Did you know that the Bible doesn't just condone abortion, it actually requires it in the case of infidelity, and gives (bad) instructions on how it is to be done? It's all in Numbers Chapter 5, starting at verse 11. I wonder if it would be possible to set up abortion clinics which perform abortions with a modernization of the method described in the Bible, for the subset of women who qualify.

Nick Denton was a sleazebag. I knew that within one minute of meeting him, as he described the new web site he was planning, called "Valleywag." He was proud he had learned the name of Larry Page's girlfriend and he could break that story, as if who Larry was dating was worthy news of some kind.

As I've written earlier, Tesla has the ability to load special "search" neural networks into the cars to hunt for things they want to use to train with. In this article on Forbes, I hypothesize the day when there's an Amber Alert, and police ask to load networks to search for the car and people involved, and it quickly works. And then police get a taste for this, not just in the USA but China and other places. Where does it lead and can we stop it?

Most of the world was wowed by the Google Duplex demo, where their system was able to cold-call a hairdresser and make an appointment with her, with the hairdresser unaware she was talking to an AI. The system included human speech mannerisms and the ability to respond to the random phrases the hairdresser through back.

A huge opportunity awaits a young social media company that is poised to take advantage of the fall of Facebook (and Twitter). Is somebody out there ready to carry the ball and make it happen. It probably has to be somebody already with most of this done, or even operating.

For many decades I've had an ongoing debate with my friend David Brin over the ideas in his book The Transparent Society where he ponders what happens when cameras and surveillance technology become so cheap it's impossible to stop them from being everywhere.

I have some dark secrets. Some I am not proud of, some that are fine by me but I know would be better kept private. So do you. So does everybody. And the more complex your life, the more "big" things you have done in the world, the bigger your mistakes and other secrets are. It is true for all of us. This is one of the reasons the world needs privacy to work.

A week ago, a rather strange event took place. No, I'm not talking about just the Transit of Mercury in front of the sun on May 9, but an odd result of it.

While I've been in love for a long time with the idea of mobility-on-demand and the robocar taxi, I continue to have some privacy concerns. The first is simply over the idea that a service company gets a map of all your travels. Of course, your cell phone company, and companies like Google with their Location History (Warning, don't click or you will be freaked out if you didn't know about this) know this already, as does the NSA and probably all the other spy agencies in the world. That doesn't make it much better to add more trackers.

There's another video presentation by me that I did while visiting Big Think in NYC.

This one is on The NSA, Snowden and the "tradeoff" of Privacy and Security.

Earlier, I did a 10 minute piece on Robocars for Big Think that won't be news to regular readers here but was reasonably popular.

Ok, I'm not really much of a fan of banning anything, but the continued reports of massive thefts of password databases from web sites are not slowing down. Whether the recent Hold Security report of discovering a Russian ring that got a billion account records from huge numbers of websites is true or not, we should imagine that it is.

As I've written before there are two main kinds of password using sites. The sites that keep a copy of your password (ie. any site that can e-mail you your password if you forget it) and the sites who keep an encrypted/hashed version of your password (these can reset your password for you via e-mail if you forget it.) The latter class is vastly superior, though it's still an issue when a database of encrypted passwords is stolen as it makes it easier for attackers to work out brute-force attacks.

Sites that are able to e-mail you a lost password should be stamped out. While I'm not big on banning, it make make sense that a rule require that any site which is going to remember your password in plain form have a big warning on the password setting page and login page:

This site is going to store your password without protection. There is significant risk attackers will someday breach this site and get your ID and password. If you use these credentials on any other site, you are giving access to these other accounts to the operators of this site or anybody who compromises this site.

Sites which keep a hashed password (including the Drupal software running this blog, though I no longer do user accounts) probably should have a lesser warning too. If you use a well-crafted password unlikely to be checked in a brute-force attack, you are probably OK, but only a small minority do that. Such sites still have a risk if they are taken over, because the taken over site can see any passwords typed by people logging in while it's taken over.

Don't feel too guilty for re-using passwords. Everybody does it. I do it, in places where it's no big catastrophe if the password leaks. It's not the end of the world if one blog site has the multi-use password I use on another blog site. With hundreds of accounts, there's no way to not re-use with today's tools. For my bank accounts or other accounts that could do me harm, I keep better hygene, and so should you.

But in reality we should not use passwords at all. Much better technology has existed for many decades, but it's never been built in a way to make it easy to use. In particular it's been hard to make it portable -- so you can just go to another computer and use it to log into a site -- and it's been impossible to make it universal, so you can use it everywhere. Passwords need no more than your memory, and they work for almost all sites.

Even our password security is poor. Most sites use your password just to create a session cookie that keeps you authenticated for a long session on the site. That cookie's even easier to steal than a password at most sites.

In part 1 I outlined the many problems caused by wifi login pages that hijack your browser ("captive portals") and how to improve things.

Today I want to discuss the sad state of having security in WIFI in most of the setups used today.

Almost all open WIFI networks are simply "in the clear." That means, however you got on, your traffic is readable by anybody, and can be interfered with as well, since random users near you can inject fake packets or pretend to be the access point. Any security you have on such a network depends on securing your outdoing connections. The most secure way to do this is to have a VPN (virtual private network) and many corporations run these and insist their employees use them. VPNs do several things:

• Encrypt your traffic
• Send all the traffic through the same proxy, so sniffers can't even see who else you are talking to
• Put you on the "inside" of corporate networks, behind firewalls. (This has its own risks.)

