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Sure piracy problem does take a chunk out of film profits

I don't know of any studies about movie piracy, but studies I've read about concerning music piracy that weren't paid for by the major music labels show that music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates.

With books, it takes 2-3 weeks after a book hits the shelves for copies to show up on the internet. One publisher commissioned a study to see how badly the piracy impacted sales, and was astounded to find that after the initial sales spike when it went on sale, there was a second sales spike when the book hit the internet.

From what I've seen, piracy only affects sales in a positive way. That's why Cory Doctorow posts his books on his website for free download.

There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.

I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.

These people don't believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books has. Copyright law has always recognized your right to own your books. When copyright laws are made -- by elected officials, acting for the public good -- they always safeguard this right.

But ebook publishers don't respect copyright law, and they don't believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you "buy" an ebook, you're really only licensing that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, "Buy this book" and they talk about "Ebook sales" at conferences -- no one says, "License this book for your Kindle" or "Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!")

I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law's guarantee of ownership in your books.

So you own this ebook. The license agreement (see below), is from Creative Commons and it gives you even more rights than you get to a regular book. Every word of it is a gift, not a confiscation. Enjoy.

What do I want from you in return? Read the book. Tell your friends. Review it on Amazon or at your local bookseller. Bring it to your bookclub. Assign it to your students (older students, please -- that sex scene is a scorcher) (now I've got your attention, don't I?). As Woody Guthrie wrote:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

Oh yeah. Also: if you like it, buy it or donate a copy to a worthy, cash-strapped institution.

Why am I doing this? Because my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks, @timoreilly for this awesome aphorism). Because free ebooks sell print books. Because I copied my ass off when I was 17 and grew up to spend practically every discretionary cent I have on books when I became an adult. Because I can't stop you from sharing it (zeroes and ones aren't ever going to get harder to copy); and because readers have shared the books they loved forever; so I might as well enlist you to the cause.

I have always dreamt of writing sf novels, since I was six years old. Now I do it. It is a goddamned dream come true, like growing up to be a cowboy or an astronaut, except that you don't get oppressed by ranchers or

see also: Cory Doctorow's novel Makers http://craphound.com/makers/download/ Decent read for when you want to escape reality for a while. Download-able in 12+ formats no DRM.

Cory Doctrow had a book that is a very good read in addition to telling how to mess with RFID surveillance if Big Brother happens. Free & CC
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Cory Doctorow's excellent book on exactly this topic (I just read it) as well as gold farming and various related practices. Wrapped in a great novel. http://craphound.com/ftw/ Available for free download or real money for paper. A definite "Must Read" for all /.ers

This is slightly off-topic, but is anyone here familiar with Cory Doctorow? He wrote a book I just finished called Little Brother where this same thing happened (except a little more localized and extreme) and he shows how pointless it really is. The book can be found here for download and it's under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. If I was in Marcus's position right now (the book's main character), I'd be scared and facepalming at the same time. I wouldn't be scared of terrorists; I'd be scared of my own government! And to think we always shoot down the very ideas of some foreign governments that "don't respect freedom" when we're doing the very things we hate. It just doesn't make sense.

He may not credit Tim (or the masturbation guy) every single time he utters those words but he has indeed credited him:

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism).

But hey, don't let facts get in the way of slagging Cory. Do you realize how long it would take for Cory, or anyone, to talk if they had to cite the origin of every single thought they're expressing?

He credits Tim just fine on his website:

http://craphound.com/overclocked/2007/01/08/about-this-sitefaq/

So this time he didn't spell it out, but it's not like he is claiming this idea is "his"

I think he just agrees and feels it is basically a fact in the culture today.

Tim first wrote that idea, that I am aware of, back in 2002 so after 8 years or so, I think it might be fair to say that it has become fact or reality to many of us.

