Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

You are here: Home / Music / Open thread

Open thread

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Thought we could use a fun open thread topic: best songs that are partly in French.

Always been fascinated by this one, so 70s, even by David Gates’ standards.

And this makes me wish the 70s had never ended.

What else? Besides Blondie and Michelle, of course.

Or just go back to yelling at each other about Glenn Greenwald.

Reader Interactions

287Comments

  3. 3.

    Randy P

    There’s a great one on the Blue Jasmine soundtrack. The French part sounds like it might be Cajun. I’ve been trying to track down the lyric to see what the French words are. I’ve got as far as finding out it’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Lizzie Miles.

  5. 5.

    skjellyfetti

    Peter Sarstedt – Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)

    Not exactly French but much about the lifestyle of affluent Parisiènnes.

  7. 7.

    Alexandra

    A vote for Serge Gainsbourg. Don’t care whether they’re partly or completely in French.

    Bonnie and Clyde, Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus and the entire album of Histoire De Melody Nelson.

    Yeah, baby.

  9. 9.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    That’s my favorite David Gates song.

    ELO has one. Roll Over Beethoven? Driving, can’t google.

  11. 11.

    artem1s

    Ce que j’ai fais, ce soir la
    Ce qu’elle a dit, ce soir la
    Realisant mon espoir
    Je me lance, vers la gloire …

    I hate people when they’re not polite…

  13. 13.

    john

    April Wine – Just Between You and Me. More seriously, Beausoleil – Zydeco Gris Gris. Also, that Ca Plain Pour Moi song.

  18. 18.

    The Red Pen

    @john:

    Ca Plain Pour Moi

    Ca Plane Pour Moi

    It doesn’t translate literally, but means “it’s easy for me.” The reference to a plane is like it’s gliding — or “smooth sailing.”

  23. 23.

    Eljai

    I remember Stevie Wonder’s “My cherie amour”, but that probably doesn’t count because, after the title, it’s pretty much all in English.

  24. 24.

    srv

    Reposting for all the open source folks, lawyers or experts on British Law:

    The owner of Lavabit tells us that he’s stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we’d stop too. There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.

    What to do?

    What to do? I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure it out. And the conclusion I’ve reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad. But it’s good to be realistic. And the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how “clean” we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I don’t know how to function in such an atmosphere. I don’t know how to do Groklaw like this.
    …
    So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can’t do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.

  25. 25.

    gogol's wife

    I always thought Michel Legrand was incredibly corny, but Les Parapluies de Cherbourg has changed my mind. Divine!

    It’s not really OT, because it’s all in French in the movie but all in English in the hit songs that emerged (“I Will Wait for You” and the other one the name of which escapes me right now).

  29. 29.

    flukebucket

    Rod Stewart. Tonight’s the night. The French portion always was kind of freaky to me

    J’ai un peu peur
    Je que c’est que va dira maman
    Mon amour viens plus prus, embrasse-moi.
    Oh, Je t’adore beaucoup
    Cette nuit mon ami
    oui cette nuit mon ami
    Je t’aime Je t’aime Je t’aime ….

  31. 31.

    Randy P

    Since you mention the 70s, “Voulez-vous Coucher avec moi” by the Pointer Sisters, of whom I was quite the fanboy once.

    And nobody has mentioned “Michelle ma Belle” by The Beatles?

  34. 34.

    MikeJ

    @cleek: I think people just don’t understand how the internet works at a fundamental level. Unless you personally own all the cables between you and your recipient, somebody else can see what you’re doing. And if you own all of it, it ain’t an internet, it’s a network.

  35. 35.

    maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor

    “Hungry for You” by the Police deserves a mention.

  38. 38.

    Belafon

    @cleek: According to the guy who invented the mouse, it was a feature that the internet remembered everything you did, so that you wouldn’t have to.

  39. 39.

    Yatsuno

    @MikeJ: I find it even more amusing that a lot of the folks who are freaking out about their online privacy are also the no gubmint seekrit evar trolls as well. Privacy for me but not for thee. AKA White Male Problems, which we all know are the only ones that matter.

  43. 43.

    Anna in PDX

    Darling, je vous aime beaucoup by Nat King Cole
    Safety Dance by Men Without Hats (“Francais!”)
    Sting’s song that includes the French rapper Sté Strausz “Perfect Love Gone Wrong” (from the point of view of the dog, it’s a great song, really fun)

    @Waldo:Yes, Melanie’s “what have they done to my song ma”! That is a great song. Melanie is great, period.

  46. 46.

    Jacel

    Martin Mull (on the “and His Fabulous Furniture” album) sang a song with verse in early language lesson French and then, just as expressively in English: “Ah, yes. I am a man. What time is it? Potatoes. The book of my aunt, and the cheese and vegetables of my mother.”

  47. 47.

    ? Martin

    @cleek: Yeah. And you can secure it when you need to, but it makes it less collaborative. I don’t understand Groklaw’s situation here:

    If you want to add strong encryption on top of your email, that’s easy. The challenge with it is that you need a second communication mechanism to share the encryption key. That makes it harder to collaborate – particularly with strangers, but what the fuck else do you expect? If you’re communicating with strangers, you already run the risk of the other end of that communication being the NSA or whoever you are trying to encrypt your data from.

    Public and secure are mutually exclusive things.

    And there’s a whole host of other ways to collaborate that exclude email that provide encryption. FFS, just use iMessage or Facetime which are both end-to-end encrypted and apparently unbreakable to law enforcement. They’re hardly the only things out there like that.

  51. 51.

    cleek

    @Yatsuno:
    there’s also a curious overlap between the ‘government should run our healthcare system’ crowd and the ‘government can’t know who i talk to’ crowd.

    if you don’t trust it to have the capability (though not the legal authority) to read your email and track your phone calls, how on earth could you want it to know everything about your health situation (including your mental health, your sexual issues, and the number of times your hemorrhoids flared up last year) ? it’s the same government, kids.

  54. 54.

    raven

    @cleek: Well, it makes a good blogpost!

    There are many myths about the origin of the name ‘jambalaya.’ One commonly repeated folklore is that the word derives from the combination of the French ‘jambon’ meaning ham, the French article ‘à la’, a contraction of ‘à la manière de’ meaning “in the style of”, and ‘ya’, thought to be of West African origin meaning rice.[citation needed] Hence, the dish was named jamb à la ya. European explorers had imported rice from Asia and Africa. Enslaved Africans already had a native name for this crop; they called it ‘ya’. As Europeans learned the term ‘ya’ for rice, it became included in the name of the dish. However, this theory is largely discredited. Ham is not the signature element of the dish, so there is no reason why it would be featured in the name. Furthermore, there is no known African language in which ‘ya’ means “rice.

