:: 12-Oct-2001 19:17 (Friday) ::

From http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_8.20.html

The U.S. Senate approved far-reaching anti-terrorism legislation late last
night, rejecting efforts to limit the measure’s impact on the privacy and
civil liberties of American citizens. The Uniting and Strengthening
America Act (S. 1510) was the product of negotiations between the Justice
Department and the Senate leadership. In an unusual departure from normal
legislative procedure, the bill was sent directly to the full Senate
without any debate or consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI) and other colleagues, including Paul Wellstone
(D-MI) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA), unsuccessfully attempted to have the
Senate vote on three amendments designed to minimize the impact on civil
liberties. “What have we come to when we don’t have either committee or
Senate deliberation or amendments on an issue of this importance?” Feingold
asked. “Each of us cares as much as anyone in this room about the fight
against terrorism, but we want to make sure we don’t go beyond that goal
and intrude on our civil liberties.” The unamended bill was approved by
a 96-to-1 vote, with Feingold dissenting.

:: 01-Oct-2001 16:04 (Monday) ::

Having some issues with stats today. First, only 1/2 the logs for 9/25
were processed, so we’ll be processing that today. Hopefully, I can run
just 9/25 without redoing the past 5 days. Doing so will undoubtedly cause
some oddities on the stats pages though, so consider yourself warned. :)

Also, the past few days haven’t run due to a disk space issue.

:: 23-Sep-2001 05:12 (Sunday) ::

http://www.eff.org/alerts/20010921_eff_wiretap_alert.html

Draft legislation, proposed only just days abo (19-Sep) seeks to deny
Americans the right to privacy by mandating government backdoors in all
encryption products. This right on the heels of 13-Sep’s “Combating
Terrorism Act” which proposes similar injunctions on the freedom and
liberties of American citizens and was rushed through with less than 30
minutes of consideration on the senate floor.

The ATA/MATA draft bill is expected to go to vote as early as this week.
If you’re in the united stats, this bill can and will have serious impact
on your privacy. Please consider contacting your representatives and
those on the senate committee considering the bill to voice your concern
for this erosion of privacy in the dubious name of combating terrorism.

http://www.eff.org/alerts/20010921_eff_wiretap_alert.html

The EFF has an excellent summary of the situation with pointers to the
relevant facts and elected officials. Even something as simple as one
email to the senate subcommit te can make a difference.

The events of 11-Sep are horrific to us all, but we can’t expect to defeat
an attack on freedom by destroying those freedoms ourselves.

Please consider adding your voice to the debate before it’s too late.

:: 12-Sep-2001 18:10 (Wednesday) ::

Statsrun didn’t happen last night due to missing logs. As soon as I get
the logs on tally, I’ll start the run. This only affects RC5.

:: 08-Sep-2001 21:36 (Saturday) ::

The 9/05 run is in progress. I’ve turned web access off for the next hour
to give it a bit of a head start. I’ll probably turn web access off again
later tonight for another few hours. Hopefully, we should be back to normal
by tomorrow night.

Sorry for the delays.

:: 08-Sep-2001 18:00 (Saturday) ::

I’m not certain if the 9/5 run crashed or not, but some of the logfiles
are definitely missing from tally. As soon as the logfiles get transfered
over, I’ll be re-running rc5 stats from 9/5 to today.

:: 08-Sep-2001 17:53 (Saturday) ::

It seems something went wrong and the Sept. 5th stats are missing. I’m
looking into in right now…

:: 07-Sep-2001 06:59 (Friday) ::

Logs for Sept. 6 didn’t all make it to tally last night, so the statsrun
didn’t happen. Sept. 6th is running right now. If the logs for the 7th
make it to tally on time, then the 7th will run right after the 6th. Sorry
for the delays.

:: 23-Aug-2001 01:51 (Thursday) ::

Moo!

I’ve recently taken on answering some of the help@distributed.net mail,
specifically the topics our front-line help people have categorized as
requiring the attention of a stats dba. (For those of you still in the
queue, thank you for your patience.)

In the course of trying to answer some of the questions, I’ve made some
interesting discoveries:

. A lot of you depend on the phistory_raw page to produce additional
stats you can’t get any other way. (For those who don’t recognize the
page names, this is the Block Submission History page which shows each
participant’s lifetime history as a histogram.)

. Some of you use it so much, it’s putting a heavy workload on both
apache and sybase on tally.

. Some of you don’t really need the history for all time, just for a day,
or a couple of weeks.

. A certain @home subscriber in the northwest Chicago suburbs is
producing somewhere around 1/7 of all website traffic on tally, primarily
on the phistory_raw page.

I’d like to address all these problems real soon. As a first attempt,
I’ve cobbled together some variations on existing pages that I hope will
solve most of these problems. I’d like to ask you to test these out,
especially those of you who do a lot of scripting. They’re not linked
from the existing stats pages, but if they work as well as I hope, they
will be soon.

The new pages are:

http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/phistory30.php3?id=1
http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/phistory30_raw.php3?id=1

As the filename suggests, these pages return the same information but only
for the last 30 days. You can substitute your own id for the 1 at the
end. They’re only available for RC5-64 at this time. Depending on your
feedback, I might even make the number of days a parameter. Please submit
all comments and feedback about these pages to bugzilla,
http://www.distributed.net/bugs/

As for the participant in the Chicago area, we appreciate your enthusiasm
for stats. We’re not mad, and we’re not going to cut you off or anything,
but please PLEASE drop me an e-mail me directly (bwilson@distributed.net).
We’d like very much to find a solution that gives you what you need without
producing quite so much traffic for both of us. Hopefully, this quick
fix will serve as a reasonable alternative.

On a different note, we’ve recently “hired” two new guys to help with
stats. We’re planning an all-stats meeting this weekend (Aug 25, 2001)
to bring them up to speed, rebalance the workload, and set some priorities.
With that in mind, if you have any features you’d really like to see in
stats, I’d like to know about it ASAP. Items already on our dream list
include:

. OGR recycle/repair

. Cross-project stats

. Better inter-project links

. Site redesign

. my.distributed.net

. Sub-teams

. A decaying average score, so newer participants rise faster and
inactive participants fall faster

. Using id as the id instead of e-mail (retires become a thing of the
past!)

.

As always, thanks for all the cycles!

:: 15-Aug-2001 16:43 (Wednesday) ::

There was a hiccup in last night’s OGR run, which is why the RC5 run didn’t
happen. OGR is up and running again, and I’m going to let RC5 process two
days tonight. Sorry for the delay.