TIME magazine recently reported on what happens to consumer electronics when they die, and it’s pretty ugly. Read the article, or if you prefer, watch Michael Zhao’s YouTube video:

In large part, it’s up to us to dispose of our e-waste safely, and up to manufacturers to publish instructions for doing so. For instance, my laptop (which is much-adored, and will not be thrown away anytime soon!) came with a recycling kit. One can always give old-but-working gadgets to charity and sell broken things for parts.

And on a larger scale, we ought to encourage the U.S. to sign on to the Basel Convention, and solve our pollution problems here at home rather than exporting them.  The Basel Action Network is campaigning for the U.S. to do just that. They also focus on the larger problem of rich-world pollution being exported to developing countries.

Exports and exploitation aside, though, I think the root of the problem is the mentality that says we have to have the latest, greatest, shiniest toys, and anything older than two months or so is just passé. Maybe it’s time to reexamine that assumption.

***

On a more positive note, the American University in Iraq is calling for book donations. They seem to be looking for books on social science, technical books, that kind of thing, so if you have the books and money for postage, this looks like a great way to do something positive for the Iraqi people.

***

Finally, Tamora Pierce and others have come out strongly against the proposed REPAIR Act (H.R. 767), which purports to help native wildlife but could end up hurting “undesirable” wild animals, such as feral cats. Feral cats are not a danger to humans, and they deserve to live every bit as much as do their domesticated cousins. It’s far better and more humane to neuter them and release them back into the wild than to kill them outright. (Besides, when the phrase “killing kittens” is used as shorthand for ultimate evil, it’s a pretty good indication that the government shouldn’t be funding it.) Please write your senators and ask them to vote against this ill-considered bill.

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As a copyleftist, I admire the intent behind the Orphan Works Act of 2008 (H.R. 5889 and S. 2913). At present, as far as today’s artists and historians are concerned, orphan works—those for whom the creators, or the creators’ beneficiaries, cannot be located—might as well be locked in a vault. No one can reprint or remix these works for fear of their owners suddenly appearing and suing for copyright infringement. The bill would limit the user’s liability in these cases, and orphan works would be available to our culture once more.

However, a closer look at the bill reveals a legal gray area that would damage formerly clear-cut copyright infringement cases. Users would be allowed to assume that a work is orphaned after conducting and documenting a “reasonable” search for the creator, and whether they had done so would need to be determined on a case-by-case basis. This is particularly troubling for visual artists, whose work often becomes separated from their byline.

The U.S. Copyright Office, in its infinite wisdom, has proposed that the private sector should create protection rackets huge databases of non-orphaned images, in which artists would presumably pay to register their entire body of work. I have another idea.

Rather than multiple databases of non-orphaned images, there should be one finite database of works which are known to be orphaned, maintained by the Copyright Office. If someone found a work that she thought might be orphaned, but that wasn’t listed in the database, she would submit it to the Copyright Office, which would perform the search for the creator. (I imagine that the staff at the Copyright Office could be trained to do a much better job than the average computer user.)

Using this method, the legal gray area mentioned above would be gone. The user either asked the Copyright Office to do a search or he didn’t. If he didn’t, use of the work is copyright infringement, QED. If he did, any infringement would really be the Copyright Office’s fault, so it would be responsible for compensating the artist. As a result, the Office would err on the side of caution when determining a work’s status.

My main fear is that the Copyright Office could leave “subversive” or “obscene” orphan works out of the database, effectively censoring them.

Whatever form the Orphan Works Act eventually takes, it needs to preserve the presumption of copyright that currently keeps artists safe. What other ways could the Act be amended to better protect artists?

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In my previous post, I discussed the workings of PGP e-mail encryption, as well as the rationale behind it. To recap: unencrypted e-mail is like a postcard, viewable to anyone who intercepts it. Encrypted e-mail is in a metaphorical envelope, signed and sealed.  PGP encryption takes a little bit of extra effort, but if you want to keep your data private, it’s worth it.  This time, I’ll show you how it’s done.

