Nice talk from 28C3 on methods that arms race between governments and Tor developers.

Personally, if I had a need to send encrypted Tweets I’d use one of the PGP tools for smart phones or computers (such as AGP for Android) and encrypt the text before posting.

Some critics of CryptTweet wondered what the point would be of encrypting Twitter DMs. However, I can think of some interesting ways to use something like Twitter in conjunction with PGP to securely coordinate activities that might otherwise be easily observed/intercepted by police and other government authorities.

Exxon has an incredibly long-winded look at this question focusing on the energy density of various fuels. Their answer,

All of the energy concentrated in one gallon of gasoline is enough to charge an iPhone once a day for almost 20 years.

Of course, coal is actually generates the majority of electricity in the United States. The Center on Materials and Devices for Information Technology Research wiki takes a stab at estimating the carbon footprint for charging a smart phone and concludes it is about half a pound of CO2 per charge.

A more extreme/bizarre/cool version of this occurs in Japanese dating sims such as Love Plus where the in-game virtual girlfriends send email and text messages and the game plays out largely in real time.

A silly related tool I found a couple years ago is GamerDNA.com’s XBOX Voice feature. Create an account, feed GamerDNA your XBOX Live ID, and it will construct a daily blog entry written from your XBOX’s perspective. Don’t game for a few days? Your XBOX will get increasingly bitchy and whiny. Earn a few achievements, and it extolls your gaming godness (you can see an archive of my XBOX’s recent daily updates here.)

I’m surprised we don’t see more tools like this (aside from the cost of providing them). For example, Bethesda foolishly seems to want to enter the MMO arena with an Elder Scrolls MMO. Personally, I think that goes entirely against the grain of what has made the Elder Scrolls successful. What I would like to see, however,is an autogenerated journal feature where I could push out accumulated data on what my character has been doing and this would be converted into an epic chronicle of all of my adventures, complete with screenshots. I could then share that or use it as a jumping off point for fan fiction, etc.

Some MMOs have started to go down this route but then punked out. Champions Online had a number of social networking features built in, so you could natively post text and screen shots to Twitter and other services. That was interesting, but like most such services if you actually use it, you just end up polluting your timeline with crap very few other people want to see. I saw a few people create Twitter accounts for their character and Twitter that way, which was nice.

What would have been much cooler, however, would have been a dozen or so comic book templates that corresponded to the various quests and story arcs in the game. Then when a player finished a quest or reached a significant portion in a story arc, the system could have taken a screen shot and pushed that out server side to the company’s servers.

As time goes by, then, the player ends up with a comic book depicting his or her exploits in comic book form in the game world which, again, can be linked to and become a jumping off point for fan fic, remixing and other activities surrounding the game.

With a setting like modern day super-heroes, SMS messages and emails sent to the player from in-game characters could be awesome. Champions Online had a nemesis system (the last time I played, it kinda sucked, but it was one of the few innovative ideas that CO had). An email from my nemesis needling me for cowardice when I hadn’t logged in for a few days or bragging about the beat down he put on me the other night or threatening revenge for the most recent thwarting of his evil schemes would have frigging rocked.

Nice Instructable on how to create a Flash flash drive. Want!

The creators of this video seriously need to start a Kickstarter campaign to expand this into an entire season’s worth of shows.

There are lists going around the Internet of elections won by a single vote (or in some cases a tie). Many such lists are filled with completely fabricated elections, but it is certainly the case that reported results of an election can be a tie or a victory of just one vote.

The problem, of course, is that in most cases a single vote doesn’t really matter in these cases either. Why? Because unless we’re talking about a very small group of people voting, such as for some rural office where the number of voters may be in the low hundreds, elections that come down to just a single vote or even a small number of votes are statistically ties — the supposedly single vote that sways everything is well within the margin of error of whatever method is being used to tabulate the ballots.

For example, in the United States many jurisdictions have laws that if the results from a mechanically or computer tabulated vote shows a candidate losing to another by a small enough margin, there has to be a recount. Frequently that recount is required to be done by hand.

But researchers at Clemson University and Rice University found that hand counting of ballots after an election results in a margin of error of up to two percent.

Based on the processing of the ballots, the researchers found a one-half to 1 percent error rate for the “read and mark” method, and up to a 2 percent error rate for the “sort and stack” method.

Byrne noted that although these error rates may seem insignificant, the margins of error can make all the difference in close elections.

“While an error rate of 1 or 2 percent may seem small, recent elections — like the Iowa caucuses just last month — have had margins of victory small enough that a counting error could play a role,” Byrne said.

This is why the debate over who won Florida in 2000 was so ridiculous. The final vote count had George W. Bush winning by 537 votes over Al Gore out of 5,963,070 votes cast. The correct answer is that it is impossible to know who won Florida in 2000 since there’s no way the vote counting methodology in Florida was precise enough to count votes to the level of precision needed (especially given what we learned later about the odd standards and methods that were used for some of the hand recounts).

For example, I have authorized IFTTT to access both my Twitter account and my Diigo account. I have then set up a task so that every time I mark a tweet as a Favorite, any link mentioned on the tweet automatically gets added to my Diigo bookmark. I have done the same thing with Google Reader so that every story I mark as starred gets added to Diigo as well.

I’ve currently got 18 different tasks defined in IFTTT. One thing I really appreciate about the service is its ability to send SMSes and emails based on triggers. This can be everything from straightforward reminders — I have one that texts me every day to remind me to take my medicine at the appointed time — to monitoring my Gmail and texting me whenever an email with a specific subject line shows up.

IFTTT is a great start, but it does have a few drawbacks. The first is that while 40 web-based services is quite a few, obviously there are dozens more than I wished it supported.

For some services IFTTT really needs to let me set up multiple accounts. IFTTT lets me connect my Tumblr and WordPress blogs to its system so that I could, for example, automatically have any post I make on Tumblr automatically posted to WordPress.

That’s great, except that I’m limited to just one WordPress blog (and one Tumblr as well). So I’d like my Tumblr posts added to one WordPress blog and my Tweets added to another. On IFTTT, at the moment, you just can’t do that.

The interactions with the services’ APIs are also fairly limited in many cases. For example, I can set up an IFTTT task to text or email or tweet when a file shows up in my Dropbox public folder, but I can’t tell it to do so when a file is added to any arbitrary Dropbox folder which is less-than-useful.

A similar service, Dropbox Automator, takes care of this problem … at least for Dropbox. I’m using a web service that automatically backs up its data file to Dropbox every morning, and there’s no way in hell I’d want that file in my public folder.

With Dropbox Automator, I can set up a task so that as soon as that file gets added to my Dropbox it gets emailed as an attachment and then added to a /Processed/ subfolder that I delete every so often.

Hopefully IFTTT will more fully exploit the Dropbox API (and other services’ APIs) more thoroughly in the future to allow that level of interaction.

