George Hussein Entenman

Why is my Facebook name George Hussein Entenman?

My motivation

In my case, I was outraged when Rush Limbaugh (may he be burning in Hell) constantly repeated “Barack Hussein Obama” while pretending to be all innocent of its effect.

I’ve kept this name on Facebook because I’m a little afraid to change it and because I think it’s helped attract the attention of people in the Arab world. Having lived in Southern Tunisia for three years back in the day, I want to have friends from North Africa in particular.

It was the online world that showed me what to do

The following story is told by the New York Times.

Hussein

Obama volunteers from Columbus, Ohio, who have adopted the middle name Hussein include J. T. Marcum, left, Aaron Barclay, Alex Enderle, Norm Shoemaker and Chelsey McCune. They use the name on the Internet and in greeting one another. Credit Kirk Irwin for The New York Times

Emily Nordling has never met a Muslim, at least not to her knowledge. But this spring, Ms. Nordling, a 19-year-old student from Fort Thomas, Ky., gave herself a new middle name on Facebook.com, mimicking her boyfriend and shocking her father.

“Emily Hussein Nordling,” her entry now reads.

With her decision, she joined a growing band of supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by informally adopting his middle name.

The result is a group of unlikely-sounding Husseins: Jewish and Catholic, Hispanic and Asian and Italian-American, from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Okla., to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.

Jeff Strabone of Brooklyn now signs credit card receipts with his newly assumed middle name, while Dan O’Maley of Washington, D.C., jiggered his e-mail account so his name would appear as “D. Hussein O’Maley.” Alex Enderle made the switch online along with several other Obama volunteers from Columbus, Ohio, and now friends greet him that way in person, too.

Mr. Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim. Hussein is a family name inherited from a Kenyan father he barely knew, who was born a Muslim and died an atheist. But the name has become a political liability. Some critics on cable television talk shows dwell on it, while others, on blogs or in e-mail messages, use it to falsely assert that Mr. Obama is a Muslim or, more fantastically, a terrorist.

“I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama’s name like it was some sort of cuss word,” Mr. Strabone wrote in a manifesto titled “We Are All Hussein” that he posted on his own blog and on dailykos.com.

rest is truncated …

I left a comment on PoliticsNC

I commented on a guest article on PoliticsNC:

Tom, your buddy Rick Henderson is indeed a Libertarian. Libertarians are those people who talk freedom and then caucus with Republicans every time. They have some good instincts but love police and military power, love depriving the gov’t of needed revenue, and vote to confirm SCOTUS justices who always vote to limit our freedoms.

To the case in point, Mr Henderson smoothly says he agrees with some of these proposals [of HR 1], or versions of them, but doesn’t say which and claims that they should “be debated and decided by state officials, not members of Congress or federal bureaucrats.”

He links to a page claiming that HR 1 limits free speech and makes the absurd claim that the bill “…would nationalize federal elections, having Washington decide everything from how to operate redistricting to the number of days of early voting every state must allow. (Seven states still don’t allow in-person absentee voting, and less than half of all states don’t allow early voting on Saturday or Sunday.)”

Lord keep the Feds from forcing us to have non-partisan districts or forcing states to keep polls open on weekends! Why that’s practically fascist!

He adds, “The notion that the federal government could run elections more fairly or efficiently than states is laughable, frightening, probably unconstitutional ….”. I wish I knew how setting ground rules is the same as “running an election”.

How about the “election security” bugaboo? I remember when our NC Legislature decided that voters had to have photo IDs but disqualified state-issued IDs such as Student IDs. To keep students from voting in Orange County, for example. I call that voter suppression, not liberty or even libertarian.

On that same page linked to above, he cleverly juxtaposes the paragraphs about the Feds running elections with paragraphs discussing dark money, where he gets to point out that the ACLU often opposes forced disclosures of contributions (this is true), but conveniently neglects to point out that the same ACLU strongly supports reforms to curb voter suppression.

He’s a good rhetorician, I’ll give him that. But as a good logician and supporter of what’s right, not so much.

Tom, I realize that this sounds like an Ad Hominem argument, but I really intend it to be a sort Class Action Snit against Libertarians as a group. Since you seem to be friends with Mr Henderson, I assume he’s clever and fun to drink beer with. I like that.

How is it possible to steal Bitcoin?

The question

I posted the following question to Facebook a couple of days ago:

I hope this isn’t a stupid question, but how do people steal Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies? Isn’t everything supposed to be kept in a “ledger” to be valid? Maybe thieves find a way to convert it to regular money or something? Doesn’t the ledger track such conversions?

I got only two answers, one from Tunisia, one from nearby.

Jacer Omri

The only way i would think of, is to actually steal your private key (either by gaining access to your machine or to the storage where the pk is kept). I don’t know a way to get around if this happens.

Shawn Hartsock

Jacer Omri practically speaking yes. That’s it. The “anonymity” of a bitcoin transaction leans on the inability to tie a public/private key pair to a real-world identity. If you can tie a secret key to a person then bitcoin is the absolute opposite of private as every transaction is perfectly visible.

