Copyright, Police Interactions, Transparency, and Corporate Dependence

When I started this blog when I was in high school, I was quite interested (at least at a superficial level) in issues of technology law, including the abuse of copyright & patent laws. (This is an example of such a post on this blog from 12 years ago, when my maturity & writing skills were far less than they are now.) Since then, my interests have shifted a lot, so I don't follow news stories about technology law abuses as much as I did in high school or college, I certainly don't post about these issues so often, and I'd like to think my reactions on this blog are a bit more carefully considered now than they were 12 years ago. That said, as far as my older interests go, I saw a story on the website Vice, by Dexter Thomas, about how a few police officers in Beverly Hills, California, have been found to have played copyrighted music from their phones loudly when they believe they are being filmed by an ordinary person. Essentially, those particular police officers have depended on zealous copyright enforcement algorithms on social media & video sharing platforms like Instagram & YouTube to ensure that any ordinary person who tries to post a video on such a popular corporate platform will have that video automatically removed due to copyright violations. If the police officer deliberately chooses to interact with the person recording while the song is playing, that means that even if the person recording decides to mute that section of the audio before uploading, the audio from that interaction will be removed one way or another. Additionally, on many sites, if the person uploading such videos ends up doing this multiple times, that person can be blocked temporarily or permanently from uploading videos in the future.

On the one hand, my beliefs about police behavior & copyright law are such that this behavior disappoints me on both fronts (as I believe this is a gross abuse of the spirit of copyright law and of trust in police officers), but on the other hand, I can't help but appreciate the ingenuity of this "solution" to the "problem" of being recorded. Additionally, it is worth noting that the main instance of this happening as described in this story is in a police station, where it can be argued that police departments could rightfully enforce rules against using cell phones; that said, the story also mentions other instances of this happening in outdoor public spaces. In any case, beyond these issues, this story has raised several broader questions in my mind, which I list below, and which I do not intend to be merely rhetorical.

1. Would police officers be fined for broadcasting such music as a "public performance" in an unauthorized way?
2. Should this motivate an alliance between groups aiming to reform police departments & groups aiming to reform copyright laws?
3. Should this motivate greater use of the site Wikileaks or other existing sites, or creation of a similar site, as a well-known not-for-profit repository to document police abuses (instead of relying on for-profit platforms that might zealously enforce copyright laws)?
4. What should be the mechanism for determining which videos of police officers get publicized, in order to ensure that trivial misunderstandings don't get blown out of proportion at the expense of the livelihood of the police officer?

There are certainly many other questions that could be asked about this issue going forward. In any case, it is unfortunate that enforcement of copyright laws is being twisted in this way, but it will be interesting to see how similar cases develop in the future.

FOLLOW-UP: Sexual Harassment, Power Dynamics, and Institutions

Last year, I wrote a post motivated by a case of sexual harassment and assault committed by a professor in my department against a student in his group. The incidents happened in the spring of last year, but the news about the incidents and the nominal punishment only came at the end of the year. Since then, there have been further developments, as described in this article (by Marcia Brown in The Daily Princetonian), so I am writing this post as a follow-up regarding the specific developments of this case and our department's response, even as my post last year was my attempt at exploring the broader issues at stake. Essentially, Princeton University had reason early this year to investigate further claims of past consensual relationships between that same professor and other direct professional dependents (students & postdoctoral associates), and suspended him for the spring semester and summer as they conducted their investigation. The university concluded the investigation with findings of guilt on his part of having engaged in at least one such consensual relationship, and as that is a violation of university rules, he was fired. Follow the jump to read more about my thoughts regarding this; as mentioned above, compared to my previous post on this subject, this post will have more of my raw emotional reaction to this whole process and to the specifics of this case rather than a more measured take on the broader issues at stake.

Book Review: "Medici Money" by Tim Parks

I've recently read the book Medici Money by Tim Parks. It's a book that covers the rise, consolidation of money and power, and downfall of the Medici banking family in Florence in the 15th century. It focuses on the main players in the Medici family as they relate to their banking business, and how that business grew, became intertwined in politics & religion, and was able to fund the collection & creation of artworks and other cultural artifacts; the whole story is just a long power play, with jockeying between Medici family members, popes & cardinals, politicians, and competing nobility & business interests.

The book itself is a well-written, engaging, fun jaunt through that period in history; by the fact that it only has a casual section at the end containing bibliographic notes, without having a formal bibliography, footnotes, or endnotes, I can tell this was written for popular rather than technical/academic consumption, which I can appreciate. It was particularly interesting to see the tensions, contradictions, and hypocrisies of the Catholic Church's views on usury (in the old sense of lending money at any nonzero interest rate) explored fully in this book: the argument is that usury allowed ordinary people to become wealthy without needing to inherit it or work as hard, upending the social order, while the Catholic Church depended on usury to fund its own wars & extravagant lifestyles even as it condemned the practice (though even people at that time struggled to find coherent Biblical justifications for injunctions against usury), leading to weird debates about whether some commercial practices like speculation on currency exchanges were really usury in disguise. My only quibble is that the author ties the notion of usury too much to currency: the way I see it, currency simply liquefies commercial value across space (i.e. making value available across different geographic areas), while usury liquefies commercial value across time (i.e. making value available to future buyers), so while currency certainly makes usury much more feasible by combining liquidity in space and time, it is conceivable to imagine usury without currency, simply through bonds between people expecting greater future returns to be settled through consensual barter. Overall, I think this book could be an interesting and fun history for a general audience.

