] My mother is insane. Like, one of those ladies you see on
] the local news insane. Since it's inevitably going to
] come up I'll get out of the way that I am too, but at
] least I take a full dose of my medication. I've been
] meaning to make this thread for about the last year, but
] the longer I waited the more interesting the situation
] became. Also, I'm incredibly lazy. Case in point, these
] pictures are about three weeks old. Anyway, lets take a
] tour of our house.

[ this woman is truly, stunningly insane. she requires real actual psych treatment... and her son needs to move his ass out of there. I thought we had a lot of shit in our basement, but we're comparatively clear. -k]

The Awful Forums - My mother is insane (~5M of photos)

Here is a question for the MemeStreams community.. If you were proposing legislation for laws governing how venues can collect and user information from IDs, what would you propose?

[ this is obviously a growing concern, especially if we start migrating to smart card based id's in the future. i'm glad the wired article brought that up, because it's likely to have a place in our wallets soon enough. The major security concerns of these systems has been debated in the smartcard space for years (Schnier has a lucid intro to the vulnerabilities on his web site), and they're nontrivial to resolve. Legislation will help, but only insofar as laws can mandate system criteria and transparency which enable the kinds of security and privacy we, as consumers, want to have. i think the smart cards are going to have to integrate a means for card holder verification of the data transaction... for instance, the bartender swipes, and an LCD on the card indicates that their system requested your age, gender, address, & phone number, so you deny the request, or enable only the age & gender to be transmitted... the card only transmits after you enter a pin (or biometric id if we're already dreaming) validating the transaction. thus, the terminal can't get more than you allow it to. Legislation could be used to enforce the kinds of data various requestors have a right to require (i.e. the law establishes that a bar has no explicit right to know anything other than your age, and can't deny you for failing to provide other information). That may be legally troublesome... i'm no lawyer, but we already say that places can't refuse you on the basis of color or gender, so maybe not such a great leap. smartcards have other issues in situations where the cardholder can't be trusted with the data inside, but we resolve a lot of those kinds of issues already with credit cards, and i see no fundamental reason why they can't be worked out in SC's, plus they're ancillary to this particular discussion. -k]

Wired News: Great Taste, Less Privacy

] "The Government must play a greater role in punishing
] those who conceal their identities online, particularly
] when they do so in furtherance of a serious federal
] criminal offense or in violation of a federally protected
] intellectual property right," (Lamar) Smith said at a hearing on
] the topic today.

Congress wants to make it a federal crime to lie on your domain name registration. If you do not make your real address, telephone number, and email available to everyone on earth you can be sentenced to federal prison time (in this version you'd have a sentence for another crime extended). This came up in last years legislative session as well. The thing that makes my blood boil about this is that the spin is totally wrong. The copyright people are lying through their teeth, this journalist can't see through it, and the CDT/ACLU don't understand EITHER so they are providing the wrong counterpoints, almost assuring that this will pass!

This article lets slide absolute lies like:

] Smith and Berman drafted the bill after receiving complaints
] from the entertainment and software industries that much of
] their material is made available for free on Web sites whose
] owners are impossible to track down because their domain
] name registrations often contain made-up names.

No web site owner is "impossible" to track down!

DNS whois information is made available for reference. It is intended to assist communication between administrators who run networks, for security or network management related reasons. It was not designed for lawyers or police. It was also not designed with the modern spam and stalker infested internet in mind, and therefore often people fill it out with false information, especially if they aren't a business entity.

If you want to track down someone on the internet for a legal reason, you do not use the DNS whois system. That is not what the DNS whois system is for. You do a nslookup on the domain name and get the IP address. Then you use the ARIN whois system, (a completely different and totally unrelated database that used to run on the same software) which tells you what ISP an IP address has been issued to. ARIN whois is usually correct. If it is not correct you can complain to ARIN and they can check their records. Their records are always correct unless the IP addresses have been stolen (and if you're dealing with stolen IP addresses you're way past the point where DNS whois is going to help you, federal crime or not). Either way you'll get an ISP. You then go to a court and get a subpoena, and send that subpoena to the ISP, and the ISP produces contact information for the customer. This always works.

Let me be absolutely clear about this. Requiring people to keep accurate dns whois records has absolutely nothing at all to do with being able to track down domain holders on the internet. You can always do that today. Forcing people to keep accurate dns whois records is about being able to track down domain holders on the internet without court authorization. We should not allow that.

