Which will take us to the DC area for a very few days, before we go back to Miami.

Here is the picture:

The caption states, in full,

Election officials dressed as puppet theater characters guarded the ballot box on Wednesday at a polling station in Solo, Indonesia.

The New York Times vouchsafes us no explanation in the article, or in the deadpan caption, why an election official would dress up as a puppet theater character in order to guard a ballot box. Is this an Indonesian tradition? A joke? A routine thing?

I suppose it may have some virtue I’m not aware of — there seem to have been fewer problems in Indonesia than in the average Florida election, but even so I’d like to know what’s going on here.

After you have read these, ask yourself: what wouldn’t Sarah Palin lie about if she felt she had to?

It’s quite a list.

Example:

When we ask the head psychologist, who calls himself “Eldorado” after the car, about the effects of prolonged solitary confinement, he says: “You see a lot of depression and anxiety.”

But Smo interrupts: “There is no solitary confinement here. They just spend a lot of time alone in their cells.”

To make the point that the detainees want nothing to do with us, the head guard at Camp 5 takes us to a window where he opens a blind so we can see a detainee sitting about 25 feet away. The inmate immediately ties a black plastic bag to a fence to block our view.

“You see how they don’t want the media looking at them?” he says.

But we realize we are looking at a latrine and we have been invited to watch them defecate.

Example:

By January 2008, when Zanetti was there, detainees who weren’t designated as “maximum-security prisoners” were coming up with trivial complaints that showed how spoiled they were.

To make his point, Zanetti read to me from a daily briefing from the first week of April 2008: “Prisoner 765 wants onions and parsley on his salad; 845 wants a better detainee newsletter; 632 wants a Bowflex machine to build his abs.”

But, according to the master list of prisoner names and numbers provided by the Pentagon, prisoners 632 and 845 left Guantanamo in 2006, two years before the complaints, and the number 765 was never assigned to a prisoner. I left Zanetti several phone messages seeking clarification, but he hasn’t called back.

Well done, Ms. Laughlin. Don’t expect a job on the Washington Post.

Spotted via BoingBoing which has more background on the video. Apparently this is the first in a trilogy of videos that will help blacken the United Airlines brand.

And it’s catchy too.

Joe’s a real smart guy, with energy experience, so I imagine it’s a good fit.

I'm delighted to announce that starting later this month, I'll be taking on the duties of Washington Bureau Chief and Blogger for The Huffington Post.

This is a wonderful opportunity for me. It's a marvelous platform -- Arianna Huffington has built a large and thriving community of readers by adhering to the best principles of old and new media. And my new job gives me a chance to branch out a bit, while holding firm to my commitment to accountability journalism. Now I'll have a chance to work as part of a great team, and do a bit more of my own reporting as well as commentary and media criticism..

I'll still be writing frequently, but I'll also be guiding the Huffington Post's accomplished, enthusiastic and adventurous reporters; helping them continue covering Washington the way it should be covered. The extraordinary response to my departure from The Washington Post once again illustrated how much readers hunger for a new - or perhaps I should say old - method of political reporting: One that doesn't rely on stenography or "splitting the difference," but involves knowledgeable and trusted reporters calling things as they see them, speaking the truth -- and letting the chips fall where they may. We'll also be finding new and exciting ways to work with citizen journalists to access their wisdom and knowledge.

I look forward to working with all my new colleagues to hold the powerful accountable, expose corruption, explain how Washington really works -- and write about politics and government not as if it were just a game, but recognizing that it matters profoundly to every one of us.

I'm eager to hear your reaction and advice, as always. E-mail me at froomkin@gmail.com.

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has more about my move.

And one final note: I will continue serving in a part-time capacity as deputy editor of NiemanWatchdog.org.

I suppose McNamara deserves some credit for admitting what he did after the fact, but that’s not much to set aside the fact that he knew early the war was lost, or not winnable, and kept silent.

But are McNamara’s successors any less to blame? They seem to have learned nothing from his errors.

But unfortunately, in recent days someone has been abusing this for commercial purposes. I think it’s being done by hand, the IP numbers vary, and the messages did give me pause as they all seemed plausible.

But enough already.

Today I deleted comments bearing the following monikers and timestamps:

acai diet 2009-07-05 17:13:42
Bangkok hotels Thailand 2009-07-05 17:08:22
Beta alanine 2009-07-05 17:04:46
Paypal Vcc 2009-07-01 18:19:37
Option trading 2009-07-01 18:16:58
Gold Chain 2009-07-01 18:15:03
loans consolidate 2009-06-26 17:41:22
small businesses 2009-06-26 12:22:53
Natural Stone 2009-06-12 02:24:12

If one of those was you, and you’re a real person, please feel encouraged to resubmit it without a product name attached. Thank you.

New electricity meters being rolled out to millions of homes and businesses are riddled with security bugs that could bring down the power grid […]. The so-called smart meters for the first time provide two-way communications between electricity users and the power plants that serve them. Prodded by billions of dollars from President Obama’s economic stimulus package, utilities in Seattle, Houston, Miami, and elsewhere are racing to install them as part of a plan to make the power grid more efficient. Their counterparts throughout Europe are also spending heavily on the new technology. There’s just one problem: The newfangled meters needed to make the smart grid work are built on buggy software that’s easily hacked, said Mike Davis, a senior security consultant for IOActive. The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid.

