Wired State

Is App Search a Threat to Google? Maybe Not Anymore...

It's been three months since TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, an eternity in Web 2.0 and start-up time, but I'm still pondering my major takehome assessment from this fascinating event: that mobile phones, and various aps to search for aps themselves or various content like restaurant reviews, all pose a serious challenge to Google search -- well, to Google the Ad Agency.

It seemed so obvious to me what was happening  -- just like Facebook was outside of the Google ambit and enabled people to search for things -- people, places, brands, events -- so the mobile phone and ap world have been largely outside Google -- which is still back on the Internet, and not in smart phones.

Oh, to be sure there is Android, and the Android apps, but everyone knows Apple's app store has gadzillion more apps and Apple is more innovative and that there is a world exploding of apps and social services that are not captured by Google's search.

While at TechCrunch Disrupt, I observed several interesting phenomena -- there were a number of start-ups that involved using apps to search -- for example Do@ which has the motto "reinventing mobile search...search like a search engine, and answer like an app."

Another one was called Quixey -- "a functional search engine for apps that lets you find apps by describing what you want to do."

And there were a few others.

So I went up to them at the expo and asked the devs if they feared whether Google was going to kill them -- or perhaps buy them out, alternatively. They joked that they were talking to Google acquisitions already!

But not really -- and they didn't even really seem to see it as I did. Perhaps because I'm not a tekkie I could see this simple thing more clearly (or perhaps I was hopelessly misled, you tell me): there is a whole world of app search out there that has Google beat, and Google may not even realize this (of course, that's silly to even conceive of, right? Because Google is ominiscient, no?)

Of course, an app search comes up with...other apps. It's not stuff itself...exactly. And yet it rapidly does become a search of stuff -- you get the app to find things and instantly you get them -- whatever the interest, and I tried searching for "virtual worlds" and got Blue Mars' app, and so on.

Even so, try them and see what fascinating stuff you do turn up -- and then if you get "the app for that" what troves of information you'd get -- bypassing Google.

I asked some of these companies a lot of questions trying to see if they were really standing alone from the Google Borg. Did they in fact use the Google Search Appliance? Were they in fact not hooked up to Google at the end of the day, or were the apps?

They wouldn't always tell me, but it became clear that companies had servers, they had the data of their customers so valuable to marketers on those servers, running those apps, and *Google did not have that information.* Of course, this is the stuff of wars -- the Yelp reviews, for example.

What you find out when you're on a phone, especially when the service isn't that great (and that inevitably happens) -- you don't go on Google as in "www.google.com" You go to Yelp to find something or FourSquare. You use one of these services displayed at TechCrunch like Rexly to find movies or music that relates also to your social graph.

I can see this with the shift in my teenagers. Before -- was it only a year ago? -- they used to talk about how they would "go on the Internet" to find something out -- a fact to use in homework, a figure to resolve some argument, information about the weather or a store with a sale or whatever. "Going on the Internet" mean going to a box on a desk or a laptop sometimes carried around -- but it was "up there" or "in that box over there" -- and while it involved friends sometimes -- a call out on Meebo or Facebook -- it more often related to a solitary search inside google.com or ask.com.

Now, going through the same motions, the kids say "I don't know, but I can find out on my phone."  Or, "I have to look that up on my phone."  By that, they mean they will use something like Yelp or maybe just AIM -- they aren't going to go on Google from a phone. Maybe Google has to make a little mini search app for mobile in order to catch up with the way more and more people are leaving the Internet and going on their phones -- and that aggregate web of apps and connections where they are located now "in the cloud" or whatever isn't...the same thing as that old Internet where Google used to dominate everything.

And they must know this -- hence one of the reasons for the Motorola acquisition.

So at TechCrunch Disrupt back in May, I decided to go right up to  Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Location and Local Service for Google, and ask her if she felt that these new app search start-ups were a threat to Google. Why not? It's the whole point of going to these tech conferences, trying to get some spontaneous answer from these news-makers who are usually so processed.

I had earlier tried asking this question of several Google employees standing around here and there in the food lines and such, and they had no clue -- they simply didn't even want to engage on the topic -- it wasn't their department, I should ask the PR person, whatever.

I introduced myself to Marissa Mayer and just asked her point blank: "Do you think these new search apps are a threat to Google's domination of search?"

She looked at me like I was from Mars.

Ms. Mayer is one of these very well-coiffed and expertly dressed blonde women in high-tech management positions who did not get there by being warm and cuddly with the male social misfits and jerks who make up the overwhelming majority of management and employees at a company like Google.

I could tell she was hoping I'd go away. I persisted. If you're going to get something of value out of these conventions, you have to try.

"Have you seen the start-up companies here like Do@ and Quixley and Rexly? Everyone's more and more living their life on their phones and they don't go on the web to search with Google," I said.

She said she hadn't seen all of them but that she wasn't that impressed -- the search is for aps themselves, not other content -- you don't get as much content as you would in a Google search.

"But all of this is happening outside of Google," I said. "I look up a restaurant on Yelp, not Google."

She stopped and pondered. She looked thoughtfully into the distance.

"Someone will do this well," she concluded -- in that sort of hard-nosed, haughty tone that you would expect a VP of Google to use -- and the implication was that nobody was doing it very well *yet* -- but that Google -- or something that Google would buy -- *would* do it well.

I kept asking about the apps on display at TCD -- she said she "had to go meet somebody".

I don't have enough technical knowledge to know if those apps represented at TechCrunch Disrupt were in fact already doing this better than she would admit -- or what the challenges are. Obviously, they may be simplistic or limited in what they do turn up if they don't have sophisticated algorithms.

In the Google versus Yelp wars, you feel like Yelp is going to lose -- and that Google fanboyz are rooting for it to lose and stop whining.

Of course, when you download Yelp to use on your Android, then Google does get the data. And when you see how it gets it everywhere -- look at how the Google camel got its nose under the tent in Facebook for a time -- it used to own much of the bottom half of your page on searches. It used to be your search within Facebook's search box only turned up stuff within the realm of Facebook.  Then for a time, on the lower half of the page you would see Google search results that take you out of that realm.

Today, you see Facebook content, the sponsored search items (ads tailored to your keyword) and then on that bottom panel -- Bing results. I guess the friction between Google and Facebook caused FB to dump Google for that spot?  It's just as well. I want somewhere to go where I can get away from Google.

As an amateur tech observer, my insight about app searches threatening Google was something I came across on my own by watching what happened at TechCrunch Disrupt.

It occurred to me to test whether anyone else had thought about this just now, so I did a search and found this by Clint Boulton on eweek.com last year:

Applications that take users directly to e-commerce sites and other Web service destinations threaten search providers such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing, according to BroadPoint AmTech. Some vendors are making it even easier for consumers to visit their site and make purchases. For example, Amazon, eBay and Best Buy have mobile apps that enable full browsing and purchasing functionality. Consumers who download these mobile apps right to their smartphone deck can go straight to the source Website and buy what they need. Why should people use the search box?

