French Phish

I got my very first phishing email in French this morning.

Bet you can figure it out what it says, even if you don't know French :-)

But spam's such a great way to improve my technical vocab in other languages. What a horrible way to say "user": "utilisateur". It just doesn't roll off the tongue.

Convention on the Rights of the Child - Too hot to handle

Incredible:

The United States and Somalia are the only two countries that haven't ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty that recognizes the human rights of people younger than 18.

I'd never heard of it, before, but apparently it was signed in 1989 and took effect 1990. We've had 22 years to get with the program, but still can't bring ourselves to do it. Never mind how well some of the signatories are implementing it, but really...we can't bring ourselves to even make the token gesture of ratifying it???

The Convention on the Rights of the Child includes such controversial provisions as

Guiding principles (pdf): The guiding principles of the Convention include non-discrimination; adherence to the best interests of the child; the right to life, survival and development; and the right to participate. They represent the underlying requirements for any and all rights to be realized.

Survival and development rights (pdf): These are rights to the resources, skills and contributions necessary for the survival and full development of the child. They include rights to adequate food, shelter, clean water, formal education, primary health care, leisure and recreation, cultural activities and information about their rights. These rights require not only the existence of the means to fulfil the rights but also access to them. Specific articles address the needs of child refugees, children with disabilities and children of minority or indigenous groups.

Protection rights (pdf): These rights include protection from all forms of child abuse, neglect, exploitation and cruelty, including the right to special protection in times of war and protection from abuse in the criminal justice system.

Participation rights (pdf): Children are entitled to the freedom to express opinions and to have a say in matters affecting their social, economic, religious, cultural and political life. Participation rights include the right to express opinions and be heard, the right to information and freedom of association. Engaging these rights as they mature helps children bring about the realization of all their rights and prepares them for an active role in society.

But what was I thinking? Best interests of the child. Protection from all forms of child abuse. Preparing them for an active role in society. Silly me.

Good piece on the importance of locally grown food.

The notion of importing fruits and vegetables, the idea of having everything “fresh” all the time, was until recently inconceivable and is likely to become so again, as production and transportation costs rise and the absurdity of the “system” becomes evident even to those who now profit from it. When we ignore large-scale production of local food we invite apocalypse, or at least food shortages.

I always wonder about those $1.79 strawberry specials in December.

Death of the Technologists

Been a bad month for the techies. Starting with Steve Jobs on Oct. 5, followed by Dennis Ritchie on Oct. 12, and then John McCarthy on Oct. 24. We've lost a few of the founding fathers this month.

Prophetic vision

Bruce Schneier calls out someone else's call out of a 1956 Asimov short story, "Let's Get Together". Hard to believe the old man died nearly a decade before 2001.

"Consider further that this news will leak out as more and more people become involved in our countermeasures and more and more people begin to guess what we're doing. Then what? The panic might do us more harm than any one TC bomb."

The Presidential Assistant said irritably, "In Heaven's name, man, what do you suggest we do, then?"

"Nothing," said Lynn. "Call their bluff. Live as we have lived and gamble that They won't dare break the stalemate for the sake of a one-bomb head start."

"Impossible!" said Jeffreys. "Completely impossible. The welfare of all of Us is very largely in my hands, and doing nothing is the one thing I cannot do. I agree with you, perhaps, that X-ray machines at sports arenas are a kind of skin-deep measure that won't be effective, but it has to be done so that people, in the aftermath, do not come to the bitter conclusion that we tossed our country away for the sake of a subtle line of reasoning that encouraged donothingism."

Should we regulate babies?

There's some very thought-provoking discussion on assisted reproductive technologies in today's New York Times Room for Debate section.

The fertility industry in the United States is largely unregulated. This lets consumers and business people dictate what is acceptable, what is normal and what is allowable -- including the extreme cases like the one sperm donor who had 150 children. Are such situations a problem? Many other nations, like Britain, regulate the fertility industry more closely. Should the U.S. emulate them?

Personally, I think our society might benefit from a little regulation in this area...at very least things like truth-in-advertising about the successes and problems of these technologies, requirements on practitioners' training, quality control on procedures, that sort of thing. However, I am horrified to read that to the extent that there are current FDA guidelines, they suggest that gay men should not be sperm donors unless they have been celibate for 5 years, ostensibly to prevent AIDS issues. Don't straight men get AIDS, too???

