Adam Victor Brandizzi

From Reddit: Parents Of Children Who Claim To Have Had Past Lives, What Did They Tell You?. Some sample comments:

When he was 6 years old my son described in great detail my grandmother’s house he never been to. This was in 1986 or so, pre-internet. There are no pics of the place that I’m aware and no one owned a camcorder in our family, so video is out of question either. It’s a small house with red roof and a purple door (grandma painted the door every couple of years). He described all of it – that it had one big room with a fireplace across from the window, he explained where the doors are located, how there always were some boxes under the stairs, that there always was a faint smell of apples in the house (grandma ran a small time apple sauce business). That there was this cat almost completely white with a black spot around his right eye (that’s mr. Whiskers, my grandma’s cat!).

My grandma and Whiskers both died in 1977, 3 years before my son was born. To this day I can’t fathom it and can’t even get a remotely sane explanation on how does he know all this. I never told him about it, my wife has never met my grandma and never been to her house and in 1986 we were stationed in Germany, so none of my old friends could have reached my son, so this is definitely not someone’s prank. Best part of this is my son says he doesn’t remember telling me that, but my wife heard him saying that too, so if definitely happened!

And from Reddit, What Is The Creepiest “Glitch In The Matrix” You’ve Encountered?:

When I was in school I had this hippie teacher who would always tell us that the universe can help if you just ask it.

She told us one time her daughter had lost something very important and when she asked the universe to help she suddenly had a massive pulling feeling towards the sink. She walks over and immediately stuck her hand down into the garbage disposal and pulled the item out in perfect condition.

So I think it’s total bullshit of course, but later that day I was searching for a thin little booklet that I really, really needed for school. I spent 3 hours looking for it and had no luck. Finally out of frustration I almost sarcastically said, “I need your help universe.” I immediately walked over to this bookcase filled with books from my step dad. I had never once used this shelf or any book on it.

I grab a random book I’ve never seen from the middle of a huge pile. I open it to somewhere around page 200 and right there is my booklet smashed in between the pages. It was incredibly thin so you couldn’t even tell there was anything in there if you looked at it from another angle.

I’m sure there’s a good explanation, but it’s been well over a decade and I still remember the incredibly freaky vibe I got the moment I saw the book.

I don’t believe in reincarnation or paranormal forces. When I read stories like this, my first impulse is to try to think of reasonable explanations or ways they could be a coincidence. Maybe some kids have instinctive talent at that sort of cold-reading thing TV psychics do sometimes. Maybe your unconscious can remember where you put a booklet and then repress it from the conscious mind for some reason.

But these kinds of claims are often themselves far-fetched. If I told you in normal conversation, unrelated to compelling reincarnation theories, that kids have a natural talent at cold reaading, you’d scoff and demand proof. And it’s not just reincarnation and booklet-finding. If you read Reddit enough, you’ll find hundreds of equally compelling stories of telepathic contact, cryptid sightings, UFOs, et cetera.

So. Alternate hypothesis. About one million people view Reddit every day. Let’s assume 10% of those see threads like the above – which were pretty popular and which I think both made it to the front page. That’s 100,000 people. Now let’s assume that even 1/10,000 people on the Internet are annoying trolls, which is maybe the easiest assumption we’re ever going to have to make. If each of those annoying trolls posts one fake story to a thread like that for the lulz, that’s enough for ten really convincing stories per thread – which is really all there are, the other fifty or sixty are just the usual friend-of-a-friend-had-a-vague-feeling stuff.

(it’s true that in a site read by a million people, there will also be far more people who have experienced a genuine one-in-a-million coincidence, but that shouldn’t scale nearly as quickly; after all, liars can invent coincidences way more far-fetched than the sheer numbers would allow)

This hypothesis seems obviously right. If I ask “what’s the chance that at least one in ten thousand Internet users is an annoying troll?” you laugh hysterically and tell me that nobody has even invented numbers that high. It perfectly explains mysterious events that would otherwise require impossible coincidences or weird theories about hidden brain functions. So why is it so hard to make myself believe?

I think part of it is a failure of scale. Reddit looks a lot like a normal forum or blog comment section, the sort of BBS I used to go on as a kid with twenty or thirty regulars who would dominate all the discussions. If indeed 1/10,000 people is the sort of jerk who would make up a story like this just to troll people (or even 1/1,000 or 1/100 people), the chance that I’d run into them on my little BBS/comment section/Dunbar-number-group is pretty low, and I can safely ignore the possibility that five different crazy paranormal comments are all by pathological liars. It’s only when you get a place like Reddit, which manages to feel like a community while also having a million readers a day, that you have to start thinking about these things.

