Vitanuova for 2003
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I've been finding a lot of popular press coverage distressing. Maybe I should keep some sort of journal of my specific objections.

Here are a couple of bad habits which come to mind:

I got to celebrate the new year in Massachusetts with Eric and Kate, for what I think was my eighth straight year celebrating with Eric. I also saw a bunch of cool people whom I rarely see except at Eric's new year's party, and got a visit from Rachel and Vasilios, who graciously drove for hours and hours.

I did a countdown program in Python, using Tkinter. It's normally done with HyperCard, but Eric couldn't get HyperCard running right away, so I tried out Tkinter. I have to admit that I don't know an enormous amount of Tkinter, but it's pretty straightforward to get started with it. The most difficult part is probably the geometry management and packing stuff.

We thought we might be able to get the countdown to start a fire (as we'd hoped in previous years) -- lighting a candle, for example. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my solid-state relay to trigger from my laptop's parallel port, and I didn't have a voltmeter or LEDs or anything else to use for debugging purposes. So the computer control was out this year. We did try an experiment later on to see about the possibility of igniting something with electricity. Our experimental result is this: if you connect eight 9-volt batteries in series (which is very easy to do because of how the connectors are designed), a fairly large spark is produced by the 72-volt potential across the resulting gap when battery leads are brought close together. This spark is sufficient to ignite a small piece of cardboard wetted with 91% isopropyl alcohol.

A much simpler technique would be to get a thin wire like those used in cigarette lighters in cars, and connect this to a relatively small DC voltage. The wire should become hot enough to ignite things (like cigarettes). There is some detail about matching the internal resistance of the power source in order to maximize the power dissipated through the wire.

The theory here is pretty simple. Suppose that we want to cause heat by connecting a wire in series with a battery. Assume that the battery's total voltage is V, and the internal resistance of this source is Rs, the resistance of the wire is Rw. Then the total series resistance is Rs+Rw, current I=V/(Rs+Rw), power in the wire Pw=I*Vw=V^2*Rw/(Rs+Rw)^2. I did take dPw/dRw by hand (I'm ashamed to say it's the first derivative I've taken in a year or two), and found it to be V^2[(Rs+Rw)^2-2Rw(Rs+Rw)]/(Rs+Rw)^2, which has a zero when Rs=Rw. This implies that the wire will become hot most quickly when its resistance is exactly equal to the internal resistance of the battery.

(In that case, of course, the battery will also dissipate power at the same rate as the wire, so the battery may become rather hot as well.)

There's a much more general result, or technique, known to electrical engineers, and it's called impedance matching. I never got far into alternating currents in my physics class, so I didn't learn too much detail about impedances.

I'm glad I got to be here for the new year. I'll be back in California soon.

Happy new year!

I'm headed back to San Francisco.

After celebrating the new year in Hopedale, I took the commuter rail back to Boston, accessed a wireless network near MIT, and had more tea at Tealuxe in Harvard Square.

I'm reading The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson, which Riana gave me recently. It's hilarious! There's something incredibly amusing about historical linguistics, especially accounts of changes in usage.

Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice -- as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer's day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (perhaps it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

(pp. 77-8)

There are lots of other funny parts. I liked the description of the Oxford English Dictionary (now discussed at great length in The Professor and the Madman). Bryson says that the famous dictionary insists oddly

that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. After explaining at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it grudgingly acknowledge that the commonest spelling "is perh. Shakespeare." (To which we might add, it cert. is.)

When I read what Lessig wrote this morning about the Supreme Court's decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft today, I thought of what Rabbi Joshua says in Avot D'Rabbi Nathan when he sees the ruins of the Temple:

oi lanu al ze she-hu charev!

(Alas for us that it is ruined!)

Rabbi Nathan goes on to report that Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai (Rabbi Joshua's teacher) answers "b'ni, al yera l'cha" (my son, do not grieve). I hope Professor Lessig's teachers are even now writing to him: b'ni, al yera l'cha.

Yochanan ben Zakkai argues specifically that Rabbi Joshua need not grieve because there are alternatives to the Temple service ("yesh lanu capara acheret", "we have another atonement"). What is Eldred supporters' "capara acheret"?

Surely it starts with cultural struggle to show people that the public domain, and all the public's rights in copyright, are valuable; that, as the Eldred dissents recognized, the copyright law properly aims at a public rather than a private end; that no one is intrinsically entitled to property rights in creative work; that, as Professor Litman argues, legislation by private negotiation is not serving the public; and that copyright significantly burdens expression, and that the fair use doctrine may not always be adequate to remedy the harm.

The capara acheret is also to support all the people who are working on the accessibility of culture, from librarians in libraries through free software programmers through "vernacular archivists" (as Stewart Brand says) and the creators and operators of the "databases" so celebrated by Justice Breyer's dissent. And its includes supporting technologists who make creative work easier and cheaper.

It is odd that so many people should feel so comfortable with a tax -- the retroactive part of the extension -- solely to the benefit of heirs and assignees, where the creators of the famous works at issue are typically dead and buried.

Id cinerem aut manis credis curare sepultos?

(Aeneid IV, 34)

If you're feeling depressed about the Eldred decision, a little proofreading might cheer you up.

Having seen Larry Lessig argue this cause is one of the highlights of my life.

EFF has started publishing Cruelty to Analog, which will cover the activities of the ARDG.

If you use wavemon with an 802.11b wireless network, you'll notice that signal quality is measured on a scale from 0 to 92, and can be affected directly simply by bringing your hand near to your wireless card. The closer your hand gets to the card, the poorer the signal quality will become.

wavemon even has a mode in which a graph of signal quality over time is displayed. While many people use that graph (and similar graphs in similar software) to help find wireless networks, or physically locate base stations, or figure out the best orientation for a laptop using a particular network, you can also just move your hand up and down and watch the graph line go up and down as your hand moves.

This means that the 802.11 card can function as a rough proximity sensor for your hand. This evening I realized that that means you can make a wireless card into a sort of poor man's theremin -- you just need to map the signal strength to a tone, play the tone, and move your hand. You'll be able to play several discrete pitches or scales, although with much less precision than a real theremin.

I wrote a three-line shell script which implements this idea (using Linux setterm, all on a beta test version of the LNX-BBC, it so happens), and later improved it a little bit with a small C program which wraps the Linux KIOCSOUND ioctl. It works just fine -- you can easily bring the tone up and down by moving your hand back and forth. That's a lot of fun. The most obvious problem is the discreteness of the whole thing. A real theremin is plainly an analog device. (The analogy is between the pitch level and the position of your hand.) This system is very obviously quantized, at best like someone playing a poor piano scale (and it's distorted sine waves rather than piano strings with their nice harmonics).

