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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At a recent software conference, Sun Microsystems unveiled new software initiatives in areas related to RFID, 3-D interfaces, game technology and Linux. According to the CTO of Sun, the advances are further proof that “innovation [is] Sun’s DNA.” The article reviews Sun’s upcoming product offerings, noting that the company is actively looking to capitalize on hot new technology trends (e.g. a new RFID test center is on tap for May).
Also, Oracle plans to launch new RFID software offerings in an attempt to give retailers such as Wal-Mart the ability to “handle the deluge of data that RFID systems are expected to produce.” According to Oracle executives, “The IT systems most companies use today are not equipped for a world in which billions of objects report their whereabouts in real-time.” In addition to building in RFID data-processing capabilities in its databases and application servers, Oracle will release new device drivers in its software as well as “device driver frameworks.” Other big-name IT vendors, such as IBM and Microsoft, are also actively exploring new RFID technology offerings.
Finally, Delta Air Lines Inc. starts its second test of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track bags today in hopes of improving accuracy over the 96.7% to 99.9% it achieved in a test last year. Delta will write information to the RFID bag tags at the request of the Transportation Security Administration, which has backed both tests, Rary said. That information will include the flight number, passenger name and what Rary called a “license plate” – a serial number that identifies each bag.
More on the ICAO story first noted by Trevor. An international aviation group is completing new passport standards this week, setting the groundwork for all passports issued worldwide to include digitized photographs that a computer can read remotely and compare to the face of the traveler or to a database of mug shots.
Supporters hope the system will banish fake passports and help fight terrorism. But critics say the standards will enable a global infrastructure for surveillance and lead to a host of national biometric databases, including ones run by countries with troubling human rights records.
The ICAO has already settled on facial recognition as the standard biometric identifier, though countries may add fingerprints or iris scans if they wish. The standards body will vote on Friday whether to adopt radio-frequency ID chips, such as those used in Fast Pass toll systems, as the standard method of storing and transmitting the digitized information.
Simon Davies, director of human rights group Privacy International, said the ICAO hasn’t consulted with human rights groups and shouldn’t be involved at all.
The most troubling aspect of international standard setting is that it often occurs without any national dialogue through the diplomatic process. Governments merely use the standards bodies as a convenient means of implementing controversial policy.
Privacy International suggested that the ICAO should have adopted a standard that would allow computers at a border to match the traveler to the digital photo on a passport, but that did not permit any government to keep a central database of photos.
The group argued that facial recognition is not the most accurate identification benchmark, and that matching a person to an old photograph is problematic.
As a follow up on the issue of privacy and personal data protection, here is an article that is a part of a special report on Protecting your ID by Silicon.com. Their conclusion is on the timid side but deserves to be noted:
It is tempting to say data will leak, as sure as vulnerabilities in complex software will be discovered or spam will be sent. But let’s not be fooled. Sensible data protection regimes around the world – and the UK should be applauded for its progress in this area – can make a difference. They will do much to protect some of our most valuable assets – the information that relates to us.
Over the last couple of days in days I have in the North West of England. Or rather two bits of it – Bolton and Manchester.
Bolton did not seem to be the hell-on-Earth that it is normally presented as. The people did not seem very poor (although the local ‘everything for a pound’ shop was crowded) and the local Muslim (mostly brown) folk did not seem to be about to fight to the death with the local non Muslim (mostly pinkish-gray “white”) folk.
The town seemed fairly clean and the town hall, art gallery and museum were quite nice.
One thing that sticks in my mind was a church in Bolton (St George’s I think) that has been turned into some shops. As an Anglican (one of the few left) and a cultural conservative I should have been offended by this – but I was not. It “worked” – seeing the pulpit and stained glass windows (and so on) all still there, next to stores selling various nice things was actually quite nice (perhaps the decline of the Church of England can, in part, be blamed on too many Anglicans being like me).
As for Manchester.
Well first a word of explanation. Manchester in Britain is not famous for the old “Manchester School” of Free Trade (as it is overseas), although one can still find statues of Cobden and Bright and even the Conservative Peel who repealed the Corn Laws (there is also a statue of the Duke of Wellington – but that is another matter).
However, the Manchester of free markets is long gone (even the Free Trade Hall is now gone). Since the late 19th century Manchester has become famous for “social reform” (statism) – the same passion to help the poor and weak, but seeing the state (or “the community” in a sense that includes the public authority) rather than voluntarism as the way to do it. → Continue reading: Trip to the North West of England
Mark Cornish of Adam Smith Blog has a post on privacy with very pertinent comments on consumer loyalty cards.
