All things Geeky… other than, you know, all the other blogs here.

Here’s the original Star Wars trilogy, recapped by someone who has only seen bits while flipping channels passed Spike TV (or where ever…) over the years. You’re welcome.

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Apropos of just about nothing, other than I stumbled across the information, it turns out that it was 40 years ago that the Beatles went on top of the Apple (not that Apple, that one) headquarters in Saville Row, in London, and performed a short set for the purpose of inclusion in the film Let it Be. There’s all sorts of drama surrounding this story; the Beatles broke up right around this time. I’m not out to get into that mess, I just wanted to share the rooftop footage. What speaks to me is that they sound exactly like themselves in this footage - how many bands have you heard live and discovered that something important, the bit you really love about them, is a product of electronic production? Not these tracks. Enjoy!

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Well, sort of. Just thought you should know that, last year, Neil went on a promotional tour for The Graveyard Book during which he read a chapter of the book at each stop. (One particularly long chapter got split in two, much to one audience’s chagrin.) In a blessed move, his publisher consented to record these readings and place them, in their entirety, on his young readers’ website, Mr. Bobo’s Remarkable Mouse Circus. You can find the videos here. I’ve listened to parts of it at work, and sure enough he delivers the same wonderful performance during these readings that he does on the audiobook. So, turn on your speakers and open a new tab, clicky-clicky, and have Neil read you a story today while you work. Enjoy!

Although technically it’s not bigger news this year than any other year, geekdom claims Neil Gaiman as its own (Neil has no say in the matter, of course) and therefore it’s a particular triumph that The Graveyard Book has been awarded this year’s John Newbery Medal, the most prestigious honor in children’s literature. You can read about it at the New York Times and also on Neil’s blog. (The blog post is doubly-interesting, because he actually refers to the mother of his children in a way that implies she’s still married to him. No, I had no reason to think otherwise, but the absolute lack of reference to her over the years has led me to suppose some unkind things. Sorry, Neil.) For all that it’s a really good book, though, you shouldn’t read it. You should listen to it.

The Graveyard Book audiobook is absolutely fantastic. The narrator does a wonderful job of giving characters accents and mannerisms that soon have you recognizing a shift in point-of-view without any “he saids” or “she saids” being necessary. These voices aren’t just distinctive, mind you, they’re a heck of a lot of fun. He’s entertaining and droll, and of course the text he’s working with is pretty good, too. I listened to this on the way to San Francisco for Thanksgiving last year, and the time I spent listening to The Graveyard Book just flew by. The kicker is that the audiobook is narrated by Neil his own self. Isn’t there a law against being that good at that many things? If he wasn’t such a nice guy (or an incredible liar on his blog) he’d really make me sick. :p Still, sick or not, he’s produced a first-rate audiobook that I can’t recommend highly enough.

Via Boing Boing, I found this story that’s both a) heartwarming-ish and b) illuminating. I wasn’t up to speed on the Casio F-91w, which is a cheap and reliable digital watch common throughout the developing world. As it turns out, thanks to a terrorist who wrote instructions on how to use a Casio F-91w as a bomb timer, owning one of these watches goes on the scale when the Department of Defense weighs the evidence of your black terrorist heart, you terrorist. If you’re an analogy-lover, try this: because somebody used a Motorola Razr (hottest of hot cellphones, pre-iPhone) to call in a bomb threat, those who own Motorola Razr’s are de facto a step closer to being arrested than those who don’t. There are 28 instances of Guantanamo Bay detainees who have this watch listed as evidence against them.

So tongodeon of LiveJournal has been giving these watches to friends, and when given the opportunity he passed one, along with an explanatory letter, to President Obama during the campaign. He doesn’t claim that he has anything to do with the President’s decision to close Guantanamo within the year, but it still must feel great. Here’s hoping that more of us get our political Christmas presents in the near future.

