Happy birthday to Cindy.
I spent a long time talking to Gwen and Ernie about Rorty, relativism,
and realism. (I can't say of them, as I said of Zack, that they
"would rather have chocolate donuts than
moral realism" because neither of them can eat chocolate
donuts.)
I had a BBC meeting at the new Indian restaurant on Valencia. I
discovered that there are six Indian or Pakistani/Indian
restaurants in the neighborhood of 16th and Mission (one on
16th between Mission and Valencia, one between Valencia and Guerrero,
three (!) on Valencia between 16th and 17th, and one at 16th and
Harrison).
Probably we're going to go right to LNX-BBC 2.0 and start work on that
tomorrow afternoon. It will use a 2.4 kernel because of features
that we need, even though 2.4 has been a bit flaky for some people.
I hope it will stabilize by the time we're ready to make our
official release.
I still have a lot to write about from my trip to L.A.; I've barely
said anything about it here. It wouldn't be the first time I was
slow to describe a vacation trip in my web diary. I think I'll
at least try to get up-to-date with the present without waiting
to catch up on last week.
I came back from LAX on a plane, to my surprise. Since my passport
is expired, I didn't think I'd be allowed to fly these days. But
the agent at the ticket counter saw my expired passport and indicated
that it was a whole lot better, as far as ID goes, than an out-of-state
driver license, which is what most passengers had. It's virtually
impossible to verify an out-of-state driver license; they all look
different and some are extraordinarily easy to forge. (For
example, there's a company that will do that on the DEF CON show
floor every year.)
On the other hand, I paid for part of the ticket with cash. (I
don't have so much credit these days.) This made me a
"selectee"; my
ticket and itinerary were stamped all over with "SSSSS". I was
sent for "secondary screening" (where my checked bag was x-rayed
in front of me by a security officer).
When I got to the security checkpoint on the way to the gate, I
noticed the extremely long lines and the armed National Guardsmen
wandering around talking to police officers. The screeners were
carefully examining items of carry-on baggage one at a time,
and matching them up with individual passengers. I took all the
coins out of my pockets -- I'd already put my Leatherman and
sewing kit in checked baggage -- and still I set off the metal
detector.
The result of this was that I was not only searched with a
metal-detecting wand, but I was told to open my belt (which
had a metal buckle) to prove that I wasn't concealing anything
under it. Then I was frisked (by a female screener) and
finally allowed to go ahead.
I've only been frisked once before; I don't remember the
exact circumstance, but it might have been when I was going
to court (for the DVD CCA case appeal) or to the Hall of
Justice (for the Free Dmitry protest amplified sound permit)
or something like that. I didn't like it at all.
When I got to the gate, I and all the other selectees were
called out by name to a special screening table; there I was
wand-searched again, frisked again (again by a female screener),
and my carry-on bag was hand-searched by a second screener.
Immediately after this, I was told to board the plane right
away. (I wasn't allowed to go anywhere else in between being
searched and boarding the plane; if I had, I would have had to
be searched again.)
So that was no fun. On the other hand, it was quite the contrast
from the time in early 1999 when I (inadvertantly!) carried on
a desktop computer power supply, a complete toolkit, an x-acto knife,
a soldering iron, and a full bottle of isopropyl alcohol, without
being asked any questions at all. (I was coming back from DEF CON
and I'd brought a complete set of computer tools and parts in case
I'd ended up participating in some of the events there.)
Another odd thing: this time through, although I was frisked twice,
and ultimately had my person or my possessions searched by at least
five different people, nobody even bothered to ask me whether I'd
packed my own bag, or whether anyone had given me anything to carry
on the plane.
Some commentators -- on Salon or something -- suggested that all
of this still does no good against people who are actually trained
in fighting, because they can kill you with their bare hands or
fashion weapons from eyeglasses or CD players or pillows or whatever.
Or disguise dangerous substances as foods or medicines, or use
weapons invisible to x-ray scanners.
In this way, airport security measures seem analogous to the security
afforded by DRM systems. Both are likely to be ineffective
against a sophisticated attacker, but are effective or at least
impressive to a novice attacker. You can sometimes get DRM proponents
to admit that they are only really expecting to stop the novices.
(Sometimes they say this in media interviews, sometimes at CPTWG
presentations.) Would airline security folks make the same sort of
admission?
I'm almost done with "Believe (Richard Rorty Remix)".
This was an awfully busy week around the courts; the COPA argument
was held before the Supreme Court, and EFF had updates in the
Bunner, 2600, and Felten cases (and news about the Sklyarov case).
We lost our two DMCA cases on the same day -- definitely a setback
to the effort to get the DMCA declared unconstitutional -- and filed
a motion for summary judgment in the Bunner case.
I worked on aspects of the Bunner motion and was very happy with how
it turned out;
check it out.
The most
recent EFFector has news on Sklyarov, Felten, 2600, and
Bunner.
It's always especially disturbing when something bad happens someplace
you've been, like the World Trade Center or
Ben Yehuda Street. I walked down Ben Yehuda Street
on a balmy summer evening in 1995 -- two suicide bombings ago by now --
and enjoyed it very much.
It was a very pedestrian-oriented street with lots of restaurants and
cafes and shops (I think I bought a present for a family member
there) which I guess might be comparable to Newbury Street in Boston
or to the pedestrian malls in Burlington, Vermont.
I wanted to mention Olvera Street in Los Angeles, where I was
earlier this week; that was very lovely but had a bit more of the
theme-park feeling in a way that the other streets I mention
didn't seem to. The problem must be that the rest of L.A. has
grown up around Olvera Street in a way which makes the preservation
or restoration of Olvera Street look artificial.
Isn't that weird? It's "artificial" in the same way that a huge
tree growing inside someone's home would be "artificial" -- you
have to go and put it there after the fact, or take elaborate
precautions to leave it alone.
Apparently
Dean
Kamen's mysterious invention is a sort of electric
scooter which can go fast and which it's impossible to
fall off of. (Segway's home
page is up now.)
It sounds useful enough to me; my only problem
with the Zappy was that
it didn't go far or fast enough and it was easy to fall off.
(Also, it doesn't do much for physical fitness. Maybe these
things ought to be charged up by riding a stationary bicycle
connected to a generator.)
The really funny thing is that the Zappy people
are selling a
personal hoverboard; many people speculated that Kamen was
going to market a hoverboard. He's not, yet one is already on
the market! It could be yours for only $9,500 (about three
times the initial cost of the Segway).
