inignoct wrote:
] ] It's "not possible" to fix him on the
] ] liberal-conservative scale, he said. "Where I am on the
] ] political spectrum is a convenient way to avoid talking
] ] about issues."
]
] A brief article in the Washinton Post about Howard Dean...
] the quote above is my especial favorite.

Well, I've got to say this is the first interview with Dean thats made me think maybe he's not such a good idea after all.

Should countries that trade with the US have the similar human rights and environmental ideals? In general, yes. You don't do business with people who do things that you think are immoral.

Can we decide tommorow to stop doing business with everyone who doesn't conform to our exact standards. Absolutely not. This issue is way more complex then that.

1. This isn't a case of linear maturity of human rights and environmental standards. In some cases, the US is seen as the laggard. For example, the US is one of the few countries in the world where minors can be executed. Why do we assume that our standards are the bar to which everyone else ought to be held?

2. These countries are not the same as the United States, and the rules that apply here do not always make sense there. Can China have the same minimum wage law as the US? No. There are too many people there for that. Such an action would cause massive unemployment. Can India conform to the same clean air standards? No. They are in a different stage of industrialization and they cannot afford the kind of clean industry that we engage in here. If you force third world countries to obey first world emmisions standards, then those countries absolutely will not industrialize. This is well understood. Countries that industrialize have a massive increase in emmissions before those emmisions start to drop back down (as they are in the United States).

3. The economic chaos caused by such a radical action would plunge world markets into depression and damage the standard of living for everyone on the planet.

Yes, we should have standards that we expect people to meet, and we should have timeframes in which we expect them to be met, and we ought to use our weight in the marketplace to keep that progress on schedule. Furthermore, we SHOULD (and frankly, do) stop trading with countries that we beleive are acting immorally.

However, to simply stop trading with everyone who has not reached our level of sophistication and expect them to adapt overnight is to give in to the oversimplified rhetoric of the most radical socialist elements in our society.

I won't vote for that.

RE: Defining Dean (washingtonpost.com)

] Fully electronic systems do not provide any way that the
] voter can truly verify that the ballot cast corresponds
] to that being recorded, transmitted, or tabulated. 

Lots of links to resources on electronic voting systems on this site if you dig around.

Voting systems are easy to manipulate, whether you are building misleading ballots, stuffing ballot boxes, flyering the inner city with notices about the election that include the wrong date, or simply paying off some friends in hollywood to run against you so that the serious candidates are forced to back down. :)

Its very difficult to build a ballot that cannot be stuffed. Tying things to drivers licenses is not enough. Creating all kinds of fake drivers in a district is really easy to do, and the people in a position to do it also run the election. Answers here are really hard to come by. You could publish a list of every voter's address. People could verify that the number of voters is the same as the number of votes. People could also attempt to audit this data independently. Run, for example, some software that correlates the addresses with physical space using a mapquest database in order to make sure that the people live at real addresses that don't overlap and that the population densities aren't out of whack. This might be a resource for spammers, but then again, so is the phonebook. In many states the voter registration lists are already available to political parties. Its just a matter of putting it online.

As for the votes themselves, all the security experts here argue for paper validated audit trails. Now, versus some questionably designed electronic system, yeah, I can see that being useful, but I don't share their agreement that electronic voting systems are bad, for one reason that I don't think they are considering.

Why not publish all the votes on the Internet? Why is the counting process always something that happens in a back room of a high school by a bunch of "bipartisan" old ladies?

When I vote, I get a random number. I can go on the website later and verify that my random number got tabulated correctly. I can count all the votes on the website using my own software and decide for myself who won the election.

The subject of voter coercion comes up. It always does. This is probably the least common and most difficult way of manipulating an election, and yet people always raise it. So, we have systems that are secure against voter coercion but not secure against ballot stuffing. Sigh...

If you want to protect against that in this system, you need only publish some of the votes immediately for people in the voting booths. If they don't want to tell the person coercing them what their random number was, they can simply hand out another random number that has the vote the coercor is looking for.

So, in sum, I think that electronic voting systems can be much more secure then any existing paper or ele... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Rebecca Mercuri's Statement on Electronic Voting

] An even greater risk is putting this subpoena power in
] the hands of anyone willing to pretend to have a copyright
] claim. These fraudulent requests will be impossible to
] distinguish from legitimate ones.

The EFF spoke of this at Defcon... That as these subpoenas become an established proceedure, which is almost the case now, they will be a powerfull tool for stalkers, batterers, and other kinds of predators. You don't really care about being in contempt of court if you are planning to assault someone. Predators will use these subpoenas to track down their victims. The internet will really become a very unsafe place unless you use an anonymizing proxy network.

