Quotulatiousness

May 12, 2011

30 years in prison for taking photos of farms?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

As we all know, there are no higher risk facilities in the United States than the farm:

According to the New York Times, the Iowa bill, which has passed the lower house of the legislature in Des Moines:

would make it a crime to produce, distribute or possess photos and video taken without permission at an agricultural facility. It would also criminalize lying on an application to work at an agriculture facility “with an intent to commit an act not authorized by the owner.”

From a libertarian perspective, there’s so much wrong with these bills that it’s hard to know where to begin. Maybe with the bills’ ridiculous overbreadth and over-punitiveness — the Florida proposal, for example, apparently would ban even roadside photography of farms, and send offenders to prison for as much as thirty years. In proposing a (very likely unconstitutional) ban on even the possession of improperly produced videos, the Iowa bill, ironically or otherwise, echoes the tireless legislative efforts of some animal rights activists over the years to ban even possession of videos depicting dogfights and other instances of animal cruelty, for example.

Wouldn’t that kind of prison sentence for unauthorized photography be considered extreme in the old Soviet Union?

May 11, 2011

QotD: The instinctive reaction to progress

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

Douglas Adams, “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”, Sunday Times, 1999-08-29

How resilient is the internet?

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Richard Clayton summarizes a recent study by European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) on the internet’s ability to cope with disruptions. Among the ways the internet is vulnerable are:

First, the Internet is vulnerable to various kinds of common mode technical failures where systems are disrupted in many places simultaneously; service could be substantially disrupted by failures of other utilities, particularly the electricity supply; a flu pandemic could cause the people on whose work it depends to stay at home, just as demand for home working by others was peaking; and finally, because of its open nature, the Internet is at risk of intentionally disruptive attacks.

Second, there are concerns about sustainability of the current business models. Internet service is cheap, and becoming rapidly cheaper, because the costs of service provision are mostly fixed costs; the marginal costs are low, so competition forces prices ever downwards. Some of the largest operators — the ‘Tier 1′ transit providers — are losing substantial amounts of money, and it is not clear how future capital investment will be financed. There is a risk that consolidation might reduce the current twenty-odd providers to a handful, at which point regulation may be needed to prevent monopoly pricing.

Third, dependability and economics interact in potentially pernicious ways. Most of the things that service providers can do to make the Internet more resilient, from having excess capacity to route filtering, benefit other providers much more than the firm that pays for them, leading to a potential ‘tragedy of the commons’. Similarly, security mechanisms that would help reduce the likelihood and the impact of malice, error and mischance are not implemented because no-one has found a way to roll them out that gives sufficiently incremental and sufficiently local benefit.

Fourth, there is remarkably little reliable information about the size and shape of the Internet infrastructure or its daily operation. This hinders any attempt to assess its resilience in general and the analysis of the true impact of incidents in particular. The opacity also hinders research and development of improved protocols, systems and practices by making it hard to know what the issues really are and harder yet to test proposed solutions.

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

Belgian newspapers win appeal against Google

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

Apparently, even a short summary and a hyperlink are considered to be a violation of copyright in Belgium:

A Belgian appeals court has upheld an earlier ruling that Google infringes on newspapers’ copyright when its services display and link to content from newspaper websites, according to press reports.

The search engine giant is responsible for infringing the copyrights of the papers when it links to the sites or copies sections of stories on its Google News service, the Belgian Court of Appeals said, according to a report in PC World.

Google must not link to material from Belgian newspapers, the court said, according to the report (in French). No translation of the ruling is yet available.

[. . .]

The newspapers argued that they were losing online subscriptions and advertising revenue because Google was posting free snippets of the stories and links to the full article on Google News.

Google’s search engine offers links to the websites it indexes but also to “cached” copies of those pages. The copies are stored on Google’s own servers.

May 10, 2011

Is Facebook “managing” your friends for you?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:54

An interesting (and potentially disturbing) article from Mike Elgan may help explain why you don’t see as much activity from some of your Facebook friends as you might expect:

Every action you take on Facebook — clicking “Like,” commenting, sharing, etc. — is called an “Edge” internally at Facebook. Each Edge is weighted differently according to secret criteria.

What you need to know is that relationships and content that don’t get enough “Edges” will get “edged” out of existence. Facebook will cut your ties to people — actually end the relationships you think you have — and block content that doesn’t earn enough Edge points.

For example, many Facebook friendships exist solely through reading each other’s Status Updates. An old friend or co-worker talks about a new job, shares a personal triumph like reaching a weight-loss goal, and tells a story on Mother’s Day about how great his mom is. He posts and you read. You feel connected to his life.

Without telling you, Facebook will probably cut that connection. Using unpublished criteria, Facebook may decide you don’t care about the person and silently stop delivering your friend’s posts. Your friend will assume you’re still reading his updates. You’ll assume he’s stopped posting.

Any friends who fail to click or comment on your posts will stop getting your status updates, too. If you have 500 friends, your posts may be actually delivered to only 100 of them. There’s no way for you to know who sees them and who doesn’t.

I don’t use Facebook too often: certainly not every day. My Twitter updates are echoed to Facebook (but not retweets), so I don’t find it surprising that I haven’t seen everyone’s status updates lately: I just assume they’ve scrolled too far down the page by the time I get around to opening Facebook. This article implies that I never had the chance to see many of these status updates because they have “Edged” out of my feed.

Superinjunctions

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:08

British law is already difficult enough for outsiders to suss out, but the recent use of superinjunctions to prevent even the hint that a story is being legally suppressed makes it even tougher:

The high profile are gagging, the press is losing the ability to speak, and now the Twitterati is vomiting up half-digested rumours. All the signs are that Britain is in the grip of the legal virus known as ‘injunctionitis’.

It makes for an unedifying spectacle. In between news of uprisings in the Middle East, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the marriage of Will’n’Kate, the British press has been running another set of stories about what it is forbidden from reporting. The reason for this is the increasingly problematic use of the injunction, a legal prohibition issued by a judge that prevents a particular story from being published. While these have been issued for a few years now with largely little public knowledge — especially after the use of so-called superinjunctions, which forbid people from mentioning the fact that an injunction exists — over the past year or so, the injunction in all its forms has started to make the news all by itself. Which, you’d be correct in thinking, rather defies the point.

In fact, over the past few weeks, the attempts by certain individuals to gag the press has resulted in an outbreak of calculated press indiscretion. There has been the tale of the unnamed English actor who employed the services of Helen Wood, a prostitute whose previous clients include footballer Wayne Rooney. Of course, given the injunction, Wood couldn’t do a proper bonk-and-blab about the actor, but there was enough detail there for a salacious few pages’ worth. Then there was the unnamed Premier League footballer who had allegedly been having an affair with Big Brother 7 victim/star Imogen Thomas. She has since been frequently pictured looking disconsolate in a series of fetching bikinis.

It’s bad enough when the government uses its powers to suppress public discussion of items of importance to “national security” (with the definition as loose as possible). It’s much worse when the courts are allowing private individuals and corporations to have their own version of court-imposed censorship, as there’s no possibility of it being a “national security” issue.

It has not just been the tabloids making news of the unreportable. There has also been the case of ex-Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin who took out a hyper-injunction, which absurdly forbids anyone from even talking about the subject of the injunction to the lawmakers themselves — namely, parliament. (Although, of course, someone did, hence we know about its existence if not any of the details.) And things became even crazier when a prominent member of the media, BBC journalist Andrew Marr, revealed that he himself had violated his own profession’s freedom by taking out an injunction in 2008 to hush up an infidelity. In fact, as The Times gleefully reported, there are over 30 high-profile injunctions currently in operation involving a whole heap of public figures, from footballers to politicians.

So, in at least one area, we’re back to there literally being two different kinds of law, differentiated by the wealth of the plaintiff.

May 9, 2011

Happy first blogiversary!

Filed under: Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 18:02

No, not mine . . . that’s tomorrow (and it’s not my first either). Happy first blogiversary to the World’s Only Rational Man:

So what, at age 47, finally got me to blogging? You guys. Fellow citizens and liberty-loving non-Americans. What motivated me wasn’t the Ruling Class mobsters. I’ve been watching them for a quarter-century. Sometimes yelling about them, too. Audiences yawned.

