Personhood for chimps? Not any time soon.
Personhood for chimps? Not any time soon.
It’s a noble cause, but a flawed strategy. Victory is unlikely, but even if achieved it will be quickly squelched by legislation redefining personhood as belonging only to human beings.
That’s one of the problems universal marriage proponents have had: some courts have said gay couples have a right to marry, but many legislatures, including most notably the U.S. Congress via the Defense of Marriage Act, have simply legislated a definition of marriage that explicitly excludes those deemed unworthy of the right.
Luckily, DOMA was ruled unconstitutional this year (I’m ashamed to say I apparently failed to blog about the June 2013 decision…). But it was the culmination of a long battle for the plaintiff and an even longer one for opponents of the ludicrous insult to the constitution that was DOMA.
In short, it’ll be a long time before the law purports to give a damn about how depressed a chimp in a trailer park feels. And that’s a damn shame.
NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide
NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide
Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, reporting at The Washington Post:
The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.
Incidental indeed.
Jay Rosen on the "View from Somewhere"
Jay Rosen on the “View from Somewhere”
The quarter-billion-dollar news company Pierre Omidyar is founding will be fascinating: a digital-first journalism outfit with old media money behind it.
It’s an odd flip of the Jeff Bezos/Washington Post play, which involved a digital-first entrepreneur putting the same money as Omidyar, $250M, behind an old media organization.
If I had more free time, there would be a good article in there somewhere about what exactly it means to see that kind of money converging on the old/new media dichotomy from opposite directions.
But I don’t, so there won’t. For now, at least.
Stephen Wolfram is building a ghost for the machine
Stephen Wolfram is building a ghost for the machine
Stephen Wolfram, putting modesty aside as he often and justifiably does, to discuss his most ambitious project to date:
The level of automation is incredibly higher than people could ever have before – it’s incredibly powerful. Anything that WolframAlpha knows your app knows.
This can be the beginning of a vastly more accessible world of bespoke, personal programming, or it could be very, very bad.
10 misconceptions about copyright and fair use
10 misconceptions about copyright and fair use
Everyone on the Internet should have to read these.
Judge calls Google book-scanning fair use
Judge calls Google book-scanning fair use
Great news for fair use doctrine, and a big win for word geeks.
Judge Denny Chin said much in his ruling granting Google’s motion for summary judgment, but this part stuck out to me:
Google Books permits humanities scholars to analyze massive amounts of data — the literary record created by a collection of tens of millions of books. Researchers can examine word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers to consider how literary style has changed over time.
The decision is up on Scribd. I shall geek out further about it after I have a chance to read it through.
Is the job worthy of you?
The link is aimed at software developers but it’s applicable to anyone looking for a new job. I am at my current employer as much because it answered my questions satisfactorily as because I answered its questions satisfactorily.
A Friend Under Fire
Ed. note: This article was originally published in 2007 at Phillyist, the now-closed website about arts and culture in Philadelphia at which I was an associate editor. I’m republishing it here, lightly revised, for Veteran’s Day.
It’s never easy to watch friends depart for dangerous lands, but it’s comforting to know they are members of the United States Marine Corps.
That does not mean that, when my good friend, whom I met during my first year in college, when we roomed together, and who asked to remain anonymous, deployed on his first tour of duty, I was all smiles.
The sad reality is that, however well-trained, equipped and capable our soldiers are, many of our generation’s battles are fundamentally unique. Direct person-to-person combat is sometimes taken out of the equation, replaced by death squads and pockets of insurgency that blend into civilian neighborhoods, sometimes by force and sometimes with the permission of villagers.
Classic guerrilla tactics have given way to makeshift but deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs), sometimes detonated by trip wire and sometimes set off via radio remote.
When my friend returned home from about a year in Iraq, he had many stories to tell. There was, however, one in particular that illustrated the brutal moral difficulty that faces so many of our soldiers.
My friend, a native of New Jersey who attended the same Philadelphia-area university that I did, was stationed almost directly between the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in central Iraq.
For a while, he and his comrades were posted on a bridge (the one pictured above) that fed an exit ramp across the Euphrates river. This was a highway that had been in disuse since the start of the conflict and the Marines were involved in an effort to return use of the bridge to civilians in the area.
To that end, they moved their post off of the bridge to a site 500 meters away. However, in the weeks following this decision, about a dozen IEDs were placed on or below the bridge, although two ever detonated.
It is a fairly common tactic among insurgents, he told me, to send children in with these potential IEDs, usually in the form of small knapsacks or bookbags. The idea is that if the Marines don’t open fire on the child with the decoy bag, the next child will be sent in to deliver a real bomb. Some children are suckered into this or bribed, others go willingly with a terrifyingly adult devotion to their cause.
My friend was patrolling with a sniper company one day, not long after the two real bombs had gone off. The trigger man spotted a child approaching the underside of the bridge.
