What I looked like at CPTWG
![[Picture of Seth in CPTWG outfit]](/images/suit.jpeg)
Here's Eric Blossom's GNU Radio presentation from CPTWG. I'm hoping to have a link to Fred's presentation soon.
Here's what I wrote on linux-elitists about whether or not Intel's testimony at the SSSCA hearing was a good thing:
[...] On the one hand, the Intel testimony is _far and away_ the most radical position yet taken by a major technology company. It also expresses skepticism that existing DRM goes too far.On the other hand, Intel also continues to take the line that co-operation with the copyright industries on DRM is important; Intel's testimony seems to vacillate between "Hollywood has no right to tell us what to do" and "like any responsible company, we are already doing what Hollywood wants".
[...]
There is a clearly articulated contrast between the CE/IT industries' position and the copyright industries' position. The CE/IT industries are holding fast (except when they don't) to a "no mandate" position, consistent with Universal v. Sony, 464 U.S. 417 (1984), and the DMCA's "no mandate" clause, 17 USC 1201(c)(3):
Nothing in this section shall require that the design of, or design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as such part or component, or the product in which such part or component is integrated, does not otherwise fall within the prohibitions of subsection (a)(2) or (b)(1).The CE/IT view is that this means that, for example, nobody could be required to detect watermarks in unencrypted content, or to implement any particular DRM scheme, or any DRM scheme at all. To put it another way, the DMCA provides for the possibility that someone can "own" a media format, and control interoperability with it. But it doesn't mandate that products support any particular media format.
This means that you can still produce completely DRM-free devices, but they are prohibited from interoperating with "owned" formats like DVD Video with CSS, or RealAudio. There is no limitation on your ability to make a hard drive or an iPod or a ReplayTV when they don't use those formats. To many people in the CE and IT worlds, this seems vaguely reasonable: "If you don't like the conditions placed on Windows Media Audio, don't use it!" (This kind of view goes hand in hand with the suggestion that "If you don't like the conditions placed on your use of that copyrighted work, don't use it!".)
The SSSCA, by contrast, is explicitly "mandate" legislation, which says that everybody has to implement particular DRM schemes, and you can't make (certain) products without them, period. In this sense, there is to be no market competition among DRM schemes or possibility of a consumer boycott (which is definitely a possibility under the DMCA, although it would be more realistic if there were more competition today, and perhaps less vertical integration of industries).
CE/IT people have been fairly adamant about the "no mandate" concept, while copyright people have been saying that the CE/IT industry should simply not expect to be free from government technology regulation, considering that other technologies have been extensively regulated.
EFF is on the "radical fringe" because we think that the DMCA's approach is _already_ a "mandate" because we think that reverse engineering, free software, and open standards are normal, legitimate human activities which are being hindered by that law. To put this another way, we are skeptical of the idea of owning a media format.
I need to hurry up and write my own "constitutionalization of technology law" paper. One studio lawyer at CPTWG on Wednesday had _no idea at all_ why an EFF lawyer would believe that there were free speech problems with technology regulation itself (as opposed to, perhaps, certain effects of technology regulation). Tragically, the studios are steeped in the attitude that, in effect, the first amendment protects _their_ industry's right to exist and to produce its products without government content mandates -- but that this protection doesn't extend to technologists, and that technical freedom isn't even contemplated by that amendment. I am serious. The question, the problem, is not even entering their minds; it is not even on the radar.
If you push hard with some of the world's finest and most expert engineers and lawyers -- which we did on Wednesday -- then you can, after an hour or so, get some other smart engineers and lawyers to start thinking about the free speech problems with the DMCA and SSSCA. What will it take to make the public or legislators think about them?
On the cryptography list:
I've been watching the entertainment industry's approach to computers with what I can only think of as Kafkaesque horror.It's simply unthinkable that preserving the business models of entertainers trumps the utterly central role of computers and the Internet in improviing our existance.
Apparently the politicians are actually *receptive* to this. I guess this just shows how money corrupts - the heavy donor's interests outweigh those of the nation.
I've been trying to think of an analogy to show just how awful the idea of the SSSCA is. I've had to go back a way. A long way.
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(start satire)The Original SSSCA.
Statement of Yakval Enti, spokesman of the MPAA (Mnemonists, Praise-singers, and Anthemists Association) to His Highness Hammurabi, King of Sumeria:
Your Majesty: I wish to call you attention to a severe threat to the security of your kingdom, and the livelihoods of thousands of your subjects.
After Shamash sets and the people kick back after a long day of growing millet, they desire entertainment. Their favorite forms are stories, tales, and sagas, told by the members of the MPAA. Talented boys spend up to 12 years learning the tales by heart at the feet of the masters. Any evening MPAA members can be found in the taverns singing the old tales, praising the praiseworthy, and creating new tales from the old.
This system has worked well since the beginning of time - there were storytellers at your coronation, there were storytellers at your father's coronation, and there were storytellers in the caves of our ancestors.
This natural arrangement is now threatened from an unexpected direction - the scribes and accountants. The geeks' system of recording numbers and quantities has been perverted to freeze speech onto clay.
Understand the threat to our business model. At the moment, if someone wants to hear 'The Tale of the Ox, the Ass and the Sumerian', they find an MPAA member, pay him, and sit back to listen to the whole four hour saga. While anyone could recall and tell others the general outline, only MPAA members know every detail and can give the listener the whole story. If you want to hear it again, you pay again. Thousands of MPAA members rely on this fact for their livelihoods.
With the recent invention of "writing" the system is in danger of collapse. We've found that some scribes are actually "recording" entire sagas onto clay. Any scribe can "read" these out to people for free or for money, complete and word-for-word, without being a member of or paying the MPAA! A scribe who has obtained a set of tablets of an story can even read it an unlimited number of times, or (worst of all) make copies. This is starting to have an economic impact on our membership. Consider Rimat-Ninsun, whose masterwork "The Epic of Gilgamesh" took him three years to create, and who looked to it to put bread on his table into his old age, as he told it for money, or let others tell it under paid license after learning it from him. 'Gilgamesh' is now circulating on 12 clay tablets, and Rimat is starving. Who will bother to create new tales if they are just going to be written down?
"Writing" presents insidious dangers to your kingdom as well. It can be anonymous. Before writing, any message arrived with a person to speak it, who could be held accountable for their speech. With writing, it is impossible to tell what scribe "wrote" a message. Anonymous threats, kidnap notes, and untraceable sedition are now possible. Clearly "writing" carries with it far greater problems for our civilization than it does advantages.
