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I haven't had a chance to work on the comments problem, because, you see, I have another job. I've also had a plumber and a carpet cleaner here today, traumatizing poor Cassie who couldn't show them her blanket because she got shoved into a different room. She's now on her bed in my office rather than on one of the couches downstairs. I expect she'll get over the soul-crushing exile she experienced for nearly an hour today.

I have a list of 6 or 7 short plumbing tasks that I hope will take less than an hour, which is 1/8th the time window the plumbing service provided for the plumber's arrival. We all know how that goes. And at my real job, I'm coordinating a bunch of processes for a biweekly release that, so far, is pretty boring—just how we like it.

My old Surface decided it didn't trust its own drive this morning when I booted up in my downtown office. Instead of getting a new laptop, I had stumped for the $30 fee to buy another year of security patches for Windows 10. Well, the latest one changed the Bitlocker settings, requiring me to enter the recovery key...which I couldn't get to from my downtown office. Fortunately I had the key at home and entered it manually without a problem, so the Surface has sprung back to life. I will have to replace...

If you've ever played Snakes & Ladders (Chutes & Ladders in the US) with a small child, or really any game with a small child, you have probably cheated. Of course you have; don't deny it. Everyone knows letting the kid win is often the only way to get out of playing again. It turns out, Japan last week and the European Union this week both demonstrated mastery of that principle while negotiating "trade deals" with the world's largest toddler: [I]f the US-EU trade relationship was more or less OK last...

Cassie had a solid night of post-anesthesia sleep and woke up mostly refreshed. The cone still bums her out, and the surgery bill bums me out, but at least she's walking at close to her normal speed. She gets her stiches out—and her cone off—two weeks from today. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Very stupid people have allowed measles, which we functionally eliminated from the US in 2000, to infect close to 1300 people this year. Jennifer Rubin argues that the Department of Homeland Security...

Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it. Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist: Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of...

As Crash Davis said to Annie Savoy all those years ago: A player on a streak has to respect the streak. Well, I'm on a coding streak. This week, I've been coding up a storm for my day job, leaving little time to read all of today's stories: Despite (or perhaps because of) his obvious mental illness and dementia, the OAFPOTUS is really a predictable negotiator who our adversaries have figured out how to manipulate easily. Voters may not like the OAFPOTUS, but they don't like us either. Still, the...

Happy May Day! In both the calendar and crashing-airplane senses! We start with two reports about how the Clown Prince of X has taken control over so much government data that the concepts of "privacy" and "compartmentalization" seem quaint. First, from the Times: Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of...

Before I go through the stories from the last day about how we live in the stupidest timeline, here's a photo of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station I snapped heading to my return train on Friday: Elsewhere in the stupidest timeline, where maximizing corruption is the defining goal of the Republican Party: James Fallows takes us through Harvard's big "fuck you" to the OAFPOTUS's demands that the university install minders in its HR and academic departments, as does Josh Marshall. Jennifer Rubin reminds...

Cassie and I found a 20-minute gap in the rain this morning so she could have a (slightly-delayed) walk. Since around 9 am, though, we've had variations on this: Good thing I have all these heartwarming news stories to warm my heart: Dane County, Wis., Judge Susan Crawford beat Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel 55% to 45% for the vacant seat on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, despite the $25 million the Clown Prince of X donated to Schimel's campaign. The CPOX himself drew laughs from people with...

Before getting to the weather, I don't anticipate any quiet news days for the next couple of years, do you? Someone who owns at least 16 rooms and condos in the OAFPOTUS's Wabash Ave. building in downtown Chicago has sued, alleging that—wait for it—the organization running the building is bilking investors. I mean, how preposterous! Speaking of corruption flowing from the OAFPOTUS like toxic waste from a Union Carbide plant, Molly White mourns the end of SEC oversight of the crypto industry. Former US...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ just hit 17.5°C, which it hasn't hit since 5:54pm on November 5th. That's almost 125 days, quite a while to go without wearing a jacket outside. Unfortunately, spring weather isn't the only thing in the news today: Philip Bump asks, how low can the OAFPOTUS's approval rating actually go? Paul Krugman decries our current "government by QAnon." Radley Balko lays out three things Democrats can do right now. Ezra Klein uses the example of California's high-speed...

As we end the work-week, we can start our weekend with these little nuggets of horror and amusement: The UK Home Office has demanded that Apple create a back door into its cloud storage system to allow the UK government to snoop on everyone's content worldwide, which, if I correctly understand Apple's ADP architecture, is technically impossible. ProPublica has compiled a list of the people Elon Musk has enlisted to capture the government of the United States. Paul Krugman calls Musk's efforts an...

Ah, ha ha. Ha. Today is the first full day of the Once Again Felonious POTUS, who wound everyone up yesterday with a bunch of statements of intent (i.e., executive orders) guaranteed to get people paying attention to him again. Yawn. But that isn't everything that happened in the last 24 hours: Jonathan Last argues that maybe the OAFPOTUS just doesn't like Americans. Jennifer Rubin reminds everyone to remain vigilant that the OAFPOTUS's mangling of the English language has consequences. Jeff Maurer is...

A friend pointed out that, as of this morning, we've passed the darkest 36-day period of the year: December 3rd to January 8th. On December 3rd at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, the sun rose at 7:02 and set at 16:20, with 9 hours 18 minutes of daylight. Today it rose at 7:18 and will set at 16:38, for 9 hours 20 minutes of daylight. By the end of January we'll have 10 hours of daylight and the sun will set after 5pm for the first time since November 3rd. It helps that we've had nothing but sun today....

Once again, in the aftermath of the OAFPOTUS's demented press conference yesterday, I need to remind everyone to ignore what he says and watch what he does. He's not as harmless as the guy at the end of the bar who everyone avoids talking to, but he's just as idiotic. Meanwhile, in the real world: Block Club Chicago interviewed Mayor Brandon Johnson in the wake of the City Council barely passing his 2025 budget by a vote of 27-23. Perry Bacon Jr. blames President Biden's overconfidence for the failures...

Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.) Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era: Adam Gray (D) has defeated US Representative John Duarte (R) in California's 13 district, bringing the House of Representatives to its final tally of 210 Democrats and 215 Republicans. An assassin shot and killed...

The Post has more details about the pagers that the Mossad blew up, injuring thousands of Hezbollah terrorists: As an act of spy craft, it is without parallel, one of the most successful and inventive penetrations of an enemy by an intelligence service in recent history. But key details of the operation — including how it was planned and carried out, and the controversy it engendered within Israel’s security establishment and among allies — are only now coming to light. The idea for the pager operation...

I had the opportunity, but not the energy, to bugger off from Heathrow for an hour and a half or so connecting from Marseille. Instead I found a vacant privacy pod in the Galleries South lounge, and had a decent lunch. Plus I'm about to have a G&T. I've loaded up my Surface with a few articles, but I really only want to call attention to one of them. Bruce Schneier has an op-ed in the New York Times with his perspective on the Hezbollah pager attack and supply-chain vulnerabilities in general. I may...

A few weeks ago I planned a PTO day to take a 25 km walk tomorrow along the North Branch Trail with pizza at the end. (I'll do my annual marathon walk in October.) Sadly, the weather forecast bodes against it, with scattered thunderstorms and dewpoints over 22°C. But, since I've already got tomorrow off, and I have a solid PTO bank right now, I'll still take the day away from the office. And autumn begins Sunday. Good thing, too, because the articles piled up this morning, and I haven't had time to...

The forecast still predicts today will be the hottest day of the year. Last night at IDTWHQ the temperature got all the way down to 26.2°C right before sunrise. We have a heat advisory until 10pm, by which time the thunderstorms should have arrived. Good thing Cassie and I got a bit of extra time on our walk to day camp this morning. Elsewhere in the world: The Fifth Circuit has ruled that broad, geofenced searches violate the 4th Amendment, contradicting the Fourth Circuit, and setting up a likely...

The US election is 98 days away, and August starts Thursday. Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'...into the future... And yet, the ever-present Now keeps us here: Both Paul Krugman and Molly White are baffled that the XPOTUS is making cryptocurrency a campaign issue, when almost none of their voters understands the first thing about it. (Hint: their biggest tech-bro donors care about it a lot.) James Fallows introduces us to Minnesota governor Tim Walz (D). Chuck Marohn shakes his head sadly at...

One of the many stories that piqued my interest this morning included a rant by the anti-Sorkin himself: Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, does not like how "politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom." (He also implies that Liz Truss, and not Kamala Harris, most embodies the character of Selina Meyer.) Former President Obama has endorsed Vice President Harris. John Scalzi received a press...

Network security company CrowdStrike pushed a minor update to its Falcon Sensor product around 11pm Chicago time yesterday that managed to take down almost every virtual machine in Microsoft's Azure cloud: Cascading technology errors stranded airline passengers around the world, halted hospital surgeries and crippled office workers’ computers on Friday in one of the most disruptive computer outages in years, highlighting how much of the world relies on potentially error-prone software from a handful of...

Three celebrities from my youth died yesterday, but for obvious reasons none was the top story on any news outlet this morning. No one should politicize the attempt on the XPOTUS's life yesterday at a rally outside Pittsburgh. We have no idea why the assailant shot the XPOTUS and three other people; the FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police are investigating, and with the shooter killed by the Secret Service, we won't have to wait for a criminal trial for the full story. I trust both agencies to...

It has started raining in downtown Chicago, so it looks like Cassie and I will get wet on the walk home, as I feared. I still have a few tasks before I leave. I just hope it stays a gentle sprinkle long enough for us to get home from doggy day care. Just bookmarking these for later, while I'm drying out: Researchers concluded that the problem with online misinformation and epistemic closure comes from people, not technology. Apparently we generally look for information that confirms our existing biases....

I've got a performance this evening that requires being on-site at the venue for most of the day. So in a few minutes I'll take two dogs to boarding (the houseguest is another performer's dog), get packed, an start heading to a hockey rink in another city. Fun! If I'm supremely lucky, I'll get back home before the storm. Since I also have to travel to the venue, I'll have time to read a few of these: Jamelle Bouie warns that the convicted-felon XPOTUS has even less preparation for a possible second term...

I took Cassie out at 11am instead of her usual 12:30pm because of this: The storm front passed quickly, but it hit right at 12:30 and continued for half an hour with some intensity. It'll keep raining on and off all day, too. Other things rained down in the past day or so: Robert Wright points out the obvious, warning that the XPOTUS was (and would be again if re-elected) way, way worse than President Biden on Gaza. Jennifer Rubin points out the obvious, echoing the warnings of Republican...

I'll lead off today with real-estate notices about two houses just hitting the market. In Kenilworth, the house featured at the end of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles can be yours for about $2.6 million. If you'd prefer something with a bit more mystique, the Webster Ave. building where Henry Darger lived for 40 years, now a single-family house, will also soon hit the market for $2.6 million. (That house is less than 300 meters from where my chorus rehearses.) In other news: Tina Nguyen warns about the...

I'm almost done with the new feature I mentioned yesterday (day job, unfortunately, so I can't describe it further), so while the build is running, I'm queuing these up: Philip Bump analyzes the New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan's dismissal of the XPOTUS's bogus immunity claim. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D) told reporters he's done everything he promised to do when he took office a year ago, at which point the reporters no doubt collectively cocked their eyebrows. Molly White doesn't think...

Remember this XKCD from 2020? With a little help from what researchers think may be the Russian government, that little brick wobbled a bit in the past few days: The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. It was an incredibly complex backdoor. Installing it was a...

Getting ready for a work trip on Monday plus (probably) having to do a demo while on the work trip means I spent most of the day getting ready for the demo. In a bit of geography fun, because the participants in the demo will be in six different time zones from UTC-7 (me) to UTC+10 (the client), I got the short straw, and will (probably) attend the demo at 3:30 am PDT. I say "probably" because the partners on the call may take mercy on me and let me brief them instead of monitoring the technology in the...

