Vote On Whether NSA Whistleblower Be Prosecuted?

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/should-ny-times.html has an article on this. Over five thousand votes so far and there’s about a two to one margin in favor of prosecuting him. I was not expecting to see that. I thought “oh right, an internet vote on a subject like this, it’s a given how this vote will turn out” as I clicked to it.

Why are there so many idiots who are voting this way. I thought most people would still remember Hitler and what happened to all his cohorts that went along with him. They were mostly prosecuted and given the death sentence. Doing illegal things whether you’ve sworn an oath to Hitler or not does not make it legal. Same rule follows here with Bush. Yet all these people are voting in just the opposite direction. How can we have so many idiots in this country?

Don Knuth, at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/iaq.html has some interesting questions all these people should ponder. I’ve copied them here. (Does it take a certain intelligence to understand and or come out with questions like this? I would not think so but considering our American public I suspect it is probably true.)

1. Why does my country have the right to be occupying Iraq?
2. Why should my country not support an international court of justice?
3. Is my country not strong enough to achieve its aims fairly?
4. When the leaders of a country cause it to do terrible things, what is the best way to restore the honor of that country?
5. Is it possible for potential new leaders to raise questions about their country’s possible guilt, without committing political suicide?
6. Do I deserve retribution from aggrieved people whose lives have been ruined by actions that my leaders have taken without my consent?
7. How can I best help set in motion a process by which reparations are made to people who have been harmed by unjust deeds of my country?
8. If day after day goes by with nobody discussing uncomfortable questions like these, won’t the good people of my country be guilty of making things worse?

Alas, I cannot think of a satisfactory answer to any of these questions. I believe the answer to number 6 is still no; yet I fear that a yes answer is continually becoming more and more appropriate, as month upon month goes by without any significant change to the status quo.

Ethanol plants going bust

Ethanol in my mind has always been a bad idea. It allowed some farmers to drive up the world food prices, including our own, with our tax subsidies. It has caused massive amounts of deforestation through the world as our taxes have driven up the prices farmers in other countries could get. Ethanol still required burning. I don’t care if it is theoretically a cleaner burn somehow. It’s still pollution. And it took money and attention away from the solar and wind which are truly clean and economical industries. I had no idea Ethanol would vanish so quickly though. That’s just incredible.

It’s a scene that has been repeated throughout the United States: Clovis, N.M. Nevada, Mo. Hartsburg, Ill. Lamoni, Iowa. Evansville, Wis. Greybull, Wyo. Rock Port, Mo. Belle Fourche, S.D. All were supposed to have biofuels plants operating or under construction by now. None do.

This week, another ethanol plant, in Pratt, Kan., declared bankruptcy. Prospects for another in San Pierre, Ind., have grown dim.

Hopes ran high in many small towns amid an explosive interest in biofuels and a rush to build large plants. Unseen by planners, however, was the coming spike in crop prices and a financial meltdown unlike any that America has seen since the Great Depression.

64 Bit Java

It does not seem Ubuntu is 64 bit ready. My feeling is everything is in transition and won’t be ready for another couple years. However it’s good to see more support for 64 bits. For instance Java is now available in the 64 bit mode for windows and linux here.

Cheney: Waterboarding ‘successful’

This seems in sharp contrast

In an interview with ABC News, Cheney said waterboarding was appropriate in the interrogation of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, accused of masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“On the question of so-called torture, we don’t do torture,” Cheney said. “We never have. It’s not something that this administration subscribes to.”

to what actual detainees say. The Supreme Court now wants to look into this.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday granted an appeal by four former Guantanamo prisoners and ordered further review of their lawsuit against top Pentagon officials for torture and religious abuse. The justices set aside a U.S. appeals court ruling that dismissed the lawsuit by the four British citizens over their treatment at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba on the grounds they have no right to sue. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the appeals court for further consideration in view of the high court’s ruling in June that Guantanamo prisoners have the legal right to challenge their continued confinement before federal judges in Washington, D.C.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Green Desalination Plants?

I’m reading the article “Calif. near impact report on Monterey desalination” thinking this is the future water source technique for most of the south west along the coast. I wonder how long it will take to make these plants run on alternative energy?

Anti Virus In Ubuntu: Clam

I saw mention of clam at http://ubuntuadministrator.com/?p=377 and it looked like it might be interesting. Especially if it does not run all the time, just when I ask it to scan a directory. Unfortunately the steps there were not accurate. They probably meant:

sudo apt-get install clamav-freshclam
sudo freshclam

which gives

ClamAV update process started at Sun Dec 14 08:01:07 2008
WARNING: Your ClamAV installation is OUTDATED!
WARNING: Local version: 0.92.1 Recommended version: 0.94.2
DON’T PANIC! Read http://www.clamav.net/support/faq
main.inc is up to date (version: 49, sigs: 437972, f-level: 35, builder: sven)
daily.cvd is up to date (version: 8756, sigs: 34762, f-level: 38, builder: sven)

Not really what I wanted to see. I googled about and found a post about installing it from the menu system “applications->Add/Remove…” and did that. At the end you had to start up clamtk in gksudo mode to update the db. However that installation did nothing to remove the error messages when I ran from the command line. So I read the “DON’T PANIC! Read http://www.clamav.net/support/faq”. There they have a debian part but no Ubuntu part. I go to look at the debian notes and it was merely a placeholder for somebody else to finish. To verify I checked the redhat notes and notes were indeed there for a redhat installation. Sigh. So I decide to download their tar file and start from scratch. This was the key. In their tar files they have good documentation. I followed that documentation and it all worked fairly well. However I don’t want to document that now. Just a place holder for me so that the next time I want to install it on Ubuntu I know I need to download their tar file and look at their html documentation.

