Interesting Stuff

I realize that this would have been more timely before the election, but I’ve come across a very good demonstration of how Diebold voting machines can be compromised without leaving any evidence behind. Seeing this stuff makes it seem much more real than reading about it.

and one more reminder to not trust Wikipedia more than you’d trust a friend of an acquaintance: the entry on Jim Sensenbrenner has had its “controversy” section removed. There is now no mention that Sensenbrenner introduced the controversial PATRIOT and Real ID Acts, nor is there a mention of his travel budget, which is paid for by special interests (against congressional rules) and is the largest of any Congressperson. edit: upon closer reading, these things are sprinkled in among the other sections in the page, but are not as easily accessible as they had been. So remember: don’t trust Wikipedia to be either correct or unbiased, any more than you’d trust anyone you’ve just met. Edit: and don’t trust the pages to keep the same format they have now.

The big thing around here is that UCLA Police tasered a student for refusing to show his ID or leave the library. This was caught on camera and can be found on YouTube, though I should post a WARNING: THIS VIDEO IS VERY DISTRUBING, AND WATCHING IT MADE ME PHYSICALLY SICK. If you are still interested, here is the video. The UCLA administration has ordered an independent investigation into the matter, while the student has hired a civil rights attorney and filed a lawsuit for brutal excessive force.

In other news, the US has decided to trade nuclear technology with India. I think this is an absolutely horrible move on many different fronts. India has not signed the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, and may very well restart its arms race and standoff with Pakistan. Part of the fuel sent to India will be used in civilian reactors, but part is also reserved for military applications that the UN will not be allowed to examine. Finally, this gives the US even less bargaining power to get Iran to stop its neclear programme (which I am given to understand is completely non-weapons oriented; they seem to be pursuing only energy). I got to see Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq (who resigned because he was convinced they didn’t have WMDs when the politicians kept saying they did), a couple weeks ago, and he said at the time that as soon as the election was over, Bush was going to start pushing the Iran nuclear weapons thing again (which has already started: the US navy has begun moving troops into the Persian Gulf). Ritter, as a former weapons inspector, has pored over the reports of the current weapons inspectors in Iran, and is confident that they have done a good, solid job but have found absolutely no evidence whatsoever of a nuclear weapons programme in the country. I’ve gone off on a tangent, but the main idea is that the US is trying to lie about Iran, and their actions with India are only undermining their position further.

Finally, the scariest news for today: the Military Commissions Act was signed into law today. Among other things, it allows people, even US citizens, to be detained and tortured (by the definition in the Geneva Conventions) without ever being charged or told why they are being held, at the sole discretion of the president. The scariest part about this is that if there are abuses, there is absolutely no way they will ever be disclosed or appealed. If you are wrongfully imprisoned by this law, you will never be given access to a lawyer, you will never be allowed to challenge the legality of your detainment, and you will never be heard from again. I feel very frustrated that the majority of Congresspeople were in favour of this. Due to laws like this, combined with the Real ID Act of 2005 (which requires a National ID card to be carried by everyone starting in 2008, and which was introduced by civil liberties foe Jim Sensenbrenner), it seems that our country has become alarmingly protofascist. It’s really scary stuff.

There seems to be a whole lot of talk all of a sudden about net neutrality recently, with editorials from both sides as well as grassroots websites on both sides. The basic debate is whether or not ISPs should give priority to certain packets of data getting to/from your computer, based on certain characteristics of the data (its source/destination, the type of application that is sending/receiving it, etc). A bit of an anti-regulation overview can be found here, including a quote from the head of the Center for Democracy and Technology, Alan Davidson. I’m tentatively leaning towards the pro-net neutrality side, but I think there are good arguments on both sides of the debate here.

On the anti-neutrality side,

• It would be nice if VoIP and streaming video were given priority over, say, email, since they need to be received in realtime, while my email can arrive half a second late and I won’t really notice. This would make realtime applications run better on hardware that can barely support them, and shouldn’t make a significant difference on hardware that can easily support them or hardware that can’t do it at all.
• This sounds silly, but it is the ISPs’ hardware that delivers the internet to you. They can really do anything they want with it. If you don’t like what they’re doing, switch ISPs. I can’t think of any legal argument that really prevents ISPs from doing this kind of thing.
• Tiers of service have worked in many other businesses: airline tickets have first class, coach, economy, etc. Shipping has 2-day delivery, 3-day delivery, ground delivery, etc. This would be a similar system, and is likely to operate at a similarly useful level.
• As a general rule, free markets work better than ones that have been regulated by the government. If ISPs want to start partnering with certain websites to deliver their content faster than their competitors, I suspect a lot of business could grow around such a concept, and lots of people would make lots of money. This isn’t necessarily good for the consumer (it has the potential to not be bad for the consumer, however), but it’s great for lots of businesses, and probably good for the economy.

On the pro-neutrality side,

• There have already been past incidents (most notably in Canada) of abuse of this system, in which things like VoIP service from the ISPs’ competitors had its quality intentionally degraded.
• We’re already paying ISPs for broadband internet access; we shouldn’t have to pay them again for the same broadband internet access to websites that aren’t affiliated with them. Such tiering would divide the internet into many different clusters and make inter-cluster communication more difficult.
• Giving preference to packets of one sort of application over another will likely discriminate against any new form of application that tries to run over the internet, making innovation harder.
• The internet is sort of like a public good, and from an economic standpoint, government regulation (in the form of a regulated monopoly) often is best for the consumer.

This next is a very weak argument and should not be persuasive at all, but a lot of people I would consider “good,” including Google and the creators of TCP/IP are in favor of net neutrality regulation. A lot of groups I would consider “bad,” such as large telecom companies, are against net neutrality. The one exception is that Jim Sensenbrenner, creator of the PATRIOT Act and general foe of civil liberties and privacy, is pro-net neutrality and even introduced the legislation about it (though it was voted down for the moment).

What do other people think of the issue? I imagine I’ve missed some important points in the debate somewhere, and if you know which ones, I’d like to hear about them. Other opinions are always welcomed.