Exactly!

BroadPoint AmTech said 10 percent to 30 percent of the mobile searches consumers trigger for Amazon.com, eBay and the like go through the Google, Yahoo or Bing search box on their iPhones, Google Android devices and other smartphones. Ads served with these navigational queries cultivate decent click-through rates.

But many vendors are making it even easier for consumers to visit their sites and make purchases...Consumers who download these mobile apps right to their smartphone deck can go straight to the source Website and buy what they need without opening a browser, entering queries in a search box, said BroadPoint AmTech analyst Ben Schachter.

This was said back in January 2010 -- why didn't it continue to become more of a problem for Google, given that searches with apps have probably only skyrocketed since then with the huge surge in i-phones and app startups?

As always happens in the tech blogosphere, there was a squall of blogs back in January 2010 all speculating about this subject (some merely reprinting the same basic press release) -- yet it didn't become such a big story as to get into the New York Times.

To be sure, the Times had a story after TCD on Do@ is speeding up the mobile search -- and taking you to sites already fixed up to make it easier for mobiles to view them. In fact increasingly, when I get links in email or Facebook I click even sitting at my desktop, and what I get is a page meant to be viewed from a mobile.

Maybe it is a problem for Google, but not one they can't fix by rolling out Nexus One and now buying Motorola so they dominate handsets with their own and probably there are other things we don't know about.

Of course, we're also told that apps are dead, too.

But my own hunch, based on what I saw at TechCrunch Disrupt and this little encounter with Marissa Mayer, that when she says "Someone will do this well..." she doesn't mean waiting around and admiring some other company doing this from afar, she means...something Google will own.

With the Motorola acquisition, Google now has a lock on travel apps, for example:

With a native travel application already on Blackberry, one coming soon no doubt to iPhones and iPads and, now, Google having the ability to ship travel search as a native app on all Motorola devices, the travel search ecosystem will change yet again.

Whatever the real story, one thing is certain, all this fuss kicked up about patent trolls and the need to dismantle the patent system, with incendiary articles appearing right on time as if on cue like Sarah Lacey's, now really look stupid -- after Google has made a major move and a market mover all related to buying...patents!

 

Linden Lab Should Create a Web Site and Ap to Sell Digital Goods

 
Geek fads and short-lived enthusiasms -- who should care about them? Once again TechCrunch tells us something is "dead" or "in the dead pool" and we're supposed to chime in -- email is dead, the Internet is dead, now Flicker is dead.

What has this to do with the consumer? The consumer will still go on using Flickr. Not everybody is a photographer; lots more people are viewers or people looking for photos to use on blogs or news stories or whatever. Of course, if the devs themselves don't care about their brainchild enough to remain in the company that bought it, and just sell it like that, well, should we care?

I remember hearing Caterina Fake in Second Life -- there was some kind of news conference with her -- was it at Davos? -- and I remember recalling that her philosophy didn't grab me, and she was an example of yet another start-up having no notion of viability other than selling herself to one of the big companies -- in this case Yahoo. (Remember, for a time there was concern that Flickr wouldn't allow uploads of screenshots from virtual worlds? Then they got over that.) That's always unsettling -- that there isn't this rich ecosystem of various-sized companies, instead, there is Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, perhaps a few others, and then these start-ups that they buy and demolish, or buy and trade among themselves, or buy and incorporate as a department, and then the cycle starts all over again. Even something fairly big (like Motorola) gets bought out by Google!

Why is Flickr "dead"? Well, because Mike Arrington says so? He was annoyed that if he stopped paying the premium price, he couldn't get his pictures back from Flickr -- he would have to pay up to access them again. That seemed eminently reasonable -- especially because he would undoubtedly have originals already on his hard drive or camera phone memory. Few people would have a unique copy of a photo only on Flickr -- it's a storage system but the copies have to come from somewhere. But he griped about it, and there was a certain zeitgeist where others were griping about how they didn't feel there was "innovation" lately, or that the premium didn't offer much extra. Everyone -- that is in the geek set -- began to say that Instagram would overtake Flickr.

Here's the thing, though. Instagram isn't a service for end-use consumers who want to find and view photos -- it's just an ap for photographers to upload to other sites like Facebook, really. It doesn't have a website where I can go search the photos by topic or join interest groups and view photos, i.e. Second Life screenshots or Central Asian photographs. People say Google+ will take over this "space" -- but there isn't a one-stop go-to place where I can see everybody's photos -- unless I circle them and follow them and scroll through all the dreck to see their photos. Maybe they will add this at some point, but it will still have wonky interface like Google always does and it won't have "pay me" built into it.

What's most important about Flickr now in terms of usefulness to somebody beyond the circle of photo-walkers, the photos that have Creative Commons licenses on them can be reused or mixed and matched by others. There's the 10 percent who create; there are the 90 percent who consume. You have to think of them, too.

Now, I'm a HUGE critic of Creative Communism, which decouples commerce from copyright and forces "sharing". The CC licenses don't have an option which says "pay me if you want to use a copy".

And that's what I really want to do. I want to PAY the photographers, not by contacting Getty Images and have to negotiate or have some huge fee for what amounts to a blog use viewed by perhaps 1,000 people before it sinks into an archive, I want to pay the photo *instantly* in microcurrency that I get from the platform like virtual money that cashes out to real money for that artist. I want to be able to tip photographers I like with this same cash when I see they've done a good job, or even commission photos in interest groups, etc. And no platform lets me do that because of the early geek Internet creators and their fundamentalist religion of copyleftism.

So when somebody is ready to make money and overcome this silly religious dogma, please call me. I will go to your site and pay you money to use your photo (or for that matter, song, texture, or any digital creation), especially if it's a reasonable price, like a dollar per use. The merger of a PayPal like payment system that works comfortably with large numbers of small transactions from digital wallets and a reliable cashout that has lots of fraud protections is what the Internet needs to get to the next stage beyond the early technocommunists. We're waiting.

Meanwhile, we will go on using Flickr. Using the silly CC license that doesn't get the author paid, or if he shuts off copying rights and puts "all rights reserved" (the default, fortunately), then I'll contact them and negotiate the price -- or *not*, because it's too much bother.

Yahoo, get rid of Creative Communism, put a grownup payments/tipping/cashout system on there and let people get paid for their creativity and time on the Internet and you can go to the next stage.

But...why wait for Yahoo to figure this out, as I think of it.

Linden Lab already has a profitable company (they say $75 million a year, it's a private company so we don't know how real that figure it, but it seems accurate). They already have a robust, very much stressed and checked and revised and troubleshot virtual currency system with an exchange called the LindEx. And they already have a great virtual goods marketing system, SL Marketplace.

So all they have to do is extend that out from virtual stuff inworld to other digital goods based on the real world -- photorgraphs, songs, textures, etc.