Cory Doctorow's new Young Adult book, For the Win talks about some of this. The main premise of the book is that the horrible sweatshop working conditions of MMO gold farmers in China, India, Malaysia, etc. inspire a plucky gang of visionaries to lead union organization for "virtual world workers". He Creative Commons licenses all of his work so grab an ebook from his site and check it out.

Don't tell me that people buy stolen creds and log into them just to take all their e-loot (worth thousands of e-dollars)?

It's about cold, hard cash. The e-loot and e-dollars are worth hard currency; mainly because you can trade e-dollars for it. From a somewhat aged article on the BBC in 2007:

Research by security firm Symantec suggests that the raw value of a WoW account is now higher than a credit card and its associated verification data.

One card can be sold for up to $6 (£3) suggests Symantec, but a WoW account will be worth at least $10. An account that has several high level characters associated with it could be worth far more as the gold and rare items can be sold for real cash.

Corry Doctrow has even turned the concept in to a novel called For The Win (far more fictional than educational - but there are echoes of reality to be found).

Looks like someone should read FTW to understand how virtual economies work.

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Just finished reading this - and confirms my fears that we are stepping closer and closer to it being fact not fiction.

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

I'd just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and we began our escape. I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my short boots -- ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for running and climbing, and the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes them convenient at the never-ending metal-detectors that are everywhere now.

We also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets easier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery -- all the bells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of security. We surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favorite side-exit. We were halfway along when Darryl hissed, "Crap! I forgot, I've got a library book in my bag."

"You're kidding me," I said, and hauled him into the next bathroom we passed. Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid -- Radio Frequency ID tag -- glued into its binding, which makes it possible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books on it are out of place.

But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools track us with arphids, but they could track library books, and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book.

I had a little Faraday pouch in my bag -- these are little wallets lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencing arphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing ID cards and toll-booth transponders, not books like --

"Introduction to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of a dictionary. ...
"I'm thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley," Darryl said. His dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, which meant he'd get free tuition when he went. And there'd never been any question in Darryl's household about whether he'd go.

"Fine, but couldn't you research it online?"

"My dad said I should read it. Besides, I didn't plan on committing any crimes today."

"Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different."

"What are we going to do, Marcus?"

"Well, I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing arphids is a dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going for a walk around the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized merchandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so the manufacturers have refused to implement a "kill signal" that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. You can reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hate doing that to library books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book, but it's still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't be shelved and can't be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack.

That left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30 seconds in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. And because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked it back in at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode it with the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back on its shelf.

All we needed was a microwave.

A lot of Cory Doctorow's science fiction deals with these subjects in a very creative way (much better than Stallman). And a most of it is available for free on the web too.

A lot of Cory Doctorow's science fiction deals with these subjects in a very creative way (much better than Stallman). And a most of it is available for free on the web too.

“Now, the latest stats show a sharp rise in grey-market electronics importing and other tariff-breaking crimes, mostly occurring in open-air market stalls and from sidewalk blankets. I know that many in law enforcement treat this kind of thing as mere hand-to-hand piracy, not worth troubling with, but I want to assure you, gentlemen and lady, that Social Harmony takes these crimes very seriously indeed.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy. For extra kicks and grins, read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom about a society based on this concept, plus using online reputation instead of currency.

I'm rather skeptical of how well boycotts do these days.

However, bad reviews and ratings seem to work.

I don't know how it is over there in the US. But here in UK I can buy decent movies on DVD for 3£. I'm not going to spend more money on an electronic book if it comes with DRM. I hope that authors such as Cory Doctorow will take over eventually. I.e. that books will be based on donations or sponsorships.

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Cory_Doctorow_novel)
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

In the words of Cory Doctorow:

"So you start to f with your sleep schedule. You get up at four AM so you can chat with your friends. You go to bed at nine, 'cause that's when they go to bed. Used to be that it was stock brokers and journos and factory workers who did that kind of thing, but now it's anyone who doesn't fit in. The geniuses and lunatics to whom the local doctrine tastes wrong. They choose their peers based on similarity, not geography, and they keep themselves awake at the same time as them. But you need to make some nod to localness, too--gotta be at work with everyone else, gotta get to the bank when it's open, gotta buy your groceries. You end up hardly sleeping at all, you end up sneaking naps in the middle of the day, or after dinner, trying to reconcile biological imperatives with cultural ones. Needless to say, that alienates you even further from the folks at home, and drives you more and more into the arms of your online peers of choice.

