Monday, November 17, 2003

China "cyber dissident" may be freed (Reuters). A 23-year-old "cyber dissident" detained last year for criticising the Chinese government may be released soon, family members say. Four officials from the Beijing Public Security Bureau visited Liu Di's home last week to convey the news, her grandmother said on Monday. Liu Di, a former psychology major at Beijing Normal University who wrote under the screen name "Stainless Steel Mouse", became a high-profile symbol for democracy and free speech in China since her detention in November 2002. . . . Liu wrote political satires about the ruling Communist Party and posted messages in Internet chatrooms calling for the release of online dissidents. Liu was never formally charged and has been held at Beijing's Qincheng Prison for political detainees. Good news if this proves to be true. 2:11:07 PM    comment []

Long Live The King: Is this the end of Western literature as we know it? Let's hope so! By Lev Grossman, in Time. [W]e — that is, we readers — have an odd and deeply ingrained habit of dividing books into two mutually exclusive heaps, one high and literary and one low and trashy, and we should stop it. Books aren't high or low. They're just good or bad. Take a look at that second heap, the trashy one, and you'll notice something interesting: it's very, very large. Ipsos BookTrends is a service that tracks consumer book purchases — numbers that, unlike sales figures for albums or movie tickets, are rarely seen outside the industry. According to Ipsos, 34% of all novels sold in the U.S. this year were romance novels. Six percent were fantasy and science fiction, and 19% were mysteries and thrillers. Only 25% fell under "general fiction," the category that includes the even smaller subdivision of literary novels: your Jonathan Franzens, your David Foster Wallaces, your E. Annie Proulxs. Statistically speaking, the literary novel is a small part of a very big picture. How did America's reading habits become so radically polarized, so prissily puritanical, that at best a quarter of what people read (or at least what they buy) qualifies as legitimate literature? It hasn't always been like this. As recently as the mid--19th century, historians of the novel tell us, there was only one heap. Dickens wrote best-selling novels, but they weren't considered "commercial" or "popular" or "your-euphemism-here." They were just novels. No one looked down on Scott and Tennyson and Stowe for being wildly successful. No one got all embarrassed when they were caught reading the new Edgar Allan Poe over lunch. But by the time modernism kicked in, in the early part of the 20th century, things had changed. The year 1922 saw the publication of both T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, two of the greatest literary works in Western history, but also two of the first that are impossible to understand without (and, arguably, with) compendious footnotes and critical apparatuses. All of a sudden you knew something was literary because it was difficult. You either got it or you didn't, and if you didn't, you didn't admit it. As much as Americans like to be democratic in our politics, we have become aristocratic in our aesthetics. This was something strange and new. Reading literature and having a damn good time had become quietly but decidedly uncoupled. And yet we think of this state of affairs as normal, and it has left us with a set of perverse biases that persist to this day. We have a high tolerance for boredom and difficulty. We praise rich, complex, lyrical prose, but we don't really appreciate the pleasures of a well-paced, gracefully structured plot. Or, worse, we appreciate them, but we are embarrassed about it. .... . . . I applaud the National Book Foundation's choice, and I hope it encourages the small but determined school of writers who are carefully, lovingly grafting the prose craft of the literary heap onto the sinewy, satisfying plots of the trashy one to produce hybrid novels that offer the pleasures of both. Writers like Donna Tartt and Alice Sebold, Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks, Jonathan Lethem and Margaret Atwood, writers whose work will most likely define — more than anything by brilliant mandarins like Wallace or Franzen — what will be known to later generations as the 21st century novel. The next literary wave will come not from above but from below, from the foil-covered, embossed-lettered paperbacks in the drugstore racks. Stay tuned. Keep reading. The revolution will not be canonized. (Here's the original url, too) 12:10:49 PM    comment []