Whether its the elminiation of judicial oversite for subpoenas or the approval of vigilanti computer hacking, Congress seems to be absolutely committed to the erosion of critical, fundamental pillars that underlie the very rule of law in the United States in an attempt to give their friends in the media industries what they want. Enabling predators is obviously far far worse then any amount of copyright infringement that might be going on, but thats just the beginning. If they continue down this road, Congress must eventually must conceed that by picking away at the rule of law they are in fact picking away at their own authority and their own reasons for existance. Do it here, and establish that its legal here, and it will pop up somewhere else, and then again, and again, until there are very serious threats to the stability of this system of goverment.

Of all possible ways to address this problem, these people have chosen a path that is dumber then any I had imagined... Between these actions, and the pressures they exert which will naturally lead to the development of extremely strong anonymizing proxy technology, Congress is breaking ground, at this moment, on a very, very ugly future for all of this. And they have absolutely, positively, no fucking clue about the implications of their actions. Tim May might just turn out to have been right all along.

The implications of DMCA subpoenas on privacy/stalking

] Many of the more than 3,600 death row inmates nationwide,
] as well as defendants and offenders at other points in
] the capital punishment system, have not received the
] quality of legal representation that the severity and the
] finality of a death sentence demand.

Old news, but interesting... The ABA wants a moratorium on the death penalty, essentially because convictions in our legal system are more often a function of wealth rather then guilt.

American Bar Association on the Death Penalty

This presidential candidate is running a weblog. Its a good way of seeming net-savvy, but he doesn't seem to have much of a technology strategy. He is, however, opposed to the Iraq war.

Blog for America - Howard Dean

] Even more troubling are the warning signs that large
] media corporations -- with massive market power -- could
] abuse that power by slanting news coverage in ways that
] serve their political or financial interests. There is
] always the danger that news organizations can push
] positive stories to gain friends in government, or
] unleash negative stories on artists, activists or
] politicians who cross them, or tell their audiences only
] the news that confirms entrenched views. But the
] danger is greater when there are no competitors to air
] the side of the story the corporation wants to ignore.

[IP] Ted Turner on FCC consolidation rules (text included)

] Ever since the invention of the printing press,
] governments have tried to make an ally out of owners of
] the means of information distribution. That's as old a
] story as when the powers that be tried to suppress
] Gutenberg's Bible. Not because they didn't believe in
] the Bible, but because they didn't believe everyone
] should be able to get one. This is a 600-year-old
] story. It's not a new story. But it's news to the United
] States that one side should get this close to that goal.

Strong words from Reed Hundt about the new FCC media ownership rule changes. Ted Turner has also come out strongly opposed to this in recent days. Basically the deal is that soon all the TV will be owned by Fox in the same way that all the radio stations are owned by Clear Channel.

[IP] Former FCC chairman: Deregulation is a right-wing power grab

] Joe Lieberman today is proposing a comprehensive new
] strategy to reignite our innovation economy and spur a
] new generation of prosperity. This strategy has an
] overarching goal of increasing U.S. productivity to a
] sustainable rate of 3 percent each year, roughly 50%
] greater than our ten year average - which would enable
] family incomes to double ever generation...

Leiberman comes out swinging with an aggressive pro-technology, pro-innovation strategy. 2004, round one, FIGHT!

Leiberman's technology plan

This is a complete Super-DMCA page with the text of the laws in various states and detailed information. Who can fight this in Tennessee??

Freedom to Tinker: Status of State Super-DMCA Bills

] But the real success story is the Contras, or rather
] their modern successor: al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden's crew
] is a band of government-funded anticommunist
] counterrevolutionaries who grew up and cut the apron
] strings. These new-model Contras don't need state support
] from Washington, Moscow, or any Accessory of Evil. Like
] Project Democracy, they've got independent financing: oil
] money, charity money, arms money, and a collection plate
] wherever a junkie shoots up in an alley. Instead of
] merely ignoring and subverting governments for a higher
] cause, as Poindexter did, al Qaeda tries to destroy them
] outright. Suicide bombers blew the Chechnyan provisional
] puppet government sky high. Cars packed with explosives
] nearly leveled the Indian Parliament. We all know what
] happened to the Pentagon.
]
] The next Iran-Contra is waiting, because the
] contradictions that created the first have never been
] resolved. Iran-Contra wasn't about eager American
] intelligence networks spreading dirty money in distant
] lands; it was about the gap between old, legitimate,
] land-based governments ruled by voters and the new,
] stateless, globalized predation. The next scandal will
] erupt when someone as molten, self-righteous, and
] frustrated as John Poindexter uses stateless power for
] domestic advantage. That's the breaking point in American
] politics: not when you call in the plumbers, but when you
] turn them loose on the opposition party. Then the Empire
] roils in a lather of sudden, indignant fury and strikes
] back against its own.

Wired 11.04: The Secret War Machine (Bruce Sterling)