Blog/May 2011/May 6th

May 6th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

The big news this week is that Daniela has changed her return flight, and will be coming home sooner. Yay! She'll be returning with "the boyfriend" (cue ominous music); so we'll have both of them under the microscope for a while... bwahahaha!!!

Other than that, it was a normal week for us. Sarah had a relaxing week in the blistering heat of Tel Aviv. We're looking forward to the celebration of Israel's 63rd Independence Day this coming Tuesday. I've written before about the pall of barbecue smoke hanging over the Land on our Independence Day every year... and from the looks of it, this time will be no different. I'll let you know next week, B"H.

I'm on a campaign to protect my friends and family from the evils of insecure wireless networks. Last week I wrote about a fellow who ran afoul of the law because someone downloaded illegal material using his (unsecured, open) wireless connection. Besides that knotty problem, leaving your wireless network open has two other main downsides:

First, you are paying for a certain amount of bandwidth. When you allow others to just use your connection, they will use up part of that bandwidth. Most of the time you probably won't notice; but if they download videos or other large things, you will definitely notice.

Second, someone using your network can "see" any data passing over it. So your financial information or other sensitive material could be viewed by someone you don't know, who may not have your interests at heart. Most people wouldn't leave their filing-cabinets open for everyone to peruse, why would you do the same with your wireless network?

The solution is really, really easy. First you need to tell your "router" to use "WPA" security, and give a reasonably strong password to your connection. Then, for each wireless device you use, tell it to use WPA and the password you set up, to connect to your network. If you can't use WPA (your router doesn't support it for instance), you can use WEP instead -- but that's less secure. This solution works whether you are using Windows, Mac OS/X, Linux or Android -- and it doesn't take more than five minutes to implement. On a related note, please make sure your router is not using its default password!

On a different note, this week I was discussing with a friend the distinction between "scientific method" and "religious thought". The central point I was making is that in religious terms, the existence of God is taken as a given; and by His nature, it is impossible to prove He exists -- therefore, religious thought lies outside the purview of scientific method. The essence of scientific method is that a theory must be capable of being disproved, or it cannot be a theory. This week, we found out that Einstein's "theory of relativity" has been demonstrated to be correct, once again. Since no experiment has ever shown it to be incorrect, and because it accurately predicts real phenomena, we rely on it. But the instant some disproof of it is made, the theory as it is would be abandoned and either modified or discarded -- that's the scientific method. Whereas belief in God is not capable of being disproved -- and so will never be scientifically provable (or disproved).

Stuff of note:

• Last week I talked about the Amazon "cloud" outage. Here are more details.
• The Department of Homeland Security is keeping up its fascist ways. But to their credit, Mozilla told the DHS to jump in the lake.
• Somebody is offering advice on how to switch away from ubuntu. Others are complaining of kubuntu stability issues. I've actually found the latest "Natty" kubuntu to be very stable and nice to work with -- so I don't know what these people are complaining about.
• Linux is always last! But don't get too complacent -- Linux can still be infected with viruses (although it is much more difficult than with Windows). So the cardinal rule of internet safety still applies: don't run anything you get from an untrusted source!

Just the three of us this week. The menu consists of: tuna salad, ḥummus, eggplant, tomato salad, quinoa, chicken soup, baked chicken with lemon and olives, couscous, zucchini with carrots, chili, rice, salatim and "just cake".

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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