A tangent on another historian of science and technology I enjoyed taking a course from and who wrote about information technology and who died relatively way too young:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "James Ralph Beniger (December 16, 1946 -- April 12, 2010) was an American historian and sociologist and Professor of Communications and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, particularly known for his early work on the history of quantitative graphics in statistics, and his later work on the technological and economic origins of the information society."

RIP Jim. Thanks for being an excellent -- and kind -- professor. And mentioning me and other students with thanks in your Control Revolution book.

And thanks also introducing me to the 1978 book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought" by Langdon Winner --- which just gets more relevant every day.
https://www.amazon.com/Autonom...
        "This study of the idea of technology out of control makes an important contribution to our understanding of the problems of civilization. The basic argument is not that some persons or groups promote technology against the public interest (true though that is), or even that our technology develops in its own way in spite of all our efforts to control it (also true in some respects). Rather, Winner is concerned with a more subtle effect: the artifacts that we have invented to satisfy our material wants have now developed, in size and complexity, to the point of delimiting or even determining our conception of the wants themselves. In that way, we as a civilization are losing mastery over our own tools.... 'As a source for readings and reflections on this problem, the book is rich and rewarding.... If it has a practical lesson, it is that of awareness: only by recognizing the boundaries of our socially constructed scientific-technological reality can we transcend them in imagination and then achieve effective human action.'"

Winner's book is perhaps a sort of antithesis of "The Soul of A New Machine"? In that sometimes technologists (I'm looking at your OpenAI and cohorts) can get so excited about problem solving and miss the big picture. Related humor:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes...
        "This reminds me of the engineer who is condemned to death, but as his turn approaches they find that the mechanism on the electric chair is no longer functioning. About to send everyone home, the engineer calls out "Wait! I think i can see the problem!""

I heard that Winner did not get tenure at MIT essentially because he suggested that the method of education used there was essentially blinding the MIT students to the social implications of what they were doing. A related book:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
        In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
        The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
        Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Anyway, I am so thankful for people like Jim Beniger, Langdon Winner, Michael Mahoney, and others who provided a larger perspective to technologists on what they were doing.

If I can find fault with "The Soul of a New Machine" from hazy recollections from 40+ years ago I don't think it did that. It's still informative though on how technology -- like now AI development -- can become addictive for techies with both good and bad aspects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      "The book follows many of the designers as they give almost every waking moment of their lives to design and debug the new machine."

It's maybe kind of like the difference between books that glorify warmaking and "winning" versus those that glorify peacemaking and "win/win/win"?

An example of the latter is "To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or an essay by Terry Dobson on Aikido:
https://livingthepresentmoment...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      "My teacher taught us each morning that the art was devoted to peace. "Aikido," he said again and again, "is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate other people, you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it." ..."

Or in a way Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" 1956 short story about wearable networked mobile computing for sharing knowledge that inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext which contributed to the creation of the web.

Or Alfie Kohn's "No Contest: The Case Against Competition":
https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont...

One of the most interesting things I overheard at lunch at IBM Research was something along the lines of "We hire the top people from the most competitive schools -- and then wonder why they can't get along and cooperate."

And I'd add, wonder why many technologists rarely take much time to think about the broader social implications of what they are doing.

And "Soul of a New Machine" -- from what I can remember of it -- exemplifies and celebrates that focused mindset.

I can thank someone (maybe Bruce Maier?) who posted this essay to the Lyrics TOPS-10 timesharing system I used in high school circa 1980 -- for helping me have some reservations about such narrow focus:
"The Hacker Papers [about some Stanford CS students]"
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/te...
      "As much as an essay, this is a story. It is a true story of people paying $9,000 a year to lose elements of their humanity. It is a story of the breaking of wills and of people. It is a story of addictions, and of misplaced values. In a large part, it is my own story. ..."

Also assigned reading in Michael Mahoney's course on the history of science and technology at Princeton circa 1984. Although I had read it already -- and found it inspiring.

RIP Tracy Kidder.

And also RIP Professor Mahoney who died in 2008 at the relatively young age of 69 -- just when a historian is typically getting very productive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://www.dailyprincetonian....

"Histories of Computing"
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/bo...
"Computer technology is pervasive in the modern world, its role ever more important as it becomes embedded in a myriad of physical systems and disciplinary ways of thinking. The late Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer scholar of the history of computing, one of the first established historians of science to take seriously the challenges and opportunities posed by information technology to our understanding of the twentieth century."

It's going to be a rough next decade with ongoing loss of pioneers of personal computing and those who wrote about them or who inspired them. People like Steve Jobs and Doug Engelbart and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon who have passed on years ago. Glad that Steve Wozniak and Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and so on are still hanging in there! A heartfelt thanks to all of them for giving us possibilities -- even if we may not be doing great things with them right now.

"Original architects [Wozniak] of the personal computer hate what it's become..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Steve Wozniak says he's "disappointed a lot" by AI and rarely uses it"
https://www.techspot.com/news/...

