Posts from — August 2004

Frustrating the man. How to herd cats: tie a small bright object to a string; place it in the peripheral vision of the cat; and then pull it around a corner out of sight.
Ben Laurie’s been trying to entice me to pounce on tor. … I pounced yesterday morning.
Tor helps to frustrate the man in the middle’s attempt to monitor your internet usage patterns. For example every time you send mail to Joe the man can see that your talking to Joe. This lets the man draw social network drawings that are both static and dynamic. Even if your mail’s encrypted.
Tor frustrates by mixing your traffic up with that of other tor users. Picking your traffic out of the crowd’s traffic is harder. The traffic of the tor users is bounced around the internet thru tor router nodes run by volunteers.
On my Mac this was really easy to set up; well in the usual geek sense of easy: download; build; install; cleanup; run it.

curl -o f.tgz http://freehaven.net/tor/dist/tor-0.0.8pre3.tar.gz
tar zxt f.tgz
cd tor*
./configure; make; sudo make install
Password: …
F=`pwd`; cd ..; rm -rf $F f.tgz
tor

But you should proably follow the directions.
Then you need to adjust your Network Preferences to use it. Each interface has settings for proxies; you need to set the ‘Socks Proxy’ to use 127.0.0.1 (i.e. your own machine) and port 9050.
If this get’s popular then I suspect the hive mind will cough up a Mac disk image and some GUI facade for running it.
I had having trouble with reaching things on my local private network; until the nice folks in the tor community tapped me with the clue stick and pointed out that you can write domain names to not route thru the proxy – it’s right there on the same page where you turn on the proxy – duh. [Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm]

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handy bit of technology, bound to tick off someone though.

Here's your fucking latte, sir.

I looked this one up for an argument in comments to Belle’s post below, and I’ve been laughing and crying ever since. It’s a useful way to think about the extent to which “trickle down” economics has worked for the poorest in society. As we all know because people who know we’ve read Rawls keep telling us, the poorest benefit from economic growth. How much do they benefit?

[Crooked Timber]

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real economic policy….. someday they will be able to afford another cup of coffee….

Where's Mine!!??!! . Half a Man”Single women won't have to sleep alone much longer,” writes Sheila Halloran in The Boston Herald. “Women in Japan are wrapping themselves in the arms of a new alternative bed-mate. …The Boyfriend Arm Pillow, a realistic version of the real thing, features a squeezable upper body of … By Julia (mailto:spamthis@youidiots.com). [Flailing in the Surf!]

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ummm, why would you want one? seems like something that would be better if it were real.

Open Source Academia.

Laurie Taylor and I have recently finished an article drawing on many of the currents in thinking about Open Source and suggesting some ways to integrate those thoughts into a classroom pedagogy. C&C Online has accepted the article and published it, retroactively, in the Spring 2004 Virtual Classroom section. I'd be interested to hear any comments y'all have.

[Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy]

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interesting, of course, i have just started practicing my method of open learning environment based education with my last course. i guess i should write it up somewhere.

Open Media Project Launched: “JD Lasica and Marc Canter have launched a promising new organization called Open-Media.org, and it deserves wide attention.
Here's JD's take on the subject, and here's Marc's posting. Good, important work going on here.” [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] [Universal Rule]

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it is a good idea, and it isn't the first time we've seen it. we'll see how successful this project is in comparison to other projects.

welcome to the new crusades…. bush policy is pretty clear apparently. break all commandments, and then justify it in the name of religion.

Rob linked to this article about flow and educatio …. Rob linked to this article about flow and education ages ago, but I wanted to save this quote:

“The implicit hope has been that if we discover more and more rational ways of selecting, organizing, and distributing knowledge, children will learn more effectively. Yet it seems increasingly clear that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive in nature. It is not that students cannot learn, it is that they do not wish to.”

It's all about motivation, relevance, connections to others, meaningful networks and authentic tasks. These words all seem like the opposite of traditional education. [Jeremy Hiebert's headspaceJ -- Instructional Design and Technology]

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simple solution, don't teach those that don't want to learn, just fail them. then explain to them, what that means, not in terms of today, but in terms of their future. then, let them self-motivate.

ICC Telecoms Liberalization. An international business guide for policymakers. The International Chamber of Commerce has launched a new guide to assist countries considering embarking on the liberalization of their communications infrastructure. http://www.iccwbo.org/home/statements_rules/statements/2004/liberalization.pdf… [InternetPolicy.net]

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like energy liberalization….. probably not a great idea to let corporations, which have recently been fairly compared to sociopaths, guide policy.

Hypothesis: It's Still A Free Country. Thanks to Beth Novak for pointing me to the NYCLU site on Protecting Protest: Protecting Protest is a campaign of the New York Civil Liberties Union to ensure that protest can take place safely and legally during the Republican National Convention this August. We’re defending civil liberties from a storefront near Madison Square Garden, in the courts by challenging NYPD demonstration control tactics, at City Hall, and on the streets. The Republican national convention and the protests it inpires seem like a decent field test of the hypothesis that it’s still a free country. I am mildly confident that thanks to the the work of the NYCLU and other groups like it, we will again fail to invalidate this hypothesis…. [Discourse.net]

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especially since the republican's won't let people wearing prochoice t-shirts in the 30 people mobs of bush supporters that hear him speak.

Mike Davis. “The Pentagon as Global Slumlord” [Interactivist Info Exchange]

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worth a peak.