Carlton Ward
Andy Dickerson
Becky Radway
Becca Blackwell

---

Hilary Chaplain
Kathryn Holmes
Alison
BBGPG

---

Lizzie Carena
S/E/M/L
Charley Layton

Sophie stood before me. I'm leaving with that guy, she gestured. Yes, I thought that would happen, I chuckled. She hugged me. The guy, whose name we managed to never utter, did not hug me, though he usually does. They went home together. That was the last time I saw Sophie. The rest of us sat down, finished our drinks, and split up. I went with Sophie's ex-girlfriend and the guy who sometimes serves as her ironic beard. They smoked their disgusting light cigarettes, the kind with very little tobacco but lots of horrible chemicals that make me cough and hopefully fail to give me lung cancer, because watching someone else die of that was excruciating enough. So we get to our next destination and there is a Peruvian girl sitting on a stool and shopping for shoes on her phone. I am fascinated. Phone app developers had told me that people actually did this but I thought it was just wishful thinking on their part. The Peruvian girl, who is named something that sounds like it was uttered accidentally by Tommy Gnosis, complains to Sophie's ex-girlfriend that some guy keeps harassing her. We instinctively form a human barrier to shield her from this alleged transgressor, who, it turns out, is the pompous drug dealer with whom Sophie's ex-girlfriend is just about to conduct business. I'll be right back, she says. Hit on her. What Why I shout after her. There is no response. Sophie's ex-girlfriend and the drug dealer return from the darkness, having swapped possessions. The drug dealer is a blowhard and proceeds to regale us with stories so little interest to me that I can't even remember what they were about, but as drug dealers are wont to do, he abuses the power of his possession to maintain the delusion that people would tolerate his presence even if he didn't have illegal commodities to sell them. When the beard and Sophie's ex-girlfriend go out for a smoke break, I went home.

Rhoda is guarded. She is secretly in love with her brother. When he gets a girlfriend, she finds a boyfriend. She tells no one what she's really thinking. Rhoda likes to seize the day. In the midst of evening conversation, she will excuse herself to use the bathroom or come right back , then, within literally two minutes, she will go home with an acquaintance or stranger. Often these encounters or the aftermaths thereof do not go according to her liking, and she will make veiled remarks of hostility, should she see those people again. Rhoda was unhappy so she changed everything in her life. Though multiple things remained constant, she concluded that she was, in fact, the problem. Rhoda does not make enough money on which to live. She works part-time, and turns down all other job offers. Other people make up for her financial shortcomings so that she is not homeless and starving. Rhoda is certain that it is more difficult to be female than male.

Now that I've almost caught up with life after an extended stint on the West Coast, it's time to play. Like Gunnar, I acquired a Banana Pi courtesy of LeMaker. My GuruPlug (courtesy me) and my Excito B3 (courtesy the lovely people at Tor) are giving me a bit of trouble in different ways, so my intent is to decommission and give away the GuruPlug and Excito B3, leaving my DreamPlug and the Banana Pi to provide the services currently performed by the GuruPlug, Excito B3, and DreamPlug. The Banana Pi is presently running Bananian on a 32G SDHC (Class 10) card. This is close to wheezy, and appears to have a mostly-sane default configuration, but I am not going to trust some random software downloaded off the Internet on my home network, so I need to be able to run Debian on it instead. My preliminary belief is that the two main obstacles are Linux and U-Boot. Bananian 14.09 comes with Linux 3.4.90+ #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Sep 12 18:13:45 CEST 2014 armv7l GNU/Linux, whatever that is, and U-Boot SPL 2014.04-10694-g2ae8b32 (Sep 03 2014 - 20:53:14). I don't yet know what the status of mainline/Debian support is. Someone gave me a wooden cigar box to use as a case, which is not working out quite as hoped. I also found that my hack to power a 3.5" SATA drive does not work, so I'll either need to hammer on that some more or resolve to use a 2.5" drive instead. memory:

Mem:        993700      36632     957068          0       2248      11136
-/+ buffers/cache:      23248     970452
Swap:       524284       1336     522948

cpu:

Processor       : ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
processor       : 0
BogoMIPS        : 1192.96
processor       : 1
BogoMIPS        : 1197.05
Features        : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt 
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0xc07
CPU revision    : 4
Hardware        : sun7i
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 03c32de75055484880485278165166c9

Normally I'm disgusted by fangirling of jwz, but it seems that he finally wrote something I like.

