Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the lovely and talented trystel!!! Have a great one!!

River: Stage Three Trust

If you're in a long-term relationship, or you're thinking about whether you want to be in one, Go read this article titled "Stage Three Trust" by theferret. I'll wait. Here's the intro:

What I am about to discuss is Stage Three advice -- the nitroglycerin of relationship counseling. Used properly in the right place, the "How Could This Happen?" technique will help you to maintain a loving, stable relationship... But use it at the wrong time, and it'll explode into a fountain of heartache and betrayal.

See, most relationship advice breaks down into three rough categories, each sequential:

1. How to determine whether someone you like is worth staying with, and what to do when they aren't;
2. How to build trust with each other;
3. How to act once that absolute trust is in place.

Hardly anyone talks about Stage Three, absolute trust, because the things you do to build a happy relationship with someone you trust are absolutely suicidal when used with someone who's not trustworthy. This advice, when used on the wrong people, will allow terrorists of love to fly Boeing 767 airplanes into the twin towers of your heart.

Heck, there are a lot of stable relationships that never reach Stage Three, and they're doing okay. They don't have absolute trust and never will, but a lot of people don't want to risk letting folks inside that close.

Furthermore, Stage Three takes a long time to get to for some people. Gini and I were married for four years before we even brushed up against it. That's right: we were willing to marry for life almost half a decade before we decided to trust each other implicitly.

It's suddenly very clear that Colleen and I have reached Stage Three -- we've probably been there for a long time, but I don't think we really knew that until earlier this year, when that trust was tested close to the point where anything less would have broken. Many, probably most, of the people reading this have not.

I'll also add that, clearly, absolute trust is neither necessary nor sufficient for a stable long-term partnership. You may be happy together but unable to open up completely to one another, or you may have perfect trust and transparency and love but be unable to share living quarters without driving one another mad. (The latter is stable; it leads to the kind of loving long-distance friendship that can last for a lifetime, the kind Gwen Knighton writes about in "Love Song for a Friend".)

Talk to one another. Figure out where you are in that journey, and where you want to get to.

Lessig on Creative Commons and DRM'ed media

Free Culture and DRM (Lessig Blog)

Ben Jones has a piece about my book, Free Culture, being made available on Kindle, a platform that uses DRM.

In my view, the "free culture" test for a work is whether it is available freely -- not whether it is also available not freely. "Free Culture" is available freely -- meaning, it is licensed freely here. One can put that freely licensed version on a Kindle, freely. I hadn't known my publisher was going to make Free Culture available on the Kindle, but now that they have, I'd be very keen to have a version I can make freely available on the "Free Culture" remix page.

Speaking as a singer-songwriter with CC-licensed works available both freely and via DRM-encumbered media such as iTunes, I must say I agree.

Hard copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song! are, of course, available from CD Baby and you are, of course, free to rip your copy and share it with your friends. Tell them where you got it.

Clearing my tabs: Choosing secure passwords

Schneier on Security: Choosing Secure Passwords

Ever since I wrote about the 34,000 MySpace passwords I analyzed, people have been asking how to choose secure passwords.

My piece aside, there's been a lot written on this topic over the years -- both serious and humorous -- but most of it seems to be based on anecdotal suggestions rather than actual analytic evidence. What follows is some serious advice.

The attack I'm evaluating against is an offline password-guessing attack. This attack assumes that the attacker either has a copy of your encrypted document, or a server's encrypted password file, and can try passwords as fast as he can. There are instances where this attack doesn't make sense. ATM cards, for example, are secure even though they only have a four-digit PIN, because you can't do offline password guessing. And the police are more likely to get a warrant for your Hotmail account than to bother trying to crack your e-mail password. Your encryption program's key-escrow system is almost certainly more vulnerable than your password, as is any "secret question" you've set up in case you forget your password.

Offline password guessers have gotten both fast and smart. AccessData sells Password Recovery Toolkit, or PRTK. Depending on the software it's attacking, PRTK can test up to hundreds of thousands of passwords per second, and it tests more common passwords sooner than obscure ones.

So the security of your password depends on two things: any details of the software that slow down password guessing, and in what order programs like PRTK guess different passwords.

Don't recall where I found the link for this one; probably Don Marti. Good advice in any case.

State of the Bear, continued

The koi have spawned; the little ones school near the edge of the pond like tiny jewels: grey, gold, bronze, black, white. Beautiful. Their parents are huge, and even more beautiful.

Sitting and watching them it was easy to ignore the fact that the computer I'm using for my new project at work had frozen again, and again refused to boot (it booted fine when I got back after sitting unplugged for a couple of hours; presumably a thermal problem). Easy, too, to ignore the fact that I had been staring at my cell phone for five minutes debating whether to make a call (I never did).

I suppose that what I'd been feeling up until recently has been best described as blunted affect rather than actual depression most of the time; Colleen says it's been a dozen years. I wouldn't know; I can't remember the last time I was consistently happy for more than a day or two without some specific cause. It may be just a shift in brain chemistry, and it's probably temporary, but I'll take it.