Obama's Transparency: Policy Laundering and Secret Treaties

Hey folks, here's what your transparent Obama administration has done for you lately: they've collaborated on an international copyright treaty called ACTA. Not a big deal in itself, except for the fact that the Obama administration has refused to disclose what the treaty says, citing "national security."

Seriously? NATIONAL security, for copyright laws? You mean issues like illegally downloaded MP3s of Britney Spears are at the heart of protecting the republic? National security... Puh-lease! More like JOB security for "intellectual property" lawyers, and politicians who get "campaign contributions" from big media conglomerates.

What does this verboten copyright treaty include? More of the good stuff we, the people, have demanded from our elected representatives:

• More policing of the internet.
• More requirements for internet service providers to babysit everything you do, resulting in unnecessary overhead costs that will be passed on directly to you, the beloved consumer.
• More tools to censor free speech by claiming it "infringes" on something.
• More ways to cut off your internet access, without due process.
• More restrictions on breaking copy-protected technology, even if it's to make content accessible to people with disabilities.

Didn't you vote on the referendum for all that? No? Hmm.

If you are a lowly member of the public, the text is secret. The names of persons who attend the meetings are secret. The titles of the documents are secret. If you represent a big firm or law firm -- pretty much any big firm it seems, the U.S. government will show you documents after you sign a non-disclosure agreement - curbing your right to speak out on the contents of the documents you see...

The entire U.S. tech sector has been publicly silent, as the Obama administration has co-oped them into trading silence for access to the secret documents.
-- James Love, "ACTA: A Patriot Act for the Internet", The Huffington Post

Let's see what Obama has proclaimed as his commitment to "an unprecedented level of openness in Government"...

• "Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing." Unless, of course, that includes things that give big corporations and the Government the tools they need to slap you around with bullshit lawsuits and internet censorship. That totally gets a pass, I guess.
• "Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government's effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions." You got to contribute your opinion towards shaping this copyright treaty, right? Oh... No, none of us did. Well, at least we've all got the freedom to request access to the text of the treaty, to at least give ourselves a fair shot at complying with the law we didn't have any say in. Oops, that's not true either. Oh well!
• "Government should be collaborative." Absolutely! That's why the various governments and international organizations, including numerous officials who were not elected by you or the citizens of other member states, got to collaborate very closely on this treaty. What? You thought Obama meant you got to take part in the collaboration? Haha, oh you silly citizens. You crack me up!

Yes sir, this is certainly "unprecedented openness", "accountability", and "transparency" -- all courtesy of the guy I mistakenly voted for, Barack Obama. On the plus side, at least we're going to drag Canada down the toilet with us.

And if you live in China or a third-world country, you can be happy that bullshit treaties like this will force what little innovation remains out of the United States and into your soon-to-be-less-restrictive homeland.

Update: Oops, sorry China, my second home. Looks like you and the other misbehaving countries may end up caught up in this mess as well:

The ultimate objective is that large emerging economies, where [intellectual property rights] enforcement could be improved, such as China or Russia, will sign up to the global pact.
-- European Commission, "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Fact Sheet"

Update 2: Big props to Wired for calling out ACTA for the scam it is: policy laundering.

[If] the United States signs and ratifies the treaty, Congress would be obliged to change the DMCA [copyright law] to comply with it, while the administration throws its hands in the air and says, "It wasn’t our idea! It’s that damn treaty!"

That practice is common enough to have a name: policy laundering.

Update 3: Added quote from Huffington Post, above.

Twitter Lists - A Quiet Revolution

I've been playing with the new Lists feature over at Twitter for about a week now, and I gotta say I'm really liking it. Like Twitter itself, Lists is such a simple mechanism and yet it offers such a range of possibilities. I have a couple of things on my wish list for Lists, but I'll get to those in a second.

Lists didn't 100% click for me until last night, when I read this blog post by Sean Bonner (@seanbonner). I read this part, and it went *CLICK!* in my brain:

Once it’s understood that you don’t have to be following someone to add them to a list people will begin to adjust who they are following to those they actually know and interact with moving news and site feeds, or celebs and joke accounts over to lists...

