From This March 2003 Slashdot article: the government has no responsibility or requirement (and thus no incentive) to have correct data or to be corrected. Ted Kennedy gets a rare exception because he's not only famous but powerful. You and I have no chance. Just ask the 5,500 David Nelsons.
And whatever they claim otherwise, they're still getting data from credit reports and the like. So say you're one of the hundreds of thousands of identity theft victims. With ID theft you have rights, and the credit reporting agencies responsibilities, to attempt to fix bad data. Takes 200 hours of your time and never, ever really finishes, but all you lose is your potential new job and potential new car loan.
But in the meantime the bad data gets into the gov't files: now you never can fix it. And your taint creeps out to touch all your associates (like how the casino software catches ex-roommates of ex-roommates of card counters). Now not only do you not get hired after the NCIC screen in the background check, but your buddies and grandparents all get extra airport searches (they should add a nurse they way they do some of those searches... add in a breast or testicular cancer lump screen while you're there). And of course as 1 in 2500 of us is a terrorist any close check of you will find those suspicious degrees of separation in your Orkut links. Hi Mr.Tuttle, your new name is Toast.
The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life...
"If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm.
"Worse yet, we may never know what negative assumptions or judgments have been made about us in state files... Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight.
" That possibility alone will, over time, make us increasingly think twice about what we do, where we go, with whom we associate, because we will learn to be concerned about how it might look to the ubiquitous watchers of the state..."
"The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society..."
If these errors were merely harmful to the innocent, that would simply be horribly injust and an affront to the ideals of the US. But these errors are also stupidly harmful to safety. From Schneier (via my D.Nelson post)... "almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. This not only wastes investigative resources that might be better spent elsewhere, but it causes grave harm to those innocents who fit the profile..."
Using the same math, I calculate that there are about 5,500 David Nelsons in the US. Almost 6,000 if you include Dave, Davis and other close SoundEx matches. They include an Oregon state senator and Ozzie and Harriet's son.
From this article on the ACLU's lawsuit: [of people on the list] "the "no-fly" list has resulted in routine stops of passengers without terrorist ties who "have no meaningful opportunity to clear their names," said the complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union... They are detained, interrogated, delayed, embarrassed, humiliated in front of other passengers."
"Plaintiff David Nelson, 34, a trial attorney in the St. Louis, Missouri, area, said he has been stopped more than 30 times -- every flight he's taken..." Its all the Nelsons everywhere, although evidently the one bad one is from Tennessee. From another article "...this week 18 men named David Nelson, all residents of Oregon, confirmed they have been repeatedly delayed at airport counters and security checkpoints in the last year or so."
I do not feel safer that all T. Kennedys or all David Nelsons are being searched. They should hire police to follow the one bad David Nelson around and save those 12,000 searches (assuming 1 trip per year) for random searches of everybody. As Bruce Schneier points out:
"Profiling has two very dangerous failure modes. The first one is obvious. Profiling's intent is to divide people into two categories: people who may be evildoers and need to be screened more carefully, and people who are less likely to be evildoers and can be screened less carefully.
But any such system will create a third, and very dangerous, category: evildoers who don't fit the profile... Evildoers can also engage in identity theft, and steal the identity -- and profile -- of an honest person. Profiling can result in less security by giving certain people an easy way to skirt security.
There's another, even more dangerous, failure mode for these systems: honest people who fit the evildoer profile. Because evildoers are so rare, almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. This not only wastes investigative resources that might be better spent elsewhere, but it causes grave harm to those innocents who fit the profile."
Bad Soundex matches don't make us more secure. Even good soundex matches aren't much better: the bad guys will just learn which names not to use. Random searches: annoying, but results in more actual safety.
On the why not side, there's that the idiotic laws of the US can mean growth in non-US tech firms... As Charlie Stross (of recent Singularity and SF article fame wrote back in April 02:
"I'd like to note my complete support for the CBDTPA.
I understand that virtually nobody else has said anything positive about this Act. That's because virtually everybody who has contacted you to discuss the Act so far is American. I'm not American, and I'd like to congratulate you on this most excellent piece of legislation, which will do more for the European computer, software, and music industries than any amount of pork our own legislators could have given us.
This Act is wonderful. At a stroke, you're crippling your software industry, destroying your nascent open source infrastructure, putting all your unsigned bands and hopeful novelists back behind the counter at McDonald's, and giving your computer and electronics vendors a huge ball and chain to lug around.
You'll also have given a big hand to Hollywood and the music industry -- a $35Bn turnover sector -- and successfully trashed the electronics, software and hardware industries -- upstarts whose $600Bn turnover is of no account. In so doing, you will have helped advance the USA to the status Imperial Britain aspired to in 1902 -- that of has-been former superpower.
If you pass this act, I will be sure to express my gratitude for the resulting pay rises and improved employment opportunities -- in Scotland and the rest of the EU, and indeed the developed world -- in writing. Thank you, and good luck."
On the yes, donate side... The US government's policies on copyrights / DRM / protecting Hollywood do affect the rest of the world. Our congress is the elephant in the electronics shop. The EFF is trying to keep the elephant tranquilized-- i.e. minimize the damage it can cause. The EFF is often a first responder-- it tries to catch weird new tech policies before they grow out of control and become laws in the US (and then the rest of the world). So donate 97% of your 'Rights x Technologies' monies to your local groups. But then also donate 3% to the EFF to prevent the bad US policies from being yet another worry for your local group. Insurance.
. But yes, the EFF has also lost cases. 2600 magazine for example. It was an expensive fight and they EFF didn't have the most sympathetic posterboy as a client. For some unknown reason the RIAA/ MPAA / FBI doesn't go after 'Widows, Orphans and Kittens Magazine' first. Yet the EFF took on the case anyways because it was important. They stopped before the Supreme Court because it was obvious they'd lose there and it was the wrong time for the wrong precedent.
For all the amazing things they do and things they've done they are a small non-profit. Only a small fraction of Slashdot readers are EFF members because if 1/10th of us joined then it should have 80,000 members. It doesn't. That's a lot of free riders, or a lot of people who think that none of these issues will ever affect them.
The EFF is your "freedom to innovate" insurance policy. When you need to argue "Constitutional Rights aren't just the law, they're good ideas. Technological developments aren't just my job, they're a good idea" and you just don't have the time, money or the right words to say it right, the EFF says it for you, and says it very well.
When the MP/RI/XXAA / DMCA takedown letter arrives, 98% of other lawyers or civil rights groups are just going to hear "I work in technobabble, and now I'm being sued for neutrino transducer violations because of warp field coil incompatibility with carnivore but it really is a 4th amendment issue because of eiozh bhpaceog phshzt!..." when you call them up.
When you call the EFF up with your 'intersection of technology with legal rights' legal problem, the EFF will actually understand the issue and will want to help you. And, if they can afford to help you they will- but for that they need money. That means donations ahead of time. That's why you should support the EFF now. $2/week gets you the spiffy hat, or $2.09/month the nifty bumpersticker AND 1st Amendment Rights carried into Cyberspace. Ask for 'Short' instead of Venti once in a while: you know you aren't supposed to have your caffeine all at once anyways. Or just drink regular coffee with cream and a little splenda. Not only do you save $, you'll lose #s (weight, not octothorpes). Protected rights & a smaller waistline: $2/week, $2/month. Best.Insurance.Ever.
Full Disclosure: I've met many of the EFF's staff, so I know how dedicated they are. Their staff attorneys aren't making much more than paralegals might make at the big corporate law firms. They're the not-profit, and We profit from their existance (are you listening- any encryption exporting companies? this includes You). So donate!
