] We're getting the G.D.P. growth, and by now any recovery
] in the past would be flashing green on the hiring front.
] This one isn't. With all due respect, I don't know what
] you guys are talking about. This is a profoundly
] different relationship between hiring and the business
] cycle.

Good NYT panel on outsourcing.

Who Wins and Who Loses as Jobs Move Overseas?

] At the heart of the program is a Europe-wide drive to map
] noise levels in cities in 25 nations.

Links to maps at the end of the story.

Yahoo! News - Europe Begins Program to Map Urban Noise

Jeremy wrote:
] While I appreciate the entertainment value, I think that
] "Sneakers" offers a futurist's vision of the situation. It's
] supposed to make you think ... but it's not trying to be
] "right."

I know, I was just trying to be funny... Perhaps a bad time as you seem to be dawning on some sort of revelation, but I couldn't resist.

] When I see the popular debate repeatedly circling around the
] same targets, bookending the variously weak and/or alarmist
] arguments with portentous excerpts from "1984", I am reminded
] of Flatland.

I must admit that I'm not sure what you're getting at with the juxtaposition you are making. I must still be thinking in 2D.

In any event, while that article's arguments may have been weak and alarmist (it was a liberal newsweekly) the perspective wasn't wrong. It doesn't matter if you've got a bunch of illegal mp3s in your ipod as long as you don't listen to them, but assuming that you do, we've got a problem, and probably an intractable one.

Total information awareness is a solution to the "problem" of super-empowered individuals that leaves a bad taste in my mouth for much the same reason that I don't like Bill Joy's book burning. It attempts to respond to the maturity of the individual by arming the state.

There are two ways that feudal societies handled the development of books. One was to become republican. The other was to become totalitarian. One response accommodated the increased power of individuals by providing a means to wield that power without resorting to violence. Its was a mature, realistic response to the situation, and ultimately successful. The other was an attempt to regress the empowerment of individuals through more effective "safeguards" that continued to buttress the old nature of the state. It was a way of band-aiding an obsolete system because that arrangement had certain benefactors, and it caused widespread human suffering where-ever it was attempted.

The reason Fukuyama is wrong is because we just empowered the individual again, by as much of a relative jump as we did in the 1500s, and we are going to have to through this process all over again. Some will wisely choose to find ways to ratchet down the concentration of formal power so that it comes in balance with reality, and some will choose to buttress the present status quo.

The danger I find long term, living in America as I do, is that we're the benefactors of the present arrangement, and so we are most likely to resist change despite our previous successes and the obvious reasons for those successes, and we're got guys like Fukuyama telling us that its not even something worth thinking about. So our ideas are all statist. Unfortunately, we're also on the cusp of this thing. I don't think I know of anyone who is coming up with alternatives. Other then maybe the cypherpunks.

RE: On Privacy

What is the optimal design for such a multitiered confidentiality system?

This essay appears in the December 5 issue of Science Magazine. The author is a division director at the National Science Foundation.

Privacy and Property on the Net: Research Questions

] I would promote a regime where the gov't required a very
] strong warrant-like reason before it could break the code that
] makes the link.

Well, I think maybe this is the first time I've found myself disagreeing with Lessig. I recall times when I've been unsure, but here I just flat disagree. Lessig is promoting identity escrow, which is kind of like key escrow, but for who you are rather then what you are saying. I'm bothered that Lessig doesn't think anonymnity is defendable. If you think that it always ought to be possible to identify everyone then you see with eyes of the policeman. If thats really how most people think today then I have little hope for our ability to maintain any freedom in the face of these threats. You don't have freedom defended by a vigilant public if the public likes freedom is dangerous.

