Thanks, Wikipedia Sleuths! Threat Level Places in Innovative Journalism Awards | Threat Level from Wired.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
2:05 pm EDT, Aug 12, 2008
Threat Level is one of four finalists in the 2008 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism for our readers' work digging up over 100 self-serving anonymous edits performed by corporations and governments on Wikipedia.
Readers used WikiScanner to uncover the shenanigans.
I hope they are also thanking Virgil. He did most of the work here, really.
Statue of Liberty's crown may reopen to public - Yahoo! News
Topic: Miscellaneous
4:43 pm EDT, Jul 5, 2008
The National Park Service is considering reopening Lady Liberty's crown for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to documents a congressman released on July Fourth.
More evidence that sex offender hysteria motivates corrupt legislators to produce policy that is fucking stupid.
The facts are pretty darned sad. Barely more than a child himself at 19, Bradshaw was charged with statutory rape for having sex with a 15-year-old girl. Fine. That’s punishable. I’d prefer it had been kept out of the criminal justice system (see here for more) but its punishable. He gets 5 years.
After he gets out he gives an invalid address. For that, too, he pleads guilty and is sentenced to time served. When released he moves in with his sister but can’t live there because Georgia’s draconian sex offender law won’t let him live within 1,000 feet of a recreation center!
He moves in with an aunt but can’t stay there because the home is within 1,000 feet of the First Baptist Church! Growing desperate, he finds a family friend but this time inadvertently transposes the street address!
Now the cops move in. Bradshaw is arrested because he hadn’t moved into the friend’s single-wide trailer within the legally required 72 hours — and lied and said he did! His mandatory sentence for this infraction is life in prison.
A Georgia lawyer in this thread says that many of these people end up being homeless because they cannot find a place to live that complies with the law, and then they end up getting arrested for being homeless.
Fortunately we have elected representatives who are capable of forming logical thoughts:
Sen. President pro tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) said the law is clear.
"I wish it hadn't happened, but there are consequences for people's actions," said Johnson, a chief sponsor of the offender law. "What would have happened if he had given the wrong address and had lived in a place and was harming a child next door? The law is trying to protect children. Justice has to be blind to motive."
1. Eric Johnson recommended these particular consequences. He has to defend why they are appropriate, and not refer to them as if they are beyond his control! 2. This person is not a pedophile. 3. This is not an attempt to protect children. Strict statutory rape laws are designed to attack teenagers for having sex out of wedlock. In this case coupled with a hysteria driven over broad sex offender registration rule intended as marketing fodder for political campaigns. 4. No, justice does not have to be blind to motive! There is a difference between malice murder and involuntary manslaughter. If you don't understand that you shouldn't be writing laws.
The Last HOPE - July 18-20, 2008 - Hotel Pennsylvania - New York City
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:37 am EDT, Jun 20, 2008
Warrantless Laptop Searches at U.S. Borders
Decius
U.S. customs agents have begun randomly searching the contents of laptops carried by individuals across U.S. border checkpoints. Personal laptops contain increasingly vast and intimate collections of information about their owners, and cannot be easily sanitized for government inspection prior to travel. The privacy implications of this policy are obviously tremendous. There is presently a debate in the U.S. court system about the constitutionality of these searches. This talk will cover the developments so far, explaining (and criticizing) the basic legal framework in which this debate is occurring as well as the reasoning employed by the courts that have heard this issue. Related topics will also be discussed, such as recent controversy over the Fifth Amendment right to refuse to reveal an encryption password to the police and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Attendees will be armed with a deeper understanding of these present threats to our fundamental rights.
Decius will be speaking at Hope next month in NYC. A number of other people connected with MemeStreams are also speaking. It should be a good time.
Schneier on Security: Dan Geer on Security, Monoculture, Metrics, Evolution, Etc.
Topic: Miscellaneous
8:34 pm EDT, May 28, 2008
Here is the text and video of Dan Geer's remarks at Source Boston 2008, basically a L0pht reunion with friends.
At the end of the day, however, we are facing a much bigger, more metaphysical question than the ones I have so far posed. That I can pose many others is of no consequence; either you are sick of them by now or you are scribbling down your own as I speak. The bigger question is this -- how much security do we want?
A world without failure is a world without freedom. A world without the possibility of sin is a world without the possibility of righteousness. A world without the possibility of crime is a world where you cannot prove you are not a criminal. A technology that can give you everything you want is a technology that can take away everything that you have. At some point, real soon now, some of us security geeks will have to say that there comes a point at which safety is not safe.
In the Valley's coffee community, Bill McCauley was regarded as a pleasant, popular fellow.
As well as in the Silicon Valley tech community. Several people here at MemeStreams worked for Bill back in 2000-2001.
According to Tempe authorities, on the morning of May 5, McCauley backed his car into the storage area of Red Rock Foods, 626 S. Smith Road, and deliberately set a gasoline-fueled fire.
