Geek Freak Weekend in Princeton
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
To celebrate Pi Day and Einstein's birthday, Princeton has a "Geek Freak Weekend", including a pi recitation competition. The winner could recite it out to 1371 digits.
PenFed is one credit union used by members of the armed forces, but it is not the big player -- that's Navy Federal Credit Union (NFCU). It has three times the members (3M vs. 1M) and assets ($43M vs. $15M) that PenFed has.
Not to minimize the impact, but the article reads as if all military personnel who join a credit union are affected, and this is not the case.
Exactly so. The case was United States v. One Book Called Ulysses. The gist of the ruling was that the book was not obscene because it had merit as a work of literary art. Judge Woolsey's ruling was an eloquent defense of contemporary (for then) literary art. Once the book was no longer banned in the US, the UK and Ireland followed suit and allowed unexpurgated versions.
What is doubly ironic here is that the case was engineered by Random House in order to be able to publish the book freely through the US without being prosecuted for pornography. Wow -- look at the difference today! What publisher would challenge the government and culture in this manner today? Instead, Apple seeks to create a
Digital Disneyland where everyone can have a fully predictable, enjoyable, inoffensive, and commercially lucrative (for Apple) time.
As far as TrueCrypt is concerned, I started using it when I realized what a problem I'd have if someone stole my laptop (either at home or on the road). I now keep all my sensitive financial and personal data on an encrypted volume; the innocuous stuff is in the clear. Frankly, the risk of theft is far greater than the risk of border seizure.
If it's your photos that you're concerned about,
why not just upload them to you favorite photo sharing site and delete them from the laptop?
Am I missing something, or can't you just disable the AVG extensions? This is what I did in both Firefox and IE6. I left the SafeSurf thingy running in the AVG console, but so far as I can tell, neither IE nor Firefox are letting it do anything.
That said, I, too, thought that AVG 8 went in the wrong direction -- too much useless junk.
Write a letter to the publisher of the textbook saying you are a professor considering use of their fine book in your class and request a copy. This is how professors get their copies.
I've always thought that this was quite unjust.
The latest news on this is that Judge Feinberg denied Sequoia's attempt to avoid the outside review of the machines. "Feinberg said she was confident... that the attorneys for the opposing sides could draft a 'protective order' that would safeguard all concerns," says the news story.
Interestingly, the story doesn't list Felten as the one doing the review, but rather Andrew Appel, a different Princeton computer science professor.
Yes, the ATM cost argument is totally bogus. As Ed Felten notes on his blog:
ATMs are expensive because they have a safe full of cash inside. It's important that you can't steal the cash, even if you've got time and tools at your disposal. Voting systems (at least anywhere I'll ever be likely to vote) don't dispense money. Building a reliable printer doesn't need to be expensive.
It was Union County, NJ that was planning to send sample machines to Dr. Felten. They were threatened by Sequoia and have backed down from their plan as a result.
The whole thing happened because several counties in NJ reported errors with the Sequoia machines in the February primary election. Sequoia reviewed these and just said that it was "user error" and not a problem. The counties understandably didn't find this an acceptable response, and Union County wanted to get an outside opinion.
All the details can be found in this NJ Star-Ledger story.
Mod parent up, please (I'm using up mod points to post a followup).
Here's a McClatchey story (with graphic), showing how bad the GOP filibuster threats have gotten. At the current rate, they will have forced cloture motions 153 times, three times the average over the past few years. All this to keep The Decider from having to take responsibility and veto something that the majority of US citizens approve of (like habeas corpus).
While the reporting on these votes (including Webb's bill mandating more at-home time for troops serving in Iraq) is totally lame and misleading, I have to blame the Democrats for failing to make any stink about this at all. They need to be constantly harping about "obstructionist Republicans", etc. etc. Or, instead of just letting them threaten a filibuster, make them actually do it -- that would give the press a great story to report, and would force all these Republicans to explain how much they like torture, long tours of duty for soldiers, etc.
Why are these people so intent on advertising to people who are clearly not interested in it.
A very good point. You could make the case that the person blocking the ad is actually saving the web site bandwidth costs by saving them the trouble of sending over all that Flash/graphic/audio datajunk. The person who views the content and fails to click through the ad (or even worse, is like me and just doesn't even glance at the ads) is the one who's really stealing bandwidth here.