One last really funny thing about the Zappy: I'm almost positive
that I know one of the people who gave a testimonial on their
web site. I think he was my co-worker at Linuxcare.
We had a nice BBC meeting at my apartment on Sunday with about seven
people present, and I think we made a lot of progress. We're aiming
for a release of a new version in late January, which means we ought
to hurry up a lot.
I
don't like this approach any more now than I did eight years ago.
I had lunch with Ren and Gwen and was headed to Berkeley at last
report in the evening.
Continuing on the "it's great to work somewhere where" theme: it's
great to work somewhere where you can use
"Environmental
Key Generation Toward Clueless Agents" in your work!
I went to SVLUG with Marc and Biella on Wednesday.
A
slashdot article on user interface, teaching, and Linux
usability is fascinating for the culture clashes the discussion
exposes. It's especially fascinating after I today (Friday)
gave a presentation to the EFF Board about e-mail encryption.
The story we're now telling about e-mail encryption goes something
like this: Once some great technologists like DH, RSA, and PRZ
invented some cool stuff. Then we fought legal and political
battles to make sure that the public would be allowed to use it.
Nowadays the public is allowed to use it, but it's still too
difficult for most people, so we now have to re-think how we
present e-mail encryption, to be sure that it will be useful to
everyone, even if it isn't optimally secure.
The story I'm more accustomed to telling goes like this: Once
there was one-time-pad cryptography, which was infeasible
because of the irritating key exchange and key security problems
(you had to ship a CD-ROM to everybody you wanted to communicate
with, and, what's worse, CD-ROMs weren't even invented yet!).
Then some clever people invented conventional symmetric key
block ciphers, and so now you only had to meet people in person
to exchange a short key and then could have almost ideally
private conversations. But the trouble was that you still had
to meet them -- so what would you do if you had to communicate
without pre-arrangement, as in an emergency, or at a great distance,
or with someone you had never met?
So then, the story continues, Diffie and Hellman and Merkle
and Rivest and Shamir and Adleman and Phil (just humble Phil)
provided public key cryptography, and an implementation of it,
so all of a sudden the capability existed to "communicate
securely with people you have never met", which is practically
a miracle. Public key cryptography could let you do key
exchange over a public channel and still have a private
conversation later on! The only difficulty was the need to
authenticate the identity of the owner of a particular key,
because how could you tell that the person who claims to be
Seth Schoen is really Seth Schoen?
So therefore people invented PKI in all its multifarious
forms, which is to say that they invented the idea of CAs
and webs of trust as well as of individual face-to-face
key exchange, which was the old standard for conventional
cryptography. Webs of trust would let you do transitive
trust to reach the identities of people you had never met
in person; CAs would let them present credentials, like showing
a driver license to prove who you are. These models were
complementary, in a sense; if you were a radical decentralist
sort, you could use webs of trust, and if you were a moderate
and mainstream person, you could use a CA. But either way,
you had a technique to authenticate people. Now you had
technology to make your e-mail truly private, even when
corresponding with people you'd never communicated with in
any other context. Now your e-mail would be
private.
That's where the older story ends, and there's a remarkable
clash which develops between people to whom the "end of the
story" is the key (no pun intended), and people for whom the
story is still continuing in a significant and interesting
way. (This reminds me of my poem "Deeper Still" which talks
about the Narnia stories, fate, and "she who's
an end to stories". "Are you out there, can you hear this?")
For some people, the story ended when the technology was
invented and published (and its legal status assured, if
somewhat tentatively) -- after that, the responsibility
for using the technology to achieve privacy is purely and
wholly with the users, and if any users fail to use it, it's
their own individual error and perversity, far beyond the
purview of The Story of Public-Key Cryptography, and How
It Brought Privacy to E-mail.
For others, the story is just as live and present as ever,
and the usability patterns and experiences are as much a
part of it as anything else. The availability of the
software, legally and technically, was only a preliminary
chapter or a prologue. The end-users are characters in
the story in their own right, and it's meaningless or
counterproductive to dismiss their problems as "their own
problem" (or to wait or work for the future time, the
promised paradise, in which all users are fully educated
and competent in the use and features of the technology).
... so an idealistic and compassionate programmer could
maintain: "I will not enter nirvana until all sentient
users do so!"
The slashdot article I mention shows a parallel conflict of
stories. For some people, we have The Story of Microsoft's
Undeserved Dominance, and the Pollution and Dissipation of
the Users' Natural Curiosity and Capabilities. Here Microsoft
wrote some pretty bad software which took away responsibility
and power from the users -- took away what was rightfully
theirs -- and then beguiled them with GUIs, with cartoons,
with advertising, to the tune of billions of dollars spent,
not making the users more powerful, but making them more
dependent, more accepting of their lot as envisioned by
Microsoft, less able to remember another time and another
world. Linux and free software then come to challenge them
by offering the users a new golden age, in which they are
once again educated, capable, powerful, enjoying self-determination,
in a democratic (some say: anarchist) community.
Others have The Story of Users' Evolving Expectations, and
How the Diversity of Operating Systems Met Them, or Failed
to Meet Them. Here, the golden age included only a minority
of prospective computer users, who enjoyed their own private
paradise while the rest of the public was completely
mystified and completely unable to use computers, or
completely unwilling. Then vendors, in and through a complex
ecology, developed new systems which gradually came to appeal
to the general public; as they accustomed themselves to them,
they became willing to make computers a bigger and bigger
part of their lives. In return, the users acquired
progressively higher and higher expectations around familiarity,
ease of use, and the direct and immediate suitability of
computers for the users' own chosen purposes. This soon
meant that old systems were effectively irrelevant, and the
entire industry was caught up in a race as to who could best
serve consumers.
The clash between these stories is an amazing thing to behold:
one faction sees users as deceived, captive, ignorant, servile,
and to be freed and raised up and educated. Another faction sees
that view as elitist or patronizing or arrogant, and sees users
as independent, mature, and responsible, in charge of deciding
for themselves precisely which technologies they prefer for
their own purposes, subservient to no one else's preferences.
And there are other stories at work and angles I'm missing or
skipping over. (Compare the impassioned plea of the
tank-building commune members in In the Beginning Was the
Command Line and the ordinary car dealership's responses.)
It's difficult for me to avoid thinking about stories about
love in connection with these debates; where else do stories
collide with so much passion? I'm not kidding, and I want to
say that this is what is at stake, that I am what is
at stake.
