Day: July 18, 2008

The Essential Batman Encyclopedia

A couple times on this blog I’ve mentioned my childhood fascination with the Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, three volumes that were extensively detailed guides to Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Published in the 1970s, the volumes are very dated now and even then the level of detail meant that typically only a handful of series were treated for each character. For example, none of the Justice League, etc., comic books were considered in the creation of either of the books despite the prominent role all three of DCs heavyweights play in those books.

Anyway, the good news is that DC is in the process of doing a new series of encylopedia-like volumes about its big guns, and the first entry, The Essential Batman Encyclopedia, is already out.

This book is huge at 8.5″ x 11″ and 388 pages, including a liberal number of color reproductions and artwork. This book doesn’t attempt to be as detailed as the original Batman Encyclopedia which is a good thing. First, it allows author Robert Greenberger to expand the entires to cover pretty much all the relevant Batman-related books. Second, it doesn’t waste space with relatively trivial matters (the original Encyclopedia, for example, included pretty much every villain who ever appeared, including many who made single appearances in early Batman books and really had little to no influence on the series/character as whole).

Greenberger also does a good job — well as good as can be expected — in handling DC’s confusing multi-dimensional continuity. For example, the entry on “Robin” starts off by noting how Robin came to be on Earth 2, then on Earth 1, etc., and then how these different continuities sometimes bump into each other and crossover. It would be better if DC had a sensible continuity, but barring that this approach is the next best thing.

Honestly with this book listed at $19.95 on Amazon.Com, I can’t thing of a single bad thing to say about this. It’s everything I’d hoped an updated version of the original Batman encyclopedia would be. Now bring on the Superman and Wonder Woman entries, and hopefully whereas the original books got cut off there, hopefully we’ll see this series progress so there will be a Green Lantern, etc. encyclopedia.

Please.

Xeni Jardin Hasn’t Learned A Damn Thing . . . But I Have

Xeni Jardin has a post today about her “unpublishing” of Violet Blue-related posts that caused so much controversy. Go read it now before she decides to take it down.

The post is fairly long but doesn’t really say anything beyond reaffirming that their her posts and she’ll take them down if she wants to. In the comments to the post, Cory Doctorow, Mark Frauenfelder and David Pescovitz weigh in to indicate their agreement with Jardin’s position.

To understand my position on this, which I elaborate on very pointedly in the comments to that post, go read this Boing! Boing! post from 2005 which is Boing! Boing!’s coverage of the London subway bombings including photographs and updates on the status of individual posters like Cory Doctorow who was living in London at the time.

That post was removed from Boing! Boing! because in one of the many updates to it, Violet Blue is credited with pointing to a blog with additional information on the bombing. Violet Blue is extraordinarily tangential to the post, but because the string “Violet Blue” appeared in the post, Jardin deep-sixed it.

Now it is very clear from reading the comments in this post and in the previous Boing! Boing! post about the Violet Blue controversy, that I am in the minority who find it absurd that Boing! Boing! would retcon dozens of posts simply because of incidental mentions of Violet Blue over what turns out to be nothing more than a personal falling out between her and Jardin.

I’ll just sum up my thinking about Boing! Boing! by reproducing a reply I posted there to another user who defended routine removal of materials from the Internet,

Talia wrote:

“Well, if this is orwellian, I guess I’ve participated in Orwellian actions as well, as a person who has deleted things I’ve posted on the internet. And every other single person who has ever deleted anything they put on the internet, ever, has also participated in Orwellian actions.”

BTW, I have to say I find that odd. I don’t generally delete things on the Internet (I can only think of a single occasion where I deleted a single post I made at my blog because I realized it was seriously erroneous and would cause more harm by misinforming than by adding a correction). Believe me, I’ve said a lot of things on the Internet I wish I hadn’t, but coming from a journalism background, I’ve always thought it was important to stand behind your words and own your errors.

I’ve certainly endorsed the views of people, for example, who I later disassociated with. But I can’t ever remember thinking “gee, I should go back and delete all that stuff like it never happened.” And I really don’t remember ever thinking “I should take down this really long post because somewhere in there it mentions this person who I know longer like.”

And I find it bizarre that people do think that way, but that’s probably just my particular hangup.

OTOH, this whole episode was useful in that it showed us a side of BB I think many of us didn’t realize was there. If you had asked me before this if BB would go back and removed posts like that London bombing picture thread, I’d have said no way. Retconning is something only comic book writers and sleazy businesses do.

Now I know better.

By the way, I should add that Jardin and others have argued that it is routine for bloggers to remove and retroactively edited things. Personally, I would only do that under the most extreme circumstances as I mention in my comment on Boing! Boing! But now that I think of it, there is a very well known blogger who is known for frequently deleting and rewriting the things he posts — Dave Winer. At the moment, I think Winer would fit right in with Boing! Boing!’s vision of itself.

TrueCrypt Deniable File System Broken

The other day, Bruce Schneier had some post about securing data for border crossings and in the comments someone asked why not just use TrueCrypt’s deniable file system, which in TrueCrypt’s implementation hides an encrypted file system within a TrueCrypt encrypted volume. Schneier responded that he didn’t trust TrueCrypt’s deniable file system, and today he reveals why — he and several other researchers are publishing a paper announcing they were able to break that particular feature of TrueCrypt.

ABSTRACT: We examine the security requirements for creating a Deniable File System (DFS), and the efficacy with which the TrueCrypt disk-encryption software meets those requirements. We find that the Windows Vista operating system itself, Microsoft Word, and Google Desktop all compromise the deniability of a TrueCrypt DFS. While staged in the context of TrueCrypt, our research highlights several fundamental challenges to the creation and use of any DFS: even when the file system may be deniable in the pure, mathematical sense, we find that the environment surrounding that file system can undermine its deniability, as well as its contents. Finally, we suggest approaches for overcoming these challenges on modern operating systems like Windows.

TrueCrypt has apparently addressed many of the specific issues raised by the paper in their 6.0 release, but Schneier’s claim is that there are inherent problems to creating a deniable file system so even though the techniques outlined in the paper will not work against TrueCrypt 6.0, even the deniable file system there should be treated as untrusted. Better to go with whole disk encryption, which loses the deniability but is more secure.

The entire paper is avaialble as a PDF download.