Evil "killer chip" invention not to receive patent in Germany. . .

In a continuous quest to make the world more like an episode of The Outer Limits, a "Saudi inventor" created and patented a chip which would allow the government to track (and, with some models, remotely kill) an individual if they were deemed an enemy to society.

The basic model would consist of a tiny GPS transceiver placed in a capsule and inserted under a person's skin, so that authorities could track him easily.

Model B would have an extra function — a dose of cyanide to remotely kill the wearer without muss or fuss if authorities deemed he'd become a public threat.

The inventor said the chip could be used to track terrorists, criminals, fugitives, illegal immigrants, political dissidents, domestic servants and foreigners overstaying their visas.

I think the first Model B would probably be reserved for whatever remained of habeas corpus's rotting carcass in any country that believes some of the world's citizens don't have rights.

Saudi 'Killer Chip' Implant Would Track, Eliminate Undesirables (Fox News)

"Fuhrer's Law": The Bush Memos and Treason

A provocative article deserves a
provocative image, dontchathink?

What a doozy today. In perhaps one of the most significant stories of our lifetime (their words and mine), new details have come to light about the memos written by John Yoo while serving as a legal advisor to President Bush and the Executive Branch. Alternet's Naomi Wolf puts it most simply (and alarmingly):

In early March, more shocking details emerged about George W. Bush legal counsel John Yoo's memos outlining the destruction of the republic.

The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.

...

The memos are a confession. The memos could not be clearer: This was the legal groundwork of an attempted coup. I expected massive front page headlines from the revelation that these memos exited. Almost nothing. I was shocked.

John Yoo (a man who, incidentally, is eligible for war crimes trial) was instrumental in helping to consolidate presidential power and rationalize some of the most extreme breaches of justice and U.S. law perpetrated by the Bush administration over the last eight years, among them the justification of torture and limitation of habeus corpus, presidential power to override the fourth amendment through domestic surveillance, and worse. Constitutional scholar Michael Ratner explains:

What Yoo says is that the president's authority as commander in chief in the so-called war on terror is not bound by any law passed by Congress, any treaty, or the protections of free speech, due process and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The First, Fourth and Fifth amendments -- gone.

What this actually means is that the president can order the military to operate in the U.S. and to operate without constitutional restrictions. They -- the military -- can pick you or me up in the U.S. for any reason and without any legal process. They would not have any restrictions on entering your house to search it, or to seize you. They can put you into a brig without any due process or going to court. (That's the Fourth and Fifth amendments.)

The military can disregard the Posse Comitatus law, which restricts the military from acting as police in the the United States. And the president can, in the name of wartime restrictions, limit free speech. There it is in black and white: we are looking at one-person rule without any checks and balances -- a lawless state. Law by fiat.

I won't dignify the allegations of treason made later, mainly because I don't have to - they stand completely by themselves. What was done here was treason, pure and simple - a lawless, irresponsible administration laying the groundwork for the systematic elimination of checks and balances in America. Though the Department of Justice later rejected Yoo's assertions that Congress had no check or balance against the president, history has shown that President Bush proceeded in these areas as if Yoo's memos were valid legal counsel. Ratner puts it best:

"This would be the president making war against the institutions of the United States."

Further Readin':

The memos and summaries on Wikipedia
Salon's Gary Kumiya on the torture memos
Mark Mazzetti, New York Times on interrogations

Scott Adams: Is water the next "artificial shortage"?

Image Credit: Priyadarsh Sarwade

"Who will screw us next?" asked Dilbert creator Scott Adams on The Dilbert Blog. As worldwide "shortages" create pretexts for massive price increases on ordinary consumer goods, his readers pointed toward water as the next obvious corporate assault on the uninformed public. Scott agrees.

Adams illuminates:

In order to have a good artificial shortage you need several things to be true:

1. The commodity must be essential.
2. There is a plausible "natural" explanation for the shortage.
3. Only large companies have the resources to increase supply.
4. The government is involved in some way.
5. The media hasn't yet obsessed about it, but could.
6. Inventions to solve the problem are noticeably absent.
7. There are futures contracts for it.
   

Water has it all, except for the existence of futures contracts, as far as I can tell. Once you see a market for water futures forming, bend over. That's when the manipulation will begin. Crooks prefer manipulating financial markets over building reservoirs.

Get ready.

