Off By One

I’m still damned busy, but some things I just can’t help myself from posting.

This is a small site, with no real impact, and no political pretensions — I don’t provide a service to people who want info on the government, although I criticize sometimes. However, the fact that linking to this is cause for subpoenas from my own government… Well, let’s just say that suppression of free speech is abhorrent under all circumstances. Especially when it involves the very people in positions to suppress it.

This USian blogger is pumping out information about the Adscam trials, although I’m not sure what his angle on it is, and as far as I’m concerned is providing a valuable service.

Just remember — if you’re co-national with me, it might soon be illegal for you to read those links.

It’s worth noting, as someone else in the blog community has in response to this, an old saw about the internet: It will treat censorship as network damage and simply route around it. This is a feature, not a bug.

Anyway, the workload is lightening off a bit — I may be reachable for conversation (for the masochists among you) soon, and after next weekend I actually expect to have time to relax!

As seen here, it appears that our illustrious, and apparently irremovable leaders have decided that trivialities like private communication are no longer required for the day-to-day perpetuation of our government.

So.

Let’s see… an ISP will (if this passes) have to provide detailed information about any subscriber to the police, without a warrant? What the hell?

Words fail me, not least due to the degree that I’m tired. But I hope that you can see the way I do on this one — this is just flat-out wrong.

I just had my attention brought to the EFF(Electronic Freedoms Foundation)’s User’s Guide to EULA(End-User License Agreement)s, which is a nice, human-(read: non-lawyer)-readable introduction to the wooly wonders of licensing for software.

Trust me, read one of those some time. They’re bloody creepy, and they’re getting worse, not better.

Esoterica? Pah!

Word has come down from a research team (via a major authority on cryptography) that the SHA-1 hash algorithm has been broken (discussed here and here)

This is a bit tough to grok if you’re not a crypto-nerd, but essentially what this means is that one of the fundamental ways of signing (not encrypting, that’s a whole different ball of wax) a document cryptographically has been compromized. This isn’t immediately fatal, but it does bring computation of these hashes into the realm of possibility sooner rather than later. Essentially, the team conducting the research has cut a factor of 2^11 (2048, for the binary-impaired) off of the time required to force a hash collision (NSFNG(Not Safe For Non-Geeks)). This cuts the work involved down from approximately 1208925819614629174706176 attempts to 590295810358705651712. Scary, isn’t it?

What this means, basically, is it is plausibly possible for an attacker with the computer resources of the NSA or a major world-class computing centre to get someone to sign a document, then substitute another one for it that will pass as having been signed legitimately. This has fairly broad implications in an age where the validity of electronic evidence is being questioned (pdf).

Still, I guess it’s not that big of a deal. Something better will come up, I’m sure.

This “just in”:http://www.apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/07A1C8CA269E79B5CA256FA1000F9763: Apparently, Kazaa is logging user downloads from their p2p service. I’ve had plenty to say about Kazaa being a font of nastiness in the past, but this pretty much cements it. If you’re using it still, please stop.

I’m looking at the front matter of one of my professors’ weblog, which closely associates Che Guevara with the Free Culture movement.

Does anyone else see anything ironic in that? Rabid communist/socialist as an icon of Free Culture?

Faugh.

According to a few news soruces (“here”:http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,10704524%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html “and”:http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/state/article/0,1406,KNS3483166469,00.html “there”:http://www.wkrn.com/Global/story.asp?S=2269116 ) the US 6th cicruit court reached a decision that any and all sampling of music is illegal unless the work is specifically licensed. As you can imagine, the usual suspects are going to have a field day with this one.

From where I sit, I think that’s just stupid. There are abuses, to be sure, but sampling is a valuable addition to the toolsets of some “artists”:http://www.arztpfusch.com/, even though “others”:http://www.velvetacidchrist.com/ use it as a replacement for creativity.

What could be wrong with it, if it’s not overdone (whole measures, entire themes?)

In the spirit of a gigantic fuck you to the monkeys that came up with this hyperlink policy for the Athens games, I’d like to add my little snippet to the spew. The theme on what little Metafilter had to say was attaching profanity to links to them. I say, go wild. Please, if you run a website, link that way.

And click through, by all means I want them to know they’re getting those links!

I can’t even start to enumerate the ways that this program to teach schoolchildren copyright offends my sensibilities.

Along with the american MPAA, who is also doing something like it, this program is part of a concerted effort by holders of modern, excessively-long copyrights to indoctrinate young children into toeing the party line.

Unlike some groups I don’t advocate the idea that ‘Information wants to be free’, nor do I believe that any entity, be they an artist or a massive conglomerate like the (MP|RI)AA, is obligated to give away their intellectual property just because the marginal cost of duplication is so small. However, I object to the entry of private industry lobby groups into an education system that is already starting to show signs of commercial decay.

The Register in the UK has a writeup on this, and there is an open letter from a British citizen on kuro5hin that indicates a nice, clear set of objections to the policy.

Sometimes I think that, while we’re all looking the other way, our rights as human beings — not as abstract consumers of goods — are simply going to be cancelled along with the latest crop of post-Seinfeld flops.

This shit worries me. What in the hell are we doing, letting this happen?

Spurred by a random comment from a co-worker of mine last night during a post-work wings & beer gathering, I decided today to look into the information on the back of my new Alberta Driver’s Licence. For those of you who haven’t seen one yet (I saw many of them when working as a bouncer, and I just recently got my own) they have a strip on the back that consists of some form of binary encoded information.

My question was, of course, what information.

So, I’ve been phone-tagging this morning, to a few government departments, where at least one of them told me that it’s just what’s on the front of the license, excluding the picture. I’m reasonably sure that this is the case, but it does seem to me that there is too much information on the back for it to be that simple. As near as I can tell, there are 5,824 bits of information stored on the back, or 728 bytes. Even leaving aside compression, and making a conservative estimate as to the size of the data fields, there is about 300 bytes of textual data on the card. Say, a maximum of 400. Now compression can reduce text to sometimes as little as 25% of its size, although one can’t guarantee that compression is being used, since it’s highly likely that the information is encrypted, which usually resists compression.

That being said, what is the rest of the info? Some of it would be checksum data to validate the info on the strip, but I can’t imagine that all of it would be. What information about myself am I carrying around?

The departments I spoke to are reluctant to provide me with real information about it, although I should be receiving a call today to make an appointment with Registries to go in and at least see what they see when my license is scanned. It’s a small step, but I’d like to verify at least that much.

I know that it’s not likely, but if any of my readers has more information about this, or even knows how to go about hunting more down, I’d love to hear it.