Mexican suicide aid

The New York Times reported Monday about Mexican pet shops selling pentobarbital, which is being purchased by international visitors for euthanasia purposes. The pet shops sell it for pet euthanasia, and were apparently surprised to hear that their recent sales have been for use on humans.

Car dealer strategies

A few years ago, people were using their homes as ATMs to purchase all sorts of consumer goods including cars. More recently, desperate home sellers were offering to throw in a "free" car with the purchase of a house. Now at least one auto dealer is offering to pay your mortgage.

This morning I heard a commercial for one of the local Phoenix Nissan dealers (one that receives frequent complaints from people who appear to not pay very close attention to what they are purchasing). The ad offers to make your mortgage payments for the rest of the year when you buy a car from them, even if your mortgage is as much as $2,000, without changing the sale price of the car. I suspect that means without lowering the sale price of the car below the point of profit.

It doesn't strike me as a sensible way to avoid foreclosure.

Nice article on Camp Inquiry

There's a good article on Camp Inquiry in the Buffalo News:

Deep in the Holland woods, D.J. Grothe wowed a group of kids at summer camp with a series of magic tricks. Seemingly impermeable steel rings were combined and separated again; rubber bands were melded into each other; coins vanished and returned in the unlikeliest of places.

Then, Grothe, national field director for the Council for Secular Humanism, did something even more amazing: He gave away the trick, detailing exactly how anyone can do magic.

It was another day at Camp Inquiry, where instead of swapping ghost tales or learning Bible stories, children take a critical look at claims of magic, the supernatural and even religion.

The camp's mission: Help young people "confront the challenges of living a nontheistic [or] secular lifestyle in a world dominated by religious belief and pseudoscience."

The unusual camp, now in its third year, brings together curious children from across the country to hone their skills as skeptics and critical thinkers.

Twenty-seven campers spent the past week following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, digging up fossils and learning how to face moral dilemmas.

See the full article here. I'm glad to see it's not just a camp for atheists, but is open to theistic freethinkers as well:

Organizers don't specifically address faith or religion in their planned programming, which also includes a variety of art, music and leisure activities.

But the topics arise frequently in casual discussions among campers. Some profess to be atheists, others refer to themselves as secular humanists, and a few say they believe in a higher power.

Much better than Jesus Camp.

UPDATE: I originally referred to Camp Inquiry as Camp Quest, a different set of camps with similar aims. Thanks, Carol, for the correction.

UPDATE (August 9, 2008): NPR has also done a good story on Camp Inquiry.

Skeptics Society 2008 conference

The Skeptics Society has officially announced its 2008 conference, and the topic is not the one that was first suggested, war, terrorism, and security. Instead, this year's conference is on "Origins: The Big Questions," and is co-sponsored by the Templeton Foundation.

The conference will be held at Caltech on October 3-4, and the speaker lineup includes Sean Carroll (the Caltech theoretical physicist, not to be confused with Sean B. Carroll, the University of Wisconsin at Madison professor of molecular biology and genetics), Paul Davies, Stuart Kauffman, Christof Koch, Kenneth Miller, Nancey Murphy, Donald Prothero, Hugh Ross, Victor Stenger, Leonard Susskind, Michael Shermer, Philip Clayton, and Mr. Deity.

It's an interesting mix of speakers for the subject matter, and I suspect I will attend, but I'd really rather go to a conference that brought critical thinking to the subjects of war, terrorism, and security.

Best run city in the world?

A month or so ago, we got a mailing from the City of Phoenix, which bills itself as the "best run city in the world" on the basis of an award it won in 1993, telling us that our garbage and recycling pick up days would be changing. You can see that mailing here (PDF); the announcement is on the right hand side of the first page. The flyer states that pickup days will change the week of July 14, but notice that it doesn't say when or how they are changing. Instead, it says "Watch your mail for additional information." It didn't say to call in, and it didn't say to check the city's website. In fact, it says "Residents impacted by these changes will be notified through multiple mailings identifying the specific changes to their homes." That turned out to be false.

A week or so later, a second mailing came from the city. It also didn't say how the pickup days were changing, and it also said to watch for a further notification in the mail. It didn't say to call in, and it didn't say to check the city's website.

No further notification came. Everyone in my neighborhood apparently continued to put out recycling and garbage bins on the same days, and they didn't get picked up. Kat called today, and the person answering the phone for the City of Phoenix waste disposal said that they did no specific mailings, rather, they expected people to "get curious" and either look online or call them.

