Cheerful Curmudgeon

I am not surprised, but I am still dismayed, by the continued erosion of our personal privacy in the shadow of George W. Bush’s administration. The New York Times reports in E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress that the National Security Agency (NSA), as recently as early this year, is illegally collecting email from Americans:

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

A decade ago, I was a strong proponent of OpenPGP-encrypted email. I gave up when I got tired of trying to push that rope uphill. Maybe it’s time to try again.

Did you know that, unless you encrypt your email, it is as easy to read as a note written on a postcard? Now before you say, “So what? I don’t care,” consider how you would feel if NSA wanted to listen to all of your phone calls or wanted to read all of your regular mail. I suspect that, even though you are a law-abiding citizen and have nothing to hide, you might object a tad to that invasion of your privacy.

I have published my PGP key on this web site (and it is in the popular key servers). Using this key, you can send encrypted messages to me and you can confirm that messages which I sign electronically actually were signed by me.

I sign and encrypt my email messages using EnigMail and GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) with Thunderbird, all highly reliable and free software. If you use something other than Thunderbird for your email (like Outlook or Eudora), here is a list of other mail user agent frontends. And if you use Gmail or any of the other email systems though a web browser, FireGPG is just the ticket.

Setting up the software is a little bit of work, but you will probably be done in less time than it would take you to drive to Office Depot and buy a box of envelopes. Once you have the software installed, you can encrypt an email message faster than you can lick and seal an envelope.

Cindy and Geoff did a great job and produced Caedmon Geoffrey, a wonderful, healthy baby boy at 7:12pm on May 20. He’s 9 lbs 1 oz, 21 inches tall. His plumbing works so well that he peed on the doctor during delivery. I take that as a great omen!

I have been writing a new program, having a ball doing it, and it has brought to consciousness something which I have not thought about for years: There is a bit of Dr. Henry Frankenstein in me. I love to create things which do stuff autonomously and, when I create these things, bigger is definitely better.

My current creation has lots of parts, including:

1. A daemon (I love that word, all the more since daemon’s are useful and not evil at all) which runs all the time and wakes up once a minute to see if anything interesting has happened and decide whether it should do something.
2. A script which watches for people to click special links in email messages. It leaves a “note” for the daemon, telling it that a human being received the email and did something. Cool; my program is making humans do things!
3. A script which watches for secret messages sent from another program on another computer. This script also leaves notes for the daemon, telling it that the other computer is set up and running and ready to do a human being’s bidding.

The daemon gets to do all sorts of fun things, including summoning new (virtual) computers into existance and turning them loose on the world. In the end, the daemon even gets to kill off the computers. The daemon spends real money (hopefully, this part does not get out of control!) with a real multi-national company.  And as the daemon works, it attracts the attention of people at four different companies, all of which are very interested in what this little beastie is doing.

Not bad for a creation which only exists in the virtual world inside a computer. If you see me walking around with a smug smile on my face, now you know why.

I woke up in a good mood this morning and then…

Sometimes one piece of technology makes another, seemingly unrelated, piece of technology misbehave. It happened this morning at 12:15am CDT when an automated program that I run in Amazon EC2 failed to do its thing. The EC2 instances (that’s geek speak for “virtual machines” which is geek speak for “computers which aren’t really there but act like they are”) started up but never got around to doing any useful work. Six hours later, all of the instances were still running; they should have finished their work and died off in about two hours. I killed all of the instances, grumbling because I had paid for six hours of time and gotten nothing for it and did not even know why.

The underlying problem, it turned out, was a new SSL certificate that we had installed on our e-commerce store yesterday. One of the first things that each EC2 instance does is to fetch the latest version of the software from a Subversion server, which, coincidentally, is on the same machine as our e-commerce store. With a new SSL certificate on the server, each instance was waiting for a human being to say that the new certificate was OK. Inconveniently, the human being was sound asleep.

Who would have thought that renewing the SSL certificate for our on-line store would break an unrelated Amazon EC2-based application? Hidden dependencies suck.

Now I am in a bad mood, grumbling because I did not get my relaxed waking-up time after my shower, sitting next to my wife, drinking coffee, cruising blogs. Instead I dove directly from the shower into debugging and it left me feeling edgy.

We have a mechanism at Hen’s Teeth Network which works pretty well to keep emotional baggage like this from blindsiding our coworkers: we check-in every morning. It is a chance for me to say, “I’m in a bad mood. Better watch out; I may bite.” Better forewarned than not.

I am finishing this post a couple of hours later, after checking in with my coworkers. The check-in worked beautifully, giving me a chance to blow off some of the steam. I am more relaxed and I got some support from sympathetic ears. We even laughed a bit about the situation.

We missed the hidden dependency between the e-commerce store’s SSL certificate and the EC2 application and were caught unawares. Fortunately, we did not miss the hidden dependency between my early morning upset and my interactions with my co-workers. Knowing about the dependency and having tools at hand and in daily use for handling the dependency, proved a good thing for all of us.

Do you remember when I predicted that Google Chrome would take over the world replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux? Here is the next step, to be released for CES which begins January 8, 2009.

If all you want from your computer is to read your email (Gmail) and surf the web and use the other applications that Google provides, it is just seven seconds away. No, that is not a typo. In less time than you have spent reading this article, you will be able to boot your computer and be doing useful stuff.

Of course, you could use this system for web-based applications other than Google’s, but how many people will bother. I wonder how long it will be until you can get a free, ad-supported computer with this operating system pre-installed.

The headline The end of an era – Windows 3.x startled me this morning. My first thought was to look at the dateline; it had to be in the distant past and I wanted to see how distant. I will save you the tension and anticipation; the dateline is November 1, 2008, just four days distantly past.

My favorite quote:

Windows 3.x required an 8086/8088 processor or better that had a clock speed of up to 10MHz. It needed at least 640KB of RAM, seven megabytes of hard drive space, and a graphics card that supported CGA, EGA and VGA graphics.

By comparison, the Home Basic version of Windows Vista requires a 32-bit 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 20GB of hard drive space, and a graphics card with at least 32MB of memory.

Microsoft released Windows 3.x in May 1990. I remember joyfully using the heck out of it for years, running Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel on an Epson 80286 machine with two 5 1/4″ floppies and a 20 MB (yes, that’s really “MB” and not “GB”) hard drive. We probably had 1 MB (yes, there is that “MB” again) of RAM. We printed stuff out on an HP LaserJet capable of (breathe deeply now) 300 dpi.

I still have a shrink wrapped copy of Microsoft Windows for Workgroups sitting in the basement. It came with an 80486-based computer that I bought back in about 1983. Tempting though it is to unwrap it and install it, I won’t. I no longer have any computers with a 3 1/2″ floppy drive.

Today is a good day: looking to the future with cautious hope and to the past with gentle nostalgia.

You might have noticed a bit of “uncertainty” in the economy these days. I was fascinated to see these two articles show up within 24 hours of each other:

We do not know who is right, of course, but I am an optimist and strongly biased toward Updegrove’s view.

I believe that we live in a plentiful universe, that there is more than enough of everything to go around and our challenges are in distribution and not in production. We have, for instance, more than enough food to feed everybody; we just need to get the food from where it sits to the mouths of the hungry people. I believe that we are bright enough to solve this problem.

I also believe in the basic generosity of human beings. Innumerable projects have been accomplished through the donated time of unemployed and under-employed people. People with full-time jobs and plenty of money also donate their time, of course, but history proves that unemployment does not transform normally generous people into the selfish animals which Keen predicts.

Open source software is good for everyone. The programmers get to do stuff which they enjoy, learn new technologies, and bask in the warm fuzzies of seeing the works of their hands thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated. The companies which use open source software see lower costs and (hopefully) higher profits. And last but certainly not least, the people who use open source software get to enjoy a much wider choice of solutions to their problems than would exist if only commercial software were available. With all of this goodness in a naturally abundant universe, we are certainly going to see new bounties in the open source software cornucopia.

GRAMPS (my genealogy software) version 3.0.2 just came out and I upgraded. It has lots of bug fixes and tweaks, including to several things which had annoyed me about 3.0.1. Unfortunately, they did not fix one of the things which bothered me: the pages of living individuals still do not include the persons’ pictures. Those are considered “private” data and hidden along with birth dates and places and other identifying information.

Fortunately, one of the nice things about open source software, such as GRAMPS, is that you can fix it if you do not like it. I took a bit of time and tweaked one file and, voila!, my genealogy web site now includes the pictures of living people. See, for instance, Candy’s page.

Finally, I contributed my code back to the project where it will (hopefully) be useful to other people.

I am very happy that 3.0.2 fixed one bug which I found incredibly annoying. The scanned images of my source material had not been making it onto my web site. Now, the images are neatly published. For instance, you can see my great grandfather, Nathan Herzog, and his father, Salomon Herzog, in the 1870 US census. Look at lines 16 and 13, respectively. (Click on the thumbnail to see a larger image. Then click on the larger image to get a full-sized scan which is readily readable.)

As reported this morning in Slashdot, you should read and carefully consider Google Chrome’s end user license agreement (EULA) before using Chrome. It’s hard to read in the teeny tiny box that Google provides so I am reproducing the entire text below the break. I am certainly not a lawyer but I am a paranoid, grumpy old man so here is my take on some of the things in the EULA:

• In sections 4.3 through 4.5, you agree that Google can “without prior notice to you” make Chrome stop working, deny you access to your files, and even put an upper limit on how much you use Chrome.
• In section 5.1, you agree to truthfully tell Google who you are and to keep that data up to date. Sure, Chrome has its “incognito mode” which hides your browsing habits from members of your family but Google will always know who you are what what you are doing.
• In sections 6.2 and 6.3, you agree to take full responsibility for everything done under your account, even if your account was broken into by a third party. Furthermore, you agree to notify Google by visiting an obscure web page if you become aware of any unauthorized use of your account. You’ll remember that, right?
• In section 17, you agree to let Google display advertisements anywhere it wants to, not just on Google’s web pages.

Edited 9/3/2008 10:20pm: As Ars Technica points out, the problem highlighted in the following two paragraphs is not a problem. Google is amending the EULA for Chrome and the change will be retroactive to cover all of us who have already downloaded and installed Chrome.

Those are only obnoxious. It gets worse. If you use Chrome to “submit, post or display” anything you create then section 11, Content license from you, should be particularly interesting.

• In section 11.1 and 11.2, “you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services” and “You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships.” You just wrote the next great novel using Google Chrome and Google Docs? Guess who can publish it at will: Google. Worse, if you use Chrome to display some confidential information, even if those data were password protected on an SSL encrypted internal web site and labeled “Company Confidential,” Google has the right to “publicly display and distribute” that content.

You also give Google free reign to install software on your computer.

• In section 12.1, you agree that, “The Software which you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google.” You trust them to always distribute software which is which is good for you, don’t you?

This is not necessarily bad. By using Google Chrome, you are using some very costly and valuable services. Something has to pay for that software and, in this case, that something is advertisers.

When you deal with a company, you should always remember that company’s core business. For instance, Microsoft is in the business of selling software licenses so it should be no surprise when it tries to sell you new operating systems and new versions of Outlook and Office. Google is in the business of selling advertisements so you should fully expect that it will do everything in its power to collect data from you which will let Google bring more, and more effective, advertisements to your computer screen.

(As promised the Google Chrome Terms of Service follows.)

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