Wed, 26 May 2004
I made my first post to this blog a year ago yesterday. I think it’s pretty appropriate to have commemorated such a momentous anniversary by not blogging at all yesterday.
Sat, 22 May 2004
Pick the prominant third-way thinker who said this:
America rejects the ethic of sink or swim. America rejects social Darwinism, because strength is not the same as worth. Our greatest failures as a nation have come when we lost sight of our compassionate ideals – in slavery, in segregation, and in every wrong that has denied the value and dignity of life. Our greatest strength as a nation is that we bravely face our flaws and do our best to make things right. Our greatest successes as a nation have come when we broadened the circle of protection and inclusion. And this work is not finished. We will press on until every person shares in the promise of our country.
Thu, 13 May 2004
Martin points to an Economist review of a anti-corporate film that tries to make the case that corporations are “pyschopathic” by their very nature. It’s presented as “asking the question”, but I can’t see how you’d get a different film if you’d started off with the answer.
Wed, 12 May 2004
I’ve been using the SeeMore plugin mostly for moving my travelblog pictures to separate pages, because even on broadband they’re a nuisance to download and scroll through all the time. But now that my blog’s “syndicated” I feel kind-of obliged not to fill up the planet with long essays, which means splitting longish techy essays after the first paragraph; but that isn’t really what I want my blog to look like.
I could make RSS feeds always be short, but that doesn’t really seem like the right solution either; in fact for the non-aggregated case it might be better for RSS feeds to always be long, even for the travelblog case. Which gives me four scenarios: RSS feeds which should show everything; normal web viewing which should show essays, but not photoessays; seemore web viewing which should show everything; and aggregator feeds which should only show the first paragraph or two.
I think MovableType automatically only includes the first paragraph (or few sentences even) in RSS feeds. I wonder if there’s a good way of doing something similar in blosxom.
Heh. The Gnu Hunter scoffed at my attempt to draw a distinction between the price and cost of email delivery; so I’m pleased to find I’m in good company on that issue: here’s Thomas Sowell doing a similar job on the costs of medical care. Also of interest is Brookes News, which has some interesting economics articles (among other things).
Tue, 11 May 2004
Internet Security, Monocultures, and Economic Manifest Destiny
Lots of security experts like talking about the risks of software monocultures which basically says that if there are a whole lot of similar machines on the Internet – all running Windows XP Home, say – then it’s generally fairly easy (well, as these things go) to find a security hole that lets you gain control of all of them, and worse because it’s so common lots of people are trying to do it. So less-popular systems often end have a security advantage – Apple’s OS X isn’t that secure, yet it receives far, far less than its fair share of worms, viruses and other attacks compared to Windows systems.
Okay. That’s point one.
Wed, 05 May 2004
John Ray, who writes Dissecting Leftism, an interesting blog decrying various inane comments from left-wing types, recently noted:
Statistical expert John Lott Jr. sets out why California’s virtual ban on electonic voting is just ignorant technophobia. Australia has paper voting only so I have no personal knowledge of alternatives but his claim that electronic voting is in fact more secure than paper voting seems reasonable to me. Voting security in Australia is a joke – leading to Al Capone’s famous saying “Vote early and vote often” being regarded as good election-day advice in some Australian Leftist circles. Rather like Pakistan.
Obviously, I’m going to bridle at being called a technophobe, as I’m not persuaded by the linked article that electronic voting is secure. The main problem with the article is it conflates two security issues. One is identification and ensuring that people only vote once. Australia doesn’t do a terribly good job of that – no ID is required, so you can just pick a name from the phonebook, walk up, claim you’re that person, and vote. They might find out later that “John Smith” voted twice, but that’s not going to help them catch you, so what do you care? Similar problems for people who die, but aren’t off the electoral role, or who are away, or whatever else. That’s an issue where electronic measures can help: taking digital photos of people who vote and associating that with the name they claim to vote under would give you a mechanism of better catching fraudsters, and requiring photo ID with a barcode that gets scanned and passed around the various polling places would be a pretty effective countermeasure too. But none of that is really about electronic voting – it all happens before you get into the booth.
The real problem for fraud in electronic voting is in incorrectly counting the results. It’s trivial to write a program that displays a vote for Bob on the screen or on a printer, and records a vote for Alice on a read-only CD ROM. It’s trivial to write a program that does this only one in a hundred times, or only after a thousand votes have been recorded. And it’s impossible to test for this situation. Worse: you don’t have to be acting deliberately to cause these sorts of problems; they can be caused by bugs, or out-of-spec usage. With paper it’s not an issue: you know exactly what you’ve written down, there’s no physical way for that to change between you’re writing it down and it being counted, and when it’s counted we have security measures in place to make sure it’s counted correctly.
There are ways to avoid this sort of problem – making the source code available for public inspection is one, and another is having controlled interfaces (eg, between making the vote (press a screen, get a certificate), recording it (put the certificate on a scanner) and counting it (remove the storage device from the recorder and put it in another machine) – but none of them are perfect, and none of them are really even that well understood. And that’s by experts – voting needs to be something that everyone can trust, not something that you need a PhD in computer science to be able to understand.
Based on the Australian experience – where we have fairly effective preferential voting, very simple procedures for voting (no butterfly ballots), and a whole bunch of folks who’re good at getting election results calculated very quickly – it seems to me that electronic voting is trying to solve the wrong problem (“We need computers in the voting booths! Because that’s cool!!!”), instead of the right ones (“We need some non-intrusive ways of stopping people from multi-voting”).
Tue, 04 May 2004
Hrm, the Planet aggregators don’t seem to like smartquotes in titles. So I’ve disabled them. Lame.
Linux Australia's FTA Submission
(For those playing along at home, this is about the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the United States, which includes an IP chapter that requires Australia to change its copyright and patent law to line up more with the DMCA and the US Patent Office. I’ve commented on this previously.)
Anyway, today’s post is to note that Linux Australia’s submission (#183) has finally been accepted, as has Rusty Russell’s (#184). It’s a bit weird that it took so long to accept them – they were submitted on time (ie, weeks ago), yet seem to have been accepted only after the ABC’s submission which was very late (it’s dated 30th April), and concurrent with the ASX submission which appears to have only been sent in yesterday. Weird. On the other hand, they might’ve been not quite compliant with the rules for submissions (which require addresses and such for individuals at least), so maybe that was the problem.
In other news, Matthew Rimmer from the ANU (submission 27) appeared as a witness before the committee today, and the Australian Digital Alliance (submission 71) did likewise yesterday. It’ll be interesting to see what the committee thinks of their opinions when the transcripts of those sessions come out.
Mon, 03 May 2004
Since the Professor’s decided to skip his Friday afternoon catblogging, here’s some Monday evening dogblogging for you. From left to right, meet Chips (m, silky terrier), Cheeky (m, chihuahua), and Skye (f, Siberian husky). If you’re not an RSS weenie, you can probably see Skye over on the right too, giving a practical demonstration of this blog’s theme.
(Okay, I admit it, I’m cheating by posting old photos. So sue me.)
Clinton pointed out that "you can probably see Skye over on the right too" wasn't very clear -- obviously I meant my right, which is your left.
Err, wtf? Cheeky's a chihuahua not a dachshund. Well, at least I got the "I can't spell it" part of the breed right. Fixed.
I’ve been a bit lax about noting updates to my blogroll. Introducing Clinton’s blog: Whining, not dining, Brad’s blog, currently titled The Bored and The Geeky, and Pat’s blog: Got Meat?.
(Hrm, I guess non-Aussies don’t have to grimace at the low hamming distance between “blogroll” and “bogroll”)