Terminally Incoherent

If you were just reading boingboing you have probably seen the story about the priorities of the new interim Attorney General. It turns out that Alex Acosta does not really care about terrorism, organized crime and child abuse. These are low priority objectives for him. Check out the article linked from boingboing yourself.

According to Mr. Acosta the most important job of American law enforcement right now is fighting pornography. And please do not make a mistake. It’s not child pornography we are talking about here – it’s the standard, run of the mill consenting adult porn that he is after. Mr. Acosta actually ordered to take FBI agents off child pornography cases and assign them to important tasks such as closing down adult video and book stores in residential neighborhoods:

Sources say Acosta was told by the FBI officials during last month’s meeting that obscenity prosecution would have to be handled by the crimes against children unit. But that unit is already overworked and would have to take agents off cases of child endangerment to work on adult porn cases. Acosta replied that this was Attorney General Gonzales’ mandate.

I find this very disturbing. They wasting taxpayer money by fighting windmills. It is absolutely ridiculous. These resources should be used to fight serious crime and terrorism. I think pornography is great – and certainly it is the least of our problems. For god’s sake, there are people out there strapping bombs to their chests! This is really not a good time to be chasing pornographers!

But the most disturbing fact is that, Mr. Acosta thinks that fighting pornography is more important from preventing child abuse! Next time you hear about some deranged pedophile that committed some heinous crime, and got away, remember to thank Alex Acosta. Thanks to him, the police officers and FBI agents who could have been tracking this guy were busy harassing tax paying adult industry entrepreneur! I think this is outrageous.

I just found this very insightful article on Google talk. It’s a very interesting read. He makes a very good point. It’s great that Google decided to use Jabber but, talk.google.com does not communicate with other Jabber servers.

Google has chosen not to embrace this most wonderful aspect of Jabber. Instead, they’ve created just another isolated IM network. As a Google Talk user, a person has a jabber address (@gmail.com, mirroring their email address) but the Google Jabber servers do not talk with the other Jabber servers on the net. A Google Talk user is just as cut off from the world as an AIM user is.

In other words, while Google uses the Jabber protocol, they do not participate in the Jabber network, nor do they plan to do it in the future. From the official release notes:

We look forward to federating with any service provider who shares our belief in enabling user choice and open communications. We do believe, however, that it is important to balance openness with ensuring that we maintain a safe and reliable service that protects user privacy and blocks spam and other abuses. We are using the federation opportunity with EarthLink and Sipphone to develop a set of guidelines by which all members of the federated network can work together to ensure that we protect our users while maximizing the reach of the network.

I don’t know about you, but for me this passage above quite clearly indicate that a privately run Jabber server of Joe Shmoe will not connect to the google talk network. At least not without jumping through major hoops and possibly paying some “federation fee”.

I can understand why wouldn’t they want to open up their service to all Jabber servers. It does create room for abuse – for example, rogue servers set up to spim the google network. So keeping some kind of control over the communication is not a bad idea. But I do not like the “federation” system.

It would not be hard to open it to general public. You could for example register your server with google and sign an agreement to their Terms of Service. This way google could whitelist Jabber servers, and ban the ones that break TOC by allowing large amounts of spim to leak out to Google Talk. This would shift the responsibility to moderate non-google network nodes to admins who run them.

If they launch this type of operation, they could really become a major player that could crush the competition. If Joe Average can run a Jabber service in their garage and be able to connect with Google Talk, then Jabber can become the de-facto IM standard – just like SMTP became the standard for email. It could start a revolution which would send AIM, MSN and Yahoo packing – or even force some of them to work on Jabber compatibility to stay competitive.

If they keep talk.google.com sequestered from Jabber network, and simply “federate” with partnering companies, nothing will change in the IM world. In fact, they are risking being made irrelevant by the sheer amount of users subscribing to AIM. Why would anyone want to switch to a brand new IM network, if all their friends use AIM? The only way Google can crush AIM’s dominance is to establish a standard in AIM communication by promoting the distributed Jabber based IM networks.

When I read this, it actually made me want to puke. Just read the quote below and tell me what you think about it:

According to this press release from the international arm of the more familiar Motion Picture Association of America, the MPA “has obtained a general search and seizure warrants order covering the entire city [of Delhi]. The order permits police to search any premises suspected of containing pirated products, and permits officers to open locked premises without delay.”

Please note that general search warrants are illegal in US. They are prohibited by 4th amendment. These types of search warrants were commonly used by British colonial forces – and were one of the many reasons that prompted the Revolution. In other words, the concept of general warrants goes against everything we believe in as a nation.

It is very disturbing that an American business organization is actively sponsoring such a blatant abuse of authority. The fact that general warrants may be legal in India is not an excuse to use them. This is simply wrong.

How can we ever justify sending peace missions abroad to fight blatant abuse of human rights or civil liberties such as this in some countries, when our movie industry is actively sponsoring such practices in other parts of the world?

This is very, very wrong. Holywood should be ashamed!