Free Societies Need Bad Security.

Effective security would have made Wikileaks, the Pentagon Papers, exposing Watergate, Iran-Contra, Abu-Gharib, and Teapot Dome impossible.

Imagine: A library replaced by a device which bricks if someone stops paying the monthly extortion fee. Owning of content is replaced with access to specific content on specific devices by specific people within a specific time. Archeological digs are futile. Correspondences of important people, those that are critical to the understanding of great thinkers, are totally opaque or destroyed forever.

General purpose computing no longer happens since all devices are locked down and not reprogrammable. Hobbyist computing and electronics is a historical footnote, only available on exorbitantly expensive authorized programmer machines where continual royalties are paid for nearly every action, automatically.

Your internet access device is something provably incapable of any kind of cryptography that will elude authorities with private keys burned in by the manufacturer gifting copies to those of power.

Machinery will oversee strict adherence to any power that wants to dictate how you live your life. Forget about things like drug experimentation, political dissent, unauthorized research or even speeding on the interstate at 3AM. Pop art like dj-remixing or what Andy Warhol did are either prohibitively expensive or legally (and therefore physically) impossible.

Commercial enterprises, as effective as predictable and irrelevant as integral, install proverbial blinders so consumers stare at the carrot on a string in front of them the entire day. They live in a powerless and ineffective fantasy world that convinces them of the opposite; creating the same art and have same ideas as every generation before without any access to those ideas.

After all, Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech" or the works of Camus, Orwell, and Huxley, are private property with perpetually extending sunsets of protection. In an effective security system, these pieces of private property can be removed and regulated to exist only under certain terms. It will be wonderful.

A world of effective security will only solidify and perpetuate the currently malleable power structures of society just like the development of giant weapons of the 20th century have brought on new eras of statehood longevity and oppression, irrelevance and absolutism, indifference and imminent destruction.

Ineffective security, which we currently have; permits the annals of power to be porous and vulnerable; where the light-footed innovator can expose corruption or redefine the world in new disruptive ways. It permits the curious to gain easy access to private property (such as a copy of Catch-22) regardless of the intentions of the property holder.  It permits for the free exchange of information because the gatekeepers locks currently do not work.

Being able to have introspective analysis into the machines of implementations permit new ideas to blossom, progressing society regardless of the confines of the socioeconomic order. Effective security will shackle this process by those confines, not liberate one from it.

That's the problem. It is important for things to be broken. It is absolutely critical to the organic nature of the process of innovation.

comment on reddit or HN.

The Transcendance of Empathy

Does this offend you?

Awesome. Just don't shoot the messenger. Here's what that message is:

1. Tacit dissapproval of Apple's advertising. Apple has co-opted the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, in public domain images, to peddle electronics. To illustrate the true horror of the campaign, Mother Teresa is directly, as opposed to Apple's preferred implicitly, saying "I approve of my image being used to sell plastic stuff from China."
2. When you mouth the words, "I Approve", and look at the image, you are reminded of The Culture of Consumption, especially of excess, which is Apple's modus operandi. It means that ones excess income, which is, after all, excess by definition, goes to luxury items with full knowledge of global starvation. In so doing, you are an indirect deciding factor in people going to sleep hungry and Part of the Problem.
3. The iPad being coveted by Mother Teresa is supposed to show the line between humans and the possessions we have and how we decide to take on the responsibilities and time commitment of things and not people.
4. The real child in her arms being the background to the iPad emits a feeling that this could easily be your child, but isn't and how the notion of those that one cares for is a fleeting subjective game, crass, and indifferent.

This is the transcendence of empathy.

80s mtv

my new project, 80s mtv

Don't Pay For Content

They Don't Deserve Your Money
Content providers do not trust you. They bully you into complying with a narrow view of acceptable use, shackling you to the glacial pace of policy-making.

They do not offer any of the confidence, security, or assurance that you have come to expect in return for your money.

Their are $60 devices that store 6,000 songs. At $1 per song, this $60 device can store $6,000 of content. It is easily stolen or lost and the songs can be deactivated at any time, for any reason.

