One of our most important themes here at Techdirt is the idea that the act of remixing, reimagining and recombining the creations of the past is not only natural and wonderful, it's the primary (and at a fundamental level, the only) engine of creativity in human culture. The internet era brings this to the fore and makes the cycle more immediate, because it makes the wealth of history and culture available to everyone, along with the tools to make use of it. Moreover, the sometimes-overwhelming nature of rapid change promotes a healthy degree of nostalgia in even the most forward-thinking and future-embracing among us, and it's in that spirit that this week's Awesome Stuff highlights some nostalgic offerings from Kickstarter:

One Of Those Old-Timey Cameras With A Hood (a.k.a. The Camera Obscura)

We've all seen them — if not in real life then in one of the many movies where they are used as a piece of shorthand synecdoche for "hey, it's the past!" Well, this project to resurrect the iconic camera has shot way past its goal, by staying true to the original design while also demonstrating how it can be combined with modern equipment.

Hey, Is That A Robot?

I love design and illustration work that creates contrast between content and style. I also have every former-8-year-old-boy's fondness for robots. This dinner plate, second in a series, so perfectly emulates a traditional and somewhat bland graphic style that at a glance, anyone would miss the giant robot preparing to disrupt its quaint tranquility. And it all started because the artist re-drew an image from an old plate inherited from his grandparents...

Go Fish (Through The History Books)

Kickstarter has been a boon for all sorts of creators, but there are certain very particular areas that seem to have been bolstered beyond all expectations by the crowdfunding site (the wallet has been "revolutionized" and "reinvented" at least 100 times in the last year, apparently). One of these areas is playing cards, which have a large collector community and serve as a cool way for artists to get their work out there. This extremely beautiful deck is based on the paintings of the old masters, but digitally repainted in exceptional detail (and considerable style) from scratch.

Okay, But How About Something New?

Well, it can't all be nostalgia, so here's a pointer to a project to create something that definitely didn't exist in the past: a personal indicator light that tells you whenever the ISS is overhead. Mostly pointless, perhaps, but cool, because hey, we have a space station!

Dishonorable Mention / Schadenfreude Moment

Here's something I really wish would stay in the past: a belief in ghosts. This guy wants $120,000 to produce a documentary about how ghosts are, you know, real and stuff. With science. And lazers. He promises to reveal "the truth that nobody knows about all the TV Ghost Hunting shows" which presumably is that they are fake but he is, like, totally genuine. If you pledge $1000, you'll even get one of their "devices for capturing human soul" which sounds like a good deal, actually. Just don't cross the streams.

It heartens me to see that he has only raised $5.

By now, most people who shop online are aware of the way in which companies try to tailor their offers based on your previous purchasing and browsing history. Being followed by strangely relevant ads everywhere is bad enough, but what if the government started using the same approach in its communications with you? That's one of the key ideas explored in an interesting new article by Zeynep Tufekci, strikingly presented on Medium, with the title "Is the Internet good or bad? Yes."

Tufekci suggests that neither of the two main metaphors regularly wheeled out for today's global surveillance -- George Orwell's "1984" and Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon -- is right:

To understand the actual -- and truly disturbing -- power of surveillance, it's better to turn to a thinker who knows about real prisons: the Italian writer, politician, and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was jailed by Mussolini and did most of his work while locked up. Gramsci understood that the most powerful means of control available to a modern capitalist state is not coercion or imprisonment, but the ability to shape the world of ideas.

The question then becomes: how can people's ideas be shaped so as to control them? Simply bombarding the population with messages only works for a while, until people become jaded and resistant to them. That's where Edward Snowden's revelations about "big data surveillance" come in, Tufekci suggests:

Individually tailored, subtle messages are less likely to produce a cynical reaction. Especially so if the data collection that makes these messages possible is unseen. That's why it's not only the NSA that goes to great lengths to keep its surveillance hidden. Most Internet firms also try to monitor us surreptitiously.