I had an absolutely lovely time at the EFF board dinner in
North Beach on Thursday.
I did some things which were very much in character -- writing
about PKI, trying out
User-Mode
Linux -- and one thing which was very much out of
character.
My father had a book published in Amsterdam (if I remember correctly)
in the early 1500 with woodcuts illustrating proverbs and possibly
contemporary poetry. I'd love to see that book again. The only
thing I remember from it at all (I haven't seen it since around
1993 or 1994) was the couplet
Omnia mutantur,
certe amores mutantur.
(emphasis added). I'm amazed, first of all, that I've never
mentioned this before in my diary, and second of all, that a
Google search for "certe-amores" finds nothing at all. Soon
it will find this page.
I finally understand that old books which say they were published
in "Lipsia" are published in the city we call Leipzig (in
Germany). There are other interesting examples of Latin names
of cities which used to be well known but are not exactly widely
known in America these days.
User-Mode Linux is really cool, except I couldn't get it to work
(the init scripts in the root filesystem images I tried would
tend to hang). But it seems that it would be ideal for BBC testing,
because we wouldn't have to reboot to test a BBC image, and there's
fairly good support for device emulation, and no need to use
VMWare. At least, it would be good for testing our init scripts.
Thanks to Briana, I wrote to find out about the
Cenae
Latinae (Latin conversation dinners) which apparently
happen every month in the Bay Area. That would be lots
of fun!
Mr. Bad told me that there were also monthly Esperanto dinners,
but then he went on a cross-country trip and didn't take me to
any of them. It would be confusing to switch regularly between
Latin and Esperanto conversation dinners, what with the closely
related vocabulary. "Salvete, amici, mihi nomo est Seth,
atque in regione Missionis mi habitas. Mi amas veni ad has
cenas, cxar dicere kon vobis omnibus auxiliat mihi, ut mi
lingvojn facile loqui lerni povus. Vos estas la optimi!"
I heard back from the Cenae Latinae folks, and they said that
the next dinner was this very evening (Saturday).
We had a BBC meeting at Morning Due, where I'd never been before.
Nick is working on a program called GAR which will let us build
packages for the BBC from source in a straightforward way.
Here's my linguistic diversity handout, which shows an
implementation of the same trivial computer program in each of ten
different programming languages -- pretty much all the languages
Marc and I could muster on short notice. I "know" each of the
languages there except Ruby and MarxMenu, although I "know" some
other languages other than those represented. It's interesting to
see how much variety there is in the appearance of these languages,
and all of them are fairly mainstream as far as modern programming
languages go. (I didn't try to use APL or INTERCAL or one of the
really bizarre ones.)
The most canonical source for seeing the diversity of programming
languages in the world is the famous
99
Bottles of Beer page, which shows the "99 Bottles of Beer
on the Wall" program in hundreds of different
languages.
If the Platonist is going to insist on that distinction, he has
got to have an epistemlogy which does not link up in any
interesting way with other disciplines. He will end up with an
account of knowledge which turns its back on the rest of
science. This amounts to making knowledge into something
supernatural, a kind of miracle.
(Philosophy and Social Hope, xxvii)
What a powerful and significant comment I found this! This
miraculousness was, and often is, my view. It's interesting that
people as different as John Searle and Wendell Berry (and Martin
Gardner, it seems) are prepared to insist on the miraculousness of
the human mind and human knowledge. (Berry wrote an attack on the
"scientism" of E. O. Wilson -- who pushed naturalistic analysis into
every corner of psychology and culture -- called Life is a
Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, which
I have not read.) The rest of natural science seems to be
leaving these critics behind, for example insisting on the great
importance of neuropsychology and neurophysiology for philosophy,
but the critics enjoy an enormous influence on culture -- some say
because they try to flatter human beings, others because they insist
on what is best or what is unique about people.
I remember how I hated the implications of something like
Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. There
Skinner attacks "the literatures of freedom and dignity" which
insisted on making the human mind into what Rorty calls "a kind
of miracle". Rorty himself firmly endorses freedom and dignity,
but believes that they are no part of human nature, but rather
something made by particular cultures in particular parts of
history.
One reason for the attacks on people like Rorty is the sense
that they undermine intellectual defenses against people like
Skinner. For example, you often hear something to the effect
that, if we didn't have a human nature, we would have no reason
to prefer Rorty's personal vision of an open and free society
with the Skinner-inspired vision of a totalitarian society
which appears in Brave New World. Rorty seemed
to answer that there was never any conclusive reason to prefer
one over the other, and so we were left on our own, without
any particular foundation, to seek the one we preferred as
best we could. And this is one reason it's depressing to read
Stanley Fish, because he says that kind of thing on almost
every single page.
Anyway, I have finished a first draft of my song parody.
Believe (Richard Rorty Remix)
Male voice: Lola?
Female voice: Huh?
Male voice: Die philosophen haben die Welt interpretiert.
Female voice: Es kommt darauf an, sie zu verändern.
I don't believe in Knowledge
I don't think it's attained
And I believe there's nothing lost
by doubting her again.
I don't believe in Plato
I don't believe in Kant
I don't believe you can perceive
the things beyond your sense.
I don't believe in Science
'cause Science does not know.
But I believe in Dewey and
in James and Berthelot.
I don't believe in Reason
that accesses the Truth
I don't believe philosophies
that held me in my youth.
I don't believe society could be
the way it "should";
But I hope for humanity --
the future's lookin' good.
I don't believe Theology
or in the Moral Law
I don't believe morality
is written in the stars.
I believe! I believe!
I don't believe in Essence
I don't believe in Truth
'cause I believe reality
is that which we can use.
I don't believe that Reason
swings free of history.
But I believe in irony
and solidarity.
I don't believe in Science
'cause Science does not know.
But I believe in Dewey and
in James and Berthelot.
I don't believe in Reason
that accesses the Truth
I don't believe philosophies
that held me in my youth.
I believe!
I want you to try,
no need to know why
No maxims, no rules
No ethical schools.
I believe!
No natures, no facts
No essences, no forms
For Rorty, just we
No realism to see.
I believe!
I want you to try,
no need to know why
No maxims, no rules
No ethical schools
No natures, no facts
No essences, no forms
For Rorty, just we
No realism to see...
