Slashdot Mirror

Makoss writes "Normal cryptographic hash functions turn any input text or data into a compact set of bits; useful for computers, not useful for humans. Visual hash functions turn data into graphical representations which are more easily recognizable and memorable to humans. You've seen Identicons and other simple geometric image generators already, but Vash takes the technique beyond basic geometry and produces some really striking images."

mcgrew writes with this quote from an AP report: "After four years sailing through space, the Dawn spacecraft was expected to slip into orbit late Friday around a giant asteroid to begin a yearlong investigation into the origins of the solar system. It is the first of two scheduled tour stops for the NASA probe that almost never made it to the launch pad. Because of its stunted growth, Vesta holds 'a record of the earliest history of the solar system,' said the mission's lead scientist Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles." Dawn's mission homepage has all the information and pictures collected so far. On July 9th, it snapped our best look to date at the ~530-kilometer-wide Vesta, from 40,000 kilometers away. When it arrives, it will take observations from successively lower orbits, the final one being only 460km above Vesta's surface. Next May, Dawn will break orbit and head to Ceres. (mcgrew adds, "The submission's title is a nod to Isaac Asimov. Lets hope Dawn doesn't get marooned!")

mcgrew writes with this quote from an AP report: "After four years sailing through space, the Dawn spacecraft was expected to slip into orbit late Friday around a giant asteroid to begin a yearlong investigation into the origins of the solar system. It is the first of two scheduled tour stops for the NASA probe that almost never made it to the launch pad. Because of its stunted growth, Vesta holds 'a record of the earliest history of the solar system,' said the mission's lead scientist Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles." Dawn's mission homepage has all the information and pictures collected so far. On July 9th, it snapped our best look to date at the ~530-kilometer-wide Vesta, from 40,000 kilometers away. When it arrives, it will take observations from successively lower orbits, the final one being only 460km above Vesta's surface. Next May, Dawn will break orbit and head to Ceres. (mcgrew adds, "The submission's title is a nod to Isaac Asimov. Lets hope Dawn doesn't get marooned!")

mcgrew writes with this quote from an AP report: "After four years sailing through space, the Dawn spacecraft was expected to slip into orbit late Friday around a giant asteroid to begin a yearlong investigation into the origins of the solar system. It is the first of two scheduled tour stops for the NASA probe that almost never made it to the launch pad. Because of its stunted growth, Vesta holds 'a record of the earliest history of the solar system,' said the mission's lead scientist Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles." Dawn's mission homepage has all the information and pictures collected so far. On July 9th, it snapped our best look to date at the ~530-kilometer-wide Vesta, from 40,000 kilometers away. When it arrives, it will take observations from successively lower orbits, the final one being only 460km above Vesta's surface. Next May, Dawn will break orbit and head to Ceres. (mcgrew adds, "The submission's title is a nod to Isaac Asimov. Lets hope Dawn doesn't get marooned!")

Oooskar writes "SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), a technique invented by NASA, defines the concept of building a 3D-map of the environment and simultaneously computing the position within it. Based on SLAM, Swedish startup 13th Lab has implemented real-time sub-centimeter local 3D-positioning by using only the sensors, most importantly the camera, already present in most mobile devices (demo video). The technology will be made available as a software platform for developers (sign up for beta). A first application demonstrating the technology has just been released for the iPad2. The technology should be available on other devices with similar computational power soon."

theodp writes "In his new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, legendary car-guy Bob Lutz says to get the U.S. economy growing again, we need to fire the MBAs and let engineers run the show. The auto industry, writes TIME's Rana Foroohar, is actually a terrific proxy for a trend toward short-term, myopically balance-sheet-driven management that has infected American business. In the first half of the 20th century, industrial giants like Ford, GE, AT&T and others used new technologies to create the best possible products and services with the idea that if you build it better, the customers will come. But by the late '70s, if-you-can-measure-it-you-can-manage-it MBAs were flourishing, and engineers were relegated to the geek back rooms. 'Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys,' argues Lutz, 'and software firms by software guys.' Learning that China plans to open 40 new graduate schools of business in the next few years, Lutz quipped, 'That's the best news I've heard in years.'"

Beloved of concert tapers for their small size, shock resistance, and long battery life, MiniDisc recorders never much caught on with the general public. I remember playing with one in the early '90s — before high-quality solid state stereo recorders were affordable — and looking forward to the day that I would have one of my own. Playback-only decks were available, but understandably (in retrospect) never became big sellers; when MiniDisc was introduced, CDs were still a recent comer, and 8-track was fresh in the mind. Music fans were probably tired of replacing their vinyl and cassettes with the Next Big Thing. Still, with its cheap media and decent portable recorders, MiniDisc struck a chord for some uses, and stuck around better than the Digital Compact Cassette. Now, 19 years after the introduction of the MiniDisc format, Sony has announced that it will stop shipping its MiniDisc Walkman products in September, though it will continue to produce blank media.

crackspackle writes "The Atacama desert region, a vast expanse of land stretching 600 miles along the Pacific coast of South America from Peru to Chile, is known as the driest region on earth, receiving only .04 inches (1mm) of rain per year. Many weather stations located in the region have no recorded precipitation during their existence. Sterile from the lack of rainfall, sparsely inhabited, and virtually free from electromagnetic interference, the desert hosts several major astronomical observatories. This other-worldly location is also popular among sci-fi film makers, and is a prominent test site for NASA's planned Mars mission. This week, the Atacama received 32 inches of snow, stranding motorists along the Pan-American highway and other roads, prompting numerous rescues. Footage of the snow is available on the BBC."

brothke writes "Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies is a hard book to categorize. It is not about security, but it deals extensively with it. It is not a law book, but legal topics are pervasive throughout. It is not a telecommunications book, but extensively details telco issues. Ultimately, the book is a most important overview of security and privacy and the nature of surveillance in current times." Read below for the rest of Ben's review. Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies author Susan Landau pages 360 publisher MIT Press rating 10/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 9780262015301 summary Definitive text on the topic of surveillance, security and privacy read. Surveillance or Security? is one of the most pragmatic books on the topic in that the author never once uses the term Big Brother. Far too many books on privacy and surveillance are filled with hysteria and hyperbole and the threat of an Orwellian society. This book sticks to the raw facts and details the current state, that of insecure and porous networks around a surveillance society.

In this densely packed work, Susan Landau, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University details the myriad layers around surveillance, national security, information security and privacy. Landau writes that her concern is not about legally authorized law enforcement and nationally security wiretapping; rather about the security risks of building surveillance into communications infrastructures.

Landau details numerous reasons why communications security is hard to do right; but an imperative for our ultimate security, privacy and digital wellbeing.

In 250 pages, Landau makes a compelling case. In addition to her superb handle on the topic, the book has over 80 pages of footnotes, where everyquote, statement and claim is verified and confirmed. The book is a great launching pad for a much deeper analysis on the topic.

The main theme of the book is that digital communications have revolutionized the way in which society interacts. The Internet is now the lifeblood of many businesses and governments, including a significant part of our critical infrastructure. The fact that this infrastructure lacks comprehensive security and privacy controls are a troubling concern.

In 11 dense chapters, Landau notes that since security and privacy have not been fully integrated into this infrastructure; this leaves us exposed and vulnerable to cyberattacks.

In the introduction, Landau notes that with this new computing and telecommunications paradigm, the job of law enforcement has become much more challenging. In previous years, surveillance was relatively easy. Once law enforcement had physical access to a phone line, they were in. Today, with cell phones, VoIP, Internet cafes, anonymizing services and more, the dynamics have changed and this has caused quite a shock for law enforcement; who are often struggling to deal with this new paradigm.

Landau notes that the surveillance and eavesdropping technologies that have been deployed since 9/11 are being used to catch one set of enemies. But other antagonists may be posed to turn these tools against us, and we are putting into place something for our enemies to use that they could not afford to do on their own. As to this and other difficult questions that Landau brings up; there are no simple answers.

Chapter 3 — Securing the Internet is Difficult — notes that the original creators of TCP/IP did not have security in their design. Their concerns were more along the lines of traffic breakdowns, packet loss, robustness and more; but not security and privacy. In some ways, this may be been a blessing, as Dennis Jennings, who ran the NFSNET; states that "had we known what was to come, we'd have been terrified and the Internet would never have happened.

In chapter 5 — The Effectiveness of Wiretapping– Landau notes that the biggest use of wiretapping tools is not actually the capture of conversation. But something that is not really wiretapping at all: the capture of transactional information.

Chapter 7 – Who are the Intruders? What are They Targeting?– is one of the best chapters in the book. Landau details both the internal threat and industrial espionage, and it is not a pretty picture. Landau provides numerous cases where nation-states used networks, rather than people to infiltrate US interests, governmental, industrial and scientific areas. She notes that these insider attacks are often the most difficult to detect; the reason being that insiders know the systems, know where the important data is, and what the auditors are looking at. This ultimately makes insiders attack particularly pernicious.

So how significant are nation-states infiltrating US networks? Landau quotes a confidential government source that the NASA network was "completely open to the Chinese".

Landau makes her message loud and clear in chapter 8 when she notes that it does not help to tell people to be secure; rather security must be built into their communications systems. Security must be ubiquitous, from the phone to the central office and from the transmission of a cell phone to its base station to the communications infrastructure itself.

In chapter 9 – Policy Risks Arising from Wiretapping – Landau details how deep packing inspection (DPI) is used by ISP's. It is the ISP's who have the capability to know what you are browsing, what your email says, your VoIP conversation and much more. In a short amount of time, the ISP can develop a dossier on the user, and as noted, it has the ability to amass data to an amount that the Stasi could only dream of. This surveillance ability is what is most troubling to the author.

Landau continues that the only way for a person to avoid the risk from ubiquitous uses of DPI by an ISP would be to encrypt everything. While not completely done now, Gmail and Skype do bulk encryption.

The book closes with chapter 11 – Getting Communications Security Right– and there are no easy answers. Landau notes that across the globe, there are projects on clean-slate network architectures. But our current infrastructure is quite insecure and porous.

Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies is an extremely important book on the topic of the many risks posed by new wiretapping technologies. Landau has the remarkable talent of taking very broad issues and detailing them in a concise, yet comprehensive manner. The book should be seen as the starting point for discussion on a most important topic.

Landau does an excellent job of detailing how unwarranted surveillance can undermine security and affect our rights, while noting that security for every citizen is paramount to the very spirit of the Constitution.

The book closes with the very principles of what it means to get communications security rightand that adhering to these principles cannot guarantee that we will be completely secure. But failure to adhere to them will guarantee that we will not.

As to Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, required reading it is, but that term does not do justice to the importance of this book. Simply put, this book is the definitive text on the topic and it is a title that needs to be read.

Reviewer Ben Rothke (@benrothke) is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know

You can purchase Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Space Shuttle Atlantis has just launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. STS-135 marks the final flight for the shuttle program, 30 years after Columbia touched the sky during STS-1. The mission summary (PDF) outlines STS-135's crew and event timeline. NASA's launch blog has been following the countdown all morning, and our own CmdrTaco has been tweeting live from on-site. NASA TV is also being streamed live. Meteorological reports for the launch looked doubtful at first, but a gap in the bad weather at just the right time allowed everything to proceed as planned. Atlantis successfully reached its preliminary orbit in what a NASA official called a "flawless" launch.

Some Bitch writes "Britain's biggest selling Sunday tabloid will close after this Sunday's issue. The tabloid has been embroiled in a voicemail hacking controversy for some time now and the news that they compromised the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl and paid bribes to Metropolitan police officers for stories kicked off a renewed assault on the paper. The News Corp daily counterpart to Sunday's News of the World is the Sun; the domain sunonsunday.co.uk was registered two days ago."

jones_supa writes "The Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC has bought the graphics department of VIA Technologies, S3 Graphics. This $300 million dollar deal brings HTC the ownership of new patents and graphics visualization technologies. 'In addition to its traditional markets in PCs and game consoles, S3 Graphics Texture Compression technology is increasingly being applied to smartphones and tablets, HTC said.'" It appears that HTC will be turning the tables on at least Microsoft and extracting royalties from them for a change.

An anonymous reader writes "Veteran of microcomputing Steve Furber, in his role as ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, has called upon some old friends for his latest project: a brain-simulating supercomputer based on more than a million ARM processors." More detailed information can be found in the research paper.

smitty777 writes "There is a proposal in the EU budget which would provide a 45% increase in technology and innovation spending for the 2014-2020 time period. Interestingly, some of the increase from $79B to $114B would come from the controversial farm subsidies program, the Common Agricultural Policy. The article states ... 'While some scientists and observers feel optimistic that the proposal will pass, one stated that "it is extremely unlikely that the member states will agree to anything exceeding this, so we should regard it as a ceiling" on the eventual research budget.'"

