Author: Stagger Lee

Once again, much as I hate sounding like a bong-watered granola shaver, the Dead Kennedys had this nailed in the Reagan years.  After all, think about it: where are you going to go for mobile phone privacy or computer privacy when Microsoft, Google and Apple are all mobbed up with the NSA?  You’ll need something based on Linux and I don’t mean Android, but even if you can get that securely – Verizon and AT&T and Sprint are mobbed up with the NSA and there’s no reason to think T-Mobile isn’t, and even if you don’t roll with them, every MVNO is backboned off one of them, so what good does it do you?

And even if you go to all those lengths – you have your Ubuntu laptop and your Ubuntu-based phone and you’re on some carrier that miraculously isn’t giving the NSA anything, and don’t say you’re using Skype over Wi-Fi or FaceTime or Google Hangouts – once you’ve done all that to secure yourself, ask: what about the party at the other end? Because unless they’re doing all the same stuff, you may as well not bother once the other half of the conversation is wide open.

Let’s face it: cypherpunks and BitCoin enthusiasts and the truly paranoid are all over this already, but Ed Earl Brown isn’t really stuck into this particular issue.  Mostly because even if he cared, Ed Earl Brown isn’t in a position to actually do anything about it. Even if he could shop around for a broadband provider who won’t sell you down the river, can you trust them?  (Could have trusted Speakeasy back in the day, but they got eated.) Wireless company?  I mean sure there’s Working Assets or whatever they’re called now, but unless something has changed, their MVNO backbone is Sprint.

That ship has sailed, that horse is out of the barn, that genie is out of the bottle, that metaphor is befucked, people.  The time to nip this in the bud was in 2006 or so.  Instead we find ourselves in the position implied by Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: technology has run out ahead of law and culture and the fix will have to be legal and cultural.  We cannot technologically prevent this kind of snooping and data aggregation, especially when Google and Facebook have it at the heart of their business model – all we can do is make the improper accessing and misuse of that data legally, morally and culturally unacceptable.  Which, in light of current levels of huffing and puffing online, we might actually be able to do something about.  Maybe.  But forget about un-ringing that bell right now.  In a world where people not only walk around with a personal GPS locator in their pocket but feed their location into Foursquare and their friendships into Facebook and a steady diet of their surroundings into Instagram, we’ve already proven that we’re too fond of the toothpaste to put it back in the tube.

What if Barack Obama really was opposed to the excesses of the Patriot Act and the general mad panic induced by the War on Terror?

What if he tried to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, but was constantly thwarted by Republicans who raved about the horror of unleashing these mutant super-terrorists on our poor defenseless country?

What if he tried passing a health care plan that was basically the GOP alternative to the Clinton plan in 1994 – one well to the right of Nixon in the early 70s – and saw it shot down by a Republican party who reflexively opposed anything he endorsed or proposed?

Wouldn’t it make sense at that point for him to think that the best way to get rid of something he opposed would be to endorse it and wait for the GOP to lash out at it and try to tear it down?

And wouldn’t it make sense for him to make a big splash about the Patriot Act and the wholly-legalized surveillance state, knowing full well that the Republicans would immediately attack it with the same ferocity they attacked anyone opposed to the Patriot Act during the Bush years?  Especially with libertarian-pinup-boy Rand Paul as the fashionable face of Silicon Valley Republicanism, one who would no more be able to lay off an attack on the Patriot Act than your correspondent would be able to turn down a plate of barbecue and a glass of bourbon?

Wouldn’t it make perfect sense for Barack Obama to leak the PRISM program himself, knowing that the GOP would immediately attack it, and thus cripple a surveillance-state program he could never undo himself without being savaged by the right as soft on terror and a secret Muslim and a terrorist sympathizer?

Think about it.  I’d say there’s at least a 10% chance this is completely true…

Shut it.  Seriously.  Shut your hole.  You asked for this.  You went along with this.  You decided that THA TERRISS was scarier than Magneto, scarier than Darth Vader, scarier than the Mandarin multiplied by Voldemort.  The New York Times broke this warrantless wiretap thing in December 2005, and you collectively yawned and rolled over.  As a result, every single thing you are freaking about is 100% legal.  No laws are being broken.  You gave the government a free hand because you were gripped in pant-shitting terror, so it’s a bit rich to suddenly decide that this is some amazing scandal.

