Technology and society

Is being scary smart a crime?

Submitted by lishevita on Tue, 03/19/2013 - 00:51

I've come to the conclusion that it must be. The way that the US and other governments prosecute computer related crimes makes no real sense. Look at the absurd level of pressure that was leveled against Aaron Swartz. Look at what happened to the founders of The Pirate Bay. Look at the punishment that Andrew ‘Weev’ Auernheimer just received. It's nuts. Completely nuts. There is no connection between the crimes and the punishments.

Weev is not a nice guy. He's an idiot and a jerk. He has been no Aaron Swartz, that's for darned sure, but he just got sentenced to 41 months in prison for doing something that didn't even break the security of AT&T. The Next Web describes his actions as being equivalent to pinging a server and having it tell you all its secrets. What Weev did was write a script that ran a program exactly as it was written to run. That's no more criminal than writing a web spider to find all the web pages on a single web server.

Letter to my daughter

Submitted by lishevita on Wed, 01/30/2013 - 23:20

I want you to know that you have the power to do good things and be the voice for what's right. You do not have to bend to the will of those who would wield power for their own benefit and to the detriment of other, less powerful people. You can stand for the high ideals that we hold up as the basis for this nation's mythology.

No, our nation has never truly lived up to its vision of itself, but we do have the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights that we can point to and strive towards. These serve as guides across the generations to help us find our way when politics turns the path too dark.

Who says it isn't the end of the world?

Submitted by lishevita on Fri, 01/11/2013 - 02:18

So, in case you hadn't figured it out from reading my blog already, I'm a bit of an oddball. I also have some wonderfully oddball friends. One of the things that my beloved oddball friends and I like to do is sit around contemplating horrific dystopian futures*, including the question of "What would it really mean if the Mayan end of the calendar means horrible death and destruction?" My take on that one has always been to look at the last Mesoamerican "end of the world", and to realize that from the perspective of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, it pretty much was the end. Even before most of them had seen a European face, Small Pox rushed ahead and killed two thirds of the population. And then the genocide really got started. Since December 21st came and went, all that Mayan Apocalypse stuff is completely blasé, but I say "Nay!" A single day is just a turning point. Not the thing itself.

I say, at least for the purposes of this discussion, that we are well and truly in the midst of a Revealing of a New Future that heretofore has only been contemplated in fiction. Mostly the scary kind of fiction.

Ep8: Social Scripts for Abuse

Submitted by lishevita on Thu, 01/10/2013 - 19:41
podcast audio: 
audio/mpeg iconep8-SocialScripts.mp3

How do you deal with the news that someone you know has been or is being abused? Why do people stay in situations of domestic violence? How can a community help both the victim and the perpetrator of abuse? (Is it even possible?)

In this hour and a half podcast there are no simple answers, but there are experiences, ideas, and examples of how individuals and communities have worked to stop abuse and create a space for healing.

Trigger Warning:
This episode contains frank discussion of personal experience of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised.

When vendors ignore their vulnerabilities

Submitted by lishevita on Sun, 12/30/2012 - 22:13

Every time I hear about a new vulnerability that an ethical hacker has discovered and explained to the vendor of the device or software, I'm annoyed anew by the refusal or inability of companies to take responsibility and fix the things that are broken. When someone who cares enough to contact you and tell you what's broken so that you can fix it, why would just ignore them?

The usual answer is that the vulnerability is seen as less costly than the fix, so there's no point in fixing it. In most cases, this is a shamefully short sighted view of the situation that doesn't take the full cost of the problem into perspective. The company is only looking at their own costs, not at the full range of costs to themselves and their customers.

"But, of course!" you say. "Everyone is looking out for their own interests. That's obvious!!"

What happened to enlightened self interest? It seems as if our entire culture has lost sight of this very vital part of communal interaction. I could go on and on about the problem for days, but just now I'd like to point out how it fits here.

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