So my prediction is as people get more of a grasp on lists, they will stop following celebs they never actually speak with in favor of adding them to a list of celebs, they will stop following CNN and BBC news feeds in favor of creating a news list, they will stop following bands they like listening to in favor of a music list.

(emphasis mine)

This solves an age-old problem with Twitter: information overload. There are so many cool people to follow, and so many "products" to keep up with, that your Twitter stream can quickly become murky and polluted.

My solution till now has been to limit myself to following 50 people max, with the intention of making those 50 the ones who post the most interesting stuff the most frequently. I would regularly go through my follow list and find people who hadn't updated in days/weeks, or who I could not remember posting anything I was interested in, and unfollow those people. I also forced myself to resist the urge to follow companies and products I like -- though I may want to keep up with what's happening with them, I also don't want that stuff cluttering up the stream of info coming from people I like to actually communicate with.

Thanks to Sean kicking my brain into gear with his blog post, I've now figured out how to use Twitter Lists to suit me. My system goes like this: there's those I will follow (Really Follow™) and those I will "sorta" follow by putting them into lists.

My criteria for Really Following™ someone:

1. Number one priority? Real people. Specifically, real people who I can communicate with, bounce ideas off of, and link to on a regular basis.
2. Next would be celebrities who post often, and who post good stuff I am truly interested in -- like @leolaporte and @wilw. These are celebrities who will actually respond to their followers (hi, @jason!) instead of just spamming a one-way stream of stuff with no interaction (hi, @oprah!).

And lists? Lists will be for two purposes:

1. Making high-quality lists of high-quality people, so I can easily recommend all those people at once. This solves my #FollowFriday problem where I have to post 4 or 5 times just to say WHY I'm recommending the people I am. Now I can tell you that if you want some great inspiration from wonderful people, you should check out my @hochmann/twitter-muses list. Or if you're interested in Buddhism, you can browse my @hochmann/sangha list.
2. Collecting users/services I want easy access to, but who I don't want distracting me from the Real People™ I actually follow. A great example would be my @hochmann/anti-boredom list, which is made up of feeds from fun sites like Digg and Mental Floss.

Doing things this way excites me, because it means I can keep the down-to-earth, interesting people I want in my main Twitter feed. People I care about, the cream of my hyperpersonal news stream crop, will always be there at the top. When I want to drill down into a specific group, that's what Lists are for.

Twitter Trends: Broken Beyond Belief

Ever since the "trending topics" info for Twitter was moved from an obscure search page to front-and-center on everybody's Twitter homepage, I knew trends would be in the toilet. They used to be somewhat interesting and useful, since they weren't as easily accessible by the public. Now that they're right out there for every Joe Blow to see whether he wants to or not, the inevitable spamming and gaming of the system has occurred in full force.

Trends are generally just full of crap -- stuff that only teenagers or the AOL crowd would be into. On occasion, something newsworthy pops up in the trends... But then again, I think most things that are "newsworthy" are just fluff to make the mainstream media feel important. Balloon Boy, anyone? Even I got suckered into that one, sad to say.

Today some serious spam actually made it into the trends. Clearly it was a coordinated spamming effort on two fronts, as shown in this screen shot:

(click to enlarge)

Notice the spam posts, mostly from new accounts (as indicated by their "colored bird" avatars). If you look at the list of trends on the right side, the top two trends are spam from this attack.

The funniest part is that the trend that was number one at first was "Make $ From Home." Because it has a $ in it, clicking on the trend actually returned zero results. So even if people were stupid enough to click that trend, they wouldn't see any of the actual spam or the links. Isn't the point of spam to get people to see whatever you're spamming, and to tempt them to click your link?

So basically, the only people who saw the spam posts were people like me, who went out of the way to modify the search to take out the $ symbol. And I'm betting most people who do that are not going to be dumb enough to click the stupid links. I call megafail on that spam attempt.

The other funny thing is the typo in the second trend: "Google Forune." C'mon, folks. If you're going to do a massive, orchestrated spam attack, at least spell your friggin fake product names right. Might trick a handful more noobs that way.

