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Who Will Audit the Red Cross?
Everyone is on the Red Cross bandwagon these days.
But that was not the case before Katrina. The Red Cross was fiercely criticized for its reaction to 9-11. The criticism was bipartisan.
All was forgotten once Katrina hit. The only alternatives offered for giving wre overtly-religious organizations, ranging from the Salvation Army to Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing (number two on the Administration's hit parade).
Besides, you've got to figure, this was really more up the Red Cross' alley than 9-11, which in the end only took out the center of a well-insured central city, and completely displaced only a few tens of thousands. This was different, not just New Orleans but the parishes around it, and Mississippi all the way up to Jackson.
So how are they doing?
Gittin' While the Gittin's Good
The winds of change are blowing hurricane-force in Washington. Every politician in town knows it. So the natural inclination is to push the envelope as far as possible, knowing that it will be pulled back fairly quickly.
This is as true regarding the Internet as anywhere else. The Bell-cable duopoly hangs by a thread. Wireless ISPs have Moore's Law on their side. The incumbents need something very strong to counter.
This is precisely what they're going for with a bill in the House that would raise entry barriers to the sky and prevent independent ISPs from ever gaining a market toehold. (That's the chairman of the committee proposing the legislation, Joe Barton, up above.)
Naturally they call it "pro-competitive," but in the Orwellian Washington of today those with a Clue should never listen to what they say but look at what they do.
The bill is also filled with goodies for broadcasters and TV networks, such as:
They Don't Need Your Identity
Here is a surprising story.
Three times more money is lost to identity theft where the thieves just make up an identity than when they use someone else's.
Gartner Group figures $50 billion is lost from such "victimless fraud" every year, against $15 billion from identity theft.
The problem is U.S. banks don't check identities closely. Crooks can get a pay-as-you-go mobile phone with no credit check, open up a bank account in the name of that "person," pay bills on that account for a while, then use the account to get credit cards.
Banks in Europe share identity information and aren't subject to the same fraud to the same degree. Gartner said.
This Week's Clue: The Mugabe Precedent
This week's issue of my free weekly newsletter, A-Clue.Com, offered some real political red meat. (Subscribe here.)
Some like that. Some hate it. So most of it is after the flip. Enjoy.
How is a democracy lost?
It isn't. Just as freedom can't be given, only taken, democracy can't really be lost, only stolen.
There are dozens of examples over the centuries, of honest systems turned to dictatorships. And what they all have in common is ruthlessness, not just of the dictator, but of those around him.
Where to Find the Times' Columnists
Amidst all the wailing over the Times' experiment in forcing people to pay subscriptions for Internet newspaper content, an important fact is being lost.
The International Herald Tribune.
I have seen no announcement that the IHT is changing its policies, or changing what content it offers. (The Tribune is owned by the Times Co., which bought out The Washington Post Co.'s interest a few years ago.) Here's today's opinion front page.
Bolshevism
A dedicated minority can overwhelm a disinterested majority.
To do so takes discipline, and a mindset that will brook neither criticism nor interference, that is totally obedient to the will of the leader.
What drives this mindset is fear. The leadership drives fear into people, and the mindset is gradually acquired. There are many examples of this. South Africa's Nationalists. Mussolini's Fascists. It was a hallmark of Peronism in Argentina. It's not a left-right thing, since it's most closely associated with Lenin's Russia, but it's more common than most in the democratic world believe or accept.
Note that in all these examples there's one ingredient which, many will say, does not exist in today's Republicans -- ruthlessness. That is, the willingness to do anything in the name of the cause, whether that's stuffing ballot boxes, taking control of the news media, or just shooting to kill. In the wake of New Orleans I'd question whether that ruthlessness is lacking. When you hear someone try to defend what has happened, it's hard to argue it's lacking.
Political movements can easily morph into Bolshevism, even in democracies. It's the main Achilles Heel of the whole system. I think it's what Washington most feared when he talked of "factions."
Over the last two centuries many political movements in this country have been accused of a Bolshevistic mind set, even before such a thing existed, starting (long before there was such a thing) with Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. Jackson's Democrats had some of it, and it morphed into the Slave Power, which had it in spades. Did the Big City Machines have it? How about the New Deal -- they were certainly accused of it.
See how common this is?
What's most infuriating about our time is how many white, male Americans (some females, some blacks, but overwhelmingly it's white males) have internalized this mindset. It's why I find it increasingly difficult to communicate with these bozos -- all avenues of communication are blocked-off.
Want to see the dance?
The Spoils System
George W. Bush's Bridge to the 19th Century has deposited us in 1881, in the era of the Spoils System.
The spoils system was instituted by Democratic President Andrew Jackson. "To the victor goes the spoils" meant that every government job belonged to the party in power. Postmasters, and port managers (big jobs in those days) were all political hacks.
The movement against the spoils system was led by a Republican named James A. Garfield. He was elected President in 1880 alongside a representative of that system, Chester Alan Arthur, former port commissioner for New York. He wasn't a perfect vessel for reform, but he moved in that direction.
