"Small problems" in the humanities?

I am someone who knows my way around a keyboard, but isn’t really invested in computer science, hacking, or computer and electrical engineering—I’ve often been fascinated with the idea of “small problems” in the practice of computing. I’m here referring to the ubiquitous weekend projects and semi-organized hackathons. Not only do these (very) occasionally lead to important theoretical insights, they frequently contribute to the practice. We’ve seen all sorts of feats of implementation, development, reverse engineering, and integration. 

While the humanities are a decidedly less practice-oriented field, there still are enclaves of practice, such as in digital humanities, book history, and of course, actual writing. If we were to find areas of practice, or small areas of theory, what would the humanities take to be a “small problem”, accomplishable in a weekend or a hackathon?

The student's (and faculty's) guide to computer security

[N.B. I’ll be discussing Mac software exclusively, but basically the rules apply to other operating systems.]

A friend of mine recently had his laptop stolen from school, and he came to me asking if there is any way to track the device. Basically, that answer is a sad “no”, but there are some things you can do before your laptop is stolen.

A word about “security”. I’m using this in the broadest sense possible, and will be offering a kind of “best practices” approach. The things that you’ll want to “secure” are: data, privacy, and physical device recovery. Let’s start with the easiest.

Data security

“If it isn’t in at least two places, it doesn’t exist” ~ a paraphrase from an unknown Internet source

It’s simply not enough to occasionally move your important files over to a USB key or external hand drive every now and then. Likewise, emailing your files to GMail probably isn’t good enough either. Here’s what I do, and you should too:

1. Automatic offsite backup. It may cost you $50/year but the various (secure) cloud backup services may save your butt, and if you should have irrecoverable data corruption, or if your device is stolen, you would gladly spend that $50/year to recover all of your data. In the event of a disaster it will save you a lot of time to get back up and going too, since most services will allow you to either download all your files or (for a fee) ship you a hard drive of all your data. These services run continuously or nightly (the prior is much preferred) and will save every file on your computer. This includes those intangibles that would never be saved with your current “email” backup strategy, like your holiday pictures and your large music collection. Sure, saving your dissertation-in-progress is important, but how sad would it be to lose the pictures of your children, your ex-lovers, your holidays, and your family? I use Backblaze (Mac or Windows), which I really enjoy. After some experimentation, I discovered that it hits all the criteria for me: unlimited backup, continuous (“smart”) backup, and encrypted data prior to uploading.
2. Automatic onsite backup. If you use automatic cloud backup you might not need this one, but still, it’s an extra layer of protection and can help recover particular versions of your data, or allow for very fast data recovery (if your onsite data is good, then no need to recover from the cloud). All you need is a cheap external hard drive or (better) an Apple Time Capsule for automatic over-the-air backup. Turn on OS X Time Machine and it takes care of the rest. It’s a few hundred dollars well spent.
3. Automatic cloud syncing. A third data backup!? I know, it might be overkill, but it’s easy to do and offers other benefits also. If you use a service like Dropbox (2GB free) and keep all of your more important documents in the Dropbox folder, you’ll get automatic versioning for every single save, and you’ll be able to access your files from anywhere using the web interface. Ever find yourself at school without your laptop, and you forgot to print that important document? Log in to Dropbox and view all your documents. The backup solutions described above don’t backup your data as frequently, so if a program crashes and corrupts your data you might lose an hour or a day’s worth of work, but so long as you click Save every few minutes (and you should), you’ll be safe with Dropbox. [OS X Lion has automatic backup and versioning capabilities, but until they are fully supported by all your applications this isn’t really an answer. Microsoft Word, notably, does not support system-level versioning.]

Privacy

There are two senses of privacy in this scenario. The first is privacy while you use your computer. Some of the cloud services listed above (ahem, Dropbox) are very bad in terms of privacy and data security, but they may just be a necessary evil (that’s how I view it). Your web browser is the other obvious place for privacy, and using browser extensions like Ghostery will help protect you online. The second scenario is privacy if your laptop is stolen. Here’s some tips:

1. Always secure your laptop with a password. This may seem annoying but it is important (you’ll realize that when your laptop is stolen). OS X has made it relatively painless: System Preferences -> Security & Privacy and then set “Require password ___ minutes after sleep or screen saver begins” to a number that isn’t too annoying, but is relatively secure. Mine is set to 15 minutes.
2. Your email account is your skeleton key to online privacy, so treat it accordingly. Gmail offers enhanced security such as two-factor authentication and verification code requirements (if you have a mobile device). Likewise, Facebook can do two-factor authentication by sending you an SMS with a code every time a new device attempts to log in to your account. This won’t necessarily help you if your laptop is stolen and is password protected (and it is, right?), but it’s a good idea anyway. If your laptop is stolen and you do use Gmail (who doesn’t?), go in to your Google account settings and log out of all other sessions.

