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Family outraged after a Universal character made 'OK' symbol on 6-year-old's shoulder

OK hand sign added to list of hate symbols

Petition Unicode for deprecation of 👌 immediately.

This is not OK!

Lawyer: Dear judge, I will be using emoji's during my opening statement.

Judge: How do you propose to do that?

Lawyer: As the court may have observed, I've hired a number of actors wearing various emoji costumes, who are seated here in the courtroom today. When I need the jury to see a specific emoji, I will play a certain note on this flute here, and the associated emoji will stand up momentarily.

Judge: You may pro seed.

In my last entry, there was a very common theme among the commenters. Many of you were concerned for my wife. Reading those comments was hard. I didn't detect these things that everyone was talking about, but I'm not a perfect person.

Shortly after that entry, my wife and I had a scheduled date night. We went to our local pub for taco night. I again asked her how she is doing. After she answered, I asked her what she gets out of it and why she lets me date. She tells me she is going good, and that she lets me date because she sees how happy I am. She says I'm a better person.

Over the last few weeks, it seems to me that my wife is more seriously considering doing her own dating. She has shared some fantasies with me that involve other people. Maybe she will start dating sometime soon.

She also told her mom that we are open and that I am seeing someone. Her mom was obviously concerned as it appears one-sided. I wasn't there for the conversion, but my wife says that she said she is doing well and that the communication (between my wife and I) is very open and good.

I think that some people at work are picking up on the relationship. We spend lunches together every day and I'm sure that there is a familiarity between the two of us that people can pick up on. I have not been confronted or anything, but I need to figure out what my plan is when it inevitably happens. Should I deny it? Tell them it's none of their business? Tell the truth? I'm tempted to use a cryptic answer like "Whatever you think is going on between us is almost certainly incorrect" or just "I'm not cheating on my wife".

I'm not sure how much longer I can stay in the closet with my parents either. I want L to be part of my Christmas. Maybe not have her over to my parent's house, but definitely have her over to my house. Maybe with one of my parents there.

This whole open marriage thing breaks people's brain. You see it here in the comments too. The vast majority of people do not have a mental framework for it. A normal relationship - everyone gets that. One partner cheating on the other - people get that too. A mistress that the wife begrudgingly allows - okay... but that poor woman. But my situation, where everyone knew upfront. Where my wife and girlfriend have met multiple times? Where everyone knows about everyone else and consents? That does not compute. Surely someone is being cheated.

Anyways, since the last update, we've had another group dinner. L and I made a BBQ dinner for my wife one day while she was at work. It was a lovely warm evening and we sat outside together eating our dinner. It was much less awkward than the first dinner meeting or the parade. After dinner, I cleaned up with my wife while L read stories with my daughter. It was really cool to work together as a greater team.

I mentioned that we are looking for a new bed for my daughter. L found us a used one online and her and I are going to pick it up this week. Later this month, we are all going to a hockey game together. L has offered to watch our daughter sometimes to allow my wife and I to spend more quality time alone.

This is different than my past relationships. The past ones were "on the side". There was little to no interaction between my wife and the women I was dating. This is much, much more inclusive.

So that's the latest update...

I once read Schneier pretty regularly - at least once a month. Somehow, I've gotten away from his site. William Barr made his "I'm a dummy" speech on encryption in July - https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/william-barr-consumers-security-risks-backdoors/

Schneier has made comments on that speech twice now.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/08/the_myth_of_consumer.html

The thing is, that distinction between military and consumer products largely doesn't exist. All of those "consumer products" Barr wants access to are used by government officials—heads of state, legislators, judges, military commanders and everyone else—worldwide. They're used by election officials, police at all levels, nuclear power plant operators, CEOs and human rights activists. They're critical to national security as well as personal security.

This wasn't true during much of the Cold War. Before the internet revolution, military-grade electronics were different from consumer-grade. Military contracts drove innovation in many areas, and those sectors got the cool new stuff first. That started to change in the 1980s, when consumer electronics started to become the place where innovation happened. The military responded by creating a category of military hardware called COTS: commercial off-the-shelf technology. More consumer products became approved for military applications. Today, pretty much everything that doesn't have to be hardened for battle is COTS and is the exact same product purchased by consumers. And a lot of battle-hardened technologies are the same computer hardware and software products as the commercial items, but in sturdier packaging.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/07/attorney_general_wil.html

Barr also says:

Further, the burden is not as onerous as some make it out to be. I served for many years as the general counsel of a large telecommunications concern. During my tenure, we dealt with these issues and lived through the passage and implementation of CALEA the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. CALEA imposes a statutory duty on telecommunications carriers to maintain the capability to provide lawful access to communications over their facilities. Companies bear the cost of compliance but have some flexibility in how they achieve it, and the system has by and large worked. I therefore reserve a heavy dose of skepticism for those who claim that maintaining a mechanism for lawful access would impose an unreasonable burden on tech firms especially the big ones. It is absurd to think that we would preserve lawful access by mandating that physical telecommunications facilities be accessible to law enforcement for the purpose of obtaining content, while allowing tech providers to block law enforcement from obtaining that very content.