We can't really do better with the standard 802.11 drivers, because they definitely won't give anything more precise than the 92 discerete levels. You could modify the hardware (and build a real theremin, which is far simpler electrically than an 802.11b card). Another approach is to modify the way the tones are generated. What I'm currently thinking is something like this: we need to define a function i(s) and a function n(g, p), where i(s) is the ideal pitch in Hz corresponding to a signal strength measurement s and where n is the next pitch after some small constant time step if the goal is to reach pitch g and we're currently playing pitch p. So we use the function n to change pitch smoothly and always move gradually from the pitch we're currently playing toward a goal. The goal, at any given moment, will be i(s) -- that is, we do a loop like 

p=i(signal_strength())
while 1:
	play(p)
	p = n(i(signal_strength()), p)
	sleep(time_step)

Now the pitch will always change continuously, and yet the pitch will be directly responsive to the (discrete) signal strength measurement. If the signal strength rises quickly, the pitch will rise quickly. If the signal strength rises slowly, the pitch will rise slowly. If the signal strength stays constant, the pitch will stay constant. If you move the position of your hand to a position x centimeters away from the card at one time, and later move it to the same position, the pitch should in each case approach roughly the same value -- which should be i(s) Hz for whatever value of s happens to correspond to holding your hand x cm away from the card.

(There might not be a unique such value, because it also depends on a lot of other factors like the angle at which you hold your hand. Obviously there is lots and lots of radio hardware which would give you much better results -- maybe even an ordinary AM or FM radio if you tweaked the demodulation circuit and gave it a suitable input signal. But there's not lots of radio hardware you can get so easily if you're not a radio expert and get a single digital value out of so readily and at such a high frequency. We can hope GNU Radio will change this situation quickly!)

My little theremin script is apparently even famous in Italy. It has been published by Linux Journal. Some minor changes are useful, so I'll try to pass them along to Don.

On the ferry on Thursday, I happened across a discarded copy of the New York Times which happened to be open to an article about my colleague Fred von Lohmann. This was totally co-incidental -- I wasn't looking for the article or anything.

On Friday, I had the honor of meeting Whitfield Diffie.

I'm sorry I'm still so far behind in posting news from the past month or so. I think I'll be able to catch up soon. I've read two novels I haven't even mentioned here yet! (Well, one novel and one "romance".)

Hey, did you know that "romance novel" and "Romance language" have the same etymology? (And it originally dates back to the Roman language, which is even more obvious to English speakers in the French word "roman".)

As I was walking to the Ashby BART station this morning, I saw through someone's ground-floor window a wide-screen TV, left on in an empty room and tuned to CNN. The picture was showing the Columbia re-entry over and over again. "Oh, I forgot to watch that," I thought. It was supposed to have been visible from California very early in the morning. But I wondered why CNN would keep showing the same re-entry image. A caption, which was very difficult to read, said that the space shuttle had broken up over Texas on re-entry.

I didn't understand. The loss of a space shuttle was something that happened in the 1980s. It was an iconic event of the 1980s; "the Space Shuttle disaster" happened right before my sister was born, right before the Chernobyl disaster. And then Richard Feynman investigated it.

Now "the Space Shuttle disaster" is something this decade has to share with the 1980s, as when World War II came along and people had to adjust to seeing "the Great War" in a different context. But I don't know how I can think of a Space Shuttle disaster apart from the Challenger.

When I walked on to BART I thought about what John F. Kennedy, one of the most eloquent of all U.S. presidents, famously said a long time before I was born:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It's interesting to have govenment officials whose job includes opposing the government's policies. I guess public defenders are in some sense in the same position. The Canadian Privacy Commissioner's report is rather stirring reading.

I went with several other people to see Sumana's performance in the Apollo Amateur Night. It was horrifying -- not her performance, but the behavior of the audience. They were encouraged to boo, and they took full advantage of their power. Even the Golden Overtones were booed off the stage before they got underway. If you've ever heard the Overtones, you know this is a great absurdity.

There was an incredibly self-confident gospel rapper (Ashlei Williams) who seemed talented but whose lyrics I found impossible to understand. She didn't get booed at all. I know of three theories about this. One is that she was young and people were asked not to boo young performers. Another is that she spoke quickly and left no pauses in which booing could build up. The last -- endorsed by the Amateur Night's host -- was that she was religious, and most of the audience either endorsed her message or felt uncomfortable about booing an expression of somebody's religious beliefs. She was definitely not a "cultural" gospel singer; she was more of a "win souls for the Lord" gospel singer.

The students were discoursing glibly (as my example had instructed them) about some matter or other -- the intricacies of Milton's verse, or the import of his allusions to Virgil -- and I without thinking burst out, "No, no, he doesn't want your admiration; he wants your soul!"

(Stanley Fish; also reprinted in his The Trouble With Principle)

Hearing the gospel rap (and the host's claim that nobody would want to boo God) set my mind wandering back through the question of counterevangelism -- we could ask both why there is an impulse to counterevangelism and why that impulse is considered rude or immature. One of many interpretations of Socrates is that he behaved counterevangelically, insisting that many charismatic founders of schools did not know whereof they spoke and were unworthy of belief. The execution of Socrates would then suggest that counterevangelism was not especially popular.

Remind me to tell the story of the trilemma picket.

Anyway, the behavior of the audience prevented us from hearing Sumana's act. Fortunately, she performed it for us privately a little later on. Unfortunately, The Golden Overtones didn't grant us the same privilege.

I just had an article about the broadcast flag published in print in the March issue of Linux Journal (in a prominent position). Zack has an article in the same issue. Take a look when the issue reaches newsstands. It doesn't seem to be on-line anywhere, though I expect to have a somewhat expanded version of the same article on-line soon. This is probably the first time I've been published in a national magazine. Well, credited, anyway.

Why did NASA appoint a committee on Saturday to investigate the Columbia disaster? To prevent the president from appointing one, I imagined. It looks like it worked:

The White House said Bush was not pushing for a presidential commission to study the tragedy because he is satisfied with the makeup of a panel appointed by O'Keefe, which largely consists of military officers, Fleischer said.

No Feynman. Very possibly no Appendix F.

I'm snowed in! I'm in Washington, D.C., and I can't get home because of this amazing snowstorm.

The Washington area's Baltimore-Washington International and Reagan National airports both closed until further notice; BWI had a record 13 inches of snow by evening with more to come, National Weather Service Meteorologist Steve Zubrick said.

"If these accumulations actually occur, this storm would rank in the top five of all storms in snowfall recorded in the last century," Zubrick said.

Dulles International Airport had just one runway open during the afternoon.

(Associated Press)

It's been coming down really hard for about 24 hours, and the road conditions are just terrible.