Teancum writes "On the list of items on the upcoming federal budget for 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives has announced they are going to cancel the continued development of the James Webb Space Telescope. While this debate is certainly still very much a preliminary draft, the road ahead for this project is now very much uncertain. In this time of budget cuts, it seems unlikely that this project is going to survive at this time. It certainly will be an uphill battle for fans of this telescope if they want to keep it alive."

littlekorea writes "The online music services of Apple and Google are likely to be challenged by a Sydney-based company that has been granted three new patents around file hashing and deduplication. The patents are being managed by Kevin Bermeister, of Altnet/Kazaa fame, who believes that the technology behind P2P music services has been commercialized by the music industry without license." In semi-related patent troll news, Google is being sued over using interactive panoramic images in Streetview. Because QuickTime VR didn't exist years before the patent was filed.

chrb writes "BBC News reports that U.S. cities are installing more roundabouts than ever before. The first British-style roundabout appeared in the U.S. in 1990, and now some cities — such as Carmel in Indiana, are rapidly replacing intersections with roundabouts. Supporters claim that roundabouts result in increased traffic flow, reductions in both the severity and incidence of accidents, and fuel savings. Critics say that roundabouts are more difficult to navigate for unfamiliar American drivers, lead to higher taxes and accidents, and require everyday acts of spontaneous co-operation and yielding to others — acts that are 'un-American.'" As a driver who's hit all of the continental U.S. states except North Dakota, I dread roundabouts and rotaries for all the near accidents (and at least one actual accident) I've seen them inspire, and have been unhappy to see them spread. Spontaneous driver cooperation doesn't necessarily need the round shape, either.

mikejuk writes "Google mystified other participants in an auction for patents last week by their choice of bids. They weren't the round regular numbers that are normally expected. After first bidding $1,902,160,540 — a reference to Brun's constant — and later bidding $2,614,972,128 for the Meissel-Mertens constant, they ended up submitting a bid for $3.14159 billion. Google ended up losing the auction — but was that a deliberate ploy?"

mikejuk writes "Google mystified other participants in an auction for patents last week by their choice of bids. They weren't the round regular numbers that are normally expected. After first bidding $1,902,160,540 — a reference to Brun's constant — and later bidding $2,614,972,128 for the Meissel-Mertens constant, they ended up submitting a bid for $3.14159 billion. Google ended up losing the auction — but was that a deliberate ploy?"

solardiz writes "DES is still in use, brute-force key search remains the most effective attack on it, and it is an attractive building block for certain applications (the key size may be increased e.g. with 3DES). Openwall researchers, with funding from Rapid7, came up with 17% shorter Boolean expressions representing the DES S-boxes. Openwall's John the Ripper 1.7.8 tests over 20 million combinations against DES-based crypt(3) per second on a Core i7-2600K 3.4 GHz, which roughly corresponds to a DES encryption speed of 33 Gbps."

On Monday we discussed news of a Supreme Court ruling which held that violent video games deserved free speech protection under the First Amendment. Now, frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with this followup that questions the Court's consistency in such matters. "I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the California law against selling violent video games to minors, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that the arguments by the dissenters made more sense than the majority — mainly because of the hypocrisy of continuing to ban sexuality while giving violence a pass." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

John Landis said, "R is when you bare a woman's breast, PG is when you cut it off." That is apparently now also the law of the land regarding video games, according to the Supreme Court's June 27th decision (PDF) overturning a California law that banned sales of violent video games to minors. I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the law, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that even though I agreed with the majority's conclusion, the actual arguments made by the dissenters made more sense, primarily because of the hypocrisy of the majority in treating sex as more taboo than violence.

The majority opinion, written by Scalia, has already been widely quoted as a ringing defense of free speech:

"Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones. Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny..."

But Scalia continues to believe that the government does have the right to ban the sale of nudity and sexuality to minors (as decided in the Supreme Court's 1968 Ginsberg v. New York decision), just not violence. So he kept qualifying statements like the one above by adding "except for pornography", like a judicial version of the fortune cookie "in bed" game:

"[A]s a general matter, . . . government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content... There are of course exceptions. These limited areas, such as obscenity... represent well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem."
...
"Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them."

So he's continuing the Supreme Court's tradition of carving out of a First Amendment exception for sex, but won't make one for gratuitous violence. I would be against banning either type of content, but if I were forced to ban one of the two, I would definitely pick violence. Wouldn't you?

As Steven Breyer wrote in his dissent:

"But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her? What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman -- bound, gagged, tortured, and killed -- is also topless?"

Well, he's right, isn't he? Except he misses the point that perhaps the remedy is not to ban violent video games, but to overturn the precedent that photos of topless women are harmful.

Alito seemed to agree with Breyer, when he wrote in a decision joined by Roberts:

"Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement, including machine guns, shotguns, clubs, hammers, axes, swords, and chainsaws. Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy... The objective of one game is to rape a mother and her daughters; in another, the goal is to rape Native American women."

(Alito was technically not dissenting, because he agreed that the current law was impermissibly vague, but filed a separate opinion because he was at pains to emphasize that he thought some future law against violent video games might be constitutional.) The implication seems clear: "If we can ban some things for minors — like pornography — then good God, can't we ban this stuff too?"

Scalia, in his majority opinion, responds to Alito's description of game violence: "Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us — but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression." But this is just hypocritical — because Scalia, throughout his own decision, kept deferring to the Ginsberg Supreme Court ruling, which said that the government could ban porn sales to minors if it depicted sex acts in way that the "average person" would consider "patently offensive with respect to what is suitable for minors" (along with some other criteria). In other words, if it causes disgust.

Breyer and Alito also made similar arguments to each other on another reasonable-sounding point — that industry self-regulation might not last long, now that the law has been struck down. As Alito wrote:

"The Court does not mention the fact that the industry adopted this system in response to the threat of federal regulation, Brief for Activision Blizzard, Inc., as Amicus Curiae 7-10, a threat that the Court's opinion may now be seen as largely eliminating. Nor does the Court acknowledge that compliance with this system at the time of the enactment of the California law left much to be desired — or that future enforcement may decline if the video-game industry perceives that any threat of government regulation has vanished."

Breyer agreed:

"And the industry could easily revert back to the substantial noncompliance that existed in 2004, particularly after today's broad ruling reduces the industry's incentive to police itself."

This sounds more realistic than Scalia's recitation of the video game industry party line:

"The video-game industry has in place a voluntary rating system designed to inform consumers about the content of games... This system does much to ensure that minors cannot purchase seriously violent games on their own, and that parents who care about the matter can readily evaluate the games their children bring home."

What do you want to bet that Breyer and Alito are right, and enforcement of the rating system will decline now?

Compare this with another case, when Communications Decency Act of 1996 (essentially banning the "seven dirty words" on the Internet) was struck down in 1997 at least in part because a "less restrictive means" existed for censoring content in the home — parental blocking software. I didn't like blocking software much, but as a statement of fact, it existed, and was a less restrictive means than the law. The crucial difference there was that parents who used blocking software, weren't using it in response to a government threat of legislation, they were using it because they wanted to, and didn't stop using it after the law was struck down. There's no reason to think the same is true for industry self-applied video game ratings.

Finally, Breyer (but not Alito) rejected the argument that the California law should be struck down for vagueness, arguing that it was no more vague than laws against selling pornography minors, which the court had upheld:

"Comparing the language of California's statute (set forth supra, at 1-2) with the language of New York's statute (set forth immediately above), it is difficult to find any vagueness-related difference. Why are the words "kill," "maim," and "dismember" any more difficult to understand than the word "nudity?" ... California only departed from the Miller formulation [the Supreme Court case that defined obscenity] in two significant respects: It substituted the word "deviant" for the words "prurient" and "shameful," and it three times added the words "for minors." The word "deviant" differs from "prurient" and "shameful," but it would seem no less suited to defining and narrowing the reach of the statute."

Well, I think he's right. They're all just words, and they don't have crystal clear boundaries, but you pretty much know what they mean, and there's no reason why one group of words is more vague than the other. (In fact, in a 2008 article I argued that you could measure scientifically the vagueness of a law — just show the law to different test subjects, along with some made-up scenarios, and ask whether those scenarios violated the law or not. I'm quite confident that if you applied that test to these two different laws, you would measure about the same level of "vagueness".)

Again, I don't accept the justices' premise that the government has any business banning the sale of either sexual or violent content. But if you're going to grant the premise that they can and should, then Alito and/or Breyer seem to have made better arguments than the majority on at least those three points: That violence probably deserves less constitutional protection than sex, that the industry isn't likely to keep regulating itself if they no longer think they have to, and there's no reason that "kill" and "maim" are any more vague than "nudity".

(By the way, when I say the "dissenters sounded more reasonable", I am not including Clarence Thomas, whose entire solo dissent was devoted to research showing that the Founding Fathers did not believe people under 18 had First Amendment rights at all. If Clarence Thomas thought really hard, could he think of any other category of people who were denied full civil rights in the 1700s, and hence why we wouldn't want to apply that standard today?)

Fortunately, the majority did get the most important point right, which is that studies do not show a causal relationship between video game playing and real-life acts of violence. As Scalia wrote:

"The State's evidence is not compelling. California relies primarily on the research of Dr. Craig Anderson and a few other research psychologists whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, "[n]early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology." Video Software Dealers Assn. 556 F. 3d, at 964. They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children's feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game."

Unfortunately, Scalia lacked the nerve to say that this point should have been the only point that mattered, in a society where freedom is the default unless there's a good reason to the contrary. Because the logical consequence of that, would have been that since the "evidence" for the harmful effects of pornography is even weaker, then the government has no business banning that, either.

The problem constraining all nine justices is that they felt bound by the prior Ginsberg ruling making it permissible to ban sales of pornography to minors, so their options were limited to (a) striking down the video game law while ignoring the hypocrisy of continuing to ban pornography, or (b) pointing out that violent video games are probably at least as distasteful. This ignores the possibility that they could have just (c) overturned their prior ruling, as they have done many times before.

If I were a justice writing for the majority, my whole opinion would be:

Well, we can only make an exception to the First Amendment if there's solid evidence of real harm, and there is no scientifically valid evidence of harm here, so the law violates the First Amendment and is struck down. Oh, and that goes for Ginsberg too, next time it comes up. How much did you guys pay for law school again?

Unfortunately, Obama has said that he's looking for Supreme Court candidates that display "empathy", and what I said would probably hurt the other justices' feelings, so don't hold your breath for my being nominated.

On Monday we discussed news of a Supreme Court ruling which held that violent video games deserved free speech protection under the First Amendment. Now, frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with this followup that questions the Court's consistency in such matters. "I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the California law against selling violent video games to minors, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that the arguments by the dissenters made more sense than the majority — mainly because of the hypocrisy of continuing to ban sexuality while giving violence a pass." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

John Landis said, "R is when you bare a woman's breast, PG is when you cut it off." That is apparently now also the law of the land regarding video games, according to the Supreme Court's June 27th decision (PDF) overturning a California law that banned sales of violent video games to minors. I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the law, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that even though I agreed with the majority's conclusion, the actual arguments made by the dissenters made more sense, primarily because of the hypocrisy of the majority in treating sex as more taboo than violence.

The majority opinion, written by Scalia, has already been widely quoted as a ringing defense of free speech:

"Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones. Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny..."

But Scalia continues to believe that the government does have the right to ban the sale of nudity and sexuality to minors (as decided in the Supreme Court's 1968 Ginsberg v. New York decision), just not violence. So he kept qualifying statements like the one above by adding "except for pornography", like a judicial version of the fortune cookie "in bed" game:

"[A]s a general matter, . . . government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content... There are of course exceptions. These limited areas, such as obscenity... represent well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem."
...
"Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them."

So he's continuing the Supreme Court's tradition of carving out of a First Amendment exception for sex, but won't make one for gratuitous violence. I would be against banning either type of content, but if I were forced to ban one of the two, I would definitely pick violence. Wouldn't you?

As Steven Breyer wrote in his dissent:

"But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her? What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman -- bound, gagged, tortured, and killed -- is also topless?"

Well, he's right, isn't he? Except he misses the point that perhaps the remedy is not to ban violent video games, but to overturn the precedent that photos of topless women are harmful.

Alito seemed to agree with Breyer, when he wrote in a decision joined by Roberts:

"Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement, including machine guns, shotguns, clubs, hammers, axes, swords, and chainsaws. Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy... The objective of one game is to rape a mother and her daughters; in another, the goal is to rape Native American women."

(Alito was technically not dissenting, because he agreed that the current law was impermissibly vague, but filed a separate opinion because he was at pains to emphasize that he thought some future law against violent video games might be constitutional.) The implication seems clear: "If we can ban some things for minors — like pornography — then good God, can't we ban this stuff too?"

