If you notice strange monkeys hanging around Google's main page today, that is because it is the chinese new year, and it is now the year of the monkey. That makes me happy, as I was born in 1980 - also the year of the monkey. Apparently this means that this year will be good for me - which is good luck already as I have to take my qualifying exams in May:)

Year of the Monkey

] "Internet voting presents far too many opportunities for
] hackers or even terrorists to interfere with fair and
] accurate voting, potentially in ways impossible to detect,"
] the computer experts said in a statement. "Such tampering
] could alter election results, particularly in close contests."

] "Not only could a political party attempt to manipulate
] an election by attacking SERVE, but so could individual
] hackers, criminals, terrorists, organizations such as the
] Mafia and even other countries," the report said.

... but it seems they are continuing with plans anyway.

I don't get the logic in play here.. If you had asked me several years ago what I thought would happen if these situations came up, I would have said that I'd expect the government to be very conservative when it came to the voting system. I would have though that they would have resisted all this Internet/electronic based voting system stuff way beyond the point where security professionals had given it a clean bill of health.

Why is it so important to have Internet voting systems? If there is reason to believe they are flawed, why still push? There is either a complete disconnect of logic, or other motives in play. I don't see how Florida changed the logic you'd apply to the problem..

Integrity of the voting system should take precedence over connivence, in all cases. No one seems to think any of these systems are secure, except for the people who make them.

Yahoo! News - Pentagon Stands by Internet Voting System

] Among the type of hacks the researchers outlined are ones
] that would overwhelm computers with a denial-of-service
] attack.
]
] Others are those that would remotely insert a phony Web
] page between the voter and the authentic server, and ones
] using a virus that could allow someone to alter a voter's
] choices before they're sent over an encrypted connection.
]
] "This is a minority report from one of the peer-review
] groups we invited to look at the SERVE system," said
] department spokesman Glen Flood. "Out of this group of
] about 10 or 11 members, only four of them decided that
] concerns were warranted.

It seems only 4 of them were worth a damn

CNN.com - Federal remote voting system called flawed - Jan. 21, 2004

] Inside the United States, where the war began, we
] must continue to give homeland security and law
] enforcement personnel every tool they need to defend
] us, the president said, noting that key provisions
] of the Patriot Act were set to expire next year.
]
] The terrorist threat will not expire on that
] schedule, he told lawmakers. Our law
] enforcement needs this vital legislation to protect our
] citizens. You need to renew the Patriot Act."

Fuck you Ashcroft. We are not interested in more Patriot Act. We do not live in the middle east. We live in America. We have rights and civil liberties built by our forefathers. You strip those from us and leave us with only what our forefathers would be rolling in their grave to learn about. You are not making me safer from terrorism by reading my bank account statemets without court concent but by dropping bombs on tents where terrorist reside. Also, you are not providing due process to those terrorist that reside in the United States. You only lock them up and throw away the key. Why not show the world our court system and due process and what happens to people/groups that carry out evil deeds.

Let the Patriot Act die is deserved death and bring on the guns and bombs where the real war of terrorism is fought.

MSNBC - Bush makes case for second term

] They enroll in institutions of higher education seeking
] wisdom, intellectual stimulation, and a degree that they
] hope will be their passport to self-reliance in the "real
] world." But in universities across the country, thousands
] of graduate and undergraduate students find themselves
] performing tasks that are on the ethical borderline of
] what is expected of them as students, research assistants
] and fellows.
]
]
] With a growing number of universities facing budget cuts
] and under increasing pressure to find new ways of making
] profits, student labor is grinding the wheels of
] America's academic machinery. They man phones,
] photocopiers, teach undergrad courses, grade papers,
] conduct research, analyze data

ABCNEWS.com : Are Students Slaves for Their Professors?

Very pointless...yet somehow compelling.

virtual bubble wrap

] Nokia will make an internal version of the Perl scripting
] language for Series 60 smartphones available to its
] developer community, Lee Epting, Nokia's VP of Developer
] Relations, tells us. Nokia acknowledges a demand for more
] developer options as Nokia's Symbian-based Series 60
] platform reaches mass market volumes.

This qualifies as "rad".

The Register | Nokia to release Perl for smartphones

] This collection of web pages documents Brad's activity on
] the system and the people who's lives he effected, from
] the first day he logged on MemeStreams to the day he
] passed on.

Brad

Rattle's comments:

For several months now, work has been underway building the next version of MemeStreams. It has been necessary to recode most of the site from scratch, so its taking awhile. At any given time the trials of life, lack of funding, bad timing, hardware failure, and general bad luck is screwing up the works. However, we _are_ making progress.

Just before the new year, I hit the point in the development process where new capabilities of mining and graphing social network data were becoming available. I decided to go off on a little tangent, embrace the milestone, and do something to show our technology's progress. The result is the Year in Graphs 2003. Over the course of putting this together I've wound up fixing all kinds of problems with our database conversion code and wrote much of what will become the new graphing engine. I even had a really good "eureka" moment in relation to some of our network theory.. Its been time usefully spent.

That being said, this is all very kludgy. I did not spend that much time crossing I's and dotting T's.. The fonts in the nodes are hard to read, some of the graphs look "squished", its missing the "Show Links" feature the current Social Network portion of the sites has, etc.. There is much room for improvement with our graphing. I look forward to additional feedback.. :)

While these graphs may be fun to look at, the data they are built with is what's really exciting.. The same thing that allowed me to make these graphs is what's going to lead to improvements in the capabilities of the Reputation Agent.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy browsing through this review of the past year!

MemeStreams - The Year in Graphs 2003

] Once prion diseases infect a body, the proteins change
] shape and, with a kiss of death, turn their neighbors
] into clones of themselves. Clumps of misshapen proteins
] form, overwhelming neurons and poking holes in the brain.
] Death is inevitable.

Wired News: Prions: When Proteins Attack