Crime-pensar

Era o nome que George Orwell deu à acção de ter pensamentos que eram proibidos pelos poderes instalados. Num sentido mais lato, era procurar informação que era proibida. Prova de que isto deixou de ser ficção foi a prisão de um jovem britânico que foi preso—e condenado a pouco mais de dois anos de prisão—por ter pesquisado informações sobre como fabricar bombas, e por ter na sua posse uma carta onde se confessava preparado para a jihad. Isto são indícios que justificam uma investigação, mas por si só, não deveriam ser suficientes para mandar ninguém para a cadeia. Porquê? Porque todas estas provas são, na melhor das hipóteses, circunstancias. A própria polícia admitiu isso mesmo (ênfase minha):

This case has never been about proving an endgame and we may never know what his intentions were, but when you have significant evidence of how to make explosive devices and pricing lists for weapons, we had to act quickly.

Tradução: o indivíduo tinha informação proibida, logo foi preciso prendê-lo e mandá-lo para a cadeia. Dito de outro modo: ele é culpado até ser provado que é inocente. Será que esta histeria alguma vez irá parar? Será que o caso teria o mesmo desfecho se ele não tivesse um nome “islâmico”?

Termino reproduzindo um dos comentários do Slashdot que ilustra como deveria, idealmente, funcionar a polícia:

Do you wait until they blow up the building so you can actually arrest them?

No. The police wait, and then they do their job: Which is investigating. Keep (legal) surveillance on the suspect until he or she has the materials. Now there’s motive, means, and opportunity. Those three tests were used to protect the innocent, as well as prove beyond reasonable doubt a person really was up to no good. Take away any one of those three tests, and what you’ve got isn’t justice: It’s sugar-coated crap.

That’s how we did it back before there was all this public hysteria to the point where people like you started believing the only way to keep your sorry existance secure was to delete another’s liberties wholesale on the premise they might commit a crime. Dude… if you think someone might commit a crime, you watch, wait, and learn. It’s called patience, and it has been a virtue for the last 16,000 years of human evolution, and only eschewed for the last 8 in western culture for being “too soft”.

Será que algum dia escrever posts como este também passa a ser crime? *sigh*

The War on the Internet

Non technical, very much political.

War on the Internet event #4 – Jacob Applebaum from Electronic Frontiers Australia on Vimeo.

O rescaldo

Depois da saga do SOPA/PIPA, Joel Spolsky deixou no seu G+ umas boas observações sobre o que se deve seguir:

The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us… then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, “OK, compromise,” and gets half of what they want. That’s not the way to win… that’s the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.

The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It’s time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we’ve got. Let’s force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have. Here are some ideas we should be pushing for:

* Elimination of software patents
* Legal fees paid by the loser in patent cases; non-practicing entities must post bond before they can file fishing expedition lawsuits
* Roll back length of copyright protection to the minimum necessary “to promote the useful arts.” Maybe 10 years?
* Create a legal doctrine that merely linking is protected free speech
* And ponies. We want ponies. We don’t have to get all this stuff. We merely have to tie them up fighting it, and re-center the “compromise” position.

Pouquíssimo tempo depois dessa saga, o MegaUpload foi internacionalmente esventrado. Nas palavras de Glenn Greenwald, isso apenas serve para mostrar que apesar de terem sido por agora evitados, na prática o USG já tem o poder para fazer o que a SOPA/PIPA pretendiam legislar:

In other words, many SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill — the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial — is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world’s largest sites (they have this power thanks to the the 2008  PRO-IP Act pushed by the same industry servants in Congress behind SOPA as well as by forfeiture laws used to seize the property of accused-but-not-convicted drug dealers).

E naquele que é um dos maiores exemplos de hipocrisia e falta de escrúpulos que vi nos últimos anos, o lobby do copyright volta à carga, com a desculpa de estar a “proteger as crianças”:

But taking one step back, would censorship of child pornography be acceptable in the first place? Is the copyright industry perhaps justified in this particular pursuit, beyond their real goal of blocking non-monopolistic distribution?

There are two layers of answers to that. The first is the principal one, whether pre-trial censorship is ever correct. History tells us that it plainly isn’t, not under any circumstance.

But more emotionally, we turn to a German group named Mogis. It is a support group for adult people who were abused as children, and is the only one of its kind. They are very outspoken and adamant on the issue of censoring child pornography.

Censorship hides the problem and causes more children to be abused, they say. Don’t close your eyes, but see reality and act on it. As hard as it is to force oneself to be confronted emotionally with this statement, it is rationally understandable that a problem can’t be addressed by hiding it. One of their slogans is “Crimes should be punished and not hidden”.