Until then, though, IFTTT and Dropbox Automator make an excellent — and free — combination to intelligently combine different web services.

Created with WorkFlowy.com

The Herp Derp Browser Plugin will automatically convert all comments on YouTube to “Herp Derp” to make the more intelligent and engaging. Just click on a comment to display the actual text if you feel lucky (or crazy).

Herp Derp is available for Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.

The Neitherworld blog wonders what a pen and paper roleplaying game designed specifically for playing over the Internet might look like,

We’re playing games designed for a tabletop in another medium. We’re adapting.

…but what if there were RPGs designed specifically for such a medium? RPGs designed to be played by people online who aren’t all in the same location? I’m not talking about MMORPGs. I’m talking about something analogous to a tabletop RPG. Something flexible. What would such an RPG look like?

There are some interesting answers and ideas in the comments section.

Botanicula

Not sure how much fun it would be to play Botanicula, but it sure looks pretty

The History of Giving Someone the Finger

The BBC looks at the history of everyone’s favorite hand gesture which, it notes, “seems to have overtaken cultural, linguistic and national boundaries and can now be seen at protests, on football pitches, and at rock concerts across the world.”

As Louis Armstrong might put it, what a wonderful world.

[Court reporter Terlesa] Cowart, a courts spokeswoman told the Miami Herald, put the trial transcript on an internal disc instead, and then erased the data from the stenography machine’s memory disc.

She did back the disk up on her computer, but a virus on the computer later erased all of her notes. All that remained was a transcript of one pretrial hearing and the trial’s closing arguments.

It is bizarre that Florida courts don’t create at least a digital audio recording of all trial proceedings and have a backup system in place. It is crazy to think the pictures of my action figure collection have more backup redundancy than the official proceedings of the trial of someone accused of murder.

You can configure the plugin to have private to-do lists for each user, to have all users share a to-do list, or to have a master list with individual completion of items. The shared to-do list has a variety of settings available. You can assign to-do items to a specific user (includes a setting to email a new to-do item to the assigned user) and optionally have those items only viewable by that user. You can also assign different permission levels using capabilities. There are also settings to show deadline and progress fields. Category support is included as well as front-end administration.

I was using a netbook for meetings because of its portability and long battery life, a 17″ Gateway laptop for gaming, a Dell laptop for scanning and other secondary projects, and a desktop for video editing (I also have another Dell laptop given to me as part of a freelance project).

Too many f’ing laptops (I blame cloud-based syncing software). What I wanted was a single laptop that would be light enough and have the battery life to tote around everywhere in my backpack and yet be powerful enough to run games like World of Warcraft, Portal 2, etc. at decent frame rates.

I opted for the Lenovo T420, throwing in an i7-2640M Processor, 8gb of RAM (essential if you’re running Windows — 4gb just doesn’t cut it anymore), a 500gb 7200RPM hard drive (I’d have preferred an SSD if it weren’t for issues with doing whole disk encryption on them), a Nvidia Optimus 4200M graphics card, and a 9-cell battery.

With the 9-cell battery, the T420 weighs in at a little over 5 pounds. It is light enough that I have no problem sticking it in my backpack and taking me pretty much wherever I go. The 9-cell battery coupled with Lenovo’s software for managing power means I’ve had only 2-3 times in the past four months where the laptop actually ran out of power for me (on the other hand, I travel very infrequently — a real road warrior might find the battery life in my setup lacking). Obviously the battery life goes down considerably when I’m playing games and the Optimus 4200M kicks in. The battery does also stick out a bit from the body of the laptop, but much less pronounced than on other laptops I’ve used.

Overall the T420 hits the power vs. portability sweet spot for me. I can play games like World of Warcraft or Portal 2 a 1600 x 900 and get very high frame rates. Similarly, the T420 excels at all of the business and personal tasks I throw at it. Certainly I’ve used laptops that were much faster or much lighter, but the T420 is one of the few laptops I’ve owned that I felt I could do pretty much everything I wanted to do on it anywhere I wanted to do it.

One thing I’ve been especially impressed with is the T420′s cooling. I’ve never seen a laptop perform this well and yet stay so cool. If I set up a processor intensive job on my Dell, the damn thing heats up to the point where it would be unhealthy to continue to cradle on my lap. I really have to stress the T420 to notice much of any excessive heat.

The Lenovo keyboard is, of course, awesome. I type about 120wpm and the Lenovo is just a few steps below my Unicomp keyboard (though much quieter than the Unicomp’s switches, which makes my wife happier).

The only thing I wasn’t impressed by was some of Lenovo’s utilities, which I found to often conflict with existing Windows utilities. Also, I’ve seen a lot of longtime Thinkpad fans defend the LED light for the keyboard, but I’d definitely preferred a genuinely backlit keyboard like Dell has on some of their models (though not if it required changes in the keyboard itself).

When the game starts, for example, your character can only move to the right. Want to move to the left? Then you need to buy the DLC Movement pack, which also allows jumping (its a bargain!)

Want to leave the room for a minute to grab a snack? Make sure you’ve purchased the Pause Menu pack first.

DLC Quest is available through Xbox Live, so, you guessed it — its only downloadable. Skyrim it’s not, but for only 80 Microsoft points (about $1), it is a clever, fun game that certainly makes its point.

I don’t think anyone can complain if they get a chance to draw a witch using haunted eggs to turn sailors into donkeys or a possessed cow wearing underwear on its head. This is a dark chapter in history when you think about it, but I wanted to highlight the strangeness and absurdity of it all. I really hoped to make this thick treatise into something entertaining that might inspire people to learn a little more about this insane bit of our past.

Despite the nonsense in between its covers, the Malleus Maleficarum  went through numerous editions in the 15th and 16th centuries thanks to the then-new technological innovation of the printing press.

My response? Abandon quests altogether for future Elder Scrolls games. Skyrim is at a place in its evolution where the series can’t rationalize holding onto several RPG conventions for convention’s sake. There is no reason that we need to go into Skyrim expecting quests to guide us along everywhere because the point of the game is to explore with player-driven volition. I can see a Skyrim that has no quests that are explicitly given to the player but only offers rumors and clues along with different ways of obtaining them. My first time in Riverwood, I was looting the general store on the top floor and happened to overhear some siblings arguing over finding something called the golden claw. Just that knowledge should have empowered me to go find it, but Skyrim relies on the quest-giving model and its explicitly defined objectives, which are all created by developers instead of the player. This is especially problematic when you get the claw back from the bandit who holds it. Your game journal tells you to explore the barrow further. My decision to keep going into the ruins or to get the claw back to the store would be more meaningful if I came to that decision on my own, as hints were already there to do so.

