Command Line

ORG launched just three short years ago, bringing grass roots activism on issues of civil liberties online to Britain and the EU. In that time, they’ve established an impressive track record on issues from copyright reform to e-voting. They are also actively working against any number of other issues, including every more intrusive advertising like Phorm.

ORG just kicked off another fundraising campaign yesterday at Open Tech 2008. I was one of many online supporters who has written about ORG’s activities that they contacted to help raise awareness around this drive. You’ll notice in the sidebar a widget, one you too can embed, tracking the drive’s progress. Also, if you visit the ORG-GRO page, you can see exactly where and how they are spending your contributions.

I know I have lot of readers and listeners in Britain and the EU who could help them out. If you’ve thought about helping ORG, now is an excellent time.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” — Thomas Jefferson

I am very fond of much of Jefferson’s writings. He is imminently quotable on a wide variety of subjects dear to me as well. This is a quotation to which I often return, especially today when we in the US commemorate the start of the events that led to the founding of our country.

The vigilance of which Jefferson spoke is too easily interpreted as mere watchfulness for obvious, external enemies. This line of thinking is a hallmark of the regime that has gotten our country embroiled in an unsustainable set of foreign conflicts that have more to do with the politics of hate than of liberty.

I have always considered the true price of freedom to be intellectual vigilance. Never take the facile interpretation of a difficult political or moral situation. Jefferson, among other things, was a free thinker. I think that is consistent with my view, that to retain our liberty we must constantly exercise our own intellects as strenuously as he did. Reject dogma and seek out truth and knowledge for yourself. Only in the face of fact and logic can you make a reasonable critical judgement.

There rarely are answers to complex questions that are both simple and true. That should not stop you from rising to the challenge and trying to find an intellectually tenable stance. It is easy to follow majority opinions, doing so involves no real sacrifice. We live in an unprecedented age with regards to our access to knowledge. Use those resources to discover for yourself what forms of liberty are individually dear to you and how best to defend them.

Today of all days should be one spent in consideration of personal liberty. Consider too how you can be mindful, vigilant, every day and how you may also act, add your voice, your actions to those issues of freedom that matter most to you.

This is news cast 146.

I will be taking a hiatus to catch up on planning and writing for the show. There will be no new shows in the feed for the next two weeks. The show will return with a feature cast on July 16th.

In the intro, a quick review of Wall*e based on my taking my two sons to see it this weekend. I highly and thoroughly recommend this film. I think it has an overlooked hacker theme to it, to boot.

The only security alert this week is just discussing some new malware for OS X which may be new or an existing but recent one and simple advice on how to protect yourself. The folks over at ZDNet’s Zero Day blog also think Snow Leopard is a good opportunity to get ahead of any uptick in malware for the operating system.

In this week’s news, opening of Java sources to be completed this year though some question its relevance, the future of JavaScript, ICANN considering opening up top level domain names, and the risks in a new wave of remove kill switches in consumer devices.

Following up this week, just the FISA Amendments Act with news that several senators have voiced strong opposition including willingness to filibuster, and that the vote has been delayed until July 8th, that there may be some passable compromises if outright rejection fails.

 

 News Cast for 6/29/2008 [41:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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• EFF briefing in Thomas case
• Patry’s analysis of MPAA brief on Thomas case
• Oregon claim of copyright on text of laws overturned
• Andersen awarded $100K in lawyers fees from her RIAA case