She's worried about this approach being used to influence people's political behavior, and points to a recent study in Nature that explored precisely this area:

By altering a message designed to encourage people to vote so that it came with affirmation from a person's social network, rather than being impersonal, the researchers had shown that they could persuade more people to participate in an election. Combine such nudges with psychological profiles, drawn from our online data, and a political campaign could achieve a level of manipulation that exceeds that possible via blunt television adverts.

Indeed, Tufekci thinks the process has already begun:

During a break [in a conference called "Data-Crunched Democracy"], I cornered the chief scientist on Obama's data analytics team, who in a previous job ran data analytics for supermarkets. I asked him if what he does now -- marketing politicians the way grocery stores market products on their shelves -- ever worried him. It's not about Obama or Romney, I said. This technology won't always be used by your team. In the long run, the advantage will go to the highest bidder, the richer campaign.

He shrugged, and retreated to the most common cliché used to deflect the impact of technology: "It’s just a tool," he said. "You can use it for good; you can use it for bad."

That's hardly very comforting, and neither is Tufekci's concluding thought:

Internet technology lets us peel away layers of divisions and distractions and interact with one another, human to human. At the same time, the powerful are looking at those very interactions, and using them to figure out how to make us more compliant. That's why surveillance, in the service of seduction, may turn out to be more powerful and scary than the nightmares of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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We've talked time and time again about the pipe dream on some fronts (mostly the entertainment industry) that you should tax broadband connections to give them the money they so justly deserve as victims of new business realities they repeatedly refused to acknowledge. It's effectively a "you must be a criminal tax," and despite being an immensely bad idea, it has obviously seen passage in numerous countries in the form of German levies on things like solid state drives and Canada's tax on blank media. Fortunately here in the States, efforts to push these taxes on broadband users or universities run into strong opposition.

Most people understand that letting the entertainment industry tax everybody for the behavior of a few people simply makes no coherent sense. Except apparently for "musician and freelance writer" Chris Peak, who in at attempt at humor over at the Huffington Post proudly proclaims that he thinks it would be a nifty idea if all broadband subscribers had to pay a monthly fine for the behaviors of other people. Peak begins by proudly admitting he pirates, tossing around some of the usual arguments buried under said attempted humor (it's "stealing!" and "bands and musicians have essentially given up on selling music!"), and reaches the point where he asks all broadband subscribers to pay more money for no good reason:

"The fix? There is a fix. And it could work. Tax me. Tax for me the amount of bandwidth I use. Tax me each month, then earmark the tax for the film and music industry. Collect whatever percentage off of that tax you want. Enter into an anti-piracy agreement with both the RIAA and MPAA, and distribute the tax as fairly as possible. It would be a difficult task to allocate the tax to the effected artists and software developers, but there are widely available lists, updated daily and weekly, of the most pirated albums, programs, and movies."

Because it's not like once those taxes are imposed they'll endlessly shoot skyward, completely detached from any real-world financial realities, right? If only we had real-world examples of that to show Peak how awful this idea is. Fortunately, ISPs and the entertainment industry are both known for transparency and accurate math, so it's not like they'll try to expand and abuse such a levy at every conceivable opportunity, right? It's also not like entertainment industry middlemen have a long history of taking this kind of money and ensuring they get the lion's share of it, right? Peak's idea is fool proof!

The author then cries a little bit about his inability to adapt to a new business paradigm he pretty clearly doesn't understand:

"I anticipate in the very near future my own music being completely stolen from me, pirated, and offered for free for trade between my fans. Fans are great. I wish I had more (for self-esteem issues). But that music that you kind of stole from me... I spent years writing, years recording, and years begging and borrowing and spending my life's savings on, hoping that I would find enough fans to buy my music. Because I kind of do this for a living and need to support myself. Get it?"

Got it. Surely the best possible way of building your admittedly-small fan base will be to call them thieves and impose an entitlement fee on top of every broadband connection in the nation, while demonstrating you have limited skills at adaptation. Stardom awaits!

