Andrea Peterson reports¹ at The Washington Post the Senate has passed a bill, the DATA Act, which would require federal financial data be published in a common format. It sounds like a great idea and something those nerdy data journalists are going to love. The bill is likely to pass in the House as well, and the President is expected to autograph it.

However, a part of the bill Peterson pointed out makes me nervous.

The version passed by the Senate doesn’t set a specific format for the data standard but does require it to be “a widely-accepted, nonproprietary, searchable, platform-independent computer readable format”

Now, to be clear, it’s probably better not to name a specific file format because those may come and go. But I’m hoping the final version of the law defines every word in that quoted bit, excepting “a” and “format” because if it doesn’t, implementation is going to be even slower than usual and enabling high-volume computerized public scrutiny of federal spending is really a the-sooner-the-better sort of topic.

Margaret Sullivan is Public Editor at the New York Times. She is tasked with taking the Times to task when it falls short, overreaches or otherwise misses the mark.

And sometimes it does miss the mark, like when it failed to mention successful litigation by the Wall Street Journal which resulted in publication of Medicare data the Times used in crafting a recent feature story.

Sullivan’s candor and diligence are a service to the paper’s readers and reporters alike. Subscribe to her RSS feed here.

Alex Hern reports for The Guardian this disturbing fact about the recently disclosed OpenSSL bug, now two years old and pervasive:

servers vulnerable to Heartbleed are less secure than they would be if they simply had no encryption at all.

How? The bug allows access even to information the encryption wasn’t protecting.

I wanted to share this because it’s a funny phrase, and I think it’s important to keep an eye out for humor, intentional or otherwise, in civil litigation filings.

Film studio Paramount Pictures, in its motion to dismiss a defamation suit by a plaintiff alleging the film The Wolf of Wall Street, via the book on which it’s apparently based, defamed him:

The Book did not have only one dishonest executive with a notable toupee.

That’s a sentence that only lives its best, strangest life outside its original context. But, if you’re okay with dispelling some of the magic, read the rest of the motion at Scribd, or embedded below.

Aggregation is plagiarism:

I couldn’t help but aggregate (though not plagiarize) this link Jim Dalrymple aggregated to a post by a Mr. Joe Wilcox about how aggregation is, well, plagiarism.

It’s true, now that you’ve read this you don’t need to read the original to know what it’s about. However, my guess is you’ll miss out on the personal reasons and nuanced perspective Mr. Wilcox offers if you don’t go and read his post.

I certainly agree with his position, not an uncommon one, that word-for-word copies or close paraphrases are plagiarism plain and simple. But I would term that behavior, well, plagiarism. Aggregation, done right, will collect interesting material to which the collector wants to point his own readers, adding context or perspective or opinion lacking in the original.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is a great example of that: it’s comprised almost entirely of links to the work of others, often including quotes from the linked-to article. But it’s as far from plagiarism as you can get. People read Gruber’s site specifically for his opinion on the news of the day. Most of his readers probably find the newsy bits elsewhere, be it on Twitter or another news site. But Gruber’s take adds value, and that’s why they’re there.

I like to think that’s what I’m doing here, but I suppose only readers like you can decide that.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting virtual reality will follow mobile as the next major communication paradigm. While I’m not sure that’s true with VR tech alone, the massive user base and data stores of Facebook, used wisely despite a minefield of privacy concerns, may be just what VR needs to go mainstream.

That of course assumes Oculus can get the tech to a mass-marketable state. With a $350 developer hardware kit, consumer-level pricing looks within reach. So perhaps Zuckerberg is onto something. But it’s easy to be social when you’re clicking around in a browser. The real question is whether people will have any interest in a totally immersive digital social experience.

This week’s featured podcast is 99% Invisible is “a tiny radio show about design,” by Roman Mars.

If you think often about design, you’ll love every episode of this one. If you don’t think often about design, 99% Invisible will make you think often about design. Mars doesn’t just talk about graphic design every week. He finds design everywhere.

This week’s episode is Call Now! and it is all about that magnificent corner of the advertising industry that is lawyer marketing. Whether you’re a law student lawyer, or client, it’s a must-listen. I’ve embedded it below the subscription links.

