Shoehorning drivers licenses

security / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “REAL ID” in Crypto-Gram (15 May 2005):

REAL ID also prohibits states from issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. This makes no sense, and will only result in these illegal aliens driving without licenses — which isn’t going to help anyone’s security. (This is an interesting insecurity, and is a direct result of trying to take a document that is a specific permission to drive an automobile, and turning it into a general identification device.)

Shoehorning drivers licenses Read More »

Confidential, Secret, Top Secret … and SSI

security / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “Sensitive Security Information (SSI)” in Crypto-Gram (15 March 2005):

For decades, the U.S. government has had systems in place for dealing with military secrets. Information is classified as either Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, or one of many “compartments” of information above Top Secret. Procedures for dealing with classified information were rigid: classified topics could not be discussed on unencrypted phone lines, classified information could not be processed on insecure computers, classified documents had to be stored in locked safes, and so on. The procedures were extreme because the assumed adversary was highly motivated, well-funded, and technically adept: the Soviet Union. …

In 1993, the U.S. government created a new classification of information — Sensitive Security Information. The information under this category, as defined by a D.C. court, was limited to information related to the safety of air passengers. This was greatly expanded in 2002, when Congress deleted two words, “air” and “passengers,” and changed “safety” to “security.” Currently, there’s a lot of information covered under this umbrella. …

The rules for SSI information are much more relaxed than the rules for traditional classified information. Before someone can have access to classified information, he must get a government clearance. Before someone can have access to SSI, he simply must sign an NDA. If someone discloses classified information, he faces criminal penalties. If someone discloses SSI, he faces civil penalties.

SSI can be sent unencrypted in e-mail; a simple password-protected attachment is enough. A person can take SSI home with him, read it on an airplane, and talk about it in public places. People entrusted with SSI information shouldn’t disclose it to those unauthorized to know it, but it’s really up to the individual to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’s really more like confidential corporate information than government military secrets. …

The U.S. government really had no choice but to establish this classification level, given the kind of information they needed to work with. For example, the terrorist “watch” list is SSI. If the list falls into the wrong hands, it would be bad for national security. But think about the number of people who need access to the list. Every airline needs a copy, so they can determine if any of their passengers are on the list. That’s not just domestic airlines, but foreign airlines as well — including foreign airlines that may not agree with American foreign policy. Police departments, both within this country and abroad, need access to the list.

Confidential, Secret, Top Secret … and SSI Read More »

Robot on the run

cool stuff, science, technology / /

From The Age:

Scientists running a pioneering experiment with “living robots” which think for themselves said they were amazed to find one escaping from the centre where it “lives”.

The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a “survival of the fittest” test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which has been running since March.

Gaak made its bid for freedom yesterday after it had been taken out of the arena where hundreds of visitors watch the machines learning as they do daily battle for minor repairs.

Professor Noel Sharkey said he turned his back on the drone and returned 15 minutes later to find it had forced its way out of the small make-shift paddock it was being kept in.

He later found it had travelled down an access slope, through the front door of the centre and was eventually discovered at the main entrance to the car park when a visitor nearly flattened it with his car. …

And he added: “But there’s no need to worry, as although they can escape they are perfectly harmless and won’t be taking over just yet.”

Robot on the run Read More »

Still accessible after 1000 years

commonplace book, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From BBC News:

In fact, it turns out that images stored electronically just 15 years ago are already becoming difficult to access. The Domesday Project, a multimedia archive of British life in 1986 designed as a digital counterpart to the original Domesday Book compiled by monks in 1086, was stored on laser discs.

The equipment needed to view the images on these discs is already very rare, yet the Domesday book, written on paper, is still accessible more than 1,000 years after it was produced.

