We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I thought about the line in the title – from Monty Python’s Life of Brian – when I read this article today about the diabolical “summer” that we are enduring. Floods, thousands of people displaced from their homes; huge insurance payouts……yes, all the ingredients to keep us Brits moaning as only we know how. The article does make clear, in fact, that we have had terrible summers before. In 1845, one of the wettest summers on record precipitated the Great Famine in Ireland, as potatoes, on which the Irish population were dangerously reliant, were hit by blight. The disaster led to mass starvation and emigration of millions of Irish people to the US and Australia, among other places (the rancour that was caused by that calamity has never entirely disappeared, unfortunately). It also precipitated the end of the UK’s tariffs on corn, as the then Prime Minister Robert Peel pushed ahead with free trade and caused a split in the Tory Party, leading to about 30 years of Liberal Party dominance in the age of Gladstone.
I am a global warming skeptic (not the same as denying it) and I do not know whether our lousy summer is linked to the increased violence of weather conditions that some say will be caused by global warming. But this is the weirdest weather I have experienced. A friend of mine who has taken up viniculture in the hope that hotter UK weather would lead to a revived UK wine industry may be wondering whether he has chosen the wrong career path. But then next year may be a scorcher. That is the beauty of global warming – you can blame anything on it.
ZDNet opinion leader uses an excellent metaphor for the Conservatives’s attitude to things digital and online.
..when it comes to being digital, standing with the Conservative party is like dancing with a hippo on a bouncy castle. You’re not going to be in the same place for long.
I have heard George Osborne pontificating on open source and its use in public sector. It was a politician’s speech, after all he is one so no surprises there. I was not as impressed by it as others in the audience but agree that it was a Good Thing that a member of the opposition front bench was talking about open source positively. But as usual for political parties, the left hand does not know what the right one is doing…
David Cameron told the British Phonographic Industry:
We need you in the music industry itself to continue to innovate and make the sort of technological progress that makes pirating CDs more and more difficult.
Oh dear. It gets worse:
… it is only right that you are given greater protection on your investments by the extension of copyright term.” He went on to suggest that the industry could earn this increase in monopoly rights by providing “positive role models” for children. Regulate and legislate; tame and control.
The ZDNet article sums it up perfectly:
Cameron may be telling the industry what it wants to hear, but it’s as nonsensical as curing alcoholism with whisky. If we have learned anything from the past decade, it is that the music industry — indeed, the old intellectual property-based industries as a whole — has grown lazy and defensive through being given too much control, by being allowed to write the laws to suit itself and then demand deference. Now that such an approach is technically impossible to maintain and the customers are in open revolt, merely demanding more of the same is beyond satire. It’s negligent, lazy and harmful — and in direct conflict with the facts.
Wholesale reform and new approaches are needed, not digging in to defend the ancient regime. The shadow chancellor affirms this. The leader of the opposition denies this. The rest of us have no idea what they think. Time to de-hippo that castle.
Gaia is tommyrot in a laser-guided podule. It isn’t just wank it’s wankenstein tetrated.
– Commenter Nick M
Just leave your computer turned on! I am pleased to see that all the modern gizmos that make life worth living are having a significant effect on everyone’s ‘carbon footprint’.
I cannot tell you how delighted that makes me. The notion that all the traffic that Samizdata generates adds to the preposterous statistics used to describe anthropogenic global warming gives me such a warm fuzzy glow I am myself no doubt heating up my little part of the globe… however the notion at all the people using their computer to visit the Greenpeace site are doing the same is thigh slappingly funny.
And yes, I leave my computers on 24/7. Take that, Gaia.
A Carnegie Mellon study suggests that shoppers are willing to pay more if they are re-assured about privacy. The premium mentioned is about $0.60 (30p) on goods worth $15 (£7). This is good news. Privacy is one of the ‘goods’ with benefit distributed over time and like security you wish you had it most only when you discover you have none. Usually not in circumstances of your choosing. The heartening point about the report is that before many studies were showing that despite peoples fears about what happens to their data, they continued to surrender it in exchange for low prices.
Lorrie Cranor, director of the Usable Privacy and Security Lab at Carnegie Mellon and lead author on the study:
Our suspicion was that people care about their privacy, but that it’s often difficult for them to get information about a website’s privacy policies.
So if users are happy to pay a bit extra for re-assurances that privacy of their information is respected, perhaps they would be equally willing to use tools that give them control and ownership over that data. Of course, there are issues with that, especially with the current state of online security and lack of more flexible and selective privacy. However, there are people already looking into this so I might start holding my breath. 🙂
cross-posted from Media Influencer
There is an interesting article about the Russian government backed cyber attacks against Estonia.
(via Instapundit)
I like to feel that programs get on to my computer at my invitation, rather than barging past me into the living room and demanding to know where the drinks are.
– Charles Arthur on the Word 2007 converter. Which goes for all sorts of institutions and people. If someone is prepared to explain themselves, gives us an alternative, recognises our autonomy, then we incline to trust them simply because they have shown they understand that there is trust involved.
It looks like another candidate for my Amazon wish list. A thumping great book showing stunning photographs of the red planet, as taken by the recent US rover machines. The link here is to the Chicagoboyz blog site, which has a good review of it. There is also also a film about the exploration. Great stuff.
I thought this is one of the cases where technology is nothing but good news…
German researchers said Wednesday that they were launching an attempt to reassemble millions of shredded East German secret police files using complicated computerized algorithms. The files were shredded as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and it became clear that the East German regime was finished. Panicking officials of the Stasi secret police attempted to destroy the vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders.
