A Disability History of the United States

I’ve finished three books during my vacation time so far.  I will provide you with excerpts from the three books.  The most recent book I finished was A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen:

“Most Deaf organizations and workers did not reject the categorization of people with disabilities as ‘unemployable,’ but insisted that deaf people were not disabled people.  Since the organization of the first institutions for and of deaf people in the United States, they had emphasized their separateness as linguistic community, their normality, and their full citizenship potential.  Already marginalized they sought to distinguish themselves from those they considered the truly disabled.  Some feared that hearing individuals within a larger disability community would seek to dominate if they made cross-disability alliances.  Some deaf leaders, as historian Susan Burch has written, ‘thought they could reject the stigma of disability’ by ‘rejecting overtures from disabled activists.’   Deaf leaders thus rejected alliances with disabled activists such as the League of the Physically Handicapped who challenged the employment discrimination within New Deal employment programs.
For deaf African Americans, if they were familiar with this argument it must have seemed like privileged folly  Like white deaf Americans, deaf African Americans used the relationships and institutional resources of schools to foster community.  The NFSD, the NAD, and souther state associations remained white by policy.  Many western and northern schools for deaf people were integrated, but souther schools resoundingly were not.  Most had substandard facilities due to substandard state of local funding.  Trained white teachers rarely went to black schools;  black teachers generally had little training in deaf education because of segregation in deaf schools.  Because of this the students and staff at many African American deaf schools created their own unique sign language dialects, different form the standard American Sign Language and sometimes even from that of neighboring state schools for African American deaf students.  Such linguistic developments were of necessity, but contributed to and continued racial segregation.”

I finished the very, very, short book American sign Language: fact and fancy by Harry Markowicz.  He writes:

“MYTH: ASL IS UNGRAMMATICAL….A grammar describes how a language works, how it is put together.  The opinion that ASL is ungrammatical, or that it lacks a grammar, usually results from a sign-for-word translation of ASL into English.  It is based on the assumption that ASL must be structured exactly like English.  This assumption is false since ASL is an independent language.  It has its own vocabulary, its own grammar, and both are unrelated to English.
There are, however, some speakers of English who assume that ASL must follow the rules of their language in order to be grammatical.  To support their claim, sign-for-word translations are used to show that ASL lacks a grammar or that it is ‘broken English.’  Based on these translations, ‘deficiencies’ are pointed out.  As an example, consider the sign sentence: TOUCH FINISH SAN FRANCISCO YOU? (An appropriate English translation is, ‘Have you been to San Francisco?’)”

I also read My Home Away from Home Life at Perkins School for the Blind by Robert T. Branco.  I decided to read this because as an employee of Perkins, I thought it would be cool to read what a student wrote about his experiences who actually went there.  I was excited by the idea that Mr. Branco would provide me with insight into how I can do my job better.  It would also be a really cool way to get to know about the institution.  So I read it and learned a lot.  Excerpt:

“Those who wish to judge Perkisn are free to call it whatever they want.  But can you imagine what would have happened if Perkins hadn’t been a so-called shelter, given all the thefts drugs, drinking, and sex that went on anyway among the students who were supposedly sheltered?  Ralph would say that I was sheltered because I didn’t learn about most of life’s hard knocks or how to be street smart.  He feels I don’t always handle people the right way, and therefore it relates to shelterism.  Ralph did drugs, had sex with hundreds of women, spent a nigh tin jail, and was a bar-hopper.  He can say I’m sheltered all he wants, but I would much rather be how I am than who he was, even though he’s turned his life around.  I think the perception is that Perkins sheltered us because were were all blind students living in a blind community, making our environments a shelter.”

Let me know if you end up checking any of them out!

August

I have the month of August off from work.  The students have summer vacation.  Let me know if you want to do something.  I will be taking a train to Ann Arbor from the 14th to the 19th though.

