Goodbye Big Mac cost-of-living indicators, hello Peace Index:

The Economist Intelligence Unit measured countries’ peacefulness based on wide range of indicators – 24 in all – including ease of access to “weapons of minor destruction” (guns, small explosives), military expenditure, local corruption, and the level of respect for human rights.

[…]

The main findings of the Global Peace Index are:

— Peace is correlated to indicators such as income, schooling and the level of regional integration
— Peaceful countries often shared high levels of transparency of government and low corruption
— Small, stable countries which are part of regional blocs are most likely to get a higher ranking

Lack of corruption? Education? Regional blocs? Ouch. It is like the index was created just to make countries like the US, Israel, Russia and Nigeria look bad.

The US comes in at 96th place, but I am certain someone will try and point out that the top 95 owe their spot to the bad-cop behavior of America. There is no proof of that, of course, any more than a bully in school creates peace in the yard. The underlying problem is one of defining fair governance and representation rather than right by might.

Hard to avoid noticing where Japan and Germany are on the list…near the top.

Speaking of governance and regulation, it appears Germany has just tried to ban “hacking tools”:

On Friday night the German Bundestag – the lower chamber of Germany’s federal parliament – passed without amendment a controversial government bill designed to facilitate criminal prosecution of computer crimes. Only the Left Party voted against it. At a hearing in March security experts and representatives of IT companies raised many objections all of which have been turned down.

It becomes an offence to create, sell, distribute or even aquire so called Hacker Tools that are built to conduct criminal acts like aquiring illegal access to protected data. It is feared by many that this might keep administrators and security experts from doing their job – i.e. from properly testing applications or networks to enhance security while on the other hand the blackhats don’t really care that their choosen tool has been made illegal now. Interestingly a similar clause in the Police and Justice Act amendments to the UK Computer Misuse Act has recently been suspended pending amendment for this very reason.

Another new offence is the unauthorized access of secured data by means that require the disabling or circumventing of security measures. This echoes the circumvention clause of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is still highly controversial after almost a decade and has been used in ways not anticipated by its creators to stifle legitimate security reaearch.

I’d like to get a copy of that bill…

May 24, 2007

In March and in April I voted for emergency spending legislation that would have fully funded our troops in Iraq, but also changed their mission to a sound one. That mission would have taken our troops out of the middle of a civil war, and put them into a support role, training Iraqi soldiers and police, fighting al Qaeda, and protecting our troops.

The President will not agree to that.

As a matter of fact, the President won’t agree to any change in strategy in Iraq, and that is more than a shame for the American people; it is a tragedy.

It doesn’t seem to matter how many Americans die in Iraq, how many funerals we have here at home, or what the American people think. The President won’t budge.

This new bill on Iraq keeps the status quo. With a few frills around the outside, a few reports, a few words about benchmarks. While our troops die.

I understand why this particular legislation is before us today. It’s because this President wants to continue his one man show in Iraq. The President doesn’t respect this Congress or the American people when it comes to Iraq. He wants to brush us all off like some annoying spot on his jacket.

We have lost 3,427 American soldiers in Iraq. Of those, 731 (21%) have been from California or based in California. There are 25,549 American soldiers wounded.

And today, after several days of worrying and praying, we received the tragic news of the death of Private Joseph J. Anzack JR., 20 years old, of Torrance, California, who was abducted during a deadly ambush south of Baghdad almost two weeks ago.

One member of his platoon, Spc. Daniel Seitz, summed it up this way to the Associated Press: “It just angers me that it’s just another friend I’ve got to lose and deal with, because I’ve already lost 13 friends since I’ve been here, and I don’t know if I can take any more of this.”

And he shouldn’t have to. But with this bill, he will.

The first half of this year has already been deadlier than any six-month period since the war began more than four years ago.

In this month alone, 83 U.S. Service members have already been killed in Iraq.

Let me be clear, there are many things in this bill that I strongly support–many provisions that I actually fought for, for our troops, for our veterans, for our farmers, and for the victims of Hurricane Katrina–but I must take a stand against this Iraq war, and therefore I will vote no on this emergency spending bill.

A good deal of money and effort is being spent by German researchers to reverse the document destruction used by the East German secret police group called Stasi. Although this seems noble for the causes of computer science, history and perhaps even justice, it starts to beg the question whether this will raise the bar for those who want to safely destroy their documents. Nature reports:

Bertram Nickolay, head of security technology at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology (IPK) in Berlin, says that the heart of the reconstruction software that his team has spent years developing is powered by algorithms designed to recognize and process digital patterns and images.

The pieces of torn documents are scanned on both sides, and the digital images are then analysed by a cluster of 16 computers for 25 features, including colour, shape, texture, handwriting and typeface, Nickolay says. Just like a person doing a jigsaw, the computer then groups the images into clusters with similar features, and finally fits pieces in each cluster together. The software should get better with time, Nickolay notes. “It learns as it processes.”

Sounds impressive. But “torn” documents? That doesn’t sound like secret police security.

“It was a mountain of files,” says Bormann. The Stasi lacked enough paper-shredding machines to do the job right, and began tearing documents by hand and stuffing them into bags.

The plan had been to transport bags bulging with documents by trucks to locations where they could be burned, but by January 1990 East German citizens had taken control of Stasi offices and the plan could not be carried out. West German authorities eventually seized still-intact Stasi documents and more than 16,000 bags of ripped documents.

Sounds like someone in Stasi under-prepared and over-engineered the document destruction process and thus left a giant gaping hole, which led to recovery of the files. Did they stuff all the related pages together into nicely labeled bags? Makes me wonder what was really going on in the final days — from incompetence to intentional internal subterfuge to facilitate reconstruction of files.

Project leader Jan Schneider says the algorithms used for the software could also be used to reconstruct documents shredded into much more uniform pieces by machines. “It wouldn’t be too complicated,” he says.

Ha. Neither is organizing and burning paper, but look where that ended.