Special police? Really?

Am I the only one who thinks this is a terrible idea? First heard about it on WBGO, in a segment on Newark Journal, called Life After the Newark PD.

Apparently there is an organization, known as the Newark Special Police Association, "whose members are trained at the Newark Police Academy and certified by the state training commission. The group has traditionally arranged work for officers with the city’s housing authority, schools and hospitals." However, through this organization, unemployed cops are now getting hired by PSE&G, to essentially do security guard duty. I'm ok with that. What alarms me is that these guys have "full police powers to make arrests on the job."

Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of giving unemployed folks gainful employment, especially in their areas of expertise. And it's kind of PSE&G to pick up the tab. But really? Giving police powers to what is essentially a security guard or mercenary? Even assuming that PSE&G does its job and never abuses its authority, aren't we going down an incredibly steep and slippery slope? Full police powers are generally reserved for the government, where, in a democracy, the government can be held accountable. If one of these guys goes bad, who's accountable?

Name of Blackwater ring a bell?

Banning Social Media?

It's kind of hard to believe that anyone in the "free world" is seriously entertaining the concept of setting limits on FaceBook and Twitter.

"Free speech is central to our democracy, but so is public safety and security," said Ivan Lewis, the shadow secretary of culture in the House of Commons, according to London's Guardian newspaper. "We support the government's decision to undertake a review of whether measures are necessary to prevent the abuse of social media by those who organize and participate in criminal activities."

Well...let's not even talk about the much touted role of social media during the Arab Spring. Brits are, of course, expected to behave better than those rowdy Arabs, and besides they have no good reason to question their government. But I digress.

I can't begin to imagine how they'd implement measures "to prevent the abuse of social media" that would be effective against "those who organize and participate in criminal activities" like those we've been witnessing in London over the last week or so, but measures that would not also cripple those who want to get the hell out of the way of those activities, or who want to engage in legitimate activities. There are three possible approaches they could be meditating: (1) shut down the entire social media infrastructure (e.g. shut down access to FaceBook altogether) or (2) maintain a targeted list of those known to "organize and participate in criminal activities", and just shut down their access or (3) identify criminal activities in progress and shut them down. None of these are very good.

Option 1 shuts down access for the good guys (which is most people), too. And in the middle of a crisis that includes people trying to find out about and avoid the riot (I mean criminal activity) hot-spots. Option 2 involves (a) a massive game of Whack-a-Mole, (b) massive surveillance generally considered incompatible with a free society and (c) stifling free expression for a lot of people accidentally swept up. Option 3 suffers from the same weaknesses as Option 2, with slightly better aim at the mole, but would need to be done real-time. And FaceBook says it does Option 3, anyway.

I can't see Option 1 being put into practice. Social media information is simply too useful, including to governments. However, I am sorry to say I can easily imagine governments, (including those in the "free world") attempting some variation of Option 2 and Option 3, where "criminal activities" are more and more loosely defined over time. FaceBook will become incredibly convenient for facilitating McCarthy-like witch hunts, and in fact, rather than shutting down sites associated with undesired activities, I see them governments monitoring them as honeypots. Especially when armed with subpoenas for FaceBook logs of users' friending histories.

None of this is to say that I think we should do nothing, and sit back and allow riots to take place freely. I just don't think limits on social media are a useful response. Would we shut down email, too? How about cell phone service?

Technology is always a double-edged sword.

Just saying.

Edited to add (8/14): Rebecca MacKinnon has a much more articulate analysis of how bad an idea this is.

Bill Gates is getting serious about crap

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is apparently sponsoring research to reinvent the toilet!

I think it's fabulous.

A couple of years back, BBC reported that public sanitation was considered by doctors the best medical advance in over a century. It's really sad that it's not available for a large portion of the world. Toilet technology improvements could really make inroads into that. In particular, the ability to process sewage locally, with minimal access to water infrastructure could make huge improvements in quality of life.

Apart from health considerations, the other big benefit they are looking into is use of raw sewage for energy generation (possibly using the energy for processing the waste, to recover water and minerals). Why should it only be cattle whose waste products produce power?

Staying motivated

Annapurna pointed out a nice link. 33 Ways to Stay Creative.