Answer to: Who Will Screw Us Next? (The Dilbert Blog)

Related Links:

Scott Adams on Libertarianism
Immortality grows near
The Credit Crunch Explained
Destroy war to end the holy war

Musicians to press Obama on end to "sonic torture"

Hey - whatsa matter? You some Moozlim-lovin pussy?

Man, there's so much to fix with the upcoming administration. Why does it feel like a sheepish sort of revolution, with talk of secret prisons closing and abuses of government being corrected?

According to the copyright restrictions it so zealously preserves, the United States still owes royalty payments on the hours and hours (and hours) of music it has used to torture prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq. But their lax enforcement of U.S. law while breaking international law is more indicative of their bad attitude than the main focus when torture is concerned.

From Wired:

Reprieve, a British human rights law group that represents over 30 Guantanamo Bay detainees, is planning to work with musicians to lobby President-elect Barack Obama to end the practice of sonic torture by military interrogators.

Earlier this month, Reprieve and the U.K. Musicians Union launched Zero dB, a "silent protest" over the use of music in interrogations. According to Reprieve, many of its clients have been subjected to hours of music played at deafening volume -- sometime for days or even weeks on end. And the BBC has reported on a particularly insidious practice: using the theme songs from Sesame Street and Barney [as well as to break the will of prisoners.

This has musicians furious. Last week, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails even suggested he might pursue legal action to stop the practice.

A partial list of some of the interrogators' favorite tracks is telling (emphasis added):

• “Enter Sandman,” Metallica.
• “Bodies,” Drowning Pool. [Whose idiot bassist said "I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that."]
• “Shoot to Thrill,” AC/DC.
• “Hell’s Bells,” AC/DC.
• “I Love You,” from the “Barney and Friends” children’s TV show.
• “Born in the USA,” Bruce Springsteen. [I guess "Kidnapped to Cuba" isn't as catchy]
• “Babylon,” David Gray.
• “White America,” Eminem. [Way to be subtle, ya little skinheads] • “Sesame Street,” theme song from the children’s TV show.”

I prefer the term "sonic torture" over "music torture" or whatever idiot term our guvmint has probably invented (probably something like "aural interrogation") because it's not music these people are familiar with, or "music" in any way that you'd normally experience music. It's just sound blasted at a body, and after a half-dozen hours I'm certain it all coalesces into a thick sludge of despair and tuneless garbage that destroys you more than it makes you want to cooperate with anybody.

Anybody who says that this isn't torture obviously hasn't ever felt their body, mind and soul fall apart from stress or lack of sleep. It's much, much worse than having a fingernail pulled out.

Hey - so maybe "Drowning Pool" isn't such a bad choice after all!

Rockers to Press Obama on Music Torture (Wired)

Former Army interrogator's treatise on torture

Returned Army interrogator Matthew Alexander, who served in the Air Force for 14 years and later worked as a senior interrogator in Iraq, offers a succinct debunking of torture as a method of obtaining information:

I refused to participate in [Guantanamo-style torture methods], and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

...

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate." (Source: Washington Post)

This is a very, very good article and the second page in particular is quite powerful. If we lose our moral character and respect for humanity as a nation then we've lost the only thing the terrorists can truly take from us. I have a very firm karmic (one might say Christian) belief regarding the actions of government and its employees: if we do the right thing, things will work out. Understanding what leads an individual to become a terrorist by shattering their notions of what it means to be an American seems to be an appropriate way of turning people against militant Jihadism. Torture only creates terrorists, leading us up the inevitable war against the Arab world that so many black-and-white misguided moralists see as inevitable. It's more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Feds Refuse to Identify Over $2 Trillion in Illegal Loans

Anybody who thought the $700,000,000,000 bailout was the end of massive misguided government handouts to failed businesses under the cloak of helping our economy should prepare to be disappointed - according to Bloomberg, the Feds have squirreled away nearly $2,000,000,000,000 of our tax dollars and, as usual, don't feel any particular need to share the specifics with us. (And don't worry - Barney Frank plainly doesn't feel penitent for his hand in this.)

Here's a mere $315 billion for reference (from here):

The miniscule dot near the corner of the stack is a person. The larger shape is a car. This stack is 450 feet tall (38 stories) and 25,000 square feet in area. To turn it into 2 trillion dollars, either imagine 6.4 stacks just like this, or enough dollar bills to wrap around the Earth's equator 5.1 times. That's how much your government is taking (actually, let's just call it "stealing").

