rkbabang

The Truecrypt solution offers a higher degree of security, from plausible deniability (as you describe) to the choice of the encryption algorithms themselves. Truecrypt allows you to select the protocols and the number of rounds etc., whereas I recall KeePass has much more limited options. Ultimately you just have to decide for yourself what level of security makes you comfortable. From your other comments today (on the shooting) I take it that you're far more untrusting of government than I am. I'm happy to keep my passwords protected with the level of protection KeePass affords. I'm not keeping any secrets that are worth protecting once someone has pulled out the gun. Mostly I'd just be embarrassed for them to see my stock picking record from last year! :) The biggest problem I see is that people are generally unaware of any security considerations and do silly things like choosing bad passwords, or reusing passwords etc. I don't really think the government will bother pulling out the guns on me either. If they want my bank account or my brokerage account they will simply ask my bank or broker for it. Corporations do what they are told. And I'm not bury-gold-in-the-back-yard-paraniod. If society ever degenerates to the point where we start wishing we had hoarded gold, food, and ammo, life is going to suck for everyone. I'd like to live on the assumption that that isn't going to happen. That said, I'd never feel very comfortable living in a city. I'm in a fairly rural area with enough land to feed my family off of it if I had to. I also have chickens and goats (and guns & ammo). So maybe I'm hedging my bets just a little, and you can't beat fresh eggs. Anyway, for passwords I'm more concerned about identity theft and hackers. With them I think making yourself a harder than average target is probably good enough. Unless you are someone that is going to be specifically targeted for some reason, just pulling yourself up so that you are not among the low hanging fruit is going to be sufficient protection. I setup keepass this weekend and got it running on my computer then my iPad using google docs. It maybe a small step down in security, but it is definitely a step up in convenience. There are always tradeoffs. Thanks for the info.

What statistics are you aware of? Violent crime was reduced in every state that liberalized its gun licensing laws in the United States over the last 25 years. The safest state VT, you don't even need a license to carry a concealed handgun. There are studies which claim that handguns are used defensively by civilians many multiples of the times they are used criminally. The statistics do show that suicide by gun goes up with availability of handguns, but not total suicide, so people are using the best and quickest method which they have available to them. Yes, it would be hard to commit a mass murder without a gun, but it would also be hard to commit a mass murder in a heavily armed society. Where guns are outlawed however it is pretty easy. You may remember a group of guys some years back killing 3000 people with a few boxcutters, by taking control of aircraft where everyone was banned by law from bringing their weapons. That is why about a month later I started selling bumper stickers which said "Where guns are outlawed, terrorists need only boxcutters". I don't run the website anymore but you can see it on the wayback machine: RKBAbang.com. And now you know where my username came from. RKBAbang stands for "RKBA!", which is the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and bang(!).

So has communications/publishing. Does the 1st amendment not cover what you write over the internet? The founders never imagined that you could write something and have it viewable by anyone on earth 5 seconds later. The revolution was won because of the fact that the colonists had access to the same weaponry as the British. This is sadly not the case anymore. The only way a government will fear its people is if the people have access to the same weapons as it does. The armed aerial drone or the attack helicopter is the modern equivalent of the mounted knight in full armor riding through the medieval village. Had the crossbow, then the firearm, never been invented we'd be living in the middle ages still today. If we don't want to go into another period of violence and stagnation what we desperately need is something to once again even up the power discrepancy between the rulers and the ruled.

I'm not an NRA member I quit about 15 years ago in disgust at their constant willingness to compromise with the gun control crowd, but I do notice that the most vile and hate filled speech is always from the direction of the victim dissarmament crowd directed at the NRA. Never in the opposite direction. Have a nice day.

Every square foot of livable space on this planet is claimed by one or more of these gangs of thugs. That's like telling a shop owner that "Vinny controls this neighborhood" and if he doesn't like paying his protection money, he should move. Only in the case of the shop owner he probably could find a different city without a strong mafia presence. No one should have a claim on your production simply because of where you are physically located. And no one anywhere has a right to tell me what I can buy, sell, produce, or use to protect myself based on where I happen to be. Of course there are more of you than there are of me (might really does make right, which is the entire basis of democracy) so until the freedom meme spreads the situation is what it is. I should also add that moving to New Hampshire a year ago was a deliberate effort to at least live in a place that was slightly more free than where I was before (Massachusetts).

