Tinypic: Free, anonymous, zero-hassle image hosting

Tinypic allows you to upload images up to 200+KB in size (I forget the exact size limit, but you can fit a full-screen JPEG at decent quality), and gives you back both a web page and a short URL to the bare image. There's no registration required, and the clean, bare-bones interface is compatible with all browsers. The server occasionally goes slightly wonky, and there's no telling how long it will continue to exist, but it's perfect for applications like blogs, where reliability isn't a big deal. It seems too good to be true, but I have yet to find the catch.

Of course, they offer no privacy for uploaded images either, as their random image page makes clear, but that's hardly a drawback given the target application.

I am now using Tinypic to host a portrait in the left sidebar. Perhaps showing my face will encourage me to cap the vitriol, or at least to fling it about less often, thereby helping me live up to my New Year's resolution to exhibit more generosity of spirit and less petulance here. Most of the other resolutions aren't panning out, so I might as well try for this one. Sigh.

Brief words on Ajai Raj

MeFi points to Ajai Raj's open letter explaining why he asked Ann Coulter what she thought of marriages wherein the man does nothing but fuck his wife in the ass.

First of all, logically debating Ann Coulter is like playing chess with a tapeworm. The only acceptable way to deal with jokers like Coulter is either to ignore her, or to mock her viciously. Raj did exactly the right thing. He did not physically assault or intimidate Coulter; he just replied to her nonsensical, vacuous noise with more nonsensical, vacuous noise. Any sensible conservative must believe that Coulter is an embarrassment to the right, and deserves exactly what she got. And anybody who says something like "If only you infantile leftists would behave nicely, Ann Coulter would engage in a civil, grownup debate with you!" must be dropping massive amounts of acid.

Second, Raj's question actually has a certain logic to it (a logic which is, of course, utterly superfluous, but nevertheless if you're going to embarrass somebody then logic does lend your gesture a certain extra panache). It is common for "respectable", "centrist" conservatives (e.g., Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney) to say that gay marriage should not be legally recognized because (1) marriage is inextricably linked to procreation and child-rearing, and (2) we don't know what possibly-damaging psychological effects gay parents have on children. Note that both of these facts, and not just the second, must be true in order for this argument to work: if marriage and child-rearing are separable issues, then it shouldn't matter what effects gay parents have on children, as it's logically possible to permit gay marriage but ban gay parenting. Now, in marriages wherein the husband and wife engage exclusively in non-procreative sex, marriage and child-rearing are not, in fact, inextricably linked. So unless Mitt Romney and his ilk are ready to condemn anal-sex-only straight marriages, their argument for banning gay marriage is unsound.

Of course, Romney and others are never going to come out against non-procreative straight marriages, because straight conservatives only think that it's okay to invade gay people's bedrooms.

Suspected terrorists have a Constitutional right to ride commercial air travel

Got your attention, didn't I? Now that I've destroyed any possibility of a future career in electoral politics, allow me to explain.

A recent post on Politech notes that the odious "Real ID Act" is poised for passage. Among other things, the Real ID Act establishes a national system of identification, allegedly in order to combat terrorism. You can read the Politech post, which contains a letter from the ACLU's Barry Steinhardt, for all the reasons that this act is a terrible idea. But I had a pretty frustrating email conversation with a friend today, so I want to comment on the amazing notion, which Americans and many others have simply swallowed uncritically, that (1) a unified, pervasive identification system and (2) identity-based travel restrictions are not only permissible but desirable for security purposes.

First, let's talk about permissible. The First Amendment guarantees "the right of the people peaceably to assemble"; it is one of the five fundamental freedoms that the Founders judged of paramount importance, and it is possessed by all people in the United States. This right is given to you by the Bill of Rights, not by an ID card. Even a newborn baby without a name possesses this right, merely by virtue of being a human being under the sovereign power of the United States.

And the freedom of assembly implies freedom to travel, an inference that ought to be trivially obvious from common sense and from past court decisions. You cannot assemble someplace if you're not allowed to travel there. And therefore, you have the right to travel, via airplanes, cars, horses, or your own two feet, without the government's permission.

"But," the sponsors of national ID cards and draconian travel restrictions tell us, "some people cannot be trusted with that freedom, so the government must be empowered to take it away." In particular, say the advocates of "presenting papers", the government must require that no provider of commercial air travel permit passengers to board without presenting government-specified identity documents.

But what is the government allowed to do to a human being under suspicion --- not a convict, not someone under arrest, and not someone caught in the process of committing a crime, but someone under suspicion? Is it allowed to take away fundamental rights? Is it allowed to take away such a person's freedom of speech, or of the press? Is it allowed to force such people to renounce their religion? No, obviously not. The government is allowed to stop a suspect from committing criminal acts, no more and no less, and to punish those duly tried and convicted of crimes.

So, in short, the government is not allowed to prevent a suspected terrorist from exercising his freedom to travel, any more than it is allowed to force a suspected terrorist to renounce his religion. Suspected terrorists have a Constitutional right to ride commercial air travel.

(Of course, they'll need to find an airline that will take them, but the government now makes it illegal for anybody to run such an airline.)

Now, if there were no other way to prevent planes from being hijacked, apart from stopping certain "undesirables" from riding on them, then some restrictions on the freedom of assembly would be permissible. These restrictions would be akin to the classic "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception for freedom of speech --- that freedom is revoked, in these narrow circumstances, because of the imminent potential for harm, and because no other measure would suffice to prevent such injury.