Wouldn't it be great if the product they were working on for an i-pad would be something like this! I believe it could make a fortune. I bet that's NOT what they are doing, however, because the management, governance and fraud protection challenges of such a system are perhaps insurmountable (which is perhaps why our Internet has never gone to this stage in 15 years, although it must).

I just want it to come into being, however. Imagine if you could go on your i-phone or i-pad or even a regular website and view photographs people uploaded searchable by topic or name or group and pay people money for their photos very easily -- either purchase the rights for one-time use or use on your blog of X traffic (perhaps the fee could be sliding) or simply tip the photographer if you liked their work.

Maybe there's a way to make files disintegrate or a kill-file to make the files disappear after 30 days? If they were all in the cloud this might be easy to do. So you pay a dollar to keep the photo for 30 days in view on your blog for $1, or you spend $5 to keep it permanently -- or whatever.

Why couldn't somebody put this today?

Then you could add songs, textures or art elements to use on websites or phones, software, aps -- anything really that is digitalized. Aps already sell in the ap store -- it's really just a question of making "the ap store" be something that has photos in it, too.

This wouldn't be something like having a PayPal button to click on. It has to be a microcurrency for small transactions that wouldn't accrue fees, that the platform owner would get a percentage of (but not these whopping gouges that Amazon gets for books, electronic and hard copy, geez, they are ridiculous -- $3.00 fees out of a $5.00 used hard copy book these days.)

So you get a wallet of microcurrency -- you might have a running subscription that costs $9.95 a month, you go around tipping, buying, perhaps even reselling if there is a way to secure the files.

We need to make the Internet pay, and end all this silly share-bear stuff.

Such a system might be hard to start (the way amazon.com was itself in its day) but it might also become so wildly popular (the prospect of making money online always is!) that it would overwhelm the ability of the LindEx to handle it. Maybe tying this business to the LindEx would be ill-advised, and it would need its own DigitEx or something. But the LindEx is a brand that has trust from about a million people. Each month, several hundred thousands of people use it to buy or sell currency to buy digital goods and services. Why not?

 

Doing the Authoritarian Governments' Work For Them

Whenever a controversy arises about how or whether to restrict the Internet, you can be sure that the "progressives" will step forward and invoke authoritarian governments, and then tell you that unless the West does X or Y, and refrains from anything that looks like it involves restricting the Internet, why, they will be hypocrites who look like authoritarian governments.

Sure enough, Chinese propagandists have stepped forward to wag a finger at British Prime Minister David Cameron and praise him for considering plans to shut down social media in triumphalist fashion.

The "progressives" will then essentially make common cause with authoritarians by letting their mendacious arguments stand -- and claim it then becomes impossible for those authoritarians to reform because they will endlessly be able to cite as justification for their nefarious actions the venal actions of the wicked West.

Well, baloney, says I -- this is just the usual mounting of the usual moral equivalency arguments and they should hold no weight. As if authoritarians were planning reform until the West seemed to give them an easy out! As if they needed a justification! And more importantly, as if what they do is really "like" what a Western government would do to control a riot -- a riot that isn't like a movement for freedom against tyranny, but is indeed opportunistic crime.

It's very basic. If you can't understand the difference between an elected prime minister, David Cameron of the UK, subject to parliament, a free media, the court system, public opinion, and Mubarak, the tyrant of Egypt, then it's hard to have a rational conversation with you. If these two figures become equivalent for you, then you don't respect democracy as you claim you do when you back Egyptian demonstrators -- you think revolutionary thuggery is ok to let pass anywhere, East or West.

Worse, if you reach to these metaphors to claim that BART, a transportation agency in San Francisco is "like" Mubarak because they shut off cell phone service after a police shooting to prevent panic and riots which not only they've experienced before in California, but which they could see as fresh examples in London, then again, you don't grasp the difference between legitimate restriction of freedom of speech under international principles of maintaining order in a democratic society -- *to keep that democracy viable* -- and a dictatorship where in fact the people aren't rioting and looting, or shooting at police, but peacefully demonstrating for more freedom of speech and being shot at by the army. Difference.

When people rush to invoke the arguments of authoritarians and imply that Western democracies are "like" them and therefore can't have any policy that manages the Internet for any reason, I call it "doing the work of authoritarians for them."

Authoritarians would like nothing better than to disarm and disable Western democracies that challenge them fundamentally by their very nature, and pretend that they are all fake and hypocritical so they can better rationalize their own existence and methods.

Evgeny Morozov is particularly adept at this game, always and everywhere bursting in quickly to set the stage to tell us that not only are we "like" authoritarians and "giving them common cause," we should therefore...simply do nothing. We shouldn't fight them (he hates all government programs for Internet freedom) because it's too clumsy and ineffective -- they're too powerful and crafty. And we shouldn't do anything to preserve our liberal societies from being taken over by Bolshevik thugs looting and pillaging then, either, but instead, oh, take our model from Angela Davis (whom Evgeny Morozov openly admires) and advocate violent revolutionary struggle to achieve...um...whatever it is that he thinks that achieves. Uh, parliamentary democracy and a mixed economy? Workers' self-management councils? Or maybe a tyrannical regime with terror and murder and mayhem for all kinds of people, but a Soviet Academy of Sciences where intellectuals will be allowed to perform their research into the hard sciences for the glory of the state?

So not unsurprisingly, we get this piece from Morozov in the Wall Street Journal -- still the largest circulation newspaper in America, even with AOL's aggregations, and therefore still very influential -- which enables him to reach millions of thinkers and decision-makers.

Read the comments there for my rebuttal which basically calls into question once again: why are you doing the work of authoritarians for them? Let them make their hypocritical arguments, as they always do. They will go right on repressing dissidents even if we don't provide them "models" -- to suggest that there is some hydraulic connection between our actions and theirs is just an NGO fantasy used for advocacy purposes. Not only does it suggest we have more power than we really do -- pretending we influence autocrats -- it pretends they can have less power than they do -- it's an NGO fantasy that autocrats change by good example and reiteration of best practices, instead of being forced to give up power.

Carl Bildt appears on Twitter to express the quavery indeciseveness of liberals unable to protect their own liberalism from assault by demagogic authoritarians -- maybe Cameron's idea isn't so good if the Chinese triumphantly cite it? "Well, I fear David Cameron got it somewhat wrong on netfreedom. Applause from Beijing is hardly flattering."

Again, he should be reminded of the difference between Cameron and Hu Jintao, which isn't trivial. If some Tottenham rioter who has his free or heavily-subsidized housing and education and is helping himself to sneakers and laptops thinks he is in a situation "like" Egypt, he should contemplate what made some demonstrators come out to the square in Cairo -- hunger, because bread prices had skyrocketed, after Russia declared a grain embargo suffering from its losses after forest fires, and its shipments to Egypt were curtailed, and even the US existing subsidy of half or more of food costs wasn't enough.

