Travel-related tech

I recently took a trip, and here are a few notes about some of my technology-related experiences.

I knew I'd probably want Internet access at the hotel, but I figured it would be wireless, and I was hoping for some kind of VPN. In the past I've used ssh's socks proxy feature, but I've found it to be pretty slow. So I thought I'd give wonderproxy a try. You can get a VPN account for a month for around $5, and I thought it worked really well. It was fast, and it made me feel a little better about using the hotel's wireless.

I bought a Macbook Air not long ago, and I like it. So I took it with me on the trip. I took some pictures, and I used iPhoto to copy the pictures off the camera onto the laptop. Then I tried using iPhoto to upload the photos to flickr, and that didn't work well for me. iPhoto crashed at one point during an upload of a bunch a photos, and there was no obvious way to resume the upload. I was able to figure out where it quit, and then I just told it to upload the photos it missed. But many of the photos on flickr don't have the original size--the largest version of many of them is 1024x768 (there should be three larger sizes). So I have to upload those images again or just be OK with the smaller sizes on flickr. So I'm glad I hadn't told iPhoto to delete them off the camera.

I also told iPhoto to mark several of the photos as private, and they ended up as public on flickr.

So I probably won't be using iPhoto any more.

And although southwestvacations.com did a great job of booking the trip, they totally FAIL in password security. When I created the account, I used a password generator to create a long password with all four character classes, and I saved the password in my password wallet. At one point during the trip, I needed to access something in my account. But when I tried to log in, I got invalid username/password errors. I ended up using the "forgot my password" link, thinking it would send me a login token. Nope, it sent me my password. It wasn't even my original password (which is why I was having trouble logging in). The original was around 20 characters long, but what they sent me was the first 10 characters of the password I'd created. So southwestvacations.com

• restricts password complexity (they truncated my password at 10 characters--the 11th was a percent sign, so I don't know if it was the length or the character)
• they truncated my password without warning me
• they store non-hashed passwords
• and they'll send passwords by email

FAIL.

Otherwise, it was a lovely trip. Have a look, if you like.

Restrictions on photography in NYC

The New York City Mayor's office is considering new rules which would require a person to obtain a permit and an insurance policy as a prerequisite to certain kinds of public photography in NYC.

The rule would apply to two or more people taking pictures in one location for more that 30 minutes, and also to someone using a tripod for more that ten minutes (that timeframe includes setting up and dismantling the tripod).

So what about someone taking pictures at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade? That's more than a half-hour, and typically more than one person.

The Mayor's office says that this is not intended to affect tourists and amateur photographers. In fact, the article doesn't say what these rules are intended to accomplish (the article says that the rules are coming from the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting). But I imagine that city officials will try to justify this as an improvement in city security, based on stories of terrorists taking pictures of their intended targets for planning purposes.

Bruce Schneier talks about this kind of thing a lot in his blog. He calls it security theater: doing something which has the appearance of improving security but which actually doesn't accomplish anything except inconvenience the innocent (like having someone make a cursory visual inspection of your car's trunk when you enter an airport--they're paid a wage not to look through your suitcases, just to look at your suitcases).

Refuse to be terrorized.