The top story this hour, which should surprise no one who can read a poll, is that US Senator Krysten Sinema (?-AZ), who pissed off every Democrat in Congress over her only term in the Senate, has decided not to run again. Since the Democratic Party had already fielded a candidate against her, this makes her completely irrelevant, instead of just mostly irrelevant. The November election will pit Republican Kari Lake against Democrat Ruben Gallego. Meanwhile: Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling compiled all of the...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ bottomed out this morning, hitting -4.8°C at 10:41 am, and it may even end the day above freezing. So this mercifully-short cold snap won't keep us out of the record books, just as predicted. It's still the warmest winter in Chicago history. (Let's hope we don't set the same record for spring or summer.) Meanwhile, the record continues to clog up with all kinds of fun stories elsewhere: Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has led his...

Consumer Reports released a paper last month detailing how many companies track the average Facebook user: Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data.  The Markup helped...

The computer I'm using to write this post turns 8 years old on April 6th. It has served me well, living through thousands of Daily Parker posts, two house moves, terabytes of photographs, and only one blown hard drive. So I have finally broken down and ordered a new one: a Dell Precision 3460 that will sit on my desk instead of under it, and will run Windows 11 with TPM 2.0 instead of warning me that it doesn't have the right hardware to get the latest OS. The new computer will have an 13th Gen Intel...

Via Bruce Schneier, your car does not respect your privacy anymore: Mozilla recently reported that of the car brands it reviewed, all 25 failed its privacy tests. While all, in Mozilla's estimation, overreached in their policies around data collection and use, some even included caveats about obtaining highly invasive types of information, like your sexual history and genetic information. As it turns out, this isn’t just hypothetical: The technology in today’s cars has the ability to collect these kinds...

It's 22°C and sunny right now, making me wonder what's wrong with me that I'm putting together a software release. I probably should fire off the release, but I'm doing so under protest. I also probably won't get to read all of these things I've queued up: Peter Hamby expresses concern about the rise of the illiberal left in the younger generation. Despite the ravings of Fox News and other right-leaning propagandists, the US economy is actually doing better right now than at any point since Obama was in...

Other than getting a little rained on this morning, I've had a pretty good day. But that didn't leave a lot of time to catch up on any of these before I started a deployment just now: Heather Cox Richardson examines US history through the lens of a never-ending conflict between "two Americas, one based in religious zeal, mythology, and inequality; and one grounded in rule of the people and the pursuit of equality." Josh Marshall ponders the difficulty of covering the XPOTUS's increasingly ghastly...

Inner Drive Technology WHQ cooled down to 14°C overnight and has started to climb up into the low-20s this morning, with a low dewpoint and mostly-clear skies. Perfect sleeping weather, and almost-perfect walking weather! In a few minutes I'm going to take Cassie out for a good, long walk, but first I want to queue up some stuff to read when it's pissing with rain tomorrow: A Wall Street Journal poll (which the XPOTUS funded in part) appears to have bad news for the Biden re-election campaign, not least...

It never stops, does it? And yet 100 years from now no one will remember 99% of this: A group of psychiatrists warned a Yale audience that the XPOTUS has a "dangerous mental illness" and should never get near political office again. Faced with this obvious truth, 59% of Republicans said they'd vote for him in 2024. Timothy Noah looks at the average age of the likely nominees for president next year (79) and the average age of the US Senate (60-something) and concludes our country needs a laxative....

The temperature has crept up towards 34°C all day after staying at a comfortable 28°C yesterday and 25°C Friday. It's officially 33°C at O'Hare but just a scoshe above 31°C at IDTWHQ. Also, I still feel...uncomfortable in certain places closely associated with walking. All of which explains why I'm jotting down a bunch of news stories to read instead of walking Cassie. First, if you have tomorrow off for Labor Day, you can thank Chicago workers. (Of course, if you have May 1st off for Labor Day, you can...

An entertainer, a criminal, and an architect died this week, and we should remember them all. The most notable person to die was singer Tony Bennet, 96: His peer Frank Sinatra called him the greatest popular singer in the world. His recordings – most of them made for Columbia Records, which signed him in 1950 – were characterized by ebullience, immense warmth, vocal clarity and emotional openness. A gifted and technically accomplished interpreter of the Great American Songbook, he may be best known for...

I had one of those "why am I working inside today?" moments when I got my lunch a few minutes ago. The obvious answer—Cassie needs dog food—doesn't always work when it's 27°C and sunny. It did get me to re-evaluate my dinner plans, however. Cooking pasta just doesn't appeal when my favorite sushi place has an outdoor patio that allows dogs. Meanwhile, I'm adding a feature that might take the remainder of this sprint as it completely changes how we store and present 3rd-party calculation results to the...

Corporate IT has decreed that all passwords must conform to the following rules:https://neal.fun/password-game/ Keep safe out there!

I've just read the indictment against the XPOTUS and his "body man" Walt Nauta. Wow. As a FBI agent in The West Wing once remarked, "In 13 years with the Bureau I've discovered that there's no amount of money, manpower or knowledge than can equal the person you're looking for being stupid." And wow, was the XPOTUS stupid. I'm not a practicing lawyer but I can read an indictment. If the US Attorneys can prove any of these facts—and I have no doubt they will—he's going to get convicted of a felony. Oddly...

We finally have a real May-appropriate day in Chicago, with a breezy 26°C under clear skies (but 23°C closer to the Lake, where I live). Over to my right, my work computer—a 2017-era Lenovo laptop I desperately want to fling onto the railroad tracks—has had some struggles with the UI redesign I just completed, giving me a dose of frustration but also time to line up some lunchtime reading: Both Matt Ford and David Firestone goggle at how stupidly US Rep. George Santos (R-NY) ran his alleged grift...

Good dog, people, the Discord document leak isn't that dire. And between yesterday's Post and the Times just now, I think we can all relax a bit. Look, I haven't seen the leaked documents, nor have I sought to read them, because I don't believe I'm cleared to do so. But the only classification marking I've seen reported is "NOFORN," which just means that you can't share it with non-US citizens. It's unlawful to disclose that you currently have or have ever had any security clearance above "Public...

Once again, I have too much to read: After Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) tried to end Disney's control over the municipal area around Disneyworld, the outgoing board added a series of restrictive covenants completely neutering DeSantis' hand-picked replacements, including a rule-against-perpetuities clause tying the covenants to the last living descendant of King Charles III. Robert Wright observed ChatGPT expressing cognitive empathy. An anonymous source provided a German reporter with 5,000 pages...

At my day job, I go into our downtown office at least once a week, which turns out to be about once a week longer than almost everyone else. I like the change of scene, and Cassie gets to spend those days at day camp, so it's a win for everyone. The 90%-or-so remote work that people have elected also means we have tons of empty offices while our multi-year leases run their courses. So, after waiting almost a year for the furniture upgrade that never came, the office manager today said "just go take the...

After having the 4th-mildest winter in 70 years, the weather hasn't really changed. Abnormally-warm February temperatures have hung around to become abnormally-cool March temperatures. I'm ready for real spring, thank you. Meanwhile... ProPublica reports on the bafflement inside the New York City Council about how to stop paying multi-million-dollar settlements when the NYPD violates people's civil rights—a problem we have in Chicago, for identical reasons—but haven't figured out that police oversight...

Chicago mayoral candidate and Fraternal Order of Police endorsee Paul Vallas blames "hackers" for his own choices to use a weak password and not to use multi-factor authentication on his Twitter account: Mayoral candidate Paul Vallas on Friday blamed unnamed hackers for his Twitter account liking offensive tweets over the past several years as he faced criticism from rival candidates over the social media posts. The comments came after a Tribune review this week found that Vallas’ Twitter account...

I spent way more time than I should have this morning trying to set up an API key for the Associated Press data tools. Their online form to sign up created a general customer-service ticket, which promptly got closed with an instruction to...go to the online sign-up form. They also had a phone number, which turned out to have nothing to do with sales. And I've now sent two emails a week apart to their "digital sales" office, with crickets in response. The New York Times had an online setup that took...

Let's start with combat-actor Jill Bearup explaining how the Netflix-ITV-BBC ban on corsets solves entirely the wrong problems: Meanwhile, in the modern world: The National Transportation Safety Board reported that an axle on the 23rd car of the train that derailed in East Palesine, Ohio, had a bearing temperature 140°C over normal—which is 30°C over "critical." The crew were trying to stop the train when the bearing failed. Perhaps if the train had fewer cars, or more crew, or the proper braking...

I spent the morning going over an API for standards and style, which will result in an uncomfortably large commit before I leave the office today. I prefer smaller, more focused commits, but this kind of polishing task makes small code changes all over the place, and touches lots of files. So while I have my (late) lunch, I'm taking a break to read some news: Chicago's El got color-coded route designations 30 years ago today. No more Howard-Dan Ryan line; now it's the Red Line. Web hosting service...

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing. While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company: US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if...

I've got an open research problem that's a bit hard to define, so I'm exploring a few different avenues of it. I hope reading these count: Dara Massicot performs an autopsy on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Walter Kirn worries about AIs inadvertently training themselves, and the mushy content that will result. Bruce Schneier describes hacking the tax code, which I hope he goes more into in his latest book, currently on my bedside table. The Texas DOT seems to be at war with urbanism, which makes a...

My burn-up chart for the current sprint has a "completed" line that nicely intersects the sprint guideline, so I can take a moment this Monday morning to eat lunch and read some news stories: James Fallows has some insight into the near-miss in Austin, Texas, that came uncomfortably close to killing over 100 people. AVWeb has a comment as well. Bruce Schneier lays out how adversaries can attack AIs—by corrupting their training data, among other things. Alex Shepard argues that the English Premier League...

It got practically tropical this afternoon, at least compared with yesterday: Cassie and I took advantage of the no-longer-deadly temperatures right at the top point of that curve to take a 40-minute, 4.3 km walk. Tomorrow should stay as warm, at least until the next cold front comes in and pushes temperatures down to -18°C for a few hours Thursday night. I'm heading off to pub quiz in a few minutes, so I'll read these stories tomorrow morning: London plans to build an elevated rails-to-trails park...

I have no idea. But today I managed to get a lot of work done, so I'll have to read these later: A whopping 78% of voters in Rep. "George Santos" (R-NY) district think he should resign. Who should I vote for in the upcoming Chicago Mayoral election? National Geographic explains the science behind seasonal depression. Via Bruce Schneier, it looks like ransomware payments have declined 40% since 2021. Writing for Strong Towns, Michel Durand-Wood compares urban planning to...pizza. James Fallows describes...

New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Arden, just resigned unexpectedly, which is a much more surprising story than any of these I queued up: President Biden quietly made a big move on immigration that the opposition either didn't notice or can't really criticize. Julia Ioffe understands the same thing the White House understands: Putin has no incentive to negotiate for peace. Newly-sworn-in US Representative "George Soros" (R-NY) stole $3,000 from a GoFundMe meant to pay for life-saving surgery for a...

I'm on hold with my bank trying to sort out a transaction they seem to have deleted. I've also just sorted through a hundred or so stories in our project backlog, so while I'm mulling over the next 6 months of product development, I will read these: Via Schneier, credit-reporting service Experian patched a security hole in December that allowed anyone to view someone's credit report with "the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number." It turned out, an exciting software...

We get one or two every year. The National Weather Service predicts that by Friday morning, Chicago will have heavy snowfall and gale-force winds, just what everyone wants two days before Christmas. By Saturday afternoon we'll have clear skies—and -15°C temperatures with 400 mm of snow on the ground. Whee! We get to share our misery with a sizeable portion of the country as the bomb cyclone develops over the next three days. At least, once its gone and we have a clear evening Saturday or Sunday, we can...

