Quotulatiousness

June 29, 2013

Finding replacements for Google Reader

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

If you use Google Reader, you’ve got until Monday to find a replacement tool or give up on your RSS feeds. Lifehacker wants to help:

The first thing you’ll want to do is back up your data as an OPML file through Google Takeout. You won’t be able to access it ever again once the service shuts down, so this officially qualifies as crunch time. Luckily, it’s really simple, and we’ve shown you how to do it in three easy steps. Once you’re done, I’d also make sure you have several secure backups saved at home and on the cloud, just to be sure.

As soon as your data is safe and sound, it’s time to go shopping for a new RSS home. Feedly is the most popular alternative at the moment, but there are tons of other options if it doesn’t check all of your boxes. In case you missed it, we’ve rounded up some of the best to help make the transition a little easier. All of these services will import that all-important OPML file, but some can pull your Reader data directly off of Google’s servers while it’s still available, including starred and read items in many cases, so it’s probably worth it to set up a new account over the weekend. In fact, if you haven’t settled on one alternative yet, you might want to sign up for several to hedge your bets and preserve this valuable metadata.

I’ve been using Google Reader to stay on top of news for my weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-ups at GuildMag, so finding a replacement was necessary. I settled on The Old Reader for my GW2 feeds and I’m experimenting with Newsvibe for other feeds.

I’ve been very pleased with The Old Reader, which has been a great replacement and the transition was nearly seamless. I’m still not completely sold on Newsvibe, as it has a couple of issues that reduce its usefulness to me: the session times out very quickly (less than an hour) and it can’t handle certain RSS feeds and refuses to indicate why (it just fails to add the new subscription silently).

Jeff Jarvis calls for private encryption

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

In the Guardian, Jeff Jarvis makes the case for internet communications to be protected by encryption:

Assuring the security of private communications regardless of platform — email, VOIP, direct message — should be a top priority of the internet industry in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations that US and UK governments are tapping into the net’s traffic.

The industry needs to at least come together to offer encryption for private communications as protection against government surveillance.

Guarantee of private communications should be a matter of law already. But, of course, it is not. In the US, only our first-class physical mail is protected from government surveillance without a warrant. In the UK, it was a case of opened mail that led to the closing of the Secret Department of the Post Office. As a matter of principle, the protection afforded our physical mail should extend to any private communication using any means. Just because the authors of the Fourth Amendment could not anticipate the internet and email, let alone Facebook, that should not grant government spies a loophole from the founders’ intent.

That protection could come from Congress, but it won’t. It could come from the courts, but it hasn’t.

I argued in my book Public Parts that government may try to portray itself as the protector of our privacy, but it is instead the most dangerous enemy of privacy, for it can gather our information without our knowledge and consent — that is the lesson of Snowden’s leaks — and has the power to use it against us.

Chris Kluwe on how to be a manly nerd

Filed under: Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:08

Former Vikings punter Chris Kluwe has a must-read piece in Esquire about how to be both nerdy and manly:

For example, every morning, I wake up from my nesting pile of bearskin pelts and immediately plunge into an ice-cold spring-water bath in order to facilitate maximal hair follicle growth on my face, chest, back, and pendulous member. After the brisk cleanse, I dry off by shaking my rippling muscles in a vigorous twitching pattern, much like that of a dire wolf shedding rain. I then run down a nearby small game animal, spit and roast it over a hand-built fire, and toss the bones to my pet crocodile, Frederick.

When it comes to playing video games, I’m just as manly. My Xbox 360 controller is hand-carved from a single block of mahogany, and it features an inbuilt testosterone sensor that lets me know if my massive thews involuntarily clench too hard in between rounds of Call of Duty and Battlefield 3. Obviously, the only reason I would start crushing exotic hardwood between my calloused hands is due to sheer excitement at my five-to-one kill/death ratio, and not at all because of an overwhelming abundance of pulsating sexuality coursing through my chiseled body, attracting all the poser girl gamers.

