How to earn a bad reputation by frustrating your customers to death.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.

~ Thomas A. Edison

Supposedly, Voltaire coined the saying that common sense is not so common. When it comes to American business practices, that is in full evidence. I’m a busy guy. I have not been busy updating the blog recently. Why? Mostly because I have been dealing with stupid things that companies do to drive away customers. Continue reading “Stupid Things Companies Do to Drive Away Customers”

Unimpressed by the spaghetti cabling of cheap USB to SATA adapters on eBay? Check this one out!

I had one of those kludgy USB to SATA and IDE adapters. I used it so much that some hard drives would no longer spin up on it, and finally no 3.5″ drives would at all. So, I decided to get something a bit beefier and less clunky to deal with. So, I read various reviews and settled on a Tripp-Lite U339-002 USB to SATA Dock/Cloning Station. Continue reading “Review: Tripp-Lite USB to SATA Dock/Cloning Station”

The arguments for encryption backdoors are so ludicrous, they either have to be morons or liars.

So why do they continue to argue for these backdoor mechanisms, now more loudly than ever?

The answer appears to be that they’re lying to us.

This is a reblog of an article at Lauren Weinstein’s Blog

Despite a lack of firm evidence to suggest that the terrorist attackers in Paris, in San Bernardino, or at the Planned Parenthood center in Colorado used strong (or perhaps any) encryption to plan their killing sprees, government authorities around the planet — true to the long-standing predictions of myself and others that terrorist attacks would be exploited in this manner — are once again attempting to leverage these horrific events into arguments for requiring “backdoor” government access to the encryption systems that increasingly protect ordinary people everywhere.

This comes despite the virtual unanimity among reputable computer scientists and other encryption experts that such “master keys” to these encryption systems that protect our financial and ever more aspects of our personal lives would be fundamentally weakened by such a government access mechanism, exposing us all to exploits both via mistakes and purposeful abuse, potentially by governments and outside attacks on our data.

It’s difficult — one might say laughable — to take many of these government arguments seriously even in the first place, given the gross incompetence demonstrated by the U.S. government in breaches that exposed millions of citizens’ personal information and vast quantities of NSA secrets — and with similar events occurring around the world at the hands of other governments.

But there are smart people in government too, who fully understand the technical realities of modern strong encryption systems and how backdoors would catastrophically weaken them.

So why do they continue to argue for these backdoor mechanisms, now more loudly than ever?

The answer appears to be that they’re lying to us.

Or if lying seems like too strong a word, we could alternatively say they’re being “incredibly disingenuous” in their arguments.

You don’t need to be a computer scientist to follow the logic of how we reach this unfortunate and frankly disheartening determination regarding governments’ invocation of terrorism as an excuse for demanding crypto backdoors for authorities’ use.

We start with a fundamental fact….

Read more at Lauren Weinstein’s Blog