The Noble Lie

Check out this interesting article from TechCrunch about the Obama Administration's open government initatives. Sharing more public information with the public is almost always a good idea, but the quality of open government initiatives and sites like Data.gov obivously hinge on what information is being shared. "Open Government" is not bringing us any closer to the CIA torture report still kept under cover of national security, for example.

From Can Open Government Be Gamed?

Digital tools are bringing participation back to democracy, or at least that is the idea. But once all of this data becomes free and new modes of influencing government policy are deemed to be effective, attempts to manipulate the data and game the system will emerge. Well-funded lobbyists and special interests will descend on these nascent institutions of “open government” like SEO consultants on Google. People from both sides of the aisle will also participate. Todd Herman, the GOP’s Director of New Media, admits as much. The GOP has learned from how the Obama campaign “changed the way community organizing works,” he says. The GOP’s failure in the last election was because “we did not use the tools” of digital organizing and outreach.

Speaking of SEO, Herman suggests that Democratic political activists are better than Republican ones at using SEO techniques to promote stories on Google News. He uses the example of the American Medical Association opposing Obama’s healthcare proposal and shows a screenshot of a Google News search where you wouldn’t know that was the case by scanning the headlines. He shows that as proof of the left’s SEO tactics, without really explaining how they are manipulating Google News. The problem with his example, is if you go to Google News right now and search for “AMA Obamacare” the top result is a Forbes story with the title “Will Doctors Buy Obamacare?” So maybe the Republican SEO experts are fighting back, or Google News is self-correcting.

Not to be outdone by the United States Pentagon, who recently brought their new Cyber Command online, the nation of China has been on an Internet offensive lately, taking measures to increase their online control over their citizenry. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and Paul) have been writing about, China has mandated all computers to come installed with government censorware titled Green Dam Youth Escort, which has security backdoors big enough to march the Chinese National Revolutionary Army through.

In a brand new salvo, it appears that China may have banned their citizens from Google, over concern about the amount of pornography. Google in the past has taken a lot of flack for supporting the Chinese government's censorship demands, but it appears they haven't done enough to win the nation's favor.

Microsoft is eager to fill the gap. Their new search property Bing plays very nice with China's censorship rules (see here, and here).

China is not only cracking down online. Very recently, Liu Xiaobo, leading Tiananmen Square protestor, was arrested for spreading subversive, anti-government rumors and information.

UPDATE: China's ministry of health is announcing they are explicitly blocking sites related to sexual health. Censorware is notoriously bad for blocking health information regarding parts of the body we're prudish about (like breast cancer), but that's usually inadvertent due to bad filtering techniques.

"It is prohibited to spread pornographic content in the name of sex-related scientific research," the ironically named Ministry said. "The health sections of web portals are not allowed to conduct sex-related research services."

The word they're looking for isn't "ironic," it's "Orwellian."

In the midst of news about clashes with Somali pirates, the music and film industry finally got to sink their teeth into the folks from the Pirate Bay file sharing site, to the tune of 3.6 million US dollars and four 1-year jail sentences, using new (I believe) Swedish anti-piracy laws.

The music and film industry has been waging this battle for a while, which has included unsuccessful litigation attempts and police raids. Half the charges were dropped on the second day of the trial due to the prosecution's lack of understanding of how file sharing works.

The future of the file sharing site, the most popular on the internet with as many users as the incredibly popular World of Warcraft game, is uncertain. The future of the BitTorrent file sharing protocol is on shaky ground as well, unless you count Linux distributions, or the fact that the aforementioned World of Warcraft uses the protocol to distribute patches and updates. Of course, before Pirate Bay, there was Kazaa, which got shut down. Before Kazaa, there was Napster, which got shut down. Notice the pattern? There will be another, and it will be harder to shut down and more efficient at sharing files.

This doesn't impact me because I gave the finger to the music and film industry a while ago, and am no longer interested in their products, for free or for $$$.

When a gov't votes to implement a new technology "as soon as it is available," you can usually count on it being just around the corner.

From Voice of America:

'Smart Guns' Nearing Reality

By Paul Sisco
Washington
24 April 2008

In the 1995 movie, Judge Dredd, smart guns will fire only if they recognize the shooter's palm. Gun manufactures say the use of such biometric technology in the gun's grip may soon become a reality.

"If the person is not recognized, the gun would not be unlocked, so the gun would not fire," said Ho Chang, from Austria-based Nanoident Biometrics.

Californian Griffin Dix supports a proposed bill that would require smart guns in his state.  "That gun can not be used by kids to shoot in unintentional shootings as my son died," he said. "They would also stop a lot of gun suicides.  It would stop some criminals; thieves could not use the guns."

"We think it is a reasoned approach to look at new technology that actually might make these dangerous products safer for all Californians," said Mark DeSauliner, California assemblyman.

In Soviet California, Gun shoots You!

If you know more about this bill or the status of this bill, I'm eager to hear your comments.

I don't follow 2nd Amendment rights terribly closely, but I am a big supporter of the right all Americans once had to take personal responsibility for protecting themselves and their families by bearing arms.

In the time I haven't been paying attention, my state of California has passed "Smart Gun" legislation in the Assembly (and likely in the Senate too, but I am still digging) that requires all guns manufactured to be "biometrically locked" to their owners, as soon as the available technology makes it feasible. This technology exists today. Have you ever fumbled with the biometric thumb-print readers that are starting to show up on laptops and other devices? I usually wrestle with it for about 2 minutes, before giving up and typing in my username and password manually.