What really pisses me off here is that no one on "our side of the fence" in this debate is making that point. We're going to loose this one if the discussion isn't forced back into the realm of reality. If this is about people committing crimes on internet sites that can't be tracked down by any means, we'll be passing laws based on a complete fantasy.

Kids, this is exactly how bad law happens.

Congress Eyes Idiotic Whois Crackdown

] Google notes and saves information such as
] time of day, browser type, browser language, and IP
] address with each query.
]
] Please be aware, however, that we will release specific
] personal information about you if required to do so in
] order to comply with any valid legal process such as a
] search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order.

While everyone is freaking out about their Tivos, Jeremy mentioned a much more serious issue. The fact is that TV only shows you popular culture. There are limited circumstances where surveillance of TV watching habits would really be problematic politically. TV is the soma. The Internet, on the other hand, makes your local library look tame. Google knows everything that you've thought about seriously in past 5 years. And what Google knows, the police know.

If they don't need permission or notification to pull your records from the library, how long before they can do the same with your Google records?

Google Privacy Policy

Elonka wrote:
] ] TiVo estimated that halftime viewership among its
] ] customers was up 12 percent from 2003.
]
] Um, this was news to me. TiVo maintains records of everything
] that its customers view, including everything they ask for
] replays of?? Is the FBI now going to be accessing this
] information to determine who's watching which TV shows??

[ They assure you that they're only collecting anonymous data which doesn't tie your name, customer id or IP to the viewing data. Your level of trust in the system is, of course, up to you... but their stated privacy policy can be found here : http://www.tivo.com/5.11.asp

It's the third link down. -k]

RE: TiVo's records of viewing habits

:akoff's laws are my favorite...

] Frames trump facts.
]
] This has an important consequence. Political liberals
] have inherited an assumption from the Enlightenment, that
] The facts will set us free, that if the public is just
] given the facts, they will, being rational beings, reach
] the right conclusion.

Lakoff's Second Law

] Voters vote their identities, not their self-interest.
]
] Because of the way they frame the world, voters vote in
] a way that best accords with their identities and not
] in accord with their self-interest. That is why it is
] of no use for Democrats to keep pointing out that Bush's
] tax cuts go to the top 1 percent, not to most voters.
] If they identify with Bush because they share his
] culture and his world view, they will vote against
] their self-interest.

What's Your Law?

] Norway's most famous computer whiz got an early Christmas
] present on Monday. An appeals court in Oslo upheld Jon
] Lech Johansen's earlier acquittal on all counts of
] alleged copyright violations.

Round Two goes to Jon!

DVD-Jon wins new legal victory

You know it's true. How many televisions do you have? Do you even know? How many channels do you get? Do your kids refuse to watch black-and-white programs? No one had a VCR in 1970. Now 240 million of us do, but VCRs are history now that Wal-Mart is selling DVD players for $29.

some really good points in here. he stops short of making a prediction, though... is the consumption glut going to drive us into a cedit-card-debt induced implosion, or will western culture maintain and spread its desire to have Stuff to fill every nook and cranny of its double mortgaged homes?

Fortune.com - Value Driven - Admit It: You, Too, Are Paris Hilton

] LIN: But there is the opportunity now to interview
] Saddam Hussein to find out about weapons of mass
] destruction, if in fact they exist and where they are.
] Clearly, this is going to be useful to the United States
] and the war on terror.
]
] SHARPTON: Well, if we went to war to get an
] interview, I don't think that's what we were told. We
] went to war because we said we knew there were weapons.
] Not that we wanted to capture and interview him to see if
] there was weapons.
]
] We all know Sharpton can't (and shouldn't) win the
] nomination, but I hope whoever wins puts him in the
] cabinet as Secretary of One-Liners or something.

Ha!

The Talent Show: The rapier wit of Al Sharpton

were the wright's really first? this site says:
] The first flight was by a twenty-five year old New
] Zealander, Richard Pearse on March 31, 1902.

and this (http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/10/brazil.santosdumont.reut/index.html) one mentions:
] Ask anyone in Brazil who invented the airplane and
] they will say Alberto Santos-Dumont, a five-foot
] four-inch (1.6 meter) bon vivant who was as well
] known for his aerial prowess as he was for his
] dandyish dress and high society life in Belle Epoque
] Paris.

Richard Pearse : New Zealand Pioneer Aviator (1877 - 1953)