mon, 28-jan-2008, 17:50

war and peace in iraq

photo by jayel aheram in iraq

I seem to have gotten myself way behind on my blogging; I’m five books behind, and way behind on my classical music postings. Traveling to Chicago for a funeral last week didn’t help any, but the real problem is just laziness. Why spend time posting about a book when I could pick up another? Why struggle to understand a Bach cantata when I can let the music speak for itself and move on? Why? Mostly it’s because I don’t get as much out of a book or a piece of music if I don’t think about it and blogging helps me to do that.

So, War and Peace. This is the third time I’ve read it, and I doubt if I’ll ever read it again. I enjoyed it this time around, and I believe that this is the best translation I’ve read (previously I read Garnett and then Maude’s translation), but it just wasn’t that interesting. Sure, it’s one of the greatest books ever written, and I think anyone interested in great writing should read it, but I don’t know that it has much more to say to me.

mon, 07-jan-2008, 16:44

GPG command

protected!

A Federal judge in Vermont ruled today that a defendant can’t be compelled to reveal the password used to decrypt files on his or her hard drive. From the ruling:

Compelling Boucher to produce the password compels him to display the contents of his mind to incriminate himself…The foregone conclusion doctrine does not apply to the production of non-physical evidence, existing only in a suspect’s mind where the act of production can be used against him.

This is good news for electronic privacy. Unfortunately, there is already precedent allowing law enforcement to install a key logger on a suspect’s computer to obtain the encryption password without the suspect’s knowledge. So I guess this ruling (for as long as it stands) just protects us when law enforcement wasn’t smart enough to install a key logger before charging us with a crime and seizing our computers.

I wonder what, if any, case law exists to compel a person to reveal the code used to encrypt a hand-written diary? Do we have more privacy rights now that our PGP/GPG keys are part of our fifth amendment right not to act as a witness against ourselves?

tue, 01-jan-2008, 13:16

Sitting on the new couch

sitting on our new couch

Here’s some of what I was doing in 2007:

  • more than 50 loaves of bread baked
  • 104 books acquired
  • 46 books / 18,749 pages read
  • 7 batches of beer brewed
  • 2,397 tracks or 6 days, 22 hours, 43 minutes of music downloaded or ripped
  • 100 out of 224 Bach’s cantatas downloaded or ripped
  • We also spend almost half the year moving into our new house and working to get it all set up.

Some of what I hope to do in 2008:

  • Listen and blog my growing interest in classical music, especially Bach’s cantatas.
  • Design and build a bunch of furniture for our new house. Side tables, a window seat, bathroom cabinet and storage under the stairs are on the current list.
  • Collect enough firewood this spring to make it through next winter.
  • Keep up with my reading, including reading what’s published of the Oxford History of the United States.
  • Try to make as much of my food as I can from unprocessed, local sources.

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