…because the goal of intellectual property law is not to protect intellectual property. Matthew Yglesias with a brilliant piece on why P2P matters and why MPAA and RIAA are wrong.

Americans, here is what’s being done in our name.

I’ve been in an email debate recently with a few friends on the topic of “will government use new technologies to overreach and restrict civil liberties?” Now I see this:

Motto for 21st century law enforcement: “It’s just like Abu Ghraib, and it’s portable!”

The last gaming console I owned was an Atari 2600, and boy could I whack the hell out of Warlords. Haven’t ever had much interest in getting another one, but three things pricked up my ears about the new Sony Playstation Portable: it’s got a helluva screen, it’s got media playback, and it’s got WiFi.

Now, I can’t say that I really need this, since I’m surgically connected to my laptop (WiFi, great screen), and my cell phone does movie and music playback. But… geez, the movies would be nicer on a PSP.

I think I’m just experiencing a bad case of geeklust, ever since I thought I’d have to buy a Palm Tungsten E to service a client, and had that fall through. The SE900 is still my favorite gizmo, but I’m tired of the problems I’m having with music playback (subject of a future Portentia), and let’s face it — a two-hour movie shrunk down to 90 Mb is a pretty crappy movie.

Then again, how often do I need to watch a two-hour movie on a handheld? You see the dilemma.

Just in case I need to demonstrate that I’m not always drinking the Kool-Aid, Tim Bray makes some great points here about where Apple is dropping the ball.

Ironically, it was while reading his criticism of Safari that I noticed my laptop was running silly slow. Reason: Safari was eating half of the CPU because I had a dozen windows open. Why? Can’t tell you. But I had to go and fetch out all of those URLs precisely because you can’t save them in progress, which is the gripe Tim makes.

Interesting and counterintuitive report on FCC complaints against various cellular providers today, reported on Mobile Tracker (which I found through Gizmodo).

The reason it’s counterintuitive is that every experience I’ve ever had with Verizon made me vow never to have another. Yes, I’m tempted by EV-DO, but I think I’d rather switch to my old 2400 baud modem than become a Verizon customer again. On the other hand, I was a very happy camper with AT&T Wireless, now Cingular, which tops out the complaint list. And I’m currently a reasonably happy camper with T-Mobile, coming in at #2.

So that’s why you hate your service. Go with Verizon for crippled phones and robotic customer support, or go with Cingular or T-Mobile and join the crowds complaining to the FCC. How much longer until we can use our VoIP mobiles on WiMAX, please?

Sometimes you’ve just gotta shake your head. Maybe it’s no longer big news when one guy kills another in real life because the victim unwisely sold off a dragon saber from Legends of Mir belonging to the murderer. That’s just a psychotic episode waiting to happen, and it happened to be over a video game.

But check out what a local law professor had to say about it:

Yes, this is all happening in China. And here’s a law professor in an ostensibly Communist country, arguing for rights to private property in cyberspace.

Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chain mail.

Contactless chips. Proximity cards. Doesn’t matter, it’s still RFID.

What’s interesting is that there’s now enough public awareness and antipathy against RFID that this is being tried.

I’ve been giving some thought to cool things I could do with the Mini (i.e., for other people, for money) and so I read this IBM developer article with great interest. But then I realized that Peter Seeback is my kind of guy:

I didn’t know you could do that. Way cool.

This in from Macintouch yesterday. (Link likely to break in a few days. Search their archives for “iGo Juice 70”.)

I have a client who is happy with this model, and for $35, I’ll probably be picking one up myself for emergencies. Meanwhile, I’m glad to see that NuPower has finally released batteries for the 17″ PowerBook.

The Register checks in with its own story on the TSA report. 12 million passenger records, for which contractors and TSA “did not follow accepted privacy procedures in obtaining passenger data for internal use”.

But this is the part that boggles my mind (and I’ll admit, I haven’t actually read the report yet, so perhaps some unboggling is available there):

I’m not sure how exactly you can even begin to claim that this system is maintained for security purposes when you don’t have a “system of individual identifiers”.

My God, this could be a nightmare.

Granted that the rules are different for fulltime employees and those of us in Free Agent Nation. But I can’t help wondering.

Let’s say my direct client in Iowa subcontracts some work to me from their client in California, and the work has to be serviced onsite in Massachusetts.

Or, a better (and real) example: as I was writing this, an email came in from my client in Tokyo. The work I do for him is approved and paid for in Nairobi, but sometimes I’m alerted to work that needs to be done from a consultant in Alabama (formerly Belize). The server in question is a block away from the White House.

How much paperwork do you think that transaction would require?

Some very good commentary in this discussion about Scott Richter’s bankruptcy filing.

(Note: to make Slashdot commentary manageable, sign up for a user account and then immediately filter all posts with a score less than 4.)

I’ve been saying for a while now that the preponderence of PowerBooks at geek fests boded very well for future Mac usage. Now Paul Graham is saying it much better than I have.

Via Slashdot.

I’m generally very much in favor of internationalizing governance structures, but the entire time I was reading this interview with Houlin Zhao I kept picturing him as a James Bond villain.

Perhaps the problem is that he kept talking about the need to regulate without giving any clear idea to what good would come of it. (Bureaucracy reducing spam? Please.) And perhaps the other problem is that the groups he seeks to augment — ICANN, IETF, W3C — are successful largely because of their light touch. One doesn’t get the same feeling from ITU. (Via Slashdot.)

Interesting article in the Washington Post on how the Secret Service uses distributed computing to break encryption.

Of course, I can’t let this pass without saying a few words.

That’s an improvement over the common misconception that the set of all people who use encryption are likely to be criminals. But it also doesn’t make much sense — what is the correlation between “having things to hide” and “knowing how to properly hide things”? If there is a connection, the interesting corollary is that criminals are by-and-large smarter than corporate America.

There’s a very decent random password generator in Mac OS X, but it’s “hidden” in the usual sense — buried in subfolders, not immediately obvious in the UI, and completely unadvertised. (Find it in Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access.) But I’d love to hear someone tell me how to overcome the problem that my nonrandom passwords are in my muscle memory, and I fear the switch will be as difficult and annoying as converting to Dvorak was.

Prediction: look for an article in November sometime about how compromised Windows machines in DHS are exposing this code to unforeseen intrusions. You can’t do much against a distributed codebase, but you can certainly gum up the works.

Okay, sooner than November. Oy.

Infosecurity Europe demonstrates that in London, the weakest information security link can be found between the left and right ears. Guessing that it’s not any better in the US. Via Slashdot.

According to Bruce Schneier, TSA activities have included forcing airlines to turn over records to the FBI, and lying to Congress about its activities.

More accurately, this is according to the DHS review of TSA.

Just added some comments to Rik Panganiban’s post, “Uncivil Society“. Mine is modestly titled “Where’s the self-replicating productivity meme?”.