You Can't Make Mistakes.

God Damned Right It’s Time

Well, if you haven’t voted already, since there seemed to be a great trend toward voting early or absentee—likely because Americans are leaving the United States like rats from a burning ship: it’s time.

The Economist finally published their endorsement for a U.S. Presidential candidate this week. I will let you guess who they chose. Or, you can read it for yourself.

I have to say that, in all honesty, I was thrilled to read it. I think that they made the right decision, so now maybe you all can make the right decision. Jeff and I voted via absentee write-in ballots, which don’t even get counted unless there is some electoral problem—which wouldn’t shock me in the least. So, if you haven’t planned on voting, or if you feel like you are too busy, or some other thing: please go and cast your vote for Barack Obama on our behalf. If you can’t vote for Obama, then Bob Barr is a good second choice.

Anyway, those are my two cents on the matter. I don’t have a whole lot of words for you right now as most of my words are being given to my papers and coursework. But I will say that I would greatly appreciate if you went and did your part and set the ball in motion for the United States to right itself a little bit. I’ll thank God one way or another when this is over, but I hope that it is thanks that I will be able to come back to the United States someday because it is the place that I remember, rather than having to stay away from it because increasingly resembles places that I would never want to go.

Thank you.

Don’t forget to wear a condom.

The comic this morning on xkcd is a good example of arguments for and against electronic voting.

Read it. Careful though: it is funny, so the humorless fascists for whom you work may have blocked the site and also be in the business of firing anyone who tries to access it.

Regardless of that, it is a little ridiculous to have anti-virus software on a voting machine. A voting machine should probably not be network connected. If it is in fact network connected, then we shouldn’t have had the problems that we did with corrupted SD cards not having the voting data when needed. These things each indicate other problems as well.

First, if a voting machine is online, it is immediately insecure. All computers are prone to attack through either a network interface or by way of physical access to a machine. That said, some computers are more secure than others. Those computers used for high-profile applications—such as, I don’t know, off the top of my head, uh, VOTING—will of course be more delectable targets. So, possible operating principle number one: keep voting machines off-line.

Then, if a voting machine is off-line, why does it need virus protection software? The SD cards used for transporting data—the insecurity of which we will get to in a moment—should be checked for any virus or malware IMMEDIATELY BEFORE they are being placed into a machine. Ergo, there should never have been any need for virus protection software on these machines.

On to the point of XKCD this morning: What operating system is running on these voting machines and what is it doing? I am not sure, but I am just going to take a gander that is was Windows XP, or some-such. Now, Windows is known for: crashing, being-virus prone, being entirely insecure in the case of physical access to a machine, and a laundry-list of other fun things. Firstly, Windows should not be the operating system of choice for this application. There are more than enough compelling reasons to take that right off the table. Therefore, we should assume that there was a contract—read: set of payouts, kicks-backs, or other reward perks—involved between Premier Election Solutions (a.k.a. – Diebold) and Microsoft.

Let’s look at this again. Logically, so far, we have decided that: 1) voting machines should be using a secure, robust operating system, 2) voting machines should not be networked.

Or should they?

Is it secure to have votes stored in .xls (Microsoft Access) files and then transported on SD cards to a computer terminal by some flunkie (read: election official or Premier Election Solutions Employee) for transmitting over what one would hope are secure channels?

No, is the only answer to that question, by the way. PHYSICAL ACCESS to data is the point of least security. Swapping cards is just the easiest way to corrupt/alter the voting data.

The alternative: a networked voting machine which is connected to several sets of voting servers around the country—redundancy, in this case, is security, or at least accountability—via port/transport-encrypted connection protocols. The data is transmitted and tabulated at these central sites, plural. The data that is transmitted is stored on a separate physical disk from the operating system. That disk is encrypted and, if it is an SD card, there is no physical access to it—like a slot that it plugs into. Screwdrivers with weird noses are in order if you want it out.

