is the US government tapping our Googles?

Posted on June 9, 2013 by todd

This started as a Facebook post I made a couple days ago. But on reflection, I think this topic is going to be with us a while. So I’m moving it over here, where it may be a little more permanent.

Late last week – on Thursday June 6, 2013 – the Washington Post and UK newspaper The Guardian simultaneously broke stories about the leak of information about the US government’s PRISM program. Among other things, the leaked PowerPoint document says PRISM allows the NSA the ability of “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

Here’s a link to that Washington Post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

And here’s a link to the PowerPoint slides (presented in a single HTML page): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/

Later, the tech companies all came out and made statements that were all essentially variations of “we have no idea what you’re talking about and the NSA doesn’t have such a thing.” Here’s what Google said (from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html):

First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

And so here’s what I wrote on Facebook on Saturday June 8:

Given the Washington Post’s PRISM news, Beth and I are debating which of the following possibilities is most likely:

1) The government is lying. There is no PRISM. The media has been fooled. Some counter-intelligence officer in Washington is giggling to himself right now. And Google et al are telling the truth.

2) Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are all lying. There is PRISM, and it’s active in their network, and they know it. But they can’t – or won’t – admit it.

3) There is a PRISM and somehow the feds got it integrated into the server infrastructure of all these internet companies without their knowledge. So Google’s telling the truth that it didn’t know, and the feds are telling the truth that it does exist. But if Google didn’t notice an NSA tech sneaking into the server room and tampering with their network gear, how are we supposed to trust that the Chinese or Al Qaeda haven’t done the same? This scenario invalidates everything Google has ever said about “your data is safe with us”.

4) The Washington Post made the whole thing up. It’s just a story fabricated out of thin air that the Obama administration refuses to debunk.

Since then, the federal government has already declassified and released some information about PRISM, apparently to correct the misperceptions that the media had. First, I’ve never heard of the feds declassifying anything this fast. It took less than 24 hours. Amazing how fast the process works when you’re an insider, when Freedom of Information Act requests take months or years to get processed. But more importantly, the Obama and his administration have admitted, “Yup, PRISM exists, it’s totally legal, your elected officials have known about it for years, and – trust us! – we won’t use it for anything evil.” So that eliminates possibilities 1 and 4 from my list.

Now we’re down to only two possibilities, and I’m really interested to see how this plays out. One possibility is that the tech companies did know about this all along, and are all (except Twitter) lying to their customers about it. The other possibility is that the feds did all this without the knowledge of the tech companies.

In the first case, could I ever trust Google (and again if I know they’re willing to lie about something so big? In the second case, could I ever trust Google again if I know they’re so incompetent that the NSA snuck in some system to gather data from their network without their knowledge?

That’s the question I posed on Google’s blog article about this: https://apis.google.com/105675675947442118947/posts/CzoVVJb8Kgz

What do you think is going to happen next?

Posted in Consumer Experiences, Politics | 1 Comment

is my bank’s privacy policy stupid, or am I being too pedantic?

Posted on June 2, 2013 by todd

I got an email this week from one of my banks. It is the annual reminder of their privacy policy, and is meant to make me feel good that the bank is taking my privacy and security seriously. But it does just the opposite. I realize, though, that given my personal nature, my background in quality assurance, and my lifelong hobby of playing games with complex rules, I may interpret their statement a lot more literally than they expect. Am I being a rules lawyer, or is this really as bad as it sounds? Read on…

For Your Security

TODD BRADLEY

Thank you for choosing First National Bank for your financial service needs. We appreciate the trust and confidence you have placed in us and understand the importance of protecting your personal information.

As part of our commitment to our customers, First National Bank annually notifies customers of the policy we have in place to protect private information. We would like to take a moment to assure you of the following:

First National Bank has always been and will remain committed to protecting our customers’ privacy.

We do not share your personal information except where required to complete a transaction on your behalf or where permitted by law.

There is no need for you to opt-out in order to prevent information sharing. First National Bank already limits the circumstances in which your personal information is disclosed.

The part I have a problem with is in the line in bold above. It’s the second part of that sentence that bothers me. Their statement isn’t “…or where required by law” it is “…or where permitted by law.” It seems like they’re saying that they may share my personal information in any way that isn’t illegal. They can do anything with it right up to the point of the law, but not past that. Isn’t that strange?

Given that, the rest of this could just be simplified to say, “We may do anything that isn’t illegal with your data.” It’s good to know they don’t intend to break the law, but this doesn’t give me any warm fuzzy feeling that they’re going above and beyond the minimum required by banking laws.

What do you think?

Posted in Consumer Experiences | 1 Comment

which rainbow wig should I buy?

Posted on May 18, 2013 by todd

I’ve narrowed it down to three possibilities. One of these three I want to buy and take to RollerCon 2013 with me. But which one?

