End of Silence

I noticed a few interesting tidbits about former and current well-known Austinites on “The Internets” today and thought I’d share:

• RU Sirius has an interview with Rick Linklater about A Scanner Darkly, which opens in limited release this Friday (at the Regal Arbor only, according to Fandango). P.S. Alamo South Lamar is having special screenings on July 15th with composer Graham Reynolds in attendance and playing parts of the film’s score along with the film live. How cool it that?
• Itinerant author, Bruce Sterling, was/(is?) in town this week and snapped some cool shots at last night’s fireworks show in Zilker Park.
• Lance Armstrong used to take his team to a local strip club for team building? What? Anybody else have more on this or is this just another instance of the european press trying to cause trouble for him? Is anybody actually paying attention to the Tour De France now that he’s no longer participating? Other than the hard core cycling geeks, that is?

Helen Thomas, a member of the White House press corps since the Kennedy administration, will be in town on Thursday to promote her new book, Watchdogs of Democracy? : The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public. She’ll be a guest of Writers’ League of Texas at the Austin Marriot (701 E. 11th) at 7pm. Admission is a $5 suggested donation to the Writers’ League.

Thomas was recently on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart promoting the book and was featured in a short skit as part of Stephen Colbert’s roast of G.W. Bush earlier this year at the White House Correspondents dinner (that starts at the 16:50 mark of the video). She’s been a thorn the side of many White House press secretaries and recently drove Tony Snow to make a few exasperatedly stupid comments. The Statesman had a short interview with her in Sunday’s paper.

For those that are living under a rock, there’s legislation winding its way through both the House and Senate that could potentially change how we interact with the Internet. The issue is commonly referred to as “network neutrality” or “net neutrality”. You can find a lot of information at Save The Internet.

The current and most pressing action is happening in the Senate Commerce Committee. Our own Kay Bailey Hutchison is a member of this committee and will have a say in where this issue heads out of the committee. If you support Net Neutrality, then you want to contact Sen. Hutchison via phone, fax or e-mail and let her know that you’d like her to support the Snowe/Dorgan amendment (S. 2917).

Here’s her contact information:

DC Office – 202-224-5922; 202-224-0776 (FAX)
Austin Office – 512-916-5834; 512-916-5839 (FAX)

You need to contact her office in the next few days as it’s expected to be taken up either tomorrow or Wednesday.

If you’d like to read more on the issue, here are several articles:

• Local techie and activist, Jon Lebkowsky, with an excellent post on some of the issues involved.
• Cory Doctorow at InformationWeek
• For and against from Craig Newmark and Scott Cleland on NPR
• Cringely at PBS
• Posts from other metblog cities: Miami, DC among others

I suppose it was bound to happen after the media hype earlier this year. Nevermind the voices of reason. If you’ve failed in your duty as a parent, then it must be someone else’s fault. A 14-year-old girl and her mother are suing MySpace because she was sexually assaulted by a guy she met on MySpace.

The girl is 14. The guy who assaulted her is 19. He contacted her through her profile and said he was a high school senior. After trading e-mails and phone calls, he picked her up at school, took her to a movie and out to eat and then sexually assaulted her. I’m guessing that the mother had no idea this was going on? If she did, why would she allow it? If she didn’t and the girl was stupid enough to meet a guy on the Internet regardless of what site or method she used without telling her parents the situation, then who’s fault is that? I guess they couldn’t sue the Internet.

I registered as a 14 year old on MySpace. From what I can tell, your profile is set to private when you register. It’s also appears that the “Send Message” and “Instant Message” options are disabled. I’m not sure if these features have been added since April when the assault took place. General searches on MySpace only go down to 16 years old, not lower. Of course, a search on google restricted to the myspace.com domain for “14 years old” will get you some hits. I didn’t try too hard to circumvent the restrictions I found in the first few minutes, but they appear to be making some effort. Their service would suffer if it required a drivers license or credit card. I don’t think it’s fair to put the burden on them just because you’re a shitty parent. $30 million, eh? That’ll be a nice paycheck for Mr. Loewy. This just screams money grubbing lawsuit.

And, yes, I’m a parent of two kids, a girl and a boy. I’m concerned with their safety, especially since one is starting to show interest in the Internet. What am I going to do? Restrict the hell out of him. Keep tabs on what he’s doing and ask him on a regular basis. Yes, this includes monitoring and logging where he’s going and what he’s doing. It also includes talking to him about smart behavior online, exactly what some of the guidelines on MySpace advise. The same goes for my daughter when she starts to venture out into cyberspace. Do I know that’s not what this mother did? No. If I’m doing that and my kid decides to do something stupid on a social networking site, will I blame the provider? No, but the mf’er who would take advantage had better watch out.

Perhaps Mr. Loewy would like to take on the NSA? Sounds like they’re up to something on MySpace. And watch out for those guys from Buda.

A series of reports by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine is making news across the country. NPR did a story on it this morning and the Statesman ran one today as well. The reports highlight the dismal state of health care in this country and warns that the hospital and EMS infrastructure in most cities would be unable to handle crises like an outbreak of avian flu or terrorist attack.

The report did give examples of systems that had better coordination and gave Austin/Travis County’s emergency medical system props for being a good example. While a lot of this has to be done at the local level, it’s a symptom of a much larger problem with healthcare in this country. I sure am glad that our congresscritters and leadership in Washington are spending time protecting my marriage instead of addressing frivolous things like my family’s health.

You can read the reports for yourself at the Institute of Medicine website.

Update (2006.06.15 12:02 CDT): Mahablog comments on the Washington Post article on these reports and expands (as usual) better than I ever could. This all reminded me of a couple of posts by Malcolm Gladwell earlier this year.