SaveMuniWireles.org, a group opposed to the anti-muni bill in TX, reports that the anti-muni provisions of the legislature’s gift package to SBC (the local baby Bell) has been stripped. But hang on to your seats folks, because it goes to the floor next week and SBC is fighting hard.
Year: 2005
Martin Gets Official Nod
Although long expected, Kevin Martin will be officially named Powell’s replacement as Chair of the FCC today.
For my personal take on Martin, see below.
Crass Commercial Anouncement
Crass Commercial Announcement
The bill for Wetmachine’s hosting is coming due pretty soon. Sure would be nice to sell a few books to help pay the freight! Why not take this opportunity to buy one!
The wonderfulness of same is attested to not only by me, but by the following reputable(!?!?) sources:
Acts of the Apostles:
Salon
Slashdot
Kuro5hin
Geek.com
SFSite
BioInformatics.org
Newstrolls
and many more about which Google can inform you.
Cheap Complex Devices:
Slashdot
Kuro5hin
And Google. . .
Don’t forget that you can try before you buy. The complete sources of both books are available for free download — gust glance to the left side, under “read my books” and follow the links. The all important “buy my books” section is just below that.
Wetmachine will resume its regularly scheduled programming as soon as Harold or Gary or Peg or Howard or Bremser gets around to posting something to push this story down the page.
Inventing the Future: connectivity and freedom
My dear friend John, whose generosity and interests drive this site, has said something in comment to this entry, which I just have to call him on:
“The more everything ties together the more we are open for invasion. But the Paris Hiltons of the world seem to embrace the great borgification, the assimilation into the overmind, in which notions such as autonomy and privacy are not so much quaint as incomprehensible.”
Whoa, there buddy! You’re going to have to explain why tying stuff together makes it more open to invasion. Ever try to invade a strawberry thicket? There’s good design and bad design (with respect to various desirable or undesirable effects), but I see no reason that a good interconnected design is any more pervious then a bunch of isolated stuff. In fact, in my admittedly limited understanding of military and tech. security history, the concepts of “defense in depth” and “divide and conquer” suggest to me that interconnected stuff (if done right) may be inherently safer.
Besides, I’m touchy-feely enough that I just plain like the idea of interconnectedness (done right) being not only safer, but freer and more open and enabling, not more oppressive. Croquet architect David Smith just attended the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security in Madrid. They have produced a document that begins to articulate how I happen to feel. It is called The Infrastructure of Democracy.
I had a conversation with someone at the University here about architecting Croquet – or a class of Croquet applications – so that the infrastructure can be centrally controlled. By the University, by a consortium of universities or what have you. “This is wrong,” I thought. If you design it so that the whole thing – the very infrastructure — can be controlled by you, then it will be controlled, but not by you. Either Croquet will be a success or it won’t, and if it is a success, then the Elephant in the Hallway, Microsoft, will come along and control their version. Or some government, or terrorists, or whatever bad guys haunt your anxiety closet.
I’ve recently learned from some folks in the tech security community that security is weakened when you rely on prohibiting that which you cannot prevent. Systems fail, so design your system to fail gracefully. Connectivity is abused, so design your systems to respond to it. Openness and interconnectivity are powerful tools for dealing with the attacks we cannot prevent.
On teh internets
I guess they really do know if you’re a dog.
Bringing to mind (per usual) the quavering voice of David Crosby’s over-the-top histrionic paranoid manifesto Almost Cut My Hair: “It serves to increase my paranoia, like looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a PO-LEASE car!”
However, it would have made me feel worse had this been discovered when I thought of myself as human. Now that I know I’m a robot, somehow it’s easier to take.
Quick Take on FCC 3650-3700
The FCC decided the 3650-3700 Order today. You can find a link on the FCC Home page.
As is customary, the Order is not yet released, so we have only the press release to go on.
My first take is below. I know a lot of people are going to be upset that it requires licensing, but it is not a “licensed” regime anymore than a truly “unlicensed” regime. We need to keep an open mind and wait for the actual order to come out.