Michael Geist: Name names, or privacy law toothless. While Canada may have enacted comprehensive privacy legislation, there are minimal expectations that the law will be enforced aggressively. The United States, meanwhile, may not have similarly comprehensive legislation, but there is every expectation that their current laws will be enforced in a serious manner. The lesson for the Canadian privacy community is that privacy laws alone are not sufficient to ensure good privacy practices. Rather, privacy compliance depends upon establishing the expectation that privacy practices that run afoul of the law will be punished and publicly identified. 11:10:38 AM    comment []

RealNetworks Says Windows Works Without Media Player. RealNetworks disproved claims by Microsoft that its Windows operating system depended on the inclusion of its Media Player. By Paul Meller. [New York Times: Business] 7:06:39 AM    comment []

David Burt (N2H2/SmartFilter) Is A Sore Loser. [Infothought] 7:02:41 AM    comment []

Collaborative Book Idea Gets a Nasty Review. Tony Perkins, who founded Red Herring magazine, has alienated at least one of his blog readers with a blanket pitch for help in researching a book he wants to write about Google. By John Schwartz. [New York Times: Technology] Evisceration is not pretty . . . . Something about the proposition struck Brian Dear, a software entrepreneur and writer, as being a lot like Tom Sawyer's inviting the other boys to paint the fence. Mr. Dear found the posting especially galling, he said, because he has been grinding away for years on a history of the user community that grew up around Plato, an early computer network. It just kind of rubbed me the wrong way, he said of the Perkins proposal, and I thought, 'You know, I should denounce this.' Check out Brianstorms for more. 6:58:27 AM    comment []

Keep Your Brain From Going to Pot. An altered version of the cannabis chemical THC might help prevent brain damage in head-trauma victims. By Kristen Philipkoski. Kasparov Trounces Computer Foe. Chess champ Garry Kasparov has shut down computer program X3D Fritz. The four-game match, played with a virtual board and 3-D glasses, was the latest victory in his quest to outsmart computers at the ancient game. [Wired News] 6:49:21 AM    comment []

Rumsfeld: U.S. to pull back in Korea. CNN via NewsIsFree: Popular Items. 6:45:31 AM    comment []

6:09:11 AM    comment []

Whatever happened to the Laura Callahan story? Y'know, the Deputy CIO at Homeland Security, the one with the "Ph.D." from a diploma mill who survivied a background check? She was placed on administrative leave, wasn't answering questions, then the Department advertised to replace her without firing her. Then what? The trail appears cold. The story rose as high in the media as a weblog at Reason mag, here, and InstaPundit. No Washington Post, CNN, New York Times, Fox, etc. coverage, as best I can make out. Probably not enough media consolidation for the story to bubble up to the top, I guess. 4:08:51 AM    comment []

Four years ago in my weblogging: How to help someone use a computer, by Phil Agre Federal prosecutors say white-collar crime is a priority, but they have filed only a few charges against Silicon Valley executives Women Outnumber Men at Many Colleges PEOPLink: Shop for fairly traded crafts and works of art from around the world Security problems and cryptographic solutions for human rights organizations working on the Internet ACLU in the Courts: ACLU v. Miller Affidavit of Witness Patrick Ball >Many human rights organizations have grave concerns about the security of their information. Often they ask me how they can protect their information while it is physically inside their organization, and how they can secure their Internet- based communications. Because human rights organizations often operate in hostile political environments, and because the information they acquire is often very sensitive, questions about security must be taken seriously. Every year, many human rights workers are killed in the course of their work. The principal reason they are captured, tortured, and killed is so that their captors can obtain information from them. Quite often the captors are government agents, acting either openly or as civilian death squads. Computers are also vulnerable to capture, which is why organizations want to protect information in its electronic form. Online Insider vs. DOJ vs. Microsoft What to Do About Microsoft? Antitrust Experts Offer Opinions Future will be up close and personal: Whether consumers are aware of it or not, almost everything they do on a site can be used to target what they see online. Inner-city residents often more apt to shop online Disney Must Change Go.com Logo Why Microsoft May Rule the World Jean-Louis Gassée on the DOJ v. MS Findings of Fact Echelon Watch German Court Overturns Pornography Ruling Against Compuserve and several kids and the Internet (and television) links 3:08:43 AM    comment []