The picture illustrates what happened next. Garfield was shot, killed, by Charles J. Guiteau, a "frustrated office seeker," in other words, a party hack who was upset that Garfield wanted to bring competence to government. (Guiteau, in fact had visions of becoming Ambassador to France.)
The Dry Drunk Meme
There is a long-running charge, or meme, on the left that President George W. Bush is a "dry drunk," an alcoholic who hasn't dealt with the roots of his alcoholism, and thus exhibits alcoholic behavior even when sober.
Dr. Justin Frank explored this in a book called Bush on the Couch. Katherine Van Wormer made the charge in 2002 and Malachy McCourt has gone further, writing in his short 2004 book, Bush Lies in State that he’s still an alcoholic.
How common is this meme? Example one. Example two. Example three. Example four.
So here is my point. Given his falling popularity and recent bizarre behaviors (running away from Cindy Sheehan, comparing Iraq to World War II while New Orleans died) I'm wondering if this meme isn't about to move.
The Big One
NOTE: I have been, and will be, criticized for "politicizing" the naton's worst-ever natural disaster. But knowing how something happened, what made it worse, how it can be made better and how it might be prevented is the only way I know to make sense of things which are otherwise beyond comprehension. My prayers to all.
Everyone knows 9/11 was a turning point. (Picture from Tales from the Teapot.)
It changed attitudes irrevocably, in ways we're still trying to deal with four years on.
Hurricane Katrina is another turning point, a different turning point, and a much, much bigger event.
The terrorists destroyed two buildings, and the center of a city. Katrina destroyed multiple cities -- Slidell, Gulfport, Biloxi, New Orleans.
We knew after 9/11 it could happen again. Know this after Katrina. It WILL happen again, and again, and again.
The civilizing process of the 20th century, with its oil-driven economy, is now driving the global environment off a cliff. Most of the world knew this before Katrina. Now even Mississippi knows this.
And this will change us.
- We can no longer pretend to independence. We are interdependent.
- We can no longer pretend that the environmental damage of the oil economy can be borne. It cannot.
- We can no longer remain dependent on the oil economy. It is failing, and will fail.
One of the most maddening aspects of the Katrina coverage, for me, has been MSNBC's continued emphasis on the Casinos as the engines of the Gulf Coast economy. We drive through that area every vacation, and I have taken to calling Mississippi "Pottersville," the town Bedford Falls became in the nighbmare sequence of "It's a Wonderful Life." And Louisiana has made itself into West Pottersville.
I'm not talking about sin here. I'm talking about depending on something that's artificial, fake, phony, as the basis of an economy. Pretending that you'll get rich off others' sin, that the residue won't touch you, and you can then say "screw you" to the needs of the poor, to education, to your fellow man, to the real world, that always fails in time.
It is time for an attitude adjustment.
Save the Internet!
Milton Mueller and the Internet Governance Project, whom we interviewed in June, has entered the political arena with a petition against U.S. interference in ICANN. (The illustration chosen has little to do with the subject, it's the cover of an Hour of Slack CD called XXX, from Subgenius.com.)
Mueller and the IGP were moved to act by the government's unilateral decision to shut-down .XXX after it was approved by ICANN. In his note to Dave Farber's list Mueller writes, "IGP urges everyone not to let the
advocates of content regulation be the only voices
heard by the Commerce Department."
Read it carefully.
A Modest Proposal
Here's something I haven't seen proposed anywhere. But since I'm "just a blogger" and I can't get the thought of my head, why not?
Read on. If you dare.
Many in the U.S., on both the left and right, say our enemy is Islamic Fundamentalism. One of the hallmarks of that movement (besides violent anti-Israel rhetoric) is the systematic subjugation of women.
Wherever Sha'ria (Islamic Law) is imposed, women lose their humanity. They are killed if they're raped, killed if they so much as meet with a man unchaparoned. They are ritually abused in a horror called "female circumcision" which removes their clitoris, often without anethesia.
Under Sha'ria women are treated worse than dogs. A dog who licks a stranger's hand may get a treat. An Arab woman who even looks the wrong way at a stranger will be killed by her family. (Any devout Muslim woman who wants to argue with me that slavery is freedom, please don't waste your time.)
When the Bush Administration wanted to find support for its Iraq adventure early this year the President claimed this was a war for womens' rights. He even used an Iraqi woman as a prop at his State of the Union address. (She now wants out.)
Well, it seems to me we have the wrong Muslim refugees in the West. So here's my modest proposal:
Corruption of the Lists
There's a chain of bookstores in South Georgia that hold a secret.
I discovered it on the way back from a convention in Orlando one day, desperate for some present to give my book-loving wife.
Stacked floor-to-ceiling in these stores are "best-sellers," nearly every "big" title from a right-wing hack delivered over the last decade or more. There's Laura Bush's autobiography, alongside the Swift Boat attack on John Kerry and titles from the whole Fox News pantheon. There are right-wing preachers, firebreathers, and a ton of get-rich-quick books by folks who, if they really knew that much, would have gotten rich some other way.