If you had a lick of sense, you’d recognize this: the things that the government is doing with Verizon, or Google, or Apple, or AT&T, or Facebook – these are not things that the government itself does.  These are things these companies can do all by themselves.  In fact, they’re the basis for the business model of Google and Facebook. So it’s not just the big bad evil government jackbooted thugs you should worry about.  It’s every time you click “Agree” without bothering to read the text that nobody but an IP lawyer could make heads or tails of anyway.  It’s every time you leave your privacy settings as default on every service. 

This has been our life for a decade.  Now that you’re paying attention, maybe we can start talking about what life looks in a big-data pervasive-surveillance state, and start talking less about what we can do with it and more about what we should.

So another FISA order to Verizon has been “unearthed” by the Guardian, and the usual suspects are losing their shit.  Clutch the pearls! Government snooping! OBAMA IS THE NEW HITLER ANTICHRIST!!

Um, don’t look now, but this was going on since at least 2006.  There were reports of FISA orders, of warrantless record subpoenas and telecom compliance…and nobody but the bong-watered granola shavers of the left cared.  Everyone else shuddered in fear of THA TERRISS and went right along with it, occasionally with the ol’ “I don’t have anything to hide” glibbery.

Well, now that the hateful President Supervillain Magnegro has been associated with it, maybe we can get some traction on getting the PATRIOT Act under control.  After all, Democrat big government is something to be afraid of, right?

BTW, if you dig down: this is metadata harvesting that’s been going on for seven years.  It’s almost a mortal lock that in the same amount of time, Google or Facebook have far more personal and individualized information on you…and they’re selling it to the highest bidder, and you can’t file a FOIA act or vote them out.  Sad but true: people basically don’t care about their online privacy. Never have.  Never think about it, mostly.

sigh.

So owing to a combination of circumstances, I came back into possession of an iPhone 4.  It’s the one my wife was using before I replaced it with my old 4S once I went to a 5, so it’s out of warranty and unlocked, and the test was to see whether it would work with some other SIMs and be a practical device.
 
It was an interesting experiment. You can see the limits of a phone almost 3 years old – no 3D on Apple Maps, no Siri, drags a bit here and there, the home button isn’t wildly responsive – and the screen definitely feels smaller. But it almost has the feel of one of those “mini pro” Android phones I was looking over in the mobile shops on the Rue Cler back in 2010. And if the battery is up to scratch, this wouldn’t be the worst thing to take abroad – given that I couldn’t afford to keep refreshing Twitter all day on prepaid international rates, it would only have to take pictures and maybe play some music all day.  The downside, though, is that my eight-year-old Virgin Mobile UK SIM didn’t work in it, and now I’ve cut the damn thing up and it won’t work in anything.  Shit.
 
Intrigued, though, I kept testing with my T-Mobile prepaid SIM.  I wiped the phone completely and started from scratch; my only configuration was to turn on iCloud and my office’s mobile configurator. In about 15 minutes, it was up to work spec and had all my iCloud data: mail, calendars, photo stream, notes, Passbook cards, weather locations, and Safari bookmarks.  Like the Iron Man 3 scenario I mentioned previously: pull the SIM, pop it in a new phone, start the sync, and pow, back on the horse in the time it takes to get back from the cell phone shop.  Of course, I don’t have data service – this SIM is the one that goes in the MOTOFONE I use on nights when I’m fasting from the Internet – but I can still use both home wi-fi networks (no YOU’RE a toolbag nerd) or avail myself of the wireless that’s still everywhere from the light rail to the McDonalds.  Essentially, what I have is a glorified iPod Touch that can also be used in a pinch to make actual phone calls or send and receive actual text messages.  

I only popped a few apps on there – the Google Maps app, of course, and Google Search (the voice search works, which is key given that the 4 doesn’t support Siri) and the Kindle and Economist apps so I have some reading material in a pinch. Flip off the Wi-Fi, and there’s my shutdown-night loadout in one device; reading, iPod and phone all in one.  Which makes for a nice sleek alternative (with easy bailout options in a pinch; just turn Wi-Fi back on) that fits in a pocket and looks much more sleek than carrying three things to the coffee shop.
 