In short. Yes. As we are yours. Hundreds of millions of people were killed by governments in the 20th century alone. Private crime can never equal such slaughter. You support creating a violent organization which kills millions to protect you from violence. One that steals half of everything you will ever create, to protect you from theft. Tells you what you can and can't do with your own body, what you can and can't own, how and when you can protect yourself, what you can and can't produce, what you can and can't consume, what you can and can't buy, what you can and can't sell. In theory I have no problem with you doing any of this. You should be able to do what you want. My problem is that I am not allowed to opt out of the insanity.

This is very interesting. The city I live in had a string of "swarmings" a number of years back --- vicious attacks where a gang of young guys would just beat the hell out of someone for no particular reason... or maybe to steal an iPod. It went on for about two years. At the height of it I asked a friend who's a cop about the situation, and he said there's really not much they can do, and it will just stop by itself. He reiterated this point that there are fads in bad behaviour as with anything else. Sure enough, the beatings just stopped after a while. Haven't heard of one in years. In this case it's difficult to tell how media coverage affected things. I can't remember if the swarming stories started moving off the front page, and then they stopped, or whether the chronology was reversed. It seems the dynamics of these things are very complex. Meme theory. Ideas spread from one person to the next and evolve as they do. Some ideas replicate well (religions or political ideologies) and some not as well (like shooting up schools), but even these ideas can still spread among a crowd of people unusually susceptible to them. With the internet and mass media it is like infecting everyone with every meme and seeing what sticks. This is usually a good thing as many bad ideas don't survive the exposure to better ones, but the downside is that there will always be certain deranged individuals exposed to new ideas that they wouldn't otherwise been exposed to. Like with everything else in life, with increased communications technology, you need to take the bad with the good.

I agree with everything you just said, but let me point out that it is already impossible for a 20 year old to legally have a handgun in CT. You need to be 21 to buy, own, or even apply for a permit to carry a handgun in CT. And it is impossible for anyone to legally bring a gun into a school in CT. These things are already illegal (he broke a ton of laws before he ever pulled the trigger for the first time), I don't know how you make them impossible (see my comments on drugs). A strip search or medal detectors to enter a school building? Turn our schools over to the TSA and make them like our airports? Just looking at the news, apparently the shooter was 24, not 20. So it is possible for him to have had a carry permit, but still not possible for him to legally carry in a school. At 24 I was married, owned my own home, and had my license to carry a concealed weapon. At the time I owned both a shotgun and a subcompact Glock 9mm (model 26) which I could legally put in my pocket or under my coat and carry anywhere in the state of Massachusetts (although not in schools). But somehow I never got the urge to shoot up a classroom full of children.

How long would he last? Would you try to shoot up an NRA convention or would you go to the one place that you know even people with concealed carry permits are not allowed to bring their weapons guaranteeing you a building full of unarmed victims? If guns caused murder, these things would constantly happen at NRA conventions, but never in schools.

I think it's what's wrong with human psychology. If you're already disturbed, seeing the shooting in Oregon gives social proof for going out and doing something similar. Just like airplane crashes increase after a first well-publicized one. I was just watching on TV last night they arrested a few people for a credible plot to kill Justin Beiber (my daughter was horrified). The guy admitted that he didn't want to be "a nobody". There will always be the crazies, looking for notoriety any way they can get it. The media is to blame for this as much as anything else. In short order we will know everything about this elementary school shooter. If he was looking for notoriety he got it. It may be infamy rather than fame, but that is probably what he was after anyway.

I agree with everything you just said, but let me point out that it is already impossible for a 20 year old to legally have a handgun in CT. You need to be 21 to buy, own, or even apply for a permit to carry a handgun in CT. And it is impossible for anyone to legally bring a gun into a school in CT. These things are already illegal (he broke a ton of laws before he ever pulled the trigger for the first time), I don't know how you make them impossible (see my comments on drugs). A strip search or medal detectors to enter a school building? Turn our schools over to the TSA and make them like our airports?