Scalia, in his majority opinion, responds to Alito's description of game violence: "Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us — but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression." But this is just hypocritical — because Scalia, throughout his own decision, kept deferring to the Ginsberg Supreme Court ruling, which said that the government could ban porn sales to minors if it depicted sex acts in way that the "average person" would consider "patently offensive with respect to what is suitable for minors" (along with some other criteria). In other words, if it causes disgust.

Breyer and Alito also made similar arguments to each other on another reasonable-sounding point — that industry self-regulation might not last long, now that the law has been struck down. As Alito wrote:

"The Court does not mention the fact that the industry adopted this system in response to the threat of federal regulation, Brief for Activision Blizzard, Inc., as Amicus Curiae 7-10, a threat that the Court's opinion may now be seen as largely eliminating. Nor does the Court acknowledge that compliance with this system at the time of the enactment of the California law left much to be desired — or that future enforcement may decline if the video-game industry perceives that any threat of government regulation has vanished."

Breyer agreed:

"And the industry could easily revert back to the substantial noncompliance that existed in 2004, particularly after today's broad ruling reduces the industry's incentive to police itself."

This sounds more realistic than Scalia's recitation of the video game industry party line:

"The video-game industry has in place a voluntary rating system designed to inform consumers about the content of games... This system does much to ensure that minors cannot purchase seriously violent games on their own, and that parents who care about the matter can readily evaluate the games their children bring home."

What do you want to bet that Breyer and Alito are right, and enforcement of the rating system will decline now?

Compare this with another case, when Communications Decency Act of 1996 (essentially banning the "seven dirty words" on the Internet) was struck down in 1997 at least in part because a "less restrictive means" existed for censoring content in the home — parental blocking software. I didn't like blocking software much, but as a statement of fact, it existed, and was a less restrictive means than the law. The crucial difference there was that parents who used blocking software, weren't using it in response to a government threat of legislation, they were using it because they wanted to, and didn't stop using it after the law was struck down. There's no reason to think the same is true for industry self-applied video game ratings.

Finally, Breyer (but not Alito) rejected the argument that the California law should be struck down for vagueness, arguing that it was no more vague than laws against selling pornography minors, which the court had upheld:

"Comparing the language of California's statute (set forth supra, at 1-2) with the language of New York's statute (set forth immediately above), it is difficult to find any vagueness-related difference. Why are the words "kill," "maim," and "dismember" any more difficult to understand than the word "nudity?" ... California only departed from the Miller formulation [the Supreme Court case that defined obscenity] in two significant respects: It substituted the word "deviant" for the words "prurient" and "shameful," and it three times added the words "for minors." The word "deviant" differs from "prurient" and "shameful," but it would seem no less suited to defining and narrowing the reach of the statute."

Well, I think he's right. They're all just words, and they don't have crystal clear boundaries, but you pretty much know what they mean, and there's no reason why one group of words is more vague than the other. (In fact, in a 2008 article I argued that you could measure scientifically the vagueness of a law — just show the law to different test subjects, along with some made-up scenarios, and ask whether those scenarios violated the law or not. I'm quite confident that if you applied that test to these two different laws, you would measure about the same level of "vagueness".)

Again, I don't accept the justices' premise that the government has any business banning the sale of either sexual or violent content. But if you're going to grant the premise that they can and should, then Alito and/or Breyer seem to have made better arguments than the majority on at least those three points: That violence probably deserves less constitutional protection than sex, that the industry isn't likely to keep regulating itself if they no longer think they have to, and there's no reason that "kill" and "maim" are any more vague than "nudity".

(By the way, when I say the "dissenters sounded more reasonable", I am not including Clarence Thomas, whose entire solo dissent was devoted to research showing that the Founding Fathers did not believe people under 18 had First Amendment rights at all. If Clarence Thomas thought really hard, could he think of any other category of people who were denied full civil rights in the 1700s, and hence why we wouldn't want to apply that standard today?)

Fortunately, the majority did get the most important point right, which is that studies do not show a causal relationship between video game playing and real-life acts of violence. As Scalia wrote:

"The State's evidence is not compelling. California relies primarily on the research of Dr. Craig Anderson and a few other research psychologists whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, "[n]early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology." Video Software Dealers Assn. 556 F. 3d, at 964. They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children's feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game."

Unfortunately, Scalia lacked the nerve to say that this point should have been the only point that mattered, in a society where freedom is the default unless there's a good reason to the contrary. Because the logical consequence of that, would have been that since the "evidence" for the harmful effects of pornography is even weaker, then the government has no business banning that, either.

The problem constraining all nine justices is that they felt bound by the prior Ginsberg ruling making it permissible to ban sales of pornography to minors, so their options were limited to (a) striking down the video game law while ignoring the hypocrisy of continuing to ban pornography, or (b) pointing out that violent video games are probably at least as distasteful. This ignores the possibility that they could have just (c) overturned their prior ruling, as they have done many times before.

If I were a justice writing for the majority, my whole opinion would be:

Well, we can only make an exception to the First Amendment if there's solid evidence of real harm, and there is no scientifically valid evidence of harm here, so the law violates the First Amendment and is struck down. Oh, and that goes for Ginsberg too, next time it comes up. How much did you guys pay for law school again?

Unfortunately, Obama has said that he's looking for Supreme Court candidates that display "empathy", and what I said would probably hurt the other justices' feelings, so don't hold your breath for my being nominated.

On Monday we discussed news of a Supreme Court ruling which held that violent video games deserved free speech protection under the First Amendment. Now, frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with this followup that questions the Court's consistency in such matters. "I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the California law against selling violent video games to minors, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that the arguments by the dissenters made more sense than the majority — mainly because of the hypocrisy of continuing to ban sexuality while giving violence a pass." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

John Landis said, "R is when you bare a woman's breast, PG is when you cut it off." That is apparently now also the law of the land regarding video games, according to the Supreme Court's June 27th decision (PDF) overturning a California law that banned sales of violent video games to minors. I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the law, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that even though I agreed with the majority's conclusion, the actual arguments made by the dissenters made more sense, primarily because of the hypocrisy of the majority in treating sex as more taboo than violence.

The majority opinion, written by Scalia, has already been widely quoted as a ringing defense of free speech:

"Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones. Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny..."

But Scalia continues to believe that the government does have the right to ban the sale of nudity and sexuality to minors (as decided in the Supreme Court's 1968 Ginsberg v. New York decision), just not violence. So he kept qualifying statements like the one above by adding "except for pornography", like a judicial version of the fortune cookie "in bed" game:

"[A]s a general matter, . . . government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content... There are of course exceptions. These limited areas, such as obscenity... represent well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem."
...
"Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them."

So he's continuing the Supreme Court's tradition of carving out of a First Amendment exception for sex, but won't make one for gratuitous violence. I would be against banning either type of content, but if I were forced to ban one of the two, I would definitely pick violence. Wouldn't you?

As Steven Breyer wrote in his dissent:

"But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her? What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman -- bound, gagged, tortured, and killed -- is also topless?"

Well, he's right, isn't he? Except he misses the point that perhaps the remedy is not to ban violent video games, but to overturn the precedent that photos of topless women are harmful.

Alito seemed to agree with Breyer, when he wrote in a decision joined by Roberts:

"Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement, including machine guns, shotguns, clubs, hammers, axes, swords, and chainsaws. Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy... The objective of one game is to rape a mother and her daughters; in another, the goal is to rape Native American women."

(Alito was technically not dissenting, because he agreed that the current law was impermissibly vague, but filed a separate opinion because he was at pains to emphasize that he thought some future law against violent video games might be constitutional.) The implication seems clear: "If we can ban some things for minors — like pornography — then good God, can't we ban this stuff too?"

Scalia, in his majority opinion, responds to Alito's description of game violence: "Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us — but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression." But this is just hypocritical — because Scalia, throughout his own decision, kept deferring to the Ginsberg Supreme Court ruling, which said that the government could ban porn sales to minors if it depicted sex acts in way that the "average person" would consider "patently offensive with respect to what is suitable for minors" (along with some other criteria). In other words, if it causes disgust.

Breyer and Alito also made similar arguments to each other on another reasonable-sounding point — that industry self-regulation might not last long, now that the law has been struck down. As Alito wrote:

"The Court does not mention the fact that the industry adopted this system in response to the threat of federal regulation, Brief for Activision Blizzard, Inc., as Amicus Curiae 7-10, a threat that the Court's opinion may now be seen as largely eliminating. Nor does the Court acknowledge that compliance with this system at the time of the enactment of the California law left much to be desired — or that future enforcement may decline if the video-game industry perceives that any threat of government regulation has vanished."

Breyer agreed:

"And the industry could easily revert back to the substantial noncompliance that existed in 2004, particularly after today's broad ruling reduces the industry's incentive to police itself."

This sounds more realistic than Scalia's recitation of the video game industry party line:

"The video-game industry has in place a voluntary rating system designed to inform consumers about the content of games... This system does much to ensure that minors cannot purchase seriously violent games on their own, and that parents who care about the matter can readily evaluate the games their children bring home."

What do you want to bet that Breyer and Alito are right, and enforcement of the rating system will decline now?

Compare this with another case, when Communications Decency Act of 1996 (essentially banning the "seven dirty words" on the Internet) was struck down in 1997 at least in part because a "less restrictive means" existed for censoring content in the home — parental blocking software. I didn't like blocking software much, but as a statement of fact, it existed, and was a less restrictive means than the law. The crucial difference there was that parents who used blocking software, weren't using it in response to a government threat of legislation, they were using it because they wanted to, and didn't stop using it after the law was struck down. There's no reason to think the same is true for industry self-applied video game ratings.

Finally, Breyer (but not Alito) rejected the argument that the California law should be struck down for vagueness, arguing that it was no more vague than laws against selling pornography minors, which the court had upheld:

"Comparing the language of California's statute (set forth supra, at 1-2) with the language of New York's statute (set forth immediately above), it is difficult to find any vagueness-related difference. Why are the words "kill," "maim," and "dismember" any more difficult to understand than the word "nudity?" ... California only departed from the Miller formulation [the Supreme Court case that defined obscenity] in two significant respects: It substituted the word "deviant" for the words "prurient" and "shameful," and it three times added the words "for minors." The word "deviant" differs from "prurient" and "shameful," but it would seem no less suited to defining and narrowing the reach of the statute."

Well, I think he's right. They're all just words, and they don't have crystal clear boundaries, but you pretty much know what they mean, and there's no reason why one group of words is more vague than the other. (In fact, in a 2008 article I argued that you could measure scientifically the vagueness of a law — just show the law to different test subjects, along with some made-up scenarios, and ask whether those scenarios violated the law or not. I'm quite confident that if you applied that test to these two different laws, you would measure about the same level of "vagueness".)

Again, I don't accept the justices' premise that the government has any business banning the sale of either sexual or violent content. But if you're going to grant the premise that they can and should, then Alito and/or Breyer seem to have made better arguments than the majority on at least those three points: That violence probably deserves less constitutional protection than sex, that the industry isn't likely to keep regulating itself if they no longer think they have to, and there's no reason that "kill" and "maim" are any more vague than "nudity".

(By the way, when I say the "dissenters sounded more reasonable", I am not including Clarence Thomas, whose entire solo dissent was devoted to research showing that the Founding Fathers did not believe people under 18 had First Amendment rights at all. If Clarence Thomas thought really hard, could he think of any other category of people who were denied full civil rights in the 1700s, and hence why we wouldn't want to apply that standard today?)

Fortunately, the majority did get the most important point right, which is that studies do not show a causal relationship between video game playing and real-life acts of violence. As Scalia wrote:

"The State's evidence is not compelling. California relies primarily on the research of Dr. Craig Anderson and a few other research psychologists whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, "[n]early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology." Video Software Dealers Assn. 556 F. 3d, at 964. They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children's feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game."

Unfortunately, Scalia lacked the nerve to say that this point should have been the only point that mattered, in a society where freedom is the default unless there's a good reason to the contrary. Because the logical consequence of that, would have been that since the "evidence" for the harmful effects of pornography is even weaker, then the government has no business banning that, either.

The problem constraining all nine justices is that they felt bound by the prior Ginsberg ruling making it permissible to ban sales of pornography to minors, so their options were limited to (a) striking down the video game law while ignoring the hypocrisy of continuing to ban pornography, or (b) pointing out that violent video games are probably at least as distasteful. This ignores the possibility that they could have just (c) overturned their prior ruling, as they have done many times before.

If I were a justice writing for the majority, my whole opinion would be:

Well, we can only make an exception to the First Amendment if there's solid evidence of real harm, and there is no scientifically valid evidence of harm here, so the law violates the First Amendment and is struck down. Oh, and that goes for Ginsberg too, next time it comes up. How much did you guys pay for law school again?

