Brave New World circa 1991

In 1991 two things happened. Well, several things but two really important things. Linus Torvalds created a kernel inspired by Minix and Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet. Sort of. Both did nothing more than build on the past, just like everyone else who creates something, but they each gave us something that would inadvertently remake the world.

I won't give you a history lesson here, you can go right over to Wikipedia and read the history of the Internet and Linux. My point here is the present. In response to the surge of information sharing unprecedented in history governments and private organizations struggled to cope, regulate and understand the new world emerging. At first only industrialized nations could access the web, but as hardware became cheaper and second hand hardware more prolific, and with the help of free and open source software like GNU/Linux the people in the world were meeting each other anew.

Content owners and middle men panicked at the ability of people to share and governments recoiled at the ability to learn. Misinformation and malware spread, too, but open software and the non governmental nature of the web countered this. Even while copyright laws became harsher and trade treaties more draconian, distribution outpaced the best of legal strategies. The web was open and there wasn't much that could be done about it. Authoritarian countries have had some success but the advent of software like TOR and proxies on top of satellite internet connections have hampered their regimes greatly.

But now the UN is taking steps to take over the web from private organizations. They think they can monitor and control it, as the US government has tried to do for years. Unfortunately they still misunderstand the creation that has been unleashed. Any computer running any operating system can now communicate with any other computer. All content is tradable and sendable. The UN and FBI have focused on DNS, the system that allows us to type in names to go to websites instead of numerical addresses, but DNS is just a convenience. Already most of the web is the "Dark Net," unconnected to DNS servers and completely unregulated. Many illicit activities take place on the dark net, but so do many activist activities. Whole scale shutdowns of internet nodes can temporarily keep a nation offline, such as in Syria or the Great Firewall of China. While extreme, this method does still work.

But not for long. Projects like project-byzantium.org are working on mesh networking. If there is power and working hardware in a region, people can communicate. They can move in and out of the web, the dark net, and the mesh. The more the governments of the world try to stop information now, the more layers will grow around it. Government sponsorship created the web but it has long since left their control. TOR protects activists and byzantium works on keeping them online. The greatest tool for information sharing is only now starting to grow into maturity and it will be the end of authoritarian regimes, corporate overreach and hidden politics. Wikileaks spies on governments and shares anything it finds, bitcoin offers secure and unmanipulated currency while linux has opened a world of tools that can be used to build as many webs as are needed to keep ahead of those who would suppress information.

If I were an authoritarian government, NGO or multinational corporation right now I would be trembling in fear.

Logic Priest

Shiny toys

So I ordered 3 Raspberry Pis last week, hopefully I will get them soon-ish. They seem to always be on back order. I already have a million projects in mind including a rack mounted micro server stack and robots of the quadrotor variety. So in this political free post I won't say anything about any shootings or centrists posing as liberals or Fox-splosions or even the War on Christmas™. Perhaps another post.

http://www.raspberrypi.org

Logic Priest

Academics

PZ Meyers has a post and link up that is frankly upsetting. Yet another way the US is falling behind due to privatization: higher education. We all hear the crap about public education failing, and that now includes public universities. Republicans have pushed for school vouchers to gut the primary and secondary education of our country, now they funnel funds to over priced and under qualified for-profit schools like Devry and Pheonix, where graduation rates are terrible, hiring rates are worse, and they cost as much as an ivy-league school.

The over political nature of faculty jobs, the remaining funds universities have going to coach salaries and non academic president's salaries have led to good scientists and educators leaving the system to make money elsewhere. Even as the states and the fed cut primary and secondary education funds, even as states and the fed funnel money out of them to tax breaks and for-profit schools, we have science funding under attack. There seems to be an all out war on education, on science, on intelligence in general. The US lead the world in science and technology for years but now we have an entire political party who cuts funds from and even demonizes education and research, the basis of such leadership. They think that private corporations will advance the world? Even while the private corporations suppress inventions that threaten their monopolies and sue each other over vague patents to keep innovation out? It seems like every card is stacked against an intelligent generation. From kindergarden to a PHD it costs more and more for less, with no prospect of a good job or even the ability to start a new company, since it will be sued out of business the second a tech giant sees it as a threat, the US is headed for a new stone age. The oligarchical nature of the Republican party isn't just about making as much money from bribes and insider trading and outsourcing as possible, it seems to be actively working towards making a new peasant class, blindly following the conservative march towards destruction.

Logic Priest

Broken Patents, Google Saves the Day?

While Google is getting more and more involved in the patent wars that muddy up innovation in the tech industry these days, especially in defending Android and Android partners, they have helped by creating a patent search. For a few years now the Google patent search engine has given potential innovators and curious bystanders a way to effectively search the highly obfuscated patent system of the US, and now they offer a new feature: Prior Art search.

Assuming they don't start to muddy the results themselves, which they have avoided in ordinary searches for a decade now, this could be a way to navigate an over expansive patent system, at least until (if) it gets fixed. To make any technology or software these days seems likely to infringe on someone's broad and poorly defined patent, so this could be a way to work around it, as well as is possible with such a fucked up system. Hell, the US patent system let Apple patent a search bar and rounded edged rectangular phones. Patents are supposed to protect, for limited times innovative and non obvious inventions, not styles and features.

Logic Priest