This puts the copyright industry’s efforts in perspective. In this context they don’t care in the slightest about children, only about their control over distribution channels. If you ever thought you knew cynical, this takes it to a whole new level.

Finalmente, para se perceber como foi possível chegar até este estado de coisas, a seguinte palestra do TED ilustra o caminho que se seguiu desde de bem antes da internet e do mundo digital. Se tiverem 15 minutos, é tempo bem empregue.

Adenda: cada vez que me encontro a discutir estes temas, a confusão recorrente é entre direitos morais e direitos legais. A diferença está bem explicada aqui.

Monopólios

Como não podia deixar de ser, o sarilho em que se encontra a malta do Mega Upload foi tema de conversa. Só isso não seria digno de nota, não fosse o facto de a discussão ter tomado um rumo que é, bem, pouco usual. Quando eu sugeri que as grandes editoras ou produtoras apenas querem o copyright para proteger o seu (muito rentável) monopólio, levantou-se um coro de protestos, objectando que o que as editoras detêm não é nenhum monopólio. Yeah right. Agora que a Wikipedia já não está blacked out, lê-se na definição de monopólios concedidos pelo governo que «potential competitors are excluded from the market by law, regulation, or other mechanisms of government enforcement». Se eu compro um DVD, e depois distribuo cópias, cobrando ou não por isso, tal distribuição é ilegal, porque viola o monopólio que a lei concede ao detentor dos direitos do conteúdo que está no DVD. Esse detentor é o único que pode distribuir, ou autorizar que terceiros distribuam, os conteúdos cujos direitos detém. Isto é a definição de monopólio. Sugerir o contrário simplesmente não tem qualquer fundamento.

Como nota final, acrescente-se que eu até acho que um monopólio desta natureza, em certas situações, possa ser benéfico para a sociedade no seu conjunto (que é quem pode conceder tal monopólio), desde de que 1) seja de curta duração (no máximo dos máximos, 10 anos), e 2) se restrinja a regular a actividade comercial. Este segundo ponto é o da discórdia, pois significa que coisas que P2P e afins estão fora do âmbito de qualquer monopólio que o estado possa conceder. Porque é que eu defendo isto? Porque monopolizar a transmissão de informação sem fins comerciais lesa gravemente a sociedade, sem qualquer benefício comparável em retorno. Para a sociedade como um todo, é um muito mau negócio.

Ridendo castigat mores!

Jon Stewart owns SOPA! Link here

 

The Pirate Bay did it again

Estes tipos são de mais!

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first personto own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations – it’s all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.
If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition.
We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe – but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:
The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers.
The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world – because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

Como um puto de 13 anos…

… descobriu uma forma de tornar a produção de energia eléctrica a partir de células foto-voltaicas mais eficiente. Impressionante!

http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html

Via De Rerum Natura

Democracia

Existe, na sociedade portuguesa, quem diga que a democracia não presta, e que o melhor regime é a ditadura. Descobri hoje a primeira pessoa da minha geração—da minha idade, mais concretamente—que partilha esse ponto de vista. E isso inspirou-me para escrever o porquê de eu dedicar uma parte considerável do meu tempo a pensar sobre política e temas afins.

Quem me conhece dos tempos do secundário, sabe que eu sempre nutri muito pouco (para não dizer mesmo nenhum) afecto pelas “humanidades” em geral, política e temas afins incluídos. E para dizer a verdade, esse continua a ser o caso. Mas então, para quê perder tempo a pensar sobre isso? Porque esse é o único modo de saber avaliar as decisões que depois nos afectam, e de estar em condições de lutar por decisões que nos beneficiem. A democracia não é um sistema onde magicamente desaparecem os conflitos de interesse. Estes existem sempre: o que distingue a democracia é que o critério para decidir entre várias alternativas é, regra geral, o benefício da maioria. O que não acontece numa ditadura—nem, e esta é a parte importante, numa “democracia” em que a maioria do povo se resigna a ir votar de 4 em 4 anos. Ou às vezes nem isso, preferindo antes agarrar no refilofone e trautear alguma variação de “eles (políticos) são todos iguais”. Esta é a razão pela qual eu “perco tempo” a pensar sobre isto. Porque a democracia ou é participativa, ou não é democracia. Como dizia um político irlandês de tempo idos (ênfase minha),

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.