Unfortunately, Obama has said that he's looking for Supreme Court candidates that display "empathy", and what I said would probably hurt the other justices' feelings, so don't hold your breath for my being nominated.

On Monday we discussed news of a Supreme Court ruling which held that violent video games deserved free speech protection under the First Amendment. Now, frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with this followup that questions the Court's consistency in such matters. "I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the California law against selling violent video games to minors, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that the arguments by the dissenters made more sense than the majority — mainly because of the hypocrisy of continuing to ban sexuality while giving violence a pass." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

John Landis said, "R is when you bare a woman's breast, PG is when you cut it off." That is apparently now also the law of the land regarding video games, according to the Supreme Court's June 27th decision (PDF) overturning a California law that banned sales of violent video games to minors. I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the law, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that even though I agreed with the majority's conclusion, the actual arguments made by the dissenters made more sense, primarily because of the hypocrisy of the majority in treating sex as more taboo than violence.

The majority opinion, written by Scalia, has already been widely quoted as a ringing defense of free speech:

"Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones. Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny..."

But Scalia continues to believe that the government does have the right to ban the sale of nudity and sexuality to minors (as decided in the Supreme Court's 1968 Ginsberg v. New York decision), just not violence. So he kept qualifying statements like the one above by adding "except for pornography", like a judicial version of the fortune cookie "in bed" game:

"[A]s a general matter, . . . government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content... There are of course exceptions. These limited areas, such as obscenity... represent well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem."
...
"Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them."

So he's continuing the Supreme Court's tradition of carving out of a First Amendment exception for sex, but won't make one for gratuitous violence. I would be against banning either type of content, but if I were forced to ban one of the two, I would definitely pick violence. Wouldn't you?

As Steven Breyer wrote in his dissent:

"But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her? What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman -- bound, gagged, tortured, and killed -- is also topless?"

Well, he's right, isn't he? Except he misses the point that perhaps the remedy is not to ban violent video games, but to overturn the precedent that photos of topless women are harmful.

Alito seemed to agree with Breyer, when he wrote in a decision joined by Roberts:

"Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement, including machine guns, shotguns, clubs, hammers, axes, swords, and chainsaws. Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy... The objective of one game is to rape a mother and her daughters; in another, the goal is to rape Native American women."

(Alito was technically not dissenting, because he agreed that the current law was impermissibly vague, but filed a separate opinion because he was at pains to emphasize that he thought some future law against violent video games might be constitutional.) The implication seems clear: "If we can ban some things for minors — like pornography — then good God, can't we ban this stuff too?"

Scalia, in his majority opinion, responds to Alito's description of game violence: "Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us — but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression." But this is just hypocritical — because Scalia, throughout his own decision, kept deferring to the Ginsberg Supreme Court ruling, which said that the government could ban porn sales to minors if it depicted sex acts in way that the "average person" would consider "patently offensive with respect to what is suitable for minors" (along with some other criteria). In other words, if it causes disgust.

Breyer and Alito also made similar arguments to each other on another reasonable-sounding point — that industry self-regulation might not last long, now that the law has been struck down. As Alito wrote:

"The Court does not mention the fact that the industry adopted this system in response to the threat of federal regulation, Brief for Activision Blizzard, Inc., as Amicus Curiae 7-10, a threat that the Court's opinion may now be seen as largely eliminating. Nor does the Court acknowledge that compliance with this system at the time of the enactment of the California law left much to be desired — or that future enforcement may decline if the video-game industry perceives that any threat of government regulation has vanished."

Breyer agreed:

"And the industry could easily revert back to the substantial noncompliance that existed in 2004, particularly after today's broad ruling reduces the industry's incentive to police itself."

This sounds more realistic than Scalia's recitation of the video game industry party line:

"The video-game industry has in place a voluntary rating system designed to inform consumers about the content of games... This system does much to ensure that minors cannot purchase seriously violent games on their own, and that parents who care about the matter can readily evaluate the games their children bring home."

What do you want to bet that Breyer and Alito are right, and enforcement of the rating system will decline now?

Compare this with another case, when Communications Decency Act of 1996 (essentially banning the "seven dirty words" on the Internet) was struck down in 1997 at least in part because a "less restrictive means" existed for censoring content in the home — parental blocking software. I didn't like blocking software much, but as a statement of fact, it existed, and was a less restrictive means than the law. The crucial difference there was that parents who used blocking software, weren't using it in response to a government threat of legislation, they were using it because they wanted to, and didn't stop using it after the law was struck down. There's no reason to think the same is true for industry self-applied video game ratings.

Finally, Breyer (but not Alito) rejected the argument that the California law should be struck down for vagueness, arguing that it was no more vague than laws against selling pornography minors, which the court had upheld:

"Comparing the language of California's statute (set forth supra, at 1-2) with the language of New York's statute (set forth immediately above), it is difficult to find any vagueness-related difference. Why are the words "kill," "maim," and "dismember" any more difficult to understand than the word "nudity?" ... California only departed from the Miller formulation [the Supreme Court case that defined obscenity] in two significant respects: It substituted the word "deviant" for the words "prurient" and "shameful," and it three times added the words "for minors." The word "deviant" differs from "prurient" and "shameful," but it would seem no less suited to defining and narrowing the reach of the statute."

Well, I think he's right. They're all just words, and they don't have crystal clear boundaries, but you pretty much know what they mean, and there's no reason why one group of words is more vague than the other. (In fact, in a 2008 article I argued that you could measure scientifically the vagueness of a law — just show the law to different test subjects, along with some made-up scenarios, and ask whether those scenarios violated the law or not. I'm quite confident that if you applied that test to these two different laws, you would measure about the same level of "vagueness".)

Again, I don't accept the justices' premise that the government has any business banning the sale of either sexual or violent content. But if you're going to grant the premise that they can and should, then Alito and/or Breyer seem to have made better arguments than the majority on at least those three points: That violence probably deserves less constitutional protection than sex, that the industry isn't likely to keep regulating itself if they no longer think they have to, and there's no reason that "kill" and "maim" are any more vague than "nudity".

(By the way, when I say the "dissenters sounded more reasonable", I am not including Clarence Thomas, whose entire solo dissent was devoted to research showing that the Founding Fathers did not believe people under 18 had First Amendment rights at all. If Clarence Thomas thought really hard, could he think of any other category of people who were denied full civil rights in the 1700s, and hence why we wouldn't want to apply that standard today?)

Fortunately, the majority did get the most important point right, which is that studies do not show a causal relationship between video game playing and real-life acts of violence. As Scalia wrote:

"The State's evidence is not compelling. California relies primarily on the research of Dr. Craig Anderson and a few other research psychologists whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, "[n]early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology." Video Software Dealers Assn. 556 F. 3d, at 964. They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children's feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game."

Unfortunately, Scalia lacked the nerve to say that this point should have been the only point that mattered, in a society where freedom is the default unless there's a good reason to the contrary. Because the logical consequence of that, would have been that since the "evidence" for the harmful effects of pornography is even weaker, then the government has no business banning that, either.

The problem constraining all nine justices is that they felt bound by the prior Ginsberg ruling making it permissible to ban sales of pornography to minors, so their options were limited to (a) striking down the video game law while ignoring the hypocrisy of continuing to ban pornography, or (b) pointing out that violent video games are probably at least as distasteful. This ignores the possibility that they could have just (c) overturned their prior ruling, as they have done many times before.

If I were a justice writing for the majority, my whole opinion would be:

Well, we can only make an exception to the First Amendment if there's solid evidence of real harm, and there is no scientifically valid evidence of harm here, so the law violates the First Amendment and is struck down. Oh, and that goes for Ginsberg too, next time it comes up. How much did you guys pay for law school again?

Unfortunately, Obama has said that he's looking for Supreme Court candidates that display "empathy", and what I said would probably hurt the other justices' feelings, so don't hold your breath for my being nominated.

On Monday we discussed news of a Supreme Court ruling which held that violent video games deserved free speech protection under the First Amendment. Now, frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with this followup that questions the Court's consistency in such matters. "I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the California law against selling violent video games to minors, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that the arguments by the dissenters made more sense than the majority — mainly because of the hypocrisy of continuing to ban sexuality while giving violence a pass." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

John Landis said, "R is when you bare a woman's breast, PG is when you cut it off." That is apparently now also the law of the land regarding video games, according to the Supreme Court's June 27th decision (PDF) overturning a California law that banned sales of violent video games to minors. I'm glad the Supreme Court struck down the law, but reading over the decision, I had the odd feeling that even though I agreed with the majority's conclusion, the actual arguments made by the dissenters made more sense, primarily because of the hypocrisy of the majority in treating sex as more taboo than violence.

The majority opinion, written by Scalia, has already been widely quoted as a ringing defense of free speech:

"Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones. Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny..."

But Scalia continues to believe that the government does have the right to ban the sale of nudity and sexuality to minors (as decided in the Supreme Court's 1968 Ginsberg v. New York decision), just not violence. So he kept qualifying statements like the one above by adding "except for pornography", like a judicial version of the fortune cookie "in bed" game:

"[A]s a general matter, . . . government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content... There are of course exceptions. These limited areas, such as obscenity... represent well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem."
...
"Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them."

So he's continuing the Supreme Court's tradition of carving out of a First Amendment exception for sex, but won't make one for gratuitous violence. I would be against banning either type of content, but if I were forced to ban one of the two, I would definitely pick violence. Wouldn't you?

As Steven Breyer wrote in his dissent:

"But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her? What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman -- bound, gagged, tortured, and killed -- is also topless?"

Well, he's right, isn't he? Except he misses the point that perhaps the remedy is not to ban violent video games, but to overturn the precedent that photos of topless women are harmful.

Alito seemed to agree with Breyer, when he wrote in a decision joined by Roberts:

"Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement, including machine guns, shotguns, clubs, hammers, axes, swords, and chainsaws. Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy... The objective of one game is to rape a mother and her daughters; in another, the goal is to rape Native American women."

(Alito was technically not dissenting, because he agreed that the current law was impermissibly vague, but filed a separate opinion because he was at pains to emphasize that he thought some future law against violent video games might be constitutional.) The implication seems clear: "If we can ban some things for minors — like pornography — then good God, can't we ban this stuff too?"

Scalia, in his majority opinion, responds to Alito's description of game violence: "Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us — but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression." But this is just hypocritical — because Scalia, throughout his own decision, kept deferring to the Ginsberg Supreme Court ruling, which said that the government could ban porn sales to minors if it depicted sex acts in way that the "average person" would consider "patently offensive with respect to what is suitable for minors" (along with some other criteria). In other words, if it causes disgust.

Breyer and Alito also made similar arguments to each other on another reasonable-sounding point — that industry self-regulation might not last long, now that the law has been struck down. As Alito wrote:

"The Court does not mention the fact that the industry adopted this system in response to the threat of federal regulation, Brief for Activision Blizzard, Inc., as Amicus Curiae 7-10, a threat that the Court's opinion may now be seen as largely eliminating. Nor does the Court acknowledge that compliance with this system at the time of the enactment of the California law left much to be desired — or that future enforcement may decline if the video-game industry perceives that any threat of government regulation has vanished."

Breyer agreed:

"And the industry could easily revert back to the substantial noncompliance that existed in 2004, particularly after today's broad ruling reduces the industry's incentive to police itself."

This sounds more realistic than Scalia's recitation of the video game industry party line:

"The video-game industry has in place a voluntary rating system designed to inform consumers about the content of games... This system does much to ensure that minors cannot purchase seriously violent games on their own, and that parents who care about the matter can readily evaluate the games their children bring home."

What do you want to bet that Breyer and Alito are right, and enforcement of the rating system will decline now?

Compare this with another case, when Communications Decency Act of 1996 (essentially banning the "seven dirty words" on the Internet) was struck down in 1997 at least in part because a "less restrictive means" existed for censoring content in the home — parental blocking software. I didn't like blocking software much, but as a statement of fact, it existed, and was a less restrictive means than the law. The crucial difference there was that parents who used blocking software, weren't using it in response to a government threat of legislation, they were using it because they wanted to, and didn't stop using it after the law was struck down. There's no reason to think the same is true for industry self-applied video game ratings.

Finally, Breyer (but not Alito) rejected the argument that the California law should be struck down for vagueness, arguing that it was no more vague than laws against selling pornography minors, which the court had upheld:

"Comparing the language of California's statute (set forth supra, at 1-2) with the language of New York's statute (set forth immediately above), it is difficult to find any vagueness-related difference. Why are the words "kill," "maim," and "dismember" any more difficult to understand than the word "nudity?" ... California only departed from the Miller formulation [the Supreme Court case that defined obscenity] in two significant respects: It substituted the word "deviant" for the words "prurient" and "shameful," and it three times added the words "for minors." The word "deviant" differs from "prurient" and "shameful," but it would seem no less suited to defining and narrowing the reach of the statute."

