Month: May 2014

Why Legalizing Driverless Cars is Likely to Be an Uphill Battle

One of the political battles currently being waged in Minnesota is cannabis legalization. The reason the battle is so heated is because law enforcement agents are opposing legalization because they know it will hurt their funding from civil forfeiture laws. This will likely be the reason why law enforcement agents will also oppose legalizing driverless cars:

Google’s driverless cars have now combined to drive more than 700,000 miles on public roads without receiving one citation, The Atlantic reported this week. While this raises a lot of questions about who is responsible to pay for a ticket issued to a speeding autonomous car – current California law would have the person in the driver’s seat responsible, while Google has said the company that designed the car should pay the fine – it also hints at a future where local and state governments will have to operate without a substantial source of revenue.

Approximately 41 million people receive speeding tickets in the U.S. every year, paying out more than $6.2 billion per year, according to statistics from the U.S. Highway Patrol published at StatisticBrain.com. That translates to an estimate $300,000 in speeding ticket revenue per U.S. police officer every year.

Driverless cars are less likely to violate traffic laws. As driverless cars become more prevalent this will cause the number of traffic citations issued by police to dwindle. Without the kickback from those citations departments will find that their funding will also dwindle. In other words this is why we can’t have nice things.

One of the major problems with modern policing is the fact that it incentivizes the creation of criminals. The more criminals that exist in society the more money law enforcement agencies can rake in. That creates a conflict of interest as law enforcement agencies are incentivized to support any measure that creates more criminals and oppose any measure that reduces the number of criminals. This conflict of interest becomes especially egregious when you consider that technology like driverless cars have the potential to save a lot of lives by reducing traffic accidents.

The Conspiracy Theory that Annoys Me the Most

Conspiracy theories are fun even when you don’t buy into them hook, line, and sinker. I enjoy reading about all of the wonky theories people have come up with, especially if that theory involves lizard people. But amongst the conspiracy theories out there the one that annoys me the most is that the government is all omnipotent. This theory is very prevalent in libertarian circles, which is ironic considering that most libertarians view the government has being entirely incompetent. Whenever I try to discuss tools to secure one’s self against the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance apparatus there are usually a few people who start making up bullshit and claiming that using such tools with either make you a target, are backdoored by the NSA (even if the project is open source and the code has been thoroughly reviewed for such shenanigans), or that the NSA has magical super computers that can instantly break all encryption protocols.

Unlike most conspiracy theories, which usually contain some kernel of factual information that wild theories are based off of, the claim that the government NSA can render all computer security tools impotent is entirely baseless. As Bruce Schneier pointed out in a recent blog entry the NSA isn’t magic:

I am regularly asked what is the most surprising thing about the Snowden NSA documents. It’s this: the NSA is not made of magic. Its tools are no different from what we have in our world, it’s just better-funded. X-KEYSCORE is Bro plus memory. FOXACID is Metasploit with a budget. QUANTUM is AirPwn with a seriously privileged position on the backbone. The NSA breaks crypto not with super-secret cryptanalysis, but by using standard hacking tricks such as exploiting weak implementations and default keys. Its TAO implants are straightforward enhancements of attack tools developed by researchers, academics, and hackers; here’s a computer the size of a grain of rice, if you want to make your own such tools. The NSA’s collection and analysis tools are basically what you’d expect if you thought about it for a while.

The NSA is little more than the combination of well known hacking tools, massive funding, and privileged positions on the main infrastructure. Edward Snowden has said numerous times that encryption works. Anybody who claims that the NSA can render all known encryption protocols impotent is literally making shit up. It’s no different than the conspiracy theory that lizard people secretly control all of the governments of the world. Zero evidence exists supporting the claim.

My theory is that people who claim nobody should bother using encryption because it’s futile are simply too lazy to learn how to use the tools and don’t want to admit it. To make themselves feel better they justify their actions by claiming doing otherwise is pointless.

