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There were 5 new ports for the week of June 22 to June 28:
Some ports had updates that users should be aware of; no port was removed. Some patches were backported to the 4.5-stable branch.
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Last month I released a parody video for the film “Downfall” (known as Der Untergang in German.) Having purchased the movie, I also watched it of course, and here is my review. At least in my case, the existence of the parody brought some new sales for the film. There are “spoilers” of a sort in this review, but of course you already know how it ends, indeed as history you may know almost everything that happens in it, though unless you are a detailed student of these events you won’t know all of it.
The movie, which deals with Hitler’s last days in the bunker, is dark and depressing. And there is the challenge of making some of the nastiest villains of the 20th century be the protagonists. This caused controversy, because people don’t like seeing Hitler and his ilk humanized evenin the slightest. Hitler in this film is in some ways as you might expect him. Crazy, brutal and nasty. He’s also shown being kind to some friends, to Eva, to his dog, his secretaries and afew others. He has to be human or the film becomes just caricature, and not much as a drama.Goebbels gets little humanity, and his wife, who has the most disturbing scene in the film, has a very twisted sort.
While we have only a limited idea of what Hitler was like at this time, I feel the movie actually still made him a madman caricature. The real Hitler must have been highly charismatic and charming. He inspired people to tremendous loyalty, and got them to do horrible things for him, including taking their own lives at the end as we’re shown several times. The Nazis who were recruited by Hitler in his early days all spoke warmly of his charm, but none of this comes through in the film. We don’t like to think of him that way.
The movie is told in large part from the viewpoint of Frau Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s private secretaries, who escaped the bunker and died recently. The real Junge appears in the film, apologizing for how she just got caught up in the excitement of being Hitler’s secretary, and how she wished she never went down that road. Like all the people who were there, she says she was unaware of what was really going on. Considering she typed Hitler’s last testament, where he blames the Jews for the war, and other statements he dictated to her, it’s not something she could have been totally unaware of. Junge asks Eva Braun about Hitler’s brutality as a contrast to his nicer times and she explains, “that’s when he’s being the Führer!” suggesting she compartmentalized the two men, lover and dictator, in two different ways.
During the movie the Soviets are bombing Berlin, and Hitler refuses surrender, in spite of urging from his generals and pleas for the civilians. Even Himmler, whose dastardly evil side is not shown in this film, is the “smart one” encouraging Hitler to leave Berlin, and who “betrays” Hitler in trying to negotiate a surrender. As in any war movie, when you see people being blown up by bombs and shot from their point of view, your instinct is to sympathise, and it’s easy to forget it is the allies who are doing the bombing, and the people dying are the ones who stuck with Hitler to the end. Some of them are “innocent” including many of the citizens of Berlin, but many are not. Their loyalty may seem redeeming but they are giving that loyalty (and have reached a level of trust from Hitler) in a world where many in Germany wanted him out, where a number had been executed for plots to be rid of him.
A few Nazis get favourable treatment. Speer, for example. A scene from his memoirs, which is probably false, has Speer telling Hitler that he has disobeyed his “Nero” scorched Earth orders. This scene appears in Speer’s later memoirs but is denied in earlier ones, making it likely to bean invented memory. To give Speer credit of course he did disobey the orders, and he was the only top Nazi to own up, even partially, for what he did. Junge herself comes off as perfectly innocent and loyal. General Mohnke and SS Doctor Ernst-Günther Schenck (both of whom died moderately recently) get positive treatments.
The most disturbing scene involves Frau Goebbels executing her own children. There are conflicting stories on this, though the one piece of documentation, her last letter, makes it somewhat credible. Movie directors “like” such scenes, as they are incredibly chilling and nightmare-inducing. While Hitler was losing his grip on reality, the others were not, and these horrors are all a result of how much they embraced their bizarre ideology. Frau Goebbels could have sent her children to safety, she felt there was no point in them living in the world that was to come. Still, this scene will give you nightmares, along with a number of other gruesome suicides, even if you know in your mind that the people suiciding have done such incredibly nasty things.
But this is a part of history worth understanding. And it is worth trying to understand — though we may never do so — how human beings not as different from us as we would like to believe —could have been such monsters. The movie is well made, and powerful, if depressing and disturbing at the same time.
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By Scott Burns 
It requires gobs of money to be a person of independent means when you are young.
But age changes everything.