It was lonely. A life of watching the U.S. government gradually turn into the very thing it had been created to oppose … just as the Founders had warned. “Look, look!” Audiences yawned. America was the mythical “frog in slowly heated water”.

It was so bad that the second President Bush, also a Ruling Class moron, ran on a platform called ”compassionate conservatism”. You know. What actual compassionate people call “charity” or “alms”. Voluntary socialism.

But of course what Dubya wanted was involuntary socialism. Or, as I call it, “slavery”. And the Republican Party, mostly led by Ruling Class morons, went along.

Gadgets from science fiction

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Caleb Cox rounds up ten geeky gadgets from science fiction shows and movies that he thinks we’d all like to have:

Tomorrow is always round the corner in the world of tech, and gadgets that started life in the imaginations of mad folk are starting to become a possibility.

Tools that give us superpowers may seem impossible, but ultramobile computing is a reality these days, with commonplace kit that seems more capable than devices Gene Roddenberry dreamt up.

As we’ve already looked at fantasy blades you wished you owned, it’s about time we talked-up the fantasy tech, after all, we are Reg Hardware. So here’s ten of our favourite gadgets from popular culture that may or may not be the tech of the future.

Let us know if there’s anything you think we’ve missed and give us your views on its commercial prospects in the comments section at the end.

His choices are:

  • Cloaking device — Predator
  • Holodeck — Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • Hologram communication — Star Wars
  • Orgasmatron — The Sleeper
  • Peril Sensitive Sunglasses — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • Personality glasses — Joe 90
  • Sonic Screwdriver — Doctor Who
  • Timebooth — Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
  • Telepathic Lens — The Lensman series
  • Teleportation belt — The Tomorrow People

May 7, 2011

Lanny Friedlander, Patriarch of Reason

Filed under: Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

Lanny Friedlander, founder of the libertarian magazine Reason, died in March. The New York Times and Reason magazine both had obituaries for him:

As readers of this site and the print edition of our magazine know, Reason‘s founder, Lanny Friedlander (1947-2011), died in March at the age of 63 from a heart attack.

Today’s New York Times carries an obituary for Lanny. Here are excerpts:

Lanny Friedlander, who with little more than a typewriter and a stack of paper founded the libertarian magazine Reason in his college dorm room in 1968 and ran it briefly before dropping out of sight for the next 40 years, died on March 19 in Lowell, Mass. He was 63….

In its dorm room days, Reason never attained a circulation of more than a few hundred copies per issue. Today, the magazine is a glossy publication with a monthly circulation of about 50,000; its Web site receives four million visits a month. Reason.tv broadcasts original and archival video programming online.

Comparing mouldy old tech with bright, shiny new tech

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:19

Dark Water Muse looks at competing technology from different eras:

The tech world is all a-buzz with reviews of eReaders and tablets capable of rendering eBooks, each of these device types purported to be candidates as the preferred host for future textual content to dethrone the lowly book as the natural media form readers turn to for reading textual content. Technical reviews focus solely on the merits of individual tablets and eReaders or line them up in comparative reviews. In DWM’s opinion these reviews completely miss the whole context of what is to be critiqued.

This tablet versus eReader battleground isn’t the real competitive landscape. Tablets and eReaders aren’t merely duking it out between themselves to win the hearts of readers. DWM views tablets as equivalent to eReaders when used to access published textual content such as books and magazines. Throughout the remainder of this piece DWM will refer to tablets, and other computer hardware which support eBook formats, and eReaders as simply eReaders.

As noted earlier, eReaders aren’t merely fighting amongst themselves for market share. The eReader, collectively, is fighting to displace the printed book. Read on as DWM explores exactly how that fight is going.

At the moment, I don’t really have any strong urge to purchase an ebook reader. I have a few dozen books on my iPhone, and it’s able to display the text acceptably well for casual reading (those few times I have to wait and for some reason don’t have a real book with me). My big concern with ebooks is less the reader and more the content: unlike a real book, you don’t own your copy of the content, and it can (and has) been remotely removed by the licensor in more than one case already. I have very great reservations about paying money to “buy” when it turns out that I’ve just paid a license fee that can be revoked at the licensor’s discretion without warning or compensation.

May 6, 2011

The “orphan works” gap in US copyright law

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

Nicole Ciandella writes about so-called “orphan works” under current US copyright law:

Jazz enthusiasts rejoiced when the National Jazz Museum in Harlem purchased the famous Savory Collection last year, but unless Congress fixes a gaping hole in U.S. copyright laws, few people will actually hear the prized recordings.

William Savory was an audio engineer who developed his own method of recording live audio performances in the late 1930s. Up until World War II, most live performances were recorded on 78 rpm records that could capture only about three minutes of music. But Savory used 12- and 16-inch aluminum discs, which enabled him to create and store high quality recordings of longer performances. His collection includes a six-minute version of Coleman Hawkins performing “Body and Soul” in the spring of 1940 and a recording of Billie Holliday singing a rubato-tempo version of “Strange Fruit” in a nightclub only a month after her original version was released.

While he was alive, Savory kept his recordings mostly to himself. He died in 2004. His son, who inherited the recordings, finally agreed last year to sell the whole Savory Collection to the National Jazz Museum.

Museum spokespeople say the museum is eager to share the songs with the public online, but because of the recordings’ murky copyright status, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. The performances Savory recorded are now considered “orphan works” — in other words, their copyright owners are unknown and cannot be tracked down. The museum can’t obtain permission to disseminate the recordings; and if the museum were to go ahead without permission, it would risk being hit with a copyright infringement lawsuit, meaning potentially hefty civil penalties.

May 5, 2011

Confused about the details of the Bin Laden raid? So’s the White House

Filed under: Government, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:34

Jon sent me this link which is a systematic attempt to draw together all the information/misinformation/disinformation about the Abbotabad raid:

Usually when governments use misinformation, they use it to make themselves look good. The Obama Administration gets points for originality, insofar as it’s been using disinformation and misinformation to make itself look arbitrary, unlawful, helpless and stupid. Here’s jj’s great summary:

Okay, what do we have here:

1) There was a firefight.
2) There was no firefight.
3) Bin Laden was “resisting.”
4) Bin Laden wasn’t armed. (Makes the concept of “resisting” interesting.)
[4.a) And the newest one: the SEALS thought bin Laden was reaching for a weapon.]
5) He used his wife as a shield.
6) His wife was killed too.
7) He didn’t use his wife as a shield. She ran at a SEAL who shot her in the leg, but she’s fine.
8 ) Some other woman — the maid? — was used as a shield. By somebody. Downstairs.
9) That other woman — downstairs — was killed.
10) Maybe not. She was killed unless she wasn’t — and who was she, anyway?

That’s less than half the list.

Stay on message? They’d have to have agreed on what the actual message is first.

Back to the original post, which has been updated a few times:

When people say “something is wrong here,” they’re sort of right. The “here” in which the wrongness resides isn’t this specific news story. Instead, it’s an overarching pathology that we’re talking about.

That is, the SEALS did what they did. What’s driving everyone bonkers is that this administration is incapable of being straightforward. Serpentine deceit is its MO, regardless of the topic, whether birth certificates, health care debates, or sanctioned assassinations. Everything is wrapped in a web of lies and confusion because of the paranoia, personality disorders, narcissism, and sociopathy that walk the White House halls.

May 3, 2011

The lawfare threat to bloggers (and anyone else who posts on the web)

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 18:15

Box Turtle Bulletin lays out the details of a very disturbing development:

By providing blockquotes, we let the source material speak for itself without any inadvertent inaccuracies or biases which may creep in if we were to paraphrase it. And by providing links, we allow you, the reader, to click through for more information. Of course, we cannot copy the source material in its entirety, nor can we copy major portions of it. That would violate copyright laws, which is a very serious issue. But copyright laws do allow us to copy small portions of source material for commentary and discussion purposes.

As I said, copyright laws — or more specifically, copyright lawsuits — are serious business. And now, three newspaper chains have discovered that filing copyright lawsuits can become yet another profit center. The problem is, their definition of copyright infringement not only contradicts copyright law, but also poses a serious threat to bloggers and other online outlets everywhere.