(From The Register via !=’s Absolute power shuts off absolutely (with emphasis added))

Anyone seen one of these yet? This part doesn’t sound fun:

To prove his point, Davis and his IOActive colleagues designed a worm that self-propagates across a large number of one manufacturer’s smart meter. Once infected, the device is under the control of the malware developers in much the way infected PCs are under the spell of bot herders. Attackers can then send instructions that cause its software to turn power on or off and reveal power usage or sensitive system configuration settings.

via SFDB Ecard Of The Day by South Florida Daily Blog

Politically correct update: It’s been suggested to me that the message of the card above is the pernicious “wouldn’t it be a shame if women didn’t strip down to bathing suits on a winter holiday” rather than what I innocently took it to be, which was, “isn’t it nice to be able to go to the beach.” I’m guess I’m just naive.

Emergent Chaos: The Punch Line Goes at the End

Last year, the big cancellation was the team of MIT students who broke the Boston MBTA Charlie Card system. There was a legal injunction put against them that spoilt their presentation. The fault, in my opinion went to them for naming their talk, “How To Get Free Subway Rides For Life.”

Imagine that you are a judge who is interrupted from an otherwise pleasant Saturday by panicky people who want an injunction against a talk with such a dramatic NAME, you ll at least listen to them. You decide that sure, no harm to society will come from an injunction from Saturday til Monday, and you d be right. No harm came to society, DefCon was merely a little less interesting.

Now imagine that you are the same judge and you re asked for an injunction against the talk, A Practical Cryptanalysis of the Mifare Chip as Implemented in the MBTA. That one can wait until Monday, and the talk goes on.

In a similar gedanken experiment, imagine that you are the VP of Corporate Communications for the XYZ ATM Corp. You learn that in a few weeks, someone is going to do ATM Jackpot with one of your ATMs in some show in Vegas. Despite the fact that someone else in the company approved it, what do you? You pressure them to cancel. Duh. If you don t, then you re going to spend most of August reassuring people about your products, your boss is going to be really ticked at you after all, isn t it the job of Corporate Communications to control these things? , and it s just going to be no fun. This is also why you re paid the big bucks, to make embarrassments go away.

This is why if you are a researcher, you do not NAME your talk, ATM Jackpot you NAME it Penetration Testing of Standalone Financial Services Systems. It is only on stage that you fire up the flashing lights and clanging bells and make the ATM spit out C-notes for minutes on end. That would get you all the publicity for your talk that you want, and you actually get to give it. Remember, do as I say, not as I do. If you have a flashy Black Hat talk, put the punch line at the end of the joke.

But impressed as I am with the acuity of the analysis, I’d like to know why the site caused a cross-site scripting attack warning to come up when I auto-pasted the above into my blog. First time ever that has happened.

But if it failed, it would fail horribly….

One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar.

I guess that statement requires a bit of explanation.

The topic of Corporate Finance/Capital Markets is, even within the world of the Dismal Science, a exceptionally dry and boring subject matter, encumbered by complex mathematic models and obscure economic theory.

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.” And thus began our ten-week course.

This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention - by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly checksum new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact. Early in the quarter, the Lie of the Day was usually obvious - immediately triggering a forest of raised hands to challenge the falsehood. Dr. K would smile, draw a line through that section of the board, and utter his trademark phrase “Very good! In fact, the opposite is true. Moving on … ”

As the quarter progressed, the Lie of the Day became more subtle, and many ended up slipping past a majority of the students unnoticed until a particularly alert person stopped the lecture to flag the disinformation. Every once in a while, a lecture would end with nobody catching the lie which created its own unique classroom experience - in any other college lecture, end of the class hour prompts a swift rush of feet and zipping up of bookbags as students make a beeline for the door; on the days when nobody caught the lie, we all sat in silence, looking at each other as Dr. K, looking quite pleased with himself, said with a sly grin: “Ah ha! Each of you has one falsehood in your lecture notes. Discuss amongst yourselves what it might be, and I will tell you next Monday. That is all.” Those lectures forced us to puzzle things out, work out various angles in study groups so we could approach him with our theories the following week.

(there’s more)

Previously: I Wonder if this Teaching Technique Would Work In Law School

This case mattered, because the government’s legal theory would have turned every violation of a private firm’s terms of service into a crime. Yes, that bad.

Case dismissed against woman in MySpace hoax that led to teen’s suicide

A federal judge tentatively decided today to dismiss the case against a Missouri woman who had been convicted of computer fraud stemming from an Internet hoax that prompted a teenage girl to commit suicide.

Lori Drew of Dardenne Prairie, Mo., was convicted in November of three misdemeanor counts of illegally accessing a protected computer.

The decision by U.S. District Judge George H. Wu will not become final until his written ruling is filed, probably next week. Wu said he was concerned that if Drew was found guilty of violating the terms of service in using MySpace, anyone who violated the terms could be convicted of a crime.

Congratulations to Orin Kerr, who worked pro bono for this result.

See also article at wired.com.