Hands-free is not enough

The other day, we heard that the U.S. NTSB would be proposing a nationwide ban on mobile phone use, and people were speculating that it’d increase sales and use of hands-free calling. I thought that would be odd, since a number of studies have made it clear that it’s mostly talking on your mobile phone that’s dangerous, whether it’s hands-free or not. There’s cognitive interference when you talk to someone who isn’t in the car with you, and having the device be hands-free only helps with the mechanical aspects, not with the cognitive ones, and those appear to be more important from a safety point of view.

And, as I expected, the proposed ban includes hands-free devices. Quoting from their news release of yesterday:

No call, no text, no update behind the wheel: NTSB calls for nationwide ban on PEDs while driving

December 13, 2011

Following today’s Board meeting on the 2010 multi-vehicle highway accident in Gray Summit, Missouri, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) called for the first-ever nationwide ban on driver use of personal electronic devices (PEDs) while operating a motor vehicle.

The safety recommendation specifically calls for the 50 states and the District of Columbia to ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers. The safety recommendation also urges use of the NHTSA model of high-visibility enforcement to support these bans and implementation of targeted communication campaigns to inform motorists of the new law and heightened enforcement.

According to NHTSA, more than 3,000 people lost their lives last year in distraction-related accidents, said Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman. It is time for all of us to stand up for safety by turning off electronic devices when driving.

No call, no text, no update, is worth a human life.

Note nonemergency use and other than those designed to support the driving task. There is no exception for hands-free devices in their recommendation.

The NTSB has no standing to force this; in the United States, the states make their own traffic rules. But Congress can back the recommendation with funding incentives, as they did with the now-defunct 55 MPH speed limit, and as they have done for laws requiring seat-belt use.

National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual bill that provides for continued operation of the U.S. military. But this year’s 680-page bill includes yet more civil rights violations sanctioned by our legislature. Here’s NPR’s Steve Inskeep introducing their report:

The senate last night passed a defense bill that includes controversial provisions for handling terrorism suspects. The bill would send most detainees into military custody, not into the hands of the FBI, and it would allow the U.S. government to hold some suspects indefinitely, without charge, without trial. Those ideas ran into strong opposition from national security experts across the Obama administration, setting the stage for a possible veto by the president.

About halfway through the NPR report is this:

Carrie Johnson (NPR): But some Democrats and civil liberties groups said that left up in the air whether U.S. citizens could be detained in this country indefinitely without charges. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, says there’s nothing wrong with taking a hard line against American terrorists.

Senator Graham: I’m just saying to any American citizen, if you wanna help Al Qaeda, you do so at your own peril. You can get killed in the process, you can get detained indefinitely, and when you’re being questioned and you say to the interrogator, I want my lawyer, the interrogator will say you don’t have a right to a lawyer, ’cause you’re a military threat.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: what Senator Graham and those who spout the same rhetoric are missing is that we’re dealing here not with adjudicated cases, but with accusations. The rights they’re threatening were put in place to protect Americans from improper accusations — unfair, unwarranted, trumped up, perhaps specifically intended to put away someone who’s turned out to be inconvenient.

Back in the old days of tyrannical rule, the king would accuse anyone of anything, and the accusation alone would be cause to lock the accused in a dungeon indefinitely, with no hope of help or justice. When we formed this country, we put together a system of rights and guarantees to prevent such abuse and to protect our people from that sort of thing.

And yet that’s exactly what Senator Graham and others want to put us back into: a situation wherein a government that wants to silence someone and make him disappear need only make an unsubstantiated accusation of working with terrorists, and that person can be whisked away by the military, held in secret forever, and denied access to anyone — no family, no lawyers, no advocates of any kind to help him refute what may well be false accusations. No charge of an actual crime and no evidence are necessary.

I agree with Senator Graham that we should take a hard line against people who wanna help Al Qaeda. I’m just not willing to take accusations as fact and throw away the protections we have against abuse, and neither should anyone who supports the tenets this country was founded on be willing to do so. By all means, arrest people suspected of working with terrorists. Then give them access to legal support, tell them what crimes they’re charged with, and have fair and public trials, just as we do with people accused of murder, rape, arson, and all other horrible crimes.

These provisions need to be removed from the bill, and President Obama must veto it until they are removed.

