Another sad milestone

Bradley Manning says sorry "for hurting his country". Psychologists confirm he's a four-star fruitcake with a troubled childhood, mild autism, and most damning of all, gender-identity issues. Photos emerge of Manning dressed as a woman. Nobody seems to be asking precisely where the photos came from, or who gave them to the press.

Thus ends the first high-profile American show trial in my memory, although surely not the last. And the United States confirms its intention to follow the legacy of Stalin rather than Washington. It's already got the secret police, secret courts, secret laws, state spying apparatus, restrictions on free movement and speech, automatic arrest of all foreigners upon arrival in the country, an effective one-party system (dressed up as two parties, but so managed that the differences between them are meaningless, and all candidates are effectively vetted by the same political and commercial interests) - and a legal structure that considers "hounding a suspect to suicide" as a win.

All that was really missing was the show trials, where enemies of the state would be thoroughly discredited and smeared before expressing public contrition and repentance and begging their betters for a chance to reform. Now Manning has delivered us all of that.

It's still possible for America to come back. It recovered from the Civil War, it got over McCarthyism - in theory there's no reason why it can't recover again. If only it would try.

A call to arms

I've been using the "frontier" metaphor to describe the encroachment of "intellectual property" into the realms of, basically, all human intellectual activity. Land grabs, gold rushes, robber barons, absentee landlords, bandits, battles and casualties - it has all of these. It even has the US cavalry, in the form of patent courts.

Now I'm privileged, and delighted, to be able to see, in detail, how a frontier skirmish can play out.

Joel Spolsky has rated highly in my list of personal heroes for about as long as I've been involved in the sordid world of commercial software. He's a man of many right-thinking opinions, strongly held and defended with an articulation that I can only envy. Among these is the opinion that, of the 40,000 US software patents granted every year, approximately - in round numbers - 40,000 reflect a level of innovation that "any first-year student learning Java should be able to do as a homework assignment in two hours", and should be rejected out of hand if only the patent office had access to a few relevant subject-matter-experts.

Being a great proponent of "getting things done", Joel set up a website to create precisely that access. And now he advocates swatting bad patents one by one.

40,000 a year. That's more than 100 a day.

Joel illustrates how you can demolish a particularly crap patent in just 15 minutes of work. I think that's optimistic, for a variety of reasons. And AskPatents is not that heavily trafficked, and a lot of the threads it does have are non-specific queries that are only marginally better than spam. It's a good start, but I don't think it'll scale.

But if you want to make a difference - stick your finger in the dyke, ignoring for a moment the other 39,998 holes all around you - get on over there now. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

Giving prostitutes a bad name

Good news from the homeland, for a change: it looks as if the government may be forced to recant on the madness of privatising the handling of prisoners.

It's telling, I think, that when I was a kid, if someone used the phrase "the prison service", they'd mean "service" as in "to one's country" - like military service, or - no, actually that's the only example I can think of where the meaning of the word is still reasonably close to what it was pre-Thatcher. Nowadays, it means "service" as in "service industry", as in "we may not create any actual output but we're no less commercial for that". Or to put it another way, "our business is modelled on the proud tradition of the world's oldest profession".

I was a firm believer in privatisation in the 80s. Unquestionably it was the right thing to do with manufacturing and mining industries, and with real services (defined as "things that I can be billed for personally, like telecoms or banking or travel"). But some "services" have a fundamentally different character. Policing, prisons, poor relief, public health, justice, fire and medical services, even politicians - these are "public services" that need to be paid for collectively, because any other system lends itself either to gross inequity, or the worst sort of corruption.

Of course corruption happens in non-privatised services too. However, it seems to me that it happens more, since the word "service" got divorced from "public" and shacked up with that slut "industry". That may be just a perception based on reporting/exposure, but if so it's a very widely shared perception.

The difference is that a service that is "public" can, in principle, be cleaned up. Given sufficient political will (read: outrage or scandal), you can appoint a new chief with the skills and determination to root out this sort of abuse. It doesn't happen often, and when it does, it doesn't generally last all that long.

But in a "service industry", the very concept of such "cleaning" makes no sense. When all incentives, both benefits and penalties, are expressed in terms of money, it follows that anything you can do to get more money is, by definition, not wrong. In these cases, moral bankruptcy isn't a failure or a collapse of anything - it's the baseline assumption of the system.

Can we?

I feel for Edward Snowden. I've been stuck in Sheremetyevo Airport too. I remember a sign (in English), on one door, that just about summed the place up: "NO TOILETS. NO REFRESHMENTS. NO INFORMATION. NO FLIGHTS."

What's truly shocking is how, although millions of people hail the man as a hero, the world's governments have closed ranks against him. Several governments in Europe could buy instant re-election right now just by offering him asylum - but none are. Russia said "you'd have to stop leaking". France and Portugal went so far as to deny landing rights to a plane carrying the president of Bolivia, on the basis that Snowden might have been on board. Even Ecuador and Venezuela have said "you'll have to get to our embassy first".

And the chances of that seem slim, since the Russians won't let him out of the airport.

