Stuff About Steve

I started smoking tobacco when I was 12.

I was a pretty weird kid when I was that age. I used to get picked on in school a lot. When I was in the 7th grade, I took woodworking and there were a couple of assholes (I would bet money that they are still assholes) who thought it was a lot of fun to pick on me. A guy named Jim Reed took up for me and told them to leave me alone. Jim was 16 and repeating the 9th grade for the second time. Imagine Fonzie, but much scarier and far more dangerous. The two assholes decided that picking on me any further was a phenomenally bad idea. Imagine that. That day at lunch, Jim invited me to go with him to hang out with his friends. There are those defining moments in time that forever change your life and head you down a completely different path. That was one of them

Hill Junior High School in Denver. Junior high was what happened between elementary and high school back in those days. That was before some pinhead got the brilliant idea of putting 9th grade girls in the same school building with 12th grade boys. Middle school is what they called the remainder. I've never looked at the statistics, but I'll bet teenage pregnancy hit a big spike with the widespread adoption of middle schools. But I digress.

Behind the school, there was a huge field. The far end of the field was where the rough trade hung out. When Jim introduced me to his friends, there were a number of puzzled looks, but Jim was the coolest of the cool in that crowd, so I was in. The main activity we engaged in was smoking. Someone gave me a cigarette and lit it for me. I didn't gag or puke, so that sealed the deal. We liked to pretend that the teachers didn't know what we were doing, but they did. The only reason they didn't do anything about it was, to be honest, that they were terrified of us.

A few months after that, Jim ended up in "juvie" for stealing a car and didn't come back until close to the end of the school year. That was pretty much it as far as public education went for Jim. He was permanently expelled. They used to do that for hard cases back then. Now they give them a ribbon for participation. I heard a couple of years later that Jim was shot while participating in a B&E. He was probably 18. For that couple of months, though, he was the best friend I ever had, up to that point. Well, pretty much, the only friend I had had up to that point. Jim would hang out and talk to me. Not like other people who just tolerated me, or the people who talked to me long enough to figure out which buttons to push. Jim liked me. He talked to me like a friend. It was a new experience. I liked it.

One of the things about this crowd was that they weren't on the high end of the intelligence distribution. That was my in. That was my staying power. The people in the crew respected me because I was smart. Now, I did my fair share of other people's homework during that time, but I also got a reputation for being able to keep people out of trouble. I also got a reputation for being able to steal anything. Yep, at 12 years old, I became a master shoplifter. I really could steal anything. I think the people who owned the stores just thought I was some goofy kid and never imagined that I would steal anything. I was also smart about taking risks. Not that I was always smart, though. One kid dared me to steal one of each of the girlie magazines at a particular store. That was 6 magazines. Everyone in the crew swore that there was no way I could do it without getting caught. At the time, I had a giant pea coat that I wore everywhere. I was a skinny little kid. 6 magazines fit in that coat with room to spare. Not only did I get away with the magazines, but I added three candy bars and a Zippo lighter for good measure. I became a god.

Shortly after my 12th birthday, someone gave me a joint. I went with another guy I knew to a spot safely away from the school and we smoked it. Nothing. I got nothing from it. It really was pot, because I remember the smell. I also remember the other guy having fits of laughter about his shoes. A couple of other times over the next couple of years I smoked with people. About the most I got from it was a pleasant buzz. I had no idea what all of the commotion was about. I tried speed once when I was in the 9th grade. It made me jumpy and uncomfortable. No thanks. Maybe I'll post something another time about how I went full Hunter S. Thompson a few years later.

The next year, in the 8th grade, I made friends with a boy named John Green. Yes, that was really his name. We did everything together. John was the ultimate bad kid. We skipped school to go hang out in a park and smoke. We actively sought out the company of people worse than us. John was a scrapper. He would fight in a minute, and it wasn't the usual kind of kid fighting. He was in it for blood. I saw him take down a guy twice his size, just on the savagery of his attack. The kid never knew what hit him. So, we formed a symbiotic relationship. John was dumber than a bag of hammers. I did his homework for him. I let him copy my test in the classes we shared. I wrote him crib notes for the ones we didn't. In short, I was the only reason he passed the eighth and ninth grades. In return, I was untouchable. I was still a weird kid who everyone liked to pick on, especially the jocks. They never picked on me more than once. One numbskull, who full out attacked me one day, came to school the next day with most of his face bandaged. He apologized profusely. But, like Jim and I, John and I were genuinely friends. Even after he got a girlfriend, the girl with the biggest boobs in our class, which was important back then and at that age, he didn't abandon me. I was supposed to watch out for his girl when he wasn't around, and most of the time, I was the third wheel. I didn't mind. It made me cool.

