Disqus - Latest Comments for lippard

Re: An Unnatural Modern Fascination with Murder and Celebrities?

lippard — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:01:38 -0000

"the Bible also tends to use those incidents as moral lessons about human behavior" -- that's the excuse often given, but rarely substantiated. Most of the violence, gore, and debauchery in the Old Testament is given without comment or moral lesson, and sometimes when there is a moral lesson given, it's not a good one. The Pharaoh decides to let the Hebrews go, but God hardens his heart and changes his mind. God tells Abraham to kill his child, and the fact that he was willing to blindly obey in the commission of an evil act is supposed to be a good thing. God and Satan have a bet over Job for which Job's life is destroyed even though he hadn't committed any wrongdoing. Noah's son Ham sees dad drunk and naked, tells his brothers, who cover him, and Noah curses Ham's son Canaan. God orders the Hebrews to commit genocide against several groups of people, often ordering the killing of all males and taking virgin women into slavery.

Re: Techno Bashing

lippard — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:20:28 -0000

Even if you don't like techno, Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music is cool.

Re: IT Policy at Princeton

lippard — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:06:47 -0000

Congratulations, Tim!

Re: Micropayments reconsidered

lippard — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:53:24 -0000

The transaction cost overhead issue looks to me to be surmountable. Hasn't the PayPal peer-to-peer payment model already addressed that issue? The funds are either in your PayPal account, or get deducted from a bank account, usually with no transaction charges. Similarly, using cell phones for micropayments, you either have pre-paid funds available for use for micropayments, or the micropayments get totaled up at the end of the month and appear on your phone bill.

Re: Micropayments reconsidered

lippard — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:55:57 -0000

Aren't there huge numbers of micropayments when you look at purchases by cell phone in Africa and Asia (and to a lesser extent in the U.S. and Europe)?

Re: Is InfraGard a Privacy Threat?

lippard — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:30:52 -0000

Enigma Foundry: I agree that it bears watching. Nonprofits, private corporations, and government should all be held accountable to the rule of law, and as transparent as reasonably possible in what they do.

That said, InfraGard is something akin to a neighborhood watch program, originally just for improving computer and network security, and now for physical security as well, for elements of U.S. infrastructure that are privately owned. The government *can't* protect it on its own, the bulk of the protection has to come from the private owners.

"So, are they sharing information about private citizens whom the FBI deems to be a threat? If so, what safeguards are in place to prevent 'threats' from being anyone the government doesn't like?"

Point to ponder: Alan Ralsky is a private individual who has, in the past, been one of the top spammers in the world. He has broken multiple laws and committed fraud against Internet providers in the course of his activities, since 1997. Information about his activities has been provided to law enforcement for as long as he's been doing it, but he didn't get raided until 2005 and didn't get indicted until 2008.

If you don't have solid evidence of criminal activity *and* losses that reach a certain threshold, you're not going to see a prosecution until enough evidence accumulates.

Counterterrorism is probably a little different and an area deserving of more scrutiny given the Bush administration's abuses. We already know that the FBI has misused National Security Letters.

Re: Don’t Politicize Foreign Direct Investment in 3Com

lippard — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 19:54:33 -0000

CFIUS has a very strong anti-China bias that comes primarily from the DoD. That was why Hutchison Whampoa had to pull out of its partnership with Singapore Technologies Telemedia to purchase Global Crossing, the China National Offshore Oil Company withdrew its offer to acquire Unocal, and may be why Haier dropped its bid to acquire Maytag (though I'm not sure what the infrastructure security issues are created by Chinese washing machines). I'm baffled as to why Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's PC division was approved.

The CFIUS process itself is not very transparent. It seems to require spending lots of money on lawyers and lobbyists who are former insiders in order to even find out what sort of arrangements the U.S. government is willing to accept. I think the process's main function may be to put money into the pockets of various government-connected D.C. firms.

Re: Lessig and Corruption at the FCC

lippard — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 14:29:29 -0000

How can this be readily enforced, when there is a constant flow of personnel from regulator to lobbyist? Trying to put a cap on information leaks seems to me futile, and you'd be better off making the regulator's actions more transparent and public than trying to keep a lid on it.

If the problem is “multiple stakeholders generally knew when the commission scheduled votes on proposed rules well before the FCC notified the public," then make the vote schedules public immediately upon scheduling.

Re: Should Government Censor In-Flight Movies?

lippard — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:07:02 -0000

If I had the option to take a flight showing R-rated movies with the knowledge that no children would be on the flight, I'd be willing to pay a slight premium for it...

But I've never seen a plane offer anything above PG except on those that offer individual entertainment (e.g., Air New Zealand, Virgin Airlines).

Re: Hazlett on the iPhone, walled gardens, and innovation

lippard — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 11:58:28 -0000

From what I've seen, there have been a bunch of third-party innovation add-ons to the iPhone because people have broken into the walled garden (it wasn't too difficult, which may have been Apple's intention).

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Muncipal Wi-Fi Plans Imploding

lippard — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:13:49 -0000

The City of Tempe's WiFi network projected 32,000 users. As of April 2006 it had 600, and has provided no more user counts since.