And make no mistake, the iPhone 4 – unencumbered by case or bumper – is still a ridiculously sexy piece of kit. It’s a three year old design and yet I find I am still more drawn to it than the 5. It’s on a par with the likes of the T610 or K710 from SonyEricsson, or the PowerBook 1400, or the New Beetle, or the Carolina-color Air Jordan IX – long since superseded by newer or better tech, but still awesome and still enough to ping the “want” center in my adolescent mind.  I still wish I’d had it on the Europe trip in 2010, much like I wish I’d had the old iPad for the 2010 DC trip or the iPhone 4S for the Vandy game last year.  You want a new magical piece of technology in my hands, just send me on a trip without it and it’s sure to be invented or offered within a month…

Something to remember as we keep falling over ourselves to make nice to 1.3 billion potential customers: it’s still a communist dictatorship, no matter how rich they want to get.

And once again, remember both heroes: the guy who stood in front of the tank, and the guy who refused to run him down.  Neither probably lasted very long after.

“Why are so many people invested in keeping medical issues private? The answer is probably insurance. We should change it so they have to insure people. Maybe we have a safe place where people can go live in a world like that and see if it works.”

And just like that, in only four sentences, Larry Page made the best case ever for why nobody should ever put any information into a Google product…ever.  Honestly, where do you start?  The complete oblivion to the way health care works in this country? The utter ignorance of the knock-down drag-out year-long brawl in 2009 over how to get people insured?  The indifference to the entire notion of privacy?

Larry has absolutely stupid money.  Larry doesn’t have to worry a lick about where his health care is coming from for the rest of his life. “We should change it so they have to insure people” – guess what, genius, that’s called a “mandate,” and Barack Obama burned through every last atom of political capital he had to try to make it happen.  Larry Page can pay straight cash for anything medical, pretty much forever.  Meanwhile, the rest of us are at the mercy of whoever our employer is willing to contract with – in my case, Blue Shield of California, which appears to be run by feces-flinging monkeys unable to receive communication back from the providers whose records they request.  I don’t really have an alternative either – I could go to Kaiser and take the chances one takes with an HMO, even though Blue Shield’s steadfast refusal to cover anything is practically an HMO in and of itself.  Or I could pay cash, lose the discounts that come with negotiated group insurance, and go broke inside of a year.

So yeah.  How about I just quit my job and go live in the safe place where they have to insure people? Because remember what I said about working from home a while back? I’ll just buy a ticket to fly to this place.  And best of all, I’ll just tell everyone I’ve got major health issues requiring medication and possibly longer term care in my dotage, because guess what, that’s sure to make the people who have to insure me charge the least possible amount for the insurance.  Hint: not all insurance is created equal.  What you’re probably thinking of is universal CARE, not coverage, and it’s the thing that the GOP keeps waving as part of that hellish nightmare that is Britain. Or Canada.

There have been a couple of cutting articles in the London Review of Books and the New Yorker that sort of get at this, but I’ll sum it up quick: there are way too many people in this valley who live in their little bubble at the crossroads of Affluent and Asperger’s.  People who never had to get up at 5 AM to unload a truck.  People who never sat on a forklift.  People who never worked for minimum wage at a temp gig, doing the same work that staff were getting twice the money for plus benefits.  We’ve created a class of instant millionaires who think what they have is normal, and who don’t grasp – or care – why anyone else can’t just do the same. 

What we have done in Silicon Valley is this: we have normalized the absence of empathy.  It’s not a model to emulate.

…some of Iron Man 3 works slightly better. I guess the gimmick with Mk42 is that every individual piece of it can operate individually, and that’s the whole point. The power issues were more obvious to me and more consistent, and the prototype nature of the suit was played for effect – the only thing I really still object to is that every individual piece of the Mk42 somehow flew from Tennessee to Miami in FIVE MINUTES, which would be over twenty times the speed of sound. Then again, it’s possible the suit pieces trying to break out wasn’t actually happening at the same time as the shtick…okay, it’s a show, but it bugs me less now. Also, since AIM was heavily involved in the Iron Patriot rebrand and overhaul, the idea that the revised War Machine could be used as a remote kidnapping truck is slightly more believable.

