Tag search: "200903"

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Truly: Is this what you made me for? (27 March 2009)
Hypergeometric tail inequalities: ending the insanity: Here are some notes I prepared on hypergeometric tail inequalities (PDF format, necessary for the math notation). I needed this information for something I was doing, it was hard to find in any comprehensible form on the Net, so once I found it I wrote up a better version both for my own use and for anyone else looking for the same thing. Many of the most popular pages on my site came about that way.
(22 March 2009)
Index of censorship: Pages on censorship. (15 March 2009)
Law and politics: Pages about legal and political matters (15 March 2009)
Security: Notes on a variety of security topics (7 March 2009)
An important note for users of the Samsung ML-4050ND laser printer: If you configure the paper type on the Samsung ML-4050ND to "Recycled," it thinks you mean that you are printing on the unused side of sheets that have already been printed on one side. Of course you don't want to print on the already-printed side, so it will helpfully disable the duplexer in this case, no matter what else you do. If you are printing on actual recycled paper, that is to say, paper made from recycled fibres, and you want duplex printing, then you must set your paper type to "Plain Paper." Of course, nothing in the Samsung, CUPS, Foomatic, or Ghostscript documentation, nor in the comments or content of any manufacturer or third-party PPD file (should you be crazy enough to hack PPD files manually), is remotely helpful in debugging this issue.
(1 March 2009)
Nova Scotia man convicted of child pornography on shotacon anime possession: Here's a small item (scroll down - the page has several different stories on it) from the Halifax Chronicle Herald about a man in Nova Scotia pleading guilty to child pornography charges for possession of materials that included shotacon anime. I'll post links to better coverage if I find them. It's not a pure banned-anime case, in that he apparently also had materials featuring real children; anime fans often cite "But I don't have any real child porn" as a Get Out Of Jail Free card and this case doesn't directly contradict that. But I don't think any reasonable argument can be made that the Canadian authorities will leave you alone just because you don't have any pictures of real children. I hear that Dwight Whorley's conviction in the USA has been upheld, too - though some appeals still remain - so being in the USA isn't Get Out Of Jail Free card either. The statutes and prosecutors' interpretations thereof in both places are pretty clearly intended to cover purely fictional material.
(21 February 2009)
PDF/PNG Astrological Chart Service: This form generates nice-looking astrological charts in PDF or PNG format. It's mostly a demonstration of my horoscop and starfont astrological typesetting packages for LaTeX, but the hope is that the charts will also be useful for general purposes even for non-users of horoscop. They compare favorably to those generated by the other free online chart systems I'm aware of. This system does not provide any interpretation; for that you'll have to look elsewhere. See the FAQ for instructions, privacy and other notices, and other information.
(29 June 2008)
Six Apart determined to destroy itself in blaze of idiocy: The new owners of Livejournal have done some very stupid things in the last year or so, but the new "adult content" feature is one of the stupidest. I'd almost think they are deliberately trying to force the business to fail for the tax loss or something. (2 December 2007)
Payment in Credit: Commentary on a Rebecca Tushnet article on fandom creation. (11 October 2007)
Slashdot "multicore" exploit explained: As is often the case with Slashdot coverage of security vulnerabilities, this article on a supposedly multicore-related exploit, and the Register article it links to, are so poorly written that it's not at all clear what they're talking about or why it would be a problem. The comments don't help either, since they go off in different directions based on other related and unrelated issues instead of the actual supposed problem. The real underlying issue turns out to be much less threatening than the article suggests.
(16 September 2007)
Pepsi pressured to pull Livejournal ads: So: Pepsi was running a really obnoxious "sponsored v-gift" campaign on Livejournal. The ads were shown to paid users - something which Livejournal promised they would never permit, when they started permitting ads in the first place. Now someone on Insanejournal, apparently a Livejournal expatriate, wrote a shit-disturbing letter to Pepsi telling them that their ad was running on a site that "allows the hosting of graphic violent material, linked to the inciting [sic] of racial hatred[.]" And Pepsi has pulled the campaign. (Note: I am not taking a position on whether this is cause and effect; the user seems to be claiming credit for the kill, but of course one can think of lots of other possible explanations.) On the one hand, I hated the Pepsi ads too, and I'm not sorry to see them go. But substitute accusations of "child pornography" for the accusations of "racial hatred," and you've got exactly the pressure campaign that Warriors For Innocence is trying to run. I don't think WFI's tactics are acceptable. I don't see JackAndAHat's tactics as being meaningfully different. Lowering oneself to WFI's level is not a clever idea. (29 August 2007)
The law is not magic: People have the wrong idea about the law. They think it's magic. They think that the law consists entirely of arbitrary rules, technicalities, and loopholes, and that dealing with the law is primarily about getting around the challenges the system creates. The idea that there might be real standards of conduct with a point to them that you're supposed to actually follow instead of getting around, doesn't count for much. I think it's partly the fault of the media, in showing us ten examples of dysfunctional nonsense in the law for every one example of the system actually working as it's meant to, so that we think the dysfunctional nonsense is what it's actually meant to be about. It's also the fault of the legislators, courts, and lawyers, for putting way too much dysfunctional nonsense into the law in the first place. But it's not all dysfunctional nonsense. The law generally does have a point to it, and the system is meant to actually work and to be for real.
(4 August 2007)
Scratch-and-win equals DRM: The CBC has been following a story about scratch-and-win lottery tickets, and it occurs to me that what's really going on with that is exactly the same thing that's going on with DRM/TPMs (Digital Rights Management and Technological Protection Measures). The real issue is a faulty reliance on physical security of a trusted device in untrusted hands.
(23 November 2006)
Bar code scanners and in-band commands: I've been interested in bar codes recently, and while pricing low-end scanners, I noticed something that seems to be a significant, and not widely publicized, security issue.
(9 August 2006)
Captain Copyright: Links and resources on Access Copyright's ill-fated "educational" campaign from 2006. (1 June 2006)
Some thoughts on Google in China: Lots of people are saying a lot of things about Google's recent announcement that they will obey Chinese censorship rules to filter their search results on their Chinese search engine. For a simple and graphic demonstration of the consequences, you can compare the image results for the query "Tiananmen" between regular (U.S.) Google and Google China. There are a few important points that people seem to have made either explicitly or by implication in this discussion, that I'd like to challenge. 新年快乐 to those celebrating the Year of the Dog, by the way.
(28 January 2006)
Quantum cryptography without the quantum?: Laszlo Kish at Texas A&M has announced a scheme for doing something very much like "quantum cryptography" without the need for messy individual-photon apparatus. Here's a PDF of the paper. Since this is the sort of thing that my readers are interested in and I know a bit about, I thought I'd comment even though it has run on Slashdot already.
(10 December 2005)
Edmonton Journal scales new heights of cluelessness on lolicon story: Okay, some time ago I reported on the arrest of a man in Edmonton for attempting to import what would be best described as hard-core lolicon manga (details below). Now, it's being reported (Anime News Network article, Edmonton Sun article) that he's received an 18-month conditional sentence, community service, and a fine.
(22 October 2005)
R. v. Beattie: stories illegal because the kids enjoyed it: This is a frightening decision (PDF here, recommended if you can read it because the quotations aren't properly marked up in the HTML) from the Ontario Court of Appeal in April of 2005. I found out about it while reading contemporaneous Justice Committee evidence (and my comments on that evidence were delayed, because this is more important). You must read this case. I'll say it again, you must read this case, even the disgusting quotes. It's important.
(16 June 2005)
20 exceptions to prove C-20: How the Canadian Government's absurd child pornography law forces courts to unravel arbitrarily complex fictional plots. (25 January 2003)