Watching them watching us

OK, I‘m back now. Lots to catch up on. That was very annoying.

As predicted, here’s some citizen based pushback against the governmental monopoly on collaborative information gathering. GIA (Government Information Awareness).

The premise of GIA is that individual citizens have the right to know details about government, while government has the power to know details about citizens. Our goal is develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency; gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government.

This image is from their sidebar and sums it up well:

They’ve thought this through to the point of having anonymous identities - required for anonymous sources to become trustable.

The system will accommodate information of almost any type, allowing users to sort through volumes of information which would otherwise be unusable. More importantly, the system allows for people to submit any information, while retaining anonymity, but while also being identified as a consistent source.

The Boston Globe have a good write-up.

As hosting these databases becomes standardised and affordable, forking will become possible. The possibility of a fork will provide similar benefits to the ones it brings to the development of Open Source. Focused but consensual management.

One benefit our - now excessively retrictive - copyright regime may bring us is the early realisation of the importance of publically owned and licensed data.

[/society] posted at 00:26 #

Getting used to their teachers having lives

Want to see what the society’s slide to transparency looks like on the ground?

Here’s one case:

This diary clearly made the students uncomfortable. There was, for one thing, a perception that she was writing about them (though I didn’t see it), but also a general discomfort with the idea of a teacher frankly discussing her sex life (which I also missed, apparently… I’m not sure the students and I visited the same link, now that you mention it). Or is it just the familiar student awkwardness at accepting teachers as human beings? How did that feel at 18? It’s hard for me to get a sense of that, because my parents were (are) teachers most of my life, and I’ve always thought of teachers as having lives outside the classroom.

[/society] posted at 10:02 #

On what would have been Orwell’s 100th birthday - William Gibson writes about the coming transparent society:

As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information.

The constant elusiveness of truth:

A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what’s going on more quickly, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree about it any more readily.

How Orwell’s medicine was preventative:

Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia. I’ve seen it said that because he chose to go there, as rigorously and fearlessly as he did, we don’t have to.

It might be a good idea to get another prescription soon.

[/society] posted at 20:41 #

The Next World Order?

Bruce Sterling:

The New World Order, proclaimed in Gulf War I, died in Gulf War II. The Next World Order has means, motive, and opportunity now. Instead of the customary 20th-century hot air and phony baloney, it might turn out to be rather hands-on, tough-minded, and practical. There are good reasons to think this will happen, with or without American cooperation. The Next World Order may well look like nothing we previously were led to expect.

George Monbiot:

The UN Security Council should be scrapped, and its powers vested in a reformulated UN General Assembly. This would be democratised by means of weighted voting: nations’ votes would increase according to both the size of their populations and their positions on a global democracy index. Perhaps most importantly, the people of the world would elect representatives to a global parliament, whose purpose would be to hold the other international bodies to account.

I have also suggested some cruel and unusual means by which these proposals might be implemented. Poor nations, for example, now owe so much that they own, in effect, the world’s financial systems. The threat of a sudden collective default on their debts unless they get what they want would concentrate the minds of even the most obdurate global powers.

That kind of threat is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. International financial suicide bombers.

[/society] posted at 16:18 #

Illegal Art

Illegal Art. Suggests the possibility of eventual widespread everyman support for copyright reform.

Mickey mouse gasmask:

via Tim O’Reilly

[/society] posted at 18:09 #

Loving is not funding

I took this photo here in east Oxford last week. It is a UK government advert “Targeting benefit fraud”. Someone has pasted “Love thy neighbour?” over the top.

Pure insanity.

[/society] posted at 16:38 #

Pizza for homeless billboards

The first person to introduce this in Oxford would make a killing. There seem to be more panhandlers (per-person) here than anywhere I’ve been to. A result of the easy student pickings, no doubt.

Instead of going Dumpster-diving for maybe a half-eaten sandwich and some cold fries, Peter Schoeff, a 20-year-old homeless man, was served a slice of hot pizza dripping with cheese.

All he had to do was hold a sign for about 40 minutes that read: “Pizza Schmizza paid me to hold this sign instead of asking for money.”

Minimum wage what?

[/society] posted at 11:41 #

Iraqi Suffering

Never let anyone tell you freedom isn’t expensive. Iraqis are just starting to find out with their first boy band. This is the most incredible quote:

“We lived under dictatorship for 35 years. I’m not prepared to go through that again, and I don’t think anybody is,” said lead singer Nadeem Hamed, a 20-year-old biology student. “If people attack us for being in a band, that’s terrorism.”

It seems even non-native speakers of english have absorbed the redefinition of terrorism.

Let’s hope they can just compromise on a law forbidding the sale of music to under 16’s.

[/society] posted at 11:30 #

Bhutan’s pursuit of cathode-ray happiness

The Guardian has this piece on the social destruction apparently caused by the introduction of TV in Bhutan. I’m just going to quote the utilitarian tragedy:

“His Majesty decided that, as a spiritual society, happiness was the most important thing for us - something that had never been discussed before as a policy goal or pronounced as the responsibility of the state.” And so, in 1998, the Dragon King defined his nation’s guiding principle as Gross National Happiness.

But happiness proved to be an elusive concept. The Bhutanese wondered whether it increased with a bigger house or the number of revolutions of a prayer wheel. A delegation from the foreign ministry was sent abroad to investigate whether happiness could be measured. They finally found a Dutch professor who had made its study his life’s work and were disappointed to learn that his conclusion was that happiness equalled UKP 6,400 a year - the minimum on which one could live comfortably. It was a bald and irrelevant answer for the Bhutanese middle classes, whose average annual salary was barely UKP 1,000 and whose outlook was slightly more metaphysical.

I can image the constitution: “Life, liberty and the state standardised level of happiness”.

[/society] posted at 10:51 #

The Homeless Guy

After the thrill of finding Salam Pax blogging from Baghdad I completely forgot about The Homeless Guy blogging from a library in Tennessee.

He looks set to get an apartment soon, but it’s still an interesting preview of the kinds of conversation that will emerge as technology distributes.

[/society] posted at 11:09 #

Mobile email creating ‘Computer Refuseniks’

Phone text messaging in Japan is different to the SMS messaging offered in Europe and the US. Each user has an email address, and each message is effectively an email. One surprising (to me) outcome of that is it delays the age by which Japanese become computer proficient.

Japan Media Review labels these people ‘Computer Refuseniks’

“Five years ago, before cell phone e-mail came into such widespread use, all college students felt the need to own their own PCs,” says Hiroshi Hanamoto of the online marketing firm Promotions. “Today, students with cell phone mail can easily get by without buying their own computers. Besides, they don’t have the money.”

[/society] posted at 21:36 #

Bruce Sterling reveals his strangely binary view of the Transparent Society. I need to read his book.

[/society] posted at 01:17 #

Feudalism, capitalism and socialism

Capitalism is alive and well, living inside a greatly transformed feudalism.

What does socialism need capitalism for? Wealth.

What does capitalism need feudalism for? Security.

The chains of loyalty and honor and oath taking that was feudalism are still existant, the form has just evolved into the modern military, law enforcement, and nation-state government.

— Mark Atwood

[/society] posted at 01:15 #

G in Baghdad

Salam Pax brings news that his friend ‘G’ has just started a blog. Inside he reveals the current firearms allowance in Baghdad to be one Kalashnikov and one pistol. I wonder if the NRA would accept that kind of compromise?

The result of one day enforcing this limit in “a sweep on one of the poor neighborhoods on the south tip of Baghdad” ?

after 8 long hours.…. the Americans left, confiscating 6 antiaircraft heavy machine gun bullets form over than 40 houses.

[/society] posted at 19:20 #

Evolutionary Psychology

One man’s explorations in Evolutionary Psychology contains such gems as :

Why Pigeons Don’t Know They’re Alive

If you were designing a creature, would you give it the ability to over-ride good sensible instincts, when that creature is not intelligent enough to guess the likely outcomes of these over-rides? I think not.

Why Samurai Killed Themselves

Families, not wishing to be harmed by the actions of one rogue family member, would for the sake of their genes demand that the one erring member should kill himself rather than damage the whole family gene pool.

… the attitude to suicide amongst the general peasantry was very different. It was considered a crime. A peasant man was valued for his ability to feed his family. Whereas a noble could be confident that someone would look after his children, and that there was no danger of their starving, a peasant was not in this position. A peasant who killed himself would be significantly harming the chances of his children to grow up properly fed. The nobles relied for their income on the labours of the poor in their area, so they didn’t want their peasants killing themselves off.

Why asking her out is terrifying

Today, … a man can afford to be rejected almost all the time, so long as some women consent. This was not the world our foraging ancestors lived in. Back then, the world was sparsely populated. A man might live in a band of about twenty-five people, of whom perhaps six at most would be women of reproductive age, and most of these would be spoken for. It would be common that the man would only have frequent encounters with one or two potential mates. A wise designer of human instinct would therefore give men a fear of ‘blowing it’ with such rare and precious women. The maxim ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea’ would be even less of a comfort to a man who knows that he might not set eyes on another single woman for months.

[/society] posted at 13:32 #

Geocaching

It seems I have been failing to pay attention because today was the first I heard of Geocaching and it’s already under attack.

From geocaching.com’s faq:

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

It is deceptively easy. It’s one thing to see where an item is, it’s a totally different story to actually get there.

As for the attack:

“It’s good, clean, wholesome fun - just do it someplace else,” said Brian Adams, chief of resource protection for the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, which has banned geocaching.

As someone without a GPS I can’t really appreciate the appeal but it seems likely to have some merit. The sense of community and reciprocation is warming but probably only exists because of the high cost of entry into the geocaching world. What makes it particularly interesting is that it heralds the start of the descriptive markup of the physical world.

[/society] posted at 20:33 #

Simulations

The title: “The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You Are Living in a Matrix is Quite High” is strange as the first paragraph directly contradicts it: “The Matrix got many otherwise not-so-philosophical minds ruminating on the nature of reality. But the scenario depicted in the movie is ridiculous: human brains being kept in tanks by intelligent machines just to produce power.”

Nevertheless, this is interesting stuff.