As an American its in Amendments IV, IX and X of the Federal constitution. (no, just because "freedom of thought" isn't listed either doesn't mean IX and X don't cover it. And #I too: can you have freedom of association without privacy?).
And as an American, I think the Constitution isn't just the law, its a Good Idea to be applied widely to all of life, not just narrowly to federal gov't actions.
As a Human, I'm covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights articles 12 and 13 (including 13 because if you can't travel with privacy, you don't have true freedom of movement, and being able to bicycle across the country doesn't count. Article 20- freedom of association- applies too. Plenty of my associates aren't in driving distance.)
from A Watched Populace Never Boils: "People often ask why a loss of privacy... is a restriction on freedom.... Some welcome it, feeling that the extra surveillance will cut down on crime, and provide some increased level of safety or imagined safety....invasions of privacy invade our freedoms quite directly. This is true even if the surveillance isn't abused by the watchers, even though history shows that it always is. When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselves and our actions... Yet the mainstream will never fear monitoring that much, just as it is more comfortable with censorship. What civil rights protect is not the majority, but the fringe. "
From his essay- which is even more applicable to the US as we've been losing these rights already: "A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around... if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away...
"The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
"The Government... has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so...
"It is difficult to imagine a more flagrant disregard for the rights of Canadians. This database is legally wrong and morally wrong. If the Government can get away with systematically logging and analyzing all the foreign travel activities of every law-abiding citizen, then no other private activity will long be safe from being included in the same personal dossiers - our shopping, our banking, our communications, our movements within the country...
"[Bill C-55 would give the RCMP and CSIS unrestricted access to the personal information held by airlines] I have raised no objection to the primary purpose of this provision, section 4.82, which is to ena
And for my second list add 'most SF writers...' But I think my lists hold for writers of SF as a genre- that is, post 1930's writers (after the conventions started). If they went to conventions or read award-nominated fiction then they'd hear about new science developments and read cutting edge SF.
Of course most SF stories don't have the science detailed: that would ruin the story. As another comment pointed out, good SF should read like an ordinary story, just one that happens to be set in 2060 (see the Gold Coast 'trilogy' by Stan Robinson as a prime example for that. Ordinary people, ordinary lives, just happens to be 2045). A contemporary writer simply mentions cars and lamps-- details about crude oil processing or fluorescent lightbulb design aren't needed. But the writer has to have the cars and lamps there. If you're going to get the color and background for 2060 correct , you'll have to have some ideas of what's likely then. If you can't, it doesn't need to be SF.
I would claim that understanding science is a necessary part of being a science fiction writer, not that scientific details are a necessary part of SF stories. If you're writing about people reacting to changes in science or society then you'll need some knowledge of technology or science. Sure, Neuromancer didn't include a Novell networks manual, but Gibson did have to know about computer networks at a time when an average person might not have known they existed.
And then Singularity fiction as a sub-genre of SF has usually included more science than standard SF. (similar but not identical to how Alternate History usually requires detailed historical knowledge. Unless done badly.) Blood Music had biotech. Greg Egan has astronomy / biology / entire new systems of physics. Stross has access to Slashdot posts from 2015.
Science fiction isn't about predicting the future. Writers/ fans / analysts of the genre have rarely claimed it was. Instead, its about:
Predicting how people will react to one or more significant changes to society, either in the future (most SF) or the past (the subgenre of Alternate History. Start with these 1,600+ stories.) The Handmaid's Tale wasn't predicting a fundie future for the US. It did capture the feel of what happened in Afghanistan after the fundie Taliban took over.
Predicting interesting uses for new technologies. Networks hadn't been out for that long when Brunner, and even before that Brin (or Benford? one of the 'killer B's') wrote about possibilities for worms and viruses in cyberspace.
Extrapolating / having fun with an exponential growth or decay of an important resource. What if our population booms or crashes? What if the planet freezes or goes greenhouse? What if a person or computer gets vastly more intelligent than before?
And the most important part of SF-- Sensawunda. The sense of wonder when you're pulled out of your own time and space and get to gaze (for the length of a book) through the eyes of other humans at a deep future, wide universe, and wide range of societies.
and as part of Sensawunda-- inspiring the future... all the scientists inspired by Heinlein or LeGuin or Gibson ("Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the future. If you would understand the past twenty years' technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading..."- C. Doctorow.) to go into the sciences or computing...
Enough has been written about The Singularity that any SF writer writing about 50+ years into the future should at least explain why if one isn't in their universe. Doesn't have to be a long explanation: put it in and go on with the story. Good SF writing hasn't been stopped by actual advances in science. Discovering that Venus is 700 degrees, going to the moon, or widespread PCs outdated some earlier SF stories' technology. But those events inspired many more new writers and new stories. The possibility of a singularity in a few decades should have less of an effect than those actual advances.
And if a singularity does happen, there could be a second golden age of SF. You don't just write about universes, you create them. Certainly Alternate History will be filled with that, like "what would happen if Reagan *won* the 1980 election?" versions of earth being run within the trillions of ongoing simulations (and no, the Matrix wasn't original- SF movies are usually far behind the SF literature.)
I feel that he was kicked out for being too active in the fight for privacy. His expense account problem was just the justification.
Certainly "everyone does it" is not an excuse for his large expense account. And if true, there is no excuse for his bullying behavior. What I don't see is evidence that other officials were subjected to the same level of audits, with the same consequences if their expense numbers were too high. As this article suggests, many other officials could be caught (or have been caught) with the same or larger expenses for food and travel. He may have been a bullying boss as well, but again, how many other officials have been kicked out for that?
GR was warning Canadians not to lose the privacy rights already lost to those in the US. His replacement seems to think privacy is not a right but simply a value, so that the 'right to privacy' is much less like the "right to vote" and much more like the value of good butter tarts.
And Canada has now become much better at "sharing" its information with the US. I'd want to say that's a problem for Canadians whose info has been given to the US, because who could those Canadians complain to? But then here in the US US citizens themselves don't have a right to review or correct what information the feds have- no matter how incorrect it is or how harmful incorrect information can be. Would Canada be less likely to share if GR was still commissioner? I'd be inclined to think yes.
As an American its in Amendments IV, IX and X of the Federal constitution. (no, just because "freedom of thought" isn't listed either doesn't mean IX and X don't cover it. And #I too: can you have freedom of association without privacy?).
And as an American, I think the Constitution isn't just the law, its a Good Idea to be applied widely to all of life, not just narrowly to federal gov't actions.
As a Human, I'm covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights articles 12 and 13 (including 13 because if you can't travel with privacy, you don't have true freedom of movement. 20- freedom of association- fits with this as well)
from A Watched Populace Never Boils: "People often ask why a loss of privacy... is a restriction on freedom.... Some welcome it, feeling that the extra surveillance will cut down on crime, and provide some increased level of safety or imagined safety....invasions of privacy invade our freedoms quite directly. This is true even if the surveillance isn't abused by the watchers, even though history shows that it always is. When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselves and our actions... Yet the mainstream will never fear monitoring that much, just as it is more comfortable with censorship. What civil rights protect is not the majority, but the fringe. "
From his essay: "A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear... the truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
"If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy."
And continuing his argument:
"Now "September 11" is invoked as a kind of magic incantation to stifle debate, disparage critical analysis and persuade us that we live in a suddenly new world where the old rules cannot apply... If Parliament and the public at large have been slow to react, it is probably because for most people, most of the time, privacy is a pretty abstract concept. Like our health, it's something we tend not to think about until we lose it - and then discover that our lives have been very unpleasantly, and perhaps irretrievably, altered.
