by Rhona Mahony. Google revealed last week that network intruders have read email messages in the Google accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Someone–still unknown–is determined to spy on Chinese dissidents. Other someones are determined to identify undercover police officers, ferret out employees who secretly inform the police about their company’s crimes, and stalk their own wives who have left home to escape battering. Hundreds of volunteers are now running an Internet service for people who need to protect their privacy. The service is called Tor, the Onion Router. Anyone can provide Tor, for free. Anyone can use Tor to protect his privacy, for free.

Bill McGonigle, of Lebanon, New Hampshire, decided to become a Tor volunteer when he learned that people in Iran were protesting the results of their June Presidential election. They were using the Internet to organize their meetings. The Iranian government was trying to censor their messages to one another. “I have a soft-spot for people trying to gain liberty for themselves,” he wrote in an email, “especially against tyrannical regimes. It became known that they were using Tor to get around the censorship, so at that point I put up a relay….The people I’d like to help are those living under violence-based oppression, most commonly orchestrated by dangerous and corrupt individuals posing as legitimate governments. I’d like to see an end to oppression wherever it exists.”

Get Tor

To become a volunteer, download this software.
To use Tor to protect your own privacy, download this software Continue reading →

by Rhona Mahony. Last Thursday, December 5, I brought five ounces (140 grams) of old-fashioned black gunpowder to San Francisco airport. I also brought along a boarding pass for United flight 720 to Denver that I had created at home, in an computer art program. TSA agents accepted the boarding pass. They also took no notice at all of the gunpowder. Accepting the boarding pass was reasonable. Boarding passes that we design and print at home look just like ones designed by the airlines that we print at home. I had thought, though, that I might elicit a short conversation about the gunpowder. Mind you, I had packed the stuff safely. It was in three separate jars: one of charcoal, one of sulphur, and one of saltpetre (potassium nitrate). Each jar was labeled: Charcoal, Sulphur, Saltpetre. I had also thoroughly wet down each powder with tap water. No ignition was possible. As a good citizen, I had packed the resulting pastes into a quart-sized “3-1-1″ plastic bag, along with my shampoo and hand cream. This bag I took out of my messenger bag and put on top of my bin of belongings, turned so that the labels were easy for the TSA inspector to read.

It was my suitcase that caught the attention of the TSA fellow watching the baggage X-ray monitor. He frowned. Then he waved over a stocky TSA co-worker. The co-worker picked up my suitcase and carried it down to me at the end of the conveyor belt. “Anything sharp or fragile in here?,” he asked. “Not that I can think of,” I said. What had the first fellow seen? Continue reading →

Shai Agassi plans to sell purely electric cars to people unwilling to pay one red cent extra for anything green. His company, Better Place (BP), will be fully set up in Israel by 2011, he says, in Denmark about six months after that, and in Australia about a year after Denmark. San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsome, who has just bought a Tesla Roadster, hopes to bring Better Place cars to his city. The cars, though, need a dense network of special battery-swap and charging stations to work. San Franciscans might not want a car that can’t be driven far from home. Once a driver has passed the last electron-filling station, she can only drive 50 miles (80 km) before turning back for a refill.

Required to be Better

The Better Place car looks sensible on an island, where drivers will feel constrained by geography, not their batteries. The island must have high taxes on internal-combustion cars, a supplier of electricity willing to communicate often with the electron filling machines or their masters, and drivers who will accept a bossy electronic nanny in their car. More such islands exist in the world than one might first guess.

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by Rhona Mahony. In The Jungle Effect, Daphne Miller has described her travels to places in the world where very few people get sick with heart disease (Crete), Type 2 diabetes (Copper Canyon, Mexico), depression (Iceland), colon cancer (Cameroon), and cancers of the bowel, breast, and prostate (Okinawa). She is a family-practice physician in San Francisco. Her immigrant patients pointed out to her the contrast between their traditional diet and superior health when visiting relatives back home and their regimen of donuts and weight gain after coming back to the U.S. Dr. Miller decided to follow the clues herself.

In the disease “cold spots” that she visited, she found people eating the foods that their great-grandparents had eaten, prepared in the old ways. The animals they eat also live as they did 200 years ago, either wild or domesticated but unconfined.