For ages I've been advocating for the dissolution of the tech-ctte, one of the biggest bugs in the Constitution. However, for the longest time I was unable to suggest a suitable replacement; there will always be people whose characters are so flawed that they will appeal to authority as a matter of first recourse, and those people need some sort of forum within which to waste time. Then the circus of #727708 came about, possibly the only useful thing the tech-ctte has ever done. Suddenly it became clear to me what would be a drastic improvement: replace the entire shitshow with a close analog of the Gowachin legal system from Frank Herbert's ConSentiency universe. Sure, it wouldn't fix the structural problems of a self-selecting group, or the related problem of the wider community not understanding such basic concepts as nomocracy, conflicts of interest, separation of duties, separation of powers, accountability, responsibility, independence, oversight, due diligence, corruption, transparency, and egomania, but it would still be better in nearly every aspect. Or maybe term-limit band-aids will magically fix everything.

Jebediah boarded the airplane. It was a Bombardier CRJ900 with two turbofan jet engines. Run by SPARK, a subset of Ada. He sat down in his assigned seat and listened to the purser inform him that he was free to use his phone door-to-door on all Delta Connection flights. As long as the Airplane Mode was switched on. Jebediah knew that this was why Delta owned 49% of Virgin Atlantic. On the plane ride, a woman in too much makeup asked Jebediah to get the man next to him so she could borrow his copy of the Economist. The man said she could keep it and that it was old. He had stubby little fingers. She was foreign. At Terminal 2, they passed by Kids on the Fly, an exhibit of the Chicago Children's Museum at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. A play area. Jebediah thought of Dennis. The Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority was disrupted by weekend construction, so they had to take a small detour through Wicker Park. Wicker Park is a neighborhood. In Chicago. Jebediah looked at Glazed & Infused Doughnuts. He wondered if they made doughnuts there. Because of the meeting, he knocked someone off a Divvy bike and pedaled it to the Loop. The Berghoff was opened in 1898 by Herman Joseph Berghoff. Once he got to the Berghoff, he got a table for seven on the west wall. He eyed the electrical outlet and groaned. He had brought 3 cigarette lighter adapters with him, but nothing to plug into an AC outlet. How would he charge his device? An older gentleman came in. And greeted him. Hello, I'm Detective Chief Inspector Detweiler. Did you bring the evidence? Said the man. Jebediah coughed and said that he had to go downstairs. He went downstairs and looked at the doors. He breathed a sigh of relief. Seeing the word washroom in print reminded him of his home state of Canada. Back at the table he opened a bag, glared angrily at a cigarette lighter adapter, and pulled out a Palm m125. Running Palm OS 4.0. He noticed a third person at the table. It was the ghost of Bob Ross. , said the ghost of Bob Ross. It was good for him to communicate telepathically with Sarah Palin. This has eight megabytes of RAM, Jebediah informed the newcomer. Bob Ross's ghost right-clicked on his face and rated him one star. Jebediah looked angrily at the AC outlet and fidgeted with two of his cigarette lighter adapters. DCI Detweiler said, I had a Handspring Visor Deluxe, and pulled out a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 eight-inch Android-based tablet computer running the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system by Google. This also has eight megabytes of RAM, he continued. As you requested, I brought the video of your nemesis at the Robie House. Jebediah stared at the tablet. He could see a compressed video file, compressed with NetBSD compression and GNU encryption. It was on the tablet. Some bridges you just don't cross, he hissed. Meanwhile, in Gloucestershire, someone who looked suspiciously like Bobby Rainsbury opened up a MacBook Air and typed in a three-digit passcode. Across the street a wall safe slid out of the wall. And dropped onto someone's head. She closed the laptop. And went to Dumfries. Not far from the fallen safe, a group of men held a discussion. FBI: Why are we here on this junket? CIA: Where are we? DIA: We're here. JIA: This is confusing. NSA: I have to get back to that place in Germany where I don't work. ATF: We're talking about giant robots here, people. EPA: Huh? Part 2 AUD:USD 1.0645 donuts:dozen 12 Gold $1318.60 Giant robot spiders fought each other in a supermarket parking lot. Detective Seabiscuit sucked on a throat lozenge. Who are you again? he asked the toll-booth operator. I said my name is Rogery Sterling, replied the toll-booth operator. Rajry what? I said my name is Rogery Sterling, replied the toll-booth operator. Again. Where am I? Look, I'm telling you that that murder you're investigating was caused by software bugs in the software. Are we on a boat? Look at the diagram. This agency paid money to introduce, quite deliberately, weaknesses in the security of this library, through this company here, and this company here. Library, oh no. I have overdue fees. And they're running a PR campaign to increase use of this library. Saying that the competing options are inferior. But don't worry, they're trying to undermine those too. Detective Seabiscuit wasn't listening. He had just remembered that he needed to stop by the Robie House.

