Jobs
I went by Michelle's place Tuesday night, and she and Lia and Anirvan were very concerned about my job situation. I can understand that.
I'm making some changes to my resume.
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I went by Michelle's place Tuesday night, and she and Lia and Anirvan were very concerned about my job situation. I can understand that.
I'm making some changes to my resume.
It's been fun working at EFF! Constantly hopping. <hop, hop>
If I could have seen myself a few years ago, reading what I'm writing, writing what I'm writing, and talking to those to whom I'm talking, I would have been completely amazed. The EFF is a real place!
Ouch, I guess I'm not completely out of the woods yet. I think I'm going to get better, though.
I was quoted in someone's .signature:
A "secure" eBook is an eBook that blind users can't have read aloud to them if the publisher didn't want it read aloud.-- Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org>
This is from my still-unpublished "What's Wrong With Adobe DRM". I should try to finish that sometime.
I worked on the BBC with Andrew and Duncan, but I fell asleep again. The BBC is about to ship! I'm about to go to Eric's wedding!
I made it to Massachusetts with no problem and am out here waiting to go to New Hampshire for Eric's wedding.
I'm still trying to stay in touch with people out there in California. I'll be back next week and hope to see Biella and Sumana, who are returning from long trips to other places.
I got to talk to people at Smith College about why Sklyarov's arrest is bad. They were outraged!
I'm working on two presentations for EFF for next week. I won't be able to volunteer there after the end of next week if I don't get my job situation worked out, because I really need to find work.
I totally love talking about Fourier transforms, spectra, information theory, communications technology, and so on. It's keen.
Kate and Eric got married! I was a groomsman and I wore a suit and was, I hope, well-groomed.
At the reception, the DJ dedicated a dance song to Dmitry Sklyarov.
The web site for Trigère perfumes is now up. I don't think I can get them to display a "Made with vi" banner, though.
Similarly, an early version of my mom's Melymbrosia.com site has gone up, with some of her Virgina Woolf-related pictures.
I visited Raf Anzonvin at his studio in Amherst. I hadn't seen him in a couple of years; he's been up to neat things since then. He's actually about to go give a presentation at SIGGRAPH (way more prestigious than LinuxWorld, I'm afraid).
I went to a birthday party for my friend Seth. My mother made us t-shirts about how we are Seth. There is still an on-going joke about how we ought to start the Seth Company. Well... nobody has registered sethcompany.com as yet.
I had my first-ever acupuncture treatment, and various things happened.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Dmitry Sklyarov got out of jail on bail. Perhaps I'll be able to meet him at some point soon. I missed the rally at the courthouse because I was in Massachusetts, and I missed the rally in Boston because I was in Western Massachusetts.
The new BBC is supposed to be released on Tuesday.
Thursday, at EFF in the morning: "Introduction to digital communications and multimedia technology" seminar, largely for the benefit of lawyers who want to learn some technical stuff about how multimedia works. I will bring an oscilloscope! You can come if you know me. (There is another seminar Friday on related issues, probably not open to the public.)
If only Sumana (Who Can't Stop Leaving St. Petersburg!) were coming into Oakland Airport and wanted to hang out for a little while, I could see her there! She's probably on a plane right now and won't read this until later on.
I'm getting back Wednesday. I might be at the Bay Area Debian meeting that evening.
I need work.
... not "[left-handed!] Kate and Eric" of BART trip fame, but "Kate and Eric" of getting married fame.
I got back OK. Thanks, Ben!
Also, welcome back to Biella and Sumana. I saw Biella today and I hope to see Sumana sometime soon.
I'm getting set up for the EFF seminar stuff I'm going to be doing. You can come on Thursday morning if you happen to see this in time.
My letter to Dmitry Sklyarov came back marked "NIC" ("not in custody") from Las Vegas. That's OK -- he's out on bail in Cupertino! And, in fact, I got to tell him in person what I had written in the letter, so that was just as good, or better.
But as Mr. Stallman says, "it will be done sooner if you help!"(Chris Bopp, LWN letters to the editor)
Sumana (back from St. Petersburg) visited. Yay!
Attributed by her to Leonard Richardson:
We should be careful if we visit Dmitry Sklyarov. They might think we're planning to bake him a cake with an encrypted file inside.
Sumana and to some extent Vadim and Alex are apparently teaching me to read Cyrillic phonetically. If that happens, I'll know four alphabets.
At Eric's wedding, Vanessa (the bridesmaid with whom I was paired) told me that her brother was once asked to "write out his name phonetically" for some event like a graduation where it would be read aloud. Of course, being a linguist, he wrote it in IPA...
It's much, much, much faster to mount a large ext2fs read-only than read-write. Wow. That could be useful sometimes.
I seem to remember that some other filesystems, like reiserfs, are easier to mount read-write quickly than is ext2fs. I'll have to try some of them some day soon.
The traffic on free-sklyarov has fallen off precipitously (I think it's below 10% of what it used to be). The good part is that maybe fewer people will unsubscribe now. Also, we hope that a lot of activity has shifted over to the regional Free Dmitry groups.
The U.S. Trade Representative demonstrates what's wrong with, um, all kinds of things.
