This Thursday, I’ll introduce director Kirby Dick and his movie “This Film is Not Yet Rated” at a free screening at USC. The screening is sponsored by the USC Free Culture club, a campus organization dedicated to promoting liberty, openness, and access to information.

Kirby Dick has graciously agreed to present the screening of his movie, which I reviewed in September. This Film is Not Yet Rated is the best documentary I’ve seen all year, the kind of thing that inspired outrage and sympathy. It tells the hidden story of the MPAA’s rating board, and its systematic discrimination against sympathetic portrayals of gay sexuality and sex in general, and its tacit support for ultra-violence.

The ratings board is shrouded in secrecy, and exists, supposedly, to forestall Congressional censorship of the film industry (an eventuality as unlikely as it is unconstitutional). The board’s membership is secret, as are the names of the appeals committee that is meant to watchdog the organizing. The whole, secretive mess was established by Jack Valenti in his capacity as head of the MPAA, and so it bends over backwards to help filmmakers from the major studios (while shafting indies).

Dick’s documentary revolves around his efforts to unmask the identity of the secret censor board. He hires a private eye and sets her to work (the CSI elements of the film are really juicy — it’s fun to see how private eyes really work). Threaded around this are interviews with filmmakers who’ve had run-ins with the board, and, as a climax, Dick’s own Orwellian adventures in submitting his documentary to the censor board whose identities he has uncovered.

I can’t wait to meet him — one viewing of This Film is Not Yet Rated turned me into an instant, lifelong fan. I hope to see you there!

Where: University of Southern California, Los Angeles: University Park Campus, George Lucas Instructional Building, 108

When: Thursday, November 30, 2006 : 7:00pm to 9:00pm

Link

EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen will give a free talk next Tuesday at USC in Los Angeles. Seth is the final speaker in my Fulbright Chair lecture series this year, and he’s a fascinating technologist who does an admirable job of explaining the subtle ways in which technology design can affect liberty for better or for worse.

Seth’s the creator of the conceptual Trusted Computing mod, Owner Override, an implementation of Trusted Computing that preserves all the privacy benefits and eliminates the danger to users.

He’s also the maintainer of the Bootable Business Card Linux distribution, the author of the DeCSS Haiku, and one of the investigators who cracked the secret behind the hidden codes in color laser printer outputs.

Where: University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication, Room 207 (Los Angeles)

When: Tuesday, November 28, 7PM-9PM

Hope to see you there!

Link

My latest Locus Magazine column is up: “The March of the Polygons:
How High-Definition Is Bad News for SF Flicks” is about the way that the move to high-def screens in the home shortens the commercial life of blockbuster sf movies.

Every year, the effects are more impressive, the impossible more daring. That’s because today’s special effects are almost universally generated on computers, and computers get better every year. Moore’s Law describes the trend in processor performance, doubling every two years and getting faster every year. Other laws describe even steeper curves for storage, bandwidth, and bus-speeds. If Moore’s Law applied to cars, you could replace your $12,500, 10-year-old, 39 miles/gallon Toyota with a $50 car that weighs 200 pounds and gets 500 miles to the gallon today.

It’s a good reason to go to the box-office, but it’s also the source of an awful paradox: yesterday’s jaw-dropping movies are today’s kitschy crap. By next year, the custom tools that filmmakers develop for this year’s blockbuster will be available to every hack commercial director making a Coke ad. What’s more, the Coke ads and crummy sitcoms will run on faster, cheaper hardware and be available to a huge pool of creators, who will actually push the technology further, producing work that is in many cases visually superior to the big studio product from last summer.

It’s one thing for a black-and-white movie at a Hitchcock revival to look a little dated, but it’s galling — and financially perilous — for last year’s movie to date in a period of months. You can see what I mean by going to a Lord of the Rings festival at your local rep-house and comparing the generation-one creatures in Fellowship of the Ring to the gen-three beasts in Return of the King.

Link

Next Tuesday, November 21 at LA’s University of Southern California, I’ll host a free speech by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, the legendary reverse-engineer who broke the Xbox. Bunnie is an inspirational speaker on reverse engineering and hardware hacking, and his acclaimed book, Hacking the Xbox is a veritable technical manifesto on the subject.

