Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 30

500 Days To European Elections, Pirates Needed More By The Day

Pirate Parties: Today, on January 23, it is exactly 500 days to June 8, 2014, when the next European Elections are held. Pirates entered Parliament on June 7, 2009, and have since saved Europe from “three-strikes”, ACTA, and many other examples of encroachment on civil liberties. But things are still overall going very much the wrong way – we need to fire more politicians over disregard for civil liberties to drive the message home.

Things are going to hell in a handbasket, and fast. I’ve written before that I consider the Pirate Party movement to be the last line of defense against a very ugly society – just yesterday, there was another example, that I choose to illustrate the overall trend: European politicians want the right to fire uncomfortable reporters.

A society where such a report can be published by the political power, and even taken seriously, is a society where civil liberties are endangered and verging on extinct – even if the report doesn’t become law. Even if it doesn’t become law this time around.

There are more things in the pipeline, which we must prepare for – preferably by boosting the pirate forces in Brussels. You have the various spinoffs on ACTA, everything from CETA to TPP (even if Europe is not an initial party to the latter) where the monopolistic powers will just go with “more and harder violence, but less vaseline” until things snap. Politicians mostly don’t even try to defend copyright and patent monopolies by claiming they fulfill their stated purpose of encouraging creativity/innovation – having the monopolies and enforcing them is about jobs. Pure protectionism by means of monopolization, at the expense of civil liberties and freedoms of speech and expression.

Speaking of freedoms of speech, the report mentioned above spoke of “removal of journalistic status” as a punishment for people who printed bad stories about the politicians. You will note that there is no such thing as journalistic status today; anybody can publish anything, and this is a good thing. To be able to remove freedom of speech, the European Union must first create a mechanism that grants freedom of speech – and one that does so conditionally.

That language tells us a lot about what is happening right now.

That is not tolerable, not any bit of it.

But we can send them a message. We can do this, we can do this together. We know that it works. We have done the proofs of concept. We know that we can get elected and change the world for the better.

For it is direly needed, it has never been more needed, and it keeps getting more needed by the day.

The polling stations open at oh-eight hundred on June 8, 2014. That’s exactly 500 days from now, and the clock is ticking.

[image error]

Paywall By Force: Swedish Public Television Starts Webcasting, Demands TV License Fees From All Computer Owners

Infopolicy: Swedish Public Television will start demanding license fees from every Swedish person connected to the Internet. They claim that since people on the net have the ability to see their webcasts, that counts as a television set. This is a technophobic overreach that will call the existence of public service TV as such into question.

In most states in Europe, there are governmentally-run television channels that are funded by license fees on television sets. The British BBC would probably be the most well-known example worldwide. It works like this: if you own a television set, you pay the public service channels a fee every month or year, and this money goes to produce independent, noncommercial programming. For the UK, the fee for owning a TV set is about €150 per year that goes to the BBC.

Thus, the funding of the public television channels is funded by the theoretical ability to receive them, whether you actually watch them or not. This has been under fire for some time, but has general acceptance, mostly because of lack of an alternative.

Now, as the Swedish Public Television SVT starts webcasting, they have decided to take this to a whole new level by reading the law text that says that they can collect fees from anybody with a theoretical capability to watch their programming, and demand fees from everybody connected to the Internet – all computer owners, as well as owners of pads and tablets. How’s that for a paywall?

There’s a significant amount of craniorectal interaction in this re-interpretation of the law. The television set is a one-purpose device – it can receive television programming, and that’s it. The general-purpose device is just that – a general-purpose device. It can be instructed to receive, process, store, distribute, and display any type of information. While it lies in its nature that it can receive and display any type of TV programming available to it, that doesn’t make it primarily intended to do so. A television set, by contrast, can do little else.

While the SVT’s interpretation of the law would subject people worldwide to their desire for funding, the laws enabling them to collect TV license fees are only in force up until the Swedish borders, so this would just apply to Swedish residents.

This is dumb greed, and just dumb, for three reasons:

First, this amounts to an innovation tax. By requiring €150 from every household that wants to have a computer, you are stifling the economy in a way that hinders innovation where it’s needed the most – on the long tail in small scale, where the successful enterprises start: never forget that Apple and Google both started in garages less than half a human lifetime ago. Allowing the public service television to externalize this friction on the overall economy is not acceptable.

Second, it’s plainly not reasonable to equate a general-purpose computer or tablet with a dumb TV. It paints the entire public service television staff as technoretards in a time when a need for independent and critical reporting is actually quite significant.