I got home safely. I was supposed to come home Sunday, but I came home Tuesday because of the storm. The Metro was running very infrequently on Tuesday. But on Monday, it wasn't running above ground at all. When I called up ground transportation providers on Monday to ask about the prospect of getting to the airport, they started to laugh at me. So I came back Tuesday instead.

It was quite a storm.

Nobody should think that free software DTV demodulation is not real, because it's very real.

It changed the world, it
changed our consciousness and lives
to have such fast math

available to
us and anyone who cared
to learn programming.

EFF filed reply comments, and so did many other organizations. I'll try to get a good list up at Consensus at Lawyerpoint soon.

I was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article on Microsoft Palladium (now called Microsoft NGSCB).

On Wednesday, we had a conference call with Microsoft and had a briefing about a new technology Microsoft plans to announce next week. I hope to write something about it as soon as possible.

More sentences I'd never uttered before: "So, how does this relate to section III.J of your consent decree with the Department of Justice?"

Ed Felten pointed to a fascinating LawMeme article on the subject of the privacy interests of e-mail users -- not against search and seizure, but against ordinary Internet users who forward things indiscriminately. It's a good read and thought-provoking.

There seems to be a whole genre of thought-provoking articles of the form "our experience of the Internet contains a vacuum with regard to legal and social norms around ________, as was dramatically revealed by this singular event". (Variants include "how should our everyday off-line intuition and institutions map to the Internet world? -- a question highlighted by this singular event" or "the Internet is really maturing and becoming an important and complicated part of everyday life, because now Internet users even have to deal with problems such as _______, as was dramatically demonstrated by this singular event".) Maybe the most influential piece in this genre is "A Rape in Cyberspace". These essays used to be more common than they are today. They rarely propose any kind of conceptual solution to the problem or conundrum they explore. They are not useless. Even long-time, sophisticated Internet users haven't thought about all the gaps between kinds of experience.

The good thing is that the "et in Arcadia" ("et in Cyberia"?) pieces have gotten a bit less breathless and gee-whiz. They take for granted that there is this network, and it's useful, and people actually use it and rely on it. Maybe that evolution is helpful. There are conflicting influences about this. Remind me to write about the old days of Wired.

(That's the Douay-Rheims version of a passage from the Catholic apocrypha, which is inscribed on a Catholic church in San Francisco's Chinatown.)

Last week I bought a watch, and I became a member of the ACLU and the FSF.

I hadn't had a wristwatch for about three years, since my watchstrap broke. It's a great feeling to have one again; I'm trying to get used to actually knowing what time it is.

I'd delayed joining ACLU for many years because I disagreed with them about affirmative action (though I agreed with them about almost every other issue they work on). But when I read about some recent events (I have an unfinished diary entry about this), I thought that I really needed to join the ACLU. So I did.

It's pretty well known that ACLU membership is booming. Troubling times and events tend to increase their membership numbers -- a phenomenon we're familiar with at EFF. (If I remember correctly, more people joined EFF the week Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested than any other week that year.)

Suppose you are a station attached to an unswitched Ethernet segment through which traffic is passing. You don't have an IP address.

You can't get one through DHCP, because either there is no DHCP server or there is one, but it isn't configured to give your station an IP address.

The network has no access control (which is pretty obvious when we say "attached to an unswitched Ethernet segment") and it has a default gateway which is willing to route IP traffic to and from the Internet for all local machines with IP addresses appropriate for the local segment.

By observing local traffic on the segment (and perhaps by making non-destructive active probes), how can you identify the gateway's IP address and a valid but unused IP address for yourself (and, preferably, the IP address of a name server which will perform recursive queries on your behalf), and so autoconfigure yourself as an IP node on the network without the benefit of DHCP service?

I think I know a solution to this problem, which I call the "Ethernet mimicry" problem. The short way of phrasing the problem is "how can you autoconfigure yourself on a network which won't give you an address with DHCP"? I talked to Anirvan about this a couple of weeks ago and worked out an approach I think would work.

I talked about this with Dan Kaminsky at CodeCon. He seems more likely than I to be able to implement it. The basic parts of the solution include an ability to recognize gateways (they receive traffic not addressed to them and send traffic not originated by them, whereas ordinary machines receive traffic not originated by them and send traffic not addressed to them) and an ability to tell whether a particular IP address is in use on a local segment (by sending ARP queries for it -- a capability apparently already included in the current MacOS and used when you try to set an IP address manually).

When we told Kragen about this, he revealed that he'd already invented it. Oops!

I had a great time at CodeCon over the weekend. I saw an exciting GNU Radio demo, heard about a lot of other interesting work (Dan Kaminsky's Paketto Keiretsu, for example), and had some neat conversations with people. I got to hang out with Robyn Wagner (now "Esq."!) and Lucky Green, and play a bit of Scrabble with the former. I also saw Ben Laurie, visiting from far away, and talked with him and Raph Levien about a lot of interesting issues.

I went to dinner with an extremely geeky group on the first evening of the conference, and got to ask them a question about attacks on watermark detectors. The group came up with a great solution, which I might write up as a Cruelty to Analog post or try to publish as a paper. I also heard a lot about capability systems and (as on other days of the conference) found myself repeatedly impressed by how eclectic the interests of many programmers turn out to be.

The best part of CodeCon might well have been the opportunities for conversation with such a fascinating group of people. It was a really good conference.

I passed up an opportunity to go snowshoeing in the mountains in order to attend CodeCon, but I still ended up completely exhausted at the end of it.

Microsoft announced its Rights Management Server (or Rights Management Services, which is the platform the Rights Management Server is part of) last week, two days after telling us about it in a conference call. I'm writing something up about this, which I'll publish at my EFF site shortly (and link to from here).

Everyone is finding it amusing, or peculiar, that Microsoft now has a DRM product called RMS. While the capabilities and architecture of Microsoft RMS aren't precisely the same as Richard's depiction, there is some overlap with the functionality of the system described in Richard's 1997 science fiction story about digital rights management, published before the concept was widely known or widely implemented. (I think the story is better without the "Author's Note", but maybe that's just because I'm following DRM pretty closely. That story might be part of the inspiration for Kathryn Myronuk's clever slogan "Reading is a right, not a feature", which I've been quoting in e-mail since a little after Dmitry was arrested.)

What English word has six consonants in a row?

I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal about Microsoft Rights Management Services (subscription required, but the text is available in the Cryptography mailing list archive)

An employee, for example, might be ordered to do something illegal in an e-mail that effectively self-destructs. "If the person doesn't do the thing, he can be fired," Mr. Schoen said. "If he wants to prove the boss had asked him to do something illegal, there is no record of it."

and in the L.A. Times I was quoted about the ARDG

Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Federation, a group that advocates civil liberties online, said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act puts the burden on Hollywood to protect its programs. But the studios' anti-piracy initiatives would shift the burden onto manufacturers so that "whenever you make anything technical, you have to go and ask them, 'How do I design this so that it protects your interests?'"

