Even if I trusted Facebook to keep their promises for more than a week, the bottom line is I just don’t need the service they want to provide. Facebook’s value proposition was always a way to share content with friends and family that you didn’t want to share with the whole world. For sharing with the whole world we already have Buzz, Blogs, Twitter, and many more options. For sharing one-to-one we have e-mail. Facebook, for a time, sat in-between; and it was useful. It no longer is. If there’s an existing service that offers what Facebook used to offer, I haven’t found it. Linked In comes closest, but its focus is different.

In any case, I mostly used Facebook to keep up with a few old, geographically diverse friends. I never used it much for writing. In fact, in the years I’ve had a Facebook account (going back to when you had to have a .edu address to join, and your network was your university) I think I’ve only written one significant item I’d sort of like to keep. So here it is for posterity, after a little editing. In the meantime, if you need to find me I’m easy enough to google and I put my real, unobscured e-mail address on most of my web pages.

This originally appeared as a comment in a thread on married Catholic priests, in response to the (true) claim that priestly celibacy had no support in the Bible.

Christianity and the Bible

The more I learn about both the Bible and the Church (and not just the RC church) the less they seem to have to do with each other. Aside from a few ethical principles honored more in the breach than the observance and mostly shared among the major religions, the Christian religion practiced today–rituals, sacraments, theology, etc.–has very little to do with the Bible. If we were really following the religion of the Bible we’d all be Jewish, much like Yeshua himself.

I thank Jesuit High School, both Jesuits and the lay teachers, for setting me on the path to a more rational, adult understanding of the church and of religion. I do wonder these days how many of them knew where it led. I can’t imagine they didn’t. There’s just too much scholarship about these matters, and my teachers were all far too educated not to be familiar with it. I suspect they knew just how far they could go. Debunking the loaves and the fishes, Book of Job, Lazarus, walking on water: safe. Resurrection, Virgin Birth, and Immaculate Conception: keep your mouth shut and hope the kids learn about it in college.

I also recall one class in the history of the early church taught by our parish priest. It amounted to a litany of heresies and schisms, most of which formally died out centuries ago (and all of which are still believed by many professing Christians today who don’t realize they’re heretics.) One of my older classmates expressed wonder that out of all these heresies and false beliefs, God had engineered it so that only the one true faith survived. Even then I could see this was as silly as thanking God for making our hands so neatly fit into our gloves. The sensible answer is that we believe what we believe because it’s what won historically, even if by complete accident. Aside from occasional converts (and not most of them) we’re almost all Catholics or Mormons or Lutherans or Jews or Buddhists or Muslims or what have you because it’s what we were raised as, not because we made any sort of reasonable decision based on evidence or divine revelation. And if God decided what we would be by placing us appropriately as children, he must have a really wicked sense of humor. I know no other way to account for him dividing humanity into so many different groups that all believe they are the one true path and who will periodically slaughter each other to prove it.

It’s really hard to seriously study religion (any religion, not just Catholicism or other variants of Christianity) while still retaining the basic faith of your childhood. Maybe the more philosophical variants of Taoism and Buddhism have divorced themselves enough from their history that learning the truth about the old stories no longer causes a crisis of faith. I don’t think anyone else has though. In many religions people taking religious vows end up living a lie: required by occupation to teach an official line they no longer themselves believe precisely because they’ve spent more time studying their own religion than the folks in the pews have.

Many scholars seem to end up where folks like Karen Armstrong, Paul Tillich, and Stephen Prothero did: theists, perhaps still believing in a personal and loving God, and maybe still going to church on Sunday (or Temple on Saturday, or Mosque on Friday) because they enjoy it; but no longer able to take the whole package too seriously. Religion is like sausage. If you want to enjoy it, you can’t learn too much about how it is made.

Seems the clerk forgot to remove a security tag from one of the pairs of pants. Anyone know how to get this off of the pants without tearing them or going back to the store?

As a side note, if Sears can’t even remove clunky tags like this one from clothing before it goes out the store, one really has to doubt the claims that less obvious RFID tags will be reliably disabled at the point of purchase.

This is a very serious problem. I don’t want my publishers to see the negotiation strategies I set up with my agents. I don’t want my colleagues to see my notes to my wife. The problem could range from embarrassing to disastrous, depending on who gets which e-mail. I don’t want my wife to see my correspondence with the jeweler before our anniversary.

I have filed a bug with Mozilla about this. So far I have only noticed this problem with Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 on Mac OS X 10.4. I cannot reproduce it on command, though it is frequent. It is possible there is a corrupt file system or Inbox involved somehow. However, the extra text from the wrong messages only seems to come up in the Compose window when I’m replying. I do not see the wrong text when I am merely reading e-mail.

