馬庭正's Journal

8:04am: [Toronto] The Ex. August 15 - September 1.
Anyone going? We're considering coming up. I haven't been since I was a kid, and bedfull_o_books hasn't ever been, but she's always up for going on midway rides. I'm not, so I'm seeing who else might want to check out the rides.

Admission is $14. An unlimited ride Midway Pass is an additional $31. (Otherwise you buy ride coupons which start at $1 for a coupon; rides cost from 3 to 6 tickets a ride.)

Official website is here: http://www.theex.com/

Wikipedia article is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_National_Exhibition

6:28pm: It really is America's Finest News Source.
From a month ago, but still spot on:

11:17am: The MBTA just got a restraining order to prevent three MIT undergrads from giving a talk at Defcon.
From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/09/defcon_talk_halted/:

A federal judge on Saturday gagged three Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduates from publicly presenting research at Defcon demonstrating gaping holes in the electronic payment systems of one of the nation's biggest transit agencies.

Attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which are representing the trio, said they directed the students to pull the talk, which had been scheduled for Sunday. They said the order constituted an "illegal prior restraint" on their clients' free-speech rights.

"It's a very dangerous precedent," EFF staff attorney Marcia Hoffman told reporters at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas. "Basically, what the court is suggesting here is that giving a presentation involving security to other security researchers is a violation of federal law. As far as I know, this is completely unprecedented and it has a tremendous chilling effect on sharing this sort of research."

From http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38816/108/:

There’s a saying at Defcon that the best way to spread information is to get hit with a restraining order. Freedom of information is a big deal here and anything suppressing that is met with extreme resistance. But in this case, the attendees really don’t have to do too much work because the Transit Authority placed the talk slides into the addendum of the temporary restraining order request and everything is now in public record. Furthermore, the slides are in the official Defcon CD – something which more than 5000 people have right now. So you have a classic case of the horse is already out of the barn.

From http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/vulnerability_assessment_of_the_mtba_system.pdf:

The CharlieCard is based on a MIFARE Classic RFID card producd by NXP. The card secures its data and transactions using a proprietary encryption algorithm called Crypto-1. Karsten Nohl, et al. of the University of Virginia reverse-engineered this algorithm and found serious vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities allow one to recover the key from a card in less than 30 seconds. Armed with a key, an attacker can copy someone's card remotely. Although we have not absolutely verified this, we have strong reason to believe all CharlieCards use a common key.

We have not used the CharlieCard key to read CharlieCards, so we cannot comment for certain about the data on the card. We have evidence to show that the card has a stored value, which makes it vulnerable to the same forgery attacks detailed in the CharlieTicket section. Likewise, it is vulnerable to cloning attacks too, meaning the above scenario would not steal money from the people in the street, but rather, it would duplicate the value on those cards.

Edit: There is a link from The Tech (http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/) which includes all the relevant documents submitted for the temporary restraining order.

The presentation slides are here: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf (thanks to redbird for the link). As has been pointed out, they are nowhere as informative as the above vulnerability assessment.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/eff-to-appeal-r.html adds:
"Hofmann said it's unclear right now whether the EFF will continue to represent the students if further litigation is pursued, given that they have no one on staff who can practice in Massachusetts. They will have to evaluate the situation when and if it comes up."

1:53pm: From http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SocialProblemsMatter:

There is a widespread attitude among computer people that it is a great pity that their beautiful solutions to difficult technical challenges are being prevented from working merely by some pesky social issues, and that the problem is solved once the technical work is done. This attitude misses the point, especially in system administration: broadly speaking, the technical challenges are the easy problems.

Social engineering is a much more difficult field than computer engineering; it is much easier to build something that works than to build something that people want to use.

(His techblog, devoted to system administration and associated issues is also syndicated at cks_techblog.)

2:42am: Today is Qi Xi (七夕).
The things I learn from Wikipedia!

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_Xi:

The story of Cowherd and Weaver Girl

In late summer, the stars Altair and Vega are high in the night sky, and the Chinese tell the following love story, of which there are many variations:

A young cowherd named Niulang (Chinese: 牛郎; pinyin: niú láng; literally "the cowherd", the star Altair) happens across seven fairy sisters bathing in a lake. Encouraged by his mischievous companion the ox, he steals their clothes and waits to see what will happen. The fairy sisters elect the youngest and most beautiful sister Zhinü (simplified Chinese: 织女; traditional Chinese: 織女; pinyin: zhī nǚ; literally "the weaver girl", the star Vega) to retrieve their clothing. She does so, but since Niulang has seen her naked, she must agree to his request for marriage. She proves to be a wonderful wife, and Niulang a good husband. They lived happily and had two children. But the Goddess of Heaven (in some versions Zhinü's mother) finds out that a mere mortal has married one of the fairy girls and is furious. (In another version, the Goddess forced the weaver fairy back to her former duty of weaving colorful clouds in the sky because she could not do her job while married to the mortal.) Down on Earth, Niulang is very upset learning that his wife is gone. Suddenly, his cow begins to talk telling him that if he kills him and puts on his hide, he will be able to go up to Heaven to find his wife. With tears flowing, he killed the cow, put on the skin and carrying his two children with him and off he went to Heaven to find Zhinü. The Goddess found out he had come and was very angry. Taking out her hairpin, the Goddess scratches a wide river in the sky to separate the two lovers forever (thus forming the Milky Way, which separates Altair and Vega).

