Flutterby™! From 2016-01-01 to 2016-01-31

Why Facebook Won, and Other Hard Truths. I think it goes deeper than that, but there's some truth there.

Prior to San Bernardino Attack, Many Were Trained to Spot Terrorists; None Did:

These behavioral indicators have become central to the U.S. counterterrorism prevention strategy, yet critics say they don’t work. “Quite simply, they rely on generalized correlations found in selectively chosen terrorists without using control groups to see how often the correlated behaviors identified occur in the non-terrorist population,” Michael German, a former FBI agent who is currently a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, told The Intercept.

About the big bucks business of training law enforcement in the thoroughly debunked notion of behavior indicators.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Education New York ]

Yappy Hew Near! Nappy Yew Hear!

Sooo... Making plans for the IAGSDC convention in Toronto next summer. Can we get a Niagara tour without the wine tasting?

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits ]

Apparently unicorn poppers are not what I thought...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Dance Burns More Calories Than Running.

Vimeo video accompanying the press release

Rewrites of that sketch press release-ish thing:

• Research Finds Dancing May Burn More Calories Than Cycling, Running Or Swimming
• Study finds that dance burns more calories than cycling or running

[ related topics: Current Events Sports Pyrotechnics Pedal Power Video Bicycling ]

RT Hash Tag ‏@stwange:

Wow, fuck you BT

This is all the more reason we need to move away from DNS to key-based identity systems.

[ related topics: Photography Databases ]

#VanillaISIS ? Really? Is that what the hashtag had devolved to? What happened to Y'all Qaeda?

So when they're on the trees, they're aLmonds, and off the tree it's pronounced amond, because...

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

All those different colors with the same label and flavor description....

[ related topics: Photography ]

This screwdriver was notched specifically top change the codes on a WW2 era encryption device https://www.flutterby.net/Image:2016-01-04-1

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Netflix 2016 spending on original programming will exceed Viacom, Fox, Time Warner and Fox

More fodder for the bandwidth bet...

[ related topics: broadband Software Engineering Current Events Currency ]

Northbound on the Amtrak San Joaquin 715, seeing the muddy back yards and ad hoc junk yards of the Central Valley...

[ related topics: California Culture Trains Public Transportation ]

A few years ago, I was amazed by a video that showed cars going through an intersection labeled in real-time with their license plate numbers and speeds. Last night on my train ride home I was playing around on my laptop with various facial recognition techniques to pull faces from my photo library, and identify them. It's actually hard to do with still data, because you only have one picture to work off of, but in video...

This morning on my Facebook feed this article about churches automatically getting attendance data via video popped up, but in that 4 years or so since the car intersection video showed widely deployed technology, video facial recognition has become ubiquitous. High end retailers are using it to identify regular customers. It makes total sense that churches are doing it.

http://fusion.net/story/154199/facial-recognition-no-rules/

[ related topics: Language Books Photography Work, productivity and environment Automobiles Machinery Trains Video ]

Just some musings in response to a Facebook query about what luxury brands on the web will mean:

I think products can be divided into two portions: The product itself, and the experience of the product. For commodities, the product itself is all that matters. For high end products, yes, there's additional value in the product, but the experience of purchasing and using the product becomes more important.

I'm a fan of a certain brand of high end power tools (Festool). Yes, they're amazingly well engineered, get a lot of the engineering details right, but a good portion of the value of the product is that I go down to my local Festool dealer (Hi, Fred!) and they know my name, they know what I use my tools for, they'll stay past closing time if I can't get there but need something (in fact I think I've got a weekend number for 'em). And I'm just a hobbyist. So the dealer experience is one side.

The other side is, of course, the experience of flashing the brand around. I have a "Festool" bumper sticker on my truck. Occasionally it gets me in conversations. Those conversations are generally very high value (other people who know the brand, know what it means, have common interests to mine).

So the portion that the web can impact is that sales experience. The problem is, of course, that with the advent of big data, Amazon is working to create the same sort of personalized sales experience over the web as you get in person. The huge sample size and ability to cluster customer experience means it's going to be very hard to beat with a boutique product, *unless* you build that personal connection, with real actual sales people.

I think the future of luxury brands on the web is the future of personal brands on the web. Real salespeople who cross over between in-person retail and the virtual space, People who can out-perform the algorithms in understanding customer needs.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books History Space & Astronomy Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Machinery Woodworking Festool ]

David Bowie has a new video: David Bowie - Lazarus (YouTube). I'm linking it here not because of the video, but because it's shot in portrait mode. So the assumption is that viewers will be seeing this on their tablet or phone, not on a laptop, desktop, or TV.

I think that's a powerful evolution of media...