Trigger Warning: The Author of This Blog is an A-Hole

There are so many feel good movements on the Internet that I can’t keep track of them all. Some of the most prevalent ones (that I’m aware of) are the push for people to use gender neutral terms (which is really fucking difficult when the language you’re using is English), stop using the word retarded, and include trigger warnings on any material that may trigger a traumatic memory of people you haven’t met. The last one has been gaining some traction as of late and it appears to be spreading outside of the Internet:

It’s a phrase that’s been requested this semester by a number of college students to be applied to classic books — The Great Gatsby (for misogyny and violence), Huck Finn (for racism), Things Fall Apart (for colonialism and religious persecution), Mrs. Dalloway (for suicide), Shakespeare (for … you name it). These students are asking for what essentially constitute red-flag alerts to be placed, in some cases, upon the literature itself, or, at least, in class syllabuses, and invoked prior to lectures.

These feel good movements, in addition to being an attempt to protect everybody’s sensitive feelings, generally have an (sometimes) unintended side effect: censorship. As the article goes on to state:

Of course, life doesn’t come with a trigger warning, even if it should. And while a classroom conversation about emotionally fraught subjects would seem not only advisable but also just part of any decent teaching method, slapping a trigger warning on classic works of literature seems a short step away from book banning, a kind of censorship based on offenses to individual feelings.

Whenever I run across a comment that says some permutation of “Dude, add a trigger warning!” (Dude? Way to jump to assumptions that all offense things on the Internet are posted by men you misandrist asshole!) it triggers my trigger, which is triggered whenever I run across somebody bitching because there isn’t an included trigger warning. How is the author of an article or a comment supposed to know that the content of his work is going to set off some random stranger’s traumatic memories?

Of course the opinion that trigger warning are bullshit isn’t generally accepted within the halls of the social justice warriors so they will often demand that you be censored for expressing it. And if you do include a trigger warning they will demand that you be censored because you posted something online that you expected to trigger somebody’s traumatic memories.

Imagine a class of 30 students. Each student has lived a separate life full of different experiences from every other member of the class. More than likely more than one of the students has suffered a traumatic experience and it’s also likely the the type of trauma suffered by each sufferer is different from the other sufferers. What happens when the instructor of a literature class chooses to assign Huck Finn and one of the students who suffered racial trauma objects? That instructor will be faced with deciding to assign a different book or being labeled an asshole for making a student who is triggered by the assigned material read it. Since the former is less likely to end in a week long bitchfest on Twitter as social justice warriors create a clever hashtag to use to derogatorily refer to the instructor he or she will probably choose to assign a different book. So let’s say that the instructor decides to assign Mrs. Dalloway instead only to find out one of his students was traumatized by a past attempt to commit suicide. Again we return to one of two options. Eventually the only titles that become acceptable to assign are sanitized tomes devoid of almost everything that makes for a great work (namely addressing or exploring a controversial topic).

In addition to being based entirely on random people’s feelings, trigger warning are also time period dependent. Consider many of the works of Samuel Clemens. Many of his titles contain what we now consider to be very racist language. But when they were written the terms used were part of the vernacular. When the books were written nobody would have demanded a trigger warning be added to the book. So in addition to having to predict the feels of every potential reader authors and publishers must either predict what will offend individuals in the future or periodically update the included trigger warnings.

Trying to manage such a subjective time sensitive clusterfuck as trigger warnings on novels is retarded (I’m just going to tick off all of the easily offendeds’ boxes). Because of the difficult of managing such a mess colleges and instructors will choose the much easier path of assigning completely sterile works to the detriment of students everywhere.

How the Abolition of Net Neutrality is Being Bought

The battle for net neutrality is a difficult one to sort out because it’s effective oligarchs arguing with other oligarchs. Oligarchs that hold actual monopoly in many areas to distribute Internet content want the ability to suck more money out of both customers and service providers. These oligarchs own much of the infrastructure and claim that they have a right to use it as they please since it is their property. What they don’t mention is that they have legal protections from other oligarchs that prevent any meaningful competition from arising in the Internet content distribution market.

