Miscellaneous Heathen

It's Veteran's Day, which was once Armistice Day -- i.e., the day that commemorated the end of World War I, which ended 90 years ago today. You might think all the US veterans of that war are dead. You'd be wrong.

Kip Hawley -- the mushmouthed factotum in charge of TSA -- responded to day to the Atlantic piece on TSA penetration; Bruce Schneier has more. It should come as no surprise that Hawley says virtually nothing of substance or value.

What happens when a journalist tries to act suspicious and shifty, or exploits problems with airport security widely reported?

Turns out: nothing. Yet again, we see the TSA is completely worthless.

Paul Krugman, of course, won the Nobel in economics earlier this week, and bully for him. However, Tor books points out that perhaps Krugman's most interesting work came early in his career:

Krugman is famous for his work on the economics of international trade, but as our corporate cousins at Nature remind us, one of his early works was a pioneering examination entitled The Theory of Interstellar Trade:

Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

The young Krugman observed that “This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.”

(Krugman is also known as an unapologetic fan of SF.)

... it's hard to read stories like this and not think the DEA is just a bunch of bureaucrats and tools. Turns out, they routinely cover up murder by their informants, and then force folks who blow the whistle into early retirement. Nice.

It enriches law enforcement. You see, law-enforcement organizations are able to seize and use assets from drug raids -- even in the absence of charges being filed, let alone convictions. Happen to like to keep cash around? Better hope nobody calls in a false report on you, because the cops will take it and you'll have to sue them to recover it.

The Birmingham News, of all places, points out why this is a terrible idea.

A Canadian who was tired of continual bullshit harassment by the TSA thanks to his name being on the no-fly list has finally figured out a way to stop it: he changed his name.

Carl Malamud. Who is he? He's the guy who is, essentially, daring states to try to assert copyright over their laws.

Yeah, read that again. Some states are actually claiming that their laws are copyrighted, and that reproducing them without permission -- and without paying the state! -- is a violation of copyright law. Obviously, this is a terrible idea -- the states should instead be making it as easy as possible for citizens to read the laws that govern them. So Mr Malamud is publishing them online via scanned copies for any and all to read, download, print, etc., for free.

And he's hoping very much that his home state sues.

In an LA Times op-ed, security expert Bruce Schneier rips the TSA a new one over the ID rules:

[T]he photo ID requirement is a joke. Anyone on the no-fly list can easily fly whenever he wants. Even worse, the whole concept of matching passenger names against a list of bad guys has negligible security value.

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person's name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

[...]

This vulnerability isn't new. It isn't even subtle. I first wrote about it in 2006. I asked Kip Hawley, who runs the TSA, about it in 2007. Today, any terrorist smart enough to Google "print your own boarding pass" can bypass the no-fly list.

This gaping security hole would bother me more if the very idea of a no-fly list weren't so ineffective. The system is based on the faulty notion that the feds have this master list of terrorists, and all we have to do is keep the people on the list off the planes.

That's just not true. The no-fly list -- a list of people so dangerous they are not allowed to fly yet so innocent we can't arrest them -- and the less dangerous "watch list" contain a combined 1 million names representing the identities and aliases of an estimated 400,000 people. There aren't that many terrorists out there; if there were, we would be feeling their effects.

Almost all of the people stopped by the no-fly list are false positives.

[...]

In the end, the photo ID requirement is based on the myth that we can somehow correlate identity with intent. We can't. And instead of wasting money trying, we would be far safer as a nation if we invested in intelligence, investigation and emergency response -- security measures that aren't based on a guess about a terrorist target or tactic.

That's the TSA: Not doing the right things. Not even doing right the things it does.

Needless to say, the TSA has no intelligent answer to any of this. Their usual angle is "trust us; we know what we're doing." Frankly, we've never seen any evidence that's true.

So, the Mythbusters were all set to do a segment on RFID security w/r/t credit cards -- until the credit card companies got wind of it, lawyered up, and pressured Discovery to quash the bit. We're sure that this makes the stupid RFID credit card implementations MUCH more secure, since everyone knows that security through obscurity is nearly foolproof.

Um. Wait.

This is a pretty fantastic photo of the still-incomplete tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai Tower. The last official height statement was from May: 160 floors, 636m tall.

The Sears Tower, by comparison, is "only" 442m and 108 floors.

Via BoingBoing:

A Hong Kong computer programmer who had legally resided in the US for 15 years (since he was 17) and fathered two American children went for his final green card interview and was locked up, detained until he died of cancer that the DHS refused to treat him for. [...] In detention, his complaints of excruciating back pain were treated as fakery, and he was dragged around in shackles after he lost the ability to walk, taken on long, bumpy drives while official demanded that he drop his immigration appeals. The jailers who caused his death were private contractors with fat deals with the DHS to lock up immigration detainees.