Still accessible after 1000 years Read More »

How many people die each year in the world?

commonplace book / /

From Ask Yahoo!:

According to the CIA World Factbook, as of July, 2005, there were approximately 6,446,131,400 people on the planet, and the death rate was approximately 8.78 deaths per 1,000 people a year. According to our nifty desktop calculator, that works out to roughly 56,597,034 people leaving us every year. That’s about a 155,000 a day. …

The legal information resource ItsMyLife.com offers some interesting mortality statistics for the United States. Of the 2,400,000-plus Americans who die each year, over 45,000 are killed in transport accidents. The number of homicides, poisonings, and drunk driving fatalities are roughly the same, at around 17,000 each. Perhaps more surprisingly, a stunning 178,000 Americans die from medical or hospital error every year. …

The United Nations also offers a 2005 World Health Report. One of its key findings: this year almost 11 million children under the age of five will die from a preventable disease.

How many people die each year in the world? Read More »

Cybercrime more profitable than drug trafficing

business, politics, security, technology / /

From Reuters’ “Cybercrime yields more cash than drugs: expert“:

Global cybercrime generated a higher turnover than drug trafficking in 2004 and is set to grow even further with the wider use of technology in developing countries, a top expert said on Monday.

No country is immune from cybercrime, which includes corporate espionage, child pornography, stock manipulation, extortion and piracy, said Valerie McNiven, who advises the U.S. Treasury on cybercrime.

“Last year was the first year that proceeds from cybercrime were greater than proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs, and that was, I believe, over $105 billion,” McNiven told Reuters.

“Cybercrime is moving at such a high speed that law enforcement cannot catch up with it.”

For example, Web sites used by fraudsters for “phishing” — the practice of tricking computer users into revealing their bank details and other personal data — only stayed on the Internet for a maximum of 48 hours, she said. …

Developing countries which lack the virtual financial systems available elsewhere are easier prey for cybercrime perpetrators, who are often idle youths looking for quick gain.

“When you have identity thefts or corruption and manipulation of information there (developing countries), it becomes almost more important because … their systems start getting compromised from the get-go,” she said.

Cybercrime more profitable than drug trafficing Read More »

Tim O’Reilly’s definition of open source

technology / /

From Tim O’Reilly’s “Lessons from open source software development”, Communications of the ACM 41 (4): 33-7:

Open source is a term that has recently gained currency as a way to describe the tradition of open standards, shared source code, and collaborative development behind software such as the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems, the Apache Web server, the Perl, Tcl, and Python languages, and much of the Internet infrastructure, including Bind (The Berkley Internet Name Daemon servers that run the Domain Name System), the Sendmail mail server, and many other programs. … [But] open source … means more than the source code is available. The source must be available for redistribution without restriction and without charge, and the license must permit the creation of modifications and derivative works, and must allow those derivatives to be redistributed under the same terms as the original work.

Tim O’Reilly’s definition of open source Read More »

The inevitability of taxation

business, overheard, politics, science / /

From Giampaolo Garzarelli’s Open Source Software and the Economics of Organization:

Whenever organizational forms present rapid change because of their strong ties to technology, public policy issues are always thornier than usual. Indeed, historically, it seems that every time that there’s the development of a new technology or production process, the government has to intervene in some fashion to regulate it or to extract rents from it. This point is well- encapsulated in the well-known catch-phrase attributed to Faraday. After Faraday was asked by a politician the purpose of his recently discovered principle of magnetic induction in 1831, he replied: “Sir, I do not know what it is good for. However, of one thing I am quite certain, some day you will tax it”.

The inevitability of taxation Read More »

Professions and clubs

business, commonplace book, politics / /

From Giampaolo Garzarelli’s Open Source Software and the Economics of Organization:

Deborah Savage, in an innovative piece, proposes the following economic definition of a profession: a ‘profession is a network of strategic alliances across ownership boundaries among practitioners who share a core competence’ [Savage, D. A. (1994) “The Professions in theory and history: the case of pharmacy”, Business and Economic History 23 (2): 129-60.] …

In sum, the general organizational implications of Savage’s theory of professions are considerable. The most germane implications for our purposes seem to be the following.