The other set of oligarchs are the ones that compose the legislature and regulatory bodies. It’s an election year for many in the legislature so they want to convince the serfs that their rulers are very benevolent and should be vote in for another term. Since the serfs are quite fond of the current model used to distribute Internet content the oligarchs in the legislature are demanding the model stay in place. The regulatory body most involved in this fight, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is stuck between both sides. Its current chairman, Tom Wheeler, is a form lobbyist for the infrastructure oligarchs but he also wants to continue his position as chairman of the FCC, which means he must also make the oligarchs in the legislature happy.

Fortunately when competing sects of the oligarchy go to war they don’t use bombs. Instead they negotiate with one another to determine how much which sect will pay to get its way:

These lawmakers, including the top House leadership, warned the FCC that regulating broadband like a public utility “harms” providers, would be “fatal to the Internet,” and could “limit economic freedom.”​

According to research provided Friday by Maplight, the 28 House members received, on average, $26,832 from the “cable & satellite TV production & distribution” sector over a two-year period ending in December. According to the data, that’s 2.3 times more than the House average of $11,651.

What’s more, one of the lawmakers who told the FCC that he had “grave concern” (PDF) about the proposed regulation took more money from that sector than any other member of the House. Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) was the top sector recipient, netting more than $109,000 over the two-year period, the Maplight data shows.

The infrastructure oligarchs obviously feel very strongly about being able to change their current distribution model because they are paying a good chunk of change to key oligarchs in the legislature. I predict an end to what we call net neutrality in the near future (probably not until the next election cycle or two have concluded though). It will be a slow death consisting of apparently minor changes over the coming years.

If we want to continue enjoying a distribution model that is neutral towards service providers then we will likely have to cut out the infrastructure oligarchs entirely. That will involve building our own infrastructure, which will almost certainly be declared an illegal act at some point. I’ve mentioned several times that I’m working with a handful of other people in the Twin Cities to develop a local mesh network with the hopes of expanding it over time. I think mesh networks, being decentralized (and therefore hard to stop through the judicial and law enforcement systems), are a promising strategy for bypassing the Internet service providers that are trying to double dip by charging both content consumers and content providers more money to access one another. The Chaos Computer Club’s idea to launch small satellites into orbit to bypass state censorship also appeals to me. Between all of us who dwell online would should be able to develop a practical solution to the oligarchy problem.

I’m Not Saying They’re Gold Diggers

Here in the United States we have a tradition that goes back at least as long as I have been alive. When something bad happens to you or one of your family members the tradition is to find an organization that is both tangentially linked to the bad thing and wealthy and file a lawsuit against it. That is exactly what family members of four New York firefighters who were ambushed by a man with a firearm are doing:

The families of four New York state firefighters are suing St. Paul-based Gander Mountain, alleging that the retailer’s Rochester, N.Y.-area outlet could have prevented a “straw buyer” from purchasing the rifle that was turned over to a convicted killer and used on Christmas Eve 2012 to kill two firefighters and wound two others.

The lawsuit, which has the legal heft of prominent gun control advocates behind it, said the rifle used in the bloody ambush should never have been sold to 22-year-old Dawn Nguyen in 2010 with the eventual shooter at her side.

Along with payment to the families of punitive and compensatory damages, the suit seeks to have Gander Mountain reform its practices and employee training procedures to prevent these “straw purchasers.” The suit was filed Tuesday in state court in Rochester, N.Y.

How can Gander Mountain stop straw purchases? Preventing straw purchases requires the ability to read minds, which no human has as far as I know (although I sometimes suspect that my mother has such powers). There is no way for employees of Gander Mountain to know that a person purchasing a firearm isn’t doing so with the intention of giving that gun to a prohibited person. Even if, as this lawsuit insinuates, I go into Gander Mountain with a friend and purchase a gun there is no way for the employees involved with the transaction to know if I’m buying it for myself or to give to my friend.

In other words what this lawsuit is demanding is that Gander Mountain perform an impossible feat, which hopefully means that this lawsuit will be dismissed.

Thankfully the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act shields gun manufacturers and dealers from a lot of legal gold digging. But it doesn’t completely close the door as manufacturers and dealers can still be sued for selling defective products, breaching contracts, and performing criminal actions. Depending on how this legal gold digging is being justified the case may get thrown out or Gander Mountain may be dragged into a pointless lawsuit because it was unable to read one man’s mind.