Rebecca MacKinnon then is also quick to step up to the plate with exactly the same kind of moral-equivalency arguments. To be sure, unlike Morozov or even Carl Bildt, who is generally one of the most thoughtful statesman on Twitter, she pushes past the easy rhetoric of her fans and points out that there *is* a difference when you deal with elected states.

But instead of staying with that and contemplating what it means that *other people have elected leaders she doesn't support because there were more of them in this democracy and their arguments were more compelling* she then insists that the whole point of democracies is to have debates and propose alternative policies.

Oh, surely -- except, when they come from, oh, The Heartland Institute or Heritage, right? Some place where the polices aren't to your liking? I am fairly certain Rebecca respects the right to diversity and pluralism. But what she always inevitably seems to indicate, perhaps subconsciously, is that she'd like the "progressive solution," which she feels is inherently scientific and correct, to prevail because logic should. That the solution isn't so inherently scientific isn't something she believes -- it's a religious belief.

Rebecca even subsequently cites a paper saying only more freedom of expression stops riots, not less. Sure that's going to work every time, guys? And if you REALLY believe that more freedom of speech is better than less to address hate crime (I do), then can you go over and tell Mike Massing that at The New York Review of Books? Because more freedom of speech will stop what is perceived as the violence of the right in America, right? Or are you inconsistent in your views?

See, this is the luxury of an intellectual in an ivory tower who has 16,000 London policemen (like 13,000 National Guardsmen during the Watts riots in the 1960s) to make sure she never has to face the consequences of her ideological solution -- do nothing, and let Nature take its course on the Internet.

David Cameron sent in 16,000 police, arguably later than he should have, and eventually calmed the riots -- and began arresting some 1,700 people for looting and vandalism. What is he supposed to do next time, Rebecca? Send in 32,000 and arrest 3,400?  Are we supposed to sit through hundreds *more* shops looted and burned, and perhaps this time a dozen instead of six people killed? Just to keep blogging rights intact?

If David Cameron could have obtained the cooperation of Blackberry's operators to shut down the BBM completely in some geographical areas where rioting was occuring, or even mass-launched warnings on it that looters were being photographed and identified and arrested, or if some clear instigators could begin to see their accounts blocked, even if the service remained for most people -- that might well serve to prevent more massive rioting and then more causalties

And that's why this argument isn't trivial.  Some people in threads on discussions in TechCrunch who actually witnessed the riots say they are prepared to have their government do "anything" to stop them. And do-gooding liberals rush in to say, "Anything? Really? And let your country turn into a dictatorship?" As I noted, Mike Butcher has even appeared to claim -- after first saying something should be done to turn off the BBM to stop riots -- that you "can't predict" riots -- backdating from geeky religious beliefs about technology being neutral. Technology is never neutral -- it isn't just a tool in human hands; code especially is the concretization of human will. If you deliberately build a bomb to have maximum devastation, as in Hiroshima, you aren't wielding a neutral tool, you are building an evil tool. If you make code that contains the inherency to enable mobs to organize mass riots and even mass murder *by their acceleration and amplification and viral qualities* then you haven't just built a neutral tool that is "in the wrong hands" sometimes; you've built a system with capacity for evil which makes *non-neutral technology*. Hoping that this very capacious in fact non-neutral technology will always "end up in the right hands" and "drive away the wrong hands" is naive if not sinister, when conscious.

Example: Second Life, the virtual world, which is scorned by a certain set of Web 2.0 geeks for what it mirrors about them, is an interesting prototyper of social media situations.

In Second Life, if someone griefes the world by sending self-replicating objects all over the grid to crash servers, there are "grey goo fences" that stop them from crossing server borders. If hundreds of people converge on a virtual synagogue with hate signs and fire bombs, the sim leasers or the company moderators can turn off "build" on the sim to prevent people from putting out the virtual fire and crashing the sim or preventing it from being used by its regular users. These are normal checks and balances put into a social media service in order to prevent it from being hijaced by the few to the detriment of the free use of the many. Its more visible in the virtual simulation -- if 50 pro-Palestinian demonstrators consistently block entry to a synagogue or a Jewish cultural sim to make their point, preventing its use by the owner and the public, they aren't just expressing their rights, they are hindering others from expressing theirs. In real life, "time, place and manner" restrictions are put on public demonstrations all the time. The extremist "Million Man" march of black radicals couldn't convene on Times Square, but had to go to Central Park.

Why anyone thinks you can only have restrictions on "time, place, and manner" in real life situations to prevent mob rule completely consistent with the First Amendment, but you don't get to put them on the Internet, where our public life has increasingly moved, is beyond me. (The argument for not restraining rioters on the Internet is mounted by the same "thought leaders" who either block you on Twitter or reprimand you for criticizing them and tell you to "be positive".)

(BTW, geeks endlessly fight this common-sense logic by endlessly telling you on forums that hammers are meant to pound nails, not heads, and only humans make the difference in their use -- the fact is, however, that if you build technology that has the capacity for murder *enhanced* in it, you have indeed made non-neutral technology, and you have to face the consequences of managing it. )

Of course, in these forums debates, the sliding scale for "dictatorship" goes up rapidly from stopping cell phone coverage in a few train stops (BART, or potentially London's metro) to suddenly "shutting the entire Internet off" like Mubarek (or Berdymukhamedov, during the Abadan explosion.) Can you talk rationally to people who can't see any gradation?

Er, it's a "global race to the bottom," as MacKinnon emotionally intones, if we...shut off some cell phone service so rioters can't converge and burn and loot a neighbourhood with people's livelihoods in it?

Why isn't she challenging the "global race to the bottom" of the rioters using the considerable amplification and broadcasting components of technology that creates no brakes on it? Just *what is* the plan to stop them? Er, keeping those libraries open and handing out more "checks to stay in school"? Maybe throw in one laptop per child? That's going to work?

Says MacKinnon, in the pious prescriptsions of the "progressives":

In order to prevent social, economic and geopolitical meltdown, it is imperative that those who feel marginalized and oppressed have a chance to be heard alongside the elite and powerful.

Um, "heard" by organizing and perpetrating mass mayhem on neighbourhoods, looting and rioting and even killing?

The reality is that those who "feel" marginalized and oppressed have some of the best social welfare arrangements in the world -- providing a magnet for immigrants. And they already have ample scope for self-expression -- they could all afford Blackberries and even throw-away cell phones to plot real crimes more effectively. They could all freely go on the Guardian or Yahoo or anywhere with anonymous names.There is nothing "disconnected" about the mobs in London -- they are all throughly, throughly, wired, Rebecca.

Here's the EFF program, then, in a nutshell:

laws have been passed and policies implemented that make it vastly easier for government agencies to track and access citizens' private digital communications than it is for authorities to search or carry out surveillance of our physical homes, offices, vehicles and mail.

Actually, that's not the case. Current laws make it possible for authorities to request access to telephones or homes, yet don't make it possible for them to gain the same access to digital communications -- hence the new laws being contemplated.