Some 16,250 sacks containing pieces of 45 million shredded documents were found and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990. Reconstruction work began 12 years ago but 24 people have been able to reassemble the contents of only 323 sacks.
Using algorithms developed 15 years ago to help decipher barely legible lists of Nazi concentration camp victims, each individual strip of the shredded Stasi files will be scanned on both sides. The data then will be fed into the computer for interpretation using color recognition; texture analysis; shape and pattern recognition; machine and handwriting analysis and the recognition of forged official stamps
Until I read the final paragraph.
Putting the machine-shredded documents together requires analysis of the script on the surface of the fragments. The institute has already had success putting together similarly destroyed documents for Germany’s tax authorities.
But then, it is never the technology that is at fault, but people and the uses they put it to…
No matter, I am very pleased to hear that there is some work somewhere being done on the past of former communist countries.
via Dropsafe
Dave Walker sees more online samizdat, which he deftly names samizdata. Sounds familiar?
The original Samizdat consisted of textual material intended to criticise and subvert repressive political regimes – it was surreptitiously copied and circulated in a “pass it on to your trustworthy friends” manner.
Today’s samizdata – such as a certain hex string which, in the last month, has spread from one blog across Digg and thence to thousands of blogs and sites – is material which can now also be intended to subvert repressive data management regimes.
In the days of the Cold War, samizdat was spread between people who typically knew each other, whereas today’s typical samizdata – even though it could conceivably propagate via USB memory sticks in a similar manner – employs more of a “scattergun” approach. This may well be down to the fact that secret police organisations in Cold War times were not omniscient; by contrast, today’s data management Politburos have access to Google, so the top priority for samizdata proponents is, as well as concealing their identities, ensuring that their data is propagated so widely that the probability of all the sites carrying the data being gagged becomes as close to infinitesimal as possible.
Before the AACS product key, the last major piece of data management-subverting samizdata was DeCSS. DeCSS spread by website, newsgroup and T-shirt, the AACS key has spread much more quickly by blog, wiki and tag indexer. It is a sign of the times, although I am not about to predict that AACS product key T-shirts won’t happen soon.
While the contribution of samizdat and its influence on populations to the eventual fall of various regimes is discussed in detail elsewhere, the effects of samizdata (online samizdata for the purposes of this discussion) are also not entirely straightforward; DeCSS and the falling cost of embeddable processing power clearly influenced AACS, particularly in the case of the upgradable key. However, as AACS could be broken once, on the grounds that key and encrypted material are stored together in a device under the physical control of the user, it can be broken again. The most accurate prediction I can make is that we’ll be seeing a lot more samizdata in future.
Sufferers from epilepsy might – just might – have a cure for their condition thanks to this piece of medical technology. I know one person who has epilepsy and it has had a hugely disruptive impact on her life (she is not allowed to drive, for instance).
As the late musician Ian Dury used to sing, there ain’t half some clever bastards.
Steven Baker of Blogspotting writes about his experience of casino backstage:
They have banks and banks of TV screens looking at the tables and the traffic of people. They have fixed cameras over every table, and tracking cameras operating within what look like black cantaloupe-sized half domes on the ceilings.
They zoom on one woman’s behaviour:
Then he saw it. She had her cards, a black jack, and with one quick movement she upped her bet by adding another $5 chip. We watched again and again in slow motion.
This is still fine by me. The casino is private property, in a business where some people are highly motivated to cheat. It is what happened afterwards that I find interesting.
They decided she was no pro. Still, they sent a security person to talk to her as she was leaving the table. We watched. She was surprised, confused, then grave. Then he said something that put her at ease. She relaxed, smiled, joked, and then went along her tipsy way.
I share Steven’s unease and his realisation that these casinos are giving us a preview of life in the coming age of surveillance.
Increasingly our movements and gestures, online and off, will be open to scrutiny by companies and governments alike. It will be up to them to decide what to crack down on, what to let pass. In making these decisions, they’ll be weighing not only our innocence or guilt, but also our happiness as customers, our ability to stir up a fuss, the cost of the public perception that they’re snoops. The upshot: We won’t have much privacy, but crafty governments and companies will give us the illusion we do.
In other words, technology in an environment that has not evolved to match it, i.e. does not have respect for the individual as a fundamental principle, eventually leads to a dystopia. In a society without openness and individual autonomy, technology amplifies and entrenches the power of the centralised system, however benign the original intention. I am reminded of The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The story is set in Victorian times, in a society with all the pathologies of an authoritarian system, i.e. one lacking proper checks and balances. It is taken to the point of grotesqueness and shown as ultimately fragile – its strength rests on the technology to the exclusion of individual freedom. Innovation is institutionalised, variety killed, leading to vulnerability to outside innovation and to inherent flaws within the system.
The difference between the impact of technology online and offline could not be more stark. Offline we have the modern Panopticon, surveillance cameras of increasing sophistication and intrusiveness. Online we still have the ability to protect ourselves or can find those who can help us do so rather than have our ‘protection’ imposed by a centralised institution. Yes, the internet is an anarchy and a sewer – as Ben Laurie who ought to know describes it :). But it is also a space where new ways of doing things can emerge and more importantly where individuals can flourish without depending on organisational resources. Offline we are defenceless against somebody building the aforementioned Panopticon, online there are ways to design against it.
So simply put, I would rather have the anarchy and the sewer with individual sovereignty than a Big Brother in whatever disguise.
cross-posted from Media Influencer
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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