check your games to ensure they’re appropriate for your age? I’m sorry but from where I’m sitting that’s a parents job. I was playing games that would be rated 17+ when I was in the seventh grade. My parents allowed me to do this because the felt I was mentally mature enough to handle games like Doom. The game rating board is a guideline much like the MPAA movie rating system. I don’t see why the Boy Scouts would want to push this kind of thing.

And then there is the academics pin which has the following requirements:

1. With your parents, create a plan to buy a video game that is right for your age group.

2. Compare two game systems (for example, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, and so on). Explain some of the differences between the two. List good reasons to purchase or use a game system.

3. Play a video game with family members in a family tournament.

4. Teach an adult or a friend how to play a video game.

5. List at least five tips that would help someone who was learning how to play your favorite video game.

6. Play an appropriate video game with a friend for one hour.

7. Play a video game that will help you practice your math, spelling, or another skill that helps you in your schoolwork.

8. Choose a game you might like to purchase. Compare the price for this game at three different stores. Decide which store has the best deal. In your decision, be sure to consider things like the store return policy and manufacturer’s warranty.

9. With an adult’s supervision, install a gaming system.

So this pin has nothing to do with video games really and more to do with learning how to shop smart. Why not just call it the shop smart pin? Seriously if this is what the Boy Scouts are becoming what’s the point of entering your children into it beyond social interaction?

What’s Mine is Mine and What’s Yours is Mine

Jay over at MArooned has a post showing some people don’t understand the concept of private property. Here’s the jist of the story:

A group of homeless people and housing activists took over a privately owned Mission District duplex on Sunday in what served as the climax of a protest designed to promote use of San Francisco’s vacant buildings as shelters for the needy.

OK so we have a bunch of people who decided they could just take over a home for a while and protest. The police stood by and did nothing but watch and eventually left without making any arrests. But some of the things aid by those homeless individuals made me realize something. People respect the concept of private property until they don’t have property:

Because of housing speculation during the real estate boom, “a lot of tenants were evicted,” Gullicksen said. “Now a lot of those homes are sitting empty. The city should be doing something to turn vacant buildings into affordable housing.”

They may be vacant but they aren’t owned by the city you putz. But of course Mr. Give-Me-Your-Money has a solution to the city not owning the property:

Specifically, he said the city should foreclose on buildings where hefty back taxes are owed or use its powers of eminent domain to turn over long-vacant homes to nonprofit developers. The group is not advocating turning over the city’s stock of new but unsold properties to the homeless.

So the city can either steal the house by collecting on taxes that shouldn’t exist (I’m sorry but property tax isn’t a legitimate tax in my book it’s just a mechanism to ensure you don’t actually own your property) or use their power of eminent domain to outright steal the house. Now eminent domain has always troubled me since it allows somebody to steal another person’s property so long as the one doing the stealing has the government on their side. Like property tax, eminent domain is a mechanism that prevents individuals from actually owning property since ownership implies it can’t be taken without the theft being labeled a crime giving the owner recourse. Needless to say anybody who makes a suggestion based on leveraging property taxes or using eminent domain pisses me right the fuck off. Oh and I love this part:

Jose Morales, 80, lived in the San Jose Street building for 43 years before he was forced to leave in 2008 through the Ellis Act, which allows property owners to get out of the rental business.

Morales said he now lives in a small space in an office building in the Mission District.

“The city should have protected me,” he said. “It’s like they don’t see me. It’s like I’m a ghost to them.”

Guess what buddy you just learned something, you need to take your own protection into your own hands. My question is this, you rented this home for 43 years right? Why the Hell can’t you just go rent SOMEWHERE ELSE? I know what a concept huh?

In this case the city shouldn’t have protected your whiny ass. The individual who owned the house decided he no longer wanted to rent it out. Tough shit buddy. What an individual does with his own property is his business alone. Thankfully the property owner’s attorney understands the concepts I’m talking about:

Zacks said he hopes charges are filed over what he characterized as “people taking the law into their own hands and breaking into property.”

“It’s sort of ridiculous to think that a private property owner like Mr. Tehlirian would have any obligation to house the homeless,” he said. “It’s a problem we should deal with as a community, not something that should be foisted on the back of a small property owner.”