Zhinü must sit forever on one side of the river, sadly weaving on her loom, while Niulang watches her from afar and takes care of their two children (his flanking stars β and γ Aquilae or by their Chinese names Hè Gu 1 and Hè Gu 3).

But once a year all the magpies in the world take pity on them and fly up into heaven to form a bridge (鵲橋, "the bridge of magpies", Que Qiao) over the star Deneb in the Cygnus constellation so the lovers may be together for a single night, the seventh night of the seventh moon.

It is said that if it rains on the night of Qi Xi, they are the tears of Niulang and Zhinü crying at the misery of their life.

12:02am: From IM conversation tonight:
"My life is immeasurably better than it was when I was a teenager, if only for the fact that I appear to have learned how to get along with girls."

12:53am: Followup to that $500,000 house meme, for some other places.
I mentioned to evilmagnus that I'd wasted a few perfectly good minutes looking at property listings elsewhere. This was the result.

---

Listing : MT1439255
Duplex Detached
510 000$ CAN
924 926 Rue de Bienville
Le Plateau-Mont-Royal (Montréal)
Rooms 5
Bedrooms 2
Bathrooms 1.0
Units 2
year of constr. 1900

---

454 West 50th Street Unit 2-R
New York, NY 10019
$495,000
1 Bed, 1 Bath
Year Built: 1910
3 total rooms

---

524 27th Ave
San Francisco, CA 94121
$499,000
2 Bed, 1 Bath

---

Adair Road, London W10
1 bed flat for sale: £255,000
Hallway: 2x storage cupboards.
Reception: 16'07 x 10'07 (5.05m x 3.23m). Window to front aspect, door to private garden.
Kitchen: 10'02 x 6'07 (3.10m x 2.01m). Window to rear aspect, fully fitted with integrated oven and gas hob, stainless steel sink with drainer, space for fridge and washing machine.
Bedroom: 12'11 x 9'10 (3.94m x 3m). Window to front aspect, built-in cupboard.
Bathroom:Window to front aspect, bath with shower attachment, wash hand basin, low level WC.

---

25, Wun Sha Street
Causeway Bay
Hong Kong
HK$ 4,000,000 / HK$ 6,472 per sq.ft.
High Rise Apartments, Simplex, Mid Floor Zone
618 sq.ft.
2 Bedroom(s), including Ensuite 1 Bathrooms
Combined Living and Dining Room

10:32pm: "He's fictional but you can't have everything."

9:52pm: T-Mobile's number porting?
Thus far, full of fail.

Ordered last week, still not done.

I told Mom it wouldn't work when I ordered it, but did she believe me? Noooo....

12:28pm: Nassim Nicholas Taleb's top life tips.
From http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4022091.ece:

Last May, Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It said, among many other things, that most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous. They live in a fantasy world in which the future can be controlled by sophisticated mathematical models and elaborate risk-management systems. Bankers and economists scorned and raged at Taleb. He didn’t understand, they said. A few months later, the full global implications of the sub-prime-driven credit crunch became clear. The world banking system still teeters on the edge of meltdown. Taleb had been vindicated.

Taleb's top life tips

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

A long bio/interview, but worth reading. Even if it's in a newspaper.

8:56pm: IKEA has failed me.

Feh.

4:16pm: Crap.
I busted the display on the Nikon I've been using.

I'm guessing there's no recovering from this cheaper than buying a new camera.

Feh.

Displays have not been my friend lately. The PowerBook's display is getting flaky, and the Apple store refuses to treat it as a covered repair under AppleCare.

2:28pm: Also from Larison.
This one has a lot of resonance in my own life right now.

From http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2008/07/29/loyalty/, where Larison agrees with Glenn Greenwald's recent post, "Things I learned today about democracy":

"Something that the defenders of party loyalty seem never to be able to grasp is that loyalty is a mutual obligation. It is not only something that supporters are supposed to give to their party, but it is something that party leaders owe to the people who put them and keep them in their positions."

2:15pm: Yes, I read paleocon blogs, too.
From http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2008/07/29/el-rushbore/:

Limbaugh endorses China’s fuel subsidies:

Folks, I don’t know what the price of gasoline is in China and I don’t know to what extent, if any, it is subsidized — okay, it is subsidized. See, the ChiComs need their economy growing. They need people driving around, moving around. They need people to be able to afford fuel, so they’re subsidizing fuel. They’re not bailing people out of stupid home mortgage messes. They’re buying their gasoline for them, because they need an economy. Know what energy means to this, the whole subject of economic growth. So meanwhile, the ChiComs, a country certainly growing, certainly on the rise, but it ain’t the United States of America. How does it make you feel that Zhang Linsen has a big Hummer with nine speakers blaring as he pulls out into a four-lane road with so much smog he basically can’t see the car in front of him, and you are trading in all of your cars and trying to go out and find basically a lawn mower.