It's clear that 3D printing has moved well beyond the breathless novelty stage, and is entering the breathless hype phase, with everyone declaring that it's the next big thing, and that it will transform the world etc. etc. etc. There's no denying it's a powerful technology with great possibilities. But against a background of uncritical boosterism, it's good to come across an article in the Architectural Review that points out some of the problems we will need to address to realize its full potential. Here's one:

We could start by properly critiquing the impacts of this technology beginning with a much deeper analysis of the materials used, the energy and resource requirements, and the supply chains that result in printed objects. Fully characterising the current production systems may help us to understand how they could be developed into ecosystems of exchange where the coveted objects can be meaningfully recycled by our biosphere.

It's all very well being able to print objects on demand, but unless the ecological implications -- both in terms of the raw materials used and the energy required -- are considered, it may well be that 3D printing is actually a step backwards when it comes to environmental impact. The ability to re-cycle 3D-printed objects needs to be built in from the start.

Another problem is more subtle:

If 3-D printing does not fully take on this responsibility then the sustainability of our current highly 'customised' objects is likely to be under scrutiny, as the unit cost of printers falls and hobbyists make legions of white elephants out of toxic plastics and when our landfills are chock-a-block with yesterday's badly made fashionable shapes. And while some -- such as ultrasound embryo portraits -- may have enduring sentimental value, it is likely that most will simply clutter up our rubbish dumps and precipitate our plastic marine continents as indestructible rubbish icebergs.

As this points out, if we are not careful, the personal manufacturing revolution may become the 3D equivalent of Geocities: a huge flood of badly-designed, useless pieces of junk that are soon abandoned by their embarrassed creators.

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Food fads are fascinating, especially when they turn previously disgusting biological curiosities into expensive delicacies. Lobsters were once only served to prisoners and lowly servants, but now these crustaceans are highly-priced entrees. Casu marzu is a traditional Italian cheese that contains live insect larvae (with an aftertaste that can reportedly last several hours). The maggots can jump about 6 inches, so diners should be careful to block these bugs from jumping into their mouths if they don't want to eat them. Casu marzu has a questionable legal status (for health and safety reasons), but it's sometimes available on the black market for a hefty markup in price. Here are just a few other menu items that might (or might not) be appetizing to you.

• Civet poop coffee is a delicacy, and you really need to know that your coffee beans have been partially digested by a civet cat from Indonesia. So if you're wondering if your coffee is fake, there's a test that can verify the flavor components of real Kopi Luwak. [url]
• Whelks can refer to any number of unrelated shellfish, but the commonly eaten ones are a particular kind of sea snail of the species Buccinum undatum. Whelks could become the next oyster in the seafood industry, or they could just remain unappetizing snotwinkles, as they're called in Canada. [url]
• In the early 1900s, the US faced "the meat question" -- a crisis over whether or not meat production could match the growing demand for meat products in the US. A seriously debated solution involved importing African hippos to the US -- in the same way that cows, pigs, sheep and poultry were introduced to the Americas -- and trying to convince Americans to eat hippopotamus meat. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

After years of pretending that broadband usage caps were necessary because of network congestion, the cable industry not all that long ago admitted that congestion had nothing to do with it. While the industry still pretends that usage caps on broadband networks are about their expression of "creativity" and "pricing innovation," most people realize caps were always designed to milk yet more money out of an already profitable network (and make no mistake, unlimited, flat-rate pricing is profitable), while allowing gatekeepers to simultaneously cash in on and inhibit Internet video. Carriers are relentlessly trying to expand usage caps under the banner of "fairness," and they're aided by an uncompetitive broadband market.