Smart Guns are long a staple of Cyberpunk Sci-Fi, and the ultimate smart gun requires authorization and tracking (by a computer) for every shot fired from any weapon anywhere (except soldiers, police, and other doers of "wet work" for the State).

Law Enforcement is, of course, of course, exempt.

From HS Daily Wire:

California passes smart-gun law
Published 22 April 2008

Several companies are now working on embedding palm biometrics security mechanism in guns: The gun grip will store the image of the owner's palm, and the gun will unlock only if the image of the palm holding the gun matches the stored image; California wants this mechanism in all guns sold in the state

How do we keep kids from firing guns by mistake, or crooks from using stolen guns to hurt people? New biometric technology will soon make this a reality, and lawmakers in Sacramento, California, are planning ahead. Several companies are now working on putting biometric images of hands into the grip of the gun -- and only the person whose palm image matches the images stored in the gun would be able to fire it. "If the person is not recognized, the gun would not be unlocked. So the gun would not fire," said Ho Chang from Nanoident Biometrics. Chang came to Sacramento assure lawmakers that smart guns are no longer fiction. The Public Safety Committee of the California Assembly last Tuesday moved to require every gun sold in California to have this biometric system once it is developed. "We think it's a reasoned approach to look at new technology that actually might make these dangerous products safer for all Californians," said Assemblyman Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord).

DeSaulnier thinks applying the biometric technology to weapons would prevent kids from accidentally pulling the trigger and stop thieves from using stolen guns. Gun groups, however, say it was irresponsible for the committee to pass a bill requiring technology that does not exist and has not been tested. "The last thing in the world you want to do is put a computer on a gun. What happens when the battery goes dead? What happens when the computer software fails? All of us have seen the blue screen of death on our PC's," said Ed Worley from the National Rifle Association. New Jersey passed a similar smart gun requirement in 2002. California's proposal sets a deadline of 2014. If the smart gun is not on the market by then, the law would become void.

From NRA ILA:

California "Smart Gun" Bill Passes Assembly, Now Heads to Senate!
Thursday, May 29, 2008

On Wednesday, May 28, the Assembly voted 41-30 to pass Assembly Bill 2235.  The bill now heads to the Senate for its consideration.

AB2235 would prohibit the sale of handguns other than "owner-authorized (or "smart") handguns" -- that is, handguns with a permanent, programmable biometric feature that renders the firearm useless unless activated by the authorized user.   No proven, viable handgun of this type has ever been developed.

Introduced by Assemblyman Mark DeSaulnier (D-11), AB2235 would require the Attorney General to report to the Governor and Legislature on the availability of owner-authorized handguns; once the Attorney General finds that these guns are available, only "owner-authorized" handguns could be approved for sale in California.

Please contact your State Senator TODAY and respectfully urge him or her to oppose AB2235 when it comes before them for a vote.  Contact information can be found here.

Mark at Parallelnormal linked a video which gives us a glimpse of the robotic future of humping your pack through the bush. Big Dog is a smart robot that can carry around 350 lbs of gear and can stay on its feet through rough terrain and being jostled around. He's not very stealthy though -- sounds like a swarm of hornets coming through.

Developed at Boston Dynamics, for DARPA. We'll be seeing a lot more of this stuff... The US Military's stated goal is to be 50 percent robotic by 2015.

Big Dog demo

Big Dog "beta test" (haha)

As the world turns and the economy burns, the video game industry holds steady. Nintendo prepares to the latest iteration of their handheld DS system, the Nintendo DSi. The interesting thing about this video game system is that it has a camera built into the unit, pointed directly at the player.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't like cameras pointed at me while I save the Princess.

From PC Magazine:

The idea for DARPA's global network project known as "the Internet" has been around a lot longer than Al Gore. Let's hop once again into the wayback machine, to see how people's minds were being paved long before the actual appearance of the technology.

A vision of the internet in 1969. Check out how disgusted the husband gets when he sees all the stuff the wife bought.

Newspapers on your computer? A strange idea in 1981. The newspaper boy who wasn't worried about a computer taking his job then is probably unemployed now.

In 2007, some of the most frightening testimony I've ever seen given to Congress was given by James Comey, who was a longtime veteran of the Justice Department and acting Attorney General when John Ashcroft was hospitalized. His testimony involves an incident in 2004, when he refused to certify the legality of a top-secret spy program, a race through DC to pressure the hospitalized and heavily-medicated Ashcroft (who was recovering from surgery) to get him to certify the spy program, and a tense, frightening confrontation with Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card in Ashcroft's hospital room. Though it didn't receive the necessary legal certification, the program continued anyway, so Comey resigned from the Justice Department.

One of the likely candidates for the program which Comey refers to is the Continuity of Government program code-named Main Core (read Cryptogon write-up), which is an illegal, unconstitutional database of intelligence and financial data on at least 8 million Americans (~2.6 in 100), collected and accessed without warrant or court order which has been in operation since at least the 1980s. Main Core is based on an incredibly powerful database-integration package, PROMIS, which I first read about in Michael Ruppert's "From the Wilderness."

Lately I have been posting a lot of short, self-explanatory videos. While I will continue to post clips I find very important here, I have set up a basic YouTube channel so I can go crazy posting clips and not clutter up my site.

In the process of setting up this channel with the clips I have posted on this site, I was surprised to see how many of the videos on my site have been pulled or disappeared because of "terms of use violations" and "user has removed this video."

Check me out on YouTube and enjoy this amusing shoe-news montage. I wish Keith would talk about the horrible injuries Muntader al-Zaidi suffered under custody.