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When you think the Ashley Madison thing couldn't get worse...

It gets worse.

Initial reports of the Ashley Madison hack suggested they did one thing right. If I'm reading this report from Ars Technica correctly, they managed to screw even that up by having a second password table with MD5-hashed passwords.

Why is that bad? cryptographic hash functions create unique "signatures" from electronic data. They come in two different varieties. "Fast" algorithms are used to verify the authenticity of gigabytes of data. They're used to check the integrity of almost everything sent over the internet. They're designed to be run millions of times a second with minimal memory.

Standard practice for storing passwords is to store a hash "signature" instead of the raw (plaintext) password. You log into a site, it runs the hash function, and compares the signature with the signature stored in its database.

While fast hash algorithms like MD5 are great for checking things like Windows 10 or streaming video. They're bad for storing passwords. The state of the art in breaking passwords involves making millions of guesses. With MD5 and a graphics card, a password cracker can try over a billion guesses a second.

"Slow" hash functions such as bcrypt or PBKDF2 are designed to take an arbitrary length of time. Instead of a billion guesses per second, a cracker is limited to a few hundred.

While Ashley Madison used bcrypt for their primary password table, they had a second password table with millions of passwords in MD5. As of yesterday, 11.7 million passwords have been hacked.

Not that a matters that much. Users chose really bad passwords. The top 10:

• 123456
• 12345
• password
• DEFAULT
• 123456789
• querty
• 12345678
• abc123
• pussy
• 1234567

The rest of the top 100 seems to combine numbers, sex, and wishful thinking. Sometimes in one password.

Taking a step back: Handling gender dissonance in games with distance and abstraction

Introduction

I've been thinking a fair bit about gaming and some of my choices in games. Sometime over the last year, my partner noted that I've been running almost exclusively female avatars, and asked what was up with that. Earlier this week I found this essay by Riley MacLeod on responding to a certain type of masculinity as a trans man:

The male bodies in shooters disrupt, beg for attention, decide how a situation will unfold. They storm in and take what they want, destroying everything in the single-minded pursuit of their desires. They are greedy, unpopular children, behaving in all the ways men are told we have to but can’t, all the ways that wreak havoc, big and small, on ourselves and those around us in the real world. Stealth bodies let me share in what is; they have the dexterity to repurpose what’s provided to my own ends. They let me cooperate with a situation, ask me to take into account all the moving parts and my role in them. The way men behave in stealth games feels closer to what I hope my own masculinity is: thoughtful, adaptable, aware of myself and my effect on the world around me. Shooter masculinities close off possibilities, make an enemy out of the world; stealth masculinities place me firmly in the world and let me nurture it into something new.

In recent months, I find myself feeling much the same way from a different perspective. Even "stealth" bodies are, at times, painfully masculine. And I think the difference is as much to do with narrative and game design as character design. I find myself gravitating to games with more abstraction that give me more distance from the gender of the player character or protagonist.

I'll define a game as a set of rules for organized play including some method to keep track of game state, rules for manipulating that state, and likely a set of goals or outcomes. Open-ended and "open-world" videogames may not have a single defined victory condition, but they usually will have a set of iterative or intermediate goals and achievements.

What I intend to do here is describe abstraction, gendering of characters in games, and how I find myself responding as a non-binary/non-conforming person.

Abstraction: From Senet to Mocap

To start with, modern video games exist as an interesting synthesis of board/card games and cinema. I generally reject the idea that video games offer much that is new in terms of social impact. One of my grandmothers taught me to play contract bridge, the other repeatedly warned about the additive nature of playing cards as a gateway to alcoholism and gambling. The debates about games have changed in degree but not so much in character.

English Caricature of Whist Players (wikimedia)

Evidence of games dates all the way back to the neolithic. Equally as long, we have evidence of different degrees of abstraction with tokens that resemble animals. On one end of the scale, you have backgammon pawns or pips. Senet is a game ubiquitous Egypt starting from pre-dynastic times using primarily abstractly shaped tokens.

Senet Board (By Keith Schengili-Roberts, via Wikimedia Commons)

At the other end of the scale you have the Lewis "chessmen" (probably used for a different game) with figures representing different ranks. Chess is an interesting example with sets having different degrees of abstraction ranging from human and animal figurines to nonrepresentational Muslim "pepper-pot" pieces with the standard Staunton set approximately in the middle.

