So I disapeared for several months basically because I was working on a project, I'd love to go into the details on it, but its still a secret even internally at my company so I can't explain how cool it is just yet...

anyways, I'm feeling a little stabby, I'm going to go get coffee...

bring me the finest muffins and bagels in all the land!

~10k lines of new code, and it just works on the first try...spooky...the Machine Gods are with me today...

man I love it when I get my 14th wind...

The short version of things, is that they've stopped the investigation, due to a lack of evidence of criminal intent on my part. They've given me back my passports, my computers, and I'll be getting the rest of my stuff back shortly. Essentially, I'm a free man - with no charges filed.

This story has a happy ending. Well, mostly happy. There are still major problems with airport security. Click through for the full story.

This quote from Chris in Wired 's coverage strikes a common meme:

"The message it sends to the community is that if you do security research, someday the FBI will come knock on your door."

Brian Krebs at the Washington Post's Security Fix blog is also covering Chris Soghoian breaking his silence.

Christopher Soghoian is no longer under investigation

When settling on your opinion for some topic try to be for your side of the debate and not just against the other side...

(I hope that made s(ens)|(inc)e, I've been up all night finishing my regex compiler and I'm a little punchy...

WASHINGTON, DC—After months of aggressive campaigning and with nearly 99 percent of ballots counted, politicians were the big winners in Tuesday's midterm election, taking all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, retaining a majority with 100 out of 100 seats in the Senate, and pushing political candidates to victory in each of the 36 gubernatorial races up for grabs.

Politicians Sweep Midterm Elections

Reasons to vote:

1) Iraq

2) Fear is not motive, it's a flavor enhancer (and now trans-fat free).

3) Your [I Voted] sticker is your ticket into my kegger.

4) Yelling at FNC doesn't actually accomplish anything.

5) Everytime a vote is supressed Lee Atwater eats another baby.

6) Democracy is only for the people that show up.

7) The time spent in the voting booth will be time not spend huffing glue.

8) All your base.

9) You goto vote w/ the electorate you have, not the electorate you want.

10) Everyone that doesn't vote gets a dick cheney facial.

Vote!

I saw this movie the other night, it was pretty good, probably one of the best all year (note that on any other year I might not have been able to give this high praise but its been slow this year if you ask me)...its kind of like a pulp fiction meets the usual suspects meets the professional, except its probably not quite as good as any of those individually, but its still very good...

One thing I will say that was excellent was the way it was shot, the coloring and lighting (if you care about that sort of thing) were perfect...check it out...

Lucky Number Sleven

Soghoian claims that he wanted to demonstrate the vulnerability. You could argue that he went about it in a stupid way, but I don't think what he did is substantively worse than what I wrote in 2003. Or what Schumer described in 2005. Why is it that the person who demonstrates the vulnerability is vilified while the person who describes it is ignored? Or, even worse, the organization that causes it is ignored? Why are we shooting the messenger instead of discussing the problem?

The way to fix it is equally obvious: Verify the accuracy of the boarding passes at the security checkpoints. If passengers had to scan their boarding passes as they went through screening, the computer could verify that the boarding pass already matched to the photo ID also matched the data in the computer. Close the authentication triangle and the vulnerability disappears.

The problem is real, and the Department of Homeland Security and TSA should either fix the security or scrap the system. What we've got now is the worst security system of all: one that annoys everyone who is innocent while failing to catch the guilty.

Bruce Schneier has chimed in on TSAGATE. This essay can be found on his weblog or published in Wired. The message coming out of the security community seems to unanimously contain the same basic ideas: The TSA needs to fix the problem and not shoot the messenger.

Schneier on Security: Forge Your Own Boarding Pass

I'll admit to a bit of ancestor worship going on (take that babtist upbringing!)...

Oh Machine Gods on the High Councel of Turing,
elegant be thy designs.
Thy algorithm come.
Thy project be done,
on x86 as it is on PowerPC.
Give us this day our daily code,
and forgive us our build breaking check-ins,
as we forgive them of others.
And lead us not into management;
but deliver us from bad engineers.
Amen.

alternatively...

Oh Machine Gods, grant me the serenity to accept the code I can not rewrite, the courage to rewrite the code I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.