"By doing X, you agree to Y."
"Doing X indicates consent to Y."
Don't people already have a hard enough time understanding each other
and agreeing on the implications of actions or statements, without
software license authors making up claims about what actions
mean?
I still can't agree about whether signing a contract on paper
really indicates consent (some of my friends believe it is "merely
formal" consent and not true or substantive consent; see previous days'
diary entries on this point). But at least a contract on paper has
serious historical, legal, and social credibility, going back thousands
of years. The Hebrew word for "covenant", brit, is also translated
"contract", and the Biblical covenants have a fair amount in common with
modern ideas of contracts (and some contracts are still called "covenants"
today). There is a pervasive idea that such a contract is actually
expressive of a certain state of mind which corresponds to accepting an
obligation ("intending to be bound", as they say).
In this sense, contract-signing is symbolic, and we remember from Austin
and since Austin that it is a way of doing something with speech.
(Becoming metaphysically or legally bound, that is, by saying or writing
words.)
These novel indirect "indications of consent" turn this on its head and
claim that we can speak by doing something. This is no doubt
true in some cases -- for example, the famous
United States v. O'Brien, 391 US 367 (1968).
(And there
is also the issue of whether a sit-in is speech, for legal and moral
purposes; O'Brien is a strong precedent that it is not,
legally, even though what those who sit in usually hope for is to
communicate something. I recently quoted
Eco: "He could have killed him, rather than another, to leave a sign, to
signify something else." Murder can be expressive, but it is still
murder. How about mines as text?)
The thing that really gets to me is not that actions can be expressive, but
that the "indicated consent" theories allow someone else to decide
for you what your actions will mean. You can't say "By doing X, I indicate
Z", because someone else has already said "By doing X, you will
indicate Y, whether you want to or not".
The incredibly tragic belated lesson of public key cryptography is
this: Trust means trust. There is no shortcut and no substitute for
it; if you trust someone, you are really trusting someone. If the
person you trusted is abusive, you are really subject to the
consequences. If you don't have a reason to trust someone or
something, software cannot provide one.
[...]
In the blurbs for PGP, it used to say
"Communicate
securely with people you have never met!", which was the amazing technical
achievement of public-key crypto. However, it should have added
"Still have absolutely no idea whether they are who they say they are,
or whether you should trust them!".
(on peacefire-technical)
(Speaking of that,
my
GPG key is on Drew Steib's keyserver
(although I didn't put it there!
Do you trust that key? As a great cryptographer once said, "Why?".).
I spent a long time talking about PKI and I think I now understand it well
enough to substantiate my claim that it's "incredibly tragic". See also
Carl Ellison's padlock
page and the 10
Risks of PKI.
Why do light bulbs always come unglued when you
don't
want them to and never when you do want them to?
stephane (who also had that
bad light bulb experience) has created a
Seth-o-meter
which shows how many copies of lynx I am currently running on
zork.net. (I tend to do most of my
work on that machine, and I use lynx most often for browsing the
web, and because it's under screen, I often forget to exit them...)
The Seth-o-meter uses the
"hanging out with lawyers" picture.
In other "Stephane and pictures of me" news,
her
pictures of Taska's birthday party in Santa Cruz include a relative
recent picture of me (in the "California Berkeley" sweatshirt, strangely
enough). That is still before I got my beard cut; I know that Duncan has
a more recent picture from the BBC meeting, but I haven't seen that on the
web, and Duncan's still in China right now.
I'm trying to listen to the Resurrection Symphony, but the
only recording I have is extremely uneven in volume, so I have to keep
turning it up and down to be able to hear it without (I hope) disturbing
other people in the house. I think I'd better get a recording where the
volume varies less.
On the other hand, what if people write music that's meant to be played
back with a huge dynamic range? So you should barely be able to hear
some parts, but at the high end they should hear them down the block?
(Probably the 1812 Overture is like this, when performed
with actual cannon.)
Music like that is really inconvenient to listen to, because although the
dynamic range that home audio equipment can deal with has been growing,
the variety that's actually convenient to listen to is not
growing. Some things are too quiet to hear, some things are too loud to
play. If music has a wide enough range, there is no single volume
setting where every part of certain pieces will sound "appropriate";
then no technology will fix this, because it's a part of the music itself.
Should we ask people not to write or perform music like that? That's not
a good solution. Maybe headphones, but then again you don't want the
high end to injure you, which is a real possibility with headphones.
Sometimes I've thought that it's funny that some modern societies are
rich enough that a vast number of our injuries come, not from the
pre-existing natural environment (fires, floods, earthquakes, wild
animals...) but from our own creations (keyboards! and headphones
and lots of other examples).
Some of the literature about water safety is pointing out that most
diseases now caused by drinking water in urban environments are no
longer due to bacteria (indeed, outbreaks of illness due to drinking
tap water in cities have become extremely rare) but due to industrial
pollution! So nature hurts us less now, and in return we hurt ourselves
more.