Standards of oversight, due process and accountability have been eroded in ways that have made it easier for government agencies to abuse power, and have made it more difficult for citizens to hold the abusers accountable. In the name of fighting terror and crime, members of Congress continue to propose laws that would require companies to retain more data, and for longer periods.

So far, I'm not seeing the use cases here. Instead, I see something different:

o our government's State Department and military forces were pushovers -- see Cablegate and WikiLeaks -- the wikified files of our government were an easy targets for massive looting and publication of state secrets

o private corporations that assist the government with managing the challenges of constant Internet hacking and looting were themselves then targed by the destructive hackers' collectives calling themselves Anonymous, and they were utterly savaged and their business destroyed. Then LulzSec, their offshoot, continued to do even more damage on government and military sites.

Where's that government overreach, Rebecca, that is compromising all our civil liberties? I don't see the cases. I see the opposite -- bands of malicious actors undermining a liberal democratic state.

As for data retention, companies with social media platforms ALREADY retain them, as do ISPs. The question is whether law enforcers, in a liberal democratic state -- which is indeed what we have by contrast with Egypt or Russia or China, by the way -- can have access to such data for the purposes of preventing crime.

Hacking government sites and stealing and publishing classified secrets is a crime; stealing and/or reselling or re-streaming copyrighted material is a crime; child pornography is a crime; bullying and stalking is a crime; identity theft is a crime.

Or maybe we have to have an argument that these are indeed crimes because you don't think they are?

Cunning Chinese propagandists are understandable when they speciously invoke the seeming mirror-behaviour of Westerners to justify their actions. Western liberals aren't -- if they value liberalism, they have to think about how to protect it in the long run. There is this inherent religious belief that if you protect liberalism, it automatically becomes its opposite. Really? Thanks to 13,000 National Guardsmen or 16,000 London policemen, we can go on having this theoretical discussion, you know?

 

 

Read Art. 19 of the UNUDHR if You Are in a Quandary About Cameron vs. Mubarak

Rebecca MacKinnon -- predictably -- is banging the drum about Western governments putting social media under surveillance and making the unjustifiable moral equivalence with authoritarians such as Mubarak.

To cut it short, I would refer her and others again to international law on freedom of expression -- US law is even more refined and helpful, but the arduously-negotiated text of Art. 22 and Art. 30 help you understand the restraints for Art. 19.

Rioting, looting, burning -- these are contrary to the UN charter and also the denial of other people of their rights.

 

Article 19.

    * Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 29.

    * (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
    * (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
    * (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30.

    * Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Is Cisco Selling Equipment to China REAAALLLY The Problem?

A long explanation and thought process about how I don't want to click with my mouse made in China on a petition haranguing Cisco about selling their equipment to the Chinese.

Predictably, Electronic Frontier Foundation, now with radical "Internet freedom fighter" Jillian C. York as the Director for International Freedom of Expression, is ramping up the campaign against Cisco for building a surveillance system for China.

Who could possibly *not* endorse such a thing as this petition calling on Cisco not to abuse human rights, given that China arrests and tortures dissidents and does 100 other bad things in the world (including propping up the regime of dictators Bashir in Sudan and Berdymukhamedov in Turkmenistan and blocking resolutions condemning Syria at the UN). Well, certainly not I!

Yet I'm not going to sign this petition, and just write my own letter -- directly to the Chinese government, which is the real problem here, not this American company.

And I'd like to think out loud about this entire issue, which is more complex than it looks -- and certainly more complex than the typical glib EFF knee-jerk treatment would have you believe.

Surveillance cameras are already with us in many places, in the free and unfree world; they are already used for both good and evil.

So why are we picking on Cisco? Because we can?

COMMUNISM,  NOT CAPITALISM IS THE PROBLEM

The real culprit in this story isn't the technology, it's how the technology is being exploited by an abusive authoritarian state. It's the Communist Party of China (say it with me, now, Jillian, *the Communist Party of China*) that is the real villain of this piece, not the capitalist Cisco. Our shopping markets and car-parking lots and workplaces all have video cameras and likely even our apartment buildings. We trust all those people to do the right thing with the videos and not invade our privacy needlessly; millions do. The government also has video cameras in some places like government buildings. Soit isn't that Jillian York really has a problem with video surveillance per say -- or at least, not one she is telling us about -- ; she has a problem with communism, but one that she doesn't want to admit for PC reasons, so she shifts it to a capitalist target in the classic "surrogate advocacy" gambit.

Except she doesn't really have a problem with the Communist Party's misuse of technology. Because if she were to put it like that, she'd sound "hopelessly anti-communist" and "mired in Cold-War categories" and even "McCarthyist". So you can never, ever mention the word "communism" in any negative light. Certainly, there's no petition addressed to the Communist government here.

A company like Cisco is venal, sure, in helping this nefarious CP of China do its evil deeds. But the real evil is in Beijing, not Cisco -- except, that narrative doesn't suit EFF. I do have to wonder, given its track record on so many other politicized campaigns, whether EFF choses these campaigns not so much for the value of fighting Chinese censorship and oppression, but for the shaming value that accrues to a corporation they don't like -- and the strategic value of reshaping the corporate landscape according to the doctrines of EFF.

EFF like other radical "progressive" operations is all about fighting copyright, intellectual property rights, capitalist corporations -- as long as they aren't Google (EFF is part of the Google-dominated GNI, for one, and Google is a company lefty geeks generally support.) The left is mainly interested in the campaign against capitalism, Wall Street, fat cats, rich people, government cronies, etc. -- and in that campaign, along the way, if they can find some way to shame these targets they hate by attaching them to abusive foreign governments, why, so much the better.

WE MISSED EFF WHEN IT CAME TIME TO BOYCOTT THE BEIJING OLYMPICS

If EFF were really about fighting Chinese censorship, we'd have seen a more consistent pattern on their part standing up for various Chinese dissidents over the years. We don't. That's because until Google was forced to leave China after its servers got seriously hacked (not for reasons of principle as many human rights activists had urged them), it wasn't cool to attack China -- gosh, that's where a lot of companies make their widgets. That's the backend factory of Silicon Valley!

A clue to this cunning posture in EFF can be seen not only from the paucity of work against Chinese censorship in the past, but in the form this campaign takes -- anti-corporate, targeting Cisco, taking the attention away from the bad Chinese government *because they can* and because, things being what they are in the US, the corporation might respond to vilification in the media by trying to change its behaviour. American corporations, unlike Communist Parties, tend to do that in the face of consumer campaigns, so that's why leftists use this method of "surrogate advocacy" -- where they attack the thing they can attack (Cisco), propping up the thing they can't attack (Chinese Communist Party).

Phoning Home: Why You Haven't Convinced Me to Support the Verizon Strike

Some rambling thoughts on the Verizon strike, the high cost of my phone bill, what would be reasonable to have as a phone set-up, what would be reasonable to expect a communications worker to get -- and so on.