On Thursday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, a “secret federal appeals court” as described by Wired, finally declassified an opinion from August of 2008 that approved of 2007 legislation giving warrant-less eavesdropping powers to the government when used on “international communications.” Lest we forget, that includes phone calls where one end of the line is you, living in Kansas, so long as the other end is… oh, call it your sister visiting London. According to FISCR, that’s not an unreasonable breach of the Fourth Amendment, which says (I can’t help myself)

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Yes, calling your sister in London is probable cause that you’ve done something suspicious enough for the government to listen to your conversation. According to the opinion, which is redacted to keep out juicy bits like nouns,  you were protected by all sorts of measures. For example, information gathering conducted on your phone call (in other words, the conversation)  “did not constitute electronic surveillance”… except that “[n]othing in the definition of electronic surveillance… shall be construed to encompass surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States.” What, that thing? Of course it’s not a tape recorder, you’re in Canada! (If that sentence doesn’t seem to make any sense, welcome to my world.)

I have to admit, I’m not really coming to any conclusions at the moment, I’m just a) steamed beyond belief, and b) assuming that not everybody keeps up with this stuff. And you should. Grrrr. Tune in next time, when I’ll go over the Attorney General-designate and his brave stand in defense of felony tresspassers.

Ricardo Montalban has passed away. I know, a lot of geek requiems are going to show snippets of Wrath of Khan. Ha, ha, very funny. The man offered the world a tremendous amount of love and, yes, entertainment over the years. He will always be memorialized amongst my friends for this timeless classic. Goodbye, Mr. Montalban.

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… we’ll leave your underpants out of it for now. But yes, this post is scheduled to go live right as our plane is leaving SeaTac to begin our week-ish long trip to Paris for New Year’s. As I’ve said to others, I pretty much win at girlfriend. She deserves a ton of credit for, well, everything, but in particular she did a much better job of keeping it a secret than she did for our London trip - she lost the battle with secrecy a month or more before the trip took place (she’d planned to get me to the East Coast and then tell me where we were actually going). This time, sure enough, I had clue-oriented gifts in my stocking, leading me eventually to search our bookshelf, where I found a gift-wrapped guide to walking tours in Paris. W00t!

We get there on the 31st, early, so there can be napping and re-adjusting. Then dinner at some swank digs and, if we can stay awake for it, fireworks at the Eiffel Tower for midnight. I mean, come on. Then a walk-about on the 1st, museums and such on the 2nd-4th, and home on the 5th. Here’s a map showing likely points of interest, but I welcome any suggestions. Keep in mind, we’re more interested in trying to see a few things with some depth, as opposed to doing drive-bys of the entire city. I heard someone brag once about “doing” Musee du Louvre in 45 minutes. That’s… well, that’s dumb.

photo by Ian Britton

A few days ago, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) finally accepted that security problems should be solved, not suppressed. In August, three student researchers from MIT were going to present a paper at DEFCON (the tech / hacker convention) which outlined vulnerabilities in the magnetic stripe swipe card system that MBTA uses to handle fares in the “T” subway in Boston. Despite the fact that the students were going to leave out certain key information so that their work couldn’t be easily duplicated, MBTA filed for a restraining order, saying that disclosure of the flaws, before it has a chance to fix them, will cause irreparable harm to the transit system. (See more here.) The DEFCON talk was cancelled, and eventually they brought a lawsuit to permanently stop the release of information. Finally, they announced that they were dismissing their lawsuit and had agreed, instead, to work with the students to improve security in their Automated Fare Collection System.

Cory Doctorow coined Schneier’s Law in his DRM talk at Microsoft in 2006:

“Any person can invent a security system so clever that he or she can’t imagine a way of breaking it.” This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering if you’ve made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break it. Without this critical step, you’ll eventually end up living in a fool’s paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages, snickering at you.”

Clearly, MBTA was trying to stay in that “fool’s paradise,” but somehow or other they clued in to the reality of the situation. Good on them; I just hope that there isn’t some behind-the-scenes deal that’s quietly screwing the students who did the yeoman’s work of advancing the security of MBTA’s system.

(I know, I said no more EFF posts this year, but I’m not begging for money this time…)