My drivers license expired in 2020, when all the Secretary of State's offices (what we in Illinois call the DMV) were closed, so I just renewed it online. I had hoped to upgrade to a Real ID, but it turned out the 2021 deadline for getting one got pushed back to 2023. Since I moved in October, I actually have to go to the SOS office as they won't accept address changes online. But I still don't need a Real ID, it turns out: Americans will have two more years to obtain a Real ID driver’s license or...

Even though I'm president of a medium-sized non-profit organization who understands the importance of keeping in touch with constituents, I have run out of patience. For the last couple of weeks, I have mercilessly unsubscribed from every mailing list that sent me more than two emails a week. I might wind up missing a couple of them, but my dog, some of them just would not shut up. The worst offender was my undergraduate university. In the last week, until I finally unsubscribed from them just now...

Via Bruce Schneier, Ars Technica describes in painful detail how computer repair people snoop and steal people's data all the time: If you’ve ever worried about the privacy of your sensitive data when seeking a computer or phone repair, a new study suggests you have good reason. It found that privacy violations occurred at least 50 percent of the time, not surprisingly with female customers bearing the brunt. Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after...

Cassie and I took a 33-minute walk at lunchtime and we'll take another half-hour or so before dinner as the temperature grazes 14°C this afternoon. Tomorrow and each day following will cool off a bit until Wednesday, the first official day of winter, which will return to normal. Meanwhile... As every lawyer who paid attention predicted, Justice Clarence Thomas's (R) opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen last summer articulated a Republican policy platform while providing...

Josh Barro explains the FTX collapse in simple terms: [T]his is not a technology story, because FTX was not a technology company. Sure, FTX’s business relied on technology, but so do most businesses. FTX has an app; so does Fidelity, and so does Chipotle, and that doesn’t make them tech companies. FTX was a brokerage, and there were two things that set them apart from a regular brokerage. One is that they dealt principally in nonsense financial products with no underlying economic value, and the other...

I've had two parallel tasks today, one of them involving feeding 72 people on Saturday. The other one involved finishing a major feature for work. Both seem successful right now but need testing with real users. Meanwhile, outside my little world: The XPOTUS seems to have backed himself into a corner by lying about "declassifying" things psychically, after the Special Master that he asked for called bullshit. Greg Sargent has thoughts. Pro Publica reported on Colorado's halfway-house system that sends...

It happens every September in the mid-latitudes: one day you've got over 13 hours of daylight and sunsets around 7:30, and two weeks later you wake up in twilight and the sun sets before dinnertime. In fact, Chicago loses 50 minutes of evening daylight and an hour-twenty overall from the 1st to the 30th. We get it all back in March, though. Can't wait. Speaking of waiting: Buckingham Palace just warned people that the queue to see Queen Elizabeth's coffin has a 24-hour wait at the moment, so...dress...

Writing as a guest of James Fallows, former defense official Jan Lodal outlines how subparagraph (d) of the Espionage Act should be a slam-dunk in prosecuting the XPOTUS: This paragraph makes a straightforward action a crime: namely, failing to return classified documents if properly directed to give them back. No proof of the level of classification, or the intentions of the document holder, or the content of the documents, is required. Just a simple question, did he or she give them back or not. This...

The Washington Post Fact Checker digs deep into the allegations of mishandling classified material against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and finds, nah, she good: The Justice Department investigation of classified documents found at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club has brought inevitable comparisons to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private email server that she used while secretary of state. The FBI investigation into her emails arguably tipped the close 2016...

With the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the British National Anthem has changed back to "God Save the King" for the third time in 185 years. In other news: The Guardian explains Elizabeth's funeral and other events that will take place over the next 10 days. James Fallows takes a second look at President Biden's speech from last week, in the context of the predictable reaction cycle about anything he does. Dana Milbank doesn't worry the MAGA folks want a Mussolini, since some of them keep going on about...

From around now through the middle of October, the days get noticeably shorter, with the sun setting 2 minutes earlier each day around the equinox. Fall is almost here—less than 8 days away, in fact. But that also means cooler weather, lower electricity bills (because of the cooler weather), and lots of rehearsals and performances. Before any of that happens, though, I'll read these: Damon Linker warns that "there is no happy ending to America's [XPOTUS] problem." Anthony Fauci has announced he'll...

If Cassie could (a) speak English and (b) understand the concept of "future" she would be quivering with anticipation about going to Ribfest tonight after school. Since she can't anticipate it, I'll do double-duty and drool on her behalf. It helps that the weather today looks perfect: sunny, not too hot, with a strong chance of delicious pork ribs. Meanwhile, I have a few things to read on my commute that I didn't get to yesterday: Remember when psychiatrist Bandy Lee got shouted down when she warned...

How many sign-offs do you need to execute a no-knock raid on the former president's house? Former president Donald Trump said Monday that the FBI had raided his Mar-a-Lago Club and searched his safe — activity related to an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified documents, according to two people familiar with the probe. One of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its details, said agents were conducting a court-authorized search as part of a long-running...

Today, though, I've got a lot of debugging, and several chorus meetings on various topics, plus a condo association meeting that I really don't want to attend. Since I'm president of both the chorus and the condo association (one voluntary, one voluntold), I can't shirk either. Meanwhile, some of the grain silos that remind Beirut of the massive government incompetence that led to a massive aluminum nitrate explosion two years ago today collapsed, fortunately before the memorial began. And one of the...

Somehow we got to the end of July, though I could swear March happened 30 seconds ago. If only I were right, these things would be four months in my future: We all knew Justice Samuel Alito (R) is an arrogant prick, and now the rest of the world knows as well. The Post sums up what the Schumer-Manchin climate bill will actually do. (Yay! A substance story from the paper that only seems to write about process!) The block of Lexington Avenue at 59th Street in New York looks just like it did in April 2020....

It's a lovely day in Chicago, which I'm not enjoying as much as I could because I'm (a) in my Loop office and (b) busy as hell. So I'll have to read these later: Josh Marshall points out the obvious, that the filibuster is a direct threat to American democracy. Brynn Tannehill says, actually, that's only one part of how we become Hungary. Someone just paid $11.25 million for a lakefront house in Winnetka that, if the renderings are accurate, I hope they tear down. This comes with new figures showing...

The security guru just posted a video he presented in November 2020:

Even though it seems the entire world has paused to honor HRH The Queen on the 70th anniversary of her accession, the world in fact kept spinning: Blogger Moxie Marlinspike wrote about their first impressions of web3 back in January. I just got around to reading it, and you should too. On the same topic, a group of 25 security professionals, including Grady Booch, Bruce Schneier, and Molly White, wrote an open letter to Congress advocating for serious regulation of cryptocurrencies. What's Russian...

Today we celebrate the big rock that gives us days in the first place. One out of 364 is pretty good, I guess. And there are some good stories on my open browser tabs: The Twisted Hippo Brewery has started looking for a new home, which they hope to open soon near their old location. The City of Chicago will soon stop charging car-jacking victims hundreds or thousands of dollars in towing and impound fees, which really is a thing here. Timothy Noah explains "Why Biden Had to Challenge That Trump Judge’s...

Leading off today's afternoon roundup, The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) announced today that Netflix has a series in production based on his game Exploding Kittens. The premise: God and Satan come to Earth—in the bodies of cats. And freakin' Tom Ellis is one of the voices, because he's already played one of those parts. Meanwhile, in reality: A consumers group filed suit against Green Thumb Industries and three other Illinois-based cannabis companies under the Clayton Act, alleging collusion that has driven...

Canada has put the Prairie Provinces on a winter storm warning as "the worst blizzard in decades" descends upon Saskatchewan and Manitoba: A winter storm watch is in effect for southern Manitoba and southeastern Saskatchewan, with snowfall accumulations of 30 to 50 centimetres expected mid-week, along with northerly wind gusts of up to 90 kilometres per hour, said Environment Canada on Monday. “Do not plan to travel — this storm has the potential to be the worst blizzard in decades,” the agency warns....

Via Molly White, a new company called Gripnr wants to monetize your D&D campaign, and it's as horrible as it sounds: Gripnr plans to generate 10,000 random D&D player characters (PCs), assign a “rarity” to certain aspects of each (such as ancestry and class), and mint them as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Each NFT will include character stats and a randomly-generated portrait of the PC designed in a process overseen by Gripnr’s lead artist Justin Kamerer. Additional NFTs will be minted to represent...

Now that I've got a few weeks without travel, performances*, or work conferences, I can go back to not having enough time to read all the news that interests me. Like these stories: The Economist examines how Putin might be punished for war crimes in Ukraine. Max Boot wonders why Tucker Carlson still loves his old Uncle Vlad. The IPCC says we have eight years to cut greenhouse emissions by 50% or the planet will pass the 1.5°C warming threshold no matter what else we do. Welp. Via Bruce Schneier...

In an authoritarian regime, telling your boss that he did something wrong can have fatal consequences. Therefore people avoid mentioning problems up the chain. Like, for example, that mandating the army use only Russian-made mobile phones, even though Western electronics have progressed years or decades beyond them, might leave the army at a disadvantage in combat. Similarly, as an engineer, you might not tell your superiors that blowing up the enemy's 3G cell towers will render your 3G phones unusable...

I just started Sprint 52 in my day job, after working right up to the last possible minute yesterday to (unsuccessfully) finish one more story before ending Sprint 51. Then I went to a 3-hour movie that you absolutely must see. Consequently a few things have backed up over at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters. Before I get into that, take a look at this: That 17.1°C reading at IDTWHQ comes in a shade lower than the official reading at O'Hare of 17.8°, which ties the record high maximum set in...

I had to pause the really tricky refactoring I worked on yesterday because we discovered a new performance issue that obscured an old throttling issue. It took me most of the morning to find the performance bottleneck, but after removing it a process went from 270 seconds to 80. Then I started looking into getting the 80 down to, say, 0.8, and discovered that because we're using an API limit with a request limit (180 requests in 15 minutes), I put in a 5-second delay between requests. Sigh. So now I've...

Quick hit list of stuff I didn't find time to read: There is an online map of the most pleasant walks in London, and an app that will get you from one place to another down the most aesthetically-pleasing streets. We could tax billionaires without much difficulty if Congress didn't have such close relations with them. Vice explains how the FBI can get your location data from your mobile carrier. NPR explains the legal problems that may face the production team on Rust. Finally, Alexandra Petri guesses...

On this day in 1767, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed their survey of the disputed Maryland-Pennsylvania border, which became even more contentious in 1780 when Pennsylvania aboolished slavery. A group of surveyors started re-surveying the border in 2019; I can't find out whether they finished. Meanwhile, 255 years later, politics is still mostly local: Our professional women's basketball team, the Chicago Sky, won the WNBA championship yesterday. Chicago's recently-retired Inspector General...

Cloudflare explains: BGP stands for Border Gateway Protocol. It's a mechanism to exchange routing information between autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. The big routers that make the Internet work have huge, constantly updated lists of the possible routes that can be used to deliver every network packet to their final destinations. Without BGP, the Internet routers wouldn't know what to do, and the Internet wouldn't work. The Internet is literally a network of networks, and it’s bound together by...

The United States Supreme Court began their term earlier today, in person for the first time since March 2020. Justice Brett Kavanagh (R) did not attend owing to his positive Covid-19 test last week. In other news: The Post, Guardian, and other news outlets have released their stories on the largest document dump ever, which purports to show how the ultra-rich avoid taxation by stashing their money overseas. Indians taking a highly-competitive test to become teachers in the state of Rajasthan paid...

Just a couple today, but they seem interesting: Metra may build a combined Milwaukee District / Union Pacific station in the Fulton Market district that could make commuting into the West Loop a lot easier. Greg Bensinger reminds us that maps have inherent, and sometimes deliberate, inaccuracies. Finding stolen cryptocurrency is easier than most people think. And wow, did the Chicago Bears have a bad game yesterday.

