Monthly Archives: March 2008

Earth Hour — What They SHOULD Have Said

Allow me to engage in a bit of strawman-bashing. In the comments to Don Boudreaux’s excellent post at Cafe Hayek, a rather idiotic argument came up. It is the same argument that many of our own contributors received when we opposed Ron Paul, and commenters told us “If you don’t like Ron Paul, you must tell us who we SHOULD vote for.” It’s a strawman, of course, because criticizing one idea doesn’t obligate you to posit your own. But that’s not good enough for some people, as this comment to Don’s post shows:

Congratulations!

Instead of bringing forward some better and more rational proposals that will help to avoid that hysteria that indeed clouds the environmental issues and could cause the remedies to be worse than the sickness, and help the world to be able to use scarce resources wisely and effective… you live up to your role as an educator, as a beacon of light… and just make fun of it all.

As if the folks at Cafe Hayek haven’t offered their own positive ideas on a whole host of topics, one bit of criticism gets the “well, what would YOU do about it?” response. Laughable…

…but I’m going to offer a suggestion anyway. I’m going to offer the free-market environmentalist answer.

Here’s what the World Wildlife Fund should have said:

Greetings. In our modern world, we are faced with many problems. While the work of caring environmentalists and improved technology has done a lot to improve the environmental situation in the Western world, we have much farther to go. Rising populations and increased worldwide standard of living are only adding to the strain that humanity is placing on our planet. Oil and coal have served us well to bring us to this point, but exact a heavy toll on the planet to extract and use. These sources of energy are the past; they are not the future.

Conservation is one part of the solution to this problem. Conservation helps the environment by reducing demand, and helps individuals by reducing the prices they pay for the resources they use. Taken in the aggregate across society, reduced individual energy use helps to ensure that we can move from today’s needs to the future, and do so in a smooth transition. We hope that our recent Earth Hour event reminds humanity that they should be ever-mindful of their impact on the planet, and do what they can to minimize that individual impact, for the good of their pocketbooks and the planet.

But conservation is not enough. The pressures of increased population and increased prosperity will only lead to higher energy consumption. In order to protect our Earth, we must find alternative energy sources, with a smaller impact on our environment. To ensure widespread acceptance, the solution must be both environmentally-friendly and cheap. Our current solutions show promise, but are too expensive to be deployed on a wide scale. Thankfully, rising prices of oil will make it more economically feasible to explore alternatives, and the work of firms such as Massachussetts’ Konarka Technologies are helping to bridge the gap between today and the future.

Environmentalism and energy consumption are not mutually-exclusive. The crucial factor, however, is technology. We can solve these problems, but it won’t be done by politicians or policymakers. It won’t come from Washington or Brussels. And it can’t be done by mandate. The solutions will come from hard-working, caring, dedicated scientists and engineers. It will come from those in the private sector who stand to make a profit from cheap, clean energy.

Those who care about our planet have many options open to them. For those who are still young, with their careers and lives ahead of them, we encourage you to study physics, materials science, and engineering. You can directly impact the problem by researching, developing, and implementing the technologies which will help us solve these problems. For those who may be too late to change their career path, there are countless investment opportunities in the companies working on these problems. The beauty of these options is that it offers you both the opportunity to profit and enact a social good.

Turning off your lights for an hour is a reminder of what you can do in the short term, and of the important problem that we must solve. But if you really want to help, it’s time to get your hands dirty and start making the long-term solution a reality.

Those of us on “the right” are often lambasted as uncaring when it comes to environmental problems. We are not. We are simply cognizant of the fact that the solutions “the left” offers are typically damaging, counterproductive, and anti-prosperity. The real solution will come from the same place all solutions come — the long-term work by people trying to improve their own lives, and by extension improve the world for the rest of us.

Google “Doing Their Part” For Earth Hour

Seen today:

google.jpg

“Earth Hour” is a worldwide event where individuals are asked to shut off their lights for an hour. Ineffectual, pointless, but that’s what we need to do “for the planet”.

So what does Google do? Do they run some of their servers in a lower-power mode, perhaps sacrificing the speed of search results in order to reduce energy use? Nope. Do they even do the politically correct but economically idiotic idea of buying “carbon offsets” for the energy they use for that hour? Nope. Does blackening their home page even save energy? Nope. In fact, outside of changing a few lines of very simple code, it doesn’t appear that this gesture has taken any effort at all.

What have they accomplished? Well, they’ve “raised awareness”. Good work, fellas, because without Google, I may never have known about the idea of conservation!

What a joke.

Others covering this: Don Boudreaux & Billy Beck

How Saudi Justice Is Sometimes More Merciful Than American Justice

In the field of professional executioners, the Saudi executioner has one of the more brutal reputations since he uses a sword to cut off people’s heads. This is not the clean antiseptic push-button executions of the U.S. but one where the executioner has to physically exert himself, gore splatters and the smell of blood fills the air in front of a howling mob. One can hardly imagine a more barbaric spectacle, and would imagine that the executioners must be brutal men who love killing.

‘Before an execution I give the victim’s family a chance too.’
‘I ask them if they will forgive. Sometimes this happens at literally the last minute. My thoughts and prayers are concentrated on the fact that they will forgive the criminal. I hope that they forgive him and feel joy when they do,’ he adds earnestly. Rezkallah will take it upon himself to visit the victim’s family in order to obtain a stay of execution.

‘If I get the chance, and most of the time I do, I go and ask the family to give the criminal another chance. It has worked many times and the family has forgiven the criminal at the last minute.’ He smiles for a moment, recalling one such occasion.

Following a successful stay of execution, the crowd, somewhat surprisingly given the fact that they’ve turned up to witness a brutal death, breaks into rejoicing.

‘There is clapping and cheering,’ says Rezkallah. ‘The scenes of happiness are indescribable.’