"So you get the Tribes. People all over the world who are really secret agents for some other time zone, some other way of looking at the world, some other zeitgeist. Unlike other tribes, you can change allegiance by doing nothing more that resetting your alarm clock. Like any tribe, they are primarily loyal to each other, and anyone outside of the tribe is only mostly human. That may sound extreme, but this is what it comes down to.

For some reason, I got this picture:

http://craphound.com/images/translateservererror.jpg

It's already got class action status, trial by jury. The filed suit

I've not heard of Craphound.com either, but the link is from this article

Of what possible use would a 'camera' be in locating a stolen laptop? Would they be able to identify anything other than a room with 1 or two walls in the background? If they saw a face, would that bring them realistically any closer to an arrest?

Doesn't it make more sense to triangulate the laptop's position via WiFi, or even via a GPS tracker installed in the hardware?

The article states that the laptops cost about $1000 each, and that they have had 42 reported stolen, and have recovered 18. It does not state that the security feature was beneficial in that recovery. Given that they've lost $24,000 dollars worth of hardware even with the security software, and that the resulting lawsuits will probably easily be in the 10's or 100's of times that actual loss value, is this even worth the potential litigation risk?

On page 6 of the class action doc, it specifically says that Lindy Matsko, assistant principal at Harriton High School informed the minor Blake J. Robbins, that he was engaged in improper behavior and she produced a photo of said conduct that was captured from the laptop's cam. The laptop was not reported as stolen, even though the school claims that feature is only activated in the event that a laptop is reported stolen. The parents were not informed of this capability until this incident (rather hard to hide when they produced the picture from the web cam).

The claim in the class action doc directly refutes the claims by the school.

The laptops should have never been placed with a student without notifying them of the security software, it's capabilities, or the potential privacy violations. Had they been notified at that time, I doubt the program would have been allowed to continue with said software installed as it appears to violate a number of statutes, listed beginning on page 6 of the class action PDF.

http://craphound.com/robbins17.pdf

Actually reminded me more of Little Brother

It's not my fault the industry in question is ruled by a load of useless bloody loonies.

I'm sure the school made it clear that use of the laptops would be monitored, non-official use is verboten, etc.

That's just the thing though, according to the lawsuit, the school district did not indicate that it would be monitoring students via the webcam.

The class action suit describes the agreement under which the laptops were provided; no mention is made of remote monitoring. I suggest you read the original filing.

I don't know the entire history of the checklist (which can be found here). However, my understanding is that it solved a longstanding problem on various spam-fighting mailing lists where someone would post what sounded like a bright idea for fixing the spam problem once and for all, which invariably had several of the listed drawbacks to their proposal. So the checklist was created to provide a quick way to explain exactly why the proposed plans didn't work.

One of the problems concerning biofuels is that there is so much misinformation, half-truths, and FUD going around.

A lot of it is actually overgeneralization. E.g. a study finds that producing ethanol from corn using a specific process in the US is not energy efficient, and then people conclude that producing ethanol from any source anywhere in the world is not energy efficient.

Another common claim is "step X of the process uses fossil fuel, therefore, the process is not carbon neutral". This is usually based on the mistaken assumption that the step _necessarily_ uses fossil fuel. In this thread, many people are assuming that we feed fertilizer to the algae and that the fertilizer is produced from or using fossil fuel.

All this makes it very difficult to have a sensible discussion, because many people (on both sides, I'm sure) make assumptions that often turn out to be unnecessary or false. Perhaps we could use something like the spam solutions form to capture some of the common pitfalls, so that we don't have to waste a lot of time countering the mistaken assumptions that keep cropping up.