When the data is transmitted, it can be in the form of an encrypted binary image of the disk. This is more secure than an .xls stored on an SD card. All of this will happen when the decentralized server farms call the data in at the end of the election. Also, at the end of the election, a printout could have a per-transaction list of the data received from the voters at each site. There are a number of ways to maintain the anonymity of the voters. Remove names, randomize times, etc. This printout would also be output electronically so that it can be stored for checking results, if there is a dispute.

Votes are tabulated/reported faster. The security is better—though only as good as its worst implementer. Everyone goes home happy-ish. Or at least as happy as they were before the election.

Back to the original topic: virus software. Here’s a fun thing: often, these days, viruses are written to attack and corrupt the virus protection software itself. Like real-world pathogens, they have adapted to attack the defenses first, and then go for the soft belly. So, if your computer is riddled with viruses, start over. This time, don’t use the virus software. Just use a malware detector like Spybot – Search & Destroy. In the distant past, when I still bothered with Windows, this was my virus-protection scheme, and it worked like a charm. My dad has been doing the same thing for years, and it works like a charm.

Again, back to the original topic: voting machines should not have Windows on them. Neither should servers. Linux is working all over the computing world on servers and in embedded devices for applications which require a great deal of security and require the OS to be robust—i.e. – not crashy. It comes in all sorts of flavors. It is scalable, customizable, and the source code is open. In other words, the kernel—most basic part of the operating system—can be fully customized to run exactly what is needed in the hardware, which also limits security gaps. It is also good at all the things that we talked about above: transport encryption, disk encryption, complicated networking schemes, redundancy, binary image backups. It also doesn’t have that nasty habit of crashing and dying forever. If it crashes, it can reboot, and it will be fine. This can even happen automatically since parts of the system can be restarted without your ever having to know about it in a user interface.

I don’t want to sound like an evangelical Linux user, but I am. And I will also admit that Linux is not for everyone—a statement that I do not fully believe, but which I will allow at present. It is however, perfect for an application like running voting systems. Even if you ran a Linux system comparable to what is running now on these silly machines, the problems would scale back immediately.

So, take that for what it’s worth. I felt that the comic was funny, but might need a little further explanation. There you go.

Oh yah, disclosure: This post was written from a laptop running an unnecessarily secure Ubuntu install, backed up on a server in my house running Debian and transmitted to the internet via a router running the Linux-based DD-WRT to a—you guessed it—Linux web-server share running WordPress. This blog post is delivered to you using only open-source operating systems and applications on our end. I can’t vouch for what you used to view it, but if you used Firefox, it’s a step in the right direction.

This guy, Tim Krieder, is brilliant. Today’s comic is particularly good; and poignant.

http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly080730.htm

Enjoy.

because it is none of your business.

I just heard retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis indicate—with regard to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy employed by the U.S. Armed forces for discriminating against homosexual service-people—that “when you raise your hand to swear to defend the Constitution, you are giving up some of your rights to free speech.”1

Really?

I don’t remember seeing that in the constitution. Listen to the full discussion on the Diane Rehm Show.

———

1 Diane Rehm Show, 24 July 2008

n. – the opposite of innovation.

Yah, I made up a word: sue me. Actually, don’t sue me. I can’t afford that right now. Between preparing to move out of the country and writing chapter 4 of my thesis—a job I do for very little pay—I’m not in any position for an out-of-court settlement.

More to the point though. I caught the following quote this morning, and this was the word that came into my brain.

It’s not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it. -Robert Musil, novelist (1880-1942)

It is absolutely true, by the way and it reminded me of a discussion that I had with my dad after my last post regarding the state of innovation in our current economic and social climate.

What we decided was that the best thing for a struggling economy/company/city is to let it fail, unless it is willing to change.

Case in point: General Motors. Old, good company. Makes cars. Could be substituted with any of the other major American automotive companies. They haven’t really committed any serious innovation in the past century. Cars are, with many bells and whistles aside, primarily the same as they were 100 years ago. They still operate under the same principles, for the most part, and the end result is the same. If you disagree with this, then you haven’t looked under the hood of any car. I would suggest then that you find a Model-A and dismantle it. Then, find a late model Mustang and dismantle it. Put both of the back together. You’ll see what I am talking about.