Now that ZOMG has support for Opus, I find myself wondering how one does the equivalent of vorbisgain, preferably without floating-point.

I have just pushed our pseudo-monthly batch of keyring updates to Debian. I am happy to inform you that, while the situation described in Clint Adams' interesting assessment of the state of the Debian keyring (and the quite constructive conversation that followed) still holds, and we still have way too many weak (1024D) keys in the Debian keyring, we got a noticeable effect as a result of said thread: 20 key upgrade requests in somewhat over a one week period! (mostly from DDs, with two from DMs IIRC). So, for any DD or DM reading this and not following the debian-project list where this thread took place: As keyring maintainers, we no longer consider 1024D keys to be trustable. We are not yet mass-removing them, because we don't want to hamper the project's work, but we definitively will start being more aggressively deprecating their use. 1024D keys should be seen as brute-force vulnerable nowadays. Please do migrate away from them into stronger keys (4096R recommended) as soon as possible. If you have a key with not-so-many active DD signatures (with not-so-many 2) waiting to get it more signed, stop waiting and request the key replacement. If you do not yet have a 4096R key, create a new one as soon as possible and get some signatures on it. Once 2 DDs have signed it, please request us to replace your old key. If you cannot get to meet two DDs in person, please talk to us and we will find out what to do.

I vote for Martinique.

An NSA employee reminded me that I've been on IRC for 20 years.

Total keys: 996
Key versions:
    996 4
Primary key pubkey algorithms:
    623 "DSA"
    373 "RSA"
Primary key pubkey sizes:
    624 1024
     27 2048
      2 3072
    340 4096
      2 8192
      1 10240
Total number of UIDs + UAts: 4394
Hash algorithm used for most recent self-sig:
      1 "RIPEMD160"
   3188 "SHA1"
   1041 "SHA256"
      1 "SHA384"
    163 "SHA512"
Judgment on preferred hash algorithms:
   1776 null
   2618 "weak hash with higher preference"
Judgment on expiration times:
     53 "expiration passed"
    111 "expiration too far in future"
   3887 "no expiration set"
    343 null

This was generated with debian-keyring 2013.12.13, hopenpgp-tools 0.4-1, jshon 20131010-3, and the following inefficient script:

#!/bin/zsh
infile=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg
tempfile=$(mktemp)
trap 'rm $ tempfile ' EXIT
hokey lint --output-format JSON <$ infile  >$ tempfile 
print -n "Total keys: "
jshon -a -e keyFingerprint <$ tempfile    wc -l
print "Key versions: "
jshon -a -e keyVer -e val <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Primary key pubkey algorithms: "
jshon -a -e keyAlgorithmAndSize -e pubkeyalgo -e val <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Primary key pubkey sizes: "
jshon -a -e keyAlgorithmAndSize -e pubkeysize -e val <$ tempfile    sort -n   uniq -c
print -n "Total number of UIDs + UAts: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -k <$ tempfile    wc -l
print "Hash algorithm used for most recent self-sig: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -a -e uidSelfSigHashAlgorithms -a -e val <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Judgment on preferred hash algorithms: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -a -e uidPreferredHashAlgorithms -a -e explanation <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Judgment on expiration times: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -a -e uidKeyExpirationTimes -a -e explanation <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c

This represents incorrect handling of revoked UIDs and user attributes, and possibly unknown bugs. "Judgments" are based on this document and are not generalized per key.

