I haven’t exactly followed this year’s baseball season closely, but it brought a smile to my face to see that both the Dodgers and the Yankees were eliminated yesterday.
Sorry for all you LA and NY fans, but an essential part of being a baseball fan is knowing who to root against, and these two teams are at the top of my list.
I just redesigned this site, so I’m not going to turn it pink for October. But it’s a terribly worthy cause, and Matthew Oliphant’s site is worth visiting. I need both hands to count the number of friends and family members who’ve had to deal with breast cancer. It’s no picnic.
If you have a few spare dollars burning a hole in your pocket, consider giving them to a worthy local or national organization that works with cancer patients.
Dylan Tweney is right:
Media companies should pay attention to the Napster story when they consider YouTube.
Lots of excellent observations here, and some good advice that, if history is any guide, the big media companies will ignore.
One key difference in this comparison is that Napster didn’t have much of a justification under the doctrine of fair use, whereas using YouTube as a repository for short clips from much longer video works can often be justified, especially when there’s substantial commentary that goes with the clip.
But since the very idea of fair use seems to be near death, maybe I’m just dreaming.
It has been nearly a year since Homeland Security Department Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the creation of a position for an assistant cyber security czar.
Chertoff made the announcement as part of a six-point agenda July 13, 2005, which identified elevating the position to an assistant Cabinet-level post as part of an overall strategy to “ensure that the department’s policies, operations, and structures are aligned in the best way to address the potential threats — both present and future.”
That position remains unfilled.
What on earth are they waiting for?
This is just wrong:
Top law enforcement officials have asked leading Internet companies to keep histories of the activities of Web users for up to two years to assist in criminal investigations of child pornography and terrorism, the Justice Department said Wednesday.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller outlined their request to executives from Google, Microsoft, AOL, Comcast, Verizon and others Friday in a private meeting at the Justice Department. The department has scheduled more discussions as early as Friday. Last week’s meeting was first reported by CNET, an online news service.
Internet providers should keep a record of my activities for exactly as long as they need it to handle my transaction, and then it should go away. If a law enforcement official thinks it’s important to know what websites I’m visiting, let them go before a judge, show some probable cause why they should be poking around in my affairs, and get a freakin’ warrant. You know, like the Fourth Amendment says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Honest to God, these people piss me off.
Update: Brett Glass offers these relevant comments on Dave Farber’s I-P list:
As an ISP, I can tell you that what the USDOJ is demanding […] is not only an unprecedented, vast, unwarranted intrusion that should have every citizen up in arms but would be extremely costly and in many cases simply impossible.
For example, the article mentions that the DOJ wants ISPs to retain lists of the IP addresses used by every user. But we, as an ISP, do not give each user a unique IP address; we use network address translation, or NAT. To abandon the use of NAT would not only compromise users’ safety (by making them more susceptible to Internet worms and other attacks); it would also require us to spend thousands of dollars to obtain more addresses from ARIN and to re-architect our network. What’s more, the imposition of such a requirement upon all ISPs would instantly exhaust the remaining pool of IPV4 addresses at a time when most equipment is not ready for IPV6.
The requirement that all VOIP calls be monitored is likewise absurd. We don’t provide VOIP ourselves; we merely provide the pipes. We don’t even know when a VOIP call is taking place on our network. We would have no way to monitor and track every one on behalf of the government, even if we were willing to (which we are not; we owe it to our users never to participate in such blatantly unconstitutional activity).
Note that the government first attempted to use kiddie porn as an excuse to destroy our liberty, but seems to have decided that terrorism is a more effective excuse — despite the fact that there have been no terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11.
The belief that everything and everyone must be monitored in the hope of preventing possible criminal activity is a hallmark of a police state. Is this what the US is coming to? If so, the 9/11 terrorists have won. By killing fewer people than died in the recent earthquake, they have given an irresponsible government an excuse to destroy our freedom, and have successfully cowed the populace into allowing it to happen.
Every citizen should be up in arms about this.
The people of Indonesia are suffering more than any humans should ever have to suffer. First the tsunami, then this earthquake.
I can only offer financial help, but hopefully that will help feed people and provide medical care. In this instance, I’m sending a donation to Doctors Without Borders.
If you want to help, follow that link (or send a donation to any organization you believe in), and send me an e-mail letting me know about it. In exchange, I will:
(a) Match your donation; and
(b) Send you an autographed copy of one of my books.
You can take your choice of Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition; Using Microsoft Office 2003 Professional; or Using Microsoft Office Student-Teacher Edition. If you see another book I’ve written that you’d prefer instead, ask and I’ll see if I have a spare copy sitting around.
Let me know which book you want. Send e-mail to books AT bott.com. I’ll pick up the cost of shipping. Offer good till I run out of books.
A disclaimer upfront: I don’t watch American Idol. I only see little snippets of the show on other TV programs, which is where I learned, involuntarily, about the incredibly close ballot last week to determine which of the three finalists would be booted back to obscurity.
This morning, thanks to Andrew Tobias, we learn that the balloting may not have been that close after all. Commenter M.I.T. Howard explains:
The whole country has just been subject to voting fraud (well maybe only the half who care). Yes, last week’s American Idol vote tallies were meaningless. Remember the percentages for the three finalists: 33.68%, 33.26%, 33.06% Was America really this closely divided? Unlikely. The close percentages are a tribute to the quality of the phone system. The phone lines for all 3 candidates were saturated! The lines were open for a fixed period of time and the pipeline of people voting was enough to saturate the system. The phone system did a marvelous job of accepting almost identical vote tallies for each candidate. Now that’s good engineering.
Makes sense to me.
Professor Ed Felten passes along the best summary I’ve seen of this week’s report of serious Diebold Voting Machine Flaws:
The attacks described in Hursti’s report would allow anyone who had physical access to a voting machine for a few minutes to install malicious software code on that machine, using simple, widely available tools. The malicious code, once installed, would control all of the functions of the voting machine, including the counting of votes.
Hursti’s findings suggest the possibililty of other attacks, not described in his report, that are even more worrisome.
In addition, compromised machines would be very difficult to detect or to repair. The normal procedure for installing software updates on the machines could not be trusted, because malicious code could cause that procedure to report success, without actually installing any updates. A technician who tried to update the machine’s software would be misled into thinking the update had been installed, when it actually had not.
On election day, malicious software could refuse to function, or it could silently miscount votes.
A voting machine is just another computer. And those of us who study computer security know that there are some immutable rules. Like, for instance:
Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore
Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore
Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it’s not your computer anymore
And when your computer is a voting machine, that last rule needs to be edited just a little bit: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it’s not your government anymore.
Scary stuff.
Ah, the harmonic convergence of April Fool’s Day and the beginning of Daylight Saving Time (and if anyone wants to quibble over the spelling of that term, I say bring it on). It’s an especially difficult time if you live in Indiana.
Last summer, we moved from Arizona, a non-DST state, to New Mexico, which observes the biennial semi-annual change-all-the-clocks ritual. It’s been seven years since we dealt with the headaches of Daylight Stupid Time. Glad I don’t have to deal with a commute on Monday.
Every American should be distressed about the Justice Department’s subpoenas demanding records from Google and other search engines.
Want to fight back? Here are a few Google searches I plan to run every day until this issue is resolved:
Bill of Rights
Fourth Amendment
unreasonable search and seizure
due process of law
I think it would be helpful for Attorney General Gonzales to know that Americans are interested in learning more about these concepts. Don’t you?
(inspired by Bob Harris)
Ed Bott 