Saturday, September 27, 2003

Kucinich and the Politics of Nonviolence. In Thursday night's Democratic presidential candidates' debate (yes, I watched it -- masochism, I guess), Rep. Dennis Kucinich suddenly declared himself a libertarian. No, he didn't use the L-word. But he announced his plan, should he be elected, to create a "Department of Peace" to bring about a "transformation of our society" by "making non-violence an organizing principle." [...] Since nobody with Kucinich's reverence for nonviolence could possibly want to increase "violent action or the threat of such action," he plainly couldn't seriously be calling for his projects to be governmentally enforced. He must instead be trying to persuade people to implement these programs voluntarily. [LewRockwell.com] A tongue-in-cheek look at the philosophical implications of Dennis Kucinich's claimed interest in non-violence. 7:28:30 PM    comment () Tin Foil Hat Linux is a bootable floppy distribution useful for encrypting and decrypting files on a machine that may have a hardware keystroke logger. Copy files that you want to encrypt or decrypt to a floppy, boot up Tin Foil Hat Linux. Encrypt or decrypt, storing the results on the floppy, and use the floppy from your regular OS. From the distributed readme.txt. [clairefiles] What Tinfoil Hat Linux protects against .... *************************************************** * Worms & viruses The OS doesn't support networking, all binaries are compiled staticly, and all non-root partitions are mounted with no-execute permissions. A hash of the NVRAM is displayed at boot time. * Data retrieval All temporary files are created on an encrypted ramdisk which is destroyed on shutdown. Even the PGP keyfile information can be stored encrypted on the floppy. * Keystroke monitoring. THL has gpggrid , a wrapper for GPG that lets you use a video game style character entry system instead of typing in your passphrase. Keystroke loggers get a random set of grid points, not your passphrase. * Power usage & other side channels. If you start the Paranoid options, a copy of GPG runs in the background generating keys & encrypting random documents. This makes it harder to determine When your REAL encryption is taking place. See the TEMPEST section below. * (some) User stupidity. If you use THL, it's very difficult to leave a plaintext file on your hard drive by accident. [End the War on Freedom] This sounds useful. I'll give it a try. 7:12:06 PM    comment () Bringing Democracy to the World. From this week's Onion: U.S. Invades Non-Oil-Rich Nation To Dispel Criticism LUXEMBOURG VILLE, LUXEMBOURG--In an effort to quiet criticism of U.S. military policy, 50,000 U.S. troops invaded and soundly defeated the non-oil-rich Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Monday. "Once again, the... [LewRockwell.com Blog] 6:35:59 PM    comment ()

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