Alternatively, you could use $20 bills and merely imagine a football field buried in sixty-three feet of cash, or 300 dollars for every single person living on this Earth. That's not quite as bad, right?

The stack depicted in the image represents only the cash spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, money the president is legally authorized to approve (I won't get into the ethics of this spending today). This $2 trillion, on the other hand (let's write it out again: $2,000,000,000,000) is not only unethical and shortsighted, but completely unconstitutional.

And does anybody really think that this type of thing will stop under any administration?

Yet Another Good Reason Not To Move to the UK

The new hot job for 2008: Level One All-Seeing Eye for the Minister of Traffic. On a positive note, they'll be able to fill a future V For Vendetta sequel on location.

U.S. Representatives Voting on Bailout Bill Privately Threatened With Martial Law

"Vote for our unconstitutional bailout bill or face unconstitutional martial law!" Let's spread this freedom and democracy to the rest of the world!

The Upshot of Economic Worries

Always the provocateur, Scott Adams provides a list of positives that everybody can agree on for our economic and credit woes. Spun the right way, we may be inching toward a new utopia:

- Rent gets cheaper when housing prices fall. That's a redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor.

- While it will be harder to get a mortgage for an $800K house, that house is only worth $500K now. That should make it a lot easier to qualify.

- Gas at $4 per gallon is a necessary condition for creating the next economic boom: renewable energy and green technology.

- A good recession now and then is necessary to purge the economy of things that need purging.

- College students are starting to choose technology majors over finance majors, probably because of the financial headlines, and this bodes well for the future.

I also like Scott's use of trends (evaluating every issue in context of similar situations). God bless this man for moving away from poop jokes:

And allow me to leave you with a pinch of optimism, just because I can. I call it Adams' Rule of Obvious Calamities. It states that any calamity that is foreseeable by the public at large won't turn out so bad after all. The best recent example was the Y2K problem, where computers worldwide were expected to fail. It seemed impossible that those issues could be resolved in time, but they were.

The Credit Crunch Explained (Scott Adams)

American's Immigration Process Explained

If I had a nickel for every time that an immigration opponent struggling to appear openminded told me that they have "no problem" with immigration as long as it's done legally, I'd have died by now of some kind of copper-nickle alloy poisoning. It's an old trope but I'm sure that the people who say it really believe it.

Never mind the fact that neocons who don't really get too worked up about lawbreaking suddenly find this border dispute terribly important, the one law that must never, ever be broken, under penalty of deportation. Those who don't feel that illegal immigrants should be deported at least want to make their life a living hell for a long, long time; even McCain's waffling on the issue, pretending to worry about brown people to keep his base comfortable. Remember, it's okay to burden the lives of Americans, as long as you do it while speaking English. If we celebrate "legal" immigration while keeping it a very, very difficult and time-intensive activity, all while throwing out illegals, we get the benefits of looking open-minded while keeping People Who Are Different far, far away from our homes. And what's more All-American than a little good, old-fashioned doubletalk?

All while our leaders are attempting to implement the most socialist, authoritarian, freedom-hating thing that has ever been done in my country. I had a casual respect for the Republicans back when they were all about cruel economic efficiency, but totalitarianism just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But never mind that (actually, mind that very much, but let's move on for now).

Jumping back to the immigration issue, this nice flowchart from Reason.com gives you a good look at just how easy and humane our immigration process really is. Take a look at the amply-titled What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand? and maybe shed a little light on the issue in future debates. Remember, a lie repeated enough times becomes truth and eventually common knowledge. . . unless you reject it.

Flowchart: What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand? (reason.com via BoingBoing)

How We're Destroying Ourselves: A Post of Humor and Mirth

For all that I want to call him a jackass, he actually looks sort of cool.

My college paper ran a cover story three days ago, on the seventh anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks and subsequent destruction, titled "We Will Never Forget." I realized the intended heartwarming nature of the message, but I found it disheartening. (And it's not just the fact that it's a lazy and shiftless excuse for a cover story, a fact we won't even get into here.)

9/11 was a tragedy, yes, as is any incident of human barbarism toward others (not to mention the 3,000 some-odd deaths incurred by the 19 hijackers). But much of the tragedy of 9/11 stems from what we did afterward rather than from the attacks themselves.

After all, deaths aren't the sole measure of tragedy. In the year 2001 in the United States 16,242 died from emphysema, 42,443 from automobile accidents and 157,400 from lung cancer alone (that last number was built from projections but the specific count isn't important).