IBM will get a new CEO

In my old company’s news: IBM has announced that Ginni Rometty will take over as President and CEO in January. From the IBM announcement:

Armonk, NY, October 25, 2011 — The IBM board of directors has elected Virginia M. Rometty president and chief executive officer of the company, effective January 1, 2012. She was also elected a member of the board of directors, effective at that time. Ms. Rometty is currently IBM senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy. She succeeds Samuel J. Palmisano, who currently is IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Mr. Palmisano will remain chairman of the board.

That Ms Rometty is IBM’s first female CEO is still remarkable, though IBM has long been more progressive than most large corporations in its promotion of women to executive positions, women such as Ellen Hancock, Linda Sanford, Jeannette Horan, Harriet Pearson, and Maria Azua have held Vice President positions in the company, and I watched some of them, including Ginni Rometty, move up from mid-level to Vice President during my time in IBM.

I have every expectation that Ms Rometty will be good for IBM, and I look forward to seeing how the company does under her leadership.

The New York Times paywall cometh

Yesterday, the NY Times sent this message by email to all registered users. An excerpt:

This week marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform. The change will primarily affect those who are heavy consumers of the content on our Web site and on mobile applications.

Here’s their FAQ list and the prices. As you can see, the minimum charge is $15 per month, which comes to $180 per year. That’s a lot, especially compared with free. Part of the charge is for use of smartphone or tablet apps, and they do not offer a subscription that’s web only.

Cory, at BoingBoing, doesn’t think it will work, and I agree with him. There’s bound to be confusion about how much you can see. For instance, while, according to the FAQ, you’ll always be able to read things that someone posts to a blog or that you get from a Google search, they will count against your 20 free articles a month. So if you’re not a subscriber, you can read 20 articles from the Times site, and then read 20 (or 40, or 80) more posted on someone’s blog... if you do it in that order. But if you read the articles from the 20 blog posts first and then want to snag an article directly off the Times site, you’ll have to pay. You gonna keep track of that?

Well, they say they’ll keep track of it for you, but, really, it seems a complicated mess.

Apart from that, I wonder about the links I’ve already posted. I presume that blog links will be identified in a way that the site can recognize, tagged with a token of some sort. It seems unlikely that using the referrer field that the browser sends would be reliable enough for them. But all those old Times links I’ve been posting for the last five years lack any sort of tag, so will those suddenly be blocked by the paywall? Probably, and that will be very irritating.

I also take exception to their characterization of the change as affecting primarily heavy consumers of the content on our Web site. 20 articles a month is nothing, and I would not call someone who reads one article a day a heavy consumer, in any sense. No, this will have a profound effect on the habits of a great many casual Times users, who check out a couple of items a day or so. If I want just 5 articles a month beyond the 20 free ones, I’ll have to pay $15 each month for that.

I likely won’t. I almost assuredly won’t.

So the result will be that the Times will no longer be my go-to news source for background on what I say in these pages. I’ll look to other sources instead. And I’ll do that with sadness and regret, because I think the New York Times is the best source around... and that’s the best reason I can think of for them to look for ways to fund their content other than by charging for it, article by article. They’re a business, yes, but they’re also a public service, and an important one.

Or perhaps it’s that they’re not a public service any longer. Sigh.

Republicans vs NPR

I sent the following message, last week, to my congressional representative, Nan Hayworth (R-NY 19):

The recent departure of executives from National Public Radio, and the events that triggered them, have fueled discussion in Congress about eliminating its federal funding. That would be a disastrous decision. Public radio and television provide and important service to the American public, with news, arts, and nature programming that is not connected to commercial interests. Their news agencies, in particular, benefit from their ability to remain impartial. Federal funding is entirely appropriate and necessary for these organizations, and Congress must not eliminate nor significantly reduce that funding. Ms Hayworth, please tell me your viewpoint on this matter, so that I may understand where you stand. And I urge you to stand on the side of the American public’s need for the high-quality news and arts programming that NPR and PBS provide.

I got no response. Or perhaps I did: today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to eliminate federal funding for NPR:

The House voted on Thursday to cut off funding for National Public Radio, with Democrats and Republicans fiercely divided over both the content of the bill and the manner in which it was brought to the floor.

Under the measure, sponsored by Representative Doug Lamborn, a Republican from Colorado, stations could not buy programming from NPR or any other source using the $22 million the stations receive from the Treasury for that purpose. Local NPR stations would be able to use federal funds for operating expenses, but not content.