In America, this quality of mercy, permitting the victim or victim’s family to forgive transgressions is wholly absent. Horror stories include the lifetime registration as a sex-offender of the man who was convicted of the statutory rape of the woman who is now his wife, and the man facing attempted murder charges despite his victim’s adamant testimony that the shooting was an accident.

When a family does beg for clemency, the process is far more involved. Rather than the stay of execution automatically being granted, the family must go before a governor and or a board of pardons and plead for the criminal’s life. Their wishes are irrelevant. The state alone determines what is justice. The victim’s wishes need not be respected, and are often ignored.

Yes, the Saudi legal code, with capital crimes like whitchcraft, is barbaric. But it is shameful that the U.S. legal code is less accommodating of the victims’ pleas for mercy.

I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.

The FBI Hyperlink Honeypot, and what you can do to stay safe

This post is intended to help internet users who make legitimate, non-criminal use of the internet avoid being caught by the FBI’s hyperlink honeypot. While there are methods that can be used to cover deliberate criminal activity on the internet, I will not post them here.

Declan McCullagh brings scary news of the latest tactics from the FBI (via Instapundit, via Classical Values):

The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.

Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year. The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images.

This is serious stuff, and not for the reasons you may think. The FBI is operating from the assumption that one IP address equals one household. It’s also operating from the assumption that all HTTP requests are user-initiated. Both are wrong.

First, with NAT routing and WiFi, one IP address could be several houses, or even a sizeable chunk of an apartment building. The way most homes are set up with broadband and wireless is pretty simple and extremely open to abuse. The broadband connection comes in the home and has a single IP address. The device closest to the connection is a modem, which acts as a bridge between the home network and the broadband provider. The device after that is a wireless router, which takes traffic from all devices that connect to it and channels it to the modem.

This means that, to anyone on the other side of the modem, like web sites, your ISP, or the FBI, all the traffic looks like it’s coming from a single source. Since someone has to pay for that broadband connection, all the traffic is automatically assumed to come from that person. So, as a user, it’s in your best interest to be in control of all the traffic going over your internet connection, which leads us to…

TIP #1: Lock down your wireless network with WPA

In a utopian world, free love and free WiFi might seem like wonderful things. With creeps running around and the FBI trailing after them, not so much. Since people are actually getting jailed for clicking on hyperlinks based on their IP address, it’s time to get serious about making sure only the people you want get on your network.

WPA stands for Wireless Protected Access, and it is the only secure way to prevent access to your wireless network. WPA works using a pre-shared key (PSK) of up to 63 characters to encrypt network traffic. This means that any device must have the key before any traffic can be sent or received on the wireless network.

(Don’t confuse this with WEP, which is so-called Wired Equivalent Protection. WEP has been thoroughly broken and can be cracked in less than 5 minutes.)

If you need a good, strong password, I highly recommend visiting GRC’s Perfect Passwords page. This page provides extremely secure pseudo-random passwords that make password attacks almost impossible.

If the FBI can’t tell what behind an IP address accessed a given URL, they probably can’t tell whether the user initiated the access or whether the machine did automatically. In addition to making sure that there aren’t machines on your network doing things out of your control, you have to make sure there aren’t things on your machine doing things outside your control. This brings us three more tips…

TIP #2: Scan your system for viruses and malware

Any software on your system can request any web address at any time. Well-behaved programs only do so at the user’s command. Malware, however, doesn’t. Most malware running today exists to use compromised machines as a platform to run the creator’s software on a mammoth scale, usually to generate spam.

A piece of malware could very well access a honeypot link and get you, the user, into trouble. So, install that anti-virus software and run it, often. For those without anti-virus software, it might be worth contacting an IT support company, like Sphere IT (click here), to see if they can implement any security solutions to prevent malware from getting users into trouble.

For those who don’t want to load down their (Windows) systems with bloated software like Norton or McAfee, I personally recommend Avast‘s free anti-virus. It’s lightweight and does a good job of catching crud.

Also, no matter what anti-virus you use, be sure and keep your software up to date. Anti-virus software works best when it has the latest virus definitions. Furthermore, if you want to add another layer of protection you could look into using a blockchain service from a blockchain development company, which helps to protect from hackers and more.

TIP #3: Turn off the preview pane in your e-mail program.

This one’s an inconvenience, but it’s important. If your e-mail program is rendering e-mail without your specific instruction, it’s accessing addresses without your specific instruction.

Every time an e-mail has an image or other embedded content, your e-mail program has to fetch it from the internet. If the FBI were using a JPEG image as the honey pot, all it would take your e-mail program rendering an HTML e-mail with the image in it to make it look like an attempted access.

Once the preview pane is turned off, it’s still your responsibility to delete suspicious messages without opening them. (Hey, sometimes it’s tough to do. Personally, I’m always open to a little chuckle from the latest generic drug scams and variations on the always classic Nigerian money scam. Now, I’m going to behave myself.)

TIP #4: Turn off link prefetching

If you use Mozilla Firefox, iCab, or Google Web Accelerator, your computer is accessing links without your knowledge. This feature is called link prefetching. In a perfect world, this would be a good thing for the user. Not so when a person can be arrested for being associated with the IP that accessed a link.

Here are the directions for turning off link prefetching in Firefox. Google Web Accelerator should be completely uninstalled to prevent prefetching.

These are just the things I can come up with for preventing accidental ensnarement in this despicable FBI trap. I’d appreciate any more tips and tricks for preventing you might have.

Also, for those with a larger interest in security, I highly recommend Security Now! with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte. It’s a weekly podcast that deals solely with security, and the archives are a wealth of information.

(If you have a few minutes, please come by and check out the new blog at http://pith-n-vinegar.blogspot.com/)

1 2 3 14