Zack noticed a copy of the Dover reprint of String Figures
and How to Make Them at a bookstore, and I bought it for
$1 (he already has two copies). This is an elaborate guide to
Cat's Cradle and much more, from an era in which string figures
and games were an active subject of anthropological research.
The book teaches you how to make the famous "Osage Diamonds";
maybe I will learn that. I also have the Dover book Fun
With String, which Zack has never seen. Ah, the simple
pleasures people enjoyed before the transistor...
I read about prime numbers a bit and also about the Lucas-Lehmer
test for primality of Mersenne numbers. Now I see why people who
want to find record primes like to search for Mersenne primes.
(EFF has a famous cash
prize offered for discovering prime numbers of sufficient size.
The next prize is available to a discovered of a 10,000,000 digit
prize.)
Zack had some good ideas about BBC development, and Nick did
some nice technical work.
I went out to Union Square at mid-day and wandered around briefly.
The war and the economy don't seem to have chilled the Christmas
shopping season too much, although I don't have too much experience
for purposes of comparison.
I got some very nice press coverage which I might be able to
talk about some day.
I was invited to the Small
World Brunch; you can be more useful to that project than I
can if you know someone in the Bay Area from a country other than
the U.S.
My friend Katy is moving to a really neat neighborhood in San
Francisco. As it happens, I know the exact block she's going to
be living on, and I'm jealous! (I'm very happy with where I live
now, though.)
The Rorty quote from yesterday is also quoted in my diary in November,
right after I read Philosophy and Social Hope.
It seems to be Hanukkah again, so happy Hanukkah.
I won the previous round of
Advocacy,
which is a game run by
Mark-Jason Dominus (whose
web page is really cool).
It's a fun game. Advocacy exists in part to ridicule
the advocacy that goes on in the real world all the time, the
ability to justify anything, no matter how absurd, without
regard to its real merits or drawbacks. Mr. Dominus is the
author of a piece called
"Why I
Hate Advocacy" which attacks that kind of
advocacy.
As the winner of a round of Advocacy, I got to lead the new round.
So far, there have been fairly few entries. This might mean that
people are on vacation, or that my proposal was uncreative or
uninspiring, or that there are too few people actively involved
in the game. I can do something about the last possibility: if
the idea of Advocacy (kind of like Fictionary with justifications
for an idea, but all the explanations are spurious)
appeals to you, you can join in by subscribing to the mailing
list. Some rounds can be extremely amusing.
Mark-Jason Dominus's Internet domain is
plover.com; this makes me
wish that, when you visited the home page, a hollow voice would
say "plover".
slashdot had a piece on a
solar thermal power plant to be
built in Australia and be the world's largest-ever structure (until
and unless they construct one of those orbital towers we hear so
much about). It's short on technical details, but sounds inspiring
enough to me. We need projects like this to happen, and we need to
push the edges of what's possible here?
Willey Ley, calling Willey Ley, where are you, Willey Ley?
Engineering is romantic (and you don't have to an Ayn Rand fan to
see that) and engineering is glorious!
Nick has been hard at work on the GAR Archive Resource (earlier
tentatively called the GNU Anarchy Resource), and it's a fine piece
of work which has made building packages for the BBC extremely
easy and straightforward. It's kind of like the BSD ports system
implemented in GNU Make. Woohoo!
Don Marti invented a clever thing called message/x-mail-me-this
which allows you to
get messages from mailing list web archives
re-sent to you in a convenient way. If you use Unix, it's
totally straightforward to set up practically any web browser to
support it. I got it working in under a minute today, and it
worked perfectly!
I can only say, as Leonard Richardson
said in March,
I salute you, Pete Peterson, for making us laugh about love... again.
or, to use a different salutation from a little longer ago,
"Grates," inquit, "tibi ago, summe Sol, vobisque, reliqui Caelites..."
Zack and I had a long conversation which was very interesting.
My long conversations with Zack are typically fairly private,
which makes them pretty poor material for a public diary. One
option would be to keep a private diary (which many people I
know do), another would be to have a different sense of
privacy, another to talk to Zack at length about other subjects,
and still another to refrain from mentioning private
conversations here in the first place. So many choices!
Earlier in the day, Lee and I had lunch with a cool lawyer from the
ACLU.
We also found out that we won the
"Narco News"
case. I was
surprised to discover that the lead counsel in that case (in which
EFF filed an amicus brief) was a law firm in my home town,
Northampton. My father knows one of the partners in that firm!
I'll have to go and congratulate them in person at the end of the
month.
I was thinking that autarky, which Sumana mentions, was the same
thing as autarchy, but they're different -- autos + arkein as
opposed to autos + archein. It seems that they're pronounced the
same in English, though! "Arkein" is to suffice or be adequate,
and "archein" is to rule or command.
So emotional autarchy is a very different proposition from emotional
autarky.
I used to think I had some of the latter, but then, someone could
say, life happened to me. Well, you can conceive "emotional
autarky" as a sign of immaturity or fearfulness, or as a sign of
happy maturity, just as you can conceive economic autarky. Are
countries which are seeking economic self-sufficiency being
silly, frightened protectionists, or are they seeking proper
maturity and self-reliance as countries?
A
20-year Usenet archive; I'm scarcely older than that archive and
it seems to contain all major historical events of which I have any
memories.
Various things happened; I went to Berkeley and got the new
LNX-BBC project machine up (called "gar"). (Thanks, Joe.) I saw
Brian and Michelle while I was over there.
Unfortunately, I then got sick, and have been home sick. Nick
came to visit and talked to me about the BBC, and we made a huge
amount of progress toward getting organized for future releases.
But the really big deal for this week is that
Dmitry
Sklyarov is free and will go home to Russia! Congratulations
to Dmitry, his family, his lawyers, and all the activists who kept
up pressure and attention on this case. It seems that the publicity
and pressure was really very significant -- since at the beginning,
Adobe, the AAP, and the USAO all seemed convinced that it was
necessary for Dmitry to go to jail, and to serve a long prison
sentence.
I'm hoping there will be a party on Wednesday to celebrate Dmitry's
return home.
Now my question is: Who will be the next person to
Get Caught
Reading?
Ross Anderson's
historical
perspective on terrorism and piracy (the kind with boats and
murdering people) is fascinating.
It seems that the
Fenton's Creamery
(or, as Nick affectionately called it, Fenton Screamery) in
Oakland has been closed by a fire. I remember going there about
two years ago and hearing that it was an extremely popular
destination for couples on Valentine's Day.
