Oct. 21st, 2008 @ 04:49 pm airport security sucks
Current Music: (Counter-Strike voice) - TERRORISTS WIN
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"The Things He Carried": Renowned security expert Bruce Schneier, of whom I've been a fan since I took that computer security course at Oberlin, set up an experiment in which he and journalist Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic tested Department of Homeland Security screening procedures at various airports across America.

The DHS failed. Miserably. And Goldberg's writeup, though incisive, surreal, and delightfully Palahniukesque, is genuinely alarming:

And because I have a fair amount of experience reporting on terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of branded knickknacks, I've amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I've carried with me through airports across the country. I've also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary screening four times--out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints--during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.
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From:[info]jqsilver
Date: October 21st, 2008 11:11 pm (UTC)
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"So there are, in other words, two classes of people in airports: those whose shoes are inspected for explosives, and those whose aren’t. How, I asked, do you explain that to the public in a way that makes sense?

“Social networks,” he answered. "

YES! And that's why I should work at Facebook.
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From:[info]erf_
Date: October 21st, 2008 11:27 pm (UTC)
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To identify terrorists?
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From:[info]jqsilver
Date: October 21st, 2008 11:31 pm (UTC)
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Mostly because social networks are the answer to everything, but we can identify terrorists too.
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From:[info]erf_
Date: October 22nd, 2008 05:14 pm (UTC)
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While we're on the subject of Facebook, do you think you guys could work on a lightweight version of the site for mobile devices? It'd be amazingly convenient to be able to browse FB profiles on my cell phone (or using lynx on my Nintendo DS). That text message thing you guys have is great, but it's very limited in functionality.

Being able to upload photos straight from a phone to FB would be awesome, too--perhaps you could do this with a commercial API for cell phone manufacturers?
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From:[info]jqsilver
Date: October 22nd, 2008 05:21 pm (UTC)
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I don't know all the details, but I do know that there are apps for blackberry and iphone. It is definitely something I think is important, considering everyone in Asia uses cell phones more than PCs.

I joked with people about making a version of the site for lynx, because we're heavy into the ajax on the regular site, but people just laughed.

I just got an R4 card for my DS -- what homebrew apps do you recommend?
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From:[info]erf_
Date: October 22nd, 2008 05:47 pm (UTC)
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It's a real shame that they're not taking you seriously about the lynx thing--I would have loved to see a version compatible with Links for Images (for DS Linux), or at least something wget-able for awesome scripting potential. It would be great to be able to write an app that would, for example, have your cell phone beep whenever you get poked, or parse profiles to automatically fb search people by phone number when you add them to your phone book. I'd settle for a generic skinny version for PDAs and cell phones, though. Imagine an action movie where an undercover cop overhears a name, and punches it into his PDA, and an FBI-style Facebook profile shows up...

So far my favorite apps are all on this list. I've been having trouble getting some of them to work on my DS for some reason, but most of them are pretty good. Moonshell (file manager / text viewer / mp3 player / movie player) in particular is pretty much a must, and it's so popular that a lot of card manufacturers include it on the card.
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From:[info]jqsilver
Date: October 23rd, 2008 11:57 pm (UTC)
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It occurs to me that you could possibly use the available API, that can be used to build desktop apps, to build a command-line app that could run on DS, provided you had the proper platform support for making HTTP requests.
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From:[info]erf_
Date: October 24th, 2008 12:39 am (UTC)
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I think this could be done.

I will have to investigate the possibilities.
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From:[info]cougarfang
Date: October 21st, 2008 11:49 pm (UTC)
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I was amused at the saline story...

Also, I have never been stopped for a full (or symbolic) frisking or anything of the sort. Just a full-body magnet-wanding once to discover what the hell kept making beeping noises - turned out to be a chewing gum wrapper in my pocket. And then I "smuggled" a couple of packets of eels from Taiwan to here when I came back from the summer (Mom talked me out of smuggling sausages because "eels are more legal" - at least they're cooked fish, as opposed to raw pork) and was similarly amused/alarmed at the "security theater"... I figured that the best thing terrorists could probably do is recruit a little Asian-American (legitimately born-in-America) goody-two-shoes-looking college girl like me to smuggle stuff into planes for them...
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From:[info]erf_
Date: October 22nd, 2008 02:43 am (UTC)
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I suspect he was passed over because he was Jewish (and looked the part). Theoretically the terrorists could would have the perfect cover if they started recruiting Jews, but ideologically that would be a hard sell to both their cell leaders and any Jews they tried to convince.