Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Stupid Maemo Tricks

I’ve been spending the last several weeks trying to figure out best way to blog from a N800 internet tablet. I now have a solution, but, alas, it’s stupid.

I signed up for a super secret gmail address. I set up the built-in mail client to use that address. I saved the email posting address for blogger and flickr in my contacts list.
I can upload to flickr by emailing pictures in. The subject is the title. The body is the description. tags go on new lines marked with “Tags:”. Not bad.
And I can email posts to blogger, but as far as I know, I get no tags.
The posts sit in the email outbox until I stumble upon an open wifi network. Then they get sent off to the appropriate places. So I can blog and do picture stuff when I’m offline.
This is really sub-optimal. There’s a nice-looking cross-platform uploader called glimmr, but I can’t build it on OS X because the configuration script is not cross-platform and I’m lazy (deadly combo). And there’s a blog client, but it crashes for me. Oh well. Better than nothing.
I’m off tomorrow.

This is Xena

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Happy Dog, originally uploaded by celesteh.

As you can see, my dog is very cute. Check out how her back legs are sprawled out, frog-like. This is how she normally sits, when she sits. It means she can’t spring up too quickly. Which is ok, as she rarely springs up. A more typical portrait would have her lying down asleep.
(maybe I should get her thyroid checked, actually.)
Not that she doesn’t run around when appropriate. When this picture was taken, she had just finished chasing a ball around in the woods. So fun! So cute! But indoors, she’s more sleepy. And very quiet. She only barks when a stranger is trying to come inside by themselves. (Useful) Or if she’s tied up outside a grocery store.
If you look very closely at this photo, you will fail to find evidence of fleas or ticks. Not only because the resolution isn’t anywhere near good enough, but because she gets a treatment every month which rids her of pests and protects her against heart worm.
So, if you, in Edgbaston, East Midlands, England, who has a free room in your flat, were to rent to me, you would have a very cute pet around and a bit of additional security, but with no responsibility. You could get all the belly rubs you wanted, or let her sleep (she’s not pushy at all) and never have to pick up after her. Really, it’s perfect for you.
Did I mention that she’s small?
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Posing on Pagoda, originally uploaded by celesteh.

Lake Woebegone

I just started getting the podcast to the American radio show “A Prarie Home Companion”. It’s patriotic Americana for the left wing. Or rather, the slightly less right wing. People who theoretically favor rights for gay people and women and immigrants, but want to dream of the midwestern heartland, populated by lonely Norweigan farmers and their foibles and aren’t we all struggling in this together, all of us straight, white, christian liberals?

I remember listening to a christmas episode and they were talking about the town Christmas pageant and the kids dressed as Mary and Joseph and the lights and the feeling of community and it made me feel terribly lonely. Because this community was not for me. I didn’t know the word “heteronormative” yet then, but I knew this imperfect paradise of essentialist americanism was not for me.
And my patience for it and longing for it has since been replaced by annoyance. What makes white, heterosxual christians more american than black people or gay people or atheists or costal people or queer, atheist costal black people?
I’m really tired of Americannes being defined regionally such that minority populations are more likely to be excluded. If we stop and think for a moment, we know that Lake Woebegone is not only inhabitted by white, straight christians. People migrate within the US. Even people born to Christian families drop the ID. 10% of the kids will be queer. But the continuing refernces to Norweigan farmers implicitly excludes atheists and queers and explicitly excludes jews, latinos, black people etc. Garrison Keeler’s America is not so different than Rush Limbaugh’s America. Except in Rush’s America, the enemies are at the gate. In Keeler’s, the same people Rush calls enemies just don’t exist at all.
And this is the choice for us in America. We can be normative and blend in, we can be invisible or we can be reviled. This kind of “choice” eats into you (and by “you” I mean “me”) even if you try to reject it. Square peg, round hole. Trying to make your identity fit into the grid provided for it. Being a queer alone is suxxor, because you just don’t exist. You have no mirror to reflect your existance. Affinity groups are essential for maintaining sanity, imo. Also, NPR sucks. Can we stop calling essentialist erasism “liberal?” Because it’s not, and I’m tired of it.