Exactly a person who owns a house should not be required to let somebody else live there. If you want to set up a charity home and let homeless people live there you have that right. But nobody should be demanding a government entity force a homeowner to house the homeless. If you want the government to steal shit from those who can afford it and give it to you who can not afford it move to a communist nation. What is being demanded is redistribution of wealth which is exactly what Karl Marx was all about.

Kind of Scary When You Think About It

According to the Department of Defense:

According to a Department of Defense report, there have been at least 32 “accidents involving nuclear weapons.” And the report only counts US accidents which occurred before 1980.

What kind of accidents you ask? Well:

They include such gaffes as nuclear bombs inadvertently falling through bomb bay doors; the accidental firing of a retrorocket on an ICBM; the vast dispersal of radioactive debris; and the loss of enriched fissile material and nuclear bombs (which are “still out there somewhere”).

I’m sure after each of these accidents the only words uttered were, “Oops.” Read the entire report here (It’s a PDF document so be warned).

Nothing is Black and White

So as I was browsing through my RSS reader I say a story posted on Says Uncle. Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder was tragically killed while in Iraq. As is standard protocol his body was brought back and his funeral was help. Not surprisingly Dipshit Fred Phelps and his merry band of fuckwits in the Westboro Baptist “Church” decided to throw decency to the wind and protest Lance Corporal Snyder’s funeral.

The father of Matthew Snyder sued Phelps for their actions. Well judgement has been passed down and Mr. Snyder lost and the judge decided to make him pay for Dipshit Phelps’ legal expenditures. The legal fees ended up coming to $16,510 which the family is going to have troubles paying. They’ve set up a donations page if you would like to help with the legal fee.

Of course with the title of this post you are probably expecting something else to be posted and that most certainly is the case. Needless to say by the terms and titles I’ve used in this post you know how I personally feel about the people involved. Now it’s time for me to explain what I think about this case.

As much as I despise those pricks in the Westboro Baptist “Church” I also believe they have a right to say what they’re saying. Yes it’s the unpopular route to take but the first amendment is there to protect all speech not just popular speech. As much as I hate what they’re doing they have a right to do it. I feel any lawsuit brought against an organization to prevent them for freely using their Constitutional right is wrong and the party bringing forth the suit should be made to pay for the legal fees of those they are trying to silence. From everything I’ve been able to gather I believe the purpose behind Mr. Snyder’s lawsuit was simply to silence those fuckwits claiming to be a church.

I know this is an unpopular position to take but I can not turn against my principals and beliefs. Personally I find disruption of any funeral to be distasteful. Let the friends and family of the deceased grieve in peace even if the guest of honor is your worst enemy. After all that person is dead and therefore is no longer a problem to you. But as it often happens my personal feelings collide directly with my principals. I am a man who practices what he preaches and therefore can not make an exception for something I hold to dear (the Bill of Rights) just because a I despise the person(s) using it.

Wait You Don’t Need a Gun To Kill People

Holy shit! According to Days of our Trailers it’s actually possible to commit mass murder in places that ban guns. No I’m not talking through the usual mechanism of illegally obtained guns but through the mechanism of other weapons. A man in Beijing murdered eight children with a knife.

I thought the anti-gunners said this kind of thing is only possible because of easy access to firearms.

Interesting Windows Security Issue

Note that I didn’t say security hole nor security flaw, that was intentional. The nerd part of my brain has been working in overdrive as of late which means I’ve been looking into geeky things. One thing that always intrigues me is the field of security. Well I found the following story on Wired that talks about a security issue in SSL/TLS (The security mechanisms used prominently by web browsers to secure web pages). The article leads to a “no duh” paper that shows how government entities can use their power to subvert SSL/TLS security by cohering certificate authorities into issuing valid certificates (Anybody who knows how SSL/TLS work already knew this was a possibility).

