Three Policies for Pirates

Three policies I'd like to see a Pirate Party (or any forward looking political party) adopt with respect to providers of online services, social networks, communication feeds etc.

1) There should be an option to turn the filter-bubble off. 

If you use an algorithmic filter to prioritise what is of interest to the user within a feed, you MUST also provide a version of the feed without that filter. And an easy way to switch it on or off.

2 Everyone owns their own "data-exhaust". 

If you provide a service that gets its value from observing user behaviour you cannot claim exclusive ownership of that data. The user should have an inalienable right to share or license it with anyone else. (You aren't obliged to make it available to others (which might be genuinely arduous) but you can't complain if the user or another company (with the user's consent) figures out how to do it themselves.

3) Service providers must openly explain what data they are mining / inferring from their users. 

Just as packaged foods must explain what ingredients go in to them. Online data-services must explain what they are inferring from your behaviour so that you know what you are revealing to them.

Rants

Rant #1

Microsoft, you idiots! Why do you try to force me to create a new Microsoft account to use Skype on my new Windows Machine?
I don't want another Microsoft account and I already HAVE a Skype account. (Which is yours anyway). Why not just silently merge the Skype and Microsoft identity back-ends and let me use the login / password that I already have?
What I'm going to do instead of migrating my account to Microsoft is restrict my Skype use to my Android phone (which still works, Skype on Linux broke a long time ago), and eventually migrate to other chat / VoIP solutions 99% of the time. And that's because you are being demanding and annoying rather than providing me with something useful that helps me do what I want to do.

Rant #2

HMRC (UK tax people) are absurd. Last year I set up a perfectly good online way to access my account. Today they want "confirmation" of the last 4 numerals of an "interest paying" bank account. I don't HAVE an interest paying bank account. I've certainly never registered one with them. But their stupid new "security" measure locks me out of my account with them because I can't present them with the details of one. WTF??????

Taking Issue With Paul Graham’s Premises

Good take-down of Paul Graham's feeble defence of income inequality.



Deciphering Glyph :: Taking Issue With Paul Graham’s Premises

Defeating ISIS

These days I seem to do most of my writing / thinking / arguing etc. on Quora. So for the record, here's what I'm saying about ISIS and the UK vote to join in airstrikes. (Question : "House of Commons in UK voted for action against ISIS/ISIL in Syria - Is this going to be another blunder like Iraq?)

It's utterly the wrong thing to do. And strategically somewhere between pointless and very counter-productive.

But it's not quite the same as the Iraq blunder. Iraq was an unforced war of choice against a non-beligerant nation for the purposes of socially re-engineering the middle-east : something we never had the ability to do and should have recognised from the start that we couldn't do.

In this case, the war has come to us. Or at least to France which is a pretty close ally. And IS explicitly say they WANT a war with us. (It's precisely because they want it that we shouldn't give it to them.) Nevertheless, IS is threatening us in a way that Iraq wasn't when we chose to involve ourselves in it. And we need some strategic response.

The basic problem in Syria is that the West wants to get rid of Assad. And two local powers - Russia and Iran - want to keep him. The West can't move fully against IS until that is resolved. We can't put boots on the ground in Syria without either a) Assad's permission, or b) explicitly going against Assad and therefore Russia and Iran.

This is why we're paralyzed. We all know that airstrikes can't actually beat ISIS ... airstrikes by themselves never beat anyone. We know that going in on the ground really would be a blunder, putting us into the quagmire where we try to hold territory and rebuild a state, under attack from all sides : the Assad government, more surreptitiously by Russia and Iran and their proxies, and by the remnant Sunnis who see themselves fighting for survival surrounded by hostile Shiites.

So, avoiding the quagmire, we have the second most amazingly idiotically bad strategy of all time ...

- We're going to bomb people from the air, with no hope of achieving any concrete victory.

- Some people we bomb will be ISIS fighters but many will be innocent civilians.

- Most of whom never wanted ISIS there in the first place; don't support ISIS, and only collaborate with it out of fear.

- We're going to teach those civilian Syrian Sunnis that we nevertheless consider that their lives are expendable in our loooooong war of attrition against ISIS.

- That's mainly about us "being seen" to do something.

- We'll act all shocked and outraged if some of the next generation of young Sunnis growing up in the area start to think of themselves as on ISIS's side and the West as their enemies. How perfidious can they be, considering we were only trying to help them?