    And I’m all over some folklore, like white on rice!

  55. 55.

    MikeJ

    @cleek:

    if you don’t trust it to have the capability (though not the legal authority) to read your email

    The capability cat was never in the bag that it is now out of. For a good time, fire up a copy of wireshark while sitting in starbucks discussing online privacy and just start reading out loud.

  59. 59.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @? Martin: Hmm. Doubt I’d get a quick answer back from the only person I know who might know. And my google-fu fails me.

  60. 60.

    SectionH

    Charles Aznavour For Me Formidable. I’m sure he did other French/English songs but that one comes immediately to mind.

    I inherited some of his LPs from my mother, but they’re still in Lexington. It’s harder to google his songs when I can remember lots of lyrics but not titles. Sigh.

  61. 61.

    GregB

    This is my Franco-phone summer. Went to my nephew’s wedding full of French speaking Rwandan’s, as well as some Quebeccers. Also running into a bunch of French Quebeccers at shows in Old Orchard Beach Maine and just worked with a film crew that was all French.

    Ces’t la vie.

  62. 62.

    Belafon

    @raven: Someone probably made up the word, and then when asked why, he gave the definition described. The question would then be, is that where the word came from?

  66. 66.

    zombie rotten mcdonald

    Big Zombie by the Mekons:

    Pardon merci, je suis le grande zombie
    I’m just not human tonight

  68. 68.

    raven

    @cleek: It’s in enough cajun cookbooks that I use it anyway. And the there is Creole from “Crillo” or “of the colonies”. African cooks using indigenous ingredients for European palates.

  69. 69.

    joel hanes

    @Belafon:

    While you guys are both correct about the (absent) privacy of email, groklaw is a tremendous loss.

    It’s apparent that we can’t have nice things.

  70. 70.

    The Red Pen

    @? Martin:

    If you want to add strong encryption on top of your email, that’s easy. The challenge with it is that you need a second communication mechanism to share the encryption key.

    How about just sending someone your public key? That’s how we establish secure communication with people we haven’t met, such as the good folks at Amazon dot-com.

    Then, of course, you need a way to trust that the public key you have corresponds to a private key that is in full control of the other party, but that’s way easier than establishing a secure side channel.

  71. 71.

    raven

    @Belafon:

    The Dictionary of American Food and Drink offers this creative old wives’ tale about the origin of the word:

    Late one evening a traveling gentleman stopped by a New Orleans inn which had little food remaining from the evening meal. The traveler instructed the cook, “Jean, balayez!” or “Jean, sweep something together!” in the local dialect. The guest pronounced the resulting hodge-podge dish as “Jean balayez.”

  72. 72.

    Another Holocene Human

    Ed Schultz is moving back to weekdays, and taking one of Chris Matthews’ time slots, MSNBC said Monday.

    Schultz will take over the 5 PM slot Mondays through Fridays, starting August 26th. Matthews, whose “Hardball” aired at both 5 and 7 PM, will now air solely at 7.

    VINDICATION.

    Can’t wait to see AFL, CWA, ATU heads on prime time again. CTU. & suchlike.

  73. 73.

    gussie

    @cleek: Yeah, I was just wondering if that sort of insecurity was built into the net, or into email. Nice to know it’s mostly the latter. MikeJ had me worried.

  75. 75.

    Another Holocene Human

    Now if they could bring back UP with Chris Hayes, that was some good television right there.

    And air Smugness O’Donnell at midnight, up against Charlie Smarmy Rose. kekekeke

  78. 78.

    The Red Pen

    @srv: This strikes me as the moral equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot because your shoes are made in a Malaysian sweatshop.

  79. 79.

    Punchy

    For those that haven’t seen this, just fucking disgusting.

    All three teens were black, and by the pictures published in Australian newspapers, they look just exactly how many whites would view them. This will only increase the call for more SYG laws, and calls for Zimmerman to become Mayor of Duncan, OK.

    What a fucking mess.

  80. 80.

    Mnemosyne

    @joel hanes:

    If my bank can set up secure messaging between me and one of its employees where I log into their website using my password, why can’t Groklaw?

  81. 81.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Mnemosyne: Groklaw is a very old IT law resource. Think the Slashdot crowd. With laws like DMCA out there and patent trolls a-plundering it’s an existential issue in that sector.

    I don’t understand why they can’t use encryption if they’re worried about privileged communications. Did something happen to PGP? It’s still legal, right? What geek doesn’t know about that?

  82. 82.

    Mnemosyne

    @Punchy:

    Oh goody. Timmy will be spooging himself all over these threads at this proof of the ongoing race war against whitey.

  83. 83.

    Randy P

    @Randy P: I’m an idiot. “Voulez-vous” is “Lady Marmalade”, the 2nd embedded video.

    In my defense those videos aren’t loading on this phone in this (barely any signal) location

  85. 85.

    The Red Pen

    @gussie:

    Yeah, I was just wondering if that sort of insecurity was built into the net, or into email. Nice to know it’s mostly the latter. MikeJ had me worried.

    Insecurity wasn’t “built into” email (RFC-822, if you care to read it). It’s more accurate to say that security was overlooked.

    Internet email was designed to carry messages over a network that was secure because its users were trusted. Everyone on the Internet in 1982 was either a DOD employee, a researcher, an employee at a company that worked with the DOD, or an academic. At the time, there wasn’t anything you would want to hide that you would also put on the net.

  86. 86.

    Mnemosyne

    @Another Holocene Human:

    Groklaw is a very old IT law resource. Think the Slashdot crowd. With laws like DMCA out there and patent trolls a-plundering it’s an existential issue in that sector.

    Yeah, sorry, it’s like trying to read something half-written in French when I haven’t taken French in 20 years. I’m sure those words mean a lot to IT geeks deep into hacking or whatever the kids these days are doing, but, again, I don’t know why I should be more upset about Groklaw than about, say, stop and frisk or school privatization.

    ETA: Yes, it’s true — I’ve been “on the internet” for over a decade and still have no idea what “Slashdot” is. I mean, I know it’s a website, but that’s about it. But, then, I don’t expect you guys to know who the Yarn Harlot is, so we’re even.

  87. 87.

    H.K. Anders

    Lady Marmalade, despite its butchery of the reflexive verb se coucher.

