Monthly Archive for February, 2006

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Army recruiters, podcasts, and budget cuts

February 3, 2006 1 Comment Tags: .

Lots of ranting in this post, just to warn you.

  • I just got an email to my Franklin Univ. account from a local Army Recruiter:

    Dear Franklin University Student,
    As your local Army Recruiter, I’d like to tell you about the many opportunities the Army has to offer students like yourself. Whether you know the path you want to take after college or are still deciding, the Army has many opportunities to suit your needs…

    ..and of course he goes on to talk about all the “benefits” that come with this commitment. My reply to him?

    No thanks, I’d rather not commit myself to be cannon fodder for some big oil company. I’d rather pay for school myself and actually live to graduate, but thanks for asking.

    We’ll see if I get any response…

  • [tag]Air America Radio[/tag]‘s podcast site is switching to “Premium”

    starting Feb. 7th, which means you will have to start paying for their podcasts. $7/mo. to subscribe to one show, or you can do a one-time download of a single show for $1.99. I really can’t believe they’re doing this. I just emailed them telling of my disappointment. Feel free to join me.

    On Springer’s radio show this morning he was talking about the expensive Super Bowl ads, “..well if you have $2.5 million laying around… oh wait, this is a liberal radio station“… exactly. Are people really going to buy into this? I hope not… very disappointing. I understand that it’s not free to make these podcasts, but I don’t understand why this is the first podcast I’ve ever seen that requires payment, and how can all those independent bloggers manage to get theirs out for free?

  • US Congress Approves [tag]$40 Billion Budget Cut[/tag]

    I suppose all the tax-cuts for the rich have to be made up by someone, might as well be the have-nots who are already used to getting screwed. May I add that this is the largest cut to federal student aid in history? And after this slashing of funding for welfare programs, medical coverage for the poor and elderly, and student loans, Bush is soon going to request another $120 BILLION for the war. This means we are well on our way towards spending a half TRILLION dollars on this ridiculous mess.

How is this possible? How are these people who are supposed to be working for us getting away with this insane prioritization of our money? We’re “addicted to oil” so we’re gonna keep building SUV’s and Hummers and take over other countries so we can take their oil supply? We need higher math and science standards in high school to “be competitive”, but we make it as expensive as possible to get higher education? We want “freedom, democracy, and liberty” for “unstable countries abroad” but we spy on our own citizens, rig and steal elections, and arrest people for wearing dissenting t-shirts?

Is all this for real?

The Veggie Continuum

February 2, 2006 0 Comments Tags: .

I was just listening to an old Animal Voices podcast from Jan. 2005 and one of their guests was John Mackey from Whole Foods Market (WFM). Since the podcast is about veganism, the host was inquiring on why WFM still provides meat and animal products, why weren’t they aiming for the ultimate goal of veganism for their customers?

Mackey started explaining [the personally well-known fact] that it’s hard to go from a meat-eating life to that of a vegan in one easy step. He described the process as more of a continuum that people gradually progress through. First they find out what happens to the meat they consume, and how it gets to their plate. This motivates them to try and go vegetarian. Then they find out about the consequences of dairy and eggs, what’s in their hygiene products, etc. and take another step, from veggie to vegan.

I absolutely agree with this, and I also think the “original knowledge” that starts someone off has a snowballing effect. Once you start learning about your food and its origins, you find out more and more and unfortunately only become turned off to more and more foods.

This is where I’m at. I started out just not wanting an animal to die in order for me to eat when there’s plenty of other things I could survive on. I thought it was as simple as giving up meat. Now I realize that “meat” means so much more, and what I really gave up was flesh. Pretty disturbing when you call it that huh? But the truth is, I haven’t 100% given up the idea of animals for food. I still eat lots of dairy, which comes from cows who are in a perpetual state of pregnancy so they can mass-produce milk. If the impregnated dairy cow has a male calf it’s taken away and “raised” for veal before it ever gets any of its mother’s milk. If it’s a female calf, it’s fated to live the same life as its mother.

Knowing all this puts me in the second phase of this continuum that Mackey proposed, with the desire to eventually be in the third phase. This is why it’s a very good thing that WFM is around to provide people like me with things to eat while in these various stages. It turns out they have “animal compassionate standards” that they adhere to when selecting what products are sold. That means if I’m not ready to give up chocolate peanut-butter ice cream, I can at least go to Whole Foods and buy a brand of ice cream that uses a more humane creation process. Which is not totally innocent, but a little better, another step. It was just good to hear that it’s a gradual process for everyone, and I’m not a horrible person for not being able to go vegan overnight.

How to Code a Constitution

February 1, 2006 0 Comments Tags: , .

From Wired News

By Jennifer Granick
Feb, 01, 2006

As Congress considers reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, we could really use a few good hackers in the debate.

Hackers already know a lot about how to build a system that works, whether it’s a network or a government. That’s because the principles our legal system employs to protect life and liberty are very similar to the principles that computer scientists use to design secure systems. We need hackers right now because — whether they know it or not — they understand democracy.

Take a close look at our nation’s current surveillance laws and you’ll see some of the bedrock legal principles of democracy at work. These include the separation of powers, checks and balances, due process, burden of proof, transparency and oversight, limited discretion and the rule of law. Both the Wiretap Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, enlist these principles to make sure that when the government listens in on our conversations, it does so in accordance with the values of a free society.

You can compare these legal concepts to the eight principles for designing secure systems set forth in an article by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder and discussed in Computer Security: Art and Science by Matt Bishop, where I ran across them. These principles are:

  • Separation of privilege: The protection mechanism should grant access based on more than one piece of information.
  • Least privilege: The protection mechanism should force every process to operate with the minimum privileges needed to perform its task.
  • Open design: The protection mechanism should not depend on attackers being ignorant of its design to succeed. It may, however, be based on the attacker’s ignorance of specific information such as passwords or cipher keys.
  • Fail-safe defaults: The protection mechanism should deny access by default, and grant access only when explicit permission exists.
  • Complete mediation: The protection mechanism should check every access to every object.
  • Economy of mechanism: The protection mechanism should have a simple and small design.
  • Least common mechanism: The protection mechanism should be shared as little as possible among users.
  • Psychological acceptability: The protection mechanism should be easy to use (at least as easy as not using it).

Separation of privilege is like the separation of powers coded into the Constitution. A computer system requires a user name and password; a surveillance warrant requires executive and judicial examination.

Least privilege resembles the Constitution’s enumerated powers or the surveillance statutes’ general prohibition on eavesdropping. The law broadly prohibits intercepting communications, then specifically defines limited exceptions to that rule, including probable cause. Just as you don’t need root to do word processing, you don’t need to listen in on everyone’s conversations to fight crime.

Open design is analogous to transparency and oversight: If electronic surveillance is carried out as part of a criminal probe, at some point the target of the investigation — and all the people he spoke with who were eavesdropped upon — must be told about it. More on point, Congress and the public know the legal process, and there are strict reporting requirements, even if the specific information about the wiretap applications is kept from view.

If, as the Bush administration has recently asserted, our homeland security hinged on nobody knowing that the government was conducting warrantless wiretaps, then the program’s benefit was illusory to begin with. As the old hacker adage puts it, security through obscurity is no security at all.

As the old hacker adage puts it, security through obscurity is no security at all.

We “fail-safe” by denying the government access to our private communications by default, and granting it in an emergency. In a bigger sense, we fail-safe by outlawing antisocial behavior, even though we understand that there may be extenuating circumstances that we consider on a case-by-case basis. That’s why we need a law against torture, regardless of hypothetical ticking-bomb situations in which some might justify the practice.

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