Month: December 2013

Rainfall for 2013: 69.2 inches

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The abbey has a new rain gauge accurate to 1/100th of an inch

Some parts of North Carolina have set records for rainfall this year. Acorn Abbey’s gauge has recorded 69.2 inches.

The breakdown by month:

January: 10.15
February: 3.8
March: 3.75
April: 5.4
May: 5.1
June: 8.9
July: 11.825
August: 5.85
September: 1.7
October: 1.35
November: 4.875
December: 6.6

The normal rainfall here is about 44 inches per year, so this has been an exceptional year. I’m thinking that a pattern is emerging for this area — that in years in which La Niña is not active, rainfall is generous and may well be trending upward, as is predicted in most models of climate change for this area. In La Niña years — curse La Niña! — all bets are off. La Niña summers have been wretchedly hot and dry.

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The winter rye in the garden got a poor start because September and October were unusually dry. But it’s coming along and should make the chickens very happy this winter.

New leak tells us what we already knew: Google is evil

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From an NSA presentation leaked by Edward Snowden

Bloggers at the Washington Post have reported on an important new leak by Edward Snowden. This one reveals that the National Security Agency uses Google cookies to identify and target computers on the Internet. This should surprise no one, but we need all the information we can get on how elites snoop on us.

What the leak reveals is that the NSA uses Google’s PREFID cookies to identify and track computers on the Internet. So what is a PREFID cookie and how does it work?

When you sign in to any Google service (such as Google mail), Google knows who you are. They assign your browser a PREFID cookie. This cookie reveals your identity to any site on the Internet that references the cookie and wants to track you. This tracking is not anonymous. Google knows who you are, and there is nothing to stop them from sharing your information.

How much does Google know about you? What did you tell them when you signed up for Google mail? You probably also gave them your cell phone number, right? In addition to the personal information you’ve given Google when you filled out their sign-up forms, Google has tracked you and captured and stored your Internet browsing history, which they have mapped to your real name and real identity. The Snowden leak does not reveal whether Google shares its identifying information with the NSA, but we’d be fools not to assume that they do.

It shocks me sometimes how revelations like this don’t disturb a lot of people. I think the assumption is that, because they’re doing nothing wrong or illegal, all this tracking doesn’t matter. But remember, this information is saved in Google’s (and the NSA’s) vast databases. Like a credit history, it will be used against you for years, perhaps for your entire life. When this secret information about you is sold or shared, you won’t know about it. Unlike credit histories, there are no laws that permit you to know what information about you is kept in these databases or that would permit you to challenge errors. There is nothing from stopping a company like Google from selling this information about you to anyone who wants it — a potential employer, for example, or to private investigators. If you’re ever involved in a lawsuit or a legal scrape, you can be sure that they’ll check your Internet history.

So what can you do? Don’t use Google mail! Don’t use Yahoo mail either. If you insist on using any of Google’s or Yahoo’s services that require you to sign in, then don’t stay signed in, and work out a means of keeping your cookies cleared. One solution, if you insist on using Google mail, would be to have two browsers on your computer. Use Firefox, say, for email only. Use a second browser, Chrome maybe, for all your browsing, and don’t sign in anywhere in this browser. Load up Chrome with all the essential privacy extensions — Ghostery, DoNotTrackMe, Flashblock, Referer Control, Facebook Disconnect, AdBlock, etc. Yes, some of these extensions will make your browser less convenient, but that’s the cost of greater privacy and security.

It’s ironic that Google Chrome, as far as I can determine at present, can be configured as the most secure browser. This is not a Google virtue, it’s that there are a lot of good privacy extensions available for Chrome. Here’s a DuckDuckGo link to get you started.

Vole control: the fire

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A vole flees the fire in the wildflower patch.

There were two voles hiding under the brush pile when Ken lit it on fire. As soon as they perceived what was going on, they ran to another brush pile a few feet away that was waiting to be burned.

“Poor things,” said Ken. But we burned the brush in the wildflower patches anyway. The voles fled toward the garden when the last brush pile was thrown onto the fire. I would have preferred that they’d gone to the woods.

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Vole control

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A vole runway

Ken said that, when he was pulling up dead stalks from one of the wildflower patches yesterday, a vole sat and looked at him for a while, as though to say, “What are you doing to my neighborhood?”

Of all the many little creatures that live around (and off of) the abbey, the voles are the least welcome. They do a lot of damage in the garden. Their population can jump incredibly fast if the livin’ is easy. They’re verminy, though they’re also cute in a mousy sort of way. Their other name is “meadow mouse.” But somehow calling them by the more charming name of meadow mouse would make it harder to destroy their neighborhoods.

It was an extremely wet summer, which meant a lot of brush growth. The voles love that, because it provides them with cover. Ken has been clearing the area around the garden, and the voles don’t like it at all. You can trace their runways from the chicken house to the pump house, from the garden to the wildflower patches, from the wildflower patches to the grove of trees in front of the house, and from the grove to the day lily patch. They’re furtive little things, and though we see them often they’re hard to photograph.

As far as I’m concerned, they can make themselves a new runway from the garden all the way back to the rabbit thicket and the woods, where they’d be welcome if they’d stay there. I just hope that no one ever writes a Watership Down that’s about voles rather than rabbits. That would make it much more difficult to burn out their neighborhoods and turn them into little refugees.

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The voles are not happy about this. It will be burned.

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Ken clears wildflower brush.

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It was a warm day, so Lily watched the proceedings from an open window.

Keeping an eye on the FCC

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President Roosevelt prepares for a fireside chat.

A couple of days ago, I posted an item on the importance of keeping an eye on the FCC. The item was focused on the future of over-the-air television, which may not affect your world very much. Still, we all need to keep an eye on the FCC, because decisions made by the FCC are critical to the future of the media, the future of the Internet, the choices we have, and what we pay.

A friend of mine who teaches communications law commented on that post. So that his information doesn’t get lost in a comment, I’m reposting it here.

The libertarians’ absolutist argument against regulation in the communications sector is silly on three particularly ironic points:

1) We already have a largely unregulated system thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which loosened or erased many longstanding rules, particularly those guarding against monopoly ownership. Among other things, the Act led to an almost overnight consolidation of the radio industry whereby a company like Clear Channel could grow from 60 to 1,200 stations in 18 months. The first order of business in that nationwide takeover was the elimination or decimation of local news staffing at all of those stations.

2) The media and telecom giants, from Time-Warner Cable to Disney, long ago captured the regulatory agencies, along with Congress and state legislatures, and openly and brazenly manipulate the rules they are supposed to live by. Furthermore, the FCC often doesn’t even enforce its own rules, making them meaningless. Just one example here: The FCC has allowed Rupert Murdoch to get around the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban by granting him a waiver year after year; thus, he can control newspapers, television stations and radio stations all in the same market (New York, for one).

3) Media companies WANT there to be rules because the rules help them operate in a necessarily structured and predictable environment, and because, more often than not these days, the rules favor their interests against those of the public. The ban on municipal broadband in North Carolina is a prime example, but industry-friendly — indeed, industry-written — rules stretch to the FCC and the Justice Department, which, for example, is sure to rubber-stamp a merger between Comcast and Time-Warner Cable if the two companies decide to go ahead with it. It would create a monopoly that would control the television and Internet services of about 50 percent of the American population.

There are other reasons that the libertarian dream of a no-rules-at-all utopia is stupid, but those three suffice. I suppose the fundamental point to make is that their position is ahistorical. It is detached from both the technical and legal history of the communications sector. When the federal government first started regulating radio in 1927, it was because the radio owners themselves were screaming FOR regulation — someone to police the wild, wild west of their new industry and sort out the chaos of too many stations chasing too few frequencies. Regulating the technical aspects of radio was at the center of the FCC’s mandate when it was created by the Communications Act of 1934, and it remains a vital part of the agency’s mission today.

An example particular to Acorn Abbey: The only way there will ever be high-speed Internet service in such a rural locale will be through the use of so-called “super wifi,” which harnesses unused “white space” on the “gold-plated spectrum” that television stations enjoy. It can travel for miles and penetrate buildings just like a TV signal. There are even experiments under way to see if television transmitters can be altered so that they also can transmit Internet traffic. It would solve the rural broadband build-out problem overnight because the infrastructure is already in place.

Of course, the same companies that routinely decry regulation of any kind, the likes of Comcast and Time-Warner, will do anything they can to manipulate the rules to prevent the above scenario from happening. And they will try to manipulate the rules at the federal, state and county levels to stop any new efforts to break their monopoly control. And once again, the problem will not be that we have regulations. The problem will be that we have regulations written to benefit the regulated, not us.

For background on the Radio Act of 1927:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Act_of_1927#The_Radio_Act_of_1927

For background on the Communication Act of 1934:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_act_of_1934

For background on the Telecommunications Act of 1996:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

Sousveillance?

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Source: Stephanie Mann, age 6, via Wikipedia

Periodically I check out the web site of David Brin, a science fiction writer and futurist, to see what’s on his mind. Brin is the author of the brilliant and classic Startide Rising (1983), which won both the Nebula and Hugo awards the year it was published. But, smart as Brin is, I find that I usually disagree with him. This is because I put him in the unpleasant category of techno-utopians — people who think that technology will solve all our problems, including our energy problems and even our political problems. I think that is bunk, and dangerous bunk.

Brin had linked to a piece he wrote in “The European” in which he argues that the solution to growing surveillance and invasion of privacy is “sousveillance.” The word “sousveillance” is a made-up word and is the opposite of surveillance. It means spying up at elites the same way they spy down on us. The prefix “sur” of course comes from a French word meaning over, or above; and “sous” is another French word meaning under, or beneath.

This notion that sousveillance is an effective antidote to surveillance seems to me to be so obviously silly that I’m inclined to think that the techno-utopians are even more deluded than I had thought. Just give everyone a Google glass and we’ll fix the world’s surveillance problem!

First of all, there is a straw man fallacy: “… [F]or the illusory fantasy of absolute privacy has to come to an end.” Who said anything about absolute privacy? There has never been such a thing as absolute privacy in American society or American law. The law and the Constitution are almost silent on the issue of privacy. But there have been lots of lawsuits having to do with privacy, and as far as the courts are concerned the issue is pretty settled.

But the second and biggest point of silliness is the notion that we small people have the same power to spy on elites that they have to spy on us. Yes, sometimes it happens. The photo of the cop pepper-spraying a group of already restrained protesters held our national attention for weeks. That was a fine example of sousveillance — someone had a camera ready at the right time. Another brilliant lick of sousveillance was when a waiter (or someone) at a Romney fund-raising event for rich people secretly made a tape of Romney trashing 47 percent of the American people as “takers.” It helped expose Romney as a servant of the rich, and it helped him lose the election.

Edward Snowden’s spying on the spies, then releasing the evidence to the media and to Wikileaks, is the all-time best example of sousveillance. Because of the actions of one very clever nerd, the elites caught red-handed are still squawking and trying to lie their way out it. We got some very useful information on how elites’ surveillance systems operate, though that information will soon enough be obsolete.

But as brilliant as these coups of sousveillance were, such things are always going to be rare and accidental. That is because elites have systems for secrecy that we little people will never have. They are rich, they are ruthless, and they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars (most of it our own tax money) to build walls of secrecy around themselves while monitoring everything we do. The idea that the little cameras in our phones, or built into our glasses, can fix this is seriously dumb. Nevertheless, we need to always keep our cameras handy, and we must be creative in coming up with new ways to spy on elites.

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Dumb cop: Nailed by the camera!

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Dumb politician: Nailed by the camera!