Wig #1: Rainbow Glamorous Wig

Here’s how it looks on the model:

Here’s a simulation of how it would look on me:

Wig #2: Multicolored Feather Wig

First, the model (which is a styrofoam dummy):

And now me:

Wig #3: Jumbo Rainbow Clown Wig

Here’s the model. I don’t intend to dress up as a clown, though.

And here’s a simulation of how I would look with it. Sort of like a psychedelic Bob Ross if you ask me…

Posted in Roller Derby, Travel | 1 Comment

how not to tip correctly

Posted on May 11, 2013 by todd

This has happened to me often enough over the years that I think there ought to be a name for it. Let’s say Person A and Person B go out for drinks together. A buys enough more stuff that they both feel splitting the check down the middle isn’t fair. Let’s say Person A drank $60 worth of stuff and Person B’s drank $40, for a nice round total of $100.

Person A wants to pay with a credit card and Person B wants to pay with cash. They got good service, and both want to tip 20%. B pitches in $48 in cash ($40 + $8 tip). Now the waitress takes B’s cash and A’s card back to the register and does the math. Since there’s $48 in cash, and the total bill is $100, the remainder for A’s card is $52.

Person A gets a credit card receipt for $52, and then adds on a roughly 20% tip – $10. He signs the credit card slip for $62.

Now the bar got $48 in cash and $62 on credit, for a total of $110. But that’s only a $10 tip on a $100 tab! What the hell happened? Both parties tipped about 20%, but now the waitress is only getting 10%!

Is there a name for this? How would you keep it from happening? (other than changing the premise that the two people don’t want to split the check down the middle)

Continue reading →

Posted in Consumer Experiences | 3 Comments

punk, not punk

Posted on May 7, 2013 by todd

Punk

Not Punk

Close to Punk

Even Closer to Punk

That is all.

Posted in Drivel | Leave a comment

how to do fake dolly moves in Final Cut Pro

Posted on May 7, 2013 by todd

A couple years ago, my friend Chad taught me a very useful trick in Final Cut Pro. We were both using FCP 7 at the time, though I have since moved to FCP X (an essential part of this story that I’ll get to in a bit). This was when I was still pretty new to video editing, having had other people edit my films up to that point. I shot one particular video for a charity organization and there were some shots that weren’t framed very well. Unfortunately, I shot the footage at the same resolution that I was going to output the final video in – standard definition.

Now any of you who are experienced video editors are already thinking, “WTF? Why did you do that?” Well, I assumed that since the final video was meant to go on DVD, I should just shoot and edit in SD.

But as Chad explained it to me, I should always shoot at a higher resolution than what I’m going to deliver on when possible. Then, when I have a shot that isn’t framed well, I can fix the framing during editing, without any loss of image quality. In my example, the end product was going to be 720×480, but if I shot at 1440×1080, then I can pick and choose which pixels are going to be thrown out to downscale the image. This is a way of improving the framing up or down or left or right, but the trick can also be used to zoom in a little, or – by using keyframes – to fake a dolly push. If you don’t have more pixels than you need, then if you want to zoom in a little, you’re forcing the editing program to make up pixels, and of course since it can’t invent data that’s not there, it has to guess, and that means something that doesn’t look crisp.

As I learned the trick from Chad, you can also use this to add interest to a single static shot of someone talking or doing a presentation or whatever. If you intersperse cuts from fully wide (100%) to a bit tighter (150%) then you can cover up cuts you’ve made to remove mistakes in a performance while also adding some visual interest to the video.

Here is a video by David Acampora explaining how to use this technique in Final Cut Pro 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQbphjrRNPY

But when I switched to Final Cut Pro X, I was confused for quite some time about how to do the same thing. You see, when you’re editing bigger clips on a smaller timeline, FCP X automatically scales the footage to the timeline window and calls that “100%” even though you know you’re really seeing only 66% (or something like that) of the pixels. You can do a fake zoom in FCP X by editing the Scale parameter of the Transform section of the Video tab of the Inspector window (whew, say that fast!) to something greater than 100%.

But it wasn’t clear to me if Final Cut Pro X downscales my footage first (to match the project properties – the timeline resolution) and then zooms in (interpolating pixels where there aren’t any), or if it’s smart enough to zoom in and then downscale (in which case there may be no interpolated pixels). And so for the last year I’ve been avoiding this technique as much as possible. You see, I paid for an online training class in FCP X from Ripple Training when I first decided to take the plunge to the new version. The training was great, but they didn’t cover this topic.

About a month ago, though, I subscribed to an email list from a video expert named Larry Jordan. He does a video blog series, a written blog, training videos, and lots more. The guy knows it all. So I decided to ask him about this earlier today. He immediately wrote me an email back filling in the missing gap in my knowledge. Here’s the trick in FCP X:

Select the clip that’s bigger than the resolution used for the project
Go to the Inspector and change Spatial Conform
Then use the Ken Burns mode in the Crop menu to move the image around however it looks good

Larry suggested changing Spatial Conform from Fit to Fill, but I found that there’s also the None mode which seems to give me all the pixels in the raw clip to play with. I didn’t even know about the Spatial Conform menu before. So now I have something new and cool to play with. Thanks, Larry!

