Blog/November 2011/Nov 4th

Nov 4th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

The weather's turned cold (by our standards, anyway) and we got our first real rain here in Maale Adummim last night -- water is still on the ground! Work is grinding to a halt and the new work is starting up. Our cousins the Fakestinians have been accepted to UNESCO. Mazal tov to my cousin Sara Leah on the birth of a baby girl!

By know you've heard that "Palestine" was granted full membership in UNESCO this week. That really does make sense. After all, now the entire world can enjoy Palestinian culture! Drugs (get you beheaded), sex (gets you beheaded) and Rock-(thrown with intent to kill)-n-Roll. Yeah, baby!! Their first official action as part of UNESCO was to petition for the Dead Sea to be an "Arab heritage" site. Given that they dump huge amounts of unprocessed sewage into it, I guess that's appropriate. For your further edification, here's a sweet Fakestinian love story you might enjoy. You might also be interested in seeing exactly how photo-journalism works.

Meanwhile back at my current job, their attempts to keep me by means of flattery alone did not prove fruitful. Had they given me any real incentive to stay, I would have been tempted -- but alas! they did not. So instead, I spent the week performing a brain dump so that they can continue operation without me. In the meantime, the new place is trying to get me up-to-speed on their technology, so I've spent a couple fairly long sessions going over documents and looking at their source code. I'll be starting officially a week from this coming Sunday.

It's been a pretty quiet week for us, all told. Daniela is "heads down" trying to accomplish all the projects she's got going on. Sarah has been working, Esther's been working, I've been working. Thank God, we've been working! Interestingly enough, in the past two weeks I've received a number of "job suggestions" from various recruiters... I guess the high-tech field here is short-staffed.

I mentioned last time that I would tell you how to browse the internet and maintain your privacy and anonymity, and tell you why you might want to do that. The "why" is not too hard to understand, really. You may not want to be identified when asking about some potentially embarrassing information. Or you may need to access a site that won't let you get access if you aren't in the same country as the site's servers. Or you may be in China (or some other place) which blocks access to the sites you want to see.

It turns out that both privacy and anonymity are difficult to achieve on the internet with 100% reliability. However, here are a few things you can do:

• Use an anonymous "proxy" service. This makes it appear that you are coming from somewhere else -- for example, the US when you are actually in France. It prevents the other side from knowing your actual address, although it is possible for the "powers that be" to get the logs and force the proxy provide to disclose that information.
• Use the Tor router. This is a very secure way to prevent anyone from knowing where you are "coming from". It takes your initial request, and encrypts it, passing it between various routers in the Tor network -- and finally delivering your request to its destination. It is especially useful if you are concerned about the "powers that be".
• Do not use Internet Explorer. Do not use Google Chrome. Both of these are known to "leak" information. Do use Firefox, with various add-ons to protect you (e.g. AdBlock, BetterPrivacy, NoScript...)
• When using Firefox, do "Tools|Start private browsing" when you want maximum privacy. In this mode, Firefox will not keep any information about where you are going or doing, so that nothing remains on the machine you are using. This is particularly useful if you are browsing from someone else's machine.

I'll try to tell you next time how you can set up a very secure machine.

We've got two seminary girls staying with us this shabbat, as well as one of our friends from the "old country" who's also learning in seminary this year. We present to them this week's shabbat menu: pastel de pescado (spicy fish loaf), ḥumus, eggplant, beets, hearts of palm, Israeli salad, chicken-noodle soup, baked chicken, potatoes, zucchini kugel, marble cake, cholent, rice

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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