January 2019 Articles

I can’t tell you about a specific day as a cable tech. I can’t tell you my first customer was a cat hoarder. I can tell you the details, sure. That I smeared Vicks on my lip to try to cover the stench of rugs and walls and upholstery soaked in cat piss. That I wore booties, not to protect the carpets from the mud on my boots but to keep the cat piss off my soles. I can tell you the problem with her cable service was that her cats chewed through the wiring. That I had to move a mummified cat behind the television to replace the jumper. That ammonia seeped into the polyester fibers of my itchy blue uniform, clung to the sweat in my hair. That the smell stuck to me through the next job.

But what was the next job? This is the stuff I can’t remember — how a particular day unfolded. Maybe the next job was the Great Falls, Virginia, housewife who answered the door in some black skimpy thing I never really saw because I work very hard at eye contact when faced with out-of-context nudity. She was expecting a man. I’m a 6-foot lesbian. If I showed up at your door in a uniform with my hair cut in what’s known to barbers as the International Lesbian Option No. 2, you might mistake me for a man. Everyone does. She was rare in that she realized I’m a woman. We laughed about it. She found a robe while I replaced her cable box. She asked if I needed to use a bathroom, and I loved her.

For 10 years, I worked as a cable tech in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Those 10 years, the apartments, the McMansions, the customers, the bugs and snakes, the telephone poles, the traffic, the cold and heat and rain, have blurred together in my mind. Even then, I wouldn’t remember a job from the day before unless there was something remarkable about it. Remarkable is subjective and changes with every day spent witnessing what people who work in offices will never see — their co-workers at home during the weekday, the American id in its underpants, wondering if it remembered to delete the browsing history.

Mostly all I remember is needing to pee.

Interesting read from Avery…

Multi-factor authentication remains hard-to-use, hard-to-secure, and error-prone. I’ve been studying authentication lately to see if it might be possible to adapt some security practices, especially phishing prevention, from big companies to small companies and consumers.

Here’s what I have so far.

What he’s really studying is the viability of second factors; the real issue is enrolling new users.

So here’s the catch. The whole multi-factor authentication thing is almost completely solved at this point. Virtually everybody has a phone already (anyway, more people have phones than computers), and any phone can store a secret key - it’s just a number, after all - even if it doesn’t have secure element hardware. (The secure element helps against certain kinds of malware attacks, but factor #2 authentication is still a huge benefit even with no secure element.)

The secret key on your phone can be protected with a PIN, or biometric, or both, so even if someone steals your phone, they can’t immediately pretend to be you.

And, assuming your phone was not a victim of a supply chain attack, you have a safe and reliable way to tell your phone not to authorize anybody unless they have your PIN or biometric: you just need to be the person who initially configures the phone. Nice! Passwords are obsolete! Your phone is all three authentication factors in one!

All true!

But… how does a random Internet service know your phone’s key is the key that identifies you? Who are you, anyway?

The thing about a previously-enrolled private key is you have to… previously… enroll it… of course. Which is a really effective way of triggering Inception memes. Just log into the web site, and tell it to trust… oh, rats.

Summary from the MIT Technology Review’s “The Download”:

Earth’s magnetic north pole is moving so quickly and unpredictably that our existing navigation models will have to be updated years earlier than scheduled.

What’s happening: The magnetic north pole is wandering away from the Canadian Arctic toward Siberia, and much faster than expected. It’s sped up from about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) to around 55 kilometers (34 miles) per year, according to Nature. The magnetic north pole is influenced by the movement of liquid iron below Earth’s surface. The World Magnetic Model, which provides a five-year forecast of the planet’s magnetic field, was last set in 2015 and due to be updated in 2020, but these rapid movements mean it’ll have to be updated this year.

Why does it matter? We rely on the model for the magnetometers built into our smartphones, which sit below the mapping apps that help us to get around. Organizations like NATO and the US Department of Defense also use it for navigation systems.

Yet another shutdown victim: The scheduled fix to the model was due to take place today, but it’s been pushed back to January 30 by the US government shutdown.

The linked Nature article has some interesting tidbits that give more context to what’s happening geologically and the implications for navigation and modeling.

In 2019, it’s time to stand up for the right to privacy—yours, mine, all of ours. Consumers shouldn’t have to tolerate another year of companies irresponsibly amassing huge user profiles, data breaches that seem out of control and the vanishing ability to control our own digital lives.

This problem is solvable—it isn’t too big, too challenging or too late. Innovation, breakthrough ideas and great features can go hand in hand with user privacy—and they must. Realizing technology’s potential depends on it.

That’s why I and others are calling on the U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation—a landmark package of reforms that protect and empower the consumer…