However, scribes, accountants, and their skills are essential to business, contracts, laws, and the collection of taxes. We just need to make sure that they are controlled properly.
I therefore propose the Scribal Stylus Safety Control Act. (SSSCA). This requires every scribe to have an MPAA approved, "literate" slave with him at all times, peering over his shoulder. If a scribe is seen to be "writing' something other then accounting information, for example a story (stories are the province of MPAA storytellers), or a message (which should have been given to a paid mnenomist for delivery), or anything seditious, then the slave will take away the scribe's stylus and call the authorities. I ask you to have this Act "written" into your Code of Law.
Is this difficult? Yes. Is it expensive? Yes. However, it is clear that without strict controls, widespread "writing" will not only destroy the entertainment industry, it will threaten civilisation itself!
(end satire)
----------------The SSSCA threatens to return us to a Stone Age model of information use.
Disclaimer:
The above are strictly the personal opinions of myself, and I'd be astonished if my employer had any official position on the matter (so don't pretend otherwise).
Feel free to copy this document in its entirety, with proper attribution.
Peter Trei
I met Nick and Stephane for lunch at Cancun, and we went to the bookstores at 2141 Mission and looked around. I should go back, especially since those bookstores are so close to where I work. You'd never know they were there from the outside, unless, of course, you saw the "Bookstores of 2141 Mission" sign.
Zack and I got a fancy eight-foot ladder -- used! -- at the cool hardware store around the corner from us on Mission. It was immediately useful for a variety of things, like changing a light bulb and eradicating mildew from the ceiling of our bathroom.
I'd invited some people by for a bootable business card meeting, and they all came, and stayed nearly twelve hours, during which time we ordered both lunch and dinner from Indian restaurants (not the same restaurant, though). We all practiced using GAR to build packages for the BBC, and got quite a few packages done; it would be great if we could get some momentum going and get a new BBC out soon.
The crowd -- Duncan, Andrew, Jon Webb, and Nick -- dispersed at about two in the morning, with Duncan heading out on his motorcycle with a wild assortment of computer hardware crammed into a shoulder bag.
Zack got a bench for bench pressing, and some weights. I've tried it twice and got the sense that my arms could be reconfigured if I used it enough.
I got up late and ended up deciding to go to Ocean Beach instead of doing some errands. It was a beautiful day, much as it's been recently, with clear and deep blue skies, though I didn't manage to get out of the house until late afternoon.
I caught the BART to Civic Center and transferred to the N Judah, which I rode west, and promptly fell asleep and didn't wake up until the end of the line. Conveniently enough, the end of the line is at the ocean.
I climbed up a sand dune and watched the sun set and watched some of the couples there, watching it, kissing each other, talking. I realized that "walks on the beach" -- a stereotypical thing people would like, as though a symbol of being romantic -- is actually something which people literally do in practice with their romantic partners, at least here in the Bay Area where there is such a thing as a beach. I've been to Ocean Beach three times before, but I never noticed the couples, only the sea shells (the first time), the ULTRIX licenses (the second time), and the ocean (the third time).
Every time you go to Ocean Beach, you notice something new, like reading Gödel, Escher, Bach or "Civil Disobedience". "Suddenly, you notice a couple."
So I saw the sun set over the ocean, and I put on my sweatshirt, obscuring my tie-dye shirt and "Free Mickey" button, and instantly changing others' likely perceptions of me. I looked back and forth and thought about how big the ocean looked, and how little of it I could see, and I thought of one of Newton's famous self-deprecating comments:
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
I've thought about that quotation many times, but always, always when coming across it in a book -- never while looking at an ocean. There is something powerful and unique about thinking "the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me" at the moment that an actual ocean lies before you. But don't take my word for it; go to an ocean and try it.
Photography is very good at capturing objects which could naturally lie within our field of vision, and producing representations of them which can also lie within our field of vision, so that seeing the representation mimics the sensation of seeing the original. That doesn't work for objects which we could never see all at once, like an ocean; part of the sensation of seeing an ocean is the realization that you have to look back and forth to see even the part of the ocean which is exposed to you. It's tough for a picture to capture that, unless it took up an entire tabletop, or an entire room.
As soon as the sun had set, I started to walk toward the Cliff House, having a sense that the Cliff House wasn't particularly far away from the end of Judah. Although I didn't know it at the time, the Cliff House is fully the width of Golden Gate Park, plus five blocks -- according to my map, about a mile in all. I had never thought about Golden Gate Park extended all the way to the ocean (I haven't seen much of Golden Gate Park yet), and I didn't even realize it as I walked across the park's western border.
When I reached the end of Ocean Beach, I decided to try climbing the cliff to reach the Cliff House (rather than talking the road). This turned out to be a serious challenge. The rocks at the base of the cliff were all covered in soaking wet seaweed (since they were regularly lapped by the ocean), and extremely slippery. I tried to move in toward the cliff, away from the ocean, but the cliff was much too steep at its south end (where it met ocean beach) and I had to walk north along the seaweed-covered rocks until I found an incline which could take me up and to the north, out of reach of the waves.
Now the rocks were dry, and not at all slippery, but there wasn't a path (actually, I saw two paths on my way up, but no path ran from the base of the cliff to its top), and the cliff was not necessarily meant for climbing. (I did see a few people climbing it just ahead of me, so I knew it was possible.) Not being a skilled rock climber, but always having loved to climb, I thought "I need to climb up this without assuming that I have any more or better climbing skills than I did when I was six" or "I need to climb this as though it were the glacial potholes in Shelburne Falls".
So I gradually made my way up the side of the cliff, but always took care to stand on horizontal ledges and outcroppings in such a way that I didn't need my arms to keep my balance and so that I could rest at any time. I didn't want to end up hanging on the side of a vertical face (as some skilled rock climbers will) so that I'd fall off if I let go.
I decided to explore a little further north along the cliff on my way up, rather than taking the most direct possible route, but pretty soon I started to get intimidated at what I'd gotten myself into. I looked down (oops) and realized that I was thirty or forty feet up on the side of a cliff above the Pacific Ocean; if I fell, then if I were lucky, I'd land in deep, cold, salt water more than a hundred feet from the beach. That would be no good at all.
So, rather than take risks on the steep face (which looked to involve ledges and outcroppings almost a hundred feet in the air), I decided to backtrack a bit and take a much more gradually sloping route I'd noticed earlier. With some relief, I crossed back over a narrow gap in midair (the same gap which had first provoked some thoughts about the undesirability of falling off) and fairly quickly got myself onto a gently sloping face, which, annoyingly, was covered with plants. (I can see why the plants like to grow there, rather than elsewhere.)
