Thursday, December 08, 2016

What is it with Arkansas?

Sigh, here we go again. Seriously, what is it with Arkansas that makes it such a uniquely fecund breeding ground for social neanderthals?
Arkansas’ highest court on Thursday threw out a judge’s ruling that could have allowed all married same-sex couples to get the names of both spouses on their children’s birth certificates without a court order, saying it doesn’t violate equal protection “to acknowledge basic biological truths.”
Well, that would be true, except for one teensy weensy little detail:
“There’s no requirement that DNA be given or that there be a biological relationship to a child to get on a birth certificate for a father, for the non-birth parent,” she said. “All you have to do is legitimize the child and you’re entitled [to have your name on the birth certificate], if you’re heterosexual."
So if you're straight, the court is more than happy to let you "ignore basic biological truths" but not if you're gay.  That violates Equal Protection.  Honestly, how hard can this be to understand?

Saturday, November 12, 2016

James Comey may have singlehandedly destroyed modern civilization

100 years from now when our grandchildren survey the wreckage, they may look back on October 28, 2016 as the darkest day in the history of human civilization.  When the children of the future contemplate going back in time it will not be Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin that they fantasize about killing to save the world, it will be James Comey, because there is now good evidence that his October surprise swung the election in favor of Donald Trump.  And unless we somehow manage to persuade a man who has never in his life seen reason, who believes that making money is the only virtue, who is about to appoint a young-earth creationist as secretary of education and a climate-change denialist to head the EPA -- unless we somehow manage to persuade this person that climate change is real, then future generations are going to learn it the hard way.

I know that there are climate skeptics among my readers.  A few of you even seem to have come to your views in good faith (as opposed to those who just bury their heads in the sand because they can't stand to face reality) and with a fair amount of thought and research.  It has been on my to-do list for a long time to do a deep dive into this issue to find out whether skepticism is warranted.  But in the meantime here are a few facts that, it seems to me, no sane person can deny:

1.  The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising dramatically.  We're over 400PPM now, up from pre-industrial levels well below 300.

2.  CO2 is a greenhouse gas.  If we put enough of it in the atmosphere, we will heat the planet to the point where civilization can no longer be sustained.  The only question is how much is enough.

3.  These processes play themselves out over very long periods of time: decades to centuries.  By the time it becomes evident that we've crossed the Rubicon it will most likely be too late to do anything about it.

4.  The planet is warming.  The 15 hottest years on record have all been in the last 20 years.  The last time we had a coldest year on record was 1909.

5.  The vast majority of the people who study this stuff say that the most likely explanation (indeed, the only plausible explanation) is that the planet is warming because of the CO2 we're adding to the atmosphere.

Now, maybe all of those people are wrong.  Maybe the denialists are right and the warming trend is just a natural phenomenon.  Maybe civilization is more resilient than we think and it can survive more than 2 degree rise in temperature.  Maybe we can relocate all of our coastal cities, or come up with some technological solution that will prevent disaster.  But here's the question we really need to ask ourselves: is this an experiment we really want to do?  Because what if the scientists are right.  Is that really something you want to find out the hard way?  Do you really want to put your children and grandchildren through that?

Friday, November 11, 2016

Well, that sure didn't take long

Donald Trump has been the president-elect for less than a week and he's already starting to reneg on some of his signature campaign promises. I'm shocked. Didn't we vote for Trump because he "tells it like it is"?  Next you'll be telling me he wasn't really the anti-establishment candidate.

I'd write more but I'm still having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that this is actually happening.  I mean, Ben Carson as secretary of education?  Seriously?  I guess it could have been worse.  It could have been Sarah Palin.  But, wait, Carson is a young-earth creationist.  AAAUUUGGGHHH!!!  I think my head is going to explode.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Trump's America, day 2

One day after Donald Trumps conciliatory victory speech where he spoke about unity and coming together as a nation, a good Christian left a helpful note on someone's windshield in North Carolina. It says:
Can't wait until your "marriage" is overturned by a real president. Gay families = burn in hell. #Trump2016 #Repent #GodBless
If you voted for Trump, this is on you, because preventing Hillary from appointing a Supreme Court justice was one of his flagship issues.

Calexit is starting to sound like a good idea to me.

