Continuations

In the startup world we sometimes talk about the difference between being a peacetime CEO and a wartime CEO (cf this famous essay by Ben Horowitz). While some people may be turned off by this martial metaphor, it is profoundly relevant to the government’s failure to properly deal with the COVID crisis. We must take a close look at this, if we want to stand a real chance of fighting the climate crisis, which is substantially more difficult to address. I am writing this in late in 2021, essenti...

Whenever something really bad happens, we tend to rush to do something quick and fast which makes us feel better, but throws out important principles and thus has severe negative longterm consequences. The Patriot Act post 9/11 comes to mind. We just had a failed coup, the risk of which one could see coming from a mile away (actually going as far back as Trump’s election). But now that it has taken place, however weirdly farcical, everyone seems to finally wake up and so urgent action is requ...

Yesterday evening our son and I were taking a train back from Long Island on the LIRR and the trip was a great illustration of how decrepit our infrastructure is. About four minutes before train departure there was an announcement that the train was running on time. All good and we were looking forward to getting some work done on the train. Then three minutes before departure, i.e., just one minute later, a different announcer came back on to say that the train was at least 15 minutes delaye...

It has been interesting to follow the recent spate of attacks on the systems of large companies including Apple and Facebook. The latest theory is that employees of the companies visited a site that used a zero-day Java exploit to gain access to computers. The site itself was apparently not aware of the malicious code being hosted there. At least some of this malicious activity seems to be connected to the Chinese military which has not surprisingly denied any involvement. All of this has hap...

I wrote recently about how we are at a time during which lots of little decisions will determine whether we find ourselves in an information utopia or dystopia. There is a lot of legislation in the works both here in the US and abroad that speaks directly to this. In particular, there is a schizophrenic approach to privacy. We are simultaneously getting efforts to provide more privacy in commercial settings and less privacy vis-a-vis the government. In the US, the FTC is working on new privac...

So the sentence for Chelsea Manning is 35 years. The intention of government here is obvious: like everything else in the ridiculously harsh treatment of Manning it is an attempt to deter others from leaking information. So is the detention of David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s partner under the Terrorism Act in the UK and the destruction of computer equipment at the Guardian’s offices. The game plan is clearly to intimidate any potential leakers and anyone who might help them. This is an extra...

The Internet makes possible unprecedented levels of transparency. That is why it all the more disconcerting that large government programs operate entirely in secret. Nick Grossman has an important post up today on the USV blog about starting by giving companies the right to disclose government information requests and also requiring government to provide the same information. Here is a key section:We can start to do this by being open about the extent of data sharing between internet compani...

This is a short follow up to my Friday post which argued for protest over more crypto and received a lot of critical comments. Based on these here are my replies to the key questions / objections: 1. The most common comment was – why not do both? Why not more crypto and protest? In fact won’t we need to crypto to protest? Doing both suggests that doubling down on crypto is a viable strategy. It is not – the more we invest in this now the more we expend resources on an unwinnable arms race (if...

Short post because I am away with the family, but I can’t help myself given the shutdowns of Lavabit and Silent Mail. This is what I mean when I say we are headed for a spy-versus-spy society between citizens and government. The way forward is not for citizens to embrace these crypto services and setting of an ever stronger government reaction. The way forward is for us to take back government from lobbyists and the military-industrial-surveillance complex. One starting point for that is redo...

A while back I had stopped worrying about bee Colony Collapse Disorder because it had been out of the news for a while. From this morning’s New York Times it seems like I was wrong. Apparently if anything the rate of bee colonies collapsing has accelerated. This could turn into a very serious threat to the food supply for anything that needs pollination by bees which includes many fruits and vegetables. One of the potential culprits here are genetically modified plants that include so-called ...