Judge Ensures Campaign Dollars Continue to Flow Unabated

In April the Supreme Court ruled that caps on campaign contributions were unconstitutional. This ruling was most conveniently timed as the political season is ramping up, which means both incumbents and would-be politicians can reap the maximum benefit from this unhindered cash flow. Here in Minnesota there was a separate law that determined how much politicians can accept and a federal judge just shot that down:

A federal court judge has ordered that a campaign finance law that limits how much money candidates can accept from wealthy donors be suspended.

The order marks the local legal impact of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that removed overall caps from how much money donors could give to federal candidates.

The Minnesota branch of the Institute for Justice and four plaintiffs, including two current and former Minnesota lawmakers, used the Supreme Court’s ruling in the McCutcheon case to argue that the state’s limits on ”special source” donations prevent free speech.

Here in Minnesota judges are elected. I wouldn’t go so far as to insinuate that this federal judge was looking out for his state level cohorts but, never mind, I am insinuating that.

It also wouldn’t surprise me if members of the Minnesota Congress and judiciary met and determined who would take the popular opinion hit to shoot down this restriction on campaign finances during this election cycle. Since the state Congress has take several major hits already it was probably determined that the judiciary should take one for the oligarchy this time around. Either way this ruling really changes very little. The wealthy have always been the ones to buy elections. Now they just have to pay more for them.

The Republican Party Funding Problem

In the realm of American politics there are two go-to people to blame all of the country’s woes on. If you’re on the “left” you blame all of the country’s problems on the Koch brothers and if you’re on the “right” you blame all of the country’s problems on George Soros. Let’s consider the “left’s” go-to blame machine, the Koch brothers. Anybody who espouses neoconservative, conservative, or libertarian ideas will eventually be accused of being a paid Kochtopus shill. Apparently the Koch brothers are funding everything that isn’t neoliberalism (by the way guys, you must not have my new address since I’ve not seen a check since I moved several years ago). As it turns out, in the realm of political funding, the Koch brothers aren’t at the top of the list:

OpenSecrets.org tallied the top donors in federal elections between 1989 and 2014. Koch Industries — privately owned by the Evil Koch Bros — is on the list, to be sure, but doesn’t appear until the 59th slot, with $18 million in donations, 90 percent of which went to Republicans.

Unions, unions, unions

So who occupies the 58 spots ahead of the Evil Koch Bros? Six of the top 10 are … wait for it … unions. They gave more than $278 million, with most of it going to Democrats.

These are familiar names: AFSCME ($60.6 million), NEA ($53.5 million), IBEW ($44.4 million), UAW ($41.6 million), Carpenters & Joiners ($39.2 million) and SEIU ($38.3 million).

Obviously the author is trying to point out that the Koch brothers aren’t really evil and that unions are the secret political string pullers. What I got out of the article is that the Republican Party has a funding problem. This doesn’t surprise me considering the fact that the Republican Party is becoming more political irrelevant as the years go on. Who is going to invest major money into a party that can’t deliver?

This country is slowly turning into a true one party system (at the moment it’s two party in name only since there is no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties). The reason for this is almost entirely because of the stupidity of the faltering party. And stupidity is a self-feeding monster. As the Republic Party continues to be more stupid it’s going to attract more stupid people that will ensure it keeps acting stupidly and so on. Needless to say the stupidity cycle will also ensure big money donors go elsewhere to get their psychopathic desires fulfilled.

Designer of Smart Gun Says Smart Guns are Safer

Ernst Mauch, the man behind the Armatix iP1 so-called smart gun (really a gun with an onboard authentication system), recently wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post where he states that smart guns are safer than regular guns:

Respect for this freedom to protect your family as you see fit is a major reason I believe that gun owners in the United States should have the right to purchase personalized firearms using high-tech safety features. The reality is that firearm safety has not meaningfully advanced in the past century. Nearly every other industry has transformed its safety features — often multiple times — in that same period. Given how tragic the misuse of firearms can be, guns should be no different.