- We will wait for a "miracle". That is, for some other local faction, who are nice and good people. That we'd be proud to associate ourselves with. And very friendly with us. And courageous enough to fight against both ISIS on the ground AND to march on and take over from Assad. And when that faction arises, won't our air-support be wonderfully useful to them?

That's it. That's the current strategy. Keep bombing people, and killing mostly civilians, until the miracle group turn up and do the dirty work for us.

Yeah, I think that sounds utterly fucked too.

So here's what we should be doing.

Phone up Assad, Russia and Iran. Tell them that our priorities have changed. That we aren't interested in deposing Assad at this time ... or any time in the near future. Tell him we'd like to co-operate against the common enemy. That we're willing to use our air-power to support his ground-troops against that enemy. In return we want a deal where he promises not to use chemical weapons (he won't need them with the all bombs we can provide him). And that he accepts some NATO troops / UN Peacekeepers on the ground in the retaken areas, as a guarantee that there isn't too much retribution against the Sunni population. Also we'll ask that he cuts a reasonably lenient deal with the other non ISIS, non Al Qaeda rebel factions that rose up against him.

Do the deal. Get the ISIS region back under Syrian government control. Then do a similar deal with the Iraqi government.

Maybe if we're really lucky we can get some kind of semi-autonomous Sunni area protected from Shiites, where we can work with local leaders. We don't want to make the mistake of abandoning Sunnis to vengeful Shiites, which is one of the processes that led to ISIS in the first place.

Does that sound like we've allied ourselves with an evil monster and sold out our other anti-Assad friends in Syria? Are we bad people when we do this?

Yes. And yes.

So here's the question. How serious are we? How badly do we want to kill ISIS? Are we (and our politicians) willing to pay the price?

To which Rupert Baines replied :

And the other thing people seem to ignore: we have been bombing ISIS for 14 months in Iraq

Have we been bombing civilians there?

If so, odd that their government is ok with it

If not, why would we do so in Syria?

No, we have been bombing oil fields, military bases and combat positions

And my further (lengthy) reply

I'm not ignoring that. I'm aware we're bombing a bit of Iraq ... at the invitation of the Iraqi government. And with the hope that Iraqi ground-troops will eventually move back into the IS region and re-establish the government's control there. As far as I know, we are NOT bombing a bit of Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government. We are not co-ordinating with Syrian ground-troops. We don't particularly want them to re-establish control over the region. Indeed, we have an ill-disguised hope that Assad is still going to fall to some other rebel faction.

I know people seem to think that international law and boundaries are basically ignorable. Last decade our leaders promoted the idea that our expedience trumps such niceties. So we undermined the entire system.

But THAT is one of the big problematic legacies we're struggling with now ... do we want to re-establish the rule of law? Or it a free-for-all where might-makes-right? We can't have it both ways. We can't ignore international law whenever we like, and then convincingly claim that our wider actions are aimed at, and justified by, establishing such law and stability. Even if the British conveniently blind ourselves to the hypocrisy, the rest of the world notices.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-in-a-borderless-world-the-days-when-we-could-fight-foreign-wars-and-be-safe-at-home-may-be-long-a6741146.html

ISIS define themselves against the system that we built and that we are ostensibly defending. If we now casually ignore our own system, then we just make ISIS's argument for them.

Everyone sort of admits that when we fight ISIS, we're "fighting an idea". And the priority when fighting an idea is to have a BETTER idea to offer in its place. But that's exactly what we don't have. Instead we're reiterating the mistake of Iraq : we break stuff, but don't know how to put it back together again. And then we're surprised when what emerges to fill the vacuum isn't to our taste. We hate all their ideas ... Islamic rules for creating a stable society through extreme religious obedience and harsh punishment; but we have no ideas that work better for them in their place.

We allegedly love the idea of autonomous nation-states. But draw and ignore boundaries for our colonial and post-colonial convenience. We allegedly love democracy, but support the Egyptian army overthrowing an elected Muslim Brotherhood. We love free-markets and competition, but Iraq was a feeding trough of well connected corporations sucking up the redevelopment budget.