I think about those stores whenever I see "books" like Kevin Trudeau's Natural Cures or Neal Boortz' Fair Tax Book topping things like The New York Times best-seller list, week-after-week.
Do you know anyone reading this dreck? You might not.
Artificial Scarcity
David Berlind, one of my bosses over at ZDNet, came up with an incredible statistic recently that deserves a lot more play than it got.
His source on this is Bob Frankston, co-founder of Visicalc and one of those great online friends I've never met personally. (As you can see by this picture, he's also well on his way to being a Truly Handsome Man (that is to say bald)).
Here's the key bit, as Berlind saw it:
By Frankston's calculations, for example, Verizon is reserving 99 percent of its government-ordained right of way (in the form of bandwidth that should be available to us as well as its competitors) for itself so that it may compete in the IPTV market.
Frankston's got the whole story, in hiw own words, here.
More on the flip.
This Week's Clue: Beyond The Culture Wars
This week's issue of my free weekly newsletter, A-Clue.Com, dealt with politics. (Subscribe here.) That's why the jump is so high up. Those who don't like politics, or who don't like me blogging about it, should be forced to see as little of it as possible.
But there are things I have to get off my chest.
Political generations end when a crisis emerges that they can't answer for. Then new values emerge, new myths are told, and a new generation takes power. Gradually the new formulation replaces the old until its alliances become second nature.
Continue reading "This Week's Clue: Beyond The Culture Wars"
The Emperor is Naked! The Empire is a Lie!
Cindy Sheehan has been able to demonstrate just how naked the Emperor is, and thus demonstrate the lie of Empire.
No one else could, because everyone else was afraid. Howard Dean said "we broke it, we own it." John Kerry supported it and couldn't back away from it.
This is how Democrats felt forced to respond, because they'd been stuck into a political wilderness for a generation by Vietnam. They were afraid to equate Iraq with Vietnam, fearing that political wilderness, and its chains, which bound liberalism and the cause of human rights for a generation.
Well, Cindy Sheehan broke through that fear. She lost her son. It transformed her. (It didn't transform her husband , but everyone's journey is different.)
By putting that transformation in our face, and in the face of George W. Bush, Cindy Sheehan is also making a change in us. Damn the past, damn the present, our kids are dying. Scales fall from the eyes.
There is no way at this point for the Emperor to appear clothed again, and his supporters know it.
That's why they're acting as they are toward Sheehan. It's like the crowd in the story, at first. Of course the Emperor's New Clothes are beautiful. You're just a stupid little boy. You just can't see the big picture.
Stupid. Little. Boy.
Stupid Little Boy, says Cindy Sheehan? Look at him, look at the Little Boy. Look at Casey. You call him Stupid, you call me Stupid?
Maybe we were. We were stupid because we believed in you. And look at what it's gotten us. My son is dead! And this is no fairy tale.
Continue reading "The Emperor is Naked! The Empire is a Lie!"
Bush Cuts Off DNS Intelligence
The Computer Science and Telecommunication Board has released a fairly Clueful report on the Domain Name System that manages the Internet.
Unfortunately the Bush Administration has, on the very day the report came out, moved to undercut its key recommendation.
Here's the key bit:
Before completing the transfer of its stewardship to ICANN (or any other organization), the Department of Commerce should seek ways to protect that organization from undue commercial or governmental pressures and to provide some form of oversight of performance.
The report, in other words, supports ICANN under the U.S. government because it sees this as keeping ICANN independent of government or commercial interests. Moving toward ICANN's independence is desireable, the report says, in order to minimize the perception that the U.S. government is controlling the Internet.
So far, so good.
Refusing to Learn
People often ask me what's wrong with journalism.
The answer comes down to one word -- arrogance. Even junior members of the trade think they're in a profession, whose job it is to rule on what's true and what's not, all decisions final.
Take William Beutler of The National Journal, for instance. Beutler just got a pretty amazing gig. As editor of the Hotline Blogometer he spends the day scouring the political blogosphere and tallying up the points. (He is still listed as writing The Washington Canard, but he doesn't update it often anymore. The picture is from that Web site. Beutler's a shy fella.)
It's hard work, as some in Washington might say. And mistakes will happen. Journalists complain that bloggers won't spend 5 minutes on the phone to get something right. Well, journalists won't spend 20 seconds on Google to do the same thing. And Google's improving much faster than the phone.
Anyway, Beutler's August 15 missive began by referencing Cindy Sheehan as an "alleged" gold star mother. I went ballistic. Whatever you think of Sheehan's protest, no one can argue that she is, in fact, a Gold Star Mother (all caps), this being " an organization of mothers who have lost a son or daughter in the service of our country."
After considering my e-mail for some time, Beutler made a slight change. He didn't acknowledge the mistake. He just took the alleged out. And gold star is still lower case, still in quotation marks.
Now, before you click below, get out your hankies.
A Great Woman Lies Dying
Americans who have never heard of her should remember her name. Hers is one of the great peace-making stories of our time.
By the late 1990s, Northern Ireland had been at war with itself for nearly 30 years. As Northern Ireland secretary, in 1998, she saw that the peace process could never get off the ground without the support of radicals, then held at Maze Prison.
She went to Maze Prison.
Mo Mowlam spent an hour in that prison, talking to prisoners face-to-face, eventually persuading them that the para-militaries should send representatives to peace talks.
The result was the Good Friday Agreement.
It wasn't perfect then. It's still not perfect. But it is holding. The killing has stopped. The IRA has stood down. A cycle of life is replacing the cycle of death.
Intel Fights the Power
Intel holds the telecommunications balance of power in its hand.
Here's how The Register puts it, with its usual hyperbole:
Intel is throwing its financial, technical and lobbying weight behind the rising tide of municipally run broadband wireless networks, seeing these as a way to stimulate uptake of Wi-Fi and WiMAX and so sell more of its chips and increase its influence over the communications world.
And Intel is not going to back down. As ZDNet notes today, there's money to be made.
The WiMax Imperative
Coke and Pepsi do not represent competition. It's a shared monopoly, the Drinks Trust.
The same is true for Wal-Mart and Target, Home Depot and Lowe's, and, to cut to the chase, your phone and cable companies.
By endorsing duopoly calling "competition" what is in fact a Trust, new FCC chair Kevin Martin has shown us clearly where the Bushies stand. Those who believe in competitive markets that can compete in the world need to digest this.
And Martin's model for the Internet policy? China.
So, do you want to be an ISP?
There is only one way to do it now. You have to be a WISP. You have to connect WiFi to WiMax, and reach competitive fiber.
Otherwise you're officially dead.
The FCC ruled, over Friday and Saturday, that Bell companies no longer have to wholesale their lines to competitive ISPs. They don't even have to charge competitive prices for backhaul to the Internet. They essentially repealed the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Those phonr lines that were built with government-controlled monopoly powers over decades? They're now the sole property of four corporate entities. And they can do with this monopoly power whatever they want.
The Moore's Law Dialectic
Today's politics is cultural.
Even economic and foreign policy issues are, in the end, defined in terms of social issues. This creates identification, and coalitions among people who might not otherwise find common ground -- hedonistic Wall Street investment bankers and small town Kansas preachers, for instance.
I am coming to believe the next political divide will be technological. That is, your politics will be defined by your attitude toward technology.
On one side you will find open source technophiles. On the other you will find proprietary technophobes.
It's a process that will take time to work itself out, just as millions of Southern Democrats initially resisted the pull of Nixon. Because there are are divisions within each grand coalition we have today, on this subject.
- On the right you see many people who work in open source, or who worry about their privacy, asking hard questions of security buffs and corporate insiders.
- On the left you see many people who consider themselves cyber-libertarians facing off against Hollywood types and those who create proprietary software.
This latter split gets most of the publicity, because more writers are in the cyber-libertarian school than anywhere else.
Initially, the proprietary, security-oriented side of this new political divide has the initiative. It has the government and, if a poll were taken, it probably has a majority on most issues.
But open source advocates have something more powerful on their side, history. You might call it the Moore's Law Dialectic.
What's a Brother Gotta Do (to get fired around here?)
News that Armstrong Williams is making a comeback, that he is back on the air (that he hardly ever left), leaves a nagging question in my mind.
What do you got to do to get fired around here?
The question is serious. Unless we have a way of getting rid of those who violate some ethical standard, why should anyone believe any of us? Why have any standards if we can't get rid of violators?
For those who don't know, Williams got caught in January taking bribes from the Bush Administration for touting its education policies. Yet the next month, WWRL in New York put him back on the air, in afternoon drive. Now he's got a book coming out, one which calls liberals like myself racists.
If being a racist means hating crooks who happen to be black, I'm a racist. (It doesn't mean that, so Armstrong, take your black skin outta my face.) Armstrong Williams is a crook, corrupt. He should be on an unemployment line alongside Jayson Blair and hundreds of others -- of every color -- who can't be trusted. Yet he's heard loud and clear while honest men (and women) aren't. Including honest black, male conservatives, many with great speaking voices and stories to tell. Just look around the blogosphere for five minutes if you don't believe me.
Williams tells The Hill that he's "changed," that he doesn't harrangue Democrats anymore.
But that wasn't the point of the scandal. It's like a bank robber telling me he doesn't beat his wife anymore. It's irrelevant.
Armstrong Williams put himself out as a journalist, as an independent voice, when in fact he was in the pay of the government. That was the scandal. That remains a scandal.
But there is no way to fire people who violate even such basic ethical precepts anymore. If nothing else, he could go out and blog -- make big bucks like Andrew Sullivan. Who'd know? Who'd care?
Continue reading "What's a Brother Gotta Do (to get fired around here?)"
The Tech-Politics Contradiction
The big trend of this decade, in technology, is a move toward openness.
It started with open frequencies like 802.11. It then moved into software, with open source operating systems and applications. Now we have open source business models. The ball keeps rolling along.
Open source has proven superior in all these areas due to simple math. The more people working a problem, the better. No single organization can out-do the multitudes.
But this simple, and rather elegant, fact, is at odds with all political trends.
Magic Word
When someone gets really frustrated with me, and tries to dismiss me, there's a Magic Word that sums up their feelings, isolates me, and identifies me to the like-minded.
Works like a charm.
It's the "C-bomb."
Cheap Shot in a Good Cause
Rebecca McKimmon (left, from her blog) took a shot at Cisco's China policy recently, confirming through a spokesman that the company does indeed cooperate with the government.
This is not news. So does nearly every other U.S. tech company.
The U.S. policy is, and has been, full engagement with China. This has already hurt Cisco. Back in the 1990s one of the prices for getting into the market was to share technology. Cisco did so, and a few years later Huawei, a Chinese company, had routers and bridges very similar to Cisco's old stuff, along with most of the Asian market (thanks to lower prices).
McKimmon's point now is that China Cisco is cooperating with the worst excesses of the China government, which is seeking to have both the world's best Internet technology and full control over what people do with it.
That is a good point, but I don't think you don't go after Cisco to make it.
The Coming Crash?
I should not be a fan of Dr. John Rutledge (left).
His economic prescriptions are unrelentingly right-wing. He's a social Darwinist, a raging bull.
But he's not an idiot. He understands money. He knows trouble when he sees it. And, on his blog this week, he sees it.
As I've written in my novel, the name of this big trouble is little China.
The process of China's inevitable Yuan revaluation has begun.
In a series of blog entries Rutledge ticks off what's happening.
Qwest Seeks Yet More Subsidies
Let's review.
The Bells promised to serve us broadband if we let them run over Wireless ISPs. Done. No broadband.
So they promised us broadband if we would give them absolute control over their lines, ending any requirement for wholesaling. Done. No broadband.
Then they promised us broadband if we'd stop cities from buildig out wireless networks that might compete with them. Nearly done. Still no broadband.
Now, Qwest is pushing a plan in Congress to tax your broadband access and hand it the money, promising broadband in rural areas.
It's amazing anyone would believe such hollow promises, given the history. Color Democrat Byron Dorgan and Republican Gordon Smith (both represent areas covered by Qwest) as believers. The National Journal reports the two Senators are working together on just a Qwest-subsidy bill.
Here's a quote from the National Journal article:
Aides to Smith said the bill would make money in the Universal Service Fund available so telecommunications providers could build out broadband facilities. "It would be built into the same structure, and might end up as a stand-alone fund, within the current system next to the high-cost fund," an aide said.
Here's why this is not only theft, but stupid.
Seattle Weekly Discovers VRWC
VRWC is shorthand for "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy."
It's something conservatives laugh at. But it's real.
UPDATE: Various people, some affiliated with this site, have been issuing comments here over the last few days. Most have been taken down. I stand by this story, the opinions expressed in it, and my opinion concerning sympathizers with these bozos.
It's the lynch mob mentality fostered by preachers, by politicians, by demagogues, a mentality used to attack Miami vote-counters, Vince Foster, Joe Wilson -- the list goes on and on.
It was also used to attack Andy Stephenson.
Stephenson was a blogger. He worked with sites like Democratic Underground and BlackBox Voting. He died this week of pancreatic cancer.
But not before teaching us all just what evil lurks in the hearts of men.
Harold W. Furchtgott-Roth (Gumby)
Monty Python used to have a running gag called the Gumbys. They would put on moustaches, shorts, place diapers on their heads, and talk sheer lunacy for effect. CORRECTION: There's an update to this piece below the fold which could make this reference even-more apt.
Former FCC commissioner Harold W. Furchtgott-Roth, now a fellow of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute , is a Gumby.
This guy is so Clueless that, in an age when any wingnut can practically become a millionaire by snapping his fingers, he can apparently get his stuff published only in the New York Sun, a right-wing daily with few readers, no business model, and a crappy Web site that won't let you inside its home page without giving them tons of personal information. So no link.
Instead, you'll have to read the whole thing:
America's Shame: Spam War Heats Up Again
That's the title of the most "popular" spam in my inbox right now, and maybe in your inbox as well.
It represents a new form of brazenness by U.S. spammers against the Net, because when you input the phone number in the message into Google you find the same message, as comment spam, attached to a host of different topics.
When you publicize a phone number like that, and get away with it, it's pretty obvious that the authorities are simply not interested in pursuing you. The CAN-SPAM act has gone from sick joke to tissue paper, a dead letter, and the entire Internet is now under attack from American spammers.
So am I.
This Week's Clue: The Good German
If I had my druthers, every issue of A-Clue.Com would be chock-full of stories concerning e-commerce, Moore's Law, and mobile technology.
But as a human being, I sometimes feel compelled to state what I feel, and whatever happens as a result, happens.
For the first time in my career I've been afraid this week, afraid to write what I feel.
The Finnish Example
There's a long, admiring story in today's Washington Post extolling Finland as a possible model for European development.
Finland has invested heavily in scientific research, especially since it backed a big winner during the early 1990s in Nokia. Nokia stock held by the government is one source of funds, but overall the country puts a whopping 3.6% of its income into research, well ahead of the U.S., and nearly twice as much as the European average.
The result is that, while Finland does have substantial unemployment, and the problems of an aging population threatening its ample social safety net, the 5.5 million people there are nearly as happy as those in the Monty Python song. (All together, Finnophiles!)
One respondent at the Dave Farber list expressed the view that the U.S. actually does better than the figures indicate, and that government is mostly out of the picture.
He's half-right.
Fast Work on London Blasts
When four bombs went off in London during the G-8 summit my first thought (like yours) was Al Qaeda.
I didn't blog it. I'm glad of that now.
It turns out, according to British police, that the four suicidie bombers here were British citizens, natives. Three from Leeds, one from Luton. True, their parents were Pakistani immigrants, but the people who carried this out were local. The British police, who have done wonderful work on the case so far, are now trying to find out who put them up to this.
Again, let's not pre-judge. This might be an Al Qaeda "sleeper cell." But they could have been working under a British-based Islamic radical. Their targets may not have been Englishmen, but Muslims, since all four bombs went off in areas where many Muslims live.
I don't know. Neither do you. Let the system work.
But the face of this attack is looking less like Osama Bin Laden....
Fight for One Internet
Joi Ito took up a challenge I laid down recently, in my piece on the possibility of Internet War.
Joi's point is that the Internet split has already begun, and it is based on language. Chinese and Japanese people don't care for English. People want URLs in their own language. And these URLs are unreachable by those whose keyboards only write what the Japanese call "Romaji," Roman letters.
"Why should these people be forced to learn some sort of roman transliteration in order to access the company page where they know the official Chinese characters for the names" he writes. (This is a very short excerpt. I urge you to read the whole post -- it is very wise.)
The peculiarities of language provide an excellent source of control for tyranny. Most Chinese don't leave the Chinese Internet, leaving them at the mercy of the authorities. Many Japanese choose not to leave their own language, leaving them ignorant of how others feel.
Language can also provide cover for terrorists. We can't translate all the Arabic-language e-mail or Web sites out there. We can't even find the URLs, unless we know how to look for them. So many of our problems in the War on Terror are exacerbated by a shortage of translators, or mis-translations. This problem continues to get worse.
There's more, of course.
Has The Internet War Been Declared?
The U.S. government has announced it will continue to control the DNS root structure, indefinitely.
Is this how the Internet War starts?
Until today the U.S. position was that it wanted to transition control of the root over to ICANN, a private entity, and several extensions were given.
Earlier this year, ICANN hesitated in extending Verisign's control of the .Net registry, following the SiteFinder scandal, where Verisign redirected "page not found" errors to a site it controlled (and sold ads against). Control was finally given, through 2011, but Verisign's ethical attitudes have not changed. As we noted earlier this week, it is Verisign that is behind the Crazy Frog Scandal.
Some felt that ICANN caved under U.S. government pressure. What you have here is assurance that such pressure will continue to be effective, and on behalf of a very corrupt company. If that is not seen as a provocation by the ITU I will be very surprised.
So how can that result in Internet War?
The problem, as former ICANN board member Karl Auerbach noted to Dave Farber's list today, "the only reason that the NTIA root zone is 'authoritative' is because a lot of people adhere to it voluntarily." Security expert Richard Forno (top) noted, to the same list, that "the timing is weird, coming as it does only a short time before the forthcoming meeting of the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)."
I would assert that the timing is not weird at all. The U.S. government has told the U.N. that it can shove any thoughts of international control over the DNS where the sun don't shine. It has, in effect, thrown down a gauntlet and dared the international community to challenge it.
More after the break.
Pressure on the Good Guys
Politically I think Senator Russ Feingold is one of the Good Guys. So, to be perfectly bipartisan about it, is Senator John McCain. (You know what McCain looks like, so here's Feingold.)
This is especally true regarding campaign finance. Proponents of reform have been pushing uphill with scant success ever since the 1976 decision in Buckley v. Vallejo, which basically said money is speech, and those with more money can out-shout the rest of us.
McCain and Feingold tried to fit that decision inside their eponymous campaign finance act, and while on most counts the Supreme Court ruled they did, that act also covered the Internet, and both men have insisted to this day that's true.
Now that the blogosphere has pushed-back on this, pushed back hard, from both sides of the aisle, the good guys have not been heard from.
A Digital Brown? Or A Digital Plessy?
It's unanimous.
By a 9-0 count the Supreme Court has held that Grokster (and its ilk) can be sued.
The decision was written by David Souter (right, in an old picture from Wikipedia), a conservative-turned-liberal appointed by the first President Bush.
Here's the key bit:
"We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."
I've highlighted the most relevant portion. To me it looks like they wouldn't hold against BitTorrent, but that Grokster's business model, which did sell the service as a way to infringe, crossed a legal line.
