Microsoft Vista takes control
As Vista, the new version of Microsoft Windows, gets closer to release date, there is more commentary about it. Michael Geist echoes some of the comments that Peter Gutmann made in his widely discussed paper (See: How Windows Vista Will Affect Government Information for more on this topic and links to Guttman's paper.)
- Vista's Fine Print Raises Red Flags, by Michael Geist, Toronto Star January 29, 2007. (another copy)
Here are excerpts:
In the name of shielding consumers from computer viruses and protecting copyright owners from potential infringement, Vista seemingly wrestles control of the "user experience" from the user. Vista's legal fine print includes extensive provisions granting Microsoft the right to regularly check the legitimacy of the software and holds the prospect of deleting certain programs without the user's knowledge. Vista also incorporates Windows Defender, an anti-virus program that actively scans computers for "spyware, adware, and other potentially unwanted software." The agreement does not define any of these terms, leaving it to Microsoft to determine what constitutes unwanted software. Once operational, the agreement warns that Windows Defender will, by default, automatically remove software rated "high" or "severe," even though that may result in other software ceasing to work or mistakenly result in the removal of software that is not unwanted. For greater certainty, the terms and conditions remove any doubt about who is in control by providing that "this agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights." For those users frustrated by the software's limitations, Microsoft cautions that "you may not work around any technical limitations in the software."Continue reading
Hack the Government
Carl Malamud gave a talk at the 2006 OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention) on "10 Government Hacks." He has posted his presentation materials as a series of 10 movies with textual commentary on the Internet Archive. He says he...
...whirled through 10 hacks in 15 minutes. I left myself 23 seconds to sum it up. The hacks all have a point, and that point is that government should be less about private interests and more about the public interest. The skills we use in the open source world are tools of civic engagement, tools of citizenship. And, if we apply those skills of engagement to our government, it is possible, at least sometimes, to drag the political system (kicking and screaming perhaps) towards the common good.
Here are links to each of the 10 with short annotations on a couple of my favorites:
- Hack 1: Be Media
- Hack 2: Get Standing (Somebody Sold the Attic)
- Hack 3: Be Government
- Hack 4: Adopt the FCC
- Hack 5: Enforce ODF By Proxy
In my world of vaporware hacks to government I'd love to see, I imagine a Firefox extension that detects any proprietary format in a .gov URL and talks to a backend proxy running tools like docvert to convert-on-the-fly and store the doc for the next user. Government rarely provides even minimal security (https URLs, MD5 signatures on documents, signed email, etc.., etc...), so one could add value to lots of government data by signing on their behalf. - Hack 6: Audit the Feds
- Hack 7: Link Check the Feds (Link Check the Mayor)
...periodically run a link checker against all the departments, then send the head of the agency a list with the number of broken links, ranked by department. Oh, and send a copy of the list to the chairman of the congressional oversight committee. And to each department head in the agency so the ones on the top can have something to chat about with the ones on the bottom while they're on the golf course. This hack works at any level of government. For example, link check your city government and send the results to your local newspaper. Pick a slow news day and your ranking will probably even make the evening news. - Hack 8: Annotate Hearings
...take the time to watch a hearing and blog the good parts, it definitely gets the word out. For this hack, adopt a committee or an issue, and make a habit of watching what they do and systematically annotating them. If nothing else, you help set the terms of the conversation. - Hack 9: Hold Hearings
- Hack 10: Map Spectrum (Summation)
The fight over a presidential library
Editorial Observer: The George W. Bush Library: Scholarly Mecca or $500 Million Oxymoron?. Dorothy Samuels, New York Times, 1/28/07. Here's an interesting little tidbit in today's NYT about Southern Methodist University (SMU) -- where Laura Bush sits on the Board of Trustees -- and their plan to host the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Policy Institute (similar to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University). There is growing concern within the SMU community that hosting Bush's library is not in keeping with the university’s scholarly mission, governmental integrity and the rule of law. On 1/12/07, 68 theologians, professors and other past and present faculty members, citing complaints about President Bush's poor marks on civil liberties, the environment, gay rights and the war in Iraq, sent the university president a letter questioning whether visions of the library were "consistent with the school's religious and academic values." ("A Discordant Chorus Questions Visions for a Bush Library at Southern Methodist." Ralph Blumenthal, NYT 1/14/07 Subscription required to access the archives). Samuels, the NYT editorial observer, is calling on the SMU trustees (hopefully Laura will recuse herself!) to withhold the final OK unless two basic conditions are met:
- SMU should insist that Mr. Bush rescind Executive Order 13233, his 2001 directive that limits access to the records of former US Presidents.
- The trustees should insist on disclosure of contributions to the library complex.
National Intelligence Estimate on the United States
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has been in the news recently with members of Congress complaining publicly about the Bush administration's 6 month delay in submitting an NIE (see Deb's recent post and Silverstein in Harper's). Now Chalmers Johnson (author and emeritus professor in political science at UC San Diego and contributor to the American Empire Project) has written a provocative article for Harpers Magazine (01/17/07) giving an NIE for the US (Reprinted on the Information Clearinghouse site). In it, he gives an historical wrap-up of the US military-industrial complex and tells of the danger to both the US and the entire world when military Keynesianism is combined with the Unitary Presidency.
The imperial project is expensive. The flow of the nation’s wealth – from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers – has created a form of “military Keynesianism,†in which the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.and:
To understand the real weight of military Keynesianism in the American economy today, however, one must approach official defense statistics with great care. The “defense†budget of the United States – that is, the reported budget of the Department of Defense – does not include: the Department of Energy’s spend¬ing on nuclear weapons ($16.4 billion slated for fiscal 2006), the Department of Homeland Security’s outlays for the actual “defense†of the United States ($41 billion), or the Depart¬ment of Veterans Affairs’ responsibilities for the lifetime care of the seriously wounded ($68 billion). Nor does it include the billions of dol¬lars the Department of State spends each year to finance foreign arms sales and militarily re¬lated development or the Treasury Depart¬ment’s payments of pensions to military re¬tirees and widows and their families (an amount not fully disclosed by official statistics). Still to be added are interest payments by the Treasury to cover past debt-financed defense outlays. The economist Robert Higgs estimates that in 2002 such interest payments amounted to $138.7 billion.[Thanks Information Clearinghouse!] Continue reading
A long term perspective on local info
Bill Bell is the editor of the Whittier Daily News. According to a recent column, he has been a journalist for 50 years. This long experience has given him a long perspective on access to government information, especially from law enforcement agencies. What has this experience taught him?
Today, part of the big picture in the news business is how official agencies of the government make it harder and harder to come by information that is suppose to be available to the public. That might seem like a fairly narrow concern, yet it is a symptom of a chronic societal cancer that is helping to destroy our species.Much of his column is about how open and informal local information gathering used to be. In Mr. Bell's view, it depended on police being intelligent enough to know what information could be divulged w/o spoiling their case and reporters sophisticated enough not to burn their sources for a single juicy story. But over all, he implies the level of information sharing, at least at the local level was high. How does he see the situation now?
What's it like today? The Freedom of Information Act has spelled out that a huge amount of government information and records are available to the public. But government agencies seem to make it exceedingly difficult to get to the records they consider most sensitive, despite the FOIA. And, as for local cops and deputies being forthcoming with information that should be available immediately, that's a bygone era. We get it when they feel like providing it.How true and how sad. But I'm glad to see we still have people like Mr. Bell pointing out the importance of transparency at all levels of government. Continue reading