VPNs have downsides. They are hard to set up. If you are not using a corporate VPN, and want a decent one, you typically have to pay a 3rd party provider at least $50/year. If your VPN router is not in the same geographic region as you are, all your traffic is sent to somewhere remote first, adding latency and in some cases reducing bandwidth. Doing voice or video calls over a VPN can be quite impractical -- some VPNs are all TCP without the UDP needed for that, and extra latency is always a killer. Also, there is the risk your VPN provider could be snooping on you -- it actually can make it much easier to snoop on you (by tapping the outbound pipe of your VPN provider) than to follow you everywhere to tap where you are.

If you don't have a VPN, you want to try to use encrypted protocols for all you do. At a minimum, if you use POP/IMAP E-mail, it should be configured to only get and receive mail over TLS encrypted channels. In fact, my own IMAP server doesn't even accept connections in the clear to make sure nobody is tempted to use one. For your web traffic, use sites in https mode as much as possible, and use EFF's plugin https everywhere to make your browser switch to https wherever it can.

One day I noticed my nice 7 month old Nexus 4 had a think crack on the screen. Not sure where it came from, but my old Nexus One had had a similar crack and when it was on you barely saw it and the phone worked fine, so I wasn't scared -- until I saw that the crack stopped the digitizer from recognizing my finger in a band in the middle of the screen. A band which included dots from my "unlock" code.

And so, while the phone worked fine, you could not unlock it. That was bad news because with 4.3, the Android team had done a lot of work to make sure unlocked phones are secure if people randomly pick them up. As I'll explain in more detail, you really can't unlock it. And while it's locked, it won't respond to USB commands either. I had enabled debugging some time ago, but either that doesn't work unlocked or that state had been reset in a system update.

No unlocking meant no backing up the things that Google doesn't back up for you. It backs up a lot, these days, but there's still dozens of settings, lots of app data, logs of calls and texts, your app screen layout and much more that's lost.

I could repair the phone -- but when LG designed this phone they merged the digitizer and screen, so the repair is $180, and the parts take weeks to come in at most shops. Problem is, you can now buy a new Nexus 4 for just $199 (which is a truly great price for an unlocked phone) or the larger model I have for $249. Since the phone still has some uses, it makes much more sense to get a new one than to repair, other than to get that lost data. But more to the point, it's been 7 months and there are newer, hotter phones out there! So I eventually got a new phone.

But first I did restore functionality on the N4 by doing a factory wipe. That's possible without the screen, and the wiped phone has no lock code. It's actually possible to use quite a bit of the phone. Typing is a pain since a few letters on the right don't register but you can get them by rotating. You would not want to use this long term, but many apps are quite usable, such as maps and in particular eBook reading -- for cheap I have a nice small eBook reader. And you can make and receive calls. (Even on the locked phone I could receive a call somebody made to me -- it was the only thing it could do.) In addition, by connecting a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, I could use the phone fully -- this was essential for setting the phone up again, where the lack of that region on the touchpad would have made it impossible.

One of my security maxims is "Every security system ends up blocking legitimate users, often more than it blocks out the bad guys." I got bitten by that.

I always feel strange when I see blog and social network posts about the death of a pet or even a relative. I know the author but didn't know anything about the pet other than that the author cared.

Studies have shown that if you leave USB sticks on the ground outside an office building, 60% of them will get picked up and plugged into a computer in the building. If you put the company logo on the sticks, closer to 90% of them will get picked up and plugged in.

Bitcoin is having its first "15 minutes" with the recent bubble and crash, but Bitcoin is pretty hard to understand, so I've produced this analogy to give people a deeper understanding of what's going on.

It begins with a group of folks who take a different view on several attributes of conventional "fiat" money. It's not backed by any physical commodity, just faith in the government and central bank which issues it. In fact, it's really backed by the fact that other people believe it's valuable, and you can trade reliably with them using it. You can't go to the US treasury with your dollars and get very much directly, though you must pay your US tax bill with them. If a "fiat" currency faces trouble, you are depending on the strength of the backing government to do "stuff" to prevent that collapse. Central banks in turn get a lot of control over the currency, and in particular they can print more of it any time they think the market will stomach such printing -- and sometimes even when it can't -- and they can regulate commerce and invade privacy on large transactions. Their ability to set interest rates and print more money is both a bug (that has sometimes caused horrible inflation) and a feature, as that inflation can be brought under control and deflation can be prevented.

The creators of Bitcoin wanted to build a system without many of these flaws of fiat money, without central control, without anybody who could control the currency or print it as they wish. They wanted an anonymous, privacy protecting currency. In addition, they knew an open digital currency would be very efficient, with transactions costing effectively nothing -- which is a pretty big deal when you see Visa and Mastercard able to sustain taking 2% of transactions, and banks taking a smaller but still real cut.

With those goals in mind, they considered the fact that even the fiat currencies largely have value because everybody agrees they have value, and the value of the government backing is at the very least, debatable. They suggested that one might make a currency whose only value came from that group consensus and its useful technical features. That's still a very debatable topic, but for now there are enough people willing to support it that the experiment is underway. Most are aware there is considerable risk.

Update: I've grown less fond of this analogy and am working up a superior one, closer to the reality but still easy to understand.

Wordcoin

Bitcoins -- the digital money that has value only because enough people agree it does -- are themselves just very large special numbers. To explain this I am going to lay out an imperfect analogy using words and describe "wordcoin" as it might exist in the pre-computer era. The goal is to help the less technical understand some of the mechanisms of a digital crypto-based currency, and thus be better able to join the debate about them.