Quoted by Patton Oswalt, Mr McAdam describes the beautiful, perfect elixir thusly:
Laphroaig really is the perfect whisky. Salt, blood, hospitals and fire, toffee-sweet comfort and undersea peace.
Those goofballs who make the execrable Keurig machines are annoyed that people make “compatible” pods, so they’re working out a way to keep them from working by using something akin to DRM.
But since people aren’t generally very excited about reduced functionality, they’re lying about why they’re doing it. What tools.
But, as the title says, you pod-coffee people deserve whatever you get. Grind your own, use a pour-over device, and be done with it. Cheap AND delicious!
We call this one “The Case Of The Visible Bitcoins!”
Good CHRIST those people are awful.
I think the most important thing that facebook is going to do for humanity in general and the United States in particular, as a society, is inform us which of our friends/relatives/acquaintances are fucking idiots that we really should not associate with at all.
This maps closely to another quote, the specifics and citation for which I’ve lost, to the effect of “Twitter makes me want to buy drinks for people I don’t know, and Facebook makes me want to punch my friends and family.”
Use an Apple device? And by this I mean any iPad, iPhone, or Mac?
Then you need to install all available OS updates with a furious quickness, for there is a security bug to end all security bugs in the SSL code on your device. All platforms are affected.
It’s a seriously bad, bad, bad bug. It may be the worse security bug of all time. No certificate validation is happening, which means that site you think you have an encrypted connection to might not be who they say they are. That’s an ID thief’s dream come true.
This bug is bad enough that it’s entirely possible that it was deliberately introduced at the behest of the NSA. The crypto we use daily relies on provably unbreakable encryption, so the only vulnerabilities they can exploit rely on broken implementations; this is a known tactic that the NSA and similar organizations have used. The timing certainly works.
More here.
You can check to see if you’re vulnerable using this site. On a Mac, you’ll need to use Safari to get the best possible reading, but it’ll mostly work with other browsers.
Shoring up the argument that it’s part of a deliberate effort: an even worse bug has subsequently been discovered in the Linux GnuTLS code.
Skipping the technical stuff, the takeway for you, the Heathen reader, is that you absolutely MUST upgrade your iOS devices and Macs today, right the fuck now. Full stop.
Fortunately, Apple makes this pretty easy. Just go to Settings -> General -> Software Update on an iPhone or iPad, or to (Black Apple) -> Software Update on a Mac.
Trigger Happy over in the New Republic raises issues worth considering.
If you can identify the movie these pictures are from, well, you’re both as old as I am, and as geeky as I am.
(The answer, in an IMDB link instead of my customer Wikipedia one, to avoid spoilers.)
Via Kadrey: “Alice in Waterland” by Elena Kalis.
When Bruce Springsteen toured Australia last year, he needed an extra guitar man because Little Steven couldn’t make the trip.
He tapped Tom Morello, with whom he’d apparently become friends since a performance together in LA in 2008.
Here they are, doing “The Ghost of Tom Joad” (from the Hall of Fame in 2009, not the Aussie tour).
I think it’s safe to say the collaboration works. Play it loud.
(Via this Rolling Stone interview with Morello, which is worth reading for lots of reasons.)
Update
In the “that settles it” department, looks like I’m buying tickets to see Bruce in the Woodlands in May, because Morello is with him for the whole tour owing at least partly to Van Zandt’s shooting schedule on Lilyhammer.
Without network neutrality, it may well be. N.B. that Netflix is already paying Comcast for the privilege of not being throttled. This should alarm you.
The communications networks have been built largely by government-protected monopolies, but those monopolies are now trying to extract every single dime from their customers they can. We have to stop this. The FCC needs to treat them as common carriers, and we need to realize that the net is a basic utility, like water or power.
If we don’t fix this, then the net as we’ve enjoyed it for the last 15 years is going to die.
They’re apparently not completely sure if District of Columbia drivers’ licenses count as ID.
Every time I think the Internet has gotten weird enough, somebody has to go and raise the bar.
Heathen, I give you 50 Cent dubbed over a Jehovah’s Witness signing to deaf people about how important it is that they not masturbate.
(Widely linked, earliest h/t to R. W. S.)
“WHERE THE FUCK IS WALLACE? STRING! STRING! LOOK AT ME!“
Oh. Right here.
I see.
Nevermind.
Carry on.
I have a time machine, apparently, because I got all these Christmas pictures!
How about a short, fan-made film about a lightsaber fight in the dark? It’s very well done; make time.
TODAY, I did not have to touch SharePoint.
TODAY was a good day.
Thug Notes is completely brilliant. The argument: stereotypical urban gentleman explains classic literature.
Seriously, beat this, from the Atlantic’s new feature on fraternities:
Oe warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.
Cockfighting Fans Swear Revenge Against Mitch McConnell.
Ah, Kentucky.
Well, darn.
