China

Power Adventures In Iraq

Friday, December 12, 2014 

Plugging things in here is always an adventure. Most of the outlets are the horrible giant British style so they have interlocked grounds, but most appliances are European style, so plugging things in means either using something to jam open the ground interlock, breaking the interlock tabs with force, or dispensing with the plug entirely and just stuffing bare wires in the holes.

When using the latter method, it turns out the British plugs are actually kind of useful because toggling the ground tab with a screwdriver uses the interlocks to bind the wires in place.  You just hope the ground pin is wired to ground, not hot.  Usually it just isn’t wired to anything.

Most appliances and power strips here come from China and are the sort of manufacture China was famous in the US for about 30 years ago: taking something out of the package usually breaks it.  The wires inside are so thin it is amazing they survive and grounds are never, ever actually connected.  I have cables that on the inside have a ground insulator but no ground conductor inside the insulator.  Awesome!

But we just rewired the new villa and even though the ground isn’t wired (of course), the outlets are new and seem like they’re decent quality.  And we even got British style plugs to dispense with the highly problematic and very melt-prone plug adapters.  All seemed good until….

Uh oh.  Maybe it just needed to create a little vent….

 

Nope.  Melt down.  Good thing these have a built-in fuse…  (which is still fine, though encrusted in melted plastic).

Posted at 15:27:24 GMT-0700

Category: photoTechnologyTravel

Ending Free Speech to Protect Obsolete Industries

Thursday, March 15, 2012 

In 1998 I gave a talk at DefCon 6 titled “Copyright vs. Free Speech,” the gist of which was that in order to protect the profits of the publishing industry in the face of technology which obsoleted centralized publishing, publishers had begun to buy from congress increasingly draconian legislation to protect their obsolete business model.

They have been patient and effective, implementing a long-term program of carefully designed disinformation to turn an effective method of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts into a weapon to aid extorting profit from the people’s commons.

Due to the success of their propaganda campaigns, it bears repeating that authors have no right to profit from their works. They do not “own” ideas. They, nor their assignees, have any right to control the reproduction, reuse, or dissemination of ideas and inventions once they’ve chosen to make them public. We the people have chosen to gift them with a temporary monopoly on commercial exploitation of their inventions as a mechanism the founding fathers thought would serve to maximize the availability of freely usable ideas in the public domain; that is, to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. A premise they have utterly perverted.

Any law which expands copyright steals from the public domain and gives exclusive right to commercial exploitation to the beneficiary. The copyright industry has been incredibly successful in bribing politicians into allowing them to graze their cattle in our public parks without any additional compensation to the public. Indeed, new copyright laws don’t even pay lip service to the public good and focus entirely on maximizing profits at the expense of the public domain. These legislative disasters are prima facia unconstitutional.

A new agreement, endorsed by the White House, effectively implements the dystopian warnings I gave in my 1998 talk: ISPs will begin to directly enforce copyright, acting as the muscle for the new business model the copyright industry has turned to now that publishing is obsolete: direct shakedowns.

It was clear in 1998 that if our economy was turning to the then touted model of an “information economy” (and not making things) it would become necessary to police the flow of information to block the unauthorized exchanges of ideas lest someone freely share an idea for which a private entity has been granted a monopoly and undermine the profitability of the imaginary economy.

Aside from the loss of privacy and retarding progress and the useful arts, a problematic consequence of the monitoring necessary to ensure the exchange of ideas is taxed is that citizens must always be monitored, and now directly and intrusively by their ISPs. Monitoring has a chilling effect on free speech as people are naturally disinclined to openly dissent, to only speak privately of ideas that challenge entrenched interests. Intrusive monitoring is an effective tool of totalitarianism by destroying the privacy in which informed dissent grows strong enough to overcome the entrenched.

There is no practical way to implement an effective monopoly enforcement scheme at the ISP level without active monitoring of every digital interaction, from every website visited to every message exchanged, lest one hide a privatized bit. ISP monitoring undermines the foundations of democracy, at least the significant portion which has migrated to digital forums. This is a massive implementation of the same monitoring technology and concepts used in Syria and China to control dissidents, applied here merely to further enrich a few petty plutocrats.

Posted at 19:10:48 GMT-0700

Category: PoliticsTechnology

Oh Google… you’re so cute.

Friday, November 4, 2011 

Sure you’re the largest data harvester in the world and you’ve convinced more people than even microsoft to migrate their personal and business data away from their relatively secure and relatively private personal computers and company servers onto your public, ephemeral servers where you make their data to every government in the world you do business with and all the hackers in China, and even in those circumstances where you do actually provide some measure of security, your services have helped eliminate any residual rational discomfort people might have had about giving Big Brother direct editorial review of every communication they have, every document they create, every question they think about. More than any other company, if only by dint of your scale, you have made an Orwellian informational panopticon reality.

But who can stay mad when you’re so damn cute.  Barrel roll :-)

Posted at 03:51:05 GMT-0700

Category: FunnyPolitics

March 1997?

Monday, September 13, 2010 

What happened in March of 1997?

Posted at 11:42:43 GMT-0700

Category: FunnyOdd

Blind Mountain

Tuesday, September 4, 2007 

Blind Mountain is a Chinese film about a college educated woman who is tricked into visiting a remote village on the pretense of looking for medicinal herbs and is instead sold into bondage as a slave-wife.

The film succeeds in sustaining a sense of danger and tension from the opening to the final frame, literally. The heroine is also well-treated, portrayed as respectable, strong, and intelligent she makes good and logical choices – that is despite the horror and tension of the situation, she is not reduced to being a horror movie victim. The film also explores the lack of overt malice and moral ambiguity of the captors, and makes a case for why previous victims might have chosen to accept their fate, adopting a tolerable life amidst the incredible beauty of the Western mountains of China.

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2007 Telluride Film Festival

Posted at 15:00:15 GMT-0700

Category: Films