Once you have achieved geezerhood, your personal fortune can be a small fraction of what a younger person needs, and you’ll live just as well.
There are two reasons for this--- Social Security and what might be called the Old Mortality Trick. Let’s tackle Social Security first.
While more young people believe in flying saucers than believe in Social Security, the reality is that Social Security is the largest source of retirement income for the vast majority of Americans. According to a recent study by EBRI, the Employee Benefit Research Institute, Social Security provides an average of 38.6 percent of all income for people age 65 and older. That’s more than double the 18.6 percent that comes from pension and annuity income or the 15.6 percent that comes from assets.
Even if your income puts you in the top 20 percent of all retirees, Social Security benefits are a big deal. The same EBRI study shows that top-quintile seniors still get 17.2 percent of their income from Social Security.
Impressed? You should be. Every dollar of Social Security income eliminates the need for $20 to $25 of retirement savings. As a consequence, you need a whole lot less in savings to live the Life of Riley as a retiree than you would need as a young playboy or playgirl.
How much is a whole lot less?
Well, last week I showed that you needed $3.1 million to live the sweet life with an income that put you in the top 25 percent of all American households--- an estimated $70,000 a year. Using figures from the Aon Consulting replacement rate studies, retirees can live at the same standard with a mere $490,000 if they will risk a 5 percent withdrawal rate, or $612,500 if they use a more conservative 4 percent withdrawal rate.
That’s a whole lot less than $3.1 million.
How does that happen?
Simple. The Aon Consulting studies, which I’ve cited in other columns, adjust your current earned income for employment taxes you won’t have to pay, for saving you won’t need to do anymore, for income taxes that may be lower, and for work-related expenses that are no longer necessary. At the $70,000-a-year level, they figure you need to replace only 77 percent of your income to retire and enjoy the same standard of living. Social Security will provide 42 percent, leaving 35 percent, or $24,500, to come from places like your retirement savings.
The Old Mortality Trick is equally direct. If you want to live on an independent investment income at age 25 or 30, you’ll have to live on the actual interest and dividend income produced by your portfolio. That’s now at the dismal level of 2.25 percent. You’ll need to do that because young people are going to live a really, really long time. The young can’t take little bits from their principal every year and have any certainty that their money will last as long as they do. They have to invest as though they were as immortal as they feel or as though they were close relatives of Anne Rice’s best-known vampire, Lestat.
Once you have achieved geezerhood, however, living a really, really long time isn’t a problem. You won’t. You may live a long time, but it won’t be that long. Think of it as the upside of death. It means you can dare to take 4 to 5 percent from your investments, even if they don’t produce that much income.
So between Social Security and a higher withdrawal rate, you can knock down the entry cost of the Good Life to as little as $490,000. That’s a small fraction of the $3.1 million you’d need to live the good life as an equally idle young person.
Aon Consulting: 2008 Replacement Rate Study
February 6, 2005: Social Security Is an Important Part of Personal Finance
June 13, 2004: Estimate Your Needed Retirement Income and Nest Egg
April 30, 2002: The Life of Riley Index, Retiree Version
October 27, 1998: The Life of Riley Index, Retiree Version
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Posted by David Pescovitz on July 03, 2009 06:49 PM · permalink
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen opened up a can of worms when he made the case for unmasking passwords in his blog. I chimed in that I agreed. Almost 165 comments on my blog (and several articles, essays, and many other blog posts) later, the consensus is that we were wrong.
I was certainly too glib. Like any security countermeasure, password masking has value. But like any countermeasure, password masking is not a panacea. And the costs of password masking need to be balanced with the benefits.
The cost is accuracy. When users don't get visual feedback from what they're typing, they're more prone to make mistakes. This is especially true with character strings that have non-standard characters and capitalization. This has several ancillary costs:
The benefits of password masking are more obvious:
In some situations, there is a trust dynamic involved. Do you type your password while your boss is standing over your shoulder watching? How about your spouse or partner? Your parent or child? Your teacher or students? At ATMs, there's a social convention of standing away from someone using the machine, but that convention doesn't apply to computers. You might not trust the person standing next to you enough to let him see your password, but don't feel comfortable telling him to look away. Password masking solves that social awkwardness.
I believe that shoulder surfing isn't nearly the problem it's made out to be. One, lots of people use their computers in private, with no one looking over their shoulders. Two, personal handheld devices are used very close to the body, making shoulder surfing all that much harder. Three, it's hard to quickly and accurately memorize a random non-alphanumeric string that flashes on the screen for a second or so.