By the summer of 1969, I was hanging out with my crowd occasionally during the school vacation as well. On August 16th, someone told us about a music festival at a place called Woodstock. All of the dirty, degenerate hippies we admired were going to be there. We got the brilliant idea that we were going to go. Mind you, the oldest kid in our crew was 15. We had no idea how far away it was. Someone said it was in New York. We were in Colorado. That meant it was too far to walk to and you can't shoplift bus tickets. That 15 year old got the brilliant idea to steal a car. He told us to wait for him on a certain street corner. We did, and shortly after that, he pulled up in a big station wagon. We were ready to go. But, it wasn't to be. A woman in a Jeep suddenly pulled up behind the station wagon and jumped out. I can still hear her voice. "That's my car!" Most of the crew scattered. John Green and I were so cocksure, we stood our ground and watched. Our friend must have gotten hit by the inspiration fairy because he told the woman that his grandmother in Pueblo was very sick and he was just trying to get there. He apparently also had great karma, because the woman bought his story. She even offered to drive him to Pueblo.

The boy's dean at my school was an old Army buddy of my father's. Since everyone at the school knew I was a member of the inner circle of the bad kids, I'm pretty confident that the information made its way to him and then on to my father. The only thing my father ever said to me about it was that if he ever caught me smoking, he would throw me out of the house. I'm pretty sure he knew just about everything else I was up to. I'm also pretty sure he was the reason that I didn't end up in juvenile detention when I got caught stealing once. He was a deputy in the sheriff's department. I honestly don't think my mother had a clue what was going on with me. Or if she did, she had no idea what to do about it. During that time, they got divorced, and my mother either got wise or got the nerve up to pull me out of that situation. She got me transferred to a different school, and that was the end of my budding career as a criminal and future guest of the state.

Pardon the random brain dump, but that's what this blog is about. Maybe I'll say more later.

Memorial Day

I fought in a war. No one shot at me and no one dropped bombs on me, but it was nation against nation and people died. A lot of people died.

They called it "The Cold War," and most people didn't even know it was going on. Every man, woman, child, plant, and animal on the planet was 30 minutes away from instant annihilation or a slow agonizing death from radiation poisoning and the nuclear winter. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I rode a Poseiden ballistic missile submarine. There were 41 of them. Between them, they had the firepower to end all life on Earth for 10,000 years or more. The combined firepower of the United States total nuclear warfare armaments would have been able to accomplish that 10 times over.

The strategy of both sides in this secret war was called Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. The acronym was probably a cynical reference to the insanity of the war. All wars are insane, but this was the most psychotic ever devised. It went like this. If the Russians launched missiles at us, we would detect them and launch missiles back at them. Once that point was reached, neither side could do anything to stop it. Armageddon was on autopilot.

I was the boat's resident "spook." They called me the intelligence librarian. I was the keeper of books full of information that only three people on the boat were allowed see. Some of it was information only I was allowed to see. I used that information to maintain a plot of "threats." I saw in those books the faces of people who died in that war.

The people whose faces I saw died in acts of espionage. Many of them weren't even Americans. They didn't get flag-draped coffins and military honors. They died in a field or a forest or an alley with a bullet in the back of their heads. They died of starvation and exposure in some Siberian hellhole. They died in front of a firing squad in the middle of the night. Their bodies were dumped like human garbage. Their only memorial was a picture in a secret book with the word, "COMPROMISED" stamped on it.

So today, I'm going to remember those people who won't be remembered by anyone else, or at least by a very, very few. They weren't fighting for something abstract like freedom or patriotism. They were fighting to save the human race. Salute!

The Worst President Ever (Not What You Think)

One of the more interesting pieces of political bombast in the last couple of decades calls the current office-holder the worst president in American History. Like all bombast it is hard to separate it from fiction, and it is really meaningless without context. For instance, Bush, the Lesser gets beat up pretty bad over using fear-mongering to drag us into war in the Middle East, but he doesn't hold a candle to Woodrow Wilson, who used propaganda and outright lies to drag us into World War I, one of the bloodiest and most pointless wars in the history of the world. Obama gets pummeled for his shabby record on economics, but he isn't even close in the economy-wrecking game to Herbert Hoover (ever heard of the Great Depression?) or Smilin' Jimmy Carter (15% unemployment, 19% prime lending rate, 12% inflation, and less than 1% private savings rate). How about civil liberties? Obama and Bush do have dismal records on that count, but how about this quote from Andrew Johnson?

