Not every family is in the financial or physical situation to be able to provide the care that an elderly relative can often come to need. Ideally of course, you would take care of your family yourself, live in close proximity, or as health deteriorates, have a parent or grandparent move in. Still, I recognize, have seen in my own family, that sometimes the assistance of assisted living or a nursing facility becomes necessary. If you are not able to lift them for example…. Still, the nursing home is in and of itself less than ideal. Further, it is not used as a last resort by far too big a percentage of the family. Even worse, many elderly people are more or less abandoned in such facilities, visited rarely if at all, nearly forgotten except the occasional phone call, sometimes even living far from any family. To make matters worse, Toyota seems to think it would be a good idea to delegate the care of these people to a robotic staff.[1] Now they are to be denied even the minimal comfort of contact with unknown, harried, and busy staff. Perhaps worse, they want to delegate the raising of children to robots, when intuition, common sense, instinct, and research all highlight the absolute critical nature of human interaction in a child’s development. This is a tragic development.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=8644628

In other interesting news, a Kentucky judge has held up the Kentucky Amendment banning homosexual “marriages.”[1] I wonder how long until this one is appealed to the federal courts and overturned.

[1] http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/632/05-27-2005/e43400073b26d217.html

Lots and lots of non-news in my scan today. I am starting to think that I have once again exhausted my ability to be significantly interested in national or world events. Still, a few things did catch my eye. Why is it that people get this idea that you must prioritize the world’s problems and ignore anything that is not at the top of that stack? Just because China and North Korea are worse than we are, is that reason to ignore evidence of persecution of faith and Christianity here? Some attacking Mr. David Limbaugh’s book Persecution seem to think so.[1] In the afore-referenced interview, Mr. Limbaugh presents an interesting idea that I have no ability to evaluate: that the systematic persecution of the Faith and of the Jewish people in Germany, and in other societies, was presaged by the types of miss-characterization that Christians suffer now. Certainly Germany started slow, but is this a fair charge to make? I do not know.

Still, it is worth noting that we are slowly but surely eroding our understanding of “Freedom of Religion.” From the suppression of displays of faith in public, we now move to sheltering our children from religions that a judge deems not “mainstream.”[2] This is a ruling that I cannot but find sympathy for. The rise of Wiccans and others calling themselves witches is disturbing. It makes me wonder how much of the talk of the “Black Church” in Mr. Neil Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle” is historical, something I was and am not otherwise inclined to give him much credence in. Still, as in the case of the New Mexico church that wanted to use the hallucinogenic tea in their services, I cannot but find this sort of suppression unacceptable. No government official should have the right to define what is and is not a religion, what does and does not deserve First Amendment protection. I am not sure how cults should be treated, such bodies that mimic religion present a thorny question for law. I know, instinctively, however, that this sort of action can only spell ill for the Church.

[1] http://www.stanguthrie.com/
[2] http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/51/05-27-2005/9bfe0012b94196c6.html

This week I have been trying to get GNOME to sit up and realize that changing from focus theft to pop-under is less than ideal.[2][3][4][5] After a somewhat rocky start,[1] I finally seem to be making progress. This pleases me not only for the narcissistic reasons, but because it really will make a difference to our users. For all I am more than willing to utterly disregard the opinions and reports of demanding and/or annoying users, I do care about the success of Gaim, and do want the Linux users’ experiences with it to be as pleasant as possible. That is why I have gone along with things like slashing preferences even though it is not always defaulting in ways I like. Still, it is very frustrating to deal with these GNOME guys. They are so convinced that it is absolutely essential to usability that the focused window not be obscured…

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/2005-May/msg00011.html
[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/2005-May/msg00007.html and replies
[3] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=157270
[4] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305499
[5] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120439

Chris also recently commented that it is surprising that various operating systems do not automatically incorporate encryption into your basic profile. The following was my reply.

As to why windows *did* not, remember that of the various versions of windows that came before win 2k and XP, only NT and “windows for workgroups” (not well known, it came between windows 3.1 and windows 95, never sold much) had a true concept of multiple users. Notably, windows 98’s multiple users functionality caused all sorts of settings and information to “leak” across accounts. Hardly the ideal environment for any type of automatic encryption use.

In today’s world, where even substandard systems like windows have a decent concept of multiple users, incorporating encryption into the system’s storage is far more possible. I am not sure how *effective* it would be though. Remember, in order to read and write to your encrypted files, the computer would have to “know” the key, that is store it in memory. (alternately, it could store the *files* in a ram disk, and then only need the key to sync the ram disk to the encrypted versions of the same files, but this is *far* more fragile as a computer crash would cause incalculable data loss, as the old pattern of “save often” would not *necessarily* save to non-violate memory (aka the hard drive).) The key, or the pass phrase (depending on the encryption scheme), is then vulnerable to attack by anyone else on the system with access to your memory (IE the person who hacked your computer last week because you run windows, or the system admin, or a virus). And losing a key causes far-reaching headaches, as I am sure you are aware.

Better than any pervasive scheme of encryption then, I think, is simply better (I.E. more widespread) understanding of it. Companies such as Tiger Privacy[2] provide easy to use, and sufficiently secure, encryption for email that *could* be easily and widely deployed without too much trouble for users. While this has other problems (For example, it requires POP3, and thus emails are stored on the local drive, vs the (presumably) more trust worthy (I.E. more likely to be a RAID) server), it does demonstrate that encryption is not necessarily orthogonal to ease of use.

[1] http://www.schierer.org/~luke/log/view.php?date=20050525-1009
[2] http://tigerprivacy.com/

Last week Chris sent me an article talking about the use of encryption in the Revolutionary War and colonial periods.[1] Turns out that various encryption methods were very well known and quite widespread for government, business and interpersonal correspondence. So wide spread was the use of encryption, that the courts “have not treated those persons who have used encryption, ciphers, and codes with any presumption of illegality.”[2] In criminal cases, “evidence that a defendant used a cipher or encryption has been allowed (as in United States v. Burr) as proof of the means used to commit an illegal act, but as proof of an illegal act by itself.”[3] This is significant to remember in light of a Minnesota case where the existence of a PGP encryption program on the defendant’s computer was deemed evidence, by both the trial court and the appellate court, of criminal intent.[4]

A caveat here: The crime the defendant is accused of is horrific, and if guilty, he should be locked up for life with no chance of parole.

Still, it is disturbing to see that an encryption program, with no evidence of encrypted files, or its use in any way related to the crime, is evidence that you intend to break the law. There are any number of good reasons to use PGP, or its free clone, GPG, beyond illegal activities. For instance, many open source packages come with GPG signatures to help prevent a man in the middle attack from substituting a modified version of the package either in the mirror you are downloading from, or via a transparent proxy. Similarly, PGP/GPG signatures are used to verify identity in email correspondence, and, just as it was in the colonial period and the early days of the country, used to encipher perfectly legal, but personally sensitive information to protect it from friends, family, neighbors, and random people out on the Internet who should not be reading it. It is disturbing to see how quickly after finding such research, I see confirmation that it is indeed necessary to have it.

[1] http://vjolt.student.virginia.edu/graphics/vol2/vol2_art2.html
[2] http://vjolt.student.virginia.edu/graphics/vol2/vol2_art2.html#IVD
[3] http://vjolt.student.virginia.edu/graphics/vol2/vol2_art2.html#IVD
[4] http://news.com.com/Minnesota+court+takes+dim+view+of+encryption/2100-1030_3-5718978.html

Okay, yes, I am vain, but this week’s Debian Weekly News email just made my day.

Debian-Volatile Strategy. The volatile team [29]pondered to create a second [30]volatile archive with less strict criteria. This would help packages such as [31]Gaim that need to be updated during the lifetime of sarge in order to support modified protocols. They are also looking for ways to announce updated packages.
29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/05/msg00016.html
30. http://volatile.debian.net/
31. http://packages.debian.org/gaim

I talked to some of the #Debian-release guys about this late last week, when I learned that we would not be able to back port some rather trivial bug fixes to Debian’s 1.2.1 Gaim package with any significant chance of getting them accepted. If we cannot get trivial bug fixes in, how in the world would we ever get the kind of significant changes that a new authentication for a protocol would cause? I would rather avoid a situation like the current Debian stable, which has a 0.58 that will not work with many of the protocols it claims to support.

It is nice to be listened to.

The CS Monitor has an article today talking about the state of “second wives” in France.[1] Apparently France only very recently outlawed polygamy, and a number of African men have come to France bringing multiple “wives” and the children of both “wives.” The article highlights the problems that come from lack of enforcement since the 1993 outlawing, and the unwillingness of the government to deal with those polygamous families it allowed in before outlawing polygamy. While the outlawing of polygamy is both rational and moral, it is immoral to treat these women as somehow neither married nor single and thus allow them to fall through the cracks. Naturally, they cannot be married as a marriage is between one man and one woman, so they must be single with children, and should be legally so treated. Worse, I am sure this sort of thing will be used by liberals world-wide to try to pressure France to repeal the law. This would be an unmitigated disaster, with the marriage under attack from so many other angles as well.

[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0525/p16s01-woeu.html

Ars is talking about a flash hard drive from Samsung.[1] At 16Gb max, it is, by today’s standards, too small for most desktop use. We are all spoiled by the massive 40Gb, 80Gb, and bigger hard drives available now, and most people would have trouble getting accustomed to having “only” 16Gb of space now. After all, my old desktop from college even had something like 13Gb. Still, with 16Gb available now (or rather, in August or so), it is only a matter of time before these drives start reaching the sizes we are accustomed to. In many modern systems, the disk i/o is a significant choke point, so a 150 percent performance increase here will certainly be noticeable, and few people (who don’t download lots of movies) will notice if the high end of these drives starts to compete (size wise) with the low end current drive, so long as the price wise is competitive with other drives (not necessarily of the same size).

[1] http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050524-4939.html

Congress is trying to push through a bill to create federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.[1] This move comes with lots of promises of future cures, at the cost of lives, but no results at all so far. The promising treatments from stem cells to date come from adult stem cells and from umbilical tube stem cells, neither of which cost a life to obtain. This is then thus simply an attempt by materialist and atheist scientists to further desensitize to death.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4576407.stm