Interesting Stuff

Regular readers are no doubt aware of my distrust of Wikipedia. It’s great for untrusted knowledge, the sort you get from a friend of a friend of a friend. However, I wouldn’t trust it for anything important, controversial, subtle, or tricky. Whether it’s Stephen Colbert fans changing the elephant populations or Fox News adding libel to its competitors’ entries, whether Diebold is removing the sections about how its voting machines don’t work or just minor details gotten totally wrong, Wikipedia has more misinformation, disinformation, and lack of information than I think its proponents realize. There is now a way to track such edits, but frankly I don’t have time to babysit the internet.

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has pointed out these faults in the system, too, and has tried to remedy them with his new project, Citizendium. It’s similar to Wikipedia, but with several problems fixed. There is no anonymity, so it’s easy to tell what was added by a person with a particular agenda. Misuses, vandalism, and libel get you banned for life. There are experts on particular topics who act as editors and settle any disagreements that arise from the authors (anyone can edit a page, but if an edit war breaks out, the expert steps in and stops it).

The whole thing looks much more accurate and relevant (I haven’t found a random page I wasn’t at least mildly interested in). However, I fear that the project will be doomed to failure because the barrier to entry is too high: before editing any page, you actually need to sign up for an account, which involves convincing a real person that you’re a real person, too. This is as simple as pointing to a website that contains your name and email address in the same sentence, but it means that the vast majority of netizens won’t bother signing up. I hope the project pans out, but it’s been a year and they haven’t yet broken 10,000 pages or 10,000 users. We’ll see if this takes off.

Conclusion: poetry is hard. No, I think I said that wrong, so I’ll try again. Writing poetry is hard! and totally underappreciated! I set out to see how difficult it was several weeks ago, when I decided that I would start writing my posts in metered verse, slowly turning them more and more into poetry until I got through 5 posts or someone noticed, whichever came first. I began by discussing the latest in gay marriage debates and airline liquid bans in dactyllic verse (though I relaxed the sentence length restrictions for the second paragraph). I then wrote about XeTeX in iambic pentadecameter (intended to be 3-line stanzas of iambic pentameter, but I couldn’t handle word breaks at the end of lines). Both of these posts took several hours to compose over multiple days, which took much longer than I expected. I have tried several times to compose a subsequent post with word breaks where line breaks should be, but couldn’t do it before finding several more postworthy things, and got severely backlogged in stuff I wanted to write about. So, as of today, I’m abandoning this experiment and admitting defeat. I can’t do it: writing poetry is way too hard. and the worst part is that the things with which poets concern themselves are so subtle that no one notices unless you point and say, “look at the structure of this language; it is unusual.” They put all this effort into amazing, clever literary constructions, and we, the unwashed masses, don’t even notice what they do most of the time. I certainly didn’t appreciate it until I tried it out. Attempting this has given me a newfound respect for poetry and poets. I had no idea it was so difficult, and I’m amazed that others are so skilled at it.

Get XeTeX on your box and tell me what you think of TeXing with the font Zapfino (which has been installed on every Mac). My first impression, looking round the Tubes, is that it’s gorgeous, with its swashes and alternatives for every character. However, it appears to need a bunch of extra macros, and it might be problematic understanding everything. I wish that I could try this out myself, except Zapfino is prohibitively costly just to mess around a bit. So anyone who has it without shelling out a dime, if you could give me your opinion I’d appreciate it much. I guess I ought to simply buy a Mac (despite the cost) because I’ve wanted one for ages and they look so very nice.

The news of the week comes in two different parts, and I think that they both are distressing.

The high court of Maryland held up a law which has banned all gay marriages there. They didn’t, however, say lawmakers cannot repeal the decree if they want. In other words, neither the ban nor gay marriage is unconstitutional there. This nonetheless comes as a setback for anyone trying to legalize it; I fear that repealing the law will not happen for several more years at this rate.

Also, the EU rejected a plea from their parliament asking to cancel the ban of all liquids on flights coming into or leaving from Europe. They claim that the liquids can still pose a threat in the hands of some mythical terrorists (these people, apparently, somehow are able to blow up a plane with the liquids but cannot, of course, simply carry them on in the smaller containers allowed). The problem as I see it lies in the fact that the only known terororists ever considering using a liquid explosive were foiled without such a ban, and instead they were caught using only police and detective work (note that I thought there were older attempts, but I can’t seem to find them again; I recall that they also had planned to use liquids and they, too, were stopped by police work instead. I think this had been in the ’90’s sometime, but it’s honestly just a gut feeling.). However, the EU’s Commission decided that lifting the ban would still “lower its guard” and instead they require “the full range” of (useless and impotent) measures in place. These rules are so stupid; I wish someone there would just tell them they’re being irrational.