    And Glenn Greenwald can suck my ass. ;-)

  89. 89.

    Belafon

    @joel hanes: I used to read groklaw back when they were covering SCO.

    The owner of Lavabit tells us that he’s stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we’d stop too.

    There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.

    What to do?

    My answer is keep going. If they had known what most of us knew about email back in the 1980s they would have either shrugged their shoulders or moved to the mountains.

  90. 90.

    Gin & Tonic

    @gussie: MikeJ should have you worried. The underlying communication protocol of the Internet is, by nature and design, insecure. It can be made more secure, but that takes a non-zero effort.

  92. 92.

    joes527

    @cleek: ummm… You do realize that Lavabit was a secure email service, and the “security hole” that shut them down was secret action by our government that they cant even discuss in detail w/o being put in jail?

    this just in: Lavabit was designed to be secure.
    It was secure right up to the time when our government arrived with secret documents and threats of prison to the folks running it.

  93. 93.

    cleek

    @gussie:
    oh, there’s still plenty of ways to be insecure on the net.

    you should always assume that any web site that isn’t using https is completely insecure (ie. everything you send to the host and get back is plain text, unencrypted) – never give CC info on an non-http connection! and email is just text files flying around.

    unsecured WiFi is wide open for snooping, and WiFi’s “WEP” security is easily breakable.

  94. 94.

    Draylon Hogg

    Regulo 7 by Moose has some beautiful French vocals by Stereolab’s Laetetia Sadler. Or Je suis un Rock Star by Bill Wyman.

  95. 95.

    Keith G

    @Yatsuno: You have been using this formulation…

    AKA White Male Problems,

    …quite a bit lately. As with most cliched broad strokes, I think it sidesteps the need for a more detailed and critical discussion of what is going on.

    Not the least of which, are there issues here that impact folks who are not white and/or not male?

    Certainly the least of which is that it gives of a certain smugness. Then,again, what is Balloon-Juice without a certain smugness.

  96. 96.

    peach flavored shampoo

    @Punchy: I suspect this case will become a clarion call to conservatives everywhere, who will start advocating a “shoot first, ask later” protocol for dealing with minority youth. The most messed up part is, with respect to this case, that would have been the correct response for this guy to have survived.

    I mean…these teens killed this guy soley because they were bored. Let that sink in.

  101. 101.

    RandomMonster

    Also, everything by Jacques Dutronc, but if you want a taste try out “Et Moi Et Moi Et Moi”.

  104. 104.

    polyorchnid octopunch

    @Gin & Tonic: Only if you want to make sure they can’t see the content of the email. If you don’t want them to know where it came from, where it was going, or the specific people at each end of the exchange, PGP won’t help you.

    This is why it’s useless for dissidents, neither overseas in Russia or China nor in the US.

  105. 105.

    MikeJ

    @joes527:

    It was secure right up to the time when our government arrived with secret documents and threats of prison to the folks running it.

    There is no technological way to get around a subpoena. For any communication to be useful, somebody somewhere has to know how to read it. If the law can put their hands on that person, the communication is never 100% secure.

  106. 106.

    xjmueller

    Rod Stewart. Tonight’s the night. Young woman speaking french at the end. Rod has always been a bit of a dick. Marries well though…

  107. 107.

    Belafon

    @Belafon: I should also add that while I totally think that pj deserves her privacy, it’s not the government she should be worried about. The government is not going to go after someone who’s talking about apple vs samsung lawsuits, no matter how much you might think so. They’re not even going to look at emails marked “NSA has got to go.” Now, corporations on the other hand, and she has experience at that, back when she was covering SCO.

  110. 110.

    cleek

    @Mnemosyne:
    Slashdot is a place where you can argue PC vs Linux vs Mac every day, and where people have been having this govt snooping debate since the mid-90s.

    @joes527:

    this just in: Lavabit was designed to be secure.

    Lavabit is not email. it’s a service built on top of email, which enhances email’s functionality.

  111. 111.

    The Pale Scot

    Does anyone know where one can watch the Chris Hayes’ “Politics of power” documentary? It seems it not even listed for rebroadcast.
    thx

  112. 112.

    Belafon

    @MikeJ: And, if we are going to be a nation of laws, then at some point the law has to trump technology. In both directions. Isn’t that the argument?

  115. 115.

    smintheus

    Any of the songs Francoise Hardy sang with English and French lyrics. What a lush voice she had.

  116. 116.

    Joel

    Sexy Boy by Air is an easy pick. I know Air gets love for all their work with Sofia Koppola, but I think all that later work is boring. They’ve never lived up to the potential they flashed in Moon Safari.

    Protege Moi by Placebo? Not a favorite, really, but this is a narrow category.

  117. 117.

    Origuy

    Fun fact: a text, particularly a poem or song that is in multiple languages is called Macaronic. Since it was often used to show erudition, particularly pretentiously, someone who adopted foreign fashion was called a macaroni. Hence the line in Yankee Doodle Dandy about sticking a feather in his cap and calling it macaroni.

    Edit: I’m not clear on the cause and effect. It could have started from people liking macaroni, in England at the time a foreign food.

  118. 118.

    The Red Pen

    @Mnemosyne: Slashdot is the (or one of the) original “web logs.”

    I joined a long time ago. At that time, Slashdot would ferret out cool tech stories days before you heard about them elsewhere. In short order, other tech news channels gained parity in terms of delivering new, interesting news and shortly after that, I found that I could find stuff I was interested in more easily elsewhere. At that point, the community was the main draw.

    For me, the most interesting story is about Slashdot moderation. They introduced a vote system and “karma.” They chose a few hundred top posters to start the process. Although I had different interests and outlook as most “Slashdotters,” I made the cut and became a moderator. The system was a lot like what’s on Daily Kos. This worked great, and hugely improved quality. Then people began to gripe about the moderation, so they introduce meta-moderation. Moderators could lose karma by having their moderation decisions voted down. Shortly after, I lost moderation status.

    The effect of metamoderation was to ensure group-think. Originally, moderators were chosen because their posts were well-liked, which implied that they were thoughtful contributors. After metamoderation, respect would not keep you in moderator status; now you also had to conform to popular opinions.

    When the site became mired in butthurt over the suggestion that freely distributing copyrighted works was, like, a basic human right, man, I left the site behind.

  119. 119.

    joes527

    @MikeJ: If only the trusted third part could reside in a country w/o secret subpenas for wholesale hoovering of data…

  120. 120.

