Links

A bunch of links for you again this week. I’ve just put the finishing touches on my corrections, so here’s fingers crossed that they’ll go through and that’s me, PhD after the name. 🙂

Censorship:

1. Pakistan – Government wants to create national Internet filtering system    2 March 2012, 2:50 am
2. What the Facebook and Tumblr Controversies Can Teach Us About Content Moderation    2 March 2012, 2:39 pm
3. Police Unintentionally Censor Facebook, Google With 8000 Other Sites in Denmark    4 March 2012, 3:47 am
4. Free Speech Coalition Calls on PayPal to Back Off Misguided Book Censorship Policy    7 March 2012, 7:08 pm

I doubt that PayPal will back down, but I hope something gets started to put the pressure on them – they’ve been arbitrary in this matter – perhaps an anti-trust investigation could be opened?

Comics:

1. anthropology 4000    9 March 2012, 1:00 am
2. Who’s Getting Paid and How Much in the Music Industry    1 March 2012, 3:30 pm

A funny coincidence: both of these comics are from the same guy.

Copyright / Patent:

1. Kim Dotcom Remains Free on Bail As U.S. Appeal Fails    29 February 2012, 9:59 am
2. A Lawyer/Photographer Just Deleted All Her Pinterest Boards Out Of Fear    4 March 2012, 3:06 am
3. RIAA CEO Hopes SOPA Protests Were a ‘One-Time Thing’    4 March 2012, 4:04 am
4. EFF Calls Foul on Robo-Takedowns    6 March 2012, 12:24 am
5. Congressman demands details of secretive ACTA treaty be made public    6 March 2012, 3:25 pm
6. EFF Urges Supreme Court to Take Stand on Abstract Patents    7 March 2012, 2:41 pm
7. Pinterest, We Have a Problem    8 March 2012, 10:24 am
8. Transfer of Wikipedia sites from GoDaddy complete    9 March 2012, 10:24 pm
9. With domain seizures, the United States declares trade war on the world.    9 March 2012, 10:35 pm

And the censorship on behalf of big media continues, but not without opposition. Link 7 is quite worth reading – as with so many other social media platforms, you’re truly at risk if you use it, and by the way they claim that they own it if you post it there.

Gender:

1. Boardroom Balance: EU Commissioner Eyes Binding Gender Quota System    5 March 2012, 6:58 am

It’s worked out quite well for Norway – but Germany resists. I wonder why?

Hacktivism:

1. Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing is Booming    4 March 2012, 4:19 am
2. Anonymous Rocked by News That Top Hacker Snitched to Feds    6 March 2012, 10:50 pm

Link 1 just demonstrates that people want to share files and will find a way to do so, no matter what.

Holocaust:

1. From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany    6 March 2012, 8:41 am

I think that I can’t really understand a country which would keep these people around and in power, and I wonder how it was so successfully hidden for so long.

Human Rights:

1. America’s teens sentenced to die    5 March 2012, 9:16 am
2. Analysis: Lebanon debates laws protecting women from domestic violence    9 March 2012, 7:31 am

Law:

1. Billionaire’s Bogus Legal Tactics Against Bloggers Threaten Free Speech    2 March 2012, 5:48 pm
2. Is the First Amendment in Digital Decline?    4 March 2012, 2:06 am
3. UK: Police services such as crime investigation could be privatised    4 March 2012, 2:59 am
4. Illinois judge: law barring recording police is unconstitutional    4 March 2012, 3:49 am
5. Here’s Why the Government Thinks It Can Kill You Overseas    5 March 2012, 2:20 pm
6. Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable    6 March 2012, 3:30 am
7. U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers on E-Book Pricing    8 March 2012, 5:45 am
8. Egypt – Journalists and bloggers among 12 people to appear before military courts    9 March 2012, 12:43 am
9. Telecommuter ‘Doing Business’ in N.J. Triggers Business Tax Return    9 March 2012, 4:52 am
10. Pa. Supreme Court Mulls MySpace Postings’ Intended Audience    9 March 2012, 5:05 am
11. When Does the Constitution Protect the Production of Digital Evidence?    9 March 2012, 9:53 pm
12. Attorney General Eric Holder Speech on Targeted Killing of U.S. Citizens Full Transcript    9 March 2012, 10:13 pm

Link 4 makes me happy, as at least it looks like there’s somebody out there who understands that someone needs to watch what law enforcement is up to, and to record that behavior. Links 5 and 12: pick one and read it, or even read both. I personally believe that there’s no legal basis for any of this drone killing, but hey, I guess I’m not a lawyer so my opinion doesn’t really matter.

