17 Apr 2004
Bruce Schneier and Paul Kocher point out that the cost of rigging the election with broken voting machines would be cheap
Let’s try another analysis: What is it worth to compromise a voting machine? In contested House races in 2002, candidates typically spent $3M to $4M, although the highest was over $8M. The outcomes of the 20 closest races would have changed by swinging an average of 2,593 votes each. Assuming (conservatively) a candidate would pay $1M to switch 5,000 votes, votes are worth $200 each. The actual value is probably closer to $500, but I figured conservatively here to reflect the additional risk of breaking the law.
If a voting machine collects 250 votes (about 125 for each candidate), rigging the machine to swing all of its votes would be worth $25,000. That’s going to be detected, so is unlikely to happen. Swinging 10% of the votes on any given machine would be worth $2500.
07 Apr 2004
Debian for a long time tried to have their own xterm type ‘xterm-debain’. In order to work around some problem I was having some point in the past (the oldest dotfile I have in my home directory is dated “Jan 27 1997”) I created a my personal xterm terminfo file that had some bug fix.
Fast forward to present day: I’ve upgraded to gnome 2.4, bringing with it many other updates, and suddenly bash is printing “~” when I hit DEL and joe is DEL’ing when I backspace.
This drives me nuts trying to compare the setup on that machine with all the other well behaving debian boxes I have. Finally I ran strace
[...]
access("/home/myers/.terminfo/x/xterm", R_OK) = 0
open("/home/myers/.terminfo/x/xterm", O_RDONLY) = 3
[...]
Lessions learned:
strace is the greatest- It might be nice to start with a clean
$HOME every so often
06 Apr 2004
Today I was playing with ctypes. I was getting this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "mb.py", line 4, in ?
mb = cdll.LoadLibrary("/usr/local/lib/libmusicbrainz.so.4")
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ctypes/__init__.py",
line 286, in LoadLibrary
return self._dlltype(name)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ctypes/__init__.py", line
222, in __init__
self._handle = LoadLibrary(self._name)
OSError: /usr/local/lib/libmusicbrainz.so.4: undefined symbol:
__gxx_personality_v0
Turns out that I had built libmusicbrainz.so with an older g++. This debian bug report helped, as did this posting on gcc-l.
#python
01 Apr 2004
I’ve been tossing this back and forth. I don’t think Kerry knows what to do in Iraq. Actually I’m not sure if I know where to start with Iraq. But lack of openness kills you a viable candidate for me.
01 Apr 2004
House panel approves copyright bill:
A House of Representatives panel has approved a sweeping new copyright bill that would boost penalties for peer-to-peer piracy and increase federal police powers against Internet copyright infringement.
Go for it. All it means is Mnet, Freenet, and Tor will get the critical mass they need to work. And then what? The Omniscience Protocol will be your only hope then Mr. RIAA and Mr. MPAA, and it’s an April Fool’s joke.
Bring it.