Oblomovka

2002-06-17»

From Peter Seeger, via Techdirt, via Bifurcated Rivets:

When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930s, he used to mail out a small mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs, On the bottom of one page appeared the following: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." W.G.

So we were talking about Gary's responses to the anti-RIP campaign on Cal's Web forums. Here's what Gary said:

Gary, 20:00 14 June 2002: Big deal! If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear. Simple. People who start big campaigns about little things like this need shooting.

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ell, 02:43 15 June 2002: Gary: Go read George Orwells' "1984", then tell us we have nothing to fear. :P

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Gary, 13:18 16 June 2002: Not read the book but I'm sure a work of fiction like that is hardly worth getting over-exited about. Big Brother is watching? Of course they are! They HAVE to. In this post-September 11th time, every avenue of attack needs to be considered and monitored INCLUDING those that people are getting over excited about - if we want to live in a safer country without fear of being attacked on the scale of what happened on September 11th we MUST be prepared to allow the Government to intercept all forms of communication and associated evidence - and then act on it if they see criminal activity. Like I say, if you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear.

Cal wondered if we were in a minority being worried about these issues. I said:

The particular form of this argument makes it smell like a troll, but there are people with this opinion around. I don't think they're in the majority though.

It's one of those areas where people will often exaggerate their own position when knocking off a one-liner, but don't actually reflect that attitude when they're living their day to day life.

In my experience, you get people saying this to strangers on Web forums, in taxi cabs, on TV vox pops, but if you actually engage with them on private e-mail, from the back seat, or after they've said it on camera, they quickly back down from their position to something more moderate.

The problem with a lot of politics is that most people see it as a specialised form of small talk: you state your opinion to get a reaction from your friends. It's like talking about football or religion - the more separated you are from the ability to do anything about the topic, the more extreme and opinionated you become. Helplessness breeds extremism.

I never know whether I'm being hopelessly optimistic (or deluded) when I say things like this. I've spent so much of my life - as have we all - subtly floating away from those who disagree with me. I spend a lot of my time wondering whether I'm wrong; whether I've become an extremist; whether the other side has a point. I don't see this as paralysis, I see it as critical thinking. It's one of the many reasons I like the Web - watching people change their minds, even if they change it from what I believe to another point of view. I bet, for instance, there are a lot more British people who believe in widespread gun ownership than there ever was before the Net introduced them to the real opinions of "those crazy gun whackos". Ultimately, I still think they're crazy gun whackos, but at least I've engaged with them.

I think I'll e-mail Gary and ask him what he thinks.

In case you were wondering: Dave Winer's in hospital.

2002-06-15»

I'm trying to not clog up the STAND blog with minutiae while we're still getting visitors looking for info on how to protest the the RIP bill extensions. But I had to put this link somewhere: it's the new website of the sinister Surveillance Commissioners: judges, jury and administrator for all RIP-style spying on the British public:

This website is primarily designed to be used by those who authorise and conduct covert surveillance operations and covert human intelligence sources (as informants and undercover officers are now known). It shows you how to carry out these activities in compliance with the powers granted by Parliament, and how the OSC monitors the exercise of those powers. By way of practical help we have identified some key points, some sources of advice, and some examples of good and bad practice.

I hope that the website will also be useful to members of the public who are interested in finding out about covert surveillance.

Sir Andrew Leggatt
Chief Surveillance Commissioner

Yeah, but how much are we allowed to find out?

2002-06-14»

In China, teen girls see hunks as dreamy, and route their way towards them:

Nonetheless, the craze blossomed here and in Beijing. "There was no way they could block [Taiwanese boy band "Flowers Four", and their TV show "Meteor Garden"] here. This is Shanghai," said Zhang Lulu, a 19-year-old devotee of the group.

She maintained that government bans cannot work in a society that also tolerates widespread pirating of compact discs and videos: "When girls like us have needs, there is nothing anyone can do to stop us."

So not only do I live in the future; I live in a Bruce Sterling future.

I really have to get myself a MacOS X box. The peer pressure of so many hackers moving over to fiddle with this platform is growing fiercer and stronger. And now I discover the ultimate in hacker cool - you can overclock the new iBooks in software. Change 600Mhz to 700Mhz with the click of an option button! 700 to 800Mhz! Either to 2GHz, thus busting your machine and your warranty! Oh, the illicit thrill of it!

2002-06-13»

I don't know what comet flew over Europe, but something's giving the cybberrights community there a new lease of life. At XCOM, we relaunched STAND to be more of a umbrella blog for all the different UK orgs (this the subject of my elliptical blog entry a fortnight ago). The same week, Caspar Bowden left FIPR, the main parliamentary lobbying group on tech issues - a real shame, but perhaps it'll lead to a refreshing shake-up in that organisation. And now, some of the cooler activist orgs in Europe - including the Chaos Computer Club, rivacy International and Denmark's Digital Rights) - have co-operated to form European Digital Rights, a pressure group working from Brussels.

The need for cooperation among European organizations is increasing as more regulation for the internet, privacy and interception is originating from the European Union. Especially since 11 September the pace in which civil rights threatening regulation has been passed demands unified action from civil rights defenders. Some examples of regulations and developments that have the attention of European Digital Rights are data retention requirements, telecommunications interception, the cyber-crime treaty, initiatives for rating and filtering of internet content, notice and takedown procedures of websites and fair use restrictions.

2002-06-10»

Woah. I'm still a little in shock over XCOM. If you can measure success by numbers, we did extraordinarily well - over 1000 people turned up. There were queues outside before eleven, and they had to stop people from coming in for a while in the afternoon.

I've been wanting to be a part of something like this ever since I dragged Lee Felsenstein for lunch years ago, and talked with him about putting together all the different tribes of geekdom. It was a little unsettling seeing it take off so close to my face, though.

At the end, Dave and I did one of our standard schticks we've done at previous NTK Live shows. It felt very different. Those older shows were pretty clearly meetings for fans of NTK - and this was something much much bigger. Who were these people banging on about an ASCII e-mail when there were giant BBC Microcomputer art-robot video installations machines ridden by WiFi-wielding teenagers dressed in clothes they'd made themselves out of origamid loyalty cards to talk to? Even Dave, who (with the excellent mute posse), pretty much single-handedly organised much of the show, seemed a bit dwarfed by the magnitude of what he'd done. It was all about five times bigger, and ten times weirder than I'd ever imagined it to be.

And of course the irony is that I was rushing around so much, I didn't actually see much of it. If want to know what it was like, check out the coverage by Cory and Tom Coates and Neil McIntosh. There are some photos too!