Now, there are some companies which have committed innovation. Any company that is putting a solar panel on the top of a car to give extra power for the air-con—Toyota—is innovative in this climate. Running cars on hydrogen fuel cells, hybrids, electrics, and plug-in models are all innovative.

General Motors—our present case-study—has done none of these things. And I don’t want to hear that GM has the Volt, an electric concept car. It is too late for concept cars. Please move to the back of the line.

Back to the crux of this line of argumentation: GM has made no major innovations of late, possibly ever, and yet they and their investors are worried and scrambling to figure out/fix their current financial problem. However, nothing they do will make any difference.

They already have the only solution to their problems, but it is just a concept car. They could save the company and generate a huge amount of business if they were just to release that car, and all problems along with it. It wouldn’t be for everyone, of course. At first it would only be for the brave who don’t mind being late because their battery died or something. It would be for those who are willing to test and try and see how it works. The deal that would have to come along with it, of course, is that the dealers would have to service anything that went wrong with the car free-of-charge and immediately. Throw in 24-hour tow-from-anywhere-and-take-you-home service: brilliant.1 They would change everything.

The only other thing to do now is to simply let it die, which is more likely. Maybe the market fallout from that will take the other big two with it. We can only hope.

I know, I’m a horrible bastard for wishing such fates on American companies. “Do [I] know what effect that would have on so many Americans’ lives?” Yes, I do. But, do you know what else would happen? Some genius young engineer, right in line with his time, will be able to step up and do something brilliant. This time, though, he won’t have the added innovative hurdle of having to either out-shout the “Big Three” or be subsumed into them and destroyed by their contrary interests. Jobs and economic development to follow.

We haven’t seen a Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Washington Carver, or any of their ilk in such a long time that we wouldn’t know an innovator if they punched us in the face. Maybe it is time for some knock-outs, but they won’t come until the big, stupid brutes die off to make way for the skinny, malnourished geniuses.

———

1 This idea was lifted directly from a phone conversation with my dad yesterday. Dad: it’s a great idea.

Well, I’m shocked.

This article in the Washington Times week takes a whimsical look at a new piece of technology which is of interest to our very own Department of Homeland Security.

Briefly, this device would replace the boarding pass with a simple bracelet worn around the wrist, including the following:

1. Your personal information
2. GPS capability to track your movement and the movement of your luggage throughout your flight.
3. A high voltage shock device to shock the wearer into immobilized submission, should it be necessary.

Seriously. Look into it.

Don’t forget to check out the video.

Look into it and then write your congressman, your dog-catcher and any other public official you can think of.

I for one would rather die in a fiery plane crash than slapped with a shock collar every time I get on an airplane. Terrifying. Looks like I will have to start looking more seriously into transport on freight ships for overseas travel.

Hopefully DHS is reading this and bumps me up on the list.

Any thoughts?

[Update: This made the Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me news quiz this weekend. 12. July 2008]

Eleven score and twelve years ago brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

After that, some things went terribly wrong. But really, is it the first time that we had tried and failed a little. No. We got through most of the worst bits and things seemed to work out alright.

Today we’re still limping along, economy in shambles, war-torn, demoralized. No matter! Behold our pluck! We still celebrate the advent of this great nation by hurling explosives skyward, searing the flesh of animals, and drinking vast oceans of beer until the urge to lie down and groan with bloated discomfiture takes us. That, after all, is the American way.

Keep hurling Americans. Happy Independence Day.

Back in the Saddle

Sorry for the recent hiatus in posting. I have been a bit lazy and let-lagged this week. 10 in the evening in Kalamazoo feels like what I have been calling 5 in the morning for the past year. It has been as rough transition, but getting better every day. The best part about this, as I sit and write at 7:50am on a Saturday, is that my increasingly late wake up time in Cairo is nice and early here. I have reclaimed the best part of the day, and I usually have it all to myself.

It’s good to be back… at least for a while.

I suppose that this is why I left in the first place, after all. I could have stayed here in the States and written my thesis. I would have had access to a great many more resources—the university library, easy access to the internet, face time with professors, and much more—but I would have likely been bored stiff, trudged on, written, worked some shitty part-time job: you get the picture.