Third, public service funding has been under fire for some time, which makes it doubly important to appear reasonable and balanced. This is neither, risking the public service funding as a whole for a few extra theoretical per cent of licenses from households that have no TV set but do have broadband.

This move is bound to bring about a discussion whether we need public service television at all, and if so, what for.

For myself, I will be blocking the SVT in my firewall as of right now, making my computer incapable of receiving its programming. (I haven’t owned a TV set in 15 years.)

[image error]

In A Way I Do Sort Of Envy The US Its Patent System

Patent Monopolies – Christian Engström: I most certainly don’t envy the US its patent system as such, but as a European politician, I am concerned that the US seems to be ahead of us on the road towards a patent system collapse. The region that first abolishes the patent system will get a global first mover advantage.

The quite serious blog IPKat has just conducted a rather funny web poll, where one of the questions was ”Do you envy the US its patent system?”.

I most certainly don’t envy the US its patent system as such — it’s even more screwed up than the European one, which is bad as it is, and will become even worse once the European patent with unitary effect (as opposed to a Unitary Patent) becomes a reality.

But as a European politician with a responsibility for defending European interests, I am concerned that the US seems to be ahead of us on the road towards a patent system collapse.

Patents are government sponsored monopolies, and monopolies are bad for business and bad for economic growth.

The feeling I have is that the patent system in the US is so obviously absurd that more and more big companies are beginning to see it for what it really is, an obstacle to innovation and economic growth. Allegedly, Apple nowadays spends more money on patent litigation than it does on research and development. This means that the companies that are not Apple have to spend just as much to defend themselves, unless they want to get sued out of business.

The patent system in Europe is also harmful to innovation and economic growth, but the US is ahead on the collapse curve. From a regionalistic (or whatever you call it, since the EU is not a nation) perspective, this is a concern.

The region that first abolishes the patent system will get a global first mover advantage. Low levels of patent monopolies are associated with high levels of growth. This has been demonstrated again and again in history, and can be seen by comparing different regions in the world today. (Which has the highest level of economic growth, China or Europe or the US?)

But almost no politicians (except the Pirate Party) see it this way, so it is unfortunately very unlikely that the leadership required will come from the political sphere.

My guess is that the patent system in both the US and Europe will be dismantled in my lifetime (I’m 52). But if and when that happens, it will not be thanks to political leadership, but simply because the big companies that actually produce things will get fed up with spending more and more on defending themselves against ever more aggressive patent trolls.

And when it comes to patent trolls, the US, thanks to its patent system, is ahead of Europe.

More about patent trolls in The Register: Patent trolling surges, but righteous cavalry on the way

This article was originally published at Christian Engström’s blog.

[image error]

Of Course Kids Can Code. I Did.

Reflections: There’s a highly-rated comment on Reddit right now describing how third-graders can’t write real program code. That’s horrendously wrong, not to say condescending. I know for a fact that third-graders can code: by third grade, I was writing self-modifying 6502 Assembler code.

I’m tired of seeing grown-up people claiming kids can’t do this and can’t do that. Most of the time, it’s hogwash. Every time I’ve put a young person to the test, they have aced. I’ve put 17-year-olds on national television to explain complex policies, and they shine.

But when it comes to coding, and a claim that 3rd-graders can’t write real, executable code, I just get plain angry. I coded by 3rd grade. Don’t tell me the coding tools haven’t improved in the 30 years since then.

By first grade, I was typing program listings off of magazines. This was not just before the Internet, it was before any kind of digital communication, and most computer programs were so short you could fit their entire listing in a few pages. Therefore, people did just that. A lot of them were games – running in text mode, of course: there was very little graphics to speak of. This is when I started learning ASCII codes: CHR$(42) was an asterisk, and 60-61-62 was the sequence of “”. That was used for a very primitive Space Invaders clone called Tank vs Ufo in text mode.

Of course, like any curious kid, I changed things here and there in the listings to understand what effect my changes had. That’s how I learned to code in BASIC.

By third grade, I was writing self-modifying Assembler code. The 8-bit computers of the day weren’t very helpful in accomplishing the most basic of tasks. To clear the screen, you had to create a loop that wrote spaces to the entire screen memory, but a loop could only index 256 bytes (8-bit code, remember?) and the screen was larger than that. Therefore, you had to change the executing code’s index base to move it forward 256 bytes and re-run the loop as part of the execution itself, until you had rewritten the entire screen buffer with spaces.

So the self-modifying Assembler wasn’t so much a cool hack, as it was the way you had to write to make something remotely interesting happen.

I never fell in love with Assembler, though. It just took me much too long to get anything useful done.

