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 Saturday, July 10, 2004
Open Administration. Further evidence that the parties are at odds -- the Republicans are running Microsoft and Democrats open source. When the technocrats of either party get elected, they will bring their tools and practices with them. You have to wonder how... [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
See. I don't dislike this Administration because it is evil, arrogant and petulant. I dislike them because they use Windows. It indicates that they do not get it. In addition, it indicates that they have no real focus on security, given all the continuing problems with Windows that is not seen with Unix-based systems, like. Mac OS X or Linus.
But, seriously, read the article. It actually makes quite clear the 'war' that is being fought. Between a centralized, closed system and an open, transparent one. In a world that needs to deal with huge amounts of data and tremendous complexity, the latter is the only one that will succeed. Companies, organizations and countries that figure this out will be successful. Those that do not will find themselves in the dustbin of history. 5:40:31 PM 
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LA Times. The insurgents' decentralized command structure, (Bruce) Hoffman (an advisor to coalition forces and RAND superstar) said in an interview, echoes the atomized nature of the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Thus, the arrest of deposed President Saddam Hussein in December was not nearly the intelligence windfall that U.S. authorities had predicted. Nor did his capture dry up funding for the insurgents. Think in terms of markets of networks Bruce (or hire me, LOL).
"The nature of this culture is you can't win a war of attrition with them," said Col. Robert B. Abrams of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad, "because it's a circle of violence [~] there will always be someone in the family who will pick up arms. Unless you want to kill too many people. Which of course we never want to do." [John Robb's Weblog]
This is why even finding bin Laden will not do much of anything. We are beginning to deal with blood fueds because of our behavior. We are beginning to see a ready source of continuing violence because of our behavior. As someone said, you need to have 2 strategies to fight this. A strong response and a powerful reward. A carrot and a stick. this administration only has a stick. Teddy Roosevelt said to caryy a big stick but to also speak softly. This adinistration only does one. (And, interestingly, the time Teddy was President was also a time of terrorist attacks on political bodies. He became President because McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist/terrorist. Reading about the world's responses to those times could tell us a lot aout ours.) 5:32:12 PM
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NYT. The verbal presentation of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA was much more negative than this article. They said it was a systemic problem that couldn't be fixed merely by new people or superficial reorganization. The solution they will propose is extreme centralization. This won't solve the problem. Our intelligence services are hold-overs from the cold war. They are too insulated by layer upon layer of secrecy to be effective. Given this environment, groupthink will always be a problem. There is a decentralized solution, but we won't arrive at it until our backs are against the wall. [John Robb's Weblog]
Part of the solution will have to be a decentralized one. That is the only way we know to solve extremely complex, data-laden problems of the sort we see today. It is not oone of logistics, of getting more man-hours involved. It will require a system of social networks with diverse viewpoints, something that is inimical to this Administration or to almost any source of political power today (I am not convinced the Democrats will get it either. I just feel they will do less damage to the world's population.) 5:19:20 PM
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Britt Blaser: The worst moment in my life was a hard landing at Danang, Vietnam in early 1968. [John Robb's Weblog]
Read the whole thing. Kind of makes you wish Eisenhower was around today. Only people who had never fought could be a hungry as our leaders are today. 5:11:52 PM
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I loved this. No more felon list. Until I got to this part of the article. They are not doing this becaus eit is the rightt thing to do. It is because someone finally found the flaw:When voters register in Florida, they can identify themselves as Hispanic. But those voters did not end up in the potential felons database because it had no Hispanic category.
The flaw in a state that President Bush won by a margin of just 537 votes could have been significant: Hispanics in Florida tend to vote Republican.
That is right. Hispanic feloons were not purged. Only Blacks. And the only way we were able to find this out was because the media had to file suit to get the list out in the open. What an oversight. No category in the database for Hispanics. And what a funnny coincidence. this is in the sate run by the President's brother. A state that gave Bush the election. All because they did not have Hispanics in the database.
