Joi Ito (who never got an undergrad degree) is going to do a PhD in Business Management, and his thesis project is a book on "the sharing economy."

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Boing Boing pal and superblogger Joi Ito was profiled today by the Associated Press.

"Joi is an incredibly dynamic person," said Justin Hall, an American writer on technology culture and a friend of Ito's for several years. "He's got a fantastic curiosity.

Joi Ito was hired to audit the security of the Japanese feds' big-brother national ID system as implemented in Nagano . His conclusion? The system sucks — it places the personally identifying info of Japanese citizens at risk of being stolen, altered, and deleted, and it was implemented incompetently. — Read the rest

Joi Ito has joined the board of the Creative Commons. He's trying to get Japanese CE companies to use CC licenses for the work they do, and on the Japanese ports of the CC licenses.

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Here's a 2:40 clip of Joi Ito's talk about the deficiencies in Japan's Democracy, as presented at this year's hyper-leet Davos forum.

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(via Joi Ito's Web)

Joi Ito's new paper about the mechanisms by which blogs and other tools can enable "emergent democracy" is timely, smart, and convincing.

The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. The issues are too complex for representative governments to understand. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are also very limited in their ability to solve global issues.

Richard Stallman resigned Monday from his positions at MIT and the Free Software Foundation, following controvery over his remarks suggeting victims of Jeffrey Epstein were willing participants.

Last week it emerged that Stallman had cast doubt upon the reports that AI pioneer Marvin Minsky had sexually assaulted one of Epstein's victims.

The JNU Data Depot is a joint project between rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously), bioinformatician Andrew Lynn, and a research team from New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University: together, they have assembled 73 million journal articles from 1847 to the present day and put them into an airgapped respository that they're offering to noncommercial third parties who want to perform textual analysis on them to "pull out insights without actually reading the text."

For several years, I've been covering the bizarre phenomenon of "adversarial examples (AKA "adversarial preturbations"), these being often tiny changes to data than can cause machine-learning classifiers to totally misfire: imperceptible squeaks that make speech-to-text systems hallucinate phantom voices; or tiny shifts to a 3D image of a helicopter that makes image-classifiers hallucinate a rifle

For the second year now, the MIT Media Lab has awarded a "Disobedience Prize" of $250,000, no strings attached, awarded to people whose disobedient work has benefitted society; this year's prize is share among three leaders of the #MeToo and #MeTooSTEM movements: BethAnn McLaughlin, Sherry Marts, and Tarana Burke.

Lawrence Lessig was once best-known as the special master in the Microsoft Antitrust Case, then he was best known as the co-founder of Creative Commons, then as a fire-breathing corruption fighter: in America, Compromised, a long essay (or short nonfiction book), Lessig proposes as lucid and devastating a theory of corruption as you'll ever find, a theory whose explanatory power makes today's terrifying news cycle make sense -- and a theory that demands action.

Twitter appears to have made a cautious, nearly inconsequential step towards deprecating search results for alt-right conspiracy theorists. From Gizmodo:

In what appears to be new ranking behavior, Gizmodo has identified several prominent far-right accounts now buried by Twitter's search feature.

EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow died last month, and though his death had been long coming, it's left a hole in the hearts of the people who loved him and whom he inspired.

Joi Ito has published the "1.0" version of his October essay, Resisting Reduction, which makes major advances on the earlier draft. He's soliciting revisions and comments here. Here's what I wrote about it then:

A gentleman from Hawaii sent his ex-girlfriend 144 nasty texts and phone messages within 1 1/2 hours, violating a court order from last February that blocked him from having contact with her. As part of his punishment, he now must send her 144 compliments, and none of them can be the same. — Read the rest

Joi Ito's Resisting Reduction manifesto rejects the idea of reducing the world to a series of computable relationships that will eventually be overtaken by our ability to manipulate them with computers ("the Singularity") and instead to view the world as full of irreducible complexities and "to design systems that participate as responsible, aware and robust elements of even more complex systems."

(Photo: Joi Ito, CC-BY)

He's not the only major figure in the world of tech and ideas who goes by Chris Anderson. His namesake runs the TED conference – whereas the Chris Anderson of this article was Editor-in-Chief of Wired for twelve years. — Read the rest

Syrian Creative Commons lead Bassel Khartabil disappeared in 2012, snatched off the Damascus streets by Syrian authorities; in 2015, he was secretly executed by the Assad regime, a fact that has only just come to light.

Joi Ito, the MIT Media Lab director, has an interesting proposal for managing his "partial attention problem during meetings." Joi spends between 2-3 hours on email in the morning, and another 2-3 hours at night. In addition to that, he "must diligently triage email during the day." — Read the rest

There's 25 stops in all on the US/Canada tour for WALKAWAY, my next novel, an "optimistic disaster novel" that comes out on April 25 (more stops coming soon, as well as publication of my UK tour).