dubious.biz(ness)

I was originally going to write about how stupid FAFSA is, as that’s really what I’m annoyed with right now, but perhaps later I will. I have been distracted by coming to the blog and seeing another thousand comments awaiting moderation for me about poker and porno.

Maybe I hadn’t been clear as to how this worked before, but I have unfortunately had to turn off the ability to immediately post comments to my blog, instead they have to wait my approval. This is good, because it means that I (eventually) read every single one of them, but the problem stems from a few “bad apples” on the Internet who have decided to abuse the ability to publish comments to blogs by getting together a few computers and “comment spamming” blogs with links to various sites we would never knowingly go to. These sites then rise in the rankings for search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Google because more sites are linking to them.

So unfortunately I have to delete them manually. This was entertaining at first, but now is a dull drudgery identical to the one I have to perform on my email which as you might guess is well-spammed. Unfortunately, just as the case with email, it is nearly impossible to stop all spam as the system wasn’t designed to be used to verify the sender’s address and to accept it based on their legitimacy.

However what comment spam exposes is the fact that email is not the only place this sort of junk is posted, it is posted nearly everywhere on every medium on the Internet. The main problem is that the Internet and most other computer networks for that matter were never designed for the sort of stresses they are being put through right now. But why not? Why didn’t someone forsee the ability to forge the sender’s address information and send mail to millions of recipients? Well the simple fact of the matter is that programmers are, by and large limited by time and budget.

What really surprises me is that not a single organization or agency has stepped up to take care of the problem. When cars became popular, highways became necessary. When air travel was popular, traffic control was necessary. Yet the Internet has enjoyed a relatively regulation free existence despite its well-known DoD birth and childhood.

I think that a lot of this has to do with the importance placed on the Internet’s need for anonyminity. And frankly I like the anonymous nature of the Internet when it works for me. But I do not like the idea that there is literally no way to find the identity of people who are criminally annoying if not criminals.

It would seem that the only way to remain socially anonymous and yet prevent annoying people from doing annoying things would be to make computers more intelligent, to prevent them from doing the things that we all find annoying. There is, in fact, an architecture developed by Intel and Microsoft that would at least stop most spyware, adware, and zombie computers who annoy their owners and other Internet users by preventing, in hardware, the execution of programs which are not verified to be safe with a digital signature unique to that program. Of course this would require independent verification from a very powerful third party but would prevent most spyware from running.

But, guess who hates the idea of that sort of a system: computer geeks. We don’t like the idea of a third party that determines what we can and can’t do with our computers. And we don’t want our personal identity associated with our actions online either. We think that the burden should fall, well, somewhere else. Probably on the service provider, but frankly we haven’t thought that far ahead and really just don’t want anything to change.

And yet, we sit here bitching. The real reason nothing has been done is because of the stalemate created by the nerds who made the Internet. They don’t want to make it more professional and more legitimate and because of this a lot of important problems are being addressed in technologically complicated and inefficent ways (although these ways definitely sell computers and software).

Take for example, spam filtering. The current style of spam filtering relies on commercial software the looks at all the properties of every single message one by one and analyze the sender, the sender’s ip address, the subject, body, keywords, URLs, photos, and so on in a very complex algorithm, and often it is “artificial intelligence” style with constantly changing learned criteria from previous messages that were marked spam by users. This is certainly an impressive waste of computing power, but why can’t email be verified back to a single person or computer whose trust could be verified.

This would require a lot of forethought and planning to change over, but it is certainly easier than a faulty algorithm that has perhaps 98% accuracy while also dropping 1% of legitimate mail.

However, this doesn’t solve comment spam. Nor would it solve the sorts of spam that we haven’t even encountered yet. Nearly any medium could be spammed. Text messages, cell phone calls, web sites, the list is endless. What is really needed is, unfortunately, not verification of the computer, but verification of the intent of the human pressing the button. While it may seem draconian, as long as people can easily use media to present unwanted material to people, usually at little or no cost to themselves, we will continue to be annoyed. More importantly, we will continue to be hacked, hassled, and harmed.