Well, I think he's right. They're all just words, and they don't have crystal clear boundaries, but you pretty much know what they mean, and there's no reason why one group of words is more vague than the other. (In fact, in a 2008 article I argued that you could measure scientifically the vagueness of a law — just show the law to different test subjects, along with some made-up scenarios, and ask whether those scenarios violated the law or not. I'm quite confident that if you applied that test to these two different laws, you would measure about the same level of "vagueness".)

Again, I don't accept the justices' premise that the government has any business banning the sale of either sexual or violent content. But if you're going to grant the premise that they can and should, then Alito and/or Breyer seem to have made better arguments than the majority on at least those three points: That violence probably deserves less constitutional protection than sex, that the industry isn't likely to keep regulating itself if they no longer think they have to, and there's no reason that "kill" and "maim" are any more vague than "nudity".

(By the way, when I say the "dissenters sounded more reasonable", I am not including Clarence Thomas, whose entire solo dissent was devoted to research showing that the Founding Fathers did not believe people under 18 had First Amendment rights at all. If Clarence Thomas thought really hard, could he think of any other category of people who were denied full civil rights in the 1700s, and hence why we wouldn't want to apply that standard today?)

Fortunately, the majority did get the most important point right, which is that studies do not show a causal relationship between video game playing and real-life acts of violence. As Scalia wrote:

"The State's evidence is not compelling. California relies primarily on the research of Dr. Craig Anderson and a few other research psychologists whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, "[n]early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology." Video Software Dealers Assn. 556 F. 3d, at 964. They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children's feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game."

Unfortunately, Scalia lacked the nerve to say that this point should have been the only point that mattered, in a society where freedom is the default unless there's a good reason to the contrary. Because the logical consequence of that, would have been that since the "evidence" for the harmful effects of pornography is even weaker, then the government has no business banning that, either.

The problem constraining all nine justices is that they felt bound by the prior Ginsberg ruling making it permissible to ban sales of pornography to minors, so their options were limited to (a) striking down the video game law while ignoring the hypocrisy of continuing to ban pornography, or (b) pointing out that violent video games are probably at least as distasteful. This ignores the possibility that they could have just (c) overturned their prior ruling, as they have done many times before.

If I were a justice writing for the majority, my whole opinion would be:

Well, we can only make an exception to the First Amendment if there's solid evidence of real harm, and there is no scientifically valid evidence of harm here, so the law violates the First Amendment and is struck down. Oh, and that goes for Ginsberg too, next time it comes up. How much did you guys pay for law school again?

Unfortunately, Obama has said that he's looking for Supreme Court candidates that display "empathy", and what I said would probably hurt the other justices' feelings, so don't hold your breath for my being nominated.

Speaking at Gamerlab 2011 in Barcelona, MUD1 developer Richard Bartle had harsh words for the current state of social gaming: "The big thing about social games that they don't like to tell you, is they're not actually social. Games played on social network sites is what we mean by social games ... These games are categorized more by the platform than that they are social themselves. The way they engage their players is not through interesting gameplay, it's done through extrinsic rewards — basically bribes. ... The difference is, social games rely on the extrinsic rewards so as to be compelling. People keep playing the game because it keeps giving them things — rewards. This has led to gamification. In the hands of designers, this has a great deal of potential, but unfortunately it's not in the hands of designers, it's in the hands of marketers."

dtmos writes "Robert Morris, a major contributor to the Unix password and security features while at Bell Labs, has passed at the age of 78. His interesting life was made even more interesting by his son, Robert Tappan Morris, who invented the computer worm."

ygslash writes "Among the many facilities shut down since Monday at Los Alamos National Laboratory due to the approaching wildfire is Cielo, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The National Nuclear Security Administration's three national laboratories - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore - all share computing time on Cielo, according to Associated Press." Update: 06/30 14:48 GMT by S : As readers have pointed out, this article refers to the National Nuclear Security Administration, not the National Security Agency. Summary updated to reflect that.

ygslash writes "Among the many facilities shut down since Monday at Los Alamos National Laboratory due to the approaching wildfire is Cielo, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The National Nuclear Security Administration's three national laboratories - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore - all share computing time on Cielo, according to Associated Press." Update: 06/30 14:48 GMT by S : As readers have pointed out, this article refers to the National Nuclear Security Administration, not the National Security Agency. Summary updated to reflect that.

Forget about Pi Day, today we celebrate something twice as good: Tau Day. For far too long, Pi has been the bride and Tau has been the bridesmaid. As Michael Hartl points out in The Tau Manifesto, "Pi is a confusing and unnatural choice for the circle constant." He is giving a talk at the California Institute of Technology based on the Manifesto, with pie served at the end. "Twice as many as you might expect," he says.

dartttt writes "Robert Pelloni and his team are working to develop an indie handheld gaming console, the 'nD,' which will run a number of indie games. The device will support 2D games only, and will run a custom-developed, embedded Linux firmware. It will have its own Game Store, which will allow users to download games. The SDK will be released soon, and is based on open source gaming standard SDL. Developers are being told that they can actually start making and compiling games on Windows, Mac and Linux using a 320x240 resolution."

An anonymous reader writes "Most of us know the many problems with electronic voting systems. They are closed source and hackable, some have a default candidate checked, and many are unauditable (doing a recount is equivalent to hitting a browser's refresh button). But these issues only come to our attention around election time. Now is the time to think about open source voting, end-to-end auditable voting systems and open source governance. Not in November of 2012, when it will, once again, be far, far too late to do anything about it." It'll be interesting to see what e-voting oddities start cropping up in the current election cycle; Republican straw polls have already started, and the primaries kick off this winter.

An anonymous reader writes "Most of us know the many problems with electronic voting systems. They are closed source and hackable, some have a default candidate checked, and many are unauditable (doing a recount is equivalent to hitting a browser's refresh button). But these issues only come to our attention around election time. Now is the time to think about open source voting, end-to-end auditable voting systems and open source governance. Not in November of 2012, when it will, once again, be far, far too late to do anything about it." It'll be interesting to see what e-voting oddities start cropping up in the current election cycle; Republican straw polls have already started, and the primaries kick off this winter.

KentuckyFC writes "The published human genome is contaminated with DNA sequences from mycoplasma bacteria, according to bioinformatics researchers who blame an epidemic of mycoplasma contamination in molecular biology labs around the world. The researchers say they've also found mycoplasma DNA in two commercially available human DNA chips made by biotech companies for measuring levels of human gene expression. So anybody using these chips to measure human gene expression is also unknowingly measuring mycoplasma gene expression too. The mycoplasma genes are clearly successful in reproducing themselves in silico raising the possibility that we're seeing the beginnings of an entirely new kind of landscape of infection. One option to combat this kind of virtual infection is to protect databases with the genomic version of antivirus software, a kind of virtual immune system. But this in itself could make things worse by triggering an evolutionary arms race that selects genes most capable of beating the safeguards."

bejiitas_wrath writes "Ars Technica has an interesting story about the history of the videophone in Science Fiction. Star Trek has always depicted the video calling when hailing ships and planets, but even the 1935 movie The Tunnel depicted video calling from one continent to another and even video calling from airplanes! And huge public video screens showing the news and current events. Now we can use Skype to call one another over the Internet and video call with mobile `phones, but the video quality is nowhere near the quality shown in the film 2001 or the aforementioned Transatlantic Tunnel film."

bejiitas_wrath writes "Ars Technica has an interesting story about the history of the videophone in Science Fiction. Star Trek has always depicted the video calling when hailing ships and planets, but even the 1935 movie The Tunnel depicted video calling from one continent to another and even video calling from airplanes! And huge public video screens showing the news and current events. Now we can use Skype to call one another over the Internet and video call with mobile `phones, but the video quality is nowhere near the quality shown in the film 2001 or the aforementioned Transatlantic Tunnel film."

Last week, you asked questions (many rather pointed!) of Amir Taaki, co-founder of Bitcoin Consultancy, which develops Bitcoin related services, exchanges and Bitcoin itself. (They also own Britcoin.co.uk.) Says Taaki: "When creating video games I spent much time imagining tools to make artists lives easier, and how we could keep funding developers to write free software. One contribution of mine to the community was a site where developers could get funded for developing features and I'd love nothing more than to pay people to write free software." With regard to Bitcoin, similarly, "We need fulltime developers thinking about the problems and solutions needed to keep this system running. We aim to get all the creative thinkers from the community and provide a mechanism for enabling their work." Below find his answers to the questions readers raised.

Is the gold rush over?
by curunir

With BitCoin limited to a pre-determined amount and the difficulty of mining new BitCoins, it seems that this gives a huge advantage to people who got into BitCoin early and have already amassed a considerable amount of BitCoins. Is this true and, if so, do you think this disincentive will undermine BitCoin's ability to become more popular since the majority of the population will have to work so much harder to obtain the currency?

Amir Taaki: It is certainly true that early adopters have been rewarded. I do not think these inequities will be more shocking than those in the real world. Any guesses as to how this will play out is pontification. However, I don't think anyone has proposed a working model for a decentralized secure digital currency where such a thing would not happen. Overall, I believe the properties of this currency will significantly add to the wealth of all peoples, especially those less well off.

Crypto-Anarchism?
by conner_bw

I argue that bitcoin is interesting because it's a locked currency, with a known maximum, and a timeline for that maximum based on contemporary crypto math and radical ideas. There is clearly well thought out timeline for adoption and disruption. It's not just "Cool, new money!" Are you a crypto anarchist, or similar?

A.T.: Yes, I myself am a crypto anarchist. However, not everyone on my team has the same political ideologies and we do not try to push our ideologies on each other. In fact, we have all seen our ideologies change over time with the awareness of new knowledge and information. Ideologies should not be a point of contention, especially when we all see the immense prolific value of a more efficient means of commerce.

If not, then is this another Tulip craze [wikipedia.org] and all these news stories and bitcoin currency exchange services being hyped heavily the last month machinations for profiteering?

A.T.: I do not advocate that people speculate on bitcoins. In fact I actively advocate against that because those who are new to bitcoin might see it as just that, a 'craze.' I do however think that the properties of bitcoin are clearly advantageous over the current means of commerce. Although bitcoin is still underdeveloped, everything visible in the modern world can be adapted using bitcoins as a backbone. This will result in all the services of today's world (clearing houses, security, fraud protection, interest bearing accounts...) continuing to be offered, but with far less overhead.

Austrian Acceptance
by MyFirstNameIsPaul

I have found that the Austrians have a hard time accepting the idea of a digital currency. The core of their argument seems to be that digital currencies are not made up of something that had value before being a medium of exchange, such as gold and silver. When I counter to them that BitCoin is made up of code and people pay money for things like video games, they argue that the video game would have to be the thing valued, not the computer code. How do you deal with these kinds of objections?

A.T.: Gold is not a currency in my mind. It is a store of value. I would not want to go to buy bread from my local store and shave off some gold from a bullion and take out a scale and wait for an acid test to be performed. Gold is backed by real world properties.

Bitcoin is backed by the fact that is has unique properties as well:

• Decentralized
• No bank holidays
• International
• No concept of borders
• Divisible
• True micro-transactions possible (new markets feasible)
• New privacy model
• Private identity yet transparent
• Secure
• You do not have to trust merchant sites (Sony - Playstation) to protect your data
• Fast Transactions
• No Charge backs

Useful Calculations?
by Bodhammer

Is there any way to make the calculations more useful (i.e. Boinc) and still maintain the same level of difficulty in the computations? It just seems so wasteful to run Bitcoin at this time.

A.T.: Our world's current infrastructure depends on paying employees, building large buildings, paying for heat, electricity, transportation, lawyers, courts, judges, policemen, government bureaucracies, armies and much more. Doesn't it seem wasteful to rely on tedious and sometimes ambiguous real world laws with a lot of overhead instead of mathematical laws?

When merchants started accepting bitcoins, verifiers (because miners is a misnomer) started to see that their generated coins were worth something. They became competitive and found ways to do the same calculations cheaper which provided security for the network and verified the transactions. Verifiers found out that running these hashing algorithms on one's GPU was far more energy efficient than running them on one's CPU. Specialized software was later constructed for these purposes. Some keep their machines under dry ice. In the not so distant future, hardware FPGAs will be specially designed for this verification process.

The advantages of bitcoin exist because it is an inherently more efficient and less wasteful system. The reward for minting a block, provides a healthy competition that causes the energy cost to be driven down.