Tuesday, November 08, 2016


I am so stunned I can barely formulate a thought.  The last time I felt this way was in 2000 when George Bush Jr. beat Al Gore.  Back then I thought to myself: well, maybe it won't be so bad.  And I was right.  It wasn't that bad.  It was worse.  Much, much worse.

On the plus side, it's kind of good to know that the people can still stick it to the elites when they put their minds to it.  But oh my God, Trump?  Trump???

I also find myself clinging to one other glimmer of hope: now that the Republicans control all three branches of government they will not be able to blame the coming catastrophe on the democrats.  (Well, OK, they will still blame the Democrats.  But maybe people will stop believing them.)  So even though the Republican party emerged victorious tonight, maybe it will not rise from the ashes when this train wreck ultimately plays itself out.  (But who the hell knows where all the horcruxes are hidden.)

If you are a young person who voted for Trump as a protest vote I pity you, because Donald Trump and his cronies are about to take our last hope of averting a global climate catastrophe and flush it down his gold-plated toilet.

Brace yourselves, folks.  There are very dark days ahead.

Monday, November 07, 2016

Please God, let the Democrats take the Senate

And please let them find the backbone to abolish the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees so that Hillary can appoint a ridiculously liberal justice to replace the ridiculously conservative Antonin Scalia.  Because the Republicans really need to lose this election, and they need to lose it badly.  They need to be utterly humiliated.  Squashed.  Trampled.  The evil stench of racism and misogyny and patriarchy needs to be driven back into the darkness and the shadows, along with the Donald Trump and the cockroaches who crept out of their hiding places to follow him.

The Washington Post thinks it could happen.

I'm not quite so optimistic.  The election is close, much closer than I ever in my wildest nightmares imagined it could be, and Trump and the Republicans might still pull a rabbit out of their asses (because that seems to be where they're pulling everything else from.  I mean, Melanoma Trump is going on a crusade about, of all things, cyber-bullying?  Seriously?  Does she not even know who she is married to?)

So while I'm hoping for a Republican rout, I'm not betting my life savings on it.  But a boy can dream.

However it goes, I just wanted to go on the record before election day as being absolutely, unequivocally, 100% opposed to Donald Trump.  I oppose his racism, his deceitfulness, his glorification of ignorance, his degradation of women, his utter lack of respect for the First Amendment, and his basic lack of humanity.  The man has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  He's not a good business man, nor a good entertainer, nor a good politician, not even a good human being. The only thing Donald Trump is good at is self-promotion.  But at that he is the master of masters.

Please, for the love of all that is good about the United States of America, don't vote for him.

Tuesday, November 01, 2016

Hacker News ranking algorithm weirdness

Yesterday I submitted this story to Hacker News.  Here you can see it in the record of all the stories I've submitted:

It didn't get a lot of traction at the time, which was not surprising.  Not many people look at the /new page, and there are a lot of submissions.  So most stories languish.  You generally have about a 30-60 minute window to garner enough points to make it to the front page before your story drops off the first new page and enters HN limbo, never to be seen again.

So I was really surprised when this morning my story was on the front page, apparently having been re-submitted somehow five hours previously:

(Both of those screenshots were taken within a minute or two of each other.)

I really wonder how that happened.  I wish I knew how to make it happen reliably :-)

Monday, October 03, 2016

Donald Trump's one mistake








Thank God he didn't.

Saturday, October 01, 2016

Congress raises the bar on hypocrisy



All I can do is shake my head in despair.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

The greatest traitors in American history







Tuesday, August 09, 2016

Just in case you're still not convinced...


Saturday, August 06, 2016




Some select quotes from Steven Lefevre:
and Peter Donis:






Friday, August 05, 2016


This is according to The New York Times:

Worth reading the whole thing.

Thursday, August 04, 2016

Trump campaign catastrophes continue



Now hear this


Wednesday, August 03, 2016

OMG. what a day

Wow.  Just wow.





Tuesday, August 02, 2016

Trump is more dangerous than ISIS



Your grandchildren will not forgive you.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

How is this not treason?

Just when you thought Donald Trump couldn't possibly get any more outrageous, he comes up with this:
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” Trump said during a news conference at his South Florida resort on Wednesday. 
“They probably have them. I’d like to have them released. It gives me no pause, if they have them, they have them,” Trump added later when asked if his comments were inappropriate. “If Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I’d love to see them.”
Think about that for a moment.  Here is a major party candidate for President of the United States urging a foreign government to violate U.S. law in order to damage a political opponent.

I have long since run out of superlatives to describe Trump, but if this isn't crossing the line I don't know what is.  Trump has previously observed that he could probably "shoot somebody and ... not lose any votes."  Do we really have to see blood in the streets before we wake up?  Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to American democracy.  With his finger on the nuclear button, his totally un-nuanced vindictiveness would be a clear and present danger to civilization.  He must not be allowed to win this election.

Republicans, I'm looking at you.  If Trump wins, you won't be able to tell your grandchildren that you didn't know how bad he was or how far he would go.  Trump doesn't even try to dissemble.  He wears his ignorance, his bigotry, and now his contempt for the rule of law on his sleeve with pride.  He thinks they're features!  For the love of all that is holy, don't vote for him in November.  The status quo, bad as it is, is still better than what Trump is selling.

Friday, July 15, 2016

Most incompetent VP rollout ever

Wow.  Just, wow.  If Trump screws up his VP announcement this badly what hope is there for a Trump administration to be anything other than a total train wreck?

[UDATE] And as if Trump's own incompetence weren't enough, now there's a coup in Turkey to steal what's left of his thunder this news cycle.

Sunday, July 03, 2016

I unbricked my MacBook

A couple of weeks back I wrote about how someone put an iCloud lock on a MacBook Air that I'd owned for over three years.  I was about ready to write the machine off and sell it for parts, but I couldn't do that until I had wiped the internal SSD because it contained personal information that I didn't want to fall into the wrong hands.  To do that, I needed some special tools so I could open the machine up, and an adapter so I could connect the SSD to a USB port once I'd gotten it out.  While I was waiting for those to arrive, I decided to take another whack at brute-forcing the EFI PIN using this handy-dandy utility.  It was a time-consuming process, made all the more time consuming by the fact that the Teensy3 that it runs on doesn't have any way to display which PIN code it is currently trying, so even after the machine was unlocked I still didn't know what the PIN code was.  I toyed with the idea of pointing a camera at the screen to keep track of when the unlock happened, but in the end I ended up just running the brute-force multiple times and doing a binary search to find the code.

Once I had the PIN, I was able to remove the EFI firmware lock, but I was still not able to boot from the original SSD.  Apparently, some of the things that Apple told me during the original debugging process were false (imagine that!)  As far as I can tell, there are two locks that you can put on a machine: an iCloud lock, and an EFI firmware lock, and my machine had both.  I was able to brute-force the EFI lock, but unfortunately my previous unsuccessful efforts to brute-force the iCloud lock had uncovered what seems to be a bug in the iCloud lock code: after a few dozen unsuccessful guesses at the iCloud PIN, the machine starts to disable itself for progressively longer periods of time before it will accept further guesses.  In my case, that period of time was (according to the information displayed on the screen) an hour.  But when I waited an hour, it simply re-cycled to the same screen, and still would not accept any further PIN attempts.  So I ended up wiping the hard drive and doing a clean re-install of Mavericks.  And this time, I bound the machine to my iCloud account and verified that I could lock it.  I could.

There was still one potential snag: it was possible that a machine could be bound to more than one iCloud account at once.  After all, if removing an iCloud binding really was as simple as logging in to a different iCloud account and turning on find-my-mac, that would make the lock feature completely useless against all but the most naive of thieves.  So I did the experiment: I created a second iCloud account for myself and tried to log in to it.  I could do that, but when I tried to turn on the find-my-mac feature from that account, I got this:

And that is the smoking gun.  At least on Mavericks, find-my-mac is trivial to disable and hence completely useless.  The only reason that someone else was able to lock my mac was because I didn't know that this feature existed, because I never use iCloud.  Find-my-mac is not a theft deterrent at all, it is a way for Apple to coerce people into using iCloud by allowed denial-of-service attacks to be launched against people who opt out.

There is one additional wrinkle: shortly before my machine was locked (like a week or two) I upgraded it to Yosemite.  Back when I was still dealing with Apple tech support they told me that there was no possible way that this had anything to do with the lock being placed, but I'm not sure I believe this.  The timing was just too close, and removing the lock from Mavericks just too easy, for this to have been coincidence.  I am pretty confident that Apple battened down the hatches somehow, but in order to figure that out I would have to re-upgrade the machine to Yosemite so I can noodle around with it, and I won't be making that mistake again.

But if there's anyone out there with a Yosemite machine who feels like doing this experiment (make two iCloud accounts and see what happens when you try to find-my-mac with both of them at the same time) please do let me know what happens.

Friday, July 01, 2016

Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the EU

When I first saw this story this story I thought I was being punked, because it's not April 1 and it's not The Onion:
Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim [that water can prevent dehydration] and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month. 
Suddenly I have a lot more sympathy for the pro-Brexit vote.

To be clear, it's not like the EU ministers got together and made a rule specifically forbidding this statement.  Instead what happened was that two German professors decided to test the limits of EU rulemaking by submitting an application to place the claim that water prevents dehydration on the labels of bottles of water.  The request was denied.

I'm not sure which is the more staggering stupidity: that the EU denied the application to make the almost tautological claim that water prevents dehydration, or that people in Western civilization, where perfectly drinkable water comes out of the taps for free, spend money on bottled water to begin with.

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Boris Johnson jumps ship

Not that I should be surprised by this, but Boris Johnson, leader of the Brexit movement, just announced that he will not run for prime minister.

What a sniveling coward.  After getting his country into this mess, he abandons ship and says, in effect, that it's someone else's job to get them out.  Johnson is Gilderoy Lockhart made flesh.  Or maybe Sir Robin.

If there is going to be a silver lining to Brexit, it will be that the causal chain from policy to catastrophe will be so stark and brightly drawn that it will be very hard for anyone to miss or deny (not that that will necessarily stop anyone from trying).  It is most unfortunate that this lesson will be so painful and it will take generations to repair the damage (if indeed it can ever be fully repaired).  But maybe this time the message will stick: conservatives are always wrong about everything.

Friday, June 24, 2016

I no longer believe in democracy


Talk about too-little-too-late.

This response was my "favorite":




Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Apple bricked my MacBook and there's nothing I can do about it

About two months ago my wife tried to use the MacBook Air that we keep in our kitchen and found that it was displaying a screen that neither of us had ever seen before.  It was showing a message that said:
"Locking down temporarily pending investigation.  Please contact the iCloud account the Mac is linked to."
And it was asking for a PIN code.

Many calls to Apple Technical Support and one visit to the Apple Store later it turned out that this Mac had been placed under an iCloud lock.  This is a feature that is normally used by the owner of a Mac to lock it down when it is stolen.  Except that I was the owner of this Mac.   I had bought it from a private party three or four years earlier, I cannot recall exactly.  (But see the postscript below.)

Now, Apple has the ability to remove an iCloud lock, but they refused to do it in my case because I could not prove that I owned the machine.  They wanted to see an "original receipt", which of course I don't have.  I suppose it is possible that the machine I bought was stolen, except that I have to wonder why the rightful owner waited years before locking it.  If the machine is stolen, I would like to see it returned to its rightful owner.  But the cryptic message on the lock screen gives me no way to contact the person who had initiated the lock.  Apple knows who that person is, but they won't tell me, which is understandable.  But they also won't contact this person on my behalf, which is less understandable.

I wrote a letter to Tim Cook to no avail.  He almost certainly never saw it.  I got a call from a lackey who politely but firmly told me that Apple was not going to change their policy.  They will not unlock the machine without a receipt, and they will not contact the person who placed the lock.

So I am hosed.  I have a locked machine, no way to unlock it, and no way to contact whoever placed the lock.  I can't even safely dispose of this machine because there's personal data on the internal drive that I now cannot erase.

FWIW, the machine is a 2010 11-inch MacBook Air, serial number C02DM1GNDDR0.  If you are the person who locked this machine, please get in touch.

Postscript: When I found out that my machine was under an iCloud lock and Apple wanted proof that I was the owner before they would remove it, I went back through my records and found the correspondence I had with the person I remembered buying it from.  I also went through our basement and found the box that it had come in.  I figured if the machine was stolen, the thief would probably not have taken the box, so the fact that I had it would be pretty convincing evidence that it wasn't stolen.

Unfortunately, when I checked the serial number on the box against the locked machine, it turned out that they didn't match (even though the model was an exact match).  What I think happened is that I had bought a second, identical machine at some point and then re-sold it (I have a vague recollection and some sketchy records of this second transaction).  When I sold it I must have used the wrong box.  The serial number on the box is C02DPD69DDQX.  If you own this machine, please contact me.  I have your box, and you may have mine.

Lessons learned:  If you buy a used Mac from a private party, always take it to an Apple store to make sure that it is not bound to an iCloud account.  If you don't do this, you don't really own the machine.  It turns out that the iCloud lock is implemented in the UEFI secure boot ROM.  Wiping the hard drive and doing a clean install of the OS is not enough to disable it.  Make sure you get and keep the sellers contact information.  Check their ID.  And, of course, keep track of the box.  (And check the serial numbers!)

Monday, June 13, 2016

The biggest obstacle to Martian colonization isn't technical












Sunday, June 12, 2016

Donald Trump is a moron

In the wake of the Orlando shooting, Donald Trump renewed his call for a ban on ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S.  I guess he didn't get the memo: the shooter was born in the U.S.  In fact, he was born in Trump's home state of New York.

Maybe we should put a ban on New Yorkers migrating to the rest of the country.  Or running for President.  Now that is an immigration ban I could get behind.

The real tragedy of the Orlando shootings

If you are reading this then you surely know about the Orlando nightclub shooting, the worst such attack in the history of the U.S.  Frankly, I'm surprised it has taken this long for something like this to happen.  The U.S. -- in fact, the entire Western world -- is chock-full of soft targets, and the fact that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often is evidence that run-of-the-mill terrorism is not actually a serious problem.  (By run-of-the-mill terrorism I mean terrorism that does not employ WMDs, which is indeed a potentially serious problem.)

I don't want to minimize the tragedy or the pain of the friends and families of the victims, but the (sad) fact of the matter is that 50 dead is not a very big number in the grand scheme of things.  Twice as many people died in traffic accidents on the same day.  Their deaths are no less tragic, the pain felt by their friends and families no less real, but they don't get the media attention because another 100 people will die in traffic accidents today, and another 100 tomorrow, and another 100 the day after that.  It is really important not to lose sight of the fact that terrorism grabs the headlines in no small measure because it is rare.

We will, of course, go through the usual ritual of handwringing about the second amendment.  Liberals will shout, "Well-regulated militia!" and conservatives will retort, "Right of the people!" and at the end of the day, again, nothing will change because a majority of U.S. citizens seems to believe that 50 innocents dead is not too high a price to pay for the freedom, or at least the perception of freedom.

The real tragedy IMHO is that neither side of the debate actually makes a principled argument, or acknowledges the simple fact that technology has changed the situation on the ground in ways that demand changes in the law.  Physics and economics constrained the carnage in 1791 in ways that it no longer does today.  An automatic assault rifle can do a hell of a lot more damage than a muzzle loader, and even the NRA concedes (tacitly!) that it's probably a bad idea to let people buy RPGs or SAMs or tactical nukes at the Walmart without a background check.

And therein lies the fundamental problem for gun-rights advocates.  The argument that the individual right to bear arms is a line of defense against tyranny is untenable.  An assault rifle might slow the jack-booted thugs down a little, but it won't stop them.  The government has tanks and predator drones.  You don't, and you never will.  If we ever get into a situation where your AK-47 is the only thing standing between us and tyranny, we are screwed.

Guns are not effective defenders of freedom, but they are powerful symbols of freedom.  Freedom means that individuals get to make choices for themselves that other people don't approve of, and in particular, that the government doesn't approve of.  They get to say unpopular things, take unnecessary risks, worship unfashionable deities.  People have a right to bear arms not because AK-47s will stop the government from abusing its power, but because taking people's guns is in and of itself an abuse of that power if the people do not consent to having their guns taken.  And they don't.  The fact that their rationale is bogus doesn't matter.  Making bogus arguments is also one of the privileges of freedom.

Freedom is the ability of people to make choices for themselves.  Sometimes bad things happen as a result of those choices.  That is the price of freedom.  Is it worth the cost?  That is the argument we should be having.  But we aren't because all of the players are firmly dug-in to absolute but unprincipled and hence ultimately untenable positions.  We've been here before.  It doesn't end well.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Could Trump be broke?

One of the big mysteries of Donald Trump's run for the White House is: why would he do it?  It seems like an awful lot of bother even for a self-aggrandizing narcissist like Trump.  And being the President is actually kind of a sucky job.  Yeah, you get a nice airplane out of it, but Trump already has a nice airplane (actually, several nice airplanes and a helicopter).  The White House would probably be a step down for him in terms of day-to-day lifestyle.  And the pay is pretty lousy by CEO standards.

So what's the draw?

It's possible that he really has suddenly become a patriot, that he really does want to be a public servant, that he really does want to Make America Great Again (!).  But somehow I doubt it.  He's never shown any patriotic or public service tendencies before.  Why now?

There is actually only one theory that makes sense to me, that is consistent with all of the available data, and in particular the fact that he's the first presidential candidate since the 70's not to release his income tax returns: Trump is actually broke.

Bear with me here: when you're in the 0.01% being broke doesn't mean what it means to you 99-percenters.  When ordinary shmoe's go broke it means they run out of money and can't pay for things.  When people like Trump go broke, it means he's borrowed more money than he can pay back, and this is very possible.  Trump might have gotten himself in over his head in a business deal and accumulated debt that is close to or even greater than his assets.  It even possible that he has done this without his creditors even being aware of it.  Not likely.  But possible.  And it would explain why he's running for president: it would give him leverage to get his ass out of whatever sling he's gotten it into.

There is a lot of evidence that Trump is not as rich as he claims to be.  Independent estimates of Trump's wealth range from under 3 to around 5 billion, well under his claimed $10B net worth, though still nothing to sneeze at.  But I wonder if those estimates might be wildly off, and Trump's run is really a hail-Mary to save himself from public humiliation.

[UPDATE] Whether or not I'm right about this, running for president has already been good for business.

Friday, May 06, 2016

Just two little problems...

Donald Trump today tweeted "Happy Cinco de Mayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!"

But there are two little problems (apart from the fact that he thinks Latinos are all drug dealers and rapists).  Take a look at the photo:

That photo could not have been taken in the Trump Tower.  See those trees in the window?  The Trump Tower is on Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th streets.  The nearest tree is two blocks away.

The second problem?  The Trump Tower Grill doesn't have taco bowls on their menu.

The stupidity of this is really staggering.  I mean, how hard would it have been to add an item to the menu to make himself look a little less like an idiot?

UPDATE: Hah!  I just realized that this is not Trump being an idiot, this is Trump punking us all!  The best taco bowls are made in the Trump Tower Grill because, according to Trump, the best taco bowl is no taco bowl!

Tuesday, May 03, 2016

Well, I sure didn't see that coming

When I wrote about Donald Trump's prospects to win the Republican nomination it was just before the New York primary, and he had just lost three states in a row.  I did the math and concluded that he had a shot at winning the nomination outright, but that it would come down to the wire on June 7.

Since then there has been a very interesting new development: The Donald won New York, and every primary since then.  Not just won, but totally destroyed Cruz and Kasich, winning 285 of the 300 available delegates across seven states.  If he were anyone else, it would be over.  A slam dunk.

Because he's not anyone else, it's not quite over.  Ted Cruz seems not to have made his peace with the fact that Donald Trump will, almost certainly, be the nominee.  Today he called Trump a "pathological liar," "utterly amoral," "a narcissist at a level I don't think this country's ever seen" and "a serial philanderer."  What he hopes to accomplish with these attacks at this point is a tad unclear.

I am flabbergasted.  Before New York, Trump was ahead, but his path to the magic 1237 number was tenuous, and I was confident that, at the very least, California would matter.  I was even looking forward to a contested convention just because it's a lot more fun to watch a drama when you don't already know the ending.  But (spoiler alert) Donald Trump is (almost certainly) going to be the Republican nominee.  If we were denied the nomination now, it would be the end of the Republican party.  (It might be the end of the party anyway.  A boy can dream.)

I would be more sanguine about Trump's chances (or lack thereof) in the general election if I hadn't been so utterly and completely wrong about his prospects in the primaries.  When he first announced, I, like so many others, wrote him off as a joke.  But Trump is no joke.  If I were a Muslim living in America, I'd be very, very worried.