So these things happened: The FBI withheld REvil decryption keys from victims so not to tip off the criminals. Anonymous hackers have doxxed an ISP that provides services to right-wing hate groups. Two disbarred lawyers have filed suit against the doctor who admitted to performing an abortion in contravention of Texas law. As feared, Chicago-area animal shelters have started to fill up as selfish people return the pets they took home when Covid made them lonely. Josh Marshall frames the current...

I've just spent the last 45 minutes transferring all my auto-pay accounts to a new credit card after my bank notified me that someone in Berlin tried to use my old card to buy something on a French website. Since this happened just a couple of days after T-Mobile once again lost control of millions of customer records, I assume that's how my card number wound up with a European criminal. Or maybe it came from one of the companies whose accounts I just had to update? According to C-Net, "T-Mobile says...

I have opened these on my Surface at work, but I'll have to read them at home: The City of Chicago has sued Grubhub and Doordash for deceptive practices. Sue Halpern asks, "Why is Facebook suddenly afraid of the FTC?" Paul Krugman worries that California voters might destroy their own economic success if they remove Governor Gavin Newsom from office next week. Josh Marshall fisks Robert Kagan's opinion piece on the history of the Afghanistan war. Ezra Klein says, "Let's not pretend that the way we...

Eugene Wesley Roddenberry would have been 100 years old today. Star Trek and NASA have a livestream today to celebrate. In other news: Guardian UK Washington correspondent David Smith highlights White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki's ability to expertly destroy Fox News reporter Peter Doocy. T-Mobile has suffered its sixth known data disclosure attack in four years, this time losing control over as many as 40 million customer records. New Republic's Scott Stern profiles former Monsanto lawyer Clarence...

Those topics led this afternoon's news roundup: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 6th periodic report on the state of the planet, and it's pretty grim. But as Josh Marshall points out, "Worried about life on earth? Don’t be. Life’s resilient and has a many hundreds of millions of years track record robust enough to handle and adapt to anything we throw at it. But the player at the top of the heap is the first to go." Charles Blow has almost run out of empathy for people who...

Via Bruce Schneier, researchers have developed software that can bamboozle facial-recognition software up to 60% of the time: The work suggests that it’s possible to generate such ‘master keys’ for more than 40% of the population using only 9 faces synthesized by the StyleGAN Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), via three leading face recognition systems. The paper is a collaboration between the Blavatnik School of Computer Science and the school of Electrical Engineering, both at Tel Aviv. StyleGAN is...

Via Bruce Schneier, Motherboard got ahold of a pair of Anom phones, which the FBI and Australian Federal Police used to take down a bunch of criminal networks earlier this year: Motherboard has obtained and analyzed an Anom phone from a source who unknowingly bought one on a classified ads site. On that site, the phone was advertised as just a cheap Android device. But when the person received it, they realized it wasn't an ordinary phone, and after being contacted by Motherboard, found that it...

After Fox network blowhard Tucker Carlson whined that the National Security Agency, the US intelligence service tasked with spying on communications outside the US, had tapped his phones, the agency clapped back on Twitter: TPM's Cristina Cabrera reports, "Carlson doubled down on his accusation shortly afterward on his program, saying the NSA’s statement 'an entire paragraph of lies written purely for the benefit of the intel community’s lackeys at CNN and MSNBC.'" The NSA is just having a bit of sport...

Oh, to be a dog. Cassie is sleeping comfortably on her bed in my office after having over an hour of walks (including 20 minutes at the dog park) so far today. Meanwhile, at work we resumed using a bit of code that we put on ice for a while, and I promptly discovered four bugs. I've spent the afternoon listening to Cassie snore and swatting the first one. Meanwhile, in the outside world, life continues: Ukrainian police arrested members of the Cl0p ransomware gang, seizing money and cars along with the...

As much fun as Cassie and I have had over the last few days, the news around the world didn't stop: After 448 days, Illinois will finally reopen fully on Friday. Security expert Tarah Wheeler, writing on Schneier.com, warns that our weapons systems have frightening security vulnerabilities. Fastly's content-delivery network (CDN) collapsed this morning, taking down The New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg News, and other major properties; no word yet on the cause, but we can guess. About 12,000...

I've just received my third nearly-identical fake DMCA takedown notice, which I may decide to turn over to the FBI if I can muster the shits to give. I find it funny how each one of them has a few differences that make them look like something other than lazy script-kiddie stuff. This one again misstated the statutory damage limits for willful copyright infringement, and the randomly-generated name of the "claimant" was no less bizarre than the other two. And yet I wonder why they bothered altering the...

I had planned to note Bruce Schneier's latest essay, "The Misaligned Incentives for Cloud Security," along with a report that Microsoft has noticed an uptick in SolarWinds attacks against its own services. But twice in two weeks I've received bogus DMCA takedown notices that tried to trick me into downloading files from a Google site, and I'm impressed by the effort that went into these phishing attacks. In both cases, the attacks came through the blog's Contact page, meaning someone had to copy and...

A supporter of the XPOTUS has organized, with the help of the Arizona State Senate, a private hand-recount of Maricopa County's ballots. Apparently they're looking for bamboo fibers? Yeah, it's just as crazy as it sounds: On the floor of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where Sir Charles Barkley once dunked basketballs and Hulk Hogan wrestled King Kong Bundy, 46 tables are arrayed in neat rows, each with a Lazy Susan in the middle. Seated at the tables are several dozen people, mostly Republicans, who spend...

We have gloomy, misty weather today, keeping us mostly inside. Cassie has let me know how bored she is, so in the next few minutes we'll brave the spitting fog and see if anyone else has made it to the dog park. Meanwhile: As today is May the Fourth (be with you), NPR reminded us of the time they produced a radio drama based on "A New Hope." It turns out, the FBI never actually got around to warning Rudy Giuliani that he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign. The US Trustee, the Department...

Happy 51st Earth Day! In honor of that, today's first story has nothing to do with Earth: The MOXIE experiment on NASA's Perseverance rover produced 5.4 grams of oxygen in an hour on Mars, not enough to sustain human life but a major milestone in our efforts to visit the planet. Back on earth, the Nature Conservancy has released a report predicting significant climate changes for Illinois, including a potential 5°C temperature rise by 2100. Microsoft has teamed up with the UK Meteorological Office (AKA...

The United States Postal Service has a surveillance program that tracks social media posts for law enforcement, and no one can say why: The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies. “Analysts with the United States Postal...

Microsoft Azure and Office 365 suffered an outage yesterday that affected just about everything in their cloud: Microsoft Corp. was hit by a massive cloud outage today that took most of its internet services offline. Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, as well as Teams, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox Live and Bing were all inaccessible due to the outage. Even the Azure Status page was reportedly taken offline. The first reports of the outage emerged from users on Twitter, and were confirmed by the...

Even though my life for the past week has revolved around a happy, energetic ball of fur, the rest of the world has continued as if Cassie doesn't matter: US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has taken the lead in spewing right-wing conspiracy bullshit in the Senate. Retired US Army Lt Colonel Alexander Vindman joins Garry Kasparov in an op-ed that says it's not about the individual politicians; Russia's future is about authoritarianism against democracy. Deep waters 150 meters under the surface of Lake...

I'm shaking my head at email service provider Postmark, who four weeks ago announced they would be phasing out support for TLS 1.0 (a network security protocol). I understood this when they announced it in February, 60 days ahead of their cutover to TLS 1.2, but didn't think it applied to anything of mine. This morning they sent a more focused email saying, "you're getting this email because we can see that this applies to you." Panic ensues. Why panic? Because almost everything I've developed in the...

Chicago got up to 21°C yesterday, tying the record for March 9th set in 1974. It's already 20°C right now, close to the record 22°C set in 1955. In other news: One chart shows the difference between the XPOTUS's 2017 tax cut for rich people and President Biden's pandemic-relief bill, which he will sign into law tomorrow. Lou Ottens, who invented the audio cassette tape, died at the age of 94. A survey of Windows computers found that 26% of them have not applied the WannaCry patch after four years of...

These are just some of the things I read at lunch today: Ezra Klein looks at how a $1.9 trillion proposal got through the US Senate and concludes the body has become "a Dadaist nightmare." Several groups of ice fishermen, 66 in total, found themselves drifting into Green Bay (the bay, not the city) yesterday, when the ice floe they were fishing on broke away from the shore ice. Given that Lake Michigan has one of the smallest ice covers in years right now, this seems predictable and tragic. Writing in...

Aditya Singh never left O'Hare after arriving on October 19th: Singh, 36, lived in the secure area with access to terminals, shops and food at O’Hare International Airport until his arrest Saturday after two United Airlines employees asked to see his identification, prosecutors said. He showed them an airport ID badge that an operations manager had reported missing on Oct. 26. Police said Singh told them that the coronavirus pandemic left him too afraid to fly and so he instead remained in the airport...

Security is hard. Everyone who works in IT knows (or should know) this. We have well-documented security practices covering every part of software applications, from the user interface down to the hardware. Add in actual regulations like Europe's GDPR and California's privacy laws, you have a good blueprint for protecting user data. Of course, if you actively resist expertise and hate being told what to do by beanie-wearing nerds, you might find yourself reading on Gizmodo how a lone hacker exfiltrated...

The expansion of unemployment benefits combined with sensible precautions against transmission of Covid-19 have made criminals' lives much easier: From March through the end of November, there have been more than 2 million initial claims filed for regular state unemployment benefits, according to the agency. That figure excludes people filing claims under five federal pandemic jobless aid programs the state implemented last year. The agency has said the rise in unemployment fraud is likely due to large...

We had a relatively quiet day yesterday, but only in comparison to the day before: Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (wife of presumptive Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned after nearly four years (and with nothing to gain from staying in Cabinet) mostly because they no longer needed those jobs. Said the Post: "Resigning now feels a little like eating all but the last bite of a piece of cake at a restaurant and then asking for a refund." The BBC has a...

Thank you, Tom Lehrer, for encapsulating what this season means to us in the US. In the last 24 hours, we have seen some wonderful Christmas gifts, some of them completely in keeping with Lehrer's sentiment. Continuing his unprecedented successes making his the most corrupt presidency in the history of the country (and here I include the Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding presidencies), the STBXPOTUS yesterday granted pardons to felons Charles Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone. Of the 65 pardons...

Welcome to the (abbreviated) lunchtime roundup: Not only have attackers breached hundreds of networks due to a subtle flaw in a complicated piece of software, it turns out that a Dutch software engineer has—for the second time—exposed a rather glaring flaw in an uncomplicated piece of wetware by guessing the STBXPOTUS's Twitter password. (It was "maga2020!". I am not making this up.) Thomas Edsall decries "the rise of 'political sectarianism'." It's time once again for Drew Magary's "Hater's Guide to...

The Electoral College has voted, and with no surprises, as of 16:37 Chicago time Joe Biden has received the requisite 270 votes to be elected President of the United States. And yet, we had a few surprises today: The loathsome STBXPOTUS fired his almost-equally-loathsome Attorney General, Bill Barr, which could not have happened to a better couple. The US passed 300,000 Covid-19 deaths today. Probably 250,000 could have been prevented. Security guru Bruce Schneier advocates for regulation of persuasion...

While I'm waiting for Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris to face off at 8pm Central, I have other things to occupy my thoughts: The First Lady has had a remarkably charmed pandemic life. Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein were "a driving force" in the program of separating children from their parents at the border in 2018. Today is the 65th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's first public recitation of "Howl." Apple's iOS v14 will finally have some of the security and privacy features Android...

Starting in March, this year has seemed like a weird anthology TV show, with each month written and directed by a different team. We haven't had Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme yet; I'm hoping that'll be the season finale in February. This month we seem to have Armando Iannucci running the show, as the President's antics over the weekend suggest. So here's how I'm spending lunch: With only 4 weeks to the election, a new CNN poll out this morning has Biden up 16 points among likely voters nationally....

With 58 days until the election, the noise keeps increasing. Here's some of it: Jeffrey Goldberg reports from multiple sources that the president referred to wounded soldiers as "losers" and "suckers" for serving the country. The administration moved quickly to lie about this. Andrew Sullivan calls the president a "metastasizing cancer." Catherine Rampell suggests ways to talk to right-wingers about the president's failures. Nick Martin asks, "how did 'if I die, I die' become this country's mantra?"...

I'm taking a day off, so I'm choosing not to read all the articles that have piled up on my desktop: Tropical Storm Josephine has formed east of the windward islands, becoming the earliest 10th named storm on record. The National Hurricane Center promises an "extremely active" season. By tracking excess deaths in addition to reported Covid-19 deaths, the New York Times has concluded we've already surpassed 200,000 and could hit half a million by the end of the year. The General Accounting Office, a...

This is my 55th post this month, and the fifth month in a row in which I've posted over 50 times. That brings my 12-month total to 581, the third record in a row and the fifth record this year. I guess Covid-19 has been good for something. Here's what I'm reading today: Authorities in Tampa have charged 17-year-old Graham Clark with masterminding last month's massive Twitter hack. The Atlantic's David Graham says the president is trying to destroy the election's legitimacy. George Will points to the...

I'll get to the final head-to-head comparison between my Garmin Venu and Fitbit Ionic later today. Meanwhile: The Dept of Homeland Security plans to deploy 150 agents to Chicago, and no one will say why. Could Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan finally face consequences for his career-spanning corruption? Charles Blow asks: where's the outrage? Bruce Schneier explains and hypothesizes about the Twitter class break last week. And finally, because our Covid-19 numbers have started creeping up, indoor bar...

Happy tax day! And now, we're off to the races: Jeff Sessions lost the Republican US Senate primary in Alabama. What the hell was the president talking about yesterday? George Will explains the differences, such as they are, between  Illinois governor JB Pritzker announced a tightening of the state's re-opening rules, while Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot warned we're dangerously close to shutting down again. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt tested positive for Covid-19. Author John M. Barry, who wrote about...

As I take a minute from banging away on C# code to savor my BBQ pork on rice from the local Chinese takeout, I have these to read: President Trump once again said the quiet part out loud, announcing he plans to gut fair-housing rules because otherwise they would "have...a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas." The Supreme Court will hear arguments whether the House can have access to Robert Mueller's unredacted report—in the fall. Josh Marshall goes over the "ominous and harrowing"...

My inbox does not respect the fact that I had meetings between my debugging sessions all day. So this all piled up: Josh Marshall calls our Covid-19 response an "abject failure" compared to, say, Europe's. Paul Krugman says it shows we've "failed the marshmallow test." Former CIA acting director Michael Morell says President Biden will inherit "a world of trouble." ("Arguably, only Abraham Lincoln, with Southern secession waiting, faced a tougher challenge when taking office than would Biden.") Illinois...

Last weekend's tsunami continues to ripple: Ultra-right-wing US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), writing in the New York Times to great opprobrium, recommends sending in the troops. Former general and Defense Secretary James Mattis publicly rebuked President Trump in a 3-page letter published in the Atlantic, a move that Josh Marshall supports while adding that the letter also "its own form of militarization of society." Former Joint Chiefs Chair Mike Mullen also criticized the president earlier this week. In...

Remember slow news days? Me neither. Republican legislators and business owners have pushed back on Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's plan to re-open the economy, preferring instead to force their employees into unsafe situations so they can return to making money. Professional dilettante Jared Kushner's leadership in getting a bunch of kids to organize mask distribution went about as well as one might predict. More reasonable people simply see how it means we're going to be in this a while. California...

Security guru Bruce Schneier says Zoom has cleaned up its act a lot, judging by recent surveys of video conferencing apps by the NSA and Mozilla: The company has done a lot of work addressing previous security concerns. It still has a bit to go on end-to-end encryption. Matthew Green looked at this. Zoom does offer end-to-end encryption if 1) everyone is using a Zoom app, and not logging in to the meeting using a webpage, and 2) the meeting is not being recorded in the cloud. That's pretty good, but the...

The President of the United States, a man who literally has the power to kill billions of people in an hour, made a suggestion at his press briefing yesterday: (NBC's report on the incident includes the line "He didn't specify the kind of disinfectant." Also, retired General Wesley Clark actually predicted it would come to this.) The Post: In a statement Friday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany noted that Trump had said Americans should consult with their doctors about treatment. U.S....

More than 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance last week (including 178,000 in Illinois), following the 3.3 million who filed the week before. This graphic from The Washington Post puts these numbers in perspective: Hotel occupancy has crashed as well, down 67% year-over-year, with industry analysts predicting the worst year on record. In other pandemic news: Testing in Illinois shows about 20% of the 34,000 people tested have come up positive for SARS-CoV-2, which is about the same as...

I'm trying to get my mind around a Conservative government announcing this a few minutes ago: The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has announced the government will pay the wages of British workers to keep them in jobs as the coronavirus outbreak escalates. In an unprecedented step, Sunak said the state would pay grants covering up to 80% of the salary of workers kept on by companies, up to a total of £2,500 per month, just above the median income. “We are starting a great national effort to protect jobs,” he...

I have tons of experience working from home, but historically I've balanced that by going out in the evenings. The pandemic has obviously cut that practice down to zero. Moreover, the village of Oak Park will start shelter-in-place measures tomorrow, so I expect Chicago to do the same in the next couple of days. The Oak Park order seems reasonable: stay home except for essentials like food and medicine, stay two meters away from other people, it's OK to walk your dog, and so on. Since I'm already doing...

I spent an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to track down a monitor to replace the one that sparked, popped, and went black on me this morning. That's going to set me back $150 for a replacement, which isn't so bad, considering. Less personally, the following also happened in the last 24 hours: Former Vice President Joe Biden thumped US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in most of the 6 primary-election states yesterday. Closer to home, the Illinois House district just south of me has become the center of...

In just one more example of the president slipping his leash, thanks to the Republican trolls in the Senate giving him permission to do so, the Justice Department said it found prosecutors recommendations for Roger Stone's sentence "shocking." Three Assistant US Attorneys immediately quit the case: Jonathan Kravis, one of the prosecutors, wrote in a court filing he had resigned as an assistant U.S. attorney, leaving government entirely. Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, a former member of special counsel Robert S....

Fortunately, I'm debugging a build process that takes 6 minutes each time, so I may be able to squeeze some of these in: Bruce Schneier reports on a new critical vulnerability in Windows that the NSA told Microsoft about. That's new. The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead takes a thoughtful (and only mildly snarky) look at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex withdrawing from royal life. In the same issue, John Cassidy examines the reasons behind our assassination of Qassem Suleimani. The Washington Post documents the...

I had a lot going on at work today, so all I have left is a lame-ass "read these later" post: Cranky Flier wonders why Delta is Tweeting to individual passengers. James Fallows looks at Bob Garfield's latest book. Bruce Schneier says China isn't the problem in crappy 5G security. And John Scalzi has a new book coming out, which he'll sign if you pre-order. I'd say "back to the mines," but I believe I have a date with Kristen Bell presently.

For the past seven months I've worked as a contract development lead in Milliman's Cyber Risk Solutions group. Today I officially convert to a new full-time role as Director of Product Development for Cyber Risk Solutions. We have a lot to do in 2020, and I'll post about it what I can. So far we've started building "a new generation risk platform which uses an ensemble of cutting edge techniques to integrate what is known, knowable and imaginable about complex risks in order help risk managers identify...

With only two weeks left in the decade, it looks like the 2010s will end...bizarrely. More people have taken a look at the President's unhinged temper tantrum yesterday. I already mentioned that Aaron Blake annotated it. The Times fact-checked it. And Jennifer Rubin says "It is difficult to capture how bizarre and frightening the letter is simply by counting the utter falsehoods...or by quoting from the invective dripping from his pen." As for the impeachment itself, Josh Marshall keeps things simple...

Voting in the UK general election started at 1am Chicago time (7am GMT) last night and goes until 4pm Chicago time (10pm GMT) this afternoon. Because we have regular readers in the UK, the Daily Parker will observe UK law and precedent against reporting or commenting on the election while the polls are open. Instead, I'd like to call attention to an article in yesterday's Times outlining the problems with the FBI's wiretap on Carter Page. While the inspector general found that the investigation started...

In case you're thinking of booby-trapping your house this Christmas, don't do this:

I found myself actually shocked at one piece of testimony in yesterday's impeachment hearing: A U.S. ambassador’s cellphone call to President Trump from a restaurant in the capital of Ukraine this summer was a stunning breach of security, exposing the conversation to surveillance by foreign intelligence services, including Russia’s, former U.S. officials said. The call — in which Trump’s remarks were overheard by a U.S. Embassy staffer in Kyiv — was disclosed Wednesday by the acting U.S. ambassador to...

I realized this morning that I've missed almost the entire season of The Good Place because I don't seem to have enough time to watch TV. I also don't have enough time until Friday to read all of these pieces that have crossed my desk only today: Writing in the New Yorker, Steve Coll worries how the public phase of the House's impeachment hearings will move the public. Meanwhile, Seinfeld screenwriter and New York native Peter Mehlman points out that Donald Trump "was always a joke" in New York. (I...

That's American for the English idiom "penny in the air." And what a penny. More like a whole roll of them. Right now, the House of Commons are wrapping up debate on the Government's bill to prorogue Parliament (for real this time) and have elections the second week of December. The second reading of the bill just passed by voice vote (the "noes" being only a few recalcitrant MPs), so the debate continues. The bill is expected to pass—assuming MPs can agree on whether to have the election on the 9th...

I'm surprised I ate anything today, after this past weekend. I'm less surprised I haven't yet consumed all of these: Harvard Law professor John Coates argues that "a sitting president threatening civil war if Congress exercises its constitutionally-authorized power" constitutes an impeachable offense in its own right. The Chicago Public Library will stop fining people for overdue books, as long as you bring them back eventually. National Geographic digs into the Grimm Brothers' fairy-tale collections....

A few good reads today: Bruce Schneier compares genetic engineering with software engineering, and its security implications. The Atlantic has goes deep into the Palace of Westminster, and its upcoming £3.5 bn renovation. NOAA's chief scientist publicly released a letter to staff discussing the "complex issue involving the President commenting on the path of [Hurricane Dorian]." Illinois has pulled back some regulations on distilleries, giving them an easier time competing with bars and restaurants....

Via Bruce Schneier, this is literally* a thing: The book opens with Massimo working in his combination laboratory and server farm; we know it's ironclad because of the required thumbprint and biometrics scan, but we also know it's classy because it's in an old wine cellar beneath his family villa outside Milan. Plus, he has three screens, so you know he's a serious cybersecurity hacker man. Nat is a 20-something who lives a poverty-driven boho life. Massimo—who is Mr. Cyber—is, in her eyes, a "sleek...

Just a few head-to-desk articles this afternoon: Washington DC's mayor has informed the President that the city's special security fund has no more money in it, thanks to the 4th of July Trumpaganza and the fact that the Trump inaugural committee hasn't reimbursed the city the $7.3 million it's owed since 2017. The economy seems to keep expanding despite a lack of inflation, according to the Fed. That might have something to do with wages not rising very much. We can tell these things are related...

Via Bruce Schneier, San Francisco-based "computer guy" Maciej Cegłowski put up a cogent, clear blog post last week showing how we might better regulate privacy: Until recently, ambient privacy was a simple fact of life. Recording something for posterity required making special arrangements, and most of our shared experience of the past was filtered through the attenuating haze of human memory. Even police states like East Germany, where one in seven citizens was an informer, were not able to keep tabs...

Sadly, you can't. But you can protect yourself from identity theft, as Bruce Schneier explains: The reality is that your sensitive data has likely already been stolen, multiple times. Cybercriminals have your credit card information. They have your social security number and your mother's maiden name. They have your address and phone number. They obtained the data by hacking any one of the hundreds of companies you entrust with the data­ -- and you have no visibility into those companies' security...