Subscribe to 99% Invisible:

iTunes | Pocket Casts | RSS

Listen:

When Cook turned the spotlight on someone, he hammered them with questions until he was satisfied. “Why is that?” “What do you mean?” “I don’t understand. Why are you not making it clear?” He was known to ask the same exact question 10 times in a row.

Once upon a time I had a boss who was verbally abusive of everyone he met, loose with the law and prone to what can only be called temper tantrums.

He was also a genius.

And one of his staples in a meeting was the same thing that quote above explains about Tim Cook. Eventually I was ready for it every time, and it’s a valuable lesson.

It’s hard to believe this patent should ever have been approved by a patent examiner acting in good faith, especially considering the criminal convictions standing in stark contradiction of the purported “inventor’s” affidavit of lies, but let’s assume the USPTO did, as they claim, handle this one by the book.

Even the appearance of such ridiculous impropriety as granting a patent for fake research is enough to signal the extent to which the system is flawed.

It makes for funny headlines, like this one I came up with three years ago, but the science just keeps coming: sitting too much damages human health.

The troubling part is much of the onus for a solution is on businesses employing us all, who may not have much incentive to contribute to solving the problem if the consequences don’t affect workers until after retirement.

ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen, on the license plate tracking system recently proposed by the Department of Homeland Security:

It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the commercial enterprise, not the government.

Because the government never compels commercial enterprises to give it data.

Ever.

The lesson here: the Digital Millennium COPYRIGHT Act contains no enforcement mechanism for TRADEMARK rights.

It’s not surprising that more scholarship self-identifying as IP-focused is about patents. After all, they drive much of commerce and innovation (and arguably the problems with the two) in the industrial and technology sectors.

It’s worth noting though that, unlike much of the protection afforded by a patent, many copyright protections are available even without registration, although it’s admittedly difficult to enforce them via litigation and to win statuory damages without timely registration.

Check out this PDF by the U.S. Copyright Office for more information.

At this point the anti-Constitutionalists are trolling themselves. A choice bit from this piece of garbage:

The bill will ensure the federal government gives the same deference to the 33 states that define marriage as the union between one man and one woman as it does to the 17 states that have chosen to recognize same-sex unions.

It doesn’t matter how a state wants to define marriage, whether it’s full of crazy conservatives or mushy liberals. It only matters what the Constitution requires, and that is equal protection under the laws.

All consenting adults with the capacity to validly enter a contract are allowed to marry. Legislating around that fundamental right violates the Constitution.

We’ve been over this.

Following up on my recent tirade, this made me happy. Facebook has massive amounts of influence, and is influenced by massive amounts of people, and changes like this are a positive step forward in how technology reconciles with shifting norms and modes of self-identificaiton. Good on ‘em.

Now, if Mr. Zuckerberg needs a good charity write-off for tax season, I would be happy to put him in touch with my student loan creditors.

Mr. Stern’s headline sums it up very well. If you don’t believe it can really be that bad, read the PDF.

It is that bad. Ignorance is one thing, but open hostility like this cannot stand and anyone who supports this bill commits the intellectual equivalent of burning the original Constitution to a pile of ashes.

Let me translate that from fiery liberal anger into constitutional principles:

A law allowing the detrimental differential treatment of a class of persons traditionally subject to invidious discrimination because they belong to that class violates the Equal Protection rights granted by the Constitution as to the federal government in the 5th Amendment and extended as to the States by the 14th Amendment.

Let us quote the Good Document itself:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Gotta love that 14th Amendment. There’s nothing ambiguous in the juxtaposition of the Kansas bill and the Constitution. You can’t deny someone equal protection of the laws. You can’t tell me I’m not allowed in your hotel because I’m a man. Maybe if it’s a country club. But not a hotel. Or a restaurant. Or a state.

The use of freedom of religion as a pathetic attempt to hide animosity and hatred is a supreme act of collective cowardice by the Kansan legislators who vote for this bill.

It is an un-American as it gets. But the good news is, as one ruling after another makes ever-more-clear, you can’t stop history.