I cut my finger on a stone as I was pulling myself up there, but, having reached the plants, it took me only a minute or two of easy climbing to reach a man-made wall at the top of the cliff. I was relieved to find that the wall (made to protect people on the inside from falling out) wasn't too high to climb over from the outside. With a final effort, I swung my leg over the top of the wall and then pulled the rest of my body up. I was on top of the cliff, by the Cliff House, with dirty pants, a cut finger, and lots of exciting memories.
I wandered around the outside of the Cliff House, hoping to find somewhere to rinse off my finger, or something with which to wrap it. Instead, I stumbled across the Musée Mécanique. I had only recently read an article about it, thanks to Biella and Nick. So I'd heard that the museum was supposed to be closing in September, and that people were supposed to flock there to see it while it was still open. This sounded like a reasonable idea to me, but I hadn't expected to run into the Musée on my trip to Ocean Beach. "It can't be open", I thought. "It's a Sunday and it's already after 6:00p."
It was open. So I spent about three dollars in quarters, fed into various contraptions, contrivances, devices, and artifacts. I got my fortune told twice. I watched two player pianos give rousing performances (and noticed that the music industry failed to go out of business). With a single quarter, I brough a whole carnival to life; I watched a mock execution and a 3-d peep show (in black and white, of course). I saw a man arm-wrestling against a machine. (I think that machine, unlike any human I know, could beat Mr. Demaine.)
I put another quarter into a machine and made a derrick pump crude oil out of the floor (er, ground) into a cup (er, tank).
Here, again, were a large number of couples, out on dates. (There must be some time pressure on account of the museum's plans to close in September; if ever people want to go there on a date, they've really got to hurry.) The designers of the carnival attractions from years gone by had accounted for this; so many of the machines had an intangible "watch this, or do this, with your beloved" aesthetic. Sure, some of them were aimed at people who wanted to show off (like the arm-wrestling machine, and other tests of skill and strength), but others, which gave exhibitions in which spectators were totally passive, still somehow said romance.
Incongruously, the Musée Mécanique has a large collection of fairly contemporary coin-operated video games. Maybe the idea is to show the progress of coin-operated entertainment over the last hundred years and more. There were definitely some video game classics (arcade games from the early 1980s, Pac-Man, Pole Position), but there wasn't real continuity. There was no Pong or Space War; there's a gap and all the entertainment machine history of the 1960s and 1970s (and a fair amount on either side) is omitted entirely. Maybe the arcade games are there to "give kids something to do" as their parents play with the mechanical stuff. I think that would be a silly idea, though.
By the time I left the Musée Mécanique, it was dark out, and there's very little artificial lighting up by the Cliff House, so it was dark out. I certainly wasn't about to climb down any cliffs in complete darkness, so I took the road, and walked along the beach a while, and thought about things like what my heart's desire was, and whether my arms would ever get better, and what I was going to do in life. On the beach, in the darkness, nobody could see me, not even the few people still left on the beach, and I felt a kind of solitude I hadn't experienced in a while, where nobody knew where I was, nobody could find me, nobody could see me...
I thought of Iliad I, 34 ("poluphloisboio thalasses"). Fitzgerald takes an interesting approach to translating that line: he has "by the shore of the tumbling clamorous whispering sea". So Fitzgerald decided to render "polu-" by using several different adjectives in a list. Alexander Pope was more conventional, or at least his style has become conventional for us:
The trembling Priest along the Shore return'd,
And in the Anguish of a Father mourn'd.
Disconsolate, nor daring to complain,
Silent he wander'd by the sounding Main:
I think it's important to contrast the priest's silence with the sea's roar; it makes us imagine what Chryses was thinking in that silence as he retreated, just before he began to pray.
After almost a mile's walk along that much-resounding sea, and some contemplation, I ended up among the small groups who'd come at sundown and started fires. You could see their fires from around the Cliff House, but that at that distance they were just tiny dots of light. Up close, each group had its own substantial bonfire raging, but between the groups there was no commerce.
I caught the N Judah back to the Inner Sunset, and read on the way, and got off at 9th Avenue (where it looks like 9th Avenue Books is going out of business! or did I confuse it with another business?) in the hope of eating at Einstein's Cafe. As I was about to enter the cafe, Philippe Tapon jumped up from inside and called "Seth!" and then said "I'm Philippe Tapon".
Philippe is a journalist who interviewed me (and Zack and Nick and other people) about free software last year. He was eating at Einstein's with a friend of his, and, since I'd been planning to eat there myself, I ended up joining them and staying until the place closed.
Considering how many varieties of divination have been catalogued, I'm surprised that we don't have a simple name for "divination by machine". My machine-delivered fortune this evening tells me that I "have a keen mind try to improve it" and "to cultivate a red haired person".
I never knew that there was such a title as Chief Nuclear Officer, but apparently it's pretty routine. Did anyone notice that every single one of those Chief Nuclear Officers was male? I thought there were fairly few female programmers -- and I've been teaching Python to lots of women and so, I think, doing my part to change that -- but there seem to be no female Chief Nuclear Officers. Go figure.
It's confusing to know someone named Sumana and someone named Simona. They both match S[ui]m[ao]na, and the "mana/mona" part is pronounced approximately the same (kind of like the Muppets' "manahmanah"), so you basically have to notice immediately whether someone said "su" or "si" in order to tell their names apart.
I wrote a "DRM Dark Age" proposal for a conference.
I visited Biella, saw her new place (the downstairs half of her old place), and worked on Python with her for a bit.
We're a free trading nation and in order to remain a free trading nation we must enforce law. That's exactly what I did.(G. W. Bush, imposing unilateral import tariffs on steel)
Also: French censorship laws can't be enforced against American companies, because of American free speech protections, but American censorship laws can be enforced against Russian companies, despite Russian free speech protections? (I suppose there are several consistent positions people could take -- first, that each country can apply its own laws only to companies located within that country; second, that each country can apply its own laws to everyone in the world who might speak to that country's residents; third, that jurisdiction is acquired through internationally-agreed standards on contacts (perhaps fixed by treaties like the new Hague Convention); fourth, that free speech should always be protected, regardless of whether or not any country's law protects it fully; fifth, that U.S. law should apply to everyone in the whole world and no other country's law should apply to people in the U.S.)
