Just another iPhone shot…

Illegally parked, playing with iPhone camera, waiting for Jenna to bring us delicious Chinese food.

Sadly, this is not an uncommon sight where we live in Northern New York State. Many homes get abandoned by people who can no longer pay taxes on them. In this case, I’m not entirely sure what the case is, but I do know this house has been vacant as long as we’ve lived here.

As some of you know, we’re moving, and there’s simply no way around the incredibly, earth-shatteringly obvious observation that just about everyone makes: namely, that moving seriously sucks. Uprooting your life and having to face all the junk you’ve accumulated — How in the name of sweet fuck did I end up with a tiny serving dish featuring a map of the state of Indiana?!¹ — is really just too much for any sane person to bear and remain rational.

Amidst the horrendous tedium, moments of levity — okay, moments of utter stupidity — can make the difference between surviving the move a sane person and ending up in some room somewhere rocking back and forth and talking to yourself about all the shit you’ve accumulated over the years, while a large orderly feeds you mashed peas.

So, when Jenna poked her head into the room the other day with a huge grin on her face, I knew something fun was afoot.

“You wanna go all Office Space on the old printer? I just saw the sledge hammer in the garage.” Jenna was giddy, and ready for destruction. And so was I, which is why I immediately stood up from the mess I was surrounded by and asked “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

Witht that, off we trudged to the back yard for a bit of quality time with our decade-plus old Lexmark laser printer. Truth is, it was a fine piece of technology for about a year, when it seemed that out of nowhere the problems began. For a long time, it insisted on printing a xerox-like copy of fine, long hair on each page. No matter what we did, we could not track down and remove this hair from the printer. Small fortunes were spent on and many ozone holes were created by that toxic chemical in a can shit that some crazy-ass people huff², toner cartridges were replaced, mountains were moved, forces were mobilized, and I think we even briefly achieved peace in the Middle-East in our quest to solve this problem, but it was all for nought: this was a stubborn hair, and it made its mark on ream after ream of paper. We can’t forget the jams, either; you’d think the Lexmark was into the Dead or something given all the jams it was into. It ate paper, and it often ate important paper, or the last sheet of paper when you had something huge due. The printer was a little fucker, and we both hated it.

Back when it died, we’d thought of throwing it out, but that seemed environmentally unwise, so we hung on to it, thinking that we might come across a suitable recycling venue. Clearly, we were the ones huffing that air-in-a-can-shit, because I’m not sure how else we could explain how we ever figured that there’d be a suitable recycling center for electronic equipment in the rural wasteland we live in. Unable to throw it out and unable to recycle it, into the closet it went, buried by papers due to my ADHD organizing habitsincredibly h4wt and totally mad record keeping skillz.

For those of you who suffer from a short attention span, here’s the round-up: we beat the hell out of this Lexmark with a sledge hammer, and it made pretty plastic pieces go all over the place, and it was such a thing of beauty that we had to share it with you.

Catharsis this pure is rare; of course, we expect that at least a few of you will think us environmentally unfriendly for not making earrings out of the motherboard, or weaving the wires into a multicolored International Friendship Bracelet to express our desire for global unity or some such crap, but we don’t care. This thing needed to die, and we were its very willing executioners. And so die it did, and its destruction was our rebirth, reminding us that sometimes letting out a little frustration is just the ticket for a horrible, life-altering move (click for larger photos).

Epilogue: Lest you think our fascination with destroying printers is singular, check out this page.

I was approached by the folks over at OpposingViews.com to weigh in on the debate over whether or not animals should have the same rights as people. What follows below is the quick essay I submitted to them; if I have time, I’ll probably follow it with another argument or two. You can find all angles on the debate here if their site starts working correctly… there were transient failures at the site all this past weekend. Also, sorry for the cross-posting if you happen to have seen my announcing this elsewhere.

In one episode of the 1980s absurd British sitcom “The Young Ones,” Neil, the hippie of the group, famously quipped “vegetable rights and peace!” comically upping his hippie cred into the stratosphere. Hippies, of course, are presumed to be for rights for all kinds of things: trees, rocks, water, air, and, of course, animals. Not being a hippie myself, I can’t really speak to the arguments for granting non-sentient things like trees rights (though there is a rather compelling environmental case to be made for protecting them from what economists call the “externalities” of capitalist industrial production) but it is worth thinking about why animals should be accorded at least some of the rights that we bipedal primates called “humans” enjoy.

To begin with, despite the question as posed, I don’t think animals should have the same rights as humans in all cases. Granting the dogs I live with a right to free speech or the right to vote is pointless (insert your own joke here about the election and re-election of George W. Bush). Instead, I’m advocating for something that is much more simple. In the respects that animals are like us—most notably, in their ability to feel pain, have subjective experiences, and value their own continued existence—animals should have rights similar to the rights we have. In the broadest terms, this would mean that we’d have to stop eating and wearing them, experimenting on them, and bringing them into existence for our own ends.

