The RIAA is Suing My Printer

Jun 062008
 


There is an interesting study out by the University of Washington’s Computer Science department revealing flaws in the detection of copyright infringers online. In the study, it was found that enforcement agencies sometimes used merely the fact that an IP address was seen in connection with a certain file online in implicating a user, without verification that the owner of the IP address did actually download anything, or that the owner of the IP is even a person. With IP spoofing tactics, they managed, hilariously, to get three printers in the CS department to receive DMCA takedown complaints from the MPAA. Is this result likely to get noticed in the next wave of countersuits against the RIAA and MPAA? Probably. Are universities going to change their policies because of this? No comment.

See the official page for the paper, an FAQ, and more details.

(Image courtesy of the Washington University CS Department.)

Personal References: Toward a Better System

Jun 042008
 

Here’s a hypothetical situation that is all too real: A employee has in impeccable record on paper–graduated from Stanford, interned at all the big-name companies, years of experience in key projects at well-known places, both big and small, and a very smooth interviewer, and seems extremely engaged and excited about the job. S/he is hired, and turns out to be a total slacker. He voluntarily leaves 6 months later, and takes a cushy post at another company, with good references from his two friends he made while in the current company. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is really something to look at in the hiring process. If a company were to spend tens of thousands of dollars on some new servers, the people in IT would probably look into reviews of the servers in forums, written by current and past users, and more than just one or two firsthand accounts of how well the server functions. The IT people probably would not base the decision on the marketing brochures from the selling company and a cursory demo of the platform.

So why is hiring people any different? Hiring a qualified engineer, business development person, or marketer in the Valley will probably cost you at the minimum $70,000 a year, and can often break $120,000 a year, and yet many hiring managers never make a call to even a candidate’s listed references, much less random co-workers. This problem is even more apparent in positions that are temporary or have a short hiring process, when there isn’t enough time to check references, or when there isn’t a good system for contacting past references.

Stanford’s Residential Education (ResEd) system is a good example of this. Residential staff, especially freshman residential staff plays a huge role in shaping the lives of all Stanford undergraduates, and upperclassmen who have already been staff for a year usually are preferred over those who have not, yet there isn’t a set system in place for references. The staff member’s residents over the past year would be a perfect source of information about the candidate, yet there is a stigma against contacting them, resulting in bad candidates being rehired year after year.

When a draft of a scientific paper is sent to a prestigious journal for publication, the authors (and eventual readers or the journal) expect that the article will undergo double-blind peer review by several other scholars in their field. This ensures that the final published article will be legitimate and have at least a backing of several people in the field. While double-blind reference calling may be difficult, why is there such a stigma against calling random people with which the candidate interacts? The standard system of references is inherently flawed because the candidate provides the names. It’s as if you were to ask Microsoft if Windows is secure.

I Have Your Public Information In a Searchable Cross-Referenced Database

May 212008
 

People say my girlfriend and I are a match made in heaven, and one of the reasons they give is that we both keep frighteningly detailed spreadsheets of various aspects of our lives. “That’s so sketchy!” says one, referring to a spreadsheet of a list of dozens of people’s favorite things, ranging anywhere from favorite cake, to favorite guilty pleasure, to favorite mathematical topic. Of course, I personally have a spreadsheet of every movie I’ve seen and wish to see, every book I’ve read and wish to read, every Star Trek episode I’ve seen, every flight I’ve taken, every national park I’ve visited, every IP address I’ve tracked, and, of course, the infamous spreadsheet of everyone I’ve ever counted as an acquaintance, with birthdays, current locations, how we met, contact information, their associations in terms of schools, companies, etc., and my rankings of them on four dimensions relevant to me when I meet or get to know someone. The details of that spreadsheet will stay hidden for all of time (until perhaps an archaeologist from the far future finds it and decrypts it, and writes a thesis based on the theory that those living in academic communes on the western coast of the California continent–because naturally, California will have become its own continent–in the early 21st century tended to regard each other in a very numerical fashion.)