Favorite Books

I’m re-reading The Red Tent for the third time.  Maybe fourth, I’m not sure.  I would usually tell people my favorite book is Sleeping With Cats a memoir by Marge Peircy.   She was the first feminist I ever encountered.  We have deep similarities about us.  It is true that I have never met her, but even so, I will always feel connected to this woman who lost her love at age 14 to a heroin overdose.  Who grew up in Detroit, moved to Ann Arbor, but somehow ended up in Massachusetts.  Who loves Cats and her passion for writing so much that she was able to say to no to children.  Even so, I think I need to acknowledge how much I love the book The Red Tent. Perhaps you should check it out, or both of them out, I guess.

                                                                                        

Twitter

I just joined twitter.  Let me know if you use it so I can follow you!

My New Job

Just in case you didn’t know I got a new job!  Finally!  I’m a teaching assistant at Perkins School For the Blind.

Red Wedding

I feel a bit embarrassed that this TV show has been on my mind so much, but Game of Thrones last week wast nuts!

 

 

http://www.craveonline.com/tv/articles/511715-15-funny-tweets-about-game-of-thrones-red-wedding

Mourning My School Home

I was in Western Mass in my college town, Amherst, MA last week.  It was sad because the home I made in College is no longer there.  Of course the buildings remain the same, and the spirit of the school will always be there, but my friends have graduated and moved on- as they should. Thus is the nature of a school.  Doesn’t mean I don’t miss it though.  Here is my Carrel from Div III.  My favorite place in the world at one point.  My best friends sat in the adjoining two Carrels.  

Responsibility

Social Justice: “the way in which human rights are manifested in the everyday lives of people at every level of society.”

I think one of the most important lessons the free software movement has taught me is to stop thinking about software as a product. I had to re-align my thinking and realize I have the power to say, “hey I don’t like the way this feature works” or “the program would be so much better if I could do X”.   It was a whole change on my out look about how I consume technologies to get to the point where I realized that I have the potential to change the technologies I use.

Before I came to the free software and larger free culture movement I just accepted what I was given. If the program says that I can’t download the song more than three times even though I already paid for it, oh well, that’s just how it goes. If my cell phone won’t backup my address book unless I store it with Verizon’s servers, with who knows what privacy features, and with a monthly fee, well that’s just the way it is.

Learning the motives and the ins and outs of the free software movement taught me to expect more of my service providers.  It taught me that I deserve* privacy, that I deserve autonomy over the technology that I use, and I also deserve to be able to manipulate that technologies that mediate how I communicate with people.  I didn’t realize that I could expect privacy in regards to my information.  I dont have to put up with a DRM model of music, it sucks.  We need an alternative model (like spottily or something of the sort) that emphasizes user rights.  It is our job to put our heads together and come up with systems that pay artists, yet doesn’t screw over our right to have control over the software we use.  Under the guise of these smaller lessons I had to learn that I am not merely a consumer.  What I my decisions are, what I decide to consumer or not, what I decide to produce, or say, matters and I need to be aware of my position in the world.  Meaning, it is irresponsible to put myself in the role of innocent “consumer.”

Putting myself in the role of la(z)y consumer means that I forfeit my ability to give back, to contribute to the way in which technology comes to be designed.  I leave out any valuable information I might have from my place of situated knowledge.  I’m not just talking about software, but websites, blogs, wiki’s etc… I consume and consume images and information for hours on end everyday. I should not only just consume, but contribute back.  For example, by creating a blogpost about how to hunt for the best vintage finds, or give a much needed feminist perspective on the latest news scandal, or edit a wikipedia page.  I constantly consume other people’s work and ideas. But how often do I share my knowledge that may (or may not) be useful to someone else?  I have a lot of great ideas that could be shared with people if only I put the time into communicating them effectively.  It is my responsibility to make sure that I’m producing content for people to benefit from as I benefit from their work.
But the larger point is not about my specific ideas or the blog post I am, or am not writing, that may, or may not, be useful to someone. This is about a larger cultural consciousness of just accepting the technology given without question, without regard to our rights, to our freedom, or our privacy.  Without encouragement to re-imagine new ways these technologies could exist and evolve.  Many of us are not thinking outside of the box, to the role we could have outside of “just consumer.”  We need to take ourselves and our ideas seriously. And we need to take our privacy and freedom seriously.

