Bike Ride To Smokies

I went a a bike ride to Clemson and North Carolina, to meet and ride with some friends from Louisiana. Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos most of the time.

An important stop the first day was at a McDonalds.

Fayette, Alabama was a neat small town, with a very nice courthouse. It was built in 1911 and is still in use as the county courthouse.

When our group went riding near the Smokey Mountain National Park on Wednesday, one of the motorcycles gave up the ghost. Efforts to revive it came to naught, so it was abandoned...here.

After returning to Clemson, three of us drove back up to the Smokies to camp for a night and to see the "synchronous fireflies".
Info about fireflies
The next day, we hiked to Laurel Falls.

We made it -- Laurel Falls.

Back home, Fly was practicing the yoga "Dead Dog" pose.

Google Helps the Man Watch You

I thought this link Bruce Schneier mentioned in his CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter today was interesting:

Law Enforcement Request System

Bruce says: "Police departments across the country have been knocking at Google's door for at least the last two years with warrants to tap into the company's extensive stores of cellphone location data. Known as "reverse location search warrants," these legal mandates allow law enforcement to sweep up the coordinates and movements of every cellphone in a broad area. The police can then check to see if any of the phones came close to the crime scene. In doing so, however, the police can end up not only fishing for a suspect, but also gathering the location data of potentially hundreds (or thousands) of innocent people. There have only been anecdotal reports of reverse location searches, so it's unclear how widespread the practice is, but privacy advocates worry that Google's data will eventually allow more and more departments to conduct indiscriminate searches.
Of course, it's not just Google who can provide this information."

I only mention this so we can inform our kids/grandkids how things work nowadays... :o)