By fourth grade, I was coming up with sorting algorithms. I needed to sort a large set of strings for a school assignment, and didn’t want to do it by hand, so I wrote code to do it for me. I still remember my thinking: you’d first find the element to go at the top of the finished list, and put it there, then find the element to go second in the finished list, put it there, and so on. To find the element you wanted, you’d iterate over the list backwards, swapping places for two elements if they were out of order. That way, on the first iteration, the first element was guaranteed to come all the way to the top, no matter where it had initially been, and so on for the following iterations. I remember realizing that I could limit the subsequent iterations to not cover the part of the list that was already sorted (as in, it was unnecessary to re-check the first already-sorted element on the second and onward traversals).

I learned much later that this method is called Bubble Sort. I came up with it in fourth grade. It worked well for a small set (but, as I would later teach at University, it sucked for any practical application).

By fifth grade, I had written my first database. We were copying a lot of games between one another, and this was done using 5¼” floppy disks in the early and mid-1980s before BBSes became popular – essentially the equivalent of bringing a USB stick to a friend to copy some stuff, except the disks could only hold 170 kilobytes each (yes, that’s kilo-bytes). You’d have first dozens, then hundreds of the disks, and I grew tired of not knowing which game was where, so I wrote a database that would scan a disk, ask you for which files were what, and catalog it. It was called Game Library in all simplicity, and I compressed it using a (pirated) BASIC compiler and shared with some of my friends who found it useful.

Later that year, a person I know who would go on to become one of the major investors in Spotify came up to me and asked “Rick, did you write this?”. I had no idea how he had gotten a copy of my Game Library, but felt happy and proud that people had shared my tool in paths unknown to me so he had received it.

By seventh grade, I had fallen in love with C on the IBM compatibles. I absolutely loved the concept that a pointer was an array was a pointer, and happily declared a far char pointer to be 0xB8000000, and named it “screen”, and went on to treat the entire video buffer as an array. (Remember “far” pointers on the 16-bit architectures?) I was having the time of my life playing with multiple video buffers that were swapped in and out on vertical retrace.

We were a bunch of guys in school who were playing around with the school’s computers when they weren’t being used, coding stuff like this for fun, and we were all at about the same skill set. My coding was far from an isolated phenomenon, as the “kids can’t code” would imply. Having fun while coding was a group activity.

By eighth grade, I was doing some more advanced memory stuff. To help me learn English and French in school, I had written some language aids that – just for kicks – held the translations sorted in both languages at the same time, using two sets of doubly-linked lists for the set of words I should learn to translate. One set was the origin language, the other set was the destination language, so from any word, you could step up or down in the alphabet of either language.

By ninth grade, I was projecting 3-D graphics and rotating coordinate systems. This was quite past the addiction of Elite but I still wanted to recreate that kind of graphics. On seeing one day how eight corner markers were moving on the screen in the pattern I had tried to achieve, I recall calling one of my friends in class and almost shouting in joy “Maria, the cube is rotating!!” She bugs me to this day about that being one of the most confusing phonecalls she had taken to date.

By tenth grade, I expanded that to four dimensions. Just for kicks, I wanted to visualize a hypercube, and came to understand its geometry by rotating it in the four, three, and two dimensions.

In doing 3-D graphics, I had also learned to not draw surfaces that were facing away from the viewer, by computing the surface normal and comparing it to the vector towards the viewer – the angle between them had to be less than 90 degrees for the surface to be drawn. In this way, I was able to render any convex polygon object, and played around a bit with that, as well as sorting the objects themselves by distance (drawing farthest first).

At this age (16), I started my own firm building custom software – as did quite a few others at my school with about the same skill sets. I would go on to have my first employee at 18, after graduating from secondary school but before my Army tour.

You don’t have to ace Mensa’s entrace exam, have an IQ of 169 or whatever or get some kind of award for being one of the world’s smartest people to be able to code as a kid: I did. I coded. I loved coding. Therefore, so could any other kid that wants to code and has an interest for doing so.

Today, we have coding tools that are several orders of magnitude better than what was available 33 years ago, when I started coding at age 7. Don’t tell me kids can’t learn to code. I did, and so did my friends.

I still love coding, by the way.

[UPDATE: On a fresh re-read, and as pointed out in the comments, the referred comment doesn't really speak of what kids are capable of, but what a suitable presentation method for a general audience might be. Therefore, this article is rather a response to all the other times I've seen the claim that kids can't write real code, for the Reddit comment doesn't claim that.]

