Quote this Slashdot poster:

I really cannot believe that glib is a word, I had to look it up. My English is not perfect, but it’s rare that I mix up Gnome dependency libraries and real words.

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I’m a fan of open source hardware as it lowers the barrier to entry for a software geek to dabble in RL fabrication.

Now, you can build your own large hadron collider, as a series of articles detailing its components has been published. I, for one, intend for this to be my next project.

Veracity in science fiction:

Look at me. Look at me! When you make love to me Gaius, you don’t always think about me. Your mind wanders, I know that. You think of equations, puzzles… your laundry. it’s the nature of the mind to disconnect from the body and journey on its own .

- Six to Dr. Gaius Baltar, Battlestar Galactica

This from Randy Cohen, the New York Times Ethicist, on a castle that charges more to foreigners:

If this sort of transparency leads to complaints so be it. Castle managers should be prepared to explain their prices (or to pour boiling oil from the battlements onto vistitors who besiege them with complaints).

While I’m on a constitutional rant, I bring your attention to a developing case of a federal district court judge issuing a temporary restraining order to prevent three MIT students from giving a presentation at Black Hat, the awesomest security (hacker) conference, because it contained information on how to circumvent the payment system of the Boston transportation system.

Let me rephrase. A judge issued an order to stomp on free speech.

“But they are hackers that intended to defraud the MBTA!” you say?

The prevailing legal theory is “prior restraint.” Basically, you can’t very well restrict someone from saying something. It is more encouraged to allow the act of speech to occur and deal with the potentially negative consequences later. You can’t arbitrarily restrict acts of speech you don’t like.

I point out yet another article by Eugene Volokh, called “Temporary Restraining Order Against Crime-Facilitating Speech About Security Vulnerabilities”

On the other hand, even otherwise unprotected speech generally can only be restricted after a finding on the merits that the speech is indeed unprotected. It generally can’t be restricted via a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction that’s just based on a preliminary, quick-and-dirty estimate of whether a crime was violated and whether the speech is therefore constitutionally unprotected.

The students’ presentation is available, and is rather enjoyable to flip through. Nothing groundbreaking, but in my estimation, very cool. And, in any case, it is certainly worth protecting.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has taken up their case and plans to appeal the judge’s ruling. With hope this will minimally reprimand a judge for bad decisions against society and maximally set a positive precedent to follow: don’t screw with our First Amendment.

Donate to the EFF.

Peter Swire, Professor of Law at Ohio State, wrote an excellent piece of testimony for the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights & Property rights entitled “Laptop Searches and Other Violations of Privacy Faced by Americans Returning from Overseas Travel” (pdf). Basically, he makes an analogy between unrestricted laptop searches at the borders to when the US government tried to be a third party in all cryptographic communications. End result: it failed. Miserably.

He says, “Laptop searches will not succeed at a technical level at preventing data from entering
or leaving the United States.” What this really means is: laptop searches at borders cannot possibly scale nor reliably produce any useful information for fighting crime.

At the end of the day, laptop searches and any unreasonable searches and seizures of any persons, houses, papers, and effects must be ruled illegal. Oh wait, we already have a constitutional amendment that guarantees just that:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

People who actually know what they’re talking about will then say, “Border Search Exception! Border Search Exception! Border Search Exception!”

Yes, but even the border search exception requires “reasonable suspicion” to qualify. From “District Court Holds that Border Searches Require Reasonable Suspicion” by Eugene Volokh, a noted professor of law at UCLA (who also achieved a BS in Math and Computer Science at the age of 15, three years after he started working as a programmer:

Although neither a warrant nor probable cause is needed for ordinary searches of persons and things crossing the border, cause is required for more intrusive border searches. Certain border searches are highly intrusive because they implicate the “dignity and privacy interests of the persons being searched.” Flores-Montano, 541 U.S. at 152. As a search becomes more intrusive, it must be justified by a correspondingly higher level of suspicion of wrongdoing. United States v. Aman, 624 F.2d 911, 912-13 (9th Cir.1980) (holding that to conduct a strip search, the authorities must have a “real suspicion” that the person is smuggling contraband and that “real suspicion” is “subjective suspicion supported by objective, articulable facts”.

Swire also has a shorter article related to the testimony.