Posted 11:23 PM by Floyd

Today's San Jose Mercury News carried a very strange article. It's titled Criminals' new trick, and begins as follows:

CHILD-PORN COLLECTORS USING POCKET-SIZE STORAGE DRIVES
By Jessie Seyfer
Mercury News

They're small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and so unassuming that they are sometimes mistaken for lighters.

But portable storage drives are becoming increasingly popular among child pornography collectors, Bay Area high-tech detectives say.

Twenty paragraphs later, we are still waiting to see just what tricks the child porno pervs are using these drives for. The only information was dispensed to us in law-enforcement-speak, whereby the more or less rational actions of irrational criminals is invested with a strange sense of ritual, as if the police lieutenant in charge of training sessions were describing orangutangs or wildebeasts:

Child porn collectors ``cherish'' their photos, he said.

``They catalog them. They don't want to be without them, and this gives them the capability to take it with them. They want this stuff with them so they can access it any time they want,'' Sibley said.

Well, okay, but ... maybe they find portable drives convenient, just like any other computer user.

I have another bone to pick with the writer; a staffer for the "newspaper of Silicon Valley" should know better than to repeat this tripe:

Even if the photos are encrypted, computer forensics specialists can break through most encryption schemes these days anyway, he said.

Really? 256 bit triple-DES, no problem for the men in blue? I take back my implied criticism of the cops' lack of technical knowhow; sounds like they're getting those new quantum computers that Michael Crichton wrote about in Timeline.

Posted 5:58 PM by Floyd

The last time libertarian/Republican Ron Paul was in the news, he was protesting the (soon to be) war in Iraq. He made some bullshit passive-aggressive arguments like "Isn't it a problem that some people have estimated the cost of the war to be $200 billion," and I criticized him in VodkaPundit's comment section.

Now Paul is in the news again and this time I agree with him. Paul is protesting the scandalous treatment of protesters by the president's Praetorian Guard:
(Link via Drudge.)

COLUMBIA, S.C. - A group of Congressmen have written Attorney General John Ashcroft urging him to drop prosecution of a South Carolina man arrested for trespassing while protesting an appearance by President Bush in October.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said 11 House members - 10 Democrats and Texas Republican Ron Paul - wrote to Ashcroft that charging Brett Bursey was a mistake "and is in fact a threat to the freedom of expression we should all be defending."

Bursey, a longtime activist, was arrested at Columbia Metropolitan Airport before a speech by Bush on Oct. 24. Bursey was asked to leave a restricted area moments before the president arrived.

Bursey says he was told to go to a designated protest site that was at least a half-mile away from the speech.

Although local charges were dropped, federal authorities are still pursuing charges against Bursey under a statute that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas during the president's travels.

"As we read the First Amendment to the Constitution, the United States is a 'free speech zone,'" Frank said.

Frank said a citizen's right to express themselves does not depend "on their doing it in a way the President finds politically amenable."

...

So ten Democrats protested this shameful abrogation of free speech, and one of them got the money quotes. The only Republican to speak up is pretty much a RINO (Republican In Name Only). Way to go, party of smaller government!

Posted 10:37 PM by Floyd

Evan Kirchoff is back and has some good blog posts. However I feel impelled to question his assertion, while discussing a proposed spam-fighting email tax, that a spam mailing has a response rate of 1%. Does this include the people who click on the "remove" link in the misguided hope that this will prevent future mailings (while actually they are adding themselves to more "opt-in" links)? And what about those who don't realize that the "Reply-To" is forged and write a nasty reply telling the sender to get off their backs?

Evan wraps up his post with an impassioned plea directed at those who are tempted to consummate commerce for a larger penis, working at home, or a slice of a Nigerian fortune:

Don't buy anything, and don't ever click on anything in a spam, whether it says "remove me" or "free nude teen girls". Anything that somebody would send you as spam, no matter how effectively it targets your most secret erotic or home-refinancing desires, is widely available through other Internet venues.

But what if home refinancing is your most secret erotic desire? Such people can hardly be expected to refuse, and we spam-haters must be kind enough to give them an exemption.

Posted 2:13 PM by Floyd

Women's World Cup update: The 2003 games, pulled from China due to fears about SARS, will be played in the US again! Some games may well be played in the Bay Area. I did not see the women play in 1999, but I did watch Oleg Salenko set a World Cup record in 1994 with five goals. (The Russkies were playing Cameroon, whom scuttlebutt claimed was taking a dive because their players' pay had been interrupted.)

Posted 3:14 PM by Floyd

A quarter century ago, California voters approved Proposition 13, which limits the increase in value of an assessed property to 2% per year. Prior to Prop 13 skyrocketing real estate prices had caused people on fixed incomes to be assessed out of their homes.

Every year or so liberal newspapers like the San Jose Mercury News feel obliged to pillory Prop 13 for its supposed ill effects on schools and other tentacles of state government. (Never mind that the state of California spent a stupendous 101 billion dollars in its latest fiscal year. This is the Golden State analogue to P.J. O'Rourke's observation that it's hard to feel sorry for poverty that wears $150 tennis shoes.) Here is an afterecho of one such round of Prop 13 bashing, from the SJMN letters page:

WITH California in a financial crisis, eliminating Proposition 13 is a hot topic these days. Instead of throwing it all out at once, I suggest we adopt a simple and more feasible solution.

The maximum tax increase for a property today is 2 percent annually. Let's change that number to 8 percent. No one's taxes will double in a year, and no one will have to move. An 8 percent increase is not extreme and should be acceptable to long-term homeowners.

The tax system won't be fair right away, and schools won't be well-funded right away, but things will get better every year. In five or 10 years, we should have a fairer tax system and better schools.

Bob Kochenderfer
Cupertino

Sneaky beaky! No one's taxes will double in one year; instead, at a 8% rate of increase, they will double in 9 years. California's poor and seniors thank Bob for his generosity; I assume he will help them all move out in the year 2012.

And here is some wisdom from the Rocky Mountains:

For the past 10 years, I've been living happily in Wyoming. Property tax rates are much lower than in California. Why? Because everyone pays them, not just the unfortunate suckers who have recently bought.

I shudder to think about how little understanding one would have to have of politics to think that the difference between tax rates in California and Wyoming stems from their means of taxation.

Posted 10:28 AM by Floyd

From today's San Jose Mercury News letters page:

India shows the way

I agree with Ratibhai Patel (Letters, May 21) that India is a secular state where people of all faiths can live in harmony.

Although sometimes some elements of any one faith try to uproot the other, they are an extreme minority.

In spite of the recent genocide in Gujarat, Kashmir and elsewhere, and in spite of discrimination against minorities, India remains the country of all faiths. One day it will lead the world in showing how people can live in harmony.

Yusuf Vahora
San Jose

The scary thing is, I think he's serious!