Foundation

For months now, Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign has been praised for its expert use of computer technology. The website and other communications media were all supposed to be so well done for reaching out to voters and fund raising. His was a website made by expert. It is therefore unlikely, then, that the fraud-friendly Obama donation form with its flaws found by Matthew Mosk was designed that way with any intent other than the assistance of credit card fraudsters donating to the campaign.

There are basic steps that could be taken by the Obama campaign to prevent fraud, both in his campaign accepting donations from foreigners, and in accepting money stolen from hijacked credit cards, and his refusal to do so appears to be illegal.

A campaign has the responsibility of not accepting donations from foreigners. I am no FEC expert, but I say this on assurances from the FEC itself:

Soliciting, Accepting, or Receiving Contributions and Donations from Foreign Nationals

As noted earlier, the [Federal Election Campaign] Act prohibits knowingly soliciting, accepting or receiving contributions or donations from foreign nationals. In this context, “knowingly” means that a person:

• Has actual knowledge that the funds solicited, accepted, or received are from a foreign national;
• Is aware of facts that would lead a reasonable person to believe that the funds solicited, accepted, or received are likely to be from a foreign national;
• Is aware of facts that would lead a reasonable person to inquire whether the source of the funds solicited, accepted or received is a foreign national. 11 CFR 110.20(a)(4)(i), (ii) and (iii).

Pertinent facts that may lead to inquiry by the recipient include, but are not limited to the following: A donor or contributor uses a foreign passport, provides a foreign address,

makes a contribution from a foreign bank, or resides abroad. Obtaining a copy of a current and valid U.S. passport would satisfy the duty to inquire whether the funds solicited, accepted, or received are from a foreign national. 11 CFR 110.20(a)(7).

The last two sentences of the above quote are key. If a donation comes from a foreign address, the campaign has a duty to verify the legality of the donation. This matters because Web-based Internet donations have two kinds of addresses. One is the billing address of the credit card, and the other is the Internet Protocol address of the Web transaction.

There are two addresses, but the Obama campaign is doing nothing to ensure that either address is legitimate, and therefore is not doing what the FEC requires it to do in order to fulfill its duty to reject foreign donations. Its actions also aid credit card fraudsters in giving donations easily. Which of these effects is the intended one and which is the side effect I cannot say, but there is no way this is accidental.

The first address the Obama campaign is ignoring is the billing address of the credit card. Mosk has found that the campaign will take your money without even checking until later:

When asked whether the campaign takes steps to verify whether a donor’s name matches the name on the credit card used to make a payment, Obama’s campaign replied in an e-mail: “Name-matching is not a standard check conducted or made available in the credit card processing industry. We believe Visa and MasterCard do not even have the ability to do this.

“Instead, the campaign does a rigorous comprehensive analysis of online contributions on the back end of the transaction to determine whether a contribution is legitimate.”

So an American citizen who borrows a foreigner’s credit card will get right past the Obama system. They know this is possible, but they make excuses and ignore the problem. Blame Visa, not us, they cry. But they happily take the money. And yes, they claim a ‘rigorous, comprehensive” analysis, and yet the Obama campaign has taken $174,800 in fraudulently made donations in the name of Mary T. Buskup of Missouri, Mosk found. If that’s rigor for Obama, it’s no wonder he left academia for politics.

If that weren’t enough, there is still the matter of the IP address that the Obama campaign is ignoring. Every single time a person fills in the donation form and submits it, that submission carries with it to the Obama campaign web server the exact IP address of the computer used to send it. This address can be traced to a specific part of the world, in the same was a mailing address can because blocks of addresses are parceled out by country and corporation.

However evidence on the Obama donation page suggests that instead of using the information automatically embedded in every transaction, the campaign is instead letting the user falsify his own IP address in the submitted form. To quote the source code of the donation page:

<form name="contribution" onsubmit="if (document.getElementById) { var submitbutton = document.getElementById('processbutton'); if (submitbutton) {submitbutton.disabled = true;}} return true;" action="/page/contribute/splashd1_exp" method="post" id="contribution">
<input name="_qf__contribution" type="hidden" value="" />
<input name="ip_addr" type="hidden" value="[My address removed]" />

While it is the case that the ip_addr field correctly showed my address, there is nothing that would prevent me from changing that field when I submit the form. Any expert in the field knows a form can be submitted without a browser, with hidden or visible fields changed in any way the submitter likes, which means if the Obama campaign is using this field, they are knowingly allowing people to falsify their address.

What if they aren’t using that address, you ask? Well if they weren’t using it, why put that input in? There’s no reason at all to put that field into the form unless it was being used to store that address in a database with the rest of the information on the donation, instead of using the unfalsifiable* actual source address received due to how the Internet works.

Am I assuming malice where incompetence could be an excuse? No. How am I sure? If the people who made the donation form did not know how to extract an IP address from an HTTP request, they would not have been able to put my IP address into the form just now, as I quoted above. If they knew how to do it when sending the form, they knew how to do it when receiving the form. Therefore, using the data in the form was an intentional choice.