Medical Technology:

1. Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France    4 March 2012, 2:42 am
2. Kids born later in the year more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD: Study    8 March 2012, 10:36 am
3. Supporting Early Diagnosis of Diseases Through Algorithms for the Analysis of Human Respiration    9 March 2012, 10:07 pm
4. What single quality predicts a good doctor? Curiousity.    9 March 2012, 10:36 pm

Link 2 is truly frightening: basically, if you’re the youngest in your class, you’re way more likely to be diagnosed with (and medicated for) ADHD.

Miscellany:

1. People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish    4 March 2012, 2:55 am
2. Security Forces Will Outnumber Athletes Nearly 4 to 1 at the 2012 London Olympics    5 March 2012, 12:46 am
3. Italy’s Mason-Dixon Line: Euro Crisis Fuels South Tyrolean Separatist Dreams    6 March 2012, 4:09 am
4. Why Outsourcing Science May Be The Best Hope for Its Future    6 March 2012, 10:55 am
5. Speculation Blamed for Global Food Price Weirdness    6 March 2012, 2:31 pm
6. How easy is it to buy YouTube views? $46 for 20,000 easy.    6 March 2012, 3:17 pm
7. Freelancer Payment Protection Act    7 March 2012, 12:00 pm
8. Noam Chomsky – media manipulation strategies    8 March 2012, 11:14 am
9. Game of Thrones Blu-ray price drops by 50%    9 March 2012, 10:28 am
10. America, the Beautiful (And Nutty): A Skeptic’s Lament    9 March 2012, 12:55 pm
11. The State Department is Concerned About Vatican Money Laundering    9 March 2012, 9:54 pm

Link 1 is well worth the read: basically, the article demonstrates that democracy results in only marginally-above-average candidates succeeding, because people are unable to truly judge who “the best” would be and can’t relate to them when they encounter them, so only elect people who are slightly better than they are. Link 2 makes me glad I won’t be anywhere near London for the craziness. Link 3 is particularly interesting to me, as we actually visited South Tyrol & found it to be … well, more Austrian than Italian, even having their own distinct language. Link 8 is a bit of a classic.

Museum / Library / Archive:

1. Book of Germs: The Quest for a Field Guide to Microbes    1 March 2012, 3:30 am
2. Art Forgery Scandal: Ringleader Reveals He Faked Many More Works    5 March 2012, 7:09 am
3. 1984 v. Brave New World    6 March 2012, 6:28 am
4. Boards of Directors Ignoring Corporate Cyber-Risk Management    9 March 2012, 4:52 am
5. SPIEGEL Interview with Wolfgang Beltracchi: Confessions of a Genius Art Forger    9 March 2012, 6:32 am

Link 3 is another Letter of Note, between the authors of 1984 and A Brave New World.

Open Source / Open Access:

1. Open, moral and pragmatic    8 March 2012, 10:19 am

This is more on the closed-access model of academic publication and has some really good stats in it.

Politics:

1. A Manifesto for Psychopaths    6 March 2012, 4:48 am
2. Wikipedia: ‘Bob Crow, The Lord of the Rings and Notable DJs’    8 March 2012, 4:01 pm
3. Thousands of changes made to Wikipedia from within House of Commons    8 March 2012, 4:02 pm
4. Reddit PAC aims to kick SOPA’s daddy Lamar Smith out of Congress    9 March 2012, 10:24 pm

Link 1 talks about Ayn Rand’s philosophy – a fairly good summary, I think, in the title. I’m glad that people are still moving forward to get rid of the idiots who thought censoring the internet was a good idea (link 4). Something to watch.

Privacy:

