Blackmoor Vituperative

I took a brief break from my awesome (but slightly behind schedule) project this morning, and had a conversation about the Kentucky Fried Chicken “Double Down“.

Me: I still say the Double Down is not a new thing. It’s just two perfectly ordinary things eaten simultaneously rather than sequentially. It’s as original and innovative as eating french fries two at a time.

At which point I wondered: Why do I feel the need to mock something someone else likes? Why do I even care? When did I became so negative? Was I always like this? And the thing is, I think I was. I recall thinking this exact thing before: that I don’t want to be bitter. I have resolved to be more upbeat.. how many times?

It would be easy to blame the rest of humanity. There’s no shortage of people who are vapid, grasping, immoral, or irrational (or all four — but I’m not naming names). There’s plenty of ammunition for someone looking to complain.

But complaining about stupidity and evil certainly doesn’t make me any happier. And it doesn’t accomplish much. Complaining about other people’s irrational beliefs is as likely to change their opinion as complaining about other people’s driving is likely to get them to use their turn signals. Sure, it’s fun to read about clowns mocking racists, but there are beliefs every bit as irrational and reprehensible as racism that are far more common, but mock those and you’ll have family members and treasured friends un-friending you on Facebook. So what’s the point? You can’t change anything. It’s like trying to convince the winter to turn to spring. If it happens, arguing and complaining won’t make it happen any faster: it just makes the winter less pleasant while you wait.

And hell, I belief all sorts of nutty things. Who am I to judge?

When I was younger, being cynical made me feel hip and edgy. Now it just makes me feel old. But it’s a hard habit to break.

Last RavenCon, there was some confusion about how guests are scheduled for panels. To help clear up any misunderstanding, I created this short animation on GoAnimate.

When I was a pre-teen in the mid-1970s (I must have been nine or ten), the textbook for my English class had some great short stories, such as Harrison Bergeron and Who Can Replace A Man? One of the poems in it that still sticks with me was called The Neuter Computer. “The Neuter Computer says ‘tick’ / The Neuter Computer says ‘click’ / …”.

I have looked for that poem since, but have never found it — or any mention of it, anywhere. Even the mighty Google shrugs its shoulders at my query. Am I the only one who remembers this poem?

I ran across a set of tutorials and cheat sheets for a few of the more common security vulnerabilities this morning. I thought other people might find them useful. They’re from a company called Veracode. The guides are free, and they point to other free resources if you want to learn more, so they seem to be a pretty good starting point if you are interested in this sort of thing.

• SQL Injection
• Cross Site Scripting
• Cross Site Request Forgery
• LDAP Injection
• Mobile Code Security

A fellow named Andrew Godoski has written a defense of the movie Starship Troopers over on Screened. The gist of his argument is that people dislike Starship Troopers because they don’t get that it’s satire. Critics gave it bad reviews because they didn’t get that it’s satire. People who complain about the plot, or the acting, or anything else don’t get that it’s satire.

“You just don’t get it, do you? It’s satire.”

Well, in fact, I do get it.

First, critics are idiots. Anyone who needs to be told that the Starship Troopers movie is satire is an idiot — it’s obviously satire.

Second, the reason why a lot of people dislike Starship Troopers is because, in addition to it being a stupid movie (it’s fun, but it is a stupid movie), it takes a classic work of science fiction and basically craps on it. It’s like making a movie based on The Jungle and turning it into a 90-minute hot dog commercial (and not a satirical one). Starship Troopers the movie is to Starship Troopers the novel as the Phantom Menace is to the original Star Wars.

Paul Veerhoven can make good movies, and he has. Robocop was great fun. Black Book is brilliant. But Starship Troopers is not one of those movies. It’s entertaining in the way that many bad movies are entertaining (and many are), but it is by no means a good movie.

Personally, I am done with Game Of Thrones. I gave it a fair shot, I think. The only part of the show I actually like is the opening credits. I made it to the eighth or ninth episode before I gave up on the show. I kept thinking, “it has to get better”. Apparently, it doesn’t. If I wanted to watch people I dislike doing things I dislike, I would watch the news. In fact, it reminds me a great deal of Desperate Housewives (although the scenery in Game Of Thrones is obviously much better).

Eh. It’s easy to be a critic. Game Of Thrones is a well made show, I will definitely give it that. Top marks for production, and the actors are genuinely talented across the board. That’s why I watched it as long as I did.

Saw X-Men First Class this evening with some friends. Had a lovely time. I wouldn’t say it’s a great movie, but I enjoyed it. I would compare it to League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

1. Based on a comic.
2. Changed in minor ways for no apparent reason.
3. 3/4 of the movie is what would normally be the first 1/4 of a movie.
4. Ensemble cast,
5. half of which are filler, and
6. only a couple of which are actually interesting.
7. Glacial pacing — a good portion of the movie is, frankly, padding. The movie could have been called “Waiting for Magneto to come back”.
8. Plot holes you could drive a Nautilus/Blackbird through.

Magneto was very well-played by Michael Fassbender, and I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised at James McAvoy as Professor X. I also liked Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw, but a lot of the time I wasn’t sure he was really the best choice for the role. He just seemed “off”, somehow: I can’t quite put my finger on it. Far below these was Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique, who at least elicited some pathos, if not genuine interest. No one else really bears mentioning, other than Oliver Platt, who was utterly wasted. I can only assume that most of his scenes were cut.

I know that abuses of power happened in the good old days. I know that rights were trampeled, people were railroaded, and that race or social connections meant more than evidence of guilt or innocence. Still, it’s worthwhile to recall that there was a time when people knew right from wrong, even if they didn’t live up their own ideals.

I’m not sure how much weight to give a silly television show’s version of what the United States used to be about. And I know there were no “good old days”. Still, it’s enough to make me wonder if maybe one or two things used to be better than they are now.

Oracle announced a proposal this week to transfer the OpenOffice.org (OOo) project to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The move would put OOo under the umbrella of the Apache Incubator program and involve transitioning the project’s source code to the permissive Apache License. The proposal is currently under review by the Apache Incubator Project Management Committee, which has not yet issued a decision.

[…]

Dumping the largely abandoned husk of OOo into the Apache Incubator so that it can continue to be developed parallel to LibreOffice is not a particularly constructive maneuver. If Oracle had opted to take this route last year before its friction with the community necessitated the LibreOffice fork, it would likely have been welcomed by all parties. But handing the project to the ASF at this point, when a significant portion of the OOo community has already chosen to back TDF, is just petty and distasteful.

[…]

This parting shot from Oracle punctuates the company’s legacy of bad stewardship and mishandling of OpenOffice.org. It’s not clear yet whether the proposed Apache OOo will find its footing, but it seems likely that LibreOffice will continue to flourish as OOo’s successor despite this move by Oracle and IBM to fragment the community.

I have believed for a long while now that passwords need to go away. Further support for that position is provided by a PC Pro article called How a cheap graphics card could crack your password in under a second:

Now, I cannot imagine anyone managing to mandate a nine-character, mixed-case, random-character password on an organisation. But if you did, and you weren’t hanging from a tree by the end of the first working day, the CPU would take 43 years versus 48 days for the GPU.

He then went on to add in mixed symbols to create “F6&B is” (there is a space in there). CPU will take 75 days, GPU will take 7 hours.

What does this tell us? well, the stark reality is that even long and complex passwords are now toast. If you think you were being wise by forcing users to have randomisation in their passwords, then think again. It is utterly futile.

[…]

A GPU of the type used by this chap is not unusual or high end. It is standard-issue stuff. Indeed, I have just sat through the AMD presentation here at Computex in Taiwan, and they made a big deal about putting GPU power into netbooks offering 500Gflops, without denting its 12-hour battery life. And that’s shipping within months.

All I can say is this: you have been warned. It is time to think long and hard about password security, and how you do your authentication. This has crept up on us in the background, and we really haven’t been paying attention.

Some of us have been paying attention.