There is no excuse. The Obama campaign welcomes fraudulent donations. Republicans would be wise to remember that when looking at how much money the campaign is taking in, and must not be cowed. The FEC also now has a duty to investigate this, because the Obama campaign is simply not fulfilling its duties under the law and the relevant regulation. The fact that this is technology newer than the Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope must not be allowed to be an excuse.

* Yes, proxies can technically falsify a source address, but I would not hold them accountable for that. However the Obama campaign isn’t even making fraudsters use a proxy.

On the other hand, I did get a Terminal, ssh, and an NES Emulator for starters. The emulator’s controls aren’t very good due to the touch screen’s limits, but it works. So in that sense, mission accomplished.

I ran a jailbreak installer on my iPod today. QuickPwn 1.1 from the torrent is what I installed, to be precise.

Some of the software there is slow. A lot of it is the usual kind of semi-porting from unix via a ports tree that you see on Macs all the time, now just brought to the iPod. There are some good things there, polished apps, to be sure. But you have to be careful and choosy.

I also wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who isn’t comfortable with a unix shell, and able to shell in from another computer. Too much can go wrong not to have that option.

Of course it’s also a good idea to back up the iPod beforehand, in case it needs reset and reinstalled from iTunes.

I was out walking today, since I’m still not managing to get up at 5:45am. I haven’t since my cold. I wake up very tired (I haven’t gotten to bed at a good time but once since my cold, either), stuffed up still, and just turn on the secondary alarm which is set for 7:45am.

Well, when I walk during the day I walk at a more leisurely pace, but go a longer distance. I usually end up browsing various stores too while I’m out. Well today I went into Cartoon Field at the mall, and surprise: they had a new shipment of CDs. Double surprise: It had a great little two CD set of character songs from Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu. Including the Opening, Ending, the big songs from the festival, and alternate version of the ending for every major character.

Wow wow wow. It was only $26 with tax, too.

Oh wait, I just found out why it’s so cheap. It’s not an original. In looking up what it would cost elsewhere, it comes to my attention that it’s by Miya Records, a Taiwanese firm.

Well, that’s what countries gets for sticking it to the ROC. But it is funny that they typoed their not-quite-copyright notice. Why it has one at all I guess is to fool the retailers like the one I just bought from. But still: “WARNING: FAll Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.” It doesn’t actually claim copyright but it sounds like it does, so people are tricked.

Oh well. It’s high quality and it’s the closest there is to the real thing published here, I believe.

I don’t have an exceptional amount of time today to outline my ballot and why I voted this way, but I’ve filled out my ballot and will mail it in today. Here’s how I voted.

• President and Vice President: John McCain and Sarah Palin. Sadly enough, they are the only candidates on the ballot who aren’t socialists and/or kooks. Regardless of my differences with Senator McCain, I can vote for him without hesitation or regret, without compromising any principle even. He’s simply the best man on the ballot. Plus, Governor Palin is definitely worth voting for with a smile.
• US House of Representatives, 45th District: Mary Bono Mack. Her only opponent is a Democrat, so this is a no brainer. Bono Mack may be a member of the RMSP, but she’s not a member of the pro-infanticide caucus headed by Rep. Steny Hoyer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
• State Senate, 37th District: John J. Benoit. Opposed only by a Democrat, this Republican will be a fine fighter of tax and spend policies in Sacramento.
• Assembly, 64th District: Brian Nestande. The Republican is unopposed.
• Riverside Community College District: I picked two names not listed as teachers, in order to avoid the vermicious knids of the local teachers’ unions.
• Moreno Valley Unified School District Board: I picked two businessmen to avoid the corrupt teachers’ unions, who wish to control both sides of their own contract negotiations.
• Moreno Valley City Council: William H. Batey, II. He is unopposed, but if I had a choice I’d vote someone else in. Our city isn’t run well at all, and while I don’t honestly know where Batey stands, he’s been in for at least 12 years (I was in Journalism class in high school with his son my senior year when soon after Batey was first elected), and we could use a house cleaning.
• Proposition 1A: No. We can’t afford more debt. Cut spending instead. Especially not for government run trains which seem to be literally killing people all the time here in California.
• Proposition 2: No. A law only PETA would love, would kill chicken farming in California.
• Proposition 3: No. We can’t afford more debt. Cut spending instead.
• Proposition 4: Yes. A waiting period for parental notification of minors having abortions is the least we can to protect young mothers and their unborn children. Secret abortions are the rapist’s friends.
• Proposition 5: No. I’m no fan of a lot of drug laws, but using the criminal justice system for “rehabilitation” is inappropriate.
• Proposition 6: No. We can’t afford more debt. Cut spending instead.
• Proposition 7: No. T. Boone Pickens spent big to push this law to make California taxpayers subsidize his investment in wind energy. My message to Pickens: get lost. I’m not going to pay to try to bail you out of your silly gamble on wind. Your selfishness and dishonesty in funding this without disclosing your personal investments are flabbergasting.
• Proposition 8: Yes. Let’s restore marriage to the definition it’s always had, for the children.
• Proposition 9: Yes. Let’s keep dangerous criminals in prison longer, and ensure their victims and their victim’s families can speak out about the dangers of releasing them early.
• Proposition 10: No. We can’t afford more debt. Cut spending instead.
• Proposition 11: No. Redistricting is a political matter that must be left for accountable elected officials to decide. To let backroom deals choose an unelected, unaccountable panel stacked with partisan hacks do the districting instead is antithetical to a Republican form of government.
• Proposition 12: No. We can’t afford more debt. Cut spending instead.

