School issues laptop, then uses it to spy on student

This is so mega creepy.

Many school districts are trying to ensure that children have the internet access they need for their schoolwork by issuing every child an identical laptop. In my opinion, done correctly, this is a laudable approach. Every child is guaranteed access, and (again, when done correctly) is provided with a controlled, protected, maintained internet environment, including someone taking care of things like antivirus for them, etc. Now, in order to make all that good maintenance stuff possible, one thing that a district can do is install the equivalent of a remote-access trojan that allows an administrator to reach into all of the district students' laptops and do the necessary maintenance on them from the comfort of the district's data center.

However, some bright person in a Pennsylvania school district took things a little farther. Ostensibly to protect against theft, they had webcams put into the laptops, so that if one were reported stolen, all they'd have to do (ha!) would be to turn on the remote administration, activate the webcam, have a little peek around, and with Holmes-like detective skills, immediately infer where they were, and voila! Track down the thief and retrieve the stolen goods.

I guess it got a little boring when no thefts were reported, so instead they chose to gather some...uh...information...about what kids were doing when their laptops were on. And surprise, surprise, "on November 11, an assistant principal at Harriton High School told the plaintiffs' son that he was caught engaging in "improper behavior" in his home and it was captured in an image via the webcam."

The sad thing is that I think we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future.

Edited to add:

CNN says the school claims it didn't spy on the kid. FBI is checking things out. The fact remains, however, that the District Superintendent does admit that the capability was there to spy. "This feature was limited to taking a still image of the computer user and an image of the desktop in order to help locate the reported missing, lost, or stolen computer (this includes tracking down a loaner computer that, against regulations, might be taken off campus)."

In my opinion, having this capability is just a spying incident waiting to happen.

Citizens united (against Citizens United)

Larry Lessig has an interesting posting on the awful Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

He calls for two main actions:

1. In the short term: passage of the Fair Elections Now Act. See http://www.publicampaign.org/node/38166 for a description of this law that basically calls for citizen-funded elections (donations $100 or less)
2. In the longer term: a constitutional convention to pass an amendment to the constitution to protect the independence of congress from funders (see http://www.callaconvention.org/pages/call-for-a-convention/ for his reasoning and proposed amendment)

Lessig is a very interesting guy. Years ago I followed a great online class he and a couple of other lawyers ran on Cyberspace Law. I am not a lawyer (mandatory IANAL here :-), but the class was fascinating and accessible...check it out. It is a little old, but he covers the underlying principles, which I imagine can't have changed all that much. Many of the topics covered (copyright law, privacy law, free speech, etc. as they relate to cyberspace are still very hot topics.)

Eye of the storm

Doesn't this look like something out of Magritte?

We had rather a lot of snow yesterday.

On the slow track to justice

A week or so ago I was on a train from New York to Princeton. Somewhere before Linden I heard a bit of a hubbub around me and something about "all for $1.75".

It seems that a young man was trying to get a free ride by sneaking on at one station and sneaking off again at the next station, before the conductor came by to collect tickets. Unfortunately for him, the conductor came by a little too soon. And still more unfortunately for him, it seems that this wasn't the first time he was caught in this behavior. It was his third strike.

The conductor, only slightly older than the culprit, gleefully radioed for reinforcements. So along came the older head conductor, as well as a third conductor to join in the sport. They needled him for a while, and finally, not knowing how else to extract any satisfaction from him, radioed for the police to pick him up at Linden.

The train pulled in to Linden. And waited for the police to arrive. For about 20 minutes. And then waited for the police to debrief the conductors for about 10 minutes. During which time no one was allowed on or off the train, including passengers who just wanted to get off at Linden. Luckily I was in no particular rush, but there were a number of fairly antsy people around.

During all this waiting, I had some leisure to reflect on the incident.

The predominating question in my mind was: who stood to benefit from this exercise in justice? Why was so much collective time allowed to be spent on addressing such a petty "crime"?

Consider how much time was involved: at least one trainful of people, containing possibly hundreds of passengers, was delayed for half an hour, and who knows how many other trains with how many other passengers were held up behind ours? In addition, no fewer than three police officers appeared on the scene to interrogate the dangerous fare-jumper, diverted from protecting the citizens of Linden from other dangers. Who knows what the delays may have cost the passengers, in terms of lost opportunities, irritation to their customers or colleagues or families? Had I been on my way to, say, a job interview, I would undoubtedly have been frantic at the delay. To be fair, I think that the conductors, had they known that the process would be so slow, would have contented themselves with throwing the guy off the train at Linden with a couple of savory curses.

What was the value in spending all this time to punish a $1.75 crime? At the time, it felt like the purpose of the exercise, in the minds of the conductors, was to demonstrate to the world that they were there to uphold the social contract. It wouldn't be fair, after all, to the law-abiding, paying passengers to let some thief off scot-free. And besides, they weren't going to let some dumb-ass criminal make a monkey of them. Probably there were a few people on the train who felt the same way. But I think the majority of the law-abiding, paying passengers on that train would have cheerfully allowed the social contract to be broken in this instance, if only to get to where they were going on time. Clearly there's more at stake than $1.75, but it's not clear to me how much. Is fare-jumping a major revenue-loss for the the trains? I don't know. But it would have to be a pretty significant one, to make a delay like that worthwhile. No one from NJ Transit bothered to share that information with us.

It's a common theme in security: you don't spend more on protecting something than that thing is worth.

