Archive for the Tech category
June 27th, 2008
Missed this last Friday, so you get double the helping of trivial matters:
First up - I’m big in China! Yes, if you use the Chinese Google to search for “false statement“, I’m right there on the first page of results. Ahead of Bush, Cheney, and the “Criminal Tax Manual”, no less. I couldn’t have done it without Mark Ellmore.
(Oh, okay, Mark Ellmore and oppressive governmental control.)
(Update: Sigh. Being big in China is such a fleeting thing. Already, I’m on the second page. Maybe I’ll have to settle for being big in Belgium.)
~
If you haven’t been reading Pro Publica, you should be. Start with this story about the half a billion dollars the US has spent on a failed propaganda station. Looks like the US worked very hard to ensure that no one in the Middle East ever takes anything that comes from the US government seriously.
~
Atrios noted what I thought was a pretty sobering reality check, yesterday - GM’s market cap is (take your pick): the same as H&R Block’s, half that of Avon’s, and one fifth of Ebay’s. I know things have been rough for them for a while now, but . . . wow.
~
Speaking of Google - Nicholas Carr asks whether it’s “making us stupid?” It’s a long article, but well worth your time if you’ve ever wondered about the real effects on your thinking of having Google at your finger tips for years.
~
You know how the rightwingers are always going on about the coming Islamic invasion and subjugation of America? Well, in case you missed it, one of their cultural heroes - the mercenary company Blackwater - is trying to avoid responsiblity for the deaths of three American passengers on one of its charter flights by arguing that Shari’a (Islamic law) should apply, since the crash occurred in Afghanistan.
~
The Burn Rate as performance art. Good thing he’s in Ethiopia.
~
Neal Stephenson’s new book is coming out on September 9th. I cannot possibly finish the Baroque Cycle by then.
~
The FCC wants to auction off a slice of the airwaves so you can get free wireless Internet!*
*And by Internet, they mean access to pre-approved content, excluding anything that isn’t “family-friendly”, in order to “protect children and families.”
I wish I could tell you that it’s the tidal wave of mockery and laughter that’s going to kill this proposal, but it’ll be the telecoms that prefer to charge you a hefty monthly fee to access your porn.
June 24th, 2008
If you ever sit down with me and we talk about why I’m in communications law and why tech fascinates me, you’ll probably hear about my theories on communications infrastructure and how greatly they influence the type of society in which we live. You’ll also hear that I am fairly certain that we are living in a time during which all the tools that are needed to strictly control access to (and thus things learned from) that communications infrastructure are being built. Not as part of any particular grand conspiracy, but in the service of separate self-interested industries and institutions. Once those tools are in place, however, I think it won’t be too long before a lightbulb goes off somewhere, and it will become almost irresistible to use them as a whole for commercial and political ends.
Here’s an example:
SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft, Google and PayPal, a unit of eBay, are among the founders of an industry organization that hopes to solve the problem of password overload among computer users.
[ . . . ]
The idea is to bring the concept of an identity card, like a driver’s license, to the online world. Rather than logging on to sites with user IDs and passwords, people will gain access to sites using a secure digital identity that is overseen by a third party. The user controls the information in a secure place and transmits only the data that is necessary to access a Web site.
So here’s a seemingly innocuous (at first glance) solution to the practical annoyance of multiple user IDs and passwords. Cool, have at it. But note that it is also, by definition, a proposal to tie everything you view online to your physical body, and pass that information through a single database (which also has the capacity to control what you view in the first place). What could possibly go wrong?
I mean, it’s not like the government would ever have any use for a centralized data repository. Or that a presumably-private “third party” in control of this database would ever cede access to the government for anything illegal.
Watch this. Whenever you hear about the development of tools - or adoption of laws - that make it easier to identify and control access to online content, ignore the stated purpose (it’s all piracy and terrorists, these days) and imagine how those mechanisms might be used to control the flow of information in general. And I hope that after 7 years of the Bush Administration, and about as many of lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America, there’s no question that there are very motivated entities - private and public - that would like to control exactly what you can see.
June 17th, 2008
And yes, I mean yours. You are probably aware of the recent Associated Press-instigated skirmish, and if not, well, here’s a mostly decent summary. The short version is that AP threatened small web sites with lawsuits for quoting the headlines and ledes of some of its stories. While the the AP is being fairly aggressive about it (pushing for a licensing fee to quote up to 25 words of any AP story) right now, I suspect they’ll find that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. But this story is just another reminder of where we’re heading. Nielsen Hayden gets to the quick of it:
Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.
Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.
The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.
If you think he (and I) are overreacting, look a little deeper into what’s going on with our information infrastructure. The network is transforming to enable pervasive monitoring and technical control over content, the control over that network is consolidating into a group that appears to be more willing to adopt common policies, and the laws are being rewritten to criminalize any attempts to avoid the exercise of this emerging control. That chokehold by a few may not matter to you (or at all) when it’s the next Miley Cyrus single, but it certainly should when we’re talking about the details of the next corruption scandal or natural disaster response.
