] Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said the
] administration has already looked into ways to compensate
] for future crunches on resources, pointing to a 2002
] White House appointed commission that advocated phasing
] out Social Security options for younger workers while
] allowing retired and near-retired persons to keep their
] benefits.

Social Security is a wealth redistribution system. Admit it. Thats what it is. When it started it was, on a demographic basis, taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. The reason its going to fail is that, on a demographic basis, its now stealing money from the poor and giving it to the rich. We ought to accept that its a wealth redistribution system and run it like one. You ought to get it only if you need it, and it ought to suck just enough that most people won't want it. I'm all for raising the amount of money one can put in tax deferred personal savings accounts if we can do that without bankrupting the government. However, the path to fixing social security is to see it for what it is and run it appropriately. In order to do that the people making decisions about it are going to have to agree to cut their own potential income. For the most part, politics doesn't work that way. So if you're between the ages of 20 and 40, prepare to get fucked, because you are the smallest generational demographic, and thus you have the smallest amount of democratic political power. You will witness the very definition of tyranny of the majority in your lifetime.

Good news -- and bad -- for baby boomers, says AARP

One of the frustrating things about running a site like this is that people rarely tell you if there is a problem with the site. Particularly new users.

It turns out that the MemeStreams Bookmarklet has not worked in IE since I made the changes needed to support Safari back in July. No one told me about it until yesterday. The bookmarklet has now been repaired. If you know anyone who had trouble with this in IE during the past few months, please let them know that the bookmarklet has been updated. They can reinstall it and it will work fine.

Thank you Apple for not only creating a third way to call document getselection, but also doing it in a way that sends Microsoft browsers into lala land. You truly suck.

MemeStreams broken in IE!!

Rattle wrote:
] Here is a question for the MemeStreams community.. If you
] were proposing legislation for laws governing how venues can
] collect and user information from IDs, what would you propose?

Damn, Rattle, why don't you ask a complex question. A few thoughts:

1. Most pro privacy people are libertarians, and so they generally shy away from government regulation. This has resulted in the situation we have today online, which is that entities must disclose what they do with your data, and you get to make choices. This is good in the sense that entities have been more conservative with what they do because its visible and consumers have been able to apply market pressure to reign things in.

Should the government force me to be private even if I don't want to be? I don't think so. The government should create a framework in which we can make choices.

2. The best analogy I've heard here is to copyright. There are a great deal of very strict rules about what an individual can do with commercial information. On the other hand, the rules about what a commercial entity can do with a individual's personal information are very liberal. Looking at the situation in this light is illustrative of whose interests are upheld.

The relationship is direct. Congress approved "no judge" subpoenas that the RIAA can use to obtain your personal information in order to protect their copyrights.

Furthermore, when lack of privacy causes problems, like spam, watching the government react is a lot like watching paint dry.

The system is not responding to your interests.

One of the worst offenders, of course, is the government itself. They create all these IDs. Furthermore, they usually sell the databases to all comers. In Texas you can get the DMV database on CD-ROM. Someone took it and setup a website where you could search it. People got pissed. So Texas passed a law making websites like that illegal. They still sell the CDs and the website has moved offshore. Talk about missing the point.

We ought to curtain the data the government shares.

3. The most important thing that we need is awareness and sophistication about this issue with the general populace. Levels of understanding have improved a great deal in the last 20 years, but there is still a lot of road to cover.

There is no reason why Google can't discard the last two octets of your IP address. It will not impact their demographics at all, but it would provide enough protection against turning their database into a thought crime monitor. And they'll do it, but only if we demand it.

RE: Wired News: Great Taste, Less Privacy

] The job market may not be booming. But for many in the
] college class of 2004, it won't be quite as dismal as it
] was for last year's grads.

Some good news...

Most lucrative college degrees '04 - Feb. 5, 2004

I think this is mostly interesting because of the way that it works rather then what it does. I'm not convinced that if you find one collision in the hash space through a distributed computing effort you've ruined MD5. I don't think that this property is critical in most applications. But this is still interesting...

Javascript based MD5 'cracking' project

] The Pentagon (news - web sites) won't use an Internet
] voting system for overseas U.S. citizens this fall
] because of concerns about its security, an official said
] Thursday.