Additional privacy layers and smartphones?
by DriedClexler

Is there any serious development underway to make the privacy more robust? There has been talk of "Bitcoin laundry," where large pools swap their coins around between each other to make it harder to connect a coin/address with an owner. But for this to seriously work, it needs a lot more people to be involved in it, and it has to be integrated in a way that's secure (against someone just keeping coins in the middle of a shuffle) and transparent to the user (so they don't have to think about the new addresses they generate, or which coins are optimal to send where for the maximum shuffle). How soon can we expect something like this? Also, how soon will smartphones be able to handle this with the same ease as desktops and notebooks?

A.T.: A bitcoin laundry already exists. The volume on it is very low, but if demand increases in the future then such a service is trivial to setup. A mixing service (as they're called) requires a large volume and therefore a persistent demand.

Smartphones can already use bitcoin :) An Android version of the command line Bitcoin was compiled. Additionally one can use an online wallet service (or a bitcoin exchange) to store their bitcoins.

Lost/forgotten bitcoins?
by algorimancer

One thing that concerns me is the fixed maximum number of bitcoins. Lets say people acquire bitcoins, but the amount isn't enough to worry about, so they never use them, or perhaps their computer crashes and they don't have a backup. My understanding is that these bitcoins are permanently lost from the economy of bitcoins. Over time, the total supply would begin to dwindle, presumably pushing up the value of those that remain, until people become frustrated at the small supply and are motivated to move to a new system, then bitcoin is abandoned. In the real world this happens with dollar bills, but the government can compensate for this by creating more. Is this issue addressed in some fashion?

A.T.: The supply of bitcoins is 21 million. The supply of money is infinite. A bitcoin can currently be divided to 8 decimal places. The loss of bitcoins in the future may lead to some deflation however I expect it to be insignificant. In the very long term, even if there was only 1 bitcoin theoretically in circulation, running the world economy would not be a problem. There exists only 6 MBTC in circulation at this moment.

Extreme instability of Bitcoin vs. USD
by Limerent Oil

Why would any merchant IN THEIR RIGHT MIND want to deal with Bitcoin? With the insane USD-to-Bitcoin exchange-rate gyrations happening lately, why would any serious retailer even bother, when the value of Bitcoin vs. USD could change by 50% or more in just a few hours?

A.T.: As liquidity increases transaction costs decrease. If there was already an appropriate clearing house in place, a merchant would be able to automatically accept bitcoins and liquidate them to dollars. In the same way that people who use the internet are not all cognizant of the communication protocols they are using, I foresee the possibility of merchants offering their products in USD, EUR, GBP, and customers purchasing those products in their local currency. And the underlying mechanism which facilitates this transfer is the bitcoin. Bitcoin would provide these same services that payment services, credit cards or banks do but with much less cost to the merchant and customer.

What about the lack of inflation?
by Cyberax

It's long known that economic growth is severely stunted without some measure of inflation. Adopting bitcoins for the global economy would mean that policymakers lose control on money supply, and while there are advantages in this, disadvantages far outweigh them. Additionally, adopting a global currency standard will deny governments ability to influence currency rates robbing them of yet another way to control the economy. Is there any plan to solve this? Maybe a system of independent bitcoin 'roots' operated by governments would help?

A.T.: Ben Friedman has released a lot of work on E money and how it will affect the future and how governments will adapt. The truth is that the government will still have monopolies on much of the operations of the economy such as fractional reserve banking and the issuing of licenses which allow banks to lend money.

Aspirations
by slim

What are your aspirations for the currency? Do you hope for it to be near-ubiquitous — used by corner shops and mainstream merchants like Amazon? Or are you happy to see a parallel economy grow, as a niche thing? Or something else?

A.T.: I have lofty dreams of a world where people can send money abroad without having to pay 20+% in many cases to rip offs like western union. Where people can raise funds through services like paypal but not have their accounts arbitrarily frozen. Where citizens in developing nations who already oppose their government do not have to pay for wars of genocide out of their own pockets as was the case in ex-Yugoslavia where authoritarian control over the money supply helped finance a terrible war and bring about the worst hyper-inflation in Europe since WWII.

Bitcoin in some form is going to be adopted whether it is used as a unique currency, a payment system or as a clearing house. Our aspiration for bitcoin is to provide competition to the current system making everything cheaper for all. It's about cutting the middleman, democratising money and handing back power to people.

Will governments let it survive?
by merdaccia

We live in a world where the supply and movement of money are controlled by governments, central banks, money laundering laws, and financial institutions. How can BitCoin survive in this world? Middle men like banks stand to lose a fortune in fees and exchange rates, governments stand to lose a fortune in taxes if they can't track money movement, and the black market stands to gain a silent way to move value. For BitCoin to gain adoption, some major retailers need to start supporting it, but given the above risks, what stops a government from telling companies in its jurisdiction that they can't accept it?

A.T.: The US is not the world. If their government forces everyone to continue to use typewriters in lieu of computers and pay through the nose, they can. New and better technology, especially when it is revolutionary, does threaten archaic models and practices. Hopefully there will not be contention. My team is already in contact with SWIFT which has operated for 30 years and is the backbone of international money transfer for over 9000 banks. Many forward thinkers see the advantages of bitcoins but it is easy to understand how those perhaps well-intentioned but not well-versed in what bitcoin is can promote FUD.

Regulatory compliance?
by molo

For those of us interested in developing financial services using bitcoin, how have you dealt with regulatory issues? It seems like the SEC and FINRA in the US would not be keen on unregistered broker-dealers and agents and owners not having the legally required Series 7 and Series 24 certifications. Have you sought the UK equivalent certifications? The requirements of lawyers, accountants, certifications etc. seem to put a very high capital cost on starting a legitimate business offering services in this space.

A.T.: As well as being a developer, I own and operate www.Britcoin.co.uk (the UK exchange site). My team has been in negotiations for a long time now with lawyers and regulators. There is no regulatory process or restrictions now on the running of such services. Non-regulated sectors rarely seek out regulation. However, when it comes to bitcoins, I believe the sooner they are regulated the better. If their regulation is pushed by those who understand what bitcoins are then we may be able to regulate them in the best way possible and show the world they were not created for illegal practices. The sooner they are regulated, the sooner users can have legal assurances that merchants are liable for their operations. The negligence seen at MTGox would never have happened in a regulated market.

Although the FSA have not made any official statement about bitcoins. We at www.britcoin.co.uk are hoping that we can show to the proper authorities that indeed we have recorded our history of transactions. That all the money in our users accounts is accounted for. This process would dispel the FUD surrounding bitcoins and allow the people of the world to enjoy the freedoms and wealth of bitcoins that much sooner.

Tax avoidance and illicit trading
by slim

Some "benefits" of Bitcoin, from one perspective, appear to be that its cash-like properties lend themselves to tax avoidance (making transactions without declaring them), illicit trading (e.g. drugs or prostitution) and money laundering. Do you view this as a positive, a negative, or neutral? If you view it as a problem, how can the problem be mitigated?

A.T.: Most new technologies can be used for good and bad. Of course I do not condone or agree with the use of Bitcoins for illegal purposes.

However, I really want people to understand one thing. The criminalization of Bitcoin would not stop the illegal activity that surrounds it. In fact, it would help those who use it as a means of engaging in illegal activity by not regulating the purchasing and selling of bitcoins. Criminalization would only stop people from enjoying the tremendous and fruitful benefits of such a system, it would hinder the social good. Regulation would allow the proper authorities to find and charge those who use bitcoins for illegal activities.

Britcoin.co.uk has kept a clear record of the exchanges which have gone on. Every single transaction is recorded and we are happy to open our books to the proper authorities. We are aggressively advocating and promoting the legalization and regulation of the exchanges.

Bitcoins offer massive potential for positive social change. It would be a sad thing to see Bitcoins outlawed due to ignorance or reactionary feelings. If you outlaw Bitcoin then the illicit trades will still continue, perhaps even proliferate, but the good would disappear.

Kings used to raise capital in order to wage wars. They required popular support before they were able to fund their wars. A common tool in modern day authoritarian regimes is currency manipulation in order to fund their wars of genocide (e.g Milosevic in the 90s). Bitcoin democratises governments.

Quantum Computing?
by SanityInAnarchy

Are there plans to deal with quantum computing, or with any of the algorithms used being compromised?

A.T.: If SHA256 or ECDSA was ever cracked, we'd have far bigger problems to worry about than bitcoin being destroyed. I suspect that there won't be any overnight switch, giving everybody enough time in order to adjust the current system to any changes.

The internet wasn't built perfect. But years of reshaping/patching/incremental design have shaped it into a workable network. Bitcoin will too undergo this transformation with time as it ages.

(More from the call for questions:)

is there ever going to be a bitcoin bank? ... The idea that if you lose or destroy or whatever your computer and lose all your money isn't going to make the general public accept this.

A.T.: Bitcoin now stands at its early stages. It's the kernel of the software stack that will eventually exist for this financial system. Other services and software utilising Bitcoin will exist. A common view is where Bitcoin acts as an automated clearing house between all these user facing services in the future.

Bitcoin's protocol itself will need to be extended in order for it to grow. As the network expands, block sizes could become impossible large once it rivals the transaction volume of a comparable service like VISA or Paypal. To have lightweight clients that don't need to process these large GB sized blocks new protocol commands like a txmatch regex would need to be introduced in order that clients don't need to process the entire block data.

The point to Bitcoin is that you can choose your own level of trust in an external service. One of our group's members, Patrick Strateman, came up with a scheme whereby a wallet could be recovered algorithmically using an email and a password. In the future I expect savings accounts where retrieving the money is an arduous proccess. Then we can go further to where a person has all their funds in a trusted service like with email today- how many people run their own mail servers?

What markets do you think will be the first to most aggressively adopt bitcoins as their currency?

What insights can you offer as to why the US government is having a hostile reaction to bitcoins?"

What kinds of competing P2P currencies are in development, and how will their deployment affect the valuation of bitcoins?

A.T.: Immediately as liquidity improves in exchanges, the best use for Bitcoins will be individuals transferring funds between countries without fees. Our group has a lot of interest from mobile sectors because of the potential as a micropayment system. Currently now in Africa, people use mobile credit as a form of currency to transfer funds across borders, but that's usually less than ideal.

The US government isn't a homogenous entity, and one senator (possibly funded by bankers) made a false claim on Bitcoin- calling it a scheme for drug trafficking networks. It may simply be due to reactionary misunderstanding like the people in Yahoo Finance calling Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme invented by bankers. That's why our group is aggressively pursuing press in order to dispel these myths.

Terminology

If we eventually use Bitcoin in everyday life, say, in the supermarket, how will we deal with prices in fractions of a Bitcoin? What terminology might we use for something priced at 0.00000005 Bitcoins?

A.T.: The accepted 'standard' is to use SI prefixes. 0.005 BC would be 5 mBC.

Here come the regulators ...

How will your business change when countries regulate exchanges? How do you ensure your exchange isn't being used for illicit purposes (to avoid being shut down by government authorities)?

A.T.: It is our goal (and has been for months) to get legal legitimisation. Our organisation has been aggressively seeking FSA regulation here in the UK for Britcoin. Our hope is that when governments do come to look at Bitcoin, they will see a long running, honest, legal exchange with open books. By having something in the law books about Bitcoin, it sets a positive legal precedent in the future and puts us as the policy makers rather than a bunch of old 60 year banker types.

Our exchange complies with the UK Know Your Customer laws which ensures it's not being used for illicit activity. We keep detailed transaction records and run regular audit logs to look for missing funds.

But eventually, one would want to use BitCoins to pay for legal services. My question is; how do you get to that point? Why would a legitimate business accept a currency that is used almost exclusively for illegal means? What is the strategy to convince mainstream businesses that BitCoins have a purpose in the main web, as well?

A.T.: The illicit markets are a very small part of Bitcoin yet the most sensationalist. I can see how one would think Bitcoin is purely for illegal trade if I didn't know better.

Check out the list of merchants.

Full and open disclosure: how many bitcoins do you currently own?

A.T.: 32 BC. At one point I had 6000, but I'm a bad hoarder. Everytime Bitcoins would double (and I'd have $2k), I'd donate half my wealth to other free software developers. Then recently I was going to wait until I had $4k, but the price went down and I'm very bad at holding onto cash :)

But that doesn't bother me at all. We have our group of free software developers developing Bitcoin itself and other related projects. Funds are coming in and we're growing. The goal is to this as a sustainable operation paying developers working on Bitcoin fulltime.

What are the advantages of bitcoin?

One problem I see with bitcoin is it offers very little over what we currently have. If I want to perform an online transaction using my computer, unless I am buying something illegal, then there are already companies which offer products for me to use. If I want to make an anonymous purchase in person, I would easily use cash.

