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Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute is working on a new ebook DRM dubbed SiDiM that would prevent piracy by changing the actual text of a story, swapping out words to make individualized copies that could be tracked by the original owner of the ebook. […]

The idea behind SiDiM is similar to the way rights holders have been trying to protect music and video for some time. Instead of trying to lock down copies through technical measures that prevent copying, so-called fingerprinting measures simply add markers to a work that make it possible to identify the original purchaser. In theory, this prevents people from sharing their works for the fear of being caught.

However, in music files, these types of changes are a lot less notable than a machine rewriting a book, which is why it’s unlikely that authors and literature friends would embrace SiDiM. The system is currently in testing, and Fraunhofer secured some state funding to run these tests and even got a subsidiary of the German book publisher’s association to join.

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"It was disrupted capital from the old-economy world which drove the subprime fiascos, as it strove to secure itself to anything so that it could preserve its diminishing value. This is because the dotcom era created something of a self-canabalising effect for most of the capital system. The more you invested in technology, the greater the efficiencies. The greater the efficiencies, the greater the abundance. The greater the abundance the more likely capital itself would be undermined, since you can’t put a price on air, or anything else which is abundant. What’s happening now, arguably, is that the canabalising effect is being stalled by the monopolisation effect instead. The owners of the capital — which has the potential to create abundance — are protecting their rate of profit by stalling efficiency (a la patent trolling) and by means of the monopolisation effect. This may not go on forever if the rise of technology jumps over into the Wiki open commons world, at which point it becomes accessible to everyone irrespective of the monopolies. But for as long as the monopolies exist and gate-keep access to the higher living standards provided by their own technology, some sort of subsidising effect is needed from the government to stop people becoming totally disenfranchised from the system."

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Like his predecessors, Petraeus used ‘signature’ strikes to select and destroy targets. Unlike ‘personality’ strikes, where the target is a positively identified terrorist leader or some other high value individual, signature strikes involve looking for behaviour patterns to identify groups of men who appear to be behaving like terrorists, whether or not their identities are definitively known.

One of the claimed benefits of this approach is that it makes militants more reluctant to congregate, for fear of being droned, which in turn makes it harder for them to train, or plot against the United States. This is a remarkable approach to counter-insurgency. It’s an attempt to identify and control the enemy in a frontless war by making targetting determinations based solely on how people move through the landscape. Invisible panoptical sky gods rain HELLFIRE down upon the possibly guilty, to scare the rest into submission. Dominance through terror.

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"As George Orwell long ago reminded us, you know you are in the presence of a corrupt political system when those who defend it cannot call things by their proper names. By these standards the contemporary United States is unusually corrupt. We maintain an empire that cannot be referred to as an empire, extracting tribute that cannot be referred to as tribute, justifying it in terms of an economic ideology (neoliberalism) we cannot refer to at all. Euphemisms and code words pervade every aspect of public debate. This is not only true of the right, with military terms like “collateral damage” (the military is a vast bureaucracy, so we expect them to use obfuscatory jargon), but on the left as well. Consider the phrase “human rights abuses.” On the surface this doesn’t seem like it’s covering up very much: after all, who in their right mind would be in favor of human rights abuses? Obviously nobody; but there are degrees of disapproval here, and in this case, they become apparent the moment one begins to contemplate any other words in the English language that might be used to describe the same phenomenon normally referred to by this term."

"Alexander runs the nation’s cyberwar efforts, an empire he has built over the past eight years by insisting that the US’s inherent vulnerability to digital attacks requires him to amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe. In his telling, the threat is so mind-bogglingly huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian Internet under his protection, requiring tweets and emails to pass through his filters, and putting the kill switch under the government’s forefinger. “What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks,” he said at a recent security conference in Canada. “I am concerned that this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in."

"The implications of this manifesto are plenty weird. Basically, it’s stating that it’s easier to use Google-style resources to disrupt and up-end entire industries than it is to get a ten percent improvement through incremental every day business-process improvements. This means that, technologically speaking, both government and capitalism simply get in the way — they don’t get us what we want and need to survive and thrive as human beings in the world, they are structural impediments. So much so that we could do better by a factory of ten if we all lived on GoogleX Island, an imaginary technosocial clean slate where business and government didn’t exist."