Blog Articles 136–140

Technology and law

Published on Wednesday, January 2, 2013 and tagged with politics and law.

That said, these were all (foreign) policy experts, not technologists. They all seemed to take it for granted that you could draw a line between “bad” products and acceptable / dual-use products. I tried to hold back from saying “every time you people try to come up with legal phrasings about what technologies are ok, you end up putting tools like mine on the wrong side of the line.” In retrospect, I should have said it more loudly.

— Tor project’s German Foreign Office trip report. There is a strong impedance mismatch between technology and law, that crops up everywhere from patents to copyright enforcement to law enforcement vs. dissent.

On Rule of Law

Published on Friday, December 28, 2012 and tagged with immigration.

There is a strange idea going around among some anti-immigration politicians, pundits, and lobbyists that changing the law, e.g. to open up more visas or to retroactively welcome people to the country, undermines the rule of law.

If the law is not meeting the needs of the country, if it cannot be consistently enforced, if such enforcement would be unjust, then the law undermines the rule of law. Changing the law so that it can be more practically, consistently, and justly enforced upholds the rule of law by making the law something reasonable to get behind.

Further, holding the law as immutable is not rule of law, it is tyranny of law. Those of you who know your Old Testament stories might recall a couple in which the laws of the Medes and Persians, which cannot be revoked, play a key role. One involved Daniel getting a free night’s stay at Lion’s Den Inn and Suites. Another ended with a state-sponsored bloodbath as the only legal means of stopping a genocide.

If we care about rule of law, we must seek to make the law reasonable and just. Our other options are tyranny and lawlessness.

War on Useful Language

Published on Monday, December 17, 2012 and tagged with terrorism.

But this is a language game, and I am playing the role of the futile prescriptivist holding the line against a huge tide of people who would prefer that “terrorism” simply be a synonym for “doubleplus-ungood”. A perfectly accurate phrase like “heinous criminal violence” is simply not enough for these people: they demand that the T-word be deployed. And in the end, descriptivism is the correct school of linguistics, and thus in the long run I will inevitably be wrong. Eventually, terrorism will be a synonym for “doubleplus-ungood” and a useful tool of thought will have been blunted into uselessness, like a scalpel bashed repeatedly against a brick wall.
This reminds me of how we now call everything “war” — war on drugs, war on poverty, war on women, war on Christmas — except when we pay our armed forces to shoot at another nation’s people, in which case we call it “kinetic military action” or whatever.

— Are “lone gunman” school shootings terrorism? — if they are, “terrorism” is useless as a concept.

Headbrick

Published on Tuesday, December 4, 2012.

Look, we can’t just change the whole system every single time someone’s mommy says “brain damage.” And for lots of poor kids, getting bashed in the face for the amusement of wealthy alumni is the only path to college success.

— Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s incisive analysis of college football. See also Pro Football’s Violent Toll. I am increasingly skeptical of college sports in general, and football in particular.

Configuring a Fedora Media Server

Published on Saturday, December 1, 2012 and tagged with computing, fedora, and howto.

I was trying to configure our file server to be a media server, specifically to play music with MPD and to make its speakers available as a PulseAudio output for laptops on the wireless network. This wound up being far harder than it seems like it should have been, and involved learning (among other things) that SELinux has failure modes I didn’t even know existed. And it let me explore the wonders of systemd some more.

So, here’s how I did it. All of this is on Fedora 17 with RPMFusion (for MPD). The goals are:

PulseAudio running as a system service on the server (this configuration is discouraged, but the use case of configuring a network audio appliance seems to be the sort of use case where it makes sense).
PulseAudio device advertised via Zeroconf, so the laptops can just find them.
MPD playing via PulseAudio and discoverable via Zeroconf.
Two laptops capable (also running Fedora 17) capable of discovering and using the server’s audio sink.

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