Two thoughts. First, there are times where it is better to be using a system that you know without a doubt is insecure than to use a system that appears secure, but isn't. At least with the known unsecure system, there's a chance that the user will stop and think "hmm, this is pretty sensitive, maybe I shouldn't be doing this over the unprotected link". If the user has that magic gold lock icon, they'll think they're secure even when they're not, which not only increases the chance of compromise, it also increases the chance that high-value data is compromised.

Second, key-signing parties are not a panacea. When it comes to trust and identity, how well do you really know people? There are exactly two people in the world that I can say with confidence that I'm 100% sure that I know who they are. I am the first (self-evident). My son is the other. I know that because I was in the room when he was born, he was handed to me, I carried him to another room, and he never left that room unless he was accompanied by either my wife or myself. Since then, he's been in our possession and we've maintained documentation of him (i.e. pictures, medical records, hand prints in clay, etc.)

For everyone else I know, there is no way for me to establish their identity with that level of certainty. I know that the people I call my parents today are the same people that I've called my parents for as long as I've had the concept of parent, but when it comes down to it, there's no way I can be sure that my father really is Bob Bitslinger and not, for example, D. B. Cooper, or Alice Cooper, or James Fennimore Cooper, and that's with someone that I've supposedly known my whole life.

Read Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother. It isn't particularly well written, and the story's a bit overblown, but it does a great job of explaining why key-signing parties don't solve the trust and identity problems in security.

Aha! You're guilty of Printcrime! You're goin' to the slammer, bigtime!

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Baen with Webscriptions and its Free Library has been making e-books in multiple formats available for years. They've found that after an author puts a few books into the Free Library the sales of that author's backlist (including the freely-available books) rise. I suspect that they get more sales & readers for Webscriptions as well - if I can buy individual ebooks for $6 or the entire set of releases for the month (up to 4 "frontlist" new publications plus some backlist) for $15, I might as well cough up the couple of extra books and see which writers I like.

If Cory sees his financial future in people having his written works without paying for them, good luck. Freedom is nice, but eating is nicer. Freedom can be enjoyed a lot better with a full belly.

His books are freely available for download. To get a direct example link: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother_Dutch.epub. Go have fun.

From http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt:

Your post advocates a
        ( ) technical

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

The stupidity is this:

You can, could, and still will be able to block cookies in your browser, so whatever web site operators are doing with them, it isn't going to affect your privacy or "trackability".

But, it sounds as if this new law requires the web site operators to show you screen after screen of "permissions" to continue. These permission requests are stupid as EULA dialogs, Vista-like "admin authorisation" dialogs, etc, because they (a) don't offer a meaningful change in values (be it trackability or privacy), and (b) annoy the hell out of users. I won't go into how (c) these crap warnings numb users to real warnings, which they will also mindlessly click through.

I can't decide whether this is Brazil-style bureaucracy galore, or Eastern Standard Tribe-style anti-productivity warfare.

> Kindle books are actually very user friendly

• So if I buy one, but have two or more Kindles, I can read it on all of them?
• After I'm finished reading, I can indefinitely lend a Kindle book to a friend of mine in Brazil who also owns a Kindle by sending him something over the net?
• After I'm finished reading, I can sell my Kindle book back to a used Kindle bookstore?
• I can print out a chapter of a Kindle book to take to read at the beach?

I doubt this (well, maybe the first one is doable, I don't have any Kindles, myself).

All of this functionality might be expected by a reasonable consumer who isn't already thinking about why the publisher wouldn't want him to be able to do it.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow from whom most of these examples/ideas have been lifted.

> Kindle books are actually very user friendly

• So if I buy one, but have two or more Kindles, I can read it on all of them?
• After I'm finished reading, I can indefinitely lend a Kindle book to a friend of mine in Brazil who also owns a Kindle by sending him something over the net?
• After I'm finished reading, I can sell my Kindle book back to a used Kindle bookstore?
• I can print out a chapter of a Kindle book to take to read at the beach?

