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776

Living Room / Re: For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by 40hz on December 22, 2014, 01:21 PM »

ts also a legal problem. Strictly speaking you are required by law to keep record somewhere somehow of all company internal written communications as much as is practical. At least in my understanding of business law anyway- I've seen quite a few cases where the courts order a company to present such.

Thus they were legally obligated to keep that information on record becase on the off chance they got investigated, it could be held as evidence in the courtroom and whoever was involved would be effectively screwed by the discovery of its contents.

-SeraphimLabs (December 22, 2014, 01:03 PM)

Depends on the jurisdiction I think. Here it only applies to "covered" communications. Many US corporations are now operating on a minimal retention policy. They only retain as much and as long as the law requires. With the exception of regulated securities-related communications; and tax documents and/or communications with government revenue services - which I have been told need to (or should be) be retained indefinitely.

Many companies have discovered that the old exhortation to "keep copies of everything to CYA" often backfires and makes much to be discovered in the event of a lawsuit or investigation.

There actually are recommended "retention schedules" issued by the government that cover most business documents and communications. Very few items on those schedules fall under the "retain indefinitely" category.

The trick is to religiously follow whatever schedule you adopt. If you claim you rigorously purge all internal memos every three years, you can't keep some and later destroy them if they're subpoenaed, citing your policy and stating they're "more than three years old." That's obstruction and destroying evidence. And it can also create the appearance your policy was specifically designed to impede and evade the law. Judges here don't usually like that very much.

My understanding is it's still a fairly open question here however. The current "best practice" to minimize "legal exposure" seems to be (got this from an attorney) to retain only what you absolutely must by law, and generally try to get rid of everything else as soon as is practically possible.

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Living Room / Re: For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by 40hz on December 22, 2014, 12:42 PM »

Just for conversation's sake... what would that look like from the abstract?  Maybe we can hash it out?  Any thoughts?

My requirements for adoption are simple.  Not real-time, and not brief form- though it would support almost real-time and brief form communications.

-wraith808 (December 22, 2014, 12:12 PM)

So far we have:

• not real-time - but timely
• not restricted to brief form

I'll add:

• fully decentralized - no persistent servers or trackers
• non-logging protocol
• encrypted end-to-end, with primary encryption done on the local machine -
  (note: additional encryption layers may also be added further down the chain)
• some type of "trust" mechanism between peers to minimize risk of "man in the middle" attack vector
  which ideally would also serve to identify "poison" peers
• mechanism to identify tampering attempts with messages
• integral tombstone/self-destruct mechanism available for all messages with "delete after reading" as the default. "Save this message?" must be specifically invoked (a simple push button, check box, or right-click will do) for each message in order for it to be retained.
  
• to preserve message store security, encryption is "always on." Messages are only in an unencrypted state when being displayed. Unopened messages are left encrypted. Saved messages are automatically re-encrypted on close. Deleted message are zero overwritten in background.
  
  
  

What else?

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Living Room / Re: For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by 40hz on December 22, 2014, 12:31 PM »

This to me is a people problem.

-Stoic Joker (December 22, 2014, 09:18 AM)

Absolutely. It always is.

Reduced to its essence, the main problem boils down to the fact there are basically three types of people in this context:

• people who just want to use and enjoy their computers
• people who want to sell these people software and services to run on their computers
• and people who want to fuck with the people who use computers

None of that is going to go away.

But if we can curtail the range of motion and minimize the opportunities for harm from that third group, that's a decent enough win. And probably as good as it will ever get short of caving in and instituting a fully regulated and monitored global network. Which is a cure far worse than the disease. Especially now that we know our own governments are in the habit of straying more and more into that third group of people. So handing them the keys and absolute authority won't help matters. It will only make things worse by an order of magnitude.

But that's not to say we need to roll over and accept what we currently have as the way things are or need to be.

No system will likely ever be completely secure. But almost everything we're currently using could be made considerably more secure. Because we don't need a "perfect solution." A better one will more than do for starters - even if it doesn't catch all boundary cases.