Ever read The Last Ringbearer ? It's the LOTR, but see from the loser side ("History is written by the winners"). And it shows the orcs as some kind of industrial society (aren't they ?) and the elves as some kind of lordly rulling class (aren't they ?). It twists things around in a way that can give you cold sweats...

Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.

It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.

Touché! Good point on "actually" and whether it is qualified, thanks. I guess that word only fits in relation to there actually being a novel which I was referring to? But I agree I should have worded that better. The word "fictionally" might have been a better choice? Glad your comment sparked some tangential discussion by others.

Children raised by robot educators/philosophers actually worked out well in the fictional sci-fi novel by James P. Hogan "Voyage from Yesteryear":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The story opens early in the 21st century, as an automated space probe is being prepared for a mission to explore habitable exoplanets in the Alpha Centauri system. However, Earth appears destined for a global war which the probe designers fear that humanity may not survive. It appears that the only chance for the human species is to reestablish itself far away from the conflict but there is no time left for a crewed expedition to escape Earth. The team, led by Henry B. Congreve, change their mission priority and quickly modify the design to carry several hundred sets of electronically coded human genetic data. Also included in this mission of embryo space colonization is a databank of human knowledge, robots to convert the data into genetic material and care for the children and construct habitats when the destination is reached, and a number of artificial wombs. The probe's designers name it the Kuan-Yin after the bodhisattva of childbirth and compassion.
        Shortly after the launch, global war indeed breaks out and several decades later, Earthbound humanity is united under an authoritarian government. It is this government that receives a radio message from the fledgling "Chironian" civilization revealing that the probe found a habitable planet (Chiron) and that the first generation of children have been raised successfully.
        As the surviving power blocs of Earth before the conflict are still evident, North America, Europe and Asia each send a generation ship to Alpha Centauri to take control of the colony. By the time that the first generation ship (the American Mayflower II) arrives after 20 years, Chironian society is in its fifth generation.
        The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, fascism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict.
        In an attempt to crush this anarchist adhocracy, the Mayflower II government employs every available method of control; however, in the absence of conditioning the Chironians are not even capable of comprehending the methods, let alone bowing to them. The Chironians simply use methods similar to Gandhi's satyagraha and other forms of nonviolent resistance to win over most of the Mayflower II crew members, who had never previously experienced true freedom, and isolate the die-hard authoritarians. ...

I guess it maybe all depends how wisely the robots are programmed initially? Sadly, with several AI companies racing forward in a winner-takes-all hyper-competitive safety-ignoring way to earn a lot of fiat dollars, seems like something needs to change to build a more hopeful future. Still, there is always the "Optimism of Uncertainty" as Howard Zinn called it.
https://www.thenation.com/arti...

Time to trot out my sig again, sigh: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."

It was awesome ten days ago to see someone else who understands that irony:
"The Real Danger of AI Has Nothing to Do With AI" by Mo Gawdat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "Artificial intelligence is often described as a force that will shape humanity's future, yet technology itself carries no intention, morality, or agenda. The direction it takes depends entirely on the values and decisions of the people creating and using it.
        As intelligence becomes more powerful and capable of solving increasingly complex problems, the real question shifts away from what machines can do and toward what humanity chooses to prioritize. Every major technological leap reflects the ethical frameworks of the society behind it, meaning the future shaped by AI will ultimately mirror human behavior rather than machine logic.
        The challenge is not teaching machines to think -- it is learning to think more wisely ourselves."

Mo Gawdat was talking about AI, but the same applies to using advanced manufacturing and supply chains to make hypersonic missiles as in the article. That's US$99,000 that can't otherwise be used to make food, water, shelter, energy, 3D printers, and so on -- and so exacerbating the very conflicts that lead people to want to use hypersonic missiles.

Or for a more humorous take on this by me from 2009 as another "Downfall" bunker scene parody (which coincidentally starts with a mention of rockets/missiles):
https://groups.google.com/g/po...
        "Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler:
"It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here, here, and here."
"But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?"
"The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space."
"What about the nuclear bombs?"
"All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the oceans."
"What about the tanks?"
"The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world."
"I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?"
"The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness."
"Well, send in the Daleks."
"The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with the rockets."
"Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades."
"We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters, solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason."
"But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?"
"They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots."
"I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?"
"Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance."
"How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong? ... Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room ... now!" [Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of engineers. :-) Then cue long tirade on how could engineers seriously wanted to help the German workers to not have to work so hard when the whole Nazi party platform was based on providing full employment using fiat dollars. Then cue long tirade on how could engineers have taken the socialism part seriously and shared the wealth of nature and technology with everyone globally.]
"So how are the common people paying for all this?"
"Much is free, and there is a basic income given to everyone for the rest. There is so much to go around with the robots and 3D printers and solar panels and so on, that most of the old work no longer needs to be done."
"You mean people get money without working at jobs? But nobody would work?"
"Everyone does what they love. And they are producing so much just as gifts."
"Oh, so you mean people are producing so much for free that the economic system has failed?"
"Yes, the old pyramid scheme one, anyway. There is a new post-scarcity economy, where between automation and a a gift economy the income-through-jobs link is almost completely broken. Everyone also gets income as a right of citizenship as a share of all our resources for the few things that still need to be rationed. Even you."
"Really? How much is this basic income?"
"Two thousand a month."
"Two thousand a month? Just for being me?"
"Yes."
"Well, with a basic income like that, maybe I can finally have the time and resources to get back to my painting...""