Matters actionable under section 301(b) include acts, policies, or practices of a foreign government that are ``unreasonable'' and burden or restrict U.S. commerce. Under section 301(d)(3)(B)(i)(II),
.
The United States has consulted repeatedly with the Government of Ukraine regarding the matters under investigation. The Government of Ukraine has made very little progress in addressing two key issues: (1) the use of existing law enforcement tools to stop the current piracy, and (2) the introduction of an optical media licensing regime (which has become the international norm) to prevent a subsequent resurgence of pirate activity. Accordingly, on the basis of the investigation initiated under section 302 of the Trade Act, the comments received, and the consultations, the Trade Representative has determined pursuant to sections 301(b) and 304(a)(1)(A) of the Trade Act that the acts, policies and practices of Ukraine with respect to the protection of intellectual policy rights are unreasonable and burden or restrict U.S. commerce, and are thus actionable under section 301(b).
It's amazing that such an abstract and arcane issue makes me so angry. I mean, other people have their own political issues, which are not necessarily related to punishing the Ukraine for resisting "the introduction of an optical media licensing regime".
I'm mostly angry because I was tricked into believing -- for years and years -- that the U.S. government and trade treaty organizations actually wanted to promote free trade.
It's not true. They want to promote harmonization of national laws.
It doesn't mean that they want to get rid of borders. It doesn't mean that they want to get rid of regulation or legislation in general. It doesn't mean that they want to allow the free movement of goods (or people!). It's still about political power!
I am very angry.
I went to Berkeley on Saturday. Why? I told different people different things -- depending on their interests or my progress through the weekend. It was a combination of things.
On Thursday, I gave my talk at EFF, using a borrowed oscilloscope. (This makes me think that Karl Fulves ought to write a Dover book called 77 Self-Working Tricks With a Borrowed Oscilloscope.) But then I didn't get to do my follow-up meta-Felten thing on Friday; it's been postponed to give certain a chance to hear Felten himself, before they hear me talking about him. Fair enough!
So Friday night was the Free Dmitry planning meeting at EFF, and there was a really good turnout, but various people were irritated that some of us tended to go off-topic. And that's understandable. I have a tendency toward digression, which might be fun if you are visiting me and are patient, and might not be as much fun in a meeting.
I met a fellow left-handed vegetarian Esperantist at the meeting, and another left-handed vegetarian Esperantist who was supposed to come didn't. I hope he's back in time for our annual convention at Tandoori Mahal.
Eeeee! Ni havas *alian* sinestrulan vegetaranan esperantiston inter ni. Unu aŭ du pli, kaj ni bezonas novan grupon "Sinestrulaj vegetaranaj esperantistoj por Dmitry"...(Mike Castleman, third of four likely members of said group)
After that planning meeting, I walked off with Nick and Justin (who'd both come to the meeting) and we passed Cell Space and reached Circadia. Subsequently we went to a brewing company where I ate some dinner and Nick got a "sampler" of the beers (six tiny glasses!). The funny thing was that it looked exactly like the "samplers" you get if you go try the maple syrup at New England sugarhouses: the colors, and range of colors, and quantities, and way the waitress presented and explained them, suggested a strong analogy or affinity between beers and maple syrups.
Well, I had a nice time and heard some good stories from Nick, which I wish I remembered well enough to repeat here.
Saturday morning, I visited Michelle at Cody's, went to another Free Dmitry planning meeting (in Soda, total attendance three), then met Anirvan and visited him for some hours. It's been a while since I was at his place. He's also going to come teach me something about financial planning (e.g., how to end up with savings instead of debts if you work at a high-paying job for two years).
When I left Anirvan's place, I started walking south along College Avenue (an activity I do infrequently, but one which has been the subject of many poems, collage pages, e-mail messages, and other forms of expression). It may have been over a year since I last walked down College, but somehow walking there always seems to make me feel happy, whether I imagine I have a right to be or not.
Unfortunately, I was supposed to meet Andrew at College and Ashby, but I completely missed Ashby and kept walking south until I hit the Rockridge BART station. At this point I thought "OK, walking to Oakland is all well and good when you have nothing else to do with your evening or with your life -- but evenings when you things to do, and people to meet, it might not be a wise choice". So I turned around and walked about five blocks back to a gas station and asked where exactly College and Ashby was.
"Oh, about seven blocks that way" said the attendant, pointing north (back in the direction of Anirvan's house). "It's a long walk!"
That attendant had no idea what a long walk on College is like. But I was grateful for the fact that he did at least have an idea of exactly where College and Ashby is, when I didn't.
I eventually managed to meet Andrew, only about an hour and a half late, and we went back to his place and worked on the BBC for almost 24 hours, with the exception of a few short breaks, the first of which was supposed to be a meteor-watching break.
Andrew gave me a ride to get some sushi, which I brought to Michelle's place, where were assembling such people as Kate, come all the way from Housing and Dining Services to watch meteors with Michelle.
It turned out that it was completely overcast and none of us saw any meteors at all, but it was still a nice time. (Actually, Andrew went off with Duncan to Orinda -- a long story of logistics -- and they did see a meteor or two. But we who stayed behind in Berkeley didn't.)