Anyone who lives with a cat or a dog knows that animals not only have personalities, but that they also have memories, fears, wants, and desires. The dogs and cat that I live with seek out comfort, avoid pain, and desire companionship, and it is clear to me that they suffer as acutely as I do (if not more acutely) when they are hurt, or sick, or scared. Moreover, having spent time around animals ultimately destined for slaughter, I also know that pigs and cows and chickens are also capable of these same pleasures and pains, and what appears to be a subjective awareness of their surroundings, yet for reasons that no one can really justify, we snuggle up with one set of animals called “pets,” while we eat another set of animals called “livestock.”

When it comes down to it, the case for animal rights is really a case for adopting a thorough moral and ethical stance in favor of treating like cases alike. My own outlook has been shaped by the ethical theory of Gary L. Francione, who argues that though animals and humans are clearly different, they are alike in the sense that they both suffer, and are both sentient. For this reason, Francione argues, animals should receive equal moral consideration. Most importantly, this would mean extending to animals inherent value, or really bringing them into the moral community by recognizing that certain aspects of their personhood cannot be “sold away” or sacrificed for the benefit of another. Put most simply, because animals are like us in some relevant regards, they should be treated like we would be treated in those instances.

The tired objections that animals do not deserve rights because they lack rationality, or language, or human levels of intelligence, or whatever arbitrary characteristics anthropocentric philosophers decide are important are so self-serving as to be almost comical. The obvious problem with using qualities like these to exclude animals from moral consideration is that we can almost always find humans who also lack those qualities. A great many humans lack what we’d consider to be “normal” rational faculties, yet no one seriously suggests that the mentally disabled be enslaved, or that they should be used for food or medical experiments. Similarly, you may be smarter or more eloquent or stronger than I am, yet none of those attributes gives you the right to make me your property. Why? Because in the relevant regard that both you and I share in not being the chattel of another, no arbitrary criteria—not intelligence, rationality, language, eye color, skin color, gender, etc.—can be used to violate this basic right that guarantees our inherent value. Those of us who are for animal rights (and not simply for animal welfare) wish to make “species” another irrelevant criterion for deciding who does and does not get the basic rights accorded to members of our moral community.

Surely, the road ahead towards giving animals more thorough membership in our moral community is a long one. Veganism—not consuming animal products of any kind—is certainly the first step of many in this direction, and a step that everyone can take today. In spite of what Neil the hippie might think, vegetables don’t need rights, as they feel no pain, and have no sentience. Animals, however, are another story altogether.

Some of you who aren’t so security-minded may be wondering why anyone would go to the trouble to encrypt their entire disk. It isn’t like I’m a giant corporation with trade secrets on my laptop, and I can hardly imagine that any thief or snoop would care about the drafts of the second edition of the latest book I’m working on. While customers who wish to protect secret or confidential data probably constitute the biggest market for this disk encryption solution, I think it is also essential for everyday people, too. Think about what’s on your laptop: you probably have a bunch of (potentially sensitive) passwords stored in Firefox, and depending on your email client, you could have years of email sitting on your machine. In my case, access to a lot of this email would mean access to a lot of very personal information. As Paul points out in his blog entry, much of this information could be used to steal your identity if it falls into the wrong hands. And let’s be realistic: laptops are easy to steal or lose (because it is so light and small, I also think the Macbook Air is more prone to theft). I’ve been lucky, and never had this happen, but there’s always that first time. Wouldn’t you rather know that your data are encrypted and inaccessible to prying eyes?

Plus, lately the US Government has decided that they’re within their right to inspect your laptop at any border crossing, including copying the contents of your hard drive. Having the drive encrypted is no guarantee against their asking to see what’s on your computer, but if you’re feeling like setting a legal precedent, you could try to deny them the password

In short, there’s no reason to compromise on the security of your laptop, especially in an age when so many of us do so much of our living on our computers. PGP Whole Disk Encryption makes securing your laptop easy, and in my testing it shows no performance hit, which was my main concern. Read on — but bear in mind that I’m just a regular guy who cares about security, not a security expert of any kind.