• Multiple security holes in Ruby 1.8, 1.9
• Adobe Acrobat, Reader fixes

• Pirate Bay offering crypto tools to foil Swedish surveillance law
  The surveillance law is nominally not targeting piracy, per se, but this does remind us of the group’s stance on privacy. Their offerings will include SSL on their tracker, some how-to’s for easy end user encryption, and dropping fees for their commercial VPN offering.
• Undoing statutory compromise on performance, composition radio royalties
  The exemption from royalties was a regulated compromise to begin with. Radio still thinks it works as it still has promotional value. Does it, though, really, in the wake of media consolidation and online competition? Not that those are the arguments of the labels which are desperate for any revenue other than having to actually innovate.
• Turing’s birthday
  His birthday would have been June 24th and he would have been 96. If you don’t know Turing’s contribution to computing, read the Wikipedia article at the link.
• Online forum for algorithm geeks
  Contrast this to academic research into algorithmic complexity. It is a discussion group more informed by practical problems but still pretty deeply geeky stuff. Worth a bookmark against future need for a more efficient solution for thorny computing problems. I wonder if they have anything that could keep Twitter up for longer than a day?
• Charter calls a halt to deploying NebuAd
  The good news is that a risky, invasive effort has stalled. The bad news it is another point in a disturbing trend in online advertising that begs what is next. And it is merely stalled, not stopped outright.
• Nokia to buy Symbian and open the source
  This seems to be largely a response to LiMo, another popular open platform, and of course Google’s Android platform. It is encouraging to see open source as a competitive alternative but remains to be seen if the benefits extend to customers in the form of more open, hackable devices.
• FCC wants to impose onerous conditions on next spectrum block
  This is consistent with other legislative noise tying free access to the internet with porn and other content filters. Worse, this goes beyond filters and could result in truly crippled access, block any sort of free speech protecting technologies, like encryption, and other technologies used as much if not more for other applications than morally questionable content delivery.
• Amie Street inks deal that will add over 1MM new songs
  Further validation of a very consumer friendly business model. I am heartened to see the catalog continuing to grow on top of last years investment news.
• Encoding qubits in a vapor
  Some very basic ground work, in optical quantum properties, that could lead to solving the problem of storing, retrieving and manipulating a large amount of qubits.
• Rebutting the death of the scientific method
  Anderson of Wired suggested with enough data, theory can be skipped. This article does a good job of showing how Anderson misunderstand this idea about limited applications of some classes of mass data correlations, that make sense for Google’s page ranking but not to our general understanding of science and the universe.
• Data shows Canadian carrier doesn’t have P2P congestion problems
  Bell Canada is desperately trying to spin the low numbers, stating it is all about context and suggests that minimal congestion at one link can apparently multiply non-locally into the kinds of problems it thinks justifies throttling P2P traffic.
• MPAA lands first P2P jury conviction
  Arguably the defendant, Dove, is in a different class than those in civil cases. Some may see it as borderline but it definitely makes more sense in the light of a criminal conviction to consider home a commercial scale pirate, not a casual home user of P2P for occasional infringing downloads.
• Should security vulnerabilities be treated as product defects
  Pretty obvious when you think about it, both the should do and the actually do side of it. A bit disturbing to read an anecdote based around a high profile company, though, shrugging off vulnerability reports like feature requests.

This is a feature cast.

The hacker word of the week this week is deep space.

The feature is a mild rant about what I am calling the Three Year Itch, a phenomenon I have observed in my professional life related to the typical duration of each of my successive jobs and how it seems to be biasing me towards voluntarily splitting my career up on that particular interval.

 

 Third Anniversary Show [31:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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If you want to show your support for the cancelled CBC Radio One program, Search Engine, and you have a Facebook account, you can join the group dedicated to saving it. Search Engine, among others, cited the outpouring of grass roots opposition to the tabled C-61 bill, the so called Canadian DMCA, in the form of a Facebook group, so this group may be a bit more effective than the typical online petition. It certainly cannot hurt and it is worth noting that the show’s host, and one of the producers, Jesse Brown has committed to continuing the show in podcast only form on his own in the Fall. If you really want to help, contact him directly at jesse dot brown at cbc dot ca and offer your support and, if you have it to spare, your time and skills.

I mentioned the passage of this bill in the House last week. It is coming to the Senate floor this week. I said I’d call my own Senators and I just did so, not more than five minutes ago.

Please, go to the EFF action center’s alert, enter your ZIP code or login, and make the call. Help the EFF by logging the results of your call, too. To help with the logging, be sure to ask for the Senator’s stance on the bill, ask with whom you are speaking and don’t be shy about reading the script provided or using it as a jumping off point.

I would suggest going further, too, in trying to find out if either of your Senators will support the bill with the immunity provision, despite opposing immunity, as I warned Senator Obama has stated. Make sure they understand you find such a stance untenable and if they oppose immunity, they should work to defeat the provision separate from any other concerns the bill may address. I would even recommend pressing any on-the-fence senators on what other aspects of the bill they would support if they support that non-comitall line od reasoning. The EFF’s analysis doesn’t indicate there really is anything to this bill other than telecom immunity.

I didn’t think to ask Mikulski’s staffer where she stood. I am not happy with her agreement with my views on past issues so wouldn’t be surprised if she supports the bill. I was grateful that Cardin’s office says he does oppose immunity and when I pressed he opposes immunity in any form, that unlike others he would not support the bill at all if it includes immunity. I hope that equates to a willingness to filibuster or do whatever else is necessary to defeat this draft of the bill and any future draft that tries to absolve the telcos of their culpability in the illegal wire tapping of US citizens.

This is news cast 145.

In the intro, just a quick mention of the end of Search Engine on CBC Radio One, that I wrote about on the blog, previously.

The only security alert this week is a couple of security vulnerabilities in Firefox 3 already though a fix is on the way and eavesdropping on encrypted VoIP.

In this week’s news, top woman coder explains gender differences in coding styles, UCITA sneaks back inside on the new anti-spyware bill, AP issues legal notice to a blogger that leads to a discussion of guidelines with a group whose legitimacy is unclear, and the house passes telecom immunity as part of a new FISA bill.

Following up this week, an interview with Minister Prentice and first responses to Judge Davis’ call for comments on the Jammie Thomas case.

 

 News Cast for 6/22/2008 [35:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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