I left Skyrim feeling that this was it. There’s nowhere else to progress given the trajectory the series has found for itself. It’s the same ol’ fantasy with the same ol’ combat, the same “epic” story that I have seen before. A stronger focus on helping the player tell their stories through the method that The Elder Scrolls has established would shed the necessity that binds the series in its RPG conventions. As recent RPG developers have found, the usual ways that the genre tells stories isn’t working anymore, and there’s little progress in designing something players haven’t seen before. The narrative is in the play. Let me play.

Interesting. I’m not sure we’ll ever seen a quest-free Elder Scrolls, but Skyrim does get a bit annoying in its quest-a-holic format. My son was about 20 hours into Skyrim on the XBox when he looked up and said “Dad, how do I abandon a quest?” Well, at least on the console versions, you can’t. Accept a quest, and you’re stuck with it forever. That design decision is extremely annoying.

The other problem with Skyrim quests, IMO, is the lack of parallel quest structures. For example, I enjoyed the entire line of Thieves Guild quests. What I would have liked even more, however, would have been the option to go undercover and bring the Thieves Guild to justice. I could just ignore the Thieves Guild altogether, or perhaps go in and slaughter the whole bunch, but neither of those options parallels the existing Thieves Guild quests.

The prevailing wisdom is that this isn’t the case. In the research summarized by the BBC, for example, researchers looked at three point attempts by NBA players. Rather than having “Hot Hands”, what the study found was players who made a successful three point shot were more likely to miss rather than make their next three point attempt.

They discovered that players who scored a three-pointer and then attempted another were more likely to miss the follow-up shot. However, players who missed a previous three-pointer were more likely to score with their next attempt.
“[Basketball players] assume that even one shot is indicative of future performance, while not taking into account that the situation in which they previously scored is likely to be different than the current one,” said Dr Loewenstein.
He said this showed that despite years of experience, professional basketball players let the outcomes of their most recent actions affect their behaviour in ways that can negatively impact their performance.

One of the obvious issues in basketball is that the defensive team can change how it handles a player who has just made a three-point shot. A team that lets a player step up and make a relatively uncontested three-point shot initially might react by not allowing the next attempt by the same player to go uncontested.

One area in basketball where “Hot Hands” can be studied without worrying about the changing circumstances is in free throws. Gur Yaari and Shmuel Eisenmann recently published their research looking at whether there was a “Hot Hands” effect with free throws in the NBA, and found that such an effect does, in fact, appear to exist, but for different reasons than fans and players believe,

Strong evidence for the existence of a “hot hand” phenomenon in free shots of NBA players were found. More precisely, several statistically nontrivial features of the data were found and can be summed into one concept: heterogeneity. The heterogeneous behavior was found both in “space” (across players) and time (along one season). In particular it has been shown that

• If one looks at the aggregated data he/she is likely to observe patterns that do not necessarily exist at the individual level.
• The probability of success increases with the order of throw attempt in a sequence (NS).
• Even if one looks at each individual sequence separately, “hot hand” patterns are still visible (CP): probability of success following a success is higher than the probability of success following a failure.
• These patterns could have resulted from “better and worse” periods and not necessarily from positive/negative feedback loops.

So the “hot hands” phenomenon does appear to be real, but could be better summarized as a “hot night” or “hot half”. Sometimes good NBA players are really good, and sometimes not very good at all. As Yaari and Eisenmann note near the end of their article,

In retrospect, it seems like a very long journey to walk through just in order to notice that human subjects have good periods and bad periods and that the time sequence results can not be produced from a binomial independent repeated trials with a constant probability of success.

Chez Pazienza: An Open Letter to CNN Regarding Nancy Grace (Huffington Post):

Is that simple and unambiguous enough for you to get through your heads the gravity of the situation that the world’s most irresponsible cable news presence has put your network in? Is it finally sinking in just how reckless, unhinged and flat-out dangerous Grace is — and what an embarrassment she is to the CNN brand I have to assume you value — now that she’s used your airwaves to make the ludicrously inflammatory claim that Whitney Houston may have been murdered, without a shred of actual proof? Did you cringe when one of your level-headed anchors, Don Lemon, was forced to follow up her ridiculous, histrionic accusation with a disclaimer distancing CNN from the opportunistic ravings of one of its own? Are you maybe, now, after all this time, beginning to realize the level of shame that Grace has heaped at your doorstep for the past seven years — seven years in which you’ve inexplicably given her free rein to bullhorn whatever wild theories or self-serving but ultimately defamatory blather have popped into her overactive mind?

You can’t let this continue. Enough is enough.

I’ll say it again: You have got to fire Nancy Grace — and you have got to do it now.

SAN DIEGO—Following seven straight years of long hours at the office and sacrificed weekends and holidays, all of account manager Sam Hemstead’s hard work and single-minded devotion to Pinnacle Automotive Insurance has finally paid off for CEO Charles Pardahee, Pardahee said Friday.

“There were definitely some nights I’d lie awake in bed and wonder, ‘Is Sam absolutely killing himself day in and day out for nothing?’” Pardahee told reporters while driving to his weekend home in a recently purchased 2012 BMW luxury sedan. “But Sam just put his head down and never looked back, and this year his blood, sweat, and tears have proven profitable to the tune of a 15 percent larger bonus for myself.”

 For more information, please see the State Policies in Brief on Insurance Coverage of Contraceptives by the Guttmacher Institute, which features a state chart of coverage mandates.