    MikeJ

    @Belafon: Yes, and I agree. If you own a safe and the cops think you have the proceeds of a bank robbery in it, they can get a subpoena and force you to open it or go to prison. There’s no reason why cryptographically locked documents should be different from physically locked doors.

    Now if people want to argue about secret subpoenas or that it’s too easy in general to get one, I’ll agree that those are problems. I’ll write letters, make phone call, march in a parade to protest. The problem isn’t the technology that makes investigative overreach possible, it’s investigative overreach.

  125. 125.

    srv

    @Punchy:

    and calls for Zimmerman to become Mayor of Duncan, OK.

    That one I had not heard of. Maybe he should start a Buffalo Bill type traveling show.

    @Keith G:

    Not the least of which, are there issues here that impact folks who are not white and/or not male?

    Well, the whole thing about drones is white folks way of feeling bad about all those non-white folks having to embrace a Hellfire or JDAM. What’s in it for them?

    But it is even bothering me. That white-bastion of geekydom, reddit and news.ycombinator.com have so jumped the shark that I can’t even troll with a straight face anymore. It’s like every other commenter is real or… DougJ

    America is dead.

    So where do we live? Every single thing that the US stood for has literally been murdered in the last 13 years.

    We are not the land of the free. We are not a home for the brave. We have zero moral standing on any issue. We are 100% completely corrupt and destroyed as any nation we were raised to believe in.

    I’m starting to miss truthers.

  128. 128.

    joes527

    @Yatsuno: did you just equate citizen’s right to privacy from from their government with government’s right privacy from its citizens?

    … and somehow citizen’s right to privacy from from their government is a white male issue?

    Man, you live in bizarro-world.

  129. 129.

    MikeJ

    @cleek:

    my ID is in the 26Ks, which is pretty old. but not that old.

    33k for me, but only because I absolutely refused to give any web site my email address for a long, long time.

    I met #11 or 12? (something sub teen) at a London.pm meeting once.

  130. 130.

    Gin & Tonic

    @polyorchnid octopunch: Countermail and NeoMailbox work just fine. Others will arise, I’m sure, as there continues to be market demand. People act as if Lavabit was the first and/or only. Why store e-mail in the USA?

  132. 132.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Mnemosyne: Arguments from personal incredulity really just add that touch of class to Balloon Juice.

    Seriously, are we not allowed to have other interests than this blog?

    alexa – groklaw 200778
    balloon-juice 82018
    eff.org 18031
    reddit 114

    The horror. The horror.

  133. 133.

    The Red Pen

    @MikeJ:

    I met [Slashdot UID] #11 or 12? (something sub teen) at a London.pm meeting once.

    Did you discuss the imminent reemergence of AmigaDOS?

  138. 138.

    Another Holocene Human

    @cleek:

    Slashdot is a place where you can argue PC vs Linux vs Mac every day, and where people have been having this govt snooping debate since the mid-90s.

    Crackers and phreekers who decoded ATT’s electronic switching system to f*ck with Ma Bell (and make free long distance phone calls, also, too–oh, and because they were just curious, see Woz, The) were the original non-violent offenders in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

    The rise in mandatory drug sentencing actually came afterwards.

    It’s kind of like how you can do more time for a bank robbery with a piece that was never fired than for attempted murder.

    All hail our corporate overlords.

    Yeah, so there’s a reason geeks are paranoid about this stuff… and it’s only fucking gotten worse. Good portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are arrant bullshit, imo.

  139. 139.

    The Red Pen

    @joes527:

    If only the trusted third part could reside in a country w/o secret subpenas for wholesale hoovering of data…

    Whatever happened to that data haven in Kinakuta?

  141. 141.

    peach flavored shampoo

    It is nothing new in a society awash in guns

    Killing in broad daylight a completely innocent stranger purely out of boredom by 3 teenagers in BFI OK is “nothing new”? In my world experience it is.

  142. 142.

    Mnemosyne

    @Another Holocene Human:

    Uh, that was the argument I was making since I referenced the Yarn Harlot. I’m assuming you don’t read her, or the Panopticon (which has nothing to do with what some libertarian-leaners here refer to as the Panopticon), or Grumperina, or Brooklyn Tweed. And that’s leaving aside Bikeyface, or Bike Shop Girl.

    I have interests outside of politics, but I don’t demand that my outside interests must be of vital interest to everyone who posts here, and anything that affects them affects all of us. And yet it seems that’s what I’m asked to do when it comes to Groklaw.

  143. 143.

    Belafon

    @joes527: Nope, actually. My point was that there’s a reason we allow governments to have police forces, FBI’s, CIA’s, and militaries. Governments aren’t the only entities that have the potential to, and sometimes, do bad things. As much as I want to restrict the governments ability to go running after every whim, I will never agree to having a system where there is no way for a government to get to information, even if it’s nothing more than a subpoena that has to be followed.

  144. 144.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Mnemosyne: But, then, I don’t expect you guys to know who the Yarn Harlot is, so we’re even.

    Actually, I know exactly who she is, thank you. I even have a Ravelry account.

    You’re the one mouthing off to other posters and calling them liars instead of Just Fucking Googling It.

    Also, this smacks of “I was a fan of Stephanie Pearl MacPhee before she was famous, brah.”

  147. 147.

    Another Holocene Human

    @The Red Pen: Everyone on the Internet in 1982 was either a DOD employee, a researcher, an employee at a company that worked with the DOD, or an academic. At the time, there wasn’t anything you would want to hide that you would also put on the net.

    Ha ha until that douchebag who later was my phys professor one semester left his admin account on the MIT network wide open and those East German hackers got in and started rooting around for info on nukes.

  150. 150.

    Mnemosyne

    @Another Holocene Human:

    You’re the one mouthing off to other posters and calling them liars instead of Just Fucking Googling It.

    Sorry, can you link to the comment in this thread when I did that? KTHXBAI.

    Also, this is not explaining why I should be desperately worried about Groklaw’s email problems. Since you read both websites, does that mean that everyone at Balloon-Juice should also be desperately worried about Stephanie’s fundraising for her charity bike ride, and anyone who’s not concerned is an asshole who doesn’t care about AIDS?

    ETA: And, yes, I was assuming that you’re a dude. Sorry about that.

  153. 153.

    gbear

    Fairport Convention’s cover of the Bob Dylan song “If You Gotta Go'” sung completely in french. It was actually a hit song for them. They did on a lark; the drummer is playing a stack of chairs that falls over and sends some bottles flying at the end of one of the verses. It’s a great song featuring the vocals Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson along with anyone else available who could sing.

  156. 156.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    How about Frère Jacques? My dad taught me that one when I was little. He’s Cajun from the swamps around Crowley.

  158. 158.

    Mnemosyne

    @Another Holocene Human:

    Oh, and I’m not saying that the Groklaw guys are lying or that they aren’t having problems keeping their email secure. I just don’t particularly care and don’t really see how it applies to me.

  159. 159.

    The Red Pen

    @Another Holocene Human:

    Ha ha until that douchebag who later was my phys professor one semester left his admin account on the MIT network wide open and those East German hackers got in and started rooting around for info on nukes.

    Well, yeah, but it was a trickle of events like this that lead to a slow increase in security. But internet email remains painfully insecure by default and let’s not even talk about it having no way to stop UCE.

    Remember that the 1988 Robert Morris worm relied on a feature of sendmail in which it would allow you to upload executable code to “help it out” on certain tricky email routing problems. This was enabled by default. Bottom line is that Internet security was off the radar until way too late.

  160. 160.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    Where is SFAW? It looks like some people are trying to start a fight in here or “pass the time”.

  163. 163.

    Belafon

    @MikeJ: Slightly more seriously, Dallas is thinking of joining the lawsuit against the new voting laws in the state. If they were going to change the name, it would have to read Texas (except Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin).

  167. 167.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    @Keith G:

    If you think that, “You’re dumber than you think I think you are.”

    What can I tell you, Kid? You’re right. When you’re right, you’re right, and you’re right.

  169. 169.

    gbear

    @raven: Can’t check out the video right now but I love that song. I hope it’s one of the versions with Linda Thompson singing. Absolutely beautiful song. I’ll listen when I’s at my home computer.

  173. 173.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @The Red Pen:

    If I had to choose between saving an AmStaf with a known history of mangling babies and Dennis Praeger, I’d save the AmStaf.

  174. 174.

    Belafon

    @The Red Pen: The only way to have good security is for it to be built with security in mind. The internet was not built with security in mind. Exactly the opposite, it was built with sharing in mind.

  176. 176.

    joel hanes

    @Mnemosyne:

    If my bank can set up secure messaging between me and one of its employees where I log into their website using my password, why can’t Groklaw?

    You miss the point.

    All that encryption is for naught if the courts can order the carrier to diviulge everything it knows about you, and order you to divulge the key on pain of imprisonment — which was about to hapen to the Lava guy.

    If the Feds come calling, your bank will happily roll over and tell them everything they know about you. That’s kinda OK with most people, because most people don’t have vindictive enemies in the Federal government.

    It’s not technology that’s changed; it’s the legal regime. The people who provided privacy email services no longer feel that they can in good conscience offer such a service, because they can’t hold off the Feds, and the Feds have abandoned all restraint.

    pj can’t work if not anonymous. She has unscrupulous enemies who will damage her life if they can find her.

  177. 177.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    I used to be a big fan of groklaw but then the free market opened up a treasure trove of top-notch legal pontificating in Balloon Juice Open Pet Threads.

  179. 179.

    gbear

    @raven: I was taking stock of my CD collection yesterday and realized I have way too much stuff. Between Fairport Convention, Richard and/or Linda Thompson, and Sandy Denny, I must have 60 CDs. I love that stuff.

  183. 183.

    rikyrah

    There won’t be any GOP alternative to Obamacare

    By Jonathan Bernstein, Published: August 20 at 12:04 pm

    We’re hearing more and more rumblings from top Republicans that the GOP’s current position on Obamacare is untenable — that the party can’t continue to call for the destruction of Obamacare forever without offering any alternative. The push from the right for a shutdown has only drawn that into sharper relief, and so we’re finally hearing that Republicans — finally! — will make good on their promise, now 30 months overdue, to come up with the “replace” part of repeal-and-replace.

    It ain’t gonna happen. There won’t be any serious GOP alternative to Obamacare.

    The first problem with developing an alternative to the Affordable Care Act is that there just may not be any policy alternative that comes close to accomplishing what the law accomplishes. At first, it looked like conservatives would leave themselves a way to propose their own version of the same reforms in Obamacare, and rename it on their own terms. As such, there seemed to be a method to it when, at the outset, conservatives worked hard to prevent an actual discussion of the substance of the law itself. Much of the initial hatred of the ACA was focused on a series of phony talking points and outright lies (“government takeover” of health care; “death panels”; the law was “rammed through” using corrupt procedural tricks; etc.).

    Since none of that was true, it gave Republicans an opening: they may have stigmatized “Obamacare,” but they hadn’t stigmatized the policy ideas at the core of the law — the combination of exchanges and subsidies that actually started out as a Republican plan, as Ezra Klein explains in detail today. In other words, as late as 2012 it seemed plausible Republicans could choose to invent a ConservaCare proposal based on Ronald Reagan Marketplaces that would basically offer a slightly different spin on the same underlying idea.

    But conservatives have decided that no policy overlap with Obamacare is acceptable.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/08/20/there-wont-be-any-gop-alternative-to-obamacare/

  184. 184.

    jamick6000

    Just as the #Benghazi investigation heats up, Obama gets a new puppy. Coincidence? I ThINK NOT! The media will fall for this hook, line and sinker. >:(

  186. 186.

    joel hanes

    @The Red Pen:

    Slashdot is the (or one of the) original “web logs.”

    The original weblog was Jorn Barger’s “Robot Wisdom”. Jorn had been experimenting with internet digests on Usenet, before the advent of the Web, and immediately seized on the possibility of an individual Web site to log and describe the fascinating things he was finding online as the Web flowered.

    Danny Yee’s “Pathologically Polymathic” is almost as old, and very nearly preserves the ur-form of the earliest blogs.

  190. 190.

    Belafon

    @joel hanes:

    It’s not technology that’s changed; it’s the legal regime.

    No. It’s not the legal regime. It’s maybe your naive understanding of how the world works that is changing. Subpoenas give the government that power. Period.

    As for how it’s changed recently, once again, do you know any of your history? The FISA court was set up because the government was doing this kind of stuff a while ago. It just put it under the same legal system that everything else was going through.

    Hell, the legal regime is still the same as it was 30 years ago. We just have systems that don’t necessarily conform to people’s belief. When you make a phone call, who owns the data that corresponds to the beginning and end of the phone call, especially when you give the company the right to that information? And if the company owns it, and the government legally asks them for it, do you have any rights at all?