Righthaven LLC is a copyright holding company which acquires “rights” to newspaper content after finding the content published on other web sites without permission, and files lawsuits against those web site. Righthaven was created as a partnership with Stephens Media, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and their business model rests entirely on suing web site owners and operators for extravagant “damages” as a shakedown exercise. (“Rights” are in quotes, because, contrary to what is required under copyright law, Righthaven doesn’t actually acquire any legitimate copyright “rights,” which is yet another problem with their business model.) Two other newspaper chains, WEHCO Media and Media News Group have entered into agreements with Righthaven to split the profits from lawsuits stemming from their respective newspapers’ contents.

The three newspaper chains partnering with Righthaven represent some very important voices in the newspaper industry, including the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Denver Post, Salt Lake Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Detroit News, El Paso Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and Charleston Daily Mail.

I had already heard that the Las Vegas Review-Journal had some unusual views on quoting from their website, so I’ve avoided using that site for years. I didn’t know that the St. Paul Pioneer Press had also adopted that highly restrictive view of copyright, and they were one of the newspapers I read regularly for Minnesota Vikings information. I’m going to have to avoid quoting from them, however. Here is how Box Turtle Bulletin will be handling the situation in future:

And so to protect ourselves and this web site, we will no longer cite any content from Denver Post, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Salt Lake Tribune, or any of the other news sources listed no linkhere. There will be no links, no blockquotes, nothing. For the most part, it will be as if these sources simply don’t exist.

But if it happens that, for example, the Denver Post has an exclusive story that no one else has, we will do what the Associated Press does whenever the New York Times breaks a story. We will write about the story by paraphrasing the Post’s article, but we will not quote from it or provide a link to it — just like the Associated Press does. There will be however one tweak from standard AP practice: we will provide a link, but it will be to an explanation as to why there is no link. It will look something like this:

     “The Denver Post (no link) reports blah, blah, blah…”

H/T to Walter Olson for the link.

The Royal Wedding as proof of monarchy’s descent to celebrity status

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Brendan O’Neill won’t expect his name to show up on the royal honours list after this scathing piece:

Now that the I do’s have been done and the dress has been papped to death, it’s time to put the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton into perspective. Friday’s knees-up in London and other parts of Britain was not, as both right-wing fantasists and bitter republicans would have us believe, evidence that everyday Brits remain in thrall to monarchy. Rather, the Big Day confirmed just how far the monarchy has been hollowed of meaning, and the extent to which it has rather desperately thrown its lot in with one of the few institutions that still has political purchase in Britain today: celebrity culture.

The observing classes were in equal measure overexcited and disgusted to see so many little people waving Union flags on Friday. For monarchists, this was evidence that Britons still have ‘great affection’ for their Queen and her brood and all that they represent — including hereditary privilege. For the more fashionable Windsor-weary set — republican commentators at publications such as the Guardian and the New Statesman — the sight of hordes of happy people cheering a prince and his gal was utterly alien. They are ‘brainwashed drones’, sniffed one columnist, partaking in a ‘monstrous [display] of imperial pride’, said another.

What both these cheerers and sneerers amongst the chattering classes fail to appreciate is the extent to which the royal wedding was a celebrity event rather than an imperial one. And people related to it accordingly, cheering and photographing Will’n’Kate not as their future natural rulers, but as individuals who have the aura, and authority, of celebrity. This was a celebrity happening not only in the much commented-upon fact that slebs such as David Beckham, Elton John and Tara-Wotsit-Wonkynose squeezed into the pews alongside the King of Tonga and the Queen of Denmark, but also in the fact that all those Union flags were handed out to the revellers by Hello! magazine. Responsibility for adding a nationalist gloss to Friday’s proceedings was effectively outsourced to the army of ‘Hello! helpers’ who ‘lined the royal wedding route’ armed with thousands of factory-made Union flags.

May 2, 2011

Radley Balko: “He won”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:58

A distressing round-up of the lifetime achievements of the late Osama Bin Laden:

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

  • We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
  • We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
  • In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
  • We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
  • The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
  • The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
  • Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)

The list, unfortunately goes on.

Yes, bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn’t something a special ops team can fix.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress