A personal weblog of Ted Stein.
El Greco "Portrait of a Cardinal" ca. 1600
This guy was in charge of the Spanish Inquisition. By his feet, you will notice a memo, likely from Bybee and Yoo.
On a related note, the latest torture accountability profile is live: John Leso.
Rae Abileah assaulted by pro-AIPAC thugs
My friend Rae Abileah interrupted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to demand an end to Israeli war crimes. She was assaulted -- manhandled, thrown, pulled, and gagged -- by several (male) supporters of AIPAC. She was then taken to the hospital where she was arrested (but the people who assaulted her, as of yet, have not been arrested).
A quote from Rae, explaining why she spoke out, via Moral Low Ground:
“I have been to Gaza and the West Bank,” she said. “I have seen Palestinians’ homes bombed and bulldozed, I have talked to mothers whose children have been killed during the invasion of Gaza, I have seen the Jewish-only roads leading to ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank. This kind of occupation cannot continue… I feel obligated to rise up and speak out against these crimes being committed in my name and with my tax dollars."
I photographed the Move Over AIPAC protest (though not this incident).
Patriot Award
The Bill of Rights Defense Comittee honored me with their Patriot Award for my work with the Center for Torture Accountability.
A philosophy question: Drupal's cave (of internet trolls)
Philosophical questions surround trolls, but these two Drupal modules strike me as the fundamentally wrong approach: Caving trolls creates echo chambers (see slashdot and dailykos*) and misery crosses ethical boundaries.
* Neither slashdot or dailykos use Drupal or cave, but both implement the same strategy of hiding posts that disagree with the dominant ideology. A little time in their comments will show why that is a horrible approach.
Ted vs The Cloud
Amazon's 'cloud' service, which is relied on by many serious organizations as the answer to down-time, was just down for as many as 24 hours. Not sure if this is true, but, according to TIME, some of the data Amazon hosts for its clients is lost forever. The largest Drupal hosting company, Acquia, which hosts over 40,000 Drupal websites, had to issue an embarrassing public apology to all their clients.
Now, I own a small software shop that hosts about 60 Drupal websites. Over and over again, people have told me that I should move my hosting to 'the cloud' or one day I would lose all of my clients when my server goes down. And if my server were down for 24 hours, and I lost some of my client's data, I would expect many of them to leave. Hell, I would leave. But, two years into hosting Drupal sites, my company's hosting has never been down for more than a couple minutes and 'the cloud' is proving to be much less reliable than traditional dedicated servers.
Maybe the owners of 'the cloud' you use will do a better job than you at backing up data and ensuring uptime. Or, maybe not. They certainly aren't making any promises:
We are not responsible for any data loss or data corruption [...]
People talk about the cloud like it is magical. The cloud is just a computer that you don't control. That should send chills down your spine if you are in charge of technology for an organization working for social justice and you rely on the cloud.
In short, so far: Ted 1, Cloud 0.
Cesorship on FaceBook and YouTube
It is well known that Facebook and Google violate privacy with regularity. It is less well known that they censor whatever they feel like.
Two recent examples:
Large companies denying services is the new way to censor the internet. I am now convinced of the need for open source, distributed photo and video hosting, as well as an open source social network. Maybe even distributed DNS. If the internet is not free, neither are we.
Dr. Larry C. James, torturer
Doctors are supposed to heal, not torture. Dr. Larry C. James
Mining Twitter’s Treasures
A profile on me and my TwitterMiner software: Mining Twitter’s Treasures by Kira Newman
Holding torturers accountable, now with Drupal 7
The Center for Torture Accountability is now relaunched in Drupal 7.
Design by Annie Kim, theming and site building by Scot Self.
Twitter, the Arab revolutions, and Drupal
My most recent contributed Drupal module mines twitter for research, inspired by the recent Arab revolutions and this prototype:
Twitter Analytics by #Hashtag from VJ Um Amel on Vimeo.
And this video, also from the r-sheif project, provides an overview of Twitter semantic analysis, as well as some examples:
