Your first linklist of the new year - 1-9 January 02012

[silveradept]

Greetings of the new year to you. Thank you for your well-wishes and correspondence, especially the very cute Pu-present-postcard I received from tinchen and the postcards with snow. Nature did not provide us with any snow for the holidays, and so having pictures of that was nice.

For those of you in Iowa or elsewhere, have a quick reminder as to why Ron Paul is not, in fact, a good candidate for President. Not that it mattered, as Santorum, Paul, and Romney split one-quarter of the vote between themselves, and the remainder was fought over by the other candidates. No clear frontrunner, certainly. (I think it has to do with none of the candidates having any sort of clear background. - Mitt Romney's work at Baen Capital makes him a favorite of those that want to gut the economy for their own profit, for example.) It's easy to forget the dance of the marionettes sometimes, but it's always true that nobody (or near nobody) in politics has your interests at heart.

Elsewhere, xenologer does a pair of linkdumps of excellent information for building your storehouse of knowledge about how other people see the world. Topic One: Misogyny, or why most men have the perfume of Privilege. (And the reason why that person is mad at you for what you thought was innocent or complimentary.) Topic Two: Racism, or why being White still has advantages, even if people aren't so explicit about saying so.

Perhaps as the proper final note to these things, Kate Harding points out that when your first instinct to a problem appearing is anything other than "How do we fix this problem?", then you are auful, too. Because there are a lot of Unfortunate Implications to many of the common responses to seeing jerk behavior on the Internet and in your circles.

Out in the world today, the cost of the Iraq War is not just in treasure, although it cost plenty of that, certainly. Lots of blood, lots of lives shattered, lots of costs that are not quantifiable, but will definitely be felt. All because fear allowed falsehoods to take over and pride prevented rationality from allowing an exit.

Israel is treating a credit card data breach as if it were a terror attack and vowing to retaliate against it.

And finally, a new constitution in Hungray has demonstrators and international observers concerned that human rights in the country just took a giant step backwards, as marriage is codified solely as one man, one woman relationships, life is officially defined to begin at conception, and the statutes provide no discrimination protection against QUILTBAG individuals.

In the domestic sphere, authorities have petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States is deciding whether or not an alert signal from a trained drug-seeking dog is sufficient grounds to obtain a warrant to search a private home for drugs. SCOTUS has not yet decided on whether or not they will hear the case.

The investigation into the race-based abuse and harrassment that drove a Untied States Army private, Danny Chen, to suicide, continues, with the family of the soldier asking for open proceedings in the United States to ensure that justice is done. The allegations include additional work details, degrading treatment, and excessive physical punishment.

Operators of a livestream feed for the Occupy Wall Street movement were arrested by the New York Police Department and their livestream shut down. Elsehere, a protest of senior citizens over usury to those with fixed incomes closed a Bank of America branch in San Francisco.

Appointees of anti-union activist Scott Walker (when he was a county executive) have been implicated in a scandal where they stole almost half of the government money allocated for veterans and used it for their own pleasure. That's of the charges that have been leveled so far - there may be even more charges coming.

The United States Justice Department has updated their official definition of rape to include men and those who are intoxicated or otherwise unable to give consent. Better late than never, and hopefully more accurate statistics will help Justice realize what sort of resources they should devote to it.

Last out, continuing the march of progress, transgender individuals are trying to get New York state to change the requirements for getting their legal sex changed to something less onerous than gender reassignment surgery. Because of the requirements to show birth certificates for many documents and services, transgender persons often find themselves dealing with clerks that will misgender them based on that certificate information and not on their presentation.

Oh, and thinking that Michigan's attempt is worthy of emulation, Tennessee lawmakers have advanced a bill that would class anti-QUILTBAG speech on religious grounds as not-bullying, so long as the speaker was not advocating harm or property destruction.

In technology, CVDazzle, a set of tips on how to apply makeup and paint to fool software from recognizing your face, yet not appear to be wearing a mask or other face-covering that could be illegal.

Microsoft was awarded a patent for a mechanism that would allow a GPS to plot a route to "avoid the ghetto", lest a driver be disturbed by the sight of the working poor.

Unsurprisingly, media outlets who support (or whose parent companies support) the control of the Internet by media cabals are not devoting much time to covering legislation that allows those media cabals to take over.

Finally, the Mandriva Linux distribution is in danger of abandonment, as the Mandriva corporation that supports it faces bankruptcy. One can only hope that the distribution and it's progression is open-sourced and given to the Linux community should the corporation fold up.

Last for tonight, what a truly universal and generic version of the Christian Lord's Prayer might look like.

Comments

[xenologer]

I love your linkage posts and am thus all blushy and excited whenever you put me in one.

Those posts I put up were resource posts for some of my local occupation folk, and I hope to get more up as I go through more of my bookmark folders.

[silveradept]

It's good stuff! So I'm glad to be able to promote it in my little way.

