I meant to write a
I meant to write a bunch of things for the site this evening, but I've been in serious chill mode, so all I've done is mark-up a review I've done of a very cool comic I'm reading at the moment called Out There, which is linked left. And I'm still listening to Ben Folds. I hope the neighbours like it too 
Tales from the ‘crypt… First
Tales from the 'crypt... First off, I should apologise for linking to the Washington Post article which falsely claimed that Phil Zimmermann regretted developing PGP - crap reportage at its pinnacle. Secondly - I keep hearing one politician after another railing against both encryption itself and those who object to its being demonised in the name of 'civil liberties'.
Let's look at this realistically: Assuming PGP or a similar encryption technology was indeed used to plan the events of September 11th, what would outlawing it or 'regulating' it have achieved? Well, in the first instance, prohibition never works, because too many people are too willing to profit from any black market they can get into, so the only people to suffer would be those of us who might want to encrypt our communications because they're private and personal, and not the people who plan terror and murder. Plus, "necessity is the mother of invention" is a proverb for a reason - because it's true - someone unscrupulous enough not to report what they'd developed would just create a new encryption technology, or lo-tech would re-arise, as it actually already has; not for nothing does the Al-Qaida organisation use messengers with physical messages to carry communications.
And 'regulation' won't catch the bad guys anyway - suppose everyone was legally required to hand over their private keys against the day that the government might decide it needed to check out their email. What conceivable reason would potential terrorists have to hand theirs over? So once again, the law-abiding would hand over their liberties, while the bad guys blithely carried on sending their encrypted instructions to kill, maim, and terrorise.
How this fairly obvious and logical reasoning isn't able to make it into the thick skulls of the politicos I can't fathom. Unless of course, they don't want to understand it, because it wouldn't give them an opportunity to curtail all of our liberties of course......
Who, me? Cynical?
Sunday evening R&R Sitting with
Sunday evening R&R Sitting with a glass of wine, Dillon on my lap (casually flexing her claws into my groin every now and then (*wince*)),surfing some blogs, and listening to the new Ben Folds album Rockin' The Suburbs, which is absolutely brilliant. Difficult to pick out a favourite track, though The Ascent of Stan ("once you wanted revolution//Now you're the institution.") comes quite high on the list, as does the title track ("i'm rockin' the suburbs//just like Micheal Jackson did.//i'm rockin' the suburbs//except that he was talented."). It's all good stuff though. Highly recommended.
Right, yet another minor fiddle
Right, yet another minor fiddle with the look and feel of this place. (Very minor - font and font sizes, and losing the gifs for the headers, as some people thought they were difficult to read). I've got a few thoughts about rationalising some of the stuff over on the left, which I'll do one of these days.