This suggests a more general principle: interesting things should usually be lies. Let me give three examples.

I wrote in Toxoplasma of Rage about how even when people crusade against real evils, the particular stories they focus on tend to be false disproportionately often. Why? Because the thousands of true stories all have some subtleties or complicating factors, whereas liars are free to make up things which exactly perfectly fit the narrative. Given thousands of stories to choose from, the ones that bubble to the top will probably be the lies, just like on Reddit.

Every time I do a links post, even when I am very careful to double- and triple- check everything, and to only link to trustworthy sources in the mainstream media, a couple of my links end up being wrong. I’m selecting for surprising-if-true stories, but there’s only one way to get surprising-if-true stories that isn’t surprising, and given an entire Internet to choose from, many of the stories involved will be false.

And then there’s bad science. I can’t remember where I first saw this, so I can’t give credit, but somebody argued that the problem with non-replicable science isn’t just publication bias or p-hacking. It’s that some people will be sloppy, biased, or just stumble through bad luck upon a seemingly-good methodology that actually produces lots of false positives, and that almost all interesting results will come from these people. They’re the equivalent of Reddit liars – if there are enough of them, then all of the top comments will be theirs, since they’re able to come up with much more interesting stuff than the truth-tellers. In fields where sloppiness is easy, the truth-tellers will be gradually driven out, appearing to be incompetent since they can’t even replicate the most basic findings of the field, let alone advance it in any way. The sloppy people will survive to train the next generation of PhD students, and you’ll end up with a stable equilibrium.

The weird thing is, I know all of this. I know that if a community is big enough to include even a few liars, then absent a strong mechanism to stop them those lies should rise to the top. I know that pretty much all of our modern communities are super-Dunbar sized and ought to follow that principle.

And yet my System 1 still refuses to believe that the people in those Reddit threads are liars. It’s actually kind of horrified at the thought, imagining them as their shoulders slump and they glumly say “Well, I guess I didn’t really expect anyone to believe me”. I want to say “No! I believe you! I know you had a weird experience and it must be hard for you, but these things happen, I’m sure you’re a good person!”

If you’re like me, and you want to respond to this post with “but how do you know that person didn’t just experience a certain coincidence or weird psychological trick?”, then before you comment take a second to ask why the “they’re lying” theory is so hard to believe. And when you figure it out, tell me, because I really want to know.

Cable work ahead. Alpine county, CA

www.simonstalenhag.se

g0dziiia:

I wish this was longer

Let's block ads! (Why?)

More Santa Claus.

More snowmen.

For years, YEARS, I told that story, and I got called a liar more times than I can count. I always wondered, why would I want to make a story like that up? Did they think having seen this ridiculous, disgusting spectacle somehow made me feel like a big man?

“You think you’re cool, with your sports car and your successful career? Well wait until you hear my tale of gore, degradation, and animal husbandry! Then we’ll know who’s cool!”

Anyway, I’ll include a link to the relevant clip of Dirty Jobs, but I don’t recommend that you watch it.

https://youtu.be/klWeg2VDNPE?t=23

Pretty much 100% of developers working for other people end up signing some kind of “proprietary invention agreement,” but almost all of them misunderstand what’s going on with that agreement. Most developers think that the work they do at work belongs to their employer, but anything they work on at home or on their own time is theirs. This is wrong enough to be dangerous.

So let’s consider this question: if you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time?

Before I start: be careful before taking legal advice from the Internet. I see enough wrong information that you could get in trouble. Non-US readers should also be aware that the law and legal practice could be completely different in their country.

There are three pieces of information you would need to know to answer this question:

1. What state (or country) are you employed in?

There are state laws that vary from state to state which may even override specific contracts.

2. What does your contract with your employer say?

In the US, in general, courts are very lenient about letting people sign any kind of contract they want, but sometimes, state laws will specifically say “even if you sign such and such a contract, the law overrides.”

3. Are you a contractor or an employee? In the US there are two different ways you might be hired, and the law is different in each case.

But before I can even begin to explain these issues, we gotta break it down.

Imagine that you start a software company. You need a developer. So you hire Sarah from across the street and make a deal whereby you will pay her $20 per hour and she will write lines of code for your software product. She writes the code, you pay her the $20/hour, and all is well. Right?

Well… maybe. In the United States, if you hired Sarah as a contractor, she still owns the copyright on that work. That is kind of weird, because you might say, “Well, I paid her for it.” It sounds weird, but it is the default way copyright works. In fact, if you hire a photographer to take pictures for your wedding, you own the copies of the pictures that you get, but the photographer still owns the copyright and has the legal monopoly on making more copies of those pictures. Surprise! Same applies to code.

Every software company is going to want to own the copyright to the code that its employees write for them, so no software company can accept the “default” way the law works. That is why all software companies that are well-managed will require all developers, at the very least, to sign an agreement that says, at the very least, that

• in exchange for receiving a salary,
• the developer agrees to “assign” (give) the copyright to the company.

This agreement can happen in the employment contract or in a separate “Proprietary Invention Assignment” contract. The way it is often expressed is by using the legal phrase work for hire, which means “we have decided that the copyright will be owned by the company, not the employee.”

Now, we still haven’t said anything about spare time work yet. Suppose, now, you have a little game company. Instead of making software, you knock out three or four clever games every few months. You can’t invent all the games yourself. So you go out and hire a game designer to invent games. You are going to pay the game designer $6,000 a month to invent new games. Those games will be clever and novel. They are patentable. It is important to you, as a company, to own the patents on the games.

Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when she wasn’t on duty.

Ooops. That’s not what you meant. You wanted to pay her for all the games that she invents, and you recognize that the actual process of invention for which you are paying her may happen at any time… on weekdays, weekends, in the office, in the cubicle, at home, in the shower, climbing a mountain on vacation.

So before you hire this developer, you agree, “hey listen, I know that inventing happens all the time, and it’s impossible to prove whether you invented something while you were sitting in the chair I supplied in the cubicle I supplied or not. I don’t just want to buy your 9:00-5:00 inventions. I want them all, and I’m going to pay you a nice salary to get them all,” and she agrees to that, so now you want to sign something that says that all her inventions belong to the company for as long as she is employed by the company.

This is where we are by default. This is the standard employment contract for developers, inventors, and researchers.

Even if a company decided, “oh gosh, we don’t want to own the 5:00-9:00 inventions,” they would soon get into trouble. Why? Because they might try to take an investment, and the investor would say, “prove to me that you’re not going to get sued by some disgruntled ex-employee who claims to have invented the things that you’re selling.” The company wants to be able to pull out a list of all current and past employees, and show a contract from every single one of them assigning inventions to the company. This is expected as a part of due diligence in every single high tech financing, merger, and acquisition, so a software company that isn’t careful about getting these assignments is going to have trouble getting financed, or merging, or being acquired, and that ONE GUY from 1998 who didn’t sign the agreement is going to be a real jerk about signing it now, because he knows that he’s personally holding up a $350,000,000 acquisition and he can demand a lot of money to sign.

So… every software company tries to own everything that its employees do. (They don’t necessarily enforce it in cases of unrelated hobby projects, but on paper, they probably can.)

Software developers, as you can tell from this thread, found this situation to be upsetting. They always imagined that they should be able to sit in their own room at night on their own computer writing their own code for their own purposes and own the copyright and patents. So along came state legislators, in certain states (like California) but not others (not New York, for example). These state legislatures usually passed laws that said something like this:

Anything you do on your own time, with your own equipment, that is not related to your employer’s line of work is yours, even if the contract you signed says otherwise.

Because this is the law of California, this particular clause is built into the standard Nolo contract and most of the standard contracts that California law firms give their software company clients, so programmers all over the country might well have this in their contract even if their state doesn’t require it.

Let’s look at that closely.

On your own time. Easy to determine, I imagine.

With your own equipment. Trivial to determine.

Not related to your employer’s line of work. Um, wait. What’s the definition of related? If my employer is Google, they do everything. They made a goddamn HOT AIR BALLOON with an internet router in it once. Are hot air balloons related? Obviously search engines, mail, web apps, and advertising are related to Google’s line of work. Hmmm.

OK, what if my employer is a small company making software for the legal industry. Would software for the accounting industry be “related”?

I don’t know. It’s a big enough ambiguity that you could drive a truck through it. It’s probably going to depend on a judge or jury.

The judge (or jury) is likely to be friendly to the poor employee against Big Bad Google, but you can’t depend on it.

This ambiguity is meant to create enough of a chilling effect on the employee working in their spare time that for all intents and purposes it achieves the effect that the employer wants: the employee doesn’t bother doing any side projects that might turn into a business some day, and the employer gets a nice, refreshed employee coming to work in the morning after spending the previous evening watching TV.

So… to answer the question. There is unlikely to be substantial difference between the contracts that you sign at various companies in the US working as a developer or in the law that applies. All of them need to purchase your copyright and patents without having to prove that they were generated “on the clock,” so they will all try to do this, unless the company is being negligent and has not arranged for appropriate contracts to be in place, in which case, the company is probably being badly mismanaged and there’s another reason not to work there.

The only difference is in the stance of management as to how hard they want to enforce their rights under these contracts. This can vary from:

• We love side projects. Have fun!
• We don’t really like side projects. You should be thinking about things for us.
• We love side projects. We love them so much we want to own them and sell them!
• We are kinda indifferent. If you piss us off, we will look for ways to make you miserable. If you leave and start a competitive company or even a half-competitive company, we will use this contract to bring you to tears. BUT, if you don’t piss us off, and serve us loyally, we’ll look the other way when your iPhone app starts making $40,000 a month.

It may vary depending on whom you talk to, who is in power at any particular time, and whether or not you’re sleeping with the boss. You’re on your own, basically—the only way to gain independence is to be independent. Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output, and maybe that’s OK, and maybe it’s not, but it’s a free choice.

Marketers have more customer insights at their disposal than ever. Buyer Personas can be one useful tool to turn this customer data into a story. They can help capture an abstract target audience as a tangible character sketch.

But buyer personas are only as useful as what they help you to do. Marketers can get carried away with the fiction. I’ve literally seen “watches Game of Thrones” in the personality sketches of buyer personas for enterprise software. These personality-driven personas may read well, but aren’t necessarily actionable.

This is particularly apparent when sharing buyer personas with the rest of the organization. Ideally, buyer personas can be a useful filter for the entire company to help prioritize creative, tactics, and executions. Too often, they lack sufficient insight on why and how the customers buy things. Nowhere is this gap more apparent than than classic chasm between marketing and sales.

To address this marketing/sales gap in B2B, there’s a rising emphasis on Account-Based Marketing (ABM). In ABM, marketers explicitly focus marketing tactics on a group of specific accounts, so there’s a closer link to sales at the very beginning of the process.

Here’s a cartoon I created earlier this year about buyer personas that say more about the marketing team than about the buyer.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on working with buyer personas and account-based marketing.

For decades Hollywood has treated computers as magic boxes from which endless plot points could be conjured, in denial of all common sense. TV and movies depicted data centers accessible only through undersea intake valves, cryptography that can be cracked through a universal key, and e-mails whose text arrives one letter at a time, all in caps. “Hollywood hacker bullshit,” as a character named Romero says in an early episode of Mr. Robot, now in its second season on the USA Network. “I’ve been in this game 27 years. Not once have I come across an animated singing virus.”

Mr. Robot marks a turning point for how computers and hackers are depicted in popular culture, and it’s happening not a moment too soon. Our thick-­headedness about computers has had serious ramifications that we’ve been dealing with for decades.

Following a time line of events from about a year before the air date of each episode, Mr. Robot references real-world hacks, leaks, and information security disasters of recent history. When hackers hack in Mr. Robot, they talk about it in ways that actual hackers talk about hacking. This kind of dialogue should never have been hard to produce: hacker presentations from Black Hat and Def Con are a click away on YouTube. But Mr. Robot marks the first time a major media company has bothered to make verisimilitude in hacker-speak a priority.

The show excels not only at talk but also at action. The actual act of hacking is intrinsically boring: it’s like watching a check-in clerk fix your airline reservation. Someone types a bunch of obscure strings into a terminal, frowns and shakes his head, types more, frowns again, types again, and then smiles. On the screen, a slightly different menu prompt represents the victory condition. But the show nails the anthropology of hacking, which is fascinating as all get-out. The way hackers decide what they’re going to do, and how they’re going to do it, is unprecedented in social history, because they make up an underground movement that, unlike every other underground in the past, has excellent, continuous, global communications. They also have intense power struggles, technical and tactical debates, and ethical conundrums—the kind of things found in any typical Mr. Robot episode.

Mr. Robot wasn’t the first technically realistic script ever pitched, but it had good timing. In 2014, as the USA Network was deliberating over whether to greenlight Mr. Robot’s pilot for a full season, Sony Pictures Entertainment was spectacularly hacked. Intruders dumped everything—prerelease films, private e-mails, sensitive financial documents—onto the Web, spawning lawsuits, humiliation, and acrimony that persists to this day. The Sony hack put the studio execs in a receptive frame of mind, says Kor Adana, a computer scientist turned screenwriter who is a writer and technology producer on the series. Adana told me the Sony hack created a moment in which the things people actually do with computers seemed to have quite enough drama to be worthy of treating them with dead-on accuracy.

It’s about time. The persistence until now of what the geeks call “Hollywood OS,” in which computers do impossible things just to make the plot go, hasn’t just resulted in bad movies. It’s confused people about what computers can and can’t do. It’s made us afraid of the wrong things. It’s led lawmakers to create a terrible law that’s done tangible harm.

Worst law in technology

In 1983, Matthew Broderick had his breakout role as David Lightman, the smart, bored Seattle teen who entertains himself in WarGames by autodialing phone numbers with his computer’s primitive modem, looking for systems to hack into and explore. When he connects to a mysterious system—seemingly an internal network for a game development company—he nearly starts World War III, because that “game company” is actually the Pentagon, and the “Global Thermonuclear War” game he’s initiated is the autonomous nuclear retaliatory capability designed to launch thousands of ICBMs at the USSR.

WarGames inspired many a youngster to scrounge a 300-baud modem and experiment with networked communications. Linguistically, it gave us “war­dialing” (dialing many phone numbers in sequence), which begat “warwalking” and “wardriving” (hunting for open Wi-Fi networks). The film wasn’t a terrible approximation of how a misfit kid might have tried to hack in, although WarGames did make it seem as if the system had fewer fail-safes than it actually did. (Still, it also appears to be true that in real life the launch code for all the missiles was set to “00000000.”)

The worst thing about WarGames—and its most profound legacy—was the reaction of panicked lawmakers.

Passed by Congress in 1984 and broadened in 1986, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was a sweeping anti-­hacking bill inspired by the idea that America’s Matthew Brodericks could set off Armageddon. Before CFAA’s passage, prosecutions against hackers had invoked a hodgepodge of legal theories. Crooks who broke into sensitive databases were charged with theft of the electricity consumed in the transaction.

CFAA’s authors understood that even if they explicitly banned the hacking techniques of the time, these prohibitions would swiftly be overtaken by advances in technology, leaving future prosecutors scrounging for legal theories again. So CFAA took an exceptionally broad view of what constitutes criminal “hacking,” making a potential felon out of anyone who acquires unauthorized access to a computer system.

It sounds simple: you can legally use a computer only in ways its owner has permitted. But CFAA has proved to be a pernicious menace—what legal scholar Tim Wu has called “the worst law in technology.” That’s because companies (and federal prosecutors) have taken the view that your “authorization” to use an online service is defined by its end-user license agreement—the thousands of words of legalese that no one ever reads—and that violating those terms is therefore a felony.

Decades ago, WarGames inspired a legacy of stupid technology law that we still struggle with. Mr. Robot might just leave behind a happier legacy.

This is how a young entrepreneur and activist named Aaron Swartz came to be charged with 13 felonies after using a script to automate his downloads of articles from JSTOR, a scholarly repository on MIT’s networks. Swartz was legally permitted to download these articles, but the terms of service forbade using a script to fetch them in bulk. What Swartz did was no accident—he made multiple attempts to get around JSTOR’s download limits over a period of months, and ultimately entered a basement wiring closet to tap into a network switch directly. But because of CFAA he was facing up to 35 years in prison when he hanged himself in 2013.

After WarGames, Hollywood made a trickle of “hacker movies,” many much beloved by actual hackers. There was 1992’s Sneakers, which took some of its inspiration from real-world phone phreaks John “Cap’n Crunch” Draper and Josef “Joybubbles” Engressia. There was 1995’s Hackers, which referenced the 2600: Hacker Quarterly meetups and Operation Sundevil, the Secret Service’s notorious 1990 hacker raids (which resulted in the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

But even these movies wanted for much in the way of technical accuracy. Sneakers ridiculously featured a universal key that can break all crypto; Hackers featured the graphically elaborate virus mocked by Romero in Mr. Robot. The films featured the kinds of musical viruses and absurd user interfaces that are the desperate hallmarks of a visual medium trying to make a nonvisual story interesting.

It only got worse. As cryptography crept into the public eye—first through the mid-1990s debate over the Clipper Chip, which would have put a backdoor in essentially all computers, then through subsequent political fights that rage on to this day—it became a frequent source of plot points and groans of dismay from actual hackers and security experts. Like the moment in the fifth Mission Impossible movie when hackers replace the contents of an encrypted file with 0s without first decrypting the file, or the way in Skyfall that encrypted data is visualized as a giant moving sphere. Crypto in movies works just like crypto in the minds of lawmakers: perfectly, until it needs to fail catastrophically.

Fan noise

Kor Adana is largely responsible for giving Mr. Robot the technological rigor that sets the show apart. The 32-year-old Michigan native once worked at an automotive company, attempting to punch holes in the security of the computers in cars heading into production.

Adana told me that when he threw away his lucrative cybersecurity career to work in Hollywood, he was gambling that his background in information security would be an asset rather than an odd quirk. That paid off thanks to the trust of show creator Sam Esmail, who gave Adana the authority to argue with production designers over seemingly minor details. He ensures that the correct cable connects a PC tower to its monitor, or that the network card’s activity lights are actually blinking when the shot comes out of post-production. Adana gives sound engineers fits by insisting that scenes set in rooms full of powerful PCs must have the correct level of accompanying fan noise.

Adana also battles the legal department over his commitment to technical rigor in the hacking attacks depicted on the show, knowing that hackers will go through the episode frame by frame, looking at the command-line instructions for accuracy and in-jokes. Those hackers are a minority of the show’s audience, but they’re also the show’s cheerleaders, and when an incredulous information civilian asks a clued-in hacker buddy whether the stuff on Mr. Robot could really happen, the hacker can nod vigorously and promise that it’s all true.

Another promising show is Black Mirror, created by the British satirist Charlie Brooker and now streaming on Netflix. It’s not rigorous in the same way as Mr. Robot, because it projects into the future rather than describing the technical details of the recent past. But its depiction of user interface elements and product design reflect a coherent understanding of how the technologies of today work, and thus where they may be tomorrow. Clicks on computers in the show call forth menus that have options we can recognize; the opacity of the error messages is all too plausible; even the vacant facial expressions of people lost in their technology have a plausibility that other shows rarely achieve.

My own 2008 young adult novel Little Brother, whose plot turns on the real capabilities of computers, has been under development at Paramount for a year now. The story features a teenage hacker army that uses GPS to send private e-mails and exploits software-defined radios in game consoles to create mesh networks protected by strong crypto. The one thing everyone in the meetings agrees on is that the technical rigor of the story needs to be carried over onto the screen.

As cryptography crept into the public eye, it became a frequent source of plot points and groans of dismay from actual hackers and security experts.

This isn’t trivial. It’s not just about better entertainment. When information security is the difference between a working hospital and one that has to be shut down (as was the case with the ransomware attacks on hospitals across America in 2016) and when server break-ins can affect the outcomes of U.S. elections, it’s clear that we all need a better sense of what computers can do for us and how they can burn us. Adana says he is gratified when he meets information security noncombatants who have no interest in being IT nerds but who are interested in the security and privacy implications of the technologies they use—something heretofore believed to be impossible.

Information security is one of those problems whose very nature can’t be agreed upon—and the lack of technological smarts in the halls of power is compounded by the lack of technological understanding in the body politic. Decades ago, WarGames inspired a legacy of stupid technology law that we still struggle with. Mr. Robot and the programs that come after it might just leave behind a happier legacy: laws, policies, and understanding that help us solve the most urgent problems of our age.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist; his next book, Walkaway, will be published in 2017. He is also a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and activist in residence for the MIT Media Lab.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Crow wants to go through her photos and leave comments.

(via turntfortom)

Inspied by this great CircleCI article

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Since his death, I’ve sort of discovered David Bowie. See, by the time I started paying attention to music that my parents didn’t like (that is anything but Waylon Jennings or polkas), Bowie was in his “Dancing in the Streets” phase, which did not make me want to dig into his back catalog.

Shortly after he died I watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and spent two weeks driving Missy crazy humming “Life on Mars.” That song really strikes a chord for me. It is, after all, the freakiest show.

Note from Missy: Dang, now I want to watch Labyrinth. For the 50th time.

More art.