Oblomovka

2002-12-19»

As you may have spotted, I’m college-educated, and English-speaking. I’m also currently in the midst of converting my position here in the US to the status of permanent resident. There’s no real hurry – I’m on a journalist visa at the moment which is valid for five years and is renewable; it’s just that now I’m having my child in this country, I’d like to make my stay here as secure as possible.

When I say, “in the midst of”, let me tell you what that involves. I’m on my third attempt to have the documentation even processed. Twice it’s been sent back because of a filing error on my part. This is not surprising: the documentation needed to even apply for permanent residency is so vast, and so often changed, that even with the best explanations in the world, there are dozens of ambiguities. And the explanations are not the best in the world. INS requirements differ from office to office: official Website explanations contradict one another. This is hard. Here’s the first step in my application process:

Included in that wodge are a couple of detailed notarised documents from friends, tax returns, about eight photographs (in several differing but precise sizes, not shown), and a partridge in a pear tree. And remember, there are interviews and cross-checks with the CIA, FBI and the American consulate before this finally gets through to the point where I can have an interview. And after the interview, I will have to notify the government every time I move house – or any time my friends move house, or I’m in violation.

I can honestly say it’s been the most inpenetrably complex bureacratic procedure I have been involved with in my life. If my livelihood and my residency in this country depended on it, I’d be terrified.

As I say, I’m lucky. For me, it’s just a way of securing my status. My immigration attorney says my case is “relatively straightforward”. I’m on a long-term visa here already. I can speak English. They’ve recently changed the rules in San Jose to allow me to file by post, so I no longer have to pitch a tent outside the INS offices here and wait in a queue from 1 in the morning until they open at 8.00 (think I’m joking? Go check the temporary encampment that emerges every night. There’s a video clip of it here.

But most of all, right now, I’m lucky because I’m not from an Arab country. Because the simple form-filling errors that I’ve made in the past – me, English-speaking, college-educated, was-studying-to-be-a-lawyer-at-school – would have got me handcuffed, arrested and thrown in jail this week.

Estimates by immigration lawyers suggest that a quarter of the people in LA who traipsed off to the INS to take part in yet another bureacratic hoop-jump were taken away to prison Tuesday. I wonder what the other three-quarters think? If you come from Iran, or you come from Syria, Iraq or the Sudan you know what to do in this situation. Don’t ever come forward when the government calls your name again. Hide. Because in those countries, such sudden, unexpected, disproportionate and ethnic-group specific roundups (of just the men, by the way, not the women) by government are usually a prelude to something very nasty. Of course, as they say, that couldn’t possibly happen here. But they don’t know that, do they? They’re not English-speaking, college-educated, white, and safe in their homes like me, are they?

Anyway, I’m buying myself a Christmas present. I’m joining the ACLU. It only costs $20, which is certainly less than the $600 or so my immigration application costs. There’s only one form to fill in – and I can do it online. And nobody is going to round me up and throw me in jail because I decided to come forward and hand in this paperwork. Or at least, that’s the general idea.

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2002-12-17»

Here, I think, is the key quote, from the jury foreman, Dennis Strader:

The defense argued that the program merely enabled owners of Adobe eBook Reader software to make copies of e-books for personal use. If an owner makes a backup copy of an e-book or transfers it to another device he owns, they argued, that is permitted under the “fair use” concept of copyright law.

Jury foreman Dennis Strader said the argument made a big impact on the jurors, who asked U.S. District Judge Ronald M. Whyte to clarify the “fair use” definition shortly after deliberations began.

“Under the eBook formats, you have no rights at all, and the jury had trouble with that concept,” said Strader.

(From the Associated Press story)

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The excellent Creative Commons animation I mentioned is right here. It’s brilliant. But what license is it? I’m worried that Junell’s Web server will get killed by too many people linking to it, and I’d like to co-host it here. Hmmm…

Okay, I’ve watched it right through to the end, and it looks like it’s under an attribution, sharealike, non-commercial license. So I can mirror the movie with a clear conscience! Excellent. This really works!

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2002-12-16»

I got to the Creative Commons launch late (Q and I had to apply CPR to a dead server in Portland), and had to stand near the back, near the avocado dip. My summary of the speeches, therefore, has to be “Mumble mumble mumble (LOUD CRUNCHING NOISES OF MY OWN MOUTH) (APPLAUSE)”. Some elements I gathered through the static: Lessig, to follow up on his triumph of getting Milton Friedman and Ursula Le Guin to join forces in Eldred, got video pledges of support from John Perry “Intellectual Property is an Oxymoron” Barlow and Jack “I 0wnz0r Y0ur C0mm0nw3al” Valenti. Together – AT LAST. DJ Spooky spoke, then played something Quinn described as “19th Century Koyaanisqatsi” and therefore I liked. It is under the MUMBLE MUMBLE CRUNCH license. Aaron Swartz managed to explain RDF well, even as his presentation AV morphed behind him into /dev/random piping into video memory. The Creative Commons team also showed a fantastic Flash movie that explains the whole concept far better than any echo-mumbling I could muster. I can’t find it on the site, but oooohhh when I do, it is so getting redistributed. The brie was nice.

Our replacement Roomba (the previous one died in protest of our lifestyle) arrived. We’re looking for someone else in the area to play Two Robot Vacuum Cleaners Enter, One Robot Vacuum Cleaner Leaves. This is where two Roombas are placed back-to-back in the middle of a room, and set running. First to escape through the one open door wins. Also, when we’re drunker, we’re tying pens to them and making automatic art on the kitchen floor.

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Matt‘s amazing warchalking meme makes it into New York Times Idea of the Year list (I am so proud I got to be the first to rub my hands in glee). It’s a great list, incidentally – as it would have to be, with “Pokemon Hegemon” as one of the headings.

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2002-12-14»

One more thing I’m going to have problems explaining to my daughter: what “cc:” stands for.

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2002-12-13»

Hmmm. Some buzz going about Ronald Rivest’s new startup, a cryptographically secure micropayment protcol. My spider-sense is tingling about online payment systems in 2003. Oh, boy, another opportunity to look stupid in twelve month’s time. Scott Loftesness is a good news-aggregating blogger on this topic and quite a few others.

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2002-12-12»

So, last week’s ST column was about RSI (I’m slowly crippling myself with mouse shoulder, so I’m trying to stop doing Bad Things). Gary Marshall wrote a very kind mail listing all the trick he’s been doing to fend it off. I said that it’d be great if he through it up on the Web, and he did, so I’m linking to it: Gary Marshall’s Guide to RSI.

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Great short piece from the New Yorker wondering what Philip K. Dick would make of the Total Awareness Office. I came because the title of the piece – Too Much Information – which is fun. I blogged because of the fantastic payoff in the last paragraph. Sometimes you suspect people write whole columns just to be able to finish them on flourishes like that. Or, as in this case, you just know they did.

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Small tweak to the bookmarklet below – I’ve stuck in an escape function call to cope with news URLs with GET parameters. The bookmarklet will still have problems with URLs that willfully stick in user information into the URL (like MSNBC), but it’ll do much better with quite a few others.

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