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Movies Invention and Design Journalism and Media Television Video ]

Moxie Marlinspike: We Should All Have Something To Hide:

The more fundamental problem, however, is that living in an existing social structure creates a specific set of desires and motivations in a way that merely talking about other social structures never can. The world we live in influences not just what we think, but how we think, in a way that a discourse about other ideas isn’t able to. Any teenager can tell you that life’s most meaningful experiences aren’t the ones you necessarily desired, but the ones that actually transformed your very sense of what you desire.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Theater & Plays ]

RT Mikko Hypponen ‏@mikko:

“Yes, I am a criminal.

My crime is that of curiosity.

My crime is that of outsmarting you,

something that you will never forgive me for.”

Very interesting social shift: OkCupid Adds a Feature for the Polyamorous:

The move comes in response to a rapid uptick in the number of OkCupid users interested in non-monogamous relationships. According to the company’s data, 24 percent of its users are “seriously interested” in group sex. Forty-two percent would consider dating someone already involved in an open or polyamorous relationship. Both numbers represent increases of 8 percentage points from five years ago. The number of people who say they are solely committed to monogamy, meanwhile, has fallen to a minority of all users, 44 percent, down from 56 percent in 2010.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Today in economics professors learn uncomfortable truths about themselves news: Better-looking students get better grades — but not in online classes:

“We really thought it was just that more attractive people have other personality traits, other skills,” Peters, an associate professor at MSU Denver, said. “But it does appear to be some type of actual discrimination on the part of the professors. That surprised us.”

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Sociology Current Events Economics ]

Ya know, I wanna retract the "Y'all Qaeda" crack: Idaho and Arizona are not in the "Y'all" zone: http://www.fastcoexist.com/168...uliarities-of-american-english#2

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

RT Nathan Luedtke ‏@nathanluedtke:

Before enlightenment: grind beans, boil water

After enlightenment: grind beans, boil water

[ related topics: Skating ]

Made a part to fix a neighbor's chair, wrote Monday square dance gig's choreo, studied for PADI cert. Now to dance to Jet Roberts.

[ related topics: Furniture ]

This is a reminder that I need to go take a good long run or bike ride: RT €MP€ROR X ‏@emperorx:

THE INTERNET IS A MACHINE THAT CONVERTS LONELINESS INTO ADVERTISEMENT REVENUE.

[ related topics: Net Culture Bicycling ]

Ah, the challenge of accomplishing multiple projects when the first one involves something wrapped in bubble wrap... [pop pop pop pop pop]

So sick of working on square dance choreography, still wondering what I'm gonna call tomorrow. Sigh. But can now do amazing things with SD.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Studying SCUBA: "agree on air supply limits"... Uh... Lost in Love is okay, but Now and Forever is right out.

Circlet Press: Life is fragile and so are stories: Goodbye to A.R. Morlan aka Renee M. Charles.

Linked here not just for the free ebooks, but for the memory of someone struggling and caught between cultures and family.

[ related topics: Sociology ]

Ho. Leee. Shit: Google Security Research: Issue 693: TrendMicro node.js HTTP server listening on localhost can execute commands.

Words cannot begin to describe.

I've had some discussion recently with elderly acquaintances who run Windows 10 about software to protect them. I... don't know where to begin, but I'm wondering if I need to tell the one person who's running anti-virus software that we need to wipe it from his machine.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Microsoft virus Software Engineering Sports Community ]

First full set as club caller for the Vallejo Pioneers square dance club. More sight calling than I expected top do, but fun.

Next time you're tempted to complain about your chickenshit job: Woman rescued by Petaluma firefighters after falling into chicken waste pit.

[ related topics: Food Current Events Heinlein Birds ]

Sonoma County folks: RSVP and come to one or all of these sessions! http://northbaydesignkit.blogs...p/strongtowns-in-santa-rosa.html

Sigh. Developments... well... made this pull quote stand out (it's not a fiscal thing, it's an emotional one, and I'm a degree of separation away from it, but I see the pattern): Can You Spot a Liar? Probably not. But here are some techniques grifters use, courtesy of Maria Konnikova and her new book about con artists.:

The reason those traits are so important to con artists is that you are taking advantage of people, and in order to do it well, you can’t think that you’re taking advantage of people, because the moment you do, you start feeling bad for them. ...

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design Art & Culture ]

OpenSSH: client bug CVE-0216-0777. Allows a compromised server to steal your SSH client keys, apparently only one that's not in your ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

From Shadow: An awesome demonstration of using Unicode text flow features to obscure filename extensions and con people into clicking on bad attachments: https://www.reddit.com/r/tales...l7/unstoppable_force_meets_email _attachment/cywxua3?context=4

Yes, Perl, function prototypes are cool, but if @a=(1421352000) then localtime(@a) should be the same as localtime(1421352000)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Perl Open Source Mathematics hubris ]

Saved for reading: Butler W. Lampson, specifically Hints for Computer System Design.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Graphic Design ]

On hold for an @Amtrak to ask a question about Fresno parking. She helpfully gives me a number... which is the one I called. #infiniteloop

[ related topics: California Culture Trains Public Transportation ]

Beware GM cars, they're coming with one hell of a license agreement: http://www.autoblog.com/2015/0...ors-says-owns-your-car-software/

[ related topics: Software Engineering Automobiles ]

I'm trying to use Firefox to maintain browser diversity, but more stuff isn't working in it, and their JavaScript engine is getting slow.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Machinery ]

Stop sign compliance is low for all modes, but it must be lower for drivers of police cruisers than even cyclists...

