doubleTwist

From Wikipedia:

doubleTwist Corporation is a digital media company founded by Monique Farantzos and Jon Lech Johansen. It is backed by Index Ventures (Skype, Last.FM) and Northzone Ventures.

The doubleTwist application enables users to send photos and videos to their friends and sync their media library to a wide variety of portable devices.

We do not particularly endorse the doubleTwist product, but we admire their philosophy, the work of their financial backers, and particularly love the founder: DVD Jon. This new anti-Apple advert from doubleTwist is certainly worth watching. Despite the original 1984 Apple propaganda, Apple has always been the product of monopoly, the company of total enslavement, the brand to eliminate choice, thought, freedom and convenience. Just ask anyone over age 50 who has needed to move their iTunes library.

The Anti-Transhumanists

We are not well versed in the Anti-Transhumanist movement, but in full recognition that some Transhumanist outcome is inevitable, we respect challenges to any trends towards human elimination, subjugation, or redundancy. The folks at TransAlchemy have a website a blog a Youtube channel and to me most significantly, have produced a documentary entitled "The Age of Transitions" expressing their reservations about transhumanism. Most notably, the TransAlchemists assert that Transhumanism directly succeeds the politically defunct Eugenics and Social Darwinist movements which enabled the National Socialist Holocaust. TransAlchemy is currently filming a second documentary featuring Singularity Summit coverage. Their motto: Save the Humans.

Palm Post

Our trial of the Palm Pre is concluded. With tethering enabled, the Pre is adequate, but despite being a Linux phone, there are simply no applications for it to realise its potential, and a 2 year lock in to Sprint is a tough pill to swallow - not to mention the $350 price tag for the Pre.

We are holding out for an Android phone hopefully on Verizon later this year. The greater support, adoption, flexibility and programmability of Android we hope will make it worth the wait.

Nuclear Disarmament

Disarmament does not lead to peace. Disarmament is a consequence of peace.

                                               - Stephen Schuker, 2002

Nuclear Disarmament should be seen as a sign of tremendous human progress. The Twentieth Century saw mankind reach for the bomb and with it the power of life and death over all complex life on the planet. The threat now of Environmental Destruction from pollution or biological weapons manufacture pales in comparison to the nuclear button. Nuclear armament has been the first existential threat humanity has faced in all recorded history. It surely will not be the last. This threat has not been nor probably will it ever be completely eliminated. Nevertheless, the current push towards global reduction of arms reflects increasing world peace and security.

Palm Pre

We are currently demoing a Palm Pre. Today we succeeded in "rooting" it (gaining Unix administrator control) and enabling it into a wifi router. It is still a hack, and not completely reliable and usable, but good enough to get the job done. (In the course of writing this post, the connection dropped, and we chose to switch to a more reliable connection.) The connection seems unrestricted by port and protocol so that VPN, Remote Desktop, Bit Torrent etc all seems to work on it. With Palm Pre which in USA is on the Sprint network, speed seems to be 1 Mb/s down, 0.15 Mb/s up.

Here are the directions to enable the WiFi router most easily. With root access, one can change many settings with a bit of determination.

The Pre itself is adequate as a phone and web browser. We are still not sure if we will keep it or abort it, as Bruno would say. Sprint allows 30 days to return it. Waiting for a proper Android on a proper network or submitting to the tyranny of Apple ATT are the only other options to remain a functional mobile Internaut. All choices require a 2 year lock in.

Update: Given new moves to block tethering, ATT/IPhone is a completely nonviable option.

Furk - Bittorrent Proxy and Media Repository

Furk.net has emerged on the scene recently with some very serious hardware and bandwidth, and a bonanza of useful services. Search the name of a popular film and you are likely to find it there already available for direct reasonably fast download. Assuming you were worried about joining a torrent swarm because of the lack of privacy and perchance a potential legal action, with Furk, such risks are largely eliminated. They aquire a massive repository of content from Mininova or PirateBay, and make it freely and directly available.

