Here’s a Mac OS X tip. Maybe applicable to your Windows setup, too.

Mac OS X has a security feature called FileVault. FileVault basically turns a user directory it into one big encrypted file. It’s actually a mounted encrypted disk image.

But the point here is that if you log in as that user, you can manipulate your files to your heart’s content, and when you log back out they’ll be AES-128 encrypted.

Now, the real problem with FileVault is that when you log out, everything in your user directory is now one single file. If that single file dies a horrible death somehow, then everything’s gone. So make backups, right?

Well sure. But in addition to that:

You could create different users for different purposes. On my MacBook, I have a general-use user and a more-secure FileVaulted user for banking and other financial transactions. This means I can just store a text file with account information on it. This information is thus only at risk while I’m logged in as that user. I could use another layer of security for this, with more encryption software.

Other precautions: Safari has a setting called ‘Private Browsing,’ which is available in the Safari menu at the top of the screen. This basically turns off caching. This is something I’d never do with my general-purpose user, but with the secure user, that kind of paranoia is the whole point.

In fact, the biggest gap in security in this system is the ‘blog entry you are reading right now. But I thought it might be useful to someone other than criminals.

But most of all, it’s interesting to me how my perspective changes when I change user accounts. The secure user is purposeful, so I do my work and log back out. The general-use user is the opposite, which is why I’m sitting at the computer right now.

One of the things I really, really hate about insomnia is that you end up in a zombie state where it’s difficult to do much besides stare at things.

Cuz, see… having protectiions for whistleblowers compromises national security.

Article published Mar 15, 2007
Mar 14, 2007

Bush vows to veto House’s open-government bills

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Open-government bills sped to House passage Wednesday as Democrats pushed to make President Bush and his executive branch more forthcoming about their actions. The White House struck back with veto threats.

Aided by substantial Republican support, the Democrats approved legislation to force government agencies to be more responsive to the millions of Freedom of Information Act requests for public documents they receive every year.

The House also easily passed bills to require donors to presidential libraries to identify themselves – an issue as Bush prepares for his own library – and to reverse a 2001 Bush decision making it easier for presidents to keep their records from public scrutiny.

Finally, lawmakers approved a bill to strengthen protection for government whistle-blowers. They cited the failure to expose faulty intelligence about prewar Iraq in expanding protections for national security officials. Employees of federal contractors, airport screeners and government scientists facing retaliation for objecting to political influences are also covered.

Prospects are good for the FOIA bill in the Senate, where it has bipartisan support. The other bills also need Senate action before they can go to the president.

The White House, citing the Bush’s constitutional prerogatives, warned that the presidential records bill would be vetoed if it reached his desk. The White House issued a second veto warning on the whistle-blower bill, saying it was unconstitutional and compromised national security.

[..]

Josh Marshall:

(March 14, 2007 — 11:44 PM EST // link)

It’s hard to match this hilarity.

In the evolving story of the US Attorney Purge, you know that a principal part is played by this little known provision of the USA Patriot Act which allows the Attorney General to appoint US attorneys without senate confirmation (TPMmuckraker played the central role uncovering how the provision ended up in the bill). Up until — what? days ago? — the White House was promising to veto any attempts to overturn this critical bit of legislation packed with constitutional import and critical to the prosecution of the war on terror. Now, says the Justice Department, in the words of McClatchy News Service, the provision was “designed by a mid-level department lawyer without the knowledge of his superiors or anyone at the White House.”

It’s like some pulsing gyre of Anglomania — George Orwell meets Monty Python, with Benny Hill along for the ride.

The separation of powers issue is just down the memory hole. Now it was just some Justice Department lawyer freelancing.

[..]

The night sky is black, but not because it’s black. It’s not black because there’s anything opaque here, it’s not black because there are black clouds. It’s not black because of smoke or belched chemicals from refineries. It’s black because when those lights are turned on, up and down the shore like bonfires, like Christmas lights, like birthday candles in rows and grids and matrices… It’s black because when those lights are on, we can’t see the stars.

The looming orange of streetlights fill the vision, because that’s what’s really there. The orange and the red tail lights. The thrum of a billion different specifics all moving in general in this view from on high. A momentary blip in geological time, come and gone before anyone notices. An eternity to the guy stuck in traffic.

It’s the wiring, you see. The circuit board wiring of the machine that is the city. The guy stuck in traffic sends his little message back and forth along the road, along his job, his home, his family, his progeny, his life, his soul, his connection to everything. But right now, stuck in traffic, and right now just a gone-beyond-gone blip in the Mind Of Geological Consciousness. Such as it is.

If you take your hands and cover the city, from your perch overlooking it, you can see the sky. Things start taking shape, though the bounce-back light will still obscure it. You let your eyes adjust and you can see some stars. The moon was already kind of obvious, but now you’re seeing it whole.

The moon, you see, is in it’s own traffic jam. Well, maybe not. Maybe there’s no other moon to flip off in a fit of road rage. It comes and goes, though, stuck in the same pattern, beaming down cheese-infused light to ignite the passions of lovers and werewolves.

Pull back your hands. The light of the city overwhelms a little, but you adjust. That’s what you do. You’re a human being. You adjust. You travel between these worlds and adjust wherever you go. You see both, and you see all.

A while back, I rented a Richard Thompson DVD.

Now, one of the benefits of living in Seattle is that there’s a video store here called Scarecrow Video. And the reason it’s a benefit is that they have *everything.* So if you go to the video store looking for a Richard Thompson peformance video, you end up looking at the other videos in that section. And right next to Thompson is Three Day Stubble’s ‘Rubbing and Wriggling For You.’

Three Day Stubble was a band in Houston when I was there, and of course they ended up in San Fransisco. Their schtick was basically: What would happen if you made preschoolers listen to Captain Beefheart all the time and then gave them instruments? They called it ‘nerd rock.’

I never really liked Three Day Stubble. I liked that they were there, doing extremely weird shit in a friendly, happy, odd way. But I just couldn’t listen to it. And sadly, I missed the point: You’re not supposed to really listen to it. It was also before I really ‘got’ Captain Beefheart, too.

Three Day Stubble would show up wearing polyester clothing and horn-rimmed glasses. Big strange wigs. The lead singer would sometimes do these things he called ‘avi,’ which was basically a spastic freak-out disguised as performance art. The whole show was chaotic and cathartic and a little creepy because you didn’t know if he was, maybe, mentally challenged or something.

Anyway. I found this tape at Scarecrow and rented it with the Richard Thompson one. Watching it, my respect for their bravery soared, even if the music was still too much to bear. Refining my critique: Being a rock band was always an excuse for them to be on stage and do other stuff that’s actually interesting.

And they make me laugh. Sprinkled throughout the tape are bits from when Donald The Nut appeared on The Gong Show. Which is just brilliant.

So today I thought I might look for them on youtube, but nothing’s to be found. There’s a video page on their web site, but it’s just tiny clips, like this one of some ‘avi.’

However! It turns out that Donald The Nut, the singer, spent some time in Japan, and here he is eating Japanese snack foods for a once-a-month podcast.

My trolling on craigslist paid off, at least a little bit.

I found a guy who is parting out an ’88 Vanagon, so I got ahold of the passenger-side headlight assembly. When I first got my van, the low-beam glass was cracked and had been rejoined with JB weld. I’ve been looking for a replacement all along. I also noticed the other day that the high-beam glass had been cracked, too. Both were filling up with water very slowly, with a little green line of scum on top. I should have taken a picture before I replaced it.

But replace it I did. Nice and shiny and water-tight.

And while I was in the mood to work on van stuff, I did another long-time-coming task: Cleaning gunk out of the turn signal lenses. They’re constructed in such a way that Strange Organic Material will start collecting/growing in a groove around the sides, especially when you live in a temperate rainforest. This limits the angle of view of the lights, and looks kinda creepy. So I used a soda straw from the trash can in my van to poke around in that groove, and flushed it out with water. Doesn’t look good as new, but certainly much better.

Then it was time to work on the cabin lights, one of which crumbled as I took it out of the roof of the van. Brittle aged plastic. They’re cheap, so I’ll order some. Out of three, only one is really worth keeping.

Which got me thinking about LEDs, which never burn out (for rational values of ‘burn out’), as in this, linked from a wonderful page called ‘modifications, hacks, and kludges. I’d love to be able to find a retailer that packages LEDs as drop-in replacements for incandescent dashboard instrument lights.

L33T V4N4G0N H4KKUR!!1!!

More than you wanted to know about how Spotlight works, and how it doesn’t work. Spotlight is the Mac OS X search-by-content system. The technology is very, very cool, but the user interface really, really sucks. That’s why there are a number of applications to replace it, such as this one and this one.

This person makes some nifty Mac freeware, including ToyViewer and IcoMaker. I just used both to add a favicon to mile23.com.