This doesn’t sound like a major exploit fix, as long as you’re doing the one blog owner with one blog author thing. If you’ve got multiple authors and are afraid one of them might be malicious, do this ASAP, (or at least read the release notes.) (I only skimmed the release notes.)
Anyway, we’ve finished the upgrade here, and everything looks OK.
I still can’t find any hard and fast airline travel numbers for this past Wednesday. Has my search-fu gone foobar, or is that just not being reported?
Karl Denninger says that there are plenty of tweets stating that the pedophile-scanners were “roped off”. Here’s another account saying the same thing. I also found several blogs, and a number of tweets confirming the story. No mention of any unused equipment in the legacy media, however.
Gizmodo.com also confirms, many but not all of the new machines were off, presumably because squashing the “National Opt-out Day” protest was more important than stopping the bad guys. Either that or they know the new screening is worthless against attacks like the underoos bomber, and the entire mess is just security theater.
Way back in April 2009, Homeland Security released a memo called, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”.
Wait, I sound like a lefty blog. Hell, I sound like Wikipedia.
The whole truth is that the memo wasn’t just released in April, it was released on April 15, the tax deadline day. As far as I can tell it served at least two purposes. First, it gave the media something else to report that day besides all those amazingly peaceful Taxed Enough Already protests that were just getting fashionable around that time. Second, they served as FUD; fear, uncertainty and doubt. The idea being that a first time, fiscally responsible, ordinary person that might think of attending a peaceful assembly for the regress of grievances might change their mind for fear of somehow later being associated with the “lunatic violent fringe” of Veterans gone rogue and other crazies.
Since apologies are free, and because this memo went way over the line, Janet Napolitano apologized for it a few days later.
This time the “Domestic Extremist” drama was a “leak”. The FUD to be spread was “Comply, or we’ll lump you in with the terrorists”.
The “Informant” just happened to time the “leak” to coincide with National Opt Out Day, the day before Thanksgiving, the busiest travel day of the year.
Otherwise, we would all be in boxcars on the way to the re-education camps by now.
The TSA is busy blowing their own horn about the fact that the expected mass opt-out at the pedophile-scanners never really materialized. Of course It looks like the flying public said “no thanks” to even flying this week. Only the government would call that a success. I can’t see anyone in the media reporting hard and fast travel numbers, but Amtrak says Wednesday might have been a record day, and AAA is reporting that the interstates are going to be clogged.
Menwhile, if you think my “boxcar” comment was hyperbole, well you might be right, but Uncle reports that if you aren’t a model citizen, if you opt-out, if you remind the TSA agent that he isn’t above the Constitution, or if you have the gall to question the way the TSA keeps us all safe in your blog or other alternative media, they have a new made up name for you, “domestic extremist“.
I’ve been using the SSL version of Duck Duck Go as my initial search engine for the past week or so, only switching to my fall back list of engines when the syntax of the search goes into “power user” territory. I’ve been happy with the results.
The privacy policy is much better than google and there are a number of “!bang” codes that you can use on the command line, like !ebay or !scribd or even !i (google images) for custom searches.
I’ve emailed the creator and actually gotten a response back. The engine seems to be in active development, with a forum and whatnot. It sure looks like something good is brewing. Good enough for a payola free plug, at least.
