The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Hello, GCHQ

A joint US-UK operation has obtained the master encryption keys to billions of mobile phones:

The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.

With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.

Oh, goody. Essentially, if you have a phone with a SIM card (in the U.S., that means you have AT&T or T-Mobile), the NSA and Britain's GCHQ can listen in to your conversation in real time. (The article goes into some good technical depth about the exploits and how they did it.)

Of course, they would have to be looking for you in order to do that, but still. This is the kind of revelation that (a) makes me think Edward Snowden may not have been such a bad guy after all, and (b) that because so few people care, the world is a scarier place.

By the way, I'm right now reading The Honourable Schoolboy, having finished Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in London last weekend. I'm rooting for Smiley and Westerby just the same. But you know, the USSR had 15,000 nuclear bombs pointed at us, and Western spying back then was aimed at the USSR, not at its own citizens.

OK, we get the point, Winter

Yesterday was 17°C below normal in Chicago, the 8th consecutive day of frigid temperatures here, including a new record low maximum yesterday of -16°C. And while 19 states had record lows yesterday, western states are baking:

"Winter seems to have completely forgotten about us out here," Kathie Dello, deputy director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University, told the Associated Press. "If we could find a way of sending [the Northeast] snow out here, we'd really, really appreciate that."

- Las Vegas [had a] record high of 26°C, and Reno had its warmest Valentine's Day on record (as well as a record high) when the thermometer hit 23°C. Salt Lake City (16°C) and Pocatello, Idaho (13°C) broke their daily high temperature records on Valentine's Day as well.

- Phoenix has seen high temperatures in the 80s [Fahrenheit] since Feb. 5, with the exception of one Thursday which recorded a high of 26°C.

Thank a meandering jet stream and a strong polar vortex over eastern Canada, which sounds familiar. The vortex is forecast to hang around through next week. Add frozen Great Lakes and we could have a very cool spring.

Eight days until meteorological spring

...and we had record cold this morning:

Around daybreak, the temperature at O'Hare International Airport dropped to -22°C, beating the record of -21°C for this date set in 1936. Winds from the northwest at 15-25 km/h made it feel like -30 to -35°C, and a wind chill advisory remained in effect until noon.

The coldest places this morning included -25°C in Aurora, Harvard and Island Lake, -24.4°C in DeKalb and -23.9°C in Mundelein, Union, Waukegan and West Chicago. Wind chills ranged from -33°C in Fox Lake and Wilmette to -36°C in DeKalb.

A brief return to normal this weekend (albeit with some snowfall) will precede another arctic blast next week. When meteorological spring begins on March 1st, we'll still be running 6°C below normal.

This is not helping my Fitbit numbers.

It's also worth noting that, on this day in 1847, rescuers reached the Donner Party. So it could be worse...

Weather Now still in the news

Yesterday I found out that Weather Now, my demonstration app, got a mention on local TV in New Hampshire. Apparently it's now in newspapers as well.

Are the mentions driving traffic? Hard to tell. According to Google Analytics, the site had 1,957 unique visitors on Monday against an average of around 400. Yesterday that number fell to 760. But for the three days ending yesterday, 18% of the site's visitors came from New Hampshire and another 23% from Massachusetts and New York. So it is getting picked up.

But is anyone clicking the Donate button? Sadly, no.

(The donate link works for The Daily Parker, too. Hint, hint.)

Weather Now on the news

Local Manchester, N.H., television station WMUR mentioned my weather application on the news last night:

There was only one place in the world colder than Mount Washington this morning: the south pole. The weather website wx now.com says the summit's temperature of 35 degrees below zero early this morning was the second coldest reported temperature on the entire planet.

I can't wait to see the Google analytics.

Heading for a record or two

Oh, joy. Tomorrow night into next week, Chicago could set some cold-weather records for the month of February:

Daytime highs Wednesday and Thursday are predicted to reach no higher than single digits [Fahrenheit] over much of the area–a rare development this late in a cold season. Just how rare?? There have been a grand total of 17 single digit daytime highs beyond Feb. 17 over the past 144 years which averages out to JUST ONE single digit high beyond Feb 17th per decade!

The chill’s not going away anytime soon. Were sub-freezing temps to hold the remaining 11 days of February–something which looks plausible at this distance—Feb 2015 could be in line to add another record to its lineup. Never, in the 144 years of official records here, has a February moved from the 17th to its conclusion having no generated freezing or above daytime highs.

The record low temperature for February is -29°C set 9th February 1899. We're in no danger of breaking that. But 17th February 1903 got down to -24°C, about Thursday night's forecast low.

Can't wait.

Polish Border Defense

I've finally pulled my photos off my real camera, but as I have actual work to do for my employer, it'll take a couple of days to publish some of them. This one, though, this one I'll publish today:

This guy chased me around a park in Słubice. This may be a life-size image, too. Once I crouched down to take his photo, he got a little freaked out, and bounced around for a while before his owner called him back.

That was the most hostile reaction I got from any living thing in Poland or Germany last week.

Back to winter

After nearly a week walking my ass off in reasonable early-spring weather, I arrived back in Chicago last night to -11°C, which dropped to -15°C for my commute this morning. It is strangely not comforting that it has been this cold this late on only 12 days since 1871. Or that it's going to be even colder Wednesday and Thursday.

Will it warm up? Eventually. But the National Climate Prediction Center forecasts below-average temperatures for the next couple of weeks.

It was really nice to be able to walk 10-14 km every day for a week. Maybe sometime in June I'll be able to do that again.

Review of a book turned into a movie

(Posted retrospectively on Feb. 17.)

Roger Ebert once said that good movie reviews were good, but bad movie reviews were fun. Anthony Lane's review of the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey falls into the latter category:

Who could conceivably play Christian Grey, the awkward young billionaire with the extensive neckwear collection, let alone Anastasia Steele, the English-lit major who is also, as we gasp to learn, one of the leading virgins of Vancouver, Washington? Many combinations were suggested, my own preference being Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand, who made such a lovely couple in “The Prince of Tides,” but in the end the lucky winners were Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson. Good choices, I reckon, especially Johnson, who, as the granddaughter of Tippi Hedren, knows everything about predators who stare and swoop.

“I’ve always been good at people,” he says, as though people were Scrabble or squash. He is interested in “what motivates them—what incentivizes them.” Any woman should run a mile from a man who uses the verb “incentivize,” but things could have been worse, I guess. He could have said “monetize.”

I have tried—really, I have tried—to read the book after two people I like very much recommended it to me (though for radically different reasons). I just...I just can't. I can get through four or five Kindle screens at a time, which, depending on the time of day, any eye-strain I'm feeling, and the type size, could be a page or two of a printed book. After about that much, I'm either laughing too hard to continue or my mind begins to wander to more interesting pursuits, none of them prurient.

Even as a how-to manual, the book lacks a certain...sexiness. Seriously, Dan Savage has more (and better) things to say about BDSM than Fifty Shades, as do a score of other authors I've read over the years, starting with Alex Comfort (who wrote his classic book before I was even born). And I'm pretty vanilla. I can only imagine how bored a living, breathing D/s enthusiast would feel trying to get through what passes for a racy section of the book.

And I'm not even discussing the writing. As Lane says, "No new reader, however charitable, could open Fifty Shades of Grey, browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth." Yes. The sheer unsexiness of the book might be excusable if the prose were better—or, even better, vice-versa.

Anyway, Lane's review had me laughing out loud on my flight home. Fifty Shades had me falling asleep.