parker higgins

As with last year, I played a central role in putting together this year’s April Fools’ edition of the EFF newsletter. It’s hard writing things that are supposed to be funny.

It’s really great to read today’s Supreme Court decision in Kirtsaeng, in which a bad opinion could have had very profound and negative consequences way beyond the normal contours of copyright. I attended the oral arguments in October (during Hurricane Sandy!) and wrote it up for EFF. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the decision since then, and I’m not disappointed. Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from the decision:

Like many around the web, I was struck last month by the obituary of Bell Labs engineer John E. Karlin, whose greatest legacy may be the keypad design on traditional touch-tone phones. (That is, the arrangement in a 3×3 grid with the 1-2-3 across the top instead of the bottom.) I had long heard the urban legend explanation that the arrangement was deliberately designed to slow down a population trained to quickly enter strings of numbers on calculators and cash registers and prevent them from overwhelming the phone system. It’s nice to hear that not only was there deliberate thought behind it, but real behavioral research.

Last week I dug into some claims that struck me as bogus, claiming that the LAPD was flying drones to track Christopher Dorner through Southern California. It looks like my suspicions were correct. Lorenzo Francheschi-Bicchierai at Mashable posted a write-up just a few hours after mine, but since he’s a real journalist he called the CBP and checked with them: they stated that “CPB UAS are not flying in support of the search.”

If you’ve been on Twitter today, you’ve probably seen it promoted as fact that surveillance drones have been sent into operation over Los Angeles as part of the multi-state manhunt for former cop Christopher Dorner alleged to be on a killing spree. The worst articles imply that the drones are armed and the government has authorized Dorner’s death, using language that’s ambiguous to the point of being deceptive, which is almost certainly untrue. But a closer look at the articles raises another concern: all of the reports are citing a single article which is flawed at best, and at worst may even be fabricated. Are the police using a drone at all?

There’s recently been a lot of great writing on women and the problem of gender inequality in the tech field. I recommend these three pieces in particular:

Cory Doctorow is coming through town again, this time on his tour for Homeland, the sequel to his excellent young adult novel Little Brother. Cory likes to talk about how his fiction “predicts the present”: taking the bits of future that are already here, just not yet evenly distributed, and applying them more widely. It’s a neat trick that makes his sci-fi seem eerily prescient, and I know Little Brother has been boosted by supporters of Occupy who saw much of their story foretold in his writing.

I’ve identified a little gap in my support of open access publishing that I hope to remedy with this new practice. When I encounter a news article about a new study or paper, the first thing I do is look for the underlying paper. (It’s a good idea anyway, given the standard complaints about science journalism.) If the underlying paper is not available for at least public access, I’m not going to talk about it. As my friend Tom put it, “It’s not published until it’s open access. I’ll talk about it once it’s published.”

I’ve rewritten the introduction to the US Declaration of Independence using the “Up Goer Five” text editor that only allows the 1000 most commonly used words (inspired by this new classic XKCD comic). Here you go:

In the early 90s, the musician Prince dropped his name and started going by an unpronounceable symbol. He called it “The Love Symbol,” and it’s a combination of the traditional male (♂) and female (♀) symbols.