Plutopia News Network

On February 17, Plutopia’s correspondents Scoop and Jon recorded a reading and talk by physician and science fiction author Michael Blumlein. Michael has published four novels and three story collections, including the award-winning The Brains of Rats (Valancourt 20th Century Classics). His most recent publications, both in 2018, are All I Ever Dreamed: Stories, containing three decades worth of fiction, and Thoreau’s Microscope, part of PM Press’ celebrated “Outspoken Authors” series. He has twice been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and twice for the Bram Stoker. He has been short-listed for the Tiptree. The Brains of Rats was awarded Best Collection of the Year. He has written for both stage and film, including the award-winning independent film “Decodings.” His novel X, Y was made into a feature-length movie. Until his recent retirement Dr. Blumlein taught and practiced medicine at the University of California in San Francisco.

Bijoy Goswami is an energetic and insightful entrepreneurial philosopher based in Austin, coincidentally the wild west stomping ground for our Plutopia News Network. Author of The Human Fabric: Unleashing the Power of Core Energy in Everyone, Bijoy evolved a system for social modeling and analysis, useful in building effective teams and business organizations. He was founder of Bootstrap Austin, which was arguably the foundation for the current Texas entrepreneurial scene. More recently, Bijoy has been exploring his concept of the Four Houses of the Human Fugue and the JOurneY Method.

Plutopia News Network recorded this talk by Jeremy Smith, Executive Director of Register2Vote, a TX 501c4 focused on increasing access to voting rights. Register2Vote and the related app, MapTheVote, are two nonprofit projects that use public records and simple technology to help voters and volunteers navigate around archaic laws in Texas, which has the lowest rate of voter registration in the nation. Since online voter registration is illegal in Texas, Register2Vote supports completing the form online to be downloaded, physically signed and mailed.

Jeremy is also a Founder of BlueSquad, a progressive political tech company. He is a West Point graduate who served five years in the Army as an Engineer and Special Operations officer. Jeremy is a Marshall Scholar who studied Infectious Diseases Epidemiology at Imperial College London. After leaving the military, Jeremy worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign as the Director of Plans and Operations for Voter Protection in Florida, where he helped recruit, train, and coordinate more than 6,000 attorneys countering voter suppression. Since then, he has worked on the Doug Jones campaign in Alabama and has been helping support candidates across Texas.

Chris Boyd is a telecommunications consultant, aka contract packet pusher, who has worked on large telecommunications product definitions and rollouts, network management installations, network infrastructure upgrades and installations. He’s also treasurer and member of the Board of Directors at EFF-Austin. In this talk, presented at Nerd Nite Austin, Chris does a deep dive into home network security.

Image by N. Anderson, at Wikimedia Commons

Plutopia News Network’s Jon Lebkowsky recently gave this talk at Nerd Nite Austin 108, “Adventures on the Electronic Frontier.” Lebkowsky presents an in-depth timeline for the founding and early days of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its only chapter, EFF-Austin. Lebkowsky says “Geeks usually don’t understand policy and politics, and that should change!”

EFF’s founding emerged from a perception that law enforcement and legislators don’t understand network technology and security issues. The intention was originally to form an activist community organized to educate the institutions and people who make and enforce laws. Austin became the locus for the first chapter partly because EFF’s first big case, Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, was Austin-based. By working with Steve and others in Austin, EFF came to understand that it was a hotbed of geek creativity and Internet development, making it a great place to do initial organizing.

After giving the talk, Lebkowsky realized that he’d omitted an important point: hackers that were breaking into systems as ludic rather than destructive activity were also providing an important service. They were demonstrating that the security of sensitive systems connected to the network was woefully inadequate – if they could break in, so could bad actors. Almost thirty years after the founding of national EFF and EFF-Austin, this continues to be an important issue.

Photo: Tom Brown, Jon Lebkowsky, and Manton Reece at a meeting of the Austin HomeBrew Website Club.

When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, and not a corporation.

The Internet was originally a peer to peer decentralized network of networks connecting diverse nodes. The ability to move and share content over the Internet evolved through file transfer to gopher to hypertext transport protocol and html, i.e. the World Wide Web. The early web co-evolved with zine culture, with many small independent content sites appearing, and experiments in content sharing using technologies like trackback, pingback, and Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

Over the last decade or so, the Internet has exploded. All media has become digital; the Internet has become the platform of choice for distribution. With the rise of social networks, smaller content nodes were swept into sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, blogs fell aside, and content sharing was mediated by evolving new platforms created and managed by corporations supported primarily by advertising. Content producers and consumers became “the product,” sold to advertisers in an ecosystem that mixes traditional and social media sources. The Internet has is somewhat less decentralized, replaced to an extent by managed broadband and cellular networks.

What is IndieWeb?

The IndieWeb movement is creating a new alternative environment where content can be published and shared independently. WordPress, the blog platform that is persistently free, open source, and usable for independent websites, as a foundation technology. A loose group of developers has been building auxiliary software components to facilitate independent and decentralized publishing and sharing, with these principles in mind:

* Principles over project-centrism. Others assume a monoculture of one project for all. We are developing a plurality of projects. The IndieWeb community has a code-of-conduct.

