Here are my dorkbot slides.

Carla’s pictures from dorkbot.

Flickr’s pix.

Nerd Salon is a regular gathering of geeks and friends in which alcohol is consumed, puzzles are solved, interesting people talk about bizarrely technical topics, and hanging out is accomplished.

Our inaugural event will be a collective toast- and dance-fest in honor of ultra-nerd event CodeCon. Our plan is to invade the all-mashup nightclub Bootie at Annie’s Social Club. Join us!

Date/Time: Feb. 11 starting at 10:00 PM.

Where: Annie’s Social Club, 917 Folsom at 5th St.

For future Nerd Salon parties and announcements, join the mailing list.

I’m speaking at dorkbot this Wednesday.

For more on statistics, false positives, and mass detection systems, here’s an article by J.A. Paulos from the Temple University math department.

We got a new mac a few days ago. Brad, historically a PC user, was elated at how easy it was to set up.

The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society is collecting stories about problems with locked cell phones to support our request to the Copyright Office for an exemption to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions for cell phone unlocking:

If you have a good story, know someone who does, or are aware of a community of people who might be interested, please send the link to them.

Thank you.

Eric Rescorla, on the topic of the effectiveness of mass surveillance.

My third column in the series on my obsession with the illegal wiretap scandal is now up on Wired. Its called Mass Spying Means Gross Errors.

From Cass Sunstein’s blog:

The legal questions raised by President Bush’s wiretapping seem to me complex, not simple. Here is a rough guide: (1) Did the AUMF authorize his action? (2) If not, does the Constitution give the President inherent authority to do what he did? (3) If the answer to (1) or (2) is yes, does his action violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)? (4) If the answer to (3) is yes, is FISA constitutional, or is it inconsistent with the President’s inherent authority? (5) If the answer to (1) or (2) is yes, does the wiretapping nonetheless violate the Fourth Amendment?

Its only complex because he asks the questions in a confusing order. Reorder them (3, 1, 2) and its simple. Does the action violate FISA? Did the AUMF (Authorization to Use Military Force) authorize violations of FISA? Does the Consitution give the President inherent authority to disregard FISA? (Whatever the answer to this question, there’s no need to consider (Q4) whether FISA is constitutional. Even if the President has inherent authority, FISA can be constitutional, except where it purports to limit the President). That leaves the admittedly more complicated question of whether the President’s alleged inherent authority to wiretap citizens during a durationless war violates the First Amendment. But that’s ivory tower land, since the answers to the first three questions are so simple.