As written I find it hard to argue against the language, but I guarantee I'll disagree with the interpretation, especially the spin being placed on this by the copyright industries.
As I see it the decision puts a limit on the "non-infringing uses" language of the Betamax decision, but does not overturn it. Grokster falls because its business model is based on infringement. BitTorrent has no business model, and thus may be exempt.
Trouble is that is an assertion that will be tested in courts that will twist this result just as the DMCA was twisted to reach this decision. Congress was told by the Copyright industries in 1998 that the DMCA would not overturn Betamax, that it would protect fair use, that it would not be extended in that direction and should not be interpreted as going there.
With this decision -- a unanimous decision as opposed to the 6-3 Betamax ruling -- I guarantee you the industry's lawyers will try and turn this into open season on the Internet.
But can they?
House of Card
Thanks to his political involvement many liberals are treating Orson Scott Card as a pariah.
I’m certain he doesn’t care. Many great writers have been men and women of uncertain, even unwelcome politics. Like all people they’re products of their environment.
This is especially true in science fiction, a subset of literature devoted to worlds far removed from our own time and space. I didn’t like Robert Heinlein’s politics, and I don’t discuss politics with Jerry Pournelle, either. But I enjoy both, immensely.
I also enjoy Card's work. I'm a fan, with eyes wide open to his faults and limits, but a fan nonetheless.
The Journalism Crisis
It should surprise no one that "professional" journalists hate Wikis and blogs.
A little history lesson shows you why. Only this one's fun. As part of your summer reading get yourself a copy of H.L. Mencken's Newspaper Days. (That's Mencken to the left.) It's his memoir of Baltimore's newspaper business around the turn of the last century.
Newspapermen at that time were lower class, hard drinking, smoking, swearing, worthless ne'er do wells. You wouldn't bring one home to mother. They hid in saloons, spun lies, spied on people, made less than the corner grocer, and were generally shiftless, lazy bums. Despite this, they considered themselves a class apart.
This last is still the case. But today's newspaper writers are either middle-class bores or upper-class twits. Those who report on Washington, write columns or work on editorials are among the most twittish. Many make more than the people they cover, especially if their faces are on television.
Blogs, wikis and the whole Internet Business Model Crisis threaten these happy homes. (Although I've got news for them -- stock analysts treat newspaper stocks like tobacco stocks and their ranks are being thinned like turkey herds in September. They'd be a dieing breed even without the Net.)
What's most galling to "professional" journalists is not the loss of jobs, or money, but their continuing loss of prestige. On the upper rungs of the ladder they're being replaced by "players" -- sports stars, lawyers, politicians, former entertainers. On the lower rungs they're being driven into poverty -- we've talked before of the corrupted tech press. And in the middle rungs you've got these blogs, wikis and the continuing problems of being treated like a mushroom. (You're in the dark and they're throwing manure on you.)
Our times are, in many ways, a mirror image of the 1890s.
A Note to Pew
This is a note to the nice people at the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Some of your money has gone astray. Specifically, it has gone to George Washington University for something called the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, formerly the Democracy Online Project.
GWU put a woman named Carol Darr (right, from the Center for National Policy) in charge of this group, and she has proven to be, well, not to put too fine a point on it, an idiot. Clueless, in the parlance of this blog. To be blunt about it, she is using money given for promoting democracy on the Internet in order to destroy it.
This Week's Clue: Destroying the Village
I guess I felt a little down this week -- about the direction of technology, about the economy, about a lot of things.
So the readers of A-Clue.com got an earful. (You can get one too -- always free.)
There are times when history, like television, goes into re-runs.
We have literally turned Iraq into another Vietnam. But we've seen this movie before, so when Rumsfeld does his McNamara imitations, or Bush plays like LBJ's dumber brother, we change the channel.
Yet the fact is that when history repeats (unlike television) it does so in spades, in triplicate.
World War I was horrible. World War II was worse.
Iraq is not the only Vietnam repeat out there. We're doing the same thing with the Internet.
We're ignoring history. We know what would work to secure our computers, and the networks they run on. But we don't act. So we get this incremental escalation, this drip-drip-drip that leaves us, in the end, worse off than we would be had we taken decisive action at the start.
There are laws on the books that should deal with spam, with spyware, and with the problems of identity theft. They can be found under headings like fraud, theft, and fiduciary responsibility. Nothing is being done today that wasn't done before - only the means have changed.
Instead of moving against these problems together, as was attempted in the 1990s, we're leaving everyone on their own, and sometimes the cure winds up being worse than the disease.
Anakin Scott Card
As a young writer the force was strong in Orson Scott Card.
His Secular Humanist Revival Meeting was a model of the form. He came on in the guise of a Baptist preacher to speak against creation science, and for a secular society in the humanist tradition.
The strongest statement he made in that talk was to note that any religion which gained the power of the state could lose its holiness because its first task once in power would be to oppress other religions. “This was even true for my own religion, in the Rocky Mountains,” he said.
