What SOPA Means in Plain Language

Published on January 18, 2012

By now you have probably noticed that the Internet is abuzz with a protest against SOPA. I’ve read some of the news coverage and it does a shockingly poor job of explaining the objection.

SOPA stands for “Stop Online Piracy Act.” It has a related piece of legislation, PIPA, the “Protect Intellectual Property Act,” that does essentially the same thing.

The titles of the bills don’t describe what they would do. They describe the pretext for what the bills will really do:

  1. grant sweeping new powers to the U.S. government to censor the Internet
  2. grant Big Media the power to automatically shut down Web sites they don’t like, without having to present firm evidence to a court

Simply put, these laws have no place in a society that values freedom of speech.

For more information, I would encourage you to visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They have a one-page summary that is worth your time to read.

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A New Year, a New Edition of D&D

Published on January 10, 2012

Today my wife pointed me to an article on CNN.com announcing a new edition of Dungeons and Dragons. That’s right. A new edition, announced only four years after the last edition. I was just starting to get used to Fourth Edition — and starting to play it enough to actually want to buy some of the products.

Now that the news has sunk in for me, I welcome it. Fourth Edition has its advantages, but it is not without faults, as I have written before. Although I’m annoyed at yet another opportunity to throw out a stack of books and spend a hundred bucks on new ones, I’ve come to regard 4E as the Windows Vista of D&D. Once it’s gone, I think most people will be glad to forget about it.

There is not much information yet about what 5E is going to look like. It was only announced yesterday, for crying out loud. Probably the best source for news related to the new edition is EN World, specifically, their D&D Next page.

Partly out of professional interest as a semi-pro game designer, and partly because I have an active, regular game getting started, I expect I’ll follow the development of this edition more closely than I did for Fourth, and will probably buy and read the books a lot sooner this time around. For now, I’ll just start by reacting to some of the information we do have.

A New Year, a New Edition of D&D continued »

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2011, The Year of Fighting Back Against the Black-Hats, Part 2: Defenses Against Phishing

Published on October 17, 2011

As you may recall, back in January I wrote a post declaring this the year of “fighting back against the black hats. Now it’s mid-October, and I am finally getting around to the second post in the series. So maybe 2012 will be a year of fighting back as well…

What is Phishing?

Simply put, phishing is a form of fraud where someone tries trick you into disclosing secret information (such as your credit card number) by posing as someone you trust (such as your credit card company). In fact, phishing is a form of wire fraud, plain and simple. In my opinion it is unfortunate that the word “phishing” even exists. It’s a gratuitous neologism that, because of its cutesy spelling, potentially reads as something more innocuous than it actually is.

In fact, phishing is the most common form of identity “theft.” It’s rampant on the Internet. And you are a target.

How to Protect Yourself

Munckin card: Curse! Duck of Doom. "You should know better than to pick up a duck in a dungeon. Lose 2 levels."

You should also know better than to open a link in an e-mail message.

The whole point of phishing is that it’s trying to trick you. Contrary to what some know-it-alls might say, it is not easy to defend yourself against.

  1. Don’t click on a link in an e-mail message, even if the message looks legitimate. Unfortunately this is the hardest rule to follow. Even the best of us forget. It’s easy to laugh off the silly Nigerian money-laundering scam but much harder to remember the rule when the message looks like it comes from your telephone company or a relative. And, like the hapless adventurer who picked up the Duck of Doom, our first mistake may have severe repercussions. Phishing e-mails take you to Web sites that may look legitimate, but actually capture your login and/or financial information for purposes of identity theft.
  2. Use software to help you follow rule #1. As I mentioned in my previous post, you really need anti-virus software anyway. You can probably get it free of charge from your Internet service provider so there’s no excuse. Most “anti-virus” software these days is a multi-faceted suite of defenses that also includes some protection against phishing.
  3. Do not trust your own judgment to identify fraudulent messages. Sooner or later, you’ll be tired or distracted and you’ll slip up. I used to take pride in my ability to spot a scam, and I almost got burned today. Only my anti-virus software saved me. If you believe you have superhuman powers and will never be fooled, please carefully read the fairly brief academic paper, Why Phishing Works.

2011, The Year of Fighting Back Against the Black-Hats, Part 2: Defenses Against Phishing continued »

Filed in Computer Security | No replies

Changing Auto-Run Programs in Windows 7

Published on August 14, 2011

I’ve been running Windows 7 for about a year and a half now. I have never been a Windows fan but Windows 7 definitely seems the least annoying — and most reliable — version of Windows I’ve seen.

One of the remaining annoyances though is that even though I’ve been pretty careful about what I install on my PC, a certain amount of crapware has crept onto the machine. Crapware is stuff you, the computer user (or “owner” as I like to call myself) never asked for, don’t care about, and don’t want to use, but none the less is installed “for” you when you install something you did want, like a driver for a new piece of hardware. I am not talking about malware here; crapware is harmless but it’s annoying because it slows down the machine. I also have concerns that it’s spying on me a bit, sending “market research” data back to the mother ship. Besides, since I think of myself as the owner of my computer, anything I didn’t explicitly decide I want on my machine has no right to be there.

The particular piece of crapware that is on my nerves today is the help program that came with my Logitech webcam. I am not really opposed to having the webcam help program installed on my machine. What bothers me is that Logitech has decided that the help program needs to start every time I log into my computer. This post documents my quest to make it stop.

Changing Auto-Run Programs in Windows 7 continued »

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Best Password Advice Ever

Published on August 10, 2011

I have actually been mulling over posting about passwords and my current beliefs about how to choose them, but the Web comic xkcd beat me to it, and of course said in about 100 words what would have taken me 10 times as many:

XKCD cartoon on password strength.