Well, we did indeed "get curious" as to why our garbage wasn't picked up, so I guess their expectation was valid. My initial assumption was that we had a new garbageman who didn't know my house was on his route, since I've had to call a few dozen times in the past about garbage and recycling not being picked up for that reason.

I've put out the recycling bin for pickup tomorrow--next to the full garbage bin that will be sitting out there until next week. So far, none of my neighbors have done the same.

Phoenix foreclosures spreading

The Arizona Republic is catching up with reality:

Foreclosures across metro Phoenix number 16,647 for the first half of the year compared with 9,966 during all of 2007 and 1,070 in 2006.
...
"It has become more of an equity problem than a subprime problem," said Tom Ruff, a real-estate analyst with Information Market.
...
Notice of trustee sales, or pre-foreclosures, also continue to climb. There were 35,111 pre-foreclosures filed in Maricopa County through July. That compares with 30,166 for all of 2007.

The article also notes that the median resale price for a home in Phoenix is now $210,000, down 30% from the peak in 2006.

More people are speculating about reaching a bottom. That would be nice, but we've still not seen a peak on preforeclosures, which set another record in June (6929, vs. 6416 in May). For comparison, the total sales volume in June was 5748 (and 5656 in May), according to the Arizona Realtor's Association. (These stats via Einzige, thanks!)

Did Diebold tamper with Georgia's 2002 elections?

Former McCain advisor and security researcher Stephen Spoonamore suggested at a press conference on Thursday that Diebold tampered with Georgia's 2002 elections for Governor and Senator, in which Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democrat Sen. Max Cleland. Spoonamore was given a copy of a patch applied to Diebold machines in two strongly Democratic counties, DeKalb and Fulton, by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, allegedly in order to fix a clock-related problem. Spoonamore found that the patch did nothing to correct the clock problem, and contained two copies of the same program, but was unable to determine exactly what it did without access to the Diebold hardware. He has supplied a copy of the patch, which he obtained from a whistleblower in the Georgia Secretary of State's office, to the Department of Justice.

Netroots and telecom

There's a telecom panel at the Netroots Nation conference today on the subject of "Big Telecom: An Emerging Threat to Our Democracy?" The implied answer is yes, and it appears that every participant on the panel will be making that case. Here's the description of the panel:

Massive telecom companies control virtually all of our voice and internet communications these days—and new evidence shows a near-total lack of commitment to our democracy. AT&T has proposed filtering all content traveling on its network. Verizon tried initially to block NARAL's pro-choice text messages. Most telecom companies are fighting net neutrality. Can democracy survive an assault by those who control the tubes?

The panel members don't include anyone with any experience managing or operating an actual telecom network, but instead includes two people who have repeatedly demonstrated not only an ignorance of telecom law, technology, and policy, but who have misrepresented facts and failed to engage with the arguments of their critics, Matt Stoller and Timothy Karr (see posts on this blog in the "net neutrality" category). The closest person to a representative of a telecom is Michael Kieschnick of Working Assets, a company that is a reseller of long distance and wireless service on Sprint's network.

I agree with many of their positions--I don't think ISPs should be allowed to block websites on the basis of disagreement with content. I think ISPs should be transparent about their network management processes and filtering. Where I disagree with them is that they advocate that the FCC step in to regulate the Internet in a way that it has never had authority to do so before, and demand that network operators not be allowed to implement classes of service with different rates of charges, or even usage caps. Art Brodsky expresses the point which has also been made by Robb Topolsky of Public Knowledge, Timothy Karr of Free Press, and Matt Stoller:

In the name of "network management," some companies want to throttle down the use of legal applications, like BitTorrent which may, coincidentally, provide competition in entertainment programming. They want to impose usage caps across the board on all customers which would stifle innovation and curb the use of video (there's that anti-competitive meme again) without actually solving the problem of the so-called "bandwidth hogs." The way caps are being discussed now, they would only lead to higher prices and less usage for an industry that already charges more for less than most broadband providers around the world. Parts of our broadband industry may be the only sector in the world that wants to cut down the amount of its product it wants customers to use.

Brodsky's last sentence is clearly false--broadband is like a fixed-price all-you-can-eat buffet. All businesses want to maximize their profits by maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. When bandwidth is sold at a fixed cost in unlimited amounts, where a small number of users are consuming the majority of the service, it's in the business's interest to restrict those users or charge them more for what they consume in order to satisfy the rest in a cost-effective manner. The options are few--you can either restrict the "bandwidth hogs" in some way, charge them more so that they pay for what they use, or raise the price for everyone. These guys seem to advocate the latter approach, while I'm in favor of allowing all the options to be used in a competitive market. Where I disagree with Comcast's approach in issuing RST packets to block BitTorrent traffic is not that they did it, but that they were not transparent about what they were doing (and apparently didn't quite get it quite right--it should not have completely broken BitTorrent, but only slowed it down).