The only real solution to preventing abuse on a network is establishing a multitiered system of trust, which requires first a system of authentication (verifying someone’s identity) followed by authorization (allowing them to do something or access something), and accounting (recording what and when they do things). This sort of system, shortened to AAA, is the basis of most computer security systems and is brutally effective in most cases. It is over 20 years old and by no means my creation.

However, AAA is completely lacking on the Internet, because of the self imposed condition of annoyminity that we computer geeks are forcing on the populace at large because of our ideals. It is time to drop the romantic idea of an annoymous medium and start imposing some classic security design on the Internet, and frankly the sooner the better.

Anyone can feel free to remind me of this in twenty years when we live under fear of the thought police and big brother, I realize the pandora’s box I may be suggesting, but I am not sure the current pandora’s box is any better than this one. At the very least we are protecting the most vulnerable and least protected by preventing criminals from taking advantage of their insecurity.

As for FAFSA, I believe that only the government can create such ridiculous forms with illogical and arbitrary requirements. Despite the fact that I am independent and provide for myself with my own job, according to questions 48-54 of the dear FAFSA, I am required to give them all the information for my parents since I was born after January 1, 1982. Nowhere in the ridiculous form did it as if I lived on my own, paid my own bills, claimed myself, was not dependent, and so on. However, had I been married and 18 I would have been considered independent. I’m not sure that I can even comprehend the logic behind this… but unfortunately it screws my chances of government grants.

Further it uses the ridiculous tax returns, which frankly smack to me of old boy system bureaucracy. Why is it that business owners can deduct nearly everything while employed folks are stuck footing the bill? Oh bother, I could continue but why. Anyway, FAFSA is in for better or worse.

I have an offer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have an offer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

B+ (3.33/4.00 GPA) at EKU and I am accepted. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Oh, yeah, that and a few thou pounds. Heheheheheh.

And the funniest part, the damned thing was posted on 31 December 2004. So its been “somewhere” since last year and just decided to land on my door.

It also comes with strange, sternly worded warnings about having lots of money and spending it and so on. Anyway, I am going to go party. Actually I going to go work, but all the same.

Today is probably a monumental day as it marks the first day of school for me as I’m going to the lovely town of Richmond at 8:00am to go to school. I’m taking three classes this semster there, Physics 131 (College Physics I), Computer Science 191 (Advanced C), and Math 224 (Calculus II). Of all of them I have the biggest fear of Calc II, and the most comfort with Physics, but unfortunately Physics is at 8:00am four days a week.

So needless to say I am logging a lot of miles. I don’t think my car appreciates it. She likes short drives, ones that barely warm her coolant, not long Interstate cruises. Further she likes to tempt me and Smokey Bear likes that and I don’t like Smokey. Speaking of which, EKU is a policeman factory. It makes you want to break the law, doesn’t it?

I shouldn’t even have to mention, but to those asking, no word from Cambridge. Last time, everyone on the internet chat rooms either had an invitation to interview, a rejection, or was ready to kill themselves and kept posting “WHERE IS MY LETTER” and “SHOULD I CALL THEM??????” but of course we’re all to chicken to call (well I just don’t want to drop the $.20 unless it’s justified so I’m prepared for a long wait again.

However, one issue which I have been ignoring for better or worse because of all the other changes roiling about is, shall we say, funding. Specifically it is scholarship time. I need to send off scholarship and aid letters and pray. There are very few scholarships I am eligible for because I am a white middle class male with no disabilities. Were I a poor hispanic woman with a lisp (speech impediment), I would probably be able to gather up about $100,000. I am not being sarcastic. Nearly every single scholarship appeals to a very small demographic, or it is an essay contest about toilet paper. Essay contests are impossible to win in bulk and I lack the sort of fill-in-the-”other”-bubble profile to win the special interest scholarships.

