Category: General

Real ID act — please act to oppose

Great summary of what’s wrong with the Real ID act — with a “fax your sentators” link — please consider taking action on this. Especially if you are fortunate enough to be in a state with Republican senators (I am not). I say “fortunate” because Republicans control the Senate (and everything else). Opposition from Democrats will be less effective because it will invoke partisan polarization. Opposition from fellow Republicans would be more effective because it would turn debate to the merits of the bill rather than making it into an “us-them” shouting match.

But any debate would be good. According to this page, there has been no debate whatsoever on this bill, and it’s attached as a rider to an “easy pass” military spending bill.

Quoting…

What Is ‘Real ID’?

from the Hartford Courant, Oct. 30, 2001
Real ID = National ID Card

This Tuesday, the US Senate is scheduled to vote on the implementation of a national ID card system. The Real ID Act is nothing less than a Real National ID Act. The only thing left to the individual states is which pretty picture they will choose to put on the card: everything else will be controlled by Washington DC bureaucrats.

What does this mean for America?

1. Dead Cops.

The Real ID Act requires that you give your permanent home address: no PO boxes; no exceptions. What about judges, police, and undercover cops? Oops!!! Hey Senators, let’s endanger our police and judges!!!

2. Stolen Identities.

Our new IDs will have to make their data available through a “common machine-readable technology”. That will make it easy for anybody in private industry to snap up the data on these IDs. Bars swiping licenses to collect personal data on customers will be just the tip of the iceberg as every convenience store learns to grab that data and sell it to Big Data for a nickel. It won’t matter whether the states and federal government protect the data – it will be harvested by the private sector, which will keep it in a parallel database not subject even to the limited privacy rules in effect for the government.

3. Government Spying.

Real ID requires the states to link their databases together for the mutual sharing of data from these IDs. This is, in effect, a single seamless national database, available to all the states and to the federal government.

4. Papers, Please.

If Real ID passes the Senate, our nation will join the ranks of the old Soviet Union, Communist China, and Vietnam by issuing its citizens a national ID card. The Machine Readable Zone may come in the form of a 2-dimensional bar code – but the Department of Homeland Security, which will be crafting the regulations implementing Real ID, has made clear that it would prefer to see a remotely readable RFID chip. That would make private-sector access and systematic tracking even more easy and likely.

This national ID card will make observation of citizens easy but won’t do much about terrorism. The fact is, identity-based security is not an effective way to stop terrorism. ID documents do not reveal anything about evil intent – and even if they did, determined terrorists will always be able to obtain fraudulent documents

5. Unsafe Roads.

Once upon a time, a driver’s license was a license to drive a motor vehicle. Turning driver’s licenses into national identity cards will actually make our roads more dangerous: by barring illegal immigrants from getting a driver’s license, Real ID means more illegal immigrants will now drive without any training or certification. Your insurance company is certain to be understanding.

What’s wrong with the Senate?

The Real ID Act has never been debated on the US Senate floor. They’ve never talked about it in any committee. Heck, most of them haven’t even read it! Yet they’re planning to vote on it on Tuesday, no questions asked.

In order to make a single irresponsible Congressman with totalitarian leanings happy, the Senate leadership let him write the bill and then slipped it into a another bill, one that would keep our fighting men and women taken care of in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supporting our troops means making sure they come home to a free nation, not a surveillance state.

Things Only a College Student Could Write

From a review of Achewood in a student paper —

Achewood’s confused hilarity stems from its fidelity to a dynamic and porous narrative skin. While character personas remain consistent, the reader’s relationship to the characters is in a constant state of flux….Achewood’s textual landscape fundamentally resists definition.

Now that is some funny shit, as Quentin Tarantino once said. Or at least a character played by Tarantino.

I am all about the value of education and academia and the humanities and all that, but it still boggles my mind that people pay large amounts of money to learn to write phrases like “fidelity to a dynamic and porous narrative skin.”

And I didn’t even include the part of “pure, aestheticized contingency… at its core.”

Here’s my review of Achewood: It’s a funny comic strip, that is in turns hilarious, ridiculous, disturbing, disgusting, beautiful, touching, wise, and weird. I will be reading it as long as Onstad keeps writing it.

Fink, Jack, and other Open Source Mac (Audio) Geekery

I’ve been thrilled for a while with the power of JACK, the Jack Audio Connection Kit, which has an elegant and usable macintosh port. It’s basically a tool for taking audio inputs and outputs from various software sources inside your computer and controlling, in real time, how they are connected with each other. The mac version of Jack comes with a wonderfully easy pointy clicky thing called JackPilot which lets you start and stop Jack and do things with it.

For example, one trivial thing I’ve done with Jack is used it to make my own mp3 copies of NPR’s Realplayer streams. I fire up JackPilot and then fire up RealPlayer. “Realplayer” appears in the JackPilot routing window. Then I fire up Audio In, a simple recording program, and with a couple double clicks I connect the output of Realplayer both to the input of Audio In and also to the speakers (so I can hear it). Now Audio In is getting a pure stream of output from RealPlayer and making a copy of it.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. There are some really nice sound applications that depend on Jack for their input and output. Ardour is a digital audio workstation. It takes a lot of getting used to because it’s not a native Mac application at all (ported from Linux, requires Apple’s X11.app) and a lot of the interface is strange and hard to comprehend, and the documentation is really sketchy. But there’s a nifty tutorial out there which discusses how you can hook Ardour and a neat drum machine called Hydrogen, and pipe other stuff into it too, and just jam and stuff. There’s also a spiffy OS X/JACK port of Sooperlooper, a live looping sampler.

All of the above are downloadable and usable as is. Jack is easy to learn, Ardour is pretty hard (maybe it’s easier if you already know a lot about digital music programs like Pro Tools), Hydrogen is fairly easy, SooperLooper is easy too.

But I saw neat stuff I wanted to try that wasn’t ported yet. Like Jack Rack, a JACK-based live effects machine. Most of that stuff compiles to X11 and requires a lot of Linux-based libraries that don’t come with OS X and are a pain to port by hand.

So my eyes turned to the Fink project. I’d become really frustrated with Fink the last few times I’d tried to use it, so I don’t know why I tried it now, but I did, somehow. I figured out what the problems were keeping me back (with the help of the FAQ). The main thing was, I hadn’t installed Apple’s X11 SDK (which comes with the Developer Tools). That was messing me up. I thought I had installed it but I was wrong. So I went and got it and Fink came together. And I could indeed compile Jack Rack.

Once I got Fink working I discovered I could do some other neat things I’d wanted to do a long time ago, like get XSane, an open source scanner program, working. Neat stuff. I also noticed that there was some stuff in Fink which would be really useful for my work, like both GTK and Carbon versions of the wxWidgets libraries, which I had previously been laboriously compiling by hand. Awesomeness.

I thnk that I had never really learned to use Fink properly because I’d always used the Fink versions of Debian tools like “apt-get” and the like. (Cause I used to use Debian Linux). But Fink has a bunch of tools of its own, invoked via the ‘fink’ command, and they seem to work better than, and to be more powerful than, the “apt” stuff alone.

Now I’m thinking about compiling JACK TimeMachine. Or maybe I could just go back to playing around with tunes…