<mode idiotie>

Comment se tenir au chaud tendu qu’on utilise un ordinateur portable dans un lieu public, en conservant la confidentialité ? Voici la solution

Libre traduction d’un extrait : « fournir à l’utilisateur confidentialité, chaleur et concentration pour l’usage d’un ordinateur d’un lieu public ».

</mode idiotie>

Last year, I’ve published a short article titled “Fear is what terrorrists want” with a reference to Bruce Schneier. I also think fear may might what our leaders may wish, as a way to have more control on the people, as a way to justify privacy violation by the gouvernments in many countries with the main consequence to have our freedom reduced.

Today, on the same topic, Bruce Schneier he tells us to «Refuse to be Terrorized», by Schneier, referencing the action «I am not afraid», which proposes to contact your officials and tell them to «stop being afraid, and stop acting out of fear». This action is specific to the USA, but I think it may apply to other countries, including France and the UK.

On the 3rd of September, the BBC revealed that during the last recent Scottish elections in May, about 70,000 ballots have been automatically canceled by the counting machines with no human oversight.

Actually, about 140,000 ballots were counted as spoilt and some of them were automatically rejected. What were the conditions to reject these 70,000s ? Is it « we take randomly an half of the spoilt ballots and we reject them » ? Or yet « we reject 50% of the spoilt ballot for each possible result » ? What is the method ? This is a public election concerning all Scottish people, so it should be definitely released and broadcasted to the citizens.

Apart of that, « the Conservative Party condemned the Scotland Office for being slow to release the information ». If the BBC investigation did not lead to this announce, would it have ever been released ?

In 2003, in Belgium, 4096 ballots that were cancelled. Wikipedia article says «The error was only detected because she had more preferential votes that her own list which is impossible in the voting system. The official explanation was The spontaneous creation of a bit at the position 13 in the memory of the computer».

What’s next ? A million of canceled/forgotten/changed ballots ?

Today, I was cleaning some mail servers’ queues, deleting as much spam as I could in a reasonable amount of time and effort.

"As much" means several thousands per server and "reasonable amount of time and effort" means no more than 2 or 3 hours (doing other stuff at the same time).

Ok, you will tell me "hey guys, where have you been for the last couple of years ?" Most of the spam I’ve quickly identified, targeted and deleted was about:
 sex (get a bigger one and so)
 congratulations for being the winner of a game you have never participated to (lottery, heritage, ...)
 assistance requests
 urgent ! things

So, here again, yes, spam stuff is around sex and money.

Yeah, I know this for a while. I personally receive thousands of spam each month (just a few missed, hopefully). But well ... really seeing this in from of your eyes, make you wonder a little bit more about our world.

For almost five years now, we can’t spend a day without one news about some arrested terrorrists, an avoided plot, a false positive alarm to explosive or chemicals in an airport or whatever maintaining a state of fear.

For five years now, terrorrism is the big thing of the politicians, police, army, and news industry.

For five years now, fear is what news industry fed us with in its daily menu, helping politicians to achieve their goals, finally helping terrorrists goal: make us fear.

Bruce Schneier wrote an excellent article about this. I share his thoughts about what is happening these days and refuse to fall into this state of fear. Everyone must be careful, as you are careful not to cross the street when a car is coming, but we must not be scared «oh a car is going to suddenly drive on me if I decide to cross the street, what am I going to do !!!».

We must live our lifes, and not play this game. Damn it, let’s just live.