General
Jack Valenti's 1982 VCR testimony has been published by Cryptome. It's important and timely reading.
In 1981, Mr. Chairman, this United States had a $5.3 billion trade deficit with Japan on electronic equipment alone. We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.Now, the question comes, well, all right, what is wrong with the VCR. One of the Japanese lobbyists, Mr. Ferris, has said that the VCR -- well, if I am saying something wrong, forgive me. I don't know. He certainly is not MGM's lobbyist. That is for sure. He has said that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had.
I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
(I'm going to do a quiz where you have to decide whether Valenti said something in 1982 or 2002. I expect it be very difficult.)
Fortunately, EFF has issued comments on the BPDG report. And several interesting people have expressed their support.
There seems to be some risk of a new COINTELPRO, because the Attorney General has decided to roll back rules which were created as a response to COINTELPRO. There is a suggestion that history or political sentiment comes in cycles, so thirty years ago was the era of the Church Commission and the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act and the proximate causes of the modern freedom of information and privacy movements. (And also the skepticism of power which came from the anti-war movement, and so on.) Today, a substantial number of people haven't lived through that time (I haven't, for one), and others may not remember it vividly. So now there is a remarkable opportunity for old walls between intelligence and domestic law enforcement to be broken down, for new FOIA exemptions to be created, for new surveillance powers to be created, and so on. Maybe I'm wrong to try to get people to read the Valenti and VCR wars stuff; maybe they should be reading the Church Commission hearings instead.
And also, if we use open source software, the terrorists have already won!
Here is a formal language for defining contracts. The same author, Nick Szabo, came up with smart contracts, which seem very important to me.
On Thursday, I went to a lecture by Professor Lessig at the Mechanics Institute; earlier in the day, I got to visit the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. (I used to live just a few blocks from the Magnes Museum, but never knew about it until I met its former curator Ruth Eis. She told me I should hurry and see the current exhibit, and I did, although I didn't make it until the last day of the exhibit.)
On Friday, I went to a book-binding competition ("bind-off") between members of two Bay Area bookbinding societies. The unusual thing was that the bookbinders were given extremely unusual materials for this task -- for example, sheets of nori, handcuffs, paper bags, and disco balls.
Despite this, they managed to produce some beautiful books (some said: "beautiful 'books'"). The event was hosted by the San Francisco Center for the Book, a few blocks from Linuxcare. So I got a repeated sense this past week that there were lots of great things nearby everywhere and I didn't know about them. If I could save up some money at some point, I'd consider taking one of their weekend introductory letterpress courses.
The bind-off had a comic interlude with a former page from the San Francisco Public Library (she was proud of her title) who purported to tell us how to take care of books. In fact, she showed us how not to take care of books, and she was very funny. (She also showed off her talent for shelving people: she would interview them briefly and then assign them Dewey call numbers.)
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