Lewis "Chessmen" (wikimedia)

Staunton Chess Set (Frank A. Camaratta, Jr.; The House of Staunton, Inc.; via Wikimedia Commons)

Early video games used a high degree of abstraction due to the limitations of the hardware. When publishers communicated gender, they used secondary text and artwork to do it. Pacman is masculine by virtue of name and secondary art work. We personify Pacman more by contrast to the ghosts. Advances in video and audio technology over the last 30 years has brought us to high-fidelity rendering on home hardware (warn:feminine android violence).

At this point, representation of gender in-game is a stylistic choice. Those choices tend to reinforce gender binaries to various degrees. However there are ways to get some distance from forced gender in games.

Pushed Gender: The Cinematic CRPG Protagonist

One of the areas that I'm struggling with as a gamer is the popularity of the cinematic CRPG/action protagonist. Game storytelling typically alternates between action sequences and menu-driven dialogues and cutscenes. In early versions, the game told the story purely through text. NPCs received limited voice acting for particularly important scenes first. Today, in a typical AAA game, storytelling cut-scenes can involve animation and vocal performance for all characters.

While this offers a more cinematic experience overall, the relationship of player to the performance becomes something akin to a stage manager shouting cues off-stage. At least for me, the use of player-character vocal and animated performance limits the degrees of freedom to imagine variation of the characters. In Mass Effect, Jennifer Hale owns Commander Shepard, I'm just picking which variations of Hale's performance I prefer. Which I should say isn't a slight against the quality of Mass Effect (at least the first two games), just a statement regarding how I perceive the player-character when animated and voice-performed.

The tension is particularly jarring for a player-character with even fewer options, Jensen from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The sexual tension driving the plot is hinted in the prologue and made explicit in the opening credit cinematic (warn: medical horror). Of course, you can "headcanon" and fanfic just about any interpretation of a character, but the more stuff on the screen, the further you have to go "off the page" to get to a bi or nonbinary interpretation.

Getting Distance: The Isometric RPG

Shadowrun Hong Kong, Establishing Shot

"Isometric" RPGs are named for the bird's-eye, top-down perspective on the scene. The genre is currently undergoing something of a revival, with Pillars of Eternity and Shadowrun Returns as new games, and remasters of the classic Baldur's Gate series also on shelves. Some common features of the genre include:

• "Isometric" perspective.
• Control of multiple characters.
• A "primary" plot line centered on the player character.
• "Secondary" plot lines centered on companion characters, sometimes more interesting than the primary character arc.
• Primarily text-based storytelling, usually shorter than provided by cut-scenes.
• Character customization primarily via pre-generated portrait images.
• Reduced or minimal voice acting.

While I don't know of any that allow you to specify a nonbinary character at creation, Shadowrun games have a "shadow" character portrait with obscured details.

Shadowrun Hong Kong Character Creation

The visual distance from the character makes it easier to imagine androgyny, while the multiplicity of game identities opens the door for some fluidity.

Vehicles: You are the Machine

Vehicle games put most of the action as the driver/operator/pilot of a vehicle. The game may or may not offer character icons or a character model, but they don't interact directly within the game world. With the perspective centered on the vehicle rather than a humanoid character, the physicality of the human character can be completely re-imagined.

In Euro Truck Simulator 2, all of the game mechanics are achieved at the wheel of the truck or through a text-based management interface. There is a character icon that appears in some views, but the game offers a fair variety of photographic choices with a range of age and ethnicity. If you twist the camera round far enough, you can get a view of your pragmatically dressed character model. Voice performance is limited to increasingly emphatic yawns when you stretch a driving shift out too far.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 (Yes, those are bi-pride colors.)

In Eve Online, you are the immortal cyborg pilot of a set of space ships. The development of Eve is an interesting case. Several years ago, the company announced the development of "walking in stations." The project went as far as new character-creation tools and two rooms of "captains quarters." Players objected strongly to the shift in focus combined with planned microtransactions, and development was dropped. Eve Online is intensely social, almost every action involves cooperation or competition with other players. However the community rejected the idea of basing that sociability on virtual avatars.

Eve Online

Both games offer a role-playing component. Choices professional development unlock skills and goals over time. However that role-play doesn't involve interactions between animated human bodies. With sexuality and gender presentation kept off the screen, I can imagine anything I want behind the metal and chrome.

Conclusion, the tl;dr

Taking a step back from the cinematic perspective of many contemporary AAA titles helps me work with the dissonance between the publishers ideas about gender and my own ideas about gender.

100 years ago today: trans arrest

The Seattle Star reported that Professor Eugene de Forest was "confronted with the charge of masquerading as a man.

(de Forest:) "Before God, I have never harmed or done wrong to a living being. Born with a handicap of a strange personality, which makes me wish to appear as a man, I have done my very best with the life God has given me. All I ask is to have the right to earn an honorable livelihood, and to live in peace without hurt to any one." (quoted verbatim)

tw:transphobia

Mushroom Mushroom!

Possible bolete. Wet weather brings out the mushrooms.

Experimenting with bi-pride colored trucks. The small bits of utopian control we seek for in games.

(divisors z) → (Listof Natural)
z : Integer
Returns a list of all positive divisors of the integer z. The divisors appear in ascending order.

Another reason why Racket rocks, because optimizing trial-division for large numbers.

It makes solving the Fermat Exponent problem easy:

Apparently, there was a period of time in Beethoven's transition from classical formalist to bombastic romanticist (possibly accompanied by severe hearing loss and disillusionment with Napoleon) when musicians said, (translated from 19th-century German), "What the heck, Beethoven! This isn't music! My kids could write this!"

Elsewhere:

• Dragon Con followup: Female heroes and femininity | Feministe
• Charles Blow on bisexuality, gender, and fluidity Sexual Attraction and Fluidity - The New York Times
• Worth thinking about: Crossdreamers: Felix Conrad Talks about Transgender Research, Crossdreaming and Beach Clubbing
• I'm about halfway through this article on nonduality: True Nonduality and the Neo-Advaita - You are not done yet!

Octavia Butler's DAWN Optioned for TV

Butler's Dawn has been optioned for television. Producer Allen Bain:

I definitely want to stay true to the material and honor the legacy of Octavia Butler, because I think that's important and I do think that's possible in 2015. I think my predecessors have broken a lot of ground in television and the distribution channels have changed, so you can actually make TV now that you couldn't 15 years ago. Back then a show had to be episodic in the sense that you could tune in any day, it didn't matter if you knew the backstory, and you could watch it from beginning to end and be satisfied. That's changed tremendously in the last 15 years or so.

It's Not a Race

A comic by Justin Hubbell about taking baby steps with genderqueer transitions. Just read the whole thing.

Readopting Linux: Edimax EW-7811Un Installation

I had some problems with this one. (It gave me trouble on Windows as well.) I found instructions that worked for me here, about halfway down: wireless - Is there a standard WiFi driver for the Edimax EW-7811Un? - Ask Ubuntu

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install git build-essential linux-headers-generic dkms
git clone https://github.com/dz0ny/rt8192cu.git --depth 1
cd rt8192cu
sudo make dkms

Re-adopting Linux: Updating a few Things

• How to Build Emacs on Linux Focused on Ubuntu, possibly generalizable to Debian.
• Installing 32-bit binaries for GOG.com games. Libraries needed for some games in the GOG library.
• How to Install LibreOffice 5.0 in Ubuntu and Derivatives

On history and the meaning of bisexuality

Is it really progress that in 25 years, stereotypes about my sexuality have gone from "anything that moves" to "binary only?"

150 years ago when scientists were describing human sexuality, they were trying to distill complex cultures down to a handful of words. There were men loving men and women loving women. There were men and women who loved both. There was butch and femme. There were "normal" guys and feminine fairies. There were gay, lesbian, and bisexual people who "crossdressed" full-time and part-time. Anne Lister put on a suit and a masculine name to cruise the red light district. There were trans people who fully transitioned (to the extent that was possible) and married. Their spouses may or may not have been co-conspirators.

And all this was further complicated by colonialism and contact with cultures that don't do gender and sexuality the same way, which scientists still don't understand.

So scientists did what scientists do, they created a theory. Then they created words to describe that theory, out of loanwords from another language which made their theory seem less like making shit up. Then they overgeneralized without really questioning about what the people they described really wanted.

