Category Archives: Aside

Leave the very strange circumstances aside, and just think about the possibility (hopefully remote, but possible) that a 13 year old girl and a 12 year old boy who had consentual sex will be branded for the rest of their natural lives as sex offenders and therefore denied jobs, forced to live on the outskirts of society, listed on police web sites, shunned by their communities, and tracked with monitoring bracelets. Yeah, clearly the lawmakers are doing a good thing here.

_The Observer_ in the UK prints an investigative story about a US government drug enforcement operation, run through Homeland Security rather than the DEA, that kept an informant on payroll even after he tortured and killed a man and continued to support him as he assisted in the abductions and killings of 11 others, one of whom was an American resident caught up in a case of mistaken identity. The operation was approved by the Department of Justice and, as is common in the current administration, when employees inside the agencies questioned the operation, they were punished and threatened. Reminds me a lot of the movie _Traffic_. Glad to hear we’re trying new and innovative strategies in our quest to to “win” the “war” on drug trafficking.

“The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today’s America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It’s that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny.”

I’ve been occasionally following Amazon’s forays into web services, and spent the last couple hours reading up on their fairly new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, which provides an infrastructure for anyone to inexpensively setup and run one or many server instances within the Amazon data center. EC2 is darn cool, not only for things like scientific computation sets but also for more standard tasks like web serving and such. Combined with Amazon’s existing S3 storage service for reliable storage, the possibilities are pretty amazing for building scalable web apps. There are some obviously missing components, however, such as effective load balancing and some sort of database environment not to mention the problem that when a virtual server goes away so goes all of its data. I’m sure Amazon is well aware of these problems, and I suspect that they’re working on them. Depending on the latency of S3, I suspect an enterprising hacker could create a filesystem driver for it that, used correctly, could solve a lot of the storage issues. If/when Amazon reveals a database web service, they’ll have quite a platform on their hands. I’m really impressed by how Amazon is creatively opening up their infrastructure in ways that improve their bottom line while also dramatically leveling the playing field for small players in the web space.

_Wired Mag_ runs a cover story on Lonelygirl15 that, while late to the party, is pretty interesting and informative. It talks about the genesis of the show, the promise of the medium, and why Lonelygirl hasn’t made the jump from YouTube to a network. My favorite bit of fan speculation noted in the article was the idea that the whole thing was a sophisticated viral ad campaign for Target since the entire set was purchased there.

The UTOPIA Community MetroNet is an alliance of fourteen Utah cities building out optical fiber communications plant and operating it as a public utility open to all. Using UTOPIA, homes and businesses can choose one (or many) of several commercial providers of data, voice, and television services without being locked into the local cable or telephone monopoly or having to install a satellite dish or other equipment. Fiber to the Home is the best possible future for internet connectivity, and the Utah effort is the largest I’ve seen to date. Meanwhile, Boston, Cambridge, and other Massachusetts cities are bickering over how to provide municipal wifi using technology that will be obsolete by the time it is deployed. Why are they so far behind?

My office has been abuzz about the recent tazing of a UCLA student by campus police officers. Many people have jumped to numerous conclusions based on a difficult to interpret cameraphone video posted on YouTube. Blake Ross posts his thoughts along with a statement from an eyewitness, and I _generally_ agree with his thought process and conclusions, based on our imperfect knowledge of the incident, although I don’t believe, given the potentially dangerous situation, that the officers were out of line in initially refusing to give their badge numbers.

Today Al Jazeera English launched with an impressive studio and an equally impressive breadth of coverage, not to mention a much-needed Middle Eastern perspective on the day’s news. You can watch their first six minutes of air on YouTube. I think this expansion of the Qatar-based news network is a very good development in the quest for a free and democratic Middle East. Now if only someone in the US would carry it.

“The brazen kidnapping Tuesday of dozens of employees at a Higher Education Ministry building in Baghdad, experts and Iraqi officials say, provides evidence of an all-out assault on the Iraqi middle class, a worsening of sectarian violence or a general collapse of the rule of law — or all three.”