The Strident Centrist Blog

The New York Times this morning has a story about a newly discovered way in which encrypted data on can be compromised when you have physical access to the computer. The discovery was made by a group at Princeton University, and it is described in chilling detail. All you need to do is turn off the computer, quickly remove the DRAM memory modules, throughly cool them down, reinsert them into a computer with equipped with a utility that will enable you to locate and read out the keys used to decode the encrypted data, then use the keys to access that data on the hard disk. The colder you chill the DRAM module the longer it will retain its memory contents. Several minutes can be achieved with an ordinary “Canned Air” duster, whereas hours of retention are possible with liquid nitrogen. Here’s the page at the university’s website where you can find more details.

I finally found the problem, or rather problems, I was having trying to get the “Empowering” proposal to display as desired using Internet Explorer 7, which I described in a post yesterday. First there was a semicolon missing from a statement in the top-level file behind the display. That solved the background color issue. The font issue was solved by the use of a properly formatted “style” element in the subordinate file. Damn computers that don’t understand what you intend.

I’m gaining new respect for people who build websites for a living, because I’m pulling my hair out trying to make sure the major internet browsers display the Empowering Working People in the 21st Century piece I put up a week or so ago the way I want to present it. Specifically, I want the text to appear in MS’s Arial (or similar sans-serif) font on a yellow background. SeaMonkey 1.1.7, the new all-in-one internet package from Mozilla, is the only one of the three I’ve tried that gets it right. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1, my default browser, does the yellow background part fine but insists on using what looks like a Times Roman font. And Microsoft’s Internet Explorer gets the font right but puts the text on a white background with yellow stripes top and bottom. What’s really weird about IE, though, is that it gets it right when I invoke the page files from my local disk using the File/Open function, but not when I surf to the URL after I’ve uploaded those very same files to the website host. I can’t for the life of me figure out why the rendering of the same files should differ. /rant

It still works - I think. At least the site home page comes up OK. Just selected a past post and that comes up OK too.

I just upgraded to a current version (2.2.2) of the WordPress blog engine scripts and so far it worked flawlessly. Sure am impressed with the hosting company LunarPages. Anyone out there who’s thinnking of setting up a website for whatever purpose can do a lot worse than hosting with them.

Now we’ll see if this post goes up OK.

I just noticed that the time stamps of posts have been off by an hour, presumably since the change-over to daylight savings time. I just changed the offset from GMT so hopefully the time of this post should be approximately correct.

There is a “Truth In Advertising” problem on my part, however. On further examination of the AuthImage plug-in, it became apparent that it had not been tested with version 2.0 of WordPress, which is what is running Stridentcentrist.com. So I sniffed through the plug-in piles and found ” Math Comment Span”, an extension that requires the comment poster to answer a simple arithmetic problem before the comment will be accepted. Hopefully this will cut down the spam deluge around here. Enjoy!

If any of you readers have tried to submit comments to posts recently and have not seen them be displayed, here’s why. Apparently the most faithful surfers to my blog are comment spamming bots. Every day I get scores, and sometimes hundreds, of automatically-generated comments saying something like “Nice blog you’ve got here” followed forthwith by pitches for diet pills, stock offers, penis enlargement scams, etc. Since the comment function has been set to “Moderate All” from the get-go, I have to personally review the submissions and decide whether or not to let them through. As this has increasingly become an exercise in scaning through mountains of span chaff in search of the occasional kernel of genuine comment wheat, I’ve become less and less dedicated to the effort. In fact, while distracted by complications in my family life during the last couple of months of last year and extending into January, I’ve largely gotten out of the habit. And so, I am beginning the transition to Comment Plan B.

Which is, unmoderated comments, but with a wrinkle. The latter will be provided by a plug-in added to the blog engine, WordPress, that displays a word wrinkled up in a graphic image that you, the commenter-wannabe, have to enter correctly in order for your prospective comment to be accepted. The idea is that the bots will be unable to decipher the word in the image, and thus be frustrated in their attempts to robo-post, whereas the meat-space human with a brain has the wherewithal to interpret and enter it correctly. If you read other blogs with any frequency and diversity, you’ve probably run across this technology before. The plug-in is called AuthImage and tonight or tomorrow morning I am going to install it. Or at least try.

Which brings me to the core purpose of this post. I am what my dad used to call the “chief cook and bottle washer” around here, meaning that this is a one person operation and thus by necessity I’m a jack-of-all-trades. I not only drive, but maintain the vehicle and add any desirable performance enhancements. And considering that the latter functions requires skills that I’m only marginally familiar with, it’s entirely possible that I could screw this up and be off the air for a while. So, please be patient while I dive in to this. I’ll let you know how it comes out and hopefully you’ll soon be able to post your own comments.

I’m about that close to ripping every vestige of Yahoo! out of my computer. All that has held me back from doing it already is the fact that my kids and I keep in close touch with Yahoo Instant Messenger.

When I fired up this morning I was prompted to download and install the latest version of YIM, which I did. This evening when I clicked on the “Send Link” function in my Firefox browser, instead of a new message form on my old familiar Thunderbird email client with the URL already on the page, up popped another tab in the browser prompting me to sign in to Yahoo! I killed it and tried again; same thing. The only thing different from the last time I sent a link, which was probably yesterday, is the Yahoo update. I clicked on the browser “Options” tab to change the default, but so far have not found how I can do it.

This really pissed me off. Yahoo had no damn right to make this kind of a change in my system without my consent! I sent their CS operation an email about it and it was with diffuculty that I restrained myself from exhibiting some of the more colorful elements of the vocabulary I learned in the Army. I am eagerly awaiting their response.

As David Isenberg says, it’s the opposite of Net Neutrality. This is the way the issue should be framed, so pass the meme along. If everyone who sees this sends the link to 3 or 4 others, it will be all over the net in no time.

Science Daily has had more than its usual quota of interesting pieces over the last few days. Here are a few of them:\

Very long lasers made of optical fibers offer a promising route to highly secure communications.

Nothing beats quantum communication for absolute security, but the new method, which relies on classical rather than quantum physics, provides faster communication over long distances. It would also be feasible with existing hardware, in contrast to quantum communication that will require development of new, and probably expensive, components.

A new technique to identify objects of art will be foolproof

The system is based on the owner of the work selecting, for example, one square centimetre. The roughness/texture and colour of that square centimetre are then measured on a micrometer scale, and put into a database. Objects and collections which are fingerprinted can then be easily identified and traced when on loan or in transport.

It sounds good, but mightn’t it be a bit premature to say it’s foolproof?

Greenland Ice Sheet Still Losing Mass

The study indicates that from April 2004 to April 2006, Greenland was shedding ice at about two and one-half times the rate of the previous two-year period, according to CU-Boulder researchers Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr. The researchers used measurements taken with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, to calculate that Greenland lost roughly 164 cubic miles of ice from April 2004 to April 2006 — more than the volume of water in Lake Erie.

Erie is by far the smallest of the Great Lakes by volume, but that’s still a hell of a lot of water. This last story has an explanation of how the dual-satellite GRACE experiment works.

A change in gravity due to a pass by GRACE over a portion of Greenland imperceptibly tugs the lead satellite away from the trailing satellite, said Velicogna. A sensitive ranging system allows researchers to measure the distance of the two satellites down to as small as 1 micron — about 1/50 the width of a human hair — and to then calculate the ice mass in particular regions of Greenland.