Mon, 29 Sep 2003 00:18:08 GMT

Sorry if I am wordier today than normal. I have been upset by many of the things that this administration has done. It is harming way too many things simply for its own aggrandizement. It is a total embodiment of the attitudes that have permeated the last decade. Winning is more important than playing the game. No need to be fair, as long as I win. Winning is measured by how much money and power I have. Laws are for losers.

Even monkeys recognize unfairness and respond to it with very human responses. People do not like to see others get ahead because of unfair means. At least some of us do. Apparently, many in this administration lack this very basic trait. It may well be their undoing.

Because I know that I do have that trait. And that is one reason this administration has pissed me off so many time. Fair may not be realistic but it is one of the basic stories we tell ourselves as Americans. Fight fair. This country will not long allow leaders who do not fight fair. It brought Nixon down. It may yet bring down Bush.

How to ruin a great army? See Donald Rumsfeld

Some excellent points. Rumsfeld has a dream that high tech and air power will change the way that wars are fought. Maybe so, but the peace will never be won by those methods. It will always require men on the ground. We do not have enough men, well trained for what they are required to now do. We have part-time citizen soldiers, sold on using their National Guard duty as a way to college, now finding out that they can have no choice in their lives, that they will serve for as long as needed in Iraq. The only way that the Armed Forces have been able to meet recruitment and retention goals has been to prevent anyone from leaving the military until the current ‘war’ is over. As discussed in the present article, it took 20 years for the Armed Forces to overcome the destruction Vietnam had on them. Rumsfeld and the other civilians in this Administration are well on their way to destroying it again. Their rush to Iraq is hardly different from Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It destroyed Johnson and could well destroy this Administration. Americans do not treat kindly politicians whose decisions kill their sons in battles, especially those that had to lie about it in the first place. I mean, we still have conspiracy theories about Roosevelt knowing that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. If you are going to send our sons to be killed, you had better have a lot more evidence than this Administration has provided.

Back in October I talked about the possible problems that would occur by having so many Americans in the Middle East. Unfortunately, I accurately described the targets that our soldiers would present, how it did not take many brains to blow up some soldiers.

I then asked how we would deal with this danger.

So, what to do? Hey, I’m just a middle-aged scientist. I would hope that the finest military minds in the world are trying to figure this out. But, as 9/11 showed, you can get hit really hard in your blind spots. I just hope that we have people who have really thought this out. Because it seems that at the moment some in the military has not really figured out just how they want to fight this thing. They have huge blind spots. Because in the real war, you can not cheat.

I described the rigged war games that occurred a year ago. The one that ‘proved’ that Rumsfeld’s approach to war would be successful. In order to prove this, they had to rig the war games, because the leader of the Red team, retired general Paul Van Riper, leading the ‘Iraqi’ factions (really an unnamed country in the Middle East), sank the US fleet as it entered the Persian Gulf. Yep, sunk our entire fleet, including an aircraft carrier, using low tech approaches such as messengers on bikes and suicide bombers on boats. In order to restart and move on, the officials had to tell the other soldiers on the Red team to disobey any orders from Van Riper. That was after they had to refloat the fleet. So he quit in disgust. Read the Guardian article or, better yet, the Army Times. They cheated to win the war games that would be used to fight the war. Fortunately for them, Van Ripper was not the leader of Iraq. Saddam was a sham and now they have to deal with a peace for which they appear to have made no realistic plans. I guess they expected to be able to just restart the ‘game’.

These are they guys who are putting are citizens in harm’s way. They misstate, mislead and use whatever is at hand to prove that they have the winning viewpoint, no matter how divergent that viewpoint is from reality. People are dying every day in Iraq because of the arrogant nature of these people. We may eventually get out of this but I firmly believe that it will not be due to any of the guys in there now but come from someone who really wants to solve the problems. That is what has always saved the US. As long as we still allow people to come forward to solve our problems, we will do fine. But if our government goes to the mattresses every time someone dissents, it could be a long time before we get things right.

When will balance be returned? A Rant and a Ramble

[rant on]What ticks me off most about the whole Wilson fiasco is that it was so obviously an attempt to intimidate people who had information embarrassing to the White House. ‘We don’t want people speaking the truth. And if they do, cut them off at the knees to serve as an example.’ It is typical of the short term thinking that permeates this Administration, the win at all costs that is such a holdover of the last 10 years. All that matters is that we win, EVERY single time. It is all tactics (and thuggish ones at that) and little strategy (other than if we win everytime we will have to win in the end). If someone tells the truth about something that we don’t like, let’s smear him. This is the same arrogant thinking that brought down Nixon. It is why Hoover is reviled by so many. Do we have another ‘Enimies List’? They have the power now to arrest and incarcerate ANY American, holding themwith no time limit, no judicial oversight and no lawyer. This violates so much of the Bill of Rights but no matter. I am sure that this is something that they have used against their enemies, which may very well include anyone who disagrees with them.