Some words of inspiration

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. (No, those aren't the words). I can't believe it's been over 2 weeks already! Today I put a recurring bi-weekly reminder on my calendar at work to remind me to be sure and put a post up at least every two weeks. It won't happen again!

Anyway...

A couple of days ago, I got the best fortune cookie. It reads:

Engage in group activities that further transformation.

It's so...fortune cookie.

And yet, isn't that something we'd all like to do? Work with other people to change the world?

I wonder if this one goes with the other fortune cookie I got recently:

Solid gains are possible today. With a headache.

I hung that one outside of my cube. So far, no one around me has complained of a headache.

Can't get something for nothing

So the latest dangerous-product-from-China scandal is kiddie jewelry.

Seems that in an effort to cut prices while following US regulations, the jewelry producers have cooperatively removed the lead, but substituted it with cadmium, another nasty heavy metal, carcinogen, brain-stunting, all that. It seems that there's no rules against cadmium in kid's jewelry.

Oops.

When will we, as a nation, realize that there is a hidden cost in cheap stuff?

Cheap products are made of cheap stuff. And sometimes that stuff is cheap because it's less desirable (for example, less healthy). Think melamine. Think heparin. If something looks too cheap to be true, it is. The company is going to cut corners to make a profit.

Is buying more cheap stuff for our kids really worth it, at the expense of their health? At the expense of the jewelry workers' health? At the expense of the jewelry workers' living wage?

Out with the old, In with the new!

Well...it's been a while, but I think that's going to change. About a month ago, I made a deal with Sharney that starting with the new year I would update my blog at least once every two weeks, if she would do the same. So Sharney, we're on! Let's go, girl! Here's to the expression of new thoughts and insights for the new year!

From most points of view, I can't say goodbye to 2009 (and for that matter the aughts or the naughts or whatever you'd like to call that abysmal decade) fast enough. (Annapurna pretended to be offended by my lack of respect for the decade, and then she pretended to be mollified when I told her that there were some silver linings.) But really, from the "surge" in Afghanistan to the huge giveaway to the health insurance industry we're on the brink of, let's just say I'm less than enthusiastic about our prospects for the future. But hope springs eternal, and maybe better things will turn up in 2010.

I was going to bore you with a trivial review of many of the books I read last year (and I may yet become sadistic or desperate enough to go through with that plan), but instead, I think I'll open the year with a very apt cartoon I just saw, courtesy of Bruce Schneier.

As a once-upon-a-time student of pattern recognition/machine learning/data mining techniques, this cartoon appeals to me -- real data often looks rather like this. As a security nut, I can assure you, this is a serious issue in (IT) security. There is a rather large industry devoted to developing tools and techniques for distinguishing between real intrusions and false alarms, and still the majority of alarms do turn out to be false.

This country has a tendency to want to assign blame to someone whenever anything goes wrong. Sometimes that's useful, and sometimes we do learn to fix mistakes. Just to be clear, in the case of the underwear bomber, I think the pattern looked more like

But, in general, I think there's too much of a tendency to demand action, where there is really no good basis for action. The net result is that as a society, we look for patterns and find those we wish to see rather than spending our efforts on activities that may actually help us make things better.

Some recent visitors

This summer I opened a 24-hour cafeteria on my kitchen window. It's quite popular in the neighborhood. There's sometimes even a queue on the railing outside.
I believe this fellow is a House Finch. We also get a lot of sparrows, blue jays and Tufted Titmice, but I don't have photos of these.
We also have an acrobatic squirrel. He jumps from the railing or the screen to the feeder, and sometimes even manages to get in. He's been caught in there, though I don't have a photo to prove it. (Annapurna managed to get a video!) I think maybe he's licking his wounded pride here, at another miss.

Word/Phrase History -- Pimping

I found a use of the word "pimping" in Shamela (published 1741):

In the Character of Mrs. Jewkes Vice is rewarded; whence every Housekeeper may learn the Usefulness of pimping and bawding for her Master.

Did they do stuff like that in 1741? :-)

Pimp doesn't seem to be listed on Word Detective, so I can't compare notes that way.

Word/Phrase History -- Bamboozle

Every so often I see a word or phrase in a fairly old text (say 2 or 3 hundred years old), and I think "That's odd...I would have thought that was a modern sort of word!" I've been planning for some time to keep a list of such words, and this is as good a place as any to put it.

So today's word is "bamboozle". Now, had I thought about it (which I admit I hadn't), I would have guessed that bamboozle was a '70's sort of word. Or maybe Roaring 20's. However, I ran across it last year while reading Cecilia (published in 1782), and more recently while recording a chapter of it for Librivox. In Volume Two, Chapter III, wealthy Cecilia's batty, miserly guardian, dressed up as a chimney sweep at a costume party is worried about her trying to run off with a gold digger:

" 'Ah ha!' cried the chimney-sweeper, significantly nodding his head,'smell a rat! a sweetheart in disguise. No bamboozling! it won't do; a'n't so soon put upon.' "

My Random House College Dictionary has this definition of bamboozle: "1. to deceive or get the better of (someone) by trickery, flattery or the like; humbug; hoodwink. 2. to perplex or mystify." It offers no etymology for the word. In such situations, I generally turn to one of my favorite references, namely The Word Detective by Evan Morris. He's got an excellent list of words and their etymologies, histories, etc. each described quite wittily. He finds that bamboozle was used as early as 1710 by Jonathan Swift, though the origins of the word are in dispute.