Another person who came by was Michelle's fellow Hesperian Librarian. ("I know a Berkeley NGO / Near the Addison and Milvia Street sign / And in this Berkeley NGO / There works a good friend of mine / [...] / Hesperian Librarian, / Michelle in a 501(c)...")
After that, I went back to Andrew's place and fell asleep, and I'm skipping over all of the logistics which, as I've said, involved some people going to Orinda and seeing meteors there (and coming back with an SUV).
We worked on the BBC for hours and hours and made huge amounts of progress. We're already kind of late in shipping it. Oops.
We have a merged tree and a merged changelog and some nice improvements. I got a splash screen and some help screens working, and I think Andrew is even close to getting a Debian installer working again. (There's some question about testing the latest kernel on a whole bunch of machines.)
Duncan apparently knows people in Hong Kong who will physically take our CD to the factory where it will be duplicated, thus saving us a day or two and letting us get our CDs published in time for LinuxWorld.
The other kind of odd and unexpected thing is that Duncan and I are the featured speakers at the BayLISA meeting on Thursday at Incyte in Palo Alto. Perhaps I'll be able to find some work at that meeting, too.
Next meeting: 7:30 to 9:30 pm - Thursday, 16 August, 2001
Seth Schoen and Duncan Mackinnon
the Bootable Business Card
Neat! BayLISA is a very worthwhile organization, and I'm proud to be speaking there.
Unfortunately, my right arm started to hurt again during the past few days. It's still not as bad as it's been.
I discovered that my pager had been set to the Las Vegas roaming area, from when I went to DEF CON, which is why I haven't gotten any pages in almost a month. Oops.
You can't eat bits.(various critics of cryptoanarchy)
But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.(Matthew 4:4 (KJV))
(The Straight Dope addresses whether man can really live on bread alone.)
Twenty-four hours of work at Duncan's house! (Well, sleeping again, sometimes.)
This is a good BBC.
Was there a Tuesday? We kept working on the BBC, and I visited Michelle and Lia in the evening. The BBC was shipped to Hong Kong. These days are a bit of a blur for me; my sleep schedule was severely disrupted by that BBC work. It always seems to be perfected at the last minute.
I had a chiropractic appointment and received "permanent and stationary" status.
I had a very nice job interview at EFF. In the evening, Duncan and I gave an enjoyable talk at BayLISA -- it was kind of rambling, but we had a nice time and got to mention a lot of cool features of the Bootable Business Card. It seems that sysadmins are impressed and enthusiastic.
One guy wanted to buy me a beer to thank me for working on the BBC. He settled for buying me a root beer. A number of people congratulated me on the project and said it was indispensable for their work. I also received a nice t-shirt with the pink "Bay LISA" logo. Now all sysadmins everywhere will be jealous. (As I know somebody named Lisa who lives in the Bay Area, I think it would be amusing to send her a shirt like that. I don't know whether she'd want it.)
I also got to announce that I was hired as EFF's Staff Technologist.
While demonstrating the new BBC, I had the sense that it was something that people in the audience really wanted and really needed. How pleasant!
I had dinner with a crowd including Karsten Self and Roger Gregory (that Roger Gregory). As you might expect, we talked a lot about DRM.
Karsten is up late, too, after that meeting, and he wrote:
Note that "Science" ~1784 pertained to "general knowledge", including what we'd consider literature and other artistic works. "Useful arts" refers to "artifices" -- science or technology in today's vernacular. "Science and the useful arts" in the Constitution has almost the reverse of the apparent contemporary meaning. We'd probably phrase it today as "knowledge, culture, and applied technology".From the 1913 Webster's definition:
The ancients reckoned seven sciences, namely, grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy; -- the first three being included in the Trivium, the remaining four in the Quadrivium.And, for art:The employment of means to accomplish some desired end; the adaptation of things in the natural world to the uses of life; the application of knowledge or power to practical purposes.Cheers.
It's too bad that Steve Fossett had to land. I had been following the progress of Solo Spirit with some enthusiasm, and it looked really good. I bet he'll try again.
Anirvan helped me make a budget. It seems that I'll be able to afford to live in the Bay Area. I could still use some consulting work!
packages.lnx-bbc.org is now up, which doesn't do you that much good unless you happen to have a BBC running.
I went to the BayLISA picnic at Oak Meadow Park in Los Gatos. Thanks to Rick and Ancilla for transportation.
There, I gave out some BBCs, and rode on a train for a little while. Clever technique of the day: bringing aluminum foil to barbecues for vegetarian grilling!
We're apparently also going to be at Linux10 next week.
In "Freedom, Power, or Confusion?", Eric Raymond takes up the controversy around free software and freedom: he worries that Richard Stallman and Bradley Kuhn want to make it illegal to publish software under a non-free license.
I think it's straightforward enough to agree with this talkback about the FSF's position: they might wish for non-free licenses to be considered invalid (but not to throw people in jail for attempting to use them).
Still, Eric's concept of "flerbage" is interesting philosophically for several different reasons. (He says that, because the word "freedom" is overloaded with complex meanings, he's going to make up a new word, for the sake of argument; then he gives a traditional libertarian definition for "flerbage".)