Had I stayed here for the last year, I would not be writing now about how much I enjoy the air, the trees, the cool 10°C mornings, Taco Bell, Miller Lite, American Chinese food, walking barefoot in the grass: so many things. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate these things before, it is just that I didn’t appreciate them that much. I won’t gush or wax poetic about the joy of mundane things, but I will say that living in a place where everything is difficult makes me appreciate living in a place where everything is easy.

It also makes cake out of those things which before seemed difficult: as in “piece of.”

Regardless of all of that, I am having a blast. It is also stunning to take note of the things that I have learned in the past year. For instance: I went to seen Iron Man last weekend. It was great. I love comic-book movies, I love movie theaters. I didn’t go to the cinema nearly enough while in Cairo. Something to think about for the future. The best part of the film, though, was not the popcorn and bucket of soda that I was endowed with upon stepping into the joint, but that the film had loads of Arabic in it: and I understood every word. Obviously, it wasn’t very sophisticated dialog—certainly no more than the dialog in the primary language of the film—but I got it. I didn’t even notice at first: then I realized that I wasn’t looking at the subtitles when I laughed at some little quip or joke. Suffice it to say that I was very pleased with myself.

Same thing when I noticed what an easy time I was having understanding Ayad—dear friend and former roommate—when he showed up late one night before leaving for Saudi Arabia for the summer. We could always talk before, but it is certainly easier now.

I continue to reflect thus as I sit here and wait for the installer to finish on my new low-energy, headless Linux server. A year ago, I didn’t know what a headless server was. In the past year in learning how to use Linux on my laptop for data analysis, I accidentally learned loads about how it works and how to use it. So, now, rather than just having a slab running Windows crap factory, I have a laptop running a scalable set of software which is tailored to my needs. I was particularly pleased when Jeff asked me to put Ubuntu on his laptop to replace the Windows Vista that it shipped with. It went from being a relatively slow, unresponsive, one-year-old system to being a blindingly fast, extensible, little mobile monster. He was/is very pleased by the improvement. He is still gushing about it, in fact.

But, to think, a year ago I attempted an install of Ubuntu on my old laptop—I have since upgraded in a very serious way—and ended up with a command-line laptop for a month. That was cool and all, but it must be noted that it is very difficult to browse the internet using the command-line terminal. Kind of fun though.

Incidentally, I just converted that laptop back into a command-line laptop, just for kicks.

All in all, though, this year was a complete success: I learned a great deal. Had I stayed home, I might not have. Or, I wouldn’t have enjoyed myself nearly as much while doing it.

Anyone else learn anything this year?

There are so few good ones left.

To celebrate my recent return to the land of my birth, I have compiled a list of American heroes. Now, these are not your typical heroes—firefighters/police/soldiers have all had their day in the sun. Nor are they the fictitious heroes of my comic book youth with their super-powers, good-intentions, and very efficient spandex pants. No, these are the little guys.

The American Editor

This guy is going around with a felt-tip and actually making edits to poorly spelled, worded, and punctuated signs and t-shirts. I want a correctly-spelled and punctuated t-shirt with his emblem on it. Screw Superman.

Here is his website: www.apostropheabuse.com

Revivers of the Classics

Americans who get out those dusty volumes of Vergil, Catullus, Cicero, et al. and breathe new life into the stories are heroic. It takes years to learn to read Latin or Greek, and since there is no purpose for it other than having done it—I have a BA in Latin, I know something about this feeling—every act they commit is an act of love. Bless them and their yellowed, dog-eared pages; their prose and verse.

Wow. I almost got choked up over that. Weird.

Nerds

Nerds of all variety, shape and size are inestimably heroic. Without them we wouldn’t have; math, computers, zombies, physics, blogging, comic books, Facebook, science fiction, Mystery Science Theater, science or Dungeons and Dragons. They contribute so positively to the world and go always unrewarded—Nay! Punished!—for their nerdery.

Keep nerding guys and girls. Don’t be put off by the nay-saying of others.