[Politech] Larry Lessig replies to Politech over limiting anonymity [fs][priv]

] Are Southerners mainly people who are trying very hard to
] be old-fashioned Northerners?
]
] The phenomenon seems to go back a long, long way, and it
] may have something to do with how the South got to be the
] Bible Belt. Two centuries ago, when New England was the
] Bible Belt, the South had a reputation as an unchurched
] wilderness populated by godless heathens. Knoxville, in
] particular. In 1810, when it was capital of Tennessee,
] Knoxville was described with horror (by a
] Pennsylvania-churched minister) as the only capital city
] in the world without a single chapel of any denomination.
] But later, in that respect, the South became more
] Northern than the North.
]
] A related native of the North was prohibition. The
] American temperance movement started in Massachusetts in
] the 1820s. The idea gained some advocates in Tennessee,
] but they weren't successful in a big way until after
] Illinois reformer Frances Willard conducted her more than
] one crusade in Knoxville. She sometimes made the South
] seem as if it was behind the times because unlike
] some progressive Northern communities, we didn't yet have
] prohibition.

A very interesting observation on the collective psychology of the South.

The Old North

I didn't recommend this before so I'm doing it now.

This webpage will redirect you to a Google image search using a random search term based on the filename scheme used by many popular digital cameras. What results is the most random, random sampling of pictures.

Basically, it offers random views into people's lives... See something interesting and you can dive in and explore. Its really quite an experience.

The Google random picture generator

] Under Yahoo's new architecture, a system sending an
] e-mail message would embed a secure, private key in a
] message header. The receiving system would check the
] Internet's Domain Name System for the public key
] registered to the sending domain.

Yahoo Spam PKI

] "We are beginning to see a shift in the traditional
] privacy debate from simply focusing on an individual's
] right to privacy, to also including consideration of
] society's right to protect itself," says a letter from
] ChoicePoint CEO Derek Smith in the company's most recent
] annual report. "ChoicePoint as a company and I as an
] individual continue to believe, however, that in a free
] society -- particularly in today's society -- we do not
] always have the right to anonymity."

This is a loaded perspective coming from someone who has a financial interest in the erosion of privacy. (I'm reminded of Scott McNealy's comment that privacy is dead. Easy for you to say asshole, the computers you sell are being used to kill it!)

As you read into this article it just gets worse. Their next trick is to claim that they "self regulate" access to this information better then the government would. If Mr. Lee really believes this then he doesn't have a basic understanding of economics. The money that the feds pay you to do a search would be reflected in the overall costs of running their own system anyway, so no, you aren't prohibiting access in any way. PR at its best. Say something simple, and wrong, which requires a complex response. Simple beats correct in public debate every time.

Then you find out about a large number of black people who were excluded from the 2000 election in Florida...

The fact is that we are building extremely effective systems for fine grained social control. They are coming out of the wood work at every level. We are using the 911 attacks to justify actions we considered reprehensible in the wake of the 1993 WTC bombing (proving that emotions are more significant then needs here), without any clear relationship between the absence of these technologies and the success of these attack (anything could have been helpful).

The fact is that these systems are already being abused.

The fact is that there will be more successful attacks against us, and that we will further use those attacks to justify more technologies of social control. Eventually those in our society who desire to control us will finally have the means at their disposal, and they will take upon those means to enslave us.

I hope this country has the god damn spine to stand up to these fuckers when they arrive. If not, the next terrorist attacks will be our Reichstag fire.

Creative Loafing Atlanta | COVER | BIG BROTHER'S LITTLE HELPER

] Cease and desist letters can make such spurious claims
] and overreaching demands because they are not official
] legal filings and there has been, as yet, little
] accountability for their abuses. Even though recipients
] may have the legal right to engage in the threatened
] activity (in this case the facilitation of free speech),
] those without specialized legal expertise and a solid
] defense fund most non-corporate recipients
] may simply comply with the letter's demands out of
] fear, uncertainty and lack of resources. The Interz0ne
] conference organizers hardly had the time to even react
] to their cease and desist letter, which Blackboard sent
] on the eve of the students scheduled presentation.

A very good analysis. Again, I believe that knowingly sending overboard cease and desist letters should be a crime bearing significant punitive liability. Wealthy entities will continue to chill speech in their interests until this is resolved.

Analysis of the Blackboard Case