One question is whether freedom is valuable because it's freedom or because of the particular benefits it provides (or activities or other values it protects). This is not an idle question. Suppose you're a member of the Merry-Kant Civil Liberty Society, and you think freedom is wonderful and should be promoted everywhere possible. But you're opposed to a certain activity (it shouldn't be hard to think of examples). You think it should be banned or fought by the government. One day, upon reflection, or in the midst of a political argument, you decide that the right to engage in that activity is actually a legitimate form of freedom. Therefore, you stop advocating for the activity to be banned.
Or suppose you're a member of the MKCLS and you think that a certain hobby of your friend's is within your friend's rights, that it's a legitimate form of freedom. One day your friend is killed in an accident related to the hobby. You realize that the hobby is extremely dangerous and that thousands of people are being killed or injured by it. But you still think that the right to practice the hobby is an essential part of freedom. Sadly, you decide that freedom is not the highest political virtue; you resign your membership in MKCLS, angry that your friends with the organization refuse to see other values as more important than freedom.
Or you're a member of the National Riled Association, and you're very irritated because one of your favorite pastimes is viewed with disdain or skepticism by mainstream society. But you think that your right to engage in this pastime is an important form of freedom, and you try to convince some people that the pastime is good, and others (who can't be persuaded) that your right to practice it is essential to freedom. Later, in the midst of reflection or political argument, you conclude that actually there is no right to practice this pastime. So you stop telling people that freedom requires that you be allowed to engage in your pastime. At the same time, you still like your pastime and consider it valuable and beneficial, so you retain your membership in the NRA.
These examples raise (and if I were writing a philosophy book, I'd have to make them more colorful and interesting, or else refer to people as "A" and "B") questions about the nature of the commitment to freedom. Is it that we first believe in freedom, and then try to find in what that freedom consists? Or is it that we value certain activities, rights, relationships, or concrete instances of freedom, and accordingly say that we value freedom (maybe because it protects these, or because these allow us to see the value of freedom)?
From the "support freedom, then find out what it is" angle, I'm reminded of the passage
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end.
in Donne's sonnet "Batter my heart, three-personed God". (We identify ourselves as loyal to freedom, and then we wait around for freedom to show up so that we can honor it properly.)
Anyway, back to Eric's piece: his definition of flerbage doesn't seem to help us understand whether copyright law promotes flerbage, or injures it. And this is an important question. Most of the people I know who work on copyright issues tend to suggest that copyright is a government-granted monopoly, that it is created purely through legislation, and so on.
If, then, Richard and others want to modify or abolish copyright law, how can it be clear that they are taking away anybody's flerbage? Is there a straightforward argument that copyrights are necessary for flerbage?
Eric says that he thought about this question:
Observe that I am not prejudicing the discussion by assuming that the software I write is my property.
His deduction about flerbage is rather that
I don't have to use Bates's bloatware. [...] The odds that anyone is going to come to my home and kill, me, or rob me, or force me to labor for their ends rather than my owm, are not increased by Sicromoft's license.
I maintain that this takes copyright as a given, or at least assumes that copyright law is not itself harmful to flerbage!
After that, I went to Stephane's place and watched two episodes of The Prisoner with a number of geeks. It was a lot of fun. I ended up drawing my "amicus curiae" cartoon for them (hmmm, I wonder whether Robyn's gone home, as the summer seems to be winding down), and it might be the inspiration for a comic short film. Most likely a hypothetical comic short film.
I'm going to court on Thursday. You can come too! Watch for the EFF alert tonight: Sklyarov preliminary hearing and Bunner preliminary injunction appeal, both forthcoming in San Jose this Thursday.
The mouse caused a lot of stress for me Sunday night, but I seem to be getting a little calmer now. I'm probably going to order a Hav-a-Hart nonlethal trap tomorrow, and try to catch the mouse and transport him to Australia. No, actually, to Bernal Park.
Ever the optimist and the wit, John writes on dvd-discuss today:
It was Seth Schoen joining EFF that caused the flood of articles and editorials in recent days questioning the DMCA and Dmitry's arrest. A technical wizard teamed with the implacable legal attackers must have shaken the copyright industry.Today's Wall Street Journal has an op-ed taking issue with Jack Valenti's stance on copyright, and advocates that MPAA cease and desist its losing game against digital piracy and get on with making piles of money deploying tools that take advantage of easily available content as evidenced by the movie-via-Internet initiative.
And yesterday the Washinton Post editorialized in favor of reassessing the adverse impact of DMCA and coming up with improved legislation. Today CNN. And who else has been mentioned here?
Is Judge Kaplan reading all this and wondering how to plug the growing leak in his dike? Or did his August 17 nervous revisionism get leaked to the media? Seth did you hack the judicial intranet?
and then
Excuse me, I meant to write that it was James Tyre leading and Wendy Seltzer undergirding the Felten attack, being paid a tad less than the $1.2 million fee paid so far in 2600's case, that turned the tide. How can the miserly copyright industry compete with limitless resources of invaluable intellectual treasure?
I'll just say that I've been having a very nice time at EFF this week, thank you.
Sumana visited. Biella took BBCs to BALUG, where I hear they were very popular. (I then saw Biella again during a lunchtime expedition from the EFF; she started volunteering there today.)