Bitcoin seems to suffer from a lack of portability, which makes me wonder, what "need" is bitcoin catering to? What do I do in my day-to-day life that bitcoin will help me do such that as some point, bitcoin becomes irreplaceable and achieves de facto permanency?

A.T.: Sending funds abroad is time consuming, expensive and difficult. Recently I tried sending funds to a Polish bank from the UK- the bank was closed and I waited until Monday. Requiring me to be in person at the bank, the woman was unable to enter the Polish L looking character into her terminal. I had to aquire an internet banking code to do it online. Waited 3 days, logged in and the internet banking form didn't work. In the end, I ended using a friend to aquire Bitcoins and use the Polish exchange bitomat (we never use Britcoin ourself).

I wanted to donate funds to the excellent Symphony of Science musician. I went to fill in the Paypal form, spent 10 mins signing up to an account, entering all my very personal details and my card was rejected. In the end I got him to accept Bitcoins and donated directly without paying fees to Paypal.

Sony recently was hacked. Millions of accounts were leaked. If they were using Bitcoins then the addresses people donated to would be known to the attacker. Not my private keys which enable said attacker to spend my cash.

With commerce, everything becomes cheaper. Bitcoin vastly reduces the overhead needed for fees. We no longer require staff sitting inside banks pressing numbers on a keyboard since the system is automatically backed by mathematics and cryptography, not laws and people.

EdwinFreed writes "It's being widely reported that Bob Pease, well known analog circuit designer and author of Pease Porridge, has died in a car accident. He reportedly was driving alone in his 1969 Beetle and failed to negotiate a turn."

Hugh Pickens writes "Books are on their way to extinction, writes Kevin Kelly, adding that we are in a special moment when paper books are plentiful and cheap that will not last beyond the end of this century. 'It seems hard to believe now, but within a few generations, seeing an actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion.' But a prudent society keeps at least one specimen of all it makes, so Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has decided that we should keep a copy of every book that Google and Amazon scan so that somewhere in the world there was at least one physical copy to represent the millions of digital copies. That way, if anyone ever wondered if the digital book's text had become corrupted or altered, they could refer back to the physical book that was archived somewhere safe. The books are being stored in cardboard boxes, stacked five high on a pallet wrapped in plastic, stored 40,000 strong in a shipping container, inside a metal warehouse on a dead-end industrial street near the railroad tracks in Richmond California. In this nondescript and 'nothing valuable here' building, Kahle hopes to house 10 million books — about the contents of a world-class university library. 'It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded Internet Archive. The only broad archive of television and radio broadcasts is the same organization,' writes Kelly. 'They are now backing up the backups of books. Someday we'll realize the precocious wisdom of it all and Brewster Kahle will be seen as a hero.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Books are on their way to extinction, writes Kevin Kelly, adding that we are in a special moment when paper books are plentiful and cheap that will not last beyond the end of this century. 'It seems hard to believe now, but within a few generations, seeing an actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion.' But a prudent society keeps at least one specimen of all it makes, so Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has decided that we should keep a copy of every book that Google and Amazon scan so that somewhere in the world there was at least one physical copy to represent the millions of digital copies. That way, if anyone ever wondered if the digital book's text had become corrupted or altered, they could refer back to the physical book that was archived somewhere safe. The books are being stored in cardboard boxes, stacked five high on a pallet wrapped in plastic, stored 40,000 strong in a shipping container, inside a metal warehouse on a dead-end industrial street near the railroad tracks in Richmond California. In this nondescript and 'nothing valuable here' building, Kahle hopes to house 10 million books — about the contents of a world-class university library. 'It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded Internet Archive. The only broad archive of television and radio broadcasts is the same organization,' writes Kelly. 'They are now backing up the backups of books. Someday we'll realize the precocious wisdom of it all and Brewster Kahle will be seen as a hero.'"

Freddybear writes "Xiph.org, makers of ogg audio and theora video codecs, submitted a detailed proposal to the FTC for the patents workshop. Their proposal recommends changes which would help to eliminate the practice of 'submarine' patents regarding standardized technologies. Quoting: 'The Xiph.Org Foundation recommends that the FTC work to require specific, ex ante disclosure of patents or patent applications that would read on standards under development, that failure to disclose exhaust the patent, and assertion of such a patent ex post be deemed anti-competitive. This should apply not only to standards development activities that the patent holder participates in or knows about, but those it should have known about. Furthermore, vague infringement allegations or activities designed to avoid an SSO's disclosure requirements or undermine the standards process should also be deemed anti-competitive.'"

Jim Hall writes "Many of us in IT recognize that software patents are a bad idea — you can patent just about anything if you put "on a computer" at the end of it. But now we can finally do something about it. Congress is considering the America Invents Act — your Representatives are very interested in hearing from you. Also, the USPTO is inviting public comments to change the system (you need to file by June 29, 2011.) I've written a blog post about software patents with more, starting with a primer of copyright and patents."

Jim Hall writes "Many of us in IT recognize that software patents are a bad idea — you can patent just about anything if you put "on a computer" at the end of it. But now we can finally do something about it. Congress is considering the America Invents Act — your Representatives are very interested in hearing from you. Also, the USPTO is inviting public comments to change the system (you need to file by June 29, 2011.) I've written a blog post about software patents with more, starting with a primer of copyright and patents."

theodp writes "As IBM gives itself a self-congratulatory pat on the back as it celebrates its 100th anniversary, Robert X. Cringely wants to set the record straight: 'IBM didn't invent the personal computer', writes Cringely, 'but they don't know that.' Claiming to have done so, he adds, soils the legacy of Ed Roberts and pisses off all real geeks in the process. Throwing Big Blue a bone, Cringely is willing to give IBM credit for 'having helped automate the Third Reich'."

An anonymous reader writes "Sing it with us: What lives in the rainforest, under a tree? Spongiforma squarepantsii, a new species of mushroom almost as strange as its cartoon namesake. Scientists from the San Francisco State University have discovered a new species of mushroom in Borneo with sponge-like properties. Its strange behavior convinced them to name it after the famous Bob. There is no word on whether or not their chances of getting future grant money will be improved by this choice." Did you know (prior to clicking on the Wikipedia link above) that SpongeBob was created by a marine biologist?

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "Facebook indirectly accused Google of creating dummy accounts to log in and spider information from their site, and Google denied the charge. But if Google wants to help users discover what strangers can find out about them, then spidering Facebook with dummy accounts is exactly what they should be doing." Read on for the rest of his thoughts.

In the dust-up over the revelation that Facebook had paid a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google indexing Facebook's site, one point was often overlooked: the allegation that Google had been creating dummy Facebook accounts, and using them to log in to Facebook and spider information that was only available to Facebook users. This was denied by Google and never proven, but the denial obscures a more important point. Paradoxically, rather than hurting user privacy, it would have helped to protect user privacy in the long run if Google actually had been logging in to Facebook, spidering the information that was available to members, and making that information available in Google search results.

To review the facts not in dispute: When you create a Facebook profile, Facebook by default makes certain categories of information viewable to other users. Most of your personal information (in particular, your contact information) is viewable to other members that you confirm as your Facebook friends. A narrower set of information — usually including your name and your interests, but not including your contact information — is viewable to other Facebook members who are signed in to Facebook, but who are not in your friends list. (Let's call this the "Facebook stranger" version of your profile.) Finally, since 2007 Facebook has made an even smaller subset of information available in a "public search listing," which can be viewed without being logged in to Facebook or even having an account. Facebook explicitly stated that one reason for creating these public search listings was to make the profiles more easily findable by Google.

Now, the op-ed that Burson-Marsteller was trying to plant in the press strongly suggested that Google was using tactics like creating fake Facebook accounts in order to log into Facebook and scrape the "Facebook stranger" version of people's accounts, and not just the public search listings. (For one thing, the op-ed accused Google of likely "violating the Terms of Service" of Facebook. While scraping the public search listing obviously doesn't violate the TOS, creating dummy accounts to log in to Facebook and spider content automatically certainly does — and that's the only thing Google could do on Facebook beyond spidering the public search listing.) Of this allegation, Wired senior writer Steven Levy wrote:

This information is a lot easier to unearth from inside Facebook, but actually logging into Facebook to purloin information would indeed be troublesome. For one thing, it would violate the terms of service agreement. Is Google doing this? One of the Burson operatives implied that it is. But Google says the company does not go inside Facebook to scrape information, and I find this credible. (If Facebook has logs to prove this serious charge, let's see them.)

But why is this such a scurrilous charge anyway?

When you search for a person's name on Google, you might be looking for information about that person, or you might be doing research on what other people in the world can find about that person (particularly if that person is yourself). If a certain fact about you — for example, the members of your Facebook friends list — is viewable to anyone with a Facebook account as long as they're logged in to Facebook, then anybody in the world can obtain that information about you anyway, by getting their own Facebook account. So it's perfectly legitimate for Google to report that as a fact that anyone can find about you, if you Google your own name. You may not like the fact that Facebook exposes that information about you to anyone with a Facebook account, but it's Facebook, not Google, that makes the information available to anyone. If you Google your own name and Google tells you that that some piece of information is available to any Facebook user, Google is doing you a favor.

For that matter, it's not that easy to view your own "stranger Facebook profile" on Facebook, to see for yourself what other users can see about you. You can't just click your own profile while signed in, since that will show you all of your own personal information. You can't sign out and then click your own profile, since that will show you your public search listing (which is shown to non-logged-in users). You would have to, instead, create a second dummy Facebook account (already a violation of Facebook's TOS), which usually requires creating a second email address that you can tie to your second Facebook account, then signing in with your second account and trying to view your "real" one... How many people — even the most privacy-conscious ones who pore over every article about Facebook allegedly exposing their data — have ever tried that experiment? Having the information already spidered by Google would make it much easier.

When would you actually derive some privacy benefit from not having your "Facebook stranger" profile information listed in Google? Really, only if you're being looked up by a particularly lazy stalker who searches your name on Google — but then doesn't even bother signing in to Facebook and searching for your name on Facebook. If they're motivated enough to find you on Facebook and view your "Facebook stranger" profile there, then you've gained nothing by blocking that information from Google.

Notice this argument does not extend to some general principle that webmasters shouldn't be able to tell Google not to index parts of their website. Many websites have specified, using the Robots Exclusion Standard, that they don't want Google indexing certain documents on their site. (The Robots Exclusion Standard allows webmasters to create a file called robots.txt on their website, which tells search engines not to index any files listed in the robots.txt file. It would be technically possible for a search engine to ignore that directive and index the documents anyway, but virtually all search engines do follow it.) In that scenario, even if a document listed in robots.txt contains personal information about someone, there's no argument that "someone could find it anyway by searching, so Google is doing you a favor by listing it," because nobody would be able to find it by searching unless Google lists it. What makes Facebook a special case is that (a) it has its own search function, and (b) more importantly, it's already the place that everybody knows to go looking if they're searching for a person. These two facts mean that people can find you on there without Google's help.

That might sound unfair to Facebook — that simply because they've achieved success, different rules should apply to them, and Google ought to be allowed to violate their TOS by logging in to their system and spidering people's Facebook-stranger information. But it's the only way for Google to display honest answers, if a user comes to Google to ask: What can strangers on the Internet find out about me?

P.S.: I received many useful suggestions in response to a previous article, in which I described an algorithm for crowdsourcing the abuse-complaint-review process on Facebook, and offered a $100 prize split between users who sent in the best criticisms or improvements. So I'm going to do it again in a more free-form approach: I'll offer a $50 prize to be split between readers who email me the best negative comment or counterargument to the argument that I've just made here. Entries have to be submitted by email, although of course you can and should post your thoughts in the comment threads as well. Email bennettSPAMMERS at SUCKpeacefire dot org with "googlebot" in the subject. You can also donate your winnings to a charity of your choice.

"Bitcoin," says the project's website, "is a peer-to-peer currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions." Wikipedia offers a readable explanation of the underlying technology. In (very) short, Bitcoin uses a distributed database and public key encryption to allow users to reassign ownership of units of Bitcoin currency (BTC), and does so in a way that can keep the user's identity private. Bitcoin isn't yet accepted the way credit cards are, but it's more than theoretical. You can buy (some) things with Bitcoin, and trade the currency itself. Now, you can ask question about Bitcoin of Amir Taaki, a developer of client interfaces and stock trading software for Bitcoin, and owner and operator of trading exchange Britcoin.co.uk. Amir requests that questions focus not "so much on the mining (too many people get focused on that when it's a minor aspect of Bitcoin) nor simple technical questions (people can go find that info themselves on Wikipedia/the forums/sourcecode)," but rather on the harder-to-answer questions. Reading some of the related stories listed below may give you ideas on what those are. Standard Slashdot Interview rules apply: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment. Amir will get back with his answers.