I'd like to support a union on strike. That's normally my default. If I see one of those big union rats on the street in New York of a local demanding fair wages and benefits, I cross the street and don't go in that store or business. As I often say, I come from a teacher's union family, my children's father was in the truckers' unions, I always ordered the union bug as my printing option and I look for the union label when shopping for clothes. All good.

But I'm stretched thin because I'm not in a union myself and will likely never be -- the freelancers' union associations isn't really a union and in fact is frustrating in its offers to help freelancers get health insurance -- the same excessive demands for paperwork as the needs-testing state "Child Health Care Plus" companies, etc. In this electronic day and age, shouldn't you just go to the state or federal authorities and obtain the final figure of the income filed for tax purposes, and assign a sliding scale of a fee on that basis? Why the hard copies of IRS returns, the three months of paystubs, the letters from employers that must be renewed every six months, the bank statements, the proof of address, and the rent bills?

I'M NOT GOING TO PAY A LOT FOR THIS PHONE BILL!

More to the point, I pay a lot for my phone bill -- and I can only say this when I hear a call to support striking Verizon workers in the CWA -- um, just let me finish paying my $200 monthly phone bill for my land line, and my $200 monthly phone bill for my kids' cell phones on the cheapest possible plan, and hey, I'll get right back to you. But...coughing up this $400 a month for you guys is getting to be harder and harder. Do you really need more?

A friend in Texas also with Verizon service had to wonder -- why am I paying so much more than him in New York? I don't know? I only know that a $150-200 landline phone bill for two lines, one for telephone and one for computer/fax *even without any long distance phone calls* is routine.

I use Skype for long distance or email people to call me or even buy those instant phone cards -- long distance calls are just way to expensive. Calls to New Jersey are particularly ridiculous.

I'm paying supposedly just $37 a month for a DSL line -- but there are so many taxes and fees and surcharges on top of that and the land line bill for two lines (one dedicated to the DSL, one open). Couldn't I get by with one line? I've wondered that very thing, but I've found in practice, every night the people in my household needing the Internet right when other people need to talk on the land line is a challenge. One problem I have is that for years, giving out thousands of my business cards in a freelance translation and writing business, suddenly changing my phone number is a huge problem. But perhaps I can have it forward for awhile -- I will look into it.

Even so, the second line isn't really the biggest part of the cost.  Cell phones, even when bought on sale as bargains with "buy one, get one free," even with plans that seem to take only the basics, seem to always cost $100 a month if they have Internet access and have unlimited texting. We never use all the minutes but cleverly, they have no option with less minutes -- you have to take the minimum as a flat rate.

And why is this detour from the topic of striking workers relevant? Because the 45,000 strikers are from the wireline, or landline division which is hurting and receiving less revenue because people like me, strapped to make ends meet, are dropping their land lines.

I'm more motivated than ever to ditch one of the lines and ditch long distance phone service completely now that I have to pay these two teenagers' phones,and do any long distance calling in the US I need to do on their phones to get better use of the minutes, and on Skype.

TEENAGE PHONE WASTELAND?

Why do I give them phones? Of course, nobody asks this question anymore, now that three year olds have their own cell phones and the poorest people in the poorest neighbourhoods buy and maintain a cell phone before they do a lot of other things. I give my kids phones so that I can always find them and keep up with them. I know some people without teenagers who scorn the parent who "uses the cell phone as a babysitter," but I can only stare at them blankly: what, you were planning to place a teenager under house arrest? Lock them in a closet? What *is* your notion of what would be appropriate during those hours of 4-6 pm when you might be at work or in meetings and they are out of school and able to get in trouble? What *is* your plan when they go out at night on a weekend? Um, detention after school for no reason? Detention at home?

Cell phones are here to stay, and there's a simple proposition here: keep them charged and on and answer my calls when I call and you aren't home on time for your curfew -- or your cell service gets shut off, end of story.

CUT COSTS?

So how to cut costs? Switch to some other company, you say? well, why? This one works, and particularly the Internet mainly always works, and I don't want to go back to any others. I had Metro PCS on one cell phone for awhile -- it didn't work in other states. I've been on AT&T and constantly had trouble with the email down or blockage of Russian email addresses I needed for work that I didn't have in my spam blocker and they did, and no amount of calling them or safe-listing them would fix it. I had this problem with Verizon -- but calling them *did* fix it pretty much for all of them. Verizon has even sat patiently with me while I presented to them ping tracking of the server hops on the way to Linden Lab's server, and told them earnestly of Linden claims that my Second Life packet loss was "all on my side" -- and heard them laugh out loud -- and procede to explain to me where the hitch was on *the Lindens'* side. One of the gratifying moments of life.

One might consider switching completely to cell service and ditch the land line, but not only do I want to make sure I'm not depending on a cell phone's battery or finding its charging wire if I need to call 911 or keep in touch with elderly relatives who might need help, I can't call overseas on a basic-plan US cell phone, something I need to do a lot. Yes, it's good if I can do this on Skype -- but Skype can be very iffy sometimes, dropping in and out and still running up a bill if the other person doesn't have Skype, so that sometimes if I have an important interview, I will use a dedicated land line. I have to rely often on conference calls with various jobs -- I tried going on Skype with these, and I fell off them too many times to keep relying on Skype or even a cell phone -- and I would go back to my land line. People invoke these affordances and cheap options without actually sitting and recording faithfully how many times they have sat in meetings, waiting for the people on Skype to keep reappearing and keeping relogging, or for the people on cell phones to get back in range or become audible again.

HOW MUCH FREE HEALTH CARE IS REALLY REQUIRED -- CAN'T YOU PAY SOMETHING?

But let's come back to the striking workers -- which we're told is really only about health care. One can feel more sympathy for them, striking against a private company, than for the Wisconsin state workers. Many lefties would reproach me for not getting behind the state workers in Wisconsin, but it only took one TV show to change my mind -- actually, two. In the first, a 55-year-old man who had retired from a career of teaching was sitting in his suburban home, with his full health insurance, and his wife, who was also retired, and they were explaining why they went to the demonstrations. I goggled. I am far, far from retirement at the age of 55. I have no house or health insurance. So, maybe they could do with a little less, maybe make a little bit more of their co-payments on the health bills so that their state isn't bankrupted? I'm not getting this.

And the second show showed the strikers shouting down and pushing others with contrary views, and behaving like asses. I was unimpressed, naturally.

A Facebook friend debating me on this said that I shouldn't judge the situation by my own deficits, that I should get health insurance and residential stability too and not begrudge it in others. That my position on this is like saying people in Poland shouldn't demonstrate because they should be grateful they have more freedom than people in Belarus...or something.

But it's not about begrudging or feeling so social class envy. Again, it's about *goggling*. Goggling that people who work for the state and live from our taxes would demand so much -- it just seems greedy. They are ranting about the greedy rich and the corporations and the politicans in big business' pocket, but it looks to me like they have quite the deal with a big business too -- the state. And we do get to democratically discuss this.

