China
Power Adventures In Iraq
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).
Ending Free Speech to Protect Obsolete Industries
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.
March 1997?
What happened in March of 1997?
- March 4 – U.S. President Bill Clinton bars federal funding for any research on human cloning.
- March 6 – President of Guyana Cheddi Jagan dies in office.
- March 6 – Pablo Picasso‘s Tête de Femme is stolen from a London gallery (recovered a week later).
- March 6 – In Sri Lanka, Tamil Tigers overrun a military base and kill more than 200.
- March 11 – An explosion at the Tokaimura nuclear waste reprocessing plant in Japan exposes 35 workers to low-level radioactive contamination, in the worst nuclear accident in Japan’s history.
- March 13 – India‘s Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader.
- March 13 – The National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China creates a new Chongqing Municipality, out of part of Sichuan.
- March 13 – The Phoenix Lights are seen over Phoenix, AZ.
- March 16 – Sandline affair: On Bougainville Island, soldiers of commander Jerry Singirok arrest Tim Spicer and his mercenaries of the Sandline International.
- March 18 – The tail of a Russian An-24 charter plane breaks off while en-route to Turkey, causing the plane to crash, killing all 50 on board, and resulting in the grounding of all An-24s.
- March 21 – In Zaire, Etienne Tshiksekedi is appointed prime minister; he ejects supporters of Mobutu Sese Seko from his cabinet.
- March 21 – Mercenaries of Sandline International withdraw from Papua New Guinea.
- March 22 – Tara Lipinski, 14, becomes the youngest women’s world figure skating champion.
- March 22 – The Comet Hale-Bopp makes its closest approach to Earth.
- March 24 – The 69th Academy Awards, hosted by Billy Crystal, are held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, with The English Patient winning Best Picture.
- March 26 – In San Diego, California, 39 Heaven’s Gate cultists commit mass suicide at their compound.
- March 26 – Julius Chan resigns as prime minister of Papua New Guinea, ending the Sandline affair.
Blind Mountain
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.