Why is data regarded as so much more malicious when stored in an easily searchable digital format? If I were to tell someone that for everyone I have ever met, I remembered the person’s birthday, how I met him/her, what s/he does in life, and how s/he appealed to me in the four dimensions most important to me, and that I could easily recall those facts on command, I would probably be hard-pressed to find a person who did not think that I was a thoughtful, sociable human being. But as soon as I change the word “remember” to “store in my spreadsheet,” I suddenly transform into a sociopathic stalker, the types that lounge around in AOL chatrooms and MySpace pages of 13 year-olds and whose vocabulary consists entirely of two- to five-letter acronyms or xoxo. I keep spreadsheets because memories, especially of something as unique as people, are too precious to be tossed haphazardly in the very imperfect storage called the human brain. I am doing nothing more than helping myself remember what would have otherwise taken me much more effort to remember, but I probably would have remembered nevertheless. Even when I search people up in public databases to find a home phone number or the like, I get weird glances as if I had just entered their homes and looked through all their drawers.

I am only 20, but I remember when birthdays were considered private information. Yet, nowadays, I could pretty easily find the birthday of anyone about which I care to have that information. Photography, even painting, was considered an encroachment on privacy at some time in history, but today, there are laws protecting photographer’s and painter’s rights in public. (For example, in the United States, contrary to popular belief, you have the right to take a picture of a person standing in his/her house, so long as you are standing in public property.) Will other information currently considered semi-private, such as work histories, home addresses, our acquaintances, our feelings and opinions of others, become freely accessible by the public in the future? With the internet racing through puberty, complete with legal acne and all, we are becoming more interconnected than ever. Even with people I have never met, I can, with a cursory glance at their Facebook profile, LinkedIn profile, blog, and/or other web presence, determine their interests, age or birthday, closest friends, current occupation, and current problems in life, and for most people I know, the fact that other people have can find this information doesn’t really bother them. Why should it?

So why is keeping my own spreadsheet any different than just searching through Facebook or Google?

College Endowments not Coffers of Gold To Be Plundered

May 142008
 

Articles like this one in Trees and Things rile my blood. Not only is this activity blatantly predatory, but shows both a lack of concern for many of the nation’s pressing issues and a fundamental lack of understanding of (or desire to understand) how endowments work.

Yes, the thing known as the Endowment in most top private universities across the United States is increasing, and yes, there is a deficit, but coveting the money of educational institutions to help offset the national debt is an atrocious proposition. Many congresspeople complain that the major Universities with the $10+ billion endowments should allocate more money to financial aid, and use the money to expand programs and admit more students. However, things are far more complicated than than. Stanford’s $17-something billion endowment is not the giant vault that people imagine it to be. It is a conglomerate of tens of thousands of donations, each earmarked for a specific purpose, with only a small fraction going to the “general fund,” the part of the endowment where the University has discretion for its use, and another fraction going to financial aid, mostly earmarked for certain groups of students.

Forcing Universities such as Stanford to use a certain percent of their endowment for financial aid may simply be illegal, or, if not, would force schools to allocate more money to financial aid from the general fund than otherwise prudent, diminishing funding for research and other academic activities , the very activities that make the top institutions so successful and attract the world’s top talent. Leading from this, there is the conception that the best tuition is no tuition. While this is an honorable goal, it is economically flawed. The schools with the top endowments currently offer the best financial aid in the nation, excepting those few like Olin College that offer a full tuition scholarship for all accepted. These top endowment schools typically offer over 95% of a student’s financial need in terms of grants, work study, and low-interest loans. Free tuition sounds attractive, but economically, having a cost equal to the value of the benefit from the education is another way to attract only those students who will value the education. As a staff member of a Stanford dorm, I know that for large events, there should preferably be a small charge, even if there are funds to cover everyone’s cost, just to make sure those who sign up will not balk, and that the people signed up at least value it enough to pay x dollars.

So the next question is, why not admit more students? That is perhaps easiest to answer. The value of a Stanford education is that students have the opportunity to take classes from eminent professors and first-hand contact with them, as well as to do research with them. There simply aren’t more top professors; they are continually stolen back and forth in a friendly war between top institutions. Admitting more students would have a definitely dilution effect on the quality of education. Ask any student in a Big Ten school, and you will find that contact with a professor is rare and valued. Schools like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and others, are slowly working to make education material from its classes and seminars available freely online through programs such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare.