Posted in Film | Leave a comment

seeking help with my video backlog

Posted on April 21, 2013 by todd

Do you or someone you know want to get more experience with video editing in general or with Final Cut Pro X specifically? I’m looking for one or two like-minded individuals to help me catch up on my huge backlog of non-paying video editing projects. I’ve been shooting way faster than I’ve been editing for some time now. The list of unfinished projects finally got so long that I stopped taking on new projects – even some of my favorite topics, like roller derby – until I can knock some of these off my plate.

My video work is split between paying jobs (advertising, training, etc.) and non-paying jobs (both short films and work for charity organizations). I’m not looking for someone to help with the “work” stuff, but I could definitely use help with the “fun” stuff. Here is a list of what’s on my backlog right now:

roller derby action highlights videos
pedestrian bridges of Portland
interview with the Mayor of Missoula about creating community in a “big box store” world
Harvest Garden – a non-profit combination garden/workshop that donates all their food to charity
Team USA roller derby – two or three topics from the 2011 World Cup
Smashed Potato – a short film that’s 90% shot and just needs animation and editing
documentary on my grandparents’ life as dry land farmers in western Colorado, as told through interviews of people who knew them
Derbyverse season 2 – my roller derby culture interview series; interviews are all shot and just waiting to be edited
vacation 2008 – I’ll probably do this myself, unless I find someone who is really into canyons and rivers

If you want to help with any of these, you’ll need a modern Mac with Final Cut Pro X. I’ll provide guidance, training as necessary, hard drives to shuttle things back and forth, gratitude, good coffee, and so on. This would be the perfect way for a student to get some real world experience and credits on a low pressure project with small commitment. To find out more, just call me at 720-480-4890 or email todd@toddbradley.com.

Oh, if you haven’t seen my work before, here are some videos similar to what you’d be helping with.

Posted in Film, Roller Derby, Travel | Leave a comment

photos for future posts to Unexpected News for US

Posted on March 31, 2013 by todd

Posted in Drivel | Leave a comment

Bento 101: Assignment 5

Posted on March 3, 2013 by todd

The way to get into a bento habit, apparently, is to have lots of pre-made items around the kitchen. Apparently there’s even a Japanese word for this bento stash: johbisai. This week’s assignment was to make or buy one of each of three categories of johbisai:

Something that can be ‘stashed’ in the freezer for future bentos.
Something that can be ‘stashed’ in the refrigerator for at least a week, for future bentos.
Something that can be ‘stashed’ in a kitchen cabinet/pantry (i.e. at room temperature) for future bentos.

So here’s what I bought or made this week for my stash

made furikake (basic topping for rice) – Mine was ground dried toasted onions, salt, and a few other spices
made cole slaw – red cabbage, carrots, jalapeños, apple cider vinegar, salt, and sugar
made sho-yu tamago (soy sauce eggs)
made teriyaki tofu
bought tiny dill pickles
bought grape tomatoes

I didn’t put any of these in the freezer, though. They’re all either in the fridge or the pantry. What would you freeze out of this list?

Posted in Bento 101 | Leave a comment

Bento 101: Assignment 4

Posted on March 2, 2013 by todd

Here’s my homework for Assignment 4. Yeah, there was no Assignment 3, as far as I can tell. We went from 2b to 4. Whatever.

The assignment was to make a bento-based lunch. My new bento boxes arrived about a week ago (see Assignment 2b) and I’ve used them to bring my lunch to work twice now. Unfortunately, I didn’t take photos of either lunch, being in too much of a hurry during packing and eating. And I can’t remember what I at the first time.

But yesterday I can remember what I had for lunch. One bento box was about half full of white rice, and on top of that was a crock pot chicken dish that I made earlier in the week. It was based on this recipe. But I used skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs instead of the boneless, skinless ones the recipe called for. And we didn’t have corn starch, so I thickened the sauce with some flour. (It turned out a bit greasy, but fairly tasty). In the other bento box were fresh carrot sticks and mixed nuts.

Here are the questions I’m supposed to answer for this assignment:

Did you enjoy your lunch? I did enjoy eating it, though I ate it at my desk at work so I didn’t fully appreciate the meal.
Did you enjoy making your lunch? For the most part I enjoyed it. The leftover rice and chicken were easy. All I had to do was pack it neatly into the boxes and slice some carrots. It was first thing in the morning and I was in a bad mood, so it wasn’t as enjoyable as it might have been.
Were there any issues with toting your lunch to work/school? Any issues at the office? No issues at all. The bento boxes fit into my messenger bag just fine, and I toted them to work with me on the bus. I microwaved the rice and chicken, and it came out tasty.
Is this something you see yourself doing regularly? Yes, especially if I can keep making food in advance to pack. I don’t feel like I have enough time in the morning before work to make anything complicated for lunch, so having something pre-made (leftovers) is essential for me.