I saw Brian LaMacchia at the Berkeley DRM conference today and got to talk to him a little more about Microsoft RMS. I commended him on admitting the existence of attacks against Microsoft's DRM, something many other DRM vendors refuse to do. (Whenever I talk to a Microsoft technologist about a Microsoft DRM technology and propose an attack, the technologist always replies "Yup, that attack would work!"; do you know any other DRM vendor who'll react that way?)

Mr. Rogers died today; he was 74.

Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.

(Fred Rogers, March 20, 1928-February 27, 2003, quoted in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417, 445 (1984), n. 27 (citations omitted))

I've long wondered what he meant by his proviso "in a healthy way"; I ought to have written to ask him. It reminds me of Locke's proviso:

Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this "labour" being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.

(John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, para. 26)

What they have in common is that it's very easy to remember the general statement and to forget about the proviso or qualification. For Mr. Rogers, it was "in a healthy way"; for Locke, it was "where there is enough, and as good left in common for others". It's hard to imagine that either man would have wanted us to pass idly by his qualification. To Mr. Rogers, "in a healthy way" would surely have been a central part of his message.

I remember when Mr. Rogers ate some tapioca pudding on his show, because one of his neighbors had shared it with him. I was really jealous because Mr. Rogers got to have tapioca pudding, and I (at home) didn't get any. I thought Mr. Rogers was really lucky to have such friendly neighbors who wanted to give him tapioca pudding. But he was lucky in more ways than that; he was lucky to have the opportunity to help interpret the world to generations of young people.

Another time he asked his cameraman to turn the camera around and show us the studio (with its lights, cameras, scaffolding, and staff members). That was a shock; it was fascinating and horrifying; it was generous and courageous; it was a frame-breaking experience which set me up to enjoy Hofstadter and, maybe, in a small way, to weather other disillusionments.

I once wrote a fan letter to Mr. Rogers (long before I'd heard of the Betamax doctrine or knew that I had him to thank for it). I drew him a terrible picture of a fish and told him that I loved his show. He wrote back, thanking me effusively, and included a drawing of his own (a caboose, if I remember correctly, drawn with somewhat greater artistic skill).

Now sweatered Rogers, each and every day,
Was kind and gentle -- "in a healthy way".
He'll come no more on the T.V.:
Timor mortis conturbat me.

We'll miss you, Mr. Rogers.

Early this morning, Quinn gave birth to her daughter Ada. Congratulations to Quinn and her family!

As you can see from the link above, Quinn and her family decided to post frequent updates during the experience, and nearly instantaneous baby pictures of Ada.

I'm guessing I'm sick. I've been exhausted and a little dizzy for about a week, and there's a flu going around EFF (but my symptoms seem pretty different from anybody else's).

I got to go to the Berkeley DRM conference and Stanford spectrum conference (thanks to the organizers of each). They were very interesting, and I got my first glimpse of Marybeth Peters.

I also got to see Aaron Swartz and Bob Frankston, the latter preaching his very seductive gospel of connectivity.

Why, Bob asks, are CD sales down?

Because of Internet piracy! answers a hypothetical recording executive.

No, says Bob, because of cell phones. People used to buy CDs for entertainment while they were going somewhere, in a car or while walking around. Now they would rather talk to friends. If they have the ability to talk to friends, they find that more interesting than listening to somebody else.

Everyone nods.

Also at the spectrum conference, Judge Alex Kozinski served on a moot court panel and kept explaining that "property owners are very grabby".

I think I've understood the so-called "spectrum commons" argument (which may be misnamed), and I'm trying to write something up about it.

Even if you have a cell phone, which I don't, it's still worth buying a music CD now and then, at least if the CD is by Dar Williams.

Ben took me out to Borders in Union Square, where Dar Williams was performing and signing copies of her new CD The Beauty of the Rain. We each bought a copy and got it signed (and got to talk to Dar for about a minute).

Far and away the best song is "The One Who Knows", which is just lovely. (I would hold it up with "How Can I Help You To Say Goodbye?" by Patti Loveless, which has a sadder perspective on a related theme.) "The Beauty of the Rain" is pretty good too. In general, I don't think this CD is as consistently good as The Green World, which was a great triumph.

The Free Software Foundation has shipped its LNX-BBC-based membership cards! All of us at the LNX-BBC project are very proud.

If you join the FSF, you can get one. Even Jon Johansen is an LNX-BBC user!

In a profile of Ed Felten, Jack Valenti says:

What does breaking the code have to do with research? Research for what? Are you researching cloning, or the laws of physics? We're not dealing with Boyle's Law here . . . we're dealing with trying to protect a piece of property, a feature film, from being illegally stolen.

I gave the 15th anniversary address at SVLUG, which is odd, because Linux is only 12 years old. My talk was called "The Empire Strikes Back: Constraining Free Software Development" (a title partly due to Eben Moglen), and Biella, Praveen, and Riana came out to hear me along with about a hundred other people.

Several people in the audience were "TV people" and were quite familiar with the issues surrounding ATSC. It was funny afterward to hear one of them complain to the others about what a bad idea it had been to add color to NTSC.

I used MagicPoint for my talk. I was a little annoyed by MagicPoint's handling of line wrapping, but in general it seems like a convenient way to do a presentation with free software. It would probably be difficult for people to tell that it's not PowerPoint.

Who knows a convenient way to convert an ATSC transport stream to something more readily displayed by common PC software? Would you use HDTVtoMPEG2?

I'm still sick.

I got diagnosed with something called viral labyrinthitis, a kind of inner ear infection. Some web sites suggest that it can cause permanent damage, but my symptoms are a lot milder than what those sites describe, and the doctor predicted I'd feel better next week (hopefully in time for the IETF meeting).

Via Electrolite: veterans try to explain what war is like.

When I saw Bowling for Columbine, I felt sick and had to leave. I felt almost the same way reading that article.

I'm still sick with my viral labyrinthitis. I'm tempted to read Borges in honor of it.

I missed a protest march because I'm still sick.

I read three stories by Borges -- "The House of Asterion", "Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth", and "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths" -- on account of my labyrinthitis.

I'm still sick. I've been sick for almost two weeks. I wish I'd get better soon.

Riana came to visit and played Boggle with me, which cheered me up a bit. I spent an hour at the IETF meeting, but found it difficult because I continued to feel dizzy. There's a lot I'd like to hear and see at the IETF this week, so I hope I hold out.

Even when I'm sick, I'm a pretty good Boggle player.