The problem is the gun control crowd can't wait to make this political. They have the legislation written and laying in wait for events like this. This is like Christmas come early to the gun-control lobbyist. Or like 9/11 to the military industrial complex. People who want to take away freedom always need tragedy, they wait for it, they feed off of it.

I agree on the shotgun for home defense. But this latest shooting took place in someone's home? Why should you lose the right to defend yourself the moment you walk out of your door? Maybe some of the dead adults in CT today have guns at home that they are not allowed by law to take to work inside the school building. You are most at risk outside of your home, around other people.

Yeah, but I'd prefer you have to go to the black market to get your cocaine. In the same way, I'd prefer that a guy who failed to take his psych meds couldn't walk into the local Walmart/Dick's/Bass Pro and pick up an AR15 and would have to go through some more difficult channels. Sorry I don't agree. I'd prefer a world where I could buy my cocaine at the grocery story by the pound and my fully automatic machine guns without a license. I'd prefer a world without all of the violence, poverty, and corruption that black markets create.

I just read the story. My god that is horrific! CT already has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country though, and of course guns in schools are already completely banned nation wide (which is one reason these things seem to always happen in schools). This loon already broke the law bringing the gun(s?) into the school. How did restricting the principle/teachers/ and other adults from arming themselves help the situation? The worst of these mass-shootings always happen in gun-free zones (schools/post offices/cities that ban guns/movie theaters that ban guns/etc). How would banning guns stop something like this? Cocaine is completely banned, but does anyone want to tell me that if I wanted some I couldn't get some in sort order? And cocaine doesn't grow in my climate, yet any semi-competent machinist could turn out guns by the thousands in his basement. It is 300 year old technology, I don't think you can ban them. And I wouldn't want to if you could.

Okay, sounds good. What about the plausible deniability, that the truecrypt hidden volume provides. Say someone does steal your file and tries to decrypt it, or puts a gun to your head and tells you to decrypt it? If you have the non-hidden volume encrypted with a much easier to break password and contains nothing but a folder of porn pictures or something you can give them that password and say "OK, you got me" and look all embarrassed and no one will know the hidden volume exists with all your account info in it. Or if they are tying to crack your password without your knowledge they will get the non-hidden volume first and not know the hidden one exists. No I haven't gone this far yet.

Interesting. I'll have to look into that. Can you store other info besides passwords? I store a bunch of info right now in my text files besides username/passwords, such as: Account Name, Account Number, customer service tel#, URL of login page, account unlock questions/answers, etc... I don't have just one big file to search through, because truecrypt creates an entire disk partition that is mounted to look like a disk to your OS, I have a directory with one file for each type of accounts. Bank Accounts, Credit Cards, Online Forums, Brokerage Accounts, Online Shopping, ... I find the right file then it is easy to find the right account. It really is a fairly quick process. I'd say equal to keeping it in a scrap of paper in your wallet. If I'm on Windows 7 I can usually find what I'm looking for with just the text file preview in explorer without even opening the file. On linux it is just a few key strokes: > xe ba<TAB><ENTER> TAB key is autocomplete and only my bank_accounts.txt file begins with 'ba' and 'xe' is my alias for XEmacs. But if KeePass works on iOS that might be reason enough to switch. --Eric

I personally have a different strong password for each and every account online. Each passwork is 15+ characters long containing upper/lower case letters, numbers, symbols and spaces. Some of them on accounts that I use often enough I remember, but I keep all usernames and passwords in a file that I have encrypted into a TrueCrypt partition. I store that partition as a file in google docs. So if I'm at home or at work or anywhere else (you can carry truecrypt around with you on a usb stick or install it on a machine) I can download the file, decrypt it, open the partition and read the file containing my passwords. The downside is that there is no way to decrypt it and view it from an iOS or Android device. Maybe it isn't the best solution, but it is secure. EDIT: I should also mention that with this method I need to remember both my Google docs password and my TrueCrypt volume's password. Otherwise I would not be able to download and decrypt the file.