Sklyarov's arraignment is postponed. Bunner's appeal is still on; join us now and (let Andrew Bunner) share the software, you'll be free...
I went to an appellate court hearing in San Jose. That's a long story.
Then I went to a party at Sumana's house (after dinner with Michelle and Lia). I saw lots of people, including Michelle, Nathaniel, Anirvan, and Leonard. I had a really nice time; I hope I didn't bore people by talking about copyright history. ("It all started back in 1710, with a little law called the Statute of Anne...")
In the morning, we had breakfast at Venus on Shattuck. Erik visited me at work, and I worked on an assortment of things.
Linuxcare is continuing development of their own bootable CD project, called LBT. Duncan and I took a look at the LBT beta this evening; here are some good things about it. I might do more comparison in the future, although that would be likely to add comments about things they've taken out of the LBT system.
It's going to be a really busy week. Here is a list of some of the events: Robert Austin show, Linux10 picnic, LWCE (including our talk, LNX-BBC distribution, and EFF membership booth work), Dmitry fundraising party, Free Dmitry protest march, and maybe a trip to HSC. That's a start; there are at least three or four other things, including the software patent summit.
I went down to the Linux10 picnic in Sunnyvale, and saw lots of people I knew there. We also gave away an LNX-BBC, and I talked to various people about various things. Apparently, I'm going to meet David Weekly pretty soon.
There was a keysigning at the picnic, and some people laughed at a group of people gathered around a park bench, hunched intently over pieces of paper, enthusiastically reading hexadecimal strings to one another. "Five! Four! Alpha! Two! Two! Charlie! Eight! Zero! Four! Bravo!" (Unfortunately, Rick's machine hugin crashed today.)
At the picnic, I wrote captions for a pair of donuts ("free as in speech" and "free as in beer"). A woman who'd come from Davis ate the "free as in speech" donut, leaving the other behind. Biella took a picture of the resulting sheet of paper, with the "free as in beer" donut left behind.
We also went to Fry's, where I wanted lots of things and didn't buy any of them.
Linuxcare took down the LBT pages. Note that the LBT 2.0 beta ISO9660 image is still available.
In the evening, I went to Buca di Beppo in my old neighborhood with Michelle and Lia. I have a job!
I'm way too busy to be posting a diary entry!
Did you know that you have to have a government-issued photo ID to get an amplified sound permit in this City?
I met David Weekly. Zack got back. I saw lots of people at LWCE setup. The BBCs got here from Hong Kong, and they are excellent. I got sound-setup working on the BBC, and ogg123, and mpg123, and we won't ship that.
Come to our talk, and our booth, and the Free Dmitry stuff, and the Linux Journal suite, and the BOF sessions, and everything!
Is it true that you read this and will be in San Francisco some time this week? Page me at (415)582-8271 to say hello, and let me know if you want to get together at some point. I will be in the EFF booth at LWCE most of the time.
Vita Nuova is exhibiting at LWCE, right nearby EFF!
We gave our BBC talk at LinuxWorld, and had a generally great time all around. The new BBCs are extremely popular, and so is EFF.
I talked to a bunch of interesting people (and had a nice dinner with a large group at the end of the day). We're still trying to publicize some Sklyarov events.
Very complicated things going on, and again too little time to write about them. I'm thoroughly caught up in LinuxWorld and Sklyarov stuff.
Wow, this is fun!
The office of the Chief of Police approved our amplified sound permit, at an administrative hearing Wednesday afternoon. And everybody's making jokes about the Hall of Justice. "Hey, if you're going to the Hall of Justice, could you get me some?" "Sorry, they're all out."
The new BBCs are really popular! LWN gave us a really nice review at the top of their Distributions page this week. (But Jonathan Corbet merely says that "the version number is a long story". Hmph. I told that story to plenty of people today, plenty of times.)
I met lots of neat people.
And Dmitry Sklyarov came to the party held in his honor.
I should write something about the golden ratio, so that our version number will be a long story which is actually told somewhere. The golden ratio is just a very beautiful thing.
Here is a general question: what number is it such that when you square it, it is the same as adding A?
It's x, such that x=(1+sqrt(1+4a))/2
This number will be an integer when 1+4a is a square (because 1+4a must be odd, so if it is a square, its square root must also be odd).
Of course, that must happen infinitely often.
Duncan and I got to see a little bit of the setup phase. I was impressed by the lack of security associated with registration for badges: to get a speaker badge, I just had to give my name (and no other information); to get an exhibitor badge, I just had to mention an exhibitor (and no other information). It's probably just as well, because I didn't have any photo ID.
That was an issue earlier in the day Monday, when I went to the Hall of Justice and was told that I couldn't get an amplified sound permit without having government-issued photo ID. I have none -- so I couldn't get an amplified sound permit.
(I wonder if you have to be a U.S. citizen/permanent resident to apply for those permits. This gets back to the nature of non-citizens' free speech rights, which has seemed to me to be an embarrassingly weak corner of U.S. civil liberties legal history. I think Gwen has been looking into this recently.)
The LWCE speakers' room had good food, all the time, for speakers; I hear the press room had the same, for the press. We also saw some people there, like Chris DiBona.
