kimi wei blog

In a tale that mirrors the crushing privacy violations and vitriolic penal environment of Delores Umbridge in Harry Potter’s world, high school administrators in the Lower Merion School District of Pennsylvania used school issued computers, and software supposedly installed to protect students, to invade the privacy of the students homes and family lives.

Installed webcams were activated to spy on students and their families. This blew up in their face when a school administrator disciplined one student for “engaging in improper behavior in his home,” (that’s the language used in the family’s lawsuit) – and had the audacity to back her claim up by showing the photograph the webcam took of the Robbins boy as evidence.

The spying software’s been disabled, the school district’s being sued by the family, the makings of a class action suit have been initiated on behalf of the 1800 students given spy-equipped computers. And just maybe, now people will realize that violations of individuals’ privacy have gone way too far in a very unhealthy direction and it’s time for the public to draw the lines of what will and will not be tolerated.

Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (PDF)

See also
boingboing article
TechNewsWorld article

People ask me why I won’t let my kids buy an XBox. I explain our family policy: “Our family doesn’t support Microsoft. In any way.” Many hearing this think my view is seriously radical (not to mentioned extremely flawed). After all, XBox graphics are great and the games are cheap. “But, buying a kids’ gaming system? That’s not supporting a company!”

“To you it isn’t, which is completely fine. But to me, it is,” I reply. “Microsoft manufactures XBox, so my boys can’t have one.”

Sometimes this remark sparks off a dialogue about why I dislike Microsoft so much. There’s a bit on this subject at the end of my last blog post, but what really convinces people I may have legitimate grounds as a basis for my opinion is when I ask if they’ve heard that Microsoft sued the Brazilian government for abandoning the use of Windows on government computers in favor of using the free Linux-based operating system – and according to Microsoft (phrased this way when I first heard it) interfering with the company’s ‘g-d given right’ to earn a profit.

Lawrence Lessig, currently Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and formerly at Stanford Law School (where he founded Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society), wrote in this 2004 article

Apparently Microsoft has taken the first steps to filing a criminal defamation action against a Brazilian government official who was quoted criticizing Microsoft in a magazine article. Sergio Amadeu, head of the agency responsible for spreading free software within the Brazilian government, is reported to have accused “the company of a ‘drug-dealer practice’ for offering the operational system Windows to some governments and cities for digital inclusion programs. ‘This is a trojan horse, a form of securing critical mass to continue constraining the country’.”

Online petitions support Mr. Amadeu and Brazil’s “right to choose”

Pedro Cadina in a Linux Journal article comments

The Brazil Free Software Project launched the “Brazil has the right to choose” campaign, backed by a digital petition which, by June 27, had received more than 8,000 signatures from around the globe. His supporters include Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Constitutional Law at Stanford University; and Richard Stallman, head of the Free Software Foundation (FSF); Hipatia, the Italian NGO; and others.

The petition asserts (Portuguese language version here) states

In the middle of the week of the largest free software event in Latin America and one of the most important in the world, the president of Microsoft Brazil, Emilio Umeoka, has begun the attempt at intimidation declaring that the decision of the Brazilian government to support free software on computers in the public sector is being “influenced by ideology”. The salesman with the monopolistic megacorporation, Mr. Umeoka, goes further, afirming that the sovereign decision of our government, legitimately elected, can lead the country in “the wrong direction”. The right one, in the opinion of the salesman, would perhaps be to maintain the “market reserve” for MS in the government, fatten the wallets of the richest man in the world and continue sending, annually, billions of dollars out of the country in the form of royalty payments, in a country where 22 million people go hungry and 46 million live below the poverty line.

It’s so bold for a company to attempt by court action to hold an entire government hostage to its profit motive. Don’t you think?

I’m glad the Brazilian people seem not to be giving in on this one – see CNET’s 2009 article Brazil’s Love of Linux.

An ‘incredibly dangerous concept’

In several articles written in his typically clear style, internet user advocate Lauren Weinstein explains why he opposes the idea of ‘Internet Driver’s Licenses’, which he refers to as an, “incredibly dangerous concept. . . . I’m disappointed, though not terribly surprised,” Lauren comments, “especially in light of Microsoft’s explicit continuing support of Chinese censorship against human rights — to hear a top Microsoft executive pushing a concept that is basic to making the Internet Police State a reality.” He frames his opposition in an earlier article(January 2010).

Even here in the U.S., one of the most common Internet-related questions that I receive is also one of the most deeply disturbing: Why can’t the U.S. require an Internet “driver’s license” so that there would be no way (ostensibly) to do anything anonymously on the Net?