We got a huge amount of work done on the BBC -- and had a meeting
about it in Oakland -- but my right arm is sore now.
I'm hoping that there will be a party for Dmitry on Wednesday
or so of next week.
Zack and I went shopping at Rainbow, where we got some nice stuff.
I built huge numbers of BBC packages, had my arms hurt, and tried
unsuccessfully to go swimming. It turns out that the recreational
swimming time at the Garfield Pool is for kids only.
Thus the analogy between the magical and the scientific conceptions of
the world is close. In both of them the succession of events is
assumed to be perfectly regular and certain, being determined by
immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and
calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of chance, and of
accident are banished from the course of nature. Both of them
open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to him who
knows the causes of things [cf. Vergil: "Felix qui potuit rerum
cognoscere causas"! -- Seth] and can touch the secret
springs that set in motion the vast and intricate mechanism of
the world. Hence the attraction which magic and science alike
have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus
that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure
the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through
the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless
promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an
exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds
and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial
city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour,
bathed in the light of dreams.
(Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 57)
So once again:
Corripuere viam interea, qua semita monstrat.
Iamque ascendebant collem, qui plurimus urbi
imminet adversasque aspectat desuper arces.
Miratur molem Aeneas, magalia quondam,
miratur portas strepitumque et strata viarum.
Instant ardentes Tyrii: pars ducere muros
molirique arcem et manibus subvolvere saxa,
pars optare locum tecto et concludere sulco;
iura magistratusque legunt sanctumque senatum.
Hic portus alii effodiunt; hic alta theatris
fundamenta locant alii, immanisque columnas
rupibus excidunt, scaenis decora apta futuris.
Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura
exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos
educunt fetus, aut cum liquentia mella
stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas,
aut onera accipiunt venientum, aut agmine facto
ignavum fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent;
fervet opus redolentque thymo fragrantia mella.
"O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt!"
Aeneas ait et fastigia suspicit urbis.
(Aeneid I, 418-438)
What do we want?
Free Dmitry!
When do we want it?
Now!
What are we going to do when we get it?
Party!
The new machine had a hard drive fail, but it seems that all of our
work was backed up (which is good, because I wouldn't have been
eager to repeat all that packaging).
Here's my non-literal translation of the passage I quoted yesterday.
I'm sure there are a few bugs in it (aside from the bees).
The path appears, they hurry up the road,
and now they climb a hill, which, set against
the city, looks upon it from above, and views it,
taller than its towers. Aeneas stands amazed:
the vastness of the city, only lately huts
and tents, a refugee camp. Stands amazed:
the gates and noise, the roads and traffic.
The men from Tyre seem to glow with work beneath.
Some plan the walls and build up a guard-tower,
and roll up boulders with bare hands from quarries.
Some find a spot for homes, and excavate
their cellars. Governors decree and plan,
convening an assembly, forming laws in holiness.
They start to dig a harbor, as meanwhile
they choose a spot to raise a theater up, carving out
the natural columns from a cliff, foreseeing
the future beauties of the scenes and sets.
Just think of bees in fresh young summer, who
can work beneath the sun at flower-mining,
raise up their young -- or pile up the honey
and store it safe in cells, receive the loads
of pollen coming in, or form a line to keep
the lazy drones away. Aeneas did, and said
"You lucky ones, whose city walls rise now!";
he contemplated, saying so, their height.
(Aeneid I, 418-438)
My arms hurt.
I participated in a BPDG conference call, an unusual experience.
I went to Berkeley and had dinner with the Craig family and the
Rudich family. That was great!
Professor Rudich
taught a CS class I took at Berkeley a few years ago; Mr. Craig
taught a philosophy class I took in high school. Mr. Craig
taught at NMH so long, in fact, that both Professor Rudich
and I are his students (so that some of Mr. Craig's students
are also some of his students' students, as in this case).
I went to Kinko's and worked on some posters without too much
luck, but tomorrow is going to be a good time.
Professor Rudich told me on Tuesday that he'd recently found a result
in cryptography concerning obfuscators, or methods of making programs
more difficult to understand. (This is a big deal, of course, in
copyright and in DRM -- all sorts of software publishers go to
great lengths to make their programs resistent to reverse engineering.)
The conclusion reached by Rudich and his collaborators is that
obfuscators don't exist, which is to say that a truly secure
obfuscator is a theoretical impossibility. The paper announcing
this is called "On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs", by
Barak et al.
This doesn't mean that obfuscators can't make things hard to
understand (so that someone would have to expend an extra effort to
read them), just that they can't, in general, make things
impossible to understand -- there is no algorithmic
technique which can accomplish that. The abstract says that
an obfuscator O is an (efficient, probabilistic)
"compiler" that takes as input a program (or circuit) P and produces a
new program O(P) that has the same functionality as P yet is
"unintelligible" in some sense. Obfuscators, if they exist, would have
a wide variety of cryptographic and complexity-theoretic applications
[...] Our main result is that, even under very weak formalizations of
the above intuition, obfuscation is impossible.
I've been reading The Puzzle Palace by Bamford. Some
parts of it seem rather boring, where Bamford describes military
hierarchy and the succession of people who held any one office
(such as DIRNSA). The spy stories and the esoteric facts about
Fort Meade (the kind of physical security and approximate quantity of
computers there twenty or thirty years ago) are much more exciting to
me than, for example, discussions of whether one branch of the Armed
Forces tended to be favored over another in the selection of deputy
directors.
- "That was one of the best Free Dmitry parties ever!"
- "Yes, and it had that special ingredient: a Free Dmitry."
The Free Dmitry party was just excellent. We had a great turnout,
a great space, celebrity guests (Dmitry, his boss, his lawyer,
lots of local activists...), good sound (thanks, Fred and Patrick),
good food, etc. There are endless people to thank for all this.
You can
listen
to the speeches from the party on Radio EFF (MP3 format).
I saw lots of friends there, many of them from the local Linux and
free software community. There were also lots of reporters there,
and I gave several interviews, frequently interrupted by the fact
that this was a party.
Thanks to Katie, we had a birthday cake for Dmitry, whose 27th
birthday was Tuesday. We all gathered round and sang "Happy
Birthday" with much enthusiasm.