I know that you might be thinking: “But nerds don’t have to be American, do they?” No, of course not. But we have amenities that pave the way for such advanced nerdery that it cannot be found elsewhere: free and ready access to internet, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly (for unending sessions of Dungeons and Dragons), coffee, and beer—depending on the time of day. So, there is a great deal of incentive for being a nerd in the States.

Anyway, those are my heroes this week. I’m sure there are more that I am forgetting, but mostly I am just glad to be back home. Not because I hated where I have been, but because of what living in Egypt has taught me about where I am from.

So, I will leave you with a question—one that my roommate left me with a few weeks ago: What did you do to be privileged enough to be born an American? And, how are you utilizing or taking advantage of that privilege in your life and what you do?

Okay, that did choke me up.

Nightmare night

Since you last heard from me, I have been lost in the bellies of various airplanes and then was delivered into the hungry maw of homeland security.extra It’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been real fun.

Our flight out of Heathrow was delayed, which I somehow knew instinctively. Something always has to go wrong at Heathrow. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be Heathrow. What I wasn’t banking on, though, was “scheduled maintenance” which would delay us for 3 and a half hours.

Now, I would think that if you were going to schedule maintenance on a plane, you would schedule it for a time when said plane wasn’t about to taxi. This is not how it is done, however. Once we all boarded the flight, it was really quite pleasant. There was really no one on the plane: it was mostly empty, which meant that each passenger got at least two seats and loads of leg-room. Sweet. The crew was funny too. They didn’t give a shit since there were so few of us, so it was very laid back. I got some much needed sleep finally.

When we arrived at Dulles, however, it was a different story entirely.

We were first ushered onto the weird Dulles airport shuttle thing. It’s like a really uncomfortable waiting room, with tightly packed seats, except that the whole thing moves and changes levels depending on where it is and where it needs to go. It is a creepy prelude to the nightmare that Homeland Security/Customs and Border Patrol will then inflict.

You can imagine that I was really looking forward to the body cavity searches that I would be receiving, having just lived in North Africa for 8 months. I have to say, they took it easy on me. I think that the guy who questioned me was a rookie though, he didn’t really know what to ask and just seemed kind of nervous.

I did get extra-special service though—not the ultra-special, wait in a room for hours and hours and then be body-cavity searched version though. They just wrote in huge letters all over my form and then sent me off to a special line with all of the Latinos, Arabs, and anyone else who was brown. I was the only white guy. It was nice. Made me feel at home again, like in Cairo.

So I get to the front of the line finally and the guy that got stuck with me was alright. He was a little green, but friendly—and thorough. He aksed me question after question about my program, my teachers, how I met my tutors. My favorite was when he caught a glance of the load of Quranic studies books and asked me if any of my studies were of a religious. He was, of course, hoping that I would slip up and admit to having been drafted into the ranks of some extremist group.

I haven’t, by the way.

I said “Yes, I’m a religionist by training, so I study the religious texts as well.”

Then finally, after having decided that I was not going to be a threat to our great nation. I was allowed through, back onto American soil.

Thankfully it was really late, so my plans were shot, and I decided to just wait for my flight to come up in wee hours—now swiftly approaching.

I tried to find someone to take my bags off me again, but no one was at any of the desks for Northwest Airlines, so I had to schlep around the airport with 60 kg of luggage, desperate for a coffee.

I thought that was bad, until the time came when I could check in for the connecting flight to Detroit and woman decided to charge me for my bags. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. Apparently,even though I had just come 10,000 miles with these heavy bags, now I had to pay $50 to get them another 500 miles home. She said she couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t been charged in the first place as she had never heard of an airline with a 30 kg weight limit before (both Virgin and British Airways have a 30 kg weight limit, FYI). Bastards. It’s just an example of a sinking American carrier scheme to get a few more nickels and dimes.

It’s amazing how I didn’t have any troubles with airline employees until I landed in the United States. Surprise, surprise.

But I’m better now, I just found Vitamin Water in the airport while waiting for the flight. It went well with the rest of my Xanax. I’ll have a nice relaxing nap on the plane.