fling93 loves fishies

National ID Card That Respects Privacy?

As a libertarian, I’ve generally opposed ideas like national identification cards, but I have to admit I’ve never thoroughly thought through the issue (whew, I’m glad I’m writing, not talking!). Turns out I had a common misconception about the whole concept, cleared up by this interesting Wired article:

The truth is, any identification system is inherently neutral; it can either respect privacy or threaten it.…
…
…a privacy-friendly card is feasible if it follows one simple rule: verification, not identification. In other words, the card would confirm identity but wouldn’t allow the government to pick you out of a crowd. There’s a model: In 1995, Canadian entrepreneur George Tomko invented an innovative technology that made it possible to lock packets of data in encrypted files, using a fingerprint as a private key. After clearing a background check, the users of a Tomko-like card would receive a digitized packet of information that said, for example, they were cleared to cross a particular border. They’d download the parcel onto a card and lock it with a thumbprint.

Using this card at a border checkpoint, they’d swipe it and then provide a thumbprint. If the print decrypted the file, the system would verify their identity. Because the fingerprints wouldn’t be stored in a central database, individuals would retain complete control over how much personal information was revealed. To maximize privacy, the system would keep no identifiable records of who had passed through, and it would not be linked with any other databases that might allow predictions of future behavior.

Volokh on the History of Free Speech

Sorry for the lack of blogging lately. Yes, I’m still playing around with the new iBook and iTunes, and I’ve also been feeling a bit under the weather the past few days. I’ll actually be blogging even less this next week because me and the missus will be flying to Houston (and — shudder — Arkansas) to visit her folks. I’ll try to post at least once or twice, depending on the Internet access situation, but in case I don’t, check back here on the 15th (next Thursday).

In the meantime, Eugene Volokh has some interesting background on the First Amendment, mainly shattering the myth that liberals are eroding away free speech protections from where they were historically. Start with his National Review Online piece, where he recounts historical examples countering the myth:

Big Fish Review

While I was in Houston, we caught Big Fish. Er… I don’t mean we went fishing and caught a big fish, I mean we saw Tim Burton’s new movie, Big Fish (fishing is a poopie sport). As you might expect, it was a cute movie with some creative imagery, with some minor flaws.

Airline "Security"

Well, I’m back from Texas and Arkansas. On the flight over, I was randomly flagged to be searched more thoroughly (you know, the whole shoe-checking deal and a hand-search through my baggage), not once, but twice (we had one changeover). This angered and annoyed my wife to no end, and she kept complaining “What are the odds of that happening?”

Personally, I wasn’t bothered by it, especially since we got to the airport with plenty of time to spare. One thing that did seriously disturb me was the fact that my selection for this screening was visibly marked on my ticket. Think about that for a bit. What possible deterrence would this provide for a terrorist? The whole point of a random screen is that you want this extra search to be unpredictable — to act as a possible point of failure for any terrorist plan and thus serve as an extra deterrent. Well (assuming a terrorist group has found a way to get weapons past the usual checks), all they need to do to defeat this supposed extra layer of security is to send several terrorists on the same plane, figure out which one of them isn’t flagged by this screening, and then transfer all the weapons to that passenger.

Somebody didn’t really think that one through.

Audioscrobbler Update & MusicMobs

I previously blogged on Audioscrobbler in an earlier post. Basically, you download a plugin for your MP3 player, and it automatically keeps track of which songs, artists, and albums you listen to the most. The idea being that you can find other users with similar tastes to discover new artists (and it protects your privacy — you only provide a username, not an e-mail address).

They’ve recently moved to a new server, so there’ve been some hiccups. Not all of the original functionality has been restored (e.g., forums, generated list of users similar to you, searching for artists), but it’s getting there. And shortly after I blogged on them, their server went down for a while, and after they came up, they’d changed the protocol, requiring users to download a new plugin. For a while, I ran into a few issues with the Winamp plugin’s song submissions, but the latest one (v1.1.4, Build 589) seems to be stable. As always, you can see what I’ve been listening to here.