The time has come for us to claw back this money, said Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee.

According to the voting, representative Hayworth voted against it. I’m not surprised, as she’s a newly seated Republican. But it’s very clear that she is not representing her district, which is very much in support of National Public Radio.

It matters little, really, because the measure will almost certainly not pass in the Senate, and so it will die. But what these idiot Republicans are doing is unfortunate, frightening, dangerous. And the partisanship that has settled in our legislatures since 2000 is the most dangerous part of all.

Illinois Governor Signs Capital Punishment Ban

Yesterday, Illinois joined the civilized world, including 15 other states, by abolishing the death penalty. Their reason? One of sense:

Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it, Mr. Quinn [Illinois Governor Pat Quinn] said in a statement.

In 2000, at the same time that Texas Governor George W. Bush was crowing arrogantly that every one of the people executed in his state during his reign — well over 100 — was guilty and deserved to die, the governor of Illinois at that time, George Ryan, suspended the death penalty because DNA evidence proved that a disturbing number of the death-row inmates there were, in fact, innocent.

Before then, George Pataki won the election for governor in New York with the promise of reinstating the death penalty here. And our state’s top court subsequently declared the law unconstitutional. No one has been executed in New York since 1963. The Massachusetts law has also been declared unconstitutional by its state courts.

The thirteen other states that do not have death penalty statutes at all are Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

In contrast, Texas has killed 466 inmates since 1976. Virginia is a very distant second, at 108. In fact, Texas has executed more people than the next six states, combined (Virginia, Oklahoma (96), Florida (69), Missouri (68), Alabama (50), and Georgia (49)).

Illinois executed 12 prisoners between 1976 and Governor Ryan’s moratorium in 2000. Hooray for them for making it clear that they’ll kill no more.

AOL to acquire dumpster full of garbage

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that AOL will pay $315 million for the Huffington Post, using this headline:

Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post

The problem here is that the HuffPo hasn’t been news in several years, if it ever was at all. I used to follow it in my feed reader, occasionally finding things of interest, but at least for the last three of its less than six years, it’s just been full of pointers to other people’s news, inane commentary, new-age silliness, quackery, and other junk. I stopped following it at all well over two years ago.

AOL apparently hasn’t. To be sure, there are things to be found there that are worth reading — I just don’t find it worth panning through the pebbles to find those few bits of pyrite, and there certainly isn’t anything that rates as gold. But with AOL’s content coming up even emptier, I guess the acquisition will be some sort of a boost, at least.

But news? Not unless something changes. Not unless Ms Huffington tosses the likes of Deepak Chopra and the other crazies that post there, and goes back to the substantive commentary that she used to have more of than now.

And it will be up to Ms H, indeed; according to the report:

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.

Well, best of luck to AOL’s new Huffington Post Media Group, but I, at least, am more skeptical than the HuffPo has ever been.

The Internet is falling!

The big Internet tech news this week is that the last block of Internet addresses, for the version of the Internet Protocol (IP) that we mostly use (IPv4), has been allocated. Or, as the headlines are saying, we have now run out of Internet addresses. Of course, it’s filled the tech media, as above, but it’s shown up in the mainstream press as well; here it is from the New York Times, and from The Guardian.

What does it really mean, that we’ve run out of IPv4 addresses?

Well, for one thing, it doesn’t mean that we’ve run out of IPv4 addresses. The Times gets it better than the other articles, in its headline:

The Last Block of IPv4 Addresses Allocated

The last address has not been assigned, not by a long shot. IPv4 addresses are allocated to organizations in large blocks — sometimes blocks of 60,000 or so, sometimes blocks of more than 16 million. Those organizations then assign addresses within those blocks, sometimes individually and sometimes in sub-blocks. What has just happened is that the last large block of addresses has been allocated. There are still many, many IPv4 addresses available for assignment, within many of the blocks that have been allocated.

For example, IBM has a 16-million-plus block of addresses comprising all addresses that start with 9 (that is, every address of the form 9.x.x.x; they also have some of the 129.x.x.x range). Those 9.x.x.x addresses are assigned within the company’s network. Not all of them are assigned, of course; there aren’t more than 16 million devices within the company.

Similarly, Internet service providers, such as Comcast and Verizon, have large blocks of their own, some for use within the company, and some to provide to their customers.

