I’ve been mulling around the idea of more wide-spread crytographic use. One thing that I see as sorely lacking in current popular/professional culture is verifiable electronic signatures. The Adobe stuff seems wrong to me every time I use it as an end user (read: see it on some pdf; I’ve never actually generated a signature with it).

But verifiable electronic signatures is something us geeks figured out a long time ago! So simple, really. Just get all those law firms and law schools to teach their lawyers and paralegals how to use GPG and BAM! a gigantic WOT for law system users. And then, businesses would start adopting it (since their lawyers use it) and then… and then….

But, it appears to me that lawyers don’t actually care about verifiable electronic(ly communicated) signatures. The recent court cases involving Prenda Law (copyright troll) are proof of that. It all comes down to some argument in a court room with a bunch of he said/she said. I think they must like it this way.

Does anyone reading this know of a lawyer (or someone represented by a lawyer) who has used GPG to sign a document and had that document used in the court of law?

So, that’s all to say that lawyers won’t be the way to getting more widespread use of crytographically secure digital signatures, even though they’re a great use case for them.

Every month I pay ~$20 to keep my hosting on Linode. True, it serves more than just my blog (it also serves several sites, as well as my email). But it’s all to keep in contact with people.

I pay two phone bills: one for home, and one for my mobile phone. Those average around $50 a month.

I pay Google for my Google Voice number. Sure, it’s not a monetary transaction, but I make up for it in the ad revenue they can squeeze out of me.

Funny thing is you also pay to keep in contact with me. Whatever price you pay for hosting, and whatever privacy costs you might make in exchange for free email.

Being present and available has it’s cost. Looking at email and answering the phone costs attention and a certain amount of bandwidth.

Telemarketers and spammers treat these platforms as commodities only because we have no way to bill them in return. If we could send them a bill for our attention, would they be so cavalier about how they treat us? Perhaps it might balance out in the end.

But ultimately we’re the final arbiters of what gets our attention: by answering the phone, reading the email, or responding in kind.

We pay dearly to keep in contact with each other, to keep our presence felt. How would our conversations vary if we treated it as a privilege rather than a given?

On Saturday I was a productivity powerhouse. We managed to get Pixel to the vet, I mowed the lawn, and we did some afternoon shopping for some essentials. I was on fire, so my next productivity task was to take care of the power supply that was making noise (the fan was making a scraping sound, and while it went away before, this seemed as good a time as any to get rid of the problem once and for all). So a quick trip to Microcenter, and I had a brand new modular power supply from Thermaltake. I like the modular power supplies because there’s not as much loose cables laying around the case, which means less things to try to tie off inside the case. Since my previous power supply(Antec) was also modular, I thought “gee, I won’t have to re-run cables in the case. This will be great!” So I disconnected the old power supply, and connected the new power supply; reusing the old cables wherever possible.

Total time: about 6 minutes.

Pleased with how clever I was, I left the machine on it’s side with everything exposed, and proceeded to flip the switch.

Almost instantly a little cloud of white smoke formed around the modular connectors. My hand raced to the back of the machine to flip the switch on the power supply off, all the while smelling the familiar and unwelcome smell of frying electronics.

Within seconds my brilliant idea went up in smoke.

Panicked at the thought that I completely fried everything in my machine, I pulled out the new power supply and replaced the old power supply back to it’s previous duties. My hope was that the power supply had tripped some fail-safe, and I was only out the power supply. My fear was that it took the connected hard drives and fried them.

I hit the power switch. Nothing.

I cycled the power supply, and hit the switch again. Nothing. Only three lonely lights on the Leopold keyboard greeted me.

Fuck.

I bolted for the storage area to get a spare machine to see if I could ascertain what the damage was and rebuild. I hooked the drives up, and prayed. Thankfully they all spun up, and the familiar (but incredibly slow. The spare machine is rather old and not known for being a speed demon.) Ubuntu screens greeted me. Thankfully the drives weren’t toast.

That meant the motherboard likely got the brunt of whatever happened. I wondered if anything was salvageable. I’ve had this particular motherboard / CPU combo since 2008, so an upgrade was definitely in the works, but I wasn’t sure what was out there, and what it would cost. Also I wasn’t sure what other cards on the machine were toast. My video card is relatively inexpensive (ASUS ATI Radeon 5450) so if that didn’t work I could get another from Microcenter. But I needed to figure out what motherboard and CPU would work.

After a brief look at Microcenter’s page via my laptop, I decided on the AMD FX8350 / ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 combo, with 8GB of DDR3 1600 RAM. It seemed like the best price / performance sweet-spot, and I was in a hurry. I also picked up a replacement power supply of the one that I picked up earlier that day. Almost as an afterthought I asked Ben (the awesome associate at Microcenter) if he knew if the motehrboard worked under Ubuntu. He didn’t know for certain, but apparently he runs Ubuntu under VirtualBox on his Windows machine, so that was nice to find out. My phone Google-fu was a little quicker than his, and it appeared everything was in order for me to run Ubuntu on this setup with no problems. After a relatively quick foray into the Microcenter checkout queue, I was on my way.

the computer-gods were smiling on me, because everything about this install went very smoothly. The motherboard installed into the case with no problems, and everything seems to be running smoothly. Were it not for the absolute panic that I had before heading back to Microcenter, one might say that I had planned it all along to get a comptuer upgrade. I’m thankful I didn’t lose any data that I’m aware of, and I’m grateful that Microcenter had exactly what I needed to upgrade my machine quickly and efficiently.

Moral of the story: just because it fits doesn’t mean it’ll work, and whnever it comes to power supplies make sure you use the cables that come with it. Laziness is not a virtue when it comes to hardware.