NFL Conference Championships

Well, I know I didn’t watch any regular season NFL games this year, but here’s my take on the two Conference Championship games anyway. And let me tell you, it’s pretty darn cool to be surfing the web while watching the game on TiVo, so I can look up the stats and rosters.

Why Silicon Valley Happened Here

Via Jonas Luster, I found an entry by Robert Scoble which, aside from being a rant against religion, claims that Silicon Valley happened where it did because of tolerance:

Is there any reason that Silicon Valley happened in California, and not, say, Kansas? Well, yes. Silicon Valley’s politicial leaders setup a system where ideas were accepted. Even radical wacky crazy ideas.

Go back to the 1960s. Where was the pill invented? Silicon Valley. Where was LSD invented? Berkeley. Where did the hippie movement get started? San Francisco. Which community was among the first to open its arms to homosexuals? San Francisco.

Now, why didn’t Silicon Valley happen in Kansas (or any of the “bible belt” states?) Well, mention any of these topics above in the bible belt and you’ll get run out of town. If you’re really unlucky you could end up dead.

Others later corrected him on where those things were actually invented. Anyway, I think he’s on the right track, but his focusing on religion is an oversimplification. Off the top of my head (hey, don’t sue me if I’m wrong — I just work here), I think Silicon Valley happened here because of several factors.

Unintended Effects of Progressive Taxes

Virginia Postrel links to a Daniel Weintraub column that points out an unpleasant side-effect of a progressive tax system:

The rich are no longer getting richer in California. And the rest of us, oddly enough, are suffering from their misfortune.

That’s the story from the latest report on tax returns filed for the 2002 tax year. The preliminary figures, which I obtained from the Franchise Tax Board last week, show that the number of returns reporting incomes exceeding $1 million dropped again, to about 25,000. The combined income earned by those fat cats also shrunk, by more than 20 percent.

Why should we care?

Because California’s skewed income distribution, combined with progressive tax rates, means that the people at the very top of the income heap pay a very high percentage of the personal income tax collected in this state.

Their extraordinary, onetime income surge at the end of the last century provided most of the new tax revenue that legislators and former Gov. Gray Davis used to raise teacher salaries, increase welfare benefits and expand eligibility to state-provided health care. But the decline that followed also accounted for most of the revenue drop that contributed to the state’s fiscal crisis. And as of the most recent tax year, they hadn’t hit bottom yet.

Why Dean Stumbled

Well, I guess I was premature about Dean and, unfortunately, the decline of the two-party system (well, that’s why I had a question-mark in the title). In hindsight, Ehrlich’s application of Coase’s theory to the political parties was too simplistic in that political parties are much more than just information gathering organizations. The parties themselves actually wield a good deal of power regardless of how much information they gather.

Super Bowl Violence and V-Day

Super Bowl Sunday’s coming up, and my wife mentioned that it’s the worst day of the year for domestic violence against women. It occurred to me I could use that as a tie-in announcing V-Day and my wife’s upcoming appearance in her school’s production of The Vagina Monologues. Well, it sounded like a good idea, but after poking around a little bit, I ran into one little problem…

How to Play Craps

Last night the wife and I had a great time “gambling” at Casino Bowl 2004, a fundraiser to benefit the Emergency Housing Consortium. It was $50 a head, and you get $200 in play money chips as well as a free drink and raffle ticket. Yeah, you don’t actually win money, but the highest winners of the night got to win some neat prizes. We both had a blast! It was called “Casino Bowl” because of the upcoming Super Bowl Sunday, and all the people working there wore various football jerseys. Plus among the prizes was a Jeff Garcia autographed football — a SJSU alum as my wife always points out — and a nice suede 49ers jacket (yeah, there was also a Raider jacket, but who’d want that?).

Of course, I headed straight for the craps table. My wife started out at the slots, but didn’t have much luck so she joined me. She’s never played craps before, but since it wasn’t real money, she found it less intimidating to try it out. As for me, back in one of my earlier jobs, our Director of Software had a fondness for gambling, so for a few of our Software Group offsite outings, we did a day trip to Vegas, and before we went, one of the managers gave us a crash course on craps (and being engineers, it involved flow charts). And I was quickly hooked.