Getting back from Brazil involved a one-hour flight from Rio to Sao Paulo, an hour+ bus ride (in Sao Paulo traffic) from the Congonhas domestic airport to the Guarulhos international airport, four hours waiting, a six-hour overnight flight to Mexico city, and finally five more hours to Chicago.

The transition from “near-absolute freedom in Rio de Janeiro” to “my parents’ house outside Chicago” was rather jarring. Luckily for me, the airport in Mexico City is basically like a American colony created to ease the transition. There is a Starbucks, a Carl’s Junior, a 7-11, an Angus Steakhouse, and no actual Mexican businesses that I identified.

I had the following conversation with one of the very helpful information desk attendants. It began in Spanish, but he shifted to nearly-flawless English as soon as he figured out I was American.
<Spanish>
“Good morning, how can I help you?”
“I was wondering if there is a place I could get Mexican food.”
“There is a Chili’s on the upper level.”
“I’m sorry, my Spanish is very bad. I don’t mean food in Mexico, I mean food of the type that is typical from Mexico.”
</Spanish>
“You can get fajitas at Chili’s.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“See, I’ve just been in South America, and I really missed good Mexican food. There isn’t any real Mexican food at the airport?”
“Only Chili’s. Sorry.”

I took a pass on the airport Chili’s, but there are plenty of other things that are amazing about America: bendy straws, free refills, ice cubes in drinks, the Eisenhower Interstate System, In-N-Out, Chicago-style pizza, actual Mexican food, and 24-hour diners.

Being at home after traveling for so long felt kind of strange, so after about a week I beat it out west for Defcon in Las Vegas, which is where I am at the moment. The convention has been pretty cool, and I’ll try to write about that later. Sunday night, I’m hitting the road again, this time headed for the Seattle area for the returning Watson Fellows conference.

In the 2002 clip, a 72-year old Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, punches a guy named Bart Sibrel in the face. Sibrel is apparently a filmmaker who claims that the moon landing was a hoax. He invited Buzz Aldrin to do an interview for what Aldrin thought was a Japanese TV show, and then started harassing him.

The lesson: Buzz Aldrin is a total badass. He may be old, but he doesn’t put up with crap. Also, he has just rocketed to the top of my Favorite Astronauts List.

“There is an art, it says, or rather a knack to flying.

The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy.”

On Monday, I decided to take that advice to heart. I’d been looking for something big I could do to cap off my travels, and jumping out of an airplane seemed to qualify. What follows is a collection of photographs and observations from that experience.

The company I jumped with is called Skydive Rio. They actually weren’t that professional. It took them several days to get around to replying to my initial email; half the time they didn’t answer their phone. When I asked about how to get to the Jacarepaguá Airport where they’re based, they were like “oh, just take a cab,” but eventually agreed to pick me up from a shopping center at the edge of town. I took the bus out to the mall and spent about 30 minutes waiting for them. They finally did come get me in the crappy little red Fiat pictured above. It was stuffed to the gills with skydiving gear.

Unloading all the parachutes. Skydive Rio seems like it’s almost less a money-making business and more just a bunch of guys who like to jump out of planes and figured out how to get other people to pay them to do it.

Me, trying to look really confident about everything.

Anyway, last night, I flew to Rio de Janiero. There’s a weekly street party Friday nights underneath the Carioca Aquaduct, so I went out to that. It was a really cool, lively scene, with samba, live music, colorful clothes and dirt cheap food and drinks.

I wish I had photos, but I try not to take a camera out at night in Brazil. So far on this trip, I feel like I’ve done reasonably well at avoiding theft. I was short-changed by a cabbie in Buenos Aires, and I lost my previous camera on the overnight bus, but I haven’t been mugged or lost anything really important.

In Brazil, I’m orders of magnitude more paranoid about theft than I have been in any other country. I’m used to being told, “oh, tourists shouldn’t go to that part of town,” but here in Brazil, even the locals seem really cautious. In Sao Paulo, when driving at night, everyone rolls through red lights because if you’re sitting stopped at a light, somebody might run up and rob you or take your car (I hadn’t realized the tactic I use in Grand Theft Auto was effective in real life as well).

When I go out at night here, I take only my old Pomona student ID (I actually have a Watson Fellowship ID too, but it’s closer to passport-sized and therefore really inconvenient to carry) and as much cash as I think I’ll need; I leave my bankcard, driver’s license, and camera. Last night at the street party, I was dancing when I felt a hand slip into my left front pocket. Since it wasn’t that kind of dancing, I was pretty surprised. I looked, and there was a guy next to me blatantly grabbing for my wallet. I shoved him, and said something appropriately meaningless but internationally interpretable like, “Hey! What the fuck, man!”

I’m not exactly sure what reaction I was expecting. Quickly slinking away? Feigned confusion and denial (“Oh, see, I thought I was reaching into my pocket! My mistake.”)? Trying to pass it off as a gay pass? In any case, his actual reaction was probably funnier. He just kind of stared at me with this shocked, indignant look, like he couldn’t believe that I might actually be offended by his comically-obvious attempt to pickpocket me. We stared at each other for 5 or 10 seconds, and then he moved off, presumably to try again on somebody drunker.

In truth, this is only the second goofiest reaction I’ve gotten from somebody trying to rip me off on this trip. In Florence, I went out for drinks with my friend Rachel, and we paid the bartender with a €20 note; he brought back change for a €10. When we called him on it, he just laughed and gave us the correct change, while saying, “Ha! You caught me! (Do we win a prize?) I have to try, you know, I always have to try…”

I’m glad I held onto my wallet, but I also feel like maybe I should have done something more to raise the marginal cost of pickpocket attempts. There were plenty of cops around, but by the time I approached one and explained myself there’s no way they would have caught the guy. Maybe I should have hit him, but the chance of inciting a street brawl made that option less appealing.

I understand that petty theft is going to be an issue any time you have rich westerners and crippling poverty in close proximity. I am not an absolutist when it comes to property rights, and the gross disparity in relative need complicates the moral calculus. In Buenos Aires, one night I was walking home eating a takeout pizza when a bunch of street children begged away all my slices. I don’t care what you think of Lew Rockwell, you’d have to be a monster to look a hungry child in the face and go right back to eating your cheese and pepperoni.

That said, I am not such a bleeding heart that I’m just going to let you take my wallet.

This photo gives some sense of how large and built-up Sao Paulo is. There are skyscrapers and high-rises almost all the way out to the horizon, and then mountains way in the distance. Oh, and from the center, the view looks like this in all directions. Sadly, this photo was not taken from a helicopter, but rather from the observation deck of the Banespa Building, which was inspired by the Empire State Building and remained the tallest building in Sao Paulo for many years.

Avast! Thar be pirates!

However, yesterday, I noticed one street vendor selling the first non-pirated piece of software I’ve seen:

Yes, that is a shady, bootleg-looking copy of Kurumin Linux. I bought it, mostly for the novelty factor, and as a souvenir. But also on the theory that I was supporting free software in some minor way (although probably more directly supporting shady street vendors).

For reasons that I have trouble articulating, the idea of selling pirated software seems more objectionable to me than simply giving it away free over a file-sharing network. I think it’s a moral distinction: profiting from somebody else’s work seems dishonest. Legally, I’m not aware of any distinction between illegally “distributing” copyrighted works on a street corner or on bittorent.

I think current intellectual property law is badly broken and in need of major reform, but I’m not a big fan of software piracy, either. Not only does piracy potentially hurt developers, but it also distorts the market and probably hampers the adoption of free software.

What’s ironic is that I’m sure the vendor had no idea that the Brazilian Linux distro was the only thing on his table (ok, cardboard box) that he actually is allowed to sell legally. When I said I wanted to buy it, he flipped through a big CD wallet, but didn’t find a copy. He told me to wait for 5 minutes, stashed his cardboard display in an alley, and disappeared. A while later, he came back with the disc, and made sort of a quick, sketchy hand-off.

Ok, so this is kind of a stupid little phishing scam that one of my friends pointed out to me, but I found it pretty amusing. Basically, you can put anything you want in the URL after the “?k=”, and it will generate a page pretending to have a magical solution to your problem (one which just happens to involve downloading and running their obviously malware-ridden software). Some of the more amusing suggestions I’ve seen or come up with include:
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=My-Marriage
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=Human-Nature
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=Cancer
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=The-Tragedy-of-the-Commons
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=Time-travel-paradoxes
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=The-Nameless-Horror
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=The-yawning-void-within-my-soul
http://errornerds.com/errors/?k=Radioactive-Robot-Holocaust-of-2029

Phishing scams like this one are interesting because they remind me just how little effort goes into most malicious computer attacks. Social engineering can be a form of hacking in some cases, but this page doesn’t even come close to the level of actual hacking.

I guess I can give them a few points for good web design. They have a lot of (stolen) logos on the right-hand side (Look, they’re hacker-proof!). The photo of “Andrew the PC Nerd” is a nice touch, too. You’d trust that guy with your computer, right? Look, he’s a youngish, slightly overweight white guy with glasses! He must know how to fix computers. And if that’s not enough proof for you, he’s standing in front of a Windows logo! Sidenote: It should be a tipoff that a site is a scam when every single image on the page links to the same download URL.

Shamelessly hotlinked without permission

Their comments section also deserve props for being convincingly banal (“errr…I hate Microdude sometimes, why couldn’t they make vista as good as xp?”). Although the 4th comment down takes its “username” from the search query, which can lead to some incongruous results. It’s also smart of them to have the comments supposed posting times listed in terms of days from the present, rather than fixed dates. It saves them the trouble of having to update their scam site. If you actually try to leave a comment, it redirects to a generic “windows errors” page, with your new comment on the bottom. Well done, although I have to penalize for crappy grammar (“Error Your Getting?”).

