Subscribe to this blog in Radio:
Didn't find what you were looking for?
E-mail this blog's author, Bruce Umbaugh:  |
|
 |
Friday, May 12, 2006 |
I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed ! ! ! William Gibson on NSA wiretapping.
Open Source Radio did a special yesterday on the NSA's indiscriminate, illegal wiretapping of American citizens, revealed in an expose in yesterday's USA Today. They got William Gibson on for a rare interview and he was fascinating, trying to place this in context as a spasm generated by humanity's inability to master its technologies. Audio starts about 34 minutes in.
I can't explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we've all got some...
The interesting thing about meta-projects in the sense in which I used them [in the NYT editorial] is that I don't think species know what they're about. I don't think humanity knows why we do any of this stuff. A couple hundred years down the road, when people look back at what the NSA has done, the significance of it won't be about terrorism or Iraq or the Bush administration or the American Constitution, it will be about how we're driven by emerging technologies and how we struggle to keep up with them...
I'm particularly enamored of the idea of a national security "bubble..." Technologies don't emerge unless there's someone who thinks he can make a bundle by helping them emerge...
I've been watching with keen interest since the first NSA scandal: I've noticed on the Internet that there aren't many people really shocked by this. Our popular culture, our dirt-ball street culture teaches us from childhood that the CIA is listening to *all* of our telephone calls and reading *all* of our email anyway.
I keep seeing that in the lower discourse of the Internet, people saying, "Oh, they're doing it anyway." In some way our culture believes that, and it's a real problem, because evidently they haven't been doing it anyway, and now that they've started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response.
It's very hard to get some people on-board because they think it's a fait accompli...
I think it's [the X-Files, Nixon wiretapping, science fiction]. I think it's predicated in our delirious sense of what's been happening to us as a species for the past 100 years. During the Cold War it was almost comforting to believe that the CIA was reading everything...
In the very long view, this will turn out to be about how we deal with the technological situation we find ourselves in now. We've gotten somewhere we've never been before. It's very interesting. In the short term, I've taken the position that it's very, very illegal and I hope something is done about it.
Link (Thanks, Brendan!)
[Boing Boing]
9:12:50 PM 
|
|
CC-licensed Byrne/Eno My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: Remix and share.
At a new website here , remix music and share your vision using tracks from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s original 1981 album.
For the first time ever, fans are able to legally remix and share their own personal versions of two songs from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s groundbreaking album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The interactive forum bush-of-ghosts.com has been developed to celebrate the reissue of the album 25 years after its original release.
By agreeing to the terms of download, users will be able to download the component audio for two tracks from Bush of Ghosts – "A Secret Life" and "Help Me Somebody.  This component audio is licensed to the public under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Consistent with that license, users can legally create remixes and upload them to the site. Visitors can listen to, rate, and discuss the remixes, and are also encouraged to create their own videos, which will be streamed on the site. Via Joi Ito
[Smart Mobs]
9:08:01 PM
|
|
Bill killed?.
Isn't this interesting? Remember when I bought General Wesley Clark's cell phone records for under a $100 in order to prove that anyone's privacy could be violated?
Well, since that time there have been a number of bills in the House and Senate to address this problem. The House recently passed one bill unanimously, and a second bill was coming up in the House today. But it suddenly disappeared without a word right when the story broke about the Bush administration illegally spying on all of our phone records.
Coincidence? [Pajamas Media]
9:06:18 PM
|
|
King Kaufman's Sports Daily: Weirdest thing in sports: Barry Bonds' "chase" of the motionless, and technically dead, Babe Ruth. Plus: The media's amazing power.
This Barry Bonds "chase" of Babe Ruth's home run record has got to be the screwiest thing I've ever seen, and that's if you don't even think about the whole steroid thing, which, just so we can have a few nice moments together, let's not think about for a second.
First of all, it's a pretty low-speed chase, isn't it? I mean, you thought the white Bronco was dawdling. I don't know how to break this to you, but Babe Ruth is dead. He's kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.
He has stopped hitting home runs.
Chasing Babe Ruth is like chasing a parked car. There ain't a lot of drama involved.
...
[Salon]
8:51:35 PM
|
|
Tip of the iceberg.
A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said Thursday he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens. …
[Tice] said he plans to tell the committee staffers the NSA conducted illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of U.S. citizens while he was there with the knowledge of Hayden. … “I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It’s pretty hard to believe,” Tice said. “I hope that they’ll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn’t exist right now.”
ThinkProgress.org, quoting from National Journal
Italics (but not bold) supplied by me.
Note to AM: Apropos of your comment many posts back, this story exists due to those in the trenches. [Emergent Chaos]
8:45:53 PM
|
|
Response to the first post.