That telecommunications company was GTE—which became Verizon. Barr conveniently ignores that CALEA-enabled phone switches were used to spy on government officials in Greece in 2003—which seems to have been a National Security Agency operation—and on a variety of people in Italy in 2006. Moreover, in 2012 every CALEA-enabled switch sold to the Defense Department had security vulnerabilities. (I wrote about all this, and more, in 2013.)

The final thing I noticed about the speech is that it is not about iPhones and data at rest. It is about communications—data in transit. The "going dark" debate has bounced back and forth between those two aspects for decades. It seems to be bouncing once again.

This 2016 essay 'The Value of Encryption' needs to be touched on if anyone doubts the necessity of encryption - https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/04/the_value_of_encrypt.html

And, finally, another 2016 blog that I'd like to see updated soon - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/worldwide_encry.html

The findings of this survey identified 619 entities that sell encryption products. Of those 412, or two-thirds, are outside the U.S.-calling into question the efficacy of any US mandates forcing backdoors for law-enforcement access. It also showed that anyone who wants to avoid US surveillance has over 567 competing products to choose from. These foreign products offer a wide variety of secure applications­ -- voice encryption, text message encryption, file encryption, network-traffic encryption, anonymous currency­ -- providing the same levels of security as US products do today.

Details:

There are at least 865 hardware or software products incorporating encryption from 55 different countries. This includes 546 encryption products from outside the US, representing two-thirds of the total.
The most common non-US country for encryption products is Germany, with 112 products. This is followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Sweden, in that order.
The five most common countries for encryption products­ -- including the US­ -- account for two-thirds of the total. But smaller countries like Algeria, Argentina, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Chile, Cyprus, Estonia, Iraq, Malaysia, St. Kitts and Nevis, Tanzania, and Thailand each produce at least one encryption product.
Of the 546 foreign encryption products we found, 56% are available for sale and 44% are free. 66% are proprietary, and 34% are open source. Some for-sale products also have a free version.
At least 587 entities­ -- primarily companies -- ­either sell or give away encryption products. Of those, 374, or about two-thirds, are outside the US.
Of the 546 foreign encryption products, 47 are file encryption products, 68 e-mail encryption products, 104 message encryption products, 35 voice encryption products, and 61 virtual private networking products.
The report is here, here, and here. The data, in Excel form, is here.

Press articles are starting to come in. (Here are the previous blog posts on the effort.)

I know the database is incomplete, and I know there are errors. I welcome both additions and corrections, and will be releasing a 1.1 version of this survey in a few weeks.

I know there are those who believe that only the government should have access to ̶g̶u̶n̶s̶ encryption.

In this subthread I engage in some remembering of very fun years past when I was a classic Mac OS developer. Co-author of a product called Timbuktu. Author of Timbuktu/Remote.

Those few years (about six years) were a diversion from writing accounting software. The company wanted a screen sharing product for Mac, similar to the text only Carbon Copy on the PC -- in order to facilitate doing tech support of accounting products.

I've never changed jobs. But everything has changed around me across multiple acquisitions. Timbuktu got the company acquired for the first time. They were interested in Timbuktu and not the accounting products. They were happy to keep those as long as they were making money, but didn't really care about them.

Meanwhile they were wildly profitable on the back of PhoneNet connectors, if you ever heard of those. But eventually that came to an end, and the accounting part of the business split off into a separate business, and a few months later, I joined it. In retrospect, a very wise move.

Those were fun, fun times. It was an R&D playground for a long time.

Rumor: AMD Zen 3 Architecture to Support up to 4 Threads Per Core With SMT4 Feature

This rumor has been around for months now, such as in this May 8th video.

One possibility is that Zen 3 Epyc gets SMT4 and Zen 3 Ryzen only gets the current SMT2, or maybe SMT3.

Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Little Endian

The other big thing to watch out for would be a large amount (at least 1 GB) of High Bandwidth Memory stacked on top of the I/O die, acting as L4 cache. This could happen with Zen 3, or Zen 4 at the latest. Compare to Intel's eDRAM which has been included on some of its chips with integrated graphics (64-128 MB). Ultimately, every chip should be getting some version of this in the years before the transition to 3DSoC designs.

Someone suggested that it was bad to put a bunch of DRAM on chips, since it is a single point of failure. But reducing the distance data has to travel on the chip is the way forward for more performance. You can still have DRAM DIMMs in addition to the CPU, but there will be a demand for as much DRAM or universal memory as possible near or inside the CPU. 1-8 GB is a good start, but it would be better to have room for the entire operating system, application(s), and full data sets. Meaning something more like 64 GB to 1 TB.

Attackers are mass-exploiting an anonymously disclosed vulnerability that makes it possible to take control of servers running vBulletin, one of the Internet’s most popular applications for website comments. Sites running the app should take comments offline until administrators install a patch that vBulletin developers released late Wednesday morning.

The vulnerability was disclosed through an 18-line exploit that was published on Monday by an unidentified person. The exploit allows unauthenticated attackers to remotely execute malicious code on just about any vBulletin server running versions 5.0.0 up to 5.5.4. The vulnerability is so severe and easy to exploit that some critics have described it as a back door.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/public-exploit-code-spawns-mass-attacks-against-high-severity-vbulletin-bug/