July 3, 2008

Hey, free carbon tax

Even now that public opinion has started to shift towards more concern about climate change, political inertia—and especially the inherent conservatism of the American system—make a dramatic change like a nationwide carbon tax or cap-and-trade system incredibly difficult to implement. It's just too easy for a small group of vocal opponents to block legislation, or more likely dilute it to the point where it doesn't do anything. [When I say "too easy" I'm not taking a normative position; I just mean that the system isn't designed to make change easy.]

But consider our current situation: in the past year the price of gasoline has gone from about $3.00 to about $4.00/gallon. In effect, from the perspective of 2007, we've imposed a $1.00/gallon carbon tax. For comparison, even proponents of carbon taxes are looking at more like $.10/gallon. This isn't ideal for a number of reasons:

  • The price of gasoline depends to a great extent on the price of oil and the price could go down at some point. On the other hand, there's no reason to believe it will go down and people's behavior has already started to change.
  • Oil burning isn't the only carbon emitter and coal and natural gas prices aren't going up as smoothly, though a little searching suggests they may be going up too, which is what you'd expect.

The good news, though, is that the inertia of the political system works to keep prices high. Even if there was something effective the government could do to bring prices down—which seems unlikely in any case—all that carbon control proponents need to do is block that legislation, which is a lot easier than getting their own legislation passed.

Posted by ekr at 10:10 PM | Comments (1) | Misc

July 1, 2008

You go to elections with the voting system you have

After the California Top-to-Bottom Review, Alex Halderman, Hovav Shacham, David Wagner, and I got together and asked ourselves whether there was some way to make good use of the existing voting systems. The result was:
You Go to Elections with the Voting System You Have: Stop-Gap Mitigations for Deployed Voting Systems

J. Alex Halderman, Eric Rescorla, Hovav Shacham, David Wagner

In light of the systemic vulnerabilities uncovered by recent reviews of deployed e-voting systems, the surest way to secure the voting process would be to scrap the existing systems and design new ones. Unfortunately, engineering new systems will take years, and many jurisdictions are unlikely to be able to afford new equipment in the near future. In this paper we ask how jurisdictions can make the best use of the equipment they already own until they can replace it. Starting from current practice, we propose defenses that involve new but realistic procedures, modest changes to existing software, and no changes to existing hardware. Our techniques achieve greatly improved protection against outsider attacks: they provide containment of viral spread, improve the integrity of vote tabulation, and offer some detection of individual compromised devices. They do not provide security against insiders with access to election management systems, which appears to require significantly greater changes to the existing systems.

The paper will appear at EVT '08. (PDF.)

Posted by ekr at 8:32 PM | Comments (0) | Voting

June 29, 2008

Oh good, more TLDs

ICANN has announced plans to expand the pool of TLDs:
"The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net," said Dr Twomey. "It's a massive increase in the 'real estate' of the Internet."

Presently, users have a limited range of 21 top level domains to choose from -- names that we are all familiar with like .com, .org, .info.

This proposal allows applicants for new names to self-select their domain name so that choices are most appropriate for their customers or potentially the most marketable. It is expected that applicants will apply for targeted community strings such as (the existing) .travel for the travel industry and .cat for the Catalan community (as well as generic strings like .brandname or .yournamehere). There are already interested consortiums wanting to establish city-based top level domain, like .nyc (for New York City), .berlin and .paris.

I'm having some trouble seeing the value of this proposal. As I've mentioned earlier, there has been remarkably little uptake of the non big 7 gTLDs, with .com being the elephant in the room. What reason is there to believe that .brandname is going to have any more uptake? So, it doesn't make much sense to say that this increases the "real estate" of the Internet.

Even if that weren't true, the structure of the DNS more or less negates the idea that creating more TLDs somehow creates more "real estate". One could easily create exactly the same amount of real estate by inventing a single new TLD, e.g., .tld which implements whatever policies you intended to promulgate for new TLDs. This would have essentially the same effect except that the names are a bit longer. Moreover, we effectively have all that real estate, since any existing DNS zone could instantiate exactly these policies: nothing in the DNS structure stops me from setting up tld.educatedguesswork.org.

That's not to say that this is necessarily a bad idea, but the arguments I've heard so far aren't very convincing.

Posted by ekr at 9:47 PM | Comments (5) | DNS

June 28, 2008

The utilitarian vampire

As I mentioned earlier, Netflix Instant Viewing (and hence the Roku) is pretty heavy on the cheezy 80s TV shows. Mrs. EG and I have been catching up on Forever Knight, the existential tale of a vampire living in Toronto, trying to become human, and making up for his sins by posing as a Canadian cop named Nick Knight (though not that polite, so you can tell he's not really Canadian). Anyway, in the Forever Knightiverse, it seems you can get along OK by drinking cow's blood, so we're back to the situation I alluded to in an earlier post, vampirism as an immortality treatment with some annoying side effects. Given that, it occurs that Mr. Knight would do a lot more good for people by starting a cow blood production operation and saving the lives of the terminally ill by turning them into vampires. Just saying.

Posted by ekr at 9:56 PM | Comments (0) | Biology

On public radio popularity

I was listening to NPR this morning and caught an interview that made me think about the hierarchy of importance of appearances in public radio. Obviously, being on the radio is good, but some appearances are better than others. In ascending order of importance in the public radio universe, the list goes something like this.
  • Appearing on This American Life
  • Appearing on a "specialty" show like Latino USA or News and Notes.
  • Being mentioned in a news segment.
  • Being interviewed briefly in a news segment.
  • Appearing on a local show, like Forum
  • Appearing on a national show, like All Things Considered
  • Appearing on Fresh Air.
  • Appearing repeatedly.
  • Appearing repeatedly on Fresh Air.
  • Getting mentioned when you die.
  • Having Fresh Air rerun your interview when you die.
  • Getting mentioned on the anniversary of your death.
  • Having Fresh Air rerun your interview on the anniversary of your death.
  • Having your relatives interviewed on the anniversary of your death.
  • Having your relatives interviewed on their birthday.

I'm not kidding about the last one, by the way. I heard an interview today with Ernest Hemingway's son, on his 80th birthday—the son's not Ernest's.

Posted by ekr at 8:34 PM | Comments (1) | Misc