We have a Bill of Rights to protect us from the arrogance of power. Why do we again and again have to be taught the same lessons? For most of the last 10 years, conservatives did not trust government, but as soon as they were in, trust was restored. Now they can all get theirs. And liberals are no better. Their arrogance can be just as bad.

Capitalism is the best manner to run an economy that humans have devised. It is the only one that provides useful negative feedback loops that depend on the ways humans really act. Removing the incentive aspects of capitalism removes the feedback loops, negating almost all of the positive aspects of capitalism. But many of the neoconservatives in power now want to distort the free marketplace themselves. They get rich and powerful, as do their cronies. Not because they actually do anything constructive. They just grease wheels so that the guys at top keep getting richer.

We need an effective balance between these two views. This Administration has pushed them so out of balance (although Clinton was not innocent. Conservative southern democrats know all about crinyism and taking care of your own) that it may take years to get back to any semblance of balance. But what do these guys care? They will NEVER be punished commensurate with their crimes. They will retire with their ill-gotten gains, waiting to be rehabilitated while they write books and give lectures. Sometimes I long for the days where you could banish the the dictators. Let’s send them to Antarctica or someplace where how much money they have squirreled away does not matter?[/rant]

[ramble]I firmly believe that a new political power will develop in this country. I think that a Third Way will come about. There are many ethical people of every political stripe that will not stand for this abuse of power from either liberals or conservatives. I belive that it will use bottom-up approaches simply because we are rapidly getting to the point where a top-down approach simply will not be trusted. In a truer sense of democracy than we surrently operate under, the PEOPLE will decide. I am not saying that they will necessarily be smarter or that we will have a utopia. But, it will be difficult for anyone individual to drive public policy unless they ahve a much more direct mandate from their constituents. eMail, the web and other networking technologies will make it much easier for everyone to know more.

Open source works because it leverages the multitude of viewpoints available to solve difficult problems. And it is not as much concerned with the BEST process as it is finding one that works. Adaptive networks describe not only the Internet, or biological systems, but the emerging properties presented by high tech. Building consensus, listening to constituents, empowering the discussions are all processes that all great leaders have had. The groups that utilize these tools better, that empower its constituencies the best, that are nimble and react with a multiplicity of approaches to difficult problems, will prevail. Those that follow a top-down, authoritarian process, which devaules dissent, which is slow to change, that sees the world as black and white, and permits only one viewpoint will fail. Just a monocultures do not succeed in nature, monoCULTURES will not succeed in an environment of rapid change and difficult decisions.[/ramble]

Are They Turning On each Other?

Good Morning. Calpundit has some nice coverage of the fun.

But, just to recap here. We have a senior administration official who has pointed the finger at two top White House officials. This person has named names to the WaPo, but not on record. These White House officials had tried to shop the story to a half dozen journalists before Novak bit. Top administration officials means cabinet rank or higher, plus a few assorted other people and perhaps some important deputy secretaries. Top White House officials is a really really small list of people.

Billmon has more. As does Steve “Dude, Where’s my Permalinks?” Gilliard and Kos. And corrente. And Mark Kleiman.
UPDATE: 56K makes the following point:

Just want to say that this whole incident illustrates why the practice of anonymous sources is evil.

This story was shopped around, which means there are 6 journalists along with their editors who know who leaked the original story. They already know who broke the law.

And now the WPost knows who within the administration has turned.
Given the level of gossip I am guessing the whole celebrity press corps the names of the prinicpals, but they will now go on the air and make a big deal of talking about who could be involved.

[Eschaton]

What is amazing is that this story has been out there since July yet it is only now becoming a story because one adminstration official is trying to get some other ones. It is never fun to watch an organization implode but there could be some real raminfications about this. From the details, a whole bunch of media personnel know EXACTLY who was shopping this story. The names of the officials will become known. Then it does not matter what the Justice Department does. The smell of blood, along the lines of Watergate, will cause every reporter to try and get their own piece of the story. Of course, maybe this is the reason Ari Fleischer left, since he would be the best fall guy for this attempt at dirty tricks.