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by Rhona Mahony. Maybe. The most remarkable thing, though, about violence in the United States between spouses and lovers over the last 15 years has been its decline. In these charts from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, we see the trend.

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by Rhona Mahony. Small, inexpensive laptop computers from Asus, Acer, HP, Dell, and other companies have been selling well. Many people have found that the low price and portability of these Lilliputian machines outweigh the inconvenience of squinting at a seven-inch (18-cm) display and relearning to type on a child-sized keyboard. At least one famous tall person, Stephen Fry, whose hands are presumably large if not Brobdingnagian, has publicly announced his delight with his Asus EEE PC. Those of us with weak eyes and stubbornly unretrainable fingers, however, have been left out of the fun. Why don’t companies offer a tiny, $300, 20-watt, stand-alone computer into which one can plug a comfortable keyboard and the actually legible display of one’s choice? Such computers do exist. Like their tiny laptop cousins, they require honest assessment of one’s computing needs. In return, they offer several unexpected advantages over a conventional desktop PC.
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Since August, well-organized crowds of hundreds of aggrieved debtors have stood at the entrances–and prevented the opening–of courthouses in Northampton, Springfield, Worcestor, Athol, and Great Barrington in western Massachusetts. On the first occasion, a farmer and Army veteran, Luke Day, stood on the courthouse steps holding a petition asking the judges not to execute any more foreclosures or debt processes until the protesters could meet with state legislators to craft relief for borrowers. Fifteen hundred men stood with Day. Most of the police officers accompanying the judges sympathized with the debtors and declined to make arrests. The judges, prudent men, went home. Continue reading →

by Rhona Mahony. I’ve written here (“Water is Precious, Poop is Priceless”) about the advantages of dry toilets. They conserve potable water. They produce organic fertilizer. Those results are good, because many people in the world don’t have clean water to drink. Instead, they get sick. What’s more, many poor countries spend scarce foreign exchange to import synthentic fertilizer. Experiments with different kinds of dry toilets and collection systems can take place anywhere, at many scales. It is possible that advocates of dry toilets might not be merely loony, tree-kissing ascetics trying to take the fun out of our bathrooms. Finding a smart way to dispose of, and even make use of, human manure for the 21st Century could have big pay-offs.

I want to test how practical it really is to lug buckets of sawdust and human manure around the house. My test is easy in one way: I am the only person in my family of five using the dry toilet. That leaves me with one-fifth the lugging. It is harder in one way, though, from the experience of someone whose town is collecting the toilet contents. I am doing my own composting. Continue reading →

by Rhona Mahony. In three weeks, Americans will elect a new President, They’ll also elect new Senators, Congressional representatives, and many state and local officials. Voters in six U.S. states, though, will vote on “direct-recording” electronic (DRE) machines that produce no paper print-out that can be used to double check the accuracy of the machine. Voters in 29 other states may get a paper print-out but, like those in the paperless states, will have no way of knowing how error-prone or easy to manipulate their DRE voting machine is. (See VerifiedVoting.org.) Independent tests of voting machines–done outside the closed labs of the manufacturers–have not been encouraging. Last year, Debra Bowen, California’s Secretary of State, asked computer scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, to help her staff do a “Top-to-Bottom Review” of many of the voting machines that we have been using in California. The result? Ms. Bowen’s team found that machines from Diebold (now Premier Election), Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia were so inaccurate or so insecure or both, that they have “decertified” the machines. If you don’t live in California, you may find yourself looking at one of those duds on November 4.

Better Security with Transparent Software

Should we throw our votes into a black hole? Should we let vote-stealers snicker at us? There may be a better way.

Computer engineer Alan Dechert and his colleagues are offering a system that they call “Open Voting.” It prints out a paper ballot that the voter can read over herself. The ballot has a bar code Continue reading →

by Rhona Mahony. When I was a child, back in the late Renaissance, I often saw drawings of three monkeys: one covering its eyes, one covering its ears, the third covering its mouth. The monkeys illustrated an ancient proverb, of surprisingly murky origin. They advised us that to stay pure and safe, we should see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. I am pure and safe enough. I prefer these monkeys:

Thanks to Bruce Kitess for his photo.