I got very little sleep, since I talked to Michelle on the phone for six or eight hours. Duncan picked me up in the morning and took me to the LBNL LUG meeting at Berkeley Lab, where we gave a talk on the BBC, and left some EFF materials for interested people. We were invited by Greg Kurtzer, formerly of Linuxcare, who's doing some interesting work with clusters for the Earth Sciences Division there.
We also visited Larry Doolittle, an engineer who works on Linux-based instruments and control systems, and is doing neat things with free software on tiny chips.
Finally, we got a tour of the Advanced Light Source, a truly remarkable instrument which is being used for some very impressive science.
After leaving the Lab, I visited Michelle.
Congratulations to PROSA on their re-opening. I didn't notice when they re-opened on my birthday last year, but I just saw a diary entry which made me take a look.
Various things are always being said around copyrights:
"I'm not saying the public domain is bad," Mr. Valenti said. "But how does it benefit the consumer? If a film is in the public domain, who takes care of it? Who refurbishes it if the print goes bad? What incentive does anyone have to keep the movie alive and vibrant?"(The New York Times, February 25, 2002)
Then again:
I could well go on, but you don't want to hear this story from me. You want to hear this from Lawrence Lessig [...] Lawrence Lessig is a Stanford law professor and Lessig is one heavy cyber-dude, he is heavier than depleted uranium. He despises copyright abuse, and he also knows who, how, and why they stole our broadband. I love that Lessig guy. Just knowing the truth is out there, it cheers me all up.
On Tuesday, I learned how an Okito box works, and how to use one. I'm tempted to put that into my Forward and Back (a weekly update on what I've been doing at work): "~ researching Okito box technology" but, although the Okito box is the second-cleverest piece of technology I've seen so far this week, it's somewhere around 80 years old and has no obvious civil liberties implications. ("The Okito Box: A Civil Liberties Perspective"?)
Amazon settled its lawsuit against Barnes and Noble over the one-click patent. There's no word on the terms of the settlement, or whether Amazon might sue someone else in the future. The FSF Amazon boycott page doesn't have any advice for all of us who've been boycotting them since the lawsuit was filed. Amazon itself has taken down the page about patent issues formerly posted on its site.
How to Explain Zero-Knowledge Protocols to Your Children.
Ali Baba searched all the way from the fork to the dead end, but he did not find the thief. Ali Baba said to himself that the thief was perhaps in the other passage. So he searched the right-hand passage, which also came to a dead end. But again he did not find the thief. ``This cave is pretty strange,'' said Ali Baba to himself, ``Where has my thief gone?''
(This story is also alluded to in an Ivars Peterson math journalism book somewhere.)
The cryptography list and subsequently Cryptome are reporting on a remarkable new pair of papers about recent work on compromising optical emanations. The idea here is that you can watch (with a very high-speed detector) the slight fluctuations in intensity of a modem LED, and find out what data is going through the modem (it's a power analysis thing -- the LED power available is correlated with the value of the bit which is being transmitted). So just by watching a device's status indicator lights, you might be able to find out its internal state, along the lines of some of the power analysis attacks on smartcards I saw at the RSA conference. But not only do you not have to touch the device, the device doesn't even have to be meant to communicate at all, and you might be able to observe it from some difference.
The other paper applies the same sort of idea to the light emitted by a computer monitor, assuming that you can't see the monitor itself, but can just see the total amount of light it's emitting. For example, you might be behind the monitor, facing toward a wall, and the light coming out of the monitor could be illuminating the wall. By watching the fluctuations in intensity of the light reaching the wall, you can potentially reconstruct exactly what is displayed on the monitor! (Again, you don't have to be able to see any kind of image on the wall; you're just watching the pattern of brightness and darkness over time.)
The papers are Information Leakage from Optical Emanations and Optical Time-Domain Eavesdropping Risks of CRT Displays.
I met Tim Pozar and Larry Reid, two people who know more about radio than I could imagine hoping to.
I taught a Python class. I'm having my students practice loops by working on a number of geometric figures problems (given a number n, print out a figure of the following type...).
I went to Rachel's house and did some out-of-character things and had a very nice time in the philosophy discussion there.
Soon I hope to be able to ask my Python students to write a program equivalent to mine, which generates Sierpinski gaskets:
o
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That beautiful fractal is generated from about 15 lines of Python. I should really ask my class to play around with cellular automata, too!
Sputnik: it's not just a Soviet spacecraft any more! I wonder whether their 50 MB ISO image is a based on the Linuxcare BBC or not.
I went to a bar with some people from EFF. The graffiti in the bathroom said "Anarchy is true virtue". Beneath it, someone had written a rejoinder: "Anarchy requires true virtue". What a wonderful contrast these two sentiments were!
On the SVLUG list:
Crawford Rainwater writes: > In case some folks have not heard, the hearings for > the SSSCA are back in motion again in DC. One potential > and very possibly interpretation of this bill would > mean that Linux would need to be copyrighted and have a > "source key" (like those wonderful MS OEM license keys > we all love) to some extent, if not completely. As > a result, and in my opinion, this could harm the creative > development of open source software which I believe to > be one of the foundations of the Linux community. Hi, Linux is already copyrighted. So is this message, unfortunately. There's no way for me to get rid of this copyright unless I assign it to someone else. The specific way that technology mandate legislation like the SSSCA threatens free software is by limiting the right to provide technology with "user-serviceable parts", including software. They threaten to require particular aspects of technology to be devised with an aim of preventing end-users from modifying them. A narrower proposed mandate which demonstrates this is the proposed rules from the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group. http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/20020215_bpdg_compliance_rules.html Here the idea is that certain technologies (in this case, demodulation and decoding of an over-the-air digital television broadcast) may only be done in a tamper-resistant way. It seems pretty clear to us that this is incompatible with a free software implementation. (There are two ways we could use "incompatible" here: first, the implementation could be done in hardware and it could just be impossible to make free software interoperate with it; second, the implementation could be done in software, and it could be made illegal to publish the software. In the first case, free software drivers are prevented from taking advantage of particular features of a device, or perhaps from communicating usefully with a device at all. In the second case, _some_ specific pieces of free software are banned outright.) None of these proposals seems to be a general attempt to outlaw free software. But to the extent that there are technologies which have to be done in a modification-resistant way and to the extent that those technologies are mandated by law, the scope in which free software and free hardware are useful will shrink. One example of the kind of thing some copyright holders have in mind: you could imagine a sound card which had a watermark detector built in. Whenever the sound card detected a particular watermark in any of its input, it would enter a "protected" mode, and cause its output on the PCI bus to become encrypted. For unwatermarked audio input, the output on the PCI bus would be cleartext, as normal. In this case, in order to get the keys to decrypt the "protected" audio data, you would have to sign an NDA and pay a license fee to a licensing agency. In addition, you'd have to agree that any software you wrote using those keys would be "tamper-resistant" and would also faithfully respect the policies set by each copyright holder (which might be recorded in another watermark). Certainly DRM vendors have already designed technologies like this. An SSSCA-like law could provide that nobody was allowed to manufacture a sound card unless the sound card responded to these watermarks in this way. Then Linux systems wouldn't be able to make use of the watermarked sound at all, unless you obtained an add-on piece of proprietary software which could decrypt the "protected" stream but also faithfully abided by all of the wishes of each copyright holder, and prevented you from getting a decrypted version inside of a free software application, or even within the kernel. All other audio applications would be totally unaffected; you could write an OSS or ALSA driver for the new sound card, and it would work as normal, until you tried to record some sound from a source containing a watermark. At that point, the recording would simply fail, or what you recorded would sound like static. The exact amount of functionality that you wouldn't be able to access from free software depends on how broad the mandates ended up. Computer companies, to the extent that they accept that there will be some affirmative SSSCA-like mandates, are trying to keep them as narrow as possible. But that doesn't mean that they're looking out for free software. Proprietary software can meet "compliance and robustness rules" like BPDG's like using obfuscation, even though computer scientists would argue that obfuscation isn't providing real security. Free software can't use obfuscation; it's against _our_ rules.
