Mitch's Blog

Walton:

Friday is one of Heinlein’s “late period” novels. The general rule if you haven’t read any Heinlein is to start with anything less than an inch thick. But of his later books, I’ve always been fond of Friday. It’s the first person story of Friday Jones, courier and secret agent. She’s a clone (in the terms of her world an “artificial person”) who was brought up in a creche and who is passing as human. It’s a book about passing, about what makes you human. I think it was the first female out-and-out action hero that I read. It’s also a book about being good at some things but with a large hole in your confidence underneath. No wonder I lapped it up when I was seventeen!

What’s good about it now? The whole “passing” bit. The cloning, the attitudes to cloning, the worry about jobs. The economy. It has an interesting future world, with lots of colonized planets, but most of the action taking place on Earth–that’s surprisingly unusual. There’s a Balkanized US and a very Balkanized world come to that, but with huge multinational corporations who have assassination “wars” and civil wars. There’s a proto-net, with search paths, that doesn’t have any junk in it–that’s always the failure mode of imagining the net. It was easy enough to figure out you could sit at home and connect to the Library of Congress, but harder to imagine Wikipedia editing wars and all the baroque weirdness that is the web.

Also:

Heinlein’s ability to write a sentence that makes you want to read the next sentence remains unparalleled.

The novel predicts a near-future California that is an independent nation. If I recall correctly, the chief executive is called a Sachem and wears a feathered headdress as a token of office. The whole government is structured like B-movie American Indians. Friday, the hero of the novel, says the government is ridiculous — but it works, and California is a good place to live.

I thought about that sequence often during the special gubernatorial election in 2003, when leading candidates included a washed-up action hero, an even more washed-up former child star and a porn star. The washed-up action hero won. He actually was a pretty good governor and has emerged since as an elder statesman.

Much after the election, I came across a retrospective on the former child star, Gary Coleman, which acknowledged he never had a chance of winning but actually had excellent grasp of the issues.

Cory:

Look, cybercrime is a real thing, from pig butchering to ransomware, and there’s real, global harms that can be attributed to it. Cybercrime is transnational, making it hard for cops in any one jurisdiction to handle it. So there’s a reason to think about formal international standards for fighting cybercrime.

But that’s not what’s in the Cybercrime Treaty.

Here’s a quick sketch of the significant defects in the Cybercrime Treaty.

The treaty has an extremely loose definition of cybercrime, and that looseness is deliberate. In authoritarian states like China and Russia (whose delegations are the driving force behind this treaty), “cybercrime” has come to mean “anything the government disfavors, if you do it with a computer.” “Cybercrime” can mean online criticism of the government, or professions of religious belief, or material supporting LGBTQ rights.

Nations that sign up to the Cybercrime Treaty will be obliged to help other nations fight “cybercrime” – however those nations define it. They’ll be required to provide surveillance data – for example, by forcing online services within their borders to cough up their users' private data, or even to pressure employees to install back-doors in their systems for ongoing monitoring.

These obligations to aid in surveillance are mandatory, but much of the Cybercrime Treaty is optional. What’s optional? The human rights safeguards.

Many homeless and formerly homeless San Diegans expressed reservations about a plan to build a 1,000-bed mega-shelter in the city citing concerns about infectious diseases and conflicts. “The hard truth is that though life on the street can be dangerous and miserable, many who spoke with us would rather deal with the unforgiving nature of life outdoors than move into a 1,000-bed shelter.” By Emily Ito and Lisa Halverstadt. voiceofsandiego.org

Dave discusses linkblogging on his podcast:

A 20-minute morning coffee notes rambler podcast, started with a narration of how we do linkblogging these days, mostly by hand, and how Bluesky is being hurt by not having a large-enough character limit. Another plea for textcasting, some standards for what we put on the wire over the social web.

I’ll be interested in hearing Dave’s perspective. I have used Dave’s linkblog as an inspiration for my own, but a few months ago, I began wondering if there’s any value in linkblogging.

I grab links from the same popular websites viewed by everyone with an interest in the news — NYTimes, Washington Post, Reddit, etc. Those websites have far bigger platforms than I do; I provide negligible amplification.

On the other hand, I do enjoy Dave’s links, and he reads those same platforms. So maybe there’s value after all.

I still share links when I want to respond to something (you’re reading an example right now!), or if I think an article might benefit from the boost I give it. Indeed, I drafted multiple link posts at lunch today.

Although I’ve been doing less linkblogging here, I share links most days on reddit.com/r/technology. I have professional motives for that.

The Crowdstrike fiasco is a lesson in the importance of building resilience — on a societal and individual level, Glenn Reynolds says.

On social media I see people stranded in Paris with no working credit cards and dead ATMs, and that leads to another important lesson: Always carry cash! When traveling, I generally carry enough cash to get me through at least a couple of days (often more) and even at home I keep some cash in case things don’t work right.

Back in the 2003 New York blackout, Amy Langfield wrote about the value of keeping a stash of small bills that she could use at the bodegas when the credit/debit card machines were down. The cashless society depends on the flawless functioning of networks that aren’t really secure or reliable. Cash carries its own information with it – a $20 bill is worth $20 – and you don’t need to know more to spend or accept it. That’s resilient. Likewise making sure you have plenty of cushion with regard to supplies of medication, food at home, and the like.

I think about preppers sometimes. They have a reputation as kooks. But natural disasters happen. Utility grids fail. It’s a good idea to have a few weeks’ supply of shelf-stable food, drinking water and meds on hand, as well as the means to bug out if you need to.