First Georgia backs down on evolution, and now this. Its nice to win a few, but of course neither the GA Superintendent nor the Pentagon are really diametrically opposed to us on these issues.

Yahoo! News - Pentagon Cancels Internet Voting System

] Expensing doesn't make accounting sense. There is no cost
] incurred by companies when they issue stock options to
] employees. Rather, they represent "capital income" and
] not compensation. Therefore, the basic expensing precept
] is misguided.

Expensing options will hurt the economy

] After this year, they say, the stock-option party may be
] drawing to a close.
]
] The party pooper is an accounting standard change slated
] to take effect in 2005. The controversial rule, proposed
] by the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board, the
] standards-setting body for the profession, requires firms
] to record a charge on earnings statements to reflect the
] cost of employee stock-option grants.

This is a travesty in every sense of the word. The Bush administration has basically robbed every middle class worker the opportunity to EARN OWNERSHIP and participate in the wealth building process. It will make it harder for companies to recruit, retain, and leverage their workforces. And it will further exacerbate the already ridiculous pay packages given to executives and insiders.

Last Hurrah for Stock Options

] State Schools Superintendent Kathy Cox, in a press
] release Thursday morning, said she would ask that the
] word evolution be put back in the state's proposed
] curriculum.
]
] "I made the decision to remove the word evolution from
] the draft of the proposed biology curriculum in an effort
] to avoid controversy that would prevent people from
] reading the substance of the document itself," wrote Cox.
] "Instead, a greater controversy ensued."

GA Superintendent backs down on Evolution

] "The Government must play a greater role in punishing
] those who conceal their identities online, particularly
] when they do so in furtherance of a serious federal
] criminal offense or in violation of a federally protected
] intellectual property right," (Lamar) Smith said at a hearing on
] the topic today.

Congress wants to make it a federal crime to lie on your domain name registration. If you do not make your real address, telephone number, and email available to everyone on earth you can be sentenced to federal prison time (in this version you'd have a sentence for another crime extended). This came up in last years legislative session as well. The thing that makes my blood boil about this is that the spin is totally wrong. The copyright people are lying through their teeth, this journalist can't see through it, and the CDT/ACLU don't understand EITHER so they are providing the wrong counterpoints, almost assuring that this will pass!

This article lets slide absolute lies like:

] Smith and Berman drafted the bill after receiving complaints
] from the entertainment and software industries that much of
] their material is made available for free on Web sites whose
] owners are impossible to track down because their domain
] name registrations often contain made-up names.

No web site owner is "impossible" to track down!

DNS whois information is made available for reference. It is intended to assist communication between administrators who run networks, for security or network management related reasons. It was not designed for lawyers or police. It was also not designed with the modern spam and stalker infested internet in mind, and therefore often people fill it out with false information, especially if they aren't a business entity.

If you want to track down someone on the internet for a legal reason, you do not use the DNS whois system. That is not what the DNS whois system is for. You do a nslookup on the domain name and get the IP address. Then you use the ARIN whois system, (a completely different and totally unrelated database that used to run on the same software) which tells you what ISP an IP address has been issued to. ARIN whois is usually correct. If it is not correct you can complain to ARIN and they can check their records. Their records are always correct unless the IP addresses have been stolen (and if you're dealing with stolen IP addresses you're way past the point where DNS whois is going to help you, federal crime or not). Either way you'll get an ISP. You then go to a court and get a subpoena, and send that subpoena to the ISP, and the ISP produces contact information for the customer. This always works.

Let me be absolutely clear about this. Requiring people to keep accurate dns whois records has absolutely nothing at all to do with being able to track down domain holders on the internet. You can always do that today. Forcing people to keep accurate dns whois records is about being able to track down domain holders on the internet without court authorization. We should not allow that.

What really pisses me off here is that no one on "our side of the fence" in this debate is making that point. We're going to loose this one if the discussion isn't forced back into the realm of reality. If this is about people committing crimes on internet sites that can't be tracked down by any means, we'll be passing laws based on a complete fantasy.

Kids, this is exactly how bad law happens.

Congress Eyes Idiotic Whois Crackdown