Hippo, Birdie, Two Ewes...

... to min0taur!!

Have a good one!

We're shocked!

Shocked, I tell you! To think that the government is tapping our phones!

Am I the only one who isn't surprised? Here we have CNN and Reuters saying that "President George W. Bush denied on Thursday the government was "trolling through" Americans' personal lives, despite a report that [the NSA] was collecting phone records of tens of millions of citizens", and that "Bush did not confirm or deny the USA Today report. But he did say that U.S. intelligence targets terrorists and that the government does not listen to domestic telephone calls without court approval and that Congress has been briefed on intelligence programs."

Am I the only one who thinks that Bush is lying?

Here's what I think is behind the "warrantless wiretapping" program, and why it really has to be warrantless: they're listening to everything. The to/from numbers don't really need to go into a database -- that's how the phone companies keep track of billing. All they have to do is give the government access. That's the part they don't mind leaking. It's annoying, but it's obvious.

The part they don't want to get out, is that, probably, almost every single call is being listened to -- not by humans, of course (so they'll argue in court, if it comes down to it, that it's technically not listening at all) but by computers running speech recognition software. The software isn't very good -- it can't provide even approximate transcripts -- but it doesn't have to be. All it has to do is recognize a handful of keywords (like "bomb") and a couple of languages (like Arabic). That's enough to flag a call for more scrutiny, so they keep the recording and run it past a human. If it seems "suspicious", they look through the call database for a chain of calls linking it to a foreign number or somebody they're watching. Six degrees of separation says they'll probably find such a chain, so off they go to a (secret) court with the evidence they need to tap the phone.

UPS gooooooooood!

Had a power failure at home today -- some idiot ran into a power pole, most likely. Fried lisa_marli's husband's computer, a block away from us, but we were fine. There are two of the cheap Windows boxen that are not (yet) on APC UPSs, (one ancient Tripplite supply just up and croaked, and the one in the Y.D.'s room died when some idiot person who thought they were being helpful plugged a vacuum cleaner into it).

Unfortunately, getting the network back up was another matter. The gateway box tends to hang -- waiting for a BOOTP packet, I think -- instead of rebooting, the firewall seems to come up in an odd state sometimes, and in any case the ADSL modem came up weird and had to be power-cycled. Everything needed to be smacked upside the head for a while before it all settled down and worked. I'd work on the gateway some more, but that means taking it down, so I'll have to wait until I'm alone in the house, or at least the only one awake.

I really need to set up off-site backups, don't I?