Almost speechless

Things like this (also reported several other places) take a special kind of stupidity.  "Kyle Dubois and his parents claim teacher Thomas Kelley did not warn Dubois and other students of the dangers of the electrical demonstration cords in their electrical trades class"?  Uh ... HELLO???  Have you spent your entire life UNDER A ROCK?!?  I don't think any of my school teachers ever specifically warned me of the dangers of leaping off tall buildings, yet I somehow managed to make it through my teens without becoming a greasy red smear on a sidewalk somewhere.  (Neither did I try to test my superpowers against speeding locomotives.)

As a friend elsewhere observed, "I don't think he's going to be able to convince a jury that he only got brain damage after electrocuting himself."  Hell, my ten-year-old knows — from watching me — that any time you have no choice but to to work on live electrical components, especially anything with high voltage on it, you keep one hand behind your back whenever possible to minimize the risk of an electric shock across the chest.

It's not the teacher who totally blew his responsibilities on this one.  It's the parents, for raising a teenager lacking in even the most basic concepts of self-preservation in the presence of modern technology (where "modern" refers to "any time in the last hundred years or so").

(And yes, I totally, shamelessly front-loaded the music on this one.  Sometimes social commentary is required.  I frequently worry, in light of incidents like this, that we are raising a generation too stupid to survive in our own civilization.  The only question in my mind was the choice between this and Pink Floyd's Brain Damage.)

Brilliant (literally) hack

Via Bruce Schneier:  A team of cryptologists at the University of Trondheim, Norway, have developed a successful attack that works against both currently-deployed existing quantum cryptographic systems, IDQ and MagiQ.

The attack, which allows an eavesdropper (traditionally "Eve") to completely recover all quantum-encrypted data sent over the link, completely invisibly to the recipient (traditionally "Bob"), is brilliantly simple:  Eve simply blinds Bob's quantum detector with a 1mW laser, preventing it from operating as a quantum device capable of detecting single-photon polarization, then intercepts all the entangled photons and reads them herself.  Eve then resends every 1 bit to Bob as a bright laser pulse, which Bob's detector, blinded for quantum events, responds to in classical mode and reads as a 1.  Bob's detector — and Bob — cannot tell the difference.

"We have exploited a purely technological loophole that turns a quantum cryptographic system into a classical system, without anyone noticing," says Makarov.

Quantum encryption has been widely considered, and widely touted as, unbreakable because the laws of physics guarantee that you cannot measure any property of a quantum system without detectibly disrupting the system.  Thus it has been taken as gospel that you cannot eavesdrop on a quantum communication channel without leaving clear evidence that you have done so.  This inspired piece of lateral thinking is a Kobayashi Maru strategy — faced with an unwinnable game, Makarov's team have simply changed the rules of the game to one that they can win.

[Grease-]Monkeying around

One of the things that's always been a minor peeve to me on LiveJournal (and then, later, on Dreamwidth) is the Forrest Gump box-of-chocolates nature of the Quote button.  (You never know quite what markup you're going to get.)  For LiveJournal, I long ago found a Greasemonkey script called LiveJournal Blockquote, which made the Quote button consistently generate a <blockquote> tag.  But it doesn't work on Dreamwidth (and appears to have vanished from userscripts.org anyway).

That's why I wrote an improved version today, called LJ Quote Fix.  It works on both LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, should work on any site based on the LiveJournal codebase, and has provisions for customizing and styling your quote markup using CSS (though at this time there isn't a UI for it, other than Greasemonkey's 'Edit' button.)

By default, it formats quotes like this.  (Well, mostly like this, anyway.  If you're reading this in my style, the light-blue background comes from my journal's custom CSS.)