* Selfdogfood instead of email. Show before tell. Prioritize by scratching your own itches, creating, iterating on your own site.

* Design first, protocols & formats second. Focus on good UX & selfdogfood prototypes to create minimum necessary formats & protocols.

* … people-focused instead of project-focused, [with] regular meetups where everyone is welcome.

This episode is a conversation with two IndieWeb proponents, Tom Brown and Manton Reece, both software developers. Manton is the creator of the independent blogging system Micro.blog.

If you’re interested in IndieWeb technology, there’ll be an IndieWebCamp conference in Austin February 23-24, 2019. Click here for more information (including info about sponsorship).

Cyrus Farivar, speaking to a gathering of EFF-Austin supporters, discusses his book Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech, about the last fifty years of surveillance and privacy law.

Cyrus is Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, an author, and a radio producer. His earlier book, The Internet of Elsewhere: The Emergent Effects of a Wired World – about the history and effects of the Internet on different countries around the world, including Senegal, Iran, Estonia and South Korea—was published in April 2011. Plutopia’s Jon Lebkowsky interviewed Cyrus about the earlier book in a conversation on >the WELL.

He previously served as the Sci-Tech Editor, and host of “Spectrum” at Deutsche Welle English, Germany’s international broadcaster. He has also reported for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, The Economist, Wired, The New York Times and many others.

Bonus content on YouTube: Cyrus Farivar Question and Answer Session

Scott McCollough has spent his years as an attorney focused on the places where technology collides with regulation, working primarily for telecommunications companies, Internet service providers, and application providers. He’s a leading expert on telecommunications and Internet law and policy.

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, Scott speaks at a monthly EFF-Austin meeting, making a deep dive into the intricacies of privacy law. He discusses the definition of privacy, and why it’s important. He explores the natural law, positive law and utilitarian arguments in favor of privacy.

“The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. However in a line of decisions going back as far as 1891, the court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the constitution. Personal rights could be deemed fundamental or implicit in the concept of ordered liberty are included in the guarantee of personal privacy.”

More information at

Nate Wilcox is an award-winning political and public affairs consultant and a recognized expert in online politics. He is the co-author, with Lowell Feld of “Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics”. More recently, Nate edits a blog about combat sports for SBNation/Vox Media.

In his work as a political consultant, Nate pioneered new practices in politics including podcasting, online video, use of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, blogger outreach, and aggressive online advertising.

In our far-reaching conversation with Nate, we discuss the evolution of politics from the mass media era to the age of social media. “We’re not just talking about change in who’s controlling information,” Nate says, “but we’re talking about changes in how people process information… We skim, text… We’re not processing complicated arguments at all… we’re getting so much of our media as video… which engages entirely different parts of our brains… our emotional brains rather than our thinking brains.”

Join us for an energetic conversation about the politics du jour… “We have enormous amounts of work to do!”

Austin, Texas is widely regarded as a leading center for development of cutting edge technology and a vibrant startup culture. In an election year, how do local Austin candidates for public office deal with issues confronting the tech world? EFF-Austin decided to find out, inviting two local candidates for the U.S. Congress and Texas Senate, Joseph Kopser and Steven Kling, to participate in a tech roundtable. They discussed how they will craft laws and policies relating to current and emerging technologies. Both candidates have backgrounds in the tech industry.

From EFF-Austin:

The rate of technological innovation accelerates at an exponential pace every year, and yet it seems the laws we pass to regulate these new technologies struggle to keep up, leaving our rights and the smooth functioning of our society at risk. From the abolition of net neutrality and demands for encryption backdoors in our secure communications to such outlandish and ill-advised proposals as link taxes and impossible-to-implement copyright filters, we see our politicians proposing policies that leave experts in their respective fields shaking their heads in dismay. The lack of elected officials with professional backgrounds and experience in the technology sector leaves our legislators woefully unprepared to fully understand the implications of the laws they are passing, forcing them to defer to well-funded industry groups who may not always have the public’s best interest in mind. To ensure that our laws around emerging technologies are written with the expertise necessary to enshrine and preserve our rights, it is vital that industry leaders in these fields answer the call to civic service.

Joseph Kopser, a 20-year combat veteran and Bronze Star recipient, is president of Grayline, a company that works to bring together experts, data, and solutions to help companies and public institutions manage disruptive change. Before that, he was Global President of moovel Group GmbH, a subsidiary of Daimler AG, the maker of Mercedes-Benz, and cofounder and CEO of RideScout, a Texas-based technology company that enabled seamless multimodal experiences and connected transit commerce to app users worldwide.

Steven Kling was also a decorated combat veteran, having participated in Operation Enduring Freedom ’05 & Operation Iraqi Freedom ’09. He received the Bronze Star Medal, Joint Service Commendation Medal and Combat Action Badge. He is founding partner at KratoSoft, LLC, a consulting company focused on Atlassian integration, configuration and process management. Before that, he worked as Senior Staff Engineer at HomeAway.com. Steven is running for the Texas Senate in District 25.