You know, fuck it. It’s summer, it wasn’t as strong as the others but it’s more Tony Stark, I’ll have it. I’m on board. All the suits he was dodging between down the stretch reminds me HEAVILY of 2006 when I was flipping between 3 or 4 separate phones constantly. Horses for courses and all that. Maybe the early stages of “Every Man His Own Tony Stark.” I think there might be a couple of lessons in that picture for my current state of mind…

It started with the Cassidy brothers, of course. When we all met up in the courtyard of my old workplace in DC to load the van, one of them pulled the Serengeti drivers off his own face and put them on me, “for the look.” Brown gradient aviator-looking shades, half Elvis and half Delaware Avenue club-boy, but it was in the spirit of things. And my bachelor party went up to AC, and everybody cashed, and when I got back to California, I took my ill-gotten loot and bought a pair of Ray-Ban wire-frames with polarized amber lenses.

It wasn’t until I wore them on the honeymoon that I realized what a difference they made. The amber is for high-contrast and the polarizing reduces glare, and the result was that everything – especially green – just popped. The hills of the Cotswolds, the gardens of Bath, everything was in high-definition. When I got home, I went back to the blue Oakleys and saved the ambers for when I needed the rose-colored effect…life literally looked better through those.

Eventually I crunched the Oakleys in a moving accident, and went to the ambers full-time. I can never keep the special stuff special; it always turns into everyday wear eventually. And then, the following June, I sat on the ambers. Idiot. So they went somewhere safe, because I couldn’t well dispose of them. And it was hot as hell, no sign of fog, summer being typical depressing summer. And I finally threw my hands in the air, drove to Stanford Shopping Center, bought a pair of Wayfarers in tortoise with the polarized amber lenses, and then just drove up 280 until I could see fog again. I just needed hope. And within a day or two the heat broke and 2006 went on to be a great year.

I’m still wearing those glasses. I have the plain black Wayferers for color-neutral wear, bought when the ambers went missing for a couple of months, and they are the daily-wear ones. And I have a new pair of the tortoise-ambers, in a slightly larger size, which are for special occasions only. But the original tortoise amber Wayferers are on right now, out by the BBQ smoker. The trees are vibrant green and the world has that golden glow, and right now, everything is all right.

Called it. Kinda. I was mostly facetious about Twitter, but Tumblr makes a kind of sense for Yahoo’s acquisition. Words like ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ get tossed around for a microblogging service that was the hot thing in Brooklyn a few years back and is best known these days for its endless supply of animated GIFs. But the question is…is it worth $1.1 billion cash?

To Yahoo, maybe. Tumblr exists in a space between full-scale blogging and Twitter. It works well on mobile, both for reading and posting, and like Twitter bought a best-of-breed iPhone app to revise into its official client. It has a simple mechanism for reposting, favoriting and commenting. Lightweight and lean, it’s as much blogging client as most folks need, and I probably could have done all my blogging there as easily as on Moveable Type or WordPress. Little bit blog, little bit social network, little bit mobile – all things Yahoo could use some help with.

Meanwhile, Tumblr is just now starting to monetize itself – ads, sponsored posts that started cropping up around a month ago – but hasn’t made any kind of money yet. For Tumblr, this is the likeliest exit strategy they were liable to get. Probably not as much as the investors were hoping for, but Tumblr is a fairly mature company; if the big blowup was going to happen it would have happened by now. This is their big blowup, and it’s of a piece with the modern Silicon Valley: the endgame is less IPO than acquisition by somebody with plenty of cash. And Tumblr didn’t have an obvious suitor. Yahoo may not be the prettiest girl in the world, but she’s the prettiest girl in the bar and it’s getting late.

The obvious model is Facebook buying Instagram – they threw a quick billion to get right in mobile, and so far have largely left it alone. Rumblings are that Yahoo will do the same thing with Tumblr, leave it to its own devices for now and not try to force it into the Yahoo model. One tends to hope it doesn’t work out like last time – del.icio.us and Geocities and Flickr didn’t really flourish under the purple Y. But that was before Marissa came to Sunnyvale, and if the model is Google acquiring YouTube, then this might work. YouTube and Instagram were obvious goods, though – easy video and mobile photo sharing – and Yahoo’s going to need to make a bigger and better case for what Tumblr’s for if they’re going to realize $1.1B worth of value for their new toy.