Mas então, se a democracia dá tanto trabalho, porque não acabar com ela de vez, e trazer de volta os regimes mais autoritários? Para muitos a resposta será tão óbvia que escrevê-la não seria nada a não ser supérfluo. Para mim, é razão para um outro post.

Piratas!

Hoje pela internet fora protesta-se contra o SOPA e a PIPA. Esse protesto tomou forma com muitos sites importantes (um dos nomes mais sonantes será a versão inglesa da Wikipedia) terem sido, propositadamente, “blacked out”. Partilho aqui dois dos mais giros e informativos: the daily wtf brinda-nos com um mui brilhante exemplo de sarcasmo, e o the oat meal, que, bem é preciso ver

Escusado será dizer o que eu penso deste disparate todo. Quem ainda não souber, pode ir ler as razões para ser “pirata”. Finalmente, uma refrescante perspectiva destas duas propostas de lei, de um ponto de vista mais legal e menos técnico. Este último link ilustra bem o tipo de mafioso que é o actual chefe da MPAA, Chris Dodd.

Forget the Pirate Bay, bring in the fuckin’ Armada!

EDIT: SOPA/PIPA na Khan Academy:

EDIT 2: Chris Dodd, o mafioso, nas suas próprias palavras. *sigh*

A internet é uma grande distracção

Quando eu tinha um computador que não estava ligado permanentemente à net, eu usava-o quando precisava (e ligava-o à net quando precisava). Agora, é cada vez mais difícil não estar a olhar para lá para ver se alguma coisa “mudou”: msn, mail, facebook, hacker news, you name it…

O primeiro já não chateia muito, o segundo resolvi passando a usar o mutt, o terceiro resolvi cortando o mal pela raiz, o quarto, enfim, estou a trabalhar nisso. Mas enquanto trabalho dou por mim a pensar se haverá algum modo de não ver este lado obscuro da tecnologia como um retrocesso. Afinal de contas, a internet era suposto “libertar-nos”, não criar um outro sítio ao qual pudemos ficar “presos”.

E o giro é que eu até sou uma pessoa que não tem muita exposição a este problema: não usava jogos nem apps do facebook, a minha conta do twitter está a apanhar pó, etc. Bem mas sem stress: problemas sem solução, só a morte e os impostos!

 

So long Zuck, and thanks for all the «friends»!

Vou deixar o Facebook. De vez. Porquê? Resposta curta: por causa disto.

Resposta (um pouco mais) longa: começo por (re)afirmar que nunca fui um fã do FB (nem de redes sociais no geral). Aderi ao FB quando o seu uso se tornou na maneira com menos atrito de manter o contacto com algumas pessoas que por circunstâncias da vida, se encontram longe. Mas o custo tornou-se demasiado elevado. É impossível impedir as «tags» de serem aplicadas nas fotos, o que quer dizer que com o passar do tempo, Zuck & companhia ficam com a capacidade de me identificar a partir de uma simples foto—e com uma precisão cada vez melhor, à medida que mais fotos e mais tags vão adicionadas. E depois de identificado, ficam com toda a informação que inexoravelmente lá pára, resultado inevitável de ter uma centena (ou mais) de pessoas a interagir, com o FB como o único intermediário. E isto é mais do que eu estou disposto a tolerar (especialmente tendo em conta pérolas como esta). E se por um lado é certo que o Zuck boy não tem que se ralar com o que eu tolero ou deixo de tolerar, não é menos verdade que eu se não gosto de redes sociais, tenho mais é que deixar de as usar.

E portanto, aqui estamos: a minha conta está prestes a ser enviada para o «dustbin of history» (ou pelo menos assim espero eu), e às pessoas com as quais o FB era o principal meio de ligação, fica a promessa de arranjar alternativas. Não terão tão pouco atrito, mas também não será por causa disso que deixarei de manter o contacto.

Ah e tal.

Este era o meu blog, escrito em inglês, e excepcionalmente em português—até agora. Depois de registar o meu domínio, mudei-me para a google, e agora voltei para aqui. Não sei porquê, perguntem-me daqui a umas semanas… Entretanto devo passar a escrever em português, apenas, e não sei o que fazer em relação à temática. Bem, vou escrevendo e depois logo se vê o que aparece…

Duas notas finais: primeiro, não vá eu mudar de “sítio” novamente, por favor usar como bookmark isto: http://www.erroneousthoughts.org/blog (redirecciona para o meu blog “propriamente dito” )

A segunda, era isto:

See you on the next post…

So long, and thanks for all the posts!

