Bruce Schneier has posted on his blog about Richard Clayton’s attempts to work around the Chinese government’s content controls. This is, quite literally, child’s play (think parental consent and how kids locked in their room often figure out how to slip out the window).

Here’s an interesting twist to the debate about privacy:

Customs officials found a prescription bottle labeled as Viagra in his luggage that didn’t have Limbaugh’s name on it, but that of two doctors, said Paul Miller, spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

A doctor had prescribed the drug, but it was “labeled as being issued to the physician rather than Mr. Limbaugh for privacy purposes,” Roy Black, Limbaugh’s attorney, said in a statement.

Privacy? Medical records are protected, so had his name been on the bottle it would have been his right to demand it be kept private. However, by carrying a controlled substance with someone else’s name on the bottle he not only loses the information security controls put in place to protect him but he incurrs the risk of a second-degree misdemeanor.

Limbaugh reached a deal last month with prosecutors who had accused the conservative talk-show host of illegally deceiving multiple doctors to receive overlapping painkiller prescriptions. Under the deal, the charge, commonly referred to as “doctor shopping,” would be dismissed after 18 months if he continues to submit to random drug tests and treatment for his acknowledged addiction to painkillers.

Ok, but what can be done about an addiction to misrepresentation of the truth for personal gain?

Sahana was apparently born out of the Indonesia tsunami as a free and collaborative (open source) solution:

It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.

A concern would be whether the code is reviewed often and carefully enough to catch backdoors and other gaps. Motives and threats can be very sticky to pin down in disaster recovery, especially in destabilized nations with contentious leadership. Seems like a lot of the success of the system depends on the information reported from various sources,and so I wonder if they’ve considered using a ranking system based on validity of past reports to shore up the integrity. I noticed they mention biometrics but I can’t tell how widely it’s used — perhaps only to authenticate aid workers entering names into the database, rather than to provide signatures for reported information.

Slappingturtle has updated their info on iAlertU; a product meant to help protect Macintosh laptops from casual theft (by tying an alarm feature to its motion-detection capability and video camera).

It might just work as well as car-alarms at reducing theft. Or perhaps worse if Mac users are allowed to assign any old sound file to the alarm. Am I being too sarcastic?

Also seems like a great thing for playing practical jokes on someone.