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Pool portion of PADI open water SCUBA cert complete. But

Tipping point: 1/4 the price to buy a person a tablet with a decent display than to print out pictures for them.

[ related topics: Photography ]

I lurk on a couple of mailing lists where people who haven't thought much about identity regularly propose "the blockchain" as a solution to identity problems. And, of course, I've also scoffed at Bitcoin, not for the concept, but because it's too unstable to work as a currency rather than a speculative investment vehicle, and because transactions don't complete fast enough to make it a reasonable payment vehicle. And that's only gotten worse recently.

Anyway, Larry​ pointed to this article on why the current path of Bitcoin is going a direction that makes it less usable: Mike Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

Later addendum: I'm as up for the point and laugh at Bitcoin as anyone, but here's a counter: Point-by-Point Response To Mike Hearn’s Final Bitcoin Post.

[ related topics: Weblogs Work, productivity and environment Currency Economics ]

The one day this week my truck could go into the shop, so I rode my bike to work today. Soaked. But feeling hard-core.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Machinery Bicycling ]

Lodging booked for my open water dives in Monterey this weekend. Fingers crossed about what the storms mean for wave height...

Break room conversation about having enough spoons, and it took me a moment to figure out eating utensils, not disability discussion.

[ related topics: Community ]

A couple of times recently, when first starting out in the morning, the truck hasn't moved forward when I've shifted into Drive. Wiggle the column a bit, and it starts moving. It also did this one evening coming home from work, worryingly after I'd driven it about a thousand feet (pulled out of parking, stopped at a stop sign, went to merge into traffic, whoops!).

With the weekend Monterey trip, Charlene said "rent a car". So I did. Now weekend Enterprise rates are pretty damned good, I've got Friday through Monday for $62.61 with 400 miles, extra miles are $.20 each, and I think I'll come out just about even.

However, I got to thinking: Truck has a 17 or 18 gallon tank, gets about 320 miles per tank. Gas is cheap right now, but if it were not a whole lot more expensive, given that a compact car is almost certainly going to get double that mileage-wise, I'll almost make up the cost of the rental in gas alone.

This is something seriously worth considering as we go to replace the truck... Especially since I've been commuting more.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Travel Automobiles Machinery ]

The Onion bought by Spanish broadcaster Univision Communications for roughly twice the valuation of The Washington Post.

[ related topics: Food ]

From the "are you smoking crack?" files: 3 of the RSA security conference panelists are CSI: Cyber *actors* http://www.rsaconference.com/events/us16/agenda/keynotes

Addendum: Violet Blue has a well measured look at this.

[ related topics: Drugs Cryptography Conferences ]

And forecast is for bigger waves than I can do my check dives in. Looking to see what the next two weekends look like.

Parent of the year. And awesome at interior decorating: Imgur: I built a tree in my daughter's bedroom

[ related topics: Eric's Life ]

People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened:

The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicates that the participants came to internalize the stories they were told, providing rich and detailed descriptions of events that never actually took place.

Lots of good fodder to consider next time you're doing anything that involves the veracity of memories... Including serving on a jury.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Current Events ]

Stripparaoke: the new nightlife trend that combines – yes – stripping and karaoke. So this is apparently amateur karaoke with the stripping by the regular strippers in the club. It sounds awesome.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events ]

"Evenin', Sam." "Evenin' Ralph."

OH at the office: "I have needed to buy kneepads for my entire adult life, and I've never purchased them." I've got several sets...

Realized that my Presidential preference basically comes down to: Who's willing to give Edward Snowden a full pardon?

Penguin scraps degree requirement:

The firm wants to have a more varied intake of staff and suggests there is no clear link between holding a degree and performance in a job.

This announcement follows a series of financial companies dropping academic requirements for applicants.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Current Events Monty Python Heinlein Education ]

RT Nobilis Reed ‏@Nobilis

Hey look! @EmpoweredComic (one of my must-buys) is now a webcomic!

Seriously folks. Add this one to your list.

http://www.empoweredcomic.com/comic/volume-1-page-1

Added here so I can move the link to the tablet.

"I'm really sorry that I deleted your [snow] penis"

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

The Guardian: US authorities distorting tests to downplay lead content of water.

