Trump Trumpets His Moral Turpitude Over Torture

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 262017
 

The comic book villainous president Trump has just spoken about how he believes that torture works.

The first thing to point out is that it is widely acknowledged that there is no evidence to show that it works, and anecdotally the torturer is in severe danger of hearing what she wants to hear from the victim. In other words the gut feeling that it ought to work is not to be trusted.

Secondly, torture is prohibited under international law. Now we know that the US is in the habit of showing the finger to the international community – if the US were not so powerful, they would be labelled a “rogue state”.  Just look at a list of the nations that utilise torture – it’s one of the key indicators of a bad state.

Finally, torture is wrong. Under all circumstances it is wrong. You do not “win” over terrorists by descending to their level!

Just How Dumb Is Trump’s Team?

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 222017
 

News story.

We’re all used to politicians lying – either baldly (“Is the sky blue? No, it’s pink.”) or by avoiding the subject altogether (“Is the sky blue? I think the question shouldn’t be is the sky blue, but whether the colour really matters.”). But normally you can see some rationale behind the lie – there’s some genuine advantage to the politician by lying.

And seeing a politician who doesn’t bow down to the media is somewhat gratifying. At least when it serves some purpose.

But headbutting the media and spouting easily disproved lies about the number of people attending Trump’s inauguration?

Crass stupidity and arrogance of the first order.

There’s no point to it – after all who really cares how many people were stroking Trump’s ego on the day? After all his ego doesn’t need any bolstering, and even if it did there were still plenty of people in attendance.

Shattering the establishment (which is something I don’t believe Trump really intends no matter how much he claims) is all very well, and indeed to be encouraged. But you don’t accomplish it by picking stupid fights over nothing important.

Trump is in danger of giving a new word to label stupidity – Trumpidity.

 

The Right To Be Offensive

 General  No Responses »
Jan 202017
 

There are people out there who believe that “I’m offended” is some sort of magical trump card that calls a halt to the debate and requires the offender to issue a grovelling apology. It finds it’s most extreme expression in religion – blasphemy.

Which is a useful place to find excellent examples of the foolishness of trying to avoid offence – there are those who consider that the Koran is blasphemous because it is not a christian holy book and similarly there are probably those who consider that christian churches are hotbeds of blasphemy because they’re not islamic. Which group is right? Or perhaps they are both wrong.

Now I do not believe in going out of my way to be offensive to people, but neither am I going to restrict my opinions because they might be offensive to some people out there.

And when you come down to it, the offended person isn’t really hurt are they? Nobody dies; nobody is hospitalised. The only “harm” that occurs is the harm that the offended person causes to themselves.

And if you choose to be offended by something I write, bear in mind that I can choose to be offended by some of the things you hold sacred :-

  1. That you  believe in a stone age psychotic deity who proclaims “Love and worship me, or I’ll send you to a place of eternal torture”.
  2. That you insist on eating charred decaying animal corpses; and worse do so where I can smell the odious aerial effluent.
  3. Perhaps you voted for what may very well turn out to be the most cartoonish president of the USA since records began. You did know that the entire world is looking at the US freak show and shaking their heads in disbelief?
  4. Perhaps you believe that certain groups are inferior – women, men, people of a different “race”, etc.
  5. Perhaps you think that the rich are perfectly entitled to avoid their obligations to society and that tax avoidance is not a dishonourable thing to do.

But I choose not to. I’ll argue about it, and quite possibly think of you as stupid. But I won’t be offended

And if you do get offended, well then good.

  1. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/06/03/im_offended_126814.html

Got Entropy?

 Linux, Security  No Responses »
Jan 192017
 

Entropy.

Any serious cryptographic routines needs a good source of random numbers, and whilst Linux provides a random number generator by default it’s sources of entropy can be somewhat limited. Especially when you’re talking about a virtual machine.

Indeed if you try to pull too much randomness out of the Linux entropy pool (especially when it is especially limited), what you get might not be quite as random as you expect.

Which is where hardware randomness generators come in. And I finally have one (actually two), and have hooked them up. You may be able to guess what time I plugged it in from the graph below :-

So what real world difference does it make?

Well nothing is dramatically obvious, but :-

  1. I have slightly more confidence that any cryptographic software I might run has a good source of randomness and is less likely to accidentally perform poorly (in terms of cryptographic strength).
  2. Some cryptographic software blocks if the Linux entropy pool is empty; with a hardware source I can be more confident that any performance issues are not due to a lack of randomness.
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