The sniper, following new orders the company had received in the wake of the two recently detonated IEDs, lined up a shot and took it, instantly killing the child.
Further invesigation revealed that the bag the child had been carrying was empty.
This tragic illustration of what has happened and may still happen in Iraq and Afghanistan is not the only story my friend had. There was the eight-year-old boy who approached a patrol of Iraqi army officers and US Marines, begging for water. He quickly triggered a bomb vest he had been wearing under his clothes and took the lives of five servicemen, as well as his own. There was the other young boy who drove a car bomb up to a local school, killing himself and a dozen other children.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the conversation I had with my friend about these stories was how he told them. We discussed the sad sickness of a war that involves children, but he made clear, in the field, second-guesses are dangerous luxuries.
We can only wonder, from this side of war, what these situations are doing to men and women who fight them for us. The statistics are daunting, but this is not that kind of article. Making men and women into numbers is part of the problem.
Let’s try to keep in mind, not only on Memorial or Veterans days, what exactly it means to serve your country, and that sometimes, even if someone returns physically unharmed, they may not have survived unscathed.
They do not confine their service to one or two days a year, and we must not so limit our gratitude. It is a debt we cannot repay, but we must never stop trying.
Image courtesy an anonymous friend of the author, with permission.
A new kind of freelance journalism
A new kind of freelance journalism
This is essentially journalism à la carte: Peter Jukes offered to continue live-tweeting the News of the World phone-hacking trial if the crowd would fund it. Interest was strong enough to do just that, and his Indiegogo funders ordered up some trial coverage, funded through Christmas.
He’s probably not the first and certainly not the last, but I predict this is just the beginning of a trend and this sort of thing will be far more common in the years to come.
Correction: This blog correctly uses the same title I gave this post to describe this long-form article. So, it’s not so new, after all.
AOL lawyers don't understand Creative Commons. At all.
AOL lawyers don’t understand Creative Commons. At all.
David Kravets writes at Wired about AOL’s demand that an app called People+ stop using a complete replica of AOL’s tech company database.
AOL’s CrunchBase is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution:
We provide CrunchBase’s content under the Creative Commons Attribution License [CC-BY].
However, the terms of service for the same product say, with my emphasis:
CrunchBase reserves the right in its sole discretion (for any reason or for no reason) and at anytime without notice to You to change, suspend or discontinue the CrunchBase API and/or suspend or terminate your rights under these General Terms of Service to access, use and/or display the CrunchBase API, Brand Features andany CrunchBase content.
Actually, as AOL attorneys should know (but apparently don’t), the company cannot reserve any such right at all, at least as to any data accessed, used or displayed while the Creative Commons license is still in effect, which it is as of November 6, 2013.
AOL can legally prohibit future access, use and display, but once content is under a Creative Commons attribution license one reserves no rights whatsoever, except the right to attribution.
It’s baffling that AOL lawyers would assert otherwise.
Pivot while there's still time
Pivot while there’s still time
Bobby Ghoshal, co-founder of the now-defunct social news app Flud:
A year after pivoting to the enterprise we were out of business […] because we ran out of money and investors didn’t have enough data to make a decision to jump on board.
I buy this reasoning. I read a lot about venture capital investors and how they conduct their due diligence.
Investors want to (as they should) gorge themselves on data before even discussing the possibility of backing your startup.
But if the first iteration of your idea falters and you’re too late to accept it or notice it or implement a pivot, getting to the next phase of development won’t save you because, as Ghoshal notes, the data won’t be there to convince investors to sign on the line which is dotted.
Of course, passion and user engagement is important when you’re building an app with a backend service. But all passion and users usually get you is a meeting.
It’s data that closes deals.
Steam has more subscribers than Xbox Live
Steam has more subscribers than Xbox Live
The Steam gaming network is now the number 2 community for gamers in the world. Sony’s PlayStation Network is on top with 110 million users, followed by Steam with 65 million. Microsoft’s Xbox Live network takes the third spot with 48 million subscribers.
The Steam number is truly impressive because, unlike the other two on the list, Steam has no console on the market yet.
The PC-gaming market and multiplayer software maker expects to launch beta hardware soon, but to take the second position without anything in households yet is quite a feat.
NSA responds to “erroneous” data collection reports (full text)
The National Security Agency, in a mass email to press Oct. 31, presumably responding to a recent Washington Post report on the agency’s direct data monitoring of company’s like Google and Yahoo, goes all third-person self-referential on us:
What NSA does is collect the communications of targets of foreign intelligence value, irrespective of the provider that carries them. U.S. service provider communications make use of the same information super highways as a variety of other commercial service providers. NSA must understand and take that into account in order to eliminate information that is not related to foreign intelligence.