Despite claims that imposing caps is about altruism or even helping grandmothers, most consumers understand that ISPs want them to pay more money for the same product at a time when network hardware and bandwidth costs are falling. Generally, ISPs that do impose caps insist that these caps will be flexible as modern usage evolves. That claim is about to get tested more seriously as next-generation game console downloads and 4K video slowly come to market.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings not that long ago stated the company's planned 4K streams will need at least 15 Mbps but optimally 50 Mbps. Streaming a 1080p 3D movie from Netflix at the moment eats around 4 to 5 GB per hour, a total that could jump to closer to 20 to 30 GB per hour with 4K video. Similarly, Sony is cooking up a 4K video download service that could involve downloads as high as 100 GB per title. It's a subject getting revisited with everybody binge-watching "House of Cards." Tacking 4K video on to existing bandwidth consumption begins to get very bandwidth intensive when you're talking about entire series at 4K resolution (how much modern compression codecs like Google's VP9 or H.265 will help are very rough estimates):

"Streaming in 1080p on Netflix takes up 4.7GB/hour. So a regular one-hour episode of something debiting less than 5GB from your allotment is no big deal. However, with 4K, you've got quadruple the pixel count, so you're burning through 18.8GB/hour. Even if you're streaming with the new h.265 codec—which cuts the bit rate by about half, but still hasn't found its way into many consumer products—you're still looking at 7GB/hour. But you're not watching just one episode, are you? Of course not! You're binging on House of Cards, watching the whole series if not in one weekend then certainly in one month. That's 639 minutes of top-quality TV, which in 4K tallies up to 75GB if you're using the latest and greatest codec, and nearly 200GB if not. That means, best case scenario, a quarter of your cap—a third, if you're a U-Verse customer with a 250GB cap—spent on one television show. Throw in a normal month's internet usage, and you're toast."

Gizmodo doesn't note that many people's bandwidth caps are even lower. CenturyLink, Suddenlink and AT&T lay claim to tens of millions of DSL users (which the companies don't intend to upgrade anytime soon) who face 150 GB monthly caps on top of a significant flat monthly fee -- plus sometimes the cost of a mandatory copper voice line and all the additional, annoying fees that entails. Those slower, 3-10 Mbps connections in reality cost very little to provision and provide, but there's the rub: these customers are being aggressively beaten about the head and neck on price because of limited nationwide competition. Innovation and creative pricing, indeed.

ISPs have long defended low bandwidth caps by claiming that the majority of today's users wouldn't be impacted by them, knowing full well that the majority of tomorrow's users would. That day is coming quicker than you'd think, and it's worth watching whether ISPs are flexible on allotments, or if they keep existing allotments firmly in place to intentionally clothesline Internet video customers -- especially those looking to cut the cord.

One of the logistical problems facing long-running publications is the archiving of old material. I say "problem," even though some publications view it more as an opportunity to finally move paper archives to digital in order to preserve them (and even make money in the process). Others view it as dead weight and simply dump anything older than some arbitrary cutoff date (or lock it up behind a paywall). US News & World Report seems to fall into the latter camp.

One of Jim Romenesko's readers recently noted that the publication had ditched a lot of its previously archived material. When contacted about the now-eradicated archives, US News editor Brian Kelly had this to say:

“Last week we launched a new content management system and decided that we could not effectively keep archived web content published prior to 2007 on our site. Those stories, which mostly originated in the print magazine, are available on the LexisNexis and EBSCO archive services, as well as in bound volumes.”

If US News just wanted to paywall its archives, it certainly could have done so. (Not that that's a great idea...) Now it's being done by proxy via LexisNexis and EBSCO, destinations most people aren't going to go when looking for US News stories. Then there's the "bound volumes" Kelly mentions, which are only useful to someone in the vicinity of those printed copies.

The problem here is that US News' many contributors have now effectively lost access to their reporting work. It doesn't appear anyone was notified about the removal, at least not from what's contained in Kelly's statement. Presumably, those contributors have their own copies stored locally, but linking to a body of work (when looking for work elsewhere, etc.) just became a lot more difficult and potential outlets are far less likely to follow a link to a gated article -- and that's presuming the journalist will spend the time and money to locate their US News contributions in the first place.

There's no notification on the website telling readers that the site's archives only date back to 2007. (Not to mention, the website's search function seems to be fundamentally broken…) And it's not as though this was just a simple dump of everything pre-2007. The US News site has selected articles archived dating back as far as 1993. So, it appears US News has done some very selective archiving to preserve anything deemed "important." Everything else is in the hands of third parties.