Brodsky's suggestion that Comcast has an interest in blocking BitTorrent because it provides competition in the entertainment space is absurd--they have an interest in blocking it because it's a very popular application which itself exploits Internet protocols in a way not anticipated by the designers in order to consume more bandwidth, getting around the congestion controls in TCP/IP by using multiple TCP streams. If BitTorrent traffic wasn't filling up the majority of Comcast's bandwidth, they'd have no interest in it, except when the MPAA and RIAA issue them subpoenas about their users infringing copyrights.

If the government prohibits the use of differential classes of service (which is already heavily used by private companies to give priority to applications within their enterprise which have requirements for low latency and jitter, such as real-time streaming audio and video, including Voice over IP) and requires that congestion be dealt with by building out infrastructure sufficiently that there will never be congestion no matter how many users max out their connectivity with BitTorrent, that will reduce competition by culling smaller companies out of the picture and making market entry more difficult. In any environment where a provider's upstream capacity is less than the sum of the capacity to every customer (and that's everywhere, today, and always has been), all-you-can-eat bandwidth is like a commons. The more that is available, the more the heavy users will consume, to the detriment of each other and the light users. Without setting caps and having tiered pricing or implementing technology that prioritizes packets and drops from the heavy users and from less-realtime-sensitive applications first (like BitTorrent), there are no incentives against consuming everything that is available.

I also think it's a huge mistake to have the FCC start regulating the Internet. FCC chairman Kevin Martin would no doubt love to place indecency standards and filtering requirements on Internet content. Once you open the door to FCC regulation of the Internet, that becomes more likely. And the FCC has been completely ineffectual at dealing with existing abuses like fraudulent telemarketing, illegal prerecord calls to residences and cell phones, caller ID spoofing, etc., already covered by statute and regulation. I'd rather see clear statutes that include private rights of action than entrust control of the Internet to the FCC. The FCC is a slow-moving bureaucracy, and AT&T and Verizon have the deepest pockets, the most lawyers, and the most personnel who have shuffled back and forth between government (including the NSA) and industry. That gives AT&T and Verizon the tactical advantage, and leads to less competition rather than more.

Which brings me to the warrantless wiretapping and telecom immunity issues, which Cindy Cohn of the EFF no doubt addressed on the Netroots Nation panel. I suspect I have little if any disagreement with her. I've long been a supporter of the EFF, as are many people involved in the management of ISPs. I strongly oppose telecom immunity for warrantless wiretapping, a complete abdication of Congress' responsibility to support the U.S. Constitution. But this shows the power of AT&T and Verizon. Not only did they get what they wanted, but the very infrastructure which was built to do this massive interception of traffic for the NSA and for law enforcement interception under the CALEA laws was built for them with assistance from government funds. All telecoms have to be compliant with CALEA (now including VoIP and broadband Internet providers), but the big incumbents who were most capable of affording it on their own got it at the lowest costs, while their competition was required to build it out at their own expense even if it never gets used.

But there are legitimate uses for deep packet inspection, for understanding the nature of the traffic on a network for management purposes, including tracking down security and abuse issues. Since it is in the hands of the end user to use encryption to protect sensitive content, I think use of DPI by network providers is reasonable for the purposes of providing better service in the same way that it's reasonable for a voice provider to intercept traffic for quality measurement purposes. It's also reasonable for interception to occur for "lawful intercept," but it should always require a court order (i.e., both executive and judicial branch approval) on reasonable grounds. The difficulty of obtaining wiretaps depicted in the television program "The Wire" is how it should be.

I've written a lot on these issues, much which can be found in this blog's Network Neutrality Index.

If any reader of this blog happens to have attended the Netroots Nation telecom panel or comes across a description of its content, please point me to it, as I'd like to see what was said. I don't have high hopes for the accuracy or reasonability of statements from Stoller and Karr, but I could be surprised, and the other panelists probably had interesting and important things to say.

(See my Blogger profile for the disclosure of my employment by Global Crossing, which is currently listed by Renesys as the #3 network provider on the Internet in terms of number of customers, ahead of AT&T and Verizon, behind Sprint and Level 3.)