Yesterday, Microsoft made an error making a nameserver delegation chage (where they switch computers for their internal address book), causing large swaths of Azure to lose track of itself: Summary of impact: Between 19:43 and 22:35 UTC on 02 May 2019, customers may have experienced intermittent connectivity issues with Azure and other Microsoft services (including M365, Dynamics, DevOps, etc). Most services were recovered by 21:30 UTC with the remaining recovered by 22:35 UTC.  Preliminary root...

The day after a 3-day, 3-flight weekend doesn't usually make it into the top-10 productive days of my life. Like today for instance. So here are some things I'm too lazy to write more about today: More evidence that living on the west side of a time zone causes sleep deprivation. Over the weekend, at 2pm on Saturday, Chicago set a record for the lowest humidity on record. A software developer and pilot looks at the relationship between the software and hardware of the Boeing 737-MAX. The grounding of...

First, Bruce Schneier takes a look at Facebook's privacy shift: There is ample reason to question Zuckerberg's pronouncement: The company has made -- and broken -- many privacy promises over the years. And if you read his 3,000-word post carefully, Zuckerberg says nothing about changing Facebook's surveillance capitalism business model. All the post discusses is making private chats more central to the company, which seems to be a play for increased market dominance and to counter the Chinese company...

Just a few things I'm reading that you also might want to read: Responding to yesterday's post about the Democratic Party's flirtation with anti-Semitism, reader DH sends an article from today's Guardian explaining why the left is doing this worldwide. Atlas Obscura describes the middle-ages privacy measure called letterlocking. Illinois officially had its coldest temperature ever when Mt Carroll hit -39°C on January 31st. The Tribune digs into why the Jane Byrne Interchange remodeling will got almost a...

Today actually had a lot of news, not all of which I've read yet: About 60,000 commuters couldn't get home tonight after Amtrak signaling at Union Station, Chicago, broke down. Writing for New Republic, Matt Ford calls Michael Cohen's testimony to Congress today "the art of the deal you can't refuse."  David Frum (among others) points out that for all the GOP's impugning of Cohen's character, no one actually refuted the facts of his testimony. The Economist's Gulliver column speculates that US carriers...

I had these lined up to read at lunchtime: Bruce Schneier explains how blockchain shifts, but does not eliminate, trust; and Bitcoin isn't useful. A lined article from 2017 goes further and says Bitcoin is an environmental catastrophe. A new interactive project shows how the summers in your city will feel in 2080. (Chicago's then will feel like Kansas City's today.) It turns out, if you're liberal, your brain reacts much differently to repulsive pictures than your conservative friends' brains. I'm ready...

...will be to Bletchley Park: The National Museum of Computing is a must-see if you are ever in the UK. It was a short 30ish minute train ride up from London. We spent the whole afternoon there. There is a rebuild of the Colossus, the the world's first electronic computer. It had a single purpose: to help decipher the Lorenz-encrypted (Tunny) messages between Hitler and his generals during World War II. The Colossus Gallery housing the rebuild of Colossus tells that remarkable story. We saw...

By now you may have heard that Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who oversees elections in Georgia, and who is running for governor of Georgia this coming Tuesday, claims the Democratic Party hacked the voter registration database. No. What happened is, when the state Democratic Party's voter protection director reached out to his office directly after being alerted to a gaping data vulnerability, he turned his own malfeasance into an attack on his opposition: By the time Democrats reached out to...

We have a deployment at work tonight at 5pm (because in financial firms, you always deploy at 5pm on Friday). Fortunately, we've already done a full test, so we're looking forward to a pretty boring deployment tonight. Fortunately, we have the Internet, which has provided me with all of these things to read: It turns out, men are responsible for 100% of all unwanted pregnancies. Real, live diplomats explain how to respond to something like Jamal Khashoggi's apparent murder, and how we're not actually...

If the Kanye West–Donald Trump crazyfest didn't do it for you, there are plenty of other things to take a look at this lunchtime: Jonathan Capehart just laughed at Kanye. So did Katie Rogers, but more subtly. US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) calls for a halt to weapon sales to Saudi Arabia. Let's once again review the case against leafblowers. Read Andrew Sullivan's weekly column. Bruce Schneier worries about physically-capable computers. Despite the cold, you can still get a drink alfresco in Chicago or go...

As in, "nice work, Dutch military, for unraveling a GRU operation and blowing 300 GRU agents worldwide:" Dutch authorities have photographs of four Russian military intelligence (GRU) operatives arriving at the Amsterdam airport last April, escorted by a member of the Russian embassy. They have copies of the men’s passports — two of them with serial numbers one digit apart. Because they caught them, red-handed, inside a car parked beside the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The...

This week, I got an email from the SEO coordinator at Alaska Airlines: My name is Shawn with Alaska Airlines. I'm reaching out concerning a specific link on blog.braverman.org. As you may have heard, Alaska Airlines acquired Virgin America last year. We are in the process of updating all Virgin America links to go directly to our website, https://www.alaskaair.com. We want to make sure your readers are being sent to the correct place! We would really appreciate it if you could update the link and anchor...

In late 2016, someone apparently attacked American diplomats in Cuba and China with a device that caused people to hear loud sounds and experience concussion-like brain damage. Now, doctors working with the attack victims may have figured out what it was: The medical team that examined 21 affected diplomats from Cuba made no mention of microwaves in its detailed report published in JAMA in March. But Douglas H. Smith, the study’s lead author and director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the...

Via Bruce Schneier, retired USMC Colonel Mark Canclan has authored a report outlining what threats we're likely to face in the next few years, and how to cope with them. He includes some chilling strategic possibilities: The cyber attacks varied. Sailors stationed at the 7th Fleet' s homeport in Japan awoke one day to find their financial accounts, and those of their dependents, empty. Checking, savings, retirement funds: simply gone. The Marines based on Okinawa were under virtual siege by the...

Via Schneier, Stuart Schechter has an excellent article for MFA n00bs people new to multi-factor authentication: Many online accounts allow you to supplement your password with a second form of identification, which can prevent some prevalent attacks. The second factors you can use to identify yourself include authenticator apps on your phone, which generate codes that change every 30 seconds, and security keys, small pieces of hardware similar in size and shape to USB drives. Since innovations that can...

Researchers at Clemson University, working with 538.org, identified 3 million tweets from 2,800 Twitter handles belonging to Russian trolls: “We identified five categories of IRA-associated Twitter handles, each with unique patterns of behaviors: Right Troll, Left Troll, News Feed, Hashtag Gamer, and Fearmonger. With the exception of the Fearmonger category, handles were consistent and did not switch between categories.” The five types: Right Troll: These Trump-supporting trolls voiced right-leaning...

Via Schneier, the head of security for the marketing firm running the game stole the million-dollar game pieces: [FBI Special Agent Richard] Dent’s investigation had started in 2000, when a mysterious informant called the FBI and claimed that McDonald’s games had been rigged by an insider known as “Uncle Jerry.” The person revealed that “winners” paid Uncle Jerry for stolen game pieces in various ways. The $1 million winners, for example, passed the first $50,000 installment to Uncle Jerry in cash....

I probably won't have time to read all of these things over lunch: President Trump is repaying Vladimir Putin for his 2016 win right in front of us, while still avoiding the consequences of Russia's interference. That said, Putin has to wonder what else our security services know about him. Trump's bad behavior in Britain will poison relations between both countries for a long time. Resigning didn't get Scott Pruitt out of legal jeopardy. Rent control is becoming an important issue in local politics....

I didn't have a chance to read these yesterday: Boxer Joe Louis had a home in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. As of yesterday, none of the 4 major U.S. air carriers has propeller-driven airplanes in service anymore. Juggalo makeup can reliably defeat facial recognition software. Contra this article by Franklin Foer, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior really is annoying. Now I'm off to work. The heat wave of the last few days has finally broken!

Via Bruce Schneier, interesting research into how to use mouse movements to detect lying: Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have long noted a big "tell" in human behavior: Crafting a lie takes more mental work than telling the truth. So one way to spot lies is to check someone's reaction time. If they're telling a lie, they'll respond fractionally more slowly than if they're telling the truth. Similarly, if you're asked to elaborate on your lie, you have to think for a second to generate new...

Greg Sargent this morning points out that my party's congressional candidates aren't running the campaigns that the popular imagination thinks they are, which is a good thing: There’s a narrative about our politics right now that you constantly encounter on social and political media. It goes like this: Democrats are too obsessed with the Russia investigation, or with Stormy Daniels, or they’re just too focused on “not being President Trump,” and as a result, they aren’t articulating an affirmative...

A couple stories of interest: CityLab has a good explanation about why New York stopped building subways 80 years ago, and how that has caused epic transit problems today. Developers plan to build a new skyscraper in Chicago for $1 bn. At 433 m, it would be the second-tallest building in Chicago, just 9 m shorter than Willis Tower. Credit-card signatures are finally going away in the U.S. OK, back to being really too busy to breathe this week...

Via Bruce Schneier, DHS Senior Analyst Jack Anderson describes how walls are still a dominant security metaphor, and the consequences of that choice: Walls don’t fail gracefully. But there is a bewitching tendency to trust them more than we should, and this leads to dangerous liabilities. Extreme risk prognosticator Pasquale Curillo calls this tendency to depend too much on controls we’ve put in place the “fence paradox.” By protecting things — which they must — organizations can encourage situations...

Via Bruce Schneier (and other sources), the Australian government suffered one of its worst-ever disclosures of secrets caused by not looking through used furniture: It begins at a second-hand shop in Canberra, where ex-government furniture is sold off cheaply. The deals can be even cheaper when the items in question are two heavy filing cabinets to which no-one can find the keys. They were purchased for small change and sat unopened for some months until the locks were attacked with a drill. Inside was...

I got a weird text from T-Mobile a few minutes ago: T-Mobile Alert: We have identified an industry-wide phone number port out scam and encourage you to add account security. Learn more: t-mo.co/secure Well, that does not sound good. And it's not. Apparently thieves have found that American mobile phone providers are unusually helpful when it comes time to steal mobile phone numbers (called "SIM hijacking") or to port those numbers to third-party mobile providers. In both cases, the thieves now have a...

As part of my current project's non-technical requirements, I've just completed 5 hours of anti-terrorism and security training. Biggest takeaway: bullets ricochet down, grenade shrapnel goes up. Also, don't put random CDs in your computer. Oh, and I have to repeat about 3 hours of it a year from now. Today is actually a company holiday but I've got a lot of work to do, including this training. Also we've gotten about 60 mm of snow today with more coming down. So steps go down, heating bill goes up.

I'm under the weather today, probably owing to the two Messiah performances this weekend and all of Parker's troubles. So even though I'm taking it easy, I still have a queue of things to read: NBC is reporting that the President was warned in August that Russians would try to infiltrate his transition team. Josh Marshall thinks Trump will try to fire Robert Mueller at some point in the near future. Atlanta's Hartsfield airport—the busiest in the world—had no power for 12 hours yesterday. CityLab goes...

Via Bruce Schneier, an advisor to the project, Citizen Lab has created an online tool to help you stay safe online: Security Planner is a custom security advice tool from Citizen Lab. Answer a few questions, and it gives you a few simple things you can do to improve your security. It's not meant to be comprehensive, but instead to give people things they can actually do to immediately improve their security. I don't see it replacing any of the good security guides out there, but instead augmenting them....

I'm about to fly to San Antonio for another round of researching how the military tracks recruits from the time they get to the processing center to the time they leave for boot camp (officially "Military Basic Training" or MBT). I have some stuff to read on the plane: WPA, which is probably securing your WiFi, has been hacked after 14 years. Great. At least SSL is still secure. The New Republic claims that Republicans are ignoring the will of the people by tossing out ballot initiatives. (This is not...