Sexual Harassment, Power Dynamics, and Institutions

I've been thinking (read: armchair philosophizing without necessarily going into much depth) lately a bit about the notion of individuals shaping the interactions they have with other people versus the other way around, and the related notion of how individuals shape institutions versus the other way around. This idea has stuck in my mind especially in the context of sexual harassment committed by a professor against a student in my department (for a broad overview, see this article by Alanna Vagianos in HuffPost, and for a more detailed account, see this article by Allie Spensley in The Daily Princetonian; disclaimer: I know the student but not the professor), because of the complicated way that power imbalances between faculty and students intertwine with institutional tensions at large research universities like Princeton University. Follow the jump to see more blather from me about this.

Book Review: "Atomic Accidents" by James Mahaffey

I've recently read Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey. It's a fairly long and detailed exposition into accidents involving civilian nuclear power or military nuclear weapons in the US, UK, [former] USSR, Japan, and elsewhere. The author goes into quite granular detail with respect to the history of a certain weapon or civilian site, the timeline of the accident, and the aftermath; with each, he summarizes the lessons that were learned (or should have been learned but were not). After an introduction showing how nuclear accidents are quite similar in many respect to railroad accidents, the first few chapters go into the development of nuclear technology through WWII and the accidents along the way. The middle section of the book goes into knowledge gained about the occupational hazards of employees at power plants, the risks of transporting nuclear material by airplane, and related ideas. The last few chapters are about more recent accidents in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, ending with an assessment of the current state of nuclear power.

As a layperson with respect to the field of nuclear engineering, I think this book may be best suited for experts and other people with a serious interest in the field; for laypeople, the first few and last chapters are interesting, but reading through the middle sections became somewhat tiresome, as the technical details and jargon were a bit hard to follow, and the structure of the stories of the accidents became rather repetitive. The author does discuss issues of fear/hysteria in the general public with respect to nuclear accidents, yet the [seemingly contradictory] combination of the overall discussion of nuclear accidents in gritty detail along with some relatively cursory words of support for the safety and efficacy of nuclear power at the end means that this really is for experts who rationally understand the full historical & current contexts underlying nuclear power. Additionally, as a side note, the author briefly mentions India's nuclear program twice, noting that the Indian government broke a promise to Canada to not turn an imported reactor design toward weapons development, and that nuclear power plants there have had spotty safety records; while I am all for calling out entities that are cavalier about these issues, I found the author's word choice to be unnecessarily condescending toward India in a manner reminiscent of British imperialists justifying the subjugation of India in order to "civilize" the "savages". That aside, as noted earlier, I would recommend this book to those with a serious interest in this subject.

PCLinuxOS (Kinda) Saved My Laptop

Yesterday, I was surfing the web in my room as usual, when some exterminators came to my house and advised that I leave the room while the pesticides were applied. I unplugged my laptop from the wall outlet, forgetting that I had also removed the battery. Whoops.

Today, I was alarmed to see that I could not boot into my Linux Mint system; the OS would give a "no init found" error after the boot splash. First, I had to boot into Microsoft Windows 7; thankfully, that worked as Linux Mint was the OS I was [of course] using when I accidentally unplugged my computer. I looked up the error, and it turns out it's a common one that can be solved by a file system check ("fsck") from a live CD. All the guides I saw recommended using a live CD of the same OS whose hard drive partition is affected, but I had left my live CDs and USB sticks in my dormitory room. Whoops again. What I figured would just be a minor inconvenience turned into a semi-major problem.

First I tried making a Linux Mint live CD from within Microsoft Windows 7. The first attempt failed because I didn't use the right tool to burn the ISO file to the CD. The second attempt failed too, but that is because the live CD would hang during the [very long] boot process after the boot splash screen was done.

After that, I figured it may just be an issue with Linux Mint, so I rummaged through some CDs and found an old Fedora 11 "Leonidas" GNOME live CD. That would also hang right after the boot splash, so at that point I became quite worried that my computer may never be able to work with Linux ever again.

Finally, I found an old PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE live CD, and I gave that a shot. To my relief, it worked, although it would not connect to the Internet. I entered "su" into the terminal followed by "fsck -y /dev/sda5" (because my Linux Mint partition is "sda5"), and that seemed to work OK. Rebooting into my installed Linux Mint system worked! I was incredibly happy to see my main OS back in working order and to see that I would not have to resign myself to using Microsoft Windows 7. There are only two lingering issues, and both of them are quite minor. The first is that some odd error message involving "PXE" and "PCI" is displayed for a few seconds just before the GRUB boot menu is displayed, but that goes away on its own anyway. The second, which may be related to the first, is that Linux Mint is apparently no longer able to recognize my laptop's ethernet card, so I must now depend on wireless connections to access the Internet, and I will have to train myself to overcome my aversion to wireless connections stemming from numerous failed attempts by my family to send wireless Internet signals to the very room where I am typing this. Anyway, regardless of the fact that I don't particularly care for the newer versions of PCLinuxOS, I salute [the older version of] PCLinuxOS for doing its job when I needed it most!

(UPDATE: I was a little concerned that this accident may have fried my laptop's ethernet card, so as per some advice posted somewhere online, I unplugged my laptop from everything (power, ethernet, even the USB mouse), and didn't touch it again for the next 16 hours (i.e. from yesterday afternoon until now). For one, that weird error message has disappeared. For another, the ethernet card is now recognized in the "System Profiler and Benchmark" program as well as in the output of the terminal command "lshw -C network", although my laptop refuses to connect to the ethernet. Hooray!)