Sometimes, when one of the lesser females manages to somehow defeat me (obviously by cheating), I’ll let loose a primal bellow of animalistic rage in order to send her weak and delicate frame scurrying back into the bedroom where she belongs. Once she’s safely returned to her proper place, I make tender, ravishing love thrusts into her always-willing ladyparts, which I know she enjoys immensely. As a manly gamer, it is both my duty and my privilege to remind the fairer sex of the proper hierarchy in the electronic jungle, and I take my duties seriously. We manly gamers need to constantly reassert our alpha-ness upon the inferior girl gamer wannabees so they don’t get any stupid ideas that they’re as good as us.

1948 and the “Black Friday” of cryptanalysis

Filed under: Books, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

In Salon, Andrew Leonard looks at the early years of the NSA:

On Oct. 29, 1948, the Soviet Union suddenly changed all its ciphers and codes. What later became known as “Black Friday” delivered a huge shock to the two U.S. intelligence agencies that had conducted the bulk of American code-breaking efforts during World War II and its immediate aftermath. Before Black Friday, the Army’s SIS and the Navy’s OP-20-G complacently assumed that they had acquired the keys to most of the world’s encrypted communications. But with a flip of the switch the U.S. was once again in the dark — just as the Cold War was heating up.

“One of the gravest crises in the history of American cryptanalysis,” writes historian Colin Burke, led directly to the 1949 merging of the SIS and OP-20-G into the Armed Forces Security Agency. Three years later, another bureaucratic shuffle transformed the AFSA into the National Security Agency. A sense of panic induced by the “Soviets’ A-Bomb, the Berlin Blockade, the forming of the satellite bloc in Eastern Europe, the fall of China, and the Korean War” — all of which “were not predicted” by the intelligence agencies — encouraged the U.S. government to authorize the NSA to spend tens of millions of dollars on computer research, in the hope that technological advances would help crack the new Soviet codes.

Colin Burke is the author of It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis, 1930s-1960s. Burke completed his history in 1994, but until last week, his volume of crypto-geekery had only a handful of readers. Part of a series produced by the NSA’s Center for Cryptological History, It Wasn’t All Magic was considered classified material until May 2013, and was only made available online on June 24.

Nice timing! With the NSA currently occupying its highest public profile in living memory, a look back at its early history is quite instructive. It is useful to be reminded that the mandate to spy and surveil and break codes was absolutely critical to the early growth and evolution of computer technology. Some things never change: The immense effort required to crack German and Japanese codes during World War II are an early example of the intimidating challenges posed by what we now call “big data.”

It’s actually quite surprising that it took the Soviets until 1948 to change their codes: from 1942 or so, Britain and the US were sharing their Enigma decryptions of top-secret German messages with the Soviet Union. Even if the information was provided without the original text, the Soviets were fully aware that this was the fruit of decryption, not human spy reports. At the end of World War 2, that Anglo-American expertise would obviously have been redeployed to other ends … and reading Soviet message traffic clearly would be one of the more interesting sources of data.

QotD: Orwell on nationalism and the world state

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

What is the use of pointing out that a World State is desirable? What matters is that not one of the five great military powers would think of submitting to such a thing. All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr. Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood. Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to ‘enlightened’ and hedonistic people. What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the S.S. men patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the ‘sacred soil of the Fatherland’, etc. etc.), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered from. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

[. . .]

Mr. Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life, symbolised in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses. The principal villain of his Outline of History is the military adventurer, Napoleon. If one looks through nearly any book that he has written in the last forty years one finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man. Now, he is probably right in assuming that a ‘reasonable,’ planned form of society, with scientists rather than witch-doctors in control, will prevail sooner or later, but that is a different matter from assuming that it is just round the corner. There survives somewhere or other an interesting controversy which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of the Russian Revolution. Wells accuses Churchill of not really believing his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with blood, etc., but of merely fearing that they were going to introduce an era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill’s estimate of the Bolsheviks, however, was nearer the mark than Wells’s. The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells’s attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors must fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century Liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, must triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler cannot be a danger. That he should finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.

George Orwell, “Wells, Hitler and the World State”, Horizon, 1941.

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