Danny O'B @mala@mastodon.social

The Security Education team is doing their regular review-and-update to https://sec.eff.org/ -- I like this explanation of why "Use Tor; use Signal" ends up being a inexact but relevant shorthand piece of advice. https://sec.eff.org/articles/minimum-viable-teaching

"The power of the Internet historically arose from its edges: innovation, growth, and freedom came from its users and their contributions, rather than from some centrally controlled core of overseers. But today, for an increasing number of users, there is a powerful center to the net—and a potentially uncompetitive and unrepresentative center at that." -- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/competition-civil-liberties-and-internet-giants

Most useful thing I've discovered recently: if you need to transfer some text from #Linux to your phone, you can use https://github.com/gtanner/qrcode-terminal and "xclip -o | qrcode-terminal" to output the clipboard as a QR code, and then use the iphone/android camera app to snag it.

Had a huddled conversation in the European Parliament with a colleague after the JURI vote trying to work out what #article13 would mean for federated/decentralized services like #mastodon and #ipfs . We’ll need to see the final text which may not be available until next week.

So I've managed to finagle a pass to the European Parliament vote on #article11 and #article13 tomorrow, and with some luck, I will be livetweeting it for EFF. It'll be at 10:30AM CET at @EFFlive@twitter.com. I'm sorry I didn't set up a Mastodon feed, but it's 3AM here now, and I've been kind of busy 😴

Pharmaceutical patents are such a freaking mess, and the consequences are always explicitly about preventing sick people getting medicine.

I really admire Jamie Love, Burcu Cilic of Public Citizen and Ancella Santos Quintano of Health Action International who keep fighting for the pubic interest in this area (and to whom I'm listening to right now).

I like hearing about IP stuff outside the stuff I'm achingly familiar with, because it's always just as completely batshit crazy, but you get that nice hit of naive amused shock when you hear about it for the first time.

TIL that Pfizers's #patent on the underlying active ingredient in Lyrica expired, so they patented a new one for the same ingredient when used to combat pain, then got mad when doctors prescribed the generic, instead of *their* identical, patented drug. https://www.internationallawoffice.com/Newsletters/Healthcare-Life-Sciences/Denmark/Accura-Advokatpartnerselskab/Dispensing-generic-drug-infringes-second-medical-use-patent

I know most of the debate on #Article13 and #Article11 has been on a pretty abstract level in the past few days, but if you want a deeper analysis of where we are, and how we got here, Julia Reda's interview today is great: http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2018/06/18/julia-reda-discusses-current-proposal-directive-copyright-digital-single-market/

(Actually I am here today for the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue http://tacd.org/ which is one of the consumer rights alliances that does all the heavy-lifting in the background, and doesn't get as many headlines as it should)

My main observation so far: WiFi hotspots in Belgium mostly adopt the ALLCAPSNOSPACES convention

I'm in Brussels for the #Article13/#Article11 vote and it's always interested to see how my social media reading shifts with the timezone change. Hello people from Europe, I missed you.

If it works, it will be a profound test of the Robin Hanson/Nick Szabo/etc worldview, both in whether it produces useful results, and whether the consequences will be just too ethically weird for anyone who doesn’t buy into the underlying ideology or directly benefits to accept. Maybe it’ll just fizzle, but if it doesn’t? All bets are off. Or rather, all bets are on.

Augur seems a hugely ambitious project and I really don’t know if they can pull it off — I put a 80% chance on them missing a way it can be gamed, or just being sunk by an implemention flaw in the contracts or In Ethereum, or it just being too slow and unwieldy to use. But I think that they know that, and are trying very hard to avoid the pitfalls. They’re crazy to even try it, but not deluded about the extent of the challenge.

Augur, an attempt to build a decentralized prediction market on Ethereum launches on July 9th. For me, if it works, it will be one of the last pieces of the 90s Cypherpunk gameplan to go live — and that’s pretty scary, because this is the one that *even people in that community* conceded might be too much power to give to everyone in the world, willy-nilly.

Things got very real when Jim Bell wrote Assassination Politics and ended up in jail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell

Be humble in what you convey, compassionate in what you perceive

warning: by the time your password reset email has arrived, i have forgotten why i was even trying to log in to your site