I leave you with Aaron Swartz talk about how he helped end SOPA and PIPA.  He says something at the end of the talk, something like he could have just curled up on the couch, popped some popcorn, and watched transformers.  But he didn’t.  And we have his work (and many others!!) to thank for a SOPA & PIPA free web. What if he had decided to just stay in and watch TV?  Where would we be if all those who advocated for these vital issues decided to leave it to someone else?  He says that this will happen again, and he’s right, so we can’t just sit back and leave it up to someone else.  I don’t have the answers on how to be a responsible consumer, but I do think that changing my attitude to realize I have a social responsibility was the first step for me towards that end.  I’m am afraid I sound self-righteous, and that I sound as if I have an elevated idea of my position in the world.  This is not my intention.  I merely think that if we, not just me, took ourselves seriously as not just consumers, but instead people with ideas and the need to protect freedoms, there would be a huge cultural shift for the better.  A world of people who critically question.  A world that is active in defending their civil liberties and re-imagining ways out of oppression.

And as promised  here’s Aaron:

http://youtu.be/Fgh2dFngFsg

*I’m not sure what I think about using the word “deserve” because it implies I’ve done something and now I should be rewarded.  That’s not quite what I mean, but I don’t know what word to use otherwise.

HTML5 is Dangerous

via Free Culture Foundation Blog

Don’t let the myths fool you: the W3C’s plan for DRM in HTML5 is a betrayal to all Web users.

April 23rd, 2013 by Kẏra

A handful of myths have become common defenses of the W3C’s plan for “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME), a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) scheme for HTML5, the next version of the markup language upon which the Web is built.

These arguments obscure the threat this poses to a free and open web and why we must send a strong and clear message to the W3C and its member organizations, that DRM in HTML5 is a betrayal to all Web users and undermines the W3C’s self-stated mission to make the benefits of the Web “available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.” The W3C exists to bring the vision of an undivided ‘One Web’ to its full potential, and DRM is antithetical to that goal.

Among the most popular claims are:

1. that DRM doesn’t work; that it exists to protect creators, but since it is easily cracked and can be worked around, it is largely ineffective and irrelevant
2. that DRM in HTML5 is a necessary compromise to finally bring an end to the proliferation of proprietary, platform-specific browser plugins such as Adobe Flash Player and Micrisoft Silverlight
3. that the web needs DRM in HTML5 in order for Hollywood and other media giants to finally start giving the Web priority over delivering media over traditional means

All of these myths depend on dangerous misconceptions of how the planned Encrypted Media Extensions work, why Hollywood’s threat of boycott is completely empty, who DRM is actually built for, and what the purpose of free and open Web standards is. Implementing the EME proposal would simultaneously legitimize DRM through the HTML5 standard and needlessly concede the very purpose of Web standards. This is not a compromise for the advancement of the Web, it’s a complete concession of the principles of the W3C.

The next time any of those myths come up, you can use the following to respond:

1. DRM is not about protecting copyright. That is a straw man. DRM is about limiting the functionality of devices and selling features back in the form of services.

Public perception of DRM is that it exists to prevent unauthorized copying, but that it’s inherently ineffective because it’s impossible to simultaneously show someone something and keep it hidden from them. This is a grave mistake that hides the actual function of DRM, which is overwhelmingly successful: to prevent completely legal uses of technology so that media companies can charge over and over for services which provide functionality that should never have been removed to begin with.

