I had to find out about the American woman with the yellow badge. At a social gathering later that evening, I described my observations to some of the NGO delegates who regularly attend these U.N. events. Turns out that the yellow-badge woman is June Sivilli, an employee of the U.S. drug czar’s office and a regular fixture at Vienna drug meetings. Until now, she has been able to speak as an official voice of the U.S. government — and the U.S. is always the most important voice on U.N. drug policy issues. Now that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are bringing the voices of ordinary people to the table for the first time ever, she was actively subverting the process, throwing every possible obstacle in the way of this quite benign process.

Let me know if you want to be on my team.  If you could come up with a good team name, that’d be cool too.

Here’s an excerpt from the EFF:

When ordinary Americans were being wiretapped, Boehner’s [sic] attacked them and their right to privacy, claiming “I believe (phone companies) deserve immunity” from the law. But when Boehner himself was being wiretapped, he had no hesitation to claim his own right to privacy, claiming “no one is above the law.”

Seems like a no-brainer to me.  Who voted for this asshat?

The idea is this:  write a Firefox plugin that allows users to enter a vi- or emacs-like mode (can be context sensitive or not) that allows them to perform rapid filtering and modification of the currently diplayed mode (via the same types of text transforms as are possible in powerful text editors plus more).  Obviously, a browser is not an editor so the exact set of operations possible is probably not useful.  However, the internet can be more interactive–and I see no reason it shouldn’t be.

For example, imagine being able to, at a keystroke or two, display all the links in a web page while removing all the rest of the text (even displaying information about each link with it), toggle all images in a page on and off, or   While, with a few more keystrokes being able to remove all paragraphs that don’t refer to your dog, or highlight every reference to George Bush that occurs in a paragraph that also talks about cheese fries.  Since the plugin would likely be implemented using rewrite rules of the page source, web developers could use it to view modifications on the fly.

Complicated filters could be tested on the fly using regexes and/or lisp-like constructs. Reversing them would only take a single key stroke. A buffer could store past commands for editing. These commands would preferably be displayed in the address bar. Adding functionality to the address bar would be as simple as entering mode, setting hooks, and exiting mode. Aliases can be used in the address bar. These can be saved for future use once they are honed and either auto-loaded, called up by context, or only loaded manually. A hook can be set to automatically turn certain websites obnoxious colors to remind the user not to linger there too long. Pages containing java applets can gracefully remove them and insert images of serene landscapes rather than ugly “download plugin” boxes or (even worse) the applets themselves. If a basic version of the plugin were actually built into Firefox, it could download your customizations and temporarily apply them to your session no matter which computer you were on as long as it was running a new enough version. You get the idea.

Although some of the stuff I mentioned can be done by saving and modifying the page source and re-opening it locally, this is poor for several reasons.  Firstly, it requires knowledge of various web programming standards and protocols.  Second, it probably requires (except in simple cases) deep code inspection which is time consuming.  Third, it’s slow, etc.  Having a plugin do the work requires no knowledge of how web pages are made.¹ Some of this stuff can also be done with current keyboard shortcuts. These shortcuts are limited and can be made even faster if multiple shortcuts are to be chained by reducing them to one-key-each commands while in mode.

There are definitely much better and useful ways of using such a plugin than what I’ve come up with. It’s time that web pages are easily manipulable by the user in ways that even the page designer didn’t imagine. An easy to use (for simple tasks) yet powerful (for complex tasks) interface for achieving this similar to the one I described is needed.

1.This is at the expense of learning to use the plugin, however the plugin could be made to handle web pages regardless of how they’re made, while the user still only has to learn one new way of interacting with a computer.  In addition there could be several ways of interacting with the plugin, which are similar to ways people already use, such as vi- or emacs-style hooks and lisp type stuff.  And any new way of writing web pages can be “taught” to the plugin while the user might never even know about it.

In addition to inventing LSD, Dr. Albert Hofmann identified the active components of Psilocybe mushrooms and Ololiuhqui and devoted his life to the study of plant chemistry and the beneficial uses of plants.  He served on the Nobel Prize committe for many years.

