Jamaica Farewell - len bullard with chris kidd

NSA, Privacy, Security Some Thoughts

Serious mindmelds required.

If the NSA sent me the same contract as Google and other dataHoovers use, I'd sign it. Both entities have the same problems of privacy. The NSA has security. So starting with what the web has already accepted as privacy for example in a contract with Google, work out to security. Some amateur thoughts...

Privacy. The legal solution has two parts: opt-in and penalty for failure to perform. The chasm is the assertion that citizens as groups do not legally bargain with the government over issues of opting in or out of policy and that the citizen does not have the right to seek redress (at least of winning). So penalty to perform only falls on the non-governmental entity in the transaction. Should a government as I suspect ALL will maintain a covert capability, there is no means to stop this effectively or over a lifecycle(n). For the agreement among nations to coordinate internet privacy to work, there would be enforceable agreements. And that turns the web into a profitable weapons market or full transparent inspection for less profit.

The reason is the business model is to use the data for profit and the security model is to use the data for defense. In both cases, political or economic advantagee pushes the information ecosystem toward the weapons market. In a dominantly capitalist system, profits win over social responsibility unless such responsibility is engendered by the use of the system itself. Building legal controls into digital systems is doable but is not well-understood at the international level past how we name the transactions: URn. Then it is an issue of expression: say RDF.

Security means access to a file. To fix this, you will need an uncrackable unhackable mcguffin, and at the rate of development in the information ecosystems, this is hard to maintain and be connected. However because we can represent the law as integrated policies over a multi-variate transition state space, we can give domains such as privacy and security relationships that state the legal declarations to any level of information such that the transition from private to public and any other domain can be ascertained and adjudicated.

Transactions are measured at that transition boundary. Think of it as a phase space transition. The static model isn't difficult. It's the dynamic model we'd have to trust our globe to manage.

Ne Me Quitte Pas (If You Go Away) (Brel/McKuen)

I arranged and recorded this wonderful song by Jacques Brel and Rod McKuen as a study in Brel's style as applied to small orchestra, guitar and voice. The choice of actress came out of my wife telling me it has a film noir feel, so it came down to Audrey Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck. Audrey wins for the French taste and well... expression.

French is one of two classes I flunked in my first year at college. Apologies for my lack of skill, but I chalk it up to nothing is ever wasted and one never knows what might come in handy years later. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVeAuKoemNo&feature=c4-overview&list=UUQvOiEo12qnnekOauzmXY_Q

Another Time Like Now (+playlist)

Web Piracy: The Worm is Turning and Getting Teeth

I follow The Trichordist blog (www.trichordist.com) to keep up with issues of web piracy.  I recommend it for those in or out of the entertainment industry because David Lowery and his crew fight the good fight.   After decades of hearing nothing can be done, it is good to see some doing something.

This fight is going better.  More a-listers are speaking out and there is (looking at an earlier post) finally a focus on transactional models that bring to the discussion what is necessary;  standards for tracking and reporting based on computer science concepts that can be implemented and reported.  Excellent.  I recently noted a blog from a colleague lamenting timbl explaining that drm standards as much as so many of the digerati hate them are necessary.   That is good news for the creative industry over all.  It is not possible to stop piracy on the internet.   There is every possibility to improve the situation such that it is a reasonable business.  

The revelations about privacy, government snooping etc. even the problems with the obamacare website are bursting the myth of the web bubble: that it is an irrresistable juggernaut of technology innovation, resistance is futile, yadda yadda.   The web isn't going away and no one believes the creative industries can be turned back in time,  But there is finally a sober conversation that technology serves human needs and not the other way around, that technologists are not the moral arbiters of social progress and in fact in too many cases have been social morons.

Until we have transactional standards for transparent auditing and models for transactional pricing we won't be there, but at long last the conversation is realistic and those who say "it can't be done" are being held in the same regard as the tea party for the same reasons:  fools for the pirates of the economy are still fools.

Que bueno.

They may want to write some articles about developments in digital fingerprinting and tracking for media files.   Laws without teeth are games for monopoly money.  This has to be real and it has to have consequences both good and bad.

How to Navigate ROL

An old friend commented on the scene on my Facebook page. It is a screen snap from a virtual reality album I created called "The River of Life". It is on the web at the address below.

You will require a plugin or browser that can render VRML97. A suggestion is the Blaxxun browser at BitManagement
(if others work, please say).

To experience the world:

1. Copy the URL into your browser address box.
2. Let the world load completely. You will hear music.
3. If you have Blaxxun, right click and choose view my avatar.
4. Put your avatar on the boat or right click and select Viewpoints/The Boat.