This is like paying $6,000 for a highly-delicate, non-refundable, non-replaceable $6,000 "money card" that you are supposed to carry around everywhere and hope you don't drop it, damage it, or forget it. And oh yeah, the balance can be decreased arbitrarily without notice.

Sounds stupid, right?

It is, and that's the best deal they offer. You'll probably pony up for the same thing multiple times. Sounds like a sweetheart deal for them, doesn't it? That's right, say it with me:

They Are Scamming You
They want you to pay for a restricted license to play a downloaded file that can be remotely deleted at any time. Then, if you lose it and want another copy, they will act like they have no record that you already paid them for it; as if an accounting system is some technically insurmountable pipe dream. That's stupid, they already have every purchase on file and have probably already sold your data ten times over.

Really, they are lying to you and are just looking for an excuse to charge you money.

You should not be doing business with someone like that, who fundamentally mistrusts you and is not willing to give you control of what you pay for. So because the content provider no longer trusts you, you must no longer trust them.

The Old Way
This wasn't always this case. 15 years ago, if you purchased an audio CD, you were permitted the following:

1. The right to duplicate and convert.
   You could copy the CD onto a cassette or CD-R for personal use and archiving.
   
   
2. The right to device agnosticism.
   That CD would work in your car, handheld player, boombox, and home stereo system. They were not keyed to a class of system and were fundamentally generic.
   
   
3. The ad-free right.
   As a quid-pro-quo for your money, you could enjoy the CD without arbitrary advertisements.
   
   
4. The right of merchantability.
   If you mailed in a damaged CD in case, many record labels would send you a new copy for a nominal fee, ensuring you that you wouldn't have to double-pay to re-access what you already purchased.
   
   
5. The right of satisfaction.
   Many music stores permitted you to listen to the entire CD in the store prior to purchase or even return it if you simply didn't enjoy it.

You Get Nothing For Your Money
In the digital age, all of these rights will ideally (in the eyes of the provider), be removed; because there is a fundamental culture of distrust.

Fortunately, there is still one mechanism that guarantees you such rights.

Piracy Is The Answer
Piracy gives you the consumer confidence you have become accustomed to in the 90s that the content provider refuses to offer in the internet age:

1. You can backup the content freely in the way of your choosing.
2. You can enjoy the content on future technology or any existing one.
3. The content is pure and functional. It comes without restrictions or advertising.
4. The content is readily replaceable.
5. If you are not satisfied, you can revoke ownership of it without any fear of an unrecoverable monetary loss.

Until the content providers give you the same guarantees in the digital age that they gave in the physical one, they will not be offering a product worthy of your time or money so there is no reason to give them any of it.

So, for a product you can trust in, become a Pirate today.

Flash Sucks

But everything else sucks more.

Where is the alternative to the write-once run-anywhere platform that has a rich UI toolkit, is installed on almost all machines ... what? Java you say? Really, come now; Loading anything in Java in the browser feels like I'm booting up a Virtual Machine. What about Silverlight? No, not that either.
Standards you say? Ok, let's roll. You can do most of what Flash does with:

1. CSS3
2. HTML Video
3. WebGL
4. Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (progress)
5. HTML Canvas
6. Imaginary Partial Loading Support That Doesn't Exist (maybe the partially supported <script defer="defer">)
7. SVG
8. The Imaginary Sandboxing for Separation of Applications standard
9. HTML Audio
10. HTTPS
11. WebSockets
12. Imaginary Crossdomain.xml Equivalent That Doesn't Exist
13. LocalStorage
14. ECMAScript 5
15. IndexedDB

And even if you got the imaginary things working and the drafts finalized you still need a solution that

• Works on all major platforms
• Works on all major browsers
• Has no nuanced implementation details
• Has non-conflicting, non-ambiguous standards
• Is well understood
• Has a usable IDE for graphic designers
• Has a wide, cheap, coder base.