Finally, the large endowments serve as an important rainy day fund in case of catastrophes. A large earthquake is set to strike the San Francisco Bay Area within the next thirty years, and while all of Stanford’s buildings are earthquake-reinforced, there are large collections of multi-million dollar scientific equipment that may be damaged during the Earthquake. The fund serves as a security policy against natural disasters, and equally damaging disasters such as policy changes that result in dramatic funding cuts from the federal and state governments.

There is no doubt that the United States is slowly losing its edge in science and technology. The last thing we need is to punish successful schools for their high donation rates from their successful and happy alumni. I would be less angry if the proposed “endowment tax” concepts would give money back to education, but the billions of dollars the federal government would essentially steal from the top research institutions by modifying some laws to their advantage would would mostly be used for offsetting a few days of fighting in Iraq.

Wake. Up.

Apple, eBay, Amazon at Bottom of Climate Scorecard

May 112008
 

One of my new favorite blogs, Earth2Tech, has just posted on ClimateCounts’ release of the latest Climate Scorecard, scoring companies on their efforts at informing and taking action on climate change. Not sure exactly how accurate this is, as Dell is surprisingly low on the list, considering its now industry-standard recycling program and efforts at creating more eco-friendly laptops and servers. This is similar to the well-known “Guide to Greener Electronics” released by Greenpeace, which has a greater emphasis on the use and disposal of toxic materials and release of greenhouse gases in production.

Play Video Games. Beat Molecular Biologists. Feel Good.

May 082008
 

Harnessing the millions of easily distractable minds worldwide, groundbreaking science is being done. Rosetta@Home, the software that is modeled after Stanford’s Folding@Home and designed for distributed calculation and prediction for 3D protein shapes on millions of computers worldwide, now has a new feature. As the Economist article describes, the new Rosetta@Home software contains a game in which users (players) can manipulate the 3D protein structure according to basic laws of chemistry and physics in order to minimize energy. This was created due to the fact that 3D protein alignments and folding are still hugely computationally intensive, and often, the best 3D structures are found by molecular biologists working by hand rather than a computer using a heuristic algorithm. Moreover, humans often find these optimal structures faster than would the Rosetta@Home distributed computing network. There are some friendly competitions going on already.

Three Issues

May 072008
 

1. Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), a longtime pet of congress and “clean coal” advocates, is shown to be infeasible in a report by Greenpeace. Of course, you skeptics out there will immediately point out that a report by Greenpeace is not to be trusted. While Greenpeace does have a tendency to employ radical campaigning and rhetorical strategies that are often more sensational than factual, their reports are, fortunately, always backed by solid facts and prominent researchers in the field. This report shows CCS has several problems, ranging from prohibitively high costs, lack of suitable storage, and a significant increase in non-CO2 emissions resulting from the capture process. Read it. It’s interesting.

2. It’s not often that Human Rights Watch has a news release on the US (besides Guantanamo, but according to the current administration, that’s not US soil anyway). Today, they have release a report showing the wide disparity between imprisonment rates of whites versus blacks. Everyone knows this, but HRW has given us the most unambiguous numbers yet collected regarding this issue.

3. Cyclone Nargis. 20,000 dead. Twice as many missing. They need help. Google has set up donation pages for the large world relief organizations. Normally, I urge people to donate to whatever organization they believe would help, but in this case, I strongly urge you to stick to organizations you know have direct access to the country because the Burmese dictatorial government is processing visas for aid workers at a crawl. Skip your morning espresso for a week. Save a few lives.

EDIT: As of 11 May, reliable sources now estimate close to 100,000 dead.

The Dangers of Toothpicks–and not what you think

May 072008
 

Read the following article:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354327,00.html

I mean, I entirely understand the stance the school is taking. Wizards should not be tolerated. Zero-tolerance has worked well in drugs and alcohol prevention, so we can rather safely assume that it should work in wizard prevention as well. Of course, the school should naturally assume the worst when it comes to the toothpick-vanishing wizards of the world. Blink an eye, and they might end up vanishing unsuspecting students, rival teachers, or worse, the number zero or the letter ‘A’. Schools across the nations should look up to this school on a hill (or floodzone, as it’s in Florida), and weed out all wizards that may be feigning as teachers. Think of the children!

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