As I watch my friends and enemies rush to make their 501(c)3-qualified donations before midnight, I think to ask, What if, instead of giving to these fat, corrupt organizations that are rolling in money and waste most of it, you gave to the FSF, the SFLC, or the Tor project?

In the future there will be an episode of Elementary with Frankie Faison playing Judge O'Hare.

As you know, I am not big on reviews, so you should disregard the remainder of this entry. I recently found myself in what is called a theatre complex , watching an adaptation of Moli re's Les Femmes savantes by Freyda Thomas, who is apparently famous for playing Alenis Grem on Deep Space Nine. Called The Learned Ladies, this translation to English manages to approximate some of the rhyme of the original, thereby making it unquestionably better than DS9. Also noteworthy is the all-female cast, cobbled together from two all-female theater groups. Elizabeth Neptune plays Chrysale, occasionally channeling the spirit of Jackie Gleason or bringing adorable ardor to such epic lines as Tea! I won't say anything about her eyes, but I will say something about her slippers. Sara Montgomery, as B lise, is delightfully crazy in her singing, dancing, costume changes, and other antics, which serve to transform this otherwise-completely-serious play into a comedy. I definitely won't say anything about her shoes. Madeleine Maby begins playing Philaminte well before the show starts. Spoiler alert: she sits on the stage, pretending to look through a telescope and make notes from before the house opens until right before the start of the first scene. I still feel exhausted by the thought of having to do that myself. L' pine is portrayed by Alyssa Lott, who also plays three minor roles. Her mastery of physical comedy is not wasted on this production. Marta Kuersten plays Clitandre opposite Sarah Brill's Henriette. While Marta's performance was quite good, she looks much better as a woman. I will not be saying this about everyone. Katie Honaker delivers visceral smarm and sleaze as Trissotin. Even her hairstyle is somehow evocative of contempt. Susan Finch plays Vadius and Le notaire. Susan was definitely most convincing as a man. Despite mutterings to the contrary, some suspension of disbelief was necessary for the other male roles, but not for Vadius, oh no. Finishing out the list we have Janna Emig as Martine, Francesca Day as Armande, and Kathryn Alexander as Ariste, with good performances, particularly in the second half. Even though it didn't have Coppertop from Strangers With Candy and a boy-band song-and-dance cover of To Be with You by Mr. Big, I recommend this play.

I might switch to a FirefoxOS phone on Wednesday.

On Twitter, people demonstrate that they don't understand the wondrous world of OpenPGP.

Jessa is moving to Boston. Why is Jessa moving to Boston? To work for Microsoft. What will she be doing for Microsoft? Studying how drag queens use Facebook.

I want a CLI WebDAV client that's better than cadaver or hdav. I want a program that can sync an .ics file with a CalDAV server, by dividing it up into events and individually synchronizing each of those. I don't have a clue how deletions would be handled, but that would be nice too. Then I want a program that can synchronize the .ics file with org-mode files. I want a SIP client that works as well as Twinkle but has the architecture of SFLphone or is a library upon which an arbitrary UI can be constructed. I want an HTML-rendering library that has callbacks or hooks for security- and privacy-relevant things like cookies and SSL certificates. I want at least one browser built on this library. I want it to support vi-like keybindings. I want an HTTP(S) proxy that can be dynamically-configured per-client or per-connection through a standardized protocol that web browsers or their plugins can speak. I want it to be able to handle all the relevant things covered by AdBlock Plus, RequestPolicy, and NoScript. I want HTTPS authentication through Monkeysphere and mod_gnutls. I want a git-annex backend for Ogg Vorbis files that treat the audio streams independently of the metadata yet stores them together in the same file so that everything behaves as usual but the annex doesn't bloat by 400Go after I run beets. I want a file transfer queuing system that can work over any sort of transport mechanism, direct or asynchronous, that handles partial transfers and throttling, and is generally magical. I want all kinds of accounting software improvements. I want sane PBX software. I want an OpenStack that doesn't use libvirt for KVM. I want backup software that behaves some weird hybrid of BoxBackup and Dirvish. I want a peer-to-peer card- and board-game platform that uses cryptographic assurance. I want everyone to use YAML instead of XML. I want a phone that's not running a doomed operating system. I want lots of other stuff.