When I was growing up in Atlanta, Jane Barbe ("Miz Barbe", as we young-uns would say down South) lived around the corner from us. Whenever we needed to call the time-of-day service to get the accurate time, we used to refer to it as "Calling Miz Barbe to get the time". It was always a bit eerie to hear a neighbor's voice in those kinds of systems...
They may or may not be relevant here, but you should check out
Benetech, a California non-profit that is dedicated to "technology serving humanity". They have an impressive portfolio of technology projects in the areas of human rights, literacy, etc. And for programmers who live out there and are interested,
they're hiring, too.
For what it's worth,
Bruce Schneier
is recommending that everyone renew their passports now so that you can avoid having a chipped one for another 10 years:
The security mechanisms on your passport chip have to last the lifetime of your passport. It is as ridiculous to think that passport security will remain secure for that long as it would be to think that you won't see another security update for Microsoft Windows in that time. Improvements in antenna technology will certainly increase the distance at which they can be read and might even allow unauthorized readers to penetrate the shielding.
As he says, "You don't want to be a guinea pig on this one."
He also says you can disable the chip by running the passport through the microwave, but "although the United States has said that a nonworking chip will not invalidate a passport, it is unclear if one with a deliberately damaged chip will be honored." My guess is that it would result in a long and painful trip to the customs interrogation area.
The animated video on comingZune is pretty odd, and, if you ask me, pretty disturbing. I've already seen a couple of different people who think that the rabbit is going to bite the head off the little guy... I could see it happening. Not sure what marketing genius came up with this one...
As featured a couple of weeks ago in this article on Wired, these RFID chips have already been hacked. From TFA:
LAS VEGAS -- A German computer security consultant has shown that he can clone the electronic passports that the United States and other countries are beginning to distribute this year.
The controversial e-passports contain radio frequency ID, or RFID, chips that the U.S. State Department and others say will help thwart document forgery. But Lukas Grunwald, a security consultant with DN-Systems in Germany and an RFID expert, says the data in the chips is easy to copy.
"The whole passport design is totally brain damaged," Grunwald says. "From my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They're not increasing security at all."
Indeed. One of the little-noticed lessons from the success of iTunes et al.: it proves that music customers are perfectly happy purchasing audio files that are of noticeably lower than CD quality. "High-definition" quality, in the music arena, is just not important to a growing chunk of the market. Why should video be any different?
It's funny, too, because I remember all the fuss about what a mistake it was to settle on 44.1 kHz for CDs because of the quality issues. Now, 128 kbps audio is good enough to pay money for -- good enough to be a substitute for CDs.
Yahoo! should be praised for doing their part for Homeland Security. How so?
1. Ban "Osama" in e-mail account name 2. When Osama Bin Laden tries to create an account to communicate with fellow terrorists, he finds that he is unable to!
If all e-mail providers and ISPs did this, we'd effectively isolate Osama Bin Laden from the Internet! What a fabulous victory in the War On Terror (or whatever Bush is calling it this month).
As usual, Ed Felten has some insightful commentary about this on his blog. Interestingly, he ties this to the recent stories about ISPs giving favored treatment (for a fee) to certain net traffic over others. How does the AOL/Yahoo proposal fit in? Here's Felten's take on it:
What's different here is that senders aren't paying for delivery, but for an exemption from the email providers' spam filters. As Eric Rescorla notes, this system creates interesting incentives for the providers. For instance, the providers will have an incentive to make their spam filters overly stringent -- so that legitimate messages will be misclassified as spam, and senders will be more likely to pay for an exemption from the filters.
Felten thinks that market forces will either make this work or not work, assuming that competition exists. If people have a hard time getting the e-mail they want under AOL/Yahoo because they keep getting sucked up into overly-agressive filters, they'll go elsewhere.
Actually, although MP3 is supported by the ANSI/NISO Digital Talking Book standard, the LOC will be using some flavor of AAC for their books. And the plan is that they will be DRM'd in some fashion or another. Libraries for the blind enjoy an exemption under the copyright law -- they can produce copies of books without seeking permission of the copyright holder, so long as they are in "specialized formats" serving people with disabilities. DRM will be applied to the LOC books to "specialize" them and hence conform to the law. And, FYI, the current generation of analog audio books from LOC manage this by using 4-track cassette tape -- a special format if ever I heard of one.