From what the conversations were, it sounds like a lot of the Occupy people need 098-101 level courses about making sure that you're not just looking out for people the same as you. Or that you're not acting like a privileged git.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N) Absent thoughts on the awfulness article:

'[you apparently don’t realize that ]a highly motivated person can pretty easily discover the identity behind a pseudonym': Is this in fact accurate? What means is claimed to be effective at learning a True Name from anonymity, and what would be necessary to prevent this? To claim that anonymity can that easily be broken without a government-level override or similar is a fairly serious claim.

Concept of taking the Internet, which is {a blissful anarchy inconveniently filled with 90% crud which can nevertheless reveal its deepest abysses (to a point...) without fear of personal danger due to near-guaranteed anonymity} and 'clearing house': Somewhat horrifying, and a great loss/shame if completed successfully. Given freedom of expression, it can be given that people one despises will say things that one despises, but it is still a worse action to muzzle them from saying their true (despised) thoughts, and likewise have oneself muzzled from saying reasonable things that others would despise.
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Religious and political flamewars for instance can be absurd to read, and mostly pointless (except for honing debating skills, gettting used to the extreme points of view that other sorts of people hold, et cetera), but it would be tragic if they were prevented from taking place in the first place.
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Having the opportunity to see the darkness that lies in human minds, finally out under the light instead of being concealed by necessity in daily life, one stands to gain nothing if one reduces this situation to a mere reflection of the public interactions that take place in non-electronic reality.
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I do not know what measures are proposed to silence the denizens of the Internet, and prevent anything from being said which is not approved of by the silencing authority, but I am inclined to approve of those who approve of others saying their true thoughts, even if they violently disagree with them.
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If this labels me as awful, for wanting to be able to know all that awful people have to say against others (recalling the Devil's Advocate phrase), then it seems an acceptable label.

(I remain curious about the claimed ease with which a pseudonym can be shredded, and likewise about whether our own legal name can be easily discovered by such a person despite the standard precautions taken.)

[silveradept]

Using what's available, social mining, then social engineering, one could build a fairly good profile of a person and possibly obtain a True Name. It just takes someone tagging them in a photo with their actual name or referring to someone by their name instead of a handle. In this case, N, it's not so much trying to brute-force and reverse-engineer as it is to get in the ballpark and then take advantage of people sharing things.

Unless you can control everyone else in your social circle, human and automated, and force them to adhere to the same security protocols regarding you as you impose on yourself, then there's always a leak somewhere.

Shining light into the darkness does not make it less awful, just more illuminated. And the more illuminated awful things are, the more people see them as awful and will relegate them. I agree, though, that "cleaning house" of undesirables will have the same effect any other pogrom does - you get one pocket cleaned and six more have appeared in your absence. Better to follow the Jeffersonian idea that speech is best fought with more speech instead.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N)

First two paragraphs:

I'm reminded of the problem of people CCing an email address to a long list of people who also see it, often resulting in a flood of spam to a previously tidy inbox.

However, both in the {tagging in a photo with their actual name} and {forcing others to adhere to the same security protocols}, the assumption is that there has already been a breach.
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Either {people you interact with under your legal name with all the authority of your legal identity} already know the name of your secret persona which you take actions online with, or {people you interact with anonymously under a pseudonym} already know the legal identity of the person pulling the strings.
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While someone may semi-publicly use the Internet for personal things which involve their physical and legal existance, such as business networking or Facebook or dating websites or similar, that is still them acting in their capacity as that legal entity, all strings and associations attached. Anonymous interactions (by contrast), between people irrespective of location and based on desired exchanging of thoughts only, are a completely different set of social circles which would not notice each other even if they were to accidentally overlap. For someone else in one or the other to be able to leak one's other identity or identities to third parties means that there has already been a far more serious breach of secrecy from you to that second party, and it is that breach of privacy which seems unnecessary and generally easily avoidable. Their is no need to coerce people into revealing something that you have no cause to tell them (or anyone else) in the first place.
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Whether an anonymous person wanders into a café (say, in front of the nose of a police officer) with a bag over their head for identity protection, or a person drops into an anonymous forum with their real name and face and address on their sleeve for anyone to see and blink at, there is predictable doom. If people are not allowed anonymity (privacy) in public, then it seems questionable to decry the disadvantages of publicity in private (mutual anonymity).

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Third paragraph:

*nods...* Notable is that the consequences of the successful pogroms are generally much more horrifying after the fact than those of the unsuccessful ones.

It is indeed enjoyable to speak about such things, all the more so when such conversation can be conducted in absolute personal security. *smiles* (*imagines a life before anonymity, when arguing a position too unpopular could presumably lead to semi-permanent ostracism and/or a ruined reputation/career... even these days, still, people losing their jobs when they blog about their work conditions and stamp their own legal names on their writings to make it an official public complaint instead of an anonymous one... (though even if ostensibly anonymous, it's always dangerous to refer directly to circumstances specific to one's own position)*)