1. If you’re using Windows, download GNU Privacy Guard for Windows (GnuPG).
   • If you’re a Mac or Linux user, you’ll have to figure out for yourself which program best suits your needs. This page is a good place to start.
   • Run the installer application, follow the instructions, etc.
2. Open the program called GPA and click Keys > New Key.
3. Put your real name in the “User ID” field and fill in your e-mail address of choice. The passphrase ought to be something long, but still easy for you to remember. Keep it secret and safe, just as you would any other password.
4. Finally, select an expiration date for your key. If you think you’ll be using the e-mail address you entered for the rest of your life, it’s okay to leave this field blank.  Otherwise, it’s easier to let your key expire and make a new one than to edit it and try to somehow distribute the new version to everyone you know.  Hit OK.  Congratulations, you have a key pair!
5. If any of your contacts also have public keys and have posted them to the Internet, you can import them into your keyring (basically an address book for your friends’ keys).  Save your contact’s key to your hard drive as a text file, then (still in the GPA program) click “Import,” find the file, and hit OK.

So, how to actually encrypt and decrypt e-mail?  Well, if you’re using the best web browser (Mozilla Firefox) and the best webmail service (Gmail, natch), then the FireGPG plugin makes it incredibly easy.  (Install it and hit “Compose Mail” in Gmail, and you’ll see what I mean.)  Most other popular e-mail programs will have plugins as well; here’s a fairly comprehensive list (scroll down to “Plugins”).

If you have any questions, please ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to help!

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(It’s been a while, but I’m back. Thanks to the folks at Brazen Careerist for inviting me aboard; I’m honored to be a part of such an interesting community.)

E-mail is not private.

Every message you send travels as plain text over the Web, with no safeguards to prevent some malicious person from intercepting it. It’s more or less like sending a postcard. In terms of your privacy, it’s actually even worse - a postcard can be shredded, but even if the sender and recipient both delete any given e-mail, chances are a copy still exists on the Internet in some form.

The solution is public-key cryptography. With software like GnuPG, you can create a keypair consisting of a public key and a private key. Publish the public key as widely as you can… e-mail it to your friends, for instance, or post it on your Facebook. Guard the private key with your life.

When someone sends you an e-mail, they encrypt it with your public key. You, and only you, can decrypt the message with your private key (assuming you’ve kept it safe).

You can also use a variant of your private key to sign messages you send. The recipient can check the signature against your public key and confirm that the message is really from you.

You should encrypt your e-mail whenever possible. If you habitually encrypt even innocuous messages, then any truly private encrypted mail won’t stick out like a sore thumb.

My hope is that e-mail encryption will become commonplace. As Bruce Schneier put it recently, “Who controls our data, controls our lives.” And data, gentle readers, is a slippery thing. It gets away from us all too easily, and once it does, there’s no way to tell where it will wind up… with spammers? With our employers? With the government?

In my next post, I’ll explain exactly how to set up PGP encryption, but in the meantime, here are some links to get you started.

• GnuPG.org - project homepage for GNU Privacy Guard, encryption software built on the OpenPGP standard
• Public-key cryptography on Wikipedia
• Gpg4win - software package containing GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) and other handy software, including a plugin for Outlook 2003

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One of GOOD magazine’s latest “Transparencies” (interesting charts, to the rest of us) is on plants that can neutralize common toxins.  The chart itself is a rather unwieldy graphic - I had to scroll sideways to get the whole thing, and my monitor’s set at 1280 x 800 - so similar lists can be found in text here and here.

The items containing these toxins are everywhere (e.g., plastics, as those “essential2″ ads keep helpfully reminding us). Their effects may be slight; then again, they may not. Either way, we should want clean air on principle, and if a potted plant can help make it cleaner, then why not?

For myself, I’ll look into getting a red-edged dracaena (listed as “marginata” on the GOOD chart). The source of all knowledge says it requires minimal care, so hopefully even I can manage it!

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Employee Evolution’s latest post on Generation Y and activism is really interesting, as is the discussion in the comments. My first thoughts are over there.

More later, probably.

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This bill, currently pending in the U.S. House of Representatives, would essentially hold U.S. companies accountable for working with the governments of “Internet-restricting countries” to violate citizens’ Internet freedoms.

The megacorporations are not happy. The Interactive Advertising Bureau - which counts AOL, AT&T, Fox News, Google, Reuters, Time Inc., and Yahoo! Inc. among its members - posted a letter to House Speaker Pelosi (PDF) signed by the IAB and about two dozen other business organizations. The letter claims that H.R. 275 would interfere with legitimate U.S. business operations overseas.

No doubt they are correct. But in 2004, Yahoo! Inc., an American corporation, aided the Chinese government in arresting the peaceful activist Shi Tao, who was attempting to spread his message through e-mail. This is an outrage. The United States should not turn a blind eye to such things; if it does, it will become yet another party to the suppression of free speech online. Conversely, if the bill becomes law, foreign governments will have a much harder time pressuring businesses to block Internet content, turn over private user information, and so forth.