For your own safety, if you use Thunderbird, please do not top post. Please do carefully check the full text of everything you send out, quoted text included. If you notice the same problem, especially on a different platform or version, add a comment to the Bugzilla report. And if you happened to get any weird messages from me in the loast week or so? Please delete them. Thanks.

If, like me, you upgraded to 2.0.x and are having problems, you can still download the old version from Blaze’s web site. Save it on your hard drive; then drag and drop it onto an open Firefox window. The restart Firefox. (For some reason File/Open did not work for me.)

There’s probably more to this than I understand yet, though, because reverting to the old version 1.1.5 does not seem to fix this. That is, on the system I didn’t upgrade it all still works and on the system I upgraded and then reverted it’s broken. I’ll let you know if I figure this out.

Needless to say, this makes me a lot less likely to subscribe to yahoogroups mailing lists. Most new lists are going to Google anyway. However there are several legacy groups I subscribe to that probably aren’t going to switch immediately.

My first idea was to see if AdBlocker Plus could do the trick. It does work in Thunderbird as well as Firefox, but it doesn’t seem to be able to handle the text ads inside the Yahoo messages.

Then I noticed this at the bottom of each message:

Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional

Plain text! That’s just what the doctor ordered! The second option sends an e-mail to listname-traditional@yahoogroups.com that changes you into plain text e-mail without the annoying sidebar ads. After you send this Yahoo will send you back a confirmation message:

Hello,

We received a request from you to switch your email format from “Fully Featured” to “Traditional” for your group rest-discuss. Please confirm your request by replying to this message.

If you do not wish to switch the email format for group rest-discuss, please ignore this message.

Just reply to that message and you should be set up without the ads.

Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Cookies -> “Allow sites to accept cookies” and “for the originating site only”

No big deal. The preference must have been nuked when I upgraded, so I opened up the privacy tab and looked for the right option. It wasn’t there! Maybe in security? Nope. Not there either, nor anywhere else I could find. It seems Firefox has given in to the howling of incompetent developers who never understood HTTP in the first place and were annoyed that their sites broke when users turned off third party cookies. Consequently they eliminated the preference. Don’t worry, however. There is a workaround.

You can restore the old behavior using the hidden preferences. Here’s how.

1. Type about:config in the location bar
2. Type “cookie” in the Filter field
3. Right-click network.cookie.cookieBehavior and select “Modify” from the pop-up menu
4. Change the value to 1
5. Click OK.
6. Close the window

Everything’s good, right? Well, no. It turns out that some evil sites have figured out how to get around this, and that’s where my bad cookies were sneaking in from. Firefox really needs to fix this, and it shouldn’t be that hard to do. Just change the behavior so it only allows cookies for what’s actually shown in the location bar, not any weirdness from frames or iframes or redirects.

In the meantime, the only built-in solution is to go back to site-by-site cookie preferences. Bleah. Firefox allows you to do this by going to Tool/Options (or Firefox/Preferences on the Mac), selecting the Privacy Tab, and then selecting “Ask Me Every Time” from the Keep Until choice menu.

Then you’ll constantly be bombarded by popups like this one:

Worse yet, if you accidentally block a cookie from a site that requires it, you’ll have to find that site in a dialog three levels deep and unblock it. The user interface is rather poor. A somewhat better UI is provided by Ron Beckman’s CookieSafe plugin.
This extension places an icon in your status bar you can use to accept, block, or temporarily accept cookies from the site. This gives you best privacy by blocking all cookies by default and then quickly enabling them only when a site absolutely refuses to work without cookies.

1. Type about:config in the location bar
2. Type “keyword” in the Filter field
3. Right-click keyword.URL and select “Modify” from the pop-up menu
4. Change the value to http://generic.a9.com/
5. Click OK.
6. Close the window

That’s it. You’re now using A9′s generic service. Update: It seems A9 violates the URL spec somehow by treating http://generic.a9.com/query%20term differently from http://generic.a9.com/query+term. it works with the former but not the latter, which is what Firefox sends for multiword queries. That rules it out. I’ll have to try a different one.