But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being...."
"When people are worried about their safety, when we have seen the horrors of which toda
The calculation of odds assumes that the protein molecule formed by chance. However, biochemistry is not chance, making the calculated odds meaningless. Biochemistry produces complex products, and the products themselves interact in complex ways. For example, complex organic molecules are observed to form in the conditions that exist in space, and it is possible that they played a role in the formation of the first life [Spotts 2001].
The calculation of odds assumes that the protein molecule must take one certain form. However, there are innumerable possible proteins which give biological activity. Any calculation of odds must take into account all possible molecules (not just proteins) which might function to promote life.
The calculation of odds assumes the creation of life in its present form. The first life would have been very much simpler.
The calculation of odds ignores the fact that innumerable trials would have been occurring simultaneously.
Especially the ones who switched at the last minute.
"Hi, could you tell me what the most recent 10 books the Rep has read?"
"You can't? How about the last 10 books and magazines the Rep has read on taxpayers' time?"
"No, the Rep doesn't read then? OK, how about you or one of the other staffers go ahead and read him/her something. It's called the Constitution. Spelled c-o-n-s-t-i-t-u-t-i-o-n. You should be able to get a copy at the Library of Congress. You know where that is?"
"Oh, you do know where the Library of Congress is? You have an account? Then could you tell me what the last 10 books the Rep has received from the library?..."
"[The gov't] appears to have become convinced that privacy must be sacrificed bit by bit, day by day, in pursuit of greater goods: reassuring a public frightened by the outrages of September 11; mollifying an insistent U.S. government; meeting the wishes of police, security forces and other Government institutions that have recognized the aftermath of September 11 as an opportunity to expand their powers... Now "September 11" is invoked as a kind of magic incantation to stifle debate, disparage critical analysis and persuade us that we live in a suddenly new world where the old rules cannot apply.
If Parliament and the public at large have been slow to react, it is probably because for most people, most of the time, privacy is a pretty abstract concept... But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives...
[if privacy isn't protected] Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight. That possibility alone will, over time, make us increasingly think twice about what we do, where we go, with whom we associate, because we will learn to be concerned about how it might look to the ubiquitous watchers of the state.
You stopped briefly in Thailand during a business trip...But might repeat travel to Thailand get you flagged by the Government's analysts as a possible pedophile...? Could you find yourself detained for questioning every time you travel?
You're passing time browsing on the Internet and you're idly curious about what kind of propaganda in favour of al-Qaeda various extremists might be putting out. But could visiting such Web sites get you identified as a potential terrorist yourself and bring CSIS or RCMP officers knocking on your door?
You're stopped on the street by a stranger asking for directions. But if by then proliferating street video surveillance cameras are linked to biometric face-recognition technology, what if the system immediately identifies the stranger as a known or suspected terrorist? If the police officer then calls up your name and address by matching your onscreen image to your driver's license or passport photo, will you go into security files yourself as a suspicious individual who had a street meeting with a terrorism suspect? Would you do better to keep walking whenever any stranger tries to talk to you?
The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free.
Seeing as how the Steve Jackson Games case, quoted in this decision, helped bring the EFF into existance. I have to imagine they see the irony more than anyone else on how the judge could get so many things so wrong. I'm sure the EFF is ready to fight this and all the similar cases that stupidity and Ashcroft will bring into existence. (Disclosure: I've met many of the EFF's staff, so I know how much they'll want to fight this.)
But they are a small non-profit, and only a fraction of Slashdot readers are EFF members (because otherwise the EFF would have a membership count closer to the ACLU's, say). That's a lot of free riders, or a lot of people who think that none of these issues will ever affect them. 99% of other lawyers / civil rights groups are just going to hear "I work in technobabble, and now I'm being sued for technobabble because of technobabble..." when you call them up with your 'intersection of technology with legal rights' legal problem. The EFF will actually understand the issue and will want to help you. And, if they can afford to help you they will- but for that they need donations. That's why you should support the EFF.
Back in April this story covered Brad Templeton's essay on GMail, privacy and encryption. I was suprised at the number of "email is public, get over it" comments. Why should I have to get over it just because encryption wasn't designed in from the getgo? Technologies have gone from public (non-private) to private and protected before. Consider the switch from party lines to private lines in the telephone system- we went from "all phonecalls are open/public unless you buy your own expensive line" to "all calls are private and its usually illegal for anyone else to listen."
We- the technical community- can demand a similar switch for email. Unfortunately the use rate of encryption for email is ridiculously low (less than 10% of incoming to Diffie or Zimmerman, they once said). So we've ended up in this strange zone where email could be encrypted as a matter of course, but it isn't. There is no inherent reason why email has to be public, but by our design (or lack thereof), this major massive system of communications is practically (and with this ruling- legally) public, and for what benefit? Why do people so casually accept the non-privacy of email? Its like we were still using party lines 120 years later.
At the core of it, because privacy is a fundamental human right every communication system we use should have privacy built in. If its not, there should be a very good reason why not. "Oh no, it will take extra computational cycles" is not a good reason (not with crypto like ECC around). "Oh, Ashcroft doesn't want it" is even a worse reason. "Perfect encryption is too hard for the public to use": also bad.
The key to deploying encrypted mail is to make it happen with close to zero involvement by the user. This is hard, and requires some security compromises that have made cryptographers uneasy in the past.
However, I have come down to the view that getting encryption widely deployed, even with some minor flaws, is better than getting perfectly designed encryption (if that's even possible) that hardly anybody uses.
The reason is that I exchange mail with tons of people, not just my closest linux-using nerd friends. If I want my mail to be private, I have to get the general public encrypting. This is a particular concern with new laws just passed granting U.S. law enforcment the power to read the "header" of a message -- including the subject lines of E-mails without a warrant. In addition, other nations have always had such powers, and on top of it all, most ISP backbones and mail servers are poorly secured from snooping by almost any system cracker trying to invade your privacy [now including the ISP itself!]...
Problem is, the current UI and ease of use for encryption add-ons aren't so good. It makes it a tough choice to use it other than with other geeks. Not that you force everyone to use crypto in email, but it should be as easy to choose it as to not choose it. As an analogy, if I say "lets start building doors and doorjams with locks built in," that doesn't equal "force everyone to lock their door." It does mean "its now as easy to choose to lock your door as to keep it unlocked." To me choice means the two alternatives are sitting there, equally available... If there were big "Send: This is Private" and "Send: This is Public" buttons on every email program. Right now the "choice" is "Send" vs "Spend hours retrofitting your system and writing to your recipient to explain to them how to read your email, and getting your grandpa to use it- just give up trying to go there..."
In the PanIP ecommerce patent case, PanIP went after a bunch of little ecommerce sites-- tiny little sites. Bogus patent, but if you're a small company you can't afford to fight bad patents because the cost of fighting, and the risk of losing, is too high. All you can do is settle. With PanIP the little guys banded together, fought as a group, and won.
I call "Bogus" on PanIP even before the patent review is over because if you really felt your patent is good, you'll go after the big fish. Go after Amazon.com or Buy.com for $50,000,000 instead of tiny companies for $5,000. PanIP probably wasn't expecting the little guys to group together.
The EFF is adding to their history of being a group defense for technological innovation in free speech areas. For example, Chilling Effects helps anyone dealing with a C&D letter. Their DirectTV fight helped protect individuals who couldn't afford to do anything but settle, given DirectTV's threats, even when innocent.
The EFF is small enough (come on everyone, buy coffee instead of TripleTallLattes for 2 weeks and DONATE to the EFF) and doing so much already that they're not going to choose patents just because the patent-holder is suing. They're choosing patents where the EFF thinks prior art exists or the patent isn't novel and the patent is hurting free speech and the right to technological innovation.
Even if there isn't prior art per se, a patent can still be far too obvious yet be granted. On this topic, I like this essay on telling good patents from bad:
"But I have found a common thread in many of the bad patents which could be a litmus test for telling the bad from the good. Patent law, as we know, requires inventions to be novel and not obvious to one skilled in the art.
But the patent office has taken too liberal a definition of novel. They are granting patents when the problem is novel, and the filer is the first to try to solve it. As such their answer to the new question is novel. The better patents are ones that solve older problems.
Amazon was one of the earliest internet shopping operations. So of course they were among the first to look hard at the UI for that style of shopping, and thus were first to file an invention called one-click-buy. But one-click-buy was really just an obvious answer to a new problem. The same applies to XOR cursors, browser plug-ins, and streaming audio and video
...While it would not solve every problem, I think if patent examiners asked, "How long has somebody been trying to solve the problem this invention solves?" and held off patents when the problem was novel, or at least applied more scrutiny, we would have a lot less problem with the patent system.... many of the bad patents (notably the bad software patents) that are causing trouble these days fail my test -- they were not very clever solutions to novel problems, not novel solutions to hard problems.
Anecdotally I noticed that my credit report now has no addressed for me other than my rented post office boxes (including the wrong number for a previous one) because 100% of my bills go there. So there won't be a match between my credit report and my drivers licence. Can't imagine the gov't will look upon that kindly: anything that confuses them makes them angry, I've noticed.
College students might have their "permanent" (home) address for taxes, one or more local addresses per year for school (and voting), and perhaps also a POBox. If they have a credit history, it won't necessarily keep up with their moving around. So from the point of view of BigBroBrand database, they'll look dreadful.
The unemployed also might use more than one address that shows up in the database (renting a POBox to appear like a local when applying for jobs, or using a friend's address).
All to say I'm not happy that they're using data on "how good are you at moving small green pieces of paper around?" gathered by private companies to guess "how risky is it for us to give you more green pieces of paper?" as a proxy for "how established are you in a neighborhood?" to let the government guess "how risky is it for us to let you travel around?" (...On the whole its those private companies being handed planet-sized bundles of green pieces of paper to continue tracking you that are happy: they themselves don't get tracked, much.)
Or so it was implied via this article on the Matrix program that found 120,000 people (.04% of the US population) having a high terrorism quotient. Take that an average person knows 1,000 people. Then, she must be 1.7 degrees away from a HTQ person. You're much more closely connected to a terrorist than to either of Kevin Bacon or Erdos, say.
Yet I bet that their "120,000" number is about as good as my own analysis above- sounds very precise, but not at all accurate... But since those HTQ people are now defined- and who wants to waste data- they're going to show up in the gov't databases. And then their roommates and co-workers are going to get flagged as medium TQ people. And then their roommates get to be medium-low TQ people. And so on and so on... If you're lucky you'll only be a LLML TQ, but no one gets to be 100% free of the taint.
Even though that original 120k number doesn't pass the sniff test. Sure, ".04%" seems like a small number, but that equals one in 2500 people. Is 1/2500 people in the US a terrorist? That'd be 1 terrorist per 10 airplane flights, or several terrorists per major sporting event, or 400 terrorists in Silicon Valley (plus the 30 laid off who've moved back home). Unless they're all fantastically incompetent, the US should have several terror events per day.
The data combines multiple sources including gov't files. It includes your associates (roommates past and present, family members, travel companions). I assume they use software like casinos use for this (i.e. if your old college roommate recently got caught card counting, you're going to have a harder time playing at casinos too.) but with data the casinos can't get like your CPNI (phone calls). The gov't data probably has your associations: memberships in the ACM, ACLU, or NRA can come from mailing list rentals, and the gov't / IRS knows deductable donations.
So, what if the data is wrong? I'd say the results would be worse than identity theft or a simple bad credit report.
With ID theft, bad data gets attached to you and affects your ability to find jobs, get loans, rent housing, etc. But, it only affects you (perhaps also a spouse). You can get your data and try to fix it. Takes 200 hours and never quite finishes, but you have rights and the credit agencies have duties.
With this system, bad data will affect you and your ability to travel. The government has admitted that it has no responsibility to fix bad data in government files. So, you'll have few to zero chances to fix it. And the best part is bad data about you will creep out to taint anyone you've associated with. If you look bad, then so do your old roommates. And your new business partners. And whoever you call regularly. So now grandma will get a free breast cancer screening whenever she flies (mmmmm. Wand searches).
The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life...
wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences. If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect...
Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight...
That possibility alone will, over time, make us increasingly think twice about what we do, where we go, with whom we associate, because we will learn to be concerned about how it might look to the ubiquitous watchers of the state.
The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society like Canada.
"[gives example of Canada wanting to collect data, US style]... This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of t
The big bottleneck 70k years ago: Toba volcano
on
Mutation Creates SuperKid
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· Score: 2, Informative
While vitamin D production is an important location-specific difference in humans, we also have some traits that have no survival value (for example eye shape, hair curliness, or facial hair patterns). One theory is that founder's effects in small groups of humans 74,000 years ago led to this.
The reason small groups of humans were cut off from each other was a supervolcano that caused a nuclear winter effect for many years, killing off most humans and keeping the rest separate long enough for superficial traits to become geographically dominant. This article on the Toba supervolcano talks about this theory:
Some 74,000 years ago, in what is now Sumatra, a volcano called Toba erupted with a force estimated to have been 10,000 times that of Mt. St. Helens. The sky darkened around the globe as ash blocked out the Sun. Temperatures plummeted by as much as 21 degrees at higher latitudes around the planet, said Michael Rampino, a biologist and geologist at New York University.
Rampino has estimated that three-quarters of the plants in the Northern Hemisphere may have died.
Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, suggested in 1998 that Rampino's work might explain a curious bottleneck in human evolution, a phenomenon observed by other researchers who study DNA: The blueprints of life for all humans are remarkably similar given an evolutionary timeline known to stretch back more than 2 million years.
Ambrose thinks that early humans, struggling as always against the elements, were pushed to the edge of extinction after the Toba eruption. Perhaps only a few thousand survived, Ambrose says. Humans today would all be descended from these few, and in terms of the genetic code, not a whole lot of evolution occurs in 74,000 years.
At the least, however, we evolved enough to gain the capacity to invent satellites and employ them to warn us of the next Toba, if it is to come
Oh, and Yellowstone is a supervolcano that is overdue in its pattern of going off every 600,000 years:
The eruption of pent-up energy will cover half the United States in ash, in some places up to 3 feet (1 meter) deep. Earth will be plunged into a perpetual winter that would last years. Some plant and animal species will disappear forever.
I wouldn't call the Soprano's unviolent or un-un-PC: it shows on broadcast TV in Canada. Not cable, broadcast.
Anyways, I'm not Canadian, but I find it worrysome that a Canadian privacy czar is warning Canadians not to lose rights that Americans have already lost. The US government *is* compiling dossiers of information on the travels of all of its persons (citizens and resident aliens: the 4th amendment says "persons"). It *is* making sure it has access to our e-mail and telephone message patterns. It *is* creating the equivalent of a national identity card through unifying the procedures for state licences.