UPDATE: The "Big Telecom" panel was live-blogged (dead, unarchived link: http://openleft.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=C865142FFB85E14AAD27045B9A342B15?diaryId=7032"). Stoller's anecdote about the Bill of Rights on metal is referring to Dean Cameron's "security edition" of the Bill of Rights, which was also promoted by Penn Jillette.

San Francisco's city network held hostage

The mainstream media has reported the arrest of the City of San Francisco's network administrator, being held on $5 million bond, as though he had secretly taken control of the city's network and servers and held them hostage, and implies that he has access to data stored on servers on the network. The reality, however, appears to be somewhat different.

Paul Venezia at InfoWorld has dug a little deeper, and found that Terry Childs, a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE, Cisco's top certification), was responsible for managing San Francisco's "FiberWAN" MPLS network, which he, though not the top network architect, built and managed himself. He has always been the only one with access, which he protected vigorously for fear that no one else around him was competent to do so. His paranoia seems to me excessive and misplaced--the risk of no one else having access is itself a single point of failure, and the fact that he originally refused to write remote configuration to flash, meaning that in the event of power failure the devices would not come back up and function properly without intervention, shows him to be a bit off.

Childs never "tampered" with any system or network device to take it hostage, he simply maintained control of what he built and refused to give others access to it. He never has had control of any servers or databases apart from the ones directly involved in managing the network, such as the authentication servers for the network. So the talk of data being stored on the network including "officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail bookings" appears to be irrelevant. Nothing has been done to prevent anyone from accessing any of those things or to gain unauthorized access to them; the network is still up and functioning normally, and Childs didn't have any special access to or manage or control the host-level access to the servers with that data. Now, he was probably able to intercept data transmitted on the network (necessary for troubleshooting), but if sensitive data was only accessed via encrypted sessions, even that risk wouldn't exist.

Childs' problem appears to be that he was overprotective, untrusting of the competence of his peers and management (perhaps with some justification), and placed technological purity and security over business requirements. Not unusual features for people with a very high level of technical skill.

Check out Venezia's article--it looks to me like he's got the goods on this story.

UPDATE (July 23, 2008): Childs gave up the passwords to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, after a secret visit arranged by his attorney, Erin Crane, with the mayor. Childs' attorney's statements are consistent with Venezia's article:

In her motion to reduce bail, Crane said Childs had been the victim of a "bad faith" effort to force him out of his post by incompetent city officials whose meddling was jeopardizing the network Childs had built. At one point, she said, Childs discovered that the network was at risk of being infected with a computer virus introduced by a colleague.

"Mr. Childs had good reason to be protective of the password," Crane said. "His co-workers and supervisors had in the past maliciously damaged the system themselves, hindered his ability to maintain it ... and shown complete indifference to maintaining it themselves.

"He was the only person in that department capable of running that system," Crane said. "There have been no established policies in place to even dictate who would be the appropriate person to hand over the password to."

The defense attorney added that "to the extent that Mr. Childs refused to turn over the password ... this was not a danger to the public."

Childs intends to fight the computer tampering charges:

Referring to the felony computer-tampering counts, Crane said, "Mr. Childs intends to not only disprove those charges, but also expose the utter mismanagement, negligence and corruption at (the Technology Department) which, if left unchecked, will in fact place the city of San Francisco in danger."

UPDATE (September 11, 2008): Venezia has a new story about the latest round of motions in the Childs case, where the prosecution has filed some apparently technically inept documents. I've also come across an affidavit supporting Childs' arrest from SFPD Inspector James Ramsey (PDF), which presents a very strong case that Childs was up to no good--he had set up his own racks of equipment including modems in a training room, was running his own mail servers and intrusion detection systems, and connecting his own personal equipment to the network. He had cut holes in a locked cabinet next to his cubicle to run cables into them, where he had placed a dialup modem and a computer to allow himself unauthorized access to the city network. The guy seems like a bit of a nut who was engaged in some highly inappropriate behavior meriting termination and criminal prosecution.

UPDATE (August 22, 2009): The judge in the Childs case, Superior Court Judge Kevin McCarthy, has dismissed three charges of tampering, leaving one count related to his initial refusal to give up the passwords, which has a maximum sentence of five years. Childs has served over a year in jail, due to his inability to raise $5 million in bail. He will appear in court on Monday regarding the final charge. Childs gave up the passwords to San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom after spending eight days in jail.

Another reason to hope Obama wins the election

Stephen Baldwin says he will leave the country if Obama wins. But will he stay away for at least four years?

Of course, he's just mocking his brother Alec's statement that he would leave the country if Bush were elected in 2000, which he didn't follow through on, either.