I had lunch with Katy, who came by with a friendly dog.
I heard the consummately wonderful Mass in B minor at the St. Ignatius Church at USF with Leonard and Sumana. Sumana gave me a letter she'd written me.
I noticed several effects where Bach dramatized a particular passage by making the music fit or symbolize the text. Kerman calls this "word painting":
Second, composers attempted to match their music to the meaning of the words that were being set. The term word painting is used for this musical illustration of the text. Words such as "fly" and "glitter" were set to rapid notes, "up" and "heaven" to high ones, and so on [...].Sigh was typically set by a motive including a rest, as though the singers have been interrupted by sighing. Grief, cruel, torment, harsh, and exclamations such as alas -- words found all the time in the language of Renaissance love poetry -- prompted composers to write dissonant harmony.
[...] First developed in the sixteenth century, word painting has remained an important expressive resource of all later music. [... In] the Baroque period [...] it was especially important [...].
Gloria: loud and with trumpets (like angels announcing God's glory). Then much quieter on "et in terra pax".
"Tu solus altissimus" goes particularly high. It would be great if that passage contained the highest note in the entire Mass, but I doubt it.
"Et incarnatus" is very quiet (maybe to keep the associated mysteries secret?) and then "crucifixus etiam pro nobis" is very somber (as is common). The chorus actually looked sad as they were singing this.
"Et resurrexit" is loud and jubilant and surprising, unexpected. The musicians crept up and quietly lifted their instruments and then gave forth a great "Et resurrexit!" blast with trumpets and the whole chorus. I think someone who didn't know that the "resurrexit" came after the "crucifixus" would have felt quite a jolt of surprise; I did, even though I knew it was coming.
"Et expecto, expecto": the first "expecto" is long and drawn out, to show waiting, and then the word is repeated to show how insistent the waiting can get. There are many different kinds of waiting. You can wait skeptically or faithfully or anxiously or eagerly or "in the background", as we say in computing.
When I heard the phrase expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi, I was very deeply moved, and I started to think about what the vita venturi saeculi might be. Faithful readers of this diary will remember that I discussed that phrase in my very first vitanuova diary entry. Hearing the "expecto" this evening brought to mind every single utopian and salvationist aspiration I have ever had in my life.
In one sense, the vita venturi saeculi for me used to be having a girlfriend. That girlfriend knows that now, and if for someone reason she's thinking about it today, she's not happy about it. She wasn't prepared to be my vita nuova or my menousa polis. Sometimes I have said that maybe she was a humanist and didn't even believe in all of these wild ideas in foreign dead languages, hadn't heard about those gospels or having heard them, didn't believe in them (see "Agreeing with Paul"). (That diary entry talks about the Nicene Creed too! Go figure!)
See also: April 12, 2001 (see "Free software"). "Yes I said Yes I will Yes" and also
But it's tragic, because there was a big miscommunication about Linux, where Linux geeks said that Linux was the be-all and end-all of the operating system world at the moment (I recognize that Linux can benefit from new technology, but we could say, as they say in Hemingway, that it was "less bad"; remember what Michael Elkins says about mutt). And we said this because that was actually our experience.But if people have totally different ideas about what they're up to or about what's virtuous and vicious, it's not completely shocking that they would not see why we said that Linux was so great; certainly Linux is very different, which wasn't emphasized enough in its full generality.
And if it's tragic when this happens with an operating system, how much more so with a whole world view or a whole account of the New Life!
Aren't all of these problems the same problem, in some sense? It's about our capacity to believe in gospels and to believe that our experience is universalizable and to wait passionately and actively, expectare vitam venturi saeculi.
I waited so well, waited long and hard, and you know "expectare" or "exspectare" and "expect" literally means "to look out for", and so to refine or focus one's perceptions, to watch, not just to pass time but to turn your perception and tune your perception and get up in the morning and look out your window and actively try to see what you are looking for.
Nowadays, the vita venturi saeculi hardly seems to involve a girlfriend, but it seems to involve arms without an injury, arms that work well and are free from pain. I would like that; that would be a new age and a new life now. That seems to be what I'm waiting for and what I'm looking out for today.
I have another diary entry which mentions the "hearing a gospel and not believing it" phenomenon -- one of my best-ever vitanuova entries, June 8, 2001 (see "Telluris theoria sacra"). This entry also mentions the Nicene Creed. Some days it just seems like all of my diary entries mention the Nicene Creed somewhere.
I suppose they all do, in a sense: as I mentioned above, and in my first entry here, I named this diary "vitanuova" in part after that very "vita venturi saeculi" we supposedly all "far within our faith" were waiting for. If I'd never heard the Nicene Creed, I surely would have chosen a very different name for my diary on the web.
Today's big news is that I went swimming in the morning at the Garfield Pool. It was almost my first time swimming since high school. Biella's suggested that I go three times a week and cure my arm injuries that way. I think I've got a chance of doing that, if I go back regularly. Swimming is a lot of fun. I'm in terrible shape.