Now we get to the core of the simulation argument. This does not purport to demonstrate that you are in a simulation. Instead, it shows that we should accept as true at least one of the following three propositions:

(1) The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small

(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours

(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation.

These arguments assume finite computational power. If you also consider the possibility of infinite computational power and infinite storage (a real stretch, I know) then simulations could be recursive. The probability of being in a simulation becomes even higher and our ‘God’ is also probably in a simulation.

Via Slashdot

[/society] posted at 11:34 #

China jails 4, tortures 1 for e-subversion

Well, the Chinese government doesn’t mess around when dealing with those evil pro-democracy subversives.

The Beijing Intermediate People’s Court sentenced geologist Jin Haike, 27, and Xu Wei, a 28-year-old journalist for Beijing’s Consumer Daily, to 10 years each in prison. Yang Zili, a 31-year-old computer engineer, and Zhang Honghai, a 29-year-old freelance writer, were each given eight years.

One of the men sentenced on Wednesday, Xu Wei, told the court he had been brutally beaten and tortured with electric shocks to his genitals, according to campaign group Human Rights in China. The former journalist had to be carried out of the court after he struck his head on the judge’s desk and was knocked unconscious, the group said.

[/society] posted at 23:09 #

Oil Corruption

An Economist article on how badly countries tend to handle mineral wealth and how accounting disclosure rules (“Publish What You Pay”) for big oil companies should help third world development.

The Publish What You Pay folks look like something quite rare. Well thought out, realistic, targetted activism.

[/society] posted at 17:33 #

Notes on (the Politics of) Eurovision

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Eurovision Song contest is worth watching at least once every few years, as long as you follow three rules:

1. Skip all the songs and only tune in for the voting.
2. Pretend the singing never even took place.
3. Ensure someone with half-decent knowledge of European geography, history and politics is present.

Most of the songs are so bad that and the public’s bias so strong that the only way to explain much of the voting is in the context of political history. This is widely discussed inside of Europe but is probably missed by those looking in.

Time have an article from last year:

This “is the continuation of European wars by peaceful means,” says Jurgen Meier-Beer of Germany, who is on the committee overseeing the show.

Gilles Renault, music critic for Liberation. “It’s more of a joke than anything else.” Britain, at least, knows to laugh. In fact, people throw parties to enjoy what Terry Wogan calls “sublime awfulness.”

There is also a more comprehensive statistical analysis:

… voting patterns tended to break down into three blocs: a Western Bloc (England, Ireland, France, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg), a Northern Bloc (the Scandinavian countries plus Germany) and a Mediterranean Bloc (Turkey, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Greece and Cyprus.) Each was far more likely to vote for countries within its bloc than for those outside it. And as a rule of thumb, the further away countries are, the less likely they are to give each other points.

If you get bored of watching it from this perspective you can also consider the possibility of bribery and which countries would care enough - about the potential positive PR - to do it.

[/society] posted at 14:18 #

Labour MP has weblog, will flame

Labour MP Tom Watson has a weblog and is using it to lay into Tory opponent Bill Cash MP, whose politically sensitive mobile phone conversation he overheard on a Monday morning train.

Cash retorts in The Mirror:

“If people are listening in to other people’s conversations - and in my view misinterpreting them - then I think that’s a very great shame.”

Which annoys Watson:

No, no, no Mr Cash you can not get away with that. You know I didn’t misinterpret anything. Continue down this road and I will have to reveal the rest of the conversations we all had to endure. In fact I might do anyway.…..

If this is anything to go by, the next election is going to be fun.

[/society] posted at 10:37 #

Social skills first developed to enable large game hunting

Meat eating as the basis of civilisation. Vegetarians declared 'Untrustworthy'.

[/society] posted at 08:55 #

What happens when the future starts to evenly distribute

Pre-natal scans look set to - in the long-term - indirectly solve India’s overpopulation and women’s rights problems.

[/society] posted at 08:43 #

Big Brother prefers WiFi

The Transparent Society gets closer. How long before those CCTV WiFi signals become hacked? How long before people realise they are better off without a state monopoly on snooping?

Calling it ‘4G’ nicely twists the knife in 3G too.

London’s City of Westminster Council is to bring 802.11b wireless networking to the streets of Soho. The scheme, dubbed the Westminster 4G project, will initially provide Wi-Fi connectivity for council operatives and remote systems.

Other applications the Council is considering include the roll-out of greater CCTV monitoring - at a fraction of the cost of current systems which have seen the Council spend around £2 million installing just 30 cameras in the West End

[/society] posted at 11:11 #

Stopping Gun Gangs in Britain

Gangs and guns are big news here in the UK after some recent high profile shootings. The argument is usually a dichotomy of “re-arm the innocents” vs “disarm everybody”, and personally I tend to side with the former.

However, this article shows a practical solution. Most of it makes sense, we’re not dealing with criminal geniuses.

It’s always worth remembering that the fuel behind the whole situation is drug prohibition, but I don’t have time to rant about that right now.

[/society] posted at 10:56 #

US traditionalism

The map included in this article is fascinating. An animated version would be awesome.

via Z+Blog

[/society] posted at 10:01 #