His reference was to the Mormon Church, of which he is a lifelong member. To escape its secular hold he made his home in North Carolina. Still does.
Short Term Values
We do have a values problem in this country. (The illustration is from a Mormon-oriented marketing outfit.)
Too many of us have short-term values.
I could go off on our leaders over this, but leaders need followers, so I'm going after you instead.
- Why can't businesses see past the current quarter?
- Why is the environment so easily dismissed?
- Why does the news care more about the idiot on the Buckhead crane than what is happening in Iraq?
- Why are religious leaders so anxious to take the state's money?
We see this on the Internet all the time. I think this new XXX TLD is a perfect example. It doesn't answer the question -- what's sexual and what should we do about it? Just build a ghetto and toss Jenna Jameson in there -- oh and Planned Parenthood too. Then what, Adolf?
Americans won't move toward IPv6 because we got a ton of addresses back in the day. Besides, NATs work fine, right?
It is so easy to outsource our software production, to let Taiwan and China make our chips, to do everything we can to discourage kids from getting into tech. Our kids want to win American Idol. India, meanwhile, has a reality show called "the search for India's smartest kid."
Which country do you think is going to win the future, hmmm?
One for the Web?
The European Constitution's impending failure in France is being credited to the Web. (Picture from Wikitravel.)
As the BBC reports:
This is the first major campaign in France in which the internet has become a key weapon, with bloggers and internet-users becoming the "No" campaign's front-line troops - not just in terms of influencing public opinion but also in rallying the French public to attend its campaign events.
If it happens, and the Web is credited after-the-fact, it would be a first, and it would be important.
As for Europe? I have a cunning plan...
Always On Political Roadblock
Why hasn't the World of Always On arrived?
The ingredients are all here, and they're cheap-as-chips: (An example is this nifty little camera, from yoursecurity.us.)
- Wireless networks. You can buy an 802.11 wireless gateway for $65.
- PCs to run the applications are down well below $250.
- RFID kits? Cameras? Sensors? All available.
- Long battery life? Thanks to Zigbee, that's a big check mark, too.
I'm convinced the hurdles facing Always On applications aren't technical, and aren't artifacts of the market.
They're political.
Let's run them down, shall we?
The Way of Hollywood is Madness
When will we get effective political pushback against Hollywood's absolutism on copyright?
I once thought it would happen when people were jailed for linking.
I was wrong.
The filing of criminal charges against the people who ran Elite Torrents, a BitTorrent "tracking site," and the complete take-down of the site, has caused few ripples. Washington remains as absolutist as ever.
Instead, it's technology that retains our confidence. BitTorrent is now becoming trackerless. No trackers, no tracking sites to take down, no track linkers to toss in jail.
But that's not good enough for me. This is like depending on super weapons to defend us in an atomic age. Without peace, soon, between copyright owners and copyright users, the Internet will be effectively destroyed.
It doesn't take much imagination to see Al Qaeda propaganda, or even terrorist plans, being distributed via a Torrent. Especially a trackerless torrent.
From there it is a very quick move to seeing politicians equate file sharing with terrorism, Torrent users with Al Qaeda, and demands for a complete shut-down on any technology that can benefit the enemy.
Screwed
Juan Cole today headlines a think piece on Iraq, "Sometimes You are Just Screwed."
I don't disagree. The insurgency has become a meat grinder, but bugging out would mean total defeat. The Army lacks volunteers, and there's no appetite for a draft. It is (as I feared it would be years ago) a Tar Baby, and it's destroying our economy as well as our military.
If that were all that was going wrong it would be bad enough. Vietnam cost 58,000 American lives and Iraq has already wounded one-third that number -- over 12,000 troops, over 6,000 contractors.
Getting into a second Vietnam is bad enough. But that's just one of three terrible fates facing the U.S. today.
The Frist Rule
The filibuster, as we knew it, is dead.
Who should we thank for this? Why, Dr. Bill Frist, M.D. (right, from eparent.)
Until U.S. Senate Majority Leader Frist acted it took 60 Senators to assure passage of anything. That was the number needed to invoke cloture, a motion to limit debate in the self-styled "world's greatest deliberative body." Any group of 41 Senators could hold questions open through this filibuster-lite tactic.
Now the number needed for passage is less than 60. Depending on the unity of the proponents of a person or position, it could be as many as 59 or as little as 50.
So a Democratic Administration with a thin Democratic Senate majority could, if its Senate members were unified, pass strong environmental laws with 50 votes (and the Vice President), voting to ignore the chamber's rules and go ahead. It could pass national health care legislation, or a gay marriage bill, on a wafer-thin majority. It could make Hillary Clinton the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. (Heck, it could make Monica Lewinsky Chief Justice. Get thee to law school, girl!)
This became the de-facto rule as soon as Frist moved toward what its advocates called (at the time) the Nuclear Option (probably because it's so gosh-darned funny when the President tries to say the word "nuclear").
Yesterday's historic agreement was in fact a fig leaf over this accomplished fact.