Saw a tweet from Leo Laporte earlier today about Republican lawmakers resurrecting a bill that will require all internet service providers, including Wi-Fi access points in the public and at home “for two years to aid police investigations.” The bill is a rehash of some legislation that was brought up about 3 years ago by Democrats.
So what does it mean? For all coffee shops, universities, book stores, hotels, public parks and so on, they will all be responsible for keeping track of every single connection that is made to them via wireless device and log it. It also means that if you have a Wi-Fi network set up in your own home, you will also be held responsible for the same.
The bill is called the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act, aka the Internet SAFETY Act. It goes without saying that I’m for child safety, but law enforcement and congress needs to get smarter about how they track and arrest people who are exploiting children. This law is basically operating under the assumption that we’re all criminals who need to be tracked. It’s an open-ended wire tap on everyone. Everywhere.
So far I haven’t seen much response from any civil liberties groups yet, but I’d expect it soon, especially since they were all over it in 2006.
What do you think? Is this another case of losing liberties in exchange for safety? Shouldn’t we expect more funding for law enforcement to create special units to cover this sort of crime rather than open ended tracking of all of us?
Just read this amazing article in Wired about the study of autism and the lives of people who have autism. For me it was fascinating. I’ll admit that my knowledge of autism and Asperger’s is very limited, coming from packaged news products and Time magazine or whatever you may find while waiting at the doctors office. Which unfortunately has informed me more about the common (mis)conceptions about it rather than going to any depths. This one article in Wired destroyed all of that.
One researcher in Canada, Laurent Mottron, is looking at autism from a completely different angle: not as a disease, but a variance of biology…
“I wanted to go as far as I could to show that their perception — their brains — are totally different.” Not damaged. Not dysfunctional. Just different.
By far the most intriguing part of the article was about 27-year-old Amanda Baggs, who lives in public housing in Burlington, Vermont. I’ve embedded one of her videos, which she produces herself and has received 400,000 hits so far. It is just mind-blowing and really humbled me. But I’ll let her speak for herself, she communicates much better than I can…
Hey ho there, it’s just come to my attention that google quit supporting inline objects on their igoogle home page product. What this means is that people who were using my little tutorial to stop igoogle from auto-refreshing and to get another window, such as pulling in google reader, are pretty much s.o.l. One caveat to this is that if you managed to load in that inline gadget prior to December 12, 2007, google supposedly took a “snapshot” to allow you to continue using it.
After a cursory look around the tubes, I haven’t seen anything that could replace the inline tools I had suggested. I’ll add more info if I find any updates on this scenario…