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 23:07:05 GMT

How The Ohio Cable Modem Uncappers Fared. Dave writes in with a link following up on a story from last year about some Ohio residents who found themselves facing federal crimes prosecution for simply uncapping their cable modems. The details of the story were sickening. While you can understand why a cable company might get annoyed at someone for uncapping their cable modem to allow for faster speeds – at most you’d expect a warning letter or (worst case) cutting off the service. Instead, this cable company happened to “estimate” damages of over $11,000 a person (with no justification). It just so happens that was the level needed to get the FBI interested – so suddenly these folks who wanted a little more bandwidth found themselves facing federal charges. In a followup to the story, it was noted that the cable company was coming down particularly hard on a lawyer they didn’t like due to some of his actions as a local prosecutor. So now, a year later, Broadband Reports has written up a followup to look at what happened to all of the accused uncappers. Most of them settled, paying thousands of dollars in fines and agreeing to community service. Some cases were dropped outright. The lawyer, though, went to court – and won. It turned out that the terms of service from the cable company didn’t actually say you couldn’t uncap your modem. No matter what the result, it’s still disturbing to see the FBI getting involved with some people who just wanted faster internet connections.
[Techdirt]

Continuing abuses of cartels of the federal system. How can this be construed as a federal crime? Don’t we have better things to do, like get some terrorists? And I love that the actual person who went to court won. So many of these tactics are simply intimidation. Charge someone with a psuedo crime that has extremely harsh penalties, create a loss of millions, suggest that they could be sent to hard labor for years and most people would settle. Like the RIAA cases, the goal is NOT to take these to court but to create publicity. The huge penalities serve to get a lot os cases settled. This way the bullies win on all sides. It is wrong and is one reason I will never get a cable modem if given a choice. Unfortunatley, we have little choice in broadband today.

Blazing a trail

River Person or Goal Person.

Dina Mehta quotes from an article by Chuck Frey:

The late self-help expert, Earl Nightingale, once explained that there are two types of people: river people and goal people. Both types of people can experience personal fulfillment and success in life, although in different ways.

Goal People

Most of us are undoubtedly familiar with goal people. They are the individuals who write down their objectives and timetables for reaching them, and then focus on attaining them, one by one. By laying out a roadmap of future achievements in front of them, goal people give their creative minds a clear set of stimuli to work on. Their subconscious minds can then get to work incubating ideas and insights that will help them to reach their goals.

River People

River people, on the other hand, don’t like to follow such a structured route to success. They are called river people because they are happiest and most fulfilled when they are wading in a rich “river” of interest — a subject or profession about which they are very passionate. While they may not have a concrete plan with measurable goals, river people are often successful because they are so passionate about their area of interest.

River people are explorers, continually seeking out learning opportunities and new experiences. For river people, joy comes from the journey, not from reaching the destination — exactly the opposite of goal people.

Recognizing both qualities in yourself — Most people are a combination of these two personality types. I know I am. In my full-time job, I am expected to be goal oriented. I have specific personal and departmental objectives for which I’m responsible. At the same time, however, I get the most “juice” out of being an explorer, learning new skills, collecting information and writing about innovation and technology.

So beautifully written. I guess I am a bit of both, though the river person tends to dominate. What about you?

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

I’ve have always used a different metaphor. I would rather blaze a trail than build the town. Finding a new path is much more exciting for me than getting just the right brick for the wall. I would rather wander, finding things I would never think to look for, than make sure the roads are straight. Adventuring versus process. We need both but I prefer the former and will fight to be allowed to go a’roamin’.

Read the report

Ohmigod! Reading this report on Maryland and digital election machines (see below) is like reading something from Bizarro World. What would they have implemented if this review had not taken place, if the software had not been leaked? Here are some nice excerpts:

AccuVote-TS voting system is not compliant with State of Maryland Information Security Policy & Standards

Yes, the system that is going to be used did not even meet the state’s own security standard. This leads to this wonderful material:

Failure to meet the minimum security requirements set forth in the State of Maryland Information Security Policy and Standards indicates that the system is vulnerable to exploitation. The results of a successful attack could result in voting results being released too soon, altered, or destroyed. The impact of exploitation could lead to a failure of the elections process by failing to elect to office, or decide in a ballot measure, according to the will of the people. The impact could be a loss of voter confidence, embarrassment to the State, or release of incomplete or inaccurate election results to the media.

I’ll bet it would have an impact!!

SBE [State Board of Elections] does not require the secure transmission of election vote totals

Yes, transmissions could be altered in transit and there is no process to detect this.

SBE relies upon Diebold (the AccuVote-TS vendor) to load the version of software certified by the Independent Test Authority (ITA)

Yet, it has no process to verify that the software actually loaded is correct. Great.