Getting one user's data is probably not ever going to be completely preventable. But getting things to where obtaining one user's data no longer so easily allows you to use that subset to get at every other user's data certainly is. That's just employing better engineering. Like our electrical codes - they can't prevent every single fire or accident. But they do reduce the number of incidents to a very tiny statistical probability. Because they contribute to enforcing "known good" standards and "best" practices that minimize the damage when an incident actually does occur.

And that's good enough for day to day use AFAIC.

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Living Room / Re: For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by 40hz on December 22, 2014, 11:54 AM »

@Wraith - didn't I say "metaphore" earlier?

I'm of the opinion we don't need something else. We need something new.

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Living Room / Re: For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by 40hz on December 22, 2014, 11:33 AM »

@rg - LOL! That would certainly work for me.

Half the time I get into a 'discussion' these days I feel like I'm a character in this comic strip:

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Living Room / Re: For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by 40hz on December 22, 2014, 11:30 AM »

I don't care for chat either. It's easier to just pick up a phone AFAIC. I'm not afraid to actually talk to a live person. (My age must be showing. )

But in this scenario, I think "chat" is more a metaphor for the system-wide changes needed rather than an actual endorsement for chat technology.

Had e-mail been left using text, it wouldn't be much of an issue. But once it was web and script enabled "for your convenience and greater productivity" it became a ticking bomb. And a great target of opportunity since the underlying protocols were (as noted earlier) never designed to be secure - nor intended to be used in situation where security was a consideration. Apparently most people, businesses, and government agencies didn't get copied on that memo. And when you add in how sloppily coded most e-mail apps were coded, it was only a matter of time. Especially when they're capable of calling all these nifty black-box APIs and services that let them do more than just allow you to compose, edit, send, and read messages.

When you go Rube Goldberg, you get Rube Goldberg.

The important takeaway is that you need a decentralized message transport mechanism that has strong encryption and security coded in from the get go. That an an intrinsically more secure and better engineered protocol for it to run on top of. SMTP and POP ain't it. And IMAP is a central server approach that isn't any better when it comes to security concerns.

It's not so much we need to abandon e-mail. It's more that it's time we realize what we call e-mail is a lot more than just text messages. And it's time to get serious about it instead of limping along with an outdated and half-assed solution that is making more and more problems for all of us.

Again, this is just my

(Add in that penny for your thoughts and we'll have a shiny nickle! )

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Living Room / Re: For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by 40hz on December 22, 2014, 08:51 AM »

Thinking in terms of a decentralized non-logging P2P approach is a good start. It won't be totally secure since nothing really can be. But it can be made secure and difficult enough to capture that the cost-benefit ratio tilts in favor of letting something go unless dealing with a demonstrably "high value" target. At the very least it makes broad-sweep data gathering less attractive and far more costly in terms of storage and analysis. You can only raise taxes so much to fund a hopeless project. Even the U.S. military, who wrote the book on money pits, knows that. Merged with known strong encryption (if that means anything now - or will continue to mean much in the near future) makes it even more of a challenge to would be interceptors.

As far as "if people would just ______" I can only say: not gonna happen. And I'm enough an old-school computer guy that I was taught (and believe) that if it always needs to be done, a person shouldn't need to do it at all.

No-exceptions, boring, "always" is what we created machines for. Computers don't always handle exceptions well. But they're champs at mandatory and routine tasks. So lets let our software take care of the heavy lifting. Drudge work is what we originally built the little ogres for in the first place. (Who in their right mind wants to spend years of their limited lifetime calculating ballistics tables for field artillery no matter how good they are at math - or how much they enjoy it?) Let all those expensive chips we built keep busy instead of running endless NOPs when they don't have anything better to do than waste electricity and sit around waiting to be hacked.

Just my for now. ("It's a 'three pipe' problem, Watson.")
 

