Weekend? Media.

Had a nice time at the Dungeon Friday night before fleeing the crowds and finding out we were v. tired and crashing. Saturday watched movies (Charlie's Angels, Omen, The Great Escape, Ultraviolet) with kittyglitter for most of the day (keeping the couch from escaping, and other lessons were learned as well) and then gave sotto_voce a ride home from the homeless shelter Arts Center and watched Chisaii Gaijin Iron Chef .. which was rather strange.

Sunday, I slacked around the house mostly and then caught up with cosmiclola for a lovely dinner of vindaloo and a showing of A Dog's Breakfast, which is a lot of fun, particular for Stargate junkies. It was good to get a chance to hang out with her and catch up. I have much more respect for the Yaris now, despite seeing one in Psyched.

I finished The Gripping Hand, and perhaps too quickly. Also, the book's (end) was rather sudden and abrupt-seeming. I think I grasp the galactic strategic objectives that were in play and I don't question that they were resolved. I guess this is what people were saying when they liked the sequel not nearly as much as the original classic. Still it does resolve nearly all of the major issues from both books before stopping, I just feel like I missed some stuff, and I know I was barely following the complex space battles (...)

the movies:( Read more... )

And...

Of the set, I collected cuddles from three before returning to work today, which was quite nice. There is definitely weirdness afoot.

And I don't just mean getting instructions from Mistress and reports from a subby woman in the same gmail box. That was weird, but in an altogether good way.

No the weirdness is in the scheduling (as before, but more so). Particularly in the quite odd "I'm pleased and flattered that you want me to sleep here with you, but I hadn't planned on it, am not sleepy, and you're going to work at dawn, and I might have other plans tonight" except that it was more like, trying to bring that up and getting shushed, and trying to crawl out of bed and getting pulled back in.

If I wasn't so dense I might think she was interested in seeing more of me, eh?

With the continued strangeness all around and a possible change in my work shift coming up soon ... hmmmmm

Lessons Learned? Nil

At lunch today I read over a whitepaper from 2002 called "Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation". It's only eight pages including the references and I recommend any interested party to look it over. Even skimming the few really technical bits, the points are clear in passages such as those I quote below. I got the link to the PDF of the paper was from Crypto-gram, Schneier's newletter: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html .
( Skip a bit for length.. )

In the nearly thirty years since the report, it has been
demonstrated that the technology direction that was
speculative at the time can actually be implemented and
provides an effective solution to the problem of malicious
software employed by well-motivated professionals. Un-
fortunately, the mainstream products of major vendors
largely ignore these demonstrated technologies. In their
defense most of the vendors would claim that the market-
place is not prepared to pay for a high assurance of secu-
rity. And customers have said they have never been of-
fered mainstream commercial products that give them
such a choice, so they are left with several ineffective
solutions collected under marketing titles like “defense in
depth”.

That's right folks. The reason your OS (`uname`) is not secure-able against attacks that have been documented for 35 years is because no one ever offered to pay for it, and the reason you can't get it that way (if you ask) is ... because no one ever does. Somehow, I think this is all Microsoft's fault, but they had a lot of help. But hey, the new Mac System release (Leopard) has a shiny new Dock, right? *sigh* Ed: Actually MS Vista has much better advances in security than Leopard, but the system is so large and complicated that is difficult to manage, much less secure.