I'm not saying this to make an argument that Islamic attacks on the West are justified because of our hypocrisy. Don't accuse me of that. I AM saying that the hypocrisy reveals the weakness of the ideas we're offering them. They are superficial facades which even we don't respect or believe in, deep down. But without having something better to offer, how do we "win" against the idea of the Caliphate?

And without a strategy for winning, you have nothing but tactics, designed to maintain some kind of stand-off.

When the attack comes in England, it will almost certainly be executed by British born or resident ISIS sympathizers. It's likely not to be directed from the ISIS region but be planned here too. And largely financed locally or from a very diffuse global network of funders. How exactly do tactical strikes on oil-fields in the ISIS regions prevent, or degrade ISIS's capacities to execute, such an attack?

Airstrikes attacking the military and even economy of the Islamic State are a perfectly valid tactic ... IF you are supporting a ground invasion to seize control of the territory and hand it over to a legitimate authority. That's fine.

But don't try to fool yourself, or anyone else, that airstrikes against ISIS territory are at all useful in preventing the next "terrorist atrocity" in London. There's no possible way that an airstrike in Syria is going to do that. There are no fat causal pipes that can be cut. Just diffuse memes floating across the internet and individuals circulating through the international air-transport system.

It's stupid to imagine that airstrikes in Syria will protect us. And that's what's totally terrifying, the ignorant level of political discourse. People who are meant to be responsible enough to run the country engaging in magical thinking about what military action can and can't do.

Airstrikes in Syria are ONLY useful in support of a ground-invasion. WHERE IS THE GROUND INVASION?

Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS

Glenn Greenwald :  Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS

RFID Blocking Wallets

Sign of the times : Faraday Store an online shop specializing in wallets that are also Faraday Cages to prevent your RFID enabled credit-card and other documents being scanned without your knowledge or permission.

Intellectual Property

Welcome to a world where not only is IP used to stop you using software you DO want, but is also part of a major bargaining tool to oblige you to run software that you don't necessarily want.

The deal will supposedly grant Asus the right to Microsoft's vast collection of patents affecting Android phones.

As part of the deal Asus will bundle Microsoft software, including Office, on future Android phones.

Gbloink! on Scratch

Nice one! A 16 year old re-implements Gbloink! on Scratch.

In other news, the Gbloink! site is back up. Now just a static thing made with Bootdown.

Gbloink! Site Down

The Gbloink! site is down. Compromised by spammers probably via WordPress. I'll clean it out and it will be back soon(ish).

Silbury Air Performance Guide

Some fascinating insights here :

Giles Fraser :

So, to recap: corrupt German companies bribed corrupt Greek politicians to buy German weapons. And then a German chancellor presses for austerity on the Greek people to pay back the loans they took out (with Germans banks) at massive interest, for the weapons they bought off them in the first place. Is this an unfair characterisation? A bit. It wasn’t just Germany.

James Galbraith on Greek Referendum

Worth reading.

Legal Highs

For once, I have to agree with The Spectator(!)

We are moving ever further from common law towards the tyranny of Roman law in which everything is banned unless it is specifically permitted.

....

It is often said that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but that can only reasonably apply when the law is written in such a way as to leave no doubt as to what is permitted and what is forbidden. A law which can put you in prison for seven years for not memorising all the exemptions to a piece of legislation that amounts to an all-out war on chemistry is capricious. You’ll get no argument from me if you say that most of people who get prosecuted under this law will be lying when they claim that they ‘didn’t know it was illegal’ but for a non-trivial minority it will be the truth.

Of course, such "whitelist" laws are increasingly popular with new technology too.

Bonus : Things You Own Which Are Now Illegal

Are the police really going to come after people with air freshener or flowers in their home? Plainly not. But that's precisely the problem. This is not law as we know it. It is the aspiration of a child-like intellect cloaked in the respectability of a government bill. Trying to ascertain the effects is like trying to sit down on an imaginary chair: it does not exist. It is not there. It is just words. You might as well legislate against sub-standard sausage sandwiches made by a deli in 2018.

The really depressing thing is that, with expected Tory, Labour and SNP support, this insane bill is likely to pass with barely any opposition at all. But it will at least serve as a symbol of how deranged our debate on drugs has become.

Lab on paper

Lab-on-paper developed for rapid, inexpensive medical diagnostics -- ScienceDaily

Facebook Takes Over The World

Some depressing reading. I've been saying for a while that Facebook has basically "reinvented television", the stream fed to passive consumers, reflexively channel surfing or hitting a "like" button like pigeons in a Skinner Box.

