(Potentially relevant link)

I had some stupid assignments in college, and, yes, freshmman health had some of the worst offenders. But this takes the cake. My brother's assignment is to:
1. Add specific numbers to the top of his mobile phone and show the contacts to the professor. (I, for one, have no mobile phone. When I did have a mobile phone, it was my private property and NOT subject to search my professors and the phone book was determined BY ME.)
2. Sign up for text alerts. (I, for one, have no mobile phone, and when I did, texting was far from free. if you want me to sign up for text alerts, you pay for them.) For the record, they used to email us these alerts. They're not actually very relevant.
3. Tell the professor what route he (my brother) take to and from class. Maybe we should have a mandatory GPS tracker?
4. Photocopy his student id card, driver’s license, credit cards, insurance cards and anything else of importance in his wallet and
4a. Show a copy to his professor. (No, but I will report the assignment to the professor's supervisor.)
4b. Keep a copy in his [probably dorm] room. (An unencrypted hard copy in a shared room? This is to keep him SAFE?)
4c. Send a copy to his parents. (Guess who's over 18. That's right: EVERY STUDENT THERE.)

So, things to consider when applying to college now includes 'considers you an adult' (it actually was a problem back in my day to) and 'understands the concept of privacy'. (Also a problem to some extent in my day--while I was there, they finally switched to NOT displaying your SSN on your student id card, though professors would illegally post it with your grade or pass it around on an attendance sheet. They also still printed your full CC number on your book store receipts, though.)

I don't know what school to recommend, but I know it's not East Carolina University.

A few weeks ago, I finally joined MyBarackObama just so I could join the 'Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right' group. I muchly favour Obama over McCain and Hillary. I figured I'd also donate a bit of money to him iff he got it right.

Apparently, somehow the registering failed and I didn't join the group. Fail. But at least my fail wasn't epic. Obama's was.

If you live in the US, you should be aware that Obama said that he 'unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies' and that he would 'not be among those voting to end the filibuster'. And he didn't vote to end the filibuster--he was absent from the vote, even though he 'supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same'--but he did vote FOR the FISA Amendment Act, a bill giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies. Gee, that phrase seems familiar.

Voting for the FAA would have done next to nothing to directly harm popular opinion of Obama. It would signify that he's not a rightwing nutjob, but most people had figured that out. Fewer than 40% of Americans (or even 40% of conservatives!) supported telecom immunity. The 30-something% who support it probably aren't too keen on Obama anyway, so he wouldn't be losing their support. Presumably he's hoping for a big payout from the telecom industry. Or maybe he thinks he needs the support of Democratic politicians, who are apparently more rightwing than the average Republican voter (probably they get their money from the telecoms, wherewas the voters don't). But those guys will support him anyway because 1) he's their candidate and 2) they want to hitch a ride on his coattails into office.

Telecom immunity isn't the most important thing in the world, to me. I care more about the government telling companies to violate our rights than companies saying 'Okay. Sounds like fun!' But it's still a big deal. Even bigger, though, is saying repeatedly and specifically that you will strongly oppose telecom immunity and then voting in favour of it.

It's sensible that Obama is moving to the centre. The standard winning move is to appeal to your base in the primaries and move to centre for the general election, and I'm completely fine with him doing that. Sure, his supporters are liberal, but the change Obama has been promising is that he's the un-Rove, and that's what we care about the most--being centrist is good.

The left-to-centre shift, however, cannot rightly be done by making specific promises to appeal to the base and then switching to the opposite position. Work out a compromise (which the FISA Amendment Act was absolutely not) and throw a bone to the right/centre where you wisely avoided making specific promises. Don't reverse on earlier promises, especially those that are both specific and important to your base.

I still favour Obama over McCain (it's the economy, stupid), but we don't win by getting someone from the Democratic Party elected. We win by forcing that person to do what was promised. Most of his supports seem to have already let him slide on one major, major issue (campaign finance). We'd have to be pretty pathetic to let him continue to lie to us over and over again. Supporters of Obama should be the first and most vocal critics when he breaks his promises, because those promises were made to us to get our support, not to McCain and his supporters.

I guess one of my fails was epic. I failed to notice that 'change' is a synonym for 'flip-flop'. Obama, it's a shame you're not getting any public financing, 'cause you won't be getting any of my money either, and you won't get my vote either if you don't get your act together.

The French Resistance did a decent job in France, though they needed a lot of help.

A few years ago, I wasn't so hopeful for us. Military has improved, I said. At this point, the argument that we need guns in case the government gets oppressive is bogus. They have tanks and missiles and intensive training.

Then we went to Iraq, and it became apparent that the US military, for all it's sophistication, still couldn't crush a few thousand guys with guns and limited training or experience.

Maybe Iraq will teach them how, but our leaders seem adamantly opposed to learning anything from their mistakes. Really, I think the only thing possible in the near future that would be sufficient would be increased big brotherhood: if you can track individuals well enough, you can crush an insurgency. Guns rights are only of penultimate importance in being able to overthrow the government. Privacy is number one. If they take your guns so you can't shoot them, you can instead build bombs with which to blow thy enemy into tiny bits, in thy mercy. If they're watching us, though, you can't do either.

ACLU trumps NRA.

For years I've wondered why we don't have encrypting phones.

Five or ten years ago, phones may not have had great processors, and some would argue there wasn't much need. The first issue is quickly dying and the other is thoroughly obsolete.

Demand exists. Maybe it's not huge, but it exists.

Interoperability should be simple. Your phone initiates conversation with a quick 'Know such-and-such encryption?' and if the other phone says 'yes', you trade keys and encrypt (or, I suppose, send your pubkey and subsequently encrypted AES key¹). Maybe this means older phones get a couple tones at the beginning of a call. Probably not, but I don't know how they operate.

Phone companies probably like lock-in, so a lone company creating an encryption protocol and releasing a phone probably isn't sufficient. Get some big players on board. Get them all together, create a free, open standard for encryption and agree to all to start supporting it at least on the fast enough models.

Until you do this, I see no need to buy a mobile phone. (If they did this, I'd have a need: to support the concept. Actually, why not release a landline phone for this as well?)

¹ Can you get deniability with AES? I've always thought making it illegal to record people talking to me on the phone is really stupid, but if it's something we want, this could be a way to handle it. Maybe doesn't work so well with voice data.

Okay, so I took over a hundred photos at the recent FLT gathering (homeschooling group). Lots of kids. I should be able to post those without anyone getting upset (though I know people who would be upset if I posted photos of them). How about labelling who each person is? With their full name? And address?

Okay, I'm not including the addresses, and usually I only know the first name. Surely /that/ much is fine, right?

These people are mostly sensible. They won't care, I suspect.