Book Review (relatively spoiler free)

So I just finished the latest novel, Harry Potter and the Title that Gives Away a Major Plot Point. Um, what can I say? That book is powered by hype. It was hype that made me go to a book store at 12:20 at night so that I could be among the first to purchase it. It was hype that made me sit and read it all at once. It was hype that first got me into the series.

Let’s face it, the writing is not all that great and the plots are all pretty predictable, although I’ll admit once in a while she throws in a good twist. That said, this book is much tighter written than some of the previous ones in the series. It’s a reasonable length and extraneous bits were mostly left out. There were no quiddich matches, for instance. Returning characters appeared without any backstory, which has it’s good points, but I found it kind of confusing when a red shirt not heard of except in passing for many books suddenly appears. The book makes most sense when the other books are fresh.
After sprawling across six previous books, some of them far too long, there are a lot of characters in the Harry Potter universe. Who could keep track of all of them? The teacher of Muggle Studies? Has she even been mentioned since an aside when the kids got old enough to take electives? So when the red shirts start dropping left and right, with no re-introduction, well, wait, who just got killed?
Anyway, off to a promising start with a focused plot, the book eventually gets . . . melodramatic. I won’t quote any words from it, but the writing gets to be completely over-wrought. Unsupportably so.
In a book about magic, it’s silly to complain about a deus-ex-machina, because, well . . .. Anyway, you’ve probably already made up your mind about whether or not you’re going to read it. Perhaps, like me, it’s already too late for you. But I will give a your of caution: just skip the epilogue.
What’s with the British tacking these stupid epilogues on to things? It’s just like the last chapter of Clockwork Orange. Why do they think we can’t handle just letting the damn thing end? No, several years in the future when the pain of all the dead red shirts had subsided, the surviving characters maintained the friendships that they had built and went on to breed. “All was well.” Yeah, it actually ends with “all was well.” Gah, what bullshit. All that melodrama with an inane epilogue . . . the combinations is too much. The book has a promising beginning but doesn’t pay off in the end.
Or maybe I’m grumpy because I stayed up until 6 AM reading and then woke up a few hours later and finished it. I need a nap.

Crypto Howto

Last night, I posted my PGP key with no context whatsoever. Some of you probably didn’t quite grok it. So here is an explanation of what it is and how to use it. This is specifically written for OS X users, but the concepts can apply more generally.

What is PGP

PGP stands for “Pretty Good Privacy.” But it’s more than pretty good, it’s very very strong encryption. This means that you can send email to somebody such that only that person can read it. You do not have to meet ahead of time and arrange secret passwords or secret knocks. No “the crow flies at midnight” required.
Or rather, there IS a “the crow flies at midnight” required but anybody and everybody knows it. This is something called a public key. You want to shout your public key from the rooftops. Anybody that wants to send you a secret message has to know it. But the public key is only half the story. You also have a private key which you keep secret.
Your buddy in the Animal Liberation Front wants to send you some secret email. Zie uses your public key to encrypt the email. This transforms hir message into a bunch of gobbledygook. Zie sends you the gobbledygook. Nobody can figure out what the secret message is – except for you! Your private key (and ONLY your private key) can descramble the message.
Your public and private keys go together. One scrambles. The other descrambles. They are a key pair and work together.
The main point: you can send secret messages to people that ONLY they will be able to read.
You can also use PGP to sign messages, which is something that we’ll get to at the end.

Why would you want to send secret messages?

Email goes through the internet like a postcard goes through physical mail. Your text is not at all hidden. The postal carrier can easily read what you’ve written. Do you use gmail? You know how the ads on the side are related to your email contents? It’s because they’re peeking at your mail to figure out what ads to show you. (They promise that no human ever peeks, it’s just an ad-making engine.)
Just like with a postcard, any computer sitting between your computer and the recipient can read your email. For Americans, under the Patriot Act, various government agencies can demand that your ISP hand over your email and never even tell you it happened. I’m sure you’re not planning any nefarious deeds, but recall that police have been infiltrating the sort of peace groups that gather and hold candles. If you’ve ever gone to an anti-war march or just have a similar name to somebody who has, it’s possible that your email is being intercepted. To put this another way: you know all those stories of woe surrounding the idiotic “no fly list”? Well, the same thing is probably going on with email, except since nobody tells you, you never know. Recall that the big telephone building in the Mission District of San Francisco has a bunch of federal spy equipment in the basement. Reading emails going into and out of the Bay Area.
Maybe you’ve got a really unique non-activist name and are completely apolitical. What have you got to hide? Except that steamy extra-marital affair!

