The Exercise of Vital Powers

I think not.

The Wall Street Journal did a piece on On BlackBerry Orphans, children of parents who are totally obsessed with their BlackBerry or Treos.

I’m getting really sick and tired of these “work/life balance” articles. I understand why the media does it. Filling column inches based on the random drivel of so-called experts is pretty easy. Still, there never seems to be much perspective, and what little there is comes in the form of a one line quote from someone interviewed for the story.

In this case the perspective comes from the CEO of RIM (maker of the blackberry) and a 15 year old kid who seems to understand that work equates to earned income.

One of BlackBerry’s biggest defenders, Jim Balsillie, the chairman of Research In Motion, says children should ask themselves, “Would you rather have your parents 20% not there or 100% not there?” ….

Chris DuMont, 15, of San Marino, Calif., recognizes that his father’s habit helps bring in income. “Sometimes when we’re on vacation he’ll be on” his device, Chris says. “But the whole reason we’re on vacation is because he’s working.”

Balsillie’s point is quite valid. In the “good ole days” before cell phones, the bread winner (usually the father) worked late and was never home for dinner. Now, with the availability of cell phones, email, IM and PCs, parents can leave the office at a decent hour, get their kids from school or daycare, take them to soccer practice and still get some work done at home when the kids are doing homework.

Embrace the technology folks.

All that said, we have a major cultural problem in this country with people and their phones. If you and I are having a face to face conversation, don’t answer the phone if its not important. If its your boss or your kid or your wife and you take the call thinking it might be important, but it turns out that it isn’t, tell them you are in the middle of a conversation and you’ll call them back. Don’t make the person standing in front of you wait why you idly chat on the phone.

If a group of friends are at dinner, get up from the table to take that important call. Don’t make the rest of us sit quiet or talk over you. If you can’t safely drive and talk, then send the call to voicemail. I’ve never had any issue telling a non-emergency caller that I can’t talk because I’m driving, or that I’m at dinner and I’ll call back in an hour. Use that caller-id.

Those guys in California, Europe or Japan who can’t calculate time zones and call you during dinner can wait. The project deadline won’t slip because you decided to have an uninterrupted dinner with your kids. Face it, your job isn’t that important, and people aren’t impressed.

And for that matter, get some perspective on the terms important and emergency. At my current job, I’m responsible for systems that if they go down can affect people’s ability to dial 911. That’s important. I’ll leave the table to answer the phone from the office. And if I’m at dinner and people can dial 911, I’ll tell them I’m at dinner and I’ll deal with it later.

Quick round up of interesting tech news.

A Canadian group has developed a program to enable people in free countries to allow people in less free countries (think China) to access the forbidden parts of the Internet. It reminds me of the mathematician from Jurassic Park who said, “Life finds a way”. So does information.

Space Elevator companyLift Port has managed to get their robot to climb 1500 ft. Only 61999.65 miles to go!

Finally some House Republicans are stepping into the whole Google/Yahoo/Microsoft in China issue by proposing a bill that would prevent US companies doing business in China from housing their servers in China. I’m not too keen on that legislation. I might support a measure that requires companies to store personally identifiable information in countries not on the State Department’s list of nations it deems repressive to human rights. However, this measure as it is currently being touted will hinder American competitiveness overseas and would grant advantages to companies from countries with a less stellar track record of protecting freedom of expression.

Oh, and Cold Fusion is a reality

Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for policy, Stewart Baker at the US Chamber of Commerce’s event on combating intellectual property theft (source):

“I wanted to raise one point of caution as we go forward, because we are also responsible for maintaining the security of the information infrastructure of the United States and making sure peoples’ [and] businesses’ computers are secure. … There’s been a lot of publicity recently about tactics used in pursuing protection for music and DVD CDs in which questions have been raised about whether the protection measures install hidden files on peoples’ computers that even the system administrators can’t find.

“It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.”

He then goes on to make strange claims about Avian Flu and the need for remote access.

Figures this would happen once I pay off my mortage

So apparently some security researchers have figured out how to disable CALEA wiretaps using a very simple technique that has been around since the very early days of phone system hacking (phreaking to us the hacker jargon). By emitting a C-Tone on the line during the call you can confuse the wiretapping software into thinking that the phone is on the hook and thus it will not record the audio. The paper below also details how you can confuse the system as to what number you dialed and how long the call lasted.

http://www.crypto.com/papers/wiretapping/

Here is an interesting statistic. It shows the amount of Energy consumed per dollar of GDP. It really is a measure of technological efficiency. We are getting more and more out of every barrel of oil.

Thats good news for America (and the world) and bad news for oil companies and environmental groups. The former because they sell less oil, the latter because their “cause” is weakened.

http://intensityindicators.pnl.gov/graphics.html

HT: Transterrestrial Musings via Instapundit

A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

“We’ve found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

Full Story

Big Brother is Watching

To hell with NASA, this is the future of space travel:

Today’s communications satellites demonstrate how an object can remain poised over a fixed spot on the Equator by matching its speed to the turning Earth, 22,300 miles (35,780 km) below. Now imagine a cable linking the satellite to the ground. Payloads could be hoisted up it by purely mechanical means, reaching orbit without any use of rocket power. The cost of launching payloads into orbit could be reduced to a tiny fraction of today’s costs.

(link)

A federal trial court in Chicago has ruled recently that the ancient legal doctrine of trespass to chattels (meaning trespass to personal property) applies to the interference caused to home computers by spyware. Information technology has advanced at warp speed with the law struggling to keep up, and this is an example of a court needing to use historical legal theories to grapple with new and previously unforeseen contexts in Cyberspace.

In Sotelo v. DirectRevenue, the plaintiff filed a complaint against various defendants alleging that, without his consent, the defendants caused spyware to be downloaded onto his computer. In a nutshell, the plaintiff alleged that the spyware tracked his Internet use, invaded his privacy, and caused damage to his computer.

(link)

I’ve often explained to politicos and anarco-libertarians that spammers illegally trespass when they connect to a mail server and dump hundreds of thousands of unwanted messages, using up bandwidth and disk space. Its the reason I applaud the Georgia Gen. Assembly for passing the Slam Spam act last session.

Its nice to see a judge apply common sense to technology. I would much rather apply well tested legal principles to new technologies than rely on statutory solutions. The DMCA is a prime example of what can go wrong when a special interest driven legislature gets involved.