SBE GEMS server is connected to the SBE intranet

Current security controls state that the voting system not be on a network. Not only is it but it also contains parts of MS Office and other irrelevant software. They recommend testing for trojans or other exploits. Another ‘Who thought connecting the voting server to an intranet was a good idea?’ This section ends with this gem:

We recommend that SBE discontinues the use of an FTP server to distribute the approved ballots.

Amazingly, the ballots were to be distributed by a very non-secure system. I bet the hackers are just drooling about what they can do hacking into these systems

The system, as implemented in policy, procedure, and technology, is at high risk of compromise. Application of the listed mitigations will reduce the risk to the system. Any computerized voting system implemented using the present set of policies and procedures would require these same mitigations.

This is the final statement of the risk of this system. Not a very hopeful one, considering that these are basic ideas about security. Why did it require an outside investigation to uncover these things? What would have happened if this investigation had not taken place? And it would most likely not have taken place if someone had not gotten ahold of code they were not supposed to see. I will only believe in digital voting if it uses processes that are open and transparent, at least to more than just the commercial pressures present in a for-profit company. The needs of the company are not those of the state or its voters. What sorts of penalties would there be for a company that provided faulty software? Absolutely none, since it would most likely blame the state. In the meantime, we would have elections that no one could trust. I guess I’ll just move to an absentee ballot. Those are secure, right?

Rigged Machines

E-voting given go-ahead despite flaws [New Scientist]

Great. The organization that was supposed to vet the new electronic voting machines from Diebold says that they still have problems and things need to be fixed before moving on. This does not prevent the Governor of Maryland to give them his blessing. he press flack stated ‘We are convinced that in the right environment these can be some of the most secure machines in the nation.’ Being a cynic on these sorts of things, I wonder how much Diebold donated to his campaign? We are supposed to be able to read the report, redacted of course to prevent material from falling into the hand’s of hackers, at the governor’s website by Friday.

[The report can now be downloaded.]

You can read the press release right now. My jaw dropped when reading the new things Diebold was adding ONLY BECAUSE AN INDEPENDENT AUDIT WAS LAUNCHED. ‘incorporating encryption into the electronic transmission of election results’. What, were the transmission of election results going to be in plain text? ‘providing personal identification numbers for when election officials access the system’. I think accessing an election system should be at least as difficult as accessing an ATM. Read the other things that the state wants done. Almost everyone of them is something a reasonable person would expect to have already been done. Encryption of vote tallies. Require 100% verification of unofficial tallies. Provide a process for followinwg tally audit trails. My favorite is the last thing that the state required before approving the system. ‘Change default passwords and passwords printed in documentation.’!!!! Great. Diebold did not think of that before and had to have a state request it after an independent audit. Whay will happen to the election process when it is controlled by a few proprietary systems whose inner working are closed to the very public using them? What little we know about this system came about becuase they mistakenly leaked a version of the software on the net. Why should we really believe that a company that has to be told to encrypt this information really has a clue about doint it right? Will they be the MS of elections, fixing each voting fault with a patch? The entire democratic process breaks down if we can not trust the machines that tally the vote. Human error is one thing. Manipulation of the results by software is another.

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 05:46:15 GMT

The Challenges to Creating a New Democratic Majority. The rosy view that there is an ‘emerging Democratic majority’ in the US, must factor in how our 18th century winner-take-all electoral system often maintains minority control despite fewer votes. [AlterNet]

An interesting discussion for those who think that things will get rosy for Democrats as time goes on. It will not be so rosy.

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 05:39:55 GMT

Java for Bioinformatics. Bioinformaticians and biological scientists have to sift through a lot of data. Visualization helps. While Perl has been a mainstay of bioinformatics, several projects and APIs in the Java world are making Java a viable development language. Stephen Montgomery surveys the scene. [O'Reilly Network ONJava.com]

Some useful matyerial for my class. I had been looking for a good site for examining protein structures. There is a nice link here.

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 05:38:53 GMT

Having 2 three hour sessions a week teaching Bioinformatics is brutal. Keeping everyone engaged while be coherant sure takes a lot of energy. I love blogging but my energy level my be low for the next few weeks.

