Sabbatical
I began a one-semester sabbatical leave today. I'll be working on a textbook, Algorithms for functional programming. In case you're interested in following my progress, I set up a Web log that tracks it.
Why political campaigns make us miserable
“The misery of the protracted presidential campaign season”
Glenn Greenwald, Salon, August 16, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/16/elections/index.html
The gist: (1) Fifteen months before the election, six months before the first primary, the political media are already engrossed in speculative fictions about the candidates, at the expense of any serious discussion of policies or even of what used to be thought of as news events. (2) As a consequence of this preposterous obsession, candidates who cannot be readily wedged into the dominant narratives are marginalized. The leading example of this is Ron Paul. (3) Another consequence is polarization: The psychodrama of the campaign requires any partisan to believe that his own party is supremely good, the opposition infernally wicked. The rhetoric reinforcing this thesis has been hauled out in every Presidential election since 1960 and is now threadbare and more tiresome than persuasive.
Computer security at the Department of State
The U.S. Department of State has developed an asset-monitoring application, iPost, designed to detect and report security vulnerabilities in the Department's computing systems. Last month, the Government Accountability Office issued a report, “State has taken steps to implement a continuous monitoring application, but key challenges remain,” evaluating the performance of this application and identifying several problems with it. The GAO noticed, for instance, that only Windows workstations and servers were being monitored, not the numerous workstations, servers, routers, and embedded computers that run other operating systems; that iPost monitored those systems sporadically rather than continuously, as it was supposed to; that it produced many false-positive vulnerability reports; and that the third-party vendors who were supposed to supply timely information about new vulnerabilities were not, in fact, doing so.
The iPost application was developed internally at a cost of approximately $1,200,000,000, after a survey of available commercial packages determined that none of them would be adequate.
I found the exclusive focus on Windows equipment interesting. The ratio of $0 : $1,200,000,000 does not accurately reflect the ratio of non-Windows security vulnerabilities to Windows security vulnerabilities, but perhaps it's close enough for government work.
I learned about this report from an article by Mike Masnick in TechDirt (“State Department spent $1.2 billion on an asset monitoring system... that ignores all non-Windows equipment,” August 11, 2011).
Encrypt locally if you must store globally
“Encrypt early,
encrypt often!”
Andrew
Binstock, Dr Dobb's, August 9, 2011
http://drdobbs.com/security/231300517
The gist: If you store data on a cloud server, you should encrypt it on your local machine before transferring it and decrypt it on your local machine after recovering it. Otherwise the service provider can and will read it, and can and will turn it over to law enforcement officials on request.
One point is worth emphasizing: The user must do the encryption and decryption, not the service provider, and must not turn over the cryptographic keys to the service provider. Encryption at the server's end, with the server's keys, may offer some protection against hackers, but offers no protection against inside jobs.
Dollar-denominated debts are still debts
“End of the American Empire”
Craig Murray, August 6, 2011
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/08/end-of-the-american-empire/
One of our largest creditors is starting to suspect that we're deadbeats. One experienced observer considers this a big deal.
Since so many people believe that the United States can always just fire up the printing presses and run off as many dollars as are needed to pay off our debts, I found this passage particularly interesting:
“International supervision over the issue of U.S. dollars should be introduced and a new, stable and secured global reserve currency may also be an option to avert a catastrophe caused by any single country,” Xinhua said.
In other words: The printing presses should be under international supervision, since Americans can't be trusted to use them responsibly.
Transformative use is fair use
“Making sense of fair use”
Neil
W. Netanel, Lewis & Clark Law Review, volume 15 (June
29, 2011)
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1874778_code109222.pdf?abstractid=1874778&mirid=1
In a historical survey of lawsuits in which a fair-use defense was raised against accusations of copyright violation, a professor at the UCLA School of Law concludes that “fair use is a different doctrine today than it was ten or twenty years ago.” Instead of focussing mainly on whether any damage was done to the commercial interests of the copyright holder, as was the case in the 1980s, judges are now far more likely to examine whether the defendant's use of the copyrighted material was transformative -- whether it generated a “new expression, meaning, or message,” clearly distinct from the significance of the original.
I have many unanswered questions
Thank you, Nina Paley!
For everyone else: See http://mimiandeunice.com/category/ip/, or order the minibook from Question Copyright, or download it from the Internet Archive. Copy and share!
Free software undercuts market for legal document management
“Swiss proprietary companies block government open source release”
“djwm,” The H open, August 2, 2011
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Swiss-proprietary-companies-block-government-open-source-release-1317032.html
Swiss ICT, a trade group representing developers of proprietary content-management systems is lobbying the Swiss parliament to block the release of a free-software CMS, OpenJustitia. Programmers working for the Swiss federal court developed OpenJustitia to enable lawyers and judges to manage and search legal documents more easily. It is licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License, and the Swiss federal court planned to start distributing it to the public this summer.
Thomas Flatt, the chairman of Swiss ICT, claimed that distributing the software would “interfere in a market where several competitors are active.” Well, yeah -- in software development, markets are economically dysfunctional and commons are economically sustainable. That's one of the key advantages of the GPL.
Will This American Life use Ogg Vorbis?
“Helping
out This American Life -- with an Ogg copy of the show”
Brett Smith, Free Software Foundation, August 1, 2011
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/tal-in-ogg-vorbis
A couple of weeks ago, the radio series This American Life did an hour-long episode discussing software patents (“When patents attack!” July 22, 2011). The Free Software Foundation has written to the production team, pointing out that, since they distribute the program in podcast form using the patent-encumbered MP3 format, they are exposing themselves to some of the same risks that confront software developers. The FSF recommends that they switch to Ogg Vorbis, and prepared an Ogg Vorbis version of “When patents attack!” to demonstrate its benefits and ease of use.
The FreedomBox logo, animated
Nina Paley and Joshua Spodek have created an animated logo for the FreedomBox, based on the graphic logos designed by Spodek and John Emerson:
