iRights was formed in January 2000 to track legal issues on the Internet. I was interested in these issues after spending the previous year in Third Voice anti-advocacy, and after studying the relevant law on censorship and such, I realized that nobody really knew how legal Third Voice was. Not only that, but there wasn't even a legal theory adequate to describe the situation as it truly was. A lot of metaphors were tossed about, but they all failed to capture vital aspects of the situation, even the metaphors I made.

Communication Ethics book part for Prelude. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

This is the first of what I hope will be semi-regular newsletters on the struggle to ensure that voting equipment produces a "voter verifiable audit trail".... I am convinced that any solution to the voting machine problem is going to require major and sustained grass roots pressure.

Magical thinking about computers strikes again, and this time may adversely affect our entire government system. This issue is far, far more important then it seems, and it's an uphill battle just to get people to understand that. Warning: The newsletter is a depressing read.

As of yesterday at about 1:10 p.m. EST, I am officially done with school. I have completed the program for a Masters degree in computer science at Michigan State University, and all that remains is a bit o' graduation ceremony (though I'm not going to the big one), and getting the diploma in the mail.

(This explains the light, even for me, posting; been busy.)

My current workplace is picking me up for a few months, then I hope to directly sell a software program I am currently working on to the public, which you'll hear some more about as I have more substantial information to show.

I've ended my boycott on Amazon.com due to the news that Bezos is using his fortune to get into the private space industry.

I'm still not willing to use them preferentially, but you can't be a one-issue consumer, right? I guess I'm willing to let those two things cancel.

As y'all probably know I've been interested in Bayesian filtering. I've been using the Mozilla 1.3 implementation, because even though I don't think it's going to work in the long term I figure you ought to get it while the getting's good.

Plus side, it's been pretty good, with easily a 97%+ success rate on both correct positives and correct negatives.

The downside is that the false positives have been pretty bad. I cleaned out my spam folder today and here's what got thrown into the spam folder:

One major outcome of this project is the discovery that simple tree matching algorithms don't work.

I tried an algorithm where I took the three best nodes from a tree and compared that to a database of the three best nodes from the collected text works. The expectation is that the numerical value of each sense represents meaning spread out across many words and would to some degree adequately represent the "high points" of the text snippet.

An idea I had for my next blog-style thing, since iRights is within a few months of basically wrapping up.

I think it would be great to have a blog-like thing that tracks predictions: Who makes them, when they make them, and whether or not they come true. Kinda like Long Bets, but tracking anyone who makes a prediction at all, and no money; just reputation points. Also, rather then waiting for people to enter them, we record predictions of people who may not even be aware of the site at all.

I thought this was really touching (via InstaPundit):

A captured Iraqi colonel being held in one of the hangars listened in astonishment as his information minister praised Republican Guard soldiers for recapturing the airport.

He looked at his captors and, as he realised that what he had heard was palpably untrue, his eye filled with tears. Turning to a translator, he asked: "How long have they been lying like this?"

The Justice Department lifted a requirement Monday that the FBI ensure the accuracy and timeliness of information about criminals and crime victims before adding it to the country's most comprehensive law enforcement database.

The system, run by the FBI's National Crime Information Center, includes data about terrorists, fugitives, warrants, people missing, gang members and stolen vehicles, guns or boats. [Privacy Digest]

I submit to you that this is actually a good thing, or at least will be in the long run.