[image error]

Petition To Fire Aaron Swartz’ Prosecutor Reaches Goal

Activism: Early Tuesday morning, the petition to the U.S. Administration to fire Carmen Ortiz reached the prerequisite 25,000 signatures. Carmen Ortiz was the prosecutor that drove the prosecution against Aaron Swartz, which many mean contributed or led to his tragic suicide. The U.S. Administration, by its own rules, must now take the petition seriously and respond to it.

The United States Administration has a means for citizens to directly petition them – 25,000 citizens need to sign a petition for the administration to act on it. Acting on it doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing and complying, but it does mean that every petition that reaches this goal is taken seriously enough to respond to it – in action, words, or both.

Early Tuesday morning, a petition to fire Carmen Ortiz reached the prerequisite 25,000 signatures – as of this writing, it stands at 28,157 signatures. Carmen Ortiz was the prosecutor that led the draconian case against Aaron Swartz. The petition states that prosecutor Ortiz’ overreaching, draconian, and disproportionate prosecution is a danger to life and liberty:

A prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants regardless of their guilt is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path.

It remains to be seen whether the administration will act on the petition, but we can’t recall a previous successful petition being directly aimed at a named official in this manner, which does require a bit of afterthought.

Further, it’s arguable that if the U.S. Administration doesn’t react on what has happened and lets the actions of the prosecutor’s office go unsanctioned, it sends a strong message that might makes right. That will eventually lead to vigilante retaliation – and we’d be surprised if several branches of Anonymous haven’t already gone to town trying to dig up anything they can get on Cortiz, to strike back with any kind of skeleton previously hidden deep in closets.

Overall, there is a feeling that Aaron Swartz’ death has to mark the beginning of a change. This petition could be a ticket and an opportunity for the administration to begin such a change, if nothing else, just by firing an overreaching prosecutor. That would be a symbolic action that would still send a message, albeit a weak one, but it would go a long way for many. In contrast, a nonaction from the administration would be a signal that vigilante justice is the only remaining option, which would be unfortunate on many levels.

There is also an ongoing petition to fire assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann, also connected with the events that led to the tragic suicide of prodigy Aaron Swartz. That petition has yet to reach its goal.

[image error]

Alpha Geeks (and Pirates) Explained

Activism – Andrew "K`Tetch" Norton: For some time, there has been a misunderstanding of how to deal with Pirates, or even just getting their viewpoint. They’re seen as arrogant, hard-headed, brash, and full of wacky ideas. More interestingly, they find it hard to work together smoothly, to find a common consensus. Why is that? Ladies and Gentlemen, the answer is simple, it is ‘Alpha Geek’.

So what is an Alpha Geek?

Throughout the natural world, the existence of the ‘Alpha Male’ is well documented. This is the biggest, the strongest, and therefore generally the leader of the group or community. The establishment is simple, the dominant male, and the challenger fight. The winner becomes the Alpha.

Sometimes, the Alpha stays the alpha for a long time, and will pass it on to his children, but generally the position is obtained through physical dominance. One of the best known visual representations of this is the “Dawn of Man” section from Kubrick’s film 2001. The alpha comprehensively establishes his dominance by shattering opposition.

Yet the simplistic way of the typical ‘Alpha Male’ no longer translates into human society. Instead there are societal positions that will give the dominance, such as Mayors, and Kings. The right of conquest was superseded by the right of law, which diminished the role of the Alpha male just as the dependence on purely physical power as a requirement for survival was diminished.

Meanwhile, the geek in the community carried on, being the one people went to. Often they’d become the doctor, the scientist, or some other ‘learned position’. It’s so well known that it’s one of the most recognisable tropes in fiction out there, from boy genius through smart guy, to absentminded professor.

Yet as a society becomes more technological, tools grow in both ubiquity and power; they can offset the physical presence that is often under-developed. Now good science and technological skills are more important and can effect a greater result than being ‘big and strong’.

Thus we’ve had the rise of the geek, especially in adult life. While the captains of the football or cheerleading teams were popular in school, as a general rule they won’t be a major shaker. They may become an insurance salesman, or car dealer. Meanwhile the geek will be earning significantly more at a tech venture, or as a lawyer or doctor.

Throughout it all, they are aware of the other smart people, and sort themselves into a hierarchy. Everyone knows the ‘smartness’ of their friends, and it’s no different in the wider circle of the community. The pecking order is established through knowledge and intellectual sparring, rather than bashing hands and heads together. Places are known, and all is happy.

Thus the Alpha Geek is established.