I hope Canada can stand up to the requests the US makes of it to remove the privacy protections of its citizens, and I hope someday to get back my privacy rights as an American.
so totalitarianism is defined by gun control laws? Canadians certainly have guns: my Canadian relatives grew up hunting their own meat and the ones in rural areas still do. [As an aside, for Lott there are debates about his data, but he has a point]
On free spreech- the not publishing trial information before the trial is over is a difference (+1 for the US). On the other hand Canadians get to use strong language or show nudity on broadcast TV without pixelation or 3 million dollar fines (+1 for Canada). [And equal rights = the right to go topless in Ontario (+lots for Ontario)]
Freedom of the Press is a secondary consideration? It is one of their Fundamental Freedoms: "freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication" (explicit freedom of thought- that's spiffy).
Canadians aren't required to carry identification at all times, or to identify themselves on demand: better than the US on that regard (+1 Canada).
Anyways, from a Webster's 1913:
'1.totalitarian - characterized by a government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control; "a totalitarian regime crushes all autonomous institutions in its drive to seize the human soul"- Arthur M.Schlesinger, Jr.'
That doesn't seem to describe either of the US or Canada.
Until 9/11, knives were legal. I carried my leatherman or pocket knife, and never heard of them being used for much more than opening those titanium-strong bags o' snacks. Post 9/11, knives wouldn't work: passengers aren't going to obey hijackers, knowing the new possibilities. So, knives were dangerous on 1 day only. (Especially now with reinforced doors. Plus, the 9/11 murderers didn't just have knives- they had bomb threats.)
In fact, I feel less safe given that all passengers have no methods to defend themselves. No, I wouldn't want potentially depressurizing / cabin damaging guns aboard. But a few knives? Could be useful.
And drugs? 99% of the bad events I've heard of on planes comes from legal doses of that legal drug alcohol. Yes, illegal drugs are illegal, but I'm not seeing what the harm *to me* is that someone forgot to take their stash out of their bag. Unless they're the captain or crew, their stupidity or their buzz/high/trip doesn't make me any less safe than the dangers from the alcoholics in 1st class.
All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and
privacy.
That's California. I also have Amendments IV, IX and X of the Federal constitution. (And just because "freedom of thought" isn't listed either doesn't mean IX and X don't cover it.)
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
I include 13 because if you have to give up your privacy entirely to travel, you don't have freedom of movement. And no, the ability to bicycle cross-country as a substitute for flying doesn't count.
"People often ask why a loss of privacy... is a restriction on freedom.... Some welcome it, feeling that the extra surveillance will cut down on crime, and provide some increased level of safety or imagined safety.
But the truth is that invasions of privacy invade our freedoms quite directly. This is true even if the surveillance isn't abused by the watchers, even though history shows that it always is.
When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselves and our actions...
Yet the mainstream will never fear monitoring that much, just as it is more comfortable with censorship. What civil rights protect is not the majority, but the fringe. The fringe is usually feared by the majority, and most subject to its oppression. Yet the fringe is the lifeblood of a society's future. When I say a watched populace never boils, I refer to the ability to bubble with change and novelty. Yes, it also means unrest, for there are both positive and negative elements to the fringe. Yet the fringe today becomes the mainstream in the future. That is how a healthy, dynamic society works. That is how our society works...
"Now "September 11" is invoked as a kind of magic incantation to stifle debate, disparage critical analysis and persuade us that we live in a suddenly new world where the old rules cannot apply.
If Parliament and the public at large have been slow to react, it is probably because for most people, most of the time, privacy is a pretty abstract concept. Like our health, it's something we tend not to think about until we lose it - and then discover that our lives have been very unpleasantly, and perhaps irretrievably, altered.
But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being...."
"When people are worried about their safety, when we have seen the horrors of which today's breed of terrorists are capable - and there may be more - it's easy to lose perspective. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that security is all that mat
When the former privacy czar of Canada wrote his Warnings on why privacy protection is important post 9/11, he intended it to be a warning to Canadians not to lose rights Americans have already lost. I'm sure he didn't intend it to be an anti-guidebook for Ashcroft et ilk. The essay answers your question:
"A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear... the truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.
But there also will be tangible, specific harm.
The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life...
wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences. If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect...
Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight...
That possibility alone will, over time, make us increasingly think twice about what we do, where we go, with whom we associate, because we will learn to be concerned about how it might look to the ubiquitous watchers of the state.
The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society like Canada.
Here's where Ashcroft is using the essay as a guidebook:
"Last summer, the CCRA informed me that, contrary to its past undertaking, it has decided to keep all API/PNR information about Canadian travellers for six years in a massive new database.
All this personal information - more than 30 data elements including every destination to which we travel, who we travel with, how we pay for the tickets (sometimes including credit card numbers), what contact numbers we provide, even any dietary preferences or health-related requirements we communicate to the airline - will be available for an almost limitless range of governmental purposes...
"This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society...
It is difficult to imagine a m
or this upcoming case of broken standards: BT
on
Open Source Life?
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· Score: 1
What happens when a closed source company borrows from an open source program, gets a patent on it and eventually makes that open source program unusable?, to stretch the software to biotech analogy.
One upcoming example: BT. BT is a bacteria / toxin used by organic farmers for decades to kill certain insect pests. At the previous rate of use- as a spray- there was a very, very low probability of insects developing resistance. Decades of use hadn't produced it. BT has now been spliced into crop plants: Monsanto got a patent simply for moving the gene from the bacteria to plants. (Its like Microsoft getting a patent for GUIs just by porting them from Macs to PCs-- not by writing new code, just a port. I don't think simply moving a gene from place to place meets the new and original requirements of patents. Taking "a method for killing insects via a gene that produces a toxin" and simply moving it from bacteria to corn really isn't unobvious)
The widespread planting of monocultures of BT crops means BT resistance is increasingly likely. As this happens the non-organic farmers can move onto other pesticides. But the organic farmers whose old standard- BT sprays- became useless have no backup. There was no system set up to compensate these farmers from their soon to be broken standard. Nor was there any "royalty" paid to these farmers who'd discovered BT in the first place.
BT resistance so far has been limited, because of BT's complexity, strict regulation, and additional pesticide use when outbreaks happen. But all it will take is planting in a non-regulated country- a place without enforcement for either of the manditory 20% nonBT plants or the use of secondary pesticides- and BT resistance could- and based on history, will- quickly show up.
Slashdot Mirror
And whatever they claim otherwise, they're still getting data from credit reports and the like. So say you're one of the hundreds of thousands of identity theft victims. With ID theft you have rights, and the credit reporting agencies responsibilities, to attempt to fix bad data. Takes 200 hours of your time and never, ever really finishes, but all you lose is your potential new job and potential new car loan.
But in the meantime the bad data gets into the gov't files: now you never can fix it. And your taint creeps out to touch all your associates (like how the casino software catches ex-roommates of ex-roommates of card counters). Now not only do you not get hired after the NCIC screen in the background check, but your buddies and grandparents all get extra airport searches (they should add a nurse they way they do some of those searches... add in a breast or testicular cancer lump screen while you're there). And of course as 1 in 2500 of us is a terrorist any close check of you will find those suspicious degrees of separation in your Orkut links. Hi Mr.Tuttle, your new name is Toast.
From my favorite precient and well-written essay on privacy losses:
If these errors were merely harmful to the innocent, that would simply be horribly injust and an affront to the ideals of the US. But these errors are also stupidly harmful to safety. From Schneier (via my D.Nelson post)... "almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. This not only wastes investigative resources that might be better spent elsewhere, but it causes grave harm to those innocents who fit the profile..."
