Re: Bayoneting a Scarecrow

(George Monbiot reviewed Loose Change in The Guardian. "Bayoneting" is about reaction to the review.)

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Yesterday several Santa Clara County Greens visited our three congressional representatives' offices. Just to make things more interesting we did the circuit on the VTA Light Rail trolley and Caltrain heavy rail, and Drew had his bicycle.

We presented our resolution demanding that they stop supporting the Iraq war. The congresscritters don't give a damn what we think, but it's important to keep bothering them. We also stopped at the mostly abandoned San Jose Mercury News office in Palo Alto. Carol Broullet ran for Congress against warmonger Anna Eshoo last year, and holds a weekly "rally" down the street from there. Lofgren's staff was friendly. Honda's and Eshoo's staff were rude, making no secret of the fact that they really don't want their constituents showing up at their district offices.

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Shortly, an expensive publicity blitz will try to convince PC owners to "upgrade" to a new operating system (OS), MS-Windows Vista. It's a bigger threat to our rights and to progressive organizing than losing "net-neutrality." Don't do it.

You'll be told it's more "secure" than previous operating systems. Perhaps; each Microsoft (stock ticker symbol MSFT) OS gets a little better about that. But the real security "enhancements" in Vista are about securing the property rights of transnational media corporations. Vista tries really hard to stop you from copying proprietary "content": computer programs, movies and music. It's full of "kill switches," triggers that disable application programs and even hardware devices when the system detects an attempt to breach copyright. If you try to use MSFT Word, and your system can't verify through the Internet that your copy of MS-Word is paid for, you can't edit or create new files any more.

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Recently a correspondent mentioned in passing, "you'd better not say anything bad about Bill Gates." Her daughter had received tuition assistance from a Gates Foundation "charity." So I didn't tell her that schools which participate in that program aren't allowed to use Macintoshes in their classrooms.

The late 19th Century robber barons invented the modern public relations industry. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon. Rockefeller had himself photographed giving dimes to poor children, and had full time employees to make sure those pictures made the newspapers and newsreels. You can bet he paid those "communications professionals" thousands of times more than he gave those children. But they weren't as effective as today's flacks, or the term "robber baron" never would have made it to public awareness.

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Friday from 5:30 6:30, Mountain View (CA) Voices for Peace has a "vigil" at the intersection of El Camino and Castro. Last weekend I showed up with my electric peace sign, visible blocks away. Tian posted his picture of it from the Dec 6 protest in downtown San Jose. I always forget to bring my camera to these things.

Afterwards, we strolled down Castro Street for dinner at Queen House mom & pop chinese. Merriam had her big IMPEACH BUSH posterboard because her car was out of the way. So here we were walking through the restaurant district on a chilly Friday evening with a big IMPEACH BUSH sign.

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You already know I'm on a quixotic mission to get people, especially progressive activists to actually try the great noncommercial software that we should be using instead of the corporate stuff.

Today's riff is a little piece on how to scrub a hard drive before you get rid of it, without spending money (or risking your security) on trade secret computer software. It's in the CNet help forum, which I suspect gets more traffic than progressive political weblogs.

We scrub the drive with a utility program that comes with all Linux distributions. So we begin by making a bootable CD with Damn Small Linux on it. For people who already know how to burn a CD, that's pretty easy. I put that part in a similar piece on my Windoze monopoly blog. Damn Small Linux can also be installed on a USB flash drive, but I don't go into that.

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I've been hosting and "owning" (nannying, moderating, facilitating...) Green email lists for a dozen years. Every few months someone asks/suggests/demands that I set the list(s) she is on to alter every message that goes through it. The alteration she wants is that the mailing list software should add a line to the message headers. That line should say "Reply-To: posting address".

The reason she wants the mailing list software to do that is that she is having trouble posting to the list. When she is looking at a message that came through the list, in her colorful and oh-so-user friendly email program, and she hits its big colorful "Reply" button, her email program opens a composing form. (Hey! The term for the computer program you use to read and send email is mail user agent or MUA. Microsoft Outlook Express is an MUA. So is the part of Yahoo Mail that you interact with.) The composing form has a To: line with the author of the message filled in. She wanted to post a followup to the list, not to the previous poster in private. She is having trouble changing that To: line so her message will go to the list.

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Recently I've been getting porn spam from a big Canadian outfit called Webfinity a/k/a Python Video a/k/a Dynamic Pipe.

It uses an extra layer of indirection, exploiting a parade of compromised Microsoft Windows machines in consumers' homes. If you click on a link in the spam, the site you eventually reach attacks your PC with malicious software, and your Microsoft PC becomes part of Python's porn server network. Ironic, eh?

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Has anybody but me noticed a change in the common use of the word "attack"?  Since 9/11, the slightest public disagreement or criticism is an "attack."  The propaganda state wants us continually aware of "attacks" of all kinds from all directions.