Naming sexuality was based on the 19th century conceit that naming something is equivalent to understanding it. That those names didn't accurately describe the people or things involved is pretty typical for the 19th century. At least half of our post Victorian language to describe sexuality involves misnomers and euphemisms. Colonial place names range from the wildly optimistic to the wildly inaccurate. This practice taken up by 20th century city planners who named neighborhoods and streets after plants that didn't exist on site.

English has been described as a language that mugs other languages for nouns in dark alleys. I think modern English is even more macabre. English assaults other languages, takes their coats and hats, and goes dancing. Usually we don't notice this. Democrats favor a proportional system and Republicans claim to be populist. Mass hysteria doesn't involve a giant uterus. We use the word depression to describe a clinical mental illness, an economic phenomenon, a geologic feature, and a weather system. Language is conventional, it is almost never logical.

But, let's turn back to the 19th and early 20th century. "Homosexuality" included Lister's cross-dressed cruising and drag, a concept that Mae West went to jail for putting on the stage. (The New York state legislature would ban explicit homosexuality from the stage until the 1970s.) "Heterosexuality," included elements of gender-deviance as a kink. "Bisexuality" included elements of both heterosexuality and homosexuality, often treated as a transitory or deceptive homosexuality.

The point is that those words were coined to describe cultures and lifestyles that included a wide range of genders and gender expressions. The denotation of those words may be "attraction to the same sex" "attraction to both sexes." But the connotation of those words always implied that we were swishy or butchy people who wore the wrong clothes, spoke in the wrong registers, and made "normal" people nervous.

Biphobia Exists: September 1, 2015

• On Reddit: over a hundred examples of negativity aimed at bi men
• Drexel University: bisexual and questioning women at higher risk for eating disorders
• Northern Illinois University: study funded to research microaggressions against bi women
• YouGov: a third of young Americans place themselves in the middle of the Kinsey Scale
• After Ellen: Label your sexuality allready!

Link Cleanup: August 31, 2015

• Objections to Fun Home not about trigger warnings.
• Some freshmen object, other like it.
• Brit Mandelo on Tiptree/Sheldon as a lesbian writer

Re-adopting Linux: Making the Switch

Choices Choices

One of the things that makes Linux unique is the variety of choices in distribution various groups offered. I had been running various distributions in virtual machines for some time, so I wasn't totally unfamiliar.

Currently I'm working with Xubuntu, a variant of Ubuntu that uses XFCE as the primary desktop environment. Ubuntu has most of the software packages I want in reasonably current versions, has a large number of people banging on it, and is officially supported by Steam. XFCE is a nice, simple, and clean user interface. I have the hardware to run practically any desktop environment but have a fair bit of experience with XFCE under VirtualBox.

I also considered Linux Mint, but the live DVD didn't work well with my video hardware (GeForce 750Ti).

Testing

I used a live DVD to test out Netflix before committing to an install.

1. pop the DVD in
2. reboot
3. download chrome
4. login to Netflix
5. test with debugging console.

Installation

Installation was very easy. I resized my NTFS partition, then rebooted into Windows 7 a couple of times to run disk checks.

The only real problem I've had is that my USB WiFi adapter has been starting to glitch. I'm almost positive this is a hardware fault because it glitches under Windows 7 as well. I'll get three or four hours of service, then it starts throwing errors. Unplugging and reconnecting the device usually works. A replacement is on order.

Installation was actually easier than setting up the same hardware on Windows 7, where both video and WiFi adapter demanded searching for updated drivers. This included the chicken/egg problem that you need the drivers to have an operating system to search for the drivers. With the exception of the glitchy network adapter, everything has just worked so far.

Maximum Product Of Two Primes Less Than N: Racket and C++

Maximum product less than n of two primes

Racket

C++ (Sieve Omitted)

Linux Revisited Again

She'll be coming 'round the mountain when she comes

— traditional

I seem to be coming back around to linux again, and feel like putting down some of my own thoughts about the decision. While the "year of desktop linux" has been a running joke for the last two decades, I think we're now getting to the point where the decision is less of an issue.

I should probably clarify that my home computer is a home-built Frankenstein built on an installment plan: I buy an upgrade, and I install it.

The Politics: Why not Windows 10?

Privacy. It seems that with Windows 10 that Microsoft has gone opt-out rather than opt-in on certain forms of data reporting. While it looks like a lot of this can be turned off, the recent finding that parental modification was turned on by the upgrade disturbs me. Of course, I'm 44, own my computer, and am not accountable to my parents. But it opens the question about what other kinds of reporting might be turned on as a useful feature by a future update.

Why Linux? The Hobbies

At the moment, two of my hobbies involve writing and programming. In both cases the workflow I prefer to use is slightly better supported on Linux.

Writing

Currently my preferred workflow includes markdown or emacs org-mode and pandoc. Both emacs and pandoc have been ported to Windows but linux remains the primary platform of support. Windows introduces some annoyances to the process.

Programming

My programming hobby involves solving simple puzzles in multiple programming languages. Most of the programming languages I work in have Linux as a primary platform and Windows as a secondary platform. In Common Lisp for example, SBCL offers a bit better features and performance compared to any of the open-source lisps for Microsoft Windows. Working through cygwin for gcc and clang is something I find to be a bit awkward.

There are exceptions. Racket has always impressed me on any operating system. Microsoft has F and C#, but I don't have an investment in learning them.

Question 1: Games?

One of the reasons I went to Windows 7 in building my Frankenstein was access to AAA MMORPG and RPG games. I think that's less compelling to me now than it was previously for a couple of reasons.

The first is that I've had a loss of faith in game design lately. Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 were huge disappointments. Generally speaking, take away the cinematic cut-scenes and the primary game mechanic involves cutting your way through dozens of dehumanized mobs to get from spawn point to goal. Even Bethesda's Fallout and Elder Scrolls series hinges on boss fights and ambushes to move the story forward. So I'm no longer as interested in playing those games as I've been in the past.

Images via pixelcurious.

And on the other side, Valve and GOG.com have made great strides in bringing new games and back-catalog releases to OS X and Linux. 20 out of 54 of my Steam games have Linux ports, along with about half of my GOG.com titles (including three of the games I've been playing the most this year.) Playonlinux has moved WINE gaming forward a fair bit. It's an area where the last few years have seen a lot of progress.

Question 2: Streaming Video?

Late last year, Netflix got support via Google Chrome, so that's taken care of. Still, a big test before install involved watching videos through a liveCD.

There's Always Dual-Boot

And if all else fails, I'm not burning any bridges by dual-booting.

Bridge hands problem in C++

Notes: Fun Home, Republican Fibs, and a Party of Losers.

Fun Home: Some incoming Duke University freshmen object to Fun Home as an entirely optional reading. Eliel Cruz responds:

This bubble of ignorance that conservatives live in when they treat LGBT stories as “other” isn't just bad for academics, however—it’s also dangerous to our country's ongoing struggle for equality. Excluding LGBT people from one’s worldview means it’s easier to see them as less than deserving of empathy—or less than human.

Ted Cruz gets it wrong. Sgt. Phillip Monk wasn't fired:

One military training instructor who worked for me and counseled young airmen told them: “Homosexuals were the downfall of Rome, and now they’ll be the downfall of the military, and the military will fall because of their lust and greed.” About 13 trainees filed a complaint against him. Those complaints went straight to my boss, who told me we had to do something about it.

I went to legal, and legal said, “You have to do something about this.” We had a zero tolerance policy on discrimination. I went back to my staff and told them. Monk said, “He’s got freedom of speech!” But we had to discipline the instructor. It wasn’t even a huge punishment. It was a warning.

Monk was up in arms. He came to me and said, “You know, ma’am, I can tell we’re not gonna agree on this. My replacement is already coming in. Do you mind if I take leave while this happens?” I said, “Sure, it’s your prerogative.” He walked out of my office, filled out the paperwork, gave it to me, and I approved.

George R. R. Martin tells his side of the Hugo Losers Party:

Windows 10 turns Parental Monitoring on by Default

"This weekend we upgraded my 14-year-old son's laptop from Windows 8 to Windows 10. Today I got a creepy-ass email from Microsoft titled 'Weekly activity report for [my kid]', including which websites he's visited, how many hours per day he's used it, and how many minutes he used each of his favorite apps."

-- Windows 10 automatically spies on your children and sends you a dossier of their activity - Boing Boing

Useful feature for parents, boo for making it a default settings change.