[Quick reminder that Reader shuts down July 1. Here are the alternatives. -egg]

Google Reader Is Shutting Down; Here Are the Best Alternatives.

What we do know is that, on this side of the Atlantic, efforts are being stepped up to demonize Snowden, and to delegitimize his claim to be a conscientious objector to the huge electronic-spying apparatus operated by the United States and the United Kingdom. “This is an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent,” General Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “What Snowden has revealed has caused irreversible and significant damage to our country and to our allies.” Over on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “I don’t think this man is a whistle-blower… he could have stayed and faced the music. I don’t think running is a noble thought.”

via Demonizing Edward Snowden: Which Side Are You On? : The New Yorker.

[This man really, really dislikes Tim O’Reilly. He’s got some interesting things to say about open source, free software, and government-as-a-platform. -egg]

While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.

via The Meme Hustler | Evgeny Morozov | The Baffler.

Hey, this was a really good book. One of the best new authors I’ve encountered in ages.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9378352

Steven-Hall.org.

Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a governmentwide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.

The Insider Threat Program has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration, and the Education and Agriculture departments.

It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.

via Obama: Watch your co-workers | Nation/World News | Idahostatesman.com.

[THIS. A million trillion times THIS. -egg]

80 million surfaces generated using 3D modeling software and mesh-based digital language have resulted in a series of 3D printed complex architectural objects by michael hansmeyer and benjamin dillenburger. entitled ‘digital grotesque,’ the work will culminate in a full scale printed room launching july 22nd; however, a 1:3 scale prototype premiered in the swiss art awards this week in basel, switzerland. the prototypes show a regard for both material sensitivity and the limits of technologically manipulated form– millions of grains of sand bind together to create a new typology of sandstone and subsequently treated to be glazed and gilded. drawing from the algorithmic confines of the game of life and cell division, a set of simple geometries met with minimal parameters begets a highly involved form. the result is rich, shimmering composition ridden with impossible undercuts and a transcendental sense of the limits of technology. the term grotesque is derived from the unplanned complexities of a water-shaped grotto, itself a naturally occurring architecture long regarded for the uncanny presence of human-sized spaces in various landscapes. while hansmeyer and his lab in ETH zurich have long explored the confluence of algorithms, control systems and technology, the project works with the basic architectural idea of a room and injects an unprecedented sense of wonder into tectonics once held unchanging.

via digital grotesque: a 3-d printed room by michael hansmeyer.

“My Little Droney” by Christopher F. Smith, via Murmuration Festival.

via Boing Boing http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/35208/f/653965/s/2da6d3b7/l/0Lboingboing0Bnet0C20A130C0A60C220Cmy0Elittle0Edroney0Bhtml/story01.htm

[Hey, it just keeps on coming! -egg]

The Guardian has published two more top-secret NSA memos, courtesy of whistleblower Edward Snowden. The memos are appendices to “Procedures used by NSA to target non-US persons” 1, 2, and they detail the systems the NSA uses to notionally adhere to the law that prohibits them from spying on Americans.More importantly, they expose the “truth” behind NSA director James Clappers assertion that “The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress.” This turns out to be technically, narrowly true, but false in its implication, as Declan McCullagh explains on CNet:

via More NSA leaks: how the NSA bends the truth about spying on Americans while insisting it doesnt spy on Americans – Boing Boing.

What’s more, even if today’s digital technologies are holding down job creation, history suggests that it is most likely a temporary, albeit painful, shock; as workers adjust their skills and entrepreneurs create opportunities based on the new technologies, the number of jobs will rebound. That, at least, has always been the pattern. The question, then, is whether today’s computing technologies will be different, creating long-term involuntary unemployment.

At least since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1700s, improvements in technology have changed the nature of work and destroyed some types of jobs in the process. In 1900, 41 percent of Americans worked in agriculture; by 2000, it was only 2 percent. Likewise, the proportion of Americans employed in manufacturing has dropped from 30 percent in the post–World War II years to around 10 percent today—partly because of increasing automation, especially during the 1980s.

While such changes can be painful for workers whose skills no longer match the needs of employers, Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, says that no historical pattern shows these shifts leading to a net decrease in jobs over an extended period. Katz has done extensive research on how technological advances have affected jobs over the last few centuries—describing, for example, how highly skilled artisans in the mid-19th century were displaced by lower-skilled workers in factories. While it can take decades for workers to acquire the expertise needed for new types of employment, he says, “we never have run out of jobs. There is no long-term trend of eliminating work for people. Over the long term, employment rates are fairly stable. People have always been able to create new jobs. People come up with new things to do.”

Still, Katz doesn’t dismiss the notion that there is something different about today’s digital technologies—something that could affect an even broader range of work. The question, he says, is whether economic history will serve as a useful guide. Will the job disruptions caused by technology be temporary as the workforce adapts, or will we see a science-fiction scenario in which automated processes and robots with superhuman skills take over a broad swath of human tasks? Though Katz expects the historical pattern to hold, it is “genuinely a question,” he says. “If technology

via How Technology Is Destroying Jobs | MIT Technology Review.

xkcd: Prometheus.