Two Slashes

I came back from another semester at school thinking I would have something resembling a normal holiday season. As headache-inducing as the season customarily is for me during a normal year, this one’s poised to take the gold as one of the more frustrating. How so? A series of events I’d like to call the “Chistmas-takes.” (I’m still trying to figure out whether that’s the best way to merge the words. There are just too many good possibilities!)

Not-A-Tree
It’s family tradition each year to get a real, live tree for Christmas. There are plenty of stories and subtraditions to go along with this, including the numerous incidents involving either my father or myself nearly getting knocked off ladders trying to cut the netting, the wide (when netted!) trees that don’t fit through the front door, the trees that are too tall and need to be cut in approximately half just to be stood up in the living room, and the replacement of the tree stand every third year or so because the one currently in use just won’t hold this year’s tree.

My parents decided to forego all of the “frustration” (as they put it) this year and opted for a fake tree, an idea I’m having a rather difficult time warming up to after twenty years of pine scent and sap. And in a way, I do think I’ve got reason to gripe: the “not-a-tree” (as I’ve so eloquently dubbed it) is more of a faux-pine cylinder (at least, from certain angles) than it is a tree-shape, and I just don’t think a tree I can pull into at least four pieces without the need of a bow saw screams “Holidays!” to anyone. Honestly, I feel like I’m celebrating Festivus every time I walk past the “tree”, what with the metal trunk and all.

Not So Gifted
Despite my parents complaining year after year that I’m one of the most difficult people they’ve ever had to shop for, they usually come through reasonably well. It’s all but certain that I should expect a few books under the tree every year, and in most cases the books I end up with are reasonable selections.

This year, however, my mother decided to eschew any Christmas-morning confusion and plain out told me the books I should be expecting. One was the latest in a series of books I’ve been reading since my childhood. To be honest, they’re (disturbingly) below my reading level at this point, but I find them an entertaining read now and then, though it works out better when I hadn’t been given the same book for Easter.

The other book? Well, I’d rather not mention it, but now that I have…erm, Twilight. (Yes, I shuddered when she said it, too.) I’m sorry, but fantasy romance novels aren’t my cup of tea. Nor have they ever been. I think perhaps the closest I’ve come to that genre was the Harry Potter series. And that’s also as close as I would like to come to it, thank you very much.

Tower In The Snow
Christmas Eve generally ends up being the calm before the storm, with a (relatively) quiet family dinner, T’was The Night Before Christmas, and perhaps a viewing of It’s A Wonderful Life.

Not this Christmas Eve, however. Two of my siblings decided that the best way to honor the holidays was by honoring their gender. And they did so alright, ‘erecting’ what can only be described as a five-foot-tall phallus in the middle of the front lawn. It’s since been partially dismantled, but I’m sure the neighbors have more than a few questions for the next person they see setting foot outside my house.

Mugshot
I may have a digital camera, but I don’t often pull it out at family gatherings to take pictures of everyone and everything for posterity’s sake, and I own perhaps a single picture frame, which at the moment probably rests haphazardly in a drawer in my dresser. (One day, I’ll probably have a different mindset, but that’s another topic…)

Imagine my surprise, then, to open up a gift from my aunt to find this keychain picture frame resting inside the colorful paper.

I wasn’t the only one to double-take at the idea, either. Rachelskirts offered up a few of her suggestions on how to use the device, but I’m not quite sure that stuffing it full of pictures of the Pope or Elijah Wood qualify as intended uses for the product. I’m open to any other suggestions on how to put it to use, but pending anything worthwhile, it’s sitting on my desk and will probably be given off at some point.

There have been a multitude of other headache-inducing moments, including my mom figuring out how to use a snowblower for the first time, resulting in a driveway’s worth of snow in the garage, and the series of mishaps right before dinner on Christmas Eve, but those are perhaps better kept to myself.

I realize that this mostly sounds like a giant complaint post, and perhaps you’re right if you’re thinking so. To that, I’ll simply point out that there’s not much of a happy story to be had when the holiday magic is gone.

Humbug?

You know, there’s something to be said about the feeling when you know you’re going to be handed a pretty big job.  Sure, there’s a lot of work involved, but you also have that big payout at the end to expect too.

Such is the case with an organization that had an idea of where they were going and what they wanted when they contacted me to do some work for them.  After a face-to-face with one of the higher-ups who would be making decisions, I agreed and took on the job.  I put in the work, and even took time out of my day to go to their meetings to present what I had done as progress.  I got feedback and regular communication, and overall things went along more smoothly than I could ever have hoped for; I still don’t think I’ve taken on a job that went together as easily as this one since. (continue reading…)

So, I was trolling around the ThinkGeek site a few minutes ago, bored out of my wits and wondering what a crazed geek like myself might want for Christmas, when the TG site proudly offered me a large advertisement for this.

What you’re looking at folks, is the IronKey, a thumb drive so secure, it shouldn’t exist for the simple fear of you not being able to get your information back.

Seriously, here’s an excerpt of the description of the blasted thing:

Passwords can be hacked, but not the IronKey. It’s built to withstand attacks both virtual and physical. 10 incorrect password attempts, and the encryption chip self-destructs, making the contents of the flash drive totally unreadable. The contents of the drive are filled with epoxy, so if a hacker tries to physically access the chips, he’d more likely damage them instead. Even if he did get access to the memory chips, they’d be worthless without the encryption chip. Electron-shielded, even a scanning electron microscope can’t get inside.

While 10 invalid password attempts might be good enough for some people who don’t think anybody’s ever going to be touching the drive (in which case, why not settle for something that isn’t a nuclear option like this), I see it as more problematic, especially if you’ve got a problem typing croretcly correctly (Yes, that little typo was actually on purpose…).  If you come back to find someone screwing with your drive (or, perhaps more believably, you’ve forgotten the password, but remember what you think it might be), only to find that they’ve (you’ve) burned through all your password attempts and the drive’s gone and self-destructed, you’re screwed.

It’s almost as if the designers put this thing together intentionally to teach people a valuable lesson:  backups need to be as secure as the originals.  Why do I say this?  They specifically mention that restoring to an IronKey takes minutes, as calmly and caringly as though it happens that people need to replace them all the time.  I don’t think encrypted backups on a DVD (or any other medium) are going to self-destruct after a few failed password attempts, and it’s pretty damn easy to just image the disc and walk away to deal with it on my own time in my own lab.  And I won’t even go near the fact that it’s filled with epoxy…while useful for security, epoxy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…though on the bright side it will be guaranteeing that you won’t be getting a refurbished drive off Woot anytime soon. (Where’d I put that heat gun?)

And the idea of a Tor-based “secure” web browser built in is fitting, it’s also laughable.  Not only has Tor been found to have several vulnerabilities (despite them, it’s still a great service if you want to try to be anonymous in your surfing) .  The exact same experience is delivered by simply using something along the lines of Torpark; while you still end up having to trust other people you’ve never met, you also don’t have to trust the traffic to be monitored by the people manufacturing the device.

So, with all that in mind:  Why do people bask in the illusion of security, thinking that just because a product claims it’s safe, it’s the best product for them?  It’s my question posed to you for the moment.  What makes people feel that their information is inherently secure in such a device, but they don’t realize that not only are they securing it from the outside world, but from themselves as well?