I signed up for EMusic's service. They have the right idea (no DRM, immediate downloads) but unfortunately too few artists and tracks available. Obviously some of the bigger labels, or publishers, or both, said something like "how can you imagine putting tracks up for sale with no DRM?" [even though that's what CDs are] or "how can you pay us such low royalties compared to CD?" or just "why should we bother to sell things on-line?".

But EMusic, if only for respecting our first sale rights, deserves our support. (Beyond that, I'm starting to suspect that they're exactly the way I would like to buy music -- except I'd like it to be available in Ogg Vorbis format too. They could offer MP3 and Ogg downloads side-by-side, and give you a discount on your subscription if you chose Ogg downloads instead of MP3. It's cheaper for them, because they don't have to pay the MP3 royalties.)

I know over a dozen people who've said "I want to pay the artists, but I want an immediate download of an unencrypted track, and only the track I want". Maybe I know atypical people, but I know lots of people who could make good EMusic customers.

Maybe I'll write to artists I like and suggest that they either offer their own MP3 and Ogg sales or sign on with EMusic. (That's assuming they don't have contracts with labels which would forbid that, which is a huge and totally unwarranted assumption.)

I'm feeling a little better -- more tired than dizzy today -- and spent a few hours at the IETF meeting (ipr and sip WGs). But when I told Helen that I was sick, she said "I suggest reading a good fiction book", so I took her advice and bought William Gibson's Pattern Recognition at Borderlands and read it almost straight through.

I found the set-up much more exciting than the conclusion, but Gibson is still an enthralling writer and didn't butcher the technology as badly as he might have. The well-connected NSA agent in the trailer part was a bit much, though.

Pattern Recognition has a properly blood-curdling (or chilling) villain.

Even though my labyrinthitis may be on the way out, my arms have gotten really sore again.

I ate lunch from Tu Lan during the break in the IETF meeting, and it was delicious.

Cory takes me to task for suggesting yesterday that EMusic needs to support Ogg Vorbis. He argues that it would be more expensive for them in various ways (including storage costs) and that they're unlikely themselves to be paying any per-track royalties on MP3 downloads.

But in fact, the MP3 patent licensors are charging a percentage royalty on "related revenue" and EMusic could actually save money by allowing us an Ogg Vorbis download option instead of MP3-only. (That's assuming that the marginal cost of offering this option exceed 2% of their revenues, and that they can find an accounting model which distinguishes "MP3-related" and "non-MP3-related" revenues in their business.)

That 2% of related revenue would probably be defined as "reasonable and non-discriminatory" by most standards bodies. As one person commented in the ipr WG this morning, a little 2% here and 2% there soon adds up to 50% (if you were using 25 technologies with such patent claims against them).

I started to write a rant about patents here, and the collective action problem, but really, in this particular case, none of that is very relevant. Many existing businesses which are paying the 2% MP3 tax can probably realize substantial savings by the incremental step of offering Ogg downloads and streams in parallel to their existing MP3 downloads and streams. They don't have to stop offering MP3s. They can pass some of the savings along to their customers. (E.g., for every Ogg you download, you earn credits which you can redeem for extra bonus tracks.) If this were done, it could provide a specific and totally non-ideological way that Oggs could become appealing to random music fans, which would also facilitate support for the format in players.

Only a few people, like Ed Felten and Larry Lessig, have been able to communicate particularly effectively with "outsiders" about what is at stake in the current copyright wars. And even they, when they give speeches, are mostly addressing people who already have at least a passing interest.

Fritz Attaway testified last week that most people would not even notice if the broadcast flag mandate were adopted. While I question this (I think they would feel the impacts, but not know to attribute them to the mandate, any more than most DMCA opponents know to blame Bruce Lehman for that statte), I do sense a serious division between, say, slashdot readers and the general public, or LawMeme readers and the general public, or Freedom to Tinker readers and the general public, or Crypto-Gram readers and the general public.

This was a gap that Cindy Cohn bridged, and everyone working with her bridged, with great success in the Bernstein litigation: even though the "general public" was not thereby enlightened, some corners of the Federal judiciary were enlightened, with extremely remarkable results.

Do you remember when operating system distributors in the U.S. didn't bundle PGP and SSH? I do -- it was five years ago. Thanks, Cindy!

Meanwhile, and famously, the entertainment industries are seizing a vast control over the kind of technology that's readily available to the general public. (Fritz explained at the Berkeley DRM conference that that was all the control they expected to be able to get.) At the same time, people who oppose this are spending hours and hours talking to each other. I'm doing that right this moment. I'm writing a complaint about what Bruce Lehman did to free expression, what he did to free software, what he did to research, and, as Will Rodger observed, what has happened to "intellectual honesty" about technology.

Not only will Bruce Lehman never read this complaint, but this complaint can never be expected to be interesting to anyone outside a circle of people who are already mad at Bruce Lehman.

I have a skepticism of the approach that grounds outreach in "consumer expectations", partly because, as Fred observed, we can't expect in detail things that haven't been invented yet, else they would have been. What we mean by "innovation" is that something we can't identify and haven't experienced is going to be found and is going to be of interest to us -- a peculiar faith indeed, and more surprising than the monument "to the Unknown God".

There are deeper reasons to be concerned about "consumer expectations", and the deepest of these is that they are so malleable. If CEA were to spend a billion dollars on TV advertising to say that you ought to expect to be able to do something, a lot of people would expect to be able to do it. Conversely, without marketing, or in the presence of a sufficiently clever campaign in the other direction, it would never occur to most people that they could "expect" to be able to do the things that new technologies could in principle enable.

In fact, this situation is constantly present outside of the copyright wars. We can do lots of things that we don't do, and there are constantly enormous struggles to redefine "normal" in people's minds. I'm alternately encouraged and terrified by the power of culture and popular opinion, since the world and human civilizations could logically be so different from what they are today.

As I was recently discussing with Rob Hamadi, and as Whit Diffie pointed out last year, we have expectations based on prior experience, but that doesn't really constitute an independent standard for anything. If we've been exposed to a particular lifestyle or technology, we may consider it normal and appropriate; if we haven't, we may not know what we're missing. If Universal City Studios had prevailed against Sony, the world and culture might have been poorer, but there probably wouldn't have been riots in the streets. (This is one of the frustrations of MPAA's argument that the popularity of DVD proves anything. As a technical matter, we could have had things much, much more capable and flexible; as a legal matter, we may yet someday. Already, implementers like the Videolan team in France are demonstrating some of the innovation which is possible outside the constraints of a DVD CCA license. But there are no riots against DVD CCA -- just a few small pickets -- because most people are usually prepared to choose the path of least resistance in the marketplace.)