As he lay dying, his family -- wife and two children, aged 1 and 3 -- were denied access to him while the warden considered their request to visit.

More at NYT.

Slate explains why Georgia and Georgia have the same name. Interesting fact: it's only in English that they do.

These are not factory second posts; they're full quality, and include the usual guarantee. Use as directed:

• In South Africa, somebody put a bar inside a boabab tree.
• Traveling to or from the US? Don't take your good laptop. The DHS has decided that it can take your electronics for examination, keep them as long as they want, expose themselves to zero liability, and do all of this without any sort of cause whatsoever. Lovely.
• Old but splendid: Alzheimer's Sufferers Demand Cure For Pancakes
• Worried that you like baseball, but that the Olympic version might not suck enough? Fear not! We give you the 11th inning rule.

Last year in their fine snowy state, a SWAT team raided an innocent family's home unannounced; they threw in flash-bang grenades and ended up in a shooting match with the homeowner, who thought he was being attacked by some armed gang. Fortunately, no one was killed.

Guess what happens if you raid the wrong house and shoot at innocent people in Minnesota? Yep, that's right: you get a commendation. No one was held accountable at all.

On Sunday, a redneck jackass in Tennessee barged into a Unitarian church during a children's performance and shot several people because he "hates liberals."

The story's here, there's followup here, and I found it here, with commentary I consider more or less spot on.

For the lazy: A student at the University of Central Florida left an on-campus Mass without eating his Jesus biscuit. Mayhem -- including assault and death threats, and of course including apoplexy from fundies and mealy-mouthed commentary from halfwit university administrators -- ensues. Note the absurd headlines and ledes in the Fox affiliates' stories, by the way; they'd have us believe he was stealing something and holding it hostage, when in fact all he did was take something that was freely given and then not swallow it. Wack. O.

Bruce Schneier explains why killswitches are a bad idea. Basically, it comes down to a question of whether or not items you buy are owned by you, or by others.

People seem to continually forget to ask "what will happen with this new regulation or feature is misused?" when they ask for schemes like this. It's not a question of whether it'll be hacked; it's a question of when.

"Brothel Bus"

This story makes the case for ditching General Motors from the Dow Jones Industrial Average given its poor performance lately (the stock's at a 33-year low). GM's market cap -- the value of the firm, arrived by by the markets by multiplying the number of shares by the share price -- is down to a paltry $7.5 billion (lower than Ford, which is about $11.9 billion). GM's sales will be about $179 billion this year, but they just don't make money on all that income, which hurts the stock.

For the sake of comparison, non-Dow member company Apple Computer has a market cap of about 20 times that (about $153 billion, with revenues of $40 billion and, you know, persistent profits out the wazoo). Cisco has similar numbers.

This photo of a tornado should probably send you into hysterics.

As it turns out, at least five Americans still believe in the Constitution:

The Supreme Court ruled today that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

In its third rebuke of the Bush administration's treatment of prisoners, the court ruled 5-4 that the government is violating the rights of prisoners being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

The fascist wing -- Scalia, his mini-me, and Bush's twins -- dissented.

In late 2003, Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen, was detained in Macedonia (en route to vacation) by local officials because he has the same name as some terror watchlist person. The Macedonians eventually released him (1/2004) -- at which point he was snatched off the street in Macedonia by Americans, who stripped and beat him before flying him to Baghdad and then, eventually, a CIA interrogation facility in Afghanistan where he was repeatedly beaten and interrogated. By March, he was taking part in a hunger strike to protest his detention. At some point, American officials realized that perhaps they had the wrong guy, but refused to do anything about it. Finally, in late May, they flew him to Albania and released him at night on a deserted road.

al-Masri has brought suit against the US for his kidnapping and torture, only to have the suit dismissed on national security grounds. He has now gone to court in Germany to force his government to seek the extradition of the CIA agents who kidnapped him in 2004; we hope very much he succeeds, but we're cynical enough to know he won't. Justice isn't something our government is particularly interested in when it's inconvenient.

International Herald Tribute:

On a talk show last autumn, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail Delyagin offered some tart words about Vladimir Putin. When the program was televised, Delyagin was not.

His remarks were cut and he was digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily; they left his disembodied legs in one shot.)

Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from television news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.

The stop list is, as Delyagin put it, "an excellent way to stifle dissent."

More:

And it is not just politicians. Televizor, a rock group whose name means television set, had its booking on a St. Petersburg television station canceled in April, after its members took part in an Other Russia demonstration.

When some actors cracked a few mild jokes about Putin and Medvedev at Russia's equivalent of the Academy Awards in March, they were expunged from the telecast.

