Joi Ito's Web

On March 15, 2012, Bassel Khartabil was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus. Since then, his family has received no official explanation for his detention or information regarding his whereabouts. However, his family has recently learned from previous detainees at the security branch of Kafer Sousa, Damascus, that Bassel is being held at this location.

Bassel Khartabil, a Palestinian-born Syrian, 31, is a respected computer engineer specializing in open source software development, the type of contributions the Internet is built upon. He launched his career ten years ago in Syria, working as a technical director for a number of local companies on cultural projects like restoring Palmyra and Forward Syria Magazine.

Since his arrest, Bassel's valuable volunteer work, both in Syria and around the world, has been stopped. His absence has been painful for the communities that depend on him. In addition, his family, and his fiancée whom he was due to marry this past April, have had their lives put on hold.

Bassel Khartabil has been unjustly detained for nearly four months without trial or any legal charges being brought against him. -- freebassel.org

This is our statement of Support to Bassel, his family and friends.

Creative Commons supports efforts to obtain the release of Bassel Safadi, a valuable contributor to and leader in the technology community. Bassel's expertise and focus across all aspects of his work has been in support of the development of publicly available, free, open source computer software code and technology. He pursues this not only through his valuable volunteer efforts in support of Creative Commons, but in all of his work in the technology field. Through his efforts, the quality and availability of freely available and open technology is improved and technology is advanced.

Please help us #FREEBASSEL by signing the support letter at freebassel.org.

Photo I took of Daniel in 2009 when we met for drink in a maid cafe in LA.

I just finished reading Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez. Daniel became one of my favorite science fiction writers when I read Daemon. Steward Brand turned me on to Daemon. If you haven't read Deamon, you should. I wrote about it back in 2008. After Daemon, Daniel wrote a sequel, Freedom™, which was also awesome.

In addition to being gripping thrillers that you can't put down, the books are all based on existing or near future technologies that make the stories amazingly scary and plausible. When Daniel wrote Daemon he was "an independent systems consultant to Fortune 100 companies. He has designed enterprise software for the defense, finance and entertainment industries," and can actually hack most of the technology that he talks about in his books.

In Daemon and Freedom™ the theme was a kind of MMORPG world gone wild where the online takes over the real world.

In Kill Decision, Daniel pivots and takes us to a world where autonomous mass-produced swarming drones establish a new era of warfare. There is an interesting discussion in the book where one of the characters argues the following:

In the middle ages, trained, mounted, armored knights could do an asymmetrical amount of damage taking out huge numbers of peasants making them an important unit of power. (Think Game of Thrones :-) ) This influenced the architecture of government - feudalism. Later, with the invention of gunpowder, a large number of mostly unskilled peasants properly armed with rifles could take on a relatively large number opponents, leveling the play field and paving the way for democracy.

WIth the autonomous drones empowered with the kill decision, brute force manufacturing and big data analysis - in other words money - could become the primary force of power.

Whether you're talking to Lessig about the corruption of modern lawmaking by special interests or the #occupy movement, it's clear that money and the aggregation of financial power is out of control and taking over the world. In Kill Decision, Daniel takes this trend and connects it very directly to the technology that we're all so excited about and adds a deadly and exciting twist.

There are a number of important elements of the story that take place in research labs at universities and it was a lot of fun comparing some of the characters to people in my new life at the Media Lab. (Looking forward to Daniel visiting the Media Lab.)

Overall, really great book. I totally recommend it and props to Daniel for totally nailing the timing. In case you missed it, see the Ted talk on autonomous quadrcopters from this year's TED which play a big role in in Kill Decision. I also loved the little details like the dig on Comic Sans. ;-)

The book comes out July 19 and you can pre-order it on his website.

Obviously, this is just one student and doesn't necessarily generalize, but I love that the electrodermal activity is nearly flatlined during classes. ;-) (Note that the activity is higher during sleep than during class...)

"Changes in skin conductance at the surface, referred to as electrodermal activity (EDA), reflect activity within the sympathetic axis of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and provide a sensitive and convenient measure of assessing alterations in sympathetic arousal associated with emotion, cognition, and attention."

From:

Poh, M.Z., Swenson, N.C., Picard, R.W., "A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-term Assessment of Electrodermal Activity," IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol.57, no.5, pp.1243-1252, May 2010. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2009.2038487 PDF

Reading the dictionary

The Internet, innovation and learning

Picture of PSINet Japan POP 1994