But I hadn't realized that it's quite as bad as this. Read these excellent articles from The Awl :

• Content Distributed  
• Territory Annexed
• The Facebook Proposition 
• The Next Internet is TV

Freedom of Speech

It really doesn't help, the week we're all so enthused by the virtues of freedom of speech, that we're basically putting a man in prison for life because of what he said and wrote.

Oh, I know we have some other things on him too : supplying a phone and being part of kidnapping plot. But, be honest with yourself, if that's ALL he'd done, and he'd never written or said anything else, would he really be getting put in a Supermax prison for the rest of his life?

Migration Watch

Mark Steel : "Christmas must be fun for MigrationWatch"

New Momus Album

I can't decide if Momus is just getting more productive or if I'm slowing down in keeping up, as it were.

But there already seems to be a new Momus album out on YouTube.

As always, it's a mixed bunch. But some tracks I'm already liking very much.

The GhostBoxish Bathyscaphe  :




System of Usher :



The Brutalist :



Catholic App is a classic Momus twisted take, satirising the end of privacy.



I probably disapprove of Unreconstructed (after unwrapping its layers of irony) but it's musically and lyrically clever.



Spore is a salacious zero-g love-song with a luscious tune.



If Thunderclown was anything to go by, I'll probably get into the rest after a couple of listens too. Even at his most antipathic or discordantly "experimental"  Momus's songs are always wriggling with little earworms.

Saddam's Chemical Weapons

Status Report:

Saddam's Chemical Weapons :  Existed, sold to him by the US / European companies, covered up by Pentagon at the cost of their own soldier's health due to potential embarrassment.

My cynicism : Undiminished.

20 Years of Blogging

Dave Winer has a mixed mood contemplation of 20 years of blogging and his career.

It is a criminal waste that no institution is able to give him a context to do bigger work. Although perhaps he would end up being too constrained.  

Anyway, congratulations Dave. Happy 20th. And thank you. For the inspiration and everything you've contributed. I'm still using my software based on the Concord outliner every day. And I think more and more people are getting ready for the next reboot.

Britain's Independent Nuclear Deterrent

is ... er ... leased from the US.

Isabella Acevedo: the immigration minister's cleaner stuck in Yarl's Wood

Worth reading.

Champion of Democracy

Owen Jones :

Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive regimes on earth and bans political parties, trade unions and all forms of dissent; deprives women of many of their most basic rights; kills "witches"; has recently declared atheists to be terrorists; and persecutes LGBT people. It should surely be an ostracised regime. And yet this is the biggest market for British arms, with our government approving £1.6bn worth of exports, ranging from equipment for machine guns to "components for military equipment for initiating explosives."

Game Over

Leechblocked Quora

Had to be done ...

 

Cameron and Antibiotic Resistance

Cameron does something important and starts to look into the threat of antibiotic resistance.

But he puts an economist in charge of the project with an explicit assumption its an economic problem that industry has failed to invent more antibiotics.

So lets see if the committee starts recommending the banning of antibiotics in intensive farming practices or if they just come with recommendations to extend "intellectual property" rights or other incentives for big pharma companies.

Facebook Caught Experimenting on Users

Social Network Analysis research gets icky.

I have to admit that I see how this happened, and I would probably have signed off on the ethics of it myself (or been willing to be part of this). But I can see how it looks pretty bad to be caught doing it. And frankly, maybe it is pretty bad.

OTOH : I think what they found out knowledge worth having. But it's largely worth having in order to know the danger that corporations having this power present. You wouldn't want the academic study of this to be banned, and for the research to disappear into internal surreptitious tinkerings where no-one else ever sees the results except in private reports to the marketing department and advertisers.

PayPal Police

Do you have government permission for your privacy?.

Mimesis, Civilization and Collapse

A must-read article from The Archdruid. Fascinating and disturbing.
The Broken Thread of Culture

OneNote and Magic Pen

Microsoft seem to be doing something pretty cool here. Tight integration of a custom UI device (the stylus on their latest Surface tablets) with their note-taking app. OneNote.