The part that interested me most was an exert from one of the sited sources in the paper. See back in the day there was some kerfuffle over the fact that Microsoft included a couple hundred trusted root certificates in their operating system. Root certificates are what ultimately get used to validate a certificate issued to a website. Thus root certificates are the ultimate “authority” in determine if a website you are visiting is valid or not. The more root certificates you have the large the possibility of a malicious certificate being certified as trusted (Statistically speaking of course. This assumes that with more root certificates the possibility of one of those root certificate “authorities” being corruptible increases). Anyways Microsoft eventually trimmed down the number of root certificates included in their operating system. But they didn’t actually cut down the number of certificates because according to their own developer documentation:

Root certificates are updated on Windows Vista automatically. When a user visits a secure Web site (by using HTTPS SSL), reads a secure email (S/MIME), or downloads an ActiveX control that is signed (code signing) and encounters a new root certificate, the Windows certificate chain verification software checks the appropriate Microsoft Update location for the root certificate. If it finds it, it downloads it to the system. To the user, the experience is seamless. The user does not see any security dialog boxes or warnings. The download happens automatically, behind the scenes.

Microsoft just pulled a security theater here. They didn’t cut down the number of trusted certificates, they just moved them somewhere people wouldn’t see them. If you connect to a web page that has a certificate that can’t be validated against a root certificate Windows will automatically go out to Microsoft’s servers and see if a root certificate there will validate the web site’s certificate. If one of those root certificates will validate the web site certificate it is downloaded onto your machine automatically and the site is listed as trusted. In essence Windows trusts more root certificates than it lets on.

So what does this mean? Well it means the window for having corrupted root certificate authorities is larger. With the exception of Firefox all major web browsers depend on the underlying operating system’s root certificate store to validate web pages (Firefox actually ships with it’s trusted root certificates and uses it’s own store as opposed to the underlying operating system’s). This also gives two potential locations to place a malicious root certificate. If an attacker was able to gain access to Microsoft’s online root certificate store and upload their own root certificate any SSL/TLS page they created using that root certificate for validation would show as trusted in all versions of Windows (Firefox still would show the site as untrusted). Granted the window for this attack would be small as Microsoft would most likely find it almost immediately and remove it. Likewise the likelihood of such an attack occurring a very small considering the short time frame it would be valid for. But it’s interesting thing to ponder regardless. Additionally the same attack could create a binary of Firefox with the same malicious root certificate included and make it available for download causing the same problem for Firefox users.

No matter what operating system or browser you use the validity of SSL/TLS connections eventually requires that you trust somebody (Which goes against the trust no one security motto). The question here is who are you willing to trust. Only you can determine that but knowing how a security system works and how it’s implemented are important in making that decision. Anyways I just thought that was interesting.

GunPal CEO Charges Dismissed

Good news has been brought to my attention by Everyday, No Days Off. The CEO of GunPal, Ben Cannon, had all charges against him dismissed.

For those of you who hadn’t heard Mr. Cannon was charged with impersonating a police officer after he was accused of pulling a woman over. The accusation made was he used a red light and badge but the police found no such evidence at his domicile.

And People Want This Stuff in Their Cars

One thing people seem to clamber for more and more are methods of tracking and disabling cars remotely. Usually people talk about wanting to be able to track their car and disable it if it gets stolen. There are various methods of implementing such a device allowing for these things to be done via SMS or a web page. Of course companies that make these devices promote them as enhanced security and peace of mind. Parents love the idea of being able to track their teenager’s every move. The problem made apparent by Bruce Schneier is such devices are double-edged swords:

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Oh yeah and the part to concern yourself with:

Ramos-Lopez’s account had been closed when he was terminated from Texas Auto Center in a workforce reduction last month, but he allegedly got in through another employee’s account, Garcia says. At first, the intruder targeted vehicles by searching on the names of specific customers. Then he discovered he could pull up a database of all 1,100 Auto Center customers whose cars were equipped with the device. He started going down the list in alphabetical order, vandalizing the records, disabling the cars and setting off the horns.

Any device that you can use to remotely disable your vehicle can be used by somebody else as well. In this case the devices were put into place by banks since the people buying the cars had been delinquent on payments. But after the WAY over-blown Toyota fiasco there is a lot of talk by government officials about requiring automobiles to be equipped with black boxes. If the government does that you can bet money they will also put in a remote kill switch.