Link Madness

Bill Moyers on this administration, the press, and secrecy.

Torture's Long Shadow by Vladimir Bukovsky. Whoo.

And, finally, as an antidote: waaaay too cute.

Trustiness

A spot of hacking tonight produced gratifying results. In Python,

from net_flow import TrustNetwork

 capacities = [ 20, 7, 2, 1 ]
network = TrustNetwork()

 network.add_edge("-", "el_seed")
network.add_edge("el_seed", "test1")
network.add_edge("test1", "test2")
network.add_edge("test3", "test4")
network.add_edge("-", "test4")

 network.calculate(capacities)

 for user in network:
    print user, '\t', network.is_auth(user)

produces

-               True
el_seed         True
test1           True
test2           True
test3           False
test4           True

which looks more-or-less correct to me; c.f. http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html.

The net_flow Python module contains a class wrapper around a hand-written wrapper for mod_virgule's net_flow.c. Using net_flow with a scraped download of the current advogato certification network (sorry, raph...) I can reproduce much of the current list of certified masters. I get 602; the actual list contains 766 members. So obviously I'm still doing something wrong, but probably it's just a matter of reading the mod_virgule source code a bit better.

raph, if you happen to read this, could you verify that the capacities:

capacities = [ 800, 200, 200, 50, 12, 4, 2 ]

and the seeds

network.add_edge("-", "raph")
network.add_edge("-", "miguel")
network.add_edge("-", "federico")
network.add_edge("-", "alan")

are what advogato is currently using, please?

thanks,
--titus

p.s. I'll make net_flow available once I clean it up and validate it a bit more.