This is not to say that shoulder surfing isn't a threat. It is. And, as many readers pointed out, password masking is one of the reasons it isn't more of a threat. And the threat is greater for those who are not fluent computer users: slow typists and people who are likely to choose bad passwords. But I believe that the risks are overstated.
Password masking is definitely important on public terminals with short PINs. (I'm thinking of ATMs.) The value of the PIN is large, shoulder surfing is more common, and a four-digit PIN is easy to remember in any case.
And lastly, this problem largely disappears on the Internet on your personal computer. Most browsers include the ability to save and then automatically populate password fields, making the usability problem go away at the expense of another security problem (the security of the password becomes the security of the computer). There's a Firefox plugin that gets rid of password masking. And programs like my own Password Safe allow passwords to be cut and pasted into applications, also eliminating the usability problem.
One approach is to make it a configurable option. High-risk banking applications could turn password masking on by default; other applications could turn it off by default. Browsers in public locations could turn it on by default. I like this, but it complicates the user interface.
A reader mentioned BlackBerry's solution, which is to display each character briefly before masking it; that seems like an excellent compromise.
I, for one, would like the option. I cannot type complicated WEP keys into Windows -- twice! what's the deal with that? -- without making mistakes. I cannot type my rarely used and very complicated PGP keys without making a mistake unless I turn off password masking. That's what I was reacting to when I said "I agree."
So was I wrong? Maybe. Okay, probably. Password masking definitely improves security; many readers pointed out that they regularly use their computer in crowded environments, and rely on password masking to protect their passwords. On the other hand, password masking reduces accuracy and makes it less likely that users will choose secure and hard-to-remember passwords, I will concede that the password masking trade-off is more beneficial than I thought in my snap reaction, but also that the answer is not nearly as obvious as we have historically assumed.
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Good essay -- "The Staggering Cost of Playing it 'Safe'" -- about the political motivations for terrorist security policy.
Senator Barbara Boxer has led an effort to at least put together a public database of ash storage sites so that people can judge the risk to the areas where they live. However, even this effort has been blocked not by coal companies or utilities, but by the DHS. How could it possibly be a national security interest to cover up the location of material that's "not toxic or anything?" It's not. In fact, even if the ash turns out to be as bad as its worst critics fear, blocking the database is far more dangerous than revealing the location of these sites. Not only has there not been any threat against these sites by terrorists, and no workable scenario by which they might cause a problem, coal slurry impoundments are already failing with regularity, dousing parts of America with millions of gallons of this material. It doesn't take terrorists to make this happen.Blocking the release of this information doesn't protect the citizens of the United States in any way. It's just another example of the same creeping secrecy that makes cities more difficult to manage because of secrecy over facilities. The same creeping secrecy that "blurs" national monuments from images and puts intentional gaps in public information. The same creeping secrecy that increasingly elevates the most unlikely attack -- the shoe bombers of the world -- above our right to know what's going on around us so that we can make informed decisions. The same secrecy that defends torturers.
Posted by schneier on July 03, 2009 12:18 PM · permalink
Good essay -- "The Staggering Cost of Playing it 'Safe'" -- about the political motivations for terrorist security policy.
Senator Barbara Boxer has led an effort to at least put together a public database of ash storage sites so that people can judge the risk to the areas where they live. However, even this effort has been blocked not by coal companies or utilities, but by the DHS. How could it possibly be a national security interest to cover up the location of material that's "not toxic or anything?" It's not. In fact, even if the ash turns out to be as bad as its worst critics fear, blocking the database is far more dangerous than revealing the location of these sites. Not only has there not been any threat against these sites by terrorists, and no workable scenario by which they might cause a problem, coal slurry impoundments are already failing with regularity, dousing parts of America with millions of gallons of this material. It doesn't take terrorists to make this happen.Blocking the release of this information doesn't protect the citizens of the United States in any way. It's just another example of the same creeping secrecy that makes cities more difficult to manage because of secrecy over facilities. The same creeping secrecy that "blurs" national monuments from images and puts intentional gaps in public information. The same creeping secrecy that increasingly elevates the most unlikely attack -- the shoe bombers of the world -- above our right to know what's going on around us so that we can make informed decisions. The same secrecy that defends torturers.
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