The Alpha Geeks and Pirates

So we have alpha-geeks. For centuries they’ve puttered around, doing what they do, which is generally advancing society. However, in recent years, their work has been more and more regulated and controlled by governments, while their work has expanded from local projects to ones of a larger scale.

Most of this is because of the explosion of communication technology over the last 30 years. Back then, you used the postal service to talk to people overseas, cellphones were almost non-existent as a consumer good, and computers were small, hooked to the TV and could maybe manage 9 colours. All the while with less ram than than would take to hold this webpage.

Now, it’s as easy for me to keep in touch with people 100, 1000 or even 10000 miles away, as it is the person next door. And I can manipulate data at home, with an ease not even purpose-made commercial setups could have managed 15 years ago (You want me to stabilize 30 minutes of shaky video, match it to a presentation, split screen it, clean up the audio, and present it all in 720P? took an afternoon – took longer to upload it in fact. On the editing desks Comedy Central used when I worked on one of their shows, would have taken a few days)

Along the way, this tinkering has upset many established players in the business world. Technology and innovation have undermined traditional businesses, and business models (from Saddlers to CD sales).

We’re sorry. We’re trying a new thing, that’s what we do. We experiment, we tinker, if it works great, if not, oh well. That’s how civilization has worked for tens of thousands of years, in countless societies. Only in the last few hundred, have we started saying ‘no, I don’t like your progress’ and worked against it with laws and litigation.

Traditionally, that was an activity usually reserved for the religious institutions, but the government is another issue altogether. Smart people are to the point where the action of trying to influence is not working, and as geeks do, when something doesn’t work, change your approach. Since influencing those that run for office hasn’t worked, it’s time to try it themselves. They’re running for election, and calling ourselves Pirates.

Pirates and Politics

At present, politics is mostly about words. It’s about the lie most easily swallowed. The problem is that by focusing on lies, we end up with a leadership that has to perpetuate lies, to keep in power. One that creates new messes in an attempt to fix the messes caused by their last lies.

“You use words, and I’m told you it well, but words are soft and can be pummeled into different meanings by a skilled tongue. Numbers are hard. Oh, you can cheat with them but you cannot change their nature. Three is three. You cannot persuade it to be four, even it you give it a great big kiss” – Marvolo Bent in Pratchett’s “Making Money”

Pirates are different. We’re fact (or ‘numbers’ according to Mr Bent) based . We may not have the ‘skilled tongue’, but we have the skills for the job instead. Or, to put it another way:

Traditional politicians have to skills to GET the job but are typically terrible at it
Pirates have the skills to DO the job, but are typically terrible at getting the job.

Why is that? Well, people think they’re arrogant, or condescending, that they don’t connect with regular people, and they have some sort of elitism, or they’re going to do something ‘evil scientisty’.

The first two are fairly understandable, and are reflective of how different brains think. My wife thinks I’m condescending when she’s struggling with algebra, or calculus, but the problem is, I see the problem, I see the answer. I can’t explain it, it’s just ‘obvious’, but what’s obvious to me, is arrogant or condescending to those who can’t follow it. It’s like trying to explain ‘blue’ to someone who has always been blind.

This can make them hard for people to connect to.

Elitism is a problem too. We don’t have enough of it. We’re talking about leadership positions in society, the ability to regulate and pass laws affecting everyone. Isn’t it maybe a good idea to put the best people in those positions? If you do feel that the ‘common man’ might be a better idea, then let’s go back to Sortition, and have our lawmakers selected by random lottery; Plenty of ‘common man’ thinking then.

“Evil scientist” things is much in the same vein, and like the first, is an appeal to emotions (generally personal insecurity and inferiority). In reality, these are ploys that are pandering to stereotypes, but they’re acceptable stereotypes to the general populace. However, point out that your existing lawmaker is a liar, or that they just plain can’t be trusted (even/especially by their wives) and people will go ‘yeah, so what’.

So…?

So now the next thing Alpha-Geeks are working on, are the nuances of political communication. Like all other subjects, they’re generally approaching it from an empirical standpoint. Trial and error, observe, and re-test. There may be – no, will be – failures of what is said and done. That can come across, again, as condescending, or arrogant (funnily enough, that was how the early draft of this piece was described).

Yes, they could copy the old way of doing things, and be done with it too, but that’s not the way to progress. If the ‘current’ was enough, we’d still be in the stone age. It’s only by trying new things that we move on. DaVinci was a great inventor and designed flying (and everything else) machines a-plenty. They didn’t work, but they didn’t stop him trying, and finally, the Wright brothers succeeded. Nor did we stop there. New and different designs were constantly tried. Some worked, some didn’t and some were a disaster, but it’s dealing with failure, and moving on that’s important.

