The Anarchist in the Library: an interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan

The Anarchist in the Library: an interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan

Good discussion of how “democracy and creative culture share this notion that they work best when the raw materials are cheap and easy and easily distributed. You can look at any cultural development that?s made a difference in the world?reggae, blues, crocheting?you can look at any of these and say, y?know, it?s really about communities sharing. It?s about communities moving ideas between and among people, revision, theme and variation, and ultimately a sort of consensus about what is good and what should stay around. We recognize that?s how culture grows? In the last 25 to 30 years, the United States government made a very overt choice. The United States government decided that the commercial interests of a handful of companies–we can name them as the News Corporation, Disney, AOL-Time Warner, Vivendi–these sorts of corporations were selling products that could gain some sort of trade advantage for Americans.

You can look at any cultural development that?s made a difference in the world–reggae, blues, crocheting–and say, y?know, it?s really about communities sharing. Therefore all policy has shifted in their favor. That means policy about who gets to own and run networks, who gets to own and run radio stations, how long copyright protection will last, what forms copyright protections will take. We?ve put ourselves in a really ugly situation though, because we?ve forgotten that a regulatory system like copyright was designed to encourage creativity, to encourage the dissemination of knowledge. These days, copyright is so strong and lasts so long that it?s counterproductive to those efforts….”

Stopping spam by redesigning SMTP from the ground up?

Stopping spam by redesigning SMTP from the ground up?

Interesting column by Larry Selzer. Quote:

“Sometimes I look at the Internet and I see so many different ways being used to compromise security that I wonder whether we’d be better off trashing a lot of the existing infrastructure. After all, the Internet was designed to be secure from nuclear attack, not its own users. The whole idea of network security probably never occurred to the designers of the Internet and the main applications that run it.

In my mind, the biggest failure in this regard is SMTP, the dominant mail protocol of the net. Spam is as pervasive as it is because of weaknesses in SMTP. We know how to fix these problems; the problem is that doing so would break existing applications, which means e-mail in general. This is always a bad thing, but it’s not always a deal-killer. I think this is one area where, in the long term, it may make sense to move away from a protocol that has allowed e-mail to get out of control….”.

SARS isn’t just a health problem

SARS isn’t just a health problem
Guardian story.

“The economic impact of Sars is terrifying world leaders and financial institutions. Singapore’s Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong, warned yesterday: ‘If we fail to contain Sars, it may well become the worst crisis our country has faced.’

Estimating it has cost the city-state $847 million (£540m) so far, he added: ‘Sars will knock you backward, it may even kill you, but I can tell you Sars can kill the economy and all of us will be killed by the collapsing economy.’ …”.

The Economist has come to the same conclusion:

“the effects are now so widespread that some analysts believe SARS will be more damaging to East Asia’s economies than the war in Iraq. Standard & Poor’s, a credit-rating agency, reckons the disease’s impact could cut Hong Kong’s GDP by 0.6%-1.5% this year, Singapore’s by 0.4%-2%, and China’s by up to 0.5%. The United Nations said on Thursday that the combined effect of SARS and the war would cut almost half a percentage point off economic growth throughout Asia this year.”

The death of the Media Lab?

The death of the Media Lab?

Philip Greenspun has posted this scarifying analysis of how the MIT Media Lab pulled in so much corporate money over all those years. The Lab’s problem, of course, is that corporate America has run out of money for that kind of thing. Only the Department of Defense left…

Hitler’s library

Hitler’s library

Interesting piece by Timothy Ryback. In the spring of 1945, in a German salt mine, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division (now where have I heard that name recently?) discovered 3,000 books belonging to Adolf Hitler. More than a thousand of them are now in the Library of Congress. Ryback claims that the books–and their marginalia–reveal Hitler’s deep and disturbing interest in religion and theology. Hmmm… Pity the 101st didn’t display the same concern for Baghdad’s ancient libraries.

More on hats

More on hats

One should remember that hats are a big deal in certain cultures, just as moustaches are in others. Texas, for example, takes hats very seriously. Which reminds me of what Governor John Connally (a native Texan) once said about the Bush family after they moved to the Lone Star state and tried to pass themselves off as Texans. “All hat, no cattle” was his terse analysis.

Ed Felten’s summary of state of play on ‘super-DMCA’ bills

Ed Felten’s summary of state of play on ‘super-DMCA’ bills

This must be one of the most depressing reads on the Web. As Larry Lessig says: “What is so frustrating about this business is not the people (like these governments) who disagree with you. But that their disagreement reveals that they have not done anything to understand the issue. We are over 5 years into this battle, yet these laws look like they have been drafted by people who have lived on another planet these past 5 years.”