I sent Jonathan Corbet a couple of advance copies of the LNX-BBC 1.618, and so LWN did a really nice review of our BBC on Tuesday morning. (They mistakenly said that Linuxcare was not continuing its own bootable CD project, so I wrote in to correct them.)
Duncan and I were a little late getting to the conference, because we had to go down to the Hall of Justice to apply for an amplified sound permit from the Permits Section. (Duncan, you see, has government-issued photo ID.)
We were told to come to a hearing Wednesday, so we went in to the show, and spent some time in the EFF booth collecting donations and talking to people about the LNX-BBC system and EFF's work (especially on the DMCA). We were giving out LNX-BBCs in the booth -- with a request for a $5 donation to EFF -- as Duncan had received a few thousand of them from Hong Kong Monday morning. (Our duplicator is Wing Shing Optical, and we are very happy with them.)
Duncan and I gave a conference talk about bootable Linux CDs, with a special emphasis on the LNX-BBC project. There was a mixture of history, discussion of LNX-BBC features, and general overviews of technology (boot loaders, El Torito, initrd, our init script, cloop, and so on, as well as other alternatives to handle compression). We did enjoy bragging about some of the neat stuff which is available on our CD-ROM. We were a little disorganized, but we had a nice time and the audience seemed pretty impressed (and grateful for all the free CDs we passed out).
We did have plugs for EFF and for the Free Dmitry events during our talk, and we also did a live demonstration of some of the BBC's features, including downloadable packages (but unfortunately not sound, because Duncan's demo machine is an IBM ThinkPad 600E). Duncan said that some members of the audience had been confused, or alienated, or something, at one point during my talk.
"What, when I mentioned the kernel not being able to use real-mode BIOS calls to read the CD-ROM in an El Torito no-emulation mode boot, once the kernel jumps into protected mode?"
"No, they were fine with that part. It was the math."
You see, the version number of our release (1.618), is a math joke -- it's phi, the Golden Ratio. So I'd taken the opportunity to explain this and I had a whole slide discussing some of the properties of the Golden Ratio. It was that slide which Duncan said the audience liked least. Alas! Where have all the math geeks gone?
After our talk, an FBI agent who'd been in the audience came up and introduced himself to us. (We spotted the Fed! Oops, wrong conference...)
This reminds me that one person who came by the EFF booth on Tuesday afternoon was a military intelligence officer who works on computer crime -- I'm not eager to identify his service, because perhaps his superiors wouldn't be thrilled that he was talking to EFF. But he looked at our literature about Dmitry Sklyarov and said that it was a shame that Dmitry had been arrested, and that he hoped Dmitry would be freed soon. It was nice to hear that.
EFF gave out a large number of flyers for the Free Dmitry party and the Free Dmitry protest march; I also got the Free software Foundation, Debian Project, and Usenix to distribute those flyers. The Debian booth was selling "debian/rules" shirts (which is a good joke if you have ever compiled a Debian package). Some people have speculated that Debian created a rules file so that Debian would get a good Sucks-Rules-O-Meter score.
A group of people who were either from the Debian project or fans went out to dinner at Buca di Beppo, my very-well-received recommendation. It was really fun.
During the day, we kept on passing out BBCs, and Linuxcare kept on passing out LBTs. We received a steady stream of comments about how cool the BBC system was, and EFF got a fair number of donations in exchange for CDs.
Duncan and I were again back at the Hall of Justice (my fourth such trip in three days) for a hearing before the Permits Section. We sat in the back of the hearing room, and when the officer in charge began the meeting, I was surprised to hear him call
Katina Bishop, itinerant show, loudspeaker, non-commercial, Golden Gate Park.
And sure enough, Katina Bishop herself stood up from her seat in the front of the room, walked up to the hearing committee's desk, and began talking to the committee members.
Katina is my co-worker at EFF, and I hadn't expected to see her at all; it so happened that she had applied for an amplified sound permit for the EFF Share-In concert, and her hearing came up the same day that our Free Dmitry march permit hearing did. So there we were in the very same hearing; it was a funny co-incidence.
Duncan was called up a little later (the process was alphabetical by last name), and so we had time in between to remark on how funny it had been to run into Katina in such a place. And then Duncan and I went up to the front and Duncan was asked "Are you Duncan MacKinnon?" and that was all that the Permits Section wanted to know.
Katina's permit, and our permit, were granted (this link won't work right away).
In the afternoon, Duncan and I dropped by the Linux Journal hospitality suite to check in with Don and make sure that BBCs were being passed around.
I spoke with the folks from the EtherBoot and LTSP projects about netbooting. They've both done impressive work that we might be able to benefit from in some way.
I also stopped by the Scyld booth to give out BBCs. People now or previously at Scyld are responsible for a lot of good things on the BBC -- Ethernet drivers and diagnostics, two-kernel monte, and now some forensics tools. They had a nice Beowulf demo with a rack-mountable array of servers running a simulation. Donald Becker showed up at one point, and I gave him some BBCs; apparently he liked them, because he stopped by the EFF booth later on to talk to Duncan for quite a while.
