As many of you know, about two months ago TI sent me an email referencing the DMCA and demanding that I take down one of my blog posts. I complied at the time, but I also sent TI a response, requesting that they reconsider their position. They did not respond.

Two weeks ago Jennifer Granick at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent TI an email on behalf of myself, and several other bloggers who received similar notices from TI. In that email Jennifer told TI that we would repost our censored blog posts today if TI did not respond and clarify their position. TI has not responded.

Therefore, the original blog post has been restored, and if you didn't read it before, you can read it now. Its hardly the best post I've ever written. It was jotted down at 9:30 in the morning while I was getting ready for work. I tend to shoot first on this blog and ask questions later, and that certainly leads to posts which are poorly articulated and easily misinterpreted. In a later post I did a much better job explaining the technical concept which drew my interest to this calculator key cracking effort in the first place.

I'd like to thank the EFF and particularly Jennifer Granick for working with me as well as the other bloggers in this case. My blog post is not important, but it is important that people have a right to blog without worrying about receiving legal threats when they haven't done anything wrong. Its important that people stand up for that right, and we're fortunate that there are people out there who are willing to do it. Thank you EFF.

Don't miss XKCD's temporary redesign to commemorate the end of GeoCities. Such fond memories of the mid-90's...

xkcd - A Webcomic - Nachos - HOSTED BY GEOCITIES

OpenBTS is an open-source Unix application that uses the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) to present a GSM air interface ("Um") to standard GSM handset and uses the Asterisk software PBX to connect calls.

One of their lessons learned from running this at Burning Man is that users don't really pay attention to what carrier their cellphone has attached to.

The OpenBTS Project

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker gives an excellent macro Internet presentation at Web 2.0 Summit each year.

This year, Mary focused on the economy and mobile Internet.

The entire presentation is embedded below (courtesy of Morgan Stanley). The section on Mobile starts on page 28.

iPhone adoption is growing faster than Netscape grew - 2010 is the inflection point as AT&T roles out ~10MBPS access that works with existing phones.

First time in a long time I've read optimistic economic data.

Mary Meeker Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet about to blow up

I thought this post was interesting, as well as the blog it is from.

A funny thing happened at the various events last week (VentureAtlanta, Future Media Georgia, and GVU's Demo Day...

I suddenly noticed how many music technology companies have recently sprung up in Georgia!Here's a quick list, but I am probably missing some:

* BandMetrics
* BeatTweet
* FreeAllMusic
* Khu.sh (LaDiDa)
* Maestro.fm
* Music Intelligence Solutions (uPlaya)
* Neurotic Media (Amplified.com)
* Rank 'Em
* Vertical Acuity
* Zooz Mobile

Some of these have raised substantial venture money, some are operating on a shoestring, and at least one has multiple millions in revenue already. One of the neat things is that these are coming from multiple directions—Georgia Tech, SCAD, even the Athens music scene.

Then you add in all the music studios that call Atlanta home. Think we're seeing a cluster being born? IndieMusicTech seems to think so...null

Atlanta Music Technology Cluster? | Academic VC

Earlier this month, Gaskins was convicted in a Raleigh federal court for depositing money in a bank and faces prison for the rest of his life as a result. I am not kidding.

Gaskins, a Raleigh criminal defense lawyer, was convicted of dividing large sums of money into small deposits so that his bank would not fulfill an Internal Revenue Service requirement to report cash transactions of more than $10,000. The rule is intended to flag large sums of cash that might be tied to illegal activity.

I've edited this post several times now trying to decide what I think about this.

My initial reaction was shock. Its well known that deposits over $10,000 are investigated. The idea that it might be a crime to avoid provoking such an investigation when there is no underlying criminal activity is offensive to my view that the government ought to trust people generally unless they have some reason to suspect them of a crime. A life prison sentence for such an offense sounds positively insane.

Imagine if there were surveillance cameras on every street corner (which is increasingly true) and they were coupled with a rule that walking from place to place while intentionally avoiding their gaze was a crime punishable by long prison terms.

Imagine if telecommunications were often monitored (which is true) and there was a law against having a face to face conversation with the intent of avoiding government monitoring.

Would that be reasonable? Laws in general that require you to behave in such a way that government surveillance systems work?

This is the very definition of attaching the teeth to the fallacy that if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear from surveillance.

Google searches pull up large numbers of announcements about successful convictions involving very large sums of money. Sentences vary - the prison terms are rarely anywhere near the maximum, so the claim of life imprisonment in this case is a red herring, but any prison term for the crime of attempting to avoid government surveillance is a bit questionable. Its not clear how many of these cases have a real relationship to some underlying crime. It seems that in many of the circumstances there is an overt suspicion on the part of the prosecutors and the court that drugs are involved, but there isn't any evidence.

OK, so the legislature has provided prosecutors with a tool that can be used to target criminals in certain cases where the underlying crime cannot be proven but there is a lot of smoke. Are we going to loose sleep about likely drug dealers getting short prison terms for structuring deposits? No (notwithstanding the fact that I don't think drugs should be illegal but thats beside the point and outside the scope of this discussion.) The danger with tools like that is that they can be applied in other contexts that... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Johnny Gaskins and the End of Law by William L. Anderson

There is a muddled collection of thoughts in here. Some are wrong. Some of them are interesting. Elizabeth Warren:

The middle class is what makes us who we are.... It’s what gives us an America that’s all bought in to the whole process. That what we do is not just about a handful of folks at the top who profit from it. We all profit from it. And that’s why we work, and that’s why we vote, and that’s why we accept the outcome of elections, and, that’s why we’re safe to walk our streets, because we have a middle class for which this ultimately works, this country.

And every time we hollow that out. Every time we take away a little piece of that. We run the risk that some of what we understood as America, some of what we know as America, begins to die.

That’s what scares me.

From the post:

The sewing of hoplessness and disillusionment so thte people turn to defeatism or nihilism: It’s a method of social control as old as the hills, the ruling classes having deployed some of their finest thinkers to its engenderment and perpetuation.

“Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such;” Arendt observes in Crises of the Republic, “no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable.”

From the thread:

I’m in the south. I see and deal with a lot of the “right-wing” middle class... They do see the injustice, and many of them have just been born, bred, and raised to hold up this false left/right paradigm, and blindly accept the arbitrary dividing issues spouted by MSM dividers like Limbaugh or Beck.

On the flip side, I’ve spent plenty of time in “liberal” urban areas, and all too often, it’s more of the same, just on the “other side” of the rainbow… Same MSM memes and dividing non-issues, to pit the left middle-class against the right.

In the end, most of these folks don’t know what they’re talking about, and constantly present small-potatoes issues as the most important stuff... They don’t see their invisible bonds and that they are all linked together in a chain gang, overseen by lifetime politicians, militarists, false priests, and bankers.

MLK:

I cannot close without stressing the urgent need for strong, courageous and intelligent leadership from the Negro community. We need leadership that is calm and yet positive. This is no day for the rabble-rouser, whether Negro or white. We must realize that we are grappling with such a complex problem there is no place for misguided emotionalism. We must work passionately and unrelentingly for the goal of freedom, but we must be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle. We must never struggle with falsehood, hate or malice. Let us never become bitter.

Guest Post: A New Civil Rights Movement is Afoot for the Middle Class « naked capitalism

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets | Danger Room | Wired.com

Among their achievements: adding new features, creating new operating systems, connecting the calculator to keyboards and other hardware, playing a video excerpt from "The Matrix," and even running Nintendo Game Boy video games. Not bad for calculators such as the $100 TI-83 Plus, introduced in 1999 with a Z80 processor running at 6MHz, 24KB of memory, 160KB of flash memory, and a 96x64 pixel display.

Why all this work for projects that realistically are not going to reshape the future of computing? Much of the motivation parallels mountaineer George Mallory's rationale for climbing Mount Everest: "Because it's there."

Why hack a calculator? Why climb Mount Everest? | Deep Tech - CNET News

How many planned to return to India? I was shocked to see more than three-quarters of the audience raise their hands.

Economic troubles are sending smart people from America's Tech industry back to India. Will they go back and start innovative companies that are globally competitive? Maybe, maybe not?

Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China