Overall, I believe H.R. 275 will do more good than harm. Please contact your representatives and encourage them to support this bill.

Links

• Press release about H.R. 275 from Chris Smith (R-NJ), sponsor of the bill
• H.R. 275 at OpenCongress - track the progress of the bill; find out which representatives are sponsoring it, and which committees are considering it.

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Last night’s Democratic primary in Pennsylvania failed to resolve anything. The horse race will continue, and the media will cover every second of it.

I won’t be watching. My state’s primary took place on Super Tuesday; I’ve cast my vote. And now the campaign has degenerated into pettiness and sniping. So much hate is coming from supporters of two candidates who are far more alike than not. I don’t wish to encourage the mainstream media giving more coverage to what Obama ate for breakfast than to global warming or Darfur. Also, I have my sanity to consider.

Democrats: it’s one thing to be passionate about your candidate, but if we all combine that passion with a desire for peace - not just, you know, peace somewhere out there in the world, but wherever we can practice it - I think the next few months will go much better for us, and we’ll come out stronger at the end.

The candidates might even start talking about actual issues again.

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The captioned version of the Project Blackout pic is apparently catching on.  Practically speaking, I don’t expect the presence of a caption to affect how many mosquito nets get over to Africa.  Still, it’s a small illustration of the beauty of internet-driven campaigns: anyone can participate at any level.  Anyone can put a good idea out there and watch it become reality.  And the more people are generating ideas, the more they have a stake in the process.  They’ll do way more than they would if someone just said, “Do this and this and this and you’ll help the cause, kthnx.”

Also, someone needs to let the Nothing But Nets people know that games are supposed to be fun.  I understand that they want the content to be relevant to their mission (although it really doesn’t have to be), but repeated gameplay should unlock rocket boosters on the motorcycle, and then later the power of flight.  You know it would be awesome.

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Every year, as many as three million people, most of whom are in Africa, die of malaria. Most of these deaths are preventable. Bed nets, if a family is lucky enough to have them, can protect against infectious mosquito bites. Antimalarial drugs can combat the disease itself, if one lives in an area where they are readily available.

As Jeffrey Sachs explains in The End of Poverty, the root causes of malaria in Africa are mainly ecological. The most common species of mosquito in Africa bites humans almost exclusively. A mosquito must bite two humans in a row to transmit malaria from one to the other. Other species of mosquito, which feed on cattle and other animals as well as humans, won’t spread malaria as efficiently (for lack of a better word). Also, the warm climate speeds up malaria’s life cycle, which in turn quickens the spread of the disease.

As a result, 1-3 million people die of malaria every year. Hundreds of millions more become severely ill. Economies that are already struggling slow down even more, trapping millions in poverty.

If the percentages were the same in the United States, 100 million Americans would become severely ill over the course of a year, and 600,000 people would die. (Very rough estimates, but you get the idea.) I would say “per year,” but it wouldn’t happen more than once. After the first outbreak, the vast majority of the country would have the bed nets and medicines necessary to safeguard against malaria, and logistical obstacles be damned.

This has not happened in Africa. As of 2004, only about 2% of African children under the age of 5 were sleeping under insecticide-treated bed nets. Given that a net protecting two people for two years costs $10 (or even $5, depending on who you ask), I think we can do better.

What you can do

• Every time you play the interactive game “Deliver the Net” at the Nothing But Nets website, a sponsor will send a bed net to Africa.
• Or you could just buy a net yourself, either through Nothing But Nets ($10/net) or Against Malaria ($5/net).
• April 25 is World Malaria Day. If you’re on Facebook, sign up to “attend” and invite your friends. The event is purely online - fear not, you won’t have to leave your computer chair - but if enough invitations circulate, it’ll at least increase awareness, and maybe some people who wouldn’t have bought a net otherwise will be moved to do so.
• The founder of the World Malaria Day Facebook event is also promoting Project Blackout - make your profile picture solid black for a day on April 25, raise awareness about malaria. I’m not sure how effective this will be (I think the black profile pics should at least have a caption or something), but I’ll be participating, so you should, too.

Sources

• The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs (Penguin Books, 2005). He discusses malaria in Chapter 10; the whole book is well worth reading.
• World Health Organization fact sheet on malaria
• “Conquering the Intolerable Burden of Malaria” by J. G. Bremen et al. in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, August 2004.

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