Read the rest of the statement:
STATEMENTOct. 31, 2013
Recent press articles on NSA’s collection operations conducted under Executive Order 12333 have misstated facts, mischaracterized NSA’s activities, and drawn erroneous inferences about those operations. NSA conducts all of its activities in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies – and assertions to the contrary do a grave disservice to the nation, its allies and partners, and the men and women who make up the National Security Agency.
All NSA intelligence activities start with a validated foreign intelligence requirement, initiated by one or more Executive Branch intelligence consumers, and are run through a process managed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. When those requirements are received by NSA, analysts look at the Information Need and determine the best way to satisfy it. That process involves identifying the foreign entities that have the information, researching how they communicate, and determining how best to access those communications in order to get the foreign intelligence information. The analysts identify selectors – e-mail addresses and phone numbers are examples – that help isolate the communications of the foreign entity and task those to collection systems. In those cases where there are not specific selectors available, the analysts will use metadata, similar to the address on the outside of an envelope, to attempt to develop selectors for their targets. Once they have them, they task the selectors to the collection systems in order to get access to the content, similar to the letter inside the envelope.
The collection systems target communications links that contain the selectors, or are to and from areas likely to contain the selectors, of foreign intelligence interest. Seventy years ago, the communications links were shortwave radio transmissions between two points on the globe. Today’s communications flow over technologies like satellite links, microwave towers, and fiber optic cables. Terrorists, weapons proliferators, and other valid foreign intelligence targets make use of commercial infrastructure and services. When a validated foreign intelligence target uses one of those means to send or receive their communications, we work to find, collect, and report on the communication. Our focus is on targeting the communications of those targets, not on collecting and exploiting a class of communications or services that would sweep up communications that are not of bona fide foreign intelligence interest to us.
What NSA does is collect the communications of targets of foreign intelligence value, irrespective of the provider that carries them. U.S. service provider communications make use of the same information super highways as a variety of other commercial service providers. NSA must understand and take that into account in order to eliminate information that is not related to foreign intelligence.
NSA works with a number of partners and allies in meeting its foreign-intelligence mission goals, and in every case those operations comply with U.S. law and with the applicable laws under which those partners and allies operate. A key part of the protections that are provided to both U.S. persons and citizens of other countries is the requirement that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and the Attorney General-approved minimization procedures. These limitations protect the privacy of all people and, in particular, to any incidentally acquired communications of U.S. persons. The protections are applied when selectors are tasked to the collection system; when the collection itself occurs; when the collected data are being processed, evaluated, analyzed, and put into a database; and when any reporting of the foreign intelligence is being done. In addition, NSA is very motivated and actively works to remove as much extraneous data as early in the process as possible – to include data of innocent foreign citizens.
—NSA Public Affairs Office
FBI asks DOJ to investigate source of Calderon leak to Al Jazeera
FBI asks DOJ to investigate source of Calderon leak to Al Jazeera
It could be that I’m new to the journalism industry and only recently interested in its developments. But it seems to me as if journalism and law are converging like never before, and on an international stage.
While Al Jazeera America is unlikely to face direct legal action, the American arm of the Qatari news network only launched in August 2013. It’s new, and if its current sources face investigation and potential federal charges, prospective sources may decide not to become sources at all.
States cite lack of federal progress in pursuit of privacy reform
States cite lack of federal progress in pursuit of privacy reform
Special interest groups oppose federal privacy reform to prevent onerous new regulations.
But this effort must, at some point, become counterproductive.
A multitude of state-specific privacy frameworks that, by (federal) law, can’t operate between states, must, at some point, become at least as onerous as new federal regulations.
Details and summary tags in HTML5
HTML5 includes two tags, details and summary, that can be used to generate expanding menus you once needed JavaScript or jQuery for.
A code snippet opening and closing with the “details” tag can include a summary that, when clicked, expands to reveal additional HTML.
As of this writing, I’ve implemented it in this site’s header, but I’ve also included a working example below, which won’t work in the Tumblr Dashboard.
All you’ll see is the summary line: “Click here to expand this example.”
So this link opens this post in a new tab. Problem solved.
Now, here’s the example:
Here is a paragraph. Links work, as well. This one goes to my home page.Click here to expand this example.
Learn some more about this simple and elegant way of making web pages more dynamic for HTML5-compliant browsers at W3Schools and Hongkiat.com.
Google "zealously" private about mystery barge
Google “zealously” private about mystery barge
I thought this was interesting but not really worth mentioning here, until the Coast Guard visited, apparently, as USA Today reports, under a presumably Google-imposed gag order.
I’m an avid Google user, incredibly open on the internet, and something of an apologist for the utility of systems that know a ton about me. But I still think it’s rich that, as Michael Winters writes in the article, Google “is zealously guarding its privacy” around the barge.
So rich.
UPDATE: It’s a party barge. No, seriously.