Archive for: September 2010
Farewell Constance
Gone-fishin’ CBC Radio host Costas Halavrezos muses about his ego-lite broadcasting style on the veteran’s last Maritime Noon broadcast:
[A]s listeners, you’ve noticed I play my personal cards close to my chest. I don’t tell cute family anecdotes or talk about my favourite sports teams or what I had for breakfast, because I believe every second of broadcast time is precious, and well, the majority of you don’t get to communicate with other Maritimers every day like I do, so it’s best if I stay out of the way and free up the space.
This is but a variant of E.B. White’s famous advice to young writers in The Elements of Style: “Place yourself in the background. Write in a way that draws the reader’s attention to the sense and substance of the writing, rather than to the mood and temper of the author.” It’s a formula that made Costas was as comfortable and enduring as an old pair of slippers.
Via Bruce Wark.
The 9/11 aftermath as foreseen by Hunter S. Thompson
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald digs out a prescient morning-after column by Hunter S. Thompson of all people, published on 9/12/2001:
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive “figurehead” — or even dead, for all we know — but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.
Nothing — even George Bush’s $350 billion “Star Wars” missile defense system — could have prevented Tuesday’s attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.
Steal This Book!
That was the manifesto of my favorite Yippe, Abby Hoffman. Now you can steal it online.
Why bikes and cars breed conflict
Felix Solomon, a blogger for Reuters, proposes a Unified Theory of New York Biking that Halifax cyclists would do well to heed:
Bikes can and should behave much more like cars than pedestrians. They should ride on the road, not the sidewalk. They should stop at lights, and pedestrians should be able to trust them to do so.
They should use lights at night. And — of course, duh — they should ride in the right direction on one-way streets. None of this is a question of being polite; it’s the law. But in stark contrast to motorists, nearly all of whom follow nearly all the rules, most cyclists seem to treat the rules of the road as strictly optional. They’re still in the human-powered mindset of pedestrians, who feel pretty much completely unconstrained by rules.
The result is decidedly suboptimal for all concerned, but mostly for the bicyclists themselves. New York needs to make a collective quantum leap, from treating bicyclists like pedestrians to treating bicyclists like motorists. And unless and until it does, bike relations will continue to be marked by hostility and mistrust.
Fearing an onslaught from militant bikists, I hasten to add that I like bikes, I hope to see more of them on Halifax streets, and I wish HRM would do more to welcome their use. But I think cyclists hurt their cause every time they flip, at will and without warning, from street to sidewalk to crosswalk. Be fish, not fowl, and mos def not both.
Via Kottke.org and Daily Dish.
Complex passwords — not so important after all
A New York Times article explains something that has long puzzled me: why are institutions where security really matters so lax about passwords, while the corner store requires long, ever-changing, combinations of upper and lower case, alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric characters? Why are my credit union and my bank satisfied with a four-digit numeric PIN, which they never make me change?
The answer, according to a number of security experts interviewed by the Times, is that passwords don’t need to be strong or constantly changed. Worse, “[O]nerous requirements for passwords have given us a false sense of protection against potential attacks. In fact, they say, we aren’t paying enough attention to more potent threats.”
After investigating password requirements in a variety of settings, [Microsoft security specialist Cormac] Herley is critical not of users but of system administrators who aren’t paying enough attention to the inconvenience of making people comply with arcane rules. “It is not users who need to be better educated on the risks of various attacks, but the security community,” he said at a meeting of security professionals, the New Security Paradigms Workshop, at Queen’s College in Oxford, England. “Security advice simply offers a bad cost-benefit tradeoff to users.”….
One might guess that heavily trafficked Web sites — especially those that provide access to users’ financial information — would have requirements for strong passwords. But it turns out that password policies of many such sites are among the most relaxed. These sites don’t publicly discuss security breaches, but Mr. Herley said it “isn’t plausible” that these sites would use such policies if their users weren’t adequately protected from attacks by those who do not know the password.
Mr. Herley, working with Dinei Florêncio, also at Microsoft Research, looked at the password policies of 75 Web sites. At the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, held in July in Redmond, Wash., they reported that the sites that allowed relatively weak passwords were busy commercial destinations, including PayPal, Amazon.com and Fidelity Investments. The sites that insisted on very complex passwords were mostly government and university sites. What accounts for the difference? They suggest that “when the voices that advocate for usability are absent or weak, security measures become needlessly restrictive.”
Donald A. Norman, a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a design consulting firm in Fremont, Calif., makes a similar case. In “When Security Gets in the Way,” an essay published last year, he noted the password rules of Northwestern University, where he then taught. It was a daunting list of 15 requirements. He said unreasonable rules can end up rendering a system less secure: users end up writing down passwords and storing them in places that can be readily discovered.
“These requirements keep out the good guys without deterring the bad guys,” he said.
I’ve suspected this for a long time, although I may have carried it too far. I recently found my (former!) favorite password in the number-two slot on a list of most frequently chosen passwords.
How blogging really works
Chris Clarke explains. Don’t miss the comments. Hat tip: Marainniss.
Your lying pants
Last year, James Fallows illustrated the growing girth of North American’s by digging up photos from the 1950s of Jackie Gleason, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ramond Burr. Gleason was a notorious fatso. Hitchcock and Burr were celebrated symbols of portliness. None would draw a second look today.
Now comes evidence that the shift in our perception of what constitutes fat has been getting a quiet nudge from pants manufacturers in the form of “vanity sizing.”
Abram Sauer, of Esquire’s Style Blog, snuck a measuring tape into the change rooms of a series of men’s retail chains and came back with this heartbreaking news about the real state of his, and our, waistlines:
I recently bought some Haggar and Dockers pants on extreme sale at the Bay. My, but they’re comfy. Now I know why, dammit.
Hat tip: Daily Dish.
TIFF is big, but this is bigger
My favorite film series opens its fall season tonight with this year’s surprise winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar: The Secret In Their Eyes, a movie that crosses genres: part thriller, love story, comedy, and political drama. Showtime: 7 p.m., at the Empire Theatre, 325 Prince Street, Sydney. Previews from WhatsGoinOn and The Post. Check out the links:
Oh yeah, that other film festival starts today, too.
Your huddled masses, yearning for latte
Phil Shackleton reports on a little known border problem:
Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.
“I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. “The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?”
In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields.
“Not real effective,” he said. “The liberals still got through and Rush annoyed the cows so much that they wouldn’t give any milk.”
Hat tip: Ann Molison.
Fidel, Israel, and Iran
Do not miss Jeffrey Goldberg’s continuing posts about his surprise command audience with Fidel Castro last week. First instalment here; second here.
Goldberg is a perplexing figure, a former member of the IDF, quick to call anti-semitism against anyone who balks at his lockstep advocacy of troubling Israeli policies. He caused a stir recently with an Atlantic cover story speculating about an impending Israeli nuclear strike against Iran. Many regarded the article as thinly disguised tub-thumping for such an attack (see here and here), while others demurred. In the end, the Atlantic held an extensive, online print debate about the issue — which may turn out to be the most important of the decade.
Turns out Castro was reading, and two weeks ago, Goldberg got a phone call from Jorge Bolanos, head of the US State Department’s Cuban Interest Section.
“I have a message for you from Fidel,” Bolanos said. “He has read your Atlantic article about Iran and Israel. He invites you to Havana on Sunday to discuss the article.”
Goldberg and Castro, who is clearly worried about the prospect of war in the Middle East, chatted for three days, and while he might not be my choice for an interlocutor, he was Fidel’s, and the results are fascinating.