Installation & Booting

I won’t go into detail on installing and using the entire professional suite, since that’s beyond the scope of this review. Still, getting whole disk encryption set up on your Mac is easy, or at least it was in my case. It really is as simple as opening up PGP, selecting the disk, hitting “Encrypt” and selecting a password. The manuals from PGP are actually pretty decent, and give one a lot of faith in the whole process. After all, you are essentially choosing to encrypt every single sector on your hard drive, and if something goes wrong, your disk could be rendered unreadable. Of course, to avoid these problems, you should check for the general health of your disk, even though PGP WDE is set to stop itself if it encounters any troubles with the disk. As the PGP manual points out, “PGP Corporation deliberately takes a conservative stance when encrypting drives to prevent loss of data.” This seems smart to me when your goods are on the line. That said, PGP WDE supports desktop and laptop disks (including the SSD disk in my Macbook Air), and you can encrypt the boot disk or any other partition. You can also encrypt external disks and thumb drives, though I haven’t had a chance to play with these yet.

During the selection of the password, PGP forces you to set your keyboard to US English if you’re using any other mapping. As a long-time Dvorak user, all of my computers are mapped to the DQ keyboard layout (Dvorak mapping with QWERTY command keys), but switching back is easy, and after you’ve entered the password in US English QWERTY, you can go right back to your regular layout. Be warned, however, that you must always enter the password in the default English mapping at boot.

Once you’ve chosen your password, PGP encrypts your disk. On my machine — Macbook Air with 64G SSD Drive and 2GB RAM — this took just a hair under two hours. I just left the machine to run and did other stuff while it worked, though you can use the machine during this time if you wish. Once finished, your disk is encrypted:

On your next reboot, you’re prompted for the password:

Enter your password, and the computer boots up normally. If you fail to enter a password at all, the machine reboots itself in a few minutes in what appears to be a never-ending cycle. If you enter an incorrect password, the PGP window shows you a no-entry sign:

(It might be funnier if it posted a picture from the FailBlog, but I suspect that wouldn’t go over well with the corporate customers.)

Use

My biggest concern about using a whole-disk encryption system was the potential performance hit during daily use. Even running on a Macbook Air — one of Apple’s least powerful computers — I can’t notice any difference at all in daily operation, at least not yet (I’m only a few hours into this). I didn’t do any pre- and post-encryption tests to know for sure, but as a subjective experience, the computer feels exactly the same to me. This is how security should be — fast, basically transparent, and easy to use.

Overall Impressions

Some of you may balk at spending $83, $120, or even $199 (the cost depends on which licensing scheme and package you go with) on software to protect your laptop or other computer. Admittedly, it isn’t cheap. But how much would it cost if your laptop were stolen, and someone gained access to your personal information, or confidential work data, or even the names and credit card numbers of 80k DOJ employees? Of course, most of us aren’t walking around with that kind of data, but still: the odds are good that there’s something on your computer that could be used to facilitate the theft of your identity in some way or another. For me, the peace of mind of $83 is worth it. And since there’s no performance hit in day-to-day activities, why not give yourself the peace of mind of knowing that your data are secure from prying eyes? To me, this is simply a no-brainer.

Pros:

• no performance hit that I can feel, even though everything is encrypted on your drive

• This is how security should be: easy to install, easy to use. Set it, and essentially forget about it after you’re authenticated. I think even novice users could get this solution running pretty easily.

• Real protection for your data at a relatively reasonable cost.

• Deters attempts to route around the security by refusing safe-booting or booting from other media.

• Stronger than the built-in FileVault security provided by Apple

Cons:

• the computer isn’t secured by PGP after waking from sleep. Since a lot of us are in the habit of traveling with our computers sleeping, it may be worth setting a wake-from-sleep password. This isn’t foolproof, obviously, and it strikes me as the potentially weakest aspect of this whole security system. Of course, if the would-be thief reboots, they’re screwed.

• this software does not work with BootCamp, so if you run a windows partition and wish to secure it, you’re SOL.

Summary:

• The ease of use, the performance, and the total feature set make PGP Whole Disk Encryption a great deal for securing your entire drive in OS X. I recommend it highly — 4 out of 5 stars, if only for the sleep issue mentioned above. I’ll report back in the coming weeks if I notice any evolving issues or difficulties.

PGP Desktop Professional with Whole Disk Encryption

Starting at $83 from the PGP Corporation.

The policies state that officers may “detain” laptops “for a reasonable period of time” to “review and analyze information.” This may take place “absent individualized suspicion.”

The policies cover “any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,” including hard drives, flash drives, cellphones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover “all papers and other written documentation,” including books, pamphlets and “written materials commonly referred to as ‘pocket trash’ or ‘pocket litter.’”

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Perhaps I just read the US Constitution too literally, but this strikes me as a clear violation of the 4th Amendment. See if you agree:

Amendment 4 – Search and Seizure. Ratified 12/15/1791.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Considering that a laptop may, in fact, contain your “papers and effects,” it seems reasonable to expect that the seizure and inspection of your laptop without due cause would violate the 4th Amendment. Sadly, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit disagrees. According to the same article from the Post, that court upheld the right of the Gummint to take your laptop at the border without reasonable cause.