Makes me think that the only reason they are going along with not using this databse now is because they have something else that will work just as well. You know, if this was being done is a developing country, we would all say that the President was only elected through massive vote fraud in a state controlled by his family. I mean a database with 48,000 names but none of them Hispanic, in a state where the margin of victory was less than 100,000 votes. In a country where he did not get the majority of the votes cast. When anyone talks about the election in 2000 being stolen, just bring this up. No Category For Hispanic! And they had to be sued in court to release the information. 4:52:05 PM
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A Tale of Two Texans. The NAACP hurt poor George W. Bush's feelings, so he's... [Daily Kos]
Bush's petulant attitude is not too surprising but it fits so well with Tommy Thompson's and the AIDS conference (below) and wih Dick Cheney's F-bomb on the floor of the Senate. These guys are acting just like bullies when their bluff is called. All 'Well, if you are going to play that way, I'm taking my ball home right now.' Not much courage on display here. No political advantage in it, I guess. 4:43:51 PM
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What tech does Induce Act endanger?. Ernest Miller says:
The INDUCE Act will make "whoever intentionally induces" copyright infringement liable for that infringement. Unfortunately, the definition of "intentionally induces" is extremely broad and the proposed law would give copyright holders (such as the RIAA and MPAA) tremendous flexibility in suing developers of new technology and effectively quashing progress that the copyright holders don't like. To foster reasoned debate on this topic, I'm inaugurating a new daily feature at The Importance Of ..., called "Hatch's Hit List." Each entry will give an actual example of a new and innovative device or technology that would be threatened by the INDUCE Act.
Link [Boing Boing]
Some good links about this act. Sounds like a really good way for authority to kepp and maintain its own power. This is exactly what the culture wars will be fught over - the old dinosaurs trying to maintain power. I wonder what we would be driving today if the buggy whip manufacturers had these bits of legislation? 4:24:03 PM
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Park ranger threatens to arrest Eldred for handing out free Waldens. Eric Eldred, an Internet Bookmobile driver and poster child for the public domain, was threatened with arrest for handing out free copies of Walden at Walden Pond:
Yesterday (July 8, 2004) I took the Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond in
Concord, Mass. It was the 150th anniversary of H. D. Thoreau's book
"Walden." The Thoreau Society had a dawn to dusk reading.
After an hour of having readers print and take away free copies of "Walden,"
I was asked by the Walden Pond Reservation police to pack up and leave
and threatened with arrest. I left.
The park supervisor (Denise Morrissey, 978-369-3254) told me I could
not pass out free literature without a permit. And she would not give me
a permit because, as she explained, the state park gets money from a
concession by the Thoreau Society, which operates a store that sells
"Walden"--and I was competing with them by giving away free copies.
There is no place to park at Walden Pond except in the state parking
lot, for which I paid $5.
Link [Boing Boing]
Through the Looking Glass. You can not give out FREE copies of a public domain book on park land because it would compete with the park's own sales. What a wonderful country. 4:19:44 PM
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DMCA says you can't fix your own tape-drive. My cow-orker Jason Schultz reports on a breaking new DMCA horripilation: a court has ordered a company to stop fixing tape-drives because in so doing, it makes unauthorized access of a copyrighted "Maintenance Code."
A district court in Boston has used the DMCA to grant a preliminary injunction against a third party service vendor who tried to fix StorageTek tape library backup systems for legitimate purchasers of the system.
How is this a DMCA violation? Well, it turns out that StorageTek allegedly uses some kind of algorithmic "key" to control access to its "Maintenance Code", the module that allows the service tech to debug the storage system. The court found that third party service techs who used the key without StorageTek's permission "circumvented" to gain access to the copyrighted code in violation of the DMCA, even though they had the explicit permission of the purchasers to fix their machines.