Documents seen by the Guardian show that water boards in cities including Detroit and Philadelphia, as well as the state of Rhode Island, have distorted tests by using methods deemed misleading by the Environment Protection Agency.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

PSA: If I confuse you with someone else, it's not because of your ethnic background. I do that with white people too.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Race ]

Elf Sternberg: Teaching Web Development in High School: Chromebooks really get in the way.

Another cautionary tale about how modern computing is becoming more and more about media consumption.

[ related topics: Children and growing up tolkien Journalism and Media ]

Great read on how the NSA put the back door in NIST EC cryptography, and how Juniper ScreenOS got similar: https://blog.agilebits.com/201...oors-go-bad-mind-your-ps-and-qs/

[ related topics: Privacy Weblogs Cryptography Gambling ]

RT Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog)

It's important

To tell children

That they can be

"Anything they can dream,"

So that, one day,

They'll blame

Themselves

Instead of

The system

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Wait: Is there anyone out there who believes that Donald Trump *would* lose supporters if he shot someone? Why is this news?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events ]

It is hard to overstate the devastation from this latest storm.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Listening to James Taylor: how long has it been since the Mass turnpike was covered with snow on the first of December?

[ related topics: Pop Culture ]

Back to the watch repair materials... Parts box, with price list.

[ related topics: Photography Movies ]

And another watch repair price list

[ related topics: Photography Movies ]

Given that NY & CA's proposed ban on encrypted cell phone legislation have the same wording, who's actually behind this overreach?

[ related topics: Wireless Cryptography ]

Trying to debug an incomplete Toto toilet flush. Damn, home improvement discussion forums can make you lose all faith in humanity.

[ related topics: Community ]

How do we make marketing understand that our time to filter is a cost that hurts their efforts? (Home Depot sending me snow blower email)

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

Cutting circles out of black electrical tape to go over the LEDs in the new replacement smoke detectors so we can sleep. Why so much light?

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Any of you home improvement type people have opinions on a multi-head mini split heat pump vs forced air for a <1k sq.ft. home?

I don't know what house project I started out top do, but I've generated a ton of yak hair today

[ related topics: Photography Real Estate ]

The net is getting to be a scary-ass place: attempt at BGP hijacking Google's DNS servers: https://bgpstream.com/event/17605

If Car Commercials Were Based on Fact not Fiction - 001

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Automobiles ]

RT Martin Fischer @martin_fischer:

What's the difference between USA and USB?

One connects to all your devices and accesses your data, the other is a hardware standard.

If we're going to have a militarized police force, the least we can do is deploy it against telephone solicitors.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Enforcement Phreaking ]

I'm so old that I remember that before machine learning was big data, it was data mining...

[ related topics: Education ]

Keeping downtown Petaluma awesome

[ related topics: Photography ]

Hey, Sonoma County Transit now has NextBus! The data are hilariously wrong, which is why I'm on a Golden Gate bus, but: baby steps!

[ related topics: Bay Area Public Transportation ]

Charlene was getting ready to go out this evening and said "I need to get changed", and I'm still pondering the semantics of that statement

Politico: The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter:

Not all authoritarians are Republicans by any means; in national surveys since 1992, many authoritarians have also self-identified as independents and Democrats. And in the 2008 Democratic primary, the political scientist Marc Hetherington found that authoritarianism mattered more than income, ideology, gender, age and education in predicting whether voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. But Hetherington has also found, based on 14 years of polling, that authoritarians have steadily moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party over time. ...

[ related topics: Politics moron Education ]

If I have any preferences around any memorials held for me, they largely involve a gathering at a pub or similar, but this could sway me back to funeral parlors: Grieving family's horror as hardcore pornography played at funeral for father and baby son.

“It took them nearly four minutes to turn it off, people couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

“To the priest’s credit he handled it extremely well. He apologised on behalf of Cardiff Council and said that in 30 years of doing the job, he had never seen such filth.”

Yeah. Please remember me that way.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Current Events Heinlein ]

There are things about the notion of systemd that are attractive. It's easy to write "init"-ish scripts for it. I like the notion of fast boots by understanding resource allocation. But there's some boneheaded shit, too. Like:

Mount efivarfs read-only #2402

The path to pseudo-files that allow writing EFI are mounted read-write by default. Which means that, as root, the wrong rm can brick your machine. Whoops.

[ related topics: Sociology Writing Shoes ]

White House denies clearance to tech researcher with links to Snowden

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and security researcher Ashkan Soltani says he has been denied security clearance for his new job with White House

This is going to be a problem with recruiting in the future.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Journalism and Media Heinlein Race Real Estate ]

Decided those wall plates really needed a darker border, so did a rail and stile floating panel

[ related topics: Photography Boats Trains ]

Gluing up a panel for the bathroom vanity door

[ related topics: Photography ]

Glue up of the drawer for underneath the head of the bathtub

[ related topics: Photography ]