Political humor in general has been exiled from television here. One of the nation's most popular satirists, Viktor Shenderovich, once had a show that featured puppet caricatures of various politicians, including Putin. It was canceled in Putin's first term and Shenderovich has been all but barred from television.

Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on television simply because their views are not newsworthy.

In Utah, there's a move afoot to make it a crime for a teacher to answer unapproved questions in sex ed.

There are still tribes in the Amazon with no contact with the outside world.

They're suing Chicago little leagues for using team names in common with MLB teams. Not logos; just the names; MLB is insisting they own the idea of a baseball team named, for example, the Giants, or Tigers, and that in order to use those names the little leagues must buy their uniforms from MLB's much more expensive provider. Gee, thanks.

Fortunately, Techdirt and Stephen Colbert are on the case.

Apparently, the oldest mamallian cell line is a transmissable canine tumor spread sexually. Yup: this means it's an immortal, cancerous STD. Yikes.

Unlike most other contagious cancers such as cervical cancer in humans, CTVT isn't spread by a virus but (as recently proved) by cancerous cells themselves. Genetic analysis suggests the tumor originated in an individual wolf or domesticated dog, probably in east Asia, between 200 and 2,500 years ago. This long-dead canid's much-mutated cells are still alive and being passed along during coitus (or sometimes through casual contact) centuries later, making it the longest-lived mammalian cell line known.

The Japanese police hid a bunch of dope in some random traveler's bags and then turned loose the dogs to train them -- and then lost the hash. Score!

They announced today that they would begin charging $15 for the first checked bag from any passenger.

There's a new educational notion floating around called "Minimum 50 grading," the gist of which is that any numerical grade lower than a 50 is "rounded up" to 50. This is so stupid it makes my head hurt; John Gruber has more. From the story:

"It's a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F," says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic. "The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance."

But opponents say the larger gap between D and F exists because passing requires a minimum competency of understanding at least 60% of the material. Handing out more credit than a student has earned is grade inflation, says Ed Fields, founder of HotChalk.com, a site for teachers and parents: "I certainly don't want to teach my children that no effort is going to get them half the way there."

Reeves, as Gruber points out, is either incredibly stupid or incredibly craven here, especially with his line about students having a "six times greater chance of getting an F." Um, no. Grades aren't random; they reflect classroom work, pedagogy, and effort. Students are not six times more likely to get an F than some other grade (obviously! in a class with 10 students passing, do 60 students fail, on average?).

I'm not insane. I understand that, with sufficiently low grades, a student may be doomed to failure by mid-semester. But a grade is supposed to show, roughly speaking, percentage mastery of the subject. What sort of lesson are we teaching if showing up, literally, guarantees half credit? The only reason for policies like this seems to be improving passing rates -- but, like the post title says, it's not real. It's juking the stats -- a methodological hip-check to the pinball machine of education that results in shiny numbers with no corresponding increase in actual education.

Comcast is buying them. Given their track record, we imagine Plaxo to become little more than a giant address/social network mine for them, and user preferences be damned.

Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008.

Well, maybe not Satan, but clearly some subterranean denizen is seeking to devour a big chunk of Liberty County. Check out the pix.

Chron: 3 accused of using corpse head to smoke pot.

From DFW:

A man has been accused of attempting to pass a $360 billion check, which he claims was given to him by his girlfriend’s mother to start a record business, Fort Worth police said.

Charles Ray Fuller, 21, of Crowley, was arrested on April 22 on an accusation of forgery, police said.

Police responded to a report of a man attempting to pass the check about 4 p.m. that day at the Chase bank in the 8600 block of South Hulen Street, Fort Worth police Lt. Paul Henderson said.

The personal check was not made out to Mr. Fuller and when the bank contacted the check owner, the woman said she did not write a check for $360 billion.

Mr. Fuller was also accused of unlawful carrying of a weapon and possession of marijuana, Lt. Henderson said. He may also face a theft charge in Crowley.

Lt. Henderson said he did not know if Mr. Fuller and his girlfriend were still together.

Only two weeks after the 65th anniversary of the most interesting bicycle ride ever, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann has passed away. He was 102.

It appears we missed some sort of set-to in re: Miley Cyrus' pix in Vanity Fair. The whole thing is confusing as hell, since obviously the Mileys (like the Birtneys before her) sell at least partially on sex appeal, aspirational and otherwise, but whatever.

Thankfully, Defamer is on the case. Allow us to summarize their excellent summary of the whole affair, and the proper reaction thereto:

ZOMG111!!!!!!1 TEENAGERS FUCK!!!!! HORRORS! Meh.

Thank you, and good night.

This fantastic prank letter gives me hope for the future.