Vitanuova for 2002 October 25

Pacific Northwest

As I was saying before, the Pacific Northwest is really nice!

Looking back over the Powell's map, I see that Riana and I spent a lot of time in the rose room, no time in the orange room, a lot of time in the blue room, a fair amount of time in the purple room, a little time in the gold room, a little time in the red room, and very little time in the coffee room, the pearl room, and rare book room. Do you get the sense that Powell's is pretty large?

Riana described the gold room in a funny way -- something like "Stuff That Isn't Respectable Yet". (It houses "science fiction and fantasy", "horror", "mysteries", "nautical fiction", "erotica", "thrillers", "romance", "westerns", and "graphic novels". The way Riana put it was really funny.)

I think Riana and I told well over 100 pirate jokes during that trip. These are not really jokes; they are riddles in which the answer is provided by substituting a purported pirate utterance ("ar", "avast", "ahoy", "matie") for a similar-sounding part of some non-pirate-related phrase. (A typical example would be "Where does a pirate get a map?" "From a carrrrtographer." Or, of course, "Who's a pirate's favorite folksinger?" "Darrrr Williams." But my favorite was probably "What's a pirate's favorite article of clothing you're wearing right now?" "Avest!")

It seems that such jokes could almost be generated by a shell script, but we had a good time with them. It's an obscure genre.

So I got to hang out briefly in Walla Walla with Riana and some of her friends at Whitman, and see KWCW (hearing about the FCC from a totally different angle), and attend a class about free speech (hearing about the first amendment from a totally different angle). I came back on Tuesday and had my first ever really good airport food. I wish I could remember the name of the restaurant; it's in the Portland Airport and it's a deli restaurant and the food is actually food I would voluntarily go and eat. Maybe next time. (Speaking of delis, there is a deli in Walla Walla with a really great tiramisu or tiramisu-like thing.)

The Portland Airport (as I told Praveen) reminds me of Chicago O'Hare, except on a friendlier scale. It even has a Powell's outlet (with only new books and no used -- imagine selling used books in an airport, and wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?).

I don't know what it is about that image which I find so compelling. Airports are somehow a place where nothing second-hand is sold because nothing second-hand or non-corporate is sold. If used books (serendipitous, unpredictable, exciting, romantic) could make it into the unbelievably controlled environment of an airport, then anything could happen!

The TSA Federalized airport security screeners took over from private security forces just a couple of weeks ago. (I was flying to Washington on their very first day on the job, which was interesting.) I think they are more polite, more efficient, more respectful, and otherwise just nicer than the private screeners. It's not fun to get searched, and it's not fun to get searched by the government, but the TSA screeners seem to be doing in some sense a better job.

To give one example: before TSA, I saw occasions on which passengers confronted private security with plausibly legitimate complaints and were then harassed, searched again, or prevented from flying. But on my way back from Portland, I saw a passenger try to pick a verbal fight with a TSA screener. The screener resisted being provoked, continued to do his job, allowed the passenger to pass, and didn't go on a power trip. I was surprised -- I completely expected the passenger to end up in handcuffs. Nope: the TSA screener continued to call him "sir", and he made his flight. No handcuffs, no rifles, no threats, no extra searches. Cool.

(Now, if only law enforcement officers always behaved that way when they weren't on videotape...)

My flight was pretty uneventful, and I caught AirBART back to the Coliseum station. But on my way back to San Francisco, our BART train developed a brake problem. I smelled a strong odor of burning plastic, and our train came to a complete halt inside the Transbay Tube and was stuck beneath the Bay for about half an hour. Some of the passengers in my car became extremely angry and started to swear. One of them called the train operator and threatened to start to deface or damage the train if she didn't do what he wanted. (The train operator's response was somewhat less polite than I imagine the TSA's would have been in the same situation.) The train operator kept trying to pull forward; the train would move a couple of feet and then come to a stop again. Finally, a technician was sent out on a rescue train and was able to come aboard our train and help the operator get the train running in reverse. We rode it all the way back to West Oakland and then transferred to a new San Francisco train.