State	Summary of Statutes
Arizona *	Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 20-2329 (2002) requires all health insurance plans providing coverage for prescription medications to also provide coverage for all FDA-approved prescription methods of contraception. Religious employers may request exclusion from this requirement.(HB 2234)
Arkansas *	Ark. Stat. Ann. § 23-79-1103-1104 (2005) requires all health insurance plans providing coverage for prescription medications to also provide coverage for all FDA-approved prescription methods of contraception. This requirement does not cover emergency contraception. Religious employers are not required to comply with this policy.(2005 Ark. Acts, Act 2217; HB 2618)
California *	Cal. Insurance Code § 10123.196 and Cal. Health & Safety Code § 1367.25 (1999) require certain health insurance policies that already cover prescription drugs to provide coverage for prescription contraceptive methods approved by the FDA. Religious employers can request health insurance plans without coverage of approved contraceptive methods that are contrary to the employer’s religious tenants. (AB 39)
Colorado	Colo. Rev. Stat. § 10-16-104 (2010) requires specified health insurance plans to provide coverage for contraception in the same manner as any other sickness, injury, disease, or condition is otherwise covered under the policy or contract. (2010 HB 1021)
Connecticut *	Conn. Gen. Stat. § 38a-530e (1999) requires insurers that offer prescription drug coverage to include coverage for contraceptives. Upon written request of an individual whose moral or religious beliefs are contrary to prescription contraceptive usage, the insurance company, hospital or medical service corporation, or health care center can exclude coverage for prescription contraceptive methods. (Conn. Acts, P.A. 99-79; HB 5950)
Delaware *	Del. Code Ann. tit. 18, § 3559  (2000) requires insurers that provide coverage for outpatient prescription drugs to provide coverage for prescription contraceptive drugs and devices. A religious employer can request exclusion of coverage under this policy if coverage conflicts with the religious organization’s beliefs or practices. A religious employer that obtains this exclusion must provide its employees reasonable and timely notice of the exclusion. (Vol. 72 Del. Laws, Chap. 311; SB 87)
Georgia	Ga. Code § 33-24-59.6 (1999) requires insurers that offer prescription drug coverage to include contraceptives.
Hawaii *	Hawaii Rev. Stat. § 432:1-604.5 and § 431:10A-116.6 (1999) direct that employer group health policies, contracts, plans or agreements must cease to exclude contraceptive services or supplies, including FDA-approved contraceptive drugs or devices to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and must not charge unusual co-payments or impose waiting requirements. (1999 Hawaii Sess. Laws. Act 267; SB 822)Hawaii Rev. Stat.  § 431:10A-116.7 (1999) defines a religious employer and states that such an employer may request a health insurance plan without coverage for contraceptive services and supplies. If so requested, the health insurer must provide a plan without such coverage.  Each religious employer that invokes this exemption must provide written notice to enrollees upon enrollment a list of services the employer refuses to cover and provide written information describing how an enrollee may access contraceptive services and supplies.  (1999 Hawaii Sess. Laws. Act 267; SB 822)
Illinois	Ill. Rev. Stat. ch. 215 § 5/356z.4, § 125/5-3 and § 165/10 (2003) require coverage to include outpatient prescription contraceptive drugs, devices and outpatient contraceptive services without imposing limitations. (2003 Ill. Laws, P.A. 93-0102; HB 211)
Iowa	Iowa Code § 514C.19 (2000) prohibits specified health insurance plans, including a public employer plan, that provides benefits for outpatient prescription drugs, devices or services from excluding or restricting benefits for FDA-approved prescription contraceptive drugs, devices or outpatient services. (2000 Iowa Acts, Chap. 1120; SB 2126)
Maine *	Me. Rev. Stat. Ann. tit. 24 § 2332-J and Me. Rev. Stat. Ann. tit. 24a § 4247 (1999) require insurers that provide coverage for prescription drugs and outpatient medical services to provide coverage for all prescription contraceptives and outpatient contraceptive services. A religious employer may request exclusion from these coverage requirements, and needs to provide insured employees a written notice of the exclusion.
Maryland *	Md. Health-General Code Ann. § 19-706 and Md. Insurance Code Ann. § 15-826 (1998) require private insurers to provide comprehensive coverage for contraceptives.  Religious organizations may request exclusion from this policy.
Massachusetts *	Mass. Gen. Laws Ann. ch. 175 § 47W, ch. 176A § 8W, ch. 176B § 4W, and ch. 176G § 4O (2002) require insurers that provide benefits for outpatient services to also provide hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women and outpatient FDA-approved contraceptive services under the same terms and conditions as for other outpatient services. The law defines outpatient contraceptive services. This law excludes policies purchased by an employer that is a church or a qualified church-controlled organization. (2002 Mass. Acts, Chap. 49; SB 2139)
Missouri *	Mo. Rev. Stat. § 376.1199 (2001) requires health carriers that provide pharmaceutical coverage to include coverage for contraceptives, excluding drugs and devices that are intended to induce an abortion. The law clarifies that coverage for prescriptive contraceptive drugs or devices is not excluded if prescribed for other diagnosed medical conditions. The law exempts specified insurance policies, including health carriers owned and operated by religious entities, from the provisions of the law. The law prohibits discrimination against an enrollee because of the enrollee’s request regarding contraceptive coverage. The law requires carriers to maintain the confidentiality of any individual’s request for contraceptive coverage. (HB 762)
Nevada *	Nev. Rev. Stat. § 689A.0417, § 689B.0377, § 695B.1918, and § 695C.1695 (1999) require insurers that offer prescription drug coverage to include coverage for contraceptives. Religiously affiliated organizations are not required to provide contraceptive coverage.
New Hampshire	N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 415:18-I, § 420-A:17-c and § 420-B:8-gg (1999) require health insurers, health service corporations and health maintenance organizations to provide coverage for outpatient contraceptive services. The law also states that health insurers that provide prescription riders must cover all prescription contraceptive drugs and prescription contraceptive devices approved by the FDA under the same terms and conditions as other prescription drugs.
New Jersey *	N.J. Stat. Ann. § 17:48-6ee, § 17:48A-7bb, § 17:48E-35.29, § 17:48F-13.2, § 17B:26-2.1y, § 17B:27-46.1ee, § 17B:27A-7.12, § 17B:27A-19.15; § 26:2J-4.30; § 52:14-17.29j (2005) require all health insurance or medical providers to cover prescription female contraceptive drugs and devices in the same way that other prescription drugs are covered. Religious employers and organizations may be granted an exception. They must provide written notice to their current and prospective subscribers about this exemption.
New Mexico *	N.M. Stat. Ann. § 59A-22-42 and § 59A-46-44 (2003) require each individual and group health insurance policy, health care plan and certificate of health insurance that provides a prescription drug benefit to provide coverage for prescription contraceptive drugs or devices. A religious entity purchasing health insurance coverage can elect to exclude prescription contraceptive drugs or devices from health coverage. (SB 557)N.M. Stat. Ann. § 59A-22-42 (2001) requires specified insurance plans to offer coverage for prescription contraceptive drugs or devices, which may be subject to deductibles and coinsurance. (2001 N.M. Laws, Chap. 14; HB 59)
New York *	N.Y. Insurance Law § 4303 (2002) requires insurers that provide coverage for prescription drugs to include coverage for the cost of contraceptive drugs or devices approved by the FDA.  Religious employers are allowed to deny employees contraceptive coverage provided that employees are informed in writing of such exclusions. Most insurers must provide written notice to enrollees of their right to directly purchase, for an additional premium at the small group community rate, a rider for coverage of contraceptives. (AB 11723)
North Carolina *	N.C. Gen. Stat. § 58-3-178 (1999) requires insurers that offer prescription drug coverage to include coverage for contraceptives and outpatient contraceptive services. A religious employer may request a health benefit plan that excludes coverage for prescription contraceptives drugs and devices that are contrary to the employer’s religious tenets.
Ohio	Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 1751.01 A7 requires health insurance corporations to provide basic health services, including medically necessary voluntary family planning services.
Oregon *	Or. Rev. Stat. § 743A.066 (2007) specifies that a prescription drug benefit program, or a prescription drug benefit offered under a health benefit plan or under a student health insurance policy, must provide payment, coverage or reimbursement for prescription contraceptives and outpatient consultations, examinations, procedures and medical services that are necessary to prescribe, dispense, deliver, distribute, administer or remove a prescription contraceptive. A religious employer is exempt from these requirements. (2007 Or. Law, Chap. 182, HB 2700)
Rhode Island *	R.I. Gen. Laws § 27-18-57, § 27-19-48, § 27-20-43 and § 27-41-59 (2000) require specified health insurance plans that provide prescription coverage to also provide coverage for FDA-approved prescription contraceptive drugs and devices. A religious employer providing health insurance may exclude coverage for prescription contraceptive methods which are contrary to the employer’s bona fide religious tenets. (2000 R.I. Pub. Laws, Chap. 120; SB 2367)
Texas *	Tex. Insurance Code Ann. § 1369.104 et seq. (2001) prohibit a health benefit plan that provides benefits for prescription drugs or devices from excluding prescription contraceptives approved by the FDA. The law does not apply to coverage for abortifacients or any other drug or device that terminates a pregnancy. The law prohibits a health benefit plan from imposing cost-sharing provisions on prescription contraceptives. The law states that a health benefit plan may not impose any waiting period for prescription contraceptives. The law does not require a health benefit plan associated with a religious organization to offer a medical or health care service that violates the religious convictions of the organization, except if the prescription contraceptive coverage is necessary to preserve the life or health of the insured individual. (HB 2382)
Vermont	Vt. Stat. Ann. tit. 8 § 4099c  (1999) requires health insurance plans to provide coverage for contraceptives if they cover prescription drugs.
Virginia	Va. Code § 2.2-2818(B)(5), § 32.1-325 and § 38.2-3407.4:2 (2001) require that the health and related insurance for state employees include coverage for prescription drugs and devices used as contraceptives. (2001 Va. Laws, Chap. 334; H 2654)Va. Code § 38.2-3407.5:1 (1997) requires insurers that provide coverage for prescription drugs to offer and make available coverage for FDA-approved contraceptive drugs or devices, at the option of the purchaser. This law is not a mandate for coverage.
Washington	Wash. Rev. Code § 48.41.110 (2007) requires health insurance policies issued by the state health insurance pool to provide coverage for drugs and contraceptive devices requiring a prescription.
Wisconsin	Wis. Stat. § 609.805 and § 632.895(17) (2009) require that insurance policies and self-insured health plans that provide coverage for outpatient health care services, preventive services or prescription drugs and devices also provide coverage for contraceptives prescribed by a health care provider. The law also requires that any outpatient services that are necessary to prescribe, administer, maintain or remove a contraceptive be provided if such services are covered for any other drug benefits. These requirements do not apply to disability insurance policies that provide only limited-scope dental or vision benefits, long-term care insurance or Medicare replacement or supplemental policies. (2009 Wis. Laws, Act 28; AB 75)
West Virginia *	W. Va. Code § 33-25A-2(1), (11) (1996) requires HMOs to provide or make available basic health care services that encompass coverage for voluntary family planning services.W. Va. Code § 33-16E-1 et seq. (2005) require prescription drug parity; all health plans and medical service organizations must cover FDA-approved prescription drugs and devices under the same guidelines they cover other prescription drugs.  Extraordinary surcharges are prohibited. Religious employers may be exempt, but must provide potential or current subscribers written notice of the policy and make arrangements for them to purchase drugs or devices at the prevailing group rate from another provider. The law excludes coverage of a dependent child. The law does not apply to Medicaid.

Sources:  National Conference of State Legislatures and the Guttmacher Institute.

Note: List may not be comprehensive, but is representative of state laws that exist. NCSL accepts additions and  updates to this report.

This site is made possible by project, UC4MC21528, from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (Title V, Social Security Act), Health Resources and Services Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

 

Here’s the thing, though — the Kindle app is actually pretty good. I especially like how Amazon syncs the last page I’m reading between multiple devices. Being able to go from my laptops to my phone to my iPod to my Android devices and instantly pick up where I left off is awesome.

At home I run Calibre in server mode so I can easily download/transfer any of the thousands of book I own in Epub or PDF format, but there’s no live syncing of where the reader is in a book.

Anyone know of an open source solution that accomplishes this sort of syncing? I’m guessing PDF is a lost cause, but surely this is possible with Epub. Has anyone created an open source system that will sync last page read across multiple devices with Epub formatted ebooks?

The editors do a good job of featuring relatively high quality books, so you won’t find their recommendations littered with crap.

Directory Opus goes well beyond being a simple file manager replacement, however, and is a powerful utility that can be used to save a lot of time in doing common file operations.

The problem is that Directory Opus has so many options and features that it can be overwhelming — this is a program that now comes with a 700+ page manual.

Fortunately another Directory Opus fan has read through that manual and created the “Other Manual” guide to the program.

This is still a fairly long guide — probably longer than most people ever spend thinking about the best way to optimize a file manager — but well worth looking into. There are several configuration options that are explained in the “Other Manual” that I had yet to run across in 9 years of using Directory Opus, so even long time users should give it a look.

GigaOm writer Miguel Valdes Faura points to things like social networking and tools like Salesforce’s Chatter as things that are gradually replacing email.

Look, here’s the thing — the beauty of (most) email is that it is based on an open protocol, SMTP. I have email I sent and received in the late 1980s that I can still read on an email client that was just released yesterday, thanks to the wide support for SMTP.

I’ve also had the same email address for 16 years even though I’ve changed email hosts 6 or 7 times during that period. During a small part of those 16 years, my email was hosted at another company, but for most of the time I’ve owned the server that my email domain ran on. Today, it is dirt cheap for anyone to grab a domain name and a hosting account that includes a mail server.

Social networking and similar systems are largely the antithesis of prevailing state of affairs with email. I can use my Google+, Twitter, Facebook and other accounts only because those companies have decided to continue to allow me to — and their Terms of Service make it clear they can change their mind at any moment and cut me off for pretty much any reason.

On the other hand, if I get fed up with one of my social networks, there’s little I can do but close my account and leave. Since all of these companies use proprietary standards, I can’t easily move my Twitter account to Facebook, much less even consider moving either account to my own webserver.

I can (and do) get my data out of these systems, with varying degrees of difficulty, but just having static copies of the data doesn’t come close to replicating my account. Moreover, most of these systems seem to be getting less open. Twitter, for example, used to make it obvious where the RSS feed for your tweets was, but now they hide it like they’re ashamed of it (or, more likely, can’t figure out how to monetize it).

Every time I read someone write about relying on social networking or closed systems, I always think of the BBC’s Domesday Project — an early attempt at creating a digital artifact in which more than a million people participated. But, of course, the Domesday Project is famous in part because the BBC chose to use a proprietary technology that quickly became obsolete and almost rendered the entire project unreadable.

Social networking, as it is currently constituted, is one giant Domesday Project just waiting to happen.

Gray comes down closer to the latter view,

I have a very high opinion of children’s abilities to make good choices about how to use their free time, as long as they really have choices. Some kids go through long periods of doing what seems like just one thing, and then some adults think there’s something wrong, because they (the adults) would not make that choice. But in my experience, if kids are really free to play and explore in lots of different ways, and they end up playing or exploring in what seems to be just one way, then they are doing that because they are getting something really meaningful out of it.

In my family, both my wife and I play a lot of video games. And what we emphasize to our kids is the importance of balance. Mom plays World of Warcraft, but she doesn’t say, “I’m not going to make dinner or go to work today because I’d rather play video games.” In fact, although we play a lot of video games, we also do a lot of reading, and other activities in our free time.

We’re more project-oriented than time-oriented at our house. Kids get home at 4 p.m. and bedtime is 9 p.m. Each day there are a certain number of tasks that each child is expected to finish, whether that is homework, helping out with dinner, cleaning, etc. Once our children have finished the tasks we expect them to finish that day, they are free to use their free time as they wish. Sometimes that means my 9 year old whips off a three hour session of World of Warcraft or Skyrim. More often it means they tend to mix up their activities, alternating between watching television, playing video games, reading, or other activities such as playing board games or going swimming.

Which is not to say I wouldn’t step in and place limits on my children’s screen time if they failed to live up to their responsibilities. My son knows the laptop in his room is there because he does such a good job of keeping up with all of the things my wife and I expect him to do, and that it can easily be removed or the password changed if he acts inappropriately (something we’ve only had to do a handful of times).

Pretty much, must watch/read (transcript below):

The Coming War on General Computation
Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com

Presented at 28C3

Introducer:

Anyway, I believe I’ve killed enough time … so, ladies and gentlemen, a
person who in this crowd needs absolutely no introduction, Cory Doctorow!

[Audience applauds.]

Doctorow:

[[27.0]] Thank you.

[[32.0]] So, when I speak in places where the first language of the nation is
not English, there is a disclaimer and an apology, because I’m one of
nature’s fast talkers. When I was at the United Nations at the World
Intellectual Property Organization, I was known as the “scourge” of the
simultaneous translation corps; I would stand up and speak, and turn around,
and there would be window after window of translator, and every one of them
would be doing this [Doctorow facepalms]. [Audience laughs] So in advance,
I give you permission when I start talking quickly to do this [Doctorow
makes SOS motion] and I will slow down.

[[74.1]] So, tonight’s talk — wah, wah, waaah [Doctorow makes 'fail horn'
sound, apparently in response to audience making SOS motion; audience
laughs]] — tonight’s talk is not a copyright talk. I do copyright talks
all the time; questions about culture and creativity are interesting enough,
but to be honest, I’m quite sick of them. If you want to hear freelancer
writers like me bang on about what’s happening to the way we earn our
living, by all means, go and find one of the many talks I’ve done on this
subject on YouTube. But, tonight, I want to talk about something more
important — I want to talk about general purpose computers.

Because general purpose computers are, in fact, astounding — so astounding
that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them: to figure
out what they’re for, to figure out how to accommodate them, and how to cope
with them. Which, unfortunately, brings me back to copyright.

[[133.8]] Because the general shape of the copyright wars and the lessons
they can teach us about the upcoming fights over the destiny of the general
purpose computer are important. In the beginning, we had packaged software,
and the attendant industry, and we had sneakernet. So, we had floppy disks
in ziplock bags, or in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like
candy bars and magazines. And they were eminently susceptible to
duplication, and so they were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was
to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

[[172.6]] Enter DRM 0.96. They started to introduce physical defects to the
disks or started to insist on other physical indicia which the software
could check for — dongles, hidden sectors, challenge/response protocols
that required that you had physical possession of large, unwieldy manuals
that were difficult to copy, and of course these failed, for two reasons.
First, they were commercially unpopular, of course, because they reduced the
usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers, while leaving the
people who took the software without paying for it untouched. The
legitimate purchasers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they
hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they
resented the inconvenience of having to transport large manuals when they
wanted to run their software. And second, these didn’t stop pirates, who
found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication.
Typically, the way that happened is some expert who had possession of
technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor
itself, would reverse engineer the software and release cracked versions
that quickly became widely circulated. While this kind of expertise and
technology sounded highly specialized, it really wasn’t; figuring out what
recalcitrant programs were doing, and routing around the defects in shitty
floppy disk media were both core skills for computer programmers, and were
even more so in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready
early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became
more fraught as networks spread; once we had BBSes, online services, USENET
newsgroups, and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how
to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as
little crack files, or, as the network capacity increased, the cracked disk
images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.

[[296.4]] Which gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in
the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We
were about to have an information economy, whatever the hell that was. They
assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Now,
information technology makes things efficient, so imagine the markets that
an information economy would have. You could buy a book for a day, you
could sell the right to watch the movie for one Euro, and then you could
rent out the pause button at one penny per second. You could sell movies
for one price in one country, and another price in another, and so on, and
so on; the fantasies of those days were a little like a boring science
fiction adaptation of the Old Testament book of Numbers, a kind of tedious
enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information and
the ways we could charge them for it.

[[355.5]] But none of this would be possible unless we could control how
people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it
was well and good to talk about selling someone the 24 hour right to a
video, or the right to move music onto an iPod, but not the right to move
music from the iPod onto another device, but how the Hell could you do that
once you’d given them the file? In order to do that, to make this work, you
needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and
inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the
file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file
under certain circumstances.

[[395.8]] But as they say on the Internet, “now you have two problems”. You
also, now, have to stop the user from saving the file while it’s in the
clear, and you have to stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking
program stores its keys, because if the user finds the keys, she’ll just
decrypt the file and throw away that stupid player app.

[[416.6]] And now you have three problems [audience laughs], because now you
have to stop the users who figure out how to render the file in the clear
from sharing it with other users, and now you’ve got four! problems,
because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets
from unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too, and now
you’ve got five! problems, because now you have to stop users who figure
out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users
what the secrets were!

[[442.0]] That’s a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had
the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual
Property Organization, which created laws that made it illegal to extract
secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to
extract media cleartexts from the unlocking programs while they were
running, and it created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to
extract secrets from unlocking programs, and created laws that made it
illegal to host copyrighted works and secrets and all with a handy
streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without
having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap. And
with that, illegal copying ended forever [audience laughs very hard,
applauds], the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that
brought prosperity to the whole wide world; as they say on the aircraft
carriers, “Mission Accomplished”. [audience laughs]

[[511.0]] Well, of course that’s not how the story ends because pretty much
anyone who understood computers and networks understood that while these
laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve; after all,
these were laws that made it illegal to look inside your computer when it
was running certain programs, they made it illegal to tell people what you
found when you looked inside your computer, they made it easy to censor
material on the internet without having to prove that anything wrong had
happened; in short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did
not oblige them. After all, copying only got easier following the passage
of these laws — copying will only ever get easier! Here, 2011, this is as
hard as copying will get! Your grandchildren will turn to you around the
Christmas table and say “Tell me again, Grandpa, tell me again, Grandma,
about when it was hard to copy things in 2011, when you couldn’t get a drive
the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every
movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken,
everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn’t even
notice it was doing it, tell us again when it was so stupidly hard to copy
things back in 2011″. And so, reality asserted itself, and everyone had a
good laugh over how funny our misconceptions were when we entered the 21st
century, and then a lasting peace was reached with freedom and prosperity
for all. [audience chuckles]

[[593.5]] Well, not really. Because, like the nursery rhyme lady who
swallows a spider to catch a fly, and has to swallow a bird to catch the
spider, and a cat to catch the bird, and so on, so must a regulation that
has broad general appeal but is disastrous in its implementation beget a new
regulation aimed at shoring up the failure of the old one. Now, it’s
tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that
lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless, and just
leave it there, which is not a very satisfying place to go, because it’s
fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be
solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of
power, which is to say they will never be solved. But I have another
theory about what’s happened.

[[644.4]] It’s not that regulators don’t understand information technology,
because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law!
M.P.s and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and
people, not disciplines and issues. We don’t have a Member of Parliament
for biochemistry, and we don’t have a Senator from the great state of urban
planning, and we don’t have an M.E.P. from child welfare. (But perhaps we
should.) And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics, not
technical disciplines, nevertheless, often do manage to pass good rules that
make sense, and that’s because government relies on heuristics — rules of
thumbs about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue.

[[686.3]] But information technology confounds these heuristics — it kicks
the crap out of them — in one important way, and this is it. One important
test of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose is first, of
course, whether it will work, but second of all, whether or not in the
course of doing its work, it will have lots of effects on everything else.
If I wanted Congress to write, or Parliament to write, or the E.U. to
regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up and said “well,
everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that
every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from
the bank robbery? Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would of
course be “no”. Because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still
generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys.
And we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that
we’d be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by
changing wheels. Even if there were an /epidemic/ of bank robberies, even
if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies, no-one
would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

[[762.0]] But. If I were to show up in that same body to say that I had
absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I
said, “I would like you to pass a law that says it’s illegal to put a
hands-free phone in a car”, the regulator might say “Yeah, I’d take your
point, we’d do that”. And we might disagree about whether or not this is a
good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us
would say “well, once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they
stop being cars”. We understand that we can keep cars cars even if we
remove features from them. Cars are special purpose, at least in comparison
to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one
more feature to an already-specialized technology. In fact, there’s that
heuristic that we can apply here — special-purpose technologies are
complex. And you can remove features from them without doing fundamental
disfiguring violence to their underlying utility.

[[816.5]] This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is
rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the
general-purpose network — the PC and the Internet. Because if you think of
computer software as a feature, that is a computer with spreadsheets running
on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that’s running World of Warcraft
has an MMORPG feature, then this heuristic leads you to think that you could
reasonably say, “make me a computer that doesn’t run spreadsheets”, and that
it would be no more of an attack on computing than “make me a car without a
hands-free phone” is an attack on cars. And if you think of protocols and
sites as features of the network, then saying “fix the Internet so that it
doesn’t run BitTorrent”, or “fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no
longer resolves”, then it sounds a lot like “change the sound of busy
signals”, or “take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network”, and
not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking.

[[870.5]] Not realizing that this rule of thumb that works for cars and for
houses and for every other substantial area of technological regulation
fails for the Internet does not make you evil and it does not make you an
ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world for
whom ideas like “Turing complete” and “end-to-end” are meaningless. So, our
regulators go off, and they blithely pass these laws, and they become part
of the reality of our technological world. There are suddenly numbers that
we aren’t allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we’re not allowed
to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the
Internet is to say “that? That infringes copyright.” It fails to attain
the actual goal of the regulation; it doesn’t stop people from violating
copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright
enforcement — it satisfies the security syllogism: “something must be done,
I am doing something, something has been done.” And thus any failures that
arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn’t go far enough,
rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset.

[[931.2]] This kind of superficial resemblance and underlying divergence
happens in other engineering contexts. I’ve a friend who was once a senior
executive at a big consumer packaged goods company who told me about what
happened when the marketing department told the engineers that they’d
thought up a great idea for detergent: from now on, they were going to make
detergent that made your clothes newer every time you washed them! Well
after the engineers had tried unsuccessfully to convey the concept of
“entropy” to the marketing department [audience laughs], they arrived at
another solution — “solution” — they’d develop a detergent that used
enzymes that attacked loose fiber ends, the kind that you get with broken
fibers that make your clothes look old. So every time you washed your
clothes in the detergent, they would look newer. But that was because the
detergent was literally digesting your clothes! Using it would literally
cause your clothes to dissolve in the washing machine! This was the
opposite of making clothes newer; instead, you were artificially aging your
clothes every time you washed them, and as the user, the more you deployed
the “solution”, the more drastic your measures had to be to keep your
clothes up to date — you actually had to go buy new clothes because the old
ones fell apart.

[[1012.5]] So today we have marketing departments who say things like “we
don’t need computers, we need… appliances. Make me a computer that
doesn’t run every program, just a program that does this specialized task,
like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make
sure it doesn’t run programs that I haven’t authorized that might undermine
our profits”. And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea — just
a program that does one specialized task — after all, we can put an
electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and
we don’t worry if it’s still possible to run a dishwashing program in a
blender. But that’s not what we do when we turn a computer into an
appliance. We’re not making a computer that runs only the “appliance” app;
we’re making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some
combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from
knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and
from terminating processes that she doesn’t want. In other words, an
appliance is not a stripped-down computer — it is a fully functional
computer with spyware on it out of the box.

[audience applauds loudly] Thanks.

[[1090.5]] Because we don’t know how to build the general purpose computer
that is capable of running any program we can compile except for some
program that we don’t like, or that we prohibit by law, or that loses us
money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with
spyware — a computer on which remote parties set policies without the
computer user’s knowledge, over the objection of the computer’s owner. And
so it is that digital rights management always converges on malware.

[[1118.9]] There was, of course, this famous incident, a kind of gift to
people who have this hypothesis, in which Sony loaded covert rootkit
installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that
watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs, and terminated them,
and which also hid the rootkit’s existence by causing the kernel to lie
about which processes were running, and which files were present on the
drive. But it’s not the only example; just recently, Nintendo shipped the
3DS, which opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity
check to make sure that you haven’t altered the old firmware in any way, and
if it detects signs of tampering, it bricks itself.

[[1158.8]] Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC
bootloader, which restricts your computer so it runs signed operating
systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures
from OSes unless they have covert surveillance operations.

[[1175.5]] And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can’t be
used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance
measures that we know from repressive governments. So, SOPA, the U.S. Stop
Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSec because they can be used to defeat
DNS blocking measures. And it blocks tools like Tor, because they can be
used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA,
the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing
research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as
are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these
measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in
America, too!

[audience laughs and applauds] Don’t applaud me, applaud the MPAA!

[[1221.5]] Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over
copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we’ll
be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I
said at the beginning of this talk, this isn’t about copyright, because the
copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on
computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in
this coming century-long conflict. We tend to think of them as particularly
successful — after all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage,
and breaking the internet on this fundamental level in the name of
preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies!
[laughs, scattered applause]

[[1270.2]] But the reality is, copyright legislation gets as far as it does
precisely because it’s not taken seriously, which is why on one hand, Canada
has had Parliament after Parliament introduce one stupid copyright bill
after another, but on the other hand, Parliament after Parliament has failed
to actually vote on the bill. It’s why we got SOPA, a bill composed of pure
stupid, pieced together molecule-by-molecule, into a kind of “Stupidite
250″, which is normally only found in the heart of newborn star, and it’s
why these rushed-through SOPA hearings had to be adjourned midway through
the Christmas break, so that lawmakers could get into a real vicious
nationally-infamous debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance.
It’s why the World Intellectual Property Organization is gulled time and again
into enacting crazed, pig-ignorant copyright proposals because when the
nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water
experts, not copyright experts; they send health experts, not copyright
experts; they send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because
copyright is just not important to pretty much everyone! [applause]

[[1350.3]] Canada’s Parliament didn’t vote on its copyright bills because,
of all the things that Canada needs to do, fixing copyright ranks well below
resolving health emergencies on First Nations reservations, exploiting the oil patch
in Alberta, interceding in sectarian resentments among French- and
English-speakers, solving resources crises in the nation’s fisheries, and
a thousand other issues! The triviality of copyright tells you that when
other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and
the PC, that copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish, and not a war.
Why would other sectors nurse grudges against computers? Well, because the
world we live in today is /made/ of computers. We don’t have cars anymore,
we have computers we ride in; we don’t have airplanes anymore, we have
flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers [laughter]; a
3D printer is not a device, it’s a peripheral, and it only works connected
to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it’s a general-purpose
computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software.

[[1418.9]] The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial,
when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered
reality will create. Think of radio for a minute. The entire basis for
radio regulation up until today was based on the idea that the properties of
a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and can’t be easily altered.
You can’t just flip a switch on your baby monitor, and turn it into
something that interferes with air traffic control signals. But powerful
software-defined radios can change from baby monitor to emergency services
dispatcher to air traffic controller just by loading and executing different
software, which is why the first time the American telecoms regulator (the
FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, they asked
for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios
should be embedded in trusted computing machines. Ultimately, whether every
PC should be locked, so that the programs they run are strictly regulated by
central authorities.

[[1477.9]] And even this is a shadow of what is to come. After all, this
was the year in which we saw the debut of open sourced shape files for
converting AR-15s to full automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded
open-sourced hardware for gene sequencing. And while 3D printing will give
rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American
South and Mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their
jurisdiction printing out sex toys. [guffaw from audience] The trajectory
of 3D printing will most certainly raise real grievances, from solid state
meth labs, to ceramic knives.

[[1516.0]] And it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to understand why
regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on
self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or
the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers.
Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it’s
really… really… important to make sure that computers can’t execute
programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat
their lunch… literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real
problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of
lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and
big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the
same place — “can’t you just make us a general purpose computer that runs
all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just
make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any
two points, unless it upsets us?”

[[1576.3]] And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on
general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I
can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers
will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with
the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages,
will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we
saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on
rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on
surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because
we’ve spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to
fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it
turns out it’s just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the
stakes are only going to get higher.

[[1627.8]] As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the
fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it
won’t be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body. So when I
get into a car — a computer I put my body into — with my hearing aid — a
computer I put inside my body — I want to know that these technologies are
not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating
processes on them that work against my interests. [vigorous applause from
audience] Thank you.

[[1669.4]] Thank you. So, last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a
middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal
of trouble, because it was caught distributing PCs to its students, equipped
with rootkits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the
computer’s camera and network connection. It transpired that they had been
photographing students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and
asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful
intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, mics, and GPSes on PCs,
tablets, and mobile devices.

[[1705.0]] Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to
monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and
terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest
servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals,
thugs, and control freaks. And we haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the
copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these
are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won’t be able to fight on
without them. And I know this sounds like a counsel of despair, but as I
said, these are early days. We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that
means that great challenges are yet to come, but like all good level
designers, fate has sent us a soft target to train ourselves on — we have a
organizations that fight for them — EFF, Bits of Freedom, EDRi, CCC,
Netzpolitik, La Quadrature du Net, and all the others, who are thankfully,
too numerous to name here — we may yet win the battle, and secure the
ammunition we’ll need for the war.

[[1778.9]] Thank you.

[sustained applause]

First, you decided what you want to log. I track sleep and wake times, food, daily weight, television and reading habits and a few other things. TapLog then makes it easy to set up buttons that will quickly create a time stamped log of the event/item you’re tracking. For example, here’s the sample logging screen from the Android Market (love the rabbit sighting option):

Click the button and it creates a time stamped log. TapLog also lets you update the quantity, record location, and add notes. So I can hit my Weight button and input my weight. Or I can hit the reading button and input how many pages I read as well as add a text note summary of what I was reading, what I thought of it, etc.

The key here is that, unlike many other logging applications, TapLog really makes it easy for the users to set up the application to log what they want, how they want. It also supports having a button open a sub-menu. So a user could create a “Food” button which would then open a second screen of buttons labeled “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Dinner.”

The log can be exported as a CSV file and either shared to the SD card or emailed. The app also supports emailing a non-CSV log of events. An export to Google Docs would be nice.

Other than that, TapLog does an excellent job and is easily the best logging app available for Android at the moment.

The plugin sends an email to an SMS Gateway that triggers an SMS. Currently it only support US carriers out of the box.

For example, here’s a pretty straightforward thing I’d like to do in Windows — I’d like to set it up so that when I close the lid on my laptop, Windows automatically locks itself. Based on a couple Google searches a lot of people would like to be able to do this.

And yet, as of 2012, there is no version of Windows in which this can be done. Microsoft will let you put a laptop to sleep automatically when you close the lid, and you can always hit the Windows key+L to lock the computer, but there’s no way to configure Windows to lock automatically when the laptop lid is closed.

That, my friends, is f***ing stupid. I did find a couple of people who had created programs that intercepted the lid state and would automatically lock the lid when closed, but none of these were currently available (the website of the most popular utility for doing this was hijacked by hackers a couple years ago and is still compromised).

So if you know of a decent utility for automatically locking a Windows laptop when the lid closes, I’d be glad to hear it. Or maybe Microsoft could actually follow up on a simple, obvious feature that many of its users have requested. Just don’t hold your breath on that.