The day before Halloween isn't so scary. (link)

Volume 171
Volume 170

And my wife comes home today! Wahoo!! Happy Pappy here!!!

MO Blue, we will be at Barnes Jewish Hospital in early Nov. for my sister's bone marrow transplant assessment. Our plan is to drive down, see the docs and drive right back. So, no time for a mini TL hookup. :-(

Looks like I will be commuting back here every month until May or June as my sister will be in the hospital one week every month for chemo and then sent home immediately after. It is that time right after chemo, when her immune system has been destroyed, that is most iffy for her. Lots of opportunity for infections of all sorts to take hold. So, she needs someone at home with her.

I am learning to clean and flush her IV lines (she has a chest catheter with two lines). I am a little bit scared that I will miss an air bubble, send the air into her line and kill her. The nurse insists that a bubble or to of air will not do any damage, but I am still wary.

Right now I am making good use of the hospital's Wi-Fi to send this little message to all of you.

It went like this...

"Maybe the fact that we haven't had any complaints come forward with any specificity arguing that their privacy has been violated clearly indicates, in ten years, clearly indicates that something must be doing right--somebody must be doing something exactly right."

Vladeck rightly asked, "But who would be complaining?" And that's when Rogers dropped this piece of knowledge.

"Somebody whose privacy was violated. You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated, right?"

I'll just repeat that last bit, in case you didn't read it right.

"You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated, right?"

Edward Snowden's email provider, Lavabit, chose to shut down rather than let the feds spy on its customers, but founder Ladar Levison isn't exactly closing up shop. With an assist from encryption company Silent Circle, he's developing Darkmail, a new kind of email system that eliminates what the Wall Street Journal terms the "Achilles' heel" of Lavabit. In that case, "government access" was the weakness, with the feds able to demand encryption keys that would have opened the gates to all users' info. Darkmail will essentially render such a demand useless by putting encryption keys in the hands of users. The private keys would be stored on a user's computer and used to encrypt that user's messages. The only thing Darkmail would be able to pass to the government would be "garble."
[...snip...]
It won't be foolproof, but snoops would have to launch Trojan spyware on the computer of each person they want to track--impossible on a large scale. For all that security, a Darkmail account will cost you, but the technology's code will available to other companies to duplicate. "We want to proliferate the world with this architecture," Silent Circle's CEO tells the Verge. It's expected to launch in Q2 of next year.

And the two other Halloweeners from this week:

Volume 172
Volume 170

Pressed by the congresswoman on who was responsible for the failures, Sebelius said: "Hold me accountable for the debacle. I'm responsible."

I find it extremely annoying that no one seems to want to say how many folks have signed up.  There is no way in hell they don't know and I think their belief that this is the right path is killing the little credibility they have.

Right now I don't see how it survives, it's a complete failure in every sense of the word.  Some people are benefiting, probably a lot, but you can't roll out a controversial law with a pack of lies, a website that simply doesn't function, and higher costs with less service.

The two companies collaborated to create the DarkMail Alliance, to maintain and organize the open-source code for its new e-mail protocol, set to be released in mid-2014, replacing the current standard, SMTP, which has been used for almost every bit of e-mail on the Internet for about thirty years.

The organizers say that DarkMail will be available as an add-on or an option to existing e-mail providers, incorporating end-to-end encryption and other security features.

I hope people are listening.

Why do I get the feeling Blankfein is buying more than speeches, actual services due in 2017 wink wink.  

A federal appeals court on Thursday halted a sweeping set of changes to the New York Police Department's practice of stopping and frisking people on the street, and, in strikingly personal terms, criticized the trial judge's conduct and removed her from the case.

The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, "ran afoul" of the judiciary's code of conduct by compromising the "appearance of impartiality surrounding this litigation." The panel criticized how she had steered the lawsuit to her courtroom when it was filed nearly six years ago.

The ruling effectively puts off a battery of changes that Judge Scheindlin, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, had ordered for the Police Department. It postpones the operations of the monitor who was asked to oversee reforms of the stop-and-frisk practices, which Judge Scheindlin had said violated the constitutional rights of minorities.

The appeals court's action was an unexpected twist to what has been a long-running fight over the tactics, a centerpiece of the city's crime-fighting strategy.

The use of police stops has been widely cited by the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as a crucial tool in helping drive the number of murders and major crimes in the city to historic lows. The police say the practice has saved the lives of thousands of young black and Hispanic men by removing guns from the streets and suppressing violence.

But Judge Scheindlin ruled in August that the Police Department not only had violated the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures, but had also violated the 14th Amendment by resorting to a "policy of indirect racial profiling" as the number of police stops soared in minority communities over the last decade.

The police, Judge Scheindlin found, were routinely stopping "blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white."

Lawyers for the city had gone to the Second Circuit to ask for a stay of Judge Scheindlin's ruling and of the court-ordered mandates. In granting the stay, the circuit went beyond what the city had requested and unexpectedly ordered that the stop-and-frisk lawsuit, known as the Floyd case, be randomly reassigned.

Volume 173
Volume 172