(Source: The Economist)

Re: Falling CS Majors

lippard — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:10:46 -0000

I switched from computer science to philosophy as an undergraduate because I was already employed as a computer programmer and was being forced to take courses that they should have given me some way to test out of, and I took a strong dislike to actually building circuits in hardware which was also a requirement. I think the last straw was a LISP instructor who refused to let me do my assignments on Multics (I was employed as a Multics programmer at the time), but insisted I do them on an IBM mainframe. I dropped the class and changed majors. In grad school I had a tentative plan to teach philosophy (symbolic logic was my favorite course to teach), but minored in cognitive science and really wanted to find something that could mix philosophy and technology. While ABD, I discovered the World Wide Web and talked a local ISP into creating a position for me, and I ended up doing information security for a living.

Re: Microsoft and Antitrust: Retro-Regulators Threaten Tech Future

lippard — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:20:30 -0000

While Google and Apple are clearly growing faster than Microsoft, I don't think that alone is sufficient to put them in the lead. Microsoft clearly still dominates the market for personal computer operating systems and office applications in the corporate world.

The Rally's hamburger fast food chain used to call itself the "fastest growing fast food chain" in the U.S.--but that was only in percentage terms. It's easy for the smaller guy to have faster growth in percentage terms than the big guy.

Microsoft: market cap $268.89B, annual revenue $51B
Google: market cap $163.87B, annual revenue $10.6B
Apple: market cap $120.97B, annual revenue $19B

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » The Land Line Phone is Dead

lippard — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 18:28:42 -0000

Paul Kouroupas at the Global Crossing blog raised the issue of Verizon's stranded copper network back in July.

Re: Eric Schmidt and Laurence Tribe on Common Carriage and Net Neutrality Regulation

lippard — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 16:11:33 -0000

Also check out the offerings from BareFruit and Paxfire. Earthlink is using the former, Global Crossing has been testing the latter.

Re: Susan Landau on how FISA is a “gateway for hackers”

lippard — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:12:35 -0000

I agree. Attackers are way ahead of defenders in many ways (see Richard Bejtlich's two-part report on the most recent Black Hat Briefings).

Re: Good Stuff from Google / The Internet is Not a Cloud!

lippard — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 11:55:40 -0000

"The assertion “logs don’t contain any truly personal information about you” is not necessarily true. It’s contingent on what searches you’ve done. As AOL’s recent gaffe in distributing raw search logs demonstrated, people’s searches can be used to identify them. Each individual search is not necessarily identifiable, but a group of searches often will be, and it will grow more identifiable with the development of better data mining techniques and the collection of more data in more places."

And such data is at high risk of being intercepted without judicial review. The 9th Circuit ruling in U.S. v. Forrester says there's no 4th Amendment protection for email to/from fields or web URLs, even though this is in the packet data payload, not the packet headers. Customer traffic containing such data can be intercepted at the ISP and supplied to law enforcement without a court order.

Re: Kip Hawley is Stil an Idiot

lippard — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:23:58 -0000

There's also now a part 3.

Re: What the Restaurant Business Needs is More Lawyers!

lippard — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 19:25:06 -0000

Ah, I thought Tom Lee was Tim Lee's alter ego, the self-link was intentional and you were having a laugh...

Re: What the Restaurant Business Needs is More Lawyers!

lippard — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:12:14 -0000

Tim: You should go after this Tom Lee guy for stealing your ideas. (Or should he go after you?)

Re: What the Restaurant Business Needs is More Lawyers!

lippard — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:09:45 -0000

Restaurant "look and feel" lawsuits (about restaurant decor and menu, rather than recipes) already hit the big time with Taco Cabana v. Two Pesos (a case that resulted in the demise of Two Pesos, which was a restaurant I enjoyed visiting as a grad student in Tucson) and Fuddruckers v. Flakey Jake's.

Ironically, the Flakey Jake's in Tempe, Arizona turned into a Studebaker's, which has been involved in similar disputes...

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3190/is_...

Re: Fair Use in Action

lippard — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 12:27:06 -0000

I prefer "We are the Worms."

Re: The Long View on Google’s Street View

lippard — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:20:15 -0000

Google Street View converts what was ephemeral into something semi-permanent--it does for a public view from the street what Google has already done for Usenet news postings and email.

Re: Free Software and Offshoring

lippard — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:37:59 -0000

I recently came across a company that has a staff of programmers in Vietnam.

Re: Free Software as Professional Development

lippard — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:35:27 -0000

I learned to program in PL/I thanks to what was virtually equivalent to open source--I was a member of a Honeywell-sponsored Explorers Post which gave its members access to Honeywell's Multics operating system. Multics provided source code for the entire operating system (except for a few unbundled software applications written by third parties) to all customers, and through my account I had access to all of it. I learned from looking at other people's code and making changes to it, and ultimately was able, through the sponsorship of one of the developers, to provide my changes for review and installation into the operating system. This ultimately led to my becoming employed as a Multics systems programmer.

If that code hadn't been open to me, the employment opportunity probably wouldn't have, either--at least, not as early as it did (while I was just entering college).