Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Too Trusting

16 Comments

Spammers are starting to move into the social network sites:

Most social networks have internal messaging systems for communication between members. Petre’s group examined that of Facebook, which boasts 5 percent of the world’s population as its users. While Facebook has an antispam engine, the group found that it was better at filtering out phishing e-mails than preventing spam messages from getting through.

The group started by creating fake profiles to trick users into friending them. They created three profiles, one containing almost no information about the user, one with some information, and one with detailed information. They used those profiles to join popular groups and began sending out friend requests.

Within 24 hours, 85 users had accepted a request from the first profile, 108 from the second, and 111 from the third. Petre says that acceptances began to accelerate, since more than 50 percent of the time, users would accept the request if they shared a “mutual friend” with the fake profile. In some cases, he says, users would send a message asking for more information about how they knew this supposed new friend. The researchers didn’t respond to these requests, but in many cases, Petre says, users accepted the request anyway.

The researchers then posted a link without any explanation to the fake profiles’ walls, using a URL shortener to obscure where the link went. Almost 25 percent of the profiles’ “friends” visited the link, Petre says.

I am pretty picky about who I friend on Facebook. I will generally only accept people that I’ve met in meatspace, or at least had previous interactions with on line. Simply having mutual friends is not sufficient. I might friend someone who I don’t know if they provide a message explaining why they want to be my friend, but never if it’s simply a generic friend request. This just seems like basic common sense to me.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Liberty Over Big Government

3 Comments

Michael Barone writes about the Tea Parties and the great ongoing debate about the purpose of America:

The Progressives had their way for much of the 20th century. But it became apparent that centralized experts weren’t disinterested, but always sought to expand their power. And it became clear that central planners can never have the kind of information that is transmitted instantly, as Friedrich von Hayek observed, by price signals in free markets.

It turned out that centralized experts are not as wise and ordinary Americans are not as helpless as the Progressives thought. By passing the stimulus package and the health care bills the Democrats produced expansion of government. But voters seem to prefer expansion of liberty.

The Progressives’ scorn for the Founders has not been shared by the people. First-rate books about the Founders have been best-sellers. And efforts to dismiss the Founders as slaveholders, misogynists or homophobes have been outweighed by the resonance of their words and deeds.

The Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that “all men are created equal” with “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has proved to be happily elastic. It still sings to us today, thanks to the struggles and sacrifices of many Americans who gave blacks and women the equality denied to them in 1776.

In contrast, the early Progressives’ talk of an “industrial age” and an outmoded Constitution sounds like the language of an age now long past. Their faith in centralized planning seems naive in a time when one unpredicted innovation after another has changed lives for the better.

The “progressives” are retrogressive. A set of “elites” (who are elite only in terms of their power, not their intellect or competence) running the lives of the rest of society is the oldest idea in human history. It was opposition to such a notion on which the Constitution was based.

And central planning works no better with space policy than with any other.

Space

A Reusable Indian Rocket?

5 Comments

I don’t expect to see this thing fly into space any time soon. They don’t seem to be serious about it, as indicated by this:

“The RLV-TD will act as a flying test bed to evaluate various technologies like hypersonic flight, autonomous landing, powered cruise flight and hypersonic flight using air breathing propulsion. First in the series of demonstration trials is the hypersonic flight experiment (HEX),” it said.

“Powered cruise flight”? Of what value is that to getting into space (other than giving you azimuth and longitude flexibility)? Unless you can refuel it in flight, it will kill your performance.

I’ll repeat the three rules of aerospace vehicle design:

1) If you want to cruise, use an airbreather.

2) If you want to turn, use a wing.

3) If you want to accelerate, use a rocket.

In order to get to orbit, you have to accelerate.

[Update a few minutes later]

You’ll know that the Indians are serious about building reusable orbital vehicles when they start working on reusable suborbital vehicles.

Economics, Education, Political Commentary

Inflating The Education Bubble

41 Comments

The government student-loan takeover looks like it has a high potential for disaster:

…the bill’s student loan provisions will not save the $68 billion promised, and will move the country closer to a European-style socialism that has brought that continent stagnation. Going to a Soviet/U.S. Postal Service model of student-loan services goes against the sound maxim that competition is always better than monopoly. Moreover, the bill’s repayment terms will lead to increasing student-loan defaults, adding to the crushing fiscal burden on a government whose IOUs are now trusted less than those of some private corporations.

Third, the bill proceeds from a false premise. President Obama asserted Saturday that “by the end of this decade, we will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” Putting aside the nasty reality of a 45 percent six year college drop-out rate, the Labor Department forecasts that, over the next decade, there will be fewer new jobs requiring college degrees than there will be new college graduates.

But it continues to prop up Big Academia, which is supportive of all this continuing collectivism, so it has that going for it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Statesman Of The Year

7 Comments

Found by Howard Fineman:

So, just to clarify, some Democratic senator admitted to Fineman that he thinks the bill is political suicide, raises premiums for his constituents and feeds public anger, but voted for it anyway out of personal and party loyalty?

Gee, why would he want to remain anonymous?

[Late afternoon update]

More thoughts from Allahpundit:

And so the big Democratic surge in enthusiasm, which nutroots pundits insisted made passing O-Care an absolute political necessity, ends up being less than the surge in enthusiasm among Republicans — as expected. In fact, the GOP actually picked up a point on the generic ballot after the bill passed. They lead 49/45 now overall and 53/35 among independents. And so, I wonder: Did the left ever really believe that the mother of all welfare-state incursions would produce a stronger reaction among Democrats than Republicans? Or was that cynical garbage they were pushing in hopes that some of the dimmer lights in the Democratic caucus would be scared by it? Let the debate rage.

It seems moot now. They die was cast, and they’ll suffer the consequences this fall. And for another decade afterward, because they’re going to also lose a lot of legislatures and governors in a reapportionment year. Good.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!