Pants

It's pretty hot where I am today and I was going through drawers looking for a pair of shorts. I didn't find the ones I was looking for but I did find my 'thin' shorts. You know, the decent pair that you regretfully decided you probably were never going to fit into again but who knows, one day...

They fit.

Happy day.

It looks like 35 lbs off did do something for me.

I am the most base of lockpickers

It turns out those internet instructions on how to derive a Master Lock combination lock actually do work. My older daughter is in awe and happy to have her lock working again.

Waiting for the RedState ban hammer

I have at present a diary over at RedState, a conservative site that publishes some pretty vocal support for the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. I'm of the opposite opinion and after getting banned from a thread (and getting called a hippie, natch), I published my own diary entry below. Now I get to see whether the post will survive and it is worth investing in writing for RedState. 

In my career as a network administrator, I've been asked to break into three e-mail boxes of existing employees (entering into departed employees e-mail is routine and I've lost count of how many of those I've done). Twice I did so after verifying that it would be legal to do so, the third time, I regretfully told my bosses boss that company policies were so incoherent on the subject of notice that it didn't meet the legal standard and I wouldn't break in to find out if an employee was fielding recruiter e-mails. This lack of notice was a real accomplishment on the part of the employee handbook writers for the firm as the standard for notice is absurdly low. You can find cookie cutter notice templates for notice of lack of privacy in company e-mails all over the Internet. I still expected to get fired for that action, but didn't. No doubt a lawyer was consulted but nothing more was ever said to me. The lesson is this. While an authority may intend something, if it doesn't actually go through the action of properly saying so, it is an abuse to just go along with the flow. 

Aaron Swartz could have been given meaningful notice that what he was doing was in violation of the terms of the JSTOR license using the same technology that Panera and Starbucks use to notify you about doing naughty things with their free wi-fi. MIT chose not to do so. Instead, they treated Aaron Swartz's computer as if it was technically misbehaving (which it was) and issued a MAC block on the use of their DHCP server. Which, as they knew themselves, was trivial to defeat and was promptly defeated. But a MAC block on DHCP says nothing about JSTOR access. What Swartz did was incredibly rude, a brazen kick between JSTOR's metaphorical legs begging for attention. That doesn't mean that it was illegal or that the MAC block provided any sort of legally meaningful notice. 

JSTOR could have said that MIT was in violation of its license and pulled JSTOR access until they fixed it or they could have throttled the connections from MIT to reduce the number of downloads to tolerable levels. What the situation wasn't was wire fraud or computer fraud. It was abusing the special MIT JSTOR license until it sat up and begged. 

MIT's JSTOR license has all the integrity of an Obamacare waiver for a labor union. Mere mortals have to pay for downloads to access publicly financed scientific research papers but people who wander onto the hallowed campus of MIT get to download for free. JSTOR sets up a multi-tier access system, which is their right, but they have to do it carefully otherwise you get leakage to the little people who don't rate. JSTOR didn't do it carefully enough and Aaron Swartz exploited their licensing carelessness. It's not like he didn't already have access to JSTOR via Harvard as a research fellow at that institution. If all he had wanted to do was to get the articles, he could have smurfed out his requests via the Harvard network to be below detection thresholds and we all would have woken up one day with a giant torrent sitting out there on the Internet, similar to what happened with Climategate. He did his actions at an institution where he did not have special rights on purpose and very likely looked forward to ending up in civil court to hammer home his points and if he lost, perhaps pay a fine. 

Instead he ended up charged with multiple felonies and the prospect of losing some of his civil rights for the rest of his life. This was a turn of events that even JSTOR did not want. 

However, Attorney General Eric Holder thinks that charging thirteen felony counts for accessing information you have rights to from the wrong network was ok, if the plea deal is sweet enough. "I think what those prosecutors did in offering three, four, zero-to-six [month prison term plea term offers] was consistent with that conduct." That seems to miss the point. A civil matter was escalated to criminal status. That's the line that was crossed. Senator Cornyn (R-TX) seems to get it "I’m concerned that average citizens, if you can call them that, like Aaron Swartz, people who don’t have status and power, perhaps, in dealing with the federal government, could be bullied." Representative Issa (R-CA) is looking into the matter too, seeking to gather evidence of the affair. I don't think these Republican politicians are just taking up the Swartz case because they don't like Holder or Obama. There are real issues at stake that should concern americans of all political persuasions but especially conservatives. Overcharging is not a conservative value. Using the machinery of the criminal system to hammer out what should have been a civil matter is not a conservative value. High disparities between plea offerings and sentence at trial are a dubious tactic that may run afoul of ethics rules and, you guessed it, not a conservative value. 

But the biggest reason to have a bit of sympathy for Swartz's cause of openness is that it will, on balance, benefit conservatives. Big government thrives on confusing people and hiding the truth of its venality, idiocy, and incompetence. Automated scripts accessing information need to be kept legal in the widest possible variety of circumstances because downloading information and data mining it to figure out where the hidden truths are is our best tool for keeping serious oversight over the whole complex mess. We are not doing enough of that, and prosecutions like Swartz's discourage their use. 

Building a school for your kid

My son's current school is K-8. It has a project to expand to K-12 starting in the 2014-2015 school year. I just had a meeting with the principal to be and suffice it to say there is jumping up and down good news. The only down side is it is under embargo for the next few weeks. Still, it is a happy day.

Happy Morning

For the first time in, well, too long, I'm on the good side of 300 pounds.

Today is a good day.

Submitted citizenintelligence.org to dmoz

I love the Open Directory Project because pretty much every directory that matters will grab data loads from it. Why wouldn't they? It's free directory data. So whenever I need to register something I put it up there knowing that the domain will get known relatively quickly without me having to do a lot of work.

Sent some questions off to the FRB

Stephen Green's Math am Hard post got me to thinking so I popped off a few questions to the Federal Reserve Board to get details about what exactly is happening to the mortgage backed securities that are held on the books of the FRB.

Here's what I asked:

Goal: 

Working out what happens inside the mortgage backed securities that the FRB holds. Specifically, does anything material change when a mortgage that was bundled into an MBS is paid off via a refinance (same provider or different provider) or just a full pay out? 

1st Round Questions:

How many actual mortgages underly the MBS assets held on the books of the FRB? If this is not ordinarily tracked, that is an acceptable answer. 

If a mortgage is paid off in full and the property left unmortgaged (let's say someone wins the lottery and just pays it in full), what happens to the cash from that payoff? Do future revenues from the MBS get reduced? Are other mortgages bought to replace the lost revenue of interest payments? 

If a mortgage is paid off by a refinance, is there anything different that happens? Does the new mortgage roll into the same MBS?

Do refinance payoffs make the underlying MBS a better asset or a worse asset to be holding from the FRB's point of view? What makes it better or worse? 

Ancillary:

I would like contact information for specialist in the field that I can directly work with.