That’s where pirates are at now. Trying new things, because the old just don’t seem to work that well, and because there must be a way to make it better. Again, look at the rapid progress in any number of areas. Compare the 1600 to 1800 and you’ll find little difference; from Shakespeare to Washington. there were minor differences, as experimentation was made, but no radical change. Even 40 years ago, television in colour was a new thing, now we have High-definition sets 2cm thick, with 3D and internet capabilities, and ultra-high resolution ones just announced. But not everything succeeds, even in the TV market – Prestel, teletext, laserdiscs, Betamax were all successful (as in they worked) products, that failed.

So yes, Alpha Geeks (and Pirates) will make some mistakes, and it will take time, and there will be some failures. But the failures tend not to matter too much in comparison to the end product. When we think of Edison, we don’t remember the barn arson, or the train fire, or the near poisoning of his friend Michael Oats; it’s the electric light.

But if that won’t satisfy you, I can but suggest that you follow the advice of Shakespeare, in the form of Puck.

“If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend:

if you pardon, we will mend:

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck

Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,

We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call;

So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.”

[image error]

Deyr Fé, Deyia Frændur

Personal: When faced with emotions I can’t really handle, I tend to go to the old Viking verses to read that some things are timeless. It helps me to understand that people a thousand years ago felt exactly what I am feeling today.

In light of the recent events, I choose this verse from the Icelandic Hávamál, a verse roughly a thousand years old. It is written in ancient Viking, but I can read it fairly well as if it were modern-day Scandinavian:

Deyr fé, deyia frændur,

deyr sjálfur ið sama.

Eg veit einn

að aldrei deyr:

dómur um dauðan hvern.

Translated into modern-day English, it would go something like this:

Animals die, friends die,

you’ll die yourself some day.

I know but one thing

that never dies:

the memory of a good friend.

Sleep tight, Aaron.

(See also Travis McCrea’s article You have friends.)

[image error]

You Have Friends

Personal – Travis McCrea: This is not infopolicy related, so if you are only here for political stuff, I am sure your regularly scheduled programming will return soon. Today I learned that Aaron Swartz, American progressive political activist and EFF supporter and one of the guys who helped Lessig create Creative Commons, committed suicide yesterday, after (apparently) battling depression.

It is too common amongst our circles that this happens. Lonely and depressed people frequently find solace in technology, and furthermore other people get wrapped up into technology and forget a real world with real people who love them exist. People within our pirate circles have the additional uphill battle of knowing so many abuses that happen in the world and many times we feel powerless to change them. It can feel like nothing you do really matters.

Depression isn’t something to be ashamed of, and it’s nothing you should hide. It’s a medical condition, and it physically affects how you think. You wouldn’t hide having a broken leg, so why be ashamed of having depression? While I don’t hide it, most people don’t know that I, myself, suffer from depression (and sometimes it is very severe). I don’t work through it on my own, I have friends who I talk to. I even have an IRC channel that I frequent full of other people who are also depressed (which is a lot less depressing than it sounds).

I don’t expect you to come out and tell the world that you are depressed, depression is very personal. You need to talk to someone about it, though. Your friends are there for you, and no true friend is going to treat you different because you asked for help, it may even make them more comfortable confronting their own depression. You can talk to me, my email and phone number are public if you need someone to talk to call me 24/7. I know that my toughest time is around 3AM, when there is no one around to distract me and I feel alone. You are not alone. If it’s 3AM and you are in a dark place, or even if you just feel lonely… there is no bad reason to talk.

I feel too often people are afraid to call crisis lines or to talk to their friends because they feel that those are there for when you are about to do something really stupid… but in reality, we are here for you all the time. You don’t need to feel bad calling a crisis line because you just feel lonely, you are not less important than anyone else. (Though, full disclosure, I have never called one so I don’t know how effective their workers are).

TL;DR – You are not alone, if you ever need anything at any time you can call me 24/7, depression isn’t anything to be ashamed of.

Also, thanks to my close friend that I talk to about depression — I have found that watching this video always makes me less focused on bad things:

Update:

public.resource.org has gone dark in memory of Aaron

tuebl.ca has gone dark as well

[image error]

Death Twitches: Nokia Caught Wiretapping Encrypted Traffic From Its Handsets

Privacy: Nokia, the cellphone manufacturer, has been listening in to all encrypted communications from its handset’s browser. Every connection advertised as secure – banking, social networks, dating, corporate secrets – has been covertly wiretapped by Nokia themselves and decrypted for analysis.