Copyright already provides leverage against media distributors, but DRM provides leverage against technological innovations which have given users the capability to do much more with media than ever before. Free of technologically imposed limits, anyone can view their media whenever they want, wherever they want, on whichever devices they want, and however they want. By imposing digital restrictions, media giants can prevent users from skipping advertisements or viewing media on multiple devices, and then charging for the relief from those antifeatures. This gives media companies total control over how people use their technology and creates a huge market out of artificially produced scarcity. This exploitative practice targets the vast majority of users who acquire their media legally, and it’s already stunted the growth of the Web enough.

Ian Hickson, the author and maintainer of the HTML5 specification, is not only overseeing the HTML5 standard at the W3C but also an engineer at Google (ironically, one of the biggest corporate proponents of the EME proposal). He blasts the idea that DRM’s purpose is to enforce copyrights and explains the distinction thoroughly:

Arguing that DRM doesn’t work is, it turns out, missing the point. DRM is working really well in the video and book space. Sure, the DRM systems have all been broken, but that doesn’t matter to the DRM proponents. Licensed DVD players still enforce the restrictions. Mass market providers can’t create unlicensed DVD players, so they remain a black or gray market curiosity. DRM failed in the music space not because DRM is doomed, but because the content providers sold their digital content without DRM, and thus enabled all kinds of players they didn’t expect (such as “MP3″ players). Had CDs been encrypted, iPods would not have been able to read their content, because the content providers would have been able to use their DRM contracts as leverage to prevent it. DRM’s purpose is to give content providers control over software and hardware providers, and it is satisfying that purpose well.

2. DRM in HTML5 doesn’t obviate proprietary, platform-specific browser plug-ins; it encourages them.

The web would certainly be better off without Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash Player, but the idea that putting DRM into HTML itself to make them obsolete is absurd. The EME proposal would not make proprietary, platform-specific plugins disappear; in fact it makes a new space for them as Content Decryption Modules (CDMs). These would be no less of a problem for Web users, especially those using free/libre and open source browsers and operating systems. The fact that they would gain legitimacy as a Web standard would make them a much bigger problem.

Providing a space for a DRM scheme in HTML5 invites the kind of incompatibilities that HTML was created to undo. EMEs would require that proprietary browsers and operating systems implement more restrictive antifeatures to prevent bypassing the DRM, and as the corollary to this, EMEs would be able to detect whether the user’s software did not have such antifeatures (as is the case with free/libre and open source software, specifically GNU+Linux operating systems) and refuse to deliver the media.

New implementations of anti-user technology are not preferable to old implementations of anti-user technology. While it may eliminate the corporate demands for Silverlight and Flash, at least in their current incarnation, the Encrypted Media Extensions plan takes what makes those particular technologies terrible for users (digital restrictions management, poor cross-platform support, etc) and injects it directly into the fabric of the Web. This is equivalent to inviting Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash Player, and the like to be part of the HTML5 standard.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) writes:

The EME proposal suffers from many of these problems because it explicitly abdicates responsibility on compatibility issues and lets Web sites require specific proprietary third-party software or even special hardware and particular operating systems (all referred to under the generic name “content decryption modules”, or CDMs, and none of them specified by EME). EME’s authors keep saying that what CDMs are, and do, and where they come from is totally outside of the scope of EME, and that EME itself can’t be thought of as DRM because not all CDMs are DRM systems. Yet if the client can’t prove it’s running the particular proprietary thing the site demands, and hence doesn’t have an approved CDM, it can’t render the site’s content. Perversely, this is exactly the reverse of the reason that the World Wide Web Consortium exists in the first place. W3C is there to create comprehensible, publicly-implementable standards that will guarantee interoperability, not to facilitate an explosion of new mutually-incompatible software and of sites and services that can only be accessed by particular devices or applications. But EME is a proposal to bring exactly that dysfunctional dynamic into HTML5, even risking a return to the “bad old days, before the Web” of deliberately limited interoperability.