A large digital archive can be expensive to maintain and show little return on the investment. But even if US News was uninterested in performing this service for its readers, it should have at least considered how it would affect its writers. If nothing else, the Internet Archive has been preserving previous versions of the US News site, and all without feeling the need to put a monetary barrier between writers and their work.

As I recently noted, all the net neutrality opponents freaking out about the FCC's new neutrality promises really shouldn't be.

The announcement effectively boiled down to the agency saying "we might think about some stuff after a very long conversation that will potentially go nowhere." Yes, there are a few promises in there about pushing for greater competition and transparency, but the FCC has spent a decade making similar promises they've failed to follow through on. Still, that didn't stop Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee from declaring that the FCC's ambiguous non-announcement was the very worst sort of attack on Internet freedom -- a "socialistic" proposal that will have Americans re-living the "horrors" recently experienced during visits to Healthcare.gov.

Blackburn appears to have followed up her failure to understand how little the FCC will actually be doing (right alongside much of the press, apparently) with a bill aimed at thwarting the FCC's entirely non-existent assault on Internet freedom. H.R. 4070, or the "Internet Freedom Act," would protect us all from the FCC goin' crazy and regulatin' the hell outta them there Internets. From a statement on her new bill:

"Net Neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine of the Internet. Once the FCC has a foothold into managing how internet service providers run their networks they will essentially be deciding which content goes first, second, third, or not at all. It’s time for Congress to slam the FCC’s regulatory back-door shut, lock it, and return the keys to the free market. My legislation will put the brakes on net neutrality and protect our innovators from these job-killing regulations."

Blackburn is simply throwing some chum in the partisan water to excite her base. Pretending the horribly ill-conceived Fairness Doctrine is making its menacing return (it died in 1987) is one that gets trotted out every few months or so for just that purpose. The amusing part is that Blackburn doesn't appear to have noticed that her campaign contributors AT&T and Comcast actually really like the FCC's new proposal. Why? Because they know the very most it's going to result in is a list of voluntary, non-binding measures "prohibiting" ISPs from doing things they never wanted to (like stone-cold outright blocking of entirely legal websites or services for no sane reason) while not prohibiting them from "creative" pricing (usage caps).

The FCC has spent much of the last 20 years deregulating the broadband cable, and phone industries and doing everything in their power to support things like usage caps and limited competition through total inaction. The broadband industry in turn has spent much of that time working endlessly to weaken the FCC's authority to regulate, just in case the agency wakes up one day and decides to do its job. This entirely-hallucinated idea that the agency is suddenly going to go mad, unshackle its trademark apathy on consumer issues, abuse non-existent authority, and start creating tough new regulations is all part of one elaborate stage play. The FCC's moves are theater, the political response is theater, and the quality of all the players is abysmal.

Last Spring, wireless carriers and the government jointly announced that they'd be collaborating on building a new nationwide database to track stolen phones (specifically the IMEI number). The goal was to reduce the time that stolen phones remain useful, thereby drying up the market for stolen phones and reducing the ability of criminals to use the devices to dodge surveillance. The move came after AT&T was sued for not doing enough to thwart cellphone theft, the lawsuit alleging AT&T was intentionally lax on anti-theft practices because stolen phone re-activations were too profitable. After regulator pressure, AT&T launched new stolen device blocking tools and re-vamped their website with security tips.

Law enforcement has complained that none of these efforts have done much to stop cell theft and resale, in large part because phones stolen here are simply taken overseas and used there. This in turn prompted a push for new "kill switch" legislation in both New York and most recently San Francisco, in addition to a new bill proposed by Senator Amy Klobuchar we discussed last month. While perhaps well-intentioned, all of the bills have one thing in common: they forget that if you can kill your phone remotely, so then can governments, hackers, and anybody else.