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Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on December 21, 2014, 07:03 PM »

At least we can have fun disagreeing!  

-Renegade (December 21, 2014, 05:52 PM)

This! A worthy opponent is worth their weight in gold if you really do want to work through and clarify your position on something. It's fun. It's challenging. And it's absolutely essential if you want to avoid the trap of what philosopher William James called: "vicious abstractionism."

And it was aliens!

Y'know...lately, I'm beginning to suspect it just might be:

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Living Room / For better security, maybe it's time to abandon e-mail?

« Last post by 40hz on December 21, 2014, 03:47 PM »

Interesting article by Jordan Pearson who argues that the time may have arrived where we need to seriously consider abandoning e-mail in favor of a 'designed to be secure from the ground up' chat paradigm. Food for thought. Even if chat isn't the answer, something seriously needs to be done about our present e-mail technology. Simply bolting encryption on after the fact is a stopgap "solution" at best.

The Biggest Lesson from the Sony Hack? We Need to Replace Email

by Jordan Pearson Contributor, Canada
December 19, 2014 // 03:50 PM EST

The most striking discovery of the Sony hack wasn’t that studio head Amy Pascal had an intensely personal meltdown or that the feds were collaborating with the company on the ending of The Interview—it was that all of these things existed together in one, utterly defenseless spot, just waiting to be hacked and leaked.

We use email for everything now: newsletters, professional collaboration, and jokes to grandma. But email wasn’t designed for the age of hackers that can—apparently, god help us—bend skittish corporations to their will.

It might be time to consider a world with less email, where secure chat apps that can send messages to each other rule online communication. Unless you want to leave a paper trail, that is. <more>

 

785

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on December 21, 2014, 10:26 AM »

What happened to my 40?  I could always depend on 40 to be the rational one, balancing out the radical Renegade, and myself in the middle!

-wraith808 (December 20, 2014, 04:38 PM)

@Wraith - I think you just completely lost me there...

-40hz (December 20, 2014, 06:12 PM)

It's just that your statement sounded more closely aligned to a Ren statement

-wraith808 (December 20, 2014, 09:50 PM)

Oh! Well...that's understandable. Upon extremely rare occasions I do find myself in at least partial alignment with the Renegade. I think we generally agree when there's a problem somewhere. But we generally disagree in our interpretations of how and why said problem(s) came about. And we're almost always disagreeing about the best approach to deal with it.



Ren is the brave and principled warrior knight.



I'm the wounded, old, and treacherous Ronin.

786

Living Room / Re: Et tu, Sourceforge?

« Last post by 40hz on December 21, 2014, 10:18 AM »

^AFAIK Sourceforge is promoting it - but (at least for now) it's up to the developers whether or not to participate.

787

Living Room / Re: Do we have any musical people on DC?

« Last post by 40hz on December 20, 2014, 08:13 PM »

OK...finally something musical that may appeal to the broader tech crowd here. The creator of the iOS looping app called Loopy has started on its next iteration: Loopy Masterpiece Edition. He's invited his userbase and interested musicians to participate and follow along with the design process. And he intends to detail the entire development process in a blog he's created.

Here's his introductory video:

Then his three part walkthru of LME: part-1, part-2, part-3

Once you have what LME is all about under your belt, he moves into the software engineering behind how all this software magic is going to happen. This video will probably be quite useful to anyone who ever considered doing a serious music app. It shows just some of the thinking behind such products and is a decent example of an object oriented programming project.

Pretty fascinating, and well worth a watch, even for non-programmer musicians like myself.

There's more to read and see at the blog. I intend to follow this one closely. Recommended.

788

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on December 20, 2014, 06:12 PM »

What happened to my 40?  I could always depend on 40 to be the rational one, balancing out the radical Renegade, and myself in the middle!

-wraith808 (December 20, 2014, 04:38 PM)

@Wraith - I think you just completely lost me there...