I also have to take a moment to praise the
21st Amendment for
their service, food, hospitality, and ambience. They gave us
the entire upstairs room on condition that we spend over $500
in all on food and drink (which we did). It was an excellent
venue, and I'd hold Free Dmitry parties there again (which,
fortunately, ought to be unnecessary now). Plus, as I mentioned
before, it has "1st Amendment" in the name!
Wow, Rudy
Rucker and I are mentioned in the same article.
"It's very tricky to collect information on one individual," Schoen
tells me.
I realized that I'd lost the partition code I wrote last summer,
so I went to write it again, using a somewhat different approach.
My new code is able to run much faster, finding the ZD(52)=180180
in under a minute (as opposed to around an hour for the old
version, running on a slower computer). It still seems that
there must be a more efficient way; that value was known in the
late 1800s, before the availability of computers.
For people who weren't reading my diary last summer, ZD(n) is the
largest order of any permutation over n elements -- the name comes
from HCSSiM '93 ("Zoe/Dan").
I'm still trying to optimize my program a bit, but I may be on
the wrong track entirely.
Our party was covered by Wired (and I'm quoted). Thanks to Leonard
for finding that.
The EFF holiday party was today, and we went to see Lord of
the Rings, which was great. Hooray for parties! Now is the
time for all good men to come
to the aid of our partygoers.
I had a holiday party of my own last year, the invitations to which
which mentioned a lot of holidays, and told when they would happen
in 2000 -- in Unix time, not in the Gregorian calendar:
I know that some organizations use "holiday party" as a euphemism for
"Christmas party" ("holiday vacations" rarely co-incide with Hanukkah,
for example!). We can argue that they are being inconsiderate, or just
showing a lack of imagination. For example, there are plenty of
holidays this party could commemorate:
Party time = 977022000
Asara b'Tevet (start) Time = 978570000; error = 1548000 (17.9 days)
Bill of Rights Day Time = 976867200; error = 154800 (1.7 days)
Boxing Day Time = 977817600; error = 795600 (9.2 days)
Charles Babbage's birthday Time = 977817600; error = 795600 (9.2 days)
Christmas Time = 977731200; error = 709200 (8.2 days)
Consualia Time = 976867200; error = 154800 (1.7 days)
Eid al-Fitr (if moon sighted) Time = 977904000; error = 882000 (10.2 days)
Feast of St. Nicholas Time = 976089600; error = 932400 (10.7 days)
Feast of St. Stephen Time = 977817600; error = 795600 (9.2 days)
Hanukkah (mean) Time = 977791800; error = 769800 (8.9 days)
Hanukkah (start) Time = 977446200; error = 424200 (4.9 days)
Humphrey Davy's birthday Time = 977040000; error = 18000 (0.2 days)
Isaac Newton's birthday Time = 977731200; error = 709200 (8.2 days)
John von Neumann's birthday Time = 977990400; error = 968400 (11.2 days)
Kwanzaa Time = 977817600; error = 795600 (9.2 days)
New Year's Day Time = 978336000; error = 1314000 (15.2 days)
Opalia Time = 977212800; error = 190800 (2.2 days)
Saturnalia (start) Time = 977040000; error = 18000 (0.2 days)
Sighting of new moon (poss.) Time = 977878200; error = 856200 (9.9 days)
Sol Invicta Time = 977731200; error = 709200 (8.2 days)
Srinivasa Ramanujan's birthday Time = 977472000; error = 450000 (5.2 days)
Third Sunday of Advent Time = 977040000; error = 18000 (0.2 days)
Tycho Brahe's birthday Time = 976780800; error = 241200 (2.7 days)
Winter Solstice Time = 977405820; error = 383820 (4.4 days)
Wyoming Day Time = 976435200; error = 586800 (6.7 days)
(I don't think there is going to be a major industry popping up in
Asara b'Tevet greeting cards, though. Nor Wyoming Day, I'm afraid.)
The party is actually _on_ St. Adelaide's Day, and one invitee's
birthday, but those weren't intentional. It's also Jane Austen's
birthday, and Arthur C. Clarke's.
I'm thinking of going to see
Proof on
Saturday.
I was thinking, in the proverbial shower, about the question of
which permutation orders are possible over a given number of
elements (not just which permutation has the largest
order, but which permutations can be attained).
So one question is: what is the least n such that there is a
permutation of order q over n elements? (It's easy to see that,
if there is a permutation of order q over n elements, there is
also a permutation with the same order over n+k elements for
any non-negative k. You can just use the identity permutation
to avoid permuting the k elements at all, so the old permutation
works on a subset of the n+k elements.) I'll call this DZ(q).
Now DZ(q)<=q because there is always a permutation of order
q over q elements (the ordinary cyclic permutation in which each
element is shifted by one position). This means that, for example,
DZ(180180)<=180180. But in fact DZ(180180)<=52 because
ZD(52)=180180. But in fact DZ(180180)<52 and in particular
DZ(180180)=49 because ZD(49)=ZD(50)=ZD(51)=ZD(52)=180180 and
ZD(48)=120120<180180.
The interesting thing about these DZ numbers is that they don't
necessarily increase monotonically. For example, DZ(p), for any
prime p, necessarily equals p. But DZ(q+1) may be less than
DZ(q), especially when q is prime.
DZ(1)=1
DZ(2)=2
DZ(3)=3
DZ(4)=4
DZ(5)=5
DZ(6)=5 [2, 3]
DZ(7)=7
DZ(8)=8
DZ(9)=9
DZ(10)=7 [2, 5]
DZ(11)=11
DZ(12)=7 [3, 4]
DZ(13)=13
DZ(14)=9 [2, 7]
DZ(15)=8 [3, 5]
DZ(16)=16
Another interesting result is that DZ(p^n)=p^n where p is prime
(but never when p is not prime).
I realized that you can calculate DZ(q) in a straightforward way
by calculating the prime factorization of q, combining like terms
(e.g. 8 instead of 2*2*2, or 49 instead of 7*7), and then adding.
Can you see why?
Using this method, the factorization of 180180 is
4*9*5*7*11*13, and the sum of those factors is 4+9+5+7+11+13=49,
which is, in fact, DZ(180180). By contrast, both 180179 and
180181 are prime -- twin primes. So both have DZ values much
greater than 49.
The DZ sequence turns out to be sequence A008475 at Sloane's
Encyclopedia.
To phrase this in terms of card shuffling, if you want to find a
shuffle which requires q repetitions in order to restore the
original order of a deck, the deck must have at least DZ(q)
cards in it.