It's strange to be in a swimming pool. At one point, I did a double-take and said to myself "I'm in a swimming pool", and so I was.
I went with Zack to Phoenix Books and to the Castro, where we had a nice lunch at a place called Zao.
If you were told that you had a fire extinguisher and didn't know what to say, you could tell people that it's important to have a fire extinguisher at home and that you should have a fire extinguisher at home too and even that you can buy a fire extinguisher at Target or at many fine hardware stores near you.
One time Lindsay was in a city and a man walked by carrying a hose. "You are probably wondering why he is carrying a hose", said the man. She was. The man was right.
H. G. Wells remarks that at the time of the Reformation people "objected not to the church's power, but to its weaknesses. . . . Their movements against the church, within it and without, were movements not for release from a religious control, but for a fuller and more abundant religious control."(The True Believer, 35)
Slightly later:
The people of London acted heroically under a hail of bombs because Churchill cast them in the role of heroes. They played their heroic role before a vast audience -- ancestors, contemporaries and posterity -- and on a stage lighted by a burning world city and to the music of barking guns and screaming bombs. It is doubtful whether in our contemporary world, with its widespread individual differentiation, any measure of general self-sacrifice can be realized without theatrical hocus-pocus and fireworks.(ibid., 47)
A fortune-teller in a turban came up to me as I was eating my lunch and started to tell me things about myself, and then he did an uninspired equivoque followed by another uninspired equivoque, and then he asked me for money, and I didn't give him any. Maybe if I hadn't been so wary of the equivoque, I would have.
I thought good to discover it, together with the rest of the other deceiptfull arts; being sorie that it falleth out to my lot, to laie open the secrets of this mysterie, to the hinderance of such poore men as live thereby [...](Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 182 (emphasis added))
I finished Magic & Showmanship by Henning Nelms and Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther, the second and third books on my reading list. (I've extended the reading list a bit past its original eighteen books.)
(at the risk of repeating myself)
Whenever there's a technology, whenever there's a way that disables control, they've used the legal system to quash it. Whenever there's a technology that has a different way of thinking about distribution of content, they've used the legal system to quash it. Their single idea has been to send a message, as Hilary Rosen quite frankly said in describing the purpose of the Napster case, to send a message to venture capitalists in this valley: the message is: unless we approve, your idea will not be permitted. It will not be allowed.(Lessig)
Patrick Ball uses databases to track and document human rights abuses and war crimes. He wrote a book called Making the Case: Investigating Large Scale Human Rights Violations Using Information Systems and Data Analysis. I vaguely remember reading something about another book, like an introductory Oracle book, where all of the examples were not "suppose you are a corporate database administrators and your human resources department needs you to set up a database" but rather things like "suppose you are a field worker investigating crimes against humanity and you need a schema to record data gathered from interviews". I wish I could find the piece about that; the point of the article was that the examples in most application-oriented computer books tend to assume that computers are going to be used for business applications. And it's true that large business enterprises are the biggest users of computers, but I think everyone can benefit from computers, so why shouldn't we see some more diversity in our examples?
I spent two days in a cage in a basement in Los Angeles. In between those days, I stayed in an absolutely lovely hotel in Beverly Hills called Maison 140. Maison 140 was so lovely that it seemed unrealistic. I would look around my room and imagine that I must be on Star Trek and I must have been captured by some alien species and they'd no doubt arranged for me to wake up in what looked like a perfectly ordinary Parisian hotel in Southern California, so that I could walk around and feel at home, until later in the episode I'd discover their nefarious plan.
The testimony of Joe Kraus is a wonderful thing, a breath of fresh air.
Danny O'Brien has re-implemented Don Marti's lost "found haiku"-finding program. A first cut using it on part of my mail spool file:
This is something we
could never achieve working
within the system.I was right in the
middle of the transition
over the weekend.I can call you on
your office line and we can
catch up and talk then.You will receive your
products by the end of next
week if not sooner.Please visit our
website for the bios of
our guest speakers.Not only is smog
ugly, it's got some nasty
side effects as well.If you have any
questions, just email for more
information. Thanks!Please post this message
in any appropriate
Internet forums.As they say, freedom
of the press belongs to those
who own the presses.
At the Exploratorium:
Exploratorium-goer: "Free Mickey"? From what?Seth: From copyright. Mickey's copyright was supposed to expire in--
EG: --oh, don't get me started. I bet you read slashdot, too.
S: I read slashdot...
EG: [walks away]
I bought a binary clock at the Exploratorium. It's pretty nice; it has rows of LEDs which tell the time in binary. What I realized after buying it was that it's actually just a perfectly ordinary digital clock which has been built without any BCD-to-7-segment decoder chips. That is, this clock isn't really any more "binary" than any other digital clock. It just shows you the contents of the clock's registers directly instead of translating them into digits. You could make your digital clock "binary" this way by just clipping LEDs to certain pins inside it, and then throwing away the ordinary display part.
The most interesting new thing at the Exploratorium was probably the demonstration of the thermal grill effect. By using alternating cool and warm bars, they produce a grill which isn't even hot at all. But laying your hand across it fools your brain so that you feel a burning pain, and you're convinced that your hand is being injured. But you can leave your hand there for ten minutes and suffer no ill effects. Your hand isn't even warm when you pull it away. The burning sensation was all in your head.
They also had a wonderful experiment where you watch a video of some kids playing basketball and have to try to count how many times the ball bounces on the ground. The experiment is meant to test how easily your attention can get distracted; sure enough, my answer at the end was dramatically incorrect. ("We're going to fool you; we're fooling you; we fooled you." It's a controlled experiment which served to remind me of something in Magic & Showmanship: "Although the most unlikely moment normally comes before or after the logical moment, some conjurers deliberately choose the logical moment. They feel that boldness is the best disguise and that no spectator will imagine that a performer would take such a risk.")
The Exploratorium is always a good time.
My arms are sore. This week, if all goes according to plan, I might be able to start my "swimming three times a week" program.
One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact mean, when formulated by mathematicians, physicists and chemists. When the first mathematical, logical, and natural uniformities, the first laws, were discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. His mind also thundered and reverberated in syllogisms. He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots and ratios, and geometrized like Euclid. He made Kepler's laws for the planets to follow; he made velocity increase proportionally to the time in falling bodies; he made the law of the sines for light to obey when refracted; he established the classes, orders, families and genera of plants and animals, and fixed the distances between them. He thought the archetypes of all things, and devised their variations; and when we rediscover any one of these his wondrous institutions, we seize his mind in its very literal intention.(William James, "What Pragmatism Means")
Somewhat later:
If I issue sounds or make marks, what matters is that I intend the sounds or marks to be a speech act. But this intention must have a certain structure and content. While anything can be used to communicate, what is distinctive about speech acts is that they are conventional, in the sense that language is a set of social conventions. [...]Language does matter. The relationship of speech acts to language, however, is not that speech acts must be in a language, but rather that language constitutes a system of conventions that permits speakers to perform otherwise purely physical acts like uttering sounds that hearers understand in virtue of their knowing those conventions. [...]