The Meme meme
“There’s no such thing as a meme. Pass it on.”
I don’t know when I first encountered the word “meme”; I suspect it was sometime around 1997. In any event I disliked it enough to lampoon it in a little thing called “Notes on the Source Code”, which I wrote during one frenzied all-nighter in the spring of 1998 (“notes” later morphed into the astonishing hallucination known as Cheap Complex Devices, the most brilliant book I ever wrote. But I digress.)
Suddenly “meme” was everywhere. It was like fractal redux, ten years later.
I didn’t like “meme” because I thought it added nothing to the perfectly serviceable word “idea” and was just a lot of newfangled pseudo pscientific poppycock. I’ve changed my mind since then, even to the extent that I see much human activity as the mere playing out of memes in meat substrate.
Columbia Journalism Review on Unlicensed
Columbia Journalism Review has this article on unlicensed and its potential to revolutionize the media. I’m quoted, as are such luminaries as Eban Moglen and Dave Hughes and my co-conspirator Jim Snider from New America Foundation.
Inventing the Future: iPods
Duke and other schools are giving iPods to students. This site explains that they are looking for innovative ways to introduce technology in education. Poems and lit. to go. School fight songs. Info on the frosh dorms. I think that’s great. Why be so focused on visual information? It’s interesting to me that cell phone surfing seems to be done on phones outfitted with tiny visual screens and abuses of keyboards. Why not aural displays and voice interfaces? (Although I’m not too keen on the image of zombie students walking around in their own little isolation enforced by earplugs piping in the university’s message.)
Duke doesn’t mention anything about file sharing, but I wonder how much of their IT push is also meant to get them off the hook that some universities have been placed on in order to try to force them to be responsible for the file-sharing actions of their students.
My wife wants to run away with John Gilmore!
Well, actually maybe that’s a bit of an exageration. But she does admire his stand for privacy and the principle that people should actually be allowed to read laws that they are required to follow. If you’re not familiar with John Gilmore, there’s a good account here of his suit against Mr. Ashcroft.
My wife also notes that Gilmore has $30 million, which is about $31 million more than I have. (She’s never met him, by the way; nor had she heard of him before reading the article.)
-
Martin Gets Official Nod
Although long expected, Kevin Martin will be officially named Powell’s replacement as Chair of the FCC today.
For my personal take on Martin, see below.
Crass Commercial Anouncement
Crass Commercial Announcement
The bill for Wetmachine’s hosting is coming due pretty soon. Sure would be nice to sell a few books to help pay the freight! Why not take this opportunity to buy one!
The wonderfulness of same is attested to not only by me, but by the following reputable(!?!?) sources:
Acts of the Apostles:
Salon
Slashdot
Kuro5hin
Geek.com
SFSite
BioInformatics.org
Newstrolls
and many more about which Google can inform you.
Cheap Complex Devices:
Slashdot
Kuro5hin
And Google. . .
Don’t forget that you can try before you buy. The complete sources of both books are available for free download — gust glance to the left side, under “read my books” and follow the links. The all important “buy my books” section is just below that.
Wetmachine will resume its regularly scheduled programming as soon as Harold or Gary or Peg or Howard or Bremser gets around to posting something to push this story down the page.
Inventing the Future: connectivity and freedom
My dear friend John, whose generosity and interests drive this site, has said something in comment to this entry, which I just have to call him on:
“The more everything ties together the more we are open for invasion. But the Paris Hiltons of the world seem to embrace the great borgification, the assimilation into the overmind, in which notions such as autonomy and privacy are not so much quaint as incomprehensible.”
Whoa, there buddy! You’re going to have to explain why tying stuff together makes it more open to invasion. Ever try to invade a strawberry thicket? There’s good design and bad design (with respect to various desirable or undesirable effects), but I see no reason that a good interconnected design is any more pervious then a bunch of isolated stuff. In fact, in my admittedly limited understanding of military and tech. security history, the concepts of “defense in depth” and “divide and conquer” suggest to me that interconnected stuff (if done right) may be inherently safer.