Hofmann’s death has been confirmed by Josh of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and an announcement is expected on the MAPS website soon.

Edit:  the announcement is up.

How many times must we hear that video games cause violence before we stand up together and stop the spewing of inaccurate ideas? How many times must we listen to the RIAA tell us that college students are the root of all evil as it pertains to piracy before we tell the organization that it’s wrong? How many times must we listen to public interest groups allow families to get off the hook instead of blaming them when “security concerns” are revealed to the public before we tell them the truth? How many times must we listen to people who have no knowledge of the technology industry restate the misguided ramblings of lawmakers before we vote for change?

Read it here.

Finally, a public voice for individual responsibility.  I salute you Don.

There are some poitns still to be flushed out though and I’ve been planning on expounding similarly for a while but for now I’ll just say this: no matter what kind of country you live in, be it a “democracy” or a dictatorship, responsibility for change is ultimately in your hands (come find me if you think that was an abuse of emphasis).  Power, once obtained, is not given up freely.  Once a phone company realizes it can rip you off, it will.  Repeatedly.  And count on the RIAA to take every single cent it can from whoever it can.

Stand up, and if you have to sit down, don’t do it without a fight.  Put your money where your mouth is and try to only do business with ethical companies even if this means forgoing certain products and services.  Walk out of a store if you think they’re giving you a bad deal and tell them why.  Enough for now…

Among Barney’s many lucid arguments:

• Federal crimes for individual actions are actually quite rare—there is no federal crime of mugging for example.  Why did we make a federal crime out of the inherently personal act of smoking marijuana?
• The Federal government rarely prosecutes small amounts of marijuana anyway.
• The federal law interferes with state medical marijuana laws.
• etc….

Although the suits seem to care very little about your opinion, I recommend writing to them this time to let them know how you want them to vote on this bill.  It probably can’t hurt.  The Marijuana Policy Project has a secure form for submitting words to congresspeople and an example.

The funniest objection I saw yet came from DARE:

” while not everyone who smokes pot will end up shooting heroin, almost no heroin addicts begin with the more dangerous drug.”

Yeah, and although not everyone who drinks water will end up shooting someone, almost all murderers drink water before killing someone.  So what?  I get dumber every time I hear arguments like that, and most Americans have probably heard them so many times they no longer bat an eye and probably even agree.  We’re made if not stupid, numb to reason, by constant repetition of mantras.

Grow some balls (or breasts) and stop putting over half a million people in jail at any one time for simple marijuana possession.  Yes, I’m talking to you.  And you too.  And even you.

• Amon Tobin
• DJ Toast
• Phil Lesh (in Telstar)
• A talk by Will Wright (the Spore guy)
• A guy who thinks we should communicate with aliens by rearranging stars
• Aerial acrobatics accompanied by actual acrobats
• Space Fashion
• Capacitor
• A demo by Tesla Motors
• Documentaries, science demos, speakers, and drugs?

Also my friend Auralox is opening the day with some weird computer music.

Here’s a pic from last year:

The following day will be a bar-be-que at the MAPS house.  Sounds pleasant.

This makes a fingerprint potentially the easiest form of identification to forge, in turn making fingerprint-based access controls nearly useless.  Though some biometrics technology companies claim that forged fingerprints can be “weeded out with use of the PIN”, something as easily forgable as a fingerprint doesn’t seem to add much to the security of a PIN alone.  In fact, it seems like it would only serve as a benefit in the case where a non-technical attacker happens to find the PIN written down somewhere or obtains it from the potential victim directly—highlighting the fact that security is just as much a people problem as one solvable by the continual purchase of newer, more “advanced” technologies.

While the infallibility of the use of fingerprints to identify criminals has already been called into question, for most of their past 100+ years in court, fingerprint evidence alone has been enough to sustain a conviction.  In addition to the errors noted in the UC Irvine study, I wonder how many convictions might have been based entirely on prints forged outright (I find it hard to believe that the primitive technology needed to forge prints was just discovered in the past few years).

Edit: Here’s another article from The Register with pics.