Monday, April 18, 2016

Can Trump win? Let's do the math






Friday, April 15, 2016









Wednesday, April 13, 2016

When did deep-dish showers become a thing?






Apple UI design has jumped the shark







Tuesday, March 08, 2016

PSA: Don't attempt to upgrade the built-in openssl on OS X Mavericks

The built-in openssl is version 0.9.8-something-or-other, which is pretty badly out of date.  Today I tried to upgrade that to 1.0.1.  When I did, my laptop suddenly became very, very unhappy.  Mail stopped working.  Safari stopped working.

OK, no problem, I thought, I'll just fire up Time Machine and revert the changes.

Except that Time Machine wasn't working either!  Not only was it not working, it was not working in a particularly nasty way: I could get in to Time Machine, but it didn't actually work.  And once I was in, I couldn't get out.  The only way to escape was to power down my machine.

Then it wouldn't reboot.  I nearly had a heart attack.

I had to boot from the recovery partition and revert the changes from a SuperDuper snapshot I had taken a few weeks before (thank God I had that!)

I had no idea that openssl was woven so deeply into the fabric of OS X that changing it makes the machine unbootable.  In fact, even now I cannot think what mechanism could cause booting to fail.  It didn't even cause a kernel panic, it just never got past the power-up spinner.

Sunday, March 06, 2016

Heil Donald!

It's shocking, but hardly surprising.  After promising to torture everyone in sight when he becomes president, Donald Trump asked a crowd in Orlando to raise their right hands and swear allegiance to him.  And they did.

God help us if he actually wins the election.

Man makes musical marble miracle


Monday, February 29, 2016

The FBI can (almost certainly) crack the San Bernardino iPhone without Apple's help

The title kind of says it all.  How do I know?  Because of this photo:

That's a picture of the logic board of an iPhone 5C, the same model as the San Bernardino phone.  The chip with the red outline is a Toshiba THGBX2G7B2JLA01 NAND Flash chip.  That's the phone's memory chip.  All the data on the phone is stored there.  It's encrypted, but here's the thing: the encryption key is also (almost certainly) stored in the same chip.  So all the FBI needs to do is de-solder the chip, mount it in its own hardware, and read out the data.  Unless the FBI is completely incompetent, it should be able to do this in less than a day.  And again, unless they are completely incompetent, having read out the contents of the chip they should be able to decrypt its contents in a matter of minutes if not seconds.  And even if they are completely incompetent, they could use a copy of the chip to try five different PIN codes, and then replace the chip with a fresh copy of the original and try five more.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  At worst this would take about a week or so.

How do I know that this is possible?  Because one of the highly touted features of the iPhone 6 is that it has a secure enclave where things like encryption keys can be securely stored in a way that does not make them accessible using the technique I just described.

The FBI knows this.  Everyone in the security community knows this.  But not everyone in the general public knows this, and the FBI is counting on that ignorance to cover up the fact that their lawsuit against Apple is a charade.  They are not worried about the data on the San Bernardino iPhone, because if they were they would have had it by now.

What they are worried about is the secure enclave in the iPhone 6.  That is much harder to crack than the external memory chip on the 5C, which any competent hobbyist could do.  Cracking a secure enclave requires actually getting inside the processor chip itself, a process known as decapping.  That's possible too (the NSA can probably do it) but it's much, much harder and requires very expensive and specialized (and probably classified) equipment.

What the FBI is really trying to do here is to set a legal precedent that will let them use the power of the law to do an end-run around the secure enclave, and any other security technology that any company might produce in the future.  This is not about catching some potential terrorists, this is about effectively eliminating legal access to encryption technology.  Attempts have been made in the past to regulate encryption technology through the democratic process, and they have all failed.  So now the FBI is trying to get a court to do what Congress has on multiple occasions refused to do.

If democracy is to survive in the United States they must not be allowed to succeed.

[UPDATE:] Some commenters on Hacker News are saying that my analysis is wrong because the encryption key has additional entropy in it in the form of the processor's 256-bit unique ID.  While this is true, it does not make the 5C secure.  The limiting factor on attacking the PIN is the fact that the phone only gives you 10 attempts before wiping the flash.  But if you have a copy of the flash, you can just replace the wiped flash with a copy and make another 10 attempts.