The first Culture book I read was the the awful Consider Phlebas a couple years ago. Honestly, it’s such crap that it nearly put me off the whole series. It wasn’t until last year that I bothered with the next volume of the series, Player of Games, largely due to the number of people I found who agreed that Phlebas was crap and that a better place to start was Games.
Ok, fine. Turns out, they were right; Games was a fun book. With Banks inconveniently promoted to the choir invisible, though, I didn’t want to run right into another Culture book, so I paced myself, and didn’t start the third book until this month. And now, having finished it, I think I’m done with Culture.
Weapons is a mess. Banks is trying an ambitious interleaved structure here, but it didn’t really work for me — largely because I never really gave a shit what happened, or had happened, to the protagonist. This is further reflected by the enormous gap between the last book and this one; by the end I was really finding this a slog.
It’s entirely possible Banks just isn’t for me.
PinaColliding operates under two assumptions:
Escape, by Rupert Holmes, is a great song; and
Should there fore be in every movie.
Like, say, Lord of the Rings, or The Departed.
Actress Alexandra Daddario, late of True Detective, had this to say yesterday evening.
The NSA is a threat to our national security.
Go. Read. Schneier knows what he’s talking about.
TechDirt gives the Feds both barrels over the appalling case of Rahinah Ibrahim:
Our government lies.
This is an obvious statement but it needs to be put out there in black and white. We, the people, are represented and “protected” by a government that actively lies to its constituents to cover up its mistakes. The recent case of Rahinah Ibrahim, who was accidentally placed on the government’s “no fly” list and only removed after a long legal battle, illustrates this truth about our government to a sickening degree.
Instead of owning up to the mistake, our government argued for the better part of a decade that to even acknowledge that a no-fly list existed would expose “state secrets” and that they therefore couldn’t possibly even confirm or deny any such list, so obviously discussing this person’s status, or trying to ensure that the status was correctly determined, was impossible.
For example, from James Clapper this year, quoted in the TechDirt article:
“My assertion of the state secret and statutory privileges in this case precludes defendant or any other agency from making any response, including through document production or deposition testimony, that would serve to disclose classified information regarding plaintiff or any other individual; the sources, methods, and means by which classified information is collected; and information which would confirm or deny whether information regarding plaintiff or any other individual is in NCTC’s TIDE database.” — James Clapper, director of national intelligence, April 23, 2013.
What. The. Fuck. Techdirt again:
Eric Holder’s deferral to “state secrets” in 2013 was based on the belief that a single disclosure, especially if it prompted more, would lead to terrorists gaming the no-fly list. John Tyler, then-attorney for the DOJ, claimed in 2006 that Ibrahim’s complaint was so inextricably intertwined with the utility of the “no fly” list that her case should be dismissed.
According to these statements, being mistakenly placed on the “no fly” list is just something those wrongly blacklisted will have to deal with. These citizens (and other foreigners) just need to resign themselves to the fact that they won’t be boarding planes, possibly for the rest of their lives. Once you’re on the list, you’re on it. The list is apparently so crucial to national security that even admitting it may have blacklisted someone accidentally would turn the nation’s airports into terrorist playgrounds.
A mistake was made made, but rather than looking for a solution, the government grabbed its “state secret” broom and swept it under the “neither confirm nor deny” rug.
The government cannot be so beholden to its own inflated terrorism fears that it willingly punishes a person for nearly a decade because of a paperwork error. There’s plenty of middle ground between keeping the country safe and screwing someone over because an agent couldn’t follow a form’s instructions.
Go read the whole thing.
Remember when the FBI claimed it didn’t have to answer Ryan Shapiro’s FOIA requests because he might learn something as a consequence of their hilariously inconsistent and irrational redaction?
Yeah, they’re doing it again. This time, they heavily redacted a letter released to some privacy hawks in Congress despite the fact that one of them had already been released in full previously. But go read the whole link; it’d be hilarious if it weren’t, you know, the top law enforcement body in the country.
Snake handling pastor bitten by snake during service. He then refused medical attention, and was thereby promoted to the choir invisible.
All good Heathen, of course, know this Robert Heinlein quote, from Time Enough for Love.
Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
RAH was wrong about many, many things, but this is not one of those times.
Look. I don’t watch TV news. It’s been a dead letter for a long time. I sure don’t watch TV sports coverage — I’ve got little use for the nattering foolishness that usually qualifies as sports broadcasting, and find reading stories on ESPN completely fills what needs I have for information from that world.
So I skipped Dale Hansen’s commentary on Michael Sam until just now. That, gentle Heathen, was a mistake.
Dale Hansen is the sports anchor for Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA. It should without saying, then, that Hansen is an older, straight, white man (I checked; he’s 65). So what Hansen says about Michael Sam caught me a little flatfooted even though I knew, as you must by now as well, what his position was.
You’d think with a headline like that, I must be taking stuff out of context just for amusement’s sake, right?
Yeah, not so much.
“How mass surveillance, secret courts, confirmation bias, and the FBI can ruin your life.”
You know what fixes this? Transparency, oversight, and personal liability for those who overstep.