Security researcher Gaurang Pandya posted an article on January 5 about some unexpected behavior with their Nokia handset. It would appear that the browser traffic from the handset would get diverted through Nokia’s servers.

Then, a followup article on January 9 dropped the bomb, and the article goes into quite technical detail: It wasn’t enough that Nokia diverted all traffic from its handsets through its own servers, it also decrypted the encrypted traffic, re-encrypting it before passing it on, issuing HTTPS certificates on the fly that the Nokia phone has been instructed to trust as secure.

This means that Nokia has deliberately been wiretapping all traffic that has been advertised as encrypted on these Nokia handsets – including but not limited to banking, dating, credit card numbers, and corporate secrets – and looking at your secrets in cleartext.

This means that Nokia puts itself between your bank and you, and presents itself as YourBank, Inc. to your phone. This wouldn’t normally be possible, if it weren’t for the fact that the phone had been specifically designed for this deceptive behavior, by installing a Nokia signing certificate on the phone.

Nokia has confirmed this behavior in correspondence with TechWeek Europe (my highlights):

“The compression that occurs within the Nokia Xpress Browser means that users can get faster web browsing and more value [...blahblah...] when temporary decryption of HTTPS connections is required on our proxy servers, to transform and deliver users’ content, it is done in a secure manner”, a Nokia spokesperson told TechWeek Europe.

The issue affects at least the Nokia handsets with Nokia’s own browser, the Nokia Xpress Browser mentioned above.

So why is this a big deal?

It is a big deal because banks rely on having a secure connection all the way to you. As do corporate networks. As do news outlets’ protection of sources. Anybody listening in to the conversation in the middle breaks the whole concept of secrecy – and the phone was specifically designed by Nokia to allow Nokia to listen in without telling you.

My, my. Secure connections are presenting themselves as secure end-to-end, and a handset manufacturer breaches this most basic of trusts? We’d have a very hard time trusting a company that says “yes, we’re listening to all of your encrypted communications, yes, bank passwords and dating habits and all of it, but we’re not doing anything bad with it. No, really.”

If Nokia was in trouble over its handset sales already, this complete breach of trustworthiness has to be a death twitch.

UPDATE 1: [obsolete with Update 2]

UPDATE 2: Well, that was fast. Pandya has updated his original article where he discovered this so-called Man-in-the-Middle attack, stating that Nokia has pushed out a new version of their browser which removes the Man-in-the-Middle attack – the wiretapping of encrypted communications – from the browser’s behavior. Apparently, it took being caught with the hand in the cookie jar to stop this behavior in just hours.

You still have to remind yourself, though – if they can turn this wiretapping off with a simple browser update after having been discovered doing it, there’s not much stopping Nokia from turning it on just as silently again at some point in the future, is there?

[image error]

Why The Copyright Monopoly Is Quite Unlike Legitimate Restrictions Of Property Rights

Copyright Monopoly: In our series about defenses of the copyright monopoly, and why they don’t hold water on scrutiny, today’s article will be about the argument of the copyright monopoly being no different from other restrictions on property rights. Some people would claim that the copyright monopoly is just as legitimate as regulations of land property. This is a false assertion; the copyright monopoly is only legitimate from protectionist or corporativist ideologies.

We’ve outlined in many articles how the copyright monopoly stands in opposition to property rights, being a governmentally-granted private monopoly. We’ve looked at common objections to this observation from those who would attempt to defend the copyright monopoly as legitimate, and how such attempts all fail when confronted with basic facts about the monopoly.

Today, we’ll address a harder point: some people will readily admit that the copyright monopoly is a restriction of property rights, but that it’s no different from other restrictions of property rights, and therefore, they argue it is just as legitimate as the ban against polluting the soil on your land with radioactive waste, or similar regulations that also restrict property rights.

(Some people would be less eloquent and pick worse examples, sometimes much worse – for example, they would point at how you can’t use a hammer to kill a person. That’s most certainly not a restriction of your property rights to hammers, that’s a ban on murdering people.)

In the end, this is all about legitimacy: the legitimacy of the copyright monopoly and its restrictions to our property rights to the copies we manufacture with our own parts and labor and therefore own. Still, on the surface, the claim that the copyright monopoly is like any other restriction on property rights would appear correct. To understand why the argument is false, and doesn’t lend legitimacy to the copyright monopoly, we have to go a bit into philosophy to understand the nature of property rights, and where they come from.

Before we had states with a police that upheld the state’s laws using force, there was still the notion of property. Essentially, you could call that “your property” which you had the means to defend by yourself. This can be easily observed in the animal kingdom, too. Such property fell into three categories: loose objects, territory, and other lifeforms.