This will be my last post on wordpress.com! It’s been a good ride, but now that have registered my own domain, and knowing that blogger supports MathJax, whilst WordPress only does so for self-hosted blogs, it’s time to move on! My new homepage is here, and my new blogger blog is here. See you there!
PS: this blog will stay here, only new posts will be on blogger!

Academia in one image

 

(biased, I know, but this is my blog, so though it up)

Encryption v. self-incrimination

Ramona Fricosu is a Colorado woman who is accused of real state fraud. And in order to prove that accusation, the Obama DoJ has just asked a federal judge to order her to enter the password on her laptop, so as to decrypt its contents. The EFF meanwhile pointed out that this runs afoul of the Fifth Amendment:

Decrypting the data on the laptop can be, in and of itself, a testimonial act — revealing control over a computer and the files on it

As computers and encryption didn’t exist in the Eighteen century, one is left with trying to find the most accurate analogy that would have been plausible in those times; Slashdot provides a bunch of them, for both sides of the argument. However, I don’t think that’s how the Fifth Amendment applies to this case. Said amendment provides that (emphasis mine):

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The immediately obvious way to link this provision to Fricosu’s case is through the bold part, i.e., to concede that forcing her to reveal the password could amount to self-incrimination, if the information on the laptop could be used to convict her. However, the reason to forbid self-incrimination is not to somehow sanction a defendant being able to hide valuable evidence. It’s to avoid having a “confession” tortured or otherwise coerced out of a defendant (a common practice in 16th and 17th century England). However, that’s not what’s at stake here. Let’s assume that if the laptop was not encrypted, there would no risk of self-incrimination. Then, if the laptop is encrypted, but there was a way to be absolutely certain, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the defendant was in possession of the password, she could be compelled to give it away (or, as the prosecution stressed in this case, not to tell them the password, but just to enter it when the laptop prompts for it). For in that case, anything that’s found in laptop would already be there. In other words, this could, in no way, be construed as a “confession” being coerced out of the defendant—it would be similar to the case where no encryption was present.

But herein lies the rub. You cannot be certain the laptop belongs to the defendant, and furthermore, that she knows (or has ever know) the password. She could have forgotten it (I’m a computer engineer, and this happened to me twice, back in my CS undergrad days). Or, more generally, we could be dealing with an innocent defendant, that somehow came to be in the possession of an encrypted laptop, which he does not know how to unencrypt. If the court was to order said defendant to provide the password—an order he would inevitably fail to comply—then an otherwise innocent person would end up being held in contempt of court. This is the situation the fifth is meant to prevent. The US Supreme Court ruled in Ohio v. Reiner that one of the Fifth Amendment’s basic functions is to protect innocent persons who might otherwise be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances. And this is the reason why in this case, the prosecution’s request ought to be denied.

Note: I’m not a US citizen, but I got interested in this matter because 1) it might set an important precedent to those who work in the CS field, 2) it was deceivingly non trivial, and that got me curious.

Tales of ice-bound wonderlands

Why (and how) Pi is wrong

Not unlike computer security, mathematics, is also “about the lulz”

The blogger and the (cookie) jar

For a while now, I’ve been unable to post comments at *.blogspot.com blogs. Even anonymous comments, in blogs that allow them. Alas, when writing a comment and clicking the ‘Submit’ button, the page was just reloaded, and no trace of my comment was left behind. Weird is an understatement. Puzzled as I was, now I have discovered the reason: unlike *.wordpress.com blogs, to post a comment, any kind of comment, at blogger, you have to allow third party cookies! Yep, to comment you must open yourself to the possibility of “anonymous” surveillance (even more than what you are already exposed for just using the internet). Luckily, there’s an easy fix (if you’re a Firefox user, that is): install the Cookie Monster addon. Then disable third party cookies globally (Edit -> Preferences -> Privacy), and go submit a comment. It’ll reload the page, but the addon icon in FF’s bottom bar will tell you that the page tried to set a third party cookie. Allow it to do this always. This way, you disable third party cookies by default, while still allowing it for those sites that require it, viz. blogger. And presto, problem solved!

Addendum: I think this only happens when the comment form shows up after the “original” post, like so, and not when the comments are written in a separate page, like so. Blogger is weird…

Test post from Blogilo

I’m using the KDE blogging client Blogilo, let’s see how this works! Heck it even supports real browser-like preview inside the remote client! How awesome is that?!

My only catch so far is that the image handling (resize et al.) could be a little better. But still, it’s pretty awesome! Linux + KDE + Arch, you rock!

Rand Paul

If you live in the US, watch this: