Category: Politics

Is this what political will looks like?

Smoke on the freeway by TonyGman

To quote the photographer:

This is the Perris, Ca, 215 northbound south of perris blvd during the morning commute. This would normally be a bright time of the day, but this morning, traffic was a little stop and go due to the smoke from the local fires here in southern california.

A little understated, perhaps?

As awful as all this was, I have to wonder if this is what it will take to get people to take climate change seriously. Unfortunately even people who realize that we have a major problem on our hands are often overwhelmed by the thing, and tend to add it to the long list of Bad Things That Mostly Affect Someone Else (AIDS in Africa, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, even Shrub’s fiasco in Iraq) and change the channel.

This is particularly sad because climate change is one of those things that Americans can do something about quite directly. It’s pretty hard for me to make a major difference in a lot of situations (although that’s no excuse for not trying), but climate change is all about my behavior. I can drive less (or not at all). I can replace incandescent bulbs with CFs and turn them off when I leave the room. I can turn down the thermostat. I can support alternative energy programs. I can purchase carbon offsets. I can avoid buying produce that flew half way around the world. I can reduce, reuse, recycle. And if even some of the rest of you do the same, we make a significant difference. We probably won’t solve the problem by ourselves, but we can start the ball rolling, proving that there is support for change at the consumer (and voter) level.

It’s arguably one of the best examples of where “Think Globally, Act Locally” can really make a profound difference.

Unfortunately important things like not driving and skipping the raspberries flown in from remote lands comes at a personal inconvenience. This requires will which, sadly, is typically driven by fear. So maybe we need a few scares like this (along with tragedies like Katrina) to generate the kind of immediacy and fear necessary to get us out of our single-occupant SUVs.

Best hope we turn things around before the tragedy comes to your home, though.

Thanks to TonyGman for the great photo.

Tags: change, climate change, Photography, Politics, Think Globally Act Locally, transport

Related posts

Loose lips (still) sink ships

Frozen Solid Security Monkey by Monkey River Town

I suspect many of our readers will already have seen something about this, but just in case it hasn’t gotten a lot of U.S. press, Chancellor Alistair Darling (a very high ranking member of the British government) announced today in the House of Commons that 2 discs (CDs or DVDs – I’m not sure) were lost that contained highly confidential information for 25 Million Individuals. This data included names, dates of birth, insurance numbers, and (in some cases) bank account details — essentially all the toys you’d need to execute identity theft and fraud on a massive scale. The kind of stuff that an organized crime outfit would probably pay mucho top dollar for.

And the data was unencrypted.

Yup.

Unencrypted.

Makes you want to cry.

(In fairness, the discs were “password protected”, but no one seems clear on what that actually means. Given that most password systems for discs and files are child’s play to get through, without solid encryption on the other end “password protected” doesn’t offer much comfort.)

Unfortunately, as several of the talking heads pointed out, this is at some level inevitable as governments, corporations, and educational institutions move to larger and more centralized databases. Consider, for example, last year’s leak of the search histories of half a million AOL users.

The U of M at least tries to take these things seriously, but they don’t always get the stick by the right end. There’s a lot of noise, for example, about whether faculty like myself should be able to hold confidential student data (including things like homework grades) on our office computers or (far worse) on laptops or home computers. This is partly a security concern (stolen laptops are always a risk, who knows how well I’ve configured and updated my computers), and partly a data protection concern (how often do I actually backup my data). If they seriously go down this road, however, then one consequence is that all this grade data for the entire University is in one place. At the moment, if my computer gets lost or destroyed or stolen, there’s not much exposure. It would be painful and unpleasant for me and several dozen students, but the ripples would stop pretty quickly. If all that data is centralized, however, then the risk is arguably much greater, especially if it’s not managed well.

In reality, I’m not their real problem. I just don’t have access (and rightly so) to enough data to mess up very many people’s lives. There are admin and support staff, however, that have access to enormous amounts of sensitive information. Are they able to burn a couple of DVDs full of the stuff? Probably (but hopefully not easily). Are they trained on why that would be a really dumb idea? I think so.

But then I would have thought that staff at Revenue and Customs over here would have had that sort of training.

And apparently I would have been wrong.

Thanks to the fine folks at MonkeyRiverTown for the great photo.

Tags: computers, data protection, Education, Politics, privacy, security

Related posts