Schneier on Security: Sharp guy

Bruce Schneier' blog has long been one of my RSS feeds in Safari (I don't use any fancy RSS readers), and now I follow him on Twitter at @Bruce_Schneier. Yesterday he took a little trip down memory lane, as he quoted himself:

Anyone can invent a security system that he himself cannot break. I've said this so often that Cory Doctorow has named it "Schneier's Law": When someone hands you a security system and says, "I believe this is secure," the first thing you have to ask is, "Who the hell are you?" Show me what you've broken to demonstrate that your assertion of the system's security means something.

And that's the point I want to make. It's not that people believe they can create an unbreakable cipher; it's that people create a cipher that they themselves can't break, and then use that as evidence they've created an unbreakable cipher.

Seems to me like this observation could be made in a lot of contexts.

"I am not a <insert profession here>, but I'm smart and I think this, so this must be true."

Paywall? What paywall?

Finally hit the NYTimes 20-article limit this evening. In place of the URL of the page I was visiting, up came another URL, suspiciously like the first, but with "?gwh=" and a string of 32 (who'd have guessed?) alphanumeric characters. Then the very pretty alert box comes up, blocking the page, and telling me that I've hit the magic number.
"Gee," I wonder, "what would happen if I just deleted that whole last bit from the question mark on?"
What happens is that the page I wanted just comes back, without the warning.
1. Why bother? Are people that bad at using their browsers that this would be effective?
2. Why pay $40M for this?

Oh, and if you're quick, you can hit command-. to cancel the page load before it hits the warning, but after the content you want to read as loaded.

Stupid things about Excel 2011 for Mac

Got my Office upgrade a few weeks ago, which made me happy because I was hoping it would obviate most of my need to run Windows XP in VirtualBox. While it has done that, Excel in particular also has a number of annoying and stupid problems. Here's my list.

1. No pivot charts.
2. Limited pivot-table sorting. The Win version of 2007 lets you do lots of fairly complex sorting on various items in the pivot table. Edited to add: OK, looks like you can use the sort button in the ribbon for sorting in other columns. Fine, but different from Windows and why include that sort option in the pop-up then?
3. Click on the pivot-table button to have Excel make a table for you and it puts it in a new sheet. Fine. But that sheet is inserted before the current one. Really.
4. Same auto-create also leaves the floating info window for pivot tables open every time.
5. Ugly, partially transparent, white on black floating windows in filtered and pivot tables.
6. Missing "clear" button to get rid of all the filtering on a table at once. Instead it's in the Data menu.
7. Incomprehensible menu customization process.
8. Window re-sizing when windows are put in background.
9. Window re-sizing upon copying a chart. The original size is restored, but still, what is going on?
10. Still doesn't use the standard clipboard process, so you get asked whether you want to save large clipboard upon quitting, and items cut don't disappear right away, and the copied range will be forgotten if you don't use it right away. (Actually I don't know what set of actions will wipe out the clipboard, but it seems like most of them.)
11. Calibri? Really? (OK, this is in Windows too.)
12. Modal dialog boxes in Find/Replace that close with a button that says "Close" instead of a red close button or a cancel button. 
13. No default key combo for Replace.
14. Ugly pastel built-in chart types. (Again, Windows too.) Can they not hire someone with some taste over there in Redmond?
15. The red button stoplight button does not always get the black dot at its center when you've changed the document. [Added 15 April 11]
16. Some files are changed just by opening them and Excel will ask if you want to save them when you try to close. [Added 15 April 11]

Just keeping track

2011-03-11

But let me emphasize that we anticipate this transition to take place in a matter of days and not a matter of weeks. And so I would expect that over the next several days we'll have more information, and the Pentagon will be fully briefing the American people, as well as the press on that issue.

2011-03-18

The United States is not going to deploy ground troops into Libya. And we are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal.

2011-03-30

The Obama administration has sent teams of CIA operatives into Libya in a rush to gather intelligence on the identity, goals and progress of rebel forces opposed to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, according to U.S. officials.

2011-04-21

 President Obama has authorized the use of armed Predator drones to attack Libya government forces fighting the rebellion against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi

2011-05-19
Tomorrow marks 60 days of US non-war in Libya, which would mark the end of the War Powers Act authorization if, you know, it existed.

The NYTimes up-coming paywall

I don't quite get their plan on this (which makes me think it's about as well thought out as their other ventures and attitudes on the intertubes).

First, at no cost everybody gets to read 20 articles a month, and also to browse the "home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds," and read the Top News section on the Apps. I'm going to guess that this is going to be enough for a lot of people: "What are the headlines today? Ooh, let me read about this breaking story. OK, I'm done now." BTW, since section fronts sometimes include Top News stories, I assume links to these will be free wherever you click on them. For example, right now the top three stories on the World section front are the top three stories on the iPad Top News section. (Truth be told, I assume they'll goof this up and the links won't always be free if you don't click on them in the right place.)

Second they're charging extra to have access for both an iPhone and an iPad app. Huh?

Third, if you come to one of their articles via a search engine, blog or other social media link, that article will count against your 20 if you haven't hit it yet, but you will also still be able to read it if you have already hit 20. Search hits will have a 5-a-day limit. How is this not a giant hole in their plans? The truly devious could simply enter the title they want to read into their browser's search bar, and then click on the subsequent link in the search engine. A little more work, but not much. Or they could put the link into their own tweets or FaceBook or blog.

And I assume they're keeping track of this via cookies, which is another hole: a decent cookie manager can let a user easily switch identities and circumvent the monthly limit with ease.

The NYTimes should know better than anyone how its users reach their articles, so maybe they've got this sussed out. I just can't help thinking that they don't.

On a side note, I also don't get why their bloggers keep their blogs at NYTimes.com. Krugman and Silver and the others could likely do what Frank Rich is doing and not lose much readership. Since they don't seem to get paid anyway, what does it matter to them? If their readership does drop after the paywall goes up, will they stay?

(Gruber's had a few posts on this. Here's one.)

Edited to add (21 March): That didn't take long: Twitter feed of all NYT articles is now up and running.

Reason #4306 why I am a Mac user

I run Windows XP in VirtualBox on my MacBook. Love it. Almost everything works great. I can save the state of my Windows machine. I can revert to an older saved state. I can run those rare, but enticing, Windows-only apps like ArcGIS, or the DAVID Laserscanner, or the CVA Access database (yuck). But the big reason is that I've needed the latest version of Excel for compatibility with all the nice stuff pivot tables can do on it. (Shout out to pivot-tabler extraordinaire CVW!)

So here's the thing: open a file in Excel, make some changes, and then try to close without having saved it. Excel will throw up a dialog box for you to save that file. Cancel the save and it will then ask you whether you want to save this file which you've made changes in.

Uh...isn't that backwards? Why don't you ask me first and save a step? You know, like my Mac has done for the past 27 years.

Yes, I know this is Excel and not XP, but it's still Microsoft, so same difference.

Robots and configs and makes, oh my!

Been spending a bunch of time this weekend trying to get another kinect hack running on my MacBook. It requires the other drivers for the kinect, OpenNI. Nifty, but they have some issues with OS X, so I can run them on their own (see that image there), but not with the robot OS (ros) I've been working with and with which a number of these kinect hacks work. Bottom line right now is that I can't make nite inside ros and my weak computer skills are not giving me hope that I won't have to wait until somebody else works this out.

Still, having a ball playing with the software and watching this whole arena develop in front of my internetworked eyes.