UFS supports the geom journal (gjournal) journaling system, which reduces fsck times to something reasonable. It's not 100% absent, as with ZFS, but it works very well. Still not as fast a filesystem as straight UFS2, but faster than ZFS. I hear there's a journaling system being bolted onto soft updates, so that should prove to be an interesting development. Not sure what it offers over gjournal.

Boucher was unique in that he was compelled to reveal *again* what he already revealed to the border guards: the data on the encrypted drive. Since he already gave up the evidence once voluntarily, compelling him to give the means to show them the same evidence didn't qualify for 5th Amendment protection. I personally think this makes sense. Had he never consented to the border search, the case (if any) would have hinged on the very issue we're all interested in.

The Cybercrime link above elaborates a bit on U.S. v. Kirschner, which supports the assertion that divulging unknown passwords constitutes testimony which can qualify to be protected under the 5th.

The specific issue of passwords may be unclear, but I think that the generic question of testimony of unknown facts leading to unknown incriminating evidence is pretty straight forward. It would be nice to see the SCOTUS address this issue once and for all, but I'm thinking it will take a while before this happens.

Not sure why you mentioned typing the password vs reciting it, but the same blog had an interesting article about how typing a cellphone password was ruled to have the same protections under Miranda as verbal testimony. I love that blog; it makes for some very interesting reading.

Fortunately, you are wrong. See this Cybercrime blog entry (written by a law professor) for the gory legal details. The meat and potatoes of the post:

The Supreme Court has held, basically, that you're giving testimony - testifying - when you're communicating, i.e., when you're revealing your knowledge of certain facts or sharing your thoughts or opinions with the government. U.S. v. Kirschner, supra. You can't claim the 5th Amendment privilege to refuse to surrender physical evidence such as your blood, hair or saliva; it only applies to communications, i.e., to something that look like what a witness does when she takes the stand at trial.

I don't know about that.

I've recently begun following the Cybercrime blog, and this article talks about legal expectations of privacy, and (as I see it) the bar seems set pretty high. As usual with her blog entries, lots of supporting case law sprinkled throughout, so don't expect to coast through or skim these posts (unless you happen to be a lawyer). Sadly, the trend I've seen over my time of reading her stuff is that the courts seem to provide law enforcement with most of the wiggle room based on legal minutia, while denying that same wiggle room to the defendants. To my layman's eye, the system seems skewed in favor of the state.

In any case, if you have the time I heartily recommend adding this site to one's daily reading regimen. I think admins and users alike could stand to have a half-decent understanding of how the laws are currently being applied to our trade/hobby.

FreeBSD/amd64 8.1-PRERELEASE with firefox-3.6.3,1. Uptime 2.75 days, with the browsing being open almost as long without shutdown. At this moment, I have 11 tabs split across 2 windows (one fullscreened on 2 different virtual desktops). Virtual: 1252M. Resident: 1100M. It starts fresh at between 200 and 400MB, then continues to climb. By the end of the week, it'll be pushing 2GB resident. Glad I have 8GB to throw around.

Plugins: WikiLook, Web Developer, User Agent Switcher, Screengrab, Noscript, Linkchecker, HTTPS Everywhere, Ghostery, Font Finder, Firebug, Download Helper, Adblock Plus, and Customize Google.

The data from the near-universal grounding of US airspace the days following the 9/11/01 attacks shows pretty conclusively that air traffic has a non-trivial affect on weather patterns. Or at least that's what's I recall from the time.

For one thing, it helps Mormons to baptize the dead that haven't been saved yet. Whether this wretched practice is "practical" I leave as an exercise to the reader.

As for the Census, I only answered the 1st question (number of household members) and sent it in. A head count is all that's required for population-based allocation of representatives. Anything more is fodder for gerrymandering, and I won't be a party to such.

> A spreadsheet app is also substantially larger than a PDF reader.

This *is* Adobe we're talking about here. For grins, I just installed Adobe Reader 9.2 and Gnumeric 1.9.16 on a XP VM, and for the informal survey of the "Program Files" directory, Adobe (203MB) weighs in at almost twice that of Gnumeric (106MB).

I vote for using the best app for the job. In the case of this thread, I wholeheartedly think the spreadsheet is that tool.

That's because there's an assload of taxes lost/avoided in Utah due to tithing (10% off the bat), LDS churches and stake houses *everywhere* occupying prime otherwise-taxable real estate, and the fact that the chain of Deseret Industries thrift stores counts as a double whammy (no sales tax on the goods *and* a way for people to deduct "donations" by offloading their garbage). Never mind the above average family size, which means more kids and thus more child credits and deductions.

More power to the state of Utah for trying to get its fair share in taxes.

Personally, I opt for the "estimated" use tax option when filing. Since it's based on a percentage of income, I likely come out ahead since my income is low but I buy a huge amount online (even food). Besides, I don't keep records of much of anything, so it's not like I could come up with the actual numbers anyway.

A telecommuter I hope?

The term "incommunicado" came into being for *some* reason. Hmmmm.... I wonder what it could have been. "Impossible" my ass. My family hasn't had a cell phone for 3 years, and it's great. If we're not home, we're, you know, not reachable. It's great! We even have kids, and when the wife and I go out for lunch or a dinner and we leave the kids home, we can't even be reached by them. ZOMG! I know, I know... having the neighbor's and restaurant's phone number on a refrigerator post-it note is *so* archaic.

They'll get you, one way of the other.

I'm too lazy to find links, but there was a case a while back of some minor who was accused of accessing child porn from one of Yahoo's services. By all accounts I've read, the defense correctly used the high probability of malware infection to introduce doubt that he actually downloaded the CP himself. Facing a harsh, drawn-out legal battle (as most defendants in these cases do), the family took a plea. The boy plead to a count of (something like) corruption of a minor. His "crime"? He apparently gave (or displayed -- can't recall) some adult magazine to one of his fellow under-aged buddies.

That's right, folks, some kid ended up with a criminal record and a listing on his local sex offender list for looking at nude pin-ups with a friend, something countless curious teen boys have done since nude centerfolds have been around.

Won't somebody think of the children?!?

Ugh... my credit union takes not only my login/password, but displays a picture and phrase that I picked out of a list, *and* asks me a question. Kinda inconvenient, but I'm pretty sure I won't be logging into a bogus server in the near future.

I'm running Flash on FreeBSD/amd64, by way of the Linux emulation layer. It's documented in the handbook, and it's pretty easy to get going. As much as I despise Flash's abused ubiquity, I've found it worthwhile to have it installed for guilty pleasures like Pandora, Hulu, and RagDoll Cannon. In fact, it runs more smoothly on my machine than natively on the OpenSUSE box in the living room.

"For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life -- I wrote this some years ago -- that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest."

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)