As usual, we don't have ALL the facts on the Verizon workers. How much do they make? What kind of benefits do they have? What are their demands in actual price terms? They may be making the usual union demand for a cost of living increase or less co-payments -- but then, can we really get excited about this and see them as victims on par with struggling democrats in Egypt or rioting teens in London?

We don't get this information surely from the CWA, the Daily Kos, the lefty blogs. A business site says they have *free health care*. So...could you pay at least what I pay for child health care -- $90 a month? Even three times that would be a bargain. And we're told the demand is for free health care for retirees. Do they have a pension? Do they have Medicare? If they are poor, are they eligible for Medicaid?

DAILY KOS PREVARICATIONS

We get no help on this issue from the Daily Kos, which sends out this propaganda blast:

• $258 million—the compensation for Verizon’s top five executives over the past four years.
• $6 billion—Verizon’s annualized profits for 2011.
• $6,800—the increase in health care costs each worker could face if Verizon gets its way.

Well, here's the thing. I don't hate the rich, and inciting me to hate the rich and demand that they "redistribute" their own salaries doesn't move me. Their board of trustees and shareholders are free agents in a free association of a business and they get to set whatever compensation they see fit. If they haven't benefited from a government bailout, capping their salaries hardly seems reasonable. I will not be striking, demonstrating, or rioting because...someone has a million dollar salary and I don't. This isn't just politics or morality; it's practicality. Who is to say what salary is "too much"? You? But I don't want a government or society run by a committee of Daily Kossacks. Free means free -- the society and market economy has to be free to set whatever salaries it wishes for executives or they don't have much incentive to do business.

As for the $6 billion in profits, well, it's not like they don't have a right to make a profit? Again, I don't believe Verizon should be nationalized, socialized, capped, or constrained. It's a business. It creates jobs. If it can't make a profit and pay executives handsomely, it goes out of business and those striking workers don't even have anything to strike against.

So now, for what matters -- the $6,800 in health care costs that each worker faces if Verizon gets its way.

And that's where I demand more transparency and an end to the mispresentation -- and lying -- about this situation on the part of Daily Kos and the union.

They go from free...to $6,800 a year? Really, Daily Kos? Really?!

This is a manufactured number, that may represent the redistribution (!) to each worker per capita of costs now assumed by some company health care plan. But it's a fictional number. It's not what workers will REALLY pay to really buy health care on their own in real situations.

You know why I know this? Because I pay health care costs on my own, without insurance, and there's no way I pay $6,800 a year -- and that's being middle-aged with less than perfect health and the need for eyeglasses, check-ups, emergencies for cat bites, etc. etc.

It would indeed be hard to spend $6,800 if you are healthy or even with a chronic conditions. The average doctor's visit in New York City, where medical care is not cheap and may be among the most expensive in the nation, costs $150-$250 just to have a doctor look at you. In addition, you will face $300-600 or more in routine tests -- a blood test, an electrocardiogram, a mammogram ($190). If you have any chronic conditions count on many hundreds more. Your dental of course will be many hundreds if not thousands on top of that, with the crowns. You might have to add in some expensive procedure somewhere. But if you are not having major surgery, $6,800 is not what you are spending. Buying health care on your own will cost you more like $5,000 at the most, or more likely $3,000 -- after all, if you're healthy, and go for one check-up a year with perhaps a doctor's fee and some tests, you won't pay more than $500 for that check-up -- and then you might budget another $500 if you have strep throat once during the year or need a pair of eyeglasses.

WHO ARE THE STRIKERS?

I'm trying to think up a putative situation where a striking CWA worker would gain social sympathy. Perhaps there is a 411 operator who gets only $42,000 a year -- enough to have her kids get free lunches and other free services. I don't know if the salaries *are* that low even more entry-level telephone workers, but let's say they are. And let's say her co-pay is $50 per visit and procedures wind up costing a lot, too -- let's say she has a kid with learning disabilities or asthma or allergies -- so many do nowadays -- and she needs him covered. Suddenly, if she faces an extra $300 a month in health care bills, she will have no way of paying it. Yes, a hardship! I know what it's like -- having bills for operations for thousands of dollars that I have to take months and months to pay.

Yet most workers in an insurance pool are healthy, are not making big draws, and that's the whole point -- their fees cover the needs of those with a sick kid.

Is it that unions need to have their demands for more health care money in their own pockets, or do health care costs need to be cut in other ways?

REDUCE AT LEAST IMMUNIZATION COSTS

One obvious thing is to take the average menu of children's innoculations and reduce those costs -- and the headache of obtaining them and recording them and submitting the records -- by having schools supply them. Some do -- a few high schools in New York have built-in health clinics that provide them -- it saves the city money. Given how many times in life you are asked to provide proof of immunizations, and given how often you lose those yellow cards or your doctor's office loses them or moves and you can't get them, having them centralized in a city data base available on demand online with a pin makes sense.

When I see the bill that went into an insurer last year for the full menu of shots for my children -- $1,000 a piece for the routine immunizations -- I think there has to be something done. Part of the additional expense is the new requirement for HPV vaccines and vaccines against meningitis as the CDC schedule now includes -- HPV is a vaccine against an STD causing cancer that seems unnecessary to administer to a child age 11-12 but city planners think in harm-reduction terms, not social reality terms.

Perhaps we will never get ObamaCare in any form. But there are pieces of the health care industry that perhaps should be handed to cities and states and purchased as a block from companies -- immunizations required for school.

So I am definitely going to need convincing here. Reading about "corporate greed" doesn't move me, kids. I want to hear what you're actually getting for a salary, and what you're actually getting in your health insurance plan -- unlike me.

 

 

London Calling -- The Left's Double Standards on Free Speech and Violence

Riots in Tottenham, London, August 2011. Photo by Beacon Radio.

Liberals and leftists are developing a shocking double standard on free speech -- and few people seem to call them on it.  And with the exposure of this double standard, we're starting to come into focus something long suspected especially of  hard leftists -- that they are willing to condone violence in their own cause, even as they denounce it when it appears on the extreme right.

On the one hand, they have been fretting about the free speech of the conservative right and the Tea Party, for example blaming Sarah Palin, who they said created a climate of incitement that enabled the shooting of Rep Giffords and the killing of others in Arizona, when Palin had bulls-eyes on a map targeting Democrats she wanted to see defeated in the elections.

On the other hand, the liberals troubled by the violent rhetoric of the right are suddenly indulging in it themselves -- Tom Friedman accusing the Republican Party of having a Hamas-like terrorist faction in the form of the Tea Party; Joseph Nocera talking about suicide belts and saying we should "never negotiate with terrorists". Um, you mean those elected people across the aisle in the Congress?!