From this article on the ACLU's lawsuit: [of people on the list] "the "no-fly" list has resulted in routine stops of passengers without terrorist ties who "have no meaningful opportunity to clear their names," said the complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union... They are detained, interrogated, delayed, embarrassed, humiliated in front of other passengers."
"Plaintiff David Nelson, 34, a trial attorney in the St. Louis, Missouri, area, said he has been stopped more than 30 times -- every flight he's taken..." Its all the Nelsons everywhere, although evidently the one bad one is from Tennessee. From another article "...this week 18 men named David Nelson, all residents of Oregon, confirmed they have been repeatedly delayed at airport counters and security checkpoints in the last year or so."
I do not feel safer that all T. Kennedys or all David Nelsons are being searched. They should hire police to follow the one bad David Nelson around and save those 12,000 searches (assuming 1 trip per year) for random searches of everybody. As Bruce Schneier points out:
Bad Soundex matches don't make us more secure. Even good soundex matches aren't much better: the bad guys will just learn which names not to use. Random searches: annoying, but results in more actual safety.
On the yes, donate side... The US government's policies on copyrights / DRM / protecting Hollywood do affect the rest of the world. Our congress is the elephant in the electronics shop. The EFF is trying to keep the elephant tranquilized-- i.e. minimize the damage it can cause. The EFF is often a first responder-- it tries to catch weird new tech policies before they grow out of control and become laws in the US (and then the rest of the world). So donate 97% of your 'Rights x Technologies' monies to your local groups. But then also donate 3% to the EFF to prevent the bad US policies from being yet another worry for your local group. Insurance.
Well, from their recent legal cases / activities (including amicus briefs) they've had:
- U.S. v. Elcomsoft... remember Dmitri?
- Pre-Paid Legal v. Sturtz... protecting John Doe's from disclosure w/out proof of libel.
- Medinex v. Awe2bad4mdnx & Rural/Metro v. Doe same type of cases.
- American Amusement v Kendrick... anti-censorship
- Banco Nacional de Mexico v. Narco News... protecting journalists' rights
- and more...
- and yet more...
. But yes, the EFF has also lost cases. 2600 magazine for example. It was an expensive fight and they EFF didn't have the most sympathetic posterboy as a client. For some unknown reason the RIAA/ MPAA / FBI doesn't go after 'Widows, Orphans and Kittens Magazine' first. Yet the EFF took on the case anyways because it was important. They stopped before the Supreme Court because it was obvious they'd lose there and it was the wrong time for the wrong precedent.The EFF is your "freedom to innovate" insurance policy. When you need to argue "Constitutional Rights aren't just the law, they're good ideas. Technological developments aren't just my job, they're a good idea" and you just don't have the time, money or the right words to say it right, the EFF says it for you, and says it very well.
When the MP/RI/XXAA / DMCA takedown letter arrives, 98% of other lawyers or civil rights groups are just going to hear "I work in technobabble, and now I'm being sued for neutrino transducer violations because of warp field coil incompatibility with carnivore but it really is a 4th amendment issue because of eiozh bhpaceog phshzt!..." when you call them up.
When you call the EFF up with your 'intersection of technology with legal rights' legal problem, the EFF will actually understand the issue and will want to help you. And, if they can afford to help you they will- but for that they need money. That means donations ahead of time. That's why you should support the EFF now. $2/week gets you the spiffy hat, or $2.09 /month the nifty bumpersticker AND 1st Amendment Rights carried into Cyberspace. Ask for 'Short' instead of Venti once in a while: you know you aren't supposed to have your caffeine all at once anyways. Or just drink regular coffee with cream and a little splenda. Not only do you save $, you'll lose #s (weight, not octothorpes). Protected rights & a smaller waistline: $2/week, $2/month. Best.Insurance.Ever.
Full Disclosure: I've met many of the EFF's staff, so I know how dedicated they are. Their staff attorneys aren't making much more than paralegals might make at the big corporate law firms. They're the not-profit, and We profit from their existance (are you listening- any encryption exporting companies? this includes You). So donate!
From his essay- which is even more applicable to the US as we've been losing these rights already: "A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around... if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away...
"The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
"The Government ... has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so...
"It is difficult to imagine a more flagrant disregard for the rights of Canadians. This database is legally wrong and morally wrong. If the Government can get away with systematically logging and analyzing all the foreign travel activities of every law-abiding citizen, then no other private activity will long be safe from being included in the same personal dossiers - our shopping, our banking, our communications, our movements within the country...
"[Bill C-55 would give the RCMP and CSIS unrestricted access to the personal information held by airlines] I have raised no objection to the primary purpose of this provision, section 4.82, which is to ena
Of course most SF stories don't have the science detailed: that would ruin the story. As another comment pointed out, good SF should read like an ordinary story, just one that happens to be set in 2060 (see the Gold Coast 'trilogy' by Stan Robinson as a prime example for that. Ordinary people, ordinary lives, just happens to be 2045). A contemporary writer simply mentions cars and lamps-- details about crude oil processing or fluorescent lightbulb design aren't needed. But the writer has to have the cars and lamps there. If you're going to get the color and background for 2060 correct , you'll have to have some ideas of what's likely then. If you can't, it doesn't need to be SF.
I would claim that understanding science is a necessary part of being a science fiction writer, not that scientific details are a necessary part of SF stories. If you're writing about people reacting to changes in science or society then you'll need some knowledge of technology or science. Sure, Neuromancer didn't include a Novell networks manual, but Gibson did have to know about computer networks at a time when an average person might not have known they existed.
And then Singularity fiction as a sub-genre of SF has usually included more science than standard SF. (similar but not identical to how Alternate History usually requires detailed historical knowledge. Unless done badly.) Blood Music had biotech. Greg Egan has astronomy / biology / entire new systems of physics. Stross has access to Slashdot posts from 2015.
Enough has been written about The Singularity that any SF writer writing about 50+ years into the future should at least explain why if one isn't in their universe. Doesn't have to be a long explanation: put it in and go on with the story. Good SF writing hasn't been stopped by actual advances in science. Discovering that Venus is 700 degrees, going to the moon, or widespread PCs outdated some earlier SF stories' technology. But those events inspired many more new writers and new stories. The possibility of a singularity in a few decades should have less of an effect than those actual advances.
And if a singularity does happen, there could be a second golden age of SF. You don't just write about universes, you create them. Certainly Alternate History will be filled with that, like "what would happen if Reagan *won* the 1980 election?" versions of earth being run within the trillions of ongoing simulations (and no, the Matrix wasn't original- SF movies are usually far behind the SF literature.)
SF writers who are particularly good at sensawunda in a post singularity (and/or humans dealing with beings larger than ourselves) universe include Greg Benford, the 'can make you empathize with loss in the life of regular deathless people' Greg Egan, the 'pulls off multiple believable economic systems in one novel' Ken Macleod, the recently reviewed Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, and of course Cory Doctorow and the early Slashdot adoptor (and I worry that he's going to hit an Algernon moment soon- how can he keep writing so well?) Charlie Stross.
Many are scientists, but you don't have to be a scientist to be a good SF writer. You do have t
Certainly "everyone does it" is not an excuse for his large expense account. And if true, there is no excuse for his bullying behavior. What I don't see is evidence that other officials were subjected to the same level of audits, with the same consequences if their expense numbers were too high. As this article suggests, many other officials could be caught (or have been caught) with the same or larger expenses for food and travel. He may have been a bullying boss as well, but again, how many other officials have been kicked out for that?