789

Living Room / Re: imagine future life

« Last post by 40hz on December 20, 2014, 04:06 PM »

Now we just need a program that does your physical workout for you.  I don't think I'd like the muscle twitching type unless it can also make you unaware of the twitches.

-MilesAhead (December 20, 2014, 01:12 PM)

Or if it also induced certain "twitches" that might distract you from noticing the ones you don't enjoy? All it would require is combining two already existing product um..."feature sets." That and a clever product name* to market it under.  

Now please excuse me. I gotta go put together a quick Kickstarter.  

-------------------------------------

*Maybe the Angelina-J Total Body Workout Machine? "In just 25 minutes you'll be left totally exhaused and gasping for breath - with every muscle in your body aching so badly that you could just cry - and here's the best part: you'll still feel it was totally worth it folks!!! Get some for yourself today. Operators are standing by.

790

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by 40hz on December 20, 2014, 11:54 AM »

Just finished re-reading Hermann Melville's  Moby-Dick. Totally engrossing story that, for some reason, seems to get better and better the older I get. What can that mean? 

791

Living Room / Re: imagine future life

« Last post by 40hz on December 20, 2014, 11:21 AM »

With that level of technology, your home will more likely immediately check your medical records and see what your government-provided medical insurance has to say about it, before telling you you're already 20 pounds overweight and can't have that. Then it will "helpfully" suggest a nice salad with low fat dressing and a 12 oz. glass of unsweetened iced tea for dinner instead.

792

Living Room / Re: Does anyone here use Bitcoins?

« Last post by 40hz on December 20, 2014, 11:14 AM »

^What is it with Australia (and New Zealand) lately? They went from being two of the coolest most laid-back countries in the world to being participants in the footrace race to see which so-called "Western Democracy" can be the first to fully embrace totalitarianism. So sad.

793

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by 40hz on December 20, 2014, 11:04 AM »

From the Shameless Plug Department: My GF's cousin (Susanne Vick) doing harmony for her good friend and musical collaborator Melissa Mulligan's CD. An almost medievally pure set of harmonizations on O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

                          

794

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by 40hz on December 20, 2014, 08:36 AM »

^Good old Sammy! I keep waiting for the day he gets just a little too cocky for his own good and the sky falls on him once and for all. Still, when "you da man!" - YOU DA MAN! (Hmm...I wonder if that thing still works even with USB Services disabled. )

795

Living Room / Re: Every Episode Of Every 'Star Trek' Series Ever, Ranked

« Last post by 40hz on December 20, 2014, 08:17 AM »

^ I'm not a Trekkie, nor really that big a fan of Roddenberry's universe. But I did go to a Trek convention once. It amazes me how deeply that show has shaped so many peoples lives. (Sometimes frighteningly so.) While there I got the chance to see a panel session with some of the TNG cast.

Marina Sirtis was funny and absolutely charming those few times I got to see and hear her then, as well as at various other scifi conventions. So was George Takei (a wonderful gentleman!) and Gates McFadden. (I always thought the writers did a particularly bad job with her character. The Dr. Crusher role had the potential to be so much more. Like Bones and Spock, she would have been the perfect verbal sparring partner for Worf. Instead, they cast her as a fairly neurotic pre-menopausal empty-nester who was about one month shy of being started on Prozac. Seriously guys...this was the best you could come up with for an elegant looking and rather classy female medical officer? No wonder they pay you the big bucks!)

BTW: If you ever do get a chance to hear Patrick Stewart, don't pass it up. He usually deserts the podium and speaks without a microphone. He's a Shakespearian actor so he knows how to project his voice so that it can be clearly heard in every corner of the room. And while not a physically large man, his stage presence is enormous. Patrick Stewart owns any room he speaks in. Not to be missed.

Trivia note: when asked, Sirtis said the one thing she always wanted to be given in the show was the opportunity to sit in the captain's chair and say Stewart's iconic line: "Engage!"

796

Living Room / Re: What are your favorite movies?