I've got a lot going on today, with a final rehearsal tonight before Saturday's dress for Carmina Burana (get tickets here) and two business trips in the next 10 days. But there are a few articles to note in today's media: Dove ran a commercial this weekend that suggests an African woman can use their soap and become Irish. There has been some response. Politico reported that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's cell phone got tapped. Schneier points out that all politicians should assume this about...

Via Bruce Schneier, a British reporter requested her data dossier from Tinder. As with so many other things in life, she was shocked, but not surprised: The dating app has 800 pages of information on me, and probably on you too if you are also one of its 50 million users. In March I asked Tinder to grant me access to my personal data. Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Tinder. With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier...

Republican Illinois governor Bruce Rauner, the best governor we have right now, vetoed a bill that would have required companies to get affirmative consent from consumers before selling their geolocation data: “The bill is not overreaching,” said Chris McCloud, a spokesman for the Digital Privacy Alliance, a Chicago-based nonprofit advocating for state-level privacy legislation. “It is merely saying, ‘If you’re going to sell my personal geolocation data, then just tell me upfront that’s what you are...

The January release of Google Chrome will prevent videos from auto-playing: Starting in Chrome 64, which is currently earmarked for a January 2018 release, auto-play will only be allowed when the video in question is muted or when a "user has indicated an interest in the media." The latter applies if the site has been added to the home screen on mobile or if the user has frequently played media on the site on desktop. Google also says auto-play will be allowed if the user has "tapped or clicked...

While not quite as viscerally grotesque as a 140-tonne fatberg, new details about the failures at Equifax that led to its massive data breach are still pretty disgusting: Equifax has confirmed that attackers entered its system in mid-May through a web-application vulnerability that had a patch available in March. In other words, the credit-reporting giant had more than two months to take precautions that would have defended the personal data of 143 million people from being exposed. It didn't. As the...

Via Bruce Schneier, an essay on how the fact that something appears in nature means it can exist, and what this means for military robots: In each of the [Planet Earth II] documentary’s profiles of monkeys, birds, and lizards, I saw what technologists refer to as an “existence proof.” Existence proofs are the simplest way to resolve an argument about what is technologically possible. Before 1900, people argued whether building a human-carrying powered airplane was possible. In 1903, the Wright Brothers...

Unexpectedly had to drive for five hours today, but fortunately there doesn't seem to be much going on in the world. The president has arrived in Saudi Arabia, where so far he hasn't committed any public faux-pas. Give him time, I suppose. And anyway, he's among friends. Meanwhile, someone is selling out our Chinese intelligence assets. I sure hope it's not him.

Surprising everyone in Washington last night, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the Trump campaign's possible ties to Russia. The Washington Post sees this as really bad news for the president: “The risk is that you lose control of your agenda,” added Robert Luskin, a Washington white-collar attorney who represented Karl Rove in the Plame investigation, as well as a pair of Clinton senior officials during Whitewater....

Laura Reston at New Republic has a good piece on how the Soviets Russian government is doubling down on its disinformation campaign against Western democracies: One of the most recent battles in the propaganda war took place on January 4, less than a week after President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation for the Kremlin’s meddling in the U.S. election. The Donbass International News Agency, a small wire service in Eastern Ukraine, published a short article online headlined “MASSIVE NATO...

Some articles: Jeet Heer writes about President Trump's catastrophic first 100 days. Josh Marshall says that Trump's "religion of 'winning'" is the problem. Crain's Joe Cahill thinks that the best thing to come out of the United Airlines passenger-removal fiasco is that Oscar Munoz won't become chairman. John Oliver on Sunday warned the world about the deficiencies and scary realities of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Harvard professor David Searls, in a post from September 2015, calls ad blocking "the...

First, two unidentified have discovered malware on 38 Android devices that could only have been installed after manufacture but before distribution to retailers: An assortment of malware was found on 38 Android devices belonging to two unidentified companies. This is according to a blog post published Friday by Check Point Software Technologies, maker of a mobile threat prevention app. The malicious apps weren't part of the official ROM firmware supplied by the phone manufacturers but were added later...

Diners at Mar-al-Lago overheard the President talking with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the latest in a string of idiotic security breaches he's made all by himself: As Mar-a-Lago's wealthy members looked on from their tables, and with a keyboard player crooning in the background, Trump and Abe's evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN. News of Pyongyang's launch had emerged an hour earlier, as...

By now, everyone in the world has heard about President Trump's patently unconstitutional order to ban refugees from some majority-Muslim nations (except, coincidentally, not from those with which he has business dealings). But after his first Take Out the Trash Day, he did something a lot more far-reaching and dangerous yesterday: President Donald Trump is reshuffling the US National Security Council (NSC), downgrading the military chiefs of staff and giving a regular seat to his chief strategist Steve...

I grew up in Chicago, so I have some recollection of how things were before Harold Washington's mayoral administration. Particularly under the first Mayor Daley, large sections of the city lived under authoritarian rule. It wasn't pretty. New Republic's Graham Vyse explains what this might look like nationally. It won't be The Hunger Games—and that's part of the problem: Tom Pepinsky, a government professor at Cornell University, recently argued that Americans conceive of authoritarianism in a...

All of these articles look interesting, and I hope I get to read them: 538 explains how the Cubs beat Cleveland last night, and how they might do it 3 more times. Richard Florida explains how the class divide in the US is only getting worse. The DNC is suing the RNC over voter intimidation tactics. London's Heathrow is one step closer to getting a third runway. Trying to get to Wrigleyville this weekend? The Tribune has a guide for you. There's new data about what happens in your brain when you lie....

Some articles to read: Trump, the single best example of the Dunning-Kruger effect since Dunning and Kruger identified it, thinks he can end Chicago's crime wave in a week. Right. Also, there is no retail voter fraud. Trump's call for vigilantes to police polling places is nothing more than Jim Crow tactics. Josh Marshall wonders just what Trump's immigration policies really are. (Hint: he doesn't have any.) Scott Hanselman has advice for how to reduce your psychic weight. David Dayin in New Republic...

We had nearly-perfect weather this past weekend, so I'm just dumping a bunch of links right now while I catch up with work: Foursquare reports that Trump's presidential campaign is really, really hurting his businesses. Chicago's U.S. Cellular Field (the minor-league park on the South Side) will be getting more events now they've worked out a deal with the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority. Wired reports on how scary-easy it is to hack electronic voting machines. Paul Krugman puts out the economic...

Yet another reporter stumbles upon the Dunning-Krueger effect (though without naming it) to explain Trump's stumbles upon the body politic. Meanwhile, some Republicans are finally distancing themselves from him, but in a way that makes them look even more craven than they already looked. It's even looking like they know they've made a huge mistake. Maybe. And even though his balloon is on fire, he's already starting to blame "them" for "fixing" the general election. Via Schneier, the NIST no longer...

The Daily Beast reports that Arlington, Va.-based ThreatConnect has revealed the DNC hacker to be an agent of the Russian government. The first Sears-Roebuck store, near my house, will remain largely intact during its conversion to condo units. A remote Irish island is offering itself as a haven for Americans wanting to flee a Trump presidency. Medium.com posts the Hillary Clinton speech (NSFW) we all know she wants to give. Paul Krugman compares Trump's foreign policy ideas to Pax Romana. All for now.

Too many things to read before lunchtime: Chicago's NPR affiliate, WBEZ, has a new mobile app. There's a new mobile device that functions like a Babel fish. Republicans really don't care about your unborn baby. Serbian authorities colluded with a Dubai-based property developer to illegally destroy an entire neighborhood overnight. A snarky Republican writing for Bloomberg actually makes a good point about why the TSA may be taking much longer to screen you than before. It looks like your brain naturally...

Because no one has actually cleaned up a database of IP address geocodes, a Kansas farmer is getting blamed for all manner of bad behavior on the Internet: As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point...

Here we go: Sam the Dog is missing after being launched into the stratosphere; an English primary school is sad. You really can have too much grit. Chicagoist is trying to find the best beer brewed in Chicago. The American Public Transportation Association has decided that public transit agencies can be friends with Lyft and Uber. Via Bruce Schneier, what does the game Werewolf tell us about security? The Ricketts family bought Brixen Ivy last month, so they now own 10 of 16 Wrigley rooftops. Bastards....

Reddit recently published their 2015 Transparency Report, in which they tell how many times they received official requests for user information. However, NSA letters often require that the companies receiving them keep the letters themselves secret. So how to let the world know you've received one? Kill a canary: At the bottom of its 2014 transparency report, the company wrote: "As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence...

Bruce Schneier explains: The FBI...has been given whatever vulnerability it used to get into the San Bernardino phone in secret, and it is keeping it secret. All of our iPhones remain vulnerable to this exploit. This includes the iPhones used by elected officials and federal workers and the phones used by people who protect our nation's critical infrastructure and carry out other law enforcement duties, including lots of FBI agents. This is the trade-off we have to consider: Do we prioritize security...

Jeff Atwood uses a complaint about how computers have ruined chess forever to make an important point about security: What's not clear in this table [of exponentially decreasing dollars per gigaflop] is that after 2007, all the big advances in FLOPS came from gaming video cards designed for high speed real time 3D rendering, and as an incredibly beneficial side effect, they also turn out to be crazily fast at machine learning tasks. Let's consider a related case of highly parallel computation. How much...

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump won their respective Illinois primary elections yesterday. And in other news: Turns out, a strong social safety net leads to lower mortality, and because poor, mostly-white areas in the U.S. voted theirs down to minuscule levels, poor, white people are not doing well. When you vote against your own party in a hot battle with the opposition governor, and the governor wins that battle, that's a career-limiting move. Illinois representative Ken Dunkin (D-Chicago) got...

While I'm going through a boring cycle of NuGet updates, unit tests, and inexplicable app-publishing failures related to the above, I'm piling up a crapload of articles to read on my flight tomorrow: Lifehacker explains how to see everything on your home network. (It's not that hard.) The Chicago Tribune takes you inside Underwriters Laboratories in Northbrook, Ill., where my grandfather worked for 30 years. A group of physicists and mathematicians has listed the 15 most-complex subway maps in the...

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym yesterday ordered Apple, Inc., to bypass security on the iPhone 5c owned by the San Bernadino shooters. Apple said no: In his statement, [Apple CEO Tim] Cook called the court order an “unprecedented step” by the federal government. “We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand,” he wrote. “The F.B.I. may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would...

President Obama and I have the same fitness tracker. His, however, has some customizations: What counts as must-have features for many people — high-definition cameras, powerful microphones, cloud-connected wireless radios and precise GPS location transmitters — are potential threats when the leader of the free world wants to carry them around. And so using the latest devices means more than merely ordering one on Amazon for delivery to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It means accepting the compromises...

The Dept of Homeland Security says we can still use our drivers licenses at airports until 2018: The shift gives breathing room to Illinois, which had expected its driver's licenses and IDs to be inadequate for air travel, including domestic flights, as early as this spring. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security last fall declined to give Illinois a third deadline extension for meeting the Real ID Act standards put into place in 2005. As a result, it was expected that Illinois travelers by the middle...

The New York Times Magazine has an in-depth analysis of the daily fantasy sports (DFS) industry. I'm not that interested in fantasy sports, but this article had me riveted: Here’s how it works: Let’s say you run D.F.S. Site A, and D.F.S Site B has just announced a weekly megacontest in which first place will take home $1 million. Now you have to find a way to host a comparable contest, or all your customers will flee to Site B to chase that seven-figure jackpot. The problem is that you have only 25,000...

First, the New Republic's Jeet Heer reminds us that Donald Trump is a bullshitter, not a liar, and is that much more dangerous for it: The triumph of bullshit has consequences far beyond the political realm, making society as a whole more credulous and willing to accept all sorts of irrational beliefs. A newly published article in the academic journal Judgment and Decision Makinglinks “bullshit receptivity” to other forms of impaired thinking: “Those more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower...