NBC ran a report about how your devices would get OWNED immediately by evil Russian hackers the minute you turn them on in Sochi.
Turns out, not so much. It’s basically the exploding truck all over again. As noted in the TechDirt takedown:
Nice job. NBC are, of course, doubling down and insisting their story is genuine and correct, because they are generally craven and ignorant.
More at the well-regarded Errata Security.
Guys, I’m sorry, but it turns out crocodiles can climb trees. Govern yourself accordingly.
PLAY will be a short film about childhood, playtime, and that sort of secret world we all lost when we grew up. Chris and his partner will rpoduce the footage using a dozen GoPro cameras strapped to a dozen children who are then turned loose in a New York playground. It sounds like a punchline, but it really does work — he’s got a little sample up on his Tumblr, shot from his son’s perspective. It’s immersive and cool, and the idea of having a broader pool of such footage to work from is pretty fascinating.
There is, inevitably, a Kickstarter to make the whole thing real. The goal is modest ($24K), and they’re almost 10% of the way there. Help ‘em out, if you’ve got a little extra in your pocket.
Today is the day we fight back against ridiculous, overreaching, plainly illegal surveillance from the NSA.
Go to the link. The EFF will help you determine who your reps in Congress are, and will even set up the phone calls and give you talking points.
Make time. Even if your reps are, as mine are, generally weasels. This kind of day of action is precisely what pols respect.
This is a democracy. Take part.
Well, new SNL featured player Brooks Wheelan made one.
What’s neat about this is that a year ago, in early 2012, Wheelan had an engineering job in Los Angeles and did comedy on the side, as a hobby. He did not even have a Wikipedia page.
The video ends up documenting what will probably be one of the most momentous and amazing years in his life, but he had no way of knowing that would be the outcome when he started the project last January.
That’s pretty cool.
In this video, Rep. Blumenauer (D-OR) takes the deputy director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (Michael Botticelli) to the woodshed over bullshit answers and question-dodging about the dangers of marijuana.
Because, brother, if you’re not, you’re not living right. Only four episodes in, and this show is on a pace to be one of the best things ever on television.
Last night, the fourth episode of the thus-far-very-talky drama ended with a 6+ minute tracking shot — i.e., almost 7 minutes with no cuts or edits — that is, all by itself, the best action sequence I’ve seen in years.
No idea how long it’ll be up, but as of right now it’s on YouTube. Be aware this it’s basically one long spoiler, so stay away if you plan on catching up. A similarly spoilery recap is up at IndieWire, which includes HBO’s “behind the ep” feature free of HBO’s frankly awful web site. There’s another solid bit of discussion over at AV Club, naturally.
ZOMBEAVERS is clearly the Citizen Kane of homicidal undead rodent movies.
“His head, preserved in a jar, is held by the School of Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, and is brought out for meetings of infectious disease specialists.”
Cit.
But no: Fox News is freaking out over CVS’s decision to stop selling tobacco products.
Professional halfwit Gretchen Carlson actually asked, on air, “Is it OK legally … to restrict tobacco availability in a private store like this?” Apparently, Ms Carlson thinks some body of law governs what must be sold in any given store, and implicitly supports such laws, despite the rather alarming implications.
This is really yet another example of Fox being primarily interested only in stories they can warp into a club to hit the President with. How anyone takes them seriously is completely beyond me.
My company routinely deals with government entities that have legitimate security concerns, so it’s not surprising that, sometimes, I receive mail that is digitally signed, or has some encryption component.
Usually, this is done poorly, which is no surprise, because mail encryption is still not seamless. However, yesterday I got a mail that Outlook won’t open at all. Instead, I get this:
The hilarious part of this is that the mail opens fine with no hint of trouble when read from my Mac’s Mail.app client, or from either of my iOS mail clients. Security, Microsoft style!
Top Gear sent Richard Hammond out on a pretty unique handling test. The question: Would you rather be in a BMW 1M or a Porsche Cayman R when trapped in a desperate movie-style car chase with snipers, commandos on motorbikes, helicopters, tanks, and off-road attack vehicles?
This is why state secrets is bullshit, and why “trust me” is never a legitimate policy for law enforcement.
The government contested a former Stanford University student’s assertion that she was wrongly placed on a no-fly list for seven years in court despite knowing an FBI official put her on the list by mistake because he checked the “wrong boxes” on a form, a federal judge wrote today.
We only know this today because Ibrahim sued, which was only possible because she was able to get pro bono legal aid, because despite knowing it was bullshit the feds fought her every step of the way.
Heads. Should. Roll.
This short film (5-ish minutes) is pretty great. From the description:
“Just Ella” posits a future overrun by gibbering monstrosities. Ella takes refuge in a “the Ossington Safehouse, a collectively-run space dedicated to human sovereignty.” But despite doing the assigned tasks on the chore list, the Safehouse isn’t safe — the terrors outside are nothing compared to those within.
Contains perhaps the first cinematic example of autocomplete used for a dramatic reveal.
Widely linked, but I saw it over at JWZ’s place.