What is the relationship between the DZ and ZD sequences? Are
DZ numbers a more efficient way of calculating ZD numbers?
I had to write some factoring code in order to implement my
algorithm for DZ, but:
#!/usr/bin/python
def factor(n, start=2L):
i = start
while i*i<=n:
if (n%i)==0:
return [i]+factor(n/i, i)
i=i+1
return [n]
def dz(n):
old = 0
sum = 0
prod = 0
for i in factor(n):
if i==old:
prod = prod * i
else:
sum = sum + prod
prod, old = i, i
sum = sum + prod
try:
return int(sum)
except:
return sum
It works, too:
>>> map(dz,range(1,51))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9, 7, 11, 7, 13, 9, 8, 16, 17, 11, 19, 9, 10, 13, 23,
11, 25, 15, 27, 11, 29, 10, 31, 32, 14, 19, 12, 13, 37, 21, 16, 13, 41, 12, 43,
15, 14, 25, 47, 19, 49, 27]
I tried "map(dz,range(1,20000))", and they totally jump around. Numbers
which have lots of distinct small prime factors have tiny dz values
(e.g. dz(4620)=30), but primes have huge dz values.
Anirvan and I tried to go to Proof, but it was sold out,
so we went book-shopping instead. I got Law's Order by
David Friedman, and Software, Shamans, and Spleens by James Boyle.
(Later, I got The Phantom Tollbooth -- a great book!)
Anirvan helped me set up a program called
Spam Assassin, which
attempts to detect and identify spam. This is useful to me because
I get a lot of spam, although I'm intimidated by the "spam wars".
(It took EFF years, literally years, to reach a
consensus on the organization's position on spam. Even today, we
are getting mail accusing us of doing too little or too much in
the war on spam.) Spam sometimes seems to be an almost unique
problem in the sense of the divisions it can inspire within the
technical and civil liberties communities.
We had lunch and dinner together, in addition to our book-shopping.
Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be
made not wet.
(Bruce
Schneier)
Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting
digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from
people decrying the death of copyright. "How will authors and artists
get paid for their work?" they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I
feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a
group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do
you expect us to get to the stars, then?" I'm sorry, but I don't know
that, either.
(Bruce
Schneier again)
I'm trying to find something that
Seth Finkelstein wrote about
why scientists misunderstand politicians (something to the effect
that scientists mistakenly believe that politicians are actually
trying to find the truth, where the latter are really seeking
a stable consensus).
At Leonard's place, with Sumana, I watched A Night at the
Opera, which contains a scene in which Groucho says
that a clause in a contract "is what they call a sanity clause".
Chico responds "You can't fool me, there ain't no sanity clause!".
Ian Harding is making a lot of progress on building packages, so
that he and I together got the package count past the halfway
point (by which I mean that more than half of the packages I determined
we would need have been built and checked into
CVS).
I now have
automatically
generated statistics (updated once per hour, at the
moment) about our progress in building packages for the LNX-BBC.
I went into EFF briefly today to do some errands. Being on vacation
is lonely!
Last week, Fred recounted a conversation with
John Gilmore about
software-defined radio, or SDR. The prospects of that technology
are just mind-blowing in their implications for the kinds of things
people could do with radio communications -- it seems that almost
all aspects of radio could be converted from electrical
engineering problems into software programming problems. (That
includes tuning, demodulation, decoding, and DSP in general -- and
the reverse if you wanted to use SDR for transmitting.)
The idea, as Fred explained it (and I may be getting a distorted
view, because Fred keeps saying that he's not a technologist),
is that you have some raw uninterpreted RF signal input
directly into a very high speed DAC connected to a
very fast microprocessor. So there's no tuning in hardware; the
microprocessor just gets the bits which represent the actual
RF waveforms (within a certain band), to interpret as it chooses,
or as it's instructed by software. Thus instead of having an
"FM radio" you might have an antenna connected to a DAC, and an
"FM tuning" and "FM demodulating" software program!
This spells trouble for the legal regulation of radio receivers:
it can be made illegal to manufacture a device which receives
a certain kind of signal (for example, cell phone conversations),
but it's not clear that it can be made illegal to publish software
which instructs a computer how to extract a cell phone conversation
from a recorded broadband signal.
When I saw Bruce Perens at
the CPTWG meeting, he suggested that the laws against radio
equipment capable of receiving certain bands (passed when it was
first discovered that cell phone calls were being overheard by
parties other than their intended recipients) constituted a sort
of precedent for the DMCA -- you have some technology which is
completely inadequate for the kind of security you would like
to achieve, so you simply ban technology which implements the
trivial steps necessary to do whatever it is you don't like.
Thus, with cell phones, there was no suggestion that it was
the responsibility of cell phone vendors to deploy genuinely
secure phones (partly, some say, because law enforcement
didn't actually want that to happen!). Instead, the tools
of the technically sophisticated were attacked and driven
underground.
In some sense, it's easy to ban some item of hardware -- it
has to be manufactured somewhat, it has to be sold somewhere,
it has to be publicized somehow. Furthermore, nobody will
bring facial or as-applied constitutional challenges to
regulations of hardware (unless the hardware in question is
some sort of weapon, I suppose). So Congress can pass laws
saying that certain "black boxes" and even certain kinds of
open and documented hardware are going to be illegal, and it
may be awful but it's not clearly unconstitutional. And it's
not clearly impossible to enforce.
Banning software is much trickier. First, constitutional
challenges to legislation which outlaws the publication of
software are likely. So far, EFF is running 1 and 1 on
this (we won against the ITAR but lost against the DMCA).
Second, software is information, and need not be manufactured
or sold in any observable location. It can be printed in
books; it can be transmitted by private e-mail; it can be
memorized. (For example, the CipherSaber project has
attempted to produce a huge group of programmers who have
individually memorized how to implement RC4 in
their respective favorite programming languages. If only
anti-crypto legislation were still floating around Capitol
Hill, the fact that strong crypto algorithms and implementations
are texts resident in many indviduals' minds would be a
fascinating point to inject into that discussion.) It can
be disseminated by means of any channel by which information
is disseminated -- taught in university classes, published
as poems, studied in mathematics or electrical engineering
journals, reprinted in textbooks, placed on FTP sites (in
any jurisdiction).
If SDR really allows you to make any kind of radio device
you like, just by loading a new program, it really is a
serious challenge to the regulation of radio communications.