And all this gets back to the observation about the gap, the gap which means that only people who already agree with me (or maybe one or two who are paid to disagree) are likely ever to read these paragraphs at all. I'm reminded of something I've quoted a number of times before:

Tum Africanus: "Sentio," inquit, "te sedem etiam nunc hominum ac domum contemplari; quae si tibi parva, ut est, ita videtur, haec caelestia semper spectato, illa humana contemnito! Tu enim quam celebritatem sermonis hominum aut quam expetendam consequi gloriam potes? Vides habitari in terra raris et angustis in locis et in ipsis quasi maculis, ubi habitatur, vastas solitudines interiectas eosque, qui incolunt terram, non modo interruptos ita esse, ut nihil inter ipsos ab aliis ad alios manare possit, sed partim obliquos, partim transversos, partim etiam adversos stare vobis; a quibus expectare gloriam certe nullam potestis."

(Cicero, de Re Publica, VI, 20)

The key part of Cicero's image for me is the "raris et angustis in locis, quasi maculis, vastas solitudines interiectas [esse]", that they live in isolated and narrow places, practically spots on the face of the Earth, and vast deserts stretch between them. So we have human habitation reduced to little dots on a ball. Practically pinpricks on the surface of a ball.

Demographically, that's not quite true, if it ever was, and physically now we have the ability to come across the cosmos in a little under an hour (well, almost!). We can even read the regular commentary of an Iraqi living in Baghdad. But how many people are doing that?

I have this strong sense of a general lack of outreach and a general insularity -- maybe I should say "macularity". We have the technical infrastructure to talk to millions of people, but somehow lack the means of getting their attention.

I went and spent hours two weeks ago giving a detailed presentation about tech mandates at SVLUG, which may have been useful in the sense that many people in the audience may have been able to do something with that information, but I suspect every single one of them already opposed tech mandates and anticircumvention and already knew what both of those things are. If I walked down the street in the Mission, could I find anyone (except that one guy in a Debian t-shirt over there) who knows what anticircumvention is or even what the difference between a copyright, a patent, and a trademark is?

Fritz is right to say that people in that situation won't know the broadcast flag is there, but wrong to suggest that they won't be affected by it.

In the past, I've thought that it's a serious problem simply that technical skills are today such an unusual and specialized thing to possess -- and that the concepts of programming and communications technology are not yet public knowledge. I've been influenced by the "literacy" metaphor to say that today we have a problem in that most Americans know how to read and write English but not yet how to read and write computer software. And there is in principle no reason to believe today that people who can be taught to read English cannot be taught to read Python. There are just enormous practical barriers to actually making this happen.

Most of these barriers are themselves cultural, not physical. In other times and places, people have learned skills which are much more different from what they routinely learn here and now than is computer programming! In Soviet Russia, the level of understanding of mathematics and physics demanded of ordinary students -- and, as far as I can tell at this tremendous remove, actually exhibited by them -- was astonishing.

But of course, it's one thing to insist that 70% of Americans, or Chinese, could be literate enough to write their own computer software (or that 70% of some population could be literate enough to write their own letters) and another thing to try to imagine how that kind of literacy could actually be developed, and exactly what else we would have to give up to make it happen. I could try to start teaching a weekend class, which, absent some kind of incredible marketing genius, would presumably attract exactly those children who already self-identify as technical. Perhaps they would be the proverbial "low-hanging fruit", and perhaps that means that this is exactly the right idea as a first step.

I do have a fear, which I've expressed many times here, that as long as programming is seen as esoteric, difficult, magical, and to be performed only by specialists, there will never develop a relationship to technology which makes it a subject of useful substantive discussion rather than nervous jokes by most people. And as long as software is seen as a commodity, delivered in a box and opaquely, it will never be widely recognized as speech deserving useful first amendment protection even if someone's economic interests are at risk. It seems essential to me that there should be a broad transformation in which harnessing the remarkable power of computing to any individual's purposes be made just as routine, and just as insisted upon, as literacy in natural languages.

Then we could forget, as programmers all seem to have forgotten, that spoken language predated written language, or that written language was a product of someone's conscious effort; we could rediscover these things, and be astonished by them, and speculate on their implications.

I would welcome other people's suggestions on what might be possible either to promote any of these transformations or to try to deal with the macularity problem and stop everyone from preaching to the choir all the time. Wars ought to be a sobering reminder that a failure of effective communication doesn't just mean bad political outcomes at the ordinary scale, with a loss of freedom that you can nonetheless survive -- it means children torn into little pieces in front of their families, prisoners raped and tortured, and everyone nearby breathing poisons even if only conventional weapons are used. It means the original sense of collateral damage: not lawful copying prevented in the pursuit of suppressing unlawful copying, but civilians blown up in the pursuit of destroying military targets. And all that means, as Cindy would be quite literally the first person to remind me, that how many people learn to program is not the most important issue in the world.

After over four weeks of being sick, I'm finally starting to feel better.

I've had a lot of strange dreams while I've been sick. A few days ago, I had a dream which involved attending something at the Ninth Circuit.

I woke up from the middle of that dream, and, half-asleep, wondered if the dream would pick up where it left off if I were to go back to sleep.

The answer came to me: "No, silly! You can't just fall asleep and go directly to the Ninth Circuit! Your dream has to start out in the District Court, and then you have to appeal it."

I saw the Custom Made Theatre Company's production of Animal Farm. In the program appeared this quotation:

You must understand, sir, a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time -- we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God's grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it. I hope you will be one of those.

(Arthur Miller, The Crucible)

Somehow I feel like this is a quotation worthy of being letterpress-printed on fine paper and framed, in a typeface with serifs. If I were in touch with Willow and Willow had access to a press, I might ask her -- she did the beautiful "quæcumque enim scripta sunt ad nostram doctrinam scripta sunt" which hangs on my wall, and even thought to use the ligature "æ" instead of "ae".

Custom Made chose to set Animal Farm in America instead of England, so that the revolutionary song was "Beasts of America" instead of "Beasts of England", and the later anthem "Animal Farm" ("never through me shalt thou come to harm") was sung to the tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner"!

They may have been reminded of the Arthur Miller quotation by a piece Arthur Miller wrote in the New York Times on February 23 in which he quoted his own play.

I saw The Hours in Oakland with Sunah. It was beautiful and very, very sad.

I'm a sucker for parallel-lives and parallel-worlds movies. I wrote about that a while ago (giving examples like Run Lola Run and Sliding Doors). I love that device: you could probably make a really bad movie with a parallel-lives story, and I would probably like it a lot anyway. But The Hours is not that bad movie.

The biggest trouble with it that I know of is the portrayal of Vanessa Bell. The movie seemed to make her out to be very superficial, and I don't know why that should be.