Many companies have blocks that are much larger than they need, far more than they could ever imagine using for their normal networks. Those blocks were allocated to them in earlier times, before the worldwide web and the explosion of Internet usage, when we never thought it would matter. Or they were assigned later, when we assumed that IPv6, with many orders of magnitude more addresses, would be well deployed by now. (I’ll note that it would be very difficult, even though large portions of the allocated blocks remain unused, to reclaim the unused bits and to reallocate them.)

Let’s not be Chicken Little, here; the sky is not falling, an the Internet is not imminently doomed. Indeed, the Internet will mostly run fine, as it is, for many years yet. We’ll all be able to read our email, buy from Amazon and eBay, use Facebook, and see YouTube videos.

Eventually, we’ll be crowded out by expanding Internet use, though we have techniques to keep that at bay for a long time. What will be blocked by this are — and this should be a familiar refrain to readers here — new applications, new uses of the Internet. To move into the future, beyond email and eBay, Facebook and YouTube, we need to move to IPv6.

We have enough IPv4 addresses for now, and for a while, to accommodate putting every computer on the Internet, as long as we’re thinking of computer as we have been: desktops and laptops. Maybe iPads, too. But now add Kindles and other eBook readers. Add smart-phones. Consider that every mobile phone is a smart-phone. Do we have enough v4 addresses for all of that?

Now move into the Internet of things: add every car, because our cars need to be online. Add every television (they’ll stream video directly), every stereo receiver (streaming music, radio stations, and other audio from the Internet), every portable music player from boom box to iPod Nano. Are we getting there? Include appliances: alarm clocks, refrigerators, coffee makers. Include home- and building-automation targets: thermostats, light switches, and so on. Put in sensor networks, traffic-control and monitoring systems....

Well, given all that, we ran out of v4 addresses long ago. It’s not really the v4 address-space depletion that should be driving the move to IPv6, but the need for more address space for future applications. If you don’t think that sort of thing is important, consider this news item about electric-grid problems stemming from the recent ice storm in Texas:

FORT WORTH, Texas — A high power demand in the wake of a massive ice storm caused rolling outages for more than eight hours Wednesday across most of Texas, resulting in signal-less intersections, coffee houses with no morning java and some people stuck in elevators.

The temporary outages started about 5:30 a.m. and ended in the afternoon, but there is a strong possibility that they will be required again this evening or tomorrow, depending on how quickly the disabled generation units can be returned to service, the chief operator of Texas’ power grid said in a release.

Consider the potential consequences of intersections without traffic signals and people stuck in elevators. We’d like to shut the power down in an area selectively, killing most of it but leaving the elevators running (at least until they open on the next floor), leaving a trickle of emergency lighting, leaving the the traffic lights running. We can do that, if everything’s addressable, and the power control system is set up to allow distribution with sufficient granularity.

But if it takes a Chicken Little scare — The Internet is falling! The Internet is falling! — to get IPv6 out there, well, here it comes.

Not with our drugs, you won't!

Those of us who abhor execution have gotten some temporary good news: Hospira, the only U.S. company that manufactures sodium thiopental, has ceased its production:

The sole American manufacturer of an anesthetic widely used in lethal injections said Friday that it would no longer produce the drug, a move likely to delay more executions and force states to adopt new drug combinations.

The manufacturer, Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., had originally planned to resume production of the drug, sodium thiopental, this winter at a plant in Italy, giving state corrections departments hope that the scarcity that began last fall would ease.

But the Italian authorities said they would not permit export of the drug if it might be used for capital punishment. Hospira said in a statement Friday that its aim was to serve medical customers, but that we could not prevent the drug from being diverted to departments of corrections and the company did not want to expose itself to liability in Italy.

It’s temporary, because states are likely to approve alternative drugs — Oklahoma already uses pentobarbital — but according to the Times, the delay could be considerable because of the process required to get changes approved. Some states (such as Texas, which seems to have an insatiable itch to kill prisoners) clearly will push a new protocol through as quickly as possible, while others may be in less of a hurry.

This is also interesting as a demonstration of how one country can affect another through its policies. We’re used to using embargoes for this, to varying effect, but the problem with embargoes is that they often cause pain to the populace without resulting in policy changes in the government. In this case, Italy’s approach was simple, targeted, and effective.

