Happy Mission of Burma Day Eve! Boston has declared Sunday to be Mission of Burma Day, in recognition of the uber-influential Boston-area post-punk band that most have never heard of.
Although I do like them, they are probably my third favorite local band. It’s just funny to see such a formerly underground act get the empty political platitude treatment.
The creepy-cool illustration by Cheeseburger Brown that appears below is from my novella The Pains. It’s starting to appear here and there about the web as news spreads about the alleged abuse of the frozen head of Ted Williams.
I have to admit that the saga of Ted Williams’ head was much in the news when I was writing The Pains, and part of my intent was to mock the silly Transhumanists who were touting Alcor Life Extension as a sure route to some kind of Star Trekian afterlife.
I don’t have a care what happens to my body after I die, and I’m not much for grave veneration. But I do think that a decent respect for the remains of dead persons is kind of central to any claim to civilization. (How I Destroyed the New Economy, an essay I wrote for Salon a few years ago, tells how my taking part in the desecration of sacred ground on Martha’s Vineyard caused the dot com bubble to burst.)
So I don’t think it’s especially funny that Ted Williams’s head was evidently batted around with a monkey wrench. On the other hand I do think it’s kind of funny (Ted Williams being dead, after all), that Alcor has been revealed to be the kind of grotesque charade that I lampooned in The Pains. I hope this story makes radical Transhumanists out to look like a bunch of fools, and that the Ted Williams story brings overdue attention to Cheeseburger’s amazing illustrations and causes me to sell a bunch of books. It’s already brought me a bunch of visitors from baseball fan sites. New visitors to Wetmachine, welcome! Please check out my books. Better still, buy a few. They’re good, I promise.
Below the fold: The Gruesome Details, according to a former Alcor executive.
In December, 2006, flying phalli disrupted a Second Life press conference at a CNET event reflectively dedicated to making money in SL.
Two months later, US Presidential candidate John Edwards had his SL headquarters vandalized in a roughly similar way.
It took just over a year for the world to take the next step, when Russian chess champion cum opposition politician Garry Kasporov had a real world open meeting disrupted by a remote controlled dildo helicopter.
I find it interesting that it didn’t happen here in the US. Of course, five years earlier, cybersage William Gibson had published Pattern Recognition(1), in which Russia is depicted as a tech-hip wild west.
I don’t think the New Wild West is Russia or grassroots politics or astro-turf. It’s cyberspace. For better or worse, what happens there isn’t staying there. And, anyway, how real was the Buffalo West?
1. The netspeak prose didn’t really work for me, and I didn’t think Gibson’s rendering of a female protagonist felt authentic. But it’s easy to forgive these because they don’t really interfere with the spot-on, absolutely compelling ideas. Terrific, thought-provoking read.
In the wake of reports that Google Voice is blocking calls to “traffic stimulator” sites (like free conference calling and free porn sites), Speakeasy has now changed its terms of service to explicitly block calls to these sites with its VOIP product. To its credit, Speakeasy directly informed its users (a friend forwarded me the email reproduced below). But this now elevates the question of VOIP providers and calls to a new level.
The FCC has danced around the regulatory status of “interconnected VOIP providers” (meaning VOIP providers that connect to the regular public switched voice network (or PSTN)). It has required regular phone companies to interconnect with VOIP providers in the famous Madison River case, and subjected VOIP providers to Enhanced 911 rules and CALEA, but has shied away from calling them telecommunications services. So the ability of VOIP providers to engage in the kind of “self-help” the FCC said was off-limits when the traditional Title II phone companies tried it. (Actual Order here for us legal buffs).
I’m not making a specific recommendation here because I’m still trying to gather info. As a general rule, I despise regulatory chameleons who shift regulatory treatment based on what their best interest. If you want to be a Title I information service and be able to refuse to connect calls, don’t complain when you get blocked because you are not eligible for mandatory interconnection under Title II. But I’m also well aware that reality matters and its intrinsic messiness means that these inclinations need to be guides rather than hard and fast rules. I am aware of my ignorance of the factual situation enough to know that I’d like to have a lot more information about the nature of the services and the regulatory environment (about which I know only enough to make my usual uninformed guesses).
But the one thing I can say definitively is that the longer this goes on without any FCC response, the more VOIP providers are going to look to save themselves money by blocking these “free conference call” sites.
Stay tuned . . . .