My general claim is that what is important about language is hat it is conventional, and as such language is only one of many systems of conventions that can supply the needed conventionality.
(Lee Tien, "Publishing Software as a Speech Act")
Why did this shock me so much? Maybe it was the great plausibility of the claim that "in principio erat verbum" and all of the religious metaphysics around the primacy of language, that makes this claim plausible, so that we can say "baruch she-amar ve-haya ha-olam" -- praised be he who spoke and the world was made.
By contrast, Tien says that speech is a physical act and writing is a physical act, and they are distinguished from other physical acts only in that conventions exist which have assigned them meaning, and only so far as people participate in those conventions.
The U.K. still has blasphemy laws:
It is unthinkable that the BBC should have repeated part of a poem already found by a jury to be a blasphemous libel.
Remember "blasphemous libels" and "seditious libels"? Not against persons, but against churches and states.
I got another Godspeed You Black Emperor! CD. It's hard for me to say what the name of that CD is.
Yesterday, in a discussion of Patrick Ball's work, I said that I'd seen an essay by an author of technical books who used unusual example. Andrew Kuchling pointed out that the essay I was thinking about was "I Don't Like Your Examples!" by Steven Feuerstein.
I've been writing intensively about PL/SQL since 1994, and I have a great time doing it. At the same time, I must admit that I have simultaneously grown a little bit bored with using the same set of examples again and again (yes, those infamous emp/employee and dept/department tables), and I'm also very concerned about the state of the world as we approach the end of the twentieth century. Sure, things could be worse, but things could be a whole lot better (with my examples and the world).Given these twin preoccupations, I have decided to offer examples that are decidedly different from the usual. I'll be talking about topics ranging from the state of health care in the United States to the strength of the gun lobby, from wage structures to environmental issues. I believe that even if you don't agree with the positions I have on a particular issue, you will find that this "breath of fresh air" approach will help you engage with the technical material.
Traditional technology books, according to Feuerstein, take a limited and stereotyped view:
Most examples used in technology books focus on how to make business work more efficiently, regardless of its impact on human society and the world as a whole. As a result, we constantly read about human-resource or personnel systems. And while examples frequently touch on education, these applications have more to do with managing students (the business side of education) than with improving the quality of education those students receive. All of this seems perfectly "natural" since the vast majority of technology is used by businesses to make profits. But does it have to be that way?
If we really thought of programming as like writing and like mathematics, we wouldn't also have the habit of thinking of business applications as the natural purpose of computing. (The original purpose of computing was war -- military cryptanalysis, ballistics, weapons simulation -- and even today the world's fastest computers are used for weapons research, unless perhaps they are in Fort Meade and we don't know anything about them.)
I went to Berkeley and saw a lecture by Noam Chomsky with Sumana. Chomsky was particularly confident that famous philosophical and philosophy of science problems were solved, or, more likely, meaningless.
Sumana and I both fell asleep during the lecture; neither of us had had much sleep at all the night before. I thought Chomsky talked "like a book", and had a brief conversation about whether that was a good thing or not. I remembered Postman's discussion of the time before television, when people had long attention spans and the art of public speaking (and of listening) were more highly developed.
Then, after some ice cream, I went and listened surreptitiously to Sumana, with her permission.
I stayed with Michelle and made an arrangement with her to do some more arm exercises.
I read some flames by some people flaming us pretty hard.
I had an interesting conversation with Lee about the meaning of the first amendment, rights, property, legislation, and so on. If people are political animals, legal philosophy is something we need to worry about in order to make sense out of our lives.
This Sokoban implementation in sed is a wonderful thing.
"Mr. Schoen is incorrect on a number of points. When consumers buy a product, they are bound by the usage guidelines of the licensing agreement of that product. In practicality, this means if I buy Windows XP, I do not have rights to duplicate it, run it on multiple machines or sell it; when I buy an embedded application, this usually means that I can't rip apart the box, hack the OS, add additional features, etc., unless the manufacturer has given me explicit or implicit permission to do so (such is the case with TiVo, who seems to have green-lighted such modification). Most hardware manufacturers explicitly prohibit reverse engineering."(Sean T. Lamont, Linux Journal)
I'm probably going to reply at some point.
There was some controversy this week as a result of a letter sent by the Church of Scientology's lawyers to Google -- a 512 takedown notice telling them to remove links to certain parts of a site critical of Scientology, called Xenu.net. This prompted Google to comply, people to criticize Google, Xenu.net to get a lot of publicity, and Don Marti to have a fruitful meeting with Google staff.
The Scientology copyright disputes (part of some much larger struggles) are an example of copyright law being used deliberately to prevent publication of a copyrighted work. Of course, they're not the only such example, nor even the best-known example. Salinger v. Random House is probably the best-known example. (A biographer got ahold of some original J. D. Salinger letters and planned to use them in a biography. Salinger sued, claiming copyright infringement. He won and got to keep his letters out of the biography.)
A concrete harm appears in the form of the difficulty encountered y Scientology critics who say "look, Scientology teaches the following absurd or pernicious thing" and then want to show people scriptures or church documents to substantiate a claim. But those documents aren't published by the church, and they aren't available in libraries. One possible alternative is to paraphrase the documents, but that raises some credibility problems. (In the Salinger v. Random House case, extended "close paraphrase" also got the biographer author in trouble.)
Copyright creates challenges for people who want to criticize certain other religions, like Christian Science. The Christian Science church, based in Boston, won't allow people to use the copyrighted text of Science and Health in critical annotated editions claiming that Mary Baker Eddy was wrong. But Science and Health is published, and it's exceptionally easy to buy a copy, or read it in a library. Christian Science critics, like Martin Gardner, can write a critical book which you can read while referring to a separate copy of Science and Health. Scientology critics -- if they avoid republishing Scientology documents without permission from the Religious Technology Center, which holds Scientology's copyrights -- are in a much more difficult position. The average reader has no way to judge the accuracy of their claims!