I ran into Kieran at the GNOME booth, and I talked to him about math for a while.
Alex Katalov and Dmitry Sklyarov of Elcomsoft attended the conference together. I didn't see either of them on the show floor, but other people did. One man who came by the EFF booth had a very special present which he asked me to pass on to Dmitry: a 1960 U.S. silver half-dollar, with an engraving of the Liberty Bell on the back. (I gave it to Alex later that evening.)
There was a Debian dinner (with some folks from Amsterdam and otherwise far away) at an Indian restaurant called New Delhi (on Ellis). I'd eaten there before; it was very good, although the main reason we chose it today was that it's physically the closest Indian restaurant to Moscone Center, according to Yahoo!.
As a result of going to dinner, we were a little bit late to the Allseer party.
The party was excellent. I met Raph Levien, maintainer of Ghostscript, creator of Advogato, and the person responsible for lots of other neat things, like the original remailer list.
Dmitry Sklyarov attended the party -- but he wasn't allowed to say much, or stay long. Lawrence Lessig gave a speech in which he talked about a death penalty case he encountered while working for Justice Scalia; he condemned the DMCA (as you might expect), and called on us to help in a long battle. Richard Stallman spoke next, and hit various points, ending in a call for campaign finance reform. (The following day, a free-sklyarov subscriber noted that Ernest Hollings receives a lot of money from lawyers and copyright industries -- more than from any other group.) Sometime I should write something about campaign finance.
Cindy Cohn, from EFF, gave the last speech; one audience member told Duncan that the speech was so inspiring that it made him want to cry. (That's your answer, Cindy, if you were wondering how you did.)
I also found two people at the party whom I'd met at the EFF booth and who were from Western Massachusetts! They were affiliated with schools in the Five College Consortium, and one of them actually had Prof. David Kelly as her advisor. (He's the director of the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, which I attended in 1993.) That woman was the one who danced with ribbons during the parade on Thursday.
It's great to meet people from back where I grew up! These two drove across the country together and are headed back at some point. I hope they'll say hi to Kelly for me.
I tried to paint "svobodu Dime" on the big banner which had been hung on the wall, but I got called away in the middle, and somebody else completed it, thinking I'd meant to write "svobodu Sklyarovu". Fair enough.
I stayed at the party for several hours and ran into a number of people from EFF, the Debian project, and local LUGs.
I checked Advogato before going to sleep, and noticed an article about LWCE's admissions policies, written by a 13-year-old programmer named Zach Lipton, who was denied admission to the show on Wednesday because of his age.
I immediately wrote the following message to Kathy Moran of IDG:
Hi Kathy,I had a very nice time in my conference session today, and I'm also enjoying working in the EFF booth. Thanks for the opportunity to be a part of LWCE again.
I wanted to let you know about something I noticed on Advogato, a community web site run by Raph Levien of UC Berkeley:
http://www.advogato.org/article/331.html
This article, by open source programmer Zach Lipton, describes how he was turned away from LWCE today because he is 13 years old, even though he came to the show accompanied by an adult. I find this troubling.
Today, I'm 21, have worked full-time in the technology world for three years, have presented at three LWCE shows, and have been interviewed about technology issues by national media.
I remember my first trade show experience -- at the age of 15, I attended a non-IDG networking show on the East Coast. I attended with friends aged 15, 16, and 30, two of whom were working as computer consultants. Many of the engineers present had substantive and valuable technical discussions with us, about firewalls, routers, and cryptography. Unfortunately, some vendors treated us disrespectfully because of our age. I found this counterintuitive -- I was already working on IT infrastructure projects at my high school, and expected to be working with computers professionally within the next two to three years. (And, as it turned out, that prediction was accurate.) Why should those vendors want to alienate their future customers?
After all, some enthusiastic technologists are very young, and many young people are already doing significant technical work before they enter high school or college. This is especially true in the open source/free software community. A number of accomplished developers I know are teenagers, who often got started working with Linux when they were 12 or 13. (I started at 15; a major contributor to the LNX-BBC project, which was the subject of my talk on Tuesday, is 16 at the moment, and does superb technical work.)
One result of LWCE's age policies seems to be that properly-registered programmers who contribute to major open source/free software projects aren't able to attend the show and discuss their work with their colleagues. According to Mr. Lipton's web site, he works as a programmer on the Mozilla web browser.
I understand that IDG is concerned that young people could be disruptive to the show, and that exhibitors may not be particularly excited about speaking with attendees who are not yet computer professionals. On the other hand, my experience suggests that young people who are interested in attending trade shows are very likely to become computer professionals, often within the next few years. After all, there's a reason that these people are trying to get into your show!
The free software/open source world is full of enthusiastic and talented young people who are taking the opportunity to make connections and contributions they're likely to continue through their academic and professional lives. I would urge IDG to try to find a way to let these people participate in LWCE.
(Zach was subsequently admitted to the show; I think the issue still remains, and I'm glad to hear that IDG will be considering it.)
We held a protest march from the Moscone Center to the Burton Federal Building, with a pretty sizable police escort (I'd guess about 15 or 20 officers involved at some point). I think we peaked at 100 people, which was fewer than I'd hoped for, but we were certainly still an impressive sight.
