Schneier on the DMCA and IoT

"For the Internet of Things to provide any value, what we need is a world that looks like the automotive industry, where you can go to a store and buy replacement parts made by a wide variety of different manufacturers. Instead, the Internet of Things is on track to become a battleground of competing standards, as companies try to build monopolies by locking each other out."

The Real Yellow Multimeters

As a follow-up to my yellow multimeter post, Fluke is donating $30K worth of their multimeters to Sparkfun to replace the ones stopped in customs. Talk about turning bad PR into something good. Well played.

Yellow Multimeters

Customs says yellow multimeters infringe on Fluke's trademark, so they won't be allowed in the US. So does this mean we can only have a handful of companies that make multimeters? Fluke's are yellow. Sears sells some red ones. Who gets blue? Green?

Euron a.k.a. Drunk Cows

The SCOTUS decision on Obamacare has everyone's attention, so we've forgotten for the moment what is going on in Europe.

It reminds me of Enron Cows.

Europe link via Uncle

Who killed the internet?

The answer is funny and sad.

The War on Copyright AKA General Purpose Computers AKA Software Defined Radio

Scary stuff.

Cory Doctorow: Lockdown - The coming war on general-purpose computing. 

He makes the argument that SOPA and the like are merely the next wave of assaults on our freedom. Ignorance, greed, and fear will lead to more invasive technology and laws. He connects the dots between copyright and general purpose computing and even things like Software Defined Radios. The "Evil They" would  prevent you from doing things like modifying your UV-3R to expand the usable frequencies. Or manufacture your own AR-15 in your garage.

"Consider radio. Radio regulation until today was based on the idea that the properties of a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and can't be easily altered. You can't just flip a switch on your baby monitor and interfere with other signals. But powerful software-defined radios (SDRs) can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher or air traffic controller, just by loading and executing different software. This is why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, and asked for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios should be embedded in “trusted computing" machines. Ultimately, the question is whether every PC should be locked, so that their programs could be strictly regulated by central authorities."

SOPA

I like being late to the game... it saves me the effort of writing an opinion and I can link to someone who said it better than I could have anyway. Larry Correia:

"As for SOPA, piracy sucks, but I’d much rather have some loser rip me off than give an already out of control government one more Orwellian power."

Amen.

SOPA and Ham Radio

I knew that Reddit and Wikipedia among others were going to protest SOPA by doing a blackout, but I just read that APRS.FI will be off-line on Wednesday.

"Although the law is being made in the U.S., it will break the Internet on a global scale by making sites such as aprs.fi liable for links and content posted by the users of the site. Sites like aprs.fi are commonly run by individual developers or small volunteer teams. Due to the huge volume of automatically published user-generated content (50 packets per second currently!) it would be impossible for me to go through it all before publishing. If some APRS user would post links to copyright-infringing material, even when that material would reside somewhere else than aprs.fi itself, aprs.fi could be shut down in the U.S. and there would not be much that I could do about it."

Watching

Continuing on today's theme of watching, I found this scary infograph about the data a phone company collected about a customer in Germany. (See the interactive version here.)

Or the government could team up with a mobile phone company to track you via Silent SMS texts.

So big companies are tracking you. The government does lots of tracking.

I think we'll see more things like this neat bit of technology (Escort Live) that help level the playing field...

"Escort Live (an accessory for Escort radar detectors) not only detects police speed traps, it also broadcasts their times and locations to other Escort Live owners. They (the traps, not the owners) show up on a map on the phone’s screen, thereby creating a speed-trap social network. The police can’t be thrilled."

No Guarantee

The Dwindling Power of a College Degree - it was never a guarantee. The last line strikes me as something we should always do: prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

"The increasingly vicious battle between left and right is, at the most basic level, a dispute over how to respond to these new rules. Republicans largely claim that the new rules will make the country richer and, in the long run, will be beneficial to everyone willing to put in the hard work. Few Democrats call for a return to record high taxes and trade barriers — after all, the free flow of cheap goods has helped many, particularly the poor. But many do want a return to the spirit of the old rules, when the government sought to make life more equal, more stable and, for some, less rewarding. The rest of us, meanwhile, should go to school, learn some skills and prepare for a rocky road."

And I'm not sure that I think it is a problem that the best nurse, plumber, or truck driver make a lot more money than the worst nurse, plumber, or truck driver.

Via:

andrewchen The Dwindling Power of a College Degree - NYTimes.com nyti.ms/vNsgnFWed, Nov 30 15:49:07 from Timely by Demandforce

Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street

Video: The competing worldviews of the Tea Party and OWS:

"When it comes to The Tea Party and OWS, though, the more the surface differences become obvious, the more the transparent truth of what underlies those differences becomes obscured. It becomes easy to focus on the way the groups look and act differently — and harder to remember the way the groups think differently."

I don't have a problem making the distinction.

Via ExUrbanLeague

How the World Works: Occupy Wallstreet

Word of the Minute: Venality

Venality: a vice associated with being bribeable or of selling one's services or power, especially when one should act justly instead. In its most recognizable form, dishonesty, venality causes people to lie and steal for their personal advantage, and is related to bribery and nepotism, among other vices.

And some would give more power to the Government

"So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not."

If you are worried about big business, limit government and you reduce the power that corporations could buy.