I don't mean that "pirate radio" or unlicensed transmissions
will be helped by SDR, although that's true. It's still
theoretically possible to trace a transmission to its
physical source, if it's powerful enough to interfere with
other licensed communications, and if somebody complains.
I'm talking about regulation of radio receiving equipment:
cell phones, televisions, scanners, and so on. A purely
passive device can't be detected (although radio experts
would surely add a footnote here), and yet such devices --
when assumed to be hardware -- are routinely regulated.
Some of the things you could make in software with
a high-quality generic SDR interface include
- a radio capable of receiving any band, all in software
- a multichannel analyzer
- a receiver for spread-spectrum and frequency-hopping
transmitters (without the technical assistance of the
creators of those transmitters)
- a scanner which can intercept cell phone conversations,
and decode and log many conversations at once
- generalized surveillance equipment which can monitor a
wide frequency band, and, in software, detect and decode
multiple communications on multiple frequencies with multiple
multiplexing schemes and multiple modulation schemes (sorting
and logging all of the received data to disk)
- an NTSC television (all in software)
- an ATSC television (all in software)
- a PVR which can record multiple ATSC signals from the air
at once, as opposed to tuning to a single channel at a time
What am I missing?
Each of these purely passive devices upsets somebody's
interest or assumptions, whether it's the assumption that it
ought to be expensive to build a particular device, or that
manufacturers of a particular device should be licensed, or
that a device should be illegal or only available to law
enforcement and intelligence agencies. But, with these
features in software, they could be available to everyone!
If you want to take it further and think about SDR transmitters,
which I mentioned above, it seems that you can have all of
the aspects of transmission, including the selection of
frequency and power, under the control of software. Some of
the web sites on SDR suggest that you can make a repeater
which can have arbitrary kinds of inputs and outputs, all
of which are just a matter of programming.
Fred is interested in the blurring distinction between hardware
and software in general. FPGAs and VHDL are one of the
interesting factors here; you can write schematics in a
high-level language (which may be nearly indistinguishable from
software), and then instantly fabricate a chip based on a
given schematic.
This blurring has definitely made the development of new
and custom hardware faster, easier, and cheaper -- not to
mention more accessible to individuals, who can now
conceivably "fabricate" chips of their own designs in the
privacy of their own homes, by programming FPGAs.
The future of technology seems to be one in which more and
more operations are performed in software (or by means of a
software-like step). If we can formulate a sufficiently
precise description of the behavior we would like a
general-purpose device to adopt, then we need only say
so, and that device will become a machine behaving
in exactly the way we've described.
Second week, more advanced,
And we had to
Be a table,
Be a sportscar,
Ice-cream cone.
("Nothing", from A Chorus Line)
We could say that every feature wants to be implemented in
software, and that trend is well-known to people who design
or follow embedded systems. An increasing number of embedded
systems are actually general-purpose systems loaded with
software dedicating them (for the moment, at least) to one
particular function. (This is why we have "TiVo hacking".)
Now languages and hardware are sophisticated enough that,
in some contexts, specifying a machine precisely
enough is sufficient to realize it automatically in the
physical world. (Fred mentioned CAM in this context --
you can also make a blueprint for a physical device and
have computer-controlled lathes cut the requisite parts
out of sheet metal for you, with no further human
intervention.)
For example, logic synthesis tools have been around for
quite a while. I can write a truth table for a function
of several Boolean variables, which can also be seen as
a description of (not necessarily a plan for) a machine
which performs some function. Logic synthesis software
can analyze the truth table and write it in terms of
elementary gates combined in some way -- and then
write the gates directly into a PAL or FPGA without
even showing me the intermediate gate-level representation.
The end result is a chip, a digital machine, which
performs (or calculates) the function I described, and
the internal operation of which might be a complete mystery
to me. VHDL, which I've never used, can be like this,
only more so. Indeed, EFF published an entire book,
Cracking DES, which can be seen as a
description of a machine that would perform
extremely fast brute force searches against DES. But
with a VHDL compiler, that description can be turned into
a schematic, loaded into chips, and you'll immediately
be in possession of such a machine.
Returning to SDR, I can imagine a very general
and high-quality DAC (and maybe some kind of software-controlled
tuner or filter so that the conversion doesn't need to have
an absurdly high bandwidth), operating as an SDR, for which
people have written various "modules", each of which performs
some kind of signal-processing function on an input from an
earlier stage. I can then imagine "writing a television" or
"writing a PVR" by giving a brief high-level description of
the way in which the modules are combined to cause a computer
to emulate a particular device. Adding new features to the
television thus constructed could be as easy as adding a
single line of code.
If this seems ridiculous, just think of the kinds of operations
we do on computers today compared to the operations computers
performed not long ago. Once, sorting was a major operation,
requiring substantial programming effort (perhaps different
programs for each sorting task). Today, hardly thinking about it,
I can sort a text file by absentmindedly including "| sort" in
a shell script, or sort elements in a Python datastructure
with a single call to "foo.sort()", implemented for me by someone
else in a high-level library I've never even looked at.
Cryptographic primitives, high-level reliable and unreliable
networking over a worldwide public network, compression and
decompression, and other "infrastructural" matters, have all
been encapsulated for me inside shell tools or libraries.
I remember reading a book which discussed the reactions of
telephone industry folks, during the heyday of phreaking,
before the public switched telephone network had much of a
security infrastructure to speak of, when computers with sound
cards were introduced. "We thought it was really risky and
irresponsible to give the general public this much DSP capability"
is approximately what I remember one of the telco people saying.
And of course SDR is really much like any other kind of DSP,
conceptually -- it just uses antennas for analog I/O instead of
speakers and microphones. But "risky and irresponsible to give
this capability to the general public"? Maybe the "capability"
in question is not SDR or phreaking software but sound cards,
oscilloscopes, fast general purpose computers, and ADC. I've
met people recently who seemed to have that attitude about
ADCs!
Zack and I had dinner at Lucky Creation. "On Christmas, go to
a Chinese or Indian restaurant if you want to eat out."
I tried to clean up and pack.
We hired a man to help me carry my filing cabinet, which I
bought months ago, up to my room -- and it worked, and now
I have a filing cabinet in a place which is useful to me.
I will be on the East Coast for about a week starting tomorrow
evening. If you want to talk to me or see me while I'm there,
send me e-mail. (My pager is down right now, unfortunately.)
[Main]
Contact: Seth David Schoen