Sadly we are seeing some real bunker scenes with billionaires and they are not so funny:
https://www.vice.com/en/articl...
        "The men cited potential disasters caused by electromagnetic pulses, economic downturn, disease, or war that might "necessitate them leaving their Silicon Valley ranches and retreating to these fortified bunkers in the middle of nowhere."
        These "luxury bunkers" include features most of us could only ever dream of, like indoor pools and artificial sunlight, allowing them to remain sealed off from the world for years at a time, if necessary.
        "The billionaires understand that they're playing a dangerous game," Rushkoff said. "They are running out of room to externalize the damage of the way that their companies operate. Eventually, there's going to be the social unrest that leads to your undoing."
        Like the gated communities of the past, their biggest concern was to find ways to protect themselves from the "unruly masses," Rushkoff said. "The question we ended up spending the majority of time on was: 'How do I maintain control of my security force after my money is worthless?'"
        That is, if their money is no longer worth anything--if money no longer means power--how and why would a Navy Seal agree to guard a bunker for them?
        "Once they start talking in those terms, it's really easy to start puncturing a hole in their plan," Rushkoff said. "The most powerful people in the world see themselves as utterly incapable of actually creating a future in which everything's gonna be OK.""

are automakers responsible when someone breaks the speed limit and kills someone?

What's funny is that there's no such thing as "vicarious speeding" or "contributory reckless driving," but with copyright, there is. Analogously, sometimes the automaker is liable for drivers speeding!

But even so, Cox's behavior didn't fit contributory infringement.

The court just said T17 S501 is an ok law that they're not striking it down or anything like that, but it doesn't apply to this case!

A very good thing has happened.

The people who say that, never supply a reason. It's just dogma.

My counter-dogma: nuh uh.

It's illegal but laws aren't currently enforced, so I don't know why you're bringing the law up.

Let's perform a natural experiment: keep saying reappropriation is illegal, and then wait for the executive to do it anyway. Then watch to see if Congress gives a fuck, by impeaching the executive (or credibly threatening to impeach if the embezzled funds aren't returned in n hours).

My hypothesis is that Congress won't do anything about it, and is fine with whatever new powers that the president decides he wants.

What's your hypothesis?

Surprise: we're actually going to do that experiment. In fact, we started it last year.

It's not in society's interests, but it is in government's interests. Society and government are orthogonal teams who often conflict with each other. In the US, we spelled that out explicitly in the late 1700s, but docs go back at least as far as the Magna Carta.

Alas, "spelling out" government limitations isn't the same thing as believing limits are a good idea and enforcing them, as we're occasionally reminded. The Constitution is just ink on a page, until people give a fuck about it. And in America, the constitution is currently very unpopular. Society wants to surrender to government, or if it doesn't want that, it's sure acting like it wants that.

That's pretty neat!

The danger with using unallocated space, is that sometimes you might accidentally overwrite it. But if that happens, I guess it just means you need to figure out what your new size needs to be, make a new hidden volume, and then restore from backup. It's that last step that I never remember as a possibility, probably due to my horrible backup habits. ;-)

I think that might be a bad idea, because when thugs say "hand over your phone" and you hand them a brand new phone that you have apparently never used, you're going to get wrench-based cryptanalysis. You need to be able to hand them the keys to a realistic environment that looks like it's being used. Thugs wanna see recent timestamps.

Ideally, we need to have some casual, boring (but constantly-touched!) environment that can launch encrypted environments, but somehow not have anything that references those environments.

The biggest problem I see is storage allocation. We need to be able to plausibly deny the existence of something, but also keep it from being overwritten by not-denied environments. How do you hide "don't write to these blocks, because something else uses them"?

Some might suggest hiding in plain sight with steganography, but at some point thugs will notice that everyone they suspect, just happens to have an unnecessarily-large gigaphoto. ;-)

Having alt environments that are detectable, but can be quickly destroyed the way you suggest, might be a decent compromise as long as it keeps an innocent and recently-used one around as cover. You enter the oh-fuck PIN, and it logs you into the innocent host environment but then it immediately deletes its encrypted guests, leaving you with a truly innocent machine as far as anyone can tell. And then you just really hope you can enter that duress code (or you can trick thugs into entering it) before they image your storage.

"National Security" means anything the government wants. Anything you would consider to be an abuse, they would consider to be within bounds, because there are no bounds.