Wallace adds that not all hotels are a problem. For example, a scan of a card at a Disney resort came up with a series of garbled numbers and letters. "It looks like just junk on the card. But it ties back that information to their computer systems," he says.
Princeton professor Felten's
Freedom to Tinker
blog has a good
analysis of this. I like his attitude:
It's hard to see the value proposition for students in the DRMed version, unless the price is very low. . . . I don't object to other people wasting their money developing products that consumers won't want. People waste their money on foolish schemes every day. I wish for their sake that they would be smarter. But why should I object to this product or try to stop it? A product this weak will die on its own.
The most insidious thing about this is the way that Sony/BMG is using this to reframe the dialog about ripping/burning. When I buy a CD and rip some tracks to put on my MP3 player, or to make a backup copy of the CD, I call this "fair use". They call it "casual piracy".
JD Lasica has
an insightful
item on Edward Felten's site about exactly this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
To celebrate Pi Day and Einstein's birthday, Princeton has a "Geek Freak Weekend", including a pi recitation competition. The winner could recite it out to 1371 digits.
PenFed is one credit union used by members of the armed forces, but it is not the big player -- that's Navy Federal Credit Union (NFCU). It has three times the members (3M vs. 1M) and assets ($43M vs. $15M) that PenFed has. Not to minimize the impact, but the article reads as if all military personnel who join a credit union are affected, and this is not the case.
Exactly so. The case was United States v. One Book Called Ulysses. The gist of the ruling was that the book was not obscene because it had merit as a work of literary art. Judge Woolsey's ruling was an eloquent defense of contemporary (for then) literary art. Once the book was no longer banned in the US, the UK and Ireland followed suit and allowed unexpurgated versions. What is doubly ironic here is that the case was engineered by Random House in order to be able to publish the book freely through the US without being prosecuted for pornography. Wow -- look at the difference today! What publisher would challenge the government and culture in this manner today? Instead, Apple seeks to create a Digital Disneyland where everyone can have a fully predictable, enjoyable, inoffensive, and commercially lucrative (for Apple) time.
As far as TrueCrypt is concerned, I started using it when I realized what a problem I'd have if someone stole my laptop (either at home or on the road). I now keep all my sensitive financial and personal data on an encrypted volume; the innocuous stuff is in the clear. Frankly, the risk of theft is far greater than the risk of border seizure.
If it's your photos that you're concerned about, why not just upload them to you favorite photo sharing site and delete them from the laptop?
Am I missing something, or can't you just disable the AVG extensions? This is what I did in both Firefox and IE6. I left the SafeSurf thingy running in the AVG console, but so far as I can tell, neither IE nor Firefox are letting it do anything. That said, I, too, thought that AVG 8 went in the wrong direction -- too much useless junk.
Write a letter to the publisher of the textbook saying you are a professor considering use of their fine book in your class and request a copy. This is how professors get their copies. I've always thought that this was quite unjust.
The latest news on this is that Judge Feinberg denied Sequoia's attempt to avoid the outside review of the machines. "Feinberg said she was confident ... that the attorneys for the opposing sides could draft a 'protective order' that would safeguard all concerns," says the news story.
Interestingly, the story doesn't list Felten as the one doing the review, but rather Andrew Appel, a different Princeton computer science professor.
Yes, the ATM cost argument is totally bogus. As Ed Felten notes on his blog:
It was Union County, NJ that was planning to send sample machines to Dr. Felten. They were threatened by Sequoia and have backed down from their plan as a result. The whole thing happened because several counties in NJ reported errors with the Sequoia machines in the February primary election. Sequoia reviewed these and just said that it was "user error" and not a problem. The counties understandably didn't find this an acceptable response, and Union County wanted to get an outside opinion. All the details can be found in this NJ Star-Ledger story.
Mod parent up, please (I'm using up mod points to post a followup). Here's a McClatchey story (with graphic), showing how bad the GOP filibuster threats have gotten. At the current rate, they will have forced cloture motions 153 times, three times the average over the past few years. All this to keep The Decider from having to take responsibility and veto something that the majority of US citizens approve of (like habeas corpus). While the reporting on these votes (including Webb's bill mandating more at-home time for troops serving in Iraq) is totally lame and misleading, I have to blame the Democrats for failing to make any stink about this at all. They need to be constantly harping about "obstructionist Republicans", etc. etc. Or, instead of just letting them threaten a filibuster, make them actually do it -- that would give the press a great story to report, and would force all these Republicans to explain how much they like torture, long tours of duty for soldiers, etc.
