Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 7 April 2002

# 11:30 PM

I'm rereading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin. I should have done this years ago; I last read it when I was about twelve years old, and missed about two-thirds of the story, never mind the point (it's definitely a book with a point, or several).

Also recommended: Making Book, a collection of essays by Teresa Nielsen Hayden. You would perhaps not expect a set of guidelines for copy editors to be amusing, nor to illustrate so many useful principles for writing as well; yet that is exactly what the On Copyediting essay does. And The Pastafazool Cycle ought to be required reading for eighth graders learning how to do library research.

# 8:10 PM

Wonders never cease—the landlord sent someone around to vacuum the carpet in the common hallway. It is a great improvement. (Alas, they didn't do the stairs.) And the laundry room no longer has slime on the floor, although in other respects it is still rather grungy.

Slashdot has a link to a paper called Single Points of 0wnership which discusses how the distributed computing client bundled with KaZaa has created a serious security risk: if the distributed-computing servers were compromised, they could distribute trojan horses to all the KaZaa clients out there, potentially rendering millions of computers into zombies (sense 2).

This seems an opportune moment to do the airport security rant I promised last week, but it turns out that Bruce Schneier has beaten me to it by several months. All I can add is that to anyone with half a brain it's bloody obvious that the security checks are appearance without substance. Who do they think they're fooling?

Oh, also, you know which security regulation was being most carefully enforced? The photo-ID requirement, of course. Which, as Bruce points out, adds no security at all (fake IDs are trivial to obtain, and even if you can reliably detect them (which you can't) you still don't know whether or not the person you have reliably identified, is a hijacker). Its real purpose? Read his rant.