A couple of articles floated through my awareness today: Vladimir Putin has gone so far into the language of paranoia around today's shoot-down that one starts to get nervous. (Richard Hofstadter should be required reading.) Josh Marshall, ever the optimist, says it can still get worse. Bruce Schneier is nervous, too, about the policy repercussions from the Paris attacks. News flash: Donald Trump is a racist liar who sounds a lot like George Wallace and Ted Cruz Joseph McCarthy. IFLS outlines what...

The Boston Globe thinks it's time to do away with the TSA: Let’s face it: The Transportation Security Administration, which annually costs taxpayers more than $7 billion, should never have been created. The responsibility for airport security should never have been federalized, let alone entrusted to a bloated, inflexible workforce. Former TSA administrator Kip Hawley calls it “a national embarrassment that our airport security system remains so hopelessly bureaucratic” and warns that “the relationship...

Via Schneier, a report that FitBit trackers could, in theory, spread malware to users' computers: The athletic-achievement-accumulating wearables are wide open on their Bluetooth ports, according to research by Fortinet. The attack is quick, and can spread to other computers to which an infected FitBit connects. Attacks over Bluetooth require an attacker hacker to be within metres of a target device. This malware can be delivered 10 seconds after devices connect, making even fleeting proximity a...

You may not have known that the "Contact Us" page failed in almost all cases to send messages, but it's fixed now. Please don't make me enable Captchas.

These crossed my various news feeds today: Top story in my professional life: The EU's top court struck down Safe Harbor certification, leaving data privacy rules up to individual countries. An year-old video from ABC News demonstrating the ineffectiveness of concealed-carry (hint: you'll be shot with your own gun). The Illinois Technology Association, of which my employer is a member, is stepping up recruiting for Illinois companies in L.A. and New York. Geologists have found evidence of a huge tsunami...

Canadian Julia Cordray created an app described as a "Yelp for people," and apparently failed to predict the future: Except of course it took the rest of the world about two seconds to figure out that filtering the world to only include those with positive feelings was not exactly realistic, and all the app was likely to do was invite an endless stream of abuse, bullying, and stalking. It wasn't long before people were posting Cordray's personal details online – seemingly culled from the Whois...

In the last 48 hours, I've upgraded my laptop and surface to Office 2016 and my phone to Android 5.0 and 5.1. Apparently T-Mobile wants to make sure the Lollipop update works before giving you all the bug fixes, which seems strange to me. All four update events went swimmingly, except that one of my Outlook add-ins doesn't work anymore. Pity. I mean, it's not like Outlook 2016 was in previews for six months or anything...

Via Schneier, a new paper by researchers at Google discussed the differences between the ways security experts and non-experts treat online security. Not surprising, experts have better habits. When asked about the security practices that most matter to them, experts talked about multi-factor authentication, password safes, and getting the latest software patches, while non-experts worried about anti-virus software and changing passwords frequently: The most common things-you-do responses from each...

No, really. Today will have 86,401 seconds in it, as opposed to the usual 86,400 seconds that every day for the last 18 years has had. Because the earth interacts with lots of other gravity sources in the universe—most notably the moon—its rotation sometimes speeds up and sometimes slows down. Over the last 18 years or so, the planet has lost an entire second because of these perturbations, requiring us to update our most accurate clocks to compensate. Of course, when those clocks get updated, there's a...

Security guru Bruce Schneier, writing for CNN, is not surprised that TSA screeners missed 95% of guns in a recent drill: For those of us who have been watching the TSA, the 95% number wasn't that much of a surprise. The TSA has been failing these sorts of tests since its inception: failures in 2003, a 91% failure rate at Newark Liberty International in 2006, a 75% failure rate at Los Angeles International in 2007, more failures in 2008. And those are just the public test results; I'm sure there are many...

A joint US-UK operation has obtained the master encryption keys to billions of mobile phones: The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data. With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence...

I may have more time later today. Maybe. Via Gulliver, the Telegraph asks, "What happens when someone dies on a cruise?" ("Given that 40 per cent of cruise passengers are over 65, it's a fairly common problem.") How do browsers store your passwords? A group is driving—not flying, driving—a 747 to Burning Man. Back to work.

While we're getting ready to celebrate the birth of Baby X this Xmas, links are once again stacking up in my inbox. Like these: Someone made a transit map of Westeros. Someone explained the history of Chinese food and Jewish Christmas. Someone hacked Sony, but Schneier isn't convinced it was North Korea. Someone leaked the CIA's travel guide. Someone bumped uglies with a 737 at LaGuardia. Someone convinced American and United to allow free flight changes today. That might be it for The Daily Parker today.

Just in time for Christmas travel, I got three links from one Daily Parker reader over the last 24 hours: Marissa Mayer isn't Steve Jobs. Yes, the 113th Congress was objectively the worst ever. The Interview isn't the first time Hollywood has caved on censorship. And yes, today is cloudy. Again.

Security expert Bruce Schneier is not an alarmist, but he is alarmed: In addition to turning the Internet into a worldwide surveillance platform, the NSA has surreptitiously weakened the products, protocols, and standards we all use to protect ourselves. By doing so, it has destroyed the trust that underlies the Internet. We need that trust back. By weakening security, we are weakening it against all attackers. By inserting vulnerabilities, we are making everyone vulnerable. The same vulnerabilities...

Bruce Schneier, not one for hyperbole, calls the Heartbleed defect an 11 on a 10 scale: Basically, an attacker can grab 64K of memory from a server. The attack leaves no trace, and can be done multiple times to grab a different random 64K of memory. This means that anything in memory -- SSL private keys, user keys, anything -- is vulnerable. And you have to assume that it is all compromised. All of it. "Catastrophic" is the right word. At this point, the odds are close to one that every target has had...

At 8:16 this morning, a long-time client sent me an email saying that one of his customers couldn't was getting a strange bug in their scheduling application. They could see everything except for the tabbed UI control they needed to use. In other words, there was a hole in the screen where the data entry should have been. Here's how the rest of the day went around this issue. It's the kind of thing that makes me proud to be an engineer, in the same way the guys who built Galloping Gertie were proud. It...

I just received an alert on a credit card I used to share with an ex. The account, which is in her name since we split, has a small balance for the first time in 6 years. There are two possibilities here, which should be obvious: 1. My ex does not know I still receive alerts on her credit card. 2. My ex does not know the card is active again. Regardless of which is true (and they both may be), she needs to know about it. Given that (2) could expose her to liability for fraud, so does the card issuer. So...

Security guru Bruce Schneier has two essays in the Guardian this week. The first explains how the US government betrayed the Internet: By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical...

Bruce Schneier thinks the NSA's plan to fire 90% of its sysadmins and replace them with automation has a flaw: Does anyone know a sysadmin anywhere who believes it's possible to automate 90% of his job? Or who thinks any such automation will actually improve security? [NSA Director Kieth Alexander is] stuck. Computerized systems require trusted people to administer them. And any agency with all that computing power is going to need thousands of sysadmins. Some of them are going to be whistleblowers....

Yes, I know the weather's beautiful in Chicago this weekend, but sometimes you just have to run with things. So that's what I did the last day and a half. A few things collided in my head yesterday morning, and this afternoon my computing landscape looks completely different. First, for a couple of weeks I've led my company's efforts to consolidate and upgrade our tools. That means I've seen a few head-to-head comparisons between FogBugz, Atlassian tools, and a couple other products. Second, in the...

Security guru Bruce Schneier warns about the lack of trust resulting from revelations about NSA domestic spying: Both government agencies and corporations have cloaked themselves in so much secrecy that it's impossible to verify anything they say; revelation after revelation demonstrates that they've been lying to us regularly and tell the truth only when there's no alternative. There's much more to come. Right now, the press has published only a tiny percentage of the documents Snowden took with him....

Our company needs a specific Microsoft account, not attached to a specific employee, to be the "Account Holder" for our Azure subscriptions. Azure only allows one and only one account holder, you see, and more than one person needs access to the billing information for these accounts. Setting up a specific account for that purpose solves that problem. So, I went ahead and set up an email account for our putative Azure administrator, and then went to the Live ID signup process. It asked me for my...

Security guru Bruce Schneier suggests Snowden might not have considered all the likely outcomes: Edward Snowden has set up a dead man's switch. He's distributed encrypted copies of his document trove to various people, and has set up some sort of automatic system to distribute the key, should something happen to him. Dead man's switches have a long history, both for safety (the machinery automatically stops if the operator's hand goes slack) and security reasons. WikiLeaks did the same thing with the...

Overnight, a commenter from Ireland took issue with my last post. I responded directly, but I thought my response might be worth repeating. I'm not sure I stated my point clearly enough: I wasn't actually discussing Snowden's leak; I'm saying we can't have an adult discussion about the leak any more, because he screwed up the end game. The anonymous commenter wrote, inter alia: Einstein fled. So did Hedy Lamar. So did thousands of others - including many who aided Germany's enemies. Were they cowards?...

Someday, when a far-future Gibson writes about this time in the American Republic, he'll have a paragraph about Edward Snowden. I've got a fantasy in which the future historian remarks on Snowden sounding the alarm against unprecedented government and private collusion against personal privacy, and how his leak sparked a re-evaluation of the relationships between convenience and security, and between government and industry. But I've actually got a degree in history, and I can tell you that the future...

Via Sullivan, a new Google Chrome plugin that allows you to embed secret messages in photos you post on Facebook: That’s the idea behind Secretbook, a browser extension released this week by 21-year-old Oxford University computer science student and former Google intern Owen-Campbell Moore. With the extension, anyone — you, your sister, a terrorist — could share messages hidden in JPEG images uploaded to Facebook without the prying eyes of the company, the government or anyone else noticing or figuring...

Security guru Bruce Schneier examines Papal election security: Probably the biggest risk is complacency. What might seem beautiful in its tradition and ritual during the first ballot could easily become cumbersome and annoying after the twentieth ballot, and there will be a temptation to cut corners to save time. If the Cardinals do that, the election process becomes more vulnerable. A 1996 change in the process lets the cardinals go back and forth from the chapel to their dorm rooms, instead of being...

Via Bruce Schneier, apparently some of the confetti thrown at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade last weekend came from the Nassau County Police: A closer look shows that the documents are from the Nassau County Police Department. The papers were shredded, but clearly not well enough. They even contain information about Mitt Romney's motorcade, apparently from the final presidential debate, which took place at Hofstra University in Nassau County last month. Most significant, the confetti strips...

Via Sullivan, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg is creating 3D portraits from random hairs: Collecting hairs she finds in random public places – bathrooms, libraries, and subway seats – she uses a battery of newly developing technologies to create physical, life-sized portraits of the owners of these hairs. You can see the portrait she’s made from her own hair in the photo below. While the actual likeness is a point of contention, these images bring about some creepy-yet-amazing comments; on genetic identity...

I have just spent an hour of my life—one that I will never get back—trying to figure out why I couldn't install any software from .msi files on one of my Windows 7 machines. Every time I tried, I would get a message that the installer "could not find the file specified." I'll spare you all the steps I went through to figure out why this was happening, and get to the punchline: > Yeah, you see, the SYSTEM account needs full control over any file you're trying to install on Windows. Here's how it should...

Last weekend I described moving my email hosting from my living room home office out to Microsoft Exchange Online. And Thursday I spent all day at a Microsoft workshop about Windows Azure, the cloud computing platform on which my employer, 10th Magnitude, has developed software for the past two years. In this post, I'm going to describe the actual process of migrating from an on-site Exchange 2007 server to Exchange Online. If you'd prefer more photos of Parker or discussions about politics, go ahead...

Raganwald yesterday posted a facetious resignation outlining the dangers to employers of asking prospective employees to disclose social media information: I have been interviewing senior hires for the crucial tech lead position on the Fizz Buzz team, and while several walked out in a huff when I asked them to let me look at their Facebook, one young lady smiled and said I could help myself. She logged into her Facebook as I requested, and as I followed the COO’s instructions to scan her timeline and...