Dana Blankenhorn

SOPA, Speed and Recourse

Democracy won the Cold War because it could adapt more quickly to change than communism.

But it doesn't adapt as quickly as the Internet. No system of government can. (To the right, Hasbro's "Monopoly man" trademark.)

Markets can. Sort of. Markets have taken advantage of Internet technology to move very quickly in the Internet age. Too quickly. What has happened is an arms race, in which those with the best technology, the classiest algorithms, and the fastest executions skim the cream of every trend.

Pants on the Ground or The Politics of Sagging

This has been going on in my neighborhood for some years now, black (usually) teenagers walking around with their pants down below their hips and their underwear showing.

A lot of people are disgusted by it. Some even want to ban the practice. But recently I had a little thought experiment and reached a different conclusion.

 

The Richest Man in Town

The secret to true wealth lies in working for others, doing work you enjoy, making a difference to a community.

By that measure the richest man in Atlanta isn't Arthur Blank.

It's Pat Apoian (right) .

Detective Pat (as he's known) is an Atlanta Police officer who was injured last Friday while pulling a double-shift on behalf of the Kirkwood Security Patrol, a neighborhood group I belong to. He was called to a domestic disturbance a few blocks from my home, and was run over by (allegedly) a 29-year old named Khalif Edwards, who remains at large.

Bye-Bye Kirkwood Bar & Grill

You can learn a lot at a community meeting.

When last I wrote about my neighborhood of Kirkwood (a neighborhood in Atlanta) I was very worried that racial tensions were on the rise. I was worried that the black owner of a new business was getting a raw deal, and noted how I voted with him, feeling quite proud of myself.

Last night I attended the meeting of our local Neighborhood Planning Unit (NPU), the group whose recommendations are usually followed by the city in the granting of liquor licenses.

I learned a lot.

About 70 folks attended, almost half of them neighbors of the Kirkwood Bar & Grill, which opened a few months ago in a work-shop-residential development called Kirkwood Station. What they said was pretty shocking:

A Very Local Story in Kirkwood, Atlanta

Let's see just how powerful this blog technology thing is. I'm going to give local reporters in Atlanta, Georgia a beat on a story then watch to see if they fill in the details.

The story is about race in my neighborhood of Kirkwood.

The goal of white yuppies who began moving in over a decade ago was to have a quiet, single-family residential area with a cutesy little downtown where they could eat and shop.

They got their wish when Kirkwood Station opened a few years ago, replacing some abandoned storefronts reportedly owned by Hosea Williams himself with ground-floor shops under two-story condos and townhomes. (The main street through Kirkwood is called Hosea Williams Ave.)

The neighbors love Kirkwood Station, so much so that when a developer recently tried to redevelop the land behind it as senior housing, they rejected the application.

The anchor was a restaurant, originally called Vinocity, then the Kirkwood Public House. In both incarnations it was yuppie-friendly, with fine wines, table service, and community gatherings.

Both restaurants failed.

The Real Cybersecurity Problem is Identity

The White House has endorsed a draconian “cybersecurity” plan now making its way through Congress.

It would essentially say all your clicks belong to us. Police would have carte blanche to seize domains, decrypt files, and run roughshod over citizens in the name of catching bad guys who are hiding behind proxy servers in the Ukraine or some other such place.

All this would be unnecessary if so-called Internet advocates had accepted a very basic truth that our Meat Space ancestors knew well.

Privacy and security are the same thing. Both depend on identity.

Open Source Did Not Save Microsoft From U.S.

A lot of experts are weighing in on the end of the government's anti-trust case against Microsoft, many of them saying it was open source that stayed the government's hand.

I think they're wrong.

It was the case itself that stayed Microsoft's hand.

Anyone who hasn't been under antitrust scrutiny doesn't know what it's about. The launch of a case requires the hiring of all sorts of lawyers, both inside and outside the gates, whose job it becomes to look over the shoulders of the business and say "no."

No, you can't do that. No, you can't say that. No, you can't write that.

Before Accusing Anonymous, Sony, Some Proof Please

Sony's claim that the online advocacy group Anonymous hacked its Playstation 3 network, enabling the theft of personal data from millions of users, has been laughed away by the group.

For once we didn't do it, states a blog post at Anonops, which has in the past been a reliable port into the group's actual aims and claims.The post was linked from the Anonops Twitter feed, which also called Sony incompetent.

The charge by Sony, which is based in Japan but now run by an Australian, former CBS head Howard Stringer, is made under the signature of Kazuo Hirai, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sony Computer Entertainment America. In support of testimony to a U.S. House subcommittee, it states "We discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of our Sony Online Entertainment servers named “Anonymous” with the words 'We are Legion.'"

The only other bit of "evidence" Sony offered is that, so far, no credit card transactions have been consummated with any of the compromised data. Anonymous is known for attacks with political rather than financial motives.

Since the data theft on April 26, Sony has revealed that it didn't protect user passwords with encryption, only with a simple hash. 

Here's why I believe Anonymous didn't do it, but why it's in a world of trouble nevertheless:

Soft on Crime

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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For decades Republicans have bashed Democrats with the idea that they're “soft on crime.”

It worked. America now has a bigger percentage of its people in jail, or under the direct control of courts, than any other country. We execute more people than China (far more), and our police have many tools that violate the spirit, if not the actual language, of the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th and 8^th amendments.

(NOTE: The execution numbers actually favor China, although our incarceration rates are still highest on an absolute and per-capita basis.)

Despite what anyone in the media may tell you, street crime is down.  Total crimes peaked in 1991. They're now down by nearly a third, even though we have 70 million more people, even despite the terrible economy.

The War on Street Crime has been won.

But there has been a wave of much bigger crimes throughout our society. These are crimes conducted by business, often with just a pen. The economic crash of 2008 was caused by such crimes. Everyone suffered from it – except for the criminals.

The Investment Banking Bubble

Peter Thiel is an ass. 

Like Mark Cuban, who made his money selling a bogus proposition called Broadcast.com to Yahoo during the Internet bubble, Thiel is a guy who got lucky and thus thinks this makes him both a genius and your lord. (In his case he sold as the bubble popped, something I urged at A-Clue.com even before he did it.)

Thiel's latest nonsense is that higher education is the new bubble. Which is silly. Because American college education is the world's gold standard.

It costs billions to build just one Rice or Stanford. And you can't scale it. That's why the world's elite all has one goal for their kids – to get them through an American college. The French Ecoles, Britain's elite colleges, the trial-by-examination hotspots of Germany, China and India, none provide the opportunity even a Texas A&M in Kingsville does to a Third World elitist.

Now it's true there are anomalies. The education at Harvard isn't really better than that at Rice, not really much better than at the University of Texas. What sets it apart are the fact that admission tells someone they're smart, which is a continuing boost to self-confidence, and then there are the networking opportunities. The “Old Boys” network is real, America is not really a meritocracy.

Still, the value-for-money my son is getting at Georgia State University far exceeds what he would get at Rice right now, especially if he were paying full tuition (which admittedly hardly anyone does). A B.A., by itself, isn't worth what it was 35 years ago. Now it's just the price of admission. What matters isn't where you start but where you finish. The President didn't start at Harvard. He started at Occidental College in California.

If Peter Thiel wants to see a real bubble, of course, I got one for him.