Dear Buttons:

Sorry I haven’t been able to call you; I’ve been busy, overwhelmed really.

But not with work or family duties. Of course, these responsibilities occupy my time – nothing important is neglected.

But neither of these have prevented me from keeping in touch as I used to.

No, what has consumed what little spare time I have is a leitmotif triggered by a K-Punk posted article about “The Prestige“, a film I’m very eager to see.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Prestige is of course about the power of film and fiction to cast spells. Its own captivation depends upon keeping the question of its own generic status open: are we watching a simulation of 1890s narrative realism or have we – as some IMDB commenters complained without irony – been ‘conned’ into watching an SF film? The film’s final irony concerns the fact that, to function as magic, genuine science must appear as an illusion.

The full essay can be found here.

This got me thinking about science and magic or, more specifically, what might happen if our techniques became so subtle that they were, to quote Arthur C. Clarke, “…indistinguishable from magic”.

In a pop sci fi scenario, this very situation leads to an advanced species believing itself to be gods and insisting, accordingly, upon the worship of mortals.

Perhaps, in the real, this is what the powerful do to the powerless: demand not only obedience but worship.

Recently, on “60 Minutes“, Bush declared:

I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. … We’ve endured great sacrifice to help them. … (Americans) wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.

Which has, I think, a certain ‘hallowed am I‘ ring to it.

Love,

d.

Robots.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/n_0I4nr4u3A"" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"/]

While I try to re-energize whatever part of my psyche powers this hobby known as blogging, please enjoy the sight and sound of QRIO, Sony’s cancelled robotics program.

via the BBC…

US scientists have successfully implanted bladders grown in the laboratory from patients’ own cells into people with bladder disease.

The researchers, from North Carolina’s Wake Forest University, have carried out seven transplants, and in some the organ is working well years later.

The achievement, details of which have been published online by The Lancet, is being described as a “milestone”.

The team is now working to grow organs including hearts using the technique.

[...]

full at the BBC…

Tom Engelhardt writes:

This was — let’s be blunt — an extraordinary accomplishment for a tiny band of men with one of the more extreme religious/political ideologies around; and, if the testimony under CIA interrogation of al-Qaeda’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is to be believed — summaries  were released at the Moussaoui sentencing hearing — what happened seems to have stunned even him. (”According to the CIA summary, he said he ‘had no idea that the damage of the first attack would be as catastrophic as it was.’”)

And yet, so many years later, there have been no follow-up attacks here. This was obviously never the equivalent of breaking through military lines in war. There were no al-Qaeda troops poised to pour through that breach, ransack the rubble, and spread across New York; nor, like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor (to which the 9/11 assault was often compared), did al-Qaeda launch a simultaneous set of strikes elsewhere. Of this sort of activity the group was incapable. Such acts were far beyond its means.

By the look of it, there weren’t even sleeper cells in the U.S. ready to launch devastating follow-up attacks. (Given the Bush administration’s record from New Orleans to Iraq, we can take it for granted that its officials would have been incapable of stopping any such well-planned attacks.) As far as we can tell, most of the major terrorist assaults launched since then, from Bali to Baghdad, were essentially franchised operations, undertaken by groups who claimed a kinship of inspiration and ideology; and, in a number of devastating cases, including London and Madrid, by small, self-organized groups, brought to a boil by Bush’s War in Iraq, who struck on their own as, in essence, al-Qaeda wannabes. What al-Qaeda has really been promoting, because it was never capable of promoting much else, is a DIY world of terrorism.

[...]

full here at Tom Dispatch.

Our time amongst the living is finite.

This means that our fantasy allotment is also finite – even more finite in fact than our lives as a whole, since not every waking moment is spent in fantasy (and dreams – which are some mysterious form of involuntary problem solving, thought dump and who knows what other events – don’t count as fantasies in the way we usually mean).

Although the vast marketing computers insist I should be fantasizing about this I am, at this very moment, dreaming about creating a visual guide to David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism – which I’m now re-reading.

But I’m not one of those clever Flash lads who can whip up something animated and eye-catching.

I’m going to have to figure something out.

The future was supposed to have many things.

atomic powered flying cars..

robot butlers…

vacations on the moon…

These haven’t arrived but it doesn’t matter.

A different set of scarcely dreamed of artifacts, techniques and concepts have arrived.

What’s missing aren’t the toys: the sonic disruptors the quantum physics enhanced communication technology, the deep space probes and all the other glittering things.

We have all that.

What’s missing is the cinematic quality architectual and interior design for living you’d think would accompany our science fiction world.

Ed Felten and Alex Halderman of Princeton continue their analysis of Sony’s DRM enforcing rootkit.

A key moment:

Customizing the [rootkit uninstaller Sony offered after it was revelead they'd compromised user's machines] uninstaller in this way is more difficult for the vendor and increases customer support costs, compared to a more traditional uninstaller, so a rational vendor would not do it unless there was some benefit. Most likely, the benefit is to the vendor’s platform building strategy, which takes a step backward every time a user uninstalls the vendor’s software. Customizing the uninstaller allows the vendor to contol who receives the uninstaller and to change the terms under which it is delivered in the future.