Other search engines can be configured similarly. Just the URL changes. In most cases, however, you’ll need more than the URL for the home page. For instance, the URL for IXQuick is http://us.ixquick.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=

The big question is how the other search services compare to Google. So far, A9 does not seem to be doing so well. It used to be better, but it used to be powered by Google. Now it’s powered by Microsoft’s Live.com, a distinctly inferior search engine. IxQuick is a meta search engine that accumulates results from several search engines. The theory is that a URL that shows up in several search engines is more likely to be relevant than one that only shows up in one or two. The reality is that the bad results from non-Google engines end up polluting the good results from Google. Plus it looks uglier than Google. Scroogle is nothing more than an anonymizing, ad-free front-end to Google. That makes it one of the better alternatives out there, except that it violates the web architecture by using POST for safe operations instead of GET. Consequently, it can’t be used from within Firefox’s search bar and location bars.

Still, even if the other search engines are a little slower, uglier, and less effective than Google, I’m just not comfortable with Google storing all my search requests tied to my IP address for an undefined but lengthy period of time, so I’m going to try living with the others for a few weeks. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m sure you’ve heard about AOL’s recent release of search engine data. I’m sure you also know that various other search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and MSN store their search data indefinitely. While one hopes that they take greater precautions than AOL did to protect their users, the simple fact is it’s still accessible via subpoena and search warrant, as well as system cracking, bribery, and other illegal attacks. I know none of this is your fault, of course. In fact, I suspect you’re as concerned about this as I am. However, I do need your help in your capacity as my ISP to do something about it.

I’ve taken reasonable measures through the use of Firefox plugins, cookie blocking, and other techniques to keep Google, Yahoo, MSN, Doubleclick and others from tracking and aggregating my browsing history and searches. Unfortunately, there’s still one way they can easily identify me: my IP address.

Because I run servers off my Speakeasy ADSL connection, I need a static IP address. However I only need that for the servers. There’s no reason my regular surfing has to use the same IP address I use for this site. At a minimum I need a separate and dynamic IP address for my client connections that changes at least once a day (preferably more often) to prevent easy aggregation of my searches and browsing history.

Even better, I would like a promise from Speakeasy that the record of the dynamic IPs assigned is automatically deleted after a reasonable period of time, say two weeks or a month. I know you need to hang onto this information for a little while to manage your network and troubleshoot problems, and that’s OK. I’d just like some assurance that it’s not stored indefinitely.

Best of all, I’d like a Speakeasy hosted anonymizing proxy service for your customers. Yes, I’ve tried the third party services like Anonymizer.com; and their performance just isn’t adequate. However, a Speakeasy hosted service could be a lot closer to me (as measured in network hops), support fewer users, and perform better. I’d even be willing to pay extra for such a service.

What do you think? How much of this can you give me today? How much can you give me tomorrow? Over the last few years, Speakeasy’s been a really interesting ISP that’s taken the lead in new arenas like VOIP and wireless access. I’d like to see you expand that vigor and imagination into protecting your users’ privacy as well.

Your customer,
Elliotte Rusty Harold

Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S. commanders to round up Iraqis. The key to actionable intelligence was seen by many as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American.
…
Senior U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq later estimated that about 85 percent of the tens of thousands rounded up were of no intelligence value. But as they were delivered to Abu Ghraib prison, they overwhelmed the system and often waited for weeks to be interrogated, during which time they could be recruited by hard-core insurgents, who weren’t isolated from the general prison population.

Bottom line: if you waste your time arresting the innocent, then you don’t find the truly guilty parties. Probable cause isn’t just about protecting the rights of the accused and innocent. It’s also a critical factor in making sure the guilty are caught.

However, now NetZero has launched Private Phone which provides an unlimited supply of disposable phone numbers for free. This is like Mailinator for phones (though unlike Mailinator you do have to sign up before using a number, and you’ll have to clear your cookies if you want to change numbers).

I have no idea how NetZero plans to make money on this–they do seem to put some advertising on their web site–but this service is really cool. For instance, it would be very helpful to be able to give Staples a phone number their delivery people can use to call and confirm I’ll be home without having to listen to all the telemarketing that inevitably follows a Staples order. It’s actually only voice mail, but that’s good enough for most uses.

One downside: like many sites PrivatePhone doesn’t work with cookies. Not very good for a site that puts “Private” in its domain name.

I do wonder what the overall privacy policy for the entire site is? As usual they try to deliberately hide it behind obfuscating JavaScript to make sure no one actually reads it. A quick skim of the agreement doesn’t appear to address the Private Phone service at all. It appears to be simply the agreement for their regular VOIP service.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if they store all voice mails indefinitely. That could be a problem, and might mean it isn’t as good as encrypted Skype for avoiding subpoenas or other unwanted government attention. However it should be plenty enough to keep the telemarketers off your back.