While firearm safety hasn’t meaningfully advanced in the past century it still doesn’t hold the record. Sword, for example, haven’t meaningfully advanced in regards to safety in over a millennium. Clubs also haven’t advanced in regards to safety for even longer. Why is this? Most likely because firearms, swords, and clubs are weapons and weapons are meant to cause damage. Ernst’s claim that nearly every other industry has advanced its safety features ignores most industries involving weapons.

Armatix offers market-based solutions for improving gun safety. We understand that any time a major new technology enters the market, some people will be skeptical, and that is why it is important to clarify exactly what the Armatix pistol is.

As far as I know Armatix hasn’t been lobbying in the United States for mandating that all firearms include built-in authentication systems. That being the case I have no issue with Armatix introducing its iP1. Let the market decide whether or not gun owners want such technology. So long as Ernst and Armatix rely on the market to decide whether or not people should buy their firearms I have nothing against them.

The firearm also detects the proximity of the watch, meaning that even if the gun is stolen after the code has been keyed in, it cannot be fired. If the gun and the watch are both stolen, the thief might as well throw them out because the gun won’t fire without the correct five-digit code.

This is something I didn’t know about the iP1. In addition to having the watch you also have to know a five digit code. That further complicates things will offering relatively little additional security. Five digit codes can be brute forced pretty quickly. Even if the watch itself implements mechanism to slow down a brute force attack that means little if the thief is in physical possession of the watch. Downloading a copy of the watch’s firmware will allow an attacker to bypass any watch implemented slowdown mechanisms, which will likely render the five digit code irrelevant.

The thing to take away from this article is that the author isn’t unbiased. He designed the authentication system and is therefore invested in making it sound good. On the other hand he doesn’t indicate that he wants to lobby for mandating his design be including in all handguns, which is a good. I have no objections to the technology itself although I don’t have any interest in it since its reliability hasn’t been proven. But I also cannot accept his claim that firearms like the iP1 are inherently safer since he has a direct business interest in saying so and there are a lot of scenarios where the technology could cost you your life (for example, if your arm with the watch is injured you could be unable to fire the gun with your functional hand).

Chipotle Requests Gun Owners Not Bring Guns Into Its Stores

I have no issue with open carry. In fact I open carry quite often (basically whenever I’m on a bicycle). But actions have consequences and if you’re open carrying AR-15 rifles into stores you should understand that backlash is a likely outcome. Case in point, after an incident involving gun rights activists open carrying rifles into a Texas Chipotle location the company has officially requested that customers not bring guns into their stores:

NEW YORK (AP) — Chipotle is asking customers not to bring firearms into its stores after it says gun rights advocates brought military-style assault rifles into one of its restaurants in Texas.

The Denver-based company notes that it has traditionally complied with local laws regarding open and concealed firearms.

But in a statement Monday, the company said that “the display of firearms in our restaurants has now created an environment that is potentially intimidating or uncomfortable for many of our customers.”

I’m not going to invest time into criticizing those who were carrying rifles into Chipotle. They knew what they were doing and what the possible consequences would be. The lesson to take away from this announcement is the same lesson to take away from Starbuck’s similar announcement: being a dick never helps. I know that there’s nothing inherently dickish about the act open carrying firearms. But intent does play a factor in everything and when your intent is to make a political statement by open carrying then it’s a dickish act. Let’s face it, much like religion, politics is a topic that should only be discussed upon invitation. Any attempt to bring up politics before an invitation has been made is dickish.

Am I going to boycott Chipotle over this? Well I couldn’t even if I wanted to since I never eat at Chipotle. It seems to put cilantro in everything and cilantro does not interact favorably with my tastebuds (that shit tastes nasty and I don’t know how people enjoy it).

I’m Back

Obviously there were no posts yesterday. As it turned out I had suffered a nasty sunburn Sunday. For me that means a very unpleasant allergic reaction that involves some of the worst pain imaginable. After a day of Benadryl and ibuprofen along with bags filled with ice I’m finally at the point where I can function again.

The only upside to this shit is that I tend to avoid being in direct sunlight for very long so my chances of getting skin cancer are probably lower than most. Let me just take a moment to give a gigantic middle finger to that fusion reactor our little spaceship continues to orbit.