Fortunately, I had a book with me while I was waiting.

Trusted computing

I still haven't written up my notes from our TCPA meeting and our second Microsoft meeting.

Richard Stallman wrote an essay on trusted computing which makes a lot of good points. But I have trouble with a couple of suggestions:

In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.

and similarly

Treacherous computing puts the existence of free operating systems and free applications at risk, because you may not be able to run them at all. Some versions of treacherous computing would require the operating system to be specifically authorized by a particular company. Free operating systems could not be installed. Some versions of treacherous computing would require every program to be specifically authorized by the operating system developer. You could not run free applications on such a system. If you did figure out how, and told someone, that could be a crime.

Neither of these concerns is applicable at all to Palladium (as Microsoft has described it to us) or to TCPA (as the TCPA has specified it and as it has been implemented). While Microsoft could be misleading us about Palladium, the TCPA specification is public and implementations of it have already been made.

It's possible that some other trusted computing system could have such a misfeature, but the design of TCPA and Palladium doesn't require these properties at all, as far as I can tell, and they seem to be more or less independent.

I do share the two concerns in this paragraph:

There are proposals already for U.S. laws that would require all computers to support treacherous computing, and to prohibit connecting old computers to the Internet. The CBDTPA (we call it the Consume But Don't Try Programming Act) is one of them. But even if they don't legally force you to switch to treacherous computing, the pressure to accept it may be enormous. Today people often use Word format for communication, although this causes several sorts of problems (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html). If only a treacherous computing machine can read the latest Word documents, many people will switch to it, if they view the situation only in terms of individual action (take it or leave it). [...]

I'm not convinced that something like Palladium is the infrastructure contemplated by the CBDTPA. I think Microsoft made a good argument that the current Palladium design is not as restrictive as the measure called for by the CBDTPA and desired by the Hollywood studios. (As Microsoft pointed out to us, there's nothing in the current Palladium design which prevents you from recording, playing, or distributing MP3 or Ogg files, or other media without DRM; there is no watermark detection, and there are even things which appear to create technical obstacles to adding watermark detection where the user doesn't want it.)

However, it's possible to imagine a legal mandate for some kind of trusted computing system, which would be a bad outcome, and I'd love to hear more about what trusted computing vendors are doing to oppose that. (Part of Microsoft's answer seems to be roughly "by not actually designing the things the studios would most like to see", which is not a terrible answer.) I ought to talk more about trusted computing technologies, self-protecting content, and 1201(c)(3), so remind me if I don't get back to that, OK?

The network effects point is also one I take very seriously, perhaps most seriously of all. I've been stressing the anticompetitive applications point when I talk to people -- as I did in an interview with Technology Review earlier today. I see the problem from a slightly different angle, but a closely related one. If you're a minority platform user, network effects can cause real trouble for you. Right now, the extent of that trouble is mitigated by the possibility of doing reverse engineering to create interoperability with majority platforms, even if they use file formats and protocols which someone hoped would remain proprietary. With trusted computing infrastructure, attaining full interoperability with minority platforms may never be possible. (And that's just the beginning of the sorts of troubles which might result from network effects.)

I'm thinking about other things after our meetings last week, and I should try to write them up soon. One of the really interesting things has to do with hardware attacks and trying to assess how easy they are (and what that means). I'm glad Bunnie was able to come to our second meeting with Microsoft.

Quine

Aaron Swartz answered my call for fresh quines by providing this one:

Author: Omar Antolin (omar@galois.fciencias.unam.mx)

a = ['print "a =", a', 'for s in a: print s']
print "a =", a
for s in a: print s

I don't think it's exactly along the lines of other quines I've seen before, although it has some family resemblances to them. The use of a Python list is very nice.