Vitanuova for 2002 July 11

Time passes

I feel old because people the age of my little sister are now facing criminal charges for writing computer viruses. (Fortunately, my little sister herself isn't facing any such charges.)

It occurs to me to appreciate the kindness of one of my co-workers at TD Bank when I was an intern there in 1997 for taking me out on his lunch break around Manhattan to try to find non-leather dress shoes. I wish I could remember which co-worker that was.

Palladium

We're still studying Palladium and TCPA and trying to get to the bottom of it all.

I've definitely talked to some pretty interesting people about this, and they have pretty diverse views.

General

Here is a cool story about Prof. Felten. I suggested to him that he should register a certain domain name. If he doesn't, I'll suggest it here, and other people can register it instead.

Code is speech

Finally, somebody has found an example of code which can kill someone: genetic code for viruses, which can now be transmitted effectively (one can imagine lethally) across a digital medium. (On the other end, though, you do need a virus-assembling mechanism.)

DVD litigation fans will recall that Judge Kaplan compared DeCSS to a pathogen, where other people have compared it to poetry. (And then, of course, there's Daniel Alter. But mostly in the United States it's legal to teach people how to kill people. In fact, the government does that today. I wonder if the work of Wimmer et al. will give new meaning to "publishing a virus" and whether courts will be prepared to protect that as speech.)

Concert

I went to the Dar Williams concert at Bimbo's on Columbus, and it was very beautiful. She sang many of my favorite songs, and I discovered that the EFF office is full of Dar Williams fans, including some fairly devoted fans. (I think I've been to every Dar Williams concert here in the City since 2000, but perhaps there are some I don't know about.)

Dar sang two new songs -- one about fishing, another about being a parent ("The One Who Knows"). I think the refrain was something like

So when they ask how far love goes
When my job's done, you'll be the one who knows.

I'm enough of a fan that I noticed things like changes of "the" to "a" ("'cause when you live in a world") and a voiced "z" which appears as unvoiced "s" in the recorded version. ("Hey Dar! You're singing your song wrong! It's supposed to be /s/!")

Eszet

Speaking of "s" and "z", I was talking to a new EFF volunteer about the German character eszet (which is also spelled other ways) -- if your browser can render it, it's ß. We were wondering where this character comes from and what it might have in common with the Greek beta. Often a glyph for beta is used as a glyph for eszet.

A little bit of research reveals that it's purely a coincidence that eszet looks so much like Greek beta. As the name suggests, eszet means "sz", and the HTML character entity name for the character is "ß", because, historically, it's a ligature of the long s (the form which produces things like "Congrefs" in English, and from which we also get the integral sign in calculus) with z. The z is a curly z and the s is a long s, and they are joined together in a ligature, and that's probably also why eszet is usually open on the bottom where the classical beta is closed. Also, in a beta, the bar on the left descends slightly below the curve, where an eszet will have the bar approximately level with the curve if it's printed with a separate glyph.

(The above is partly cribbed from my note to Riana.)