Even the adult-oriented scholarships generally specify “women” or “divorced” or “single parent,” and I while I understand the difficult sacrifice that you have to make to go back to school in any of those conditions it’s simply not me, and means there isn’t a huge amount of money for me to look at. Were I a divorced single parent adult poor hispanic woman with a lisp, I would be in a wonderful situation and I imagine that Ed McMahon would be handing me giant checks and sacks of money would arrive in my mailbox. However, I am Italian (a little), so I think I can apply for the “What it means to be Italian” scholarship. I wonder if they mind if I mixed in some English, German, and Irish blood? Probably not, I’m sure.

So my best hope now is to consider the possibility, as my boss likes to remind me, of graduating college with $90k of debt. I don’t honestly intend on graduating with $90k of debt. No bank is stupid enough to lend that much money to someone who hasn’t even gotten a job yet, but I will probably leave with a very very high debt load.

Of course, I shouldn’t count my chickens just yet, as there are definitely some finance options that I can get while I’m there, like a partial sponsorship by a company or a scholarship in my second or third year. Of course that would take stellar, standout achievement within a group of high achievers. Further there are a few scholarships that don’t list their dollar amounts online and a very few of them are specific to american study in england. Finally, there are general awards that I can try for based on the fact that I am already at EKU. Where there is a will there is a way. I guess we’ll just have to start sending letters off and see.

This is probably long overdue. As many of you know, Sintha went back to Indonesia at the beginning of December and of course that corner of the world got hit by a big tsunami. No news there. For anyone that is wondering, Sintha is OK, she is on the island of Java, which is directly south of Sumatra and Sumatra’s northern coast got the brunt of the tsunami, which Banda Aceh getting the very worst.

I guess since Sintha was the one that told me about it I wasn’t concerned about her. I didn’t really read the news and didn’t stop to comprehend nearly complete devastation of that area until later I got back to Lexington. I think that anything that happens in Vegas, even in the real world, has a quality of surreality. Or perhaps it’s just me. So I think I took that news as I would take in “Paris” or “Venice” or “New York”…

Unfortunately for all those souls it is anything but an illusion. I would like to say a few things about that area. I have not been there, but I do know quite a bit about it. I also plan on going so, tsunami or bust. Southeast Asian has for a long time been the redheaded stepchild of the US. Much like Mexico, it is often touched by areas of great wealth but lacks any real wealth of its own. In previous times all of these countries have been home to great dynasties of wealth and power, however during the world colonization in the past 400 years they were traded, farmed, and abused for their natural and human resources.

Unfortunately, it would appear that everything in the path of this tsunami has been dealt another setback. The billions of dollars that have been committed do not bring back the enormous human life that has been extinguished. As well, the billions of dollars will not likely repair the economies of these countries. The relatively small sum of lives lost in the 9/11 attacks warranted an outpouring of billions and billions of dollars to fight nebulous terrorists, and I would say that fighting terror (as in fighting being scared) is about as effective as fighting tsunamis. However, where this money can go, and where it should go, is into rebuilding these countries to return a sembalance of normalcy and to try to put them back on their feet.

Unfortunately we seem more interested in buying shiny new bombers than bags of rice. I don’t necessarily think that the US Government’s job should be footing the bill for every disaster, but I do think that the honorable thing to do is to bear the burden. I think that we shouldn’t be shadowboxing either. I’d like a tax cut, a reasonable economy, and a safe homeland. I’d also like, when possible, to help those in need. Not kill those in need of being killed, but save those in need of being saved. If there could be (which it doesn’t seem likely at this point) a “new liberal thinking” it should be along those lines. The much vaunted “second bill of rights” and “new new deal” is playing out of an empty hand.

I for one am going to donate money that I don’t really have to spend because of this simple fact: $100 dollars buys approximately 1/3 of a ton of rice in Indonesia. That is a significant amount of food for people who have just lost their families, their jobs, and their way of life. And furthermore, I’m going to donate it in two months, when everyone has forgotten about this story and moved on to the next big shocker.