Obviously I'm sticking with OWL, but this is pretty nice. And you can imagine them taking it a lot further. Extra buttons on the pen. What about a chording-keyboard on a pen? Other apps. accessible through OneNote etc.

Quora's Misogyny Problem

Violet Blue has some extracts from a disturbing Question.

I notice she also has a book that looks interesting.

African Firm Sells Pepper-spray Bullet Firing Drones

Here it comes ...

Society of the Query Reader

My conversation with Aharon Amir on Search Art and the language of search is now published in the Society of the Query Reader.
Available as a PDF or other online formats linked from the page.

Patterning : Sacred Geometry

Facebook App. To Live Monitor Audio Through Your Phone

WTF? At this point the surveillance-industrial complex is just laughing at us. The US has done nothing to prevent the NSA demanding that Facebook etc. hand over user's data to it. Has done nothing to make it legal for Facebook to even tell its users if the NSA has demanded their data. And yet Facebook says "trust us, we'll only use an always-open mic channel on your person for good".
At this point it's just comical that they'd ask for this, and comical we'll accept it.
BTW: You can sign a petition if you think it will do any good.
PS : I'm glad I shut my Facebook account and don't use the app.

Patterning : Curvacious

Patterning : White Album

Patterning ...

NeoLiberalism in Simple Rules

Because markets ...

RIP Tony Benn

Gary Younge, as usual, has a great write up.

Project Tango

Johnny Chung Lee reveals Project Tango.

And, of course, it's his level of genius. And it's awesome. But, hell, aren't we scared yet?

Given everything we now know about the end of privacy, the fact that the NSA have back-doors to all our mainstream social software that Google are legally prevented from telling us about? And that Google are putting always-on cameras onto everyone's face?

Is the thing that we are really missing the ability to have millimetre accurate models of all the geometry (and therefore, via recognition algorithms, inventories of all the objects), in every room we enter? Collected automatically? And potentially streamed to Google's servers? Do I want to have someone walk into my room and immediately start telling Google / the NSA everything I have in it?

Sure, it's going to make amazingly competent robots, though.

Marx and the Middle-Class

Dillow points out that Marx was probably right about the inevitable decline of the middle-class under capitalism.

iBeacon

Interesting thought :

But iBeacon is much more than that. It is the infrastructure on which the iWatch will run. For all intents and purposes, iBeacon is the iWatch. The advantage of a wearable device, after all, rests in its ability to interact with the Internet of Things. All that remains for Apple is to build its Internet around the world’s things.

Everything You Need To Know About Blair

Guardian :

According to the email, sent the day after the News of the World's final issue and six days before Brooks was arrested, Blair also told her he was "available" to her and Rupert and James Murdoch as an "unofficial adviser" on a "between us" basis.

Transparency Helps Terrorists

Glenn Greenwald :

But what has struck me is how seriously many media figures take [the claim that public scrutiny of the secret service "helps terrorists"]. In the vast majority of interviews I’ve done about NSA reporting, interviewers adopt a grave tone in their voice and trumpet the claims from U.S. officials that our reporting is helping the terrorists. They treat these claims as though they’re the by-product of some sort of careful, deliberative, unique assessment rather than what it is: the evidence-free tactics national security state officials reflexively invoke to discredit all national security journalism they dislike.

Immortal Technique

Impressively smart and interesting political hip-hop artist.

Immortal Technique - The Poverty of Philosophy

Wealth Addiction

Excellent article describing the experience of being a money addict.


My ThoughtStorms page for it.

Google's For-Profit Surveillance Problem

Good article

Fiverr Accepts BitCoin

Now this is big.

Fiver is a great place to experiment with online commerce. Both with buying and selling new product ideas. And it's users are both innovative and internationalized. And the prices are so cheap that the fluctuations of BitCoin's pricing might be less of an issue. (What does it matter if your $5 gig fluctuates between $1 and $15? )

In other words, it seems like an excellent test-bed, place to grow.

The Day We Fight Back

Drone As Driving Accessory

Full story

Wired on GCHQ vs. Anonymous

Read it :

The key difference, however, is that while those involved in Anonymous can and have faced their day in court for those tactics [DDoS], the British government has not. When Anonymous engages in lawbreaking, they are always taking a huge risk in doing so. But with unlimited resources and no oversight, organizations like the GCHQ (and theoretically the NSA) can do as they please. And it’s this power differential that makes all the difference.