But it's total, unadulterated nonsense to conclude that infringing on people's freedom to travel is a necessary measure, or even an effective measure, to prevent hijackings. There are four other highly effective measures that, when put together, can protect planes from being hijacked:

• Screen passengers and carry-on baggage for weapons.
• Screen checked baggage for explosives.
• Reinforce cockpit doors, and instruct pilots not to open them under any circumstances.
• Instruct passengers to fight back in the event of a hijacking.

As Bruce Schneier has pointed out, the last two of these are the most important; and none of the four relies on the identity of the passengers. And that's a good thing, because screening procedures are incredibly bad at detecting the intent of a passenger. Until you figure out how to give TSA employees mutant psychic powers, you'd best rely on metal detectors, not data mining.

And what makes us think that a passenger's identity even matters? Would you permit a 92-year-old grandmother to bring an M-16 on board an airplane? Why would it matter whether she's a 92-year-old grandmother or not? Weapons should not be permitted on airplanes, period. Would you leave the cockpit door unlocked if you knew all the passengers fit the FBI's profile of "law-abiding citizens"? Of course not. The cockpit doors should be locked, period. Any security measure that effectively prevents hijackings will work equally well against 92-year-old grandmothers, Girl Scouts, and swarthy young men with odd religious beliefs.

And speaking of effective security measures, let's consider the desirability of a national ID system. "What's the harm?" one might ask. Well, there are plenty of harms, but one of them is that identity theft is on the rise, and encouraging the growth of a centralized ID infrastructure creates a really juicy, inviting target for attack.

Consider the following proposition: "If everybody in the world used Microsoft Windows, then Windows would be more secure." This sentence strikes you all, I hope, as insane. If everybody in the world used Microsoft Windows, then crackers would still break into Windows, and their cracks would just be much more dangerous. In fact, since the value of a crack would be higher, more crackers would try to break into Windows, and there would be more cracks than exist today.

Just so with a national ID system: by establishing a system of interlinked identity databases, you effectively get the sum of the individual databases' vulnerabilities, plus the sum of the databases' value for the potential attacker. It's going to be a freaking bonanza for identity thieves, or for anybody else who wants to commit identity fraud.

Years ago, it was common for banks, colleges, and other institutions to demand your social security number. Therefore, your social security number was effectively a pervasive, centralized identity document, and it was stored in many places, which was perfect for people who wanted to commit fraud of various kinds. Predictably, social security numbers got stolen; fraud and privacy invasions resulted; and the government soon made it illegal for institutions to require disclosure of your social security number.

If I were overhauling the nation's identity infrastructure, I'd learn from the lesson of social security numbers, and go in exactly the opposite direction as current advocates of a single national ID. I would create a compartmentalized, mission-specific ID card system for each legitimate application requiring identity, and make it illegal for identity data to be used for purposes other than those for which they were intended. So, for example, a driver's license would only be treated as proof that you passed the state's requirements for driving; it would be illegal for companies to store your driver's license number in their (large and breathtakingly vulnerable) databases; and even if you faked such a license, it wouldn't get you anything except the ability to drive. Under this system, you'd have a whole suite of identity documents, and none of them would be substitutable for any of the others.

Inconvenient? Sure. Security often entails some loss of convenience or functionality. But if you decided that accurate identification was important to security, that's the sort of system you'd devise, not a single, centralized national ID card.

So, to sum up: national ID cards are a dangerous idea that doesn't increase our security, and in fact actually reduces it in important ways; and preventing people from traveling based on their identities is both unconstitutional and stupid.

On the other hand, a single national ID card system will make it much easier for governments and private-sector database vendors to compile dossiers on every citizen. Granted, these dossiers will frequently be full of errors, but they'll still contain enough information to harass, intimidate, or blackmail you if the holder of that information so desires. So somebody will get some value out of it.

The killer aggregator feature waiting to be written

Four words: Google News meets Bloglines.

That should convey the idea to anybody who would understand what I'm saying, but I'll elaborate anyway. Basically, it would be far preferable to have a feed aggregator that presented blog entries from your subscription list grouped by content, not just by feed or by date. This would avoid the situation, presently all-too-common, wherein you see the same link seven times --- once via Atrios, and then again via all the people who read Atrios. It would also give you a way of reading the posts about each topic as a coherent thread of conversation, instead of a pointillistic series of textual bites.

It wouldn't even be that hard to hack up a prototype. A large fraction of blog posts --- especially the sort that you'd want to cluster --- consist one or two links, some quoted text, and commentary; the outgoing links and quoted text (easy to detect: hyperlinks and <blockquote>'d regions) provide strong hooks for the clustering/threading algorithm to grab onto. A competent Python hacker, armed with Mark Pilgrim's feed parser, could probably write a web-based aggregator with this feature in a week. (And then, of course, spend another week tweaking the algorithm to catch important special cases and such.)

Alas, I do not have a week to kill, so the world will have to wait longer for the magnificence of clustered feed aggregation. Unless somebody's already done it...

Brain Facts, for free

A friend informs me that the Society for Neuroscience is giving away Brain Facts, either as a downloadable PDF, or as a 52-page printed book, which they will mail to you free of charge (!) for single copies. Many funny/cheesy high-school-textbook-ish illustrations (check out the ones for "pain" and "the stress reaction", pages 17 and 26 respectively), and text written at a level suitable for educated laypeople.

I only wish it were licensed under a Creative Commons license, rather than an "all rights reserved" copyright. Maybe we should start an email campaign. I've already sent a suggestion using this form, but you can also email info (at) sfn (dot) org.