1. EFF Tells Supreme Court that No Means No in Wiretap Act    29 February 2012, 8:57 am
2. HTTPS Everywhere & the Decentralized SSL Observatory    29 February 2012, 9:59 am
3. Constitutional Showdown Voided: Feds Decrypt Laptop Without Defendant’s Help    29 February 2012, 2:17 pm
4. Keep the Pressure On: Canadian Online Surveillance Bill on Pause, But the Fight Continues    29 February 2012, 11:05 pm
5. West Virginia Unveils App for Suspicious Activity Reporting    1 March 2012, 4:53 am
6. HTTPS and Tor: Working Together to Protect Your Privacy and Security Online    1 March 2012, 11:11 am
7. French Data Protection Watchdog Asks Google to ‘Pause’ Privacy Policy    2 March 2012, 4:52 am
8. Et Tu, Google? Android Apps Can Also Secretly Copy Photos    2 March 2012, 10:00 am
9. Mobile User Privacy Bill of Rights    2 March 2012, 11:53 am
10. Mexico Adopts Alarming Surveillance Legislation    2 March 2012, 5:20 pm
11. New Ways To Think About Online Privacy (from TED attendees)    4 March 2012, 3:43 am
12. Court: Warrantless cell phone searches legal    4 March 2012, 4:16 am
13. Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days    5 March 2012, 12:59 am
14. International Reactions to Google’s New Privacy Policy    6 March 2012, 2:38 pm
15. Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko: Do Not Track Appears on a Mobile OS    6 March 2012, 2:49 pm
16. Colleges and Employers Demanding Facebook Passwords    6 March 2012, 3:22 pm
17. No Checks or Balances in Warrantless Wiretapping Despite Holder’s Assurances    7 March 2012, 11:13 am
18. A Tale of Two Encryption Cases    7 March 2012, 6:53 pm
19. Ubuntu 12.04 will bring OS-level privacy options    8 March 2012, 11:03 am
20. Highlighting a Privacy Problem: Apps Need to Respect User Rights From the Start    8 March 2012, 11:23 am
21. A Time Bomb For Civil Liberties: France Adopts a New Biometric ID Card    8 March 2012, 2:34 pm
22. Drones, Dogs and the Future of Privacy    8 March 2012, 2:38 pm
23. FBI Chief Claims ‘Jones’ Ruling Creates GPS Surveillance Problem    9 March 2012, 4:53 am
24. Privacy Class Actions Filed Against Google in D.C., Maryland    9 March 2012, 9:53 pm
25. Finding Your Friends and Following Them to Where You Are    9 March 2012, 10:05 pm

Once again, lots of privacy issues out there. It should be interesting to follow whether Google gets away with their privacy policy stupidity (link 14) in the face of international complaints.

Robotics:

1. Video: Darpa’s Robotic Cheetah Sets Racing Record    5 March 2012, 9:13 am
2. More Robots, Less Farmers – Company Installs 12,500th Robotic Cow Milking System    6 March 2012, 8:15 am

The video in link 1 is pretty awesome to watch (despite the backwards-bending knees of the thing). I watched it without sound, and don’t know that it’s needed, really.

Security:

1. U.S. Wants You to Hunt Fugitives With Twitter    1 March 2012, 3:30 am
2. Report: Hackers Seized Control of Computers in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab    1 March 2012, 4:57 pm
3. Angry Birds, Meet Jailbirds: New App Helps You Snitch on Your Friends    2 March 2012, 7:30 am
4. Hackers give Anonymous a taste of their own medicine    6 March 2012, 3:26 pm
5. $1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog    7 March 2012, 4:52 am
6. TSA Pooh-Poohs Video Purporting to Defeat Airport Body Scanners    7 March 2012, 2:31 pm
7. Some evidence on multi-word passphrases    8 March 2012, 2:51 am
8. Viral Video About Body Scanners    8 March 2012, 5:36 am
9. TSA responds to blogger who rendered $1B of nude body scanners useless    8 March 2012, 9:53 am
10. TSA Pressures Mainstream Media Not To Cover Story    8 March 2012, 12:01 pm

Link 4 is just a tiny bit awesome: someone hacked into Anonymous’ application they’ve been using to take down websites and loaded a virus into it. 🙂 Links 1 and 3 are disturbing, in that it’s essentially a case of people being asked to spy upon their neighbors. Links 6 through 10 will be an interesting story to see played out: basically, this is a guy who’s managed to go through several of the new scanners – in airports – and carry a hunk of metal along with him, something which he’d not have been able to do if it were back in the days of metal-detectors. Of course, TSA can’t defend against the accusation, either.

Technology:

1. Speech-jamming gun that silences people mid-sentence    4 March 2012, 4:04 am
2. Big Data + Machine Learning = Scared banks    6 March 2012, 2:57 am
3. Rogers’ “Cybersecurity” Bill Is Broad Enough to Use Against WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay    8 March 2012, 9:17 am
4. Angelina is a computer AI that builds games all by itself    8 March 2012, 10:21 am
5. How To Manufacture Desire    8 March 2012, 11:14 am
6. Tiny Linux Computer Punches Above Its Weight    9 March 2012, 10:06 pm
7. Pair Programming Considered Harmful?    9 March 2012, 10:39 pm

Link 1 could have gone into censorship, but … well, it goes here, as well, until we know how the device will be used. It seems as if it’s a horrible idea, though, to think that someone can fire your own words back at you and cause your brain to be unable to keep on speaking. The rest, well, enjoy.