bugfox blog

Raymond Chen explains in detail how to be a jerk.

Elliotte Rusty Harold has just returned from China and posts this disturbing comment:

Reflecting back on my recent trip to Beijing…one of the most striking things was the contrast between personal, day-to-day freedom in Beijing and the United States (especially NYC/Los Angeles/Orange County). I’m not talking about political representation or freedom to read whatever I felt like, but just the simple ability to go whereever I felt like going without being hassled. To my surprise, by that measure Beijing came off way better than the United States does these days, and that doesn’t speak well for the U.S.
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Somehow I thought a one-party, authoritarian state would be more oppressive than this. At least in the capital, Beijing compares favorably to major U.S. cities. To be honest, that doesn’t speak well for the U.S. If we can’t be less of a police state than a one-party, nominally Communist nation like China, then something has gone seriously wrong.

(Read the whole thing)

Back during the Cold War, right-wing types used to make a big distinction between “totalitarian states” (bad) and “authoritarian states” (not so bad.)

A totalitarian state (Russia, China or Nazi Germany) would try to monitor everything its citizens did and demanded constant declarations of effusive loyalty. An authoritarian state (Franco’s Spain) would generally leave people alone if they kept quiet and stayed out of politics.

By this definition China has clearly become an authoritarian state. But if America is becoming more of a police state than China (in terms of surveillance, etc.) then what does that make us?
Read the rest of this entry »

Declan McCullagh has a detailed analysis of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s recent Congressional testimony in which he asked for greatly expanded surveillance powers. Currently the FBI has the technical ability to monitor just about everything that goes over the Internet, but they need to get a warrant (or a secret National Security Letter) in order to do so.

Mueller wants to convince the Internet Service Providers to change they Terms of Service to force their customers to “consent” to having the FBI monitor everything they do without a warrant. If the ISPs refuse (as they probably would for fear of lawsuits) then he wants Congress to pass legislation requiring it.

He justifies this by invoking the usual suspects (terrorism and cyberattacks) but of course the surveillance would be quickly extended to cover lesser crimes like copyright violation. It is amusing to imagine the FBI locking up millions of file sharers, but probably they would just prosecute a small number of people to serve as examples.

SmartWater is a liquid with a unique identifier linked to a particular owner. “The idea is for me to paint this stuff on my valuables as proof of ownership,” I wrote when I first learned about the idea. “I think a better idea would be for me to paint it on your valuables, and then call the police.”
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If more people had a security mindset, services that compromise privacy wouldn’t have such a sizable market share — and Facebook would be totally different. Laptops wouldn’t be lost with millions of unencrypted Social Security numbers on them, and we’d all learn a lot fewer security lessons the hard way. The power grid would be more secure. Identity theft would go way down. Medical records would be more private. If people had the security mindset, they wouldn’t have tried to look at Britney Spears’ medical records, since they would have realized that they would be caught.

Bruce Schneier–Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional (via)

This seems a little grim, but it would be a useful counterbalance to the general tendency to enthusiastly embrace any plausible-sounding proposal without thinking through the consequences.

After testing the site with Safari for the first time I ended up making some massive, long-overdue changes to the stylesheet, which hopefully will allow things to display better in more browsers and screen resolutions.

In particular I eliminated the use of pixel metrics, replacing it with logical sizes (inches and points.) I also reduced the dependence on bitmap images for formatting and fixed some malformed relative URLs, which Firefox and IE handled correctly but Safari didn’t like.

If the site now looks WORSE in your browser, let me know what your configuration is and I’ll see what I can do.

Problem: the voting machines report numbers that don’t add up.

Attempted solution: local authorites commision an independent audit of the machines to determine the source of the problem.

Checkmate: the vendor prevents the audit by threatening to sue to protect its “Intellectual Property.”

Story on Ars Technica.

This is exactly why all voting machines should be required to use open source software throughout: to make sure that effective audits will always be possible. Of course no commercially available voting machines actually do this. As always the industry’s motto is “Trust us. Shut up. Just trust us.”

UPDATE: A judge orders the review to proceed, although the report won’t be available in time to do anything about it before the November elections.

“Robert X. Cringely” (Mark Stephens) repeats and debunks the story the Admiral Grace Hopper invented the term “bug” (refering to computer problems.)

Actually I’m pretty sure that she never intended to claim that she invented the term. That is a misunderstanding imposed by others. She just said that she found “the first genuine computer bug,” meaning the first bug that was actually an insect.

Like most people I have been following the unfolding problems of New York governer Eliot Spitzer with a mixture of amusement and disdain. However one detail seems particularly striking:

[Spitzer] arranged to meet with “Kristen,” a prostitute who charged $1,000 an hour, on February 13 in a Washington hotel and paid her $4,300, the court document said.

That would seem to imply that high-priced prostitutes, like high-priced lawyers, bill in six-minute increments.

GoDaddy’s continued willingness to shut down any site that draws complaints makes one thing clear: you should never register a domain with GoDaddy unless you are certain that your site will never offend anybody.

Who elected the registrars to serve as the all-powerful censors of the Internet?

Michael Nygard provides an unexpected reason why you should probably avoid buying the latest and greatest technology: Steve Jobs made me miss my flight.