Monthly Archives: November 2010

Security

PCI Deadline Extended for PABP v.1.4

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The PCI Security Standards Council gave notice today of a 90-day extension for the PABP (Payment Application Best Practices) expiration date.

After discussion with Payment Application vendors, the PA-QSA community and other stakeholders, the Council is extending this deadline by 90 days to March 2nd 2011. Accordingly, after March 2nd 2011, PCI SSC listed PABP v1.4 applications may only be used in pre-existing deployments.

This updated deadline recognizes the challenges many merchants and Payment Application end users have in implementing system changes over the busy holiday period, and allows the Payment Application vendor community to consider submitting new versions of their products for assessment against the new PA-DSS 2.0 standard that was discussed at our recent Community Meetings.

Neither the PA-DSS 2.0 standard nor the holiday period are any kind of surprise, so the Council may have had other reasons at this late date for extending the deadline.

Security

Anti-theft Bicycle Pole Elevator

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Looking for ways to make your bicycle safe and at the same time conspicuous? A site in Germany claims to have developed “the most secure bike lock in the world“.

It is based upon a wireless remote (Conrad 433 MHz transmitter SHT-7) and receiver module (Conrad 433 MHz SHR-7).

Some obvious security issues are the security of the radio signal, resistance to a long hook that could simply drag the lock down or lift the bike off the elevator, another device sent up to prevent the lock coming down…

History, Poetry

Thanksgiving History

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It is time again for a look at why we celebrate Thanksgiving. Although I have made a guess once or twice before in past years, this year I noticed Wikipedia has a greatly enhanced entry. They filed it under “Legacy” for Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (October 24, 1788 – April 30, 1879).

Right away you might wonder how a woman born in 1788 could be responsible for a holiday introduced by settlers. Ah, as I mentioned five years ago, Abraham Lincoln was the first US President to recognize Thanksgiving. Before legislation in 1863 supported by him, the only American holidays were Independence Day and Washington’s Birthday.

Hale had tried, without success, to get the four prior US Presidents to adopt Thanksgiving. Lincoln found her appeal suited a particular need ; he saw it as a chance to repair relations after the Civil War by bringing families together for a holiday.

It did not acquire the imagery of Settlers and Native Americans at the same table for another 70 years.

…presidential declarations of Thanksgiving made absolutely no mention of the Plymouth Pilgrims or a “First Thanksgiving” until Herbert Hoover’s proclamation of 1931. This revision was apparently due to a change from how Pilgrims (and Indians) were perceived. Depictions of the settlers in America before the 19th century showed violent confrontation with people they encountered. As late as the 1910s a typical Thanksgiving “Pilgrim-puritan” image is more likely to have suggested settlers were fleeing a shower of arrows and running to safety than sitting down for a friendly meal with the “natives”.

The original letter by Hale to Lincoln is also found on Wikipedia, under the section on her Legacy.

The letter does not appear on the Wikipedia entry for Thanksgiving. Perhaps even more disturbing is that the name “Hale” does not appear anywhere on the Thanksgiving entry. It appears instead in the Thanksgiving_(United_States) entry. My guess is that some people are intent on documenting Thanksgiving as an ancient festival. I think there is danger in confusing a distinctly American celebration with harvest festivals that have existed for thousands of years.

It is a wonder so few people think of Hale as the author of the American holiday Thanksgiving. A first-person account I read once from that period convinced me that many Americans thought it peculiar to adopt it as a holiday. They did not see a long history of harvest festivals in their past.

Instead, they reflected upon it as something the religious might celebrate in the East. I remember one diary by a girl who in 1863 talked about her family discussing their “first” Thanksgiving to support the US President despite reservations about Puritans. Wikipedia brings this up as a southern phenomenon, but I think that is incorrect.

In some of the Southern states, there was opposition to the observance of such a day on the ground that it was a relic of Puritanic bigotry

It was likely to be more nation-wide, as opposition to Puritans definitely was not isolated to the South:

Thanks go to Hale, I suppose, for her persistence and overcoming secular resistance and convincing Lincoln to create a national and secular Thanksgiving.

Hopefully her story will become a regular discussion topic at the dinner table. Despite the updates to Wikipedia entries for Thanksgiving history, and well-timed stories in regular press about Hale and Lincoln, she may remain more famous for her poetry:

Mary had a little lamb,
little lamb, little lamb,
Mary had a little lamb,
whose fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
Mary went, Mary went,
and everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.

History, Security

The Lies in George W. Bush’s Memoir

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Dan Froomkin at the Huffington Post has put together an excellent report called The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush’s Memoir

In the period during which Bush claims he was wringing his hands about whether or not to attack, he and his aides were instead intensely focused on building the public case for what was, in their minds, an inevitability.

Although they call out two lies “among the many”, it seems to me they may be two parts of the same lie. There is a hint in the above quote. Here are the two:

History is likely to judge Bush most harshly for two things in particular: Launching a war against a country that had not attacked us, and approving the use of cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques.

I call it one lie because it seems to be two phases of the same general issue. Approving war crimes is a second phase, directly related to Iraq invasion. In other words, the cruel and inhumane interrogation of prisoners in the US was intended to prove, through confession, that Iraq had in fact attacked the US.

In “Decision Points,” Bush describes the invasion of Iraq as something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. This is a flat-out lie. Anyone who paid any attention to the news at the time knew Bush was dead-set on war long before he sent in the troops in March 2003. And there is now an abundant amount of documentation, in the form of leaks, unclassified memos, witness interviews and other people’s memoirs to prove it.

While the US President pulled “questionable intelligence” and forgeries from others to justify the initial invasion, in the first phase, he later followed-up by generating questionable intelligence later through his illegal interrogation methods to complete the lie.

Whether you call it all the same lie or two “most essential, abhorrent, intolerable lies”, the memoir is a study in how this President seriously, and carelessly damaged National Security.

Cheney’s life since leaving office has given additional clues. It has been pointed out to me that his presence is always known because the civilian airports in some areas are shutdown and a giant SAM (surface to air missile) unit is stationed at the runway from touchdown until he flies out again.

Similarly, you can tell when Cheney goes fishing because two black military helicopters buzz an otherwise quiet countryside. I assume one helicopter is to deliver him to the exact spot in the river he prefers and the other is to stock the river upstream with fish that he likes to catch.

These men continue to exhibit a habit or removing themselves so far from reality — creating a coddled life with heavily-subsidized (by taxpayer) security blankets and cherry-picked yes men — that they probably will never understand or appreciate the damage that their lies do to their country.