Physical device recovery

This is a trickier one. Step one is “don’t lose your laptop”, but assuming you’ve skipped step one, there are a few options.

1. Sign up for Apple’s free iCloud service, and turn on “Find my iPhone” for all your devices (yeah, they still haven’t changed the name to reflect the fact that you can locate any OS X and iOS device). If your laptop connects to a wifi location you’ll be able to track it on a map. The irony of the iCloud tracking is that it won’t work if you have password protected your laptop, but, you should definitely password protect your laptop if you don’t want your identity stolen and your life ruined. Leaving a “Guest” account on your OS X machine would permit a thief to log in but not access your information, thus increasing the possibility of this service working.
2. Sign up for a (free or paid) tracking service. Unlike Apple’s iCloud there are services that run at a “root” level on your machine and can track it even if it is password protected (so long as it can still automatically connect to a wifi location). You may still be out of luck (the thief may not connect to a wifi location), but it’s worth a shot. I use the (free) Prey service which allows you to gather information on the thief, and even take a photo of the person using your webcam.

So, there you go. Spend an afternoon securing your digital world and you’ll thank yourself later. If you are a n00b and can’t figure this stuff out, go talk to your local n3rd (who should be willing to help, for a beer), or even ask an Apple Genius to help you set up the configurations.

The deep, critical importance of Library.nu

As I am sure has been heard around academic water coolers across the globe, the über pirate ebook site Library.nu shut down recently. The importance of this resource has been strongly stated by Christopher Kelty of UCLA; his argument is so cogent that I will not synthesize or summarize. Go read it, seriously.

I’ll add only two additional points to Kelty’s argument. 

1. The academic publishing industry seems so retrograde and criminally capitalist that they are now worse than the music and movie industries (who have finally given up on suing grandmothers, war vets, and the like). Not only are most music releases, and many movies and TV shows, available for download (for free, or ad-supported), it is increasingly common to receive a digital download voucher when you purchase the shrink-wrapped version. So, e.g., if you really love some band enough that you will shell out cash for a audiophile-quality 180g vinyl edition, they often let you download an MP3 copy for free. Likewise for HD Blu-ray movie disks. Having dual paper and digital copies of books is enormously valuable for a researcher. Until Library.nu shut down I was in the habit of locating the (pirated) PDF version of any book I purchased on paper (a non-insignificant number). In addition to carrying around most of my home library on my laptop, electronic copies permit non-destructive annotations, bibliometric and textual analysis, and full text search.
2. Having an entire library of full-text searchable PDFs opens up a new kind of scholarship, especially valuable for interdisciplinary research. On my Mac I can enter a search term of interest, say, “representation” and I will be presented with a plethora of books and articles that I might not have ever thought to consult. Taking this to its logical conclusion, Library.nu performed full-text search indexing on all of their materials (where possible, given OCR limitations). When starting into a new field my first place of research would be Library.nu, where I would search for relevant keywords, and search returns come across the gamut of scholarship. This is powerful stuff, and opens up an entirely new type of research.

Switching to Teksavvy DSL

(At the risk of seeming like a corporate shill, here’s another, perhaps my last, technical suggestion for safe, effective P2P)

I recently switched away from Rogers (for the second time). I am now a Teksavvy customer and two weeks in, I’m pretty impressed. The service so far is as advertised: 25mb/s down and 7mb/s up. In real world usage, P2P connections go through my BlackVPN VPN, since while Teksavvy does not traffic shape or otherwise cause me any difficulties, they will surely respond to all legal requirements. I can easily get 2mb/s down on Bittorrent, and (here’s the exciting part), the same 2mb/s up. Additionally, Teksavvy has been a pleasure to do business with.

Check out my previous BlackVPN review for more information about VPNs.

Update on Sunday, March 4, 2012 at 1:42PM by Quinn

A recent Torrentfreak article collected self-reported data about IP logging from many VPN services, including my current one, BlackVPN. BlackVPN certainly doesn’t come out in the lead in terms of privacy (I would have liked to hear a “no logs, never” response), but doesn’t seem to hold a troubling position either. As a reminder, don’t use the US & UK VPN servers for anything requiring privacy, since these are logged (NL & LT have no logs).

Using Privacy Enhancing Technologies in the real world

I’ve been consistently pleased with my BlackVPN service (see my previous reviews), which allows me to use a variety of VPNs geolocated around the globe and configured with a no logging policy. When connected (through the excellent Viscosity OpenVPN client) I can maintain an encrypted tunnel from my location to a high traffic, high bandwidth server that effectively obfuscates my Internet use, as well as tunnels past any malicious or privacy-impacting middlemen. As I discussed several years ago, Privacy Enhancing Technologies—like VPNs—may be an effective tool in the fight against bad laws (#sopa) and bad corporate policies (#rogers). If you sign up with BlackVPN use my promo code for a free month of service: ZQMCTCX