They also offer BitTorrent proxy services and speed enhanced downloads for a modest fee. Thus you can use Furk as a shield to do all the dirty work of high risk torrenting for you.

The fact that Furk is able to exist and is even able to claim a measure of legality further demonstrates that copyright enforcability is impossible.

Torrent Freak Article

Miniluv

Walking around Manhattan the other day, we found the Ministry of Love from "1984". It has no windows.

33 Thomas St.

Google Security Vulnerabilities

To access anything in a person's Google account, all one must know is email address and password. For someone who has either a well placed key recorder, or knows their victim personally, or happens to just access a person's machine after they have used it - a tremendous amount of information is thence available to an attacker. An author of this blog has been the victim of the third type of attack from a trusted loved one whose temptation to delve into personal information, like a sailor to the Sirens, was too great.

The third type of attack is perhaps unavoidable from a technical perspective and is the responsibility of the user to avoid, but the other types of attacks could be better avoided with an option for a paid security token and perhaps more regular security questions.

Although security for an average user is very important, it is perhaps even more valuable to businesses. Twitter, which the authors of this blog find an annoying fad, recently had some private corporate documents stolen and published as a result of a Google account being compromised. In the end, Google's online suite of tools are simply too useful not to use despite the vulnerabilities, and the potential for a government sub poena - nonetheless caveat emptor. Let this be a lesson to us all - and to Google especially.

William Blake Quote

"Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed."

Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara died recently. A confessed unconvicted War Criminal, McNamara was a logitician for the firebombing campaigns on Japan, and a reluctant architect of the Cuban Missle Crisis and most significantly, the Vietnam War. In addition to being a profoundly intelligent and capable CEO, Cabinet Secretary and World Bank Chief, Mcnamara was striking for his deep reflection and appreciation for the moral complexity of his actions as revealed in the excellent documentary Fog of War (torrent).

Here is the synopsis of an interview at Berkeley in 2004 including a webcast.

Who better to deduce the lessons and folly of War than a man who was its Commander. Here are a list of his 11 lessons:

1. Empathize with your enemy
2. Rationality will not save us
3. There's something beyond one's self
4. Maximize efficiency
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war
6. Get the data
7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
10. Never say never
11. You can't change human nature

Controversial, terrible, and flawed as he was, a great man has died.

All the Pb in Zhong Guo

This story from the financial press ignores what is really going on. Forget importation of toxic goods; why is Zhong Guo so backwards that they are even manufacturing toys, or other consumer products, that contain lead. If Zhong Guo is ever to be part of an advanced glorious civilistation, this will have to stop.

C-SPAN Funding

Given the lack of commercials or NPR style begathon fund-raising and the intended lack of political bias of C-SPAN, it is surprising to learn from their recent public service announcements that they do not receive public ie government money. They are in fact sponsored as a public service by the US Cable Television companies.

We all owe these companies a debt of gratitude for documenting and archiving governmental proceedings, bringing more openness to government, and making it widely and freely available without a hint of commercialism or political favouratism. This is a task which should have been the responsibility of the National Archives in a well run government, yet corporate charity has come through to do the job better and cheaper than a Government run programme ever could.

Manuel Zelaya - Drugs Policy of an Ousted Honduran Presidente

We do not pretend to know the motivations for the recent coup of Presidente Manuel Zelaya, overthrown by members of the Honduran Army last week. Was the CIA involved? These are open questions.

All else aside, we do want to commend and support el Presidente on one particular issue. He was strongly in favour of ending the oppressive and immoral 'War on Drugs.'

It is always suspicious when such a person is overthrown, particularly when the CIA is known for having a history of profiting from the drugs trade and political meddling in the region. As Alex Jones stated, 'The Drug Dealers want to make sure the Drugs stay illegal.'

First Human in Space

Apparently Yuri Gagarin was not the first person in space. It was cosmonaut Colonel Vladimir Illysushin. Other conspiracies are also alleged.