We marched from Moscone along Howard, up 4th, along Market, up Golden Gate, and stoppied and rallied and chanted at the Federal Building. The folks from Berkeley showed up with the signs midway through, so we had a nice collection, and I held a "Svobodu Dime" for a while, and later held my big "Free Dmitry" sign.
We did give out over 1,000 flyers at the conference and then another 1,000 or more along the parade route. It was fun. Richard Stallman was a special guest at the rally, and he urged people to boycott movies that they didn't think were good, as opposed to all movies. (But, he added, it was probably almost the same thing.)
Thanks to Don, Tabinda, and Duncan, as well as everyone else who marched.
On return to the conference, I attended Bill Schoolcraft's talk on the Unix filesystem. He spoke a bit about differences between various flavors of Unix (wow, the device names for disks on some Unixes are really scary!), and he told his personal story of how he came to Linux, starting as a steelworker and finding himself impressed with computers. Bill is a friend of mine from the old CABAL days, and I remember when he first came as a novice to user group meetings. He and I were hired at Linuxcare on the same day, and he's still working there (so he's been there well over two years).
I think the crowd was very appreciative of his story and his sense of humor; he was an inspiration for some of the novice users in the crowd, and he gave some advice on how to do tech support without alienating or frightening people (which is actually quite difficult sometimes!).
Coming back to the EFF booth, I talked to a number of EFF supporters, collected some more donations, and poked my head around the corner to talk at the FSF booth for a while with the new FSF VP, Bradley Kuhn. I see that the FSF is still pushing pretty hard on the ideological front! I'm afraid that they're always looking to see what's wrong with things: for example, at a previous show, Duncan gave Richard a BBC, and Richard immediately said "This doesn't say GNU/Linux!" -- so we went back and made our LNX-BBC say "GNU/Linux", and when Duncan gave Richard the new version at the party (and Dmitry Sklyarov was also a recipient), Richard said "This doesn't say GNU/Linux!".
"Yes, it does, Richard." said Duncan.
"Oh. Thanks!" said Richard.
At the booth, I gave some to Bradley; he worried about the suitability of the source code availability offer. I pointed out that the FSF's own stickers, which were supposed to be "free as in speech" (and under a license which allowed duplication), did not have bear any copyright notice at all!
But anyway, the good folks from the FSF are extremely skeptical and extremely critical. And I think we need that, and it's a benefit -- but as many people have noted, it can't be helping their public outreach.
I bought a nice shirt from Bradley ("FSF: Welcome to the GNU age!"), and then a programmer from Microsoft came by, and Bradley immediately started talking about how bad Microsoft was. Well, yes, we don't expect the FSF to be fond of Microsoft; are they bad enough that this is all we have to talk about with Microsoft staff?
I asked the Microsoft guy whether he'd like a BBC, and he said yes, so I got him to come around the corner to the EFF booth, where I gave him three, and he said he'd heard about the BBC and that his boss was actually hoping to get one. We talked about how to use the BBC to rescue Windows machines (like Gwen's laptop!), and about why there was no good current NTFS support in the Linux kernel.
Then the Microsoft guy told me that lots of engineers at Microsoft supported the EFF. That was really nice to hear. I'd just heard that lots of technical people in the military support the EFF. So there was a strong suggestion that technical people all over the place care about what we're doing; the question is, how about the general public? People who buy consumer electronics, people who have a small personal web site or zine, people who go to school or use a public library?
Given that the EFF does not have a position like the FSF's that software inherently ought to be free (although we share many positions and concerns with FSF), our reaction to Microsoft is naturally a bit different. But Microsoft is doing things that concern us, like the Secure Audio Path, Microsoft's eBook software, and other DRM work. (I have had a bit of a DRM focus so far. This is not supposed to be an exhaustive list of Microsoft initatives that can attract EFF attention.) So I'm hopeful that the people at Microsoft who like what EFF does can have a positive influence, and that we can talk to them about things like DRM and the DMCA. Microsoft -- like the armed forces, as I once said to a friend who was about to enter USNA -- clearly has a lot of power which it could use for good or ill.
In other situations, having employees with a concern for civil liberties is one of many checks on an organization's behavior. For example, Adobe employees' support for Dmitry Sklyarov was one of several incentives for Adobe not to continue to press for his prosecution.
Technical talks were strong, and community spirit was strong. Perhaps the view was different in the .Org Pavilion; it was the first time I spent almost an entire LinuxWorld show in the section reserved for non-profit organizations, and didn't represent any company.
Most large vendors told me that turnout was pretty good; a few complained that they hadn't been getting enough foot traffic or enough sales leads.
I saw a lot of people I knew!
The BBC had a strong reputation and all sorts of people were interested in it. It was really nice to see how many people actually sought us out to receive copies.
EFF is immensely popular among engineers, even at companies which the Linux community may not be very fond of.
The Free Dmitry movement has talented and influential people behind it.
So I was optimistic about this show, and I had a great time.
At the beginning of the month, Don Marti wrote an extremely worthwhile explanation of the difference between the use of cryptography for privacy (confidentiality) and the use of cryptography for copy protection. It's worth taking a look.
Contact: Seth David Schoen