A random sample of two three voters in the GTA riding of Whitby-Oshawa today showed a surge for Libertarian candidate Josh Insang. Although his numbers may not hold up over the rest of the day, he had 100% support of the voters we polled.
May 2, 2011
Exit poll in Whitby-Oshawa shows Libertarian surge
Radley Balko: “He won”
A distressing round-up of the lifetime achievements of the late Osama Bin Laden:
We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .
- We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
- We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
- In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
- We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
- The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
- The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
- Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)
The list, unfortunately goes on.
Yes, bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn’t something a special ops team can fix.
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Location of Bin Laden’s hideaway difficult for Pakistan to explain away
From the BBC News website:
More details are emerging of how al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was found and killed at a fortified compound on the outskirts of Abbottabad in north-west Pakistan.
The compound is a few hundred metres from the the Pakistan Military Academy, an elite military training centre, which is Pakistan’s equivalent to Britain’s Sandhurst, according to the BBC’s M Ilyas Khan who visited the area.
Earlier reports put the distance at about 200 yards (182 metres). Pakistan’s military says the compound is 4km (2.4 miles) away from the academy.
But it lies well within Abbottabad’s military cantonment — it is likely the area would have had a constant and significant military presence and checkpoints.
Pakistan’s army chief is a regular visitor to the academy for graduation parades.
Someone very well placed in Pakistan’s army or intelligence organizations had to have been aware of, and actively protecting Bin Laden’s hideout. There’s no way he could have lived that close to high security military establishments without active collusion with high-ranking officers or intelligence chiefs.
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I think I’ll hold off on buying a PlayStation for a little while longer
I actually was considering buying a PS3 in the near future, as our existing Blu-Ray player doesn’t play nicely with Netflix, while my domestic gaming advisor tells me that PS3’s do. Sony’s security problems are enough to give me pause:
“It’s really scary,” said Marsh Ray, a researcher and software developer at two-factor authentication service PhoneFactor, who fleshed out the doomsday scenario more thoroughly on Monday. “It’s justification for Sony freaking out. They could lose control of their whole PS3 network.”
Ray’s speculation is fueled in part by chat transcripts that appear to show unknown hackers discussing serious weaknesses in the PSN authentication system. In it, purported hackers going by the handles trixter and SKFU discuss how to connect to PSN servers using consoles with older firmware that contain bugs susceptible to jailbreaking exploits, even though Sony takes great pains to prevent that from happening.
“I just finished decrypting 100% of all PSN functions,” SKFU claimed.
There’s no evidence the participants had anything to do with the massive security breach that plundered names, addresses, email addresses, passwords and other sensitive information from some 77 million PSN users. But the log did raise questions about the security of the network, since it claimed it was possible to fool the PSN’s authentication system into permitting rogue consoles.
On this reading, arrogance on the part of Sony executives, and complacency on the part of developers and testers are key elements of the security failure:
“If you can’t jailbreak it, then I can see a developer assuming that they don’t need a particular authorization check on what’s coming across the wire because a user can’t do that,” said WhiteHat Security CTO Jeremiah Grossman, an expert in web application security. “So if somebody managed to jailbreak their device and pop a flaw, I can see something major happening there.”
Hotz, the PS3 jailbreaker who recently settled the copyright lawsuit Sony brought against him, said in a recent blog post that the theory is plausible and that responsibility for the hack lay squarely on the shoulders of Sony executives who placed too much trust in the invulnerability of the PS3.
“Since everyone knows the PS3 is unhackable, why waste money adding pointless security between the client and the server?” Hotz, aka GeoHot, wrote. “This arrogance undermines a basic security principle, never trust the client. Sony needs to accept that they no longer own and control the PS3 when they sell it to you.”
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Household robots, a progress report
Over at The Register, Bill Ray talks about the robotic domestic servants in operation around his house:
We like to consider ourselves the new breed of enlightened robot owners — not hobbyists, or enthusiasts, just enormously lazy people who’d prefer to see something else doing the work. That includes mopping the floor, cutting the grass or letting the cats in, not to mention motivating the children into keeping both room and garden tidy for fear of having their toys eaten by the machines.
[. . .]
We know Mowbot can destroy toys because sometimes he does, if the children are foolish enough to leave them on the lawn: he’ll bounce off walls and larger obstacles, but he’ll give them a shove first. It was moments after I predicted he would have no difficulty bouncing off the inflatable paddling pool that it vanished in a swirling maelstrom of plastic and water droplets that was enough to ensure the children kept the garden tidy for a year or two.
[. . .]
iRobot developed the first Roomba to raise money and credibility so it could get into the far-more-lucrative military robot business, but what makes Roomba, Scooba and Mowbot useful is not how clever they are but how much they achieve with such limited intelligence.
While Dyson repeatedly demonstrates prototypes that scan the room with sonar, and Electrolux charges a thousand pounds for their Trilobite bristling with sensors, iRobot’s Roomba bounces off walls at random while Mowbot repeatedly cuts the same grass and calls it “mulching” to avoid having to pick up the bits. None of our robots is efficient, a human could do the job in half the time – but speaking as that human I’m glad I don’t have to.
We’ve been considering buying a Roomba for one particular room in our house: our bedroom. We have three cats, one of whom is utterly terror-stricken at the sight or sound of a vacuum cleaner. At the first hint of a vacuum cleaner attack, he retreats at maximum speed in a random direction, leaving a trail of urine in his wake. This means that our bedroom gets far too infrequently vacuumed. We’re hoping that a Roomba won’t trigger his flee-and-pee instincts . . .
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