More police behaving badly

It’s been a while since I’ve written about rape (some of the most significant ones are here,here, and here). But via BoingBoing I’ve just read about a case in San Antonio that’s unusually disturbing: a police officer on duty handcuffed a suspect — a transgender prostitute — then drove her off to a quiet spot and forced [her] to commit multiple sex acts.

It’s disturbing that it happened, that a law officer would do such a thing. But what’s more disturbing is that the prosecutor charged him not with felony rape, despite the DNA and GPS evidence supporting the victim’s story, but with misdemeanor official oppression. Craig Nash lost his job and was sentenced to one year in jail.

One year, for violently abusing the trust we gave him as an officer of the law.

From what we’re given in the news article, it appears that the victim’s story is legitimate. In addition, a second victim, from a couple of years earlier, came forward. Nevertheless, the prosecutor gave the (former) cop a plea bargain, agreeing to charge him only with the misdemeanor and not to pursue the second accusation.

WTF?

Apart from that, even if the sex had been consensual, an on-duty officer having sex with a suspect is sufficiently wrong at so many levels as to warrant a penalty of much more than a year in jail. Think of the opportunities for abuse that crop up here: threatening women with arrest in order to get sex,^[1] releasing arrested suspects in exchange for sex, and so on.

It makes no difference how good a police officer he was in other ways or at other times. It certainly makes no difference how good a family man he is. None of that mitigates this crime.

We place a great deal of trust in police officers, and we give them a great deal of power. They must be held accountable for the misuse and abuse of that trust and power, and the punishments must be serious, not just slaps on the wrist. Dismissal, of course, but then real prison time, not just a token jail sentence. We have to show no tolerance for abusive or illegal — not to mention vile — behaviour.

I’ll note the related case from Custer County, Oklahoma, wherein former sheriff Mike Burgess had established a systematic system of sexual abuse. He got 79 years in prison.

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^[1] Personally, I consider this to be fully fledged rape, using a threat of arrest instead of, say, a knife or a threat of a severe beating. I’m not sure where the law would stand on it.

Safety, congressional and otherwise

Eliot Lear comments about this CNN article, which says that members of Congress are looking into increasing their own personal security, after the shooting of Representative Giffords. Eliot’s comment is this:

What about the rest of us?

This guy went in and legally bought a 9mm Glock with ammo, even though his friends and schools knew he was a little nutty. All of the dead people weren’t in Congress. They were collateral damage. What about them?

Indeed. It’s long past time to be looking at reasonable gun control, coming up with reasonable compromises between freedom to own guns and the danger which that freedom poses to society. Even a Republican congressman from Arizona, who probably supports the NRA and is against gun control, recognizes that allowing everyone to have guns is not a good idea. Here’s what Representative Jeff Flake says about threats to legislators:

But the danger is, some of these people you dismiss as crackpots, you know, a crackpot with a gun is dangerous, and that — that is worrisome. And I think what really hit home to all of us on Capitol Hill yesterday was that you’re not only putting yourself in danger if you ignore these kind of threats; you’re putting staff in danger, as well.

And not just your staff, Congressman. Film crews. Bystanders. Everybody.

Only, Mr Flake is, probably unintentionally, putting the blame on the right people for the wrong reason: it is, indeed, members of congress who are putting people in danger. But they’re not doing it by being out in public, by not having enough security, or anything like that.

They’re putting all of us in danger by not enacting legislation to limit the availability and use of guns.

Arizona passed legislation in 1994 that makes legal the carrying of concealed weapons. The shooter this weekend may have been carrying his gun legally. Even if not — if he didn’t have a permit — making it common to have people carrying guns makes it hard to sort out where the threats are and aren’t. The gun-carry proponents tout their ability to stop attacks with their own defensive weapons, but we can see how well that works in practice.

We can — and we will — fight about the Second Amendment and those pesky commas until we’re out of breath, but the reality is that we do restrict access to arms. We don’t allow certain types of weapons. Fully automatic military rifles are prohibited, and we don’t allow people to own, say, nuclear devices and other bombs. Those are arms, too. Some jurisdictions require licenses in order to own guns. Many don’t allow them to be carried around from day to day.

Until we put gun ownership in context and accept that more limitations on it are necessary for a free and safe society, we put everyone at risk.