Rather than worrying about businesses using data in order to make their shopping experience more tailored to individual customers, we should be worrying about the number of civil servants allowed to snoop on their fellow citizens. According to the Foundation for Information Policy Research police and other officials are making around a million requests for access to data held by net and telephone companies each year. Customs and Excise have 200 staff authorised to use the snooping authority and had sought access 35000 times in the last year. The Inland Revenue accessing such data a further 11700 times in the last year. Do we allow too much snooping, or is it important for fighting crime?
I have not yet got around to everyday bashing of these everyday invasions of privacy. Some would say it is a trade-off – you get a discount and they get your data – but the balance of power is certainly not even. I especially detest the Nectar card that is a joint effort to collect customer data by Sainsbury’s, BP, Debenhams and Barclaycard, with Vodafone, Ford, Threshers, Victoria Wine, Wine Rack, Bottoms Up and Adams, Childrenswear, London Energy, Seeboard Energy, SWEB energy, All:sports joining gradually.
You can see why this line of apparel appeals to me…
In my usual stupor, this morning, before all the drugs in my constitutional cup of tea kick-started my ageing brain cells, I watched a snippet of the popular BBC children’s programme, Blue Peter.
This is a perennial of tax-funded British programming, imbibed with your mother’s milk, which delivers a twice-weekly compendium presented by a rotating set of three bright young things, who tour the world looking for informational opportunities for five to 15 year olds.
When I grew up with the programme these were the splendidly quirky John Noakes, the woodenly hip Peter Purves, and the prim but smouldering Lesley Judd. Ah, the things Lesley could do with a hot wet bucket of clay which would warm the confused cockles of a 12 year old boy.
So I watched this morning’s programme with interest. A fresh-faced pretty female presenter wandered around a cocoa plantation in Africa explaining the cocoa pod origins of chocolate production. ‘Fascinating,’ I thought. There was plenty of factual information and so far a distinct lack of anti-capitalist agitation. ‘What is wrong with the BBC, this morning?’ I wondered. → Continue reading: What are your kids watching?
No, that’s not some sick April Fool joke. In fact it’s a headline from the respected silicon.com
The article reports that civil liberties groups worldwide are objecting to plans by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) to incorporate biometrics and RFID chips in all passports. This would be linked to a global identity database.
The plans, to be discussed by the ICAO next week, would make biometrics and tagging compulsory by 2015.
The ICAO’s preferred biometric is facial recognition, which was recently described by the Economist Intelligence Unit as having the potential to ensure that “privacy, as it has existed in the public sphere, will in effect be wiped out”.
Cross-posted from The RFID Scanner
Nothing any political body says can be taken at face value. On that point I doubt many would demur. In days gone by when the state had a large measure of control over information flows, this was only to be expected and was easier to do. In modern times, this is a bit harder to pull off and requires ‘spin’ and other psycho-media exercises in obfuscation to muddy waters, confuse issues, bamboozle and generally misdirect people from politically inconvenient facts. Nevertheless, in this information rich interconnected world in which we now live, one can but marvel that some political creatures seem to act as if they operate in a universe in which the official pronouncements carry the same weight they did in, say, the 1920’s.
A remarkable and even bizarre example of this is the summary which has been attached to the factual European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia‘s report on anti-semitism in Europe. This EU publication comes out against the screamingly obvious backdrop of Islamic youths running rampant in some communities in many countries. And the summary of this report states what exactly?
The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans
Huh? I mean, did they expect that no one would actually read the actual main text? The report clearly says that by far the major source of ‘anti-semitic’ (meaning anti-Jewish) violence is other semites… Muslim ones. → Continue reading: The wellspring of lies
Speaking at his monthly news conference, Prime Minister Tony Blair has repeated his support for David “Big” Blunkett’s plan to impose compulsory national Identity Cards on innocent British citizens.
Blair claimed that there was “no longer a civil liberties objection” to ID Cards and that the only thing holding them back was logistics.
This statement shows Blair’s lack of understanding of the concept of civil liberties. Identity Cards turn citizens into suspects and deprive people of privacy.
The civil liberties objections to ID Cards are as strong now as they were fifty years ago.
Update: In the Guardian: PM hints at imminent ID card move.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine
Jasper Becker
Henry Holt, 1998
“The famine of 1958-61 was unique in Chinese history. For the first time, every corner of this huge country experienced hunger (p. 99),” writes Jasper Becker, after setting the scene in the first six chapters of this truly horrifying book. Of all the world’s man-made famines – and for more than the last hundred years there has been no other kind – this one was truly the most pointless. The peasants were docile, partly because there had been peace since the Communists had conquered the land in 1949, and partly because they had been systematically intimidated. If the Soviets had needed a famine to crush the Ukrainian peasants, nothing of the sort was needed in China. All the better-off peasants had been eliminated and the rest forced into communes. Despite the fact, a fact theoretically inadmissable, that these were less efficient than the family farms, they were just sufficiently productive to feed those that worked them and the cities which contained around ten percent of the total population.
The Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, having forced through collectivisation, may have decided to persist in the policy to prove Khrushchev wrong when he, in his “secret speech” in 1956, had come close to admitting it hadn’t worked in the USSR. Mao in fact, decided to go even further and, preceded by a campaign to raise the peasants’ hopes of a Utopian future, initiated his fantasy of The Great Leap Forward. This was something as close to irrational as the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific, where stone-age inhabitants cleared runways in the jungle and awaited the arrival of the transport aircraft they remembered from the War landing and disgorging every luxury of human existence. Though perhaps best known for the “backyard blastfurnaces” that produced useless chunks of iron from the peasants’ precious pots and pans, the most destructive feature of the Great Leap Forward was the agricultural disaster produced by the nonsensical theories borrowed from Soviet pseudo-scientists such as Lysenko. The grains that were planted and the density of planting were changed according to his theories, land was abandoned for fallow, bizarre notions about the mixture of manure with rubbish and “deep ploughing” were put into operation and peasants were conscripted to build dams which fell apart and canals which leaked dry or silted up. Since all these innovations were claimed to raise productivity enormously, exaggerated statistics were fabricated and, since everyone believed them, the first harvest was wastefully consumed, though it was, in fact, lower than that of previous years, already reduced by collectivisation.
It is difficult to know how far down from the top of the communist hierarchy the ignorance extended of the true situation as this got worse and worse. As for the Party cadres in contact with the peasants, they were unable to do anything but attempt to obey orders that came down to them, to extract the government share as a proportion of the false figures they had transmitted upward. Senior Communist Party officials travelled to the countryside and discovered what was happening, but merely encountered the dogmatic denial of Mao of what they had seen when they returned. Since he could punish their disagreement with dire penalties, the more honest voiced it in only the most tentative terms, while others simply lied and the whole situation remained deadlocked while the peasants starved. How long it was before Mao’s self-deception and bloody-mindedness yielded to a realisation of the facts is not clear, but at the beginning of 1961 he was blaming “counter-revolutionaries and landlords”, a formula he could not even have expected to be believed for the famine he now admitted to be happening. There is not the slightest doubt that Mao was responsible for the policies that caused it and for the stubborness that delayed its cessation or amelioration. Not only did he never admit blame, but carried out vendettas against those who brought the famine to an end, one purpose of his initiation of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. → Continue reading: Mao’s unnatural disaster
But then I suppose you already knew that. After all, state’s often think it is justified to outlaw consensual sex-for-sale (unless it is part of a package involving marriage, of course). Now however, it seems even what you do with your private bits in a non-sexual way is the business of a bunch of priggish regulators.
You think not? Well that is what Georgia’s political masters reckon (that is Georgia in the USA not the one in the former USSR). It is now illegal for an adult woman to get a genital piercing. Now I realise that the USA already claims de facto ownership of its subjects (a much more realistic term than ‘citizens’) even when they wander off to foreign lands, but I though that these notions of owning folks only applied to the fruits of their labour, not their actual bodies (yes, I realise this may be wandering into a touchy area given the USA’s interesting history of intrapersonal economic relations, particularly in places like Georgia).
Now if some woman is subjected to non-consensual genital mutilations, I have no problem regarding that as criminal, but will someone tell me how a bunch of legislators can think they have the right to tell a woman what she can do to her own labia and clitoris for her own private aesthetic reasons? To me the law itself is an affront, but far more shocking is that every single one of the members of the Georgia legislature feel they have the right to tell a woman what she may do with her own body for her own private ends.
(via Jessica Lyons: Naturalis)
The Australian is a national broadsheet newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd, and in terms of quality and direction is fairly similar to the British Times. I suppose. Like any paper it makes the odd mistake, and has to publish a correction. On Tuesday it published the following.
A story headlined ‘Syria seeks our help to woo US’ in Saturday’s Weekend Australian misquoted National Party senator Sandy Macdonald. The quote stated: “Syria is a country that has been a bastard state for nearly 40 years” but should have read “Syria is a country that has been a Baathist state for nearly 40 years.” The Australian regrets any embarrassment caused by the error.
Personally I think that if anyone is embarrassed by this, there is absolutely no need for regret whatsoever. But that may be just me.
(Thanks to crikey.com.au for pointing this out).
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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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