All in all, I’ll give the errornerds a 2/5, with points for presentation and comedy, if not for actual technique or skill.

Yeah, that's pretty sweet.

Bookstores come in basically two varieties. You have your large, well-lit chain bookstores with broad shelves and fancy displays of the new soon-to-be bestsellers. They smell like fresh ink and are filled with employees who will look your request up on the computer because they’ve never heard of that author. These are your Barnes and Noble’s, your Borderses.

On the other hand, you have your small, dusty, independent/used bookstores, with books stacked to the ceiling on all sides, and no room for special displays. These stores smell like musty, yellowed pages and their employees will not only recognize your requested author immediately, but suggest somebody else who is actually much better, really (they will then quietly judge you for your inferior taste). Exemplars of this variety include City Lights, and Quimby’s Books, but the best ones sometimes don’t even have a name.

I think most readers tend to have a strong predilection for one or the other variety of bookstore, but I actually like them both pretty well. To me, the two are each enjoyable in their own way, but not directly comparable across categories. Today, in Sao Paulo, I wandered into what may be my favorite bookstore of the large-and-corporate type.

As you can see from the photo above, the Livaria Cultura (“Cultural Bookstore”?) is huge, with 3 or 4 different levels, and wide, sloping ramps connecting them. The selection of books was quite broad, although they didn’t have what I was looking for in English. They seemed to stock books by genre, with little regard to the language of publication. Portuguese, English, Spanish, and even a few French and Italian titles all sat next to each other on the shelves, evidence of the patronage of a well-educated segment of the Brazilian population.

There was a nice little starbucks-inspired coffee bar, and the beanbag chairs and staggered risers were super comfy as well. Oh, and there’s that pretty awesome articulated dragon, too.

Yes, you can sit inside this dragon and read.

This quixotic figure stood just outside the main entrance.

Tuesday, there was an afterparty at a Cuban bar, with similar open bar. Wednesday, I went out for drinks with the conference organizers, I recorded a brief interview I’ll try to type up later.  Thursday, I got drinks (again) with a really cool Brazilian hacker/security researcher guy. So basically, my liver probably hates me (I took Friday night off), but I’ve been having an awesome time.

I’ve done kind of a poor job of writing about things as they happened, so there’s a bunch of stuff in Chile that I should try to go back and cover. Apologies if that makes this kind of hard to follow. One cool thing a Chilean hacker showed me is actually less of a hack, and more of just a “why would they make it like that?” security failure.

Unlike Buenos Aires, where every bus line is a separate company competing against each other and fighting tooth-and-nail against a unified payment system, Santiago has a very convenient contactless smartcard system (called the “bip!”—”beep!” in Spanish—card) for both buses and metro lines. However, for reasons that are totally beyond me, the Santiago transit system has decided to make all the information about the movements of anyone using their bip card accessible to anyone who cares to see it.

If you go to this website, and then click on “Saldo y Movemientos” you can enter my Bip card number (08969210) in the field for “Ingrese su Nº Tarjeta bip!”, choose to see the last 90 days, and click “Acceptar” to see every place that I added money to the card or took a bus or metro during my time in Santiago.

To be fair, I paid cash for the card, so my bip number isn’t actually personally identifying information (or it wasn’t until I wrote this blog post, anyway). But for university students in Santiago, their student ID card doubles as a bip pass, and that student ID number IS personally identifiable. Plus, I’m sure many people pay for their bip card with a credit card, or tie their bip card to a credit account so it will automatically debit to recharge.

Furthermore, if you really just wanted to creep on a random stranger, the bip card number is printed on the receipt you get for adding value to the card. As you’d expect, most of these receipts are immediately abandoned in garbage cans or on the floor of the metro station. It would be trivial to retrieve one and then monitor that person’s movement.

I don’t have any objection to a city transit agency tracking its ridership, especially when done in a way that’s more-or-less anonymous. Obviously, it helps them to see which lines are busy, where they need to add buses, trains, and so forth. What I don’t understand is why they decided to make this information available the way they do.

What could the possible advantage to riders be? I guess it might theoretically be convenient to check the balance on your card from the internet. But surely you already know the places you’ve gone, right? Making that data accessible to the public with no authentication is only a minor security vulnerability, but it’s also a completely unnecessary one.

Sao Paulo is an absolutely enormous city. Luckily, there’s a subway and surface trams you can take to avoid traffic and get around. Unfortunately, the map of the Sao Paulo metro system is a bit…optimistic. Looking closely at the legend above, you’ll see that all of line 4 and half of line 2 are “under construction”. Half of line 5, and chunks of lines E and F, as well as the airport connection are only “in planning”. This can be kind of frustrating when trying to plan a trip:
“Oh, I can just take the…oh wait, that doesn’t exist yet. Oh, then I’ll just have to transfer at…oh, that station isn’t open either. Well, looks like I’m taking the bus.”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that they’re expanding their metro network. I’m sure in 2010-2012, all those lines will be really useful. But right now, their presence on the map is just a tease.