    I’m sorry, part of the reason I don’t freak out is that this didn’t happen yesterday, and I didn’t find out yesterday. It may also help that I know what computers and people are capable of, not only with respect to intent, but ability.

  191. 191.

    FlipYrWhig

    @joel hanes: is that different from how a bank will give you a safe deposit box but will also open the box when investigators come calling? This isn’t my thing. It’s not a rhetorical question. I’m just not following.

  192. 192.

    gbear

    I skimmed the list again pretty fast but I didn’t see a mention of C’est La Vie written by Chuck Berry and covered by every country and roots band that ever existed. I like the Emmylou Harris version.

  194. 194.

    Betty Cracker

    @lamh36: Wow. I think that’s a very powerful ad. I’ve wondered since the trial what influence (if any) that animated “reenactment” the Zimmerman defense ran had on the jurors. We’re a very visual society. Seeing something sticks, even if it’s just a representation.

  195. 195.

    ? Martin

    Because California hates America more than anyone else.

    In California, officials are ramping up a unique program that identifies and seizes guns from people who are prohibited from keeping them. Under state law, a legally registered gun owner loses the right to own a firearm when he or she is convicted of a crime or becomes mentally ill.
    __
    Last year, state agents seized nearly 2,000 firearms, but implementing the gun seizure program is a painstaking job. In a recent operation, a caravan of four unmarked trucks traversed the bedroom communities of San Francisco’s East Bay. The trucks carry nine state agents wearing bulletproof vests and armed with .40-caliber Glock pistols and Tasers. They’ll spend the next six hours looking for illegal guns, explains Special Agent Kisu Yo of the California Department of Justice.

  198. 198.

    patrick II

    My 19-year old self would say that anything Claudine Longet sang was the best French song — even if she was trying to sing it in english.

  199. 199.

    beer time somewhere

    @joel hanes:

    It’s not technology that’s changed; it’s the legal regime.

    This! With PJ it was (is) always about the law and nothing else – no politics allowed on Groklaw. Now her own gov’t is basically saying she has no expectation of email privacy. If they can’t break the encryption now, they’ll keep it until they can. I wonder how many lawyers are starting to worry about their client communications?

  201. 201.

    ruemara

    @srv: Do any of these people read a TOS? Comprehend the nature of e-communications? SMH, this is silly.

    Had a phone interview. Sounds very good, but we’ll see.

  202. 202.

    Jane2

    @Mnemosyne: I’m sure that neither the Yarn Harlot nor I give a crap about Groklaw and have survived quite nicely. Never heard of it until today.

  203. 203.

    Mark B.

    How about Je Suis Rick Springfield? It’s a catchy little tune about a middle aged guy with terrible French trying to pick up an attractive woman in a bar somewhere in France. It’s not a classic, but perhaps one day it will be.

  209. 209.

    Jane2

    My faves with French in them are by Lucille Starr…”The French Song” and her version of “Colinda”. Go, les Franco-Manitobans!

  210. 210.

    Trollhattan

    @Southern Beale:

    Yecch. Bo’s white booties are tokenism, I suppose. Not to mention Bo was a gift from a known commie.

    That’s their A-game? Like Demint trolling the possibility Obama Just Might Sign a Bill Repealing Obamacare because we Just Can’t Know That He Won’t. Life on the Wingnut Welfare circuit, reduced to a series of soul-killing photo ops.

  211. 211.

    ? Martin

    @Southern Beale: I think the real crime to them is that some black people were able to afford a $2,000 dog, when most of the folks complaining blew any shot at having $2,000 on either subprime mortgages or meth.

  220. 220.

    joel hanes

    @Belafon:

    maybe your naive understanding of how the world works that is changing. Subpoenas give the government that power.

    You are absolutely correct, of course, and I should have spent much more time on the wording of that comment.

    What is true, though not what I said, is that in the space of a few days, operators of two “email privacy” operations have closed down. Both have stated they perceive a change in the legal regime or enforcement climate that makes it no longer possible for them to promise confidentiality to their customers.

    Bad writing on my part. The claims are theirs, not mine.

  221. 221.

    ? Martin

    @The Red Pen:

    Then, of course, you need a way to trust that the public key you have corresponds to a private key that is in full control of the other party, but that’s way easier than establishing a secure side channel.

    Unless the entity you are worried about listening in is the NSA or some other signals agency. Then that’s not so easy to ensure. Additionally, it’s not so easy to ensure that the other party isn’t themselves the NSA, which is another part of the concern.

  224. 224.

    MomSense

    I don’t know why I’m in moderation. Perhaps our blog overlords don’t like Flamenco on a French music thread?

  225. 225.

    ? Martin

    @joel hanes:

    What is true, though not what I said, is that in the space of a few days, operators of two “email privacy” operations have closed down. Both have stated they perceive a change in the legal regime or enforcement climate that makes it no longer possible for them to promise confidentiality to their customers.

    I would also note that the operators of services like that (at least the ones I have known) tend to be inherently paranoid (which is why they set up the business to begin with), so while there may be a perception of a change in the legal regime, that doesn’t mean anything has actually changed. Further, what they report as abuses may in fact be perfectly legal and ordinary. These guys are often not far removed from the self-proclaimed constitutional originalists who see absolute freedom in the one area of interest they have, and are unable to draw parallels to others – where subpoenas to search a house are routine and reasonable but subpoenas to search an email account are tyranny.

    I take these with a bit of a grain of salt as a result. I need to read some responses from these operators that don’t sound like a teaparty press release with ‘guns’ scratched out and ‘computers’ penciled in. So far, both email operators statements sound exactly like that.

  227. 227.

    Roger Moore

    @joel hanes:

    Both have stated they perceive a change in the legal regime or enforcement climate that makes it no longer possible for them to promise confidentiality to their customers.

    Which again shows that they were ignorant, not that the legal environment has actually changed that much. Services to cover the tracks of email users have been facing legal challenges and been forced to divulge information to the authorities at least since the mid 1990s. It was anonymizing proxies back then rather than email encryption services, but it was the same general principle. These services are making a political point by shutting down now, not doing their users any real service.

  229. 229.

    Chris

    There’s a delightful Quebecois song called “J’aime pas ta face” in which the singer details just how much he hates his boss – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCytVNTmxZI. I think that’s somewhere in my top 3 favorite French-language songs ever.

    Also anything by Georges Brassens; his songs often turn into earworms for me, but the kind I actually don’t mind.

  234. 234.