"This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men."

Or Andrew Jackson, one of the biggest slave owners in the country and who used the Manifest Destiny to steal every bit of land from the Indians. Or Abraham Lincoln, who suspended the writ of habeas corpus to keep a political enemy in jail. Or worst of all, John Adams, who got the Aliens and Sedition Act passed into law so he could throw people who were critical of him in prison.

So, whenever I hear the accusation (or its converse, horn-tooting), I silently chuckle. I feel pretty certain that Bush and Obama will go down in history as godawful presidents, but I doubt that either of them will merit the label of worst (or even really fall into the bottom 10). It's early in the century, though, so we'll have to watch and see.

Net Neutrality

The FCC has taken its first steps toward regulating the ISPs in favor of net neutrality. The important thing to remember is that net neutrality is pure propaganda. It is the reduction of a very complex issue to two emotionally significant words. This is not an issue of ISPs versus consumers. It is an issue of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) versus ICPs (Internet Content Providers). The net neutrality supporters are fond of telling people that fast lanes will run Mama B's online cupcake business off of the Internet. That, to use a technical term, is complete bullshit. Comcast is a big corporation. NetFlix is also a big corporation.

Where the fast lanes come in to play is in the case of consumers of huge amounts of bandwidth, like NetFlix, Amazon, Google, and others. The ISPs want to charge them more because they are the entities that drive the expansion and increased maintenance of the Internet infrastructure. Without net neutrality, the result would be that your NetFlix subscription would go up, or your Amazon Prime would cost more. In the end, if you didn't want to pay more, you would drop your subscription. NetFlix and Amazon know this, and they don't want to swallow the increased cost of access, so they have started bitching to the FCC and created the whole net neutrality kerfuffle. Google took the high road and just decided to build out their own infrastructure. They have more money than God, so it wasn't a tough decision for them. If the ISPs can't differentiate bandwidth like that, then they have to distribute the cost of maintaining the infrastructure across everyone. That means your access will cost more even though you don't use more, or, even worse, they will meter your usage. By the way, the technical name for the fast lanes is speed tiers, but that isn't nearly as emotional.

ISPs already cost differentiate bandwidth for consumers. They always have. That's no different than any other service of that kind. You pay more for electricity if you use more, same with gas and water. Where ISPs give a good deal is that once you pay your monthly fee, they don't care how much you use. The cost of bandwidth is evenly distributed across monthly fees. Some ISPs are talking about bandwidth throttling and usage limits, but those would be offered as low cost arrangements. For example, Time-Warner could offer a package like you get with your cell phone. I buy 10 GB of cellular data and never even use close to all of it. It's a bargain for me to buy that instead of an expensive unlimited plan for data I would never use. They are talking about throttling arrangements as well. You buy a bucket of data at a high speed bandwidth, and when you use up your bucket, you get throttled back to a lower bandwidth. If you want to accelerate again, you buy another bucket. One again, though, those would be offered up front as low cost subscriptions. Those plans are also useful for people who have terrible credit. They can prepay for a bucket of data and their credit rating is irrelevant. The net neutrality crowd wants you to believe that the ISPs will try to force you into those plans. Ask yourself, why in the world would they try to force you to pay less for your service?

Don't get me wrong. Time-Warner and Comcast are concentrated evil. They seem to spend more time figuring out subtle ways to screw their customers than any other company I've known. Their customer service motto seems to be, "Ha ha. Sucks to be you." That's why the net neutrality propaganda works so well. Everyone hates them already, so it's easy to believe that they will try to screw us over some more. However, the proof of this being a corporation vs. corporation scuffle is the fact that AT&T and Verizon are in the mix. They are competitors with Time-Warner and Comcast in the ISP world. The idea of Verizon and Comcast being in collusion is laughable. The idea of AT&T and Verizon being in collusion is even more laughable. What those carriers all have in common is that their infrastructure is accessed by consumers of gigantic amounts of bandwidth that don't want to pay more for it.

I don't really care about the cost issue and who pays it. I'll still use the services however they come. What I do care about is the FCC getting their foot in the door of regulating content on the Internet. There is already a long-standing hue and cry in favor of regulating porn. In case no one noticed, the political party that panders to that demographic just took control of the government. I also don't care whether there is porn on the Internet or not, but I don't want the government telling people that they can't get porn on the Internet. And, how far is it from telling you that you can't watch porn to telling you that you can't post a political opinion on Facebook? This move will also stifle innovation by the ISPs. If they are all regulated to the lowest common denominator, competition will essentially disappear, and they will have no incentive to create newer, better, faster services. As one friend put it, ask yourself why wired telephone carriers stopped innovating after the invention of the automatic switch. They were and are heavily regulated. There is no incentive for them to make anything but the least effort to keep the service running.

