ARTS & FARCES internet

Sensing a definite shift in the winds, the Bush administration has agreed to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court jurisdiction of its controversial domestic wiretapping program. Just like the law demands. Instead of undertaking warrantless wiretaps as it has since 2001, the Bush administration will now seek expedited warrants from the FISA Court.

Nonetheless, the newly Democratic Congress will continue several investigations of overreaching authority by the Bush administration.

Confusion among legislators over the move abounds, apparently, as Eric Lichtblau and David Johnston report for the New York Times:

But senior lawmakers said they were still uncertain Wednesday, even after the administration’s announcement, about how the court would go about approving warrants, how targets would be identified, and whether that process would differ from the court’s practices since 1978.

At least one representative, Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) believes the new approach by the Bush administration amounts to a “blanket, ‘programmatic’ approval of the president’s surveillance program, rather than approval of individual warrants.”

Wilson told Lichtblau and Johnston the Bush administration has “convinced a single judge in a secret session, in a nonadversarial session, to issue a court order to cover the president’s terrorism surveillance program.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about cycles lately. As I grow older I’m much more aware of the natural rhythms of nature and my body. I’m also acutely aware of the cyclical nature of my kidney disease—phosphorous levels and my general state of health cycle up and down on a regular, rhythmic basis. Working as an editor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design I’m immersed in the iterative and cyclical nature of design work on a daily basis.

There are rhythms and cycles in everything. Even technology; especially technology. But technology’s cycles are unnatural and sustained solely by mistaken commercial interests. I used to buy a new laptop every year, but no longer. I jumped off that particular treadmill five or so years ago for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the wastefulness of the cycle. I’m on the third year of an IBM ThinkPad T42p. It’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned, although the Mac 180c runs a close second. So I’ve started thinking about a new computer.

The MacBook Pros are especially appealing especially given the fact that because they can run Windows and Linux it can replace two, maybe three, computers. But the closed nature of Apple’s iPhone and the company’s general arrogance annoys the living daylights out of me. It’s why I switched to Sony and now IBM laptops to begin with.

But then there’s University of Auckland (New Zealand) security analyst and “professional paranoid” Peter Gutmann’s “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection”, an analysis that equates the Vista Content Protection specification with the “longest suicide note in history.” This has been written about extensively; Karel Donk and Corey Doctorow have, by far, the best assessments. I especially like Doctorow’s nutshell overview of how Vista restricts the use of high-definition video:

The independent book publishing world just got a whole lot smaller. Advanced Marketing Services, owner of Publishers Group West—the largest indie book distributor—has filed for bankruptcy protection.

This happened over New Year’s weekend and I initially didn’t pay it much attention because I didn’t know that Advanced Marketing Services—known mostly as the exclusive book distributor for wholesale clubs like Costco and Sam’s Club—purchased Publishers Group West in 2002. Advanced Marketing Services has been having financial problems since an accounting scandal in 2003 that resulted in three of its executives being convicted of fraud.

In its bankruptcy filing, the company reported “more than US$200 million in debt to dozens of publishing companies,” according to Julie Bosman’s New York Times report.

For indie publishers working with Publishers Group West—and that means almost all of them—this is a potentially fatal blow. The assets due publishers, but now held by the court, are for sales for the September - December period—the most profitable period of the year. Small independent publishers count on this calendar period for up to a third of their annual sales. Media Bistro reports the court “had approved payments to publishers for books that shipped or will ship on or after December 29” and that Publishers Group West would remit payment “on a weekly basis for the time being.”

Not surprisingly, the best—and most complete—coverage of the issue is by a weblogger. Kathryn Cramer has some skin in this particular game and wonders out loud why publishers—including hers—were dealing with Advanced Marketing Services to begin with. After all, as an outcome of the 2003 accounting scandal, the vice president of advertising was sentenced to three years in prison for her role in falsifying earnings, a salient fact that managed to elude the mainstream news outlets.

These are not the best times to be a permanent kidney failure patient. Sometimes it seems like we’ve come a long way in the past 30-odd years when death squads decided which patients were deserving of dialysis (and would live) and which were sent home with a handful of morphine to die in a narcotic stupor. But then a wave of news comes along to indicate that we’re not that much further along after all.

Consider Kaiser Permanente’s San Francisco Medical Center. It was criticized by the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network for mismanagement of its transplant program. The Medical Center, according to the network, “effectively denied patient access to kidney transplantation and threatened safety for patients on its waiting list.” Last May the Medical Center announced it would close down its transplant program “following accusations that patients’ lives were endangered by botched paperwork and administrative errors.”

Meanwhile New York was found to have the worst dialysis patient outcomes in the US according to government records. New York’s dialysis market is dominated by small providers, “many of them run by people with little background in medicine who entered the business to meet the surging demand,” according to Richard Perez-Pena writing in the New York Times:

“Newly released patient data show that people who receive their dialysis from a national chain generally fare better than those treated by an independent provider.”

New York, in a well-meaning initiative with unintended consequences, prohibits publicly traded corporations from owning health care facilities.

Wired editor Chris Anderson has publicly released a first draft of where he thinks publishing is headed. Although specific to the monthly magazine form, Anderson’s principles can be applied to any publishing format—magazines, books, websites—you name it, the ideas are worthy of any editor’s consideration. Anderson’s key concepts are expressed as six tactics:

1. Show who we are;
2. Show what we’re working on;
3. Process as content;
4. Privilege the crowd;
5. Let readers decide what’s best
6. Wikifiy everything

Radical indeed. But Anderson hedges his bets—intelligently, one presumes—by admitting the seriousness of the consequences of his being wrong. His strategy is to advocate taking little steps. Small failures won’t bring everything crashing about his ears, and small successes can be scaled quickly across Wired‘s media properties.

In a follow-up to initial criticism, Anderson acknowledges that the kind of open source journalism he’s advocating will only work in “big” thesis-driven stories. Most of what Wired publishes is either too short or too voice-driven to work with this methodology.

It’s going to be interesting to watch as Wired begins its experiments with this open source approach to publishing. It’s going to be more interesting to see who in the publishing community is intelligent and ballsy enough to start trying to swim with this particular current, rather than against it.