    Gravenstone

    @? Martin: And cue the wingnut freak out about “jackbooted ATF thugs”.

    Yes, those would be the same cretins who mouth platitudes about “enforcing the laws already on the books”. But should the govenrment ever have the temerity to actually follow through on enforcement …

    /sigh

  237. 237.

    PopeRatzo

    @Belafon:

    As much as I want to restrict the governments ability to go running after every whim, I will never agree to having a system where there is no way for a government to get to information,

    It’s dishonest to suggest that there are some great number of us asking to stop government from getting to information. We just want them to stick to the limitations put on them by the Constitution.

    And that means, warrants, subpoenas, allowing the accused to face their accusers with representation present, etc. No secret courts, secret warrants, secret laws. There are already tens of thousands of pages of actual laws that are protected by copyright or are classified outright.

    I know there are a lot of loyal Democrats who want to blink and have this entire issue disappear behind President Obama’s “transparency commission” but that’s just not going to happen. If anything, the movement to limit the police state is picking up steam. There are people right here in these comments sections that six weeks ago would have scoffed at the idea, who now see this is the defining issue of our time. Not gay marriage, not health care reform and not…well, sorry, I can’t think of any other supposedly signature issues of the past five years. If we can’t have even the most basic privacy, gay marriage and health care reform just aren’t going to matter, because there’s no way to make sure that some small, venal Republican will rise to power who will use that national security apparatus and make innocent peoples’ lives a living hell. For an increasing number of people, even supposedly benign administrations like the current one have made their lives a living hell. Ask Aaron Schwartz’ family, or any of the whistleblowers who have been prosecuted or any of the journalists who are threatened with the Espionage Act.

    When you have police state powers, even decent men become tyrants. And furry little black puppies on the White House lawn are not going to distract those of us who believe this to be true.

  239. 239.

    Chris

    @srv:

    America is dead.
    …
    So where do we live? Every single thing that the US stood for has literally been murdered in the last 13 years.
    …
    We are not the land of the free. We are not a home for the brave. We have zero moral standing on any issue. We are 100% completely corrupt and destroyed as any nation we were raised to believe in.

    See, what makes me eyeroll about things like that is the belief that we were ever “the nation we were raised to believe in” or that what’s happened in the last few years (even if you’re counting the Bush years as the beginning). Yes, there are ways in which we’ve been getting much worse in recent years (and other ways in which we’ve been getting better), but seriously, when were we as a country NOT plagued by some serious issues? We really need to stop taking this Shining City On A Hill crap as if it were ever real.

  240. 240.

    Chris

    @rikyrah:

    At first, it looked like conservatives would leave themselves a way to propose their own version of the same reforms in Obamacare, and rename it on their own terms.

    That’s close to my own theory; that as time goes by, conservatives will eventually accept “Obamacare,” but will manage to have their cake and eat it too by praising individual parts of Obamacare (like, say, the pre-existing conditions rule) separately as if they were something completely different, while still referring to the vague, ill-defined “Obamacare” as a whole as evil and wasteful.

    ETA: Kind of the same way people now hate “big government” as an amorphous whole, but love each and every individual part of it (Social Security, Medicare, etc) if asked about it individually.

  241. 241.

    cleek

    @Chris:
    people love to think their time on earth is the most momentous and crucial and transformative time that there ever was. and their pet issue is always the most important issue, ever. and their enemies are always the worst, ever. it helps them feel important, i suppose. beats admitting that everywhere you look, all there is is just people being people, doing what people have done for millennia, but wearing different clothes.

  242. 242.

    cleek

    @PopeRatzo:

    There are people right here in these comments sections that six weeks ago would have scoffed at the idea, who now see this is the defining issue of our time. Not gay marriage, not health care reform and not…well, sorry, I can’t think of any other supposedly signature issues of the past five years.

    and there are people right here in these comments who do not think that.

    take a poll.

    and take another one in six weeks.

  244. 244.

    The Red Pen

    @? Martin:

    Unless the entity you are worried about listening in is the NSA or some other signals agency. Then that’s not so easy to ensure. Additionally, it’s not so easy to ensure that the other party isn’t themselves the NSA, which is another part of the concern.

    Keys can be generated that are of sufficient size that the NSA won’t be able to crack them in the 5-year window. The NSA being sneaky and inserting false keys is also unlikely, especially if the keys are, themselves signed by a trusted third party. The most likely scenario is for the other person’s private key to be compromised. This varies in difficulty depending on how paranoid they are.

    I can encrypt things the NSA can’t decrypt (in less than a decade), but if I send that encrypted text to an idiot, it might be easier just to get it from the recipient.

  245. 245.

    fuckwit

    @joel hanes: Hmm. There are some options, RetroShare among them, and other darknets, which could be used to be more anonymous. But good point: no encryption or technology can withstand the Rubber Hose Attack, in which some mafia enforcer or criminal or military or government agent ties you to a chair and starts beating you with a rubber hose until you give them your password and all your encrypted data.

    Now, there are some solutions, like one-time pads that get securely destroyed so that you don’t HAVE the keys to give up to anyone no matter how much they torture you, and the professional cloak-and-dagger guys in governments use that. But even that’s got to be carefully managed.

    Rubber Hose Attacks happensviolently in third-world countries, and happen here simply by lawyers threatening to sue you into poverty or government prosecutors threatening to put you away forever. Everyone has ways of making you talk.

    Ultimately, if the law allows the government to compel you to reveal your keys, then all your high technology is useless.

    Shit. There’s no solution other than a political solution: elect a Congress that can and will pass laws to rein this in.

  246. 246.

    crosspalms

    “Crazy Arms” by Ian and Sylvia (with Great Speckled Bird)

    “Complainte pour Ste. Catherine” by Kate and Anna McGarrigle (though I can’t remember if it actually has any English words in it…)

  248. 248.

    Keith G

    @Senyordave: Sorry, but I do not care. I am waiting for the president who has the courage to stop the grotesque spectacle of allowing yet more groups of millionaires to get private tours of the White House and face time with the First or Second Families.

    Looks like it won’t be this one or probable the next.

  249. 249.

    FlipYrWhig

    @fuckwit: It’s important to pass new laws. OTOH, the laws will have loopholes and carve-outs for national security, and then for major crimes, and then we’ll be pretty much back to where we started. Like how there are kinds of speech that can be restricted. There will be kinds of information that can be “surveilled.”

    IMHO the best way to get to substantive reform would be the idea of a public advocate within/before the FISA Court. Maybe make FISA Court appointments have to be approved by a supermajority of the Supreme Court or something so it can’t be purely partisan.

