Monthly Archives: March 2014

Protecting the web and user through a Internet Bill of Rights

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The guy who helped invent the internet, no not Al Gore, Tim Berners-Lee wants a new Magna Carta for the internet. If he was American it’d be a bill of rights or declaration of independence, if he was an anarchist, it’d be a manifesto. This call for a clear set of rules for the online/cyberspace is nothing new. The first article was written in 1986 – 3 years before the internet was created. This was when kids were using phones and a few other systems to hack things. The most recent was only a few years ago from an internet website.

Creating these documents is an effort in futility. We already have a bill of rights in the US that SHOULD be protecting us from the NSA, GCHQ, CIA, and other organizations. These organizations, at least the US ones, should be forbidden from given information they “accidentally” collect on US citizens to other governments. They do though. We have secret courts with secret interpretations of laws that we as citizens have no idea what they are. How is ANOTHER Magna Carta going to help?

There’s absolutely no reason to expect our governments to abide by these new laws when they are flouting the current laws – attempting to undermine existing laws through intentionally narrower interpretations of rulings – in many cases getting slapped on the wrist later for infractions that have been going on for years.

Creating a new bill of rights, Magna Carter, or whatever will not solve the problem. The problem is not the current set of laws, though that doesn’t help, the root cause of the problem is corruption and arrogance.

Now that it’s been uncovered that the CIA hacked Congress’s Intelligence Committee, one that had been defending the NSA, there’s all sorts of kerfuffle. Congress didn’t care, excepting Ron Wyden (and a few others), until they realized that they were just as likely targets any the average Joe.

Most members of Congress are funded through companies and special interest groups. These include companies that support the NSA and other intelligence organizations. If any of those orgs funded any member of Congress on a committee that oversees anything related to intelligence gathering there’s going to be corruption. Regardless of if it’s quid pro quo or not.

We will never pass a bill of rights for the internet as long as there’s potential conflicts of interest (funded by companies that bills are trying to regulate). We must address corruption before we can hope to have an effective set of rights for the internet or anywhere else.

Culture wars: the battle we didn’t know we’re losing for access to our culture

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Our culture is being held hostage

Humans are a collection of story tellers. When we hang out with our friends, new and old, we spend a great deal of time telling stories. These stories define who we are. In cases where we first meet we try to find common ground through current events, current cultural experiences, like the Olympics – TV shows, books, and movies. When you know nothing about another person, these are the only basis you have for building an understanding of what they stand for and who they are. To be honest, in many ways they are terrible indicators of what type of person they are, but they can help you identify if that person is someone with a similar world view to your own. Once you move past those conversations you move on to personal stories. The things that made you laugh and, conscious or not , enter into a game of one upmanship. Now most of the time you’re just trying to find a similar experience to relate to theirs, but it can be misconstrued.

In many cases the only context you’ll ever have with the person is through a shared experience, access to our communal culture. Regardless of our awareness or how willing to admit it we are, we have cultural gate keepers. To access any of our current culture we have to pay to access it. That’s fine, the people that produced it should definitely get paid for the work that they did. However, the people we’re paying are necessarily the people that produced the work. We’re paying for internet access at least twice (if you have home internet and a mobile data plan). In some cases that means you’re paying the same company twice for access to the same thing (verizon wireless and verizon FiOS).

Additionally, these companies have no incentive to provide better access to the content that you want o see. It’s actually in their best interest to make it more difficult and have worse service, so that the services that you want to access will pay them again for you to access the service that you are paying to access. Furthermore, these same companies think that if you use the internet a lot you should pay a higher rate!

This isn’t really anything new. I’ve been saying this for a few years. But what drives this is rent seeking behavior, investors that don’t really know what’s going on, and arrogance.

Shrinking Public Domain

The public domain is the area of our culture that no one owns any more. It’s been published for so long that it’s free to be consumed by everyone. Disney hates this. The main reason is that Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain, or would be based on the laws at the time of his creation. However, Disney is not above using the public domain to make a lot of money. Here’s a list of movies they’ve created based on public domain (over 50). FIFTY movies based on the public domain – it’s great for a corporation to exploit the public domain, but if you try to do something you’re going to get sued.