Bunnie’s latest act is founding a company called Chumby, which produces a free and wide-open “bean-bag computer” that comes with WiFi and a little color display, and the plans to reproduce any or all of it, from the flat-patterns for the bean-bag fabric skin to the source-code for the operating system. The device can subscribe to cool hacks, auto-updating itself to add great new features invented by other users.

Bunnie’s talk is part of my Fulbright Chair lecture series at USC. It’s on from 7PM-9PM on Tuesday, Nov 21, at the Annenberg School on the USC campus, room 207. Hope to see you there! As always, we’ll be podcasting the talk afterward.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang is a nocturnal hacker and the hardware lead; his responsibilities include the architecture, design and production of chumby’s electronics, as well as writing drivers for and maintaining the Linux kernel on the chumby. With a PhD in EE garnered from MIT in 2002, he has completed several major projects, ranging from hacking the Xbox (and writing the eponymous book), to designing the world’s first fully-integrated photonic-silicon chips running at 10 Gbps with Luxtera, Inc., to building some of the first prototype hardware for silicon nanowire device research with Caltech. bunnie has also participated in the design of 802.11b/Bluetooth transceivers (with Mobilian), graphics chips (with SGI), digital cinema CODECs (with Qualcomm), and autonomous robotic submarines (with MIT ORCA/AUVSI). He is also responsible for the un-design of many security systems, with an appetite for the challenge of digesting silicon-based hardware security. bunnie is also a contributing writer for MAKE magazine and a member of their technical advisory board.

Link

UPDATE: Mitch Kapor won’t be able to make it to next Tuesday’s Giants of Cyberliberties talk at USC. Mitch had some minor surgery and his recovery — though going well — is taking longer than expected, and he’s been advised against travel. He’s given me a rain check, so expect him to come back next semester for my undergrad course. We’ll still have two dynamite speakers, of course: John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore. See you next Tuesday!
Next Tuesday, November 14, I’m presenting a rare chance to hear technology legends Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow speak at a free event at the University of Southern California.

All three helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but that’s just for starters.

Mitch Kapor: Architecture is politics
Mitch Kapor also founded Lotus and created the ground-breaking spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3. He pioneered the “peering” that has become the norm for Internet service providers, and has gone on to lead social investing movements, as well as chairing the Open Source Applications Foundation and being a key player in the Mozilla Foundation.

John Gilmore: The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it
John Gilmore was employee number five at Sun Microsystems and was key
to the development of Solaris and the SPARC chip. He went on to
cofound the USENET alt. hierarchy, The Little Garden, an early
regional ISP, and Cygnus Support, the first big free software business
(now Red Hat). He continues to initiate and/or fund ground-breaking
free software projects like GNU Radio, BitTorrent, Gnash and
FreeS/WAN. He’s an activist for individual rights, including
challenging secret laws and identification demands, starting the
Identity Project, funding and strategizing to end
prohibition of drugs, liberating and aiding the victims of Guantanamo,
and supporting other freedom-oriented charities.

John Perry Barlow: We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
John Perry Barlow has had several careers — beginning as a Republican cattle-rancher who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead. In the early days of the public Internet, Barlow became famous as a kind of poet-laureate of the Internet, penning such influential documents as the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow continues to serve as a powerful spokesman for online liberty.

It’s exceedingly rare to have all three of these EFF founders on the same bill. In my five years of association with EFF, I’ve never been in the same room as all three, though I’ve come to know each of them well. These three activist/entrepreneur/artists were absolutely vital to the shape of the Internet as we know it today — they are living legends. Any one of them is worth seeing, but I can hardly contain my excitement at the thought of hearing all three together.

Space is limited, and Gilmore and Mitch have to leave right after the talk, so there won’t be any extended events with all three. Arrive early to stake out your place! I’ll post audio and possibly video after the event.

Where: University of Southern California main campus, Annenberg School of Communications, Room 207 (Los Angeles)
When: Tuesday, November 14, 7PM-9PM.

Link

(Mitch Kapor photo via Smagdali’s Flickr stream; John Gilmore photo by Carl Cheney; John Perry Barlow photo by Bart Nagel)