Of course, that situation occurs whenever some important document is unpublished. Until the Pentagon Papers were published, the debate about U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam was impoverished in a particular way. Secrecy, whatever particular legal regime or factual situation it derives from, invests in a secret-holder a tremendous power to be seen as authoritative on a particular secret, and to interpret that secret to the rest of the world. We on the outside are left to hope that the secret-holders will deign to explain to us all we need to know, all we are permitted to know.
On Thursday, I went down to Santa Clara University for a meeting of BAWUG.
I heard a really interesting presentation by IKEDA Nobuo on "The Spectrum As Commons". Ikeda suggested that, with current technology, it's become both technically and economically inefficient to treat spectrum allocations as property. He asked rhetorically whether we would want to sell individual lanes of a highway to the highest bidder and allow that bidder to prevent anyone else from using a particular lane. (Maybe I'll write more about this issue soon; it's very interesting. The FCC has been headed squarely in the "propertization" direction for quite some time, and the U.S. government has certainly appreciated the money a spectrum auction can provide. But Ikeda says that spectrum-as-property advocates are forgetting that results like Coase's Theorem apply only in specific situations and that efficiency claims for property regimes often assume things like zero transaction costs.) The audience at BAWUG was very knowledgeable; I got a nice feeling about the group and look forward to attending in the future.
Cristina's in law school at SCU, and I had the opportunity to visit her, and ended up staying over. I hadn't seen Cristina for several months, at least. She seems to be doing well and to be a smash hit with the student body. The life of a law student seems every bit as stressful as the life of a practicing lawyer!
There's a new NetHack 3.4.0 out. 3.1.2 was new around when I started playing (back in 1993, almost ten years ago!).
I've scarcely tried out 3.4.0, but the Dev Team has been doing a great job, so I'm sure it's excellent. Maybe it will be on a future Bootable Business Card.
"We all live in a yellow soup tureen" (yellow soup tureen, yellow soup tureen).
> http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/03/22/fish.food/index.html > > The technique could lead to the production of copious amounts of > > protein for consumption without the messy and involved business of > > killing fish or livestock. Wow. If I may get on my vegetarian soapbox for a moment here, we already figured out how to do this sort of thing a long long time ago with soybeans, which have a hell of a lot more protein than fish. Not to mention that they're likely much more efficient at converting nutrients into protein.
Patrick Ball gave a speech about human rights at DEF CON last summer (I didn't attend in person), prompting Slobodan Milosevic to ask him about the Cult of the Dead Cow.
Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.It is not only more sensible but more humane to base social practice on the assumption that all motives are questionable and that in the long run social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives. The establishment of a desirable pattern of habits is more vital than the implanting of right beliefs and motives. A concern with right and wrong thinking is the manifestation of a primitive, superstitious mentality.
(Reflections on Human Nature, 26 and 25 (emphasis added))
I went swimming at the Garfield Pool again, and I went on a long walk with Zack, from our place in the Mission over to Potrero Hill and eventually to Bed, Bath, and Beyond in the South of Market. Then we walked up to Powell and ended up taking BART to 16th Street, eating at Ti Couz, and walking back home from there. Plotting our walk on a map, I make it 43 blocks (some full-sized, some tiny).
I got a beard and moustache trimmer, in keeping with the principle of keeping my beard and moustache short.
Swimming is exhausting to me right now; it's been so long since I had any kind of regular exercise. It feels great to be in the water, but I don't last long.
My arm pain continued, intermittently but fairly intensely. Maybe this is the season for it. I was thinking about the various holy days this week and then these four days in Existence and Uniqueness and in real life. If I make it into April with my arm pain subsiding, the theory will be confirmed.
Swimming on Sunday really exhausted me, so that I still felt worn out through most of Monday. Exercise is such a long-term proposition, so unlike programming, or elsewhere when a theme is completed once stated.
Via free-sklyarov:
Intellectual property is freedom! Copyright infringement is slavery!
By contrast, Professor Vaidhyanathan thought Thomas Jefferson would love Napster.
Via Cryptome (on Cartome): a discussion of the origins of nationalism and the question of why people kill each other over ethnic differences so often. Whole books have been written about this, and this is actually a review of one of them, together with a book about being Irish.
I've seen a huge number of Jehovah's Witnesses regularly around the Mission District for the past couple of weeks, and distributing copies of the Watchtower publications in Spanish and English. Two women tend to stand in the BART station and hold up magazines. I also saw a bunch of Mormon missionaries here last week -- some of them also speaking Spanish, and some English -- and heard Protestant evangelists preaching by BART and was given a tract by one of them on what happens after death.
Downtown, by Powell, I saw a young woman passing out Scientology recruiting literature, and she and I made one another very nervous, or so I fancied, because I imagined that my facial expression somehow said I have read your Dianetics personality questionnaire before and I know what's in it and what it will ask me to do and I know the name of the leader of your church and of its lawyers and I've read org charts indicating the relationships of the entities that make up your church and I've spent hours reading what people represented as your secret documents and my employer has provided legal counsel to people your religion sued for allegedly publishing some of that material and I know where your offices are and I know the name of the woman who was discussed in the flyer that the woman who was picketing outside was distributing when I walked by one day on my way to UC Hastings and even if I've been totally misled and deceived by extraordinarily wicked and bigoted people I still know things about your religion which you don't. But I have no idea how my face would have said those things or whether it really did say them.
I wonder what it is that's led all these missionaries to turn out -- maybe the Easter season, maybe an Easter revival, the way there was last year. In New York City, I constantly saw Jews for Jesus missionaries, and sometimes talked to them, and I know they're out here too, somewhere (in the Haight-Ashbury, if I remember correctly).
Last year, I told Biella about the missionaries who were out and about, proselytizing for all sorts of things, and she said, well, there's a reason they call it the Mission District, you know...
And since "Mission" and "Dolores" and "Church" are all streets around here, it's somehow even possible to forget that they refer to something, and aren't just invented proper nouns.
Cory told me about a remarkable piece of software called Movable Type, a CGI package to facilitate web logging. (Unfortunately, Movable Type isn't free software; the authors publish source code and say that it's free for non-commercial uses.)
So I got the new Movable Type 2.0 set up at EFF, and it's really extremely well-written software which makes blogging amazingly easy. I'm afraid that it's put my little Python script to shame. It's just well-thought out and easy to use and powerful.
So we've used Movable Type to create a blog about the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group! It's a first for EFF, as far as I can tell, and we're going to be publishing news about what they're up to, and trying to make it accessible for people who haven't