After I patiently explain why that would be a horrendous idea, based on basic principles of free speech as applied to the reality of the Internet — most people who approached me with the “driver’s license” concept seem satisfied with my take on the topic, but the fact that the question keeps coming up so frequently shows the depth of misplaced fears driven, ironically, by disinformation and the lack of accurate information.

On Dave Farber’s Interesting People list, Lauren sets out dangers inherent in we as individual users handing over our controls to what are able to access using the internet to a monitoring organization backed by companies with so much to gain from limiting free access to information as well as users’ ability to benefit from collaboration features. Large corporate backers proposing the implementation of ‘internet driver’s license’ push for this measure to be implemented knowing that its implementation will limit the public knowledge pool by hobbling the power of the free information exchange which the internet era has brought to seekers of knowledge, facts and truth in homes and schools all over the world.

As regards user protection, Microsoft’s track record shows it can’t be trusted

Microsoft is one of the biggest proponents of ‘Internet Driver’s Licenses’. They’re also the people behind a number of other heavy-handed tactics of technology user abuse which limit user options and create vulnerabilities to viruses, worms and trojan horses in every computer Windows runs on.

Bob Latshaw tells how Microsoft invented the strategy of blocking competitor’s software applications from working on computers using Windows – first done to make Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software useless so every PC user would need to switch to Microsoft’s Excel application. A strategy that worked so well it pushed an excellent product right off the map and has severely limited user options for several decades now.

And Geoffrey James explains,

“Most people don’t know it, but it’s entirely possible to build computer systems that can’t be infected by viruses. In fact, the original computers were specifically programmed so that no application (like a browser or word processor) could make permanent changes in any other application or in the operating system. . . .

Microsoft (which had plenty of trained operating system programmers who knew the score) could have implemented Windows using the same security features that had been in place in the timesharing world for decades.”

But they decided to,

“put their firm’s ability to make money ahead of your right to have a computer that works reliably and keeps your data safe.”

These and other facts about Microsoft are enough to make me very suspicious of any movement it gets behind in the name of “User Protection”. The concept of ‘internet driver’s license”s is clearly something that’s being cooked up to make our internet access much more limited and commercialized, and our lives a great deal less free.

Sir John Sulston, Nobel Laureate, explains a phenomenon which merits thoughtful consideration.

Ownership rights pose a real danger to scientific progress for the public good

The idea of ownership is ubiquitous. Title deeds establish and protect ownership of our houses, while security of property is as important to the proprietors of Tesco and Sainsbury’s as it is to their customers. However, there is a profound problem when it comes to so-called intellectual property (IP) – which requires a strong lead from government, and for which independent advice has never been more urgently required. The David Nutt affair has illustrated very well the importance of objective analysis of complex social issues.

The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring their products to the clinic and marketplace. In reality, patents often suppress invention rather than promote it: drugs are “evergreened” when patents are on the verge of running out – companies buy up the patents of potential rivals in order to prevent them being turned into products. Moreover, the prices charged, especially for pharmaceuticals, are often grossly in excess of those required to cover costs and make reasonable profits.

IP rights are beginning to permeate every area of scientific endeavour. Even in universities, science and innovation, which have already been paid for out of the public purse, are privatised and resold to the public via patents acquired by commercial interests. The drive to commercialise science has overtaken not only applied research but also “blue-skies” research, such that even the pure quest for knowledge is subverted by the need for profit.

Jump to full Guardian article.

Recently I was thinking about how much stress pensions cause to the social and economic systems in the United States. After looking at this issue for a while I concluded that pensions are a major contributor to social inequality, and they create unreasonable (and maybe unpayable) financial burdens on future generations of employees and citizens. Here’s how:

Promise now, others pay later

When I began talking to people about pensions I learned that they may also be unsustainable: that is, pensions are promised to employees by a generation of company execs and union bosses who aren’t going to be around the day pension payouts start to come due. This is the same sell-the-future-short ruse that politicians employ when they’re able to get public commendation for voting a law into being although they make no provisions to fund the law’s enactment. New Jersey’s Amistad Legislation which became law in 2002 but is still waiting for funding to bring a racially balanced historic perspective to classrooms across the state is a good example of this. The Racism in Higher Education paper sheds some light on this sujbect.

This public manipulation ploy allows for a generation of administrators and politicians to gain the admiration and support of constituents and employees by supporting a benefit they get behind freely (pun intended) – specifically because they never have to think about how they are going to pay for it. They leave this to future counterparts who will get saddled both with the burden of payment and answering to a public indignant for being made to pay for programs they didn’t ask to be created and which aren’t going to be useful to them any time soon.

The inequality

There are people who can expect to live comfortably as pensioneers of major corporations and government job. Other citizens need to hope that their children will be able – and will want to – take care of them better than the government run social services system does (or doesn’t do).

Phil Greenspun shares interesting thoughts on the pension issue

Smart modern companies don’t offer pensions because they’ve have figured out what should have been a simple fact: the only enterprises that should be offering to send people a check every year for the rest of their lives are insurance companies (if they write annuities and end up paying twice as much as planned because of an innovation that extends human life they will save a corresponding amount by not having to pay out life insurance claims) and ones that have a printing press for money (i.e., the federal government).

Cities and states have a tougher time escaping pension commitments and traditional bankruptcy protection may not be available to them. If every household in San Diego owes $6,000 for unfunded pension liabilities, property owners and residents will have to cough it up in the form of higher taxes. If the pension fund does poorly in the stock market, the households will have to pay again.

We the people share a lot of responsibility for bankrupting our own towns and states. We vote for politicians who promise the moon but don’t immediately tax away all of our income and wealth. A politician who promises $2 in benefits and $1 in taxes will win an election over one who promises benefits equal to taxes. The federal government respects voters wishes by running a visible deficit, borrowing or printing money to cover shortfalls. The Federal government can’t truly be bankrupted by its obligations because it can simply print money to pay everyone back.

A friend sent me this link to a fascinating and distressing op-ed piece in today’s New York Times on the increasing criminalization of poverty. An excerpt:

“The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.”

It seems to me that the present is an important moment for the Jewish community to speak publicly on the importance of charitable giving and gimilut hasadim (giving of loving kindness) in the Jewish religion as being of great value for both giver and recipient (more on this topic below). The Jewish community can enter the global and national conversations surrounding these topics and speak out on behalf of kindness and mercy. This may offset the harsh judgments being assessed against the needy and indigent in this time of widespread financial distress, homelessness and hunger. When poverty is allowed to become a crime in the public eye, all people may suffer for this judgment. As a people who believes in the sanctity and benefits of charity and kindness, shouldn’t we attempt to steer public opinion in a different direction?

The face of hunger and poverty in the United States

As of June 2009, less than 100 people have died of swine flu in the US.

However, over 37 million Americans, “lived in poverty in 2007. The number of people living in poverty has increased by almost 6 million since 2000.”

Millions more apply for help to feed their families

“Retail food prices remained stable over the last two decades. But in 2007, grocery prices rose 4.2 percent, the largest increase since 1990. Prices for milk, bread, flour, and eggs doubled in the last year.

Families seeking food assistance from SNAP (formerly the food stamp program) reached a record high in September 2008.

More than one in 10 Americans now receives food stamps.”

Is hunger really a problem in the United States?

When Americans think about hunger, we usually think in terms of mass starvation in far-away countries, but hunger too often lurks in our own backyards. In 2006, 35.5 million people, including 12.6 million children, in the United States did not have access to enough food for an active healthy life. Some of these individuals relied on emergency food sources and some experienced hunger.

Who is going hungry in the U.S.?

Although most people think of hungry people and homeless people as the same, the problem of hunger reaches far beyond homelessness. While the thought of 35.5 million people being hungry or at the risk of hunger may be surprising, it is the faces of those 35.5 million individuals that would probably most shock you.

The face of hunger is the older couple who has worked hard for their entire lives only to find their savings wiped out by unavoidable medical bills; or a single mother who has to choose whether the salary from her minimum wage job will go to buy food or pay rent; or a child who struggles to concentrate on his schoolwork because his family couldn’t afford dinner the night before. A December 2006 survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated that 48 percent of those requesting emergency food assistance were either children or their parents.

Poor Families Live on the Brink of Disaster

Families in poverty feel like they are always perched on the brink of disaster. . One small thing is all it takes to be blown away. One car accident. One medical emergency. One burst pipe. One robbery. One small piece of bad luck. . It takes stamina to live on the edge and keep going regardless of how exhausted you feel.

Kindness and Charity are Obligations in the Jewish Religion

Tzedakah is derived from (tzedek) – meaning righteousness, justice, or fairness, but has come to mean charity in English.

The words justice and charity have different meanings in English. How is it that in Hebrew, one word, tzedakah, has been translated to mean both justice and charity?

This translation is consistent with Jewish thought as Judaism considers charity to be an act of justice. Judaism holds that people in need have a legal right to food, clothing and shelter that must be honored by more fortunate people. According to Judaism, it is unjust and even illegal for Jews to not give charity to those in need.

Thus, giving charity in Jewish law and tradition is viewed as obligatory self-taxation, rather than voluntary donation.

Giving charity is an obligation in Judaism (Leviticus 25:35-38, Deuteronomy 19:20-24). This obligation means providing charity to both Jew and non-Jew. In many homes one will find a tzedakah box – a box or other container where coins are dropped in and collected for charity. It is a tradition for Jews to give tzedakah on Yom Kippur, Shemini Atzeret, Pesach, Shavuot, and Purim as well as during other celebratory events such as weddings.

[O]ne who helps fulfill the poor person has a letter added to Tzedek, and it becomes “tzedakah (‘charity’).” This is the secret of, “The merciful man does good to his own soul” (Mishlei 11:17). Acts of kindness show that one is under Judgment but has perfected it with Chesed. Then it turns into Mercy.

View expanded text of this essay

A National DREAM Graduation solidarity event will take place

Tuesday, 23 June 2009 from 4-5:00 pm
at Johnson Memorial Park, Hackensack, NJ
Map address: 490 River Street, Hackensack, NJ.
(corner of River Street and Cedar Lane/E. Anderson Street)

Local event information:
201-475-1854
kimi@thewei.com
http://twitter.com/kimiwei

Both New Jersey senators, Bob Menendez and Frank Lautenberg, support the DREAM Act but as of today only two (Rush Holt and Steve Rothman) of New Jersey’s 13 Congressmen plan to vote for it.

The DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) is bipartisan legislation that will provide children raised in the United States, whom are high school graduates but not legal residents, the right to become legal US residents if they earn a college associate’s degree or serve in the military. The DREAM Act will give undocumented students with good civic records the chance to acquire the education, skills and legal status they need to be fully participating and productive members of American society.

Get involved!
Sign the DREAM Act 2009 petition
DREAM Act Twitter
DREAM Act NJ Twitter
DREAM Act on Facebook
dreamactivist.org
DREAM Act Portal

Download flyer (pdf)

This is a fascinating view of civics and the political process. Also a fundamental reminder that people’s hearts rule their actions.

Democrats have held the Senate majority in New York State since November. Yesterday, on June 9, two Democrats announced they will, “caucus with the GOP (Republicans),” and now Republicans assert that they own control of the senate and have replaced the Democratic majority leader Malcolm A. Smith, with their own man, Republican Dean G. Skelos. The Dems are challenging this political maneuver, calling it illegal.

My sons and I are really interested to know whether this maneuver is in fact, going to be proved illegal. It certainly seems to me like it ought to be. I mean, look, how does a Democrat side with Republicans over an issue and suddenly, that Democrat is considered to be a Republican for the purpose of counting how many senators are in each party? This doesn’t make sense to me, but that doesn’t mean the Republicans won’t win. Our legal and justice system can be confounding at times.

What’s all the hullabaloo about? Gay marriage. townhall.com says, “the takeover apparently had nothing to do with the issue (of gay marriage). In my opinion, the gay marriage issue may simply be the smokescreen used by the Republicans to initiate one more manipulation of American law to take advantage of technical loopholes that allows them to defeat the intended purpose of our laws. It would better if Republicans would carry out their campaigns in the clear light of day and acquire their political power through the election process – the fair and clean way.

Continue your education on this issue at
townhall.com
Examiner.com
A very Republican-slanted article from upstate New York

One of the people whose opinions on current issues I always find compelling, is Phil Greenspun. Phil’s not afraid to look an issue in the mouth and tell us what the issue looks like to his informed eye, even if everyone else is calling it a non-issue or a gobydoggle. His insights are compelling because they’re reasoned with logic and are based on simple, verifiable facts. In a blog post yesterday Phil said

Fire the AIG management

AIG has been in the news again, this time for bleeding taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars to pay employee bonuses for a job well done in 2008. Most egregiously, the very division that bankrupted the company is sucking down $165 million in 2008 bonus. Is there some sort of contract that would require the company to pay these bonuses? The company essentially went bankrupt in the fall of 2008, though the U.S. governnment tried to avoid the actual word “bankruptcy”. When a company goes bankrupt, it doesn’t pay most of its obligations under old contracts and certainly does not pay bonuses to the employees who ran it into the ground (not for moral reasons but simply because it no longer has the cash).

Hyundai promises to pay your car note for three months if you, “lose your income”. They let you return it if you can’t work things out within that time frame. You can make the return without messing up your credit, having a balance to pay or suffering other penalties.

CNN reports on the program in depth and quotes Hyundai’s US Marketing VP Joel Ewanick as saying

“With no extra charge to the sticker price, the program pays the difference between the car’s trade-in value at the time the owner files a claim and any remaining balance on the loan up to a maximum of $7,500.”

There’s a conversation about this going on at ridelust.com. Feel free to post a comment here too if you like.