I wonder if John Oliver and Stephen Colbert will come back and acknowledge their ignorance after Comcast puts a meter on your Internet access, or when the government decides that they don't like what either of them is saying and shuts their YouTube channels off. They have lined up behind a cause they don't understand and they haven't thought about the consequences. Since they are on teevee, Joe Average figures that they must know what they are talking about and he lines up right behind them.

The sky isn't falling, but it's getting really cloudy out there in Internet land.

Why I Am Not An Early Adopter

I'm a gadget person. I used to run out and buy the latest gadgets. Here are a few reasons why I don't do that any more.

1. They're expensive. Makers of gadgets spend tens of millions of dollars (or yen, or deutsche marks, or euros) on designing, developing, implementing, and testing their latest toys. Investors want to see those toys turn a profit in a year or less. Easy math says that one million people buying a $600 iPhone on the first day should pretty much cover it. Not so fast. Most of that $600 goes to pay for marketing, advertising, distribution, and the cost of sales. Those big, bright Apple stores in shopping malls and other prime locations aren't cheap. My educated guess is that less that $50 of the iPhone's sale price is profit. That's not even as much profit margin as grocery stores make. Gadget makers that lose money on a new product release won't be around for very long.
2. Bugs. Every new gadget has bugs. No exceptions. In some cases, it's something the manufacturers just can't help. Makers like Apple and Sony test their products for months. They test every scenario they can possibly come up with. Then they release the product and it still has bugs. That's because they can't reproduce the millions and millions of different situations that we humans will experience when we use their gadgets. They also can't test for long term conditions because then they would never release their products. Other makers, like Microsoft and Samsung, do limited testing and then throw the product over the wall. They are relying on you to find their bugs and complain about them. Then they will spend a month figuring out how to fix it, do some more limited testing, and throw the fix over the wall again. That's why Microsoft bug fixes tend to create more bugs. They don't do extensive regression testing.
3. Limited new bells and whistles. Let's face it, we are becoming technically saturated. There just wasn't that big of a difference between the iPhone 4s and the iPhone 5s. People seem to have jumped right from the Samsung Galaxy S3 to the Samsung Galaxy S5, skipping the Galaxy S4. One reason for this is that gadget makers have to stay fresh in people's minds. Motorola was king of the 12-keys for a while with the Razor series. Along came Android and Motorola failed to respond with a smartphone. They still dominate the 12-key arena, but that is now a tiny part of the cell phone market. (Full disclosure, Motorola has a history of doing that) Microsoft and Sony own the game console arena because Nintendo and Sega failed to keep up. (No, Wii can't survive on the strength of Mario Cart alone.) In some cases, Windows for example, the new shiny thing is that it doesn't suck as much as its predecessor.

I like early adopters. They help bring down the prices of gadgets more quickly than would happen otherwise. I like the fact that there are more and more early adopters. Seeing lines wrapped around the block at Apple stores with people waiting for days sometimes makes me happy. In 6 months, I'll grab an iPhone 6 for a fraction of what they are paying now, and it will be relatively bug-free.

Keep on adopting!

You've Been Hacked!

In the great celebrity naked picture hack event of 2014, there were two sides to the reaction.

1. It's their own fault for having naked pictures of themselves on their phones.
2. It's not their fault. They should be able to put whatever they want on their phones.

They're both right. (Thanks for not equivocating, Steve!)

It is their fault for having naked pictures, or any other private data on their phones without adequately protecting them. That's like saying that it's not your fault that you left your front door open and thieves took off with your big screen TV. Technically, it's not your fault, but your stuff is still gone, and if you do it again, more of your stuff will get gone. Lament the downfall of modern civilization if you will, but lock up your shit.

The real problem is passwords. It is a model that was proven to be broken years and years ago. So here we are at, "it is and isn't the celebrities' fault." Unless you just got on the Internet yesterday (welcome!), you should know better than to use your aunt's birthday, the name of your pet, or "happy79" for your password. The mere fact that hackers got into their phones before they were old enough that no one wanted to see naked pictures of them means that they were using weak passwords. But, here's the thing, because you can use a weak password is a problem with passwords themselves. The password model is an impediment to using strong passwords. In the heat of the moment, when you absolutely have to show your latest naked selfie to your boyfriend, you aren't going to remember the 16 character string of random letters, numbers, and symbols you used to create your iCloud password. And if you are using the best practice of never using the same password twice, you will have to dredge up which password you used on which account. Definite mood-killer.

So, what is the answer, Steve? You're doing a lot of bitching about passwords, but you're woefully short on solutions.

Mea culpa on the bitching part, not so much on the solutions part.

The solution is a system that is a combination of known strong security measures combined in such a way that your average naked selfie taker (or online banker/shopper) is going to use because it is simple to use. It would have to be simpler to use than passwords, which sets the bar pretty low. The system is a combination of

1. Zero knowledge proof authentication.
2. Strong cryptographic signing.
3. Public key cryptography.

Well, Steve, that doesn't sound simple at all. It's not technically simple, but it is simple for users. It works like this:

Sally gets online and wants to check her bank balance. She has previously set up a couple of things with her bank. A public key, which is just a set of random numbers that identifies her. Instead of her username being "SallyMae1983," It will be something like

lQO+BFPOiY0BCADyCJ1GtQ3oVeLFVOEwlqvNmvDGHc5SlBPWgA

"But wait, Steve, you said this would be simple." It is, actually, because Sally will never have to remember it. It will get created and stored on her computer and the browser, or whatever else she's using, will know where to get it and hand it to the bank. And good luck Mr. Black Hat Hacker with trying to guess that one.

The second thing she set up with her bank was a passphrase. I'm not being disingenuous here. A passphrase, unlike a password, can be anything you want it to be. It could be Hamlet's soliloquy, or the words to your favorite song. The longer the better, but since you don't have to remember it, it can be anything at all, even "happy79." The secret to all of this is that you never, ever send your passphrase to the bank after you set it up in the first place.

So, Sally gets on her browser and her browser knows how to present her key, and the bank uses that to know that it is Sally. Now, the bank sends some data, called salt, which is different every time Sally logs on, back to her browser and the bank and the browser go to work performing some complex cryptographic math on Sally's passphrase and the salt. When they are both done, they will exchange their answers, and if they both got the right answer, the bank will let Sally in, and Sally will know that it's actually the Bank, and not some phishing site. Sally never actually sent her passphrase, she just proved to the bank that she knew it, and the bank proved to her that it knew it as well. That's called zero knowledge proof.

The idea works even better on smartphones. The key and the passphrase can be stored in a very secure location on the device's SIM card. If you lose your phone, the SIM card can be remotely wiped. Paris Hilton's contact list would have never ended up on Reddit.

"So, Steve, when is the world going to get this technological marvel?"

I'm working on it. Stay tuned.

Hackers are jerks.

I wish the news media would stop romanticizing hackers. There are two kinds of hackers. The first variety are thieves, the second variety are juveniles of all ages with a roaring case of Asperger's, or as they are sometimes known, basement dwellers.

The news media labels certain hacker groups as "hacktivists," Anonymous being the most well-known. Anonymous is best known for breaking into Sony's Play Station Network a couple of years ago and stealing millions of credit card numbers. They were romanticized as some kind of geeky David taking on the evil corporate Goliath, Sony. Stupid. They didn't steal from Sony, they stole from us. In that, they are no better than a common burglar. They are lesser known for taking down Freedom Hosting on TOR last year. Freedom hosting was home to a huge amount of illegal pornography. Their aim appeared to be noble, but who made them the Internet police? Their motto is, "We do what we want because we can." Their avatar is the Guy Fawkes mask from the movie "V." Not noble. Just belligerent.

This past weekend a group calling themselves, "Lizard Squad" launched a DDOS attack on the Sony Play Station Network and Microsoft's XBox Live. They also twittered a bomb threat against the President of Sony. This group is of the second variety. Their attack had no purpose other than to gain bragging rights. They didn't hurt Sony or Microsoft, and as far as anyone knows, they weren't able to steal anything. The only thing they did was annoy a bunch of gamers. So they were just a bunch of jerk-offs with too much time, and probably money on their hands. An attack that size is more than you can do with a PC botnet. These guys had to have some serious server horsepower and big network pipes.

Hackers aren't cool. They aren't mysterious or exotic. They aren't even very tech-savvy. They know a few things about system weaknesses and how to exploit them. They have about a half-dozen hacks in their bag of tricks, and all they do is put them together in various ways. Think about it. Their number one tool is called a brute force attack, which consists of trying as many passwords as they can until they find someone who used their grandmother's birthday or the name of their cat. Not elegant. Not exotic. Just brain-dead thumping and taking advantage of something stupid someone else did.