GR was warning Canadians not to lose the privacy rights already lost to those in the US. His replacement seems to think privacy is not a right but simply a value, so that the 'right to privacy' is much less like the "right to vote" and much more like the value of good butter tarts.
And Canada has now become much better at "sharing" its information with the US. I'd want to say that's a problem for Canadians whose info has been given to the US, because who could those Canadians complain to? But then here in the US US citizens themselves don't have a right to review or correct what information the feds have- no matter how incorrect it is or how harmful incorrect information can be. Would Canada be less likely to share if GR was still commissioner? I'd be inclined to think yes.
From his essay: "A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear... the truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
"If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy."
And continuing his argument:
"Now "September 11" is invoked as a kind of magic incantation to stifle debate, disparage critical analysis and persuade us that we live in a suddenly new world where the old rules cannot apply... If Parliament and the public at large have been slow to react, it is probably because for most people, most of the time, privacy is a pretty abstract concept. Like our health, it's something we tend not to think about until we lose it - and then discover that our lives have been very unpleasantly, and perhaps irretrievably, altered.
But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being...."
"When people are worried about their safety, when we have seen the horrors of which toda
- The calculation of odds assumes that the protein molecule formed by chance. However, biochemistry is not chance, making the calculated odds meaningless. Biochemistry produces complex products, and the products themselves interact in complex ways.
- The calculation of odds assumes that the protein molecule must take one certain form. However, there are innumerable possible proteins which give biological activity. Any calculation of odds must take into account all possible molecules (not just proteins) which might function to promote life.
- The calculation of odds assumes the creation of life in its present form. The first life would have been very much simpler.
- The calculation of odds ignores the fact that innumerable trials would have been occurring simultaneously.
CB000 through CB090 might also be of interest.For example, complex organic molecules are observed to form in the conditions that exist in space, and it is possible that they played a role in the formation of the first life [Spotts 2001].
"Hi, could you tell me what the most recent 10 books the Rep has read?"
"You can't? How about the last 10 books and magazines the Rep has read on taxpayers' time?"
"No, the Rep doesn't read then? OK, how about you or one of the other staffers go ahead and read him/her something. It's called the Constitution. Spelled c-o-n-s-t-i-t-u-t-i-o-n. You should be able to get a copy at the Library of Congress. You know where that is?"
"Oh, you do know where the Library of Congress is? You have an account? Then could you tell me what the last 10 books the Rep has received from the library?..."
And perhaps send them a copy of this great essay on the value of privacy and what Americans have lost (he warns Canadians not to lose the same ones):
"[The gov't] appears to have become convinced that privacy must be sacrificed bit by bit, day by day, in pursuit of greater goods: reassuring a public frightened by the outrages of September 11; mollifying an insistent U.S. government; meeting the wishes of police, security forces and other Government institutions that have recognized the aftermath of September 11 as an opportunity to expand their powers... Now "September 11" is invoked as a kind of magic incantation to stifle debate, disparage critical analysis and persuade us that we live in a suddenly new world where the old rules cannot apply.
If Parliament and the public at large have been slow to react, it is probably because for most people, most of the time, privacy is a pretty abstract concept... But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives...
[if privacy isn't protected] Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight. That possibility alone will, over time, make us increasingly think twice about what we do, where we go, with whom we associate, because we will learn to be concerned about how it might look to the ubiquitous watchers of the state.
- You stopped briefly in Thailand during a business trip...But might repeat travel to Thailand get you flagged by the Government's analysts as a possible pedophile...? Could you find yourself detained for questioning every time you travel?
- You're passing time browsing on the Internet and you're idly curious about what kind of propaganda in favour of al-Qaeda various extremists might be putting out. But could visiting such Web sites get you identified as a potential terrorist yourself and bring CSIS or RCMP officers knocking on your door?
- You're stopped on the street by a stranger asking for directions. But if by then proliferating street video surveillance cameras are linked to biometric face-recognition technology, what if the system immediately identifies the stranger as a known or suspected terrorist? If the police officer then calls up your name and address by matching your onscreen image to your driver's license or passport photo, will you go into security files yourself as a suspicious individual who had a street meeting with a terrorism suspect? Would you do better to keep walking whenever any stranger tries to talk to you?
The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free.But they are a small non-profit, and only a fraction of Slashdot readers are EFF members (because otherwise the EFF would have a membership count closer to the ACLU's, say). That's a lot of free riders, or a lot of people who think that none of these issues will ever affect them. 99% of other lawyers / civil rights groups are just going to hear "I work in technobabble, and now I'm being sued for technobabble because of technobabble..." when you call them up with your 'intersection of technology with legal rights' legal problem. The EFF will actually understand the issue and will want to help you. And, if they can afford to help you they will- but for that they need donations. That's why you should support the EFF.
We- the technical community- can demand a similar switch for email. Unfortunately the use rate of encryption for email is ridiculously low (less than 10% of incoming to Diffie or Zimmerman, they once said). So we've ended up in this strange zone where email could be encrypted as a matter of course, but it isn't. There is no inherent reason why email has to be public, but by our design (or lack thereof), this major massive system of communications is practically (and with this ruling- legally) public, and for what benefit? Why do people so casually accept the non-privacy of email? Its like we were still using party lines 120 years later.
At the core of it, because privacy is a fundamental human right every communication system we use should have privacy built in. If its not, there should be a very good reason why not. "Oh no, it will take extra computational cycles" is not a good reason (not with crypto like ECC around). "Oh, Ashcroft doesn't want it" is even a worse reason. "Perfect encryption is too hard for the public to use": also bad.
Crypto does need to become easier to use. As Templeton wrote here on what email crypto needs:
Problem is, the current UI and ease of use for encryption add-ons aren't so good. It makes it a tough choice to use it other than with other geeks. Not that you force everyone to use crypto in email, but it should be as easy to choose it as to not choose it. As an analogy, if I say "lets start building doors and doorjams with locks built in," that doesn't equal "force everyone to lock their door." It does mean "its now as easy to choose to lock your door as to keep it unlocked." To me choice means the two alternatives are sitting there, equally available... If there were big "Send: This is Private" and "Send: This is Public" buttons on every email program. Right now the "choice" is "Send" vs "Spend hours retrofitting your system and writing to your recipient to explain to them how to read your email, and getting your grandpa to use it- just give up trying to go there..."I call "Bogus" on PanIP even before the patent review is over because if you really felt your patent is good, you'll go after the big fish. Go after Amazon.com or Buy.com for $50,000,000 instead of tiny companies for $5,000. PanIP probably wasn't expecting the little guys to group together.
The EFF is adding to their history of being a group defense for technological innovation in free speech areas. For example, Chilling Effects helps anyone dealing with a C&D letter. Their DirectTV fight helped protect individuals who couldn't afford to do anything but settle, given DirectTV's threats, even when innocent.
The EFF is small enough (come on everyone, buy coffee instead of TripleTallLattes for 2 weeks and DONATE to the EFF) and doing so much already that they're not going to choose patents just because the patent-holder is suing. They're choosing patents where the EFF thinks prior art exists or the patent isn't novel and the patent is hurting free speech and the right to technological innovation.
Even if there isn't prior art per se, a patent can still be far too obvious yet be granted. On this topic, I like this essay on telling good patents from bad:
College students might have their "permanent" (home) address for taxes, one or more local addresses per year for school (and voting), and perhaps also a POBox. If they have a credit history, it won't necessarily keep up with their moving around. So from the point of view of BigBroBrand database, they'll look dreadful.