  250. 250.

    FlipYrWhig

    @fuckwit: IOW, there will always be the opportunity for the Oliver North Defense: yes, I broke the law, but for the noble purpose of defending America in a dangerous world, so do your worst.

  252. 252.

    gogol's wife

    @Chris:

    This reminds me of someone here the other day who was saying, just try to tell people in a bar in Europe or Asia that America is the great savior bringing democracy to the world. They’ll laugh in your face!

    Yes, they probably would, and I would never say such a ridiculous thing.

    What I might say is that compared to other countries I have experience with, in particular the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, it’s a pretty good place and I feel lucky to have been born here. You’re pretty free to say what you like, you have reasonable social mobility, and my father thought it was good enough to hop on a ship when he was 18 years old and get his butt out of Europe ASAP. Of course, that was Austro-Hungary. But still. I see people like him every day, coming here to breathe a little bit freer and work their tails off.

    And if you think Obama could have been elected the leader of any European country, you’re crazy. Bush II was bad, but we’ve been through bad periods before.

  254. 254.

    Cacti

    Information wants to be free…

    Except for when it comes to wikileaks’ finances.

    But, buy an Edward Snowden t-shirt. They promise the proceeds will go to him. ;-)

  256. 256.

    Roger Moore

    I’m surprised I haven’t seen any comments on it, but Injustice Scalia is at it again. He’s complaining about the Supreme Court legislating from the bench by creating new classes of minorities who deserve rights. That’s up to Congress. Of course, if Congress actually tries to protect the rights of minorities and votes for it with massive majorities in both houses, Scalia is just fine tossing it out because SHUT UP, that’s why.

  259. 259.

    schrodinger's cat

    @gogol’s wife: I agree with most of what you have said but are there people who actually believe this?

    This reminds me of someone here the other day who was saying, just try to tell people in a bar in Europe or Asia that America is the great savior bringing democracy to the world.

  260. 260.

    Max (from long ago)

    Say No More Mon Amour! By Rex Manning.

    Only 32 weeks 6 days until Rex Manning Day. :)

  262. 262.

    schrodinger's cat

    @cleek: People also tend to equate their childhoods as an era of peace and tranquility, when everything was wonderful and they were safe. It probably was for them, but not necessarily for their parents.

  263. 263.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I agree with most of what you have said but are there people who actually believe this?

    Yes, there are, or at least there are people who like to say we are. You know, Reagan saying we’re the shining city of the hill, Bush II saying we’re going to spread democracy, etc. I have no idea if they believe that crap, but they’re perfectly happy to say it.

  265. 265.

    gbear

    @cleek: I’ll vote: My #1 concern is successful implementation of Obamacare and having it survive (or improve) beyond 2016. I can guarantee that it will still be my #1 concern in six weeks. This is an extremely selfish desire as I would like to retire well before I turn 66.

    #2 concern is that we avoid tanking the economy again and taking all of our jobs, homes, and savings down with it.

  266. 266.

    MikeJ

    @The Red Pen:

    The most likely scenario is for the other person’s private key to be compromised.

    Exactly. Nobody has their 2048 bit key memorized, so they put it on a key ring which is then protected by a password like “password” or “abc123”. That scenario exists even before you consider keyloggers or tempest.

  267. 267.

    The Red Pen

    @Roger Moore:

    I have no idea if they believe

    I can say that after extensive field work in the right-wing fever swamps, they absolutely believe this. It’s what they mean by “American exceptionalism.” Their concept of foreign policy is successfully described by Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.”

  270. 270.

    eemom

    @Keith G:

    I am waiting for the president who has the courage to stop the grotesque spectacle of allowing yet more groups of millionaires to get private tours of the White House and face time with the First or Second Families.

    Not exactly the same thing, but in a similar vein, I hated it when the FLOTUS did the fucking Oscar best picture award because some Hollywood assholes hopped on a jet.

    I also hate it that the Obamas paid thousands of dollars for fucking designer puppies instead of adopting shelter dogs.

    /not a fucking Obot today

  271. 271.

    MikeJ

    @eemom:

    I also hate it that the Obamas paid thousands of dollars for fucking designer puppies instead of adopting shelter dogs

    They needed a hypo allergenic dog and went with a known breed.

  274. 274.

    gbear

    @nineone: He’s the guy who can get this thread up to 500 comments. Also, if he asks you to do something foor him, don’t do it.

  275. 275.

    Mustang Bobby

    @matt: “Old” is relative. For some of us, 1966 wasn’t that long ago.

    But yes, to prove I’m an old fart, the best song with some French lyrics is “Michelle” by the Beatles. In fact, Rubber Soul is one of their best albums.

  277. 277.

    Betty Cracker

    @schrodinger’s cat: I heard a theory recently that the reason many older folks tend to think the world is going to hell in a hand-basket is that they project their personal physical decline on everything around them.

  278. 278.

    The Red Pen

    @MikeJ:

    Exactly. Nobody has their 2048 bit key memorized, so they put it on a key ring which is then protected by a password like “password” or “abc123″. That scenario exists even before you consider keyloggers or tempest.

    Or… you can have your private keys live inside a hardware device that you insert into a reader. The private key operations are done on the device so the private keys are only as vulnerable as access to that device — not your network-attached computer.

    The private keys I use every day are in a smart card. They are protected by a relatively short PIN, but it would be difficult for an attacker to get possession of my card, obtain the keys, and return it to me without me knowing.

  279. 279.

    Beatrice

    RN in NYC: So apparently I can’t reply to your post. FYWP. But thank you for mentioning Ma Belle Amie. I had completely forgotten that one. Loved it too when I was… um… just a wee tyke.

  280. 280.

    Keith G

    Ok, now that I fixed my comment:

    @MikeJ:

    They needed a hypo allergenic dog and went with a known breed.

    So did I at age 12. Instead, I got allergy shots so I could keep my german shepherd and my tom cat’

    Then again, no one should rag on their choice of family dog.

  283. 283.

    RN in NYC

    @Beatrice: Beatrice, I’ve been humming it all afternoon. I scanned all the comments to this thread fully expecting to see someone reference the song…and seeing that no one had was both thrilling and sad…

    The youtube video with the awkwardly sweet singer & the fringe jacket guitar player made my day!

    RN in NYC

  287. 287.

    Beckya57

    Can’t believe I haven’t seen any Arcade Fire references. “Haiti” is my favorite.

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