Documentary Link

Digital Currency Trading Declared Illegal in China

Virtual Currencies threaten the power of governments by weakening their grip over the medium of exchange - ie Fiat Currency. In that sense, it is not surprising to see one of the more Authoritarian States definitively cracking down on Virtual Currency exchange. In practise, this will lessen the booming virtual currencies business and put many Chinese "gold farmers" out of work, but generally drive the digital currency market to ever higher levels of sophistication and security.

We have touched on this issue before.

An exposition on the topic of secure digital currencies can be found in David Friedman's Future Imperfect.

We suspect that the collapse of the value of the private US Federal Reserve Dollar will spark a real push for legalisation of competing Commodity backed digital currencies.

The Often Misleading State of Electronic Waste Recycling

PBS Frontline featured a disturbing piece recently concerning the processing of electronic waste. With an undercover investigation, Frontline revealed how Americans and Europeans are assured they are "recycling" electronic waste safely and locally. Instead it is all loaded onto containers that are shipped to Ghana or the southern Chinese city of Guiyu where people work in extremely dangerous conditions burning plastics, and poisoning themselves with heavy metals to extract trace amounts of precious metals. The waste is transported under the guise of "donations." While Africa particularly needs electronics if they have any hope of ever developing, Westerners should be made aware of the environmental and human dangers of e-waste "recycling," and law enforcement agencies ought to investigate fraud and environmental destruction in this regard. Hearing that one is "recycling" tends to eliminate a feeling of guilt for many Westerners, but the reality in this case is far from that.

Galapagos Tourism

Respect the nature of the Galapagos and the importance it had in informing Evolutionary Science, by never going there. Policymakers should strictly limit the number of allowed visitors or residents through licensing and taxation, and give collected rents to foundations which protect other nature preserves.

The Google God

Tonight's discourse:

Pace: I really think once people realise the efficiency, many will start programming to the Google Ap engine


Consigliere: uuuuuuuuuugh
that's a TERRIBLE idea
we already have one giant fucking monolith, i.e. Microsoft
why would we want to trade one for another?
the last thing the web needs is a single point of failure, like if google goes down and takes everybody's webapps with it


Pace: they are at least better than M$ - should theoretically still be reployable elsewhere without too much modification


Consigliere: they're only tbetter than M$ at the moment b/c htey';re not as big/dominant
but they certainly will become so
and there's a huge difference between "theoretically" and "in realitiy"


Pace: they do support open source though


Consigliere: it doesn't matter
I"m glad they do
but it'd still be a single point of failure


Pace: agreed


Consigliere: and god only knows what they'd do with all that data once they had it


Pace: they would become God


Consigliere: yeah, but a God beholden to capitalist shareholders


Pace: yes


Consigliere: it woudl be very Old Testament


Pace: haha

The Iranian Revolution

When one attempts to shut down or contain the Internet to suppress a discontented populace, one has lost all legitimacy to rule. خدا بزرگ است.

Augmented Reality and other Smartphone News

We've been holding out on buying a smart phone given the rapid acceleration taking place. Some of the applications we have seen are quite impressive. Here is one: Wikitude. Wikitude takes GPS and phone camera input, and overlays points of interest on the image.

By the way, if you check out the Recommended Stories section, you will see more reasons NOT to get an iPhone. Once again, Apple's insistence on running their users' lives drags down the company. Apple has banned an application which remotely administers legal torrent software, and now has also banned the Electronic Freedom Frontier's RSS application because they linked to a parody video Apple found potentially politically incorrect.

Information Technology in a Free Society should be used to enable Free Speech and Expression. We can not abide a company with such anti-human business practices, unless compelled by an oppressive regime as in Israel, Iran, or Zhong Guo. A California based company protected by the US Bill of Rights has no such excuse. We posit that in a well regulated market, such suppressions themselves would be illegal. In the meantime, boycott Apple.