Technology – Page 42 – A Geek With Guns

Turn It Off And On Again

A small update to my initial thoughts on the Apple Watch. The abysmal battery life and crashing apps problem appears to have been corrected after I rebooted the watch. After that it notified me that an update to WatchOS was available. I’m not sure if rebooting or the firmware update ultimately fixed the problem but things are working much better than they were.

Apply firmware updates to watches? The future is weird. But it’ll get a lot weirder when we have to apply firmware updates to our batteries.

Initial Thoughts On The Apple Watch

Best Buy is selling the Apple Watch at $100.00 discount, which brings the price of the cheapest model down to $250.00. $250.00 happens to be the price range I think is fair for the Apple Watch so yesterday I decided to pick one up. I opted for the cheapest model, the 38mm (I have small wrists) Sports Edition in Space Gray.

Before I start with my initial thoughts lets me be up front and say that I’m a watch guy. By that I mean I’m a huge fan of watches, specifically the mechanical kind. They are to me what paintings are to other fans of art. Up front I will admit that it’s unlikely the Apple Watch will ever replace my mechanical watches for more than a few days at a time. So why did I want one? Because it makes a good fitness tracker that many of the apps I use, such as Cyclemeter, can interface with. In addition to having interfaces for a lot of my apps it also manages not to look completely like ass.

With that out of the way, let me give my initial thoughts. Having owned a Pebble (until the down button broke) and looked at most other popular smartwatches currently on the market I can say that the Apple Watch is probably the closest to being a watch. This is both good and bad. The bad is that the mentality is probably responsible for the high cost of the device. The good is that it is a very well designed product for a smartwatch. Everything from the packaging to the watch itself has a level of detail not found on any of the competing devices I’ve looked at. When you pick up and hold the watch it feels sturdy, the crappy rubber strap is less crappy than most other rubber straps (that is to say it’s softer and more flexible), and the controls feel very tight (as opposed to my Pebble, which had very mushy buttons).

Although the display is tiny it is nice. It’s a Retina display so it has a very high resolution and good color definition. Showing an attention to detail, and to get around the fact the battery in the watch is tiny, the display turns on automatically when you bring your wrist up to look at it. When you put your arm back down the display turns off. I have already developed a love-hate relationship with the touchscreen. On the upside it gives you a lot of options for controls. On the downside many of the buttons are very small. The home screen is a downright mess in my opinion and you really have to use the crown to zoom in quite a bit if you have any hopes of bringing up the app you want. With that said, controls are a problem on every smartwatch and will likely remain less than optimal until somebody thinks up a completely new way of doing things.

Speaking of controls, there are two dedicated hardware controls. One is a crown that can be rotated and pressed like a button and the other is a nearly useless button that serves only to bring up your contacts list (a feature I don’t need). I like the crown control for the most part. The only thing I run into trouble with is it doesn’t act like the back button on the Pebble. Pressing the crown returns you to the home screen, it doesn’t move you back a screen in an app. That’s probably something I just need to adjust to.

Most of the included apps don’t show the same attention to detail as the hardware. Overall I’m not really thrilled with the included apps. They all feel haphazardly put together and I have had a lot of issues with them crashing when they first open.

The battery life is shit. It’ll get you through the day, so long as you don’t use it too heavily, but that’s about it.

I still need time to use it before making any final conclusions. Right now I feel that it is a good buy at $250.00 but really does show a lot of problems, primarily on the software side, typical of a 1.0 release. It is a very nicely presented product and I think the next release will be much better. For what I want, a fitness tracker with some additional functionality, it appears to fit the bill. If you’re already tied in the Apple ecosystem it’s probably the best smartwatch available (although most models of the Pebble will give you actual battery life but at the cost of functionality).

Mi Finis La Esperantan Arbon En Duolingo

Nun la reala lernado komencas!

It’s taken me nearly 100 days but I have finally completed the Esperanto tree on Duolingo. Between Duolingo’s course, Lernu’s dictionary, and Memrise’s various Esperanto courses I feel I’ve obtained a good enough understanding of the language to call myself a beginner. I say I only qualify as a beginner because I now have a fairly solid understanding of the grammar and a large enough vocabulary to write somewhat complex sentences. That doesn’t mean I can write sentences without making numerous grammatical mistakes and I don’t always select the correct word to accurately translate my thoughts. But I’m not at a point where I can start holding simple conversations and understand a lot of written material I come across.

What is truly remarkable about this is that I have gotten this far using only free online tools. The true value of the Internet, in my opinion, is the commodification of information. A free (to you) education on almost any subject is available to anybody with an Internet connection. While it’s true not everybody has an Internet connection the current availability of information is far greater than it was before the Internet. In time Internet connectivity will likely become commodified to such a point that almost everybody who wants to be connected will be connected. The future is looking to be pretty fucking awesome.

Fascism Returns To Europe

I know what you’re thinking, fascism never left Europe. It’s true but it has been hidden under euphemisms like emergency powers, social democracies, and parliamentary procedures. But France is finally throwing off the visage of liberty, equality, and fraternity. With the Paris attacks as the excuse the French government is moving to silence those who would question it:

According to leaked documents from the Ministry of Interior the French government is considering two new pieces of legislation: a ban on free and shared Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency, and measures to block Tor being used inside France.

The documents were seen by the French newspaper Le Monde. According to the paper, the new bills could be presented to parliament as soon as January 2016. The new laws are presumably in response to the attacks in Paris last month where 130 people were murdered.

The first proposal, according to Le Monde, would forbid free and shared Wi-Fi during a state of emergency. The new measure is justified by way of a police opinion, saying that it’s tough to track people who use public hotspots.

The second proposal is a little more gnarly: the Ministry of Interior is looking at blocking and/or forbidding the use of Tor completely. Blocking people from using Tor within France is technologically quite complex, but the French government could definitely make it difficult for the average user to find and connect to the Tor network. If the French government needs some help in getting their blockade set up, they could always talk to the only other country in the world known to successfully block Tor: China, with its Great Firewall.

This is just another feather in the hat of fascism that already includes detaining activists in their homes so they can’t exercise their supposed right to free speech and targeting members of a minority religion. But the target of these measures is very clear: removing the anonymity of the people the French government wishes to target.

Fortunately the French government is setting itself up for failure. Tor has proven to be a difficult target for tyrannical governments to suppress. Every time an effective means of censoring Tor traffic is implemented a workaround is also implemented. Open Wi-Fi access points are easy to shutdown until the network is decentralized. Finding and shutting down every node in a large mesh network would be extremely expensive. In addition to taking a great deal of time and money it would also divert a sizable amount of labor from other suppression activities. And there’s no guarantee the French government would be able to find and tear down new nodes faster than activists could replace them. If the people of France are smart they’ll start working on their own version of Guifi.net.

Guns, Weed, and Crypto

Because I advocate apolitical action to achieve change in the world I periodically get political types snidely asking, “Well what have you done for liberty?” It’s a fair question. My recent efforts have been primarily focused on teaching people how to defend themselves online. Fortunately I’m not alone. I’ve been working with some phenomenal people to run CryptoPartyMN, and organization created specifically to teach people how to use security means of communications.

Our work hasn’t gone unnoticed either. A few weeks ago James Shiffer from the Star Tribune contacted us. He was working on an article covering Crypto War II and wanted to interview members of CryptoPartyMN to understand the counterarguments to the State’s claims that effective cryptography puts everybody at risk. In addition to interviewing several of us he also attended the last CryptoParty. The result was this article. As you can tell from the article we’ve got everything you could possibly want:

The three CryptoParty presenters were Burg, 32, a Twin Cities software developer and Second Amendment supporter whose blog is called “A Geek With Guns.” The two others are cannabis activists Cassie Traun, 26, an IT professional who “never really trusted the government,” and Kurtis Hanna, 30, an unsuccessful candidate for Minneapolis mayor and state Legislature who said he became interested in the issue after the revelations of NSA spying.

Guns, weed, and crypto. Between the three of us we’ve got pretty much every important freedom issue covered!

So, yeah, that’s one of the things I’ve been up to.

What The FBI Demands When It Sends A Gag Order

The first rule about National Security Letters (NSL) is you don’t talk about NSLs. If you do the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) gets to put you in a cage. But a resent lawsuit has allowed us to get the first glimpse of an NSL. Specifically what the FBI demanded an Internet service provider (ISP) hand over about one of its customers:

The National Security Letter (NSL) is a potent surveillance tool that allows the government to acquire a wide swath of private information—all without a warrant. Federal investigators issue tens of thousands of them each year to banks, ISPs, car dealers, insurance companies, doctors, and you name it. The letters don’t need a judge’s signature and come with a gag to the recipient, forbidding the disclosure of the NSL to the public or the target.

For the first time, as part of a First Amendment lawsuit, a federal judge ordered the release of what the FBI was seeking from a small ISP as part of an NSL. Among other things, the FBI was demanding a target’s complete Web browsing history, IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with, and records of all online purchases, according to a court document unveiled Monday. All that’s required is an agent’s signature denoting that the information is relevant to an investigation.

This looks like a fishing expedition more than an investigation. Investigations are supposed to involved people who are suspected of specific crimes and any information demanded from investigators should be specific to those suspected crimes. What the FBI demanded in this case was basically all information the ISP could have about their customer and some information it probably didn’t have (such as a history of online purchases). Such a vast amount of unspecific data would be useful if the FBI wanted to find evidence of a crime and charge the target based on that. Because of the secrecy of NSLs it’s impossible to know the exact motives of the FBI so there’s really nothing stopping it from going on fishing expeditions.

I’d like to see more NSLs disclosed because I’m betting most of them will look more like fishing expeditions than investigations.

Consider Estonia When Starting An Online Business

When people tell me they want to start a white market business in the United States I strongly encourage them to think twice. Between the never ending rules and restrictions and the high taxes the United States is a terrible place to start an above the ground business. Fortunately we live in a world where those imaginary lines on maps are becoming less relevant. A while ago Estonia announced it’s e-residency program, which allows people to become virtual residents of Estonia. In an article discussing Estonia’s new deal with BitNation I noticed the e-residency program might include some real benefits:

Estonia, a country at the forefront of modern e-government, has been offering efficient online services to its citizens for more than a decade.

“By offering e-residents the same services, Estonia is proudly pioneering the idea of a country without borders,” proudly states the e-residency website. In particular, e-residents can digitally sign, verify and encrypt documents and contracts, establish an Estonian company online in 24 hours with a physical address in Estonia provided by an external service, and administer the company from anywhere in the world.

Currently, establishing an Estonian bank account for the company requires one in-person meeting at one of the banks that recognize e-resident smart ID cards – currently LHV, Swedbank and SEB – but once the account is established e-residents can manage e-banking and remote money transfers from anywhere in the world.

An appealing feature of e-residency for entrepreneurs is that, in Estonia, company income is not taxed. Therefore, compliance is simplified and all income is available for re-investment. However, since e-residency doesn’t imply tax residency, e-residents are supposed to pay taxes at home for the money that they take out of the company.

The question here is how much information does the Estonian government voluntarily provide other nations. If it hands over all business information upon request this e-residency program probably isn’t going to be that useful. But if it’s unwilling to hand over information and instead relies on business owners voluntarily providing their home countries tax information this could be a boon.

I bring this up because I believe it’s a good idea to keep an eye out for good deals. My preference is for underground businesses but I know a lot of people want to operate in the white market because it’s easier. Just because you want to operate in the white market doesn’t mean you have to play by the United States’ draconian rules or fund its insatiable war machine. E-residencies are likely to become more commonly available as other governments realize the wealth they could steal by offering denizens of foreign countries a better deal. After all, many great conquers managed to sign up a lot of foreign nationals by offering to steal far less from them. There’s no reason you can’t profit a bit by taking such offers when they’re made.

Don’t Ask An Astrophysicist About Economics

Neil deGrasse Tyson has reach almost messiah levels on the Internet and it’s easy to see why. He’s a brilliant man who managed to avoid the social awkwardness many brilliant individuals suffer from. But he’s an astrophysicist, not an economist. He made this very clear during a recent interview:

It seems really easy to delude ourselves about the state of space now, right? We look at a company like Mars One and say, “Oh yeah, totally, that seems possible. A reality show would definitely fund a mission to Mars.” Or even SpaceX, we’ve looked at that company with wide eyes and only now question them after a very public failure.

The delusion that relates to private spaceflight isn’t really what you’re describing. They’re big dreams, and I don’t have any problems with people dreaming. Mars One, let them dream. That’s not the delusion. The delusion is thinking that SpaceX is going to lead the space frontier. That’s just not going to happen, and it’s not going to happen for three really good reasons: One, it is very expensive. Two, it is very dangerous to do it first. Three, there is essentially no return on that investment that you’ve put in for having done it first. So if you’re going to bring in investors or venture capitalists and say, “Hey, I have an idea, I want to put the first humans on Mars.” They’ll ask, “How much will it cost?” You say, “A lot.” They’ll ask, “Is it dangerous?” You’ll say, “Yes, people will probably die.” They’ll ask, “What’s the return on investment?” and you’ll say “Probably nothing, initially.” It’s a five-minute meeting. Corporations need business models, and they need to satisfy shareholders, public or private.

A government has a much longer horizon over which it can make investments. This is how it’s always been.

SpaceX may not be the company that manages to get privatized space exploration off the ground but not for the reasons he gives. Expense and danger have never been major hinderances to entrepreneurs. Oftentimes the State will cite dangers as its reason to hinder an entrepreneur but our history is riddled with people who took tremendous risk in the name of being the first to develop a new technology. With that said, most entrepreneurs don’t blindly rush into danger but make a best effort attempt to identify and mitigate risks. SpaceX is a great example of this. Recognizing the potential dangers rocketry imposes SpaceX has been investing resources into designing an ejection system for astronauts in case something bad does happen (something, I might add, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) never bothered with).