I’ve written about Lawrence Lessig a lot, he’s a bit of a hero of mine. He’s got a lot of integrity and really pushes for what he believes. He recently was sued (he’s a copyright lawyer) and forced a settlement with the company. He’s one of the few people that can do this, he has the knowledge, the money, and the desire to do this. In many other cases, it’s up to pro bono lawyers to fight these cases because the person in the wrong cannot fight. It’s literally David vs. Goliath. However, if David is provided the right resources most of the time Goliath goes down.

This is the case we’re dealing with in the propose Comcast Time Warner merger. Where the people most impacted have little voices. Companies are pushing to turn more of our activities into opportunities to make money. Gamers that stream on Twitch are going to be pushed to pay more, Twitch is going to be pushed to pay more for high quality access for uploads and downloads, and the people watching those streams are going to be forced to pay for quality streams. This is our culture. We are people that don’t want to be controlled by cable companies. We don’t want to be forced to deal with this. Our needs are not being met by the market.

Because we’re disparate, companies and incumbents are winning the culture war. Most people aren’t aware that we’re in a battle over affordable access to our culture. Memes, TV shows, Movies, and whatever retarded shit we watch on the internet is our culture. Making it inaccessible is a battle our gate keepers are winning. We need to figure out how to fight back. I plan on switching from Comcast when I move and never going back. I plan on switching to T-mobile and never going back to Verizon. It’s time to put our money where our mouth is. It’s going to be painful, but without our support those companies can’t oust the incumbents and cannot force change.

We need to force change with our wallets.

Russia and the prisoner’s dilemma

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For the past few years we’ve been playing a prisoner’s dilemma with Russia. In fact, I’d argue that this goes back farther than just a few years, it might even go back to our two wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan. The US essentially was able to convince through a mixture of sympathy, arm twisting, and out right lies as we know now.

Since then at every turn Russia has been a balancing force or antagonizing force depending on your perspective, to US goals in different parts of the world; specifically in places like Liberia, Syria, and Turkey. In none of these cases was Russia in a position to really push back against the US and definitely could not have pushed for Sanctions against the US.

Now, with the Ukraine crisis it’s not longer through proxies. This is a head to head game against some of the most corrupt politicians on earth. These politicians make our “corrupt” politicians look like kittens. They are not afraid to lock up someone for political dissent, like Pussy Riot or many others. Furthermore, there are a lot of accusations of out right poisoning or murder as well. In the US, there might be calls for sending someone to prison, but truthfully, I don’t think that anyone would be happy if it was incredibly easy to send a duly elected official in the US to prison. We might like it to be easier or whatever, but it’s not and it’s even better that it’s hard for dissenters to be sent to prison.

Obama likely has gained some experience with the brinkmanship that’s happened in the US in the past few months, but that’s really nothing compared to Putin’s experience as a KGB agent and running Russia for the past 15 years. For the Crimea (where Russia has “invaded or not”) this has some serious implications. At this point the US can do a few things, commit militarily, push for sanctions – likely including removing Russia from UN and other international bodies, and little else. To preempt any discussion on sanctions Russia has already said that happens they will simply shift away from the Dollar and stop repaying any US banks.

This is what we have to look forward to with this Crimea Crisis. Russia and the US are both in a no-blink position over this. The US believes that Russia is in the wrong with their actions in Crimea and Ukraine, while Russia believes it is doing nothing wrong.

We’re entering a pretty terrifying time with these stand offs. At this point we don’t know how the people are playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Are they all playing the game as if we’re going to have another turn? In all the other cases I’d say that yes, we’ve played as if there will be more turns. However, people are arguing we’re on the brink of another cold-war. I can’t make a claim either way for that – I look back at movies from the 80’s and at times have difficulty remembering the context that movie was filmed in. However, thinking about the tension in this situation and the fear that the other guy is only planning on one interaction that it’s this and never another move, that’s pretty terrifying – especially since I want to keep playing.