We are living in the world George Orwell warned us about.  The language we might use to understand and discuss the regime that oppresses us is being taken away, one term at a time, by misuse in propaganda.  Consider the valuable words whose once fairly specific meanings have been practically destroyed.  Recycle.  Feminist.  Fascist.  Liberal.  Geek.  Marketing.  Censorship.  Organic.  You can think of a dozen more.

It's not the normal evolution of language.  In that evolution, words get more versatile, more useful, more natural.  Hopefully, a new part of speech ("sentence modifier") appeared in American English in the last century.  Thinkfully, you can spot it at the beginning of this sentence.  Dictionaries haven't caught up: they're still trying to bend "adverb" to fit.  The convolutions we used in elementary school to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition are a thing up with which we need no longer put.  You can even say "very unique" without showing yourself an ignoramus.  (Don't do it in a business letter or a resume, though.)  All of those changes represent constructive evolution.  Taking meaning away is destructive.

This is double plus ungood, folks.  We should resist.  A critique is not an "attack."  Disagreement is not an "attack."

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I've been running some kind of email service for Greens since 1994. It's been a hodge-podge of forwarding aliases, Mailman lists, a big spam-blocking map, and a handful of hosted mailboxes.

It's getting expensive to run email service. The average message size and number of legitimate messages are both getting bigger. More than 97% of incoming email connections are spam or some other kind of automated attack. That fraction is doubling in less than a year: it'll be 98.5% less than a year from now. That's why the email service you get from Hotmail and Yahoo is barely adequate and getting worse. The "free email" business model is not sustainable. And the email service they throw in with your DSL or cable TV Internet access service isn't much better.

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Every agenda for social change that I've ever heard of, that involved "smashing the state," suffers from a logic design flaw known as "logical race condition." Anarchists, Marxist-Leninists, and the modern movement claiming the proper name "Libertarian" make the same mistake.

Behavior of a system with a logical race condition is determined by factors that are to a great extent random or chaotic (randomness and chaos are not the same) or at least poorly controlled. Race conditions are one of the most common software design mistakes that create security holes. Something that should be protected is exposed temporarily, and it's a race between the end of the exposure and the attacker trying to exploit it.

When the state is "smashed," a race begins. The different cliques who seek power race to grab it, and whoever gets there first is the new state. Trouble is, authoritarians usually get there first, because they're unencumbered with (slow) democratic process. There is no mechanism, during the transient "smashed state" condition, to prevent this race from occurring. Power vacuums always get filled. That's why armed revolutions and coups d'etat tend to make things worse for the working class.

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This link confirms to Technorati that we're really here:Technorati Profile.

I already claimed my log about the software monopoly and my log about the social consequences of junk email.

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A volunteer with a satellite news organization asked Open Voting Consortium for help with this issue. I've raised it in Usenet forums, to deafening silence. It is not mathematically valid to say anybody won, for example, Florida 2000. It's just as wrong to say Gore really won it as to accept the legal outcome. Nobody knows. There is no way to know.

No matter what technology is used, elections have a margin of error. There are voters whose residence is in question. There are voters wrongly disqualified, by honest error or malice. Ballots marked by hand can be ambigous. Not just hanging chads, but overvotes and undervotes: people don't make clear marks on optical scan sheets, or they try to change their own votes and leave a mess. Direct-recording electronic ("DRE") voting machines can have hardware failures as well as bad software. A driver returning a ballot box can collide with a fuel truck and burn up. Or a ballot box can be tainted because it wasn't guarded properly. If the margin of victory in an election is much less than the margin of error, how can we say anybody won?

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Greens in Europe are part of the movement to protect government and the populace from the many adverse consequences of trade secret computer software. One of the hazards they cite is the problem that a software company could hold a government agency's critical documents hostage in a pricing or exclusivity dispute. That problem emerged in the trade press recently when reviewers revealed a "kill switch" in Microsoft Office 2007. If the company determines your license isn't paid up, they can disable your ability to edit and create your own documents. Many observers suspect there have been undetected kill switches throughout the software monopoly's products for a long time. It's only a matter of time before crime gangs release malicious software that exploits the kill switch to hold users' documents for ransom.

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Ron Crane on useful transparency, from the Open Voting Consortium mailing list.

Item 1 should require that every voting system be capable of being fully supervised and audited by any citizen or group of citizens possessing ordinary intelligence, experience, and training. The term transparency has, in some circles, come to mean the property that allows ordinary voters to understand the broad outlines of how a system works. Arguing along these lines, some have said that [Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) "touch screen" voting machines] are "transparent" because voters generally understand what they do.
That's A Bad Thing. Our voting systems (and our elections generally) need to be under direct, constant citizen supervision, not solely under the supervision of experts. Experts are great as another layer of protection, but they should not constitute the sole layer.

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