WRT Petreaus: I don't see why the exposure of an affair is reason to resign, but it made more sense to me when I found out about the threatening emails and getting the FBI involved. Inviting that kind of loopy, unstable behavior I can see as a reason to resign, if only to keep the loopy and unstable away from the CIA and the people who worked under you.

Quick confab with my mom: she's making dad see a dr when they get back cause she doesn't like the changes she's been seeing, which she tried to explain away before but she's seeing it's so not explainawayable. So. Good? But also worrying.

Yes worrying, but better to identify worrying behavior and have it checked.

Smoked salmon alfredo might eventually kill me, but my god, it's so good.

Ok, I am watching Glee from the beginning and... why would you have Debra Monk and Victor Garber and not have them sing!?!?

sarameg, good on you & your mom for seeing that your dad's issues might be medical. And I hope his behavior doesn't blight your vacation too much!

Me, I just handed off the Golden Retriever for a couple of days, so while I won't exactly be able to sleep in tomorrow, I will be handling 55 lbs less of dog, and might even be able to go running tomorrow. (I can't run with two dogs, it's too much to control.)

Owen: "The one from the 60s with Leonard Whiting?"

That is some serious Shakespearian geekery there! Way to go, Owen!

Man, I really don't want to move: I've been running around all day and I have a bunch more to do. Gotta go see my folks, and then come back and feed the dogs, and then go to a year clip party hosted by a friend of a friend.

This group of friends collects movie clips all through the year, and then the host sorts them, burns them to DVD, and has a party. We vote on the weirdest/best/random other category clips, and eat lots of great Mexican food. It's really fun. I just wish I could remember people's names from one year to the next. And that I was enough of a cinemaphile to actually collect some clips...

Good luck with your dad, sarameg.

I did!

And thank goodness for that! No, wait, I mean the other thing.

CIA officers, much less the head of the CIA are not supposed to be using gmail either. Huge groups of hackers are trying to find any way into US computer systems and often find an opening through gmail and other mail services.

That Petraeus opened up the US to hacker threat is probably the biggest reason why he *needed* to resign.

CIA officers, much less the head of the CIA are not supposed to be using gmail either.

Have we learned nothing from the hacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo mail account?

Seriously, people. No dirty texts, no emails. It's like no one knows how to have a secret affair.

So, on twitter I was having an exchange with some reporters who verified what I knew about some forms of secure communication:

if you create drafts in an email account, delete the draft and the compose another draft, that can be a secure-ish form of communication. It seems that the journalists think this is what Petraeus was doing with his biographer. Problem is this was P4's personal acct, and so other email messages were there, or at least the addys were in his address book, and so Broadwell had access to them and emailed threats to P4's friend.

I don't see how it can be secure unless you assume that Google's servers are secure, though. Even if the message never leaves the server itself.