SoundCloud

Things I wish I could do on SoundCloud.

OWL Screenshots

Over on SmartDisorganized.

Gbloink! ... in the Browser!

Oh yeah, I'm on a roll, at the moment, of actually "releasing" stuff I've been doing over the last few months.
This one's really exciting for me : a version of Gbloink! that's written in CoffeeScript / Javascript and running in the browser. Longer story over on the Gbloink! site.
Try it here ... but be aware it's still pretty experimental. However, it is Gbloink! And it runs in the browser. w00t!

Machine Gardens (The "Magic" Video)

This is an old video from when I was making laser-cut machines a couple of years ago. I used it again in the Object Oriented show we did last November. This is half the work, showing the "magic" of recursive algorithms being turned by a laser-cutter into physical objects. There's a companion video which shows all the human activity and faff that was excluded from this one.

Tape

Found an old tape with more Gbloink! music on it.

Pablo Smash - PRISM Planet

Nuclear Against Global Warming

A good debate between George Monbiot and an opponent of nuclear.
ThoughtStorms is a bit sparse on climate change issues (just found the ClimateChange page itself was empty!). Will try to rectify that.

What Is ISRG?

Good blog post on the people making the decisions.

I Love This So Much :-)

China and BitCoin

Paul Denlinger's Quora answer to What is Beijing's rationale for promoting Bitcoin?

Very interesting

NSA Insiders Reveal What Went Wrong

Truth-out : NSA Insiders Reveal What Went Wrong

2014 : Whither Composing?

I know I'm asking questions rather than making predictions this new year. But here is a prediction : Google are going to keep folding Blogger into Google Plus.

This blog has been a significant writing space for me for over 10 years. It's even survived a major name change (though not change of URL).

But I think Google have little incentive to work on advancing the art of blogging. That work is going on over at WordPress and Ghost etc. All Google's innovation here is going to be integrating it more tightly into G+ (everything I post here is already automatically forwarded there). Comments are optionally integrated (G+ becomes the white-list, a useful anti-spam feature).

In 2014 I have a desire to become less dependent on Google. And I believe serious writing needs a different kind of space from the hectic rapids of social media. And I'm delighted with the move of Smart Disorganized to my own WP. And I really liked my short-lived LinkBlogging experiment on Fargo. And I'm starting to get my head around putting stuff into ThoughtStorms again ...

And so ...

Well, listen. Seriously. I can't just dump this blog. That's really not an option. It's too established a URL. Too much history. And, ultimately, I like to keep an address somewhere at an address I don't own ... just in case my web-hosting and / or domain ownership suddenly collapses for some reason.

But I think Composing is going to change its role ... less writing here. More links to writing elsewhere. It's going to become more like the "social media" that Google obviously want it to be. An interface to G+ (with RSS output). And list of pointers to my other activities.

That's what I think is going to happen, anyway.

NY Times calls for Edward Snowden to be pardoned.

Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower.

Geek Questions for 2014 : Programming on Tablets?

My latest geek question for 2014 (over on Smart Disorganized). How the hell do I program on my tablet?

UK Anti-Terror Police Sent After a 12 Year Old Planning To Protest

Terror squad yanks 12-year-old out of class over plan to protest at David Cameron's office.

Here Comes the Sousveillance

Here they come ... apps that match anyone against social media photographic databases.

Geek Questions for 2014

Over on (the new) SmartDisorganized I'm starting a series of posts on the questions I'm asking myself at the beginning of 2014.

Mainly about my own projects + some more general ones about directions in technology (especially SDI tech. of course).

Open Lab Construction Kit

Lab construction kit

As Bruce Sterling Said ...

I'm glad I don't have a job ...

The Future is Telepresence

Interesting story of Willow Garage's transformation.

Brainwashed by the Super Rich.

Good Guardian piece.

WikiLeaks Release of Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

Here

Buying Signs From The Homeless

This guy spent 10 years buying signs from the homeless in New York.

Acceleration, Money and Identity

Today's somewhat random move. Had a couple of interesting political / philosophical conversations over the last week or so. So Hilan and I decided we'd resurrect the OPTIMAES blog as venue for them.

First post here.

We'll see how this goes. Not really planning to get back into OPTIMAES at the moment ... but who knows what next year will bring. (Certainly not me.)