It seems pretty clear to me that we need someone with a big legal team and lots of money to test these regulations with a laptop drive encoded with something like TrueCrypt or PGP. Upon refusing to hand over your keys to the drive to some bumbling border agent, what would happen? Would you face “extraordinary rendition” to some Eastern European or Middle Eastern country where you’d be tortured for your password? Would you have to go back to where you came from? Would you be denied your rights of citizenship in the US? Would you become a person without a state?

The above notwithstanding, does anyone actually think this is going to deter any terrorism or whatever it is that the US is actually afraid of? I’d say that it would prevent only the most amateur of terrorists from getting information across the border. It is trivially easy to encrypt a file and email it to someone, or to put it on a server somewhere, and download it from just about anywhere in the world. No one actually needs a laptop, flash drive, iPod, cell phone, or whatever to get information anywhere. Thus, I’m not sure that this regulation actually accomplishes anything at all, except providing a pretext for the government to deepen its control and surveillance of us.

Despite the obviousness of what is essentially a non-problematic statement, the McCain camp accuses Obama of “playing the race card,” which, when boiled down to its simplest terms, means that they believe he is guilty of pointing out that there are people other than white people in the United States. Whiteness, of course, works best when it is more or less the taken-for-granted norm with unspoken power. When someone points out that it exists, or that it wields a particular set of powered relations, well then that person is guilty of “playing the race card,” which is patently ridiculous.

Beyond all of that, it seems clear to me that this is yet another instance of professional Republican politicking. By putting out the notion that Obama is playing the race card, the McCain campaign is actually sending a signal to those white voters who are uncomfortable with the notion of a black man being president. The message is simple (and simplistic): it says, “Watch out, insecure white people. Here’s another one of those uppity blacks complaining that they have nothing, when they’re stealing our jobs with affirmative action.” With the economy more or less in the shitter these days, the twin hatreds of racism (towards blacks) and xenophobia (towards “illegals”) will redouble themselves to provide a convenient narrative for white failure and a new set of fears, which will almost certainly be played expertly by the Republican party.

Even if Obama somehow wins (I think the odds are significantly slimmer than they appear on paper because of covert racism that does not come out in polls) he’ll be hamstrung by a horrendous deficit left to him by GWB. He’ll face either a crippled government, or the prospect of raising taxes to pay for the things he’s proposing. This leads to an ugly self-fulfilling prophecy in which the Republicans will be proven right when they say that Democrats are “tax and spend liberals,” and that government is grossly inefficient at providing services. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that Republicans generally hire smarter (and more evil) strategists than the Democrats.

“You know, we really didn’t get to the Adirondacks much,” Jenna lamented.

“Yeah, I know. We really should have made a point of going there more. Anyway, I know we didn’t go, but I liked knowing it was there.”

“I know what you mean,” Jenna responded. “It is pretty cool knowing there’s all that wilderness so close. That’s one thing I may miss when we move.”

“I hear you. We never really used it, but it was good to know we could have had we wanted to. Still, we’re moving to a city, where we can have a different set of things like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, have you ever looked at the back of the Philly City Paper? There are ads there where you can pay people to come and torture your balls if you want, or shove a bull whip in your bum, or otherwise do whatever kind of kink you’re into.”

Concerned that I may not have been entirely forthcoming about my sexual proclivities, Jenna worriedly asks “And this is interesting why?”

“Well,” I responded, “it is kind of like the Adirondacks. I mean, I never intend to call anyone to torture my junk, or whip me or whatever, but a part of me really likes knowing that it is there, that there’s enough weirdness and randomness and crazy humanity to sustain this stuff, even if I never use it.”

“Yeah,” she retorted, “and more importantly, you can get vegan Chinese food at 2 in the morning if you want it.”

And this, my dear friends, encapsulates just a few of the many reasons that the charms of rural life are now lost on us.

With a Surge in Iron and Steel Prices, Thieves Are Stealing Metal Manhole Covers – NYTimes.com:

“PHILADELPHIA — Francis McConnell is a field supervisor for the Philadelphia Water Department, but lately he is acting more like an undercover police officer.

His mission is to figure out who is stealing the city’s manhole covers and its storm drain and street grates, increasingly valuable commodities on the scrap market. More than 2,500 covers and grates have disappeared in the past year, up from an annual average of about 100.”

While this is partly a story about increasingly valuable metals, it is also a story about desperation and need in the city I grew up in and will be returning to in 2009. The fact that people can make a few bucks stealing manhole covers is an indication of just how badly they need those few bucks.