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Hello Future!

Full Body Scanners: What’s Next? | Bruce Schneier:

But now, the TSA is in a bind. Regardless of whatever lobbying came before, or whatever former DHS officials had a financial interest in these scanners, the TSA has spent billions on those scanners, claiming they’re essential. But because people can opt out, the alternate manual method must be equally effective; otherwise, the terrorists could just opt out. If they make the pat-downs less invasive, it would be the same as admitting the scanners aren’t essential. Senior officials would get fired over that.

So not counting inconsequential modifications to demonstrate they’re “listening,” the pat-downs will continue. And they’ll continue for everyone: children, abuse survivors, rape survivors, urostomy bag wearers, people in wheelchairs. It has to be that way; otherwise, the terrorists could simply adapt. They’d hide their explosives on their children or in their urostomy bags. They’d recruit rape survivors, abuse survivors, or seniors. They’d dress as pilots. They’d sneak their PETN through airport security using the very type of person who isn’t being screened.

The full body scanner WILL NOT detect explosives. What’s the point then? Why not use sniffer like the Israelies or the British? Oh no… That means you will have to have people that can actually think and understand the results…

And PETN is what the TSA is looking for these days. That’s pentaerythritol tetranitrate, the plastic explosive that both the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber attempted but failed to detonate. It’s what was mailed from Yemen. It’s in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guns and traditional bombs are passé; PETN is the terrorist tool of the future.

The problem is that no scanners or puffers can detect PETN; only swabs and dogs work. What the TSA hopes is that they will detect the bulge if someone is hiding a wad of it on their person. But they won’t catch PETN hidden in a body cavity. That doesn’t have to be as gross as you’re imagining; you can hide PETN in your mouth. A terrorist can go through the scanners a dozen times with bits in his mouth each time, and assemble a bigger bomb on the other side. Or he can roll it thin enough to be part of a garment, and sneak it through that way. These tricks aren’t new. In the days after the Underwear Bomber was stopped, a scanner manufacturer admitted that the machines might not have caught him.

Hmmmm here we go…

So what’s next? Strip searches? Body cavity searches? TSA Administrator John Pistole said there would be no body cavity searches for now, but his reasons make no sense. He said that the case widely reported as being a body cavity bomb might not actually have been. While that appears to be true, what does that have to do with future bombs? He also said that even body cavity bombs would need “external initiators” that the TSA would be able to detect.

Oh, so hiding explosives in your ass will be detected…. In that case:

Do you think for a minute that the TSA can detect these “external initiators”? Do you think that if a terrorist took a laptop — or better yet, a less-common piece of electronics gear — and removed the insides and replaced them with a timer, a pressure sensor, a simple contact switch, or a radio frequency switch, the TSA guy behind the X-ray machine monitor would detect it? How about if those components were distributed over a few trips through airport security. On the other hand, if we believe the TSA can magically detect these “external initiators” so effectively that they make body-cavity searches unnecessary, why do we need the full-body scanners?

Exactly.

Either PETN is a danger that must be searched for, or it isn’t. Pistole was being either ignorant or evasive.

Moving on…

Onto politics…

Once again, the TSA is covering their own asses by implementing security-theater measures to prevent the previous attack while ignoring any threats of future attacks. It’s the same thinking that caused them to ban box cutters after 9/11, screen shoes after Richard Reid, limit liquids after that London gang, and — I kid you not — ban printer cartridges over 16 ounces after they were used to house package bombs from Yemen. They act like the terrorists are incapable of thinking creatively, while the terrorists repeatedly demonstrate that can always come up with a new approach that circumvents the old measures.

And finally some sense: put the money on better intelligence gathering!

The truth is that exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing cockpit doors and convincing passengers they need to fight back. The TSA should continue to screen checked luggage. They should start screening airport workers. And then they should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and let the rest of their budget be used for better purposes. Investigation and intelligence is how we’re going to prevent terrorism, on airplanes and elsewhere. It’s how we caught the liquid bombers. It’s how we found the Yemeni printer-cartridge bombs. And it’s our best chance at stopping the next serious plot.

and the truth is:

Because if a group of well-planned and well-funded terrorist plotters makes it to the airport, the chance is pretty low that those blue-shirted crotch-groping water-bottle-confiscating TSA agents are going to catch them. The agents are trying to do a good job, but the deck is so stacked against them that their job is impossible. Airport security is the last line of defense, and it’s not a very good one.

If we continue down this path then the fucking ass-backward terrorists win. We need to show them that this is not the case and then come down on them hard.

Fuck it dude, let’s go bomb some terrorist camp.

So Mathematics is minimalist—a method to reduce the complexity of terms. When it comes to process, Engineering has the cool factor; it starts with the acronym KISS (keep it simple, stupid). Craig Damrauer is on a mission to combine art, science and math with unambiguous formulas.

New Math posters by artist and writer, Craig Damrauer, feature equations that describe thoughts and feelings through cause-and-effect relations. The fuzzy logic and emotions merge to create rationalism and positivism through reductivism—enjoyably saucy.

Add a little bit of common-sense here, some creativity there and voilà! A formula for unobtrusive design: Design = ease + context + reductivism.

The inevitable decline due to clutter | Seth’s Blog:

This is one of the best posts out there lately so I thought would be worth posting it on Minimal.

Digital media expands. It’s not like paper, it can get bigger.

As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it’s free.

One more link, one more banner, one more side deal on the Groupon page.

Economics tells us that the right thing to do is run the factory until the last item produced is being sold at marginal cost. In other words, keep adding until it doesn’t work any more.

In fact, human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn’t free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.

And it’s hard to go backward.

More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.

“To do great work you need great determination, not tools.”

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Milind Alvares - Old Macs still rock: Putting an iBook G4 back into service

Yokohama is a design by Toni Pallejà for the new Spanish company Made Design, focused on complements for offices and facilities. Made Design simply describes it as:

Hanging clothes at its minimum: a suspended hanger.

Yokohama is available as a single hanger as well as a multiple mounting from an anodized aluminium perforated plate.

Combining these gives you the interesting option to create your own composition – elevating clothing hangers into the realm of art.

How To Survive With Just 64GB - [Members Show] | OSX, Hardware | ScreenCastsOnline:

I have yet to watch it because I just signed up but it looks like Don at Screencasts Online has done a special members only two part show on tips and tricks for living with 64GB on a low end Macbook Air. I especially want to call your attention to this today because there is currently a 50% discount on the membership, but it will expire any moment now. Seems like these two episodes, if you are interested, is worth the discounted price alone.

Thanks to Myke at The Bro Show for tipping me to this.