RSA's $10 Million Dollar Deal With NSA

NSA paid RSA $10 million to distribute broken security software!

Crazy, Sexy, Cool

Fascinating aesthetic choices (visual, musical) on this online GIF art show.

New aesthetic?

Edward Snowden to Brazil

Edward Snowden's open letter to Brazil :

Six months ago, I stepped out from the shadows of the United States Government's National Security Agency to stand in front of a journalist's camera. I shared with the world evidence proving some governments are building a world-wide surveillance system to secretly track how we live, who we talk to, and what we say. I went in front of that camera with open eyes, knowing that the decision would cost me family and my home, and would risk my life. I was motivated by a belief that the citizens of the world deserve to understand the system in which they live.

My greatest fear was that no one would listen to my warning. Never have I been so glad to have been so wrong. The reaction in certain countries has been particularly inspiring to me, and Brazil is certainly one of those.

At the NSA, I witnessed with growing alarm the surveillance of whole populations without any suspicion of wrongdoing, and it threatens to become the greatest human rights challenge of our time. The NSA and other spying agencies tell us that for our own "safety"—for Dilma's "safety," for Petrobras' "safety"—they have revoked our right to privacy and broken into our lives. And they did it without asking the public in any country, even their own.

Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world. When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there. If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck on his university exam, NSA can keep that call log for five years or more. They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target's reputation.

American Senators tell us that Brazil should not worry, because this is not "surveillance," it's "data collection." They say it is done to keep you safe. They’re wrong. There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement — where individuals are targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion — and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever. These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.

Many Brazilian senators agree, and have asked for my assistance with their investigations of suspected crimes against Brazilian citizens. I have expressed my willingness to assist wherever appropriate and lawful, but unfortunately the United States government has worked very hard to limit my ability to do so -- going so far as to force down the Presidential Plane of Evo Morales to prevent me from traveling to Latin America! Until a country grants permanent political asylum, the US government will continue to interfere with my ability to speak.

Six months ago, I revealed that the NSA wanted to listen to the whole world. Now, the whole world is listening back, and speaking out, too. And the NSA doesn't like what it's hearing. The culture of indiscriminate worldwide surveillance, exposed to public debates and real investigations on every continent, is collapsing. Only three weeks ago, Brazil led the United Nations Human Rights Committee to recognize for the first time in history that privacy does not stop where the digital network starts, and that the mass surveillance of innocents is a violation of human rights.

The tide has turned, and we can finally see a future where we can enjoy security without sacrificing our privacy. Our rights cannot be limited by a secret organization, and American officials should never decide the freedoms of Brazilian citizens. Even the defenders of mass surveillance, those who may not be persuaded that our surveillance technologies have dangerously outpaced democratic controls, now agree that in democracies, surveillance of the public must be debated by the public.

My act of conscience began with a statement: "I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. That's not something I'm willing to support, it's not something I'm willing to build, and it's not something I'm willing to live under."

Days later, I was told my government had made me stateless and wanted to imprison me. The price for my speech was my passport, but I would pay it again: I will not be the one to ignore criminality for the sake of political comfort. I would rather be without a state than without a voice.

If Brazil hears only one thing from me, let it be this: when all of us band together against injustices and in defense of privacy and basic human rights, we can defend ourselves from even the most powerful systems.

Mind Traffic Geometry

I've finally taken the plunge and moved Smart Disorganized, my geek blog, off Blogger and onto a WordPress on my own server. The new URL is http://sdi.thoughtstorms.info/ (naturally it's moving in with Project ThoughtStorms.)

It's all part of the constant refactoring of my online-life.

Amazon's Quadcopters : Short Comment

I'm not as sceptical as some people about Amazon's quadcopter delivery system.

Although it's certainly still in the stage of playfulness and hype, Amazon are very smart, very ambitious and very good at turning advanced technology into viable services. The thing to remember is that quadcopters can be combined with delivery trucks, so that a truck can go to an area, launch 10 or so quadcopters to take packages the last half-mile and then move on. I bet there are some serious fuel savings there. And over such short distances, not a huge risk of air-piracy.

Westheimer

Westheimer's Discovery:
        A couple of months in the laboratory can
        frequently save a couple of hours in the library.

DJ Oleiro

One of the things that's been taking up a lot of my time recently is being involved in an art exhibition at the University of Brasilia with some other friends / artists.