The explosion also killed his pet dachshund Millikin, named for its owner's alma mater in Illinois.
No note was found, leaving those left behind only speculation about why McCauley would kill himself in such a public and painful manner.
I'm truly in shock here.. Bill burned himself to death. It's not like he ran his car inside a garage with the door down... He lit himself and his car on fire! The article uses the word "explosion"! I can't imagine what the hell could have been going on in his mind.
I maintained contact with Bill over the years. He was someone I'd talk to via IM regularly, sometimes going back and forth for hours while working on things. We wound up speaking once a year via phone for some reason or another.
He was a friend. He was someone I admired.
We was a complex guy, who you always knew you were only scratch the surface of... It was always peculiar that there were a large number of pretty damn signifigant achievements that he always kept largely to himself.
I had worked with him and then known him for a few years before I knew things like he had a PhD in physics. Or a masters in nuclear engineering.. Hell, he had a stack of degrees. He was the director of testing at one of the Livermore laser labs, and at another point one of the super computing facilities. He built the NOC at Globalcenter back during the early days of the Internet boom, and was literally right there for a number of milestones in the early history of the Internet in a number of different contexts. We built some of the most advanced data-centers in Asia under his direction.
He had a hell of a history, a ton of stories, and seemed to know someone everywhere. Back at IAWK, people regarded his rolodex like a weapon of mass destruction. He was always good for advice.
I imagine that there are many people who knew him recently who only know a fraction of his background...
Walt Finley, landlord of the industrial complex where Red Rock is a tenant, said that about a month ago, McCauley complained to him about "terrible stomach trouble."
And, Finley recalled following the suicide, the manager of Daily Buzz told him that McCauley recently was treated in a hospital emergency room.
But on Arizona-Coffee.com's thread devoted to McCauley's death, business associate Ron Cortez relayed the news that "Red Rock was going through serious financial struggles and Bill was getting behind in payments with many of his suppliers."
This is really troubling to me. It doesn't fit my image of Bill. I really want to think that bad health and financial troubles wouldn't be enough to even put a dent into the man's fortitude..
I think Bill was more lonely then he ever let on.. He always lived alone. Maybe the coffee house was a way for him to defeat being lonely. It's strange how someone can be so outgoing and generally good spirited, but be harboring something that would make them set themselves on fire.
It's a truly uncomfortable thing to try to reason through why someone would do something like this after they are gone. No notes. No emails. No myspace posts. No twitters. No clues present in any of Bill's usual places.. No sense to any of it..
This has really taken me for a loop.. I'm going to really miss Bill. I was planning to find a way to visit him and see the coffee house in the next year...
With researchers at Yale University and a group of companies that make file-sharing software, Verizon collaborated to enable faster downloads for consumers and lower costs for participating ISPs.
In a traditional P2P network, if a Verizon customer downloads a file, only 6.3 percent of the data will come from another Verizon customer in the same city, said Doug Pasko, senior technologist at the company. In the "P4P" trial, 58 percent of the data came from nearby Verizon users, vastly reducing the company's cost of carrying the traffic.
Levitan said the technology might be ready for use by next month, when NBC makes available free downloads of its TV shows using Pando's software. The shows will be financed by advertising, and P2P technology will be an essential way for NBC to cut costs. Distributing an hourlong TV show in high definition using traditional delivery systems would cost the network about $1. With P2P technology, that cost can be cut by 75 to 90 percent.
Around 2000-2002 I was talking a fair amount about creating a protocol for ordering lists of IPs by network location. My idea was fairly simple.. Create server software that would hold a full BGP route table in memory and respond to requests (over UDP based protocol probably) to score a list of IP addresses. The software would return the list of IPs with scores based on how close they were to you based on AS paths. P2P clients could then decide what peers they connect to based on the scores the server handed back. The end result would be that clients could be coded to prefer connections to clients closest to them.
These servers could live anywhere on the Internet, and could be run by anyone who is in a position to receive full BGP routes.
I mentioned this idea to Bram Cohen at a BSD users group meeting in San Francisco, and he seemed to think it was a lousy idea.. Around that time, I stopped caring..
Cable companies have been the toughest on P2P file-sharing. Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable company, is being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission for secretly placing temporary roadblocks in the way of file-sharing traffic. Other cable companies admit to using less drastic methods to slow file-sharing and keep it from drowning out other forms of traffic.
AT&T Inc., the country's largest phone company, is a member of the P4P Working Group and has participated in a simulation similar to Verizon's test. But it has also has said it is looking at ways to filter out pirated content from its lines, which presumably would mean blocking some P2P traffic. Verizon rejects that approach.
"Verizon does not accept the role of network police agency," the company said.
Hopefully a more ISPs follow Verizon's lead. (I never though I'd see myself type that sentence...)