CoryFoy writes "As someone who has been closely involved in both the 'agile software' movement as well as the 'Software Craftsmanship' movement, I have been following the work of Robert Martin for some time. So I was quite interested when I got my copy of his latest book Clean Coder where he 'introduces the disciplines, techniques, tools and practices of true software craftsmanship.' Would his book live up to being a guide for the next generation of developers, or would it go on my shelf as another interesting book that I had read, once?" Read below for the rest of Cory's review. The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers author Robert C. Martin pages 256 publisher Prentice Hall rating 5 Nebulous Rating Units reviewer Cory Foy ISBN 978-0137081073 summary A good overview of the current agile practices for software developers Before even getting into the book, it is good to know the style of Robert Martin, affectionately known as "Uncle Bob" to many people. Bob is a former preacher who comes at life — and topics he teaches — with a no-holds-bar approach. So when he approaches topics such as "Professionalism" and the software industry, I come expecting passionate discussion and serious assertions. The Clean Coder is no exception.

The book starts off with an overview of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. As a native Floridian who could see shuttle launches from my house (and, in fact, saw the Challenger explode just as it crested the trees from where we lived) this really resonated with me. The accident was a result of engineers saying no, but management overriding the decision. With this introduction, Bob makes it quite clear that when we choose not to stand up for that which we believe, it can have dire consequences.

We then dive right in, starting with the topic of Professionalism. The assertion is made that the key to professionalism is responsibility — "You can't take pride and honor is something you can't be held accountable for". But how do we take and achieve responsibility? Chapter one lays out two ways. To start, it looks at the Hippocratic Oath, specifically the rule of "First, Do No Harm". The book maps this to software by saying to do no harm to function or structure, ensure that QA doesn't find anything, know that your software works, and have automated QA. In fact, when I work with teams, I teach them that if your testing "phase" finds bugs, it's a problem with your process that needs to be addressed immediately, so the concept of ensuing that QA doesn't find anything is a great concept to bring out.

Then we move on to Work Ethic — specifically around knowing your field. This means continuous learning, practice (through things like Katas and Dojos), collaboration, mentoring, identifying with your employer/customer, and practicing humility. To help with that, Chapters 2 and 3 talk specifically about saying "No" and "Yes". When we say no, and when we want to say no, we should mean it. Saying, "We'll try" means that you, or your team, isn't already giving it their best, and that through some extraordinary effort you'll pull it off. Say no and stick to it. But, when you say Yes, mean it. People are counting on you to be truthful with them.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 begin to talk about the specific practices of coding. Chapter 4 talks about the coding process itself. One of the hardest statements the book makes here is to stay out of "the zone" when coding. Bob asserts that you lose parts of the big picture when you go down to that level. While I may struggle with that assertion, I do agree with his next statement that debugging time is expensive, so you should avoid having to do debugger-driven development whenever possible. He finishes the chapter with examples of pacing yourself (walking away, taking a shower) and how to deal with being late on your projects (remembering that hope is not a plan, and being clear about the impact of overtime) along with a reminder that it is good to both give and receive help, whether it be small questions or mentoring others.

Chapters 5 and 6 cover Test-Driven Development and Practicing. The long and short is that TDD is becoming a wide-spread adopted practice, in that you don't get as many funny looks from people when you mention TDD as you once did. And that coding at work doesn't equal practicing your tools and techniques — instead you should set aside specific time to become better through coding exercises, reading and researching other areas (languages, tools, approaches), and attending events and conferences.

Chapters 7 and 8 cover testing practices. In Chapter 7 the book looks at Acceptance Tests and the cycle of writing them — specifically at what point the customer is involved (hint: continuously) and how to ensure they stay involved. Chapter 8 goes to more of the unit testing level, and defines some strategies and models for looking at unit testing, including an interesting "Test Automation Pyramid"

Now that we've covered the developer herself, coding and testing, the book moves on to discussing time. Chapter 9 covers Time Management strategies — staying out of "bogs" and "blind alleys", using techniques like the "Pomodoro" technique to create focus, and the law of two-feet — if you are in a meeting and aren't getting value out of it, you should feel free to (respectively) leave, or otherwise modify the meeting to get value from it.

Chapter 10 covers several different methods of estimation. In the teams I work with, estimation is perhaps one of the hardest things — not because estimating can be hard (which it can be) but because either they are held so tightly to the estimates that they are afraid to make them, or, worse, they are told what the estimates are going to be. The book really only skims the surface here, covering several techniques from Planning Poker, to PERT, to "Flying Fingers", but gives a decent overview of how to do those techniques.

Rounding out the discussions of time comes Chapter 11 and talking about Pressure. The key of this chapter is that because you have committed to your principles, practices and disciplines, you should be able to stay calm under pressure. I can certainly say from experience that the worst experiences in my career are when people weren't able to stay calm, and the way the book is laid out, if you are following the practices outlines so far, you should be able to be the voice of reason and calmness.

The last three chapters cover teams and collaboration. Chapter 12 talks about important practices such as shared code ownership, pairing, and respect for other team members. Chapter 13 covers teams and the importance of having teams that gel together. The book finishes with Chapter 14 and discussions of the importance of apprenticeship, mentorship and craftsmanship.

As I mentioned earlier, I've been involved in the "agile" movement for quite some time, and have spoken with Bob on many occasions, so many of the practices in the book weren't new. I did quite appreciate the stories he had to tell about his experiences. However, I think that some people may be turned off by the hard line around "professionalism". Sometimes you do need to say no, and I think it is good to have encouragement from a book to do that. But sometimes things are more complex, and I think that you would have a harder time looking to this particular book for help with the edge cases.

In conclusion, I think this is a book which provides worthwhile information and an interesting look at how people are looking at software development as a profession. If you read between some of the hard lines made, there are some great nuggets to be gleaned from the book for software developers of any level.

You can purchase The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

CoryFoy writes "As someone who has been closely involved in both the 'agile software' movement as well as the 'Software Craftsmanship' movement, I have been following the work of Robert Martin for some time. So I was quite interested when I got my copy of his latest book Clean Coder where he 'introduces the disciplines, techniques, tools and practices of true software craftsmanship.' Would his book live up to being a guide for the next generation of developers, or would it go on my shelf as another interesting book that I had read, once?" Read below for the rest of Cory's review. The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers author Robert C. Martin pages 256 publisher Prentice Hall rating 5 Nebulous Rating Units reviewer Cory Foy ISBN 978-0137081073 summary A good overview of the current agile practices for software developers Before even getting into the book, it is good to know the style of Robert Martin, affectionately known as "Uncle Bob" to many people. Bob is a former preacher who comes at life — and topics he teaches — with a no-holds-bar approach. So when he approaches topics such as "Professionalism" and the software industry, I come expecting passionate discussion and serious assertions. The Clean Coder is no exception.

The book starts off with an overview of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. As a native Floridian who could see shuttle launches from my house (and, in fact, saw the Challenger explode just as it crested the trees from where we lived) this really resonated with me. The accident was a result of engineers saying no, but management overriding the decision. With this introduction, Bob makes it quite clear that when we choose not to stand up for that which we believe, it can have dire consequences.

We then dive right in, starting with the topic of Professionalism. The assertion is made that the key to professionalism is responsibility — "You can't take pride and honor is something you can't be held accountable for". But how do we take and achieve responsibility? Chapter one lays out two ways. To start, it looks at the Hippocratic Oath, specifically the rule of "First, Do No Harm". The book maps this to software by saying to do no harm to function or structure, ensure that QA doesn't find anything, know that your software works, and have automated QA. In fact, when I work with teams, I teach them that if your testing "phase" finds bugs, it's a problem with your process that needs to be addressed immediately, so the concept of ensuing that QA doesn't find anything is a great concept to bring out.

Then we move on to Work Ethic — specifically around knowing your field. This means continuous learning, practice (through things like Katas and Dojos), collaboration, mentoring, identifying with your employer/customer, and practicing humility. To help with that, Chapters 2 and 3 talk specifically about saying "No" and "Yes". When we say no, and when we want to say no, we should mean it. Saying, "We'll try" means that you, or your team, isn't already giving it their best, and that through some extraordinary effort you'll pull it off. Say no and stick to it. But, when you say Yes, mean it. People are counting on you to be truthful with them.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 begin to talk about the specific practices of coding. Chapter 4 talks about the coding process itself. One of the hardest statements the book makes here is to stay out of "the zone" when coding. Bob asserts that you lose parts of the big picture when you go down to that level. While I may struggle with that assertion, I do agree with his next statement that debugging time is expensive, so you should avoid having to do debugger-driven development whenever possible. He finishes the chapter with examples of pacing yourself (walking away, taking a shower) and how to deal with being late on your projects (remembering that hope is not a plan, and being clear about the impact of overtime) along with a reminder that it is good to both give and receive help, whether it be small questions or mentoring others.

Chapters 5 and 6 cover Test-Driven Development and Practicing. The long and short is that TDD is becoming a wide-spread adopted practice, in that you don't get as many funny looks from people when you mention TDD as you once did. And that coding at work doesn't equal practicing your tools and techniques — instead you should set aside specific time to become better through coding exercises, reading and researching other areas (languages, tools, approaches), and attending events and conferences.

Chapters 7 and 8 cover testing practices. In Chapter 7 the book looks at Acceptance Tests and the cycle of writing them — specifically at what point the customer is involved (hint: continuously) and how to ensure they stay involved. Chapter 8 goes to more of the unit testing level, and defines some strategies and models for looking at unit testing, including an interesting "Test Automation Pyramid"

Now that we've covered the developer herself, coding and testing, the book moves on to discussing time. Chapter 9 covers Time Management strategies — staying out of "bogs" and "blind alleys", using techniques like the "Pomodoro" technique to create focus, and the law of two-feet — if you are in a meeting and aren't getting value out of it, you should feel free to (respectively) leave, or otherwise modify the meeting to get value from it.

Chapter 10 covers several different methods of estimation. In the teams I work with, estimation is perhaps one of the hardest things — not because estimating can be hard (which it can be) but because either they are held so tightly to the estimates that they are afraid to make them, or, worse, they are told what the estimates are going to be. The book really only skims the surface here, covering several techniques from Planning Poker, to PERT, to "Flying Fingers", but gives a decent overview of how to do those techniques.

Rounding out the discussions of time comes Chapter 11 and talking about Pressure. The key of this chapter is that because you have committed to your principles, practices and disciplines, you should be able to stay calm under pressure. I can certainly say from experience that the worst experiences in my career are when people weren't able to stay calm, and the way the book is laid out, if you are following the practices outlines so far, you should be able to be the voice of reason and calmness.

The last three chapters cover teams and collaboration. Chapter 12 talks about important practices such as shared code ownership, pairing, and respect for other team members. Chapter 13 covers teams and the importance of having teams that gel together. The book finishes with Chapter 14 and discussions of the importance of apprenticeship, mentorship and craftsmanship.

As I mentioned earlier, I've been involved in the "agile" movement for quite some time, and have spoken with Bob on many occasions, so many of the practices in the book weren't new. I did quite appreciate the stories he had to tell about his experiences. However, I think that some people may be turned off by the hard line around "professionalism". Sometimes you do need to say no, and I think it is good to have encouragement from a book to do that. But sometimes things are more complex, and I think that you would have a harder time looking to this particular book for help with the edge cases.

In conclusion, I think this is a book which provides worthwhile information and an interesting look at how people are looking at software development as a profession. If you read between some of the hard lines made, there are some great nuggets to be gleaned from the book for software developers of any level.

You can purchase The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Hugh Pickens writes "Ever been annoyed during that nail-biting darkened hallway scene by someone turning on their phone to send a text? Well, don't mess with Texas or you may end up on the screen in a public service announcement. Alamo Drafthouse, a local chain of dine-and-screen movie theaters in Austin, Texas, has long waged a war against impolite moviegoers booting out customers who talk or text during performances. Phoebe Connelly writes that according to Tim League, the Drafthouse's founder, a woman was recently warned twice about texting during a screening, and then, in accordance with company policy, was escorted out without a refund. 'I don't think people realize that it is distracting,' says League. 'It seems like nothing, but if you spend as much time as I do at the movies, you realize the entire theater sees it and it pulls you out of the movie experience. It's every bit as intrusive as talking.' The irate customer called up the Alamo Drafthouse and left a profanity-laced (and perhaps slightly inebriated) message decrying the theater's policies, but the theater got the last laugh as they took the audio of the woman's voicemail, transcribed it, and turned it into an in-house preview [tl: Note, YouTube video contains some profanity] that warns theatergoers against cell phone use during movies. 'Part of what we're trying to do is have a comedic message about what to us is a very serious issue,' says League, declining to give any more details about the woman at the center of the recent PSA."