Link [Boing Boing]
and, of course, what this also leads to, if I read things right, is that this would happen even if Storagetech no longer made tape drive, was still in business or had decided to now make innertubes. The owner of one of its tape drives would not be able to repair them. If they did, they would be in violation of federal law. The only reason you have not seen auto makers do this is that there would be real hell to pay from their customers who want to work on their own cars. But why should it be different for any other owner? Worst thing Clinton signed. 4:17:44 PM
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Humiliated, Angry, Ashamed, Brown. [Pharyngula]
And this happened in Seattle, about as liberal as it gets. Be very, very careful what you take pictures of. I guess in a multigenerational war on Terrorism, being able to take a picture on a nice sunny day, or even a rainy one, will just have to be a fond memory. Isn't it nice that our own police and federal agents make us feel less safe. Anyone reading this will be able to sympathize with the fear. This man had checked with authorities and gotten permission to be where he was (where lots of other people were also). This did not stop him from being put through a horrible experience. The sort of experience that I am sure we will here more and more about. The key was not whether the police should or should not do what they did. It was their cavalier, harassing behavior to an innocent man. Intimidation of the average, innocent citizen is not a way to make people feel safer.
The fact that dozens of other people taking pictures were not stopped or questioned leaves one possible reason. The artist was not white. And this is ultraliberal Seattle. I fear that in many portions of the country he would have been arrested for simply asking if he had to produce an ID. Any 'backlip' like that to an officer is a sure way to end up in jail.
One really awful consquence of this is that the Artist now will worry anytime he takes a photo. Is he on some list? Will his 'interrogation' by the police come back? Much like someone who has been physically attacked, it will be a long time before he can resume normal thought paterns. Are we really safer?
UPDATE It looks like the local independant paper, The Stranger, may be doing a story on this. Let's hope this sort of incident gets a lot more play. This man did nothing wrong and, in fact, went out of his way to find out what the right thing was to do. He had more presence of mind than I would have had. I hope there is some sort of stink raised over this. Won't hold my breath. 3:52:23 PM
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Scientists who work at the NIH and CDC are not being allowed to attend an international AIDS conference because Tommy Thompson was heckled. That's right. The greatest research country in the world, the biggest researcher on AIDS is not sending scientists to the biggest confeerence on AIDS research becasue a political appointee got his knickers in a twist.
It is one thing for Bush to refuse to appear at an NAACP meeting (something no other President since Hoover has refused to do during an entire term) because he was called names. It is another one to prevent American scientists to participate in an international conference because of hurt feelings by a politician. It is another example to me that this Administration is only interested in science that meets its own litmus tests and will do anything it can to hurt our ability to help save the lives of others if it suits their political agenda.
This is not like Carter refusing to go to the Olympics. Science advances because of the free flow of information, because of the easy transfer of knowledge. The Soviet Union crippled its science because it hampered the ability of scientists within its borders to visit others countries. I could even try and make the point that this was a significant part of its inability to compete in the world economy. This sort of attitude, this extremely arrogant, petulant behavior, has been seen more and more in this Administration's attitude toward science than anything else. It was this attitude, first seen almost 3 years ago, that first caused me to really worry about this Administration. Science is my life. The open transfer of knowledge is how we find truth. This administration is not interested in supporting much in the wat of scientific truth and is constantly doing things to prove that. If we continue with this sort of political behavior, it will not be many years before we are irrelevant in scientific research. The good scientists will go where they can be properly supported. Political vetting of scientists, something we are already doing, will be part of our downfall. 2:59:34 PM
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Read the column and be afraid. It would almost be a funny if it was not so real. It is scary to see how rapidly any one of us can be put on a watchlist or enter a database for doing nothing, simply because someone else THINKS so. The abuse of power that naturally comes from instilling fear in others can be guaranteed to restrict our rights.
And the important things is that this sort of behaviour does not make us any safer. It simply fills the databases with wirthless information, with the data about totally innocuous people obscuring any real villian. And what if this man had been, say, Pakistani? He might have spent a lot more time in custody. 2:24:31 PM
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