And to judge from the reactions of our leaders, economic destruction doesn't dictate whether something is tragedy. Nor is destruction of U.S. land and property a shame as long as it doesn't happen in a major economic center.

And the bills that we've signed into law over the last few years have proven that man's inhumanity to man isn't such a big deal, as long as we're being barbaric to the right people. Nor is abduction without charges or due process something to cry over. And the terrorists' "assault on our freedoms?" It's nothing compared to what we're already doing to ourselves (link1) (link2) (link3). And let's not worry about the right of an honest American to feel secure in their daily actions, ok?

The Trade Center attacks have given us license to grant the already powerful among us more power, destroy our checks and balances, hate those who are different from us who we won't even bother to try to understand, bash two countries to the ground, continue to occupy them with soldiers and private firms (and are we doing anything but teaching Iraqis that the big and powerful will always run things?), detain more people without warrants, tread on the Bill of Rights and otherwise muck up our own nation.

This started out as a funny sort of satirical post. I was going to propose that we adopt a new scale of measurement for foreign disasters and deaths, one that measures them in American lives so that we could feel honest in acting the way we do regarding foreign tragedy and domestic tragedy that doesn't involve Muslims. For example, twenty times as many people died in the Sichuan earthquake of China four months ago than on 9/11/01. Seventy-six times as many died in the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and subsequent tsunami than 9/11. The idea was that we could muster up an actual equation to figure out just how much we should care about such destruction. Factoring in proximity, ethnicity, government type of affected country and damage to U.S. interests, for example, we might estimate that the Indonesian tsunami cost the world the equivalent of about 300 American lives. That's American Life Units, or A.L.U.'s for short. If we decided that the Sichuan earthquake only cost the world about 30 A.L.U.'s, for example, we could consider ourselves intellectually honest for still urging people to remember the 3,000 A.L.U.'s lost in the attacks of 9/11 seven years ago.

All of a sudden I decided it wasn't funny anymore. Can you tell why? Look - all of you who think that American lives and interests are more important than anybody else's had better think about what's happened in our country as a result of 9/11. And that's something we'd better not forget.

EDIT: Again, it's not the fact that atrocities have happened in Iraq (isolated individuals will sometimes do terrible things when you give them a gun), but the absolute lack of responsibility being taken in response which causes more of these things to happen. Excuses, lies and trigger-happy mercenaries don't spread freedom.

Printcrime: "Copy this story"

One of the neatest technological innovations of the last few years has been the advent of 3-dimensional printers, machines that can do exactly what the name implies. It's an amazing technology and it's going to be more and more important in the coming years.

And just leave it to Cory Doctorow (copyfight hero, writer, superhero) to write some great dystopian fiction on the possible future ramifications of the technology. This story's a couple of years old, but it's just as relevant now as it deals with topics currently affecting (and afflicting) our lives: expanding, militant copyright law and the (oh noes!) encroaching police state:

The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da’s customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals — performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn’t mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.

Read the Full Story!

Directive

I saw WALL-E yesterday, a film that I'd been looking forward to for more than a month, ever since I got a really good look at it after listening to an interview with Andrew Stanton, the director. I found the movie pretty fantastic aside from some controversy involving the film's title (well, not real controversy - apparently it's okay to punctuate it with a dash and not the neato interpunct that they've been using on the posters. Yes, I did just learn that word).

It's not my job to convince you that the movie's great; critics around the world could tell you that. Unlike the last couple Pixar movies (Cars in particular), this plucky little flick seems like the sort of movie that could really grow on you. Not necessarily on the day that you see it in the theaters, amidst all of the hype and hubbub, but years later, when the DVD is resting up on the kids'-level shelf with the rest of Pixar's classics (meaning, of course, pretty much everything not involving insects or automobilia).

More than probably any Pixar flick before it, WALL-E is a strong argument for the subtle art of storytelling. Without spoiling anything, the best and most revelatory parts of the film are primarily nonverbal. Remember when R2-D2 said far more through his beeps, burbles and urgent fidgets than prissy, nagging C-3P0 ever managed to communicate? That same energy is at work here. I've grown spoiled by being able to watch a Pixar film without having to deal with catch phrase-dependent comic relief characters voiced by the likes of Wanda Sykes or Ben Stiller, but WALL-E is nearly completely independent from celebrity influence, understated presence of Sigourney Weaver notwithstanding.

I'll be discussing a couple of my favorite elements of the film in the next couple of paragraphs, as well as discussing a concern that others have had with the film, so those wishing to know nothing else about this fairly new flick may wish to stop here:

The film's storytelling carries over into the landscapes, primarily during the first half of the film. Mountains of garbage and a garbage-colored robot construct the film's bleak optimism. Humans have essentially turned the planet into a giant trashpile, under the watchful eye of a well-meaning yet ultimately destructive global corporation, who reassures the human race that everything will be taken care of planetside while they stay fat and happy on giant spacefaring luxury liners.

What's interesting is that the film never stoops to the level of a message film - the specifics of the story are necessary only to set up the characters and conflict, and the commentary on human nature is unambiguously positive. I found it fantastic that when we actually meet the humans, they aren't petty, selfish, apathetic, uncaring or anything else that you'd expect them to be in a film like this. Quite the contrary - lethargic and pampered as these doughy blobs may be, they're unfailingly kind and understanding, even resourceful and industrious when given the chance. Again - not the obvious, cynical path for the movie to tread, but something far more significant. (Predictably, self-conscious neocons have gotten their britches in a bundle about the perceived environmental messages in the story, proving that they're once again missing the point.)

Secondly, Pixar's gotten far better at integrating their gags with their stories. Pixar stopped including "bloopers" in their closing credits around the time that they began to take the films more seriously as stories rather than straight comedies. Charismatic and classic as Toy Story 2 or personal fave Monsters, Inc was, it's plain that Pixar has taken a different tonal approach with their movies beginning with Finding Nemo. Portraying your characters as actors in a movie just doesn't scan when your audience has to take the grief and love shown onscreen in any serious light. This isn't to say that they've lost the slapstick touch - the traditional short before the film is as clever and madcap as anything we've seen since the days of Looney Tunes - you can watch it here until YouTube takes it down).

WALL-E may be a kids' movie (certainly it appeals to kids), but it's as significant and genuine as anything you're likely to see in the top 10 this or any year. I highly recommend it.

On a related note, I like to think that I've shown remarkable self-restraint throughout this post by not referencing the imminent release of Hellboy II. Dagnabbit!

The New Rules of the New Aristocrats

It's getting harder and harder for me not to link to BoingBoing, whose near-daily updates on the ongoing corporate war against the rights of ordinary consumers stir up my righteous indignation, making clear the threat against free expression soon to be facing our society as corporate interests begin to dictate the law. This war isn't isolated to a particular country - it's worldwide and it's happening now.

Two consecutive posts prove particularly relevant: first, an update on Michael Geist's writings on the Canadian Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and how its institution would affect Canadians (follow the story's link for the full rundown on how the DMCA criminalizes legal uses of consumer-purchased goods by making it illegal to circumvent copy-protection and adding special provisions to fair use, essentially invalidating it) .

Just as sickening are the new rules from the Associated Press restricting legal quotations of their own articles, in direct contradiction to U.S. law. Those willing to pay for already-legal consumer uses of AP stories may buy overpriced "quotation licenses" designed to limit AP story access, licenses terminable by the AP at will.

The following quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, printed in the article, is so important that I'm reprinting it here:

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt.” I suggest it’s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with a system of private law (the very definition of the word “privilege”) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be. See also Virgin Media claiming the right to dictate to private citizens in Britain how they’re allowed to configure their home routers, or the new copyright bill being introduced in Canada, under which the international entertainment industry, rather than democratically-accountable representatives of the Canadian people, will get to define what does and doesn’t amount to proscribed “circumvention.” Hey, why have laws? Let’s just ask established businesses what kinds of behaviors they find inconvenient, and then send the police around to shut those behaviors down. Imagine the effort we’ll save.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.

This inevitable aristocratization of America is a direct result of inaction on the behalf of every political party in the world, every elected representative and every corporate fat cat who allows these liberty-destroying laws and loopholes through the legal floodgate of modern legislation. The mainstream media is not reporting it because they are part of it, and most people don't even know that it's happening.

Goodbye, democracy. Tomorrow is the dawn of The Corporation.

"Don't Be Evil": Google Fights For Internet Neutrality

Google's fired the latest salvo for the ongoing fight for network neutrality and against the tiered-service model - the idea that Internet Service Providers have the right to "prioritize" certain web sites and domains, giving the short stick to small, underground sites and upstarts that can't pony up the cash to pay the ISP's for top billing.

From TheRegister:

In an effort to identify traffic discrimination by American ISPs, Google is prepping a suite of network analysis tools for everyday broadband users.

"We're trying to develop tools, software tools...that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they're not happy with what they're getting - that they think certain services are being tampered with," Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University, an hour south of San Francisco.

If the country doesn't have neutral networks, Whitt contends, innovation stagnates among application developers. And he believes that individual consumers - as well as Washington policy makers - should join the fight for such neutrality.

"The forces aligned against us are real. They've been there for decades. Their pockets are deep. Their connections are strong with those in Washington," he said. "Maybe we can turn this into an arms race on the application software side rather a political game."

The internet is one of the last bastions of free and independent thought left in the world, and it's fantastic to see a giant like Google fighting the good fight, avoiding profit-based temptations as corporate fat cats strive to create a worldwide McInternet.

Unreported Under-the-Table Copyright Meetings

Did you know that militant copyrightists are currently drafting a secret worldwide agreement designed to further crush free communication and eliminate P2P and enforce copy-protection on electronics companies? The new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement reeks of the smoke-filled rooms in which it was drafted by a host of powerful politicians and Hollywood execs, and none of the major news outlets are reporting it. Not a word.

This new law would allow border officials to search mp3 players and cell phones for copyrighted content, force Internet Service Providers to release consumer information and impose this Orwellian agreement upon developing countries. Does this sound like a threat to democracy, free expression, civil liberties and freedom? NBC doesn't think so. Neither do the flag-wavers at Fox News. Good luck finding anything about the ACTA on CNN.

It's telling that only the blogs are reporting this dystopian expansion of the ball pit of lies, self-righteous elitism and corporate interest that is modern copyright legislation. The blogging revolution came just in time, providing transparency in an age in which powerful forces want to turn us into Winston Smith and Guy Montag all at once - fat, happy and consuming the crap that they feed us. Follow this - it's going to come up again, and you won't hear it from the mainstream media outlets, Barack Obama or John McCain.

Further reading:

Michael Geist

P2Pnet

Wikipedia Article on the ACTA "Agreement"

Link to Download the Actual Document

Destroy Oil To End the Holy War

We all know that economics and trade have always been more effective, dangerous weapons than scuds and bombs. Scott Adams noticed the obvious truth - that our nation will never elect a president who proposes a workable energy solution; there's no dollars behind it. What we like is stupid wasteful stuff like ethanol - turning corn into inefficient fuel while our nation faces a food shortage, all because the farmers want it.

Fixing our oil dependency would solve much of our world's environmental, economic and political problems. It would crush cartels and fatten consumer wallets worldwide. And Israel is the only nation with the incentive to do it.

Says Scott:

The oh-my-God moment came when I realized that Israel can destroy all of its local enemies by inventing solar technology that makes oil uneconomical. Such an invention would do more harm than any military attack. And it’s all legal and moral. The politicians and business people in Israel have all the right incentives times a thousand. Their very survival is at risk. Israel is one patent away from crushing every oil producing country in the world.

The obvious problem here is that some of the most unstable nations in the world would lose their principle (and in some countries, almost single) source of income. It's an issue to deal with, but I say full steam ahead.

Israel Defeats the Entire Middle East (The Dilbert Blog)

The Future From 1979

By way of The Pointless Museum comes an excellent treat - full color scans of every page of The Usborne Book of the Future, written by Ken Gatland and David Jefferis and first published in 1979. As a dated representation of a possible future it's remarkably compelling - the visual design and illustrative quality of the book is topnotch. I used to have books like these. (Thanks once again to boingboing for the heads-up.)

The Usborne Book of the Future

Bold, Sadly Optimistic Predictions From Scott Adams

Image from e-spaces.com

From his blog entry "The Wonderful Time":

"I was watching a TV show last night about scientists who can use a modified inkjet printer to 'print' a new organ for your body, one layer at a time, using your own cells that were grown in a dish. They have already created replacement bladders that the body won’t reject. And they are already working on hearts.

You might say you don’t want to live for hundreds of years, but you are underestimating the new mood enhancing drugs that are totally legal and will put you in a state of perpetual bliss.

So there you have it: Immortality is getting nearer, and we’ll all be stupid-happy, and wealthy.

Don’t think about why that prediction is probably wrong. Just enjoy The Wonderful Time."