June 15th, 2008
Seems like Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Attorney General, has cleaned up New York to such an extent that he can now spend his time convincing ISPs to shut down access to gigantic swaths of the Internet:
Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades.
[ . . . ]
No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.
Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups–out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.
Ah. All you have to do is yell “CP!” in a crowded theatre, and any subsequent trampling is okay, it seems. It’s been years and years since I’ve been on Usenet, but it - including many alt.* groups - occupies a special place in my own personal online history. It was a place for advanced debate and discussion when the first HTML standards hadn’t even been settled. Usenet hosted the first forum that ever resulted in me getting on a plane to go meet a group of friends I’d never seen in real life (circa 1994). While I’ve long since moved on, it still appears to be a busy host to exactly that kind of interaction. But hey, Andrew Cuomo needs an issue to run on, and Verizon wants a bit of credit to trade with the regulators, so lets slash and burn the place.
June 14th, 2008
Dead at 2.
Sigh. Only the good die young.
May 30th, 2008
If you live in the US, the initials GM probably bring a car company to mind, and then likely nothing after that. If you live in the EU, you’re probably sick to death of hearing about Genetically Modified food. I’ve always been a bit disappointed by the lack of a public conversation about it in the US. Not because I think that GM necessarily equals danger to human health - that’s a question of science. Rather, I have strong societal concerns about it - something as basic as food ought not be subject to intellectual property laws, and thus controlled by a few owners. There’s a great quick summary over at Phronesisaical, which in turn points us to this Vanity Fair article on Monsanto, describing it as:
a look at Monsanto’s approach to “protecting” its intellectual property — its phalanx of investigators and lawyers threatening farmers (and some non-farmers) who they suspect of planting their GMO seeds without paying for them.
Worth reading.
~
The Republican Party of Virginia is having its nominating convention this weekend (apparently picking their nominee is too important to be left to a statewide vote). Waldo gives us his wishlist of results. My favorite observation:
[G]iven a choice, Virginia Republicans will always choose wrong. Not wrong in hindsight, but wrong like should I pick up some dinner on the way home, or drive off a bridge?
Me, I’m not standing under any bridges this weekend.
~
Something I think might be informative to the recent conversation here about the death penalty is Jared Diamond’s examination of vengeance and the impact that the state has on expressing (and suppressing) one of our most powerful emotions.
May 2nd, 2008
Another of the “worst of the worst” from Guantanamo, a television cameraman, is released without charges after six years.
~
Did you know that U.S. Customs officials can stop you at the border and go rifling through every little file on your laptop, for no better reason than because they feel like it? According to them (and the 9th Circuit), they can. Here’s what you can (try to) do about it.
~
Read this Ta-Nehisi Coates story. An intelligent treatment of subject that really brings out the stupid in people.
April 30th, 2008
you’ll enjoy this.
April 8th, 2008
The Consumerist goes to town on just how ridiculous Sprint’s “security” is, when it comes to customer accounts.
(And yeah, I’m posting this because I’ve suffered Sprint for the past decade or so, and it’s well past time to send some suffering their way. The latest bit of fun was finding ~$500 in overcharges over the past few months, and then being offered a $150 “credit” to make up for it. As in no refund of the ~$500 I’d been wrongly debited, and a $150 credit against future billings. Seriously? GTFO.)
March 17th, 2008
they will watch. And listen. And examine.
I was talking with a friend last week about my concerns over the proliferating CCTV camera network in DC. He pointed out that there were no documented abuses, and that it seemed entirely sensible to put technology in the service of safety. And I suppose that when you take it in the narrowest sense - that the cameras will only be used to investigate specific crimes that have occurred, it’s not entirely objectionable. But the problem is that the narrow purpose rarely stays narrow - if there’s a way for the state to expand its surveillance of citizens and collection of information, I think it almost always will.
Case in point: Britain’s MI5 intelligence service wants to regularly monitor the movements of London’s Oystercard users (an RFID pass used for Tube/public transport trips, similar to DC’s SmarTrip). This isn’t a case of MI5 wanting to follow up on an individual already of interest to the authorities - they already have the power to access those records. Rather, MI5 wants to look at everyone’s trips, matching it to other information they’ve collected, ostensibly to identify patterns that might prevent some act of terrorism. Of course, any public transport riding terrorist could just eat the extra cost of paying with untraceable paper tickets.
So rather than addressing an actual intelligence need, I think MI5 is - without any real need - just automatically grabbing for as much as it can. And it’s this natural expansion of powers that we need to think about when agreeing to implement public information collection systems. The original purpose may well be perfectly sensible, but we need to consider what other purposes these tools can be appropriated for in the future.
And on that note, nothing could possibly go wrong with this, eh?
Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.