It’s amazing what passes for conservatism these days. The market is currently dictating that Americans become more fuel efficient, which Limbaugh apparently disapproves of. Imagine the uproar if Obama or Clinton said that the U.S. should become more like China.

(Via Daniel Larison, who adds: "Actually, it makes me feel relieved that I don’t live in smog-infested cities where marathoners collapse and die because of the pollution.")

12:42am: I miss you, teyli.

*hug*

9:21pm: Quick question: AT&T Wireless SIM unlocking.
I have heard that AT&T Wireless is particularly uncooperative about unlocking handsets. For that reason, I'm considering T-Mobile instead. (I want a quad-band GSM phone, and I think those two carriers are my options around here, here being Connecticut.)

T-Mobile's policy is that they'll give you an unlock code after 90 days, which for my purposes is sufficient.

Am I wrong about this? AT&T Wireless's site is not being particularly helpful here.

Thanks, all.

9:37pm: Gas powered snow thrower.
I now own one. I need to move it out of my parents' garage in CT.

Some of you have already expressed interest in hosting this thing. Hosting it would entitle you to use it until I buy a house with a driveway which occasionally gets covered in snow.

One important detail is that it weighs at least a couple hundred pounds, and will probably need to be transported in our minivan. If you want to host it, you'll have to help with transport.

Another important detail is that closing on the house where it's living is in a couple of weeks. That's as firm a deadline as a closing on a house usually is.

Reply if you're interested in hosting, helping, or (most likely) both.

8:06pm: All of us like some people who make others think, "wtf?"

1:07am: That slow, scraping noise?

It's getting awfully loud around here.

Thanks to mryt_maat for the original image!

4:48pm: I just got amusing LJ comment spam.
In response to my post on jerk chicken, I got LJ comment spam advertising a site which sends e-greetings to jerks.

You keep using that word. I do not think I mean what you think I mean.

Their automated comment bot? Not so much with the nuance.

1:14pm: Oh, speaking of roller coasters...
bedfull_o_books wants to go to Kennywood. "The property features three old wooden coasters still in working order, along with a newer steel coaster, the Phantom's Revenge (2001), and one indoor coaster, the Exterminator (added in 1999)."

I'm game, but as I'm not much for riding coasters myself--I only facilitate her obsession--I figured I'd see if anyone else was up for a trip out there on one of the remaining summer weekends.

(Ages ago, ketzl proposed a trip to Cedar Point, which we're still keeping in mind, but that's a little more of a road trip than Kennywood. Even if it does have seventeen roller coasters.)

12:49pm: Two beaches yesterday: Revere Beach for the sand sculptures and Hampton Beach for people-watching and strolling. As we walked along, I had an urge to go to Blackpool and compare.



I think bedfull_o_books'd like that, as she loves rollercoasters, which Revere hasn't had for decades.



bedfull_o_books took pictures but I think she still has the camera. The irony of taking her to the beach the day after she got back from Miami wasn't lost on either of us, but she says she only spent a short time at South Beach anyway.

Water's a lot colder than in Florida, though.

11:47am: Foreclosure Prevention Workshop, Gillette Stadium, 1PM, Tuesday, August 12th.
I thought I'd post this, because I know at least one friend would be interested.

From http://www.bos.frb.org/news/press/2008/pr071708.htm:

WHAT:
Borrowers can talk face-to-face with their lender and housing counselors to work out a plan for their mortgage
WHERE:
Gillette Stadium – Fidelity Investments Clubhouse, East
One Patriot Place, Foxborough, MA
Parking lot entrance P1
WHEN:
Tuesday, August 12, 2008 – 1 PM to 8 PM
Free to attend; free parking; free public transportation available

The New England Patriots Charitable Foundation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston will host a foreclosure prevention workshop at Gillette Stadium on Tuesday, August 12, from 1 PM to 8 PM. The event is an opportunity for homeowners who are in financial distress, or concerned about foreclosure, to sit down with their lender face-to-face, and avoid foreclosure if possible.

Borrowers should bring documentation on their income, expenses, debts, and mortgage to the workshop, so they are fully prepared to talk with their lender. The documentation may also be useful in talking with a housing or credit counselor.

For more information, borrowers are invited to call a special number set up by the Federal Reserve Bank, 1-800-882-1600. Borrowers who call this number can leave their name, questions about the event, and a callback number. Calls should be returned within 24 hours. Information is also available on this web site: www.theinformedhomebuyer.org

This event is free and open to all borrowers in difficulty. Some borrowers are being alerted to the event by their lender or loan-servicer, but no invitation is required to attend.

1:10pm: I promised to post pictures way back in May. Here they are.
My original post about the Institute For Figuring's Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef didn't include any photos.

Here are two:





Other photos have too much glare from the window glass.

We didn't get to the other exhibit at the World Financial Center on our last trip. But that exhibit is there until the end of August, so we're going to try again. This time we'll take the subway.

Clicking on the photos will enlarge them. Clicking again on the enlargement will really enlarge them.

5:00pm: Laundry? More fun with friends.