  • The theory allows to narrowly define the area of operation of a profession because of its emphasis on core competencies – for example, pharmaceuticals, software, semiconductors, etc. – around which other capabilities and routines evolve and revolve.
  • It allows to distinguish professions from other forms of organization, such as firms, because integration of ownership is not a condicio sine qua non.
  • Professionals are autonomous and authoritative in their fields for their competencies allow them, on the one hand, ‘to solve routine problems easily and non-routine problems routinely’ (Savage 1994: 140) and, on the other, enable them to evaluate, and only be challenged by, other professionals. More concretely, they are independent yet interact in a coordinated and fertile fashion.
  • Professions are decentralized networks in that there’s not a central authority in command. The ‘organization’ of a profession is guaranteed by the exchange of knowledge that reduces uncertainty and stimulates trust amongst members. Professions are thus self-organizing.
  • Relatedly, there’s the role played by reputation as a signalling of quality, viz., reputation is a positive externality. Thus, professions can be interpreted as self-regulating organizations …

In a seminal article published in 1965, ‘An economic theory of clubs’, Buchanan described and formalized the institutional properties of a new category of good (or product) lying between the public and private polar extremes, conventionally called shared good. The good is usually enjoyed only by members participating in a voluntary association – i.e., a club – whose membership may be regulated by some dues. The theory of clubs, in a nutshell, studies the different institutional arrangements governing the supply and demand of the shared good. [Buchanan, J. M. (1965) “An economic theory of clubs”, Economica, N.S., 32 (125): 1-14.] …

Professions and clubs Read More »

A brief history of backdoors

history, security, technology / /

From Network Magazine:

Ken Thompson, a designer of the Unix OS, explained his magic password, a password that once allowed him to log in as any user on any Unix system, during his award acceptance speech at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) meeting in 1984. Thompson had included a backdoor in the password checking function that gets included in the login program. The backdoor would get installed in new versions of the Unix system because the compiler had Trojan Horse code that propagated the backdoor code to new versions of the compiler. Thompson’s magic password is the best known, and most complex in distribution, backdoor code.

A brief history of backdoors Read More »

The innovation of the margin

commonplace book, history, language & literature, on writing, technology / /

From InfoWorld:

In chapter 4 of Klaus Kaasgaard’s Software Design and Usability, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) alumnus Austin Henderson says that “one of the most brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin.” There was always space for unofficial data, which traveled with the official data, and everybody knew about the relationship between the two.

The innovation of the margin Read More »

A definition of fascism

politics / /

From Salon:

Robert O. Paxton, a former professor of social sciences at Columbia University and longtime historian of the political movement, sets out to formulate a working definition in his new book, The Anatomy of Fascism. … Only at the end does Paxton reveal what he’s settled on as an acceptable definition. Here it is:

“… a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

A definition of fascism Read More »

The late great Hungry Buddha

business, commonplace book, history, musings, true stories / /

This was written 15 January 2002, & the Hungry Buddha is gone now, but this is still an interesting description.

The late great Hungry BuddhaJust got back from lunch at the Hungry Buddha. Man, that was good. It’s a small place on Washington Street in downtown St. Louis. There are signs all along the walls: “Buddha would bus his own table”. “Buddha would tip”. “Overfilling your bowl is bad karma”. A stereo played a mix of tunes, everything from Smashing Pumpkins to other stuff — and at a reasonable volume that made conversation easy.

The food was really great. Basically, you grab a bowl and go through a vegetable buffet — probably the best vegetable buffet I’ve ever seen, with peppers, sprouts, carrots, celery, shitake mushrooms (!), and more! — filling your bowl, then go to the counter and answer a few questions:

“Rice, noodles, or broth?”
“One bowl or all you can eat?”
“Tofu?”
“Water, tea, or soda?”
“What kind of sauce?”

They take your bowl into the kitchen and cook it up to your specifications. 10 minutes later, a hot, steaming bowl of yummy goodness is delivered to your table. Cost? $6.50 for a bowl, or $7.50 for all you can eat.

