Category Archives: Politics

McCain versus the Universe

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I can’t tell which of these three things is worse about John McCain:

  1. He can’t tell (or is willing to mislead) when Federal money hasn’t been spent on a project
  2. He can’t tell an overhead projector from a planetarium display projector
  3. He thinks that the idea of spending taxpayer money on aiding scientific education is a bad thing

This is all down to his repeated denigration of a request for US$3M federal funding from the Adler Planetarium in Chicago (which has bipartisan support) with comments such as planetariums being “foolish”. As New Scientist says:

What may be most troubling to science educators is the fact that McCain clearly presumed that the wastefulness of spending money on a planetarium would be self-evident without any further explanation or context.

Given that the planetarium were after US$3M to replace a 40 year old projector (which they can no longer get spare parts for), and the cost of the Iraq war is over US$300M per day, it seems churlish to refuse their paltry request.

Update: Maybe McCain should see this XKCD.. 🙂

IPv6

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Glen Turner has a nice blog on th what was going on at AusNOG, well worth a read if you’re a fan of the end-to-end connectivity model.

Back from AusNOG. It’s now clear that allocations of new IPv4 addresses will cease in 2010, so a lot of the conference was about NAT and IPv6. […] So it’s going to be “carrier-class network address translation”. That is, your ISP will run NAT (and if you are the average customer, you will run NAT on your ADSL router too).

This will give the ISP’s far more control than they have now (forget net neutrality) and so if you want to escape from these potential walled gardens you’re going to be needing IPv6 to continue to enjoy what you currently have access to now..

A Tale of Two Transport Hacks

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In the USA a court has ordered that three MIT students not talk at DEFCON about their security assessment of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) fare cards. Apparently the court believes that “discussing the flaws at a public conference constituted a ‘transmission’ of a computer program that could harm the fare collection system“, which is pretty sad. There are more documents at Cryptome on the case. Their presentation was to include a cryptanalysis of the Mifare “Classic” card, which takes us to our second case..

Bruce Schneier reports that a group of Dutch researchers have won in court to be able to publish their own cryptanalysis of that very same Mifare Classic card, with the court stating:

Damage to NXP is not the result of the publication of the article but of the production and sale of a chip that appears to have shortcomings.

An outbreak of common sense that the MIT students could only dream of. I wonder if they could appeal and cite this case as grounds to have the judgement overturned ?

Are you sure you want to take a laptop to the USA ? (Updated)

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From the Washington Post:

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption, or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The full policy is available and it says that they have to destroy the information retained unless there is “probable cause“, except..

Copies may be retained by an assisting Federal agency or entity only if and to the extent that it has the independent legal authority to do so – for example, when the information is of national security or intelligence value.

So if you’re working for a company that competes with a US one you should probably be careful..

(Via)

Update: Steve Bellovin points out that this applies when you leave America, too..

HURIDOCS Looking for Open Source Developer

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Announced via Groklaw:

[Groklaw] received a request from Tom Longley, Project Manager for Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems (HURIDOCS), a Geneva-based nonprofit. They’re looking for someone to help them reengineer their database software, WinEvsys, to be released under a Free Software license. That page has tons of info, including a fact sheet and a demo and the software for download. This software is used internationally by a lot of human rights organizations to keep track of human rights abuses, of which there seems to be a never-ending supply.

There is more information on the HURIDOCS website.

Just spreading the word..

It’s the Planet, Stupid

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I think it’s time for a new catchphrase in politics, as we currently have the Labour Party umming and ahhing over the impact of carbon trading on NSW and VIC’s dirty coal generators and jobs, the Liberal Party saying “do nothing, quickly” in the hope of appeasing their corporate paymasters under the guise of protecting the economy and the Nationals being very quiet, probably working out how to square the impact of increased drought on their rural electorates with not falling out with the Liberal party.

ITS THE PLANET, STUPID

If you waste time faffing around trying to not damage the economy (which isn’t a given) and not addressing the issue then it very much looks like there’s not going to be much of a country left to worry about!

CSIRO & BOM report – “Drought: Exceptional Circumstances” (not)

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For those looking for the joint assessment by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO that’s all over the news at the moment, you can find it on the MAFF website. There is also a web page listed for the data and analysis in the report, but it’s not working yet (I guess they forgot the webmaster doesn’t work on weekends).

It’s about 35 pages long and is fairly technical, but not overly daunting. The content, however, is pretty scary. For us in Victoria is it predicting:

  • by 2010-2040, exceptionally hot years are likely to affect about 75% of the region, and occur every 1.3 years on average;
  • by 2010-2040, exceptionally low rainfall years are likely to affect about 10% of the region and occur about once every 12 years on average;
  • by 2030, exceptionally low soil moisture years are likely to affect about 11% of the region and occur about once every 9 years on average.

Historically it says that Victoria and Tasmania are down 109 mm in rainfall since 1950 and average temperature is up by almost 0.8C over the same 50 year timescale.

The most worrying thing is that these predictions are based on a lower level of CO2e emissions than we are currently tracking towards.

Observations since 1990 show that we are tracking the highest IPCC emission scenario, called A1F1, but climate simulations have not been performed using the A1FI scenario. Most climate research institutes around the world did simulations using the mid-range emission scenarios, called A1B and A2. Hence, in this report, projections for the next 20 to 30 years are based on simulations using mid-range emission scenarios.

So if we carry on how we’re doing now, then the reality could be much worse..

How Not to Handle Sensitive Documents (Updated)

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According to the the UK Government’s Cabinet Office:

Top secret – The compromise of this information or material would be likely: to threaten directly the internal stability of the UK or friendly countries; to lead directly to widespread loss of life; to cause exceptionally grave damage to the effectiveness or security of UK or allied forces or to the continuing effectiveness of extremely valuable security or intelligence operations; to cause exceptionally grave damage to relations with friendly Governments; to cause severe long-term damage to the UK economy.

So it’s not very clever to have one of your employees leave such a document on a train..

Our correspondent said that across several departments in Whitehall on Wednesday evening there is said to be “horror” that top-secret documents could have been so casually mislaid.

I’ll say! Apparently the culprit has been suspended from his job.

Update: It happened again, though this time it’s not as clear what the actual classification was.