Liberty in the balance: Security collides with civil liberties. Bob Cox spotted a Good One from The Sacramento Bee By Sam Stanton and Emily Bazar, that examines how the crackdown on terrorism has come into conflict with the civil liberties that set America apart. "The final version of the Patriot Act that was passed into law was rewritten between midnight and 8 o'clock in the morning behind closed doors by a few unknown people, and it was presented to Congress for a one-hour debate and an up or down vote," U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said in a telephone interview from his Oregon office. "It was hundreds of pages long, and no member of Congress can tell you they knew what they were voting for in its entirety." [LISNews.com]

WHen the FBI bangs down your door and hauls you away, just remember the act that gave them that power was written in the dead on night by persons who were not elected officials and was not properly vetted by Congress. The Congress of today reinds me more and more of the Republic of Rome, particularly in its lackadasical approach to its responsibilities.How can any ethical person knowingly vote for something that they have not read? Do they just sign on the dotted line where the scribes tell them? It certainly appears so.  11:24:38 PM    

The Lucent klognet. Making intranet weblog data usable. This is indeed very informative stuff. I found the timeline at the beginning interesting; it highlights the correlation between financial constraints and the adoption of lightweight tools that are useful to individuals.

Excellent presentation on supporting K-logging within a large organisation. Lucent Technologies' Information Specialist, Michael Angeles, believes blogging has evolved beyond "cool" and is moving quickly into the corporate world. In this presentation, Angeles will discuss who blogs, how and why. He will also discuss how Lucent is supporting bloggers and at the same time keeping close watch over the resulting growth of information on the Intranet. [...]

A truly excellent and well-prepared presentation.

[headshift moments via Conversations with Dina via McGee's Musings]

[Seb's Open Research]

I'll have to check this out. It is something I have been saying to anyone who would listen for almost 2 years. Blogs in the right business setting can be a tremendous asset.  11:16:19 PM    

New voting machines are criminally bad. Salon is running an astonishing interview with Bev Harris, the whistle-blower who broke the news that the computerized voting machines in use across America are not only insecure, but deliberately so, because insecure machines are easier for the techs from Diebold and other suppliers to "fix" when they have embarassing failures (of course, they're also easy for anyone else who wants to "fix" an election). Diebold hasn't denied that the leaked memos that Harris published are real -- rather, they've owned up to them and asserted a copyright on them, threatening her with a DMCA suit if she doesn't take them off the web.

Well, I don't believe you can protect intent to break the law by slapping a copyright on it. And the memos that we posted show that the law has been broken. If you can protect intent to break the law, all anybody would need to do is take their bank robbery plans and put a copyright on it, and then say nobody can look at them because they're copyrighted...

...[T]hey have been aware of these security flaws for years and they have chosen not to correct it. He says something to the effect of, find out what it will take to make this problem go away. [Referring to a voting equipment certifier, Clark tells a colleague to "find out what it is going to take to make them happy."] He says if you don't mention [a problem] you may "skate through" certification. And talking about doing "end runs" is not a good thing either.

And what's disturbing is the very same thing that these memos are talking about -- overwriting the audit log -- in the presentation in which they sold their machines to the state of Georgia they specifically bring up the audit log and say that no human can change it. This shows they made fraudulent claims, frankly.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

I wonder if absentee voting will be more protected?Without openess and transparency , these digital machines are just plain criminal. Why would I trust the word of a company which make shuge campaign donations to politicians in order to get the franchise? It is way to tempting for them to have backdoors to make it easy to get the numbers their benefactors want. I hope we never move to all digital voting.  11:12:03 PM    

Non-genetic maggot speciation. Changes in aromatic preferences can cause "sympatric speciation" among maggots -- a form of speciation that is not really genetic (the two species can still interbreed), but rather circumstantial: genetic differences contained in each species causes it to behave in a way that ensures it will never get it on with the other species.

The apple and hawthorn maggots are common names for the same species, Rhagoletis pomonella . The pest and the hawthorn plant are native to North America, but the apples they now infest were introduced from Europe around 250 years ago. During the 1860s, in New York's Champlain Valley, some hawthorn flies shifted to apple plants as their host, while others did not."There are no morphological differences between the two, so they are still the same species, but two races can be distinguished by looking at the diversity of protein structures of whole populations and by the specificity of individual flies to different host plants," explained Roelofs, who is the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Insect Biochemistry at Cornell.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

What is fascinating here is that we are possible watching speciation occurring before our eyes. We know when the maggots starting on a new food source (about 150 years ago), moving from hawthorn to apples. The two groups now have such different mating patterns that there is little gene flow between them. This sets the stage for genetic drift and mutation, followed by natural selection, to forge a new species. Lack of gene flow is a critical aspect of the barriers between species. What they look like does not matter at all, so saying they are morphologically the same is erally so much noise. What the genes tell us is more important.  11:04:25 PM