So this is the New American Century, where no half-way civilised country dares stand up to the USA. In the old Soviet Union, at least a dissident could dream they had somewhere to run to. Now that little window of hope is closed. If you offend the USA - not with violence, or sedition, or treason (the indictment against Snowden lists none of these charges), but just with public embarrassment - there is nowhere. This can only be a measure of how much pressure the Americans are putting on - well, everyone.

Anyone remember Barack Obama's 2008 campaign? "Nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change", he said. "Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity." Above all else, he was the candidate who would stand up to entrenched interests in Washington and do what was right.

And this is as simple a test case as it can be. One of the few things that's unambiguously, easily and directly within his personal power - is to grant Snowden a full pardon. He doesn't need congressional ratification, he doesn't need the joint chiefs or the supreme court or even his own legal or intelligence advisors. He doesn't even need to implicate his own party, or anyone who might have ambitions to succeed him. The choice is his, and his alone.

So come on, Barack. Now's the time. You can continue to shield the establishment that has flouted your laws, or you can shield the man who tried to stop it - the man who tried to live up to your rhetoric. Is the US government going to be ruled by laws, or is it just an imperial tyranny?

That's quite a choice for your second-term legacy. Please get it right.

"Don't be evil"? Yeah, about that...

OK, so moderation as a way to deal with spam - has more drawbacks than I'd realised.

First, it means I have to log in regularly to see what's awaiting moderation. But at the same time, I don't get the joy of coming to my blog and seeing the number of comments below a post has increased - so I don't get the same joy of anticipation at visiting my own page, so I don't come here so often, and I actually log in less frequently.

Second, it does nothing to reduce the actual volume of spam that gets posted. All it means is that it doesn't get published. I still have to read the stuff.

That leaves - 'word verification'. Which, thanks to Google's incredibly backward system, I can't even apply selectively - it applies to every commenter, whether logged in or not.

When did Google abandon the fight against spam? And why? - what do they get out of encouraging spam on their own blogs? I've suspected for a while now that they tacitly encourage it in e-mail, as a way of driving more people to use Gmail (with its legendary spam-filtering mojo - basically, it makes life more difficult for their rivals). But on blogs?

Is it a way of increasing activity ("more comments, more views per post")? The Google I used to know - back in 2001, when I emailed them and they actually wrote back - would never have taken such a shortsighted view.

Someday, I hope someone will write a history of Google that can pinpoint the moment, the management decision, where they actively decided that "don't be evil" was a fine motto for a startup, but impractical for a big business. It's a lesson that might tell us something about what kinds of company structure we should encourage, and which we should hunt down with pitchforks and torches.

Spammers. Again.

Six comments! Six comments, at time of writing, on my last post!

And every single one of them was spam.

I can't begin to describe how much I loathe spammers. If you were to catch one, tie it spreadeagled in the sun, spread marmalade all over it and then drop a hornets' nest on its face, I would consider that a good start. These are the scum who wrecked Usenet, who ruined e-mail, who have forced search engines to adopt a war footing, and now have turned their attention to little personal blogs like this one.

But how can I stop them?

Captchas (those stupid wonky letters you have to type in, to prove you're a human) have past their window of usefulness. I often find myself stumbling over them, and I suspect that for particularly tough ones (such as Google's), computers may now be better at reading them than humans.

Moderation? That would require me to log in pretty much every day, to check for new comments. I would consider it pretty rude to leave comments hanging around for longer than necessary. And I'm a busy person, I don't have that kind of time nowadays.

Disable anonymous commenting? That would disqualify some of the people I most like to hear from, including most of my family.

Join Facebook? That would combine the disadvantages of having a non-public blog with the drawback of never hearing from my family again, to say nothing of the downside of having to log in regularly and the nuisance of giving untold insights on my life to one of the world's most evil companies.

The suggestion box is open. Even if you don't know what to do to keep spammers out, I'm always interested in innovative and painful ways of punishing them. Let your imagination go wild.

How many wrongs does it take to make a right?

These Americans are crazy.

President Obama has discovered a new way of fighting wars, at a fraction of the cost (in blood and money) of the usual methods. There's a lot of debate to be had about drone strikes, but of all the possible arguments they could be rehearsing, the huge majority of Americans seem to be locked into the silliest one imaginable: whether it's OK to use them on American citizens.

I went to the lengths of looking up the rights attached to US citizenship. Nowhere does it mention "the right not to be killed by the US military, if it considers it necessary or expedient to do so".

The law that stands between me and anyone who wants to kill me is the law against murder, in whatever country I happen to be in at the time. And in every country I know of, that law says nothing about the citizenship of the victim. Murdering an American is no more, and no less, illegal than murdering a Pakistani, or a Saudi, or a Briton, or even a Frenchman. Obama may be breaking Yemeni law by launching drone strikes into Yemen, but to argue that he's violating US law by aiming them at US citizens is just wrong, on at least two very fundamental levels: by applying US law to what happens in Yemen, and by differentiating between murder victims by citizenship.

Just to put things in perspective: Abraham Lincoln ordered the killing of hundreds of thousands of US citizens. On US soil, no less. History does not generally condemn him for that.

Of all the things that Obama is (arguably) doing wrong, this simply isn't one.