…

All too often, technology companies have raced against each other to build restrictive tangleware that suits Hollywood’s whims, selling out their users in the process. But open Web standards are an antidote to that dynamic, and it would be a terrible mistake for the Web community to leave the door open for Hollywood’s gangrenous anti-technology culture to infect W3C standards. It would undermine the very purposes for which HTML5 exists: to build an open-ecosystem alternatives to all the functionality that is missing in previous Web standards, without the problems of device limitations, platform incompatibility, and non-transparency that were created by platforms like Flash. HTML5 was supposed to be better than Flash, and excluding DRM is exactly what would make it better.

3. The Web doesn’t need big media; big media needs the Web.

The idea that Hollywood, the MPAA, RIAA, or any other media giant has buying-power over the Web is a farce. The Web is here, it is the nexus of media convergence, and it’s eating up other industries. Big media companies know that they must adapt or go out of business, but they are audaciously attempting to convince us that the Web should provide them with another, more expansive system of control over online media distribution on top of the already far-reaching legal restrictions they abuse. These threats are not new.  During the Broadcast Flag negotiations to implement DRM for high-definition digital television,

MPAA’s Fritz Attaway said that “high-value content will migrate away” from television if the Broadcast Flag wasn’t imposed; he told Congress that fears of infringement without a Broadcast Flag mandate “will lead content creators to cease making their high-value programming available for distribution over digital broadcast television [and] the DTV transition would be seriously threatened.”

Glynn Moody elaborates on these hollow threats attacking free software and the free and open web:

Let’s look at the record on threats to boycott non-DRM broadcasting from these companies. In 2003, the US Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (a committee in the Hollywood-based Copy Protection Technical Working Group) went to work on a plan for adding DRM called the Broadcast Flag to America’s high-def broadcasts. I attended every one of these meetings, working on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the free/open TV projects it represented, including MythTV (an open video-recorder) and GNU Radio (an open radio/TV receiver).

Over and over again, the rightsholders in the room during the Broadcast Flag negotiations attempted to create a sense of urgency by threatening to boycott American high-def telly if they didn’t get DRM. They repeated these threats in their submissions to the Federal Communications Commission (Ofcom’s US counterpart) and in their meetings with American lawmakers.

And here’s how it turned out:

So what happened? Did they make good on their threats? Did they go to their shareholders and explain that the reason they weren’t broadcasting anything this year is because the government wouldn’t let them control TVs?

No. They broadcast. They continue to broadcast today, with no DRM.

The EFF makes this abundantly clear in their statement:

The perception is that Hollywood will never allow movies onto the Web if it can’t encumber them with DRM restrictions. But the threat that Hollywood could take its toys and go home is illusory. Every film that Hollywood releases is already available for those who really want to pirate a copy. Huge volumes of music are sold by iTunes, Amazon, Magnatune and dozens of other sites without the need for DRM. Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify have succeeded because they are more convenient than piratical alternatives, not because DRM does anything to enhance their economics. The only logically coherent reason for Hollywood to demand DRM is that the movie studios want veto controls over how mainstream technologies are designed. Movie studios have used DRM to enforce arbitrary restrictions on products, including preventing fast-forwarding and imposing regional playback controls, and created complicated and expensive “compliance” regimes for compliant technology companies that give small consortia of media and big tech companies a veto right on innovation.

Protect internet freedom: tell the W3C that DRM has no place in their standards.

Help Defective by Design, the Free Software Foundation‘s campaign against DRM gather 50,000 signatures against DRM in HTML5.

Sign the petition here:
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5

You can also contact the W3C here:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/contact

FREE CULTURE CONFERENCE

As some of you  may know I’m on the board of Student for Free Culture and I’m in NYC this weekend for our annual conference.  You guys can live stream if you want.  The schedule is here and you can participate online in the backchan.  The questions from the backchan are being projected on the screen behind the presenters.
Live stream links:
Saturday 9:30 – 5:30 Stream
Sunday 2:30-5:30 Stream
Info on the org (changing our name to Free Culture Foundation)