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 06:24:38 GMT

Liberty in the balance: Security collides with civil liberties. Bob Cox spotted a Good One from The Sacramento Bee By Sam Stanton and Emily Bazar, that examines how the crackdown on terrorism has come into conflict with the civil liberties that set America apart.
“The final version of the Patriot Act that was passed into law was rewritten between midnight and 8 o’clock in the morning behind closed doors by a few unknown people, and it was presented to Congress for a one-hour debate and an up or down vote,” U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said in a telephone interview from his Oregon office. “It was hundreds of pages long, and no member of Congress can tell you they knew what they were voting for in its entirety.” [LISNews.com]

WHen the FBI bangs down your door and hauls you away, just remember the act that gave them that power was written in the dead on night by persons who were not elected officials and was not properly vetted by Congress. The Congress of today reinds me more and more of the Republic of Rome, particularly in its lackadasical approach to its responsibilities.How can any ethical person knowingly vote for something that they have not read? Do they just sign on the dotted line where the scribes tell them? It certainly appears so.

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 06:16:19 GMT

The Lucent klognet. Making intranet weblog data usable.
This is indeed very informative stuff. I found the timeline at the
beginning interesting; it highlights the correlation between financial
constraints and the adoption of lightweight tools that are useful to
individuals.

Excellent presentation on supporting K-logging within a large organisation. Lucent
Technologies’ Information Specialist, Michael Angeles, believes
blogging has evolved beyond “cool” and is moving quickly into the
corporate world. In this presentation, Angeles will discuss who blogs,
how and why. He will also discuss how Lucent is supporting bloggers and
at the same time keeping close watch over the resulting growth of
information on the Intranet. [...]

A truly excellent and well-prepared presentation.

[headshift moments via Conversations with Dina via McGee's Musings]

[Seb's Open Research]

I’ll have to check this out. It is something I have been saying to anyone who would listen for almost 2 years. Blogs in the right business setting can be a tremendous asset.

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 06:12:03 GMT

New voting machines are criminally bad. Salon is running an astonishing interview with Bev Harris, the whistle-blower who broke the news that the computerized voting machines in use across America are not only insecure, but deliberately so, because insecure machines are easier for the techs from Diebold and other suppliers to “fix” when they have embarassing failures (of course, they’re also easy for anyone else who wants to “fix” an election). Diebold hasn’t denied that the leaked memos that Harris published are real — rather, they’ve owned up to them and asserted a copyright on them, threatening her with a DMCA suit if she doesn’t take them off the web.

Well, I don’t believe you can protect intent to break the law by slapping a copyright on it. And the memos that we posted show that the law has been broken. If you can protect intent to break the law, all anybody would need to do is take their bank robbery plans and put a copyright on it, and then say nobody can look at them because they’re copyrighted…

…[T]hey have been aware of these security flaws for years and they have chosen not to correct it. He says something to the effect of, find out what it will take to make this problem go away. [Referring to a voting equipment certifier, Clark tells a colleague to "find out what it is going to take to make them happy."] He says if you don’t mention [a problem] you may “skate through” certification. And talking about doing “end runs” is not a good thing either.

And what’s disturbing is the very same thing that these memos are talking about — overwriting the audit log — in the presentation in which they sold their machines to the state of Georgia they specifically bring up the audit log and say that no human can change it. This shows they made fraudulent claims, frankly.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

I wonder if absentee voting will be more protected?Without openess and transparency , these digital machines are just plain criminal. Why would I trust the word of a company which make shuge campaign donations to politicians in order to get the franchise? It is way to tempting for them to have backdoors to make it easy to get the numbers their benefactors want. I hope we never move to all digital voting.

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 06:04:25 GMT

Non-genetic maggot speciation. Changes in aromatic preferences can cause “sympatric speciation” among maggots — a form of speciation that is not really genetic (the two species can still interbreed), but rather circumstantial: genetic differences contained in each species causes it to behave in a way that ensures it will never get it on with the other species.

The apple and hawthorn maggots are common names for the same species, Rhagoletis pomonella . The pest and the hawthorn plant are native to North America, but the apples they now infest were introduced from Europe around 250 years ago. During the 1860s, in New York’s Champlain Valley, some hawthorn flies shifted to apple plants as their host, while others did not.”There are no morphological differences between the two, so they are still the same species, but two races can be distinguished by looking at the diversity of protein structures of whole populations and by the specificity of individual flies to different host plants,” explained Roelofs, who is the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Insect Biochemistry at Cornell.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

What is fascinating here is that we are possible watching speciation occurring before our eyes. We know when the maggots starting on a new food source (about 150 years ago), moving from hawthorn to apples. The two groups now have such different mating patterns that there is little gene flow between them. This sets the stage for genetic drift and mutation, followed by natural selection, to forge a new species. Lack of gene flow is a critical aspect of the barriers between species. What they look like does not matter at all, so saying they are morphologically the same is erally so much noise. What the genes tell us is more important.