Anyway, I blog about this for a few reasons:

1. This kind of gaming of the system was inevitable. I'm surprised it took this long, really.
2. It's now clear trends are not just inane, sophomoric nonsense; it's clearly not too hard to make them spammy.
3. This gives me yet another excuse to plug my Greasemonkey script for hiding Twitter trends. If you use Firefox or another Greasemonkey-compatible browser, just install that little script. Once you do, that pesky trends sidebar will be banished for good. I know I haven't missed it over the months, and today just gave me yet another reason to keep using it.

Halloween Pics, Come 'n Get 'em!

Bang., originally uploaded by Thomas Hochmann.

Check out my Halloween pics on Flickr, or this pretty Chinese hippie gets it!

Putting Swine Flu Into Perspective

Folks, I just want you to take a look at this graphic that puts swine flu into perspective. Go take a look at the large version where you can see all the numbers. For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume the numbers in this graphic are at least as accurate as anything fed to us by the lame mainstream media we have.

If you do take a look, you'll see how much swine flu lives up to the scaremongering -- which is to say, not much at all. Just taking a few numbers from the graphs, I'd like to point out that in the chart's 300-day period...

• There were 180 times more deaths due to traffic accidents than swine flu. Where are the protests, political measures, and grassroots campaigns for safe driving and improved traffic controls? Where are all the Public Service Announcements™ urging you to brush up at driving school?
• Virtually as many people died from leprosy as died from swine flu. How many people do you know who've died from leprosy lately?
• Over 467 times as many people died from STDs, HIV, or AIDS than died from swine flu. How come there aren't any "national emergencies" declared for AIDS? Why is the CDC spamming the TV and radio airwaves with ads for flu shots, and not condoms?
• Better yet, how come there aren't any national emergencies for cancer (nearly 1100 times as many deaths)?

It's all very fishy, my friends. I don't plan to make use of my $600 swine flu shot anytime soon. Can I get a refund?

Update: Just for the heck of it, compare the above numbers to the CDC's own stats on the seasonal flu:

Every year in the United States, on average:

• 5% to 20% of the population gets the flu;
• more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu-related complications; and
• about 36,000 people die [just in the U.S.] from flu-related causes.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Response to FLOSS 91: Boycott Novell

This post is my response to episode 91 of FLOSS Weekly, a podcast that focuses on Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS). This episode was an interview with Roy Schestowitz, representing the Boycott Novell web site. First, let me make my position clear on a few things:

• Before listening to this podcast, I was not aware of the existence of the Boycott Novell site, nor the apparent controversy surrounding it. I was aware of the community reasons for wanting to boycott or otherwise punish Novell, namely the Novell-Microsoft patent agreement.
• I fully support the idea of boycotting companies like Novell, who damage the credibility and legal integrity of Free Software/Open Source in general, and Linux in particular.
• I think the Novell-Microsoft agreement was pretty ridiculous, and the idea that the Linux community needs Novell to "shield" us from Microsoft is silly at best.

That said, I also want to make clear that my intention is not to attack Roy as a person. But I do take serious issue with how he, and by extension Boycott Novell, came across in this interview. I feel that if Roy had been representing a community I was a part of, I would be sorely disappointed by how things went. This episode may be a good case study for learning how not to handle yourself in an interview.

Despite the length of this interview (one hour), virtually no clear answers came out of it. Perhaps Roy was having a bad day, but he seemed to just talk in circles around questions instead of facing them or answering them. It sounded like a tech interview with Bill Clinton -- legendary ol' Slick Willy dancing around the point of what you asked.

I also found a lot of naiveté and/or double standards expressed in the interview. Roy said Microsoft is worthy of slamming because it only seeks to exploit or pollute Linux, and yet IBM and other Linux partners are viewed differently. That's not to say that IBM or others have tried to harm Linux/FLOSS the way Microsoft has; clearly Microsoft has been very hostile towards Linux and open source.

But it's also very naive to say that say that Microsoft interacts with the Linux community only for money, whereas IBM supports Linux for higher principles. Both companies either support or attack Linux because they see that as a way to make money. That's what companies do. Maybe the culture at IBM is very friendly to open source, Linux, etc. but that wouldn't be enough to make them do what they do. The possibility of making money encourages and allows them to be friendly to open source. The moment friendliness to open source seriously hurts the bottom line, you could see a 180 on all that friendliness.

Next, Roy seemed extremely dodgy on the issue of spam. Apparently, he and the Boycott Novell site have been accused of spamming, or endorsing spam. I don't know enough about this issue one way or the other, so I can't express an educated opinion on what's happening there. But what I will say is that Roy came across as simultaneously too passive and perhaps dodgy enough to raise suspicions that he is involved with the spam. Host Jono Bacon tried repeatedly to make the point that Roy should at least post an official statement on the site saying Boycott Novell does not engage in these activities, doesn't support them, and in fact denounces them.

I think Jono's suggestion is sensible. Roy's response was that he doesn't want to engage with the spammers at all, and he repeatedly said "I don't even know these people." I lean more in Jono's direction: it doesn't matter if you know who they are, they are damaging your credibility and you're just lying on the floor taking it like a chump. If somebody went around Facebook, Twitter, Slashdot, etc. spamming links to my blog posts and pretending to be associated with me, I would immediately put a big front-page statement that I don't condone it and am against that behavior. Of course, I could be lying -- but at least I've taken a public stance on the issue to try to put it to rest.

This issue is even more important when you consider what Boycott Novell, by its very name, represents: a call to arms. My blog doesn't really call people to action or organize any activities on any scale. But Boycott Novell seeks to be a community promoting a specific agenda and promoting a specific understanding of the situation. If you're out there riling up the peasants and whipping them into revolt, you have to accept the possibility that some bad eggs are going to take it too far -- and you have to do the responsible thing by discouraging and very publicly distancing yourself from that kind of behavior.

Side note: This is very similar to why I'm disappointed in the Dalai Lama over the Dorje Shugden controversy. It's not that I think the Dalai Lama has no right to advise against worshiping Shugden. I do think his silence on the violent and sometimes deadly actions of overzealous supporters represents either a) lazy irresponsibility or b) unspoken acceptance of said violence. Either way, it's disappointing and sad.

In the end, this interview left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It was like watching a news interview with a government official, squirming in their seat as they worm their way around the knife's point of serious questions. Whether Roy intended it or not, he came off as disorganized at best, disingenuous and evasive at worst.

First 48 Hours with the Sansa Fuze

As I mentioned last week, my loyal iPod Video kicked the bucket and I had to decide on a replacement. Being no longer satisfied to pay the Apple tax for locked-down, proprietary devices, I decided to go for something more open: the Sansa Fuze 4GB. Besides the great price (about $50 and free shipping from Amazon), three things attracted me:

1. The reputation of Sansa devices for working very well with Linux.
2. Good podcast support.
3. Physical controls (not touch screen controls) that work without looking at the device, i.e. while bicycling.

I've had my Fuze for a full two days now, and here is a rundown of my impressions so far:

• Linux Support - as expected, this player works great with Linux. It should work with just about any PC, Mac, or anything else that can take Mass Storage USB devices. I plug it in, drop music files into the "Music" folder, podcasts into the "Podcasts" folder, etc. and that's it. Done. No iTunes, no buggy hacks to fool the iPod into working with non-Apple software. Plug in, add files, walk away.
• Podcasts - one reason I could not use my little iPod Shuffle (1st gen) to take over for my iPod Video: the damn thing cannot handle podcasts well. It constantly forgets what I'm listening to, and how far I've listened. I load my player up with a handful of hour-long-plus shows; it's not acceptable to lose my place in shows that long. Fortunately, the Fuze performs excellently. It automatically remembers where I stopped listening in each show, and allows me to resume from there or start over at the beginning.
• Controls - iPods have a touch wheel, but the Fuze has a control wheel that actually rotates when you move your finger around. It works very well, feels natural, and gives great physical feedback. I've used the Fuze while biking, while riding the bus, while doing chores, etc. and I've never had problems controlling it while keeping my eyes on the task at hand.
• Sound Quality - using the same headphones, I can't tell any difference in sound quality between this device and the iPods I've owned. The sound is great. I don't own $200 headphones, though; I imagine if I did, I would be able to tell the difference. But since I'm mostly listening to podcasts (people speaking), it doesn't matter much to me either way. The small amount of music I do listen to sounds quite awesome on the Fuze.
• FM Radio - a perk that all Sansa players give you is built-in FM radio. I'm not a big fan of radio because podcasts tend to offer better content with fewer advertisements. However, I do think it's handy to have radio as a backup in case I run out of shows to listen to, or I get bored with the stuff I've loaded. Sometimes random is good, and sometimes I want to listen to songs from outside my music collection (which is stuff I tend to play way too often). Here in Albuquerque, the Fuze has given me great reception on a variety of stations, while indoors and outdoors. Overall, a great bonus feature.

