Interesting Stuff

First off, I am seriously considering switching OSes: the world file on my Gentoo system (kernel version 2.6.17-r4) seems to have been destroyed, and I’m having a lot of trouble rebuilding it and keeping everything working. I’d like a system that is less work to maintain. I’d been trying to choose between the different flavors of BSD when Mac showed me Xubuntu (a variation of Ubuntu that uses the XFCE desktop environment), and that definitely has possibilities, too. I’ve got a bunch of questions I want to have answered before I switch, though. Who among you has administered an Ubuntu system?

I have found a beautiful new webcomic, called XKCD. I suspect computer scientists will appreciate it more than others, but it has some insightful, witty concepts in it (it discusses computer science, love, happiness, “your mom” jokes, and much more, all with a postmodernism twist), and smatterings of beautiful abstract art (sandwiched between the stick figure drawings of which most of the comic is made up). Definitely worth browsing the ~150 comics in the archives (though the current strip is kinda lame). Fun strips can be found here, here, and here.

Several weeks ago, Michael showed me a trailer for a game called Portal, which seems to be a takeoff of Halflife (it will be released with the next Halflife game). It’s a puzzle game with a really cool premise.

Since this was a Wednesday, I naturally spent the evening drinking. A bunch of Googlers went to Ye Olde King’s Head Bar (about 5 blocks from work), and hung out for about 4 hours. A group of about 8 of us formed a team to compete in the weekly trivia challenge. We took 7th place out of 10, though we could have taken 5th if we hadn’t gone for broke in the final round. It was a pretty fun evening.

If you are so inclined, go take a look at DownsizeDC, which is trying to introduce the Read The Bills Act into Congress. The basic idea is that nearly all bills are passed into law without more than a handful of lawmakers actually reading them. An excellent example of this is in 1971 when the Texas Legislature unanimously passed a bill praising the Boston Strangler (a member of the house had introduced it to demonstrate that his peers pass bills without reading them). The Read The Bills Act would require all congresspeople to either read or listen to the entire text of a bill before voting on it. This will hopefully stop more pet projects, controversial measures, and unpopular riders from being unknowingly passed. It would also limit the amount of legislature that could be created, hopefully leading to smaller government. We’ll see. If you think this would be a good idea, please write/call your congresspeople!

Finally, in The Economist recently I read an article about Kinky Friedman, who is running for Texas Governor. He seems to be running on a platform which notes that everyone is fed up with both Democrats and Republicans, and want someone new (this is pretty much why Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger were elected). He seems to want to curb bureaucratic government spending while giving more money to teachers, firefighters, and other people who are actually doing useful and underappreciated things. I’m not sure he has the wherewithall or policital know-how to actually pull this off, but it would certainly be interesting if he was elected.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a small group of lawyers and techies who are sort of like the ACLU, but only for technology-type stuff. Because the EFF is so small, they don’t have the resources to take on every case that comes along the way the ACLU does. Consquently, they wait for the perfect case, and then kick ass. The EFF was behind the class action lawsuit over Sony BMG’s rootkits (I don’t think I ever posted the resolution of that, but the EFF won and if you bought one of these CDs, you can get some money and a way to remove them from your machine and stuff). The EFF was behind the landmark case about the broadcast flag that finally gave you the right to record what you want on your TiVo or VCR (again). They were the ones who got the electronic voting company Diebold kicked out of North Carolina for their unethical business practices and intentional security problems. The EFF are all-around awesome people!

Anyways, they’re now battling AT&T over the warrantless wiretapping thing (the ACLU is also suing AT&T, but the two cases are, at least for now, separate). At DEFCON, I got to see a panel of 5 EFF people discuss this case with the audience. AT&T has been completely assy about every point, arguing ludicrous things, such as the claim that the address of their main datacenter is a trade secret (despite the fact that it’s registered with the city of San Francisco and is in the phone book). Time after time, the judge has come down on the EFF’s side. The EFF has even managed to work around the State Secrets issues that right-wing pundits expected would bring the entire trial to a standstill (the EFF’s arguments here were amazingly clever. Post a comment if you’re interested in hearing more). Earlier this week, the judge in the ACLU’s suit ruled that AT&T must stop their practices, though they plan to appeal this to the 9th circuit court of appeals (though knowing the 9th circuit, the decision should stand). The EFF’s judge has already made a similar ruling, and by now should have decided whether AT&T can continue the wiretapping while they appeal (though I don’t know the outcome of that edit: they can continue re-edit: that was for the ACLU case. I still don’t know what happened to the motion to stay in the EFF case). As usual, Fox “News” is using intimidation and straw-man arguments to say that the ruling is the work of a foolish, activist, outsider judge. The Washington Post is taking a more reasonable, moderate stance.

In the meantime, there’s a scary bill looming on the horizon. This bill, if passed into law, would specifically legalize warrantless wiretapping, thereby stripping away all congressional oversight. Personally, I feel this is ridiculous, because FISA (the secret court that is supposed to oversee wiretaps) has never once in its entire 30-year history turned down a wiretap application. Moreover, the Arlen-Cheney bill would move the ACLU’s and EFF’s legal battles from the normal courts over to FISA, where no one would ever be able to find out what occurred or why. If you want to keep your Fourth Amendment rights and not have a chilling effect set over all of America, please, please call or write to your Congresspeople (note that that link is secure and any data you put in that form will be encrypted; yet another good thing the EFF does).

A couple minor points about the EFF: EFF’s stance on net neutrality →

The UN is getting pretty upset with all of the USA’s torture and human rights violations. There have been many complaints over the years, but this one is pretty serious. However, I can’t think of a way to easily resolve this sort of thing. The reasonable people of the world say that this violates US law, the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture treaty, etc. However, the people in charge of Guantanamo Bay and other US international prisons disagree and do not intend to change their ways. Is there any course of action to stop them outside of war/revolution/assassination? To the best of my knowledge, there’s nothing the UN can do besides whine a bunch, and there’s nothing the US citizens can do besides protest a lot. This administration has already shown that it will not listen to either of the above methods of lobbying. Any thoughts on what else we can do?

The good news: the president of Diebold resigned after enough problems with the ethics of his company, his products, and his personal business dealings. I maintain that if people are hell-bent on electronic voting (and I personally am hell-bent against it), the system should be transparent and open-source so that anyone can both verify that it is correct and formulate improvements to the system.

The bad news: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran claims that the Holocaust never happened. This is significantly less forgivable than claiming that Israel is a blot in the middle of the Arab world that should be wiped off it. It makes my blood boil to hear people say things like this. I might be able to understand the claims if the Holocaust had happened centuries ago, but some of the people who were in it are still alive today! Is President Ahmadinejad actually trying to claim that my grandfather did not get shipped to France to fight the Nazis? Is he claiming that 20 million Russians did not actually die in some fictional “World War,” and have merely been hiding in their basements lo these past sixty years? He certainly seems to be purporting that everything from Kristallnacht to Auschwitz is an elaborate hoax. Argh!

The ugly news: I have 3 tests to take, a 10-page paper to write, 4 assignments to grade (with 20-ish people turning in each one), 7-ish ACM problems to code up, and 3 more grad school apps that need to be finished this week. I wish I could say I’m almost home, but I’m not.