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With the TSA’s favorite new toys the body imagers becom­ing a big issue right now (right­fully), I think it’s time to unleash this lit­tle rant I’ve been refin­ing for years (as they get dumber).

First, a note on sui­cide attacks.

Since a four-pack of sui­cide attacks via air­lin­ers were the event that kick-started this cir­cus of stu­pid, it’s not sur­pris­ing that they’ve been where a lot of peo­ple focus.

The only way to try this which can be stopped is like the 9/11 attack­ers did, where they forced their way in to the cock­pit and took con­trol of the air­craft. There are two rea­sons this can’t hap­pen again. One is the rein­force­ment and reg­u­lar lock­ing of cock­pit doors. The other is the aware­ness of pas­sen­gers. If such an attack was ever tried again, even if they gained con­trol of the plane it would be Flight 93 in seconds.

Bomb-based attacks can not be stopped ever. If some­one is going to blow them­selves up any­ways, they now have a full set of cav­i­ties within which can be stuffed with large amounts of an explo­sive of their choice. Unless we’re going to start cav­ity search­ing every­one who wants to fly (to any TSA employ­ees read­ing this, that’s sar­casm not a sug­ges­tion), it can not be pre­vented. Even if one could detect the human bomb at a check­point, they could just det­o­nate right there and still have their desired effect.

Now that we’re past sui­cide attack­ers, we’re left with two tasks:
1. Keep unat­tended bags from get­ting on the plane.
2. Keep peo­ple from car­ry­ing dan­ger­ous weapons on board which could be used in a tra­di­tional hijacking.

The first is obvi­ous, ensure any bomb­ing would have to be a sui­cide bomb­ing (which we already cov­ered) by mak­ing sure that any bags on board belong to a pas­sen­ger also on board.

The sec­ond weighs heav­ily on proper appli­ca­tion of the word dan­ger­ous. This does not mean any­thing which could poten­tially be used as a weapon. This means any­thing that actu­ally makes any sense to use as a weapon. We haven’t seen any evi­dence for movie ninja grade weapons train­ing among the types that have tried to hijack a plane, so while I’m sure Chuck Nor­ris could kill 10 men with the scraper on a set of nail clip­pers that still doesn’t mean it makes any sense to take them away from pas­sen­gers. If it requires care­ful use to be of any con­cern, again the Flight 93 prin­ci­ple applies. There are more pas­sen­gers than there would be attack­ers in any air travel sit­u­a­tion, so as long as we can keep the guns and big blades off the planes any would-be attacker would eas­ily be over­whelmed even by a small num­ber of untrained indi­vid­u­als, much less if there was a trained air mar­shal or any cur­rent or for­mer law enforce­ment or mil­i­tary on board.

Both of those duties can eas­ily be filled with­out any of the inva­sive “secu­rity” the TSA wants us to believe we need, and were being filled quite nicely by their pre­de­ces­sors. We hadn’t thought of the suicide-plane attack, so they got us by sur­prise, but it was a one-shot trick. Every­thing else either can be stopped with tra­di­tional secu­rity or can’t be stopped at all.

As a final note, please every­one remem­ber that more peo­ple died this year in car acci­dents in Amer­ica alone than have died in all ter­ror­ist acts in recorded his­tory. Use some per­spec­tive. In terms of threats that mat­ter to an aver­age Amer­i­can, ter­ror­ism is near the bot­tom. Stop wor­ry­ing about it. And if you’re a would-be ter­ror­ist, please steal a TSA uni­form and shove some C4 up your ass. If we’re going to keep react­ing in fear from what­ever the last attempt was, let’s at least get some TSA agents being cav­ity searched for the good of the people.

Everybody’s friends over at the TSA had a nice fail at some point when they posted a redacted ver­sion of their “Avi­a­tion Secu­rity Screen­ing Man­age­ment Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dures” on their web site. Unfor­tu­nately for them, redact­ing by draw­ing boxes over the text and images in Acro­bat doesn’t really do any­thing use­ful, the con­tent is still there. It took a few months before some­one noticed, but once that hap­pened the Inter­net took hold and the great guys over at Cryp­tome stripped all the cen­sor­ing, replac­ing it with red boxes to clearly mark what the TSA con­sid­ers “sen­si­tive” and posted the result on their web site. I’m also mir­ror­ing the same here. I’ve skimmed the whole man­ual and read the cen­sored parts in their entirety, I hon­estly can’t fig­ure out why they even felt the need to cen­sor. Gov­ern­ments should be open unless they can pro­vide good rea­son not to be, not closed by default.

Came across this thanks to Wil Wheaton (@wilw).

US Democ­racy Server: Patch Day.

Fixed the pretty URLs and RSS feed (blasted mod_rewrite), added Gra­vatar sup­port, a tag cloud, and a down­load sys­tem that I may or may not ever use.

