Gessel On…

Hey, wow… sure, techdirt isn’t the WSJ, but for a blog it is somewhat authoritative and they’re actually noting that fact that we grant temporary monopolies to creators not as property (or to preserve jobs or to fund private jets for industry execs) but solely to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Any IP law that retards the progress of science and the useful arts, no matter how many jobs or corporate jets it saves, is unconstitutional. Tell Victoria Espinel that she should be sworn to upholding the constitution, not the corporate profits.

This is relevant now because the press was just kicked out of the anti-”piracy” summit at the white house (by “piracy,” they of course mean vigilante trust busting, not the corporate pirates of the public domain).

I got an interesting call from 305-800-1000 claiming to represent Verisign. Whoever was calling (”they,” not necessarily Verisign, but I don’t have any reason to doubt that) had reviewed my site and found I was using a CACert certificate, which the caller accurately pointed out generates a warning in most browsers, and accurately pointed out might turn users away for no valid reason whatsoever except that I didn’t pay Verisign for the privelege of using encyrption and FireFox penalizes me for not having done so.

They thought I should “upgrade” to a Verisign cert.

I politely explained that I understood that CACert isn’t included in most default browsers and that it should be and that charging for certificates was a scam and that I absolutely would not be switching and I was doing my part to make the web a better place.  Amazingly, the caller actually seemed to understand my off-script rant and thanked me for my time.

I hate the current cert model.  It is totally broken.  People seem to think that certs work as a trust tool and if only you give people big enough, annoying enough warnings they’ll not trust a free, expired (or perhaps even illegitimate) cert.  The problem is that certs are a pain in the ass.  Recently my BlackBerry started telling me Google Maps’ cert had expired.  Did I not use maps until they fixed it?  Would you?  No, of course not.   You just pick through an extra stupid dialog.  The worst thing about the new FireFox update is the real estate wasted on cert validity and the astonishingly annoying “are you absolutely sure you trust this cert?” dialogs.

The only valid reason for SSL is so that when you’re at a coffee shop or on an untrusted networks, it is harder for people to sniff your passwords.  That’s it. It completely fails as a validity check, no matter how big and red the policeman warning logo is.  It always fails for a number of reasons:

1. A bad cert doesn’t mean anything.  “Green” certs are absurdly expensive (they should be free), expire, and are hard to manage so one frequently finds bad certs on known good sites.
2. A good cert doesn’t  mean anything.  All it means is that the site paid and the URL matches.  But even a place like a bank might have dozens of URLs for different parts of their service and so getting a green cert for www.my-bank.com is just as good as www.mybank.com.  If the site looks the same, most people will log right in to either.
3. Nobody pays any attention anyway.  And they really shouldn’t.

In the end this is a disaster for net neutrality.  There are some interesting debates about FireFox’s new, intrustive dialog boxes.  The cold call I just got is a natural consequence of a FUD policy which in effect reduces interent security to the benefit of people selling certificates FireFox approves.  If it turns out there is financial benefit flowing from the vendors of “approved” certificates to FireFox, I’ll never use it again.   Even without impropriety, I think Mozilla has done a grave disservice to the internet.

This is an important question: where did Worldbeat go? Worldbeat is the essential reference for news about both Penii and angry robots. Without my weekly does of worldbeat, the world seems colder, as if the sun is hidden behind a permanent haze that just won’t clear.

Even if you don’t know Chris Watson’s worldbeat, you want it back because until you get the chance to experience Worldbeat you will never know how bright the sun shines on absurdity. Where else will you learn:

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE

In March, a 13-year-old girl sent a letter to her mother. There were, however, some problems this letter. First of all, she didn’t put a stamp on it. Secondly, her mother is dead. And third, the letter was addressed to “Paradise Street, Heaven.” Two days after she mailed the letter, it was returned to her. It came marked “unknown at this address” and with a 1.35 euro fine for the missing stamp. Everyone got all pissy at the French post office, for what was seen as its callous treatment of the girl. Nobody got all pissy at a world that tricks kids into thinking there’s a magical fantasyland where their dead parents are waiting to get mail. Nobody except Worldbeat. Because that’s what we do here.

Michael Cahill of Cambridge Beat wants to know where Chris has gone too. Where is our worldbeat? I stopped by the offices of the Echo Weekly personally and asked, but nobody there knew.

It is time to demand answers! Write the Echo and demand Worldbeat!

Faith in pseudo-science annoys me. As I get older I find myself caring less and less what other people believe and have learned, mostly, to just walk away when people espouse anti-scientific ideas. But every now and then I find myself typing something like:

“While I disagree that there’s anything less than an unprecedented flowering of innovation at an ever increasing pace, there is a risk to further progress in weakened academic structure that has led to an increase in credulity as evidenced by growing embrace of faith in psuedo-science and outright anti-scientific religion. It is not so much that fanciful flights of faith pose any meaningful challenge to good science, rather the pointless waste of resources that ultimately harm the ignorant and drain overall productivity .

“As those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, so too the directionless flailing of the uneducated repeat past failures and charge enthusiastically into dead ends long ago discovered and mapped in formal curricula. Those who bemoan the exclusion of the uneducated in scientific discourse deserve no more sympathy than obese couch potatoes whining over being excluded from consideration as contenders in marathons. Merely being qualified to appreciate progress requires a modicum of technical literacy, at the least a thorough understanding of scientific method, evidentiary proof, and basic mathematics; an understanding of which is a civic obligation regardless of profession.”

(The comment was not particularly anti-scientific and in true web2.0 abbreviated “update” form, ambiguous and without context. While it is likely a diatribe more in agreement with the original post than contrary to it, so much inspired consonance seems worthy of elevation from throw away comment against an abbreviated status post to the exulted position of “blog post,” in all vanity published glory, untarnished by critical review or editorial attention.)

DTV transition crashes and burns

This is too funny. The FCC sponsored a NASCAR driver to get the message out about the DTV transition on Feb 17 when millions of American’s will suddenly find their TV’s don’t work and all hell will break loose likely causing the collapse of society as we know it. Of course the car crashed in the first race. And the second.

One of my favorite radio shows is On The Media; one of the best shows on the radio. As good as it is every week, the first segment of the January 16th show stands out as amazing. It is a wonderful summary of some of the almost previous administration’s absolutely abhorrent behavior and abject lying. If you’ve forgotten the history of what pathetic scum they were, the first few minutes of the show will remind you of the highlights from Cheney’s disastrous energy commission to the fable of Jessica Lynch and all the rest of the lies and fabrications and constitutional subversions they subjected us to.

Cheney may have used “fuck” in his dismissal of Patrick Lehey, but the weight of that flippant obscenity pales compared to the very deliberate use of “thank.”

Thank you, George Bush. Thank you, everyone who voted for him.

Yesterday a “special edition” of the New York Times was handed out around New York. It is absolutely hilarious and I think one of the better pranks I’ve heard of.

Most of the satire is spot on. Of many examples that I found really amazing, the fake “Friedman” piece is one of my favorites. He was on The Daily show recently promoting his book and I couldn’t contain my disdain for his relentless errors and misinformation. Is there any penalty for being completely wrong? About everything? Yes! Perhaps only in satire, but yes.

The Satire is mostly about Friedman’s errors on Iraq, but he’s been wrong about just about everything: economics, social reality, the role of trade, and, of course, the war in Iraq.

I got a note about it from the Yes Men mailing list, the NYT article (real) about the Times (fake) has some details.

Carolyn and I were in Canada for the election. We saw it from the safety of a Russian themed bar called Pravda in Toronto, one of our favorites (the Chicken Kiev is amazing and Andrea the bartender is the best).

We watched on a projection screen as the results came in and the initial McCain victories were soon overwhelmed by a tide of… well… for once not being a land of morons.

We left once the electoral victory was inevitable and heard the results on the radio between Toronto and Guelph. We were happy but not surprised. We listened to people describing how happy they were, Canadian commentators speaking about how “The States” was now not a joke and might perhaps once again participate in the world’s stage as something other than belligerent idiots. It was good.

Now I have to admit a bit of wistfulness at the results. Not that I didn’t want Obama to win… but I’m sorry to see Palin go the way of Kathleen Harris. Palin is such a caricature of extreme white trash, of all that is idiotic and embarrassing in America: the Tonya Harding of Politics but with a body double for her sex tape. I’m sad that tonight Jon Stewart will be boring. That for the next eight (please) years the most ridiculous news will come from somewhere other than the white house. We could have had Palin there and every day would have been a delight of absurdity. I’d trade good leadership for comedy, but it is not an unmitigated win.

Today, on the way out of Canada, I saw something that demonstrated in a small way how monumental this moment of history really is. I followed a black American man through security screening. It was obvious he was used to being given a hard time for his color, for his culture. He expected it, reacted to the scan and the follow up as if it were part of the normal sweat inducing stress he had to live through every day. What broke his stride was when he collected his things after passing the secondary mass spectrograph screening and the Indian screener said to him as he turned away “Yay Obama!”
Across boarders, across centuries, across races this is a moment that renders irrelevant such trivialities as a global depression or wars.

It turned out the guy grew up about 20 blocks from me in Philadelphia. The world is interconnected and small and overnight the good people have a reason to be optimistic. Finally.

I was listening to Christian Radio in a red state recently and heard a news break between the adulational Christian soft rock/country exhort Christians to vote their conscious.  The commentator was, to my liberal ears, neutral in his repeated statements about voting one’s conscious until he said “I honestly believe that if the liberals win the presidency we will see Christians going to jail.”

Some of what followed I couldn’t hear behind my own laughter, but I think he said something about a liberal senate, house, and presidency having unchecked powers to criminalize evangelicals and jail them for their beliefs.

On the one hand this sort of fear mongering seems just bat excrement crazy, and a fringe not representative of the mainstream of conservative thought.  On the other hand…

(more…)

After almost eight long years of unrelentingly horrible news, of an enervating, depressing, distressing litany of stupidity and manifest religious extremism cloaked in political lies finally, finally there is one slim measure of clear thought, of defense of right of justice of decency.

It is narrowly targeted, it is in defense of the civil rights of a minority, but it is good and right and in the right direction and it deserves our full support.

The Travelers Privacy Protection Act (TPPA) is a bill that attempts to address what should be unconstitutional and illegal searches of electronic devices by DHS. Now most people might not know or even believe if they heard the rumors that DHS has claimed the right to confiscate any electronic device they want anyone carries into the US. They can keep your stuff forever. They don’t have to get permission from a judge, they don’t need probable cause or reasonable suspicion or any legally meaningful threshold to justify these seizures.

Not surprisingly, the DHS is reluctant to give up the convenience of a paperwork and accountability-free operation and there’s not too much evidence yet that they’ve been unreasonable in their use of this power, but absolute power corrupts absolutely and it is merely a matter of time before tales of intolerable abuses come to light unless the usual and assumed checks and balances are applied.

So contact your representative now and support the Travelers Privacy Protection Act, written by Feingold, Cantwell, and Smith. It sets a fairly low but legally significant standard of “reasonable suspicion” for search and limits the search to 24 hours. If DHS needs more time, they must find (either on the device or by other means) justification for “probable cause,” which may justify seizure.

Only the United States presumes such unchecked power to snoop through people’s private lives. No other country will seize devices without any judicial oversight. A very strong argument for applying minimal legal standards to DHS seizure is that failure to do so will ultimately justify other nations taking the same position. While the US has, for the bulk of those who pass under suspicion, protected nominal rights it is not necessarily true in other countries and the data on our laptops and phones might be used for political or industrial gain.

The US must strive to set the standard for protecting rights or we will continue to lose any premise of moral authority in world affairs.

Your support helps.