In 2005 we were shocked, I repeat: shocked, to find out from the EFF that color laser printers have built-in software to uniquely identify themselves. Each and every page you print has tiny yellow dots (looking remarkably like urine spray!) in a particular pattern that rats out the printer it was made on. Is this is the “mark of the beast” that Revelation 13:16-17 warns us about? Or some nefarious plot to prevent government whistleblowers from being able to anonymously point out injustices? A way to build evidence against journalists or civil rights groups?

Later, we learned that consumers who called their printer company to enquire about this privacy violation were being visited by Secret Service agents. The printer companies have apparently capitulated to “friendly requests” by the government to install this fingerprinting system. Because the technology change was instituted by covert government pressure rather than by law, we have no idea of how or why the government is using (or abusing) this information. There are no laws to say that the US government couldn’t use this information for inappropriate search and seizure. Moreover, since when would wondering about an undocumented product feature warrant a visit by the police?

Mako Hill, one of the members of my group, had the idea of starting an action to get everyone who is concerned about this to call their printer manufacturer and ask them why they installed this system, and how to turn it off. After all, the Secret Service can’t visit everyone! And perhaps the printer companies will even realize that unofficial, extralegal surveillance isn’t a feature that consumers want.

Help us let electronics manufacturers and the secret service know that we’re watching them watch us! Just be sure to clean up your living room and have some cookies on hand… you may well be having visitors.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Friends and collaborators at the Fabrica de Cosas Bonitas successfully deployed their ANA robot at the G8 summit. They used a version of a design we’ve been working on for a small, inexpensive, and relatively easy to build robot for protest and progressive political actions: designs will be available on this site by the end of July. Julio Fernandez Ostolaza built and programmed the version pictured above, and the mission was successful. One more step in our shared mission of allowing robots to move from military employment to non-violence. Congrats, Cosas Bonitas.

So now the Bush folks are saying that they want to keep US troops in Iraq for as long as they’ve stayed in Korea. Sort of the opposite of what they said at the beginning. How’s that working out?

Ah, the ongoing effort to produce a robot version of Fabio. Godspeed, researchers.

We’ve been here so many times before, like when the US government and a willing public inflamed by yellow journalists took the opportunity to invade the Phillipines and take over Cuba and Puerto Rico. Ah, Rico: What do you do with a colony that still doesn’t have the right to vote? Oh right, use it for target practice.

Then, as now, some smart cultural critics saw past the fluttering flags and yellow ribbons. Mark Twain objected to making war with Spain and wrote, but did not publish, this dissenting narrative. Not coincidentally, he sets his story in a church, where the pastor is praying to preserve our boys, make our arms strong, and give us fortune in war. An angelic figure gate crashes, explaining to the parishioners that there are two sides to this type of prayer, and tells them the other side:

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”

Mark Twain, 1904-1905.

Full story here.

Oddly, Mako Hill and Alyssa Wright, two computing culturists, have won a grant from MTV to continue developing Selectricity, Mako’s experiment in technologies for quotidian democracy.

Mako’s experiences with collaborative decision making in the open source community led him to develop rubyvote, a library that offers relatively simple interfaces to computationally complex voting methods, including preferential methods. Preferential voting allows for a bit of that John Stuart Mill magic: The greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Mill was apparently the first member of the British Parliament to call for women’s vote, incidentally, so not bad (mixed) company.

Mako demonstrated rubyvote’s principles by hacking out Selectriciy, a minimal example application. One can create a vote in about 25 seconds, then vote in about 10. There’s an SMS interface, and scalable security if necessary. The target user is not a nation voting, but rather a few people deciding where to go for dinner after a movie. You know what it’s like: You’ve just stumbled out of Cheeni Kum on a monsoon night and you’re trying to figure out where to get snacks. It can take an hour, what about here? why not there? and eventually people just give up and settle, uncomfortably, for Barista. You can do better.

One of the big arguments against preferential voting, or new voting technologies, is the fear that they would disenfranchise the average person who doesn’t yet understand how they work. Certainly, making all voting technologies open source is critical, but the issue of familiarity is worth considering. We’re hoping that MTV — and eventually American Idol — will move their voting over to Selectricity, allowing it to work as both a technical tool but also pedagogically, training future voters. Why not integrate democratic processes into all your software and communications tools? Why not use the best democratic processes available, so long as they’re available to everyone?

I’ve been working forever on a project that involves the quote Minutemen unquote, the group of anti-immigrant vigilantes and political agitators. They’ve managed, with Lou Dobbs and Tom Tancredo, to transform immigration issues in the US from bad to worse. I did a research trip to Las Vegas a couple of years ago to attend one of their conferences, titled “Wake Up America.” It was as interesting as it was pathetic. In a cool convention hall a few miles off the strip, speaker after speaker warned of the disease, poverty, and lack of purity that would come from Mexican, Central, and South American immigrants. Every once in a while, when a speaker (like Tancredo) was trying to motivate the audience, they would yell something like “We’re being invaded by Aztlan! What are we going to do about?” The audience would spontaneously start to chant: “Second Amendment! Second Amendment!” Ah, nothing like a hall full of racists advocating murder.

Perhaps the most vitriolic speaker was an AM radio host named Terry Anderson, who was advocating mass deportations. I’m paraphrasing him here, but I think I have it archived on tape: “A lot of people say ‘How are we ever going to deport them all? How would we find them.’ To which I [Terry Anderson] reply we’ll find them in the preschools, where they’re using our tax dollars to educate their kids. We’ll find them in the restaurants and hotels! We’ll find them in the hospitals and roll them away with the drip tubes still hangin’ out of their arms!” The crowd went wild. I mean wild in the sense of savage, uncivilized, lacking humanity.

Another big theme, more or less obviously mixed with arguments that advocated eugenics, was the abhorence of what they call “anchor babies.” When immigrants have babies (how _dare_ they!) born in the US, these babies are citizens by birthright, and ostensibly guarantee the security of their parents. This isn’t always the case, as recent ICE raids in Massachusetts have shown. It seems that every life is precious to this crowd, as long as it’s born to English speaking, pale parents.

So I was pretty excited when I saw this video. It must give the Terry Andersons of the US chills and palpitations. I mean, look at the two sides of the street and tell me: Who looks stronger? In ten years, who will look 100 times stronger? Que fuerte:

Leah Buechley just gave a talk at the Lab, and her work is indeed remarkable. She showed her newest fabric/electronic system, in which she laser cuts a circuit board out of conductive cloth and turns it into a washable, easily-interfaced miniature cloth computer. Here are two photos, one of the circuit board before the chips are soldered to it, the other of the finished product. Cute as, dare I say it? a button.  And 8 million instructions per second.

Nadia E and other kth students took me out to some typical Swedish nightlife and lo, it turned out to be some kind of dope J Dilla memorial in the heart of Scandinavia. Very, very slick dj, able to keep the shuffling, funky undead handsome corpse that is Dilla reanimated. Serendipity.