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Month January 2010

Entries 10 Total

The iPad is the beginning of the end

Jan 30, ’10 6:35 PM

In my circle of friends, fam­ily and work­mates I’m the tech­no­lo­gical shaman who helps them acquire, use and heal their com­puters Macs.

I’ve always enjoyed this. Not so much the tech­nical tinker­ing, but the prac­tice of help­ing people to get on with what they’re using a com­puter for in the first place. In fact it’s always frus­trated me that people like myself are needed in the first place. And even more so the dis­missive atti­tude of so many of the tech­no­lo­gists and com­puter geeks who fre­quent the tech­nical for­ums that I myself gain much of my know­ledge from. For them com­puters are not the prob­lem, people are just bum­bling idi­ots. Rather than design com­puters around people they think people should mold them­selves to the way a com­puter works.

True to form many of them are apo­ca­lyptic about Apple’s new iPad. They see it as a toy, noth­ing more than an over­sized iPod, even an affront to their com­put­ing prowess. How can one get ser­i­ous com­put­ing done without a fil­ing sys­tem, mul­tiple win­dows or a mouse they cry! ((The truth is multi-touch input is infin­itely more power­ful than a mech­an­ical point­ing device.)) Fraser Speirs aptly refers to this as Future Shock.

Ulti­mately the iPad rep­res­ents a couple of things to me: on the neg­at­ive side it’s poten­tially the begin­ning of the end of the free and open inter­net as we know it. On the pos­it­ive side it is almost cer­tainly the begin­ning of the end of the desktop meta­phor. And not a day too soon.

Someone has finally got ser­i­ous about cre­at­ing a power­ful com­puter that’s easy to use.

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Cancel Haiti’s debt

Jan 30, ’10 6:10 PM

Can­cel Haiti’s Debt peti­tion — Oxfam International

Alex von Tun­zel­mann, writ­ing for The Times, explains how Haiti became so indebted in the first place:

The appalling state of the coun­try is a dir­ect res­ult of hav­ing offen­ded a quite dif­fer­ent celes­tial author­ity — the French. France gained the west­ern third of the island of His­pa­ni­ola — the ter­rit­ory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and cof­fee, sup­por­ted by an unpre­ced­en­ted increase in the import­a­tion of African slaves. Eco­nom­ic­ally, the res­ult was a suc­cess, but life as a slave was intol­er­able. Liv­ing con­di­tions were squalid, dis­ease was rife, and beat­ings and abuses were uni­ver­sal. The slaves’ life expect­ancy was 21 years. After a dra­matic slave upris­ing that shook the west­ern world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared inde­pend­ence. But France deman­ded repar­a­tions: 150m francs, in gold.

For Haiti, this debt did not sig­nify the begin­ning of free­dom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged coun­try could afford. Haiti was the only coun­try in which the ex-slaves them­selves were expec­ted to pay a for­eign gov­ern­ment for their liberty. By 1900, it was spend­ing 80% of its national budget on repay­ments. In order to man­age the ori­ginal repar­a­tions, fur­ther loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Ger­many and France. Instead of devel­op­ing its poten­tial, this deformed state pro­duced a parade of nefar­i­ous lead­ers, most of whom gave up the insur­mount­able task of try­ing to fix the coun­try and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the ori­ginal repar­a­tions, plus interest. Doing so left it des­ti­tute, cor­rupt, dis­astrously lack­ing in invest­ment and polit­ic­ally volat­ile. Haiti was trapped in a down­ward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hope­lessly in debt to this day.

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Paypal threatens democracy

Jan 29, ’10 8:03 AM

No Right Turn on the risk to demo­cracy that Paypal presents:

Paypal has blocked dona­tions to the Arrest Blair cam­paign, sup­posedly on the basis that it “encour­ages illegal activ­ity” (con­duct­ing a law­ful cit­izens arrest of a rich and power­ful fig­ure appar­ently being illegal in the eyes of PayPal). It’s a blatantly polit­ical move — and its not the first time they’ve done it. Last week, they froze the assets of Wikileaks — a site which encour­ages and pub­lishes anonym­ous leaks in the pub­lic interest, and is cred­ited with “produc[ing] more scoops in its short life than the Wash­ing­ton Post has in the past 30 years”.

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Security researchers blast credit card verification system

Jan 29, ’10 7:54 AM

Ryan Paul writ­ing for Ars Tech­nica:

When mak­ing a pur­chase, online shop­pers are con­fron­ted with a val­id­a­tion check that requires them to sup­ply a pass­word — in addi­tion to the stand­ard secur­ity code that is on the card itself — in order to prove that they are the real owner of a credit card. … Some of the credit card com­pan­ies take advant­age of [this sys­tem] by wrap­ping their imple­ment­a­tions of the val­id­a­tion sys­tem in dra­conian terms of ser­vice that force users to agree to accept full liab­il­ity for credit card fraud.

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Howard Zinn, dies at 87

Jan 29, ’10 7:45 AM

The Boston Globe’s obit­u­ary:

Howard Zinn, the Boston Uni­ver­sity his­tor­ian and polit­ical act­iv­ist who was an early oppon­ent of US involve­ment in Viet­nam and whose books, such as “A People’s His­tory of the United States,” inspired young and old to rethink the way text­books present the Amer­ican exper­i­ence, died today in Santa Mon­ica, Calif, where he was trav­el­ing. He was 87.

AK Press Blog inter­view with Howard Zinn:

Since most mainstream/Left/liberal accounts of Howard Zinn’s leg­acy are likely to gloss over the man’s actual polit­ics, here’s a 2008 inter­view by AK author, Ziga Vodovnik.

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Blair used Kosovo War to justify invading Iraq

Jan 26, ’10 1:00 PM

Here’s another reason why I opposed the Nato bomb­ing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Give war crim­in­als like Blair an inch and they’ll take the rope and go on to invade the rest of the world:

Wood told the inquiry that some min­is­ters and even the then prime min­is­ter, Tony Blair, used to privately claim that the Nato bomb­ing of Kosovo in 1999 provided a use­ful pre­ced­ent for going to war in Iraq.

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Supreme Court puts final nail in coffin of U.S. democracy

Jan 24, ’10 11:15 AM

In 1886 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cor­por­a­tions had the same con­sti­tu­tional rights as a per­son. This was the begin­ning of the end of any mean­ing­ful form of demo­cracy in the U.S.

David Korten alludes to the reason:

The private-benefit cor­por­a­tion is an insti­tu­tion gran­ted a leg­ally pro­tec­ted right — some would claim oblig­a­tion — to pur­sue a nar­row private interest without regard to broader social and envir­on­mental con­sequences. If it were a real per­son, it would fit the clin­ical pro­file of a sociopath.

The basic design of the private-benefit cor­por­a­tion was cre­ated in 1600 when the Brit­ish crown chartered the Brit­ish East India Com­pany as what is best described as a leg­al­ized crim­inal syn­dic­ate to col­on­ize the resources and eco­nom­ies of dis­tant lands to bene­fit wealthy investors far removed from the social and envir­on­mental con­sequences. That design has ever since proven highly effect­ive in advan­cing the private interests of the world’s wealth­i­est people at enorm­ous cost to the rest.

The private-benefit cor­por­a­tion uses its eco­nomic power to privat­ize (intern­al­ize) gains and social­ize (extern­al­ize) cost.

The power afforded to cor­por­a­tions in the U.S. has, until now, been slightly cur­tailed by lim­its imposed on cor­por­ate spend­ing in polit­ical cam­paigns. In a sweep­ing decision a right-wing major­ity U.S. Supreme Court has ruled to lift these limits.

Cor­por­a­tions, and the rich behind them, finally own Amer­ica. Demo­cracy for the rich.

The 20th cen­tury has been char­ac­ter­ised by three devel­op­ments of great polit­ical import­ance: the growth of demo­cracy; the growth of cor­por­ate power; and the growth of cor­por­ate pro­pa­ganda as a means of pro­tect­ing cor­por­ate power against demo­cracy.
—Alex Carey, Tak­ing the Risk out of Democracy

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Don’t panic Haiti, the Scientologists are coming!

Jan 22, ’10 7:32 AM

Don’t panic Haiti, the Sci­ento­lo­gists are com­ing:

Were an idiot like you to itemise the myriad things that this most wretched of dis­aster zones cur­rently lacked, chances are you’d omit “mil­it­ant Sci­ento­lo­gists who claim post-traumatic stress is a con­spir­acy cre­ated by the evil psy­chi­at­ric pro­fes­sion, and who believe the cor­rect response to extreme shock is to touch suf­fer­ers with one fin­ger, before attempt­ing to con­vert them to the ways of Hubbard”.

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Airdrops finally begin in Haiti

Jan 19, ’10 8:35 AM

U.S. Defence Sec­ret­ary Robert Gates on the 15th Jan:

It seems to me that without hav­ing any struc­ture on the ground in terms of dis­tri­bu­tion, that an air­drop is simply going to lead to riots as people try and go after that stuff … It seems to me that’s a for­mula for con­trib­ut­ing to chaos rather than pre­vent­ing it.

People are dying of star­va­tion and dis­ease but they’re not allowed any sup­plies because the head of the armed ser­vices of Amer­ica, now the con­trol­ler of Haitian air­space, thinks they can’t be trusted.

This is what hap­pens when you leave author­it­ari­ans in con­trol of a human­it­arian mission.

The lack of air­drops in these crit­ical few days has also helped to cre­ate a self-fulfilling proph­ecy of dis­order, to be “fixed” by out­siders. They’ve already mil­it­ar­ised this relief effort and based on their his­tory in Haiti I don’t think the the Amer­ic­ans can be trus­ted one bit. Unfor­tu­nately Haitians don’t have much choice at the moment.

Lim­ited air­drops finally began yes­ter­day but it will be too little too late for many.

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Haiti earthquake disaster is man-made

Jan 15, ’10 7:33 PM

This might sound a strange thing to say but let’s not delude ourselves, the dis­aster in Haiti is largely a man-made one. And it’s down to the usual sus­pects:

Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest coun­try in the west­ern hemi­sphere”. This poverty is the dir­ect leg­acy of per­haps the most bru­tal sys­tem of colo­nial exploit­a­tion in world his­tory, com­poun­ded by dec­ades of sys­tem­atic post­co­lo­nial oppression.

Dec­ades of neo­lib­eral “adjust­ment” and neo-imperial inter­ven­tion have robbed its gov­ern­ment of any sig­ni­fic­ant capa­city to invest in its people or to reg­u­late its economy.

It is this poverty and power­less­ness that account for the full scale of the hor­ror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relent­less neo­lib­eral assault on Haiti’s agrarian eco­nomy has forced tens of thou­sands of small farm­ers into over­crowded urban slums.

As one com­menter notes:

Now is exactly the time to inject some real­ism into the dis­course. I’ve been reading/listening to reports from the West­ern media, and they are full of revi­sions and dis­tor­tions con­cern­ing our his­tor­ical role there. ‘Haiti is a failed state,’ ‘Aristide ‘fled,’ was ‘forced out by a rebel­lion,’ etc., ignor­ing the delib­er­ate cam­paign of destabil­isa­tion and coup d’etat against the demo­crat­ic­ally elec­ted gov­ern­ment in 2004.

Religion-free ways to donate to the relief effort:

To donate to the relief effort in a religion-free way and help counter the scan­dal­ous myth that only the reli­gious care about their fellow-humans you can donate at SHARE or Non-Believers Giv­ing Aid.

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