parker higgins

Over on the EFF “Deeplinks” blog, I’ve just published my 100th post, an intro to the cryptographic property of perfect forward secrecy. One hundred strikes me as a nice big round number, averaging a little more than one a week since I started in November 2011. Here are some of my favorite posts of the first 100.

Yesterday I posted a ship in a bottle from the 1922 book “Pirates,” and today I’ve had a chance to clean up a few more images, including most of the actual named pirates described in the book. The book seems to be scanned on a setting for text, and so the pictures require just a little bit of correction and cleaning. I’m pretty happy with the way these images turned out. Of course, since the book was released in 1922, all of these are in the public domain. So if you need a pirate drawing, go ahead.

I cleaned up this illustration from a scan of the title page of Pirates (1922). The illustrator is the great Claud Lovat Fraser. The book came out the year after he died.

Working on drones, and increasingly in the conversation around Google Glass, I keep hearing a common refrain from people who don’t understand other people’s concerns. “There are surveillance cameras on every corner in major cities, helicopters with cameras overhead, and constant tracking in a million other ways,” the argument goes, “and where is the outrage about those things?”

Bruce Schneier’s essay on today’s bombings in Boston helped shake me out of the daze I found myself in since hearing the news this morning. I am far away from Boston, and knew nobody in the blast radius, but the ability to keep refreshing feeds to read more news, hear more rumors, see more pictures, made the tragedy feel immediate.

Psy — he, of course, of “Gangnam Style” fame — is back with a second video called “Gentleman.” A day into its existence, it’s pushing 30 million views. Anyway, there are a few shots of a pretty incredible location that caught my eye. Psy and his crew are dancing on a set of steps, surrounded by shelves full of books.

Earlier this week I was treated to a visit from some two dozen of San Francisco’s wild parrots, the cherry-headed conures that live on and around Telegraph Hill. It was pretty spectacular — I was sitting at the kitchen table by the window, and first one, then two, then maybe a half dozen landed right outside on my balcony, occasionally conferring with a larger group that had set down on the roof.

As with last year, I played a central role in putting together this year’s April Fools’ edition of the EFF newsletter. It’s hard writing things that are supposed to be funny.

It’s really great to read today’s Supreme Court decision in Kirtsaeng, in which a bad opinion could have had very profound and negative consequences way beyond the normal contours of copyright. I attended the oral arguments in October (during Hurricane Sandy!) and wrote it up for EFF. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the decision since then, and I’m not disappointed. Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from the decision:

Like many around the web, I was struck last month by the obituary of Bell Labs engineer John E. Karlin, whose greatest legacy may be the keypad design on traditional touch-tone phones. (That is, the arrangement in a 3×3 grid with the 1-2-3 across the top instead of the bottom.) I had long heard the urban legend explanation that the arrangement was deliberately designed to slow down a population trained to quickly enter strings of numbers on calculators and cash registers and prevent them from overwhelming the phone system. It’s nice to hear that not only was there deliberate thought behind it, but real behavioral research.