In most situations we’re worried about public/private key theft or hijacking.

Theft of bitcoin is possible through the typical ways that ledger manipulation is possible … however the combination of data validation and leader election by lottery reduces the probability of this significantly but it is still NOT a non-possibility.

In all consensus algorithms I know of, including bitcoin, if a majority of the “deciders” come to the wrong answer (a bad transaction is called valid) then it is still possible to steal bitcoin. This would also be true with regular fiat money too. Except that the “deciders” are a much smaller set of things like banks and credit agencies.

In bitcoin you would … for example … choke the network at a point to temporarily constrain the possible deciders in the lottery of deciders (I’m referring to bit mining here) to favor some of your fellow scammers/colluders then you would all agree to present the WRONG answer as the right one. This would steal bitcoins from a victim, eventually get the block sealed inside your constrained network … and create a rift in the chain of blocks.

This has actually happened several times with a few exchanges. There’s remediation steps and that’s all very much like auditing in real life.

This is as best as I understand it. I do have a blockchain related patent but I’m far from the world’s leading expert on the problem. The alternative technologies lean on a concept of consortiums … which is based on trust-worthiness of the “deciders” and that’s the same basic problem shifted into a human government. It has all the same problems except its much easier to fire someone over it … so better? It at least saves electricity that way I guess.

My patent happens to be around ways to build consortium clusters.

George Hussein Entenman … in short: not a silly question at all. The developer analogy I use is Blockchain is very much like a git repository. Bit mining is very much like a CI/CD. And there’s a process like a merge request. The fraud prevention leans on not doing a “merge request” when there’s fraud detected.

We need another Sputnik

Quotes from Politics & Ideas: How to Step Up the Tech Fight Against China - WSJ 2021-03-03. I found the article through my public library.

The U.S. is standing still. As recently as 2001,
America's annual investment in research and
development exceeded China's by more than $300
billion. But according to a recent report from the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Chinese
investment exceeded ours for the first time ever
last year. During the past two decades, China's
research and development as a share of its economy
has more than tripled.

There are other indications of the U.S. slipping.
Over the past two decades, the number of
bachelor's degrees China awards annually has more
than quadrupled and now exceeds that of America,
the European Union and Japan combined. Although
the U.S. continues to grant more doctoral degrees
in science and engineering, the gap has narrowed
significantly.

Two decades ago, American researchers published
four times as many peer-reviewed articles in the
science and engineering disciplines than their
counterparts in China. China received fewer than
20,000 patents two decades ago, but this figure
rose to more than 400,000 by 2018, exceeding
annual U.S. patent grants by more than 100,000.

Still trying to understand the word “intersectionality”

The introduction to the MIT Press book Data Feminism tries to define intersectionality.

Key to the idea of intersectionality is that it
does not only describe the intersecting aspects of
any particular person’s identity (or
positionalities, as they are sometimes termed).
It also describes the intersecting forces of
privilege and oppression at work in a given
society. Oppression involves the systematic
mistreatment of certain groups of people by other
groups. It happens when power is not distributed
equally—when one group controls the institutions
of law, education, and culture, and uses its power
to systematically exclude other groups while
giving its own group unfair advantages (or simply
maintaining the status quo). In the case of
gender oppression, we can point to the sexism,
cissexism, and patriarchy that is evident in
everything from political representation to the
wage gap to who speaks more often (or more loudly)
in a meeting. In the case of racial oppression,
this takes the form of racism and white supremacy.
Other forms of oppression include ableism,
colonialism, and classism. Each has its particular
history and manifests differently in different
cultures and contexts, but all involve a dominant
group that accrues power and privilege at the
expense of others. Moreover, these forces of power
and privilege on the one hand and oppression on
the other mesh together in ways that multiply
their effects.

The book discusses …

...what we call data feminism: a way of thinking
about data, both their uses and their limits, that
is informed by direct experience, by a commitment
to action, and by intersectional feminist thought.
The starting point for data feminism is
something that goes mostly unacknowledged in data
science: power is not distributed equally in the
world. Those who wield power are
disproportionately elite, straight, white,
able-bodied, cisgender men from the Global
North. The work of data feminism is first to
tune into how standard practices in data science
serve to reinforce these existing inequalities and
second to use data science to challenge and change
the distribution of power.

What counts as ‘data’?

We both strongly believe that data can do good in the world. But for it to do so, we must explicitly acknowledge that a key way that power and privilege operate in the world today has to do with the word data itself. The word dates to the mid-seventeenth century, when it was introduced to supplement existing terms such as evidence and fact. Identifying information as data, rather than as either of those other two terms, served a rhetorical purpose. It converted otherwise debatable information into the solid basis for subsequent claims. But what information needs to become data before it can be trusted? Or, more precisely, whose information needs to become data before it can be considered as fact and acted upon? Data feminism must answer these questions, too.