Friends Humans and other creatures

• Once you have tired your best all that is left to do is – Let go! #quote #
• @codemaverik Umm…. If you deserve the results of your efforts you need not cling is what it implies in reply to codemaverik #
• @swatisani What happened love? Why the in reply to swatisani #
• @swatisani Wow!!!! Bar headed geese is great news! #migrants #nagpur in reply to swatisani #
• Phew! Never thought that we will be able to cram all that stuff into our bags – took all of @spbuty 's ingenuous tricks to get it in #
• @popcorn09 Girl you are smitten
  

  Read the rest of this entry »

  Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.

http://foss.in/fossin2009/schedules-first-cut.html

Yesterday, we published the first cut of the FOSS.IN/2009 talks schedules at http://foss.in/2009/schedules. Have a look, and do get back to us if you see any problems. The final schedule will be out late on Saturday.

A word of caution: while we can understand you being anxious to know when your talk is, please remember that FOSS.IN is NOT about the talks alone, but about your interaction over the 5 day event with other delegates. It is therefore important for us to know if you are planning to be here only for your talk – if so, please let us know so that we can cancel your talk.

And if you plan to disappear after your talk, note that we will completely purge your talk from the schedule, with a note saying “Speaker thought s/he was a rockstar, left after talk, has been purged”, without your name, so that you will never be able to claim to have spoken at FOSS.IN/2009.

As you can see, we are very serious about the audience and event experience.

Update: Yes, there is a screwup in the schedule – workouts are not supposed to be listed there, but in a separate list, since they are no longer time bound, or schedule, they happen over all five days. Being fixed as we speak.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/friday_squid_bl_207.html

From the Feed Store.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/fear_and_public.html

This 1996 interview with psychiatrist Robert DuPont was part of a Frontline program called "Nuclear Reaction."

He's talking about the role fear plays in the perception of nuclear power. It's a lot of the sorts of things I say, but particularly interesting is this bit on familiarity and how it reduces fear:

You see, we sited these plants away from metropolitan areas to "protect the public" from the dangers of nuclear power. What we did when we did that was move the plants away from the people, so they became unfamiliar. The major health effect, adverse health effect of nuclear power is not radiation. It's fear. And by siting them away from the people, we insured that that would be maximized. If we're serious about health in relationship to nuclear power, we would put them in downtown, big cities, so people would see them all the time. That is really important, in terms of reducing the fear. Familiarity is the way fear is reduced. No question. It's not done intellectually. It's not done by reading a book. It's done by being there and seeing it and talking to the people who work there.

So, among other reasons, terrorism is scary because it's so rare. When it's more common -- England during the Troubles, Israel today -- people have a more rational reaction to it.

My recent essay on fear and overreaction.

Gift set, originally uploaded by peeyush.

Apart from their good wills and best wishes, my friends have gifted me with loads of goodies.

Here's the second set of gifts that adorn walls of my cubicle -


Each one of these carry affections in it, cheering me up every moment I spend in office. It's way too overwhelming and I just don't know how to ever thank each one of you enough.

Thank you :)

(Previously.)

I think I've almost managed to get the DNA Lounge popup webcast window to resize the video when you resize the window. (Unsurprisingly, the only way that worked portably was to use tables.) Does it work for you? This seems to resize properly in both Firefox and Safari. It mostly works in Opera: it resizes properly, but there's a scrollbar and the bottom text is off the bottom of the screen. I'm not sure how to fix that.

What does it do in IE? Does the video resize, and is there a green box around it?

Previously.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the War on Fun gets some more press.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/leaked_911_text.html

Wikileaks has published pager intercepts from New York on 9/11:

WikiLeaks released half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

[...]

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center.

Near as I can tell, these messages are from the commercial pager networks of Arch Wireless, Metrocall, Skytel, and Weblink Wireless, and include all customers of that service: government, corporate, and personal.

There are lots of nuggets in the data about the government response to 9/11:

One string of messages hints at how federal agencies scrambled to evacuate to Mount Weather, the government's sort-of secret bunker buried under the Virginia mountains west of Washington, D.C. One message says, "Jim: DEPLOY TO MT. WEATHER NOW!," and another says "CALL OFICE (sic) AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. 4145 URGENT." That's the phone number for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Continuity Programs Directorate -- which is charged with "the preservation of our constitutional form of government at all times," even during a nuclear war. (A 2006 article in the U.K. Guardian newspaper mentioned a "a traffic jam of limos carrying Washington and government license plates" heading to Mount Weather that day.)

FEMA's response seemed less than organized. One message at 12:37 p.m., four hours after the attacks, says: "We have no mission statements yet." Bill Prusch, FEMA's project officer for the National Emergency Management Information System at the time, apparently announced at 2 p.m. that the Continuity of Operations plan was activated and that certain employees should report to Mt. Weather; a few minutes later he sent out another note saying the activation was cancelled.

Historians will certainly spend a lot of time poring over the messages, but I'm more interested in where they came from in the first place:

It's not clear how they were obtained in the first place. One possibility is that they were illegally compiled from the records of archived messages maintained by pager companies, and then eventually forwarded to WikiLeaks.

The second possibility is more likely: Over-the-air interception. Each digital pager is assigned a unique Channel Access Protocol code, or capcode, that tells it to pay attention to what immediately follows. In what amounts to a gentlemen's agreement, no encryption is used, and properly-designed pagers politely ignore what's not addressed to them.

But an electronic snoop lacking that same sense of etiquette might hook up a sufficiently sophisticated scanner to a Windows computer with lots of disk space -- and record, without much effort, gobs and gobs of over-the-air conversations.

Existing products do precisely this. Australia's WiPath Communications offers Interceptor 3.0 (there's even a free download). Maryland-based SWS Security Products sells something called a "Beeper Buster" that it says let police "watch up to 2500 targets at the same time." And if you're frugal, there's a video showing you how to take a $10 pager and modify it to capture everything on that network.

It's disturbing to realize that someone, possibly not even a government, was routinely intercepting most (all?) of the pager data in lower Manhattan as far back as 2001. Who was doing it? For that purpose? That, we don't know.