I'm going to go contrarion on the Trent Lott furor and say that I think this whole thing is pretty overblown... especially in light of the fact he apparently has a history of this sort of thing.

The remarks that may cost him his career were made at a birthday party for a hundred year old senator. I take them with exactly the same level of seriousness as I take remarks at an funeral. There's an old saying to the effect of "Where the devil himself to die, we would sing his praises at the funeral." Same for birthday parties; overblown positive statements are de rigueur.

News.Com: Elcomsoft Not Guilty. [Scripting News]

While the people who bought the DMCA are upset at the not-guilty because it will make it harder to prosecute in the future, I can't say my kind of people have a lot to be pleased about either. In the end, apparently, it came down to whether violation was "willful", and the jury decided it was not. (I can only hope the fact that we're talking about Russians "willfully" violated a law we have no particular reason to assume they knew about came into the jury discussion.)

The head of the government's Total Information Awareness project, which aims to root out potential terrorists by aggregating credit-card, travel, medical, school and other records of everyone in the United States, has himself become a target of personal data profiling.

Online pranksters, taking their lead from a San Francisco journalist, are publishing John Poindexter's home phone number, photos of his house and other personal information to protest the TIA program. [Privacy Digest]

Slashdot asks Has the Quality of Consumer Electronics Declined? [Slashdot]

About two years ago, I took Statistics in college. The second most interesting part of the course was the industrial manufacturing focus, specifically quality control.

Even more specifically, reliable ways to determine how much quality you can take out of the product and still meet some specification with some good probability.

Basically, the whole course was a primer on using statistical techniques to make cheaper products by decreasing quality. All anecdotes the prof had to tell about industry experiences was about taking out quality. If this is typical, I think it explains a lot.

Still getting sporadic emails about my Bayes spam predictions. Thanks to those who emailed for staying civil; I expected a bit more flamage.

People are still understandably skeptical (can't blame them, I'd be skeptical too). So, here's another thing I'll do: When the SpamBayes project actually releases files officially, I'll take that and implement the attack I mentioned, to see if I can make it work.

Exactly what I'll do if I can remains to be seen; I sure as *#&$ won't just release the code, though! And if I can't, I'll say so.

[Google Top Stories]

I generally stay away from international jurisdiction stories, considering them relatively uninteresting problems that must be solved through diplomacy, like any other national conflict. This seems wrong; even if the case is heard in Melbourne it should be judged under USA laws, since the article was written in America.

OK, I admit I just wanted to post an article from the Google feed to see how it looks. (Been waiting a while, too.)

Washington Post:

...under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

Federal prosecutors have arrested three men involved in what officials are calling the largest identity fraud case in American history.... Cummings would then use the ruse of "helping" the customers work through software and hardware problems to obtain the customer code that allowed the company to request credit records.

This is like a textbook case on why privacy issues are so importent. There is no such thing as "a company" or "a government" having access to privacy information; only "people in a company" or "people in a government" can have access to privacy-sensitive information. Now the people who had their credit records stolen, who have committed no crime, have to go through the effort of checking their records and potentially changing their Social Security Number and putting a fraud lock on their records, making credit transactions that much more difficult for the duration of the lock.

Matt Haughey: "The [SpamAssassian] arms race has officially begun." [Scripting News]

I'm reading between the lines here based on scanty hints (based on the remarkable uniformity of spammer's arguments that they are doing a good thing), because I'm not intimately familiar with the world of spammers, but the biggest spammers seem to talk to each other fairly regularly. If one of them has figured out how to do it, rest assured that it is not long before they all know how.

Two people have now expressed the opinion that I am underestimating the advantage of personalization, and the power of statistics. It's worth replying to, I suppose, since that's two out of three. You can see why I left this out of an already-long weblog post before.

First, I have built Bayesian filters before, so I'm not completely ignorant about how they work. I'm not an expert, but then, right now I don't know that anyone is, since there's a lot of application-specific tuning that must be done. Still, I rest my argument on general principles, not specifics.