None other than Sci-Fi author, civil libertarian, blogger, activist, and TLF commenter Cory Doctorow drops in at the Bureaucrash Podcrash (that’s a podcast for “crashers”) to discuss his new book Little Brother.
An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, “Little Brother” is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus’s guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book’s principal delights. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox gaming consoles, to a tech-savvy youth underground (we are now post-nerd, I learned — hipsters and social networking experts have replaced the unwashed coders of yore).
We at TLF may disagree with Mr. Doctorow on a number of policy issues, but I must admit that he’s a talented writer. I bought Cory’s Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, a collection of short stories, at Capital Books here in DC and read it cover to cover by the end of that weekend. A great read available free in digital form at Cory’s Craphound.
Just FYI, the latest update of my booklet on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now live. The new version, Version 3.1, provides minor updates to all sections of the book and a new appendix of relevant research in the field. I issue major updates early each year and 1 or 2 tweaks during the course of the year to reflect the evolution of the parental control and online child safety market and debate.
For those not familiar with the report, it explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education efforts, and initiatives aimed at promoting online child safety. I believe that the parental controls and content management tools cataloged in the report represent a better, less restrictive alternative to government regulation. As I conclude after evaluating that state of the market: “There has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.”
The report is available free-of-charge on the PFF website, and the previous editions of the report are housed there too in case you want to see how it has evolved over the past two years. For those interested in taking a quick look at the report, I have embedded it down below the fold as a Scribd file. Finally, as is always the case, I encourage readers to send me updates and suggestions for how to improve the report and I will incorporate them into future versions. Continue reading →
Yes, this is my second question mark-festooned post of the day, but it’s another title that calls for being phrased as a question, because it’s so unbelievable that anyone said it.
Turns out, a McCain adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, was struggling to prove that McCain has what it takes to tackle our economic woes. And here I thought it was the communists, not American war heroes, who believe in managing the economy. Anyway, Holtz-Eakin reached for anything to prove McCain’s credentials and pointed to the Senator’s service on the Commerce Committee.
Pressed to provide an example of what McCain had accomplished on that committee, Holtz-Eakin said the senator did not have jurisdiction over financial markets, then he held up his Blackberry, telling reporters: “He did this.”
That’s right everyone, Al Gore may have created the Internet, but John McCain created the Blackberry.
The Washington Post reports today on a trend that I thought we all knew about, but one I’m glad the mainstream media is finally realizing. It turns out that people who play video games are not just virginal teenage boys with acne problems. No, even 20-something, attractive women play video games.
The Post’s Mike Musgrove reports on the mother and daughters of the Burguieres family of Bethesda, Maryland. Of course in good journalist fashion Musgrove uses the Burguiereses to illustrate a larger point, he even points to the relevant stats:
It used to be that this all-woman crew wouldn’t fit the standard image of the video game consumer. But the perception of gamers as being mostly young guys isn’t so true anymore. Women and girls make up 40 percent of the gamer population, according to the Entertainment Software Association.
The most interesting point brought up in the article on this demographic trend—one that most gamers realize has been happening for quite some time—is Musgrove’s observation that women once were not naturally accepted members of the gaming community. It’s a great point, but one that can be extended to tech community in general.
A major breathalyzer vendor is facing increasing pressure to make the source code of its product available for inspection by defendants. I’m pleased to see my home state of Minnesota leading the charge. The Constitution gives you the right to confront your accuser, and if your accuser is 50,000 lines of assembly code, then you have a right to examine that code. And if CMI doesn’t want to release the source code for its products, then it shouldn’t have gone into a business in which its product is the key witness against defendants in criminal cases.
CMI’s argument that releasing the source code would put it at a disadvantage is nonsense. Making the source code available for inspection would not entail licensing the copyright of the code to anyone who wants it. So it’s true that a competitor might somehow get a copy of the source code, but it wouldn’t be able to do anything with it without facing a copyright lawsuit. And just looking at the assembly language isn’t going to be very helpful. Assembly language is notoriously difficult to interpret, and the small amount of insight a competitor might glean from seeing the source code would be outweighed by the risk of a successful copyright or trade secret lawsuit down the road.
Incidentally, all of these points apply with equal force to touchscreen voting machines. Those should be available for public inspection too, although unfortunately there’s probably not an explicit constitutional provision allowing you to confront your election judge.
It exalts terrorists and terrorism to try chasing their videos off the Internet, and it doesn’t work. Senator Lieberman’s quest to cleanse the Internet of terrorism has won a battle in a losing war by convincing Google to take down such videos. They can still be found on LiveLeak and can be hosted on any of millions of servers worldwide.
[In his eager anti-Google gafliery (“gadfliery” – the nominative case of the verb “to gadfly,” which I just invented), I’m sorry to say that TLF friend Scott Cleland has gotten it wrong.]
The better approach is to treat terrorists as the losers that they are. Their videos do not scare us, but provide us opportunities to observe, comment, and deplore them, perhaps even mocking their foolishness. In this video, at minute 2:18, terrorists appear to be training for the circus. We’ll really fear them when they can fend off lions with a chair.
A friend pointed me to this event, which looks pretty cool:
Who? Anyone who is interested in technology, mobility, art, social justice, sustainability, micro-finance – and all things Africa-esque
What? A good opportunity to share ideas, start conversations and build connections with people and organizations making a positive impact in Africa
When? Saturday, October 11th 9 am – 8 pm (end time to be confirmed)
Where? Google’s Mountain View Campus
We don’t talk about international development issues much on TLF, but technology certainly plays a key role in helping developing countries develop. If you’re in the Bay Area, you might want to check it out.
The San Diego Union Tribune has an outstanding summary of the recently-unveiled SpaceShipTwo (SS2) (Wikipedia), successor to SpaceShipOne, which became the first private vehicle to reach space in 2004 and won the $10m Ansari X-Prize. SS2 is vying to become the world’s first commercially operational spaceplane and the first in Virgin Galactic’s fleet. Pictured at left is Virgin founder and multi-billionaire Richard Branson, and to his right, Burt Rutan, designer of SS1 and SS2. The PDF does an excellent job of illustrating the basics of an SS2 flight, though at nearly 9mb, the file isn’t a quick download.
At a press conference this morning at the National Press club in Washington, the Space Solar Alliance for Future Energy (SSAFE) announced a milestone demonstration of the critical technology enabling SBSP: long-distance, solar-powered wireless power transmission. The demonstration project, led by NASA veteran John C. Mankins, demonstrated microwave power transmission between two Hawaiian islands 148 kilometers apart, more than the distance from the surface of Earth to the boundary of space. Although SBSP satellites would ultimately operate at much higher altitudes in the geosynchronous orbit (35,786 km AMSL), Mankins has successfully demonstrated the feasibility of long-distance energy transmission in principle.
Those of you who haven’t “cut the cord” to television (as I did about 5-6 years ago) may be interested to watch a special episode of Discovery Project Earth entitled “Orbital Powerplant) that will debut tonight at 10 pm with reruns on September 13 at 2am and noon.
This video provides more background on SBSP (until recently known as “Space Solar Power”):
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
None other than Sci-Fi author, civil libertarian, blogger, activist, and TLF commenter Cory Doctorow drops in at the Bureaucrash Podcrash (that’s a podcast for “crashers”) to discuss his new book Little Brother.
Yes, this is my second question mark-festooned post of the day, but it’s another title that calls for being phrased as a question, because it’s so unbelievable that anyone said it.
The Washington Post reports today
The San Diego Union Tribune has an 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.