I doubt this (well, maybe the first one is doable, I don't have any Kindles, myself).

All of this functionality might be expected by a reasonable consumer who isn't already thinking about why the publisher wouldn't want him to be able to do it.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow from whom most of these examples/ideas have been lifted.

<your entire post, basically>

AC, go read Eastern Standard Tribe. Go on, I'll wait.
http://craphound.com/est/Cory_Doctorow_-_Eastern_Standard_Tribe.txt
Done? Good. Nice read, isn't it? Anyway, note how your post is exactly what they did 'at the pike'. And yet, Big Media was still involved. Like nature, I'm afraid capitalism "will always find a way" (hoping I won't get sued by Spielberg for that).

No idea about the Norwegian version. But the English one works fine for me. http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.pdf

Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother. Free PDF download from his site: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/

Private peer-to-peer network...

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Citation for credit.

Though I doubt it's close to original work, that's where I got it and fair's fair.

With that in mind, I have to recommend Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Great book, and aimed at the highschool level. Great thing about it is that all the technology in the book is completely available, albeit a little reworked. One of the main goals of this sci-fi book is to make a sci-fi novel where the technology wasn't completely fake. He did a really good job. Also a great book because it's available for free in electronic for if your school can't afford hard copies.

Reminds me of a section in Chapter 13 of Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother. In chapter thirteen, or if you grep/search/seek out the phrase "Under what circumstances should the federal government be prepared to suspend the Bill of Rights?" Then you will see a classroom discussion about a little text that is released by the DHS, after things go ary, which eerily reminds me of this DCMA edu-mercial. The title of the educational material is called WHAT EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT HOMELAND SECURITY. During the scene the boy & the teacher go back and forth about rights, and the constitution, etc.

Eeery. Orwell, Dick, & Brunner were all right on point. *shivers*

"Lanie, I'm going to print more printers. Lots more printers. One for everyone. That's worth going to jail for. That's worth anything."

From Cory Doctorow's Overclocked, "Printcrime".

The closest I can find to an "original" is this one, which is linked to a lot.

http://craphound.com/images/apdiagramremix.jpeg

Cory Doctorw explains it pretty well.

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong.

What's one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.

That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip.

This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Throw a copy of Paranoid Linux on an XBox, crank up XNet and Clockwork Plunder and you can teach your kids to fight the man starting at an early age.

Since its XBox the obligatory Cory Doctorow, Little Brother references are mandatory :) Don't trust anyone over 25 and down with the man.

"They are meant to be used to track people."

To be honest I'm not really sure why they would really bother with arphids to track people. The way its going everyone is carrying cell phones and those are a lot easier to track and track remotely than arphids and people carry them all the time without even thinking about which isn't true for passports. arphids might be a bit easier for close proximity identification, but it doesn't seem very reliable to me.

Cory Doctorow's Create Commons book Little Brother is a not so fictional account of assorted abuses by the Department of Homeland Security. DHS tracking people with arphids in BART passes and toll passes in cars is one of the plot lines. It won this years Prometheus award(Libertarian Sci/Fi). Its not exactly a work of great literature. He ripped it out in a relatively short period of time and it could have used more work. But its kind of an entertaining read for geeks and a reminder how out of control the American government has been since 9/11. The book is also FREE. The ideas of XNet and Paranoid Linux are priceless. Adhoc WiFi may be the only way to have a free Internet where Big Brother isn't watching your every move.

One does have to wonder why the NSA is building giant new data centers in San Antonia and Utah and expanding the existing one in Maryland. They seem to be ramping up to eavesdrop on a LOT more of something. I'm also wondering what this secret program Cheney was running in the CIA was all about since it appears it wasn't the torture or the already leaked NSA domestic spying program. If you think the Democrats and Obama wont be just as bad about trampling our civil liberties as Bush/Cheney you are very naive.

Will computers liberate us or enslave us. Paradoxically, probably both at the same time.