Civil liberties groups have called the program Kafkaesque. But I have an even bigger problem with it. It's a waste of money.

I like Scheier not only because he knows what he's talking about, he knows how to say it in a way most people are more likely to care.

This particular article is about the pointlessness of the Terror-score the US assigns to every international traveller.

In fact, the Automated Targeting System is arguably illegal as well (a point several congressmen made recently); all recent Department of Homeland Security appropriations bills specifically prohibit the department from using profiling systems against persons not on a watch list.

There is something un-American about a government program that uses secret criteria to collect dossiers on innocent people and shares that information with various agencies, all without any oversight. It's the sort of thing you'd expect from the former Soviet Union or East Germany or China. And it doesn't make us any safer from terrorism.

While on the subject of airports, a man climbed a seven-foot fence and decided to pass the time sitting in a Boeing jet.

"It blows my mind that you can't get 3.5 ounces of toothpaste on a plane," he said, "yet somebody can sneak on a plane and take a nap."

What gets me, though, is that Delta gave its passengers a $7 food voucher. Airport food must be much cheaper in the Carolinas for that to be of any use. Schneier is quoted in the NYT article about the most recent run of TSA arbitrariness, the war on Gels and Liquids. This has resulted in my needing to empty a bottle of spring water, as well as a bottle of Scotch, while allowing me to carry my laptop and sparking power cables which almost lit a train on fire in Italy.

The most interesting article this digest is moderate length post on choosing and cracking passwords. The common thought on this has traditionally been "pick one or two words you can remember, and in the middle (or between them) insert some number)". This results in a fairly easy-to-remember password that, judging from the analysis mentioned in the article, is not super easy to crack. The more interesting is that the mainstream software mentioned takes advantage of swapped memmory and general insecurities prevalent in MicroSoft's and other operating systems. The solution is to use encrypted swap space, which can done on a GNU/Linux system by calling the following at start (in place of putting <swap> in your fstab):

losetup -d /dev/loopN
losetup -p 0 -e blowfish-256 /dev/loopN <swap> < /dev/random
mkswap /dev/loopN
swapon /dev/loopN

What this does is create a new loop device, loopN (N should be a number, use 0 if you have no other loop devices). It then mounts the partition you set aside (swap) for swap using a blowfish cipher with a 256-bit random key from /dev/random to write and read any memory swapped out. This can significantly degrade performance, and it will probably prevent you from hibernating (suspend-to-disk). The important thing is to use a different key whenever you reboot, which is one reason why hibernating will not work.


Finally, the story of two people getting their Virginia state drivers' licenses.