It looks like dhalps beat me to it, and linked to an excellent article. Judge Victor Marrero has ruled that the part of the PATRIOT Act discussing National Security Letters is unconstitutional, saying it violates the first and fourth amendments. Ars Technica has a good explanation of what happened. The basic idea is that these are letters which force people (read: ISPs, librarians, bankers, etc) to give information to the FBI, ostensibly so they can fight terrorism. Moreover, they come with “gag” restrictions which make it illegal to tell anyone else that you received such a letter. and there’s no judicial oversight, so it’s basically a way for the FBI to get any information they want while making it illegal to fight back (to bring this to court in the first place, the plaintiff had to remain anonymous and file as a John Doe with the ACLU). The government is likely to appeal; this same thing happened in 2004 with Judge Marrero, the government appealed, and the Secound Circuit sent it back to him after Congress revised the law in question. Nonetheless, this is definitely a (small) step in the right direction.

You know you’re onto something when Bruce Schneier picks it up and calls it “a big deal.” He found a much more eloquent article on the topic, however.

I previously wrote about how JPL employees are being forced to let the government intrusively investigate their private lives or lose their jobs. Well, now there are a couple dozen senior employees who are suing JPL and NASA to fight back. The “press release” has a lot of unnecessary Bush-bashing (Bush’s original Directive seems fairly reasonable; the problem is how NASA has been executing it, since they’re trying to do all sorts of things it doesn’t require), but it has some really nice links at the bottom to more official documents. Moreover, this is starting to be picked up in the mainstream press. It’s nice to see that some JPL employees are fighting this, and even nicer to see that people are taking notice.

Today at work we bandied about an interesting logic puzzle, and understanding the answer totally blew my mind. It goes like this:

All dragons have either red eyes or green eyes. If a dragon ever knows its own eye color, it will die on the next stroke of midnight. Moreover, dragons, like all mythical beasts, are perfect logicians. That is to say, if it is possible to infer a fact from what is already known, dragons cannot help but make this deduction.

There is a town in which n dragons live, where n is small enough that every day, every dragon interacts with every other dragon. One day, an oracle, renowned for always speaking the truth, comes to the town. She gathers together all the dragons, looks at each one, and then loudly proclaims, “At least one dragon here has red eyes!”

1. What happens in the town?
2. Suppose that at least three dragons have red eyes. Now, not only does every dragon already know that at least one dragon has red eyes, they also know that every other dragon knows this, too. What information does the oracle add that the dragons didn’t have already?

You may remember in November 2005 when I wrote about [1] the Sony/BMG rootkit scandal. To summarize: they put software on their music CDs that, when run in a computer, automatically installed files you couldn’t detect (this was the rootkit part) that acted a lot like malware, and screwed with your CD-ROM drivers so that if you tried to uninstall it, you could no longer use your CD-ROM drive. The intended purpose was to run DRM software that kept you from copying your CDs, and to hide this software so you couldn’t uninstall it. However, the rootkit could also be exploited by others, so that any malicious software (if installed in the right place) would go completely undetected by any antivirus program you might be running. It was nasty stuff. Sony eventually recalled the CDs and offered to give out software to remove the rootkit if you gave them your name, address, phone number, and a bunch of other information. In the meantime, the FTC ruled that the software was illegal, and Sony paid out millions of dollars in class-action lawsuits.

Why do I bring this up, I hear you ask? Well, it seems that Sony can’t let this idea die: earlier this week it was revealed that Sony is trying a similar thing with their new USB flash drives. Again, this software automatically installs a rootkit on your computer, and again this rootkit can be easily exploited by any other software to hide files on your machine. I suspect this will end similarly, with a recall and a class-action lawsuit, assuming this gets as far in the media as the last rootkit did (I hope the media picks up on this).

I remember back in the day when Sony was a great company, and I really liked them. Things seem to have changed significantly since Howard Stringer became CEO of the company (which happened about 9 months before the first rootkit scandal was born). These days, I’m really dismayed with them. I’m now going to start boycotting Sony products (which shouldn’t be too hard, since I don’t buy much from them anyway).

[1] Only half the links in my old post still work. Sorry about that. Does anyone have any good ideas for how to avoid this problem in the future?