Wait! Can’t terrorists and kiddie porn people also use these tools??!

Yep. Having opaque walls of your house ensures that nobody can see you when you’re sitting on the toilet, but it also means nobody can see you when you murder cute puppies. I’m still in favor of having opaque walls.

Getting Software

As if things weren’t confusing enough, the current version of PGP is called GPG. (The ‘G’ stands for GNU, not that it matters.) It does not come standard with OS X, but can be downloaded from: http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/
You will want to download several of the programs on that page. Scroll down some and then grab: GNU Privacy Guard. (Get the version that matches your operating system version (to find that out, go to the apple icon in the very top left hand corner of your screen. Click on it, then click on “About This Mac”. A window will open with a picture of an apple and the words “Mac OS X”. Below that is the version.))
Also grab: GPG Keychain Access, GPGFileTool, GPGDropThing and anything else that looks interesting.

Making Keys

After you download and install the tools, you need to create a key pair. Recall that a key pair means a public key and the private key that goes with it. One encrypts. The other decrypts. As you can probably guess, there’s some tricky math involved (it has something to do with the products of large prime numbers and is really cool, but this is the last you’ll hear of it in this post, alas). Fortunately, the software handles all of this for you.
Start up the GPG Keychain Access program. As you can guess from the name, this program keeps track of keys for you. Not only your keys, but the public keys of your friends, co-revolutionaries and secret lovers.
Under the Key menu, click “Generate”. A helpful dialog will pop up. The default values are all fine. When it asks for your name, give a name known to people who want to send you email. And for email address, obviously, you want an address also known to those people. For comment, give some info that will separate you from all the other Sarah Jane Smiths on the internet like “traveler in space and time” or “investigative reporter” or something that actually applies to you that will help your friends and co-conspirators recognize you.
Eventually, it will ask you for a password. This will be the password for your keychain. Recall that your private key has to remain secret. This secrecy requires the boring, old-fashioned, password-based security, like the combination lock on your gym locker. All the normal suggestions for picking passwords apply.
And finally, it makes your key pair. Which takes a while because of the tricky math. Go make a cup of tea or walk your dog while this part goes.

Sharing Keys

Posting your key to your blog is, alas, not the best way to share keys. Instead, there are computers called keyservers. These computers sit on the internet and do nothing but keep track of people’s public keys. They are good places to put your public keys and also a good place to find the public keys of other people.
Your new key is now listed in the Keychains window of the GPG Keychain Access program. Click on it so that it’s highlighted. Then, under the Key menu, select, “Send to Keyserver.”
Oh my gods, weird windows popping open! The terminal! Ack! Yeah, just close all of them. The program is kind of ugly and messy, but it does it’s job. Your key is now out on the internet where folks can find it.

Finding Keys

I can hear your inner monologue now, “Whee! This is fun! What next? Secret email! Oh, but who do I send it to?” Well, you could send some to me! But first, you need to find my key. Go back to the “Key” menu on your Keychain Access application and select “search for key.” Type in my name, “Celeste Hutchins”
More windows pop open, but this time you have to pay attention to them. The terminal window will give you a numbered list of all the people named “Celeste Hutchins” who have submitted keys. Which one is me? Well, make your best guess and type in the number next to it. It should then go into your key menu in the keychain application.
How do you know it’s really me and not some evil miscreant pretending to be me? Well, that’s a problem. And for that reason, you need to tell the keychain manager how much you believe that the keys actually go with the person that you think they go with.
Highlight my key. Under the Key menu, select “Edit.” Again, a terminal window opens. It waits for you to type a command. Type “trust” (without the double quotes) and then hit return. It then asks you about your trust level. It gives you a rating from 1 – 5, where 1 is “none” and 5 is “all the way.” this trust level is not about how much you trust me (or the person whose key you are editing). It’s how much you trust that they actually belong to who you think it belongs to. Do you trust that it’s really my key? Well, alas, there are some features that won’t work unless you select 5. So if you want to try sending me encrypted email, you’re going to have to pick 5. Type “5” (without the double quotes) and then hit return. Then type “quit” (without the double quotes) and hit return. Now you can close the window.