On the one hand, an instant cottage industry springing up to find all the references in the Norwegian mass murderer's manifesto coming from American conservatives -- with the implication that they should "watch it" -- or even be silenced. On the other hand, instant comparison between British authorities concerned about the misuse of social media to wage devastating riots, and authoritarians like Mubarak shutting down the Internet to prevent democracy protests.

We're a long way from Skokie, when Aryeh Neier, then head of the American Civil Liberties Union, advocated the controversial position of allowing the Ku Klux Klan to march in a neighbourhood where Jews lived, many Holocaust survivors, and later justified the decision, which split his organization, in a Voltaire-like book, Defending My Enemy.

Maybe it's because with the Internet and smart-phones, we have a million virtual Skokies available now, over and over, like Orwell's jackboot on the face at the end of 1984 - with a certain number of them crossing over into real life.

Or maybe the instinct to "defend my enemy" becomes atrophied or unavailable when "progressives" feel their own survival is at stake -- and they are unwilling to cede the media to the barbarians.

Like Michael Massing, in a troubling piece in the New York Review of Books, they urging that "something" be done about what they see as violent incitement from Fox TV -- "It's Time to Scrutinize Fox".

All you have to do is imagine that headline on Fox itself, "It's Time to Scrutinize the Nation" or "It's Time to Scrutinize Democracy Now" to see what's illegtimate about it -- although few seem to see it that way.

Massing, long a fighter for media freeom at the Committee to Project Journalists and a journalist himself enjoying free speech, invokes the need to investigate Fox for its broadcasts merely because its owner, Rupert Murdoch, is under investigation for his news operation's hacking of phones in the UK. Murdoch has shut down the offending tabloid; he has submitted to parliamentary inquiries; he has caused his top executives to resign and some have even been arrested. It's  never enough, however. There's no allegation that Fox has done anything illegal -- but maybe they should get up a police raid just in case?

And since the appalling atrocity in Norway, leftists and liberals have a new sport -- blaming right-wing anti-jihadist bloggers like Pamela Geller for inspiring the Norwegian terrorist anders Breivik -- as if he didn't have enough long-standing hate ideologies to pick from already in Europe's past and present, and in its  network of extremist groups like the English Defence League.

Although she is mentioned only once in the killer's deadly 1,500 manifesto, Geller is tied to the Norwegian Christian mass-murderer because she writes incendiary blogs hateful of Muslims. She herself hasn't called for violence -- but no matter -- it appears she once got a letter from someone in Norwegian -- maybe Breivik, maybe not -- who seemed to express the racist views he does, and who indicated he was stockpiling weapons. Geller was caught scrubbing that part of the letter from her website -- and she sure looks guilty. Even so -- neither the hateful letter-writer nor she fits the Supreme Court test of "incitement to imminent lawless action." Yet many liberal writers behave as if she, and others like her, such as Michelle Bachman noted for anti-gay rhetoric, or Sarah Palin noted for her bulls-eyes, are already guilty of speech crimes leading to violence.

The Government is Coming to Get Your Blog! But Yes, Think of the Children

Meanwhile, these very same people, or those with similar views in the same free-speech networks, are banging the drum to stop what they claim is unconscionable government intrusion into privacy and interference with free speech on the Internet. At the forefront is Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is leading the campaign against a bill that would enable the government to monitor Internet users to prevent child pornography.

In typical misleading fashion, the EFF petition doesn't even mention the child pornography issue at all -- so the cause can appear as if it is only about government intrusion into users' privacy. But when you read the bill, you see that it amends existing legislation to enable law-enforcers to prosecute child pornography.

Opinionated bloggers on this subject, like Marti Lawrence, the follower of the collectivist Seth Godin who is already in the top 100 female bloggers of Google+, essentially claim that there is unreasonable "moral panic" about child pornography and think it's just an excuse for overreach (you can see my efforts to debate this on G+ here).(She's the kind of geek who thinks this kind of reductivist anti-democratic Internet humour should be a "norm".)

How to Get Rid of Blue Tint Computer Screen

I've had this annoyance happen a number of times with the ATI Catalyst graphic cards on Windows Vista, and tend to forget how to fix it, so I'm parking this blog here, and hope it will show up in Google searches for people also suffering from this annoyance who can't seem to get any of those geek squad sites to answer or fix this common problem.

Once again, this is a solution I found for ATI Catalyst graphic cards on Windows Vista. Not other systems. Not other graphic cards. This is not a help desk. This is a blog. If you don't have this system and this graphic card, keep looking. And find a geek help site, this is just a blog. Did I mention that this is for ATI Catalyst graphic cards on Windows Vista? Let's hope by repeating this and bolding it, I will fix the problem of people continuing to ask for other answers.

It's likely rooted in the graphics card problem or maybe even the monitor, but here's what it is:

All of a sudden, your screen tints blue. This isn't "the blue screen of death," but a blue coloured tint that makes everything then purple if it is red, etc. -- and it becomes impossible on your eyes. Second Life becomes impossible to see, etc.

You try going into the display settings to see if the colour tints are off -- nothing works there.

You get the latest driver -- in this case HD ATI Radeon 5700 just got a new driver 7/17 -- and yes,  if you buy your computers at Best Buy like I do, and aren't a geek buying parts on Newegg and assembling it all yourself, that's the card you got if you got your computer a year ago.

But that new driver does nothing to solve the blue tinting.

So you check cables, turn off, turn on, take out cables, make sure they are all in place, blow on everything, etc. etc. Nothing makes it change.

So you go to the settings for the monitor -- those impossible menus with the impossibly stupid interface where you have to keep plussing and minusing and pushing and getting it wrong and going up and down menus -- really, the dumbest interface there is -- but nothing helps there.

OK, let me help.

This is if you have a PC, of course, we aren't geeks and we don't get Macs.

So you right-click on your desk top and go to PERSONALIZE  on the menu -- this is on Windows Vista. You ignore things like colour or changing the colour of Windows -- that won't help.

Go to the bottom, to DISPLAY SETTINGS.

On your first screen, go to ADVANCED SETTINGS.

On your next screen, go to the top to AMD VISION ENGINE CONTROL CENTER.

Truly, ignore all that other stuff that sounds like it might help like "Colour management". Ignore what geeks tell you everywhere which is to change the refresh rate -- you may find you *can't* do that or if you hack out of it to change it will harm your monitor. Ignore.

Next go to the bar at the middle of the page and click again on the AMD VISION CONTROL CENTER.

You get a menu with war game stuff on it.

Over on your left in the middle go to MY VGA DISPLAYS

Select IMAGE ADJUSTMENTS (VGA DISPLAY)

You will see that the little picture of your desktop with a grid over it with arrows is blue/purple.

So grab the arrows or click on the plus or minus as indicated and push it a bit up or down or sideways and watch it turn orange/red -- then it is usually back to normal, you will see pages as white again, the desk top will lose its tint. Yay!

You may have to fuss here a bit, it can take some doing to grab it right and get it back to normal without the tint.

Be sure to click OK on the other screen before that and exit.