The Boat will take you to the entrance to the temple grounds. Go to the woman on the bridge. When she refuses yoo,
touch her heart and you are bound to her. Whatever she worships, touch. When she has taught you all
she knows of love, she will release you to roam the world freely.

http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/rol/TheRiverofLife.wrl

If the project interests you, there is a tutorial about this project including code examples in the first articles of this blog:

http://3donthewebcheap.blogspot.com

Softly As I Leave You

This is a style study for me, working out the arrangement of classic jazz ballads by ear and arranging them so I can record them. Thanks Eydie. Vaya con dios.

Enough Of Me

Do you feel that since you got the Internet you just haven't had a minute alone?

The Call

A fractured fairy tale. Lyric below. :)



Radiant creatures surely come
Dawn will be your way
The time for this has come around
Today

See you on the gentle lane
Friend to you at last
Every thought is slipping to the past

Empty only call my name
Waiting for the man
Time and all the things you wait for go
Fade away

Maybe, I’ll be here to sleep
You will cross the empty sea
Arriving now and waiting for
The Call.

The Call.

len bullard - june 2013

Let Me Be With Her In Heaven (For Sharon)

Cantor Sharon Kunitz and Len Bullard

Lord, do not part in Heaven
Whom you brought together in life
Let us travel there together
Beneath the wings of love and light
Compassion will not suffer
Separation and strife
Let me be with her in Heaven
As we were together in life.

You are the one true judge
Always thy will be done
But I cannot believe her grave
Is a wall that blocks the sun
The love we shared was holy
The intimate moments few
And now her endless journey
Draws her ever nearer to you

Lord do not part eternally
I ask in sorrowful song
For the troubled days are darker
And the darkness deep and long
But the summer evening lingers
To meet the tear filled dawn
Let me be with her in Heaven
For the sake of love now gone.

In the summerland of heaven
Past the water’s edge of Sheol
Let her smiling face there greet me
And then let us journey on
For what is Heaven’s reward
If parted from those we knew
Let me be with her in Heaven
And together there with you.

Len Bullard – May 25, 2013See More

— with Sharon Kunitz

Beth (Take a Sad Song and Make It Sadder... or funny)

My shaggy dog cover of the most famous song KISS ever recorded... to Gene Simmons' chagrin. C'mon Gene, it's a pretty song. :)

Happy Easter!

Why Do We Deactivate Our Facebook Accounts?

Why do we deactivate our Facebook accounts?

The common answer is "spending too much time". Fair enough. There are others and cleverfacebook has replied to most of these with suggestions because they don't want us to deactivate. In fact, they don't delete anything. They just set a bit that stops traffic but otherwise, it's all still there stuffed in the cracks of the iron the way a sharecropper stuffed newspaper in the cracks of a shack to keep out the wind. So, nothing is deleted and if we embarassed ourselves, we painted the rows and columns in bitter permanent red ink.

Is it like heroin or cigarettes? The only way to stop is to be sure there is none around and no one who can provide any. Fine but what exactly is IT?

Security? There ain't none. After being riff'd from my last job a "visitor" entered my home studio and checked the contents of my computer, and left a recognizable sign so I'd know it was a professional courtesy. If someone wants us, that's way easy these days and no, there isn't much one can do unless one wants to sit in a corner locked and loaded. Sorry, I can't live like that and it doesn't frighten me.

Tired? Sure. That is pretty easy to understand. Of what? Answering. There comes a point when one realizes few are doing much more than advancing the same causes with slightly different ;icks like a song one sings over and over again until as Arlo wrote about CONO, he was planning dinner and Goodman deserved better. Nothing is being learned.

Not useful? I'm not sure we should use each other in conversation like that. I deleted most of the connections to people who only used FB to send me their gig dates or announcements. IOW, if the only point of the conversation was to sell me something, I didn't consider that a friendship, virtual or otherwise. It was too much like people who called me to sell life insurance or investments. I don't need friends to do that. I could put a new song there and maybe a few real friends would notice or care.

I need friends. A friend helps, a friend needs friends to help and when I can do that, it feels good. I want to feel good but slowly and inevitably I suppose, FB came to be a political party gathering where almost everyone is trying to argue about the future, blame the past, curse the present and otherwise, talk me into doing something I'd already made my mind up about. (bad sentence construction; frack strunk and white). Because of that, I kept censoring myself, trying to be too careful, too correct, too... not me.

There is something in that. Facebook becomes a false face. It is too much like going to the office where the boss has a Romney sticker on his desk (still) and his subordinate rants about Obamacare destroying America and I have to be silent. Romney Scouse Git, so to speak.

And I can't play or sing with a false face and all it seems I ever really wanted to do was play and sing like the doomed Grasshopper in the fable. And taxes are due and the girl has to go back to college and the mortgage is killing me. I guess Betty White was right: Facebook, what a waste of time....

I miss the Curvy Girls Appreciation Page.