We can easily observe in nature how lifeforms behave by these proto-property laws. You will have no problem finding an animal which clearly displays that its considers an object, a territory, or another lifeform their property.

Then, with the construction of states and laws, this became partly institutionalized. You no longer needed to defend all of your property by yourself; the state would defend it for you, but only as long as you complied with the state’s rules. Alas, you would sometimes disagree with the state as to which was your property, and you would be on the losing end of that discussion, so there was a simultaneous loss to the property rights that had been. (We can observe this in taxation, for instance.)

Further, with the invention of the state and the superior firepower resting with it, the rights to own other lifeforms started to gradually disappear, and a new form of property right was conceived: the property right to one’s own body (meaning that no other person could also own it). Thus, gradually, even people born with the wrong set or color of body parts became unownable.

(We can still observe remnants from when women were property in the Christian marriage ritual, where the woman is handed over from her father to her husband: from owner to owner, in what was primarily a property transaction. This is not a ritual we should be proud of, and there’s nothing beautiful about that part of the ritual.)

So we’re arriving at a point where the existence of the state is a precondition for uniform restrictions to property rights, even though restrictions to property rights have existed before, mainly through nonuniform application of force between the citizens themselves. But what about the copyright monopoly, then? Unlike property rights, it cannot exist without the state, for it grants the right to restrict everybody’s property rights to private interests, rather than maintaining it as a function of government.

This is a key difference.

It is quite uncontested that the elected legislature has the right to restrict property rights. I’m not allowed to pour toxic sludge into the groundwater on my own property, for example. It’s also reasonably uncontested that such an elected legislature has the right to delegate a mandate to un-restrict property rights to the executive branch – as long as the default is restricted for everybody, the legislature can delegate the duty of granting exceptions to some authority within government.

Thus, it’s not that the restrictions would apply to some private interests and not to others: property restrictions do apply nonuniformly even under a state of laws. For example, the private defense contractor Applied Nucular Research, LLC may be legally able to purchase metric tons of lithium-6-deuteride, while I may most certainly not. This would be determined by the Radiological Authority or something similarly named, with a delegated mandate from the legislature.

However, when it comes to that copy of Avengers that I bought, and which is my property, it’s not the legislature or their delegate within the government that gets to determine how my property rights are restricted; it’s a private interest. (As we have seen before, my purchase of Avengers is not a contractual agreement; the copyright monopoly stands in opposition to contracting rights and property rights. It’s a pure restriction on property rights, exercised by a private interest.)

So, we’re down to the admission that the copyright monopoly is indeed a restriction of property rights, but we have determined that a key difference between the copyright monopoly and other restrictions of property rights is that the restrictions emanating from the copyright monopoly are controlled by a private interest. How does this affect the copyright monopoly’s legitimacy?

Well, that would depend on which set of eyes you use to judge that legitimacy. At this point, we need to look at which ideologies would support such a construction, and which would not.

The notion that the state can restrict property rights by elected legislature, with exceptions to those restrictions being issued by the government executive, is a well-supported notion in socialism, conservatism, liberalism, and green ideology – all of today’s major political ideals. There are some hardcore libertarians who would argue that nobody has the right to punish you for poisoning the groundwater on your own soil; other than that, this is a pretty much uniform agreement.

However, none of these ideologies support the notion of the legislature delegating the right to restrict property rights to private interests, to delegate the responsibility outside of government of controlling citizen’s property rights. That is a governmentally-sanctioned private monopoly. Such constructions are foreign and horrid to these ideologies – they are…

Foreign to socialism, as private monopolies must not exist;
Foreign to conservatism, as property rights can’t be limited by governmentally-sanctioned monopolies;
Foreign to liberalism, as trade can’t be justly limited by private competing interests;
Foreign to green ideology, for the socialism and liberalism reasons.

The only ideologies that properly defend this construction are corporativism (in its corporatocratic meaning) and protectionism:

Corporativism: Anything which is good for the currently dominant corporations is good for society, and corporate and legislative powers should ideally meld.
Protectionism: The overriding priority is to safeguard our current jobs and industries from influences and developments that threaten them. Anything else is secondary.

Thus, in conclusion,

The copyright monopoly can only be seen as legitimate from a corporativist or protectionist ideology. For socialist, liberal, conservative, or green ideologies, it is a hideous construction.

Therefore, the copyright monopoly is quite unlike other forms of restrictions on property rights, as such restrictions find support in all major political ideologies, which the copyright monopoly doesn’t.

[image error]