I've made significant headway in the past few days. The code to write posts, save them as either drafts or published posts, and then edit their entries as either drafts or posts and save those is complete. Some of it needs a bit more testing, namely the code concerning the editing and saving of existing entries, but it's pretty stable at this point. All of that is the bulk of JAM (Jabber Administrative Machine), so within a week or two JAM should be complete, and I should be working on scripts for the main portion of Jabberwocky.

I've gotten some work done coding the brand-spanking new template system (which will make design changes far easier) and JAM (Jabber Admininstrative Machine). Haven't done much on the design yet. It will be sleek, and pretty monochrome unless I change my general idea again before I start designing in earnest.

Oh, and there will be one rather major change in 1.0. No more commenting. Sorry. It annoys me, and I'm tired of it.

I really must start developing Jabberwocky again. I have so many good ideas. I just need to find some time to develop and code. And a work ethic. I need to find one of those somewhere. Of course, I should probably get around to doing Fusion Muse for Mrs. Castellano also. Maybe she'll still pay me. I need money.

According to a recent Times article, Bush is proposing a centralized system that will allow the government to monitor all activity on the internet, in realtime. The proposal is part of the draft of "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace." The final version of the report is due out early next year.

Two major holes in the proposal:
1] The plan specifies that it would require the cooperation of all ISP's to build the system, but gives no indication of how the system would be paid for. Would ISP's eat the cost, or would the government subsidize it? If ISP's are forced to pay, it would likely result in higher prices for us consumers, particularly customers of smaller independent companies.
2] The plan gives no indication of what laws or rules would control the government's access to or use of the information if could be tracking, recording, filtering, and viewing using this system.

A quote from an official of a major data services company concerning the proposal: "Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet."

I'm including the entire article below because in case I or anyone else wants to view it after the Times has archived it.

THE ARTICLE

The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board is preparing the report, and it is intended to create public and private cooperation to regulate and defend the national computer networks, not only from everyday hazards like viruses but also from terrorist attack. Ultimately the report is intended to provide an Internet strategy for the new Department of Homeland Security.

Such a proposal, which would be subject to Congressional and regulatory approval, would be a technical challenge because the Internet has thousands of independent service providers, from garage operations to giant corporations like American Online, AT&T, Microsoft and Worldcom.

The report does not detail specific operational requirements, locations for the centralized system or costs, people who were briefed on the document said.

While the proposal is meant to gauge the overall state of the worldwide network, some officials of Internet companies who have been briefed on the proposal say they worry that such a system could be used to cross the indistinct border between broad monitoring and wiretap.

Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who represents some of the nation's largest Internet providers, said, "Internet service providers are concerned about the privacy implications of this as well as liability," since providing access to live feeds of network activity could be interpreted as a wiretap or as the "pen register" and "trap and trace" systems used on phones without a judicial order.

Mr. Baker said the issue would need to be resolved before the proposal could move forward.

Tiffany Olson, the deputy chief of staff for the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, said yesterday that the proposal, which includes a national network operations center, was still in flux. She said the proposed methods did not necessarily require gathering data that would allow monitoring at an individual user level.

But the need for a large-scale operations center is real, Ms. Olson said, because Internet service providers and security companies and other online companies only have a view of the part of the Internet that is under their control.

"We don't have anybody that is able to look at the entire picture," she said. "When something is happening, we don't know it's happening until it's too late."

The government report was first released in draft form in September, and described the monitoring center, but it suggested it would likely be controlled by industry. The current draft sets the stage for the government to have a leadership role.

The new proposal is labeled in the report as an "early-warning center" that the board says is required to offer early detection of Internet-based attacks as well as defense against viruses and worms.

But Internet service providers argue that its data-monitoring functions could be used to track the activities of individuals using the network.

An official with a major data services company who has been briefed on several aspects of the government's plans said it was hard to see how such capabilities could be provided to government without the potential for real-time monitoring, even of individuals.

"Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to track incidents while they are occurring," the official said.

The official compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet wiretap system used by the F.B.I., saying: "Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet."

One former federal Internet security official cautioned against drawing conclusions from the information that is available so far about the Securing Cyberspace report's conclusions.

Michael Vatis, the founding director of the National Critical Infrastructure Protection Center and now the director of the Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth, said it was common for proposals to be cast in the worst possible light before anything is actually known about the technology that will be used or the legal framework within which it will function.

"You get a firestorm created before anybody knows what, concretely, is being proposed," Mr. Vatis said.

A technology that is deployed without the proper legal controls "could be used to violate privacy," he said, and should be considered carefully.

But at the other end of the spectrum of reaction, Mr. Vatis warned, "You end up without technology that could be very useful to combat terrorism, information warfare or some other harmful act."

Today was the nifty little trip to ibm with miller, rizzo, and chris, and that trip was incredible. After being a bit delayed by going to the wrong watson research center, in the wrong town, we got to the thing. One James Wynne ran the event, which is interesting since my family kind of knows him. He's an ibm fellow, one of the guys who discovered - nay, invented - laser eye surgery, so i'm a bit impressed by him to say the least. He told us about some very cool things, including a new form of data storage and molecular logic ciruits. All of the attending students got little awards congratulating them on their efforts. Rizzo also gace chris and i custom awards, so i was awarded today for both "noteworthy achievement in math" and "best toe to holiday coordination."

Part of the trip was going to one of three lab tours. I went to one about 3d modelling and imaging. Very cool. I got to see some of ibm's computers and equipment in action, which was so great. Just hearing ibm fellows speak was incredible. The place was full of classic geeks: awkward, and with the weirdest senses of humor.

The best part of the trip came after the lab tour, when we went back to the room we started in. I introduced myself to James Wynn, and explained to him the connection between us. We talked for a bit, and he then took mr. miller (whom i've never had) out of the room for a few minutes and talked to him. When he came back in, he asked me to talk with him for a second outside of the room. Then he asked me if i knew who benoit mandelbrot was, to which i responded "you mean the benoit mandelbrot? Of course i know who he is!" Or something along those lines. He tells me that mandelbrot uses students part time to do clerical work for him to help him with his research, and he's gonna pass my number on to him and ask him if he wants me. ohpleaseohpleaseohplease.

One embarrasing little anecdote occured earlier in the trip while we were all having lunch. Wynne put a problem up on the projector that he said had been judged extremely difficult in some math competion. The gist of the problem was that a squirrel ran up a tree in a circular pattern and and you had to figure out how far he ran. I set to work immediately, and i knew i knew what i was doing. When i got my answer, wynne said that i had been close but not quite there. He thought there was something wrong in my thinking, but there wasn't, only my calculations. I realized after some kids from jfk went up and showed their correct answer that i had only made one very small, and one very crucial, mistake: i had used c instead of c squared in pythagoras' theorem. Dammit.