Encrypt Something

Yay, now the fun part! Open the program GPGDrop Thing. A strange-looking window opens. Type something in that window. Specifically, type your secret message! When you’re done creating your secret message, go to the GPG window and select “encrypt.” You get to pick the recipient from a drop down list. In that list, you will see your own email and the email addresses of everybody that you trust ultimately. Pick your recipient and then click ok. Your message will turn into gobbledygook. Now select the whole contents of the window, copy it and paste it into your gmail account (or other mail program). Send it. Only the recipient can descramble it.

Decrypt something

You just sent me encrypted email. I wrote back with an encrypted message. It looks like:

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin)

hQEOAwGSD30Hb8lOEAP/RmZP0J11auooLc/VGT13VDD1U+r2MhD3mivHOlK3pn8u
8gnSiHSvVTqX1xSRqWoyFKN9o+7oJMCOTLqzPxin+lzzejIPNJYQ8jIWASxHXSPS
2bAl+dVHywXs3FQH2ZgPa4Hn7hDfi5fR/cdmNdp0QTOz8JUEf8pfS8upkvGYQ1UE
AKhYTl455pEV2WU5+E4/LH0qifQWgRnmmS7J6UAow/u45GakeC2athUpF3K8l1uM
PnvLK41KRUhQPS+VkbK5CgPlR+EGTmZgxqE4fTe+oBSPB/M3DSNiCBHux/auAIOM
6QvvjCyw8G+Dejx9IGIVrky8En5rKAvdOwWfU9YApWhF0mMBEwEnVdbjuLoh+en1
e93Hfc3UabK7gGcx3xE+fJHtDnghYdamAKk0sR5kp7dBAtcENiNYmYlgD5p9hhvz
F8t3X0K/e8NREERDx814RL3AzhjJmcvTJEn27NXQ/lFOpH5AlDY=
=CNU6
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

What does it say?! Copy and paste it into GPGDrop thing. Get everything between and including the “—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE—–” and “—–END PGP MESSAGE—–“. Go to the GPG menu. Click “decrypt”. Now you can read your secret message!

Sign Messages

Sometimes encrypting messages is overkill. you don’t need to bother encrypting it, but you’d like to make certain that it hasn’t been changed mid-route. Maybe you’re sending email internationally and part of it got censored, just like an over-zealous postal carrier might strike out naughty words on a postcard. You can sign a message, thus showing whether or not it has changed en route.
This puts some text around the message like this:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

This is a signed paragraph.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFGoMDraT4BrLUNqWkRApd1AJ4xqy9KtjGdG1du6U+UKCrS3V0S3gCgoSdG
Ehf8fbykxxhJEGiq2bcZgRg=
=MKke
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

The main text is “This is a signed paragraph.” The rest is the signature. It verifies that the text that you received is the same as the text that I sent. PGP uses my text and my private key to generate the signature. The text and the key put together form a unique string of gobbledygook. You can verify that they match by cutting and pasting the whole thing into GPGDrop Thing. Under the GPG menu, click verify. If it verifies ok, the message is as I sent it. If does not, it means that my text has been changed.

Going further

If you use the Thunderbird mail client, you can install some PGP plugins to handle all of this for you. There are also scripts that exist for firefox. You will have to look these up on your own. Have fun!

Confused?

Please leave comments if you are confused or have ideas about how this can be improved. Is it clear enough for people who are not power users, but just surf the web and check their email?

PGP Key

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin)
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=1qVO
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Crypto is good