Category: Injustice

blah blah Brendan’s pet issues

September 29, 2004 /

I shouldn’t do things like reading this list of banned books, because it just makes me hate everything and accomplishes nothing. But still. My favorites are the parents who challenged the curriculum inclusion of books by Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis for promoting “witchcraft and demons” and “mysticism,” respectively. I don’t need to tell you how thoroughly Christian their books are, because you already know. See? Accomplishing nothing!

In other nonaccomplishment news, I’m going to wait and see about IPac. On the one hand, their statement of principles aligns with a lot of what’s important to me, politically. On the other hand, this is also true of the ACLU, and there are reasons I don’t belong to the ACLU. I know it’s only a word, but I just don’t like the designation of “political action committee.” For some reason I’m comfortable supporting the EFF and Downhill Battle in a way that I don’t associate with any PAC.

Okay, there is one thing I’ve been meaning to write about. The place where the EFF and Downhill Battle intersect is Save Betamax, a combined effort to stop S. 2560 (which used to be called the INDUCE Act) from taking away your iPod, TiVo, CD burner, Kazaa, VCR, scanner, tape deck or whatever else the RIAA and MPAA decide is “inducing” people to violate their own definition of copyright. I don’t much like political blogging, but 2560 is bad. I’m unfortunately writing too late to tell you to sign up for the call-in days (as I did), but I’m sure there will be more opportunities to help stop the bill from becoming law. There’s an enormous effort by a huge coalition of companies, groups and individual humans to keep veto power over media innovation out of Hollywood’s hands. I hope you’ll join it, and I hope it works.

I feel like getting arrested

September 3, 2004 /

Hey, wanna see if you’re a terrorist? Excuse me–“Specially Designated National or Blocked Person?” Thanks to the Department of the Treasury, you can, in PDF or ASCII flavors! (As stated above, I do feel like getting arrested, so I was going to write a form script that would search the file for you, but it’s 1.35Mb of unmarked-up plaintext, and I don’t want to kill my webhost with that much sequential search.)

I’m aware of this list because today I had to write down some personal info and sign a release form at work. My company could be getting a federal contractor as a client, so every employee name has to be checked against the list. Fair enough. I don’t like that, but it is the law.

I do have a problem, though, with the fact that we contracted an outside firm to do the checking. Everybody in this company had to sign a paper saying that neither my employer nor this firm were liable for any consequence of having yourself checked. Then everybody had to print his or her first, middle and last names, DOB, and SSN. The forms will be sent off to VeriCorp, who of course can be trusted with my SSN and corresponding information! I guess!

Keep in mind that my employers are probably paying thousands of dollars for this: VeriCorp is going to take a list of a few hundred names, then they’re going to take the text file linked above, and they’re going to have some people hit CTRL-F a few times. And if one of those people makes a typo and you go to Secret Terrorist Jail, whoops! Oh well! They’re not liable!

I am making use of hyperbole here, obviously. Nobody’s going to go to jail; if you’re on the SDN list and the FBI doesn’t know where you are, you’re certainly not going to be working under your real name, much less putting it down on that form. This whole thing is a redundancy measure, a legal fallback.

My point is that there is no reason to be sending hundreds of people’s personal info to an outside contractor, liability-free, when the list is publicly available, and we have an in-house software development team who are all experts at data correlation. I guess the potential client doesn’t trust us to verify our own employees, because we’re an interested party in the negotiations. But if they don’t trust us to verify the information correctly, why trust us to send it correctly in the first place?

March 4, 2004 /

Unfortunately, I missed Grey Tuesday by a week, and I feel bad about that. I have more than enough space here to have participated in it, and I haven’t been keeping up with fair use or downhill news in general.

I did check in at EFF today, though, and read their “A Better Way Forward” white paper. You might want to too. It’s excellent, and I haven’t found a decent argument against it.

December 29, 2003 /

“Before the bodies are wrapped and bound, however, the blankets are opened twice: first so that a cleric can rub a bit of dirt on the face and hands of the dead. In extreme circumstances, the ritual is considered an acceptable substitute for washing the body.

Then a man with a video camera bends over the face, panning down to a number written on a scrap of newsprint folded into the funeral shroud. The footage will be made available to families looking for loved ones, along with a record of where they were buried.”

In the Post, a description of people trying to impart spiritual significance to the mass-grave burial of tens of thousands. It’s pretty affecting.

Apparently they’re getting plenty of aid in Bam, which is good–even American planes landed there, and were welcomed, for the first time in ten years (edit: twenty-two). But it doesn’t seem likely that any amount of aid is going to make much of a difference now.

December 29, 2003 /

In Iran, a mother held her baby girl to shield her from falling rubble, and it worked–rescuers found the mother dead, but six-month-old Nassil lived.

I wonder if I’d have had the presence of mind to do that myself.

December 27, 2003 /

Oh.

Holy shit.

The headline says 20,000, but in the article they keep saying the final count will be 40,000. 40,000. More than the entire population of any of the towns where I grew up.

We’ve promised to send aid. I just hope it’s soon.

October 1, 2003 /

“Coleman said he remained worried about the ‘heavy-handedness’ of the lawsuits, which carried fines of up to $150,000 for each song shared from their hard drives. When asked whether the fines were excessive, Bainwol said they got consumers’ attention and established a deterrent. ‘Public floggings would get attention, too, but we don’t do that,’ Coleman responded.”

Well played, Senator Coleman. Well played.

Meanwhile, over at Music That Is Free And Also Fricking Rocks, Amanda informs me that Jon has put new songs up on his IUMA page. (I have to find this out from Amanda because someone else never updates his blog. But I digress.) And! They fricking rock! “Later” and particularly “Gun” remind me of the reformed-ELO-fan sound of 56 Kilobit Sentinel, and the lo-fi / high harmony contrast in “Letting Go” might be my favorite moment in a Jon song yet. Plus the outro rocks like Silverchair.