This paper from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication,11(3),article 3 is entitled,"Predicting Continued Participation in Newsgroups".The abstract reads:"Turnover in online communities is very high,with most people who initially post a message to an online community never contributing again.In this paper,we test whether the responses that newcomers receive to their first posts influence the extent to which they continue to participate. The data come from initial posts made by 2,777 newcomers to six public newsgroups.We coded the content and valence of the initial post and its first response,if it received one,to see if these factors influenced newcomers' likelihood of posting again.Approximately 61% of newcomers received a reply to their initial post,and those who got a reply were 12% more likely to post to the community again; their probability of posting again increased from 44% to 56%.They were more likely to receive a response if they asked a question or wrote a longer post.Surprisingly, the quality of the response they received—its emotional tone and whether it answered a newcomer's question—did not influence the likelihood of the newcomer's posting again".
Predicting Continued Participation in Newsgroups [Smart Mobs]
6:28:00 AM
|
|
American Thinkers.
Quick question for you all reading. I’m trying to think of current, living, vital writers, thinkers, public figures, artists, entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, etc., who are uncommonly sensitive to the deep zeitgeist of American life, able to communicate easily and powerfully to wide audiences, and particularly able to capture the richness and zest of American society and history in its ambiguity and uncertainties without being polemical. I’m looking for people who have their finger on the pulse of American society. Sense of humor and ability to not take oneself overly seriously is helpful but not necessary.
To give you some examples, some people I thought fit the bill, more or less, were:
Larry McMurtry
Gary Wills
Jon Stewart
Stephen King
Suggestions? I’ll settle also for independent, contrarian thinkers who arguably could have that kind of sharply observed perspective on American social and political life, even if they largely write about other things, like George Packer.
[Easily Distracted]
Bruce Sterling
Neal Stephenson
Howard Rheingold
come to mind
6:20:50 AM
|
|
Major Vulnerability Found in Diebold Election Machines.
This is a big deal:
Elections officials in several states are scrambling to understand and limit the risk from a "dangerous" security hole found in Diebold Election Systems Inc.'s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines.
The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide.
Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways.
"This one is worse than any of the others I've seen. It's more fundamental," said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and veteran voting-system examiner for the state of Iowa.
"In the other ones, we've been arguing about the security of the locks on the front door," Jones said. "Now we find that there's no back door. This is the kind of thing where if the states don't get out in front of the hackers, there's a real threat."
This newspaper is withholding some details of the vulnerability at the request of several elections officials and scientists, partly because exploiting it is so simple and the tools for doing so are widely available.
[...]
Scientists said Diebold appeared to have opened the hole by making it as easy as possible to upgrade the software inside its machines. The result, said Iowa's Jones, is a violation of federal voting system rules.
"All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design," he said.
The immediate solution to this problem isn't a patch. What that article refers to is election officials ensuring that they are running the "trusted" build of the software done at the federal labs and stored at the NSRL, just in case someone installed something bad in the meantime.
This article compares the security of electronic voting machines with the security of electronic slot machines. (My essay on the security of elections and voting machines.) [Schneier on Security]
6:14:31 AM
|
|
British farmer supplies gallows to totalitarian governments. Cory Doctorow:
A farmer in Middlesex Suffolk builds and exports gallows to African dictatorships, where they are used to execute dissidents and others who've been railroaded through corrupt judicial systems. He's been condemned by Amnesty International, but insists that "business is business," and some people deserve the death penalty. His business will be outlawed by a new EC regulation in July.
 The execution equipment he says he sells ranges from single gallows, at about £12,000 each, to "Multi-hanging Execution Systems" mounted on lorry trailers, costing about £100,000.
Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: "It's appalling that a British man is apparently attempting to sell gallows to President Mugabe's government [in Zimbabwe].
Link (via Neatorama)
[Boing Boing]
6:13:05 AM
|
|
Worldmapper: A New World View.
 Another great post from our friend Geoff at BLDGBLOG leads us to Worldmapper, a series of dramatically distorted multi-colored maps that show the world according to statistical data, largely obtained from obscure UN reports that glean little attention.
Cartographers Danny Dorling and Anna Barford of the University of Sheffield, UK, have created almost one hundred maps so far, which display information on population, migration, births, freight, imports and exports, and more. As they say in the New Scientist,
No one wants to look at those figures, and it would be hard to provoke any excitement by confronting someone with spreadsheets filled with numbers. But you just can't help looking at these pictures. After all, a new view of the world, rather like the famous Earthrise photo taken by Apollo astronauts, is a compelling sight.
The map here shows . . . .
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
See if you can guess what the map represents, then follow the link to see whether you're correct.
6:07:58 AM
|
|
|