A very good point. You could make the case that the person blocking the ad is actually saving the web site bandwidth costs by saving them the trouble of sending over all that Flash/graphic/audio datajunk. The person who views the content and fails to click through the ad (or even worse, is like me and just doesn't even glance at the ads) is the one who's really stealing bandwidth here.
When I was growing up in Atlanta, Jane Barbe ("Miz Barbe", as we young-uns would say down South) lived around the corner from us. Whenever we needed to call the time-of-day service to get the accurate time, we used to refer to it as "Calling Miz Barbe to get the time". It was always a bit eerie to hear a neighbor's voice in those kinds of systems ...
... Steve!
They may or may not be relevant here, but you should check out Benetech, a California non-profit that is dedicated to "technology serving humanity". They have an impressive portfolio of technology projects in the areas of human rights, literacy, etc. And for programmers who live out there and are interested, they're hiring, too.
For what it's worth, Bruce Schneier is recommending that everyone renew their passports now so that you can avoid having a chipped one for another 10 years:
As he says, "You don't want to be a guinea pig on this one."
He also says you can disable the chip by running the passport through the microwave, but "although the United States has said that a nonworking chip will not invalidate a passport, it is unclear if one with a deliberately damaged chip will be honored." My guess is that it would result in a long and painful trip to the customs interrogation area.
The animated video on comingZune is pretty odd, and, if you ask me, pretty disturbing. I've already seen a couple of different people who think that the rabbit is going to bite the head off the little guy ... I could see it happening. Not sure what marketing genius came up with this one ...
As featured a couple of weeks ago in this article on Wired, these RFID chips have already been hacked. From TFA:
Indeed. One of the little-noticed lessons from the success of iTunes et al.: it proves that music customers are perfectly happy purchasing audio files that are of noticeably lower than CD quality. "High-definition" quality, in the music arena, is just not important to a growing chunk of the market. Why should video be any different?
It's funny, too, because I remember all the fuss about what a mistake it was to settle on 44.1 kHz for CDs because of the quality issues. Now, 128 kbps audio is good enough to pay money for -- good enough to be a substitute for CDs.
Yahoo! should be praised for doing their part for Homeland Security. How so?
1. Ban "Osama" in e-mail account name
2. When Osama Bin Laden tries to create an account to communicate with fellow terrorists, he finds that he is unable to!
If all e-mail providers and ISPs did this, we'd effectively isolate Osama Bin Laden from the Internet! What a fabulous victory in the War On Terror (or whatever Bush is calling it this month).
As usual, Ed Felten has some insightful commentary about this on his blog. Interestingly, he ties this to the recent stories about ISPs giving favored treatment (for a fee) to certain net traffic over others. How does the AOL/Yahoo proposal fit in? Here's Felten's take on it:
Felten thinks that market forces will either make this work or not work, assuming that competition exists. If people have a hard time getting the e-mail they want under AOL/Yahoo because they keep getting sucked up into overly-agressive filters, they'll go elsewhere.
Actually, although MP3 is supported by the ANSI/NISO Digital Talking Book standard, the LOC will be using some flavor of AAC for their books. And the plan is that they will be DRM'd in some fashion or another. Libraries for the blind enjoy an exemption under the copyright law -- they can produce copies of books without seeking permission of the copyright holder, so long as they are in "specialized formats" serving people with disabilities. DRM will be applied to the LOC books to "specialize" them and hence conform to the law. And, FYI, the current generation of analog audio books from LOC manage this by using 4-track cassette tape -- a special format if ever I heard of one.
Princeton professor Felten's Freedom to Tinker blog has a good analysis of this. I like his attitude:
I hope he's right ...
The most insidious thing about this is the way that Sony/BMG is using this to reframe the dialog about ripping/burning. When I buy a CD and rip some tracks to put on my MP3 player, or to make a backup copy of the CD, I call this "fair use". They call it "casual piracy". JD Lasica has an insightful item on Edward Felten's site about exactly this issue.