And there you have it. A lot of bonds on the ballot his year, as though our state’s finances weren’t already in horrible shape. Oh, this state sometimes.

So here I get it all done to port rRootage to the Mac. It all builds, it all links, it finds its data. All should be well.

But NO, now I’m getting a stack smash once I fixed the data finding stuff. What a pain. I just might shelve this.

Internet advertisers like to come up with hot button things that people want to click on. Money, sex, and politics all work. Well, what do advertisers think people will react to? What two people get the electorate excited? What race has people anxious? If you think McCain and Obama, you’re wrong. From Failblog:

Best VP pick in my lifetime, and that says something given Cheney.

Regular readers know I was on the Fred Thompson train from long before his exploratory committee came out. I was behind him when the chances seemed slim that he would enter the race. I was behind him when he led the national polls. I was behind him when his campaign stalled and collapsed. I was behind him when he formed a Political Action Committee to influence the party in the right way.

I question that position now, though. FredPAC has a list of candidates now, and while there are some fine conservatives on that list, in my view there is one name that balances out the rest of the list:

That name is Lindsey Graham.

Well, technically the page says Lindsay Graham, but proofreading aside, the senior senator from South Carolina has no business being endorsed by a conservative, particularly one who attempted to make securing the borders a key issue in his Presidential campaign. Not when the Senator goes to racist hate groups like La Raza and refers to conservative Republican opponents of illegal immigration as ‘bigots.’ When Republicans like Graham give cover to the far left, and echo their rhetoric, it undermines us all. Graham fuels the ‘conservatives are bigots’ line that then gets used against us in other debates later. Such statements poison our national discourse with their untruth, and should never be used.

Fred Thompson, if you’re reading this, please take Senator Graham off your list. Backing him is not the way to rally the conservative grass roots. Backing him is not the way to improve the Republican Party in Washington. Thank you.

When I’m out, I have my iPod and my Blackberry with me usually, not my DS. So if I’m stuck waiting somewhere unexpectedly, games for those could be of value. Here’s a few I ran into this week that fit the bill:

• rRootage: It’s in the Apps Store for the iPod and iPhone. Your ship at the bottom, wave after wave of bosses coming at you, and lots of bullets to dodge. It’s as very highly refined version of the spaceship shooting games of old. It has four different modes too, based on other games. I’m so far fond of the ika (Ikaruga) mode, where there are two colors of bullets, and two matching modes you can put your ship in. Bullets that match your current mode are absorbed and fired at your enemy. Bullets that don’t match you, kill you as always.
• Dweller is a game in the Rogue/Hack tradition written for J2ME, so it runs on a Blackberry. I’ve played it little but it seems playable enough while waiting for something. It’s not Angband or even Nethack, but until I get a good ssh client for the Blackberry, it’ll do.
• Video Poker. Actually Mike Kohn has a whole set of J2ME apps, but the video poker one to me seems the best suited to the task.

By now it’s become a Known Fact™ that supporters of Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin shout nasty things about Senator Barack Obama at rallies, and have gone so far as to call for the Democratic nominee’s death. Obama has even attacked McCain for it.

This of course means it’s not true. The Secret Service is as non-partisan a group as you will find, and they deny it. Why didn’t Obama ask them before spouting off, as Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball did for the magazine’s October 27 issue:

[E]ven before Obama cited ‘reports’ of the threats at the debate, the U.S. Secret Service had told media outlets, including NEWSWEEK, that it was unable to corroborate accounts of the ‘kill him’ remarks – and according to a law-enforcement official, who asked for anonymity when discussing a political matter, the Obama campaign knew as much.

Obama in the last debate attempted to shame McCain for the alleged behavior of Republican supporters. Will Obama now claim responsibility for how his supporters treat Palin? Because there are pictures of misbehavior for him to apologize for and condemn, if he wants.

Or will Obama deny what Gateway Pundit found (be warned that the pictures are not family friendly): organized Obama supporters wearing the same t-shirt, with unmistakable bold green lettering calling Sarah Palin a crude sexual epithet I will not repeat here. Others holding signs used expletives to show a distaste for women who show an interest in sports. Presumably in Barack Obama’s America, women who are Governors and care about hockey just are not welcome, so that’s why the Obamanauts are getting in Palin’s face on command.

Again, it wasn’t just one lone person. This was an organized movement. Will Obama apply to himself the ‘logic’ he applied to McCain, and take full responsibility for whipping up in his supporters a sentiment of hostility towards women? After all, his critics claim he’s been using coded language against women since the primary races against Senator Hillary Clinton.

Are you creating a climate of hostility toward women who step out of the home, Senator Obama? If so, when will you stop? If not, when will you return the money of those who do, and throw them out of any volunteer or paid position within your and your party’s campaign efforts?