Notices by Steve Bellovin (stevebellovin@mastodon.lawprofs.org)

Timeline cleanse #6: almost all of the battleground states have closed. This calls for a video of a gentoo penguin with two chicks. Port Lockroy, Antarctica, January 2015.

Polls now closed in the first swing state, Georgia (except for a few places where voting was extended by court order), so it’s time for timeline cleanse #3: some baby great horned owls in Brooklyn, March 2023.

Nazis gonna Nazi. And the only surprising thing is that they said this out loud; I’ve always known that they felt this way.

Since US election day is approaching, it’s time to re-post this picture of the only proper way to use blockchain for voting. (I wish I knew where this photo came from. I’ve tried to find out but failed.)

Because of my arm issues, I’ve turned on dictation on my Mac. In an email comment, I said “good law” and it rendered it as “good lol”. I’m not sure if that’s an editorial comment…

@jonty @cstross I'd suggest IBM bus and tag cables, from their older mainframes: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/IBM_360_Bus_Tag_Cables.png. Note that the connectors are about 10 cm long — and you needed two to connect to each I/O device…

I needed to get to the Internet Archive today. SIgh…

Bohr once asked Pauli, “Is this really crazy enough?” That’s what I imagine the early discussions about SpaceX’s chopsticks mechanism must have been like. It’s an utterly preposterous idea and it worked. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in rocketry, and I’m old enough that I remember the first Sputnik.

When I see the phrase “prompt engineering”, I read it as “programming in a new, different, and underspecified language that has weird semantics and that you don’t know as well as you should.”
https://hachyderm.io/@danderson/113142792603203381

@mattblaze I don't think so—the desirability of triggering it would depend on on the geopolitical situation, how many pagers had been handed out, etc. But I think that there are pager groups—the only time I carried one, it was for messages to all members of the Medical Aid Squad at Bell Labs Murray Hill—and you sent pages by calling a particular number. (These days, with text pages, it's probably a web service.) Any bets on Israel not knowing the login/password/group id? Not from me…

@mattblaze Yes, but that's because your supporters wouldn't retaliate: https://mstdn.social/@DemocracyMattersALot/113045557252458842

@inthehands @mattblaze and I have talked about some complex mechanical things that we no longer do: railroad interlockings, lever voting machines, the cell door locks at Alcatraz, and doubtless many more I don’t know about. (Railroad interlockings make sure that signals and switch tracks only change state in a safe order. For example, a signal must be turned to STOP before a switch is lined against oncoming traffic.)

I spent some time yesterday listening to WCBS-AM, to get some last listening in before its demised. The programming was basically a retrospective look on the history of the station, going back to the 1930s. Sad to see it go—when I was living in North Carolina, I'd sometimes even listen to it at night. The range was almost 700 km, but it was a 50 kilowatt clear channel station, so it (often) worked.

One would think that there is some sort of threshold below which it is uneconomic to send out a bill, even an electronic one.

“Mama, why did the bear turn around and run away?”
“RFK Jr. was there.”
"Is that a problem for us?”
"Yes, he does weird things with ravens, too."
“Help!”

@sjharder @karlauerbach The Statue of Yeeterty.

Called it: https://apnews.com/article/3d97d2e9497a5a208c1309aec7a0cd6a
https://mastodon.lawprofs.org/@SteveBellovin/112712893733058732

New report: “Challenging the Machine: Contestability in Government AI Systems”, by Susan Landau, James X. Dempsey, Ece Kamar, Steven M. Bellovin, and Robert Pool: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10430

@jciv @20002ist Well, it will be typical if we don't do something about atmospheric CO₂.

There are features, such as the ability to delay patch installation, that at least at some point Microsoft enabled for enterprise versions of Windows but not for consumers. I wonder if they’ll do the same for Recall. (As noted by others, Recall is a gift to hackers and opposing counsel, which means that any decent-sized enterprise will disable it or not run Windows. But consumers? Most won’t know and/or will think themselves safe and won’t care, and can’t switch to Linux or MacOS.)