I had written a really good post this morning about the election result and lost it when my laptop died. Poetic really. We don't need my cynicism to tear celebrating liberals down from their post victory high. Reality will do that for us soon enough. In the meantime, the video I'm linking here will show you what the MSM isn't saying about this years election.
I haven't seen this in like 20+ years. Weird to tap into memories that I haven't accessed in so long. I think its all there, in your head. Everything that happened to you. But you don't know how to get at it.
The Volokh Conspiracy - District Court Holds that Running Hash Values on Computer Is A Search:
Topic: Miscellaneous
6:15 pm EDT, Oct 29, 2008
This is me writing:
I don't like Caballes. I think it leads to a dark future. Stevens wrote: “Critical to that [Kyllo] decision was the fact that the device was capable of detecting lawful activity."
So, based on your analysis that the search only occurs when it provides a result to a human, and the holding in Caballes that any result provided to a human that could only pertain to unlawful activity cannot be called a search, it seems this is not a search (for 4th amendment purposes).
Edge cases about hash collisions would likely be dismissed as easily as edge cases about the police misinterpreting the dog or the dog barking at the wrong time.
So, the bottom line becomes, any technology that we can develop to collect information about crimes is A-OK so long as it never provides any information to a human being unless an actual crime has been committed.
Let your fantasies about orwellian high-tech distopias fly! Hash checks of internet communications at ISP's? Check! Compulsary installation of face recognition cameras in all private buildings? No problem!
Artificial intelligences that read email correspondence or analyze search engine queries for patterns indicating criminal behavior? Well, they would have to be highly accurate, which is a bit far fetched by present technological standards, but if they were, then that might be alright as well...
Eventually in the distant future, you reach a point that has been mentioned by previous posters, where you've replaced your human police officers with robots... These robots are artificially intelligent and never report the results of their investigations to humans unless a crime has been committed.
Under this analysis I cannot see how the Constitution would prohibit these robots from doing all of the tyrannical things that the 4th amendment was intended to prevent the police from doing, and I don't see how this state of affairs would be materially different from not having any 4th amendment at all.
Therefore, if the 4th amendment is to have any meaning at all, there must be some reason that this kind of automated search is not reasonable.
Scalia offered the following in reference to Caballes: "This is not a new technology. This is a dog." I find that explanation extremely unsatisfying.
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders.
Which means that what matters is who you are, not when you do it. If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. And if you're not, a good economy won't save you. Someone who thinks "I better not start a startup now, because the economy is so bad" is making the same mistake as the people who thought during the Bubble "all I have to do is start a startup, and I'll be rich."
Podcasting: A new technology in search of viable business models
Topic: Miscellaneous
3:33 pm EDT, Oct 22, 2008
Some arguments have been made that podcasting does not involve public performance of a musical work — but merely the transfer of bits over the Internet, and therefore public performance rights should be challenged (see Cross, 2005; Phillips and Moore, 2001).
I was googling around and I learned that a reply I made to a blog post on Internet Music became an academic reference. Nice!
Afghan Student's Death Sentence Commuted to 20 Years in Prison | Threat Level from Wired.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
8:29 am EDT, Oct 22, 2008
About the totally awesome democratic government that we helped establish in Afghanistan.
Earlier this year I published a post about a 24-year-old journalism student in Afghanistan who was sentenced to death for asking "disruptive" questions in class and for downloading and distributing a report to other students that was critical of the unequal treatment of women in some Islamic societies.
Sayed Pervez Kambaksh (at right in a Kabul courtroom with his defense attorney) was tried and sentenced to death for blasphemy last January without having a defense attorney to argue his case.
Tuesday, an appeals court commuted the death sentence to 20 years.
Five witnesses appeared before the court, four of whom condemned Kambaksh for violating the tenets of Islam. The fifth witness retracted accusations he'd made earlier that Kambaksh had committed blasphemy and also revealed that he'd been forced to make the accusation by members of Afghanistan's intelligence service and by a professor who had threatened to expel him from university.
The neocons must have missed the part were Fukuyama said liberal democracies.
Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams - Telegraph
Topic: Miscellaneous
5:44 pm EDT, Oct 21, 2008
New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams.
While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome - even now.
BTW, If you somehow read this blog but aren't aware of it, I'm speaking on Friday night at 9PM at Phreaknic. The talk will be on border laptop searches, so if you've seen me speak at another conference this year (Summercon, Hope, Dragoncon), you may already have seen some of this content, although the situation has evolved considerably from where it was back during Summercon and my talk has evolved with it.
