Linkwad.

Honeymoon photos coming soon! Promise.

• I don’t know if I buy the “Internet is killing serendipity” argument, but this essay makes the case as well as any I’ve read.
• The history of the reeeeemiiiiiix.
• Just FYI: “Everyone else is just as bad” isn’t really a good defense, Internet commentariat.
• Obviously, the answer to “Why do we need SOPA?” is, “We don’t.”
• Pitchfork’s impact and history. For you lazy-ass TL;DR types: “A Pitchfork review may ignore history, aesthetics, or the basic technical aspects of tonal music, but it will almost never fail to include a detailed taxonomy of the current hype cycle and media environment. This is a small, petty way of thinking about a large art.”

No future (part 2).

At the risk of being hyperbolic¹, you should listen to this Titus Andronicus track while reading this Cory Doctorow essay:

As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship. This stuff matters because we’ve spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it’s just been an end-level guardian. The stakes are only going to get higher.
…
We haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

I think most people will remain blissfully² ignorant of this problem–every time Apple releases a new iOS device, people clamor to be allowed into their walled garden, and the piracy, copyright and patent wars³ rate similarly low on people’s priority lists. Which is an extremely long, link-heavy way of saying: “I am very pessimistic.”

Linkwad.

New year, old awfulness. Let’s get it.

• All together now, “Waaaaaaah!”
• I think this is a bit of false equivalence, as Iowa doesn’t currently have the kind of repressive voter ID law that he’s complaining about (That said, voter ID laws are transparently bullshit).
• If alternative energy weren’t a culture war touchstone, faced with this kind of information about oil (and gas), people would agree that we need other energy sources. But it is, so we don’t.
• More awful stories from North Korean defectors.

Stop SOPA.

Takes thirty seconds. Do it:

Linkwad.

• Judge won’t allow the SEC to let Citigroup off a slap on the wrist, judicially bitch-slaps both. Keep an eye on this one.
• Obama administration threatens to veto bill that would allow the military to detain US citizens indefinitely. No word on whether they plan to also stop summarily executing US citizens.
• I admit, I didn’t think license plate tracking was a big deal. Unsurprisingly, I’ve been proven wrong.
• Via Miller, the US of Good Beer. Cool map, although picking Lagunitas over Stone and Russian River is unacceptable.
• Ding dong, the AT&T-Mo deal is dead.
• Wi-Fi might be killing your sperm. I think this is actually more of a concern for smartphone users, who are more likely to have the device near their junk for most of the day.