I mentioned an example in my last post, but let me spell it out a little more. In some metropolitan areas, there’s a stark contrast between neat, safe, prosperous private communities in which open displays of political opinion are banned, and poor, relatively high-crime urban neighborhoods in which you often see political signs and even some picketers and canvassers. … If millions of kids grow up in communities that are wealthy but intolerant of public speech, they are likely to draw the conclusion that speech is detrimental to order and prosperity.

Today I learned that if you’re in a homeowners’ association, in California, you don’t have the right to a secret ballot. The state legislature may pass a law giving you that right for some votes. And as Peter pointed out to me, 44% of people in the Western US live in some sort of homeowner’s association arrangement, so this is a practical matter.

Note to Scoble and everyone else complaining about having to add their info to Orkut, ICQ, AIM, and so on: remember P3P?

Now if everyone can agree to accept a POST of one’s contact info.

Over the past month and a half, I’ve received spam from Peter Uberroth, Ward Connerly’s Proposition 54 campaign, several of the trailing fringe of freaks and idiots running for governor, and hundreds from opportunists selling Arnold t-shirts.

I know that Dean and Clark have smart people handling the Internet side of their campaign, so I’m not worried about them. Besides, we know where we can find Cam if we get spam from the General.

Kerry, Lieberman, and Gephardt are unknown quantities. Will they spam in the spring if they are desperate and still in the primaries?

Then there’s the incumbent. It’s so easy to assume the worst with him. After all, the Administration has proven itself not to be above equivocation and betrayal. Will his base tolerate spam?

Well, it turns out that anyone can just unregister a phone number also. It’s trivial to obtain an anonymous e-mail address through Yahoo or HotMail. If I want you back on my list, I’ll just unregister you and then call you. There’s no protection. It would be trivial to write a program that registered every phone number and equally trivial to unregister them.

That and the list of exceptions are a yard long. Bottom line, you won’t get calls from small businesses, but them who have the tall dollars will still bother you.

It’s one reason I don’t have a land line. You still can’t telemarket to mobile numbers.

Their genius plan: register multiple addresses and vote for Reverend Sharpton. Well, it says a great deal about Freepers if they think voting for a black man is embarassing.

The econony needs to to improve so all those unemployed reactionaries can engage in productive work instead of spending the day watching Fox, and posting trolls on liberal weblogs.

There’s a discussion in Nathan’s comments about how to prevent these sorts of hijinks on either side. After all, I’d expect someone from Democratic Underground to propose nominating Pinochet in an online Republican straw poll. Nathan thinks the solution is a nominal fee to join MoveOn. My gut reaction was “blah blah blah chomian identities blah blah crypto blah blah zero knowledge blah blah,” but Nathan pointed out that having people pay a fee to join a political club means that they’ve raised money, and that the club has a onus to follow the lead of them that brought them.

I’ll tell you what will happen if it were an effective TIA. There would immediately be a series of coups inside the Republican Party as the people who owned the KGB survival mechanism were systemically outed and “Trent Lotted”…It would be profoundly destabilizing. Their sexual affairs would be public. They’d be “Lewinskied.” They’d be “Whitewatered.”

I’ve been thinking about TIA since annotating content and the semantic web were hot topics at OSCOM Cambridge. As much as people fear TIA, we want it for ourselves. I’d love a software tool which consumes my email and web trail, then whispers to me, and only me, all the insights and connections it found.

But if we have Personal TIA, then the government will have TIA. No amount of legislating will stop it. Not because folks like Pondexter are bad, but because if there’s a TIA tool, and it’s not used, and there’s another major attack on the US, then the polity will howl and scream: Why didn’t you spy on our conversations, and look through our underwear drawers! But I doubt you’ll stop an Islamic Fascist by looking through Mary Jo Plotnick’s Yahoo Chat logs.

Delay is at the heart of this matter. It is his plan, pushed by the Texas Republicans, to gerrymander the congressional districts around Austin, that prompted the walk-out.

Ginger Stampley wrote in with a pointer to a Houston Chronicle article on Delay’s involvement, and the dragnet the Republican leadership sent to find the missing 50.

Kudos to UT Austin’s IT division for keeping alumni informed.

[ a big thanks to Laura V. for this ] Of Interest to Fellow UT Austin Alumni: on Sunday, March 2nd 2003, an administrative data system at the university was attacked and confidential information on current, as well as former students and staff obtained. UT Austin has an information site on the attack, as well as a way to contact their information security group to confirm if your information was compromised.

In the Old Testament, somewhere in Judges, there’s a story of how, after a battle, the Gileadite warriors needed to distinguish their own side and their enemies, the Ephraimites. They did not all know each other, but they asked anyone who tried to cross a river to pronounce the word “shibboleth”. Those who pronounced it wrong (as “Sibboleth”) were, as usually happens in Old Testament stories, killed.

Internet2 is sponsoring the Shibboleth project, http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/, which has a lot of interest from libraries as a way of handling the problem of identifying who’s a member of a group in a decentralized fashion. It’s designed to let me go to another university and assert that certain things are true, such as: (1) I am Rick Keir, and (2) I am a staff member at UW. The other school can validate these assertions because UW cooperates with the request, but the other school can’t arbitrarily ask “is Bill Humphries a staff member at UW”, because you didn’t request any service from them. Most of my personal information stays safely within UW; only the assertions I make about myself leave.

I could see a future in which Shibboleth servers were more widespread, and people would join Shib-circles just as they can be friends in the LiveJournal sense. Then I could go to, say, [someone's] journal, assert that “I am a Friend-of-Bill” and be let in, because [she] has decided to share part or all of her journal with the Friends of Bill.

Shibboleth is Open Sourced, so the Weblog community could start working with it.

Drupal offers more control over users and user permissions than Movable Type. It might do what’s needed for walled garden posting.

Drupal’s a nice system, but it doesn’t do what I really want: I’d like a system which does not require the user to set up an account. I’d like to get a token in the request that says “I’m Jane User, and here’s my assertation that I’m Jane User”, and since Jane User is my friend and her assertation could be verified (though a public directory, or because someone I trust has signed her key), she gains access to the friends and family-only materials on the server without signing in. And, the key piece is that this may be the first time she’s been on the site.

Live Journal can do that because all the journals are part of the application, and I sign on once. Any LJ user can recognize me as their friend, and I get access to their friends-only materials.

The godsawful piece is the public key infrastructure.

Using FOaF, authentication, and some modules bolted onto RSS, that would be a start.