The wife of an AOL employee, commenting on the company’s chief executive using her child’s premature birth as an example of why the company was cutting benefits:

I take issue with how he reduced my daughter to a “distressed baby” who cost the company too much money. How he blamed the saving of her life for his decision to scale back employee benefits. How he exposed the most searing experience of our lives, one that my husband and I still struggle to discuss with anyone but each other, for no other purpose than an absurd justification for corporate cost-cutting.

The view from the top is one of digits and dollar signs, not daughters and dignity.

The answer is, perhaps unsuprisingly, not clear. But while too few people know you don’t have to allow a vehicle search, the power differential during a traffic stop probably overrides abstract constitutional notions.

As the article says, be polite and minimize conversation. Police are used to the power differential and they are as comfortable with it as you are uncomfortable. They don’t want to hear about your constitutional law class or how you read an article in The Atlantic about traffic stops.

Steve Jobs, in 1985:

We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people — as remarkable as the telephone.

The remarkable thing is that, at least for people my age, ~30, as old as the Mac itself, the computer is far more remarkable than the telephone ever was. We were raised with the telephone as a commonplace thing, the way our children and nephews and nieces are growing up with iPhones and iPads.

Our computers used the telephone as merely a means to an end, a mode of connectivity. Think about that for a moment: the previous household’s most advanced piece of technology (except perhaps for the television, which is an interesting argument) ended as just a feature in the next generation’s most advanced pieces of technology.

I don’t know whether that’s good or bad for society taken in the aggregate, but the ability of technology to truly and ineffably amaze is gloriously unrelenting. I see no difference, no separating line, between technology and art. Each is made to convey meaning, to delight, to terrify, to teach, to challenge perceptions, and to inspire those who come after us.

Technology and art, or technology as art, or art as technology, are always examples of the same thing:

Humans dreaming, and then building the dream.

What a neat idea.

No one. Least of all I.

I just wrote too many words about why I think the post I link to above isn’t worth the bandwidth it’s transmitted over, but I was being tired and petty and shitting on the good-natured opinion of someone more successful than I, so I deleted those words.

I’m embarrassed I wrote the first version of this note, but I give myself a few points for having published this far more self-aware and candid revision.

MG Siegler, general partner at Google Ventures, TechCrunch columnist, and tech writer:

This year, my plan is to write roughly 500 words a day in the form of a short post here on this site.

Good idea. Me too (although I’m a little late to punch so far).

Good article by lawyer, legal journalist and fellow Temple Law alum Amaris Elliott-Engel. The law, or lack of it, as it relates to cyber warfare is near the top of my list of legal interests. 

I know this is an unpopular stance, but if you operate on any assumption other than that this happens all the time on myriad services you use, you’re a crazy unrealistic person lacking in the minimum amount of cynicism (read: realism) required to use the modern internet in a fully-informed manner.

While I don’t have time these days to do the digging someone should do on this, it strikes me as very likely we all gave Facebook permission to skim all of our content for ad-related and any other purposes when we signed up.

Digital privacy almost always comes with an asterisk these days, and that’s not going to change any time soon.

Apple, it turns out, is not happy about the legal consequences of its ebook price-fixing scheme. I would be unhappy as well if the attorney assigned by a federal judge to make sure I reformed my anti-competitive practices was sending me $1,100-per-hour bills. 

The monitor, Michael Bromwich, submitted to the court on Dec. 30 a detailed explanation of Apple’s treatment of him and his team since their assignment in mid-September. He quotes Kyle Andeer, Apple’s director of competition law, as complaining he is “disappointed by [Bromwich’s] position on rates and other fees. They do not reflect market realities.”

As a former trial attorney at the Federal Trade Commission, Andeer should know a thing or two about “market realities.” 

But then again, it’s a distaste for those realities that got Apple a monitor in the first place.

It’s a great post by great designers about the work and value that goes into and comes out of great design. It also happens to explain very clearly the concept behind my own website here at Constant & Endless.

Geoff Teehan of Teehan+Lax writes:

In the end, a successful project is never done. It is never perfect. If you aren’t learning from it, then you’ve given up. It’s a constant process of assessing the landscape, making hard choices and accepting trade-offs.

Like Saleem Sinai says in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, “the process of revision should be constant and endless.”

Prismatic is a content discovery engine powered by your own wide array of interests, aiming to avoid being limited by your filter bubble of common sharing tendencies. Check it out on iOS or the web.