The Sub­ver­sion install/upgrade method wins again, bump­ing up to 2.7 was a sin­gle com­mand while logged in as www-data on my server and then accesing wp-admin/upgrade.php

I just got back from vot­ing and sur­pris­ingly it was unevent­ful.  I say sur­pris­ingly because this is Ohio, where 2004 and 2006 elec­tions have shown sig­nif­i­cant con­cerns with the elec­tronic vot­ing machines AND on top of that they’re Diebold Accu­Vote TSX units.  Diebold of course being known for appar­ently not using a bit of their secu­rity knowl­edge gained from devel­op­ing ATMs on their vot­ing machines.

I showed up at the polling loca­tion at a bit after 8 AM, fail­ing to find it on the first pass even though there are huge signs out front say­ing “VOTE HERE”.  I blame that on being a bit hung over (yes­ter­day sucked, so Nick and I tried to invent a Jeremy Clark­son drink­ing game with a bot­tle of Skyy while watch­ing Thriller).

Here was the only real issue I had all morn­ing.  I hadn’t a clue what precinct I was in for my polling loca­tion, when I voted in 2004 there was basi­cally one place for every­one reg­is­tered on cam­pus.  The map they offered wasn’t help­ful at all, so even­tu­ally I found a list of names that I was on and caught a very tiny “D” marked in the cor­ner.  I wan­dered over to the Precinct D table, showed my ID, signed in, and was handed a smart card.  After about 5 min­utes in line I walked up and went through the system.

The UI was actu­ally quite nice, well designed, and clear.  The font ren­der­ing made it clear there was Win­dows behind it which is a bit annoy­ing, but I already knew that.  The ver­i­fi­ca­tion page was decent and I enjoyed how it printed the infor­ma­tion page by page as I looked at it on the screen, allow­ing for easy ver­i­fi­ca­tion.  The only com­plaint I have about this part of the process is that the printer was badly cho­sen.  Fonts are small and ther­mal paper just doesn’t last.

After ver­i­fy­ing my vote, the smart card popped out.  I handed it to a poll worker and headed to work.

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Orig­i­nally uploaded by fuz­heado

Food, friends, and no stress.

Fri­day night after work Nick and I went out hunt­ing beer, then came back to play Rock Band 2, dur­ing which Nevans joined us and made me look like a fool on the drums by comparison.

Sat­ur­day the Dish installer came by in the morn­ing and con­firmed that I couldn’t receive a satel­lite sig­nal, thus get­ting me out of my con­tract.  I then went out and bought stuff for the car to catch up on main­tainance and finally get it to stop com­plain­ing about my lack of washer fluid.

Sat­ur­day night Lacy came over and of course was the high­light of the week­end, she hadn’t seen Iron Man so after a House marathon we watched that and then went to bed.

This morn­ing after she left to go to work, Nick and I went up to Chardon for a bar­be­cue at some church his par­ents are affil­i­ated with.  We both noted the strange­ness of two hard­ened athe­ists attend­ing an event at a church, Catholic no less, but it was good food and a way to start off the day.  We then headed out to Welling­ton where I picked up some of my stuff that was still sit­ting around at Charlie’s place, then after a minor detour to Sam’s Club for food and Home Depot to replace the bro­ken toi­let seat here we headed home to relax with some beers and TV.

Around 1 PM today I got a call from the body shop over at Bron­des Ford.  The cur­rent esti­mate is $2600, with­out even know­ing how the sus­pen­sion looks.  The car’s only worth $3500, so it’s not worth fix­ing.  This means I have pulled my Crown Vic from eBay and I guess I’ll be back to dri­ving it around.

As if to add insult to injury, I couldn’t find my phone about an hour ago.  Fast for­ward to just a few min­utes ago when I went to check on my laun­dry.  As you’ve prob­a­bly guessed, I heard a nice thump­ing inside the dryer which was my T610 flop­ping around.  At this point it appears to be dead, bit I’m going to let it dry overnight before con­demn­ing it.

The worst thing is I can’t even fathom how it ended up in there.  I was mak­ing calls all morn­ing, I’ve been wear­ing the same shorts all day with the excep­tion of a food run where I left the phone behind, and I could have sworn I called some­one while the wash­ing machine was running.

Oh well, the T610 was near­ing the end of its use­ful life any­ways, the SIM card reten­tion issues I had before are back and not as eas­ily fix­able as last time.  It just hurts to have to buy a new phone when I’ve already got the upcom­ing bills of re-registering and repair­ing the Crown Vic to make it legal again.

I just updated this site with new pages telling about the things I love and a bit about myself as well. Links are at the top of the page.

I’m also try­ing out a new tem­plate which I really like.  I think I’ll keep it.