Filed in Computer Security | No replies

Learning the Combat System in Savage Worlds

Published on August 9, 2011

Savage Worlds rulebook cover

Lately I’ve been playing two tabletop RPGs, which partially accounts for the lack of blog posts in about three months. One of my games is, of course, Ars Magica, and the other is the (relatively) new Space 1889: Rad Sands setting for Savage Worlds.

I find that over the past three or four years my tastes in gaming have changed quite a bit. I still love Ars Magica of course, but (as I’ve written previously) increasingly I am interested in games where the rules stay out of the way and the players can focus on the story and on role-playing. So Savage Worlds, with its lightweight core rule book (paperback, 160 pages, $9.95 retail), was just the thing to try.

Overall I am very satisfied with the Savage Worlds system. It’s lean, straightforward, and includes features, such as Edges and Hindrances for characters, that encourage role-playing. Character creation was pretty quick and I was able to get my new group of five players to create characters and learn the basics within a couple of hours.

So why is it that, now four sessions into this game, we are still tripping over the combat system?

Learning the Combat System in Savage Worlds continued »

Filed in Roleplaying Games | One reply

Searching within PDF Documents using Windows Search

Published on May 8, 2011

Windows Search is a a built-in feature of the operating system which, if I recall correctly, has been around since Windows XP. It can find which files (“documents” in Windows-speak) contain certain words or phrases. It is very handy if, for example, you know you have the shopping list somewhere on your computer but can’t remember exactly where it is or what the file is called.

The trouble with Windows Search is that it can only search certain kinds of documents. Not too long ago I spent more money than I care to admit on a bunch of PDFs for Ars Magica; I already owned most of those books in hard copy but the corpus of material for that game has grown so large, and is scattered across so many books, that I don’t have the time or the patience to flip through all the possible books that might contain an obscure rule. (This is compounded by the publisher’s choice not to include an index in most of the recent books, but that’s another rant.) I thought that with the electronic rule books, that problem would be solved. Imagine my disappointment when I typed “magus” (the word for wizards in Ars Magica) and got no results!

It turns out, Windows Search doesn’t work on PDF documents, only MS Office documents and plain-text files. At least, not out of the box. But it is easy to add that capability.

Searching within PDF Documents using Windows Search continued »

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Meet Your New Dungeon Master

Published on April 30, 2011

Merlin behind the DM's screen

Merlin decided to stand in as Dungeon Master for our last D&D game.

At our last D&D game, Merlin decided he had been a spectator long enough and got directly involved in the game. He is quite the copycat. It’s a pity I couldn’t have snapped this picture a half-second earlier, when he was sitting down behind the screen and looking directly at the camera.

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Area Effect Templates for D&D Miniatures

Published on April 19, 2011

A 3x3 area on the battle mat

Two orcs are getting blasted by Todd's wizard using a 3x3 area effect: probably Thunderwave

Playing D&D 4E pretty much requires the use of tabletop miniatures (or some equivalent, like cardstock counters). During one of the early sessions of our current campaign, I realized that the wizards in particular were using a lot of area effects. Probably that’s because wizards have access to first-level powers that can be used at will.

I found that fussing over where exactly to place these area effects was slowing down the flow of play. So I went to a craft store and bought some pipe cleaners and made a few simple outlines of 3″x3″ and 5″x5″ areas. In Fourth Edition, all area effects are square, so you really need only a couple of different sizes.

These work amazingly well. Now every time one of the wizards casts a spell, his player plunks down the pipe-cleaner outline and we can all tell at a glance which monsters are going to have a bad day.

Warning: Apparently these carefully shaped pipe cleaners are the best cat toys ever according to my cat Merlin. So if you leave your pipe-cleaner templates unattended on the table, and you have a cat, you can expect to find them the next day, under the couch, crusted in dried cat spit and mangled into postmodern art. The one in this photo is all kinked because it has been resurrected from just such a fate.

Filed in Cats,Roleplaying Games | No replies

Installing Ubuntu 10.10 on a Dell inspiron 1210 (mini 12)

Published on March 19, 2011

This post is a bit more technical than what I usually write for this blog, but I spent a lot of time and trouble trying to fix an issue with my Dell mini 12 laptop. I wanted to I document it to help make it easier for others.

A couple of years ago I bought an Inspiron 1210 laptop (also known as “Inspiron mini 12″) from Dell. It’s a nice, lightweight laptop with a 12-inch screen. Interestingly, it has an Intel Atom processor, which is a 32-bit dual-core chip. It’s probably the last 32-bit general-purpose computer I will ever buy; all processors are 64-bit these days except for embedded processors on phones, toasters, set-top boxes, and the like.

At the time I bought it, Dell was shipping that model with Ubuntu Linux installed. I was looking for an inexpensive laptop for use at the gaming table, mostly to keep my notes and to run RPTools. My little Dell seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Initially, I was very happy with it.

Fast forward to late 2010, when I was assigned to give a presentation to my cloud computing class (I was a student, not the instructor). Like any good free software enthusiast, I made my presentation using OpenOffice (now LibreOffice) on my desktop PC at home. When I loaded the presentation onto my Dell mini, it wouldn’t open because it was created with a newer version of OpenOffice than I had used to create the presentation. “No problem!” I thought. “I’ll just update my version of OpenOffice.” That’s where the trouble began.

Installing Ubuntu 10.10 on a Dell inspiron 1210 (mini 12) continued »

Filed in Computer Security,Linux | 3 replies