Just How Dumb Is Trump’s Team?

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 222017
 

News story.

We’re all used to politicians lying – either baldly (“Is the sky blue? No, it’s pink.”) or by avoiding the subject altogether (“Is the sky blue? I think the question shouldn’t be is the sky blue, but whether the colour really matters.”). But normally you can see some rationale behind the lie – there’s some genuine advantage to the politician by lying.

And seeing a politician who doesn’t bow down to the media is somewhat gratifying. At least when it serves some purpose.

But headbutting the media and spouting easily disproved lies about the number of people attending Trump’s inauguration?

Crass stupidity and arrogance of the first order.

There’s no point to it – after all who really cares how many people were stroking Trump’s ego on the day? After all his ego doesn’t need any bolstering, and even if it did there were still plenty of people in attendance.

Shattering the establishment (which is something I don’t believe Trump really intends no matter how much he claims) is all very well, and indeed to be encouraged. But you don’t accomplish it by picking stupid fights over nothing important.

Trump is in danger of giving a new word to label stupidity – Trumpidity.

 

The Right To Be Offensive

 General  No Responses »
Jan 202017
 

There are people out there who believe that “I’m offended” is some sort of magical trump card that calls a halt to the debate and requires the offender to issue a grovelling apology. It finds it’s most extreme expression in religion – blasphemy.

Which is a useful place to find excellent examples of the foolishness of trying to avoid offence – there are those who consider that the Koran is blasphemous because it is not a christian holy book and similarly there are probably those who consider that christian churches are hotbeds of blasphemy because they’re not islamic. Which group is right? Or perhaps they are both wrong.

Now I do not believe in going out of my way to be offensive to people, but neither am I going to restrict my opinions because they might be offensive to some people out there.

And when you come down to it, the offended person isn’t really hurt are they? Nobody dies; nobody is hospitalised. The only “harm” that occurs is the harm that the offended person causes to themselves.

And if you choose to be offended by something I write, bear in mind that I can choose to be offended by some of the things you hold sacred :-

  1. That you  believe in a stone age psychotic deity who proclaims “Love and worship me, or I’ll send you to a place of eternal torture”.
  2. That you insist on eating charred decaying animal corpses; and worse do so where I can smell the odious aerial effluent.
  3. Perhaps you voted for what may very well turn out to be the most cartoonish president of the USA since records began. You did know that the entire world is looking at the US freak show and shaking their heads in disbelief?
  4. Perhaps you believe that certain groups are inferior – women, men, people of a different “race”, etc.
  5. Perhaps you think that the rich are perfectly entitled to avoid their obligations to society and that tax avoidance is not a dishonourable thing to do.

But I choose not to. I’ll argue about it, and quite possibly think of you as stupid. But I won’t be offended

And if you do get offended, well then good.

  1. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/06/03/im_offended_126814.html

Got Entropy?

 Linux, Security  No Responses »
Jan 192017
 

Entropy.

Any serious cryptographic routines needs a good source of random numbers, and whilst Linux provides a random number generator by default it’s sources of entropy can be somewhat limited. Especially when you’re talking about a virtual machine.

Indeed if you try to pull too much randomness out of the Linux entropy pool (especially when it is especially limited), what you get might not be quite as random as you expect.

Which is where hardware randomness generators come in. And I finally have one (actually two), and have hooked them up. You may be able to guess what time I plugged it in from the graph below :-

So what real world difference does it make?

Well nothing is dramatically obvious, but :-

  1. I have slightly more confidence that any cryptographic software I might run has a good source of randomness and is less likely to accidentally perform poorly (in terms of cryptographic strength).
  2. Some cryptographic software blocks if the Linux entropy pool is empty; with a hardware source I can be more confident that any performance issues are not due to a lack of randomness.

Two US Free Speech Myths

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 142017
 

One of the things you regularly encounter online is the fetish Americans have for free speech; not entirely a bad thing, but some of what they believe is a bit of a myth. Part of the problem is that the first amendment to the US constitution is just a little vague and handwavey :-

or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

First of all, what is that word “abridging” supposed to mean? It literally means shortening which makes the phrase nonsense even if it was supposed to be read as if “restricting” was the word used. Of course the meaning of language does change and it could well be that at the time, “abridge” would have unambiguously meant restrict. And “freedom of speech”? We normally take that to mean any form of expression whether spoken, written, drawn, or generated in some other way. But was that what was meant?

But now onto the myths … the first is a simple one and there is no real debate about it.

The right of free speech does not give you a right to be published by a third-party. If you are on Facebook for example, there is no right to free speech there – Facebook can decide to arbitrarily restrict what you can say perfectly legally. The government cannot restrict what you self-publish, but your publisher (including forum admins, mailing list admins, etc.) is free to refuse to publish for any reason at all.

Ultimately the only recourse to such censorship is to self-publish which is relatively easy on the Internet.

The second “myth” is a bit more debatable, but arguably the right to free speech is more about being free to criticise the government; in an era of lese-majesty and seditious libel, the major concern of the American revolutionaries was with political free speech. And whilst there has been free speech, there have always been restrictions on that freedom or consequences :-

  • Obscenity (as determined by the Miller test).
  • Inciting imminent lawlessness such as encouraging a lynch mob. Although this one can be a dangerously slippery slope given it’s historical use against people protesting the draft.
  • Commercial speech including advertising, and copyright.
  • Libel and slander.

So when looking at a particular restriction on free speech – such as hate speech (i.e. racial or religious hatred) – it is perfectly feasible for a law to be enacted to make such speech punishable in some form.

2016 A Bad Year? Try 1914, 1918, 1939 or 1945!

 General  No Responses »
Dec 302016
 

Everybody keeps whinging about how bad 2016 has been.

A few old people died (and some not so old people). That’s sad, but it happens every year. And yes some of your childhood heroes died – that’s what happens when you get older.

And yes a few bad political things have happened in 2016.

But is it somehow specially bad? Try comparing it with some other notoriously bad years :-

1914 Start of WWI which eventually killed millions of combatants.
1918 The beginning of the so-called Spanish flu pandemic which eventually killed up to 100 million people around the world.
1939 Start of WWII which eventually killed millions of combatants, and we learned just how evil humans can be when they put their minds to it.
1945 The first use of nuclear weapons.

So however bad you thought 2016 was, there have been a few other years far worse.

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