This was a second edition of the Object Oriented exhibition we originally ran in Kentish Town in 2011. I showed a development of my Pot Jockey piece (now translated into Portuguese as "DJ Oleira", literally "DJ Potter"). The principle is the same, to turn a MIDI DJ Controller into a tool for making round objects. But I've updated the software to allow hollow centres (ie. cups, bowls, vases), and moved from the "stack of cylinders" model to a mesh of angled faces that can approximate a curved surface.

I have a lot more documentation to do on this over the next few days - including making the latest code public - but at least I managed to get a reasonable video this time :

RIP Nelson Mandela

A good Quora answer.

Diamonds

Fascinating story.

India Goes To Mars?

Cool.

European Courage and Action?

Glenn Greenwald :

If the German and French governments – and the German and French people – are so pleased to learn of how their privacy is being systematically assaulted by a foreign power over which they exert no influence, shouldn't they be offering asylum to the person who exposed it all, rather than ignoring or rejecting his pleas to have his basic political rights protected, and thus leaving him vulnerable to being imprisoned for decades by the US government? Aside from the treaty obligations these nations have to protect the basic political rights of human beings from persecution, how can they simultaneously express outrage over these exposed invasions while turning their back on the person who risked his liberty and even life to bring them to light?

Real-time 3D Printed Board Game

Aza Raskin's modest proposal :

You start with no pieces and as the game opens, you build lots of weak little ships. Their physical size means they don’t take much material and print quickly. That fire power buys you enough time to invest in building stronger big ships. These might take upwards of 15 minutes to build, but choose carefully, you’ll be blocking your production queue. With your 3D printer behind a sheet of cardboard, your opponent knows that you are are building, and for how long you’ve been building, but not what you are building. The whirr of your stepper motors give tantalizing hints of your strategy. Of course, you’ll be able to cancel production mid-way for an incomplete downgraded/vulnerable piece, like the partially constructed Death Star.

Update : Check out Shapeways Game Section for context.

Are All The Good Ideas Already Being Done?

My Quora Answer

OReilly BioCoder

Fascinating new DIY bio magazine from OReilly.

There's Nothing so Radical as Empiricism

Chris Dillow :

There's nothing so radical as empiricism.

Tech News

Dave Winer :

Tech is where big news is happening this decade. It's time to start doing it seriously.

FirefoxOS Launches in Brazil

FirefoxOS phone launches in Brazil. If it's not too expensive I'll look into getting one.

Ultima Viagem (Last Trip) - Corpo Baletroacústico - Goiânia em Cena 2013

Here's a performance that was recorded on Friday. Of the Corpo Baletroacústico at an "integrated performance" seminar in Goiania. You don't see me but I'm playing one of the computers in the orchestra : the one that's making a kind of wooshing sound in the background of the second movement, and slightly more harmonic chords at the beginning of the third, with a few stabs of noise later on.

BSBLOrk at Dead Night

We've been doing some death-related activities in Senhoritas Cafe in Brasilia recently.

Here's the laptop orchestra playing a couple of months ago :

Meanwhile, here's some "reporting from Hell" played at a more recent event.

Falling From The Sky

My new link-blog: Yelling At Strangers From The Sky is out of action. It seems that Trex, the server behind Fargo, has serious problems.

I'm still dropping links into this outline, because the principle of having microblogging under my control is a good one. But I'll have to find a way to render the output from this blog.

Hint : It may have something to do with GeekWeaver :-)

Hint 2 : Solutions that involve me hacking something together sometimes ... take ... time ...

How Useful is NSA's Dragnet?

Yochai Benkler :

After the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, few would argue that al-Shabaab is not a terrorist organization. But al-Shabaab is involved in a local war, and is not invested in attacking the US homeland. The indictment against Moalin explicitly stated that al-Shabaab's enemies were the present Somali government and "its Ethiopian and African Union supporters". Perhaps, it makes sense for prosecutors to pursue Somali Americans for doing essentially what some Irish Americans did to help the IRA; perhaps not. But this single successful prosecution, under a vague criminal statute, which stopped a few thousand dollars from reaching one side in a local conflict in the Horn of Africa, is the sole success story for the NSA bulk domestic surveillance program.

Mermaid Rock EP