What is really important are the results:

———– SCAN SUMMARY ———–
Known viruses: 472355
Engine version: 0.94.2
Scanned directories: 6261
Scanned files: 80194
Infected files: 34
Data scanned: 5594.48 MB
Time: 1621.158 sec (27 m 1 s)

Thirty three of the infected files happened to be test files in the clam directories. The remaining file was

.opera/cache4/opr009T6: JS.Psyme-32 FOUND

and googling for this I find:

Psyme is a notoriously cunning downloader. The distributors of Psyme are known to actually insert links to the Trojan in other, legitimate websites and to propagate popups that also link to the Trojan. Clicking on the link or popup will initiate an automatic download of the Psyme Trojan that will then make contact with the Internet connection of the infected computer. From that point, it downloads other Malware, usually in the form of spying utilities like keyloggers.

Psyme abuses a vulnerability in older versions of Internet Explorer. By exploiting the way Explorer receives ADODB stream objects, the Trojan can download and install without being checked. ADOdb is a database abstraction written for certain programming languages; it allows Explorer to interpret information from various types of databases, regardless of which language they are written in.

Psyme has two popular variants; one is written in Visual Basic Script (VBS) and one in Java (JS). They have the same objectives. Additionally, there are another Trojan Downloaders called Psymedo and Trunlow that have characteristics so similar to Psyme that some authorities list them as the same program.

I don’t use opera very often. I’ll delete the cache file. Maybe I should make an account with very limited features for general web browsing and only use the default account for banking and such which probably never get viruses? I’ll think it over.

Greek Problems.

It’s interesting to see a Rodney King incident in another country. I’m normally not interested in things like this but it seems to be one of those things that will be part of our World history so maybe it’s time I pay attention to the details here.

• The officer failed to express any remorse over the students death, claiming the bullet was a stray bounce that killed him.
• Then the police said it was in response to an attack.
• All witnesses, and apparently there are many, say it was a cold blooded killing.
• Six plus days of rioting, starting on Saturday evening around 9pm (12/06/08), so far.
• Over a hundred schools and fifteen campuses are shutdown and occupied by activists.
• Tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of students took to the streets or are perhaps still on the streets.
• Police were locked in while kids threw bottles and such at them during the following week unable to respond to such a mass movement.
• Two of the officers involved in the shooting have been arrested.
• The Conservative Right Wing Government only has a one person majority and this incident will probably put an end to it.
• Apparently this conservative party has been very hard on the students raising their costs much like Reagan did to the UC system.
• The Socialists are already demanding a vote.
• Many other countries have and are showing solidarity with the students.
• Apparently the anti terrorist campaign pushed on them by the Bush administration during the 2004 Olympics kicked off these problems.
• Since the Olympics illegal wire tapping, abductions, etc., have been the norm there.

Big Brother Proof?

Unfortunately TOR is slow. Very slow. And if there is no google to index it how is anybody suppose to find anything? It’s all very confusing. In this world of big brother I like the idea but have no idea how I would personally make use of it. Or why I’d need such privacy. Still I like privacy and so this seems like it has potential in some way.

Aaron Swartz, a Reddit founder, and Virgil Griffith, creator of WikiScanner, have created a new service called tor2web that gives users access to website hosted anonymously on the Tor network.

Though Tor — “the onion router” — is more famous as a privacy tool designed to prevent tracking of where a web user surfs on the internet, since 2004 the system has allowed users to host servers as well. Unlike conventional servers, these Tor “hidden services” cannot normally be traced to the person operating them.

Dubai Vs Disney

Why can’t I be a billionaire and live in Dubai? Sniff sniff.

Published: December 13, 2008, 00:20

Dubai: The malls of Dubai already provide residents and tourists the opportunity to go skiing, ice skating and rock climbing.

But shoppers will soon be able to experience a brand new adrenaline rush with the city’s first indoor skydiving centre due to open at Mirdif City Centre next year.

Dubai already has Ski Dubai and Magic Planet from the Majid Al Futtaim Group’s Leisure and Entertainment division. But their latest venture, an interactive simulation experience, is their most ambitious project yet.

The IFly facility will feature two identical flight chambers employing the latest technology allowing thrillseekers to float, spin and fly in three dimensions. The new centre will be one of the flight chambers in the world to give members of the public the chance to learn how to fly without wings.

There will be no harnesses or wires to hold in extreme sports enthusiasts; just an ultra-smooth column of 200 km/h air. The facility will be suitable for people of all ages and indoor skydiving requires no previous training or experience.

Do Werewolves Increase By 15%, 30% Or?

I’m not much of a stargazer so this is news to me. I suspect if I thought about it for a few moments I’d have figured it out. It’s one of those things that never made it out of my subconciousness though. I found the explanation on tides a bit perplexing.

It’s no illusion. Some full Moons are genuinely larger than others and this Friday’s is a whopper. Why? The Moon’s orbit is an ellipse with one side 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other.

The best time to look is when the Moon is near the horizon. That is when illusion mixes with reality to produce a truly stunning view. For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, low-hanging Moons look unnaturally large when they beam through trees, buildings and other foreground objects. On Friday, why not let the “Moon illusion” amplify a full Moon that’s extra-big to begin with? The swollen orb rising in the east at sunset may seem so nearby, you can almost reach out and touch it.