« Last post by 40hz on December 19, 2014, 07:54 PM »

"Once Upon a Time in the West": http://en.wikipedia....n_a_Time_in_the_West

A masterpiece. No need to add further words.

-Giampy (December 19, 2014, 06:15 PM)

+1! Awesome flick.

To which I'll also add the suggestion: High Plains Drifter. Clint's very own Spaghetti Western.

797

Living Room / Re: Every Episode Of Every 'Star Trek' Series Ever, Ranked

« Last post by 40hz on December 19, 2014, 01:54 PM »

Then the ... "interesting" ... crew member was given an "interesting" outfit, (that almost made Jeri pass out a couple of times on set!) ... just to ... gain your eyeballs longer when you actually weren't impressed with the writing, as you just admitted.

-TaoPhoenix (December 19, 2014, 09:51 AM)

Aha! I always wondered why they eventually plunked Jeri into a Star Fleet uniform - even if that uniform, unlike those of the rest of the female cast, was oddly tailored to Barbie Doll specs. Apparently the Trek universe has evolved past Earth's PC phase by the time TNG boldy went...wherever to do...whatever.

My GF's reaction the first time she saw Seven of Nine was classic. After silently watching the entire episode, she looked at me and said "Huh! That's all real."  (Women apparently know these things.) I nodded and said so it seemed to me too. She reflected for a moment - and then said "Oh-KAY then!"

That was the sum total of her assessment of the woman and the costume.
 

798

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by 40hz on December 19, 2014, 08:01 AM »

Only today I have known Tina S:

-Giampy (December 19, 2014, 07:29 AM)

Quite impressive. The future of speed metal shred seems to be in very good hands as the next generation takes over. It would be even more interesting to see how she handles a slow lyrical number however. I'll have to go look. Thx for the find. 

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Living Room / Re: Every Episode Of Every 'Star Trek' Series Ever, Ranked

« Last post by 40hz on December 19, 2014, 06:50 AM »

^Yes indeed. It was bordering on modest by today's standards. You can see far more on the average beach. Or at an up-scale cocktail party. But Ms. Jackson's poise and deportment lent a certain "authority" to whatever she wore. A fully buttoned choir robe would have worked equally well with her in it.

As even the normally unflappable Dick Cavett learned.  

800

Living Room / Re: Every Episode Of Every 'Star Trek' Series Ever, Ranked

« Last post by 40hz on December 18, 2014, 08:13 PM »

Voyager isn't my favorite either, but I never understood the hate it gets.

-Shades (December 16, 2014, 05:09 PM)

I don't think it's so much hate as extreme disappointment. Voyager had the potential and opportunity to be the apotheosis of the StarTrek saga. Then Paramount Pictures started chiming in on what to do and how to do it...

Then again, I grew up with TNG, so those episodes will always be my among my favorites.

I grew up with the original. And much as I liked that, TNG was definitely (IMO) the best and finest iteration once it got past its growing pains and the main members of the cast started to click as an ensemble. Pretty much the way a real ship's crew would.

Deep Space Nine started out not that great, but I heard from others that did watch DS9 completely, its ending was very strong.

It had it's moments. But those good scenes and storylines were spread out few and far between all the soap opera junk that made up the bulk of the series. Most times it felt like you were watching Dallas, except this time it was out in space.

Granted, I watched Voyager longer, because of an "interesting" new crew member...

Ah! Jeri, Jeri, Jeri...

Ms. Ryan probably did more to rekindle our fascination with metallic spandex than anything else found in the StarTrek universe.

For the record, Famke Janssen  , Marina Sirtis, Denise Crosby, Sherry Jackson (whose legendary costume by Bill Theiss most emphatically answered the question in the TOS episode: What are Little Girls Made Of?), Beth Toussaint, and any of the 'Onion Girls' are more my speed.

(Note: Bill Theiss is on record as saying his Theiss Theory of Titillation maintains that “the degree to which a costume is considered sexy is directly dependent upon how accident-prone it appears to be.” )