Category: obscure pursuits

political science

I have seen a couple of bumper stickers that have caught my attention. One was a few months back, suggesting “a bounty on liberals.” I saw another today, with the crosshairs of a ‘scope, and a similar caption about shooting liberals.

Am I missing something? In the grand small-d democratic free-for-all, did if become OK to talk about killing one’s political opponents? The strongest I have heard from what passes for the left is “regime change begins at home” (I took that to mean the use of ballots, not bullets) and the like. These seem to be peaceful messages, even if they’re shouted.

Is this yet another sign of liberal weakness, lack of cojones? Is it more American to want to kill off dissenting voices?

I have to wonder what it would take for someone to become desensitized enough to act these ideas out. They get them from radio and TV, they buy bumper stickers and, I assume, T-shirts and caps and beer coozies with these messages. How far will it go?

As it turns out, it’s already happened.

how not to get a job

Well, it’s been pointed out that my cathartic posts on my abysmal experiences at the UW law school might be poisoning my chances of getting interviews.

I had thought of that. So what do I do now, take them down? Rewrite them?

I should perhaps write up a summary or recapitulation of the whole experience, how it started off, how some things went really well, how the founding director left and wasn’t replaced and what happened then.
Continue reading “how not to get a job”

taking responsibility

Geeks Put the Unsavvy on Alert: Learn or Log Off:

Some in the technocamp imagine requiring a license to operate a computer, just like the one required to drive a car. Others are calling for a punishment that fits a careless crime. People who click on virus attachments, for instance, could be cut off by their Internet service providers until they proved that their machines had been disinfected.

This was how the UW handled infected systems during the worm attacks of 2003: exploited systems were off the network until they could be certified as virus-free.
[ . . . ]

“Responsibility is shared,” said Scott Charney, Microsoft’s chief security strategist. “With some of these viruses that require user action, people have a responsibility to be careful and protect themselves.”

A little bit of blame the victim there: how is it so easy for people to send these around? How often is Outlook’s address book part of the infection vector?

a great essay on what works . . . . and why

Nicest of the Damned: Running a business on OS X and Linux:

I’m not saying that Macs and Linux boxes are no work, but the work, it seems to me, is focused on the solution at hand, rather than the problem of the moment. It looks like I’m continuing to marginalize the Windows boxes — our CEO wants an iMac when we move into our new space next week.

Frank has written up his experience of the past few years in different environments on building and supporting information technology solutions that work, day in and day out.

Repeatedly, he finds that Windows is the weak link and the less he relies on it, the more reliable the whole system becomes.

There’s also some good stuff about loosely-typed, flexible scripting languages versus more tightly constrained development tools: short answer, Python et al rock, proprietary toolkits don’t. Our time at CNN.com coincided (we were cube neighbors for a while) and where our day to day responsibilities differed, our experiences seem to have been much the same. I supported some Windows-based services that were uniformly unreliable and flaky, and in at least one case, the CTO of one outfit decided to rewrite their whole app from scratch, based on it’s performance in our environment.

Worth reading: I think the idea deserves a more detailed exploration.

[Posted with ecto]

clarification/amplification on spam comment interdiction

In response to this

I like the second of the two, since it’s not exclusionary. How hard would it be to defeat? And what countermeasures could be written into it (present the string as HTML entities that have to be decoded by a parser? present the word reversed? don’t use real words at all? make the letter position the result of a simple equation [what letter is in the 2^2 position in the string uiwplkg?]?)

a friend writes:

None of those countermeasures would be effective against a computer parser; most of that stuff doesn’t even matter to a computer, like whether it’s a real word or if there’s an expression to evaluate. That’s all stuff that a computer is really good at.

On the other hand, you could describe the operation to be performed in such a way that it’s hard to get the gist without fully grokking the English:

“In an attempt to verify that you are a living, breathing human being and not a mindless computer program, and not having the time or resources to arrange a Turing Test, we would like you to enter, in the blank below, the answer indicated by the following paragraph.

The previous paragraph contains words of several parts of speech: prepositions, articles, nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives. Locate the first word which belongs in that last category and enter the letter which appears in it twice.

Enter answer here:[ ]”

Of course, that’s a bad example because it exclude people who were ignorant of the intricacies of English parts of speech (when is a verb form an adjective?). But it’s the right kind of example, I feel. The idea is to make the statement of the problem as hard to parse as possible. Avoid using digits; spell out numbers and require them to be spelled out. Pull together various parts of the text with references that are unambiguous but not computationally precise. That sort of thing. And of course, there has to be a very, very large set of potential problems and answers so that it doesn’t boil down to capturing all of the questions and memorizing the correct responses with no grokkage required at all.

So randomness (to create a large problem set) and high degree of difficulty in parsing, in effect negating simple parsing, are the specifications.

[Posted with ecto]

thoughts on comment spam/prevention strategies

There’s a lot of effort going into how to prevent comment spam in movabletype and other weblogs. The key seems to be finding something that approximates a crude Turing test: the post request must meet some challenge that only a human can meet.

There are a few coping strategies in the field. One is a “captcha” engine that creates a gif of a number string and requires the numbers to be keyed as a kind of authentication: the gif is somewhat obscured, making it a problem for the sight-impaired and, we suppose, OCR software.

Another idea, not yet fielded, is a challenge-response where the question is something like “what is the X letter of word Y”? The arguments against this seem to be that a parser could be written to sort that out . . . I suppose so.

I like the second of the two, since it’s not exclusionary. How hard would it be to defeat? And what countermeasures could be written into it (present the string as HTML entities that have to be decoded by a parser? present the word reversed? don’t use real words at all? make the letter position the result of a simple equation [what letter is in the 2^2 position in the string uiwplkg?]?)

With the understanding that no scheme is perfect, what makes the bar sufficiently high as to dissuade all but the morally bankrupt with a lot of time on their hands?

[Posted with ecto]

tonight’s entertainment: raccoons fighting in a tree, 30 feet up

Apparently a mother with two cubs large raccoon of indeterminate gender felt crowded by another ‘coon and applied its considerable powers of persuasion (screeching and clawing, mostly) to make the point. Got me and my neighbors outside to see what the ruckus was (I had never heard anything like it, though I have seen some of the masked bandits about).

I brought out a really bright halogen worklight that picked them out quite easily: the victor was quite a specimen and clearly wasn’t going anywhere. The vanquished, smaller but still a good size, backed down the tree and around the side of our house, in search of unprotected cat and dog food dishes.

A good story for school tomorrow . . .

[Posted with ecto]
Continue reading “tonight’s entertainment: raccoons fighting in a tree, 30 feet up”

airports as natural place for WiFi

Delta gives a little R &38; R:

“Bizarre missing feature: Any sort of networking, so I’m blogging and uploading via my cell phone, through T-Mobile’s GPRS service.”

Frank’s not the first to note this (even this weekend). Wendy Seltzer had much the same comment about Hartsfield in a post yesterday.

Transit stations — bus, plane, rail, or ferry — seem like obvious places to install WiFi access points, especially when the authorities expect people to queue up hours before departure time. Why not make the wait as productive, or at least less painful, as possible?

[Posted with ecto]