parker higgins

I’m a sucker for stories that are tied to places I know. When I first read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, I was only glancingly familiar with most of the Bay Area settings for the different scenes. Now I spend time every day in the Mission, where most of the action takes place, and have a much better feel for the character of the location.

It’s hard to ignore successes in middleman elimination like Radiohead’s In Rainbows, NiN’s Ghosts I-IV, Louis C.K.’s Shameless and the Double Fine Adventure. But they’re not immune to criticism either. Sure, it works for them — the argument goes — but they’re already famous. And the legacy players have always served (at least) two roles; while the Internet may beat them for distribution, it’s not as good for discovery.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Paul Carr’s accusation of hypocrisy within the tech community for opposing bad copyright legislation and then also speaking out against plagiarism. His take was wrong, but it wasn’t unusual; it’s all too common for supporters of wrongheaded copyright legislation (like SOPA, PIPA and two decades of more successful proposals) to settle on a characterization of their opponents and then cry foul when those characterizations are not consistent with reality. It’s an example of confirmation bias: favoring information that supports a hypothesis and discarding (or dismissing as hypocritical) information that doesn’t.

I recently re-installed Ubuntu on my home computer, and wanted to move my office Mac’s Adium OTR key and collected fingerprints over to the new install. I had some trouble, but got it eventually, so I wanted to document the process.

Twitter made some waves this week when it announced a new feature — granular country-by-country censorship of Tweets. It was probably a tactical misstep to make this announcement in the wake of the anti-SOPA blackout protests, and initial reactions ran accordingly hot, but cooler heads have since, for the most part, prevailed. The reality is that Twitter has “boots on the ground” in a number of countries that have different speech laws than we do, and as long as it must comply with those laws to avoid endangering its employees, the best course is to make that compliance as transparent and non-disruptive as possible. Local blocks are better for the greater Twitter ecosystem, and direct attention to the bad laws that deserve the blame.

There is so much aggressively wrong with Paul Carr’s recent “Angry Nerds” piece that it is hard to know where to begin. To summarize: Carr is shocked to see that the very same tech community who rallied against SOPA and PIPA is now rallying behind 37 Signals in a case involving blatant design plagiarism — down to hotlinked images — by another start-up named Curebit.

This online blackouts last week were not only the largest in recent history, but in a narrow sense, they might be the most effective ever. Imagine: online protests and the resulting media coverage and legislator calls led to the shelving of two “sure thing” bills over the course of two days.

This week I purchased a new cell phone. I’ve been using my current phone, an HTC Desire Z (dubbed the G2 by T-Mobile in the US), for a little over a year and it’s time for an upgrade.

Over on his blog, John Lilly provides the best sort of analysis of the SOPA conversation — reasonable and measured. The problem with the “dialogue” so far, he says, is that (1) it has basically consisted of each side calling the other names, (2) which isn’t going to help now, and (3) will set a bad precedent for making new tech policy.

The first week of the new year: time to make resolutions about the sort of person you want to be, and the sorts of behaviors you want to have. Go to the gym, blog more, that sort of thing.