I think he was talking about Apple, but I think all three companies will likely be around in 10 years. 1) Amazon is a retailer which specializes in running a low margin business. As long as Bezos is around and willing to run it like this it will remain a powerhouse of retail. There will always be stuff to sell, whatever that stuff happens to be 10 years from now Amazon, will be selling it; will most likely have a larger share of the retail market than it enjoys today; and probably not making much profit doing so. At some point investors may grow tired of the low margins and the stock price may suffer, but that shouldn't have that much of an impact on its operation. Although it may mean increasing salaries to retain talent and increasing prices slightly or reducing R&D, but it shouldn't kill the business entirely. 2) Google does a ton of stuff and always innovating hoping something will catch on, which is why I'm sure Taleb isn't thinking it will go anywhere in 10 years, nor do I. 3) Apple's dominance rests on it always coming up with the next best thing. It did it with the iPod, then the iPhone, now the iPad. With greater and greater success each time: http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/styles/view_body_embed/public/images/MeekerIPad.jpg Can it continue this indefinitely? Probably not, but for the next 10 years? I think it probably can. They have a huge opportunity to do to the TV what the iPhone did to the telephone (fundamentally change what it is, how we interface with it, and what we use it for). If they can pull it off then Apple will be a multi-$Trillion company in 10 years. If not, Apple might not end up as big as it could have been, but I think you can make a good profitable business selling handheld gadgets for at least the next 10 years if you're Apple. In short I think, unless Bezos gets hit by a bus and his successor destroys the company, Taleb is wrong.

I'm not saying I would put 90% into one idea, although I currently have more than 60% in my best idea. In the past I've had as much as 15-20 positions. But I'm no investing genius. If there is a stock Mohnish Pabrai is willing to go almost all into, I'd at least like to look at it for consideration. This isn't either/or. You could hold this as a 5-10% position and if it returned 40X that would be a great thing, you could also hold a basket of Japanese net-nets alongside it, but you are unlikely to get a 10X return on them. I see no harm in trying to figure out what it is. However if I found out it was BYD, I'd be unlikely to invest at all, because I've tried to understand it in the past and have not felt confident enough to invest. I don't like technology stocks, why couldn't another company come up with some better battery technology and make everything BYD does irrelevant? What is its moat?

You got that right oddballstocks! This is a perfect example of confirmation bias and social proof bias at work. We all want the mystery stock heavily owned by the Guru who wishes to up his concentration to be the same one we own! We're just so darned predictable ;D I'm pretty sure whatever it is, it isn't one I own. So I want to know what it is so that I can look into whether or not I want to own it. Also I'm an actions speak louder than words type who finds it interesting that despite said guru's talk about Japanese stocks being so undervalued, he has a 60-90% position in some non-Japanese stock. Clearly undervalued Japanese stocks aren't among his best ideas either.

Don't forget 40X was the high end of his possible range, with 10X the low end. That is a pretty large range. It could be that his opinion is that the most likely outcome is closer to 10X than to 40X. Also 10 years ago XOM had a market cap of $235B, it could be that in 10 years it has a $800B-$1T. Which would make a $400B company significantly smaller than XOM. I suspect in a future where CHK is a $440B company XOM would be over $1T. I've owned CHK in the past, bought in the $30s sold in the $60s if I recall correctly. I haven't looked at it in a long time though.

I agree with the above. On BAC and FFH, not hookers and blow. If you must make such an investment make it a <<1% position as the world isn't going to end in two weeks and I don't think of a VD as a desirable dividend.

Ohhh, so it was all just to give you the opportunity to get in? Well good, now that you have made your purchase it is free to increase again. I think he was saying that his purchase caused the price fell, i.e. everything he touches turns to....coal? I think every investor has felt this way at some point! Just a little self-deprecating humor :) If that is the case I misunderstood him. I though he bought after it went down not before. So he's saying that he is the anti-midas, not that he can move markets with his will (which would certainly be a useful skill to have).

Ohhh, so it was all just to give you the opportunity to get in? Well good, now that you have made your purchase it is free to increase again.