technology

Internet Outlaws

Jock — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:57:43 +0000

For those of you highly skeptical of my prediction that the internet will cause the nation state as we know it to be unable to tax fairly incomes or transactions in goods and services and so cease to exist in its current form , here's a slightly different angle on it at Reason...

It seems to have finally dawned on the US government that whatever laws and regulations they pass, they will not be able to ban offshore internet gambling:

The government concedes "there are no reasonably practical steps that a U.S. participant [financial institution] could take to prevent their consumer customers from sending restricted transactions cross-border."

In other news this week about the internet and real life colliding, we also had Second Life being cited in a divorce case in the UK and a Japanese woman sued for murdering her husband's online persona.

Which are you going to be - more restrictions, ultimately futile; or building new mutual institutions to help deliver public goods in an era of a reduced ability to collect tax? read more »

Libertarian Alliance Conference, 2008 (part I)

Jock — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:54:11 +0000

I've just spent a fantastic weekend in the hallowed halls of the National Liberal Club at the annual Libertarian Alliance conference. If, like me, you see yourself as more of a theoretical policy wonk doing the background stuff of coming up with ideas, rather than the rather more practical work of debating actual proposals and then selling them on the doorstep, this was the perfect sort of a conference. A little like spending an entire party conference in the various fringe events where hand picked speakers with great ideas to sell challenge the little gray cells rather than in the sort of "win or lose" arguments over specific policy proposals of the main conference debates.

Yes, since going to Lib Dem conferences over the past few years, I have found the latter enjoyable, I don't think I've been on the winning side of a controversial debate yet, but this sort of event is where, I think, policies are incubated and born out of ideas presented by people with brains the size of several planets each or you gain the intellectual ammunition with which to turn that losing streak in policy debates into winning arguments.

I've come away from it with both many new acquaintances, a reading list that will probably take me till doomsday to get through and enough controversial ideas to keep my many sceptical Lib Dem friends arguing till, oh, next year's LA conference. I shall work up several ideas into blog posts of their own in the forthcoming weeks and months but to start with I thought I'd give a quick overview of the sessions and speakers. All the sessions were being filmed and will eventually appear on the LA website to refer to so if I fail miserably to pass the essential detail on, you'll be able to watch the originals should you wish...

Session 1 - The Defeat of of Aging: Our Ultimate Freedom? by Dr Aubrey de Gray
Session 2 - Future Shock: Three Perspectives on Freedom in the Twenty First Century with James Panton, Sean Gabb and Martin Summers
Session 3 - "The Global Rise of Private Education for the Poor: A Libertarian Perspective" by James Stansfield
Session 4 - Future Imperfect: Tech Revolutions That Might Happen and Their Consequences by David Friedman

Session 1 - The Defeat of of Aging: Our Ultimate Freedom? by Dr Aubrey de Gray

Aubrey is a fun, and at times controversial, biologist at Cambridge University working on the science of "fixing" the aging process. There are, apparently, two conventional approaches to dealing with the problems of aging. Basically, at the moment, from the moment we are created we start storing up the means of our own death. The very processes that keep us alive, metabolism, causes damage in our cells and throughout our bodies. That damage builds up until the body can no longer prevent it becoming one of the many illnesses associated with aging and that eventually, if we are not killed first by an external event, it will kill us. Globally, 100,000 out of the 150,000 people who die each day die of these conditions, which can be and usually are extremely unpleasant, often very painful and upsetting both for the sufferers and those who witness it - loved ones and carers.

One "school" of dealing with aging, "geriatrics" focuses on trying to prevent that damage becoming pathology ie developing the illnesses that will kill us. But it is ultimately futile. It is not repairing or removing the damage, just holding back the time it takes to become dangerous to us. And we cannot do that indefinitely.

The other traditional approach, "gerontology", focusses on trying to stop metabolism creating the damage in the first place. It sounds more promising, until you realise how little we actually know about metabolism. There is just so much that we cannot yet understand enough to prevent it causing damage, and therefore eventually pathology.

But there is a third, emerging approach that focuses on maintenance. De Gray made the analogy of a car - if you maintain it rigourously you can make it last more or less forever. And so this approach to aging focuses on repairing and eradicating the damage and maintaining cells. Repairing the damage means it does not build up enough to become pathology. As science, mostly microbiology, is constantly evolving, the types of damage we can repair increase. And because we are acting on the observable damage, there are a finite number of types of damage to focus on. We can see the damage metabolism creates much better than we understand the processes that lead to the damage.

De Gray and his team believe that at a very conservative estimate of the rate of development of the techniques required to repair various types of damage (some are easier, some still distant dreams of course) within 42 years we could have the ability to extend life by thirty years by repairing half of the types of damage we observe. So the current assumption is that the first person who will be able to live to 150 years old is already alive today and people currently in their thirties may be in time to have their lives extended by about thirty years over heir current life expectancy.

But as we move forward and discover mechanisms to deal with more types of damage, so we can repeat the "full body service" and begin to extend life out beyond the 150 years, indeed almost indefinitely. Again, given the rate of discovery, De Gray calculates that the first person to be able to live to 1,000 years will only be twenty years younger than the first person that will live to 150.

Such a prospect of course raises all sorts of issues, ethical, cost, policy and so on. But De Gray's conclusion was that given the amount of suffering that aging causes, and the costs to society of dealing with that suffering, we should not be put off from pursuing it. If, eventually, we have to answer some of the more difficult questions - what will the world's population look like if we can live effectively forever, and should we create ways in which someone can choose to end their otherwise perfectly healthy lives, that's something for the future.

And the cost of developing these techniques would appear to be minimal compared with even the cost of health care currently just in the UK. You can find out more, and importantly about how to help, financially and otherwise, at the "Methuselah Foundation" website.

Session 2 - Future Shock: Three Perspectives on Freedom in the Twenty First Century with James Panton, Sean Gabb and Martin Summers

I'm rather afraid that my relying on memory rather than taking copious notes will not do this session justice and it will be best to get the full picture from the recording of the session when it comes online. The speakers focussed on the many new ways in which our freedoms are being attacked and compromised, but more importantly on our apparent willingness to allow it to happen and unwillingness to protest against it. Even though theoretically, in a democracy, we are, sheep like in most cases, simply obeying and finding reasons to excuse the actions of those who would curtail our freedoms.

As I say, watch the video when it comes out.

After a very pleasant lunch with Tristan in the fascinating Ship & Shovell Pub just up the road in Craven Passage I'm afraid I was a few minutes late for the start of the session after lunch, "The Global Rise of Private Education for the Poor: A Libertarian Perspective" by James Stansfield , and decided to sit it out rather than disturb the room clattering in late, so both you and I will need to wait for the video! Or, there's a very good synopsis courtesy of the Oxford Libertarian Society blog .

Session 4 - Future Imperfect: Tech Revolutions That Might Happen and Their Consequences by David Friedman

Then came one of the great highlights of the whole weekend, a hugely entertaining session of futurology and technological ideas by David Friedman, son of Milton and Rose, and professor of Law at Santa Clara University. I just cannot do this fast paced entertaining session the justice it deserves in a few lines. It was based on the ideas in his new book, Future Imperfect, which you can get at Amazon, or if you are too mean, or just plain penurious, he has put it all online.

He covered areas I will probably blog about individually (when I have read the book), including privacy technology, law enforcement technology and how to get around it, reproductive technology (think Gattaca) and, most indelibly etched in my mind, nano technology. The main thought I came away with out of a myriad of interesting possibilities was "should we actually be worried about climate change if, within a few decades, we will have produced nanobots and artificial intelligence such that we will have obsoleted the human race!" - as Friedman put it, turned us into gerbils in the laboratories or even the Matrix, of self-aware super intelligent 'droids.

I chose to miss out the final, additional session of the day to meet up with Lib Dem activist from Ealing Toran Shaw for a drink before we all went into the dinner, but I will definately want to watch the video of the session and the Libertarian Alliance DVD on the subject of "The Great British Road Pricing Debate: Free Market Incrementalism or Just More State Control?" which is obviously currently a hugely important policy issue that has caused a lot of debate within the Lib Dems.

And so ended the main business of day one. I shall return to cover the very sociable dinner and day two, including such controversial issues as Hans-Hermann Hoppe on the idea of the "Private Law society" and Guy Herbert from NO2ID soon. read more »

Nothing to hide, sir? Ooh! Suits you sir...

Jock — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:43:52 +0000

I haven't been on a plane for the best part of twenty years now. Thanks to the new weapon in the snooping state's arsenal, it looks like I never will again.

The virtual strip search is here folks. I dare say one day they will have them in Debenhams too. read more »

Blogging will be light to non-existent...

Jock — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:07:17 +0000

...for a few days. As will responding to peoples' comments.

A couple of months ago I bought myself a new great big server and shamefully I have not set it up yet. Since it is priced in dollars and the pound is falling I suppose I ought to get on with it so I can cancel the existing one before it next needs paying!

For anyone interested it will be Debian Etch, running Xen virtualization, to give me a Zimbra virtual server for email and collaboration, a web server for my various projects and then back end servers for databases and user data.

I really need to redesign the blog, and in the process move it to my new domain jockcoats.me and upgrade to Drupal 6.

Additionally, a number of projects have been languishing waiting for this shift to the new bigger server:

OX3Online - a project to produce a community portal for the Headington area of Oxford

LiberalALTERnative.org to accompany the book on economic liberalism I am co-editing with members of the Lib Dems ALTER executive

OxfordBloggers.net - an aggregator a little like LibDemBlogs to link together as many bloggers writing in or about Oxford

OSEF.org.uk - a new site for Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum which we intend to relaunch in November's enterprise week

...and my latest wheeze...

f5c.org - "Freedom's Fifth Column" to provide a space in which libertarians (especially those hiding within existing non-libertarian parties) can write, pseudonymously if necessary, to try and show how libertarian and anarchist ideology can work through most existing parties to achieve our freedoms.

Lots to do! But don't worry, the suspension of blogging is only in order to give me a few days while I am off work this week to get the server up and running - these other projects have to work alongside my own writing...:) read more »

blogging

Why should the state validate your existence?

Jock — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:27:02 +0000

Following on the theme from my post this morning about how we could protect data about us held by agencies of the state by using a sort of a personal key and PIN like your bank's call centre has to validate with you before they can access your data, my mind wandered onto other uses for such a key.

It has been a recurring theme in this blog that the internet in particular and modern communications in general represent a great threat to the balance of power between states (and incidentally also global "intermediary" corporations) and their citizens. I say threat, but it's only a threat if you are in a position of power in a state or corporation seeking to continue to exert control over your citizens. Indeed, for the individual, it is the greatest potential opportunity, and the vehicle by which Richard Cobden's quote at the top of this blog's front page may become reality: "Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less."

Many of our institutions - governments, trans-national corporations, even currency - evolved to deal with issues of trust between people who would likely never have personal contact with each other in ever more remote markets. When trading, you've got to be able to trust that you will be paid for example - one person's "IOU" is not as good a guarantee as piece of paper endorsed collectively by an entire state - a national currency.

But we have an ever increasing range of other innovations to help us trust each other; developments that are increasing quickly with the advance of the internet. We can access our credit files, we can buy digital certificates that help give others confidence to trade with us over the web because they guarantee we are who we say we are and so on. So why not shift these into the "real world".

Why do we actually need, say, a passport to travel across borders, issued by a nation state, when we could have just as secure a guarantee of who we are through some kind of personal digital certificate from an organization bearing the risk, with strong encryption embedded in it? The British government keeps trying to sweeten its totalitarian ID card scheme by telling us, amongst other things, that it will make proving our identity to others in all sorts of transactions much easier. But in fact the history of government involvement in protecting the source data of those identities is appalling, and, as the technology gets more pervasive it seems to be getting worse.

How much confidence can you have in a government issued identity mechanism when so much data has gone missing already? Those identities are, thanks to state incompetence, all but worthless. Of course that's why, partly at least, they want to take biometric data. But in computer security it is generally accepted that being able to produce "something you have" (say a credit card or internet digital certificate) and "something you know" - a password, PIN, or private digital encryption key is far better than ony one or other of these pieces of information on its own. So far as I can see the ID card system, or the passport, with or without a national identity register, does not fulfill both of these - only the former. It is inherently weaker than the commercially available alternatives.

So, why not replace the need for passports issued by a state with identity mechanisms authenticated by trusted corporate or social organizations for whom financial success or failure rests on people being able to trust the people they certify. So you could have a personal account with Thawte as the primary guarantor, for example, and that certificate could be counter-signed by a certificate from other organizations, such as governments, who want to "mark your card" as one of their citizens, granting you the protections normally written on a passport.

It's not easy to get some of these certification authorities to guarantee your bona fides. You need often as much verification as you do to get a passport with other trusted people verifying who you are and so on. But you would not need to give these data to the poroous security mechanisms of the state which has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they cannot keep the information secure, nor does it offer the other benefit of a private contract - the ability to sue the ass off them if they damage your reputation or security by losing your data - or the corporate incentive of only being able to make a profit if you actually deliver on what people expect of you.

And you also get a choice of how strong you want the certification to be. If it's only guaranteeing small personal trades for example, you may only need to spend a few pounds and fill in a quick web form, validate your address and you're in business. If you want to travel overseas, or deal in bigger sums, or trade with distant counterparties, you may want stronger levels of guarantee and pay accordingly. It's a global standard pretty well too. So you'd have no problems using it to prove your identity in all sorts of applications - travel, trade, opening a bank account, starting a company, getting insurance, benefits, accessing what little data about you the state actually needs and so on - none of which would need to be on any single central database owned by a bunch of data-incontinents like the government is proving to be with the attendant dangers of losing all your data at once.

So, you see, we no longer even need governments to help us prove who we are. And in fact they appear to be singularly bad at doing so. The threat inherent in this is that the currently all powerful state needs to be able to do this, or it loses control of its citizens. And they are shit scared of that. If we are not mindful, in their lust to maintain that power they will get immensely more authoritarian and intrusive. The time is coming when we will no longer need them. We must do all we can to hasten that day before they get their claws in too deep into these emerging trust mechanisms. read more »

ID Cards: BT Homehub supplier gets first contract

Jock — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:52:24 +0000

Thales, the successor to Thomson CSF, has won the first contract to start the design process for the National Identity Register which will be the more sinister side of the whole ID card system. For those of us committed to opposing ID cards and the NIR at every opportunity and wanting a way to boycott suppliers this presents a challenge. Many of the possible suppliers of course are not ones with big "brand names" you can easily boycott. Thales itself is mostly a government contractor, making war machines. And they are nearly a quarter owned by the French state. Both of these in my opinion make their appointment even worse (not because it is French, per se, but because it is partly controlled by a foreign state, however currently friendly that state may be).

But they do make, through their Thomson media subsidiary, a few things we can target. They are, for example the largest or perhaps sole supplier of the BT Homehub kit (and its equivalent from Orange). They also do an awful lot of facilities stuff for film, advertising and television (they own the Thorn EMI filming facilities firm), but it will always be quite difficult to find out which programs, films or advertisers are using them.

So the main real consumer product they can be identified with is Homehub. So, if you happen to be a BT subscriber and use one of those sexy boxes, maybe it's time to switch your communications provider?

(They also make set-top digital TV boxes and DVD equipment if you want to do some more digging around). read more »

Sarkozy's scheme two years behind Jock's!

Jock — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:01:14 +0000

Would someone give me a job developing ideas for the future. Here's another one I prepared earlier:

Saharan sun could power European supergrid | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Vast farms of solar panels in the Sahara desert could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on a plan to pool the region's renewable energy.

It seems that the transmission loss problem is a little less daunting using High Voltage Direct Current - I work out that southern Morocco to London would involve about a 7% transmission loss in a more or less straight line over land. Sounds like it has potential to me. read more »

Beginning of the end for VAT?

Jock — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:33:53 +0000

...well, perhaps not quite but this is interesting, if blindingly obvious in a sort of a "why didn't we think of that" way:

HMV customers to exploit tax loophole at digital terminals - Telegraph

Customers at HMV stores will be able to avoid paying VAT by ordering CDs and DVDs through digital terminals. The "HMV Delivers" kiosks are being installed across the chain's 240 UK branches over the next two years. Their initial role will be to allow customers to order products that are out of stock in their shops. The merchandise will then be sent from HMV's offshore site in Guernsey.

I've been writing for a while now about how the globalization of communication (and delivery) technology is set to make it ever harder for states to quantify and collect taxes based on trade and incomes and make it imperative, if they want to have any revenue stream into the future, to switch taxation to more fixed sources like ("economic") land - ground rents, airspace, electromagnetic spectrum and so on, or face the prospect of ever increasingly authoritarian measures to force people to repatriate income and assets for tax purposes.

I hadn't counted on VAT being amongst the first to be threatened, but here it is. It's not going to help buying cakes from Tesco yet because it will only work if it is actually imported, I suspect (no getting away with simply operating from a warehouse in every town that happens to be owned by a Channel Island company I would think).

But people, liberal minded political types especially, need to wake up to this double threat - to recognize that revenue collection will be more difficult in future if based on moveable assets, incomes and trade, and to recognize that addressing that means going one of two ways - the more equitable land tax, or the more authoritarian crackdown on trade and "cross-border" earnings. The ability to move money and income and so on overseas is moving fast and getting ever easier for the ordinary person - you no longer need to be super-rich to go offshore. We need to act fast to counteract its effects on future tax revenues. read more »

For any of you that believe "if you've got nothing to hide..."

Jock — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:21:45 +0000

...a great post on the Libertarian Party blog today should help get you over your myopia, with a smile at least:

UK Libertarian Party: A day in the life of Old Holborn

Thursday 7th July 2011

07:00. Radio Four woke me up with
Citizen Humphries blathering on about increased tractor production as
usual. Since they started piping it directly into our homes via BBC
cable and removed the on off switch, I do as most people do. Put a
towel over the speakers they installed in every room. You’re not
supposed to and sometimes good stuff is on but I still have a headache
from last nights home brew.

07:30 Since butter was banned, I
prefer to eat an egg, fried in lard. Wolfed that down whilst catching
up on the Internet. Nobody has revoked my EU issued bloggers licence
yet even though I complained about an article in Pravda telling us that
Iraq is not really Iraq but a part of Iran. No Email as yet but it
usually arrives late after the ISP has cleaned it for me....[read the rest]

Protectionist Tory euro-snoopers

Jock — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 09:47:59 +0000

Thanks to Liberal conspiracy for highlighting protectionist amendments being sneaked into the Telecoms directive which MEPs will decide on tomorrow:

Liberal Conspiracy » And I’d Have Gotten Away With It Too, If It Hadn’t Have Been For Those Darn Bloggers…

Purple Cthulhu and prominent Brussels-ite Nick Whyte
both report on the sneaky Tories being sneaky and urge you to write to
your Euro MP before they introduce a Euro Law which could take your
internets away. Andrew Ducker has already written, as have many others.

The amendments basically set the scene for forcing ISPs to monitor all their customers' traffic to catch them sharing copyrighted material on the web and to cut customers off if they keep doing it.

Over in the comments on Matt Wardman's blog posting the other day I suggested that this whole surveillance obsession smacks of "we do it because we can". Why should one's electronic communications, voice or data, be any more permissible to be snooped on than any other communication - snail mail, face to face or similar. Just because we can. For a variety of reasons electronic communications leave traces, and traces can always be tracked, but why should they be?

It is true that we need to have a debate about intellectual property and how, or indeed whether, it should be enforced in an era of global instant communication. It appears that the artists tend to be ahead of their production companies in exploring how to use the massive marketing opportunity that is the internet, such as recent experiments in releasing music for free, or on honesty box terms, on the web. But of course it is the media corporations and production companies that are lobbying for this sort of protectionist measure. The debate needs to be held much more widely than that though, and not snuck through where these measures were explicitly removed from the directive last time the European Parliament discussed it.

I have written to Sharon Bowles and Emma Nicholson. I suggest everyone take a look at the details of these amendments and give some thought to writing also to any of their MEPs. It is being debated tomorrow, so act fast!

I very fundamentally believe that the internet in particular is seen as a threat by both governments and corporations who feel they are not able to control it. For me, it is the greatest advance in people communicating with people and eventually needing far less "government" to broker their international relationships or trans-national corporations to broker their trade. But for it to bring about the vast benefits of voluntary co-operation amongst individuals around the world it needs to find its own rules, not have them imposed by those very bodies that are scared of it! read more »