Those concerns are part of the reason cell carriers oppose kill switch legislation (again, that and they profit off of re-activations and new plans), and the worries shouldn't be taken lightly. There's a long, long list of examples where remote or artificial termination technology (Monsanto's wonderful scientific advancements are the first to come to mind) isn't a particularly great idea. Information Week tries to hash through some of these to illustrate the dangers of the concept and its contribution to a broader surveillance state, where the control over your personal devices could become an illusion and institutionalized control becomes a threat:

"Mandatory phone kill switches will hasten the arrival of the Surveillance of Everything, an unavoidable consequence of the so-called Internet of Things. Using technology to extend the reach of property rights make as much sense for other objects as it does for phones. But in so doing, individual property rights mingle with social mores and government prerogatives. Nothing is truly yours on someone else's network....Consider a recent Google patent application, "System and Method for Controlling Mobile Device Operation," which describes research to help in "correcting occasional human error," such as when phones have not been silenced in a movie theater.

The thing about kill switches is that they're a manifestation of digital rights management. In the hands of individuals, perhaps they're a good idea. But they won't remain in the hands of individuals. They will be used by companies, organizations, and governments, too. And even when people believe they have control of their kill switches, authorities and hackers can be expected to prove otherwise."

Granted governments could still shut down the BART network on protesters (one of the first examples the author gives) or kill Internet access in Egypt without necessarily needing a kill switch. A gifted hacker might also be able to remotely brick your current phone. But why would you want to make it any easier? There's countless other ways to combat cell phone theft that doesn't involve making an entire industry considerably less secure.

The Obama White House has been a big supporter of getting companies to come up with what they like to call "voluntary agreements" for various issues where both the White House and Congress know that there just isn't enough political will in Congress to pass a law. Not that Congress is particularly good at legislating, but sometimes these "voluntary agreements" don't appear to be all that voluntary, and at other times they appear to border on being collusion against certain competitors and innovators. This focus on "voluntary agreements" has been a big part of the administration's approach to dealing with copyright law. That was true prior to the SOPA debacle, but even more so since that legislative effort fell flat on its face. The most high profile of these was the six strikes "voluntary agreement" between certain major ISPs along with the RIAA and MPAA.

Of course, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Chris Soghoian showed that rather than a truly "voluntary" agreement, the White House, in the form of then IP czar Victoria Espinel, was heavily involved in the process. However, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (where the IP czar position is housed) withheld most of those emails. Soghoian sued and lost, as the court ruled that OMB was okay to hide the documents claiming either that they contained confidential commercial information or that it was part of the "deliberative process privilege."

It appears that the IP czar and OBM are going to get away with this again. A professor from the University of Iowa School of Law, submitted a similar FOIA request for details of the IP Czar's involvement in the creation of a similar voluntary agreement with payment processors -- an effort to get Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, American Express and others to stop doing business with sites deemed evil by the MPAA and RIAA. In this case, OMB is admitting that it has found 60 pages of relevant information but is withholding all of it for the same reasons given to Soghoian. Specifically:

We are withholding the 4-page final agreement under FOIA exemption 4... which protects from disclosure "... trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person [that is] privileged or confidential. We are withholding the 56 pages of various drafts of such agreement and other related documents under FOIA exemption 4 and FOIA exemption 5.... Exemption 5 protects interagency and intra-agency predecisional, deliberative materials, the disclosure of which would inhibit the frank and candid exchange of views that is necessary for effective government decision-making.

So, once again, the main issue here is the deliberative process privilege. In theory, it makes some sense to have such an exemption, because you want government employees to be willing to discuss things frankly when shooting around ideas. But here's the problem in both of these cases: these aren't government policies. The whole point is that they're "voluntary agreements" between private parties. And thus, there's no government policy involved, and thus it's difficult to see how the deliberative process privilege could or should possibly apply. Unfortunately, the court ruled otherwise against Soghoian, and I'd imagine that should Gleason appeal this rejection the results would be the same.

Of course, the end result now is that the office of the IP Czar now realizes that it has basically free rein in browbeating companies into collusive positions against upstarts and innovators as pushed for by copyright maximalists -- and it can keep the efforts of the government (i.e., threats of "do this or we'll pass legislation" or "do this or we'll make life difficult for you") totally secret. That should raise serious questions about the appropriateness and legality of nearly all of these so-called "voluntary agreements."