The entertainment industry (with the full cooperation of hardware and software vendors) is working, step by step, to replace the current open architecture with a DRM enforcing platform. Sony’s rootkit is an early example of what will be hardened into the machines in the near future.

This is what you could call a vamp till the point is reached.

Many years ago I dated a woman who was very fond of buying me surprise gifts.

Without fail these presents were within the category of things I loved, but somehow always not-quite-right.

No doubt, someone has written a treatise on handling, with flash, your lover’s well meaning misfires – that would’ve come in handy for my younger self.

One lovely spring day, she popped her very lovely self over to my apartment bearing a book. “I know you’ll love it” she said, her eyes ablaze with anticipation, “it’s a philosophy book and I know how into philosophy you are.”

She was right; that spring I was reading a collection of translated Simone Weil essays along with Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish.” It was a serious French thought kind of season.

She pressed the book into my hands and planted a juicy kiss on my lips, a good start to the afternoon.

I looked at the book’s title:

“Jacob the Baker”.

Which, disconcertingly, is still available for sale.

As I held this book there was a moment, a sliver of space-time, when I synaptically course corrected to swerve my reaction away from its natural trajectory and towards something sweet to the ear yet neutral on the topic of my opinion of the work.

“Oh. Wow. Thank you” was the best I could do at the moment.

I read the book. At first, I wondered about the author – what kind of person was he? Did he really take this material seriously? Later, I wondered more about the audience. There were people out there who
loved this book, who drew solace from it, who considered it to be a profound thing – what sort of folk were these?

Who’s the audience? That’s always the more interesting question.

…

The eXile’s John Dolan first unmasked Frey in 2003 beginning his review like so:

“This is the worst thing I’ve ever read.”

Dolan has appropriately returned to the topic of Frey on the occasion of the latter’s public flogging (a precursor, undoubtedly, to his rehabilitation and a new book) but instead of taking the easy way out by focusing his fire against Frey the liar (the standard op for this story), wonders aloud – and with the correct portion of rudeness – about the people, both high and low, who accepted such an obviously stupid work as important and praiseworthy.

“…I was stunned at the number of emails boasting proudly that Frey’s books were the only ones the writer had read in years. I guess this comes from decades of patronizing illiterates with “Reading Is Fun” soft-sell campaigns; I guess I’m supposed to be grateful, as a representative of the bad old elitist tradition, that millions of people who move their lips when they read actually finished a whole book-gold stars for everybody, a hall pass for the ones who read both Frey’s books.

But it’s a very, very strange argument, as if I were to start sounding off on mathematics with the boast that it took me three years to pass Algebra in high school, or show up as color man on an MLB broadcast bragging that I hate baseball and still hold the season record in Pleasant Hill’s Little League-not one hit or walk in an entire season.

These readers actually consider themselves noble savages, whose responses are all the purer because they haven’t sullied themselves with books. That fraud is a perfect complement to Frey’s: he pretends to be a scarred veteran and they pretend to be cultural virgins, rather than thrashed sluts who’ve been fucked a million times by every after-school special, every Brian’s Song death-porn tearjerker, and can’t imagine anything better.”

[...]

full at the eXile

As I grow older, I’m more and more interested – when it comes to considering technologies – in focusing on how a device or system’s boosters answer a simple question: what problem is this thing solving?

It’s possible to predict the most likely ways a system will fail – or fail to live up to its marketing splash – by tracking how this question is answered (which, often enough, is expressed via advertising).

This came to mind today as I read news stories about the limited deployment in three New Jersey schools of the Teacher-Parent Authorization Security System an iris recognition platform described as providing relief from “…the administrative burden associated with the student sign in/sign out process.”

Perhaps.

We’ll have to wait and see what new administrative burdens the iris recog system creates and whether it actually solves problems (it would be interesting to know what those admin burdens were and how iris recog was settled upon as the ideal solution) or merely replaces new for old.

The digital age, which seemed, only the twinkling of an eye ago, like the opening of a doorway to new, well lit rooms fully furnished with unprecedented freedom (always a dream of course but a bit more plausible than some others) shows strong signs of devolving, by corporate design, into a kind of soft prison.

Digital rights management measures – both technological and legal – are one of the walls.

But there’s no need for bitter tears when analysis and countermeasures are better responses.

What Mark Russinovich started is developed more fully here:

Ed and I are working on an academic paper, “Lessons from the Sony CD DRM Episode”, which will analyze several not-yet-discussed aspects of the XCP and MediaMax CD copy protection technologies, and will try to put the Sony CD episode in context and draw lessons for the future. We’ll post the complete paper here next Friday. Until then, we’ll post drafts of a few sections here. We have two reasons for this: we hope the postings will be interesting in themselves, and we hope your comments will help us improve the paper.

Today’s excerpt is from the middle of the paper, where we’re wading through details about the copy protection systems and the techniques they use to recognize protected CDs.

Please note that this is a draft and should not be formally quoted or cited. The final version of our entire paper will be posted here when it is ready.

More at Freedom to Tinker…