Overall, I'm stoked about this little device. It does exactly what I want, it does it well, and I don't have to use proprietary crap I don't want to. The Fuze makes everything dirt simple, and yet it is packed with features. I haven't even dug into things like photos, videos, and adding storage using the built-in microSD card slot. I expect those other features will work pretty well when I get to them.

Summary: The Fuze is an awesome and very inexpensive little device, packing tons of features into a tiny package. I am 110% satisfied.

Book Review: Digital Fortress

If you're not familiar with Digital Fortress, it is a novel by Dan Brown. He's the fellow that wrote The Da Vinci Code. I thoroughly enjoyed the latter, especially as an audiobook. Dan Brown spins some interesting tales, though he does occasionally twist the English language in painfully contorted ways.

That said, Digital Fortress is similar to The Da Vinci Code in that it consists of an almost unending series of turns in its plot, doubling back on itself and twisting around every few pages. I think Digital Fortress is the worst offender of the two, zig-zagging almost endlessly for hundreds of pages. The style of this novel consists of two main elements that repeat continuously:

1. A tense situation ensues over a couple of pages, and then... CLIFFHANGER! The next chapter zooms off to the other side of the globe for something inane. After the inane chapter, BAM! Back to the action.
2. Technobabble revelations of an "oh [expletive]!" nature.

The cliffhanger-mundane-cliffhanger pattern really left me with reader whiplash, at times. While reading Digital Fortress, there were a lot of moments where some low-down, dirty drama would start to happen, and then... Next chapter! Many of those moments left me muttering to myself, "Oh freakin' COME ON!" To be fair, a lot of those action-free interludes do a good job of fleshing out some characters and their personalities.

The technobabble revelations, as I call them, are also very frequent. They basically consist of conversations in this pattern:

1. Character A says something about a new wrinkle in whatever the current situation is, but leaves Character B hanging.
2. Character B's eyes widen and/or Character B pisses his/her pants as understanding dawns on him/her. He/she then mutters some technobabble phrase like "rotating plaintext mutation cipher injections." Whatever that string of words means, it's not good. It more or less means the world is going to f$%#ing end!
3. Character A confirms this pants-pissing revelation.
4. Optional: Character A also reveals that the rabbit hole goes even deeper, with the technobabble having worse ramifications than Character B even imagined.

Speaking of technobabble, remember that this novel is from 1998. A lot of the technobabble is not only nonsensical, it's also rather dated if you know anything at all about tech. My $30 cell phone has a lot more computing power than the billion-dollar government monoliths described in Digital Fortress, which makes the technical details almost comical at times.

Unfortunately, things really come unhinged in the last chapters of the book. When I got to this bit on page 377, that was basically the end of the line for me:

"We've got a five-tier level of defense," Jabba explained. "A primary Bastion Host, two sets of packet filters for FTP and X-eleven, a tunnel block, and finally a PEM-based authorization window right off the Truffle project."

This was followed by some "drama" involving computer defenses being shown like rings of shields, a la Star Trek, and invading hackers "circling" the shields as they fell, one-by-one. As the proud, knowledgeable geek that I am, that nonsensical string of tech lingo put me over the edge. I can't even finish the book.

I really don't want to be overly harsh on Digital Fortress. It has some good bubblegum suspense to it, overall. The story will leave you with a lot of whiplash as you read through it, and yet most of it is not that surprising ultimately. I guess if you know nothing about tech and you find encryption to be "magical," this book won't be as eye-rolling for you as it is for me. But man, it is dated, and my neck still hurts from being flung around the rapid-fire twists and turns of the plot.

If you have to choose between this and The Da Vinci Code (as if you're the one person on the planet who hasn't read it), choose Da Vinci.