More on search warrants and electronic data

Varying a bit from this item, last week the California state Supreme Court decided that police can seize and search a mobile device that an suspect has with him when he’s arrested.

This differs from the first decision in a couple of ways. For one thing, the former was by the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, a court that covers Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee; California is covered by the Ninth Circuit, and the Sixth Circuit’s decision is not binding there. For another, this decision is by a state court, not a federal one, so it applies in the state of California only.

But more significantly, this is specifically about things that someone who’s arrested has on his person at the time of arrest. The decision is based on a more general rule that police are allowed to examine whatever a suspect has when he’s arrested:

Under U.S. Supreme Court precedents, this loss of privacy allows police not only to seize anything of importance they find on the arrestee’s body ... but also to open and examine what they find, the state court said in a 5-2 ruling.

The majority, led by Justice Ming Chin, relied on decisions in the 1970s by the nation’s high court upholding searches of cigarette packages and clothing that officers seized during an arrest and examined later without seeking a warrant from a judge.

As in many other cases, this highlights a need to be clear that data storage devices and devices that can access online information are not like cigarette packages and clothing. I don’t think any of us doubt that the police can and should look for cocaine hidden in a cigarette pack, or a switchblade in the back trouser pocket. But if I’m carrying my laptop when I’m arrested, do they have reasonable access to all my stored email and other personal and financial information?

The minority of two justices say no, as do I:

The dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn’t be extended to modern cell phones that can store huge amounts of data.

Monday’s decision allows police to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee’s person, said Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, joined in dissent by Justice Carlos Moreno.

They argued that police should obtain a warrant - by convincing a judge that they will probably find incriminating evidence - before searching a cell phone.

The courts need to sort out these differences, and set up a legal understanding of where personal effects end and private data begins. Unfortunately, the current U.S. Supreme Court does not have the composition to come up with a reasonable answer to that question.

Свободного программного обеспечения

Interesting: Vladimir Putin has signed an order to move the Russian government to free software over the next four years.

The transition to open-source, or free, software will begin in the second quarter of 2011, with the Ministry of Communications examining what base software packages are needed for government agencies, according to the documents. During the same quarter, the ministry and other agencies will develop proposals for user support centers and for mechanisms to support software developers, the documents said.

Russian agencies will also begin an inventory of their IT assets during the second quarter of 2011, the documents said. Pilot agencies will begin using a basic package open-source software in the second quarter of 2012, according to the transition schedule.

Official adoption of Firefox has been going around here and there, but this goes way beyond that, with plans to deploy Linux in place of Windows, to replace Microsoft Office, and so on. The order talks of replacing proprietary software with free software, including operating systems, drivers for hardware and application software for servers and user workstations.

On the other hand, while Computerworld’s report mentions open-source software, I’m not sure about the idiom. The word the order uses, свободного (genitive of свободный), seems to mean free as in unrestricted, which is the same sense as it’s used by the Free Software Foundation — not free of charge, so much as free access. There are differences between free software and open-source software; they’re similar, but they’re not the same. Because I don’t know Russian, I can’t tell whether the Russian term (used here in the title, the words taken from the official plan) applies to the latter or not.

Good vs God

This morning, a friend pointed me to this article about a Catholic priest from Belgium who was being considered for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, when it came out that he had sexually abused a boy some 40 years ago.

Reading about that can lead one’s thoughts in various directions. Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. Is this (this case in particular, and the whole Catholic-priests-raping-children issue in general) an example of the one or of the other? Or is it just that people aren’t black and white, and there’s good and bad in everyone?

What role does religion play in this? Maybe the teachings of the priest’s church had a role in moving him toward the good work he’d done, the stuff that put him on the short list for the Nobel prize. Then again, maybe he was inclined to do that sort of thing from the start, and that led him to the priesthood, with thoughts of service.

How do we judge causes and effects in situations like this?

And, ultimately, why does the Catholic church as an organization continue to try to hide these reports and downplay their importance, and why does it refuse to just open the whole thing up, admit and apologize for it, and seriously clean house? It’s clear that the scandal has harmed the church’s reputation and driven people away from it, and that attempts to cover it up aren’t working and are only exacerbating the ill effects.

Besides: trying to hide it is simply wrong, morally and ethically. I don’t need God to tell me that; I’ve talked before about people who wave their belief in God as a moral flag, yet do bad things every day, and we have a book about how people find morality outside of religion. If the Catholic church aims to give moral guidance to a billion people, it needs to be morally secure itself.

Of course, it’s all about power: those in power want to stay there, and being fully open about the sexual abuse would result in the downfall of many at and near the top of the hierarchy, likely including the odious Benedict XVI. The work has to come from below; those at the lower levels of the church hierarchy who do have the moral stability for it, and who are as outraged as I am about what has gone on and what continues to go on, have to be the ones to get the cleanup moving.

We still shouldn't ask, but it's OK to tell, now

Everyone’s heard, surely, but it’s worth saying here anyway: this weekend, the U.S. Senate got rid of the odious Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell rule, by a vote of 65 to 31, with eight Republican senators joining the good guys.

It’s easy to forget that the rule was originally an improvement for gay rights in the U.S. military, compared with the situation before it went into effect. It’s easy to forget that, because it was such a small improvement as to escape notice for most. Now, our legislature has said that the military has to deal with homosexual Americans serving openly.

It won’t happen immediately, though. Despite that gay people have been part of our society forever, the military has to figure out how to integrate them. Apparently, just ordering people to accept it, and doling out discipline when they don’t, isn’t sufficient.

According to the Secretary of Defense, things will move apace:

Mr. Gates has acknowledged that the president will be watching closely to ensure that we don’t dawdle or try to slow-roll this and that Mr. Obama expects the military to prepare as quickly as we properly and comprehensively could.

The president will not be the only one watching.

Search warrant needed for email

It’s a busy day, so I’ll just point to an Electronic Frontier Foundation report on a court decision that we should all be happy with:

In a landmark decision issued today [Tuesday; the link is to a PDF] in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.

Jim Morrison's pardon

Wednesday would have been Jim Morrison’s 67th birthday. In one of the most famous events in his life, he was arrested in 1969, charged with indecent exposure at a concert in Miami. A few days after the concert, it was claimed that he’d opened his pants on stage. He and his band, along with many concertgoers, said that wasn’t true. He was convicted, and he appealed the conviction, but he died before the appeal was ever heard.

Thursday, the day after Morrison’s 67th birthday, Florida’s current governor, Charlie Crist, issued a pardon for Jim Morrison, wiping the slate clean and returning him to a presumption of innocence of the 1969 charges.

This is probably a good thing, really... but it’s not a very important thing. In fact, it might have been just as well left alone, left to be part of Morrison’s eclectic mystique. Governor Crist has no doubt made some friends who are fans of The Doors... and angered others, such as those who would rather not think that the police officers who testified might have lied.

But note Florida’s attorney general, Bill McCollum, who, though he voted in favour of the pardon, was ‘disturbed’ by all the attention paid to a dead celebrity when the board spent hours hearing cases involving living people seeking forgiveness trying to repair their lives.

Indeed: the main point is that I have to wonder when I see officials spending their time — sometimes a little time, but often a great deal of it — dealing with things that don’t matter very much, or even at all. We designate state or national trees, birds, mammals, reptiles, and even insects. We designate official state and national activities, at the behest or some group or other that will benefit from the publicity of having its pet activity so recognized. Our legislators spend time debating and voting on non-binding declarations and resolutions about this thing and that, anywhere from repeating yet again that we honour those who died in one disaster or another, to repeating yet again that Christmas is important to us.

It’s just silly. Go have unpaid interns write that stuff up and present it to classrooms to use as exercises in mock government. And now spent your time with real government.

That said, well... thanks, Governor Crist, for reminding us that Jim Morrison was a great artist. Whether or not the audience in Miami saw in 1969 what the TSA would be seeing routinely today, if he were still with us.

Is your credit card bank tracking what you do with your money?

Well, hey, you bet!

On Wednesday morning, CNN had a feature, which I saw in the hotel breakfast room, about tips to tell whether your bank is spying on you. The CNN reporter described the situation, which seemed to be that your bank is tracking transactions that you do with their instruments (credit and debit cards, ATM withdrawals, and so on), and is analyzing the patterns. A change in pattern might indicate a change in your situation, which the bank might want to respond to by being particularly watchful, or by making additional offers of business to you. Or it could indicate outright fraud, outside of your control, which they want to catch.

After hearing that, the anchor asked the correct question: Is this really spying? The reporter responded by saying, They know everything about you.

Well, no. They know everything that you do with things they control. They know what’s in your credit report. They know whatever their partners tell them, but it wasn’t clear from the report whether banks share this information with each other. I suspect they don’t, because it can give them competitive edges over each other.

Of course, if you have three credit cards with different logos that are managed by the same bank — say, Citibank — then that bank knows about all three of those cards. I expect my bank to track and analyze my activity. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t.

CNN spends too much of its time, these days, with fluffy, overhyped pieces.

Photo ID to ship Christmas gifts

According to a report I heard on the radio on Tuesday, United Parcel Service is making a change this month that will require folks shipping packages (such as, say, Christmas gifts — not an insignificant bit of business, you know) to show photo ID with the same name as the sender on the package.

According to the item on the radio, they think customers will understand, that, as UPS says, the customers will appreciate that this is for security and safety.

Bullshit.

This will cause endless annoyances. What happens when one person wants to go mail packages for several friends, hm? And how finely will they pick on this? If Jane Smith wants to mail a package prepared by her husband, Mark Smith, will that be OK? What if Jane goes by her maiden name, Jane Jones? What if she hyphenates, Jane Jones-Smith?

This is just asking for an already stressful holiday season to get that much worse. People can just use another shipping service, assuming that USPS, FedEx, and others don’t follow suit. But this is just stupid, and provides no safety and security at all. It makes things inconvenient for legitimate shippers in many cases, and people who are real threats will just get fake IDs.

This is worse than security theatre. It’s security nonsense.

Considering Wikileaks

Wikileaks, having recently released details of hundreds of thousands of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, has been tossed into a maelstrom of troubles over the past week. Amazon, which had hosted the web site, terminated that arrangement, reportedly under pressure from the U.S. government. Its DNS registrar, EveryDNS.net, pulled the Wikileaks domain out of the domain name service, prompting them to move to a Swiss domain name. PayPal has blocked donations to Wikileaks by permanently restricting their account, saying that the illegal activity that Wikileaks engages in violates PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. And on top of all of that, founder Julian Assange is now an international fugitive, as Interpol has backed a Swedish warrant for his arrest (the Swedish charges are unrelated to Wikileaks activities, though Mr Assange says they are yet another attempt to shut Wikileaks down).

I have a mixed opinion of the matter of releasing the confidential documents, as well as about the other things Wikileaks has released in the past.

I’ve worked with classified, proprietary, personal, and otherwise confidential material often during my career, and I well understand that some information should be kept confidential. Even in cases where openness and public scrutiny are important, there’s value in being circumspect about some things. Personnel matters, obviously, fall into this category. Plans often need be kept quiet until they’re carried out. Trade secrets and other confidential company information should be distributed only as there be need to know — and government agencies can have confidential company information as well. We often don’t reveal sources, to avoid discouraging those and future sources from coming forward. The fact that even Wikileaks doesn’t disclose the identities of the leakers is testament enough to that.

We have to balance the benefit that comes from the disclosure of information against the damage caused by that disclosure. Sometimes, it’s easy to see where the balance lies. If we disclose payoffs to a government official that have been feeding a program that serves only to line the pockets of a few, the benefit is clear, and the damage is only to those involved in the corruption. On the other side, if we expose a covert agent, citing a public right to know, there might be no tangible benefit and we may risk the life of the agent and many of his associates.

Sometimes, the determination isn’t as straightforward. With the diplomatic cables, it’s likely that they fell wildly on each side of the balancing point, with many landing too close to it to judge easily.

Whistle blowing is an important part of the checks against corruption and other forms of abuse, and it’s important for us to have a way for people to publicize the sorts of things that need to have light shone on them. At the same time, though, not everything should be so illuminated. The set of diplomatic cables is one case where discretion would have been better. The problem with an arrangement such as Wikileaks is that there’s no one sifting through the items in the set and making intelligent choices about which ones to release and which ones to hold back, at least for now.

On the other hand, while I understand the desire to shut Wikileaks down as a result of this, that heavy-handed approach isn’t going to be effective, and probably isn’t the right way to go about it. It would be better to try to establish some sort of liaison that looks for voluntary discretion. Here, too, we have to find that same balance: the benefit of shutting down a system that exposes confidential information indiscriminately, against the damage done by removing a mechanism for safely exposing waste and corruption.