But Tyson’s biggest mistake was claiming there’s no return on investment. He fell into the common trap of assuming just because he can’t imagine a return on investment one must not exist. Successful entrepreneurs are successful because they realized a return on an investment others did not. Space offers up tremendous returns to the right entrepreneur. Astroid mining, zero gravity manufacturing, tourism, and an environment that allows a lot of research to be more easily performed are just a few returns available to entrepreneurs who get into space. Mining alone could be a huge return simply because moving large amounts of raw materials through vacuum and dropping it down near where it’s needed is easier than transporting the same amount across a planet.

I think his claim that government has a much longer horizon is also in meaningless. The longest horizon in the universe won’t accomplish anything noteworthy without creativity. Governments are terribly uncreative. Unless something may expand a government’s ability to expropriate wealth it tends to have little or no interest in pursuing it. What makes entrepreneurs valuable is their creativity. An entrepreneur by definition is somebody who used their creativity to come up with a new good or service. A successful entrepreneur is somebody who came up with a good or service people wanted. Because there is nothing obviously worth stealing in space it’s unlikely governments will invest any notable resources into exploring it. It may, however, attempt to tax any goods or services an entrepreneur creates in space. And entrepreneurs will try because there is a great deal of potential value in space.

Space exploration is, amongst other things, an economics problem. I wouldn’t doubt Tyson’s input when it came to the physics involved in space exploration but I’ve seen no reason to believe his knowledge about economics comes close to his knowledge about physics.

The Dumb Smart Gun

Remember the Armatix iP1? It was a supposed smart gun that utilized a wrist-mounted authenticator to allow the gun to fire. The gun, as far as I know, never mad it to market. While the inability to bring the gun to market causes anti-self-defense advocates to blame the National Rifle Association (NRA) it turns out the real problem was likely technical. As it turns out the NRA actually had the chance to perform range tests on the iP1 and were left wanting. Here is a list of technical failures exhibited during the NRA’s testing:

Does the Armatix operate perfectly? Well, no; we found it to be troubling at best. NRA’s tests, conducted with staffers trained by Armatix, found a number of very serious problems:

The Armatix pistol initially required a full 20 minutes to pair with the watch, even with the aid of an IT pro trained in its use. Without pairing, the Armatix functions like any other handgun, capable of being fired by anyone.

Once paired, a “cold start” still requires a minimum of seven push-button commands and a duration of 12 seconds before the gun can be fired.

While the gun holds a maximum of 11 rounds (10+1), the best our experts could manage was nine consecutive rounds without a failure to fire (and that only once). Three or four misfires per magazine were common, despite using various brands of ammunition.

[…]

The pistol must be within 10 inches of the watch during “start up.” This slows and complicates the use of the pistol if one hand is injured or otherwise unavailable.

This is uncommon for a version one release although the fact the authentication system doesn’t prevent the gun from firing until it has been paired makes the entire system rather pointless. I would have thought such an obvious mistake wouldn’t have made it to a range test. The fact it did makes one wonder what other obvious mistakes were made.

New South Wales Bans Possessing Knowledge

3D printers have ensured gun control laws will continue to become less enforceable. How can a government enforce a ban on something anybody can download a schematic for and print in their own home? It can’t. But that’s not going to stop the government of New South Wales from trying:

Possessing files that can be used to 3D print firearms will soon be illegal in New South Wales after new legislation, passed last week by state parliament, comes into effect.

Among the provisions of the Firearms and Weapons Prohibition Legislation Amendment Bill 2015 (PDF) is an amendment to the Weapons Prohibition Act 1998 stating that a person “must not possess a digital blueprint for the manufacture of a firearm on a 3D printer or on an electronic milling machine.”

The maximum penalty is 14 years’ jail.

The provision does not apply to any person with a licence to manufacture firearms or the police.

‘Possession’ is defined as “possession of a computer or data storage device holding or containing the blueprint or of a document in which the blueprint is recorded” or “control of the blueprint held in a computer that is in the possession of another person (whether the computer is in this jurisdiction or outside this jurisdiction)”.

Enforcing this would require knowing every file on every person’s computer and knowing every purchase every person has made. Even banning 3D printers or requiring they be registered wouldn’t make this law enforceable because schematics exist for 3D printers that can print 3D printer parts and be built at home.

With that said, this is yet another law that should encourage people to utilize strong cryptographic tools. Ensure every data storage device you possess is encrypted. Only access websites through encrypted connections. And use anonymity tools like Tor to download any potentially illegal data (which is all data). Laws against possessing information requires the authorities be capable of finding out whether or not you’ve learned something. So long as you can conceal that from them they cannot enforce such prohibitions.