I got the Sichuan sauce with rice & tofu the first time, and then I went back for Black Bean Garlic sauce with rice & tofu. Both were excellent. However, next time I go, I think I’ll just get one bowl — I ate both, but I think I accumulated some gluttony points with the hereafter.

If you’re downtown and feeling hungry, check out the Hungry Buddha — you won’t be disappointed!

The late great Hungry Buddha Read More »

Hulk, Willie, or Peter?

commonplace book, true stories, weird / /

From The Sun:

The Hulk's willieSHOCKED six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll — and uncovered a giant green WILLY.

Curious Leah noticed a lump after winning the monster, catchphrase “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” at a seaside fair.

And when she peeled off the green comic-book character’s ripped purple shorts, she found the two-inch manhood beneath them.

Hulk, Willie, or Peter? Read More »

Now that is one good insult

commonplace book, on writing, true stories / /

From Yahoo! News (March 2004):

Andy Rooney certainly knows how to stir the passion in his viewers. The ’60 Minutes’ curmudgeon said Sunday he got 30,000 pieces of mail and e-mail in response to his Feb. 22 commentary, in which he called ‘The Passion of the Christ’ filmmaker Mel Gibson a ‘wacko.’

It’s the biggest viewer response ever to a segment on the CBS newsmagazine, which has been on the air since 1968, a spokesman said. …

He read some of the mail on the air, including one letter that called him an ‘asinine, bottom-dwelling, numb-skulled, low-life, slimy, sickening, gutless, spineless, ignorant, pot-licking, cowardly pathetic little weasel.’

Now that is one good insult Read More »

Dead for a while

commonplace book, weird / /

From BBC News:

A man lay dead in his flat for 15 months before his body was found.

Recording an open verdict into the death of Derek Perkins, 63, coroner Dr Nigel Chapman said he had never known a body to be undiscovered for so long.

The exact date of Mr Perkins’ death is unknown, but a newspaper found near his body was dated 31 December, 2002. …

In a written statement, Nottingham City Council said they had tried to make contact during the past six months by letter, phone and visits.

It said faster rent arrears procedures should help the council investigate problems sooner.

Dead for a while Read More »

Sleazy books

cool stuff, history, language & literature / /

From sleazy and how!:

I’m a sucker for a sleazy mystery or a trampy romance novel from the 1950’s-60’s. I usually buy these silly books more for the covers than the stories, but sometimes both are equally bizarre.

This is a gallery of some of the better books I’ve come across. Some have book summaries, others I just liked the covers.

Passion Prize Here are some of the ones I liked: Women’s Doctor. Chinese Lover. Come Sin With Me. Studio Apartment. Musk, Hashish and Blood.

Frenchie, with this exciting passage: “He was all ready to go. The easel was under one arm. Suddenly she couldn’t think about what she should have done. There was no right or wrong way to act, there was only one way. She ran to him and pulled him down toward her. Her fingers bit into his arms. ‘No, no,’ she murmured brokenly. ‘You mustn’t go. You can’t. I couldn’t live…'”.

Illicit Desires, which includes this blurb: “Passion’s Slaves! There’s many a sizzling tale about the ‘farmer’s daughter’, but never has the truth been told so revealingly as in this story of Eva, a member of ‘Ja-Ja” Steinhart’s household; of Mazie, her buxom, full bosomed rival, and their spirited fight for their mutual lover, Joe.”

And Call Her Wanton (“She was fair…she was frisky…she was oh, so much fun…A lusty novel of wilderness passion and a wife too naughty to be true!”).

Or The Manatee (“He had a passion for his ship’s figurehead that no living, breathing woman could satisfy.”).

I think the prize for blurb writing goes to Shady Lady: “Some people called Leslie Fentris a shady lady and most people thought that was putting it mildly. She had money and brains, and plenty of lure. Yet she was mixed up in one shameful scandal after another. Actually, she was a fine and honest person who acted the way she did for very good reasons.

Sleazy books Read More »