Primate Brow Flash

Footnotes in Gaza is probably the most powerful graphic novel I’ve ever read. In it, the author uses his journalistic skills to tell the story of an event in 1956. In the meantime, he illustrates important things about journalism and memory. This book will inevitably be compared to Maus. It has the same kind of outsider comix feel to it as Maus and uses some of the same conventions. (talking to a cranky old man in the present about events that happened 50 years ago). I’ve read Maus about 17 times and it gets to be like a missing limb I’ve been living with my entire life. Reading Footnotes is like getting a brand new spear hole in the chest. It has a lot of older people remembering seeing their loved ones get shot for no reason. It is a story told side by side with current atrocities that we can’t seem to do anything about. That is, Gaza, with all its problems is where the author has to search for witnesses to Israeli atrocities from 1956. People react like he is crazy. “Israelis are randomly killing people and tearing down homes and here he is asking about 50 years ago?” The current reality seems even more hopeless than the atrocities in ‘56. Here they are in the present putting their collective hopes on Saddam Hussein. I had to read it twice to understand the sequence of events and how they fit into the bigger picture. Basically, the people in the story were pawns for the big powers, England, France and Egypt. Israelis were reacting against Egyptian operations against Israel launched from the Gaza strip. By the time they decided to punish Gaza, the soldiers had long gone and the only ones to punish were the young men of Gaza. They lined the young men of one town up against the wall and shot them. This is collective punishment like Lidice, Oradour-sur-Glane, and Kortelisy. The story was then buried. Nobody is interested in unearthing these memories. Even the Palestinians would rather talk about their current troubles.

Is the medium of the graphic novel too prone to emotional manipulation? Perhaps. The book certainly sent my emotions spiraling. Proper history books don’t let you see the eyes of children after seeing their fathers beaten, humiliated and murdered. Maybe they should. The author’s journalistic integrity had him pointing out all the inconsistencies in the memories of participants and providing extensive documentation from both Israeli authorities and UN observers.

If you are concerned about internet privacy and security, try the NoScript Firefox extension.
NoScript’s main business is shutting down any javascript that you haven’t specifically allowed. It also provides many other features such as shutting down flash, java and unsafe web requests. One thing that scares off new NoScript users is the constant harping yellow alert bar. You can turn this off. The other thing that scares off new users: It makes the web less convenient. videos don’t play, buttons don’t work, pages reload and lose data when you enable scripting on them. These things are largely a matter of practice.
I’ve been using NoScript for about 2 years and have recently learned a bunch more about it. So here is stuff I learned from the hackademix weblog, the NoScript faq, and playing with NoScript options.

1. NoScript by default reloads all tabs affected by a new entry to the whitelist. This can cause people to lose work if, for example, they have partially filled out a form and then opened a new tab to look something up. to stop this, open a new tab, type in about:config in the url. Look up the noscript.autoreload.allTabs setting (or event the noscript.autoreload setting) and set it to false.
2. Hidden in the appearance tab is an option to display full domains. This is helpful because many ad sites have specific urls for specific websites. For example, if you want doubleclick to work on google-ads, “display full domains” allows you to whitelist googleads.g.doubleclick.net instead of allowing the entire doubleclick.net domain.
3. The “opaque” setting (options –> embeddings –> opaque embedded objects) makes embedded objects on pages opaque so that you can’t click on some invisible button by accident
4. Force secure cookies. A poorly configured site might have https but forget to mark cookies as secure. NoScript allows you to force encryption of cookies for https sites. This is off by default because it is relatively new and because some sites break if they can’t have insecure https cookies.
5. A good idea is to export your NoScript whitelist that you have built up over time so that moving to a new computer does not force you to build it again. An even better idea is to use no-script’s bookmark feature to publish your whitelist to a bookmarking system. Each instance of NoScript you use keeps track of the changes to this bookmark and updates its own whitelist accordingly.
6. Google chrome’s evolving extension framework does not yet allow for enough control to let NoScript work
7. NoScript blocks lots of stuff that are not script related. As an example, it blocks html ping elements by default.
8. Finally, some neat NoScript-specific inventions that help make you more secure:
   • ABE: Application Boundary Enforcer (ABE). Among other things, ABE prevents sites from POSTing to cross-domain resources. It strips the contents out of cross domain POST requests and turns them into GET requests.
   • ABE: If you have a specific site that needs access to LAN resources, you can publish your own ABE ruleset as a file in the root of your domain.
   • NoScript also has an invention called clear-click, which protects against click-jacking by comparing the thing you clicked with a screenshot of the page you are on. If the pictures are different, it won’t allow the click to work.

Update: Noscript also improves battery life!
Save Laptop battery with noscript