Besides, I’m touchy-feely enough that I just plain like the idea of interconnectedness (done right) being not only safer, but freer and more open and enabling, not more oppressive. Croquet architect David Smith just attended the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security in Madrid. They have produced a document that begins to articulate how I happen to feel. It is called The Infrastructure of Democracy.
I had a conversation with someone at the University here about architecting Croquet – or a class of Croquet applications – so that the infrastructure can be centrally controlled. By the University, by a consortium of universities or what have you. “This is wrong,” I thought. If you design it so that the whole thing – the very infrastructure — can be controlled by you, then it will be controlled, but not by you. Either Croquet will be a success or it won’t, and if it is a success, then the Elephant in the Hallway, Microsoft, will come along and control their version. Or some government, or terrorists, or whatever bad guys haunt your anxiety closet.
I’ve recently learned from some folks in the tech security community that security is weakened when you rely on prohibiting that which you cannot prevent. Systems fail, so design your system to fail gracefully. Connectivity is abused, so design your systems to respond to it. Openness and interconnectivity are powerful tools for dealing with the attacks we cannot prevent.
On teh internets
I guess they really do know if you’re a dog.
Bringing to mind (per usual) the quavering voice of David Crosby’s over-the-top histrionic paranoid manifesto Almost Cut My Hair: “It serves to increase my paranoia, like looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a PO-LEASE car!”
However, it would have made me feel worse had this been discovered when I thought of myself as human. Now that I know I’m a robot, somehow it’s easier to take.
Quick Take on FCC 3650-3700
The FCC decided the 3650-3700 Order today. You can find a link on the FCC Home page.
As is customary, the Order is not yet released, so we have only the press release to go on.
My first take is below. I know a lot of people are going to be upset that it requires licensing, but it is not a “licensed” regime anymore than a truly “unlicensed” regime. We need to keep an open mind and wait for the actual order to come out.
The Meme meme
“There’s no such thing as a meme. Pass it on.”
I don’t know when I first encountered the word “meme”; I suspect it was sometime around 1997. In any event I disliked it enough to lampoon it in a little thing called “Notes on the Source Code”, which I wrote during one frenzied all-nighter in the spring of 1998 (“notes” later morphed into the astonishing hallucination known as Cheap Complex Devices, the most brilliant book I ever wrote. But I digress.)
Suddenly “meme” was everywhere. It was like fractal redux, ten years later.
I didn’t like “meme” because I thought it added nothing to the perfectly serviceable word “idea” and was just a lot of newfangled pseudo pscientific poppycock. I’ve changed my mind since then, even to the extent that I see much human activity as the mere playing out of memes in meat substrate.
Columbia Journalism Review on Unlicensed
Columbia Journalism Review has this article on unlicensed and its potential to revolutionize the media. I’m quoted, as are such luminaries as Eban Moglen and Dave Hughes and my co-conspirator Jim Snider from New America Foundation.
Inventing the Future: iPods
Duke and other schools are giving iPods to students. This site explains that they are looking for innovative ways to introduce technology in education. Poems and lit. to go. School fight songs. Info on the frosh dorms. I think that’s great. Why be so focused on visual information? It’s interesting to me that cell phone surfing seems to be done on phones outfitted with tiny visual screens and abuses of keyboards. Why not aural displays and voice interfaces? (Although I’m not too keen on the image of zombie students walking around in their own little isolation enforced by earplugs piping in the university’s message.)
Duke doesn’t mention anything about file sharing, but I wonder how much of their IT push is also meant to get them off the hook that some universities have been placed on in order to try to force them to be responsible for the file-sharing actions of their students.
My wife wants to run away with John Gilmore!
Well, actually maybe that’s a bit of an exageration. But she does admire his stand for privacy and the principle that people should actually be allowed to read laws that they are required to follow. If you’re not familiar with John Gilmore, there’s a good account here of his suit against Mr. Ashcroft.
My wife also notes that Gilmore has $30 million, which is about $31 million more than I have. (She’s never met him, by the way; nor had she heard of him before reading the article.)