Flash does this. In fact, I had streaming, synchronized, animation and audio in 1996, on Netscape 2.0, on a Pentium 1 @ 120Mhz with 16MB of RAM, on a 28.8Kbps connection, on Windows 95. All I had to do was download a 160KB add-on and restart my browser; back before DOM 0, and when the W3C was moving from SGML to the fancy new "XML" standard.
A decade and a half later, going to the CSS3 equivalent I have to carefully choose the browser, then see my cpu hosed and still have frame drop, have audio sync problems, and have to load ALL of it before seeing ANY of it.
The Flash hate is totally misplaced. What they have done is absolutely phenomenal. I'm sorry that you see teeth whitening ads and porno site popups with it, but don't blame the technologists; that's like blaming Honda Of Japan because some asshole cut you off on the Freeway.
And besides, what will the ad-haters use in this future world of 2022? Some amalgamated FlashBlock equivalent that can easily just turn off all the annoying stuff? This line will be blurred and it won't be possible.
Adobe has done, and continues to do what Microsoft Failed at, what Apple Failed at, what Sun Failed at, and what Google is almost, but not quite, succeeding in, decades later.

What a Nice Logo you have, Where Did You Find it?

The small record label Balance Underground (or Alliance) has apparently lifted the Debian swirl as their logo for the past few years (actually legal, but only if the jackets have a disclaimer). It's a sub-label of another swirly label called Balance Recordings that appears to have different artwork.

_{Apparently they were also Spelling-Bee Champions.}



Here's some releases, most of them link back to discogs; the ones at the bottom are from their Facebook page.

About the author
Chris Mckenzie writes Free software.

Edit 1: The Debian swirl appears to be trivial to construct and has been used by other organizations.
Edit 2: A representative from the organization in question has some replies below concerning the logo! :)

Augmented Wiki Model

Statement of problem

An artifact of the traditional wiki model is that malice, bias, and fiction (un-valued content) can masquerade itself as factual information. The mechanisms deployed to prevent this; banning users, protecting, and locking pages each require manual intervention by a member of a privileged group of users.

Objective

To minimize the amount of un-valued content on a wiki by augmentation of the wiki model.

Assumptions

1. The value of a user's recent contributions can be used to predict the value of a user's contributions in the near future.
2. The value of a page of content currently to a wiki community can be used to predict the value of the content in the future under a certain guideline (outlined below).

Methodology

Given the above axiomatic assumptions, I propose to augment the wiki model as follows:

1. Assign a variable to every user and to every page.


1. The user variable will be called the "integrity" of the user and be a signed number starting at 0.


2. The page variable will be called the "value" of the page and be a signed number starting at 0.


2. Every user will be allowed to state a fully retractable, single "+1" "0" or "-1" on another user's or page's value. In theory this will create the following:


1. The value of the user's contributions will be directly reflected by the sum of the value of their integrity, assigned by other users.


2. The value of the page's content will be directly reflected by the sum of the value of the page, assigned by users.


3. Under the above constraints, the following limitations, that by assertion preserve the spirit of the wiki, can be imposed:


1. There will be two types of edits: moderated, and un-moderated.


• Moderated edits


• Another user has to approve the edit


• Any edit where a user's integrity is less than a page's value becomes a moderated edit


• Only users whose integrity is greater than or equal to the value of the page can approve an edit queued for moderation


• Un-moderated edits


• An edit that does not need approval.


• Any edit where a user's integrity is greater than or equal to the value of the page becomes an un-moderated edit


2. Furthermore, the following safeguards will be used


• Since certain accounts will now be of more value than others, hijacking will become a problem.


• A user's integrity will only be viewable by a user with more integrity.


• Page values will always be viewable.


• Only a user with an integrity greater than or equal to the a page's value can view the queue for moderation with the exception of


• A user who submitted an edit for moderation can purge their submission from the queue


• The history of a page will not reveal to a user with insufficient integrity which edits were moderated and which edits were not


• Since people can gain integrity through deceit, and then only disclose malicious intent after accumulation of power, any vote placed upon a user or a page is fully retractable.

Hypothesis 1

Under the augmented wiki model as proposed above, the quantity of un-valued content on a wiki will decrease.

Hypothesis 2

The augmented wiki model as proposed above eliminates the need for the traditional manual protection mechanisms employed to prevent un-valued content being committed.