The unemployed also might use more than one address that shows up in the database (renting a POBox to appear like a local when applying for jobs, or using a friend's address).
All to say I'm not happy that they're using data on "how good are you at moving small green pieces of paper around?" gathered by private companies to guess "how risky is it for us to give you more green pieces of paper?" as a proxy for "how established are you in a neighborhood?" to let the government guess "how risky is it for us to let you travel around?" (...On the whole its those private companies being handed planet-sized bundles of green pieces of paper to continue tracking you that are happy: they themselves don't get tracked, much.)
Yet I bet that their "120,000" number is about as good as my own analysis above- sounds very precise, but not at all accurate... But since those HTQ people are now defined- and who wants to waste data- they're going to show up in the gov't databases. And then their roommates and co-workers are going to get flagged as medium TQ people. And then their roommates get to be medium-low TQ people. And so on and so on... If you're lucky you'll only be a LLML TQ, but no one gets to be 100% free of the taint.
Even though that original 120k number doesn't pass the sniff test. Sure, ".04%" seems like a small number, but that equals one in 2500 people. Is 1/2500 people in the US a terrorist? That'd be 1 terrorist per 10 airplane flights, or several terrorists per major sporting event, or 400 terrorists in Silicon Valley (plus the 30 laid off who've moved back home). Unless they're all fantastically incompetent, the US should have several terror events per day.
[Pause to answer knock on door....]
Oh, never mind, we are crawling with terrorists, like the Peace Fresno anti-war group with their monthly streetside protest. Forgot that civil disobedience is now terrorism. Unless its lawful civil disobedience, of course. I'm just going to go back to my Orrin Hatch CD now.
So, what if the data is wrong? I'd say the results would be worse than identity theft or a simple bad credit report.
With ID theft, bad data gets attached to you and affects your ability to find jobs, get loans, rent housing, etc. But, it only affects you (perhaps also a spouse). You can get your data and try to fix it. Takes 200 hours and never quite finishes, but you have rights and the credit agencies have duties.
With this system, bad data will affect you and your ability to travel. The government has admitted that it has no responsibility to fix bad data in government files. So, you'll have few to zero chances to fix it. And the best part is bad data about you will creep out to taint anyone you've associated with. If you look bad, then so do your old roommates. And your new business partners. And whoever you call regularly. So now grandma will get a free breast cancer screening whenever she flies (mmmmm. Wand searches).
From my favorite essay written by a precog on privacy post 9/11( the former Canadian privacy czar's excellent essay), as I commented here in this thread on airlines gave away your privacy (and it definitely applies to those of us in the US, he's warning Canadians not to do what the US was doing already):
"[gives example of Canada wanting to collect data, US style]... This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of t
The reason small groups of humans were cut off from each other was a supervolcano that caused a nuclear winter effect for many years, killing off most humans and keeping the rest separate long enough for superficial traits to become geographically dominant. This article on the Toba supervolcano talks about this theory:
Oh, and Yellowstone is a supervolcano that is overdue in its pattern of going off every 600,000 years:Anyways, I'm not Canadian, but I find it worrysome that a Canadian privacy czar is warning Canadians not to lose rights that Americans have already lost. The US government *is* compiling dossiers of information on the travels of all of its persons (citizens and resident aliens: the 4th amendment says "persons"). It *is* making sure it has access to our e-mail and telephone message patterns. It *is* creating the equivalent of a national identity card through unifying the procedures for state licences.
I hope Canada can stand up to the requests the US makes of it to remove the privacy protections of its citizens, and I hope someday to get back my privacy rights as an American.
On free spreech- the not publishing trial information before the trial is over is a difference (+1 for the US). On the other hand Canadians get to use strong language or show nudity on broadcast TV without pixelation or 3 million dollar fines (+1 for Canada). [And equal rights = the right to go topless in Ontario (+lots for Ontario)]
Freedom of the Press is a secondary consideration? It is one of their Fundamental Freedoms: "freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication" (explicit freedom of thought- that's spiffy).
Canadians aren't required to carry identification at all times, or to identify themselves on demand: better than the US on that regard (+1 Canada).
Anyways, from a Webster's 1913:
That doesn't seem to describe either of the US or Canada.In fact, I feel less safe given that all passengers have no methods to defend themselves. No, I wouldn't want potentially depressurizing / cabin damaging guns aboard. But a few knives? Could be useful.
And drugs? 99% of the bad events I've heard of on planes comes from legal doses of that legal drug alcohol. Yes, illegal drugs are illegal, but I'm not seeing what the harm *to me* is that someone forgot to take their stash out of their bag. Unless they're the captain or crew, their stupidity or their buzz/high/trip doesn't make me any less safe than the dangers from the alcoholics in 1st class.
That's California. I also have Amendments IV, IX and X of the Federal constitution. (And just because "freedom of thought" isn't listed either doesn't mean IX and X don't cover it.)
Plus the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Articles 12 and 13:
I include 13 because if you have to give up your privacy entirely to travel, you don't have freedom of movement. And no, the ability to bicycle cross-country as a substitute for flying doesn't count.
In other person's words:
From A Watched Populace Never Boils:
And as I just commented there's the best essay on privacy post 911:
"Now "September 11" is invoked as a kind of magic incantation to stifle debate, disparage critical analysis and persuade us that we live in a suddenly new world where the old rules cannot apply.
If Parliament and the public at large have been slow to react, it is probably because for most people, most of the time, privacy is a pretty abstract concept. Like our health, it's something we tend not to think about until we lose it - and then discover that our lives have been very unpleasantly, and perhaps irretrievably, altered.
But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being...."
"When people are worried about their safety, when we have seen the horrors of which today's breed of terrorists are capable - and there may be more - it's easy to lose perspective. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that security is all that mat
"A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear... the truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.
But there also will be tangible, specific harm.
Here's where Ashcroft is using the essay as a guidebook:
"Last summer, the CCRA informed me that, contrary to its past undertaking, it has decided to keep all API/PNR information about Canadian travellers for six years in a massive new database.
All this personal information - more than 30 data elements including every destination to which we travel, who we travel with, how we pay for the tickets (sometimes including credit card numbers), what contact numbers we provide, even any dietary preferences or health-related requirements we communicate to the airline - will be available for an almost limitless range of governmental purposes...
"This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society...
It is difficult to imagine a m
One upcoming example: BT. BT is a bacteria / toxin used by organic farmers for decades to kill certain insect pests. At the previous rate of use- as a spray- there was a very, very low probability of insects developing resistance. Decades of use hadn't produced it. BT has now been spliced into crop plants: Monsanto got a patent simply for moving the gene from the bacteria to plants. (Its like Microsoft getting a patent for GUIs just by porting them from Macs to PCs-- not by writing new code, just a port. I don't think simply moving a gene from place to place meets the new and original requirements of patents. Taking "a method for killing insects via a gene that produces a toxin" and simply moving it from bacteria to corn really isn't unobvious)
The widespread planting of monocultures of BT crops means BT resistance is increasingly likely. As this happens the non-organic farmers can move onto other pesticides. But the organic farmers whose old standard- BT sprays- became useless have no backup. There was no system set up to compensate these farmers from their soon to be broken standard. Nor was there any "royalty" paid to these farmers who'd discovered BT in the first place.
BT resistance so far has been limited, because of BT's complexity, strict regulation, and additional pesticide use when outbreaks happen. But all it will take is planting in a non-regulated country- a place without enforcement for either of the manditory 20% nonBT plants or the use of secondary pesticides- and BT resistance could- and based on history, will- quickly show up.