Bruce Schneier recently blogged an interesting quote from testimony given by the director of the NSA. It’s worth sharing:

The lesson of 9/11 is that we are losing protection by too much secrecy. The risk is that by keeping information secret, we make ourselves vulnerable. The risk is that when we keep our vulnerabilities secret, we avoid fixing them. In an open society, it is only by exposure that problems get fixed. In a distributed information networked world, secrecy creates risk — risk of inefficiency, ignorance, inaction, as in 9/11. As the saying goes in the computer security world, when the bug is secret, then only the vendor and the hacker know — and the larger community can neither protect itself nor offer fixes.

I’m glad that guy’s in charge, and I hope he gets the chance to make some changes in how we as a country operate.

I’m starting to get into tea a lot more. This comes roughly 3 years after my friend Dustin telling me I should do so. Of course, he’s still way harder core than I am — he does the whole leaves and strainer thing.

I myself am into the sane regular method, which employs the use of filterbags. My current favorite brand is Tazo — admittedly because I don’t know any better and the marketing is overwhelmingly effective. Add to that the fact that Dustin included the brand in his short list of recommendations and that about closed the deal.

So, I seem to prefer the green teas, and I think I’m going to start ordering some of the various green options from Tazo in bulk. Buying individual bags from the Starbucks downstairs is not a sustainable way of handling this.

Does anyone have any tea commentary to offer? My big thing with it is getting away from soda as much as possible while still having something flavored to sip on while at the computer or reading. I’m also intruiged by the purported health benefits of green tea in particular, so that’s a plus as well. What I’m most interested in, however, is figuring out whether or not dumping Aspartame is going to afford any cognitive performance gains. I’m getting ready to actively pursue the whole “cognitive optimization” thing, and this is part of it — more on that later.

At any rate, chime in with your thoughts if you so desire.

OpenSSH 4.0 has been released. Get it while it’s hot.

As many of you may know, extensions are available for Firefox that, well….extend its functionality. If you haven’t yet dabbled, let the auto-copy extension be your first.

Essentially, it takes one complete step out of selecting a piece of text and copying it to somewhere else. In other words, rather than this taking four (4) steps, it becomes three (3). This may seem like a minor gain in speed, but for anyone doing a lot of this activity it’s potentially quite major.

It’s worth trying for a bit to see if it grows on you.

** Thanks to Ken Swain for this tip.

By the way, once it’s installed, you’ll have a little “Auto Copy ENABLED” text piece in the bottom right portion of your browser. That text serves as a toggle; if you click it the feature is disabled until you click it again.

I’ve covered quicksearches and why I think people using Firefox should utilize them before, but this latest tip is an absolute must:

Go to any search field for any site that you enjoy using. Right-click within the search field, and select “Add a keyword for this search.” You are then presented with a bookmark addition dialogue; add the stuff in there and you’re set.

Again, if you use Firefox and you aren’t using quicksearches yet, I implore you to reconsider. They’re quite sick.

** Thanks to Jason Powell for this tip.

One comment in this thread really jumped out at me, as I have heard it from more than one *nix admin:

I vote too… for XP I use suse on another partition, started with slackware in 1996. I’ve managed redhat, freebsd and openbsd servers for years. XP at times becomes boring, and I switch back to suse, and fool around with cross-compiling toolchains for embedded arm projects. I play games like Giants, monkey island, and counterstrike. Two of those cant be run reasonably on linux even with winex. I’m also a sucker for predictable UI… like windows has since win95, despite their poor performance/price/feature/flexibility/security records. I can tab between windows faster, copy/paste faster, use alt-tab alt-space, alt-f4, F5, etc heavily and I have yet to find a good responsive WM that does all that, I dont care about KDE/GNOME. By default theyre too heavy, and I’m lazy to remap keys and the likes. Yes I do use nvidia drivers for my geforce4ti 4400, still not QUITE as responsive as XP in the GUI, sorry to say. Also visit flash websites, read PDF and msword and excel files, listen to real and quicktime. I try out/install apps frequently, and making manual links, and command line configuration slows things down for trivial stuff that you’d just want up and running. I also share files between other machines via CIFS, manual mounts are a pain. I used to be all for slackware, until configuring a responsive and predictable GUI overwhelmed me, nothing works well in default (not talking about slackware, but the packages in general, installed manually). So I’m busy looking at Xandros, Lycoris, Linspire etc, while OSX has impressed me. I’ve come to the conclusion that X in itself, while being extremely flexible, is inefficient and suffers from being entirely in the userspace and treated as such. Also come to the conclusion that the window manager scene is still not settled.. the war between kde and gnome is simply a pissing contest and going the way of mozilla.. and not yet firefox, where people have realized the public’s needs, and made a product for usability. I’m not a linux basher. At work I’ve been trying hard to pile reasons to move everyone and everything to linux, thats 70+ machines. The biggest reason why we cant is binary compatibility of critical apps, a much smaller reason is the GUI should act exactly like win95-XP, retraining everyone is much more painful for us than deploying mini macs and osx even. I’m not complaining. I’m explaining why XP still manages to keep people productive until the BSOD, yeah every 6 months to a year you have to reinstall windows, much more frequently if you have spyware. But the reinstall takes less time than configuring x and the wm, mapping keys, setting screen sizes, linking all apps to the wm, and retraining the user. Quite unfortunately, in real life, samba fvwm95 and openoffice’s success are absolutely critical for Linux’s eventual success on the desktop. And ported games help too – Ghazan Haider

I think the points are strong here, and the guy doesn’t come off as having any sort of agenda. I personally think the benefits of OS X overwhelm the negatives mentioned (although the speed issues on a PB are really annoying). I think with subsequent releases of the OS and some solid hardware (a G5, for example), this main issue of mine can become a non-issue.

At any rate, it’s important to highlight the fact that people chosing Windows as their desktop aren’t all newb lamers who don’t have any experience outside of that environment.: