Rosio Pavoris

Department of Homeland and Security wants master key for DNS

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (…) wants to have the key to sign the DNS root zone solidly in the hands of the US government. This ultimate master key would then allow authorities to track DNS Security Extensions (DNSSec) all the way back to the servers that represent the name system’s root zone on the Internet. The “key-signing key” signs the zone key, which is held by VeriSign.

DNSSEC is a set of extensions of the DNS protocols that are intended to increase security all-round by making it pretty much impossible to spoof DNS (among other things). Apparently the DHS itself is involved in funding part of it, and they seem to feel they should be in complete control of it, and completely exempt from the DNSSEC measures the entire world is working to implement.

This sort of bullshit is why the internet, if it is to be government-regulated at all, should be regulated by an international commission, as I’ve said before, and why even people in countries the US isn’t likely to invade soon should keep a close eye on the self-important windbaggery that goes on there.
The DHS is looking to turn the entire world into their personal police state playground.

(Via Slashdot, which gets the implications of this completely wrong.)

Next of Kin is a really handy WordPress plug-in Terru pointed out to me.
It keeps track of how often you visit your blog, and after a certain amount of time it sends you a warning e-mail. If you don’t visit your blog for another while, it sends you another one. Then, after a third while, it e-mails one or more e-mail addresses of your choice.

Almost nobody on the internet bothers to plan for what’ll happen after they die, and it’s caused some problems before. I’ve already done some planning, but this is definitely a very handy plug-in.

I just finished Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. Together with Six Easy Pieces, it’s a much abridged version of the Feynman Lectures on Physics, by, of course, Richard Feynman.
I finished Six Easy Pieces weeks ago, but since it and the sequel add up to less than a third of a typical book, size-wise (about 140 pages each), I decided to review them together. I just got side-tracked for a bit.

Six Easy Pieces is actually the exact same book as The Character of Physical Law (which I reviewed earlier), just with the chapters moved around a bit and some bits reworded.
It’s much more recent than Character, but I thought it was a bit less coherent. Still, quite good.

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces takes most of the concepts introduced in Six Easy Pieces a step further, and introduces some relevant equations.

The first chapter introduces vectors as if it’s some super-advanced new concept (which it may well have been at the time, though I would hope that anyone who’s gone through highschool now would know what they are), and talks about how they apply to Newton.
The second returns to the various symmetries in physical laws, and delves deeper into what they mean. It also talks more in-depth about the various laws of conservation (momentum, energy, angular momentum, charge, baryons, and leptons).
The final four chapters are about special relativity and what it means, exactly. He gets a few jabs at philosophers in on the side, because he wouldn’t be Feynman if he didn’t.

While it does require some background in mathematics, it’s actually pretty easy to follow. It may be a bit too advanced for the casual reader, but anyone with an interest in physics should be able to pick it up quite readily.

At various points he hints at the limitations of the various theories and areas where our knowledge is still very much on shaky ground, or missing altogether. Given that these lectures were given in the 1960s, I’d be very interested in seeing another book, perhaps, that revisits the not-so-easy pieces and tells us what progress has been made.

Either way, they’re very interesting, and make for a surprisingly light read, given the subject matter. As a layperson, it’s kind of hard to know which bits, if any, are completely outdated, and the mathematics can be hard to follow, but it’s still very much worth reading. I certainly learned a few things.
(I never really understood the equivalence principle as well as I wanted to. Now I do.)

Takes cultural chauvinism to a whole new level, doesn’t it? Colin Mochrie is supposed to be better than this.
Jon Stewart’s take on this is much, much more enjoyable.

Apparently my mom joined the KAV (Catholic Working Class Women’s Movement; it’s a social thing, not a political or religious club). Vaguely odd thing for an upper middle class atheist to do.
I’m sure she has her reasons.

Random meme thing.

I disagree with the first R.

Too familiar.
GIFs of this have been popping up on 4chan for far too long for me to have only found this now.

Wooh easter break.

As planned, I skipped Java and went to the Fnac to see what kind of laptops they have, and to the Acco to find a Netwerken/Besturingssystemen textbook.
I didn’t quite get around to doing either, but I did spend most of what was left of my money.

I bought Stephen Jay Gould’s Life’s Grandeur, since I’ve been criticising him without ever having read any of his books. It seems to be an uncontroversial book, so it shouldn’t annoy me too much.

I also bought James Watson’s The Double Helix. Watson, of course, is a co-discoverer of DNA (together with Francis Crick), and a pretty awesome dude. Even if he looked like a bit of a twat when he was younger.

And I bought Robert Kaplan’s The Nothing That Is, which seems to be about the history of zero.

And Ernest Nagel’s and James R. Newman’s Gödel’s Proof, which is about Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Because, y’know. I likes me some logics.

And Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, which is about string theory and was once named one of the ten worst popular science books ever written. I’ve read it before, five or six years ago, and I’m aware of its limitations, so I’d like to go through it again just to see if I missed anything the first time, since my knowledge of physics in general and string theory in specific has expanded somewhat since then.

And Bertrand Russel’s In Praise of Idleness, since Russell was made of secksy and being idle is something I enjoy.

And finally, Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, because Gaiman is awesome and I desperately need to read more fiction.

Which brings my total to-read pile to 28. Totally doable.
I also bought the 28 Days Later DVD, since I still haven’t seen that one.

Incidentally, while I was waiting for my train I was reading Veto, a KUL campus newspaper, and it had an interesting article about the fusing of the various hogescholen in Leuven with the KUL itself. Turns out literally everyone in the KUL is against it, because they’re afraid it’ll ruin the university’s reputation.
I am extremely amused, and I totally agree.

I managed to finish a book before buying new ones!
The Infinite Book, by John D. Barrow, tries to explain the concept of infinity in several fields, and talks about how it has historically been regarded.

The first half of the book deals with infinity in mathematics. It starts with the obvious — Zeno’s paradoxes — and works its way through the history of mathematics all the way up to Georg Cantor and his infinite sets (א is a neat symbol), taking care to introduce complicated concepts in a way anyone could understand.

The second half deals with infinity in physics: infinite density, temperature, &c. in singularities, the infinity of space and time, and the infinity of the multiverse. It touches on things like the Big Bang (obviously), whether or not the universe will continue to expand forever, time travel, &c.
All of it is at least moderately interesting, though it does get repetitive.

The final chapter tries to philosophise a bit about what life would be like if we could live forever, in a stoner stream-of-consciousness kind of way. Barrow may be a good mathematician and theoretical physicist (though if he is, the scope of this book didn’t exactly allow him to show it off), but he’s no great philosopher.

But other than that, it was a pretty decent book. It made for easy reading, but it doesn’t treat readers like idiots, which is a hard balance to find. I certainly learned a few things.

One thing that did bother me, though: he touches on theology rather more than I thought was needed (though some mention is obviously going to be necessary, given the subject matter and the historical context), and he seemed to be extremely careful not to comment on its inanities.
Dunno. Maybe I’m more sensitive to that sort of thing than most. Still, since Barrow apparently won the Templeton Prize in 2006, I don’t think it’s just in my head.

One thing that did amuse me, though: at one point, he points out how advances in science and a deeper understanding of the world around us meant that the concept of God retreated further and further over the course of history, being confined to things science could not yet explain, time and time again.
The punchline? John D. Barrow is a deist.

Anyway. If you’re willing to ignore all that, it really isn’t a bad book. I’ll probably buy more of his books at some point, at least.

This just speaks for itself.

It’s a pity this was done because he was stealing bandwidth rather than because he really does oppose gay marriage, and that the bandwidth-stealing seems to be causing more outrage than the bigotry, but it’s still a beautiful thing.

GSA Administrator Lurita Doan, called before the House Government Oversight committee. The GSA, or General Services Administration, “helps federal agencies better serve the public by offering, at best value, superior workplaces, expert solutions, acquisition services, and management policies”, according to their own mission statement, and turning it into a GOP slush fund slash strategy think tank is about as corrupt as it gets. Doing it as blatantly as these people did is just frightening.

I’m not sure why the “I don’t recall” defense is so popular among these pigs when they’re called on their bullshit. It’s essentially an admission that the type of behavior they’re accused of having engaged in is something that they could see themselves doing, otherwise they could just answer “no”.

In related news, I’m really, really getting sick of the “Democrats are just as bad as Republicans” meme.

(Via Daily Kos.)

It’s interesting how much more smoothly our Netwerken/Besturingssystemen practica go when I’m in charge of configuring the server. Teacher person gave me a gold star~
By which I mean he drew a star on a yellow Post-it note and stuck it to my forehead, and then felt bad because it looked like a Judenstern.

Classes are cancelled on Friday because of deliberations of some sort, so tomorrow is the last day of classes before easter break. Apparently that’s two weeks long now.
Since Systeemanalyse will consist of just printing stuff out and handing it in, I’ll be skipping that, so it really won’t be worth hanging around until Cobol, so I’ll just have Java. And I’ll be skipping Java because made of hate and I need to acquire a few textbooks somewhere before the break, so win.

Remind me not to be near the Rega building after 14:00, since the ROB will be filming there for some reason.

Bi-color peacock~

(Lol cock.)

If you manage to fuck up your server to the point where the MySQL process dies every ten seconds, eventually a table is going to crash.

If anyone notices a comment they posted is missing, feel free to repost it. If anyone on a Rota Hall blog notices MySQL errors, let me know so I can fix them.

I’m going to look for better hosting.

Hell is real and eternal: Pope

HELL is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, the Pope has said.

Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, Benedict XVI said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to “admit blame and promise to sin no more”, they risked “eternal damnation - the inferno”.
Hell “really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more”.

When Ratzinger said earlier that homosexuals and divorced people should be denied the Communion, and that he wanted more Latin in the Mass, various priests said he’d lost touch with reality. I always figured him having lost touch with reality was why he got the job in the first place.

John Paul II was fluffy feel-good theist, Benedict XVI is a common fundamentalist. It’s hardly surprising, what with the perceived threat from fundamentalist Islam polarising the West further and further. I’m not sure why so many Western-European Catholics seem to be in denial about it.

(Via RichardDawkins.net.)

Apparently our host finally fixed the traffic tracking software, and it’s been recording all along, just not showing data. The original February post is here.
mail(), a PHP function for sending — gasp — email, was also broken, but that, too, has apparently been fixed. If you have a Rota Hall blog, you should be receiving email notifications for comments again now.

Of course, the webserver itself was unreachable for a while, and the databases were down for hours after that, but you can’t expect people to fulfill contractual obligations, now can you?
I appreciate how difficult it is to maintain a server farm for a reasonable number of people (I really do), but people need to learn not to make promises if they can’t keep them.
(That’s another reason trying to blame this “bandwidth crisis” on the users is bullshit.)

Anyway. We’re back now.

Populist tripe. Why were these morons elected?

(I skipped my morning class to watch the BBC news. It’s marginally less despair-inducing than Ameriko newses, but every country has its share of idiots.)

One thing I never quite understood about this sort of thing, though, including our own various “Meer blauw op straat” campaigns and any government project that has “security” in the first line of its description: who seriously wants more neighborhood policing in general?

I can understand wanting better coverage in problematic neighborhoods, but there aren’t that many of those. In the vast majority of neighborhoods, being watched by the police all the time would make me a lot less comfortable, not more.
Maybe that’s just because I’m a male between 16 and 25, I dunno.

Blah blah police state blah. Either way, it’s clearly intended to draw attention away from real problems.

Voting device pact at issue

Diebold Election Systems Inc. , one of the country’s largest manufacturers of voting machines, is scheduled to argue in court today that the Office of the Secretary of State wrongly picked another company to supply thousands of voting machines for the disabled.
Article Tools

Diebold says it will ask a judge to overturn the selection of AutoMARK , a Diebold business competitor, because the office of Secretary of State William F. Galvin failed to choose the best machine.

Basically, Massachussetts got sick of the incompetence and corruption at Diebold, and went with another company, and Diebold feels they have a right to a monopoly.
Their entire premise seems to be that (a) the state is legally obliged to pick the best possible voting machines, and (b) those are the ones Diebold makes.

I can understand concerns about voting irregularities stemming from shitty voting machines. After all, that’s how the 2004 election was rigged, and no doubt some local elections since then. However, the people to complain in that case would be the voting public, not the main competitor of the company providing the machines.

But the fact that Diebold of all companies would try this is what makes it particularly funny. They are easily the least competent company in the field (I’ve linked that before), and they’re as corrupt as any.
AutoMARK, on the other hand, seems to at least be trying to produce decent systems, though I guess we’ll have to wait and see how well they perform in action.

This is a frivolous lawsuit, and it’ll probably be thrown out immediately. Still, I wanted to mention this just because it’s such a ridiculous claim on Diebold’s part, and it’s still a waste of time and taxpayer money. There should be heavier penalties on frivolous suits.

Dawkins turns 66 today. I hope I’ll look as fapworthy when I’m that age~
Go leave birthday wishes here, or read some wishes here.

Apparently Akismet, a popular spam-blocking plugin that comes bundled with WordPress and is available for a number of other platforms, blocked its billionth spam comment yesterday. It’s frightening.

I did some research a while ago, when I was going to write about the “bandwidth crisis” and how various factors affect the internets, and apparently “only” 57% of all emails sent are spam (about 12.4 billion emails are sent per day, and about 28% of users actually reply to spam, apparently, and 8% of people polled said they’d ever bought something advertised in a spam email; these people should be shot for the sake of the herd), but as much as 94% of all blog comments are spam.
Pingbacks and trackbacks are a bit better, with about half of them being spam (I’ve never had a spam pingback, oddly), but holy fuck.

Services like Akismet (which has a clever name; the A stands for Automattic, the company that made both it and WordPress, and kismet is Turkish, Urdu, and Hindi for “fate”) are incredibly valuable, of course, but this problem is really a failure of law enforcement.
If the DMCA bulldogs can be that zealous when it comes to piracy, why do most spammers walk free?

Spam victims don’t tend to have as much money as piracy “victims”.

I don’t remember where I found this.

Ten years ago, I: was in 6th grade, wondering how various mergers of high schools in Tienen would affect me personally. I was also not sure if I’d rather have Latin or a technical education. I’m glad I picked Latin.
Five years ago, I: was in 10th grade, for the second time. That wasn’t much fun. I guess it worked out in the end.
One year ago, I: had just dropped out of Japanology; was happy.
So far this year, I: have blogged far too much, and have been annoyed far too often; attempted suicide twice~
Today, I: got up an hour earlier than I expected to; did more research on posse comitatus than I intended to, just because the Revolutionary Communist Party is five months behind the news; helped my mom engage in piracy. Gasp.
Tomorrow, I: will have to explain why I didn’t do my Webdesign homework, while also pointing out that in another sense, I’m two months ahead of schedule. Or, more likely, not.
In one year, I: will be a Computer Science student at the KUL, or dead.
In five years, I: will be a Biology student somewhere, possibly.

That wasn’t very interesting. Polar bear!

Apparently we switched this weekend, and apparently that’s a reason to make me lose an hour of sleep. I need my 14 hours of sleep, dammit.
North America switched two weeks ago, which was right after I started my hiatus, so I didn’t get to bitch about what a retardedly empty gesture that was. Maybe next year.

I still say people should learn to use POSIX time for their day-to-day activities.