We saw the movie at the Parkway in Oakland. Sunah wrote

What is great about the Parkway?

All of this seemed to be true. The Parkway has a whole little restaurant inside, so you can get dinner and a movie at the same time.

I need to get out and explore more.

How far ahead of the unclassified world is the classified world?

By 1981 or earlier there was a whole classified literature on compromising emanations, yet the unclassified world -- the "open literature" -- is only starting to examine this subject in earnest now. (Wim van Eck's paper on emanations was published in 1985, four years after that, but later FOIA requests suggest van Eck's work only scratched the surface -- the state of the military art was much broader than what van Eck referred to.)

British researchers invented public-key cryptography years before Diffie and Hellman (and also figured out RSA before Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman). But the public only found out about this recently, because the invention was classified.

Civilians are starting to get good satellite photos, but how many years behind military spy satellites are they?

I've been to two incredibly good Japanese restaurants recently. I'd been to each before, but the new visits reminded me of just how good they are.

I went with Praveen to Ryowa Ramen (2068 University Avenue, Berkeley), which has the best ramen I've ever had. (My fellow California loyalty oath opponent Jimmer Endres introduced me to Ryowa.) And then I went with Ren to Minako Organic Sushi (2154 Mission Street, San Francisco), which has the best sushi I've ever had. My opinions on Japanese food may be perceived as eccentric because I don't eat fish, and some people can't imagine how you could have a proper opinion on Japanese food without eating fish.

But actually, I think my first meal at Minako was the best meal I've ever had -- from any cuisine.

Speaking of great restaurants, I also went with Praveen and friends to the Indian Oven, which has been rated as the best Indian restaurant in San Francisco. It was also excellent, and I'm tempted to go there for my birthday.

My ear infection is finally gone. That's a relief; I was feeling sick for over four weeks, which contributed to the lack of diary entries here. I'll try to get back in the habit of writing more regularly.

Unfortunately, I'm having a lot of arm pain again. It's funny how problems can seem to line up in series, so that they're experienced one at a time (seriatim, as the Latin adverb-wielding lawyers put it).

I visited Kragen and Beatrice and tried out wedding cake (remember: choose the strawberry!) and got to meet some of their friends and make pirate jokes.

We had a meeting at the headquarters of AC Transit in Oakland to talk about privacy issues in the new TransLink system. If Lee doesn't mind, I may publish some notes soon. Transit privacy is an interesting issue which is becoming more so as more transit operators accept more payments with stored-value instruments linked to large databases.

I went to the RSA Conference and saw various people I knew, and got to talk DRM with several interested strangers. I also had the latest of my meetings with Microsoft on trusted computing, had an informal meeting with AMD, and resolved to finish a paper on the subject. In other RSA news, I got to ride a Segway scooter for the first time, thanks to a company using it as a booth attraction. It is a wonderful feeling. (I don't see it as a healthy replacement for a bicycle, or a practical replacement for a car, but it's fun!)

Supposedly I'm going to get e-mail with a digital picture of myself riding the Segway.

While I was in the South of Market, I dropped by a convenience store where I used to shop, and bought a few things for old time's sake. I told the owner about moving away from the South of Market area because of the rents. During the boom, I told him, they tried to increase our rent to $3,000 a month, or was it $4,000? The store owner said he thought those rents were back down around $2,000 now.

It's sad to wander around there and see the CoffeeNet closed down (and even painted white instead of purple, the only signs of its former glory being some purple spots on the sidewalk where the paint had dripped) and the Something Wonderful gone, too.

I was astonished the other day by the following experience:

I booted an LNX-BBC test image and started a test download of something using BitTorrent. BitTorrent was downloading into a RAM disk (actually a tmpfs, which is kind of like a dynamically-sized RAM disk) with a maximum size of about 128 MB.

I expected the download to run out of space at some point, since the file I was trying to download was about 1 GB, much larger than the RAM disk. After a little while, I went to check on it by looking at how much disk space had been used.

The system said that only about 50 MB had been downloaded. Then I remembered that BitTorrent preallocates space for the files it downloads. I couldn't understand how the download had even been able to start. The BitTorrent FAQ says that

BitTorrent pre-allocates the entire file when your download begins, then writes in pieces in random order as it gets them. As a result the file jumps to its full size immediately. BitTorrent will tell you when the download is complete.

If this was the case, how could a BitTorrent download of a 1 GB file even start on a 128 MB RAM disk? Furthermore, how could the system claim that only 50 MB had been used?

My confusion was compounded when I went to look at the size of the preallocated file, and ls reported it as occupying 1 GB.

Nick, who was visiting, explained that Unix supports sparse files and a file's size in the filesystem may be substantially larger than the amount of space it's actually taking up. When BitTorrent allocates a complete file's size on a Unix filesystem, it will only use a trivial amount of actual storage, and the amount of storage used will increase as the download progresses.

I found this totally astonishing. I'm familiar with sparse files, but I always thought they were a VMS thing and never realized that they've been a standard part of Unix for a long time. I don't know how I missed that.

The basic consequence of this is that the file size reported by ls -l can be totally different from the file size reported by du. Blocks not yet written will just not be allocated on disk, and reading them will return zeroes.

Here are four problems:

  1. you have a collection of strings G which were generated by some unknown formal grammar; find a formal grammar which generates them
  2. you have a collection of strings G which were generated by some unknown formal grammar and a collection F which could not be generated by that grammar; find a formal grammar which generates them
  3. you have a formal grammar G and a string S; determine whether S could have been generated by G
  4. you have a computer program P and a string S; determine whether, for some input, S could have been generated by P

(Another twist is to replace "grammar" by "Unix regular expression" and "generated by" with "matches".)

I would find these problems more straightforward to talk about if I had taken a compilers course, or an automata course, but I never got that far in CS. I did study formal languages only briefly, and I once read Minsky's Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, which talks about the different classes of automata.

(1) and (2) are easy because you can just say that the grammar is ( string1 | string2 | string3 | string4 | ... ). This is a trivial solution and not very useful -- it has no economy and no predictive power. It's tantamount to saying that the laws of physics are "All observed phenomena occur and all non-observed phenomena are impossible". (What's amusing is that this isn't even true, partly because some observed phenomena do not actually occur.) It would be nice to have a more interesting solution.

(4) is as hard as the Halting Problem, but it is solvable for some programs. You can see quickly that it isn't solvable in general (even if you didn't know that the Halting Problem is unsolvable and if you just had an intuition that there is no magical way of solving all math problems with the same technique). You could just write a program which verifies whether something is an exception to some conjecture. If you can tell whether "yes" is ever an output of that program, you can tell immediately whether the conjecture is true.

(3) is pretty interesting, and it can actually be solved. The regular expression version is a standard part of many programming languages. The efficiency of a solution is also an interesting question.

I regret that I didn't get to go on this hike, because it was beautiful.

The recordings on Out There Live are very good. Some of them are better than the studio recordings on some other Dar Williams CDs. I have to recommend this CD very highly.

I went to Stacey's with Zack, at the end of a fairly unsuccessful series of errands.

I got the 2nd edition of Friedl's regular expression book from O'Reilly, which might shed some light on my problem (3) above, in that it discusses implementation issues related to RE matching. Friedl's book is one of the most useful books ever published by O'Reilly, but it's not particularly well-known. But it is a triumph.

I also got a Chomsky book on the Vietnam War because of the publisher's successful attempt to suggest that it had a new relevance or resonance today.

I also got a copy of Practical Cryptography, the latest in the series of "Schneier books that criticize earlier Schneier books". (So Bruce Schneier is like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cliff Stoll -- interesting company.)

"What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen, sô er an ir ufgestigen . . . . Is that how you say it?"

"That is how it is said in my language. Who told you that?"

"A mystic from your land. He wrote it somewhere, I forget where. And it is not necessary for somebody one day to find that manuscript again. The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away."

(Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose)

(Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)

Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.54)

I repeat: it suffices that a book be possible for it to exist. Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book can be a ladder, although no doubt there are books which discuss and negate and demonstrate this possibility and others whose structure corresponds to that of a ladder.

(Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel")

If, like me, you hadn't noticed sparse files before, and you want to see a large sparse file, do 

#!/usr/bin/env python

foo = open("sparse", "w")
foo.write("sparse")
foo.seek(2 ** 30)
foo.write("file")
foo.close()

Codd's tuple-logic vision brings
"A world made of facts, and not of things";
And now he joins the ranks of history:
Timor mortis conturbat me.

The Emerging Man party in San Jose was among the geekiest events I have ever attended, and naturally great fun.

Hooray for Emerging Man!

In a rare moment of good news on copyright law, MusicCity and Grokster were held not to be subject to secondary liability for copyright infringement based on their publication of file-sharing software; the court reaffirmed the Betamax doctrine and recognized that software publishers are like VCR and photocopier manufacturers.

I worked on that case -- spending a whole day in a cage to protect others' freedom -- but most of the credit on our side goes to our lawyers, especially Fred von Lohmann. Congratulations!

I just met Ada Norton, and she is cute!

I had a great time seeing Alex, with whom I worked on the Morpheus case when he was at Wilson Sonsini and they were co-counsel.

My father and my stepmother each just sent me a wonderful thing. My father sent me my grandmother's copy of a piano score for Mozart's Requiem. ("Klavier-Auszug", or "Piano excerpt".)

The publisher of that score, Edition Peters/C.F. Peters Musikverlag, is still around, and still selling the Requiem.

I have high-resolution scans of a few pages linked above, but here's a lower-resolution version of the title page:

I like Mozart's Requiem a lot; people who know me might recall that I named my computer after it! I never knew that my grandmother liked it too.

I never really got to meet her, since she died when I was an infant. She was a pianist. If she'd lived longer, maybe she would have played music for me, or even taught me to play the piano.

My stepmother sent me a beautifully hand-decorated t-shirt. The t-shirt includes a patch which reproduces a picture of me from when I was eight and dressed up as the Rambam for a pageant. It turns out that that was the first time I was ever photographed with a beard!

(It's easy to find out what the Rambam looked like if you're curious. I didn't look a whole lot like him -- more like an eight-year-old in a costume.)

My mom's putting on a major Virginia Woolf conference at Smith College in June -- it looks like a lot of fun!

If you know any humanities fans or Western Massachusetts fans, let them know.

"Spring Street" might be the best Dar Williams song I originally didn't like.

I'm resolved to being born and so resigned to bravery.

[...]

I don't have to go to Spring Street, 'cause it's spring everywhere.

The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

("The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", 288-91)

Gardner has a long note on "so free" on p. 74 of the Annotated Ancient Mariner.

So free: It is hard to say exactly what Coleridge intended by this phrase. Most commentators have taken it to mean "thus made free." The albatross is freed as a result of the Mariner's ability to pray. The word "so" is sometimes used, however, in the sense of "then" or "thereafter," in which case the phrase may mean nothing more than that the albatross was freed after the Mariner found himself able to pray.

It also is possible that "so" is intended to intensify the word "free," which in turn may modify either "albatross" or "neck." The Mariner may be saying: After I found I could pray, the albatross was so free that it dropped from my neck; or, from my neck, which suddenly felt extremely free, dropped the albatross.

That reminds me:

This was called "writing a commentary" -- that was a common thing to do -- and these commentaries were appreciated.

(Richard M. Stallman, Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks)

We made a release of LNX-BBC 2.1 on Friday, but we're still writing the announcement. I'll write more here once the announcement is finished and posted. (If you're very impatient, just go to the home page and download.)

Dan Bricklin on shoplifting vs. illicit copying.

Bricklin makes a memorable comparison:

Pirating works online is really more like kids watching a baseball game through a hole in the outfield wall, or listening to a concert just outside the gate.

In fact the desire to capture all positive externalities resulting from one's labor or property is so pervasive that the Chicago Cubs sued owners of buildings surrounding Wrigley Field because the building owners made money operating rooftop bars with views into the baseball stadium. (Do a Google search for "Wrigley Field rooftop lawsuit" or similar.) Bricklin assumes that people will feel that it is legitimate to derive enjoyment from being nearby a concert or game without paying -- but not all stadium owners agree!

It seems to be an awfully appealing strategy to make money by taxing other people for the use of positive externalities resulting from your activity, while trying to avoid incurring costs for the negative externalities. (Some people, like entertainers' managers and publishers, may focus on capturing more positive externalities, while others, like polluters, may focus on avoiding paying for the negative externalities.)

If we can find examples of traditional activities which produce benefits for others (sic vos non vobis!) and where there has not yet been a successful lobbying effort to create property rights in those benefits, these might turn out to be interesting sources of metaphors for the copyright debates.

The interesting fact is that there is probably no absolutely consistent single obvious moral principle about externalities -- but lots of people feel as if there is one.

My friend David Alpert visited. I hadn't seen him for about nine years, and he's working for Google now, living in New York, etc. It was a nice visit, and David accidentally did me a huge favor by finding the place in Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5,000 Puzzles, Tricks and Conundrums where Loyd attempts to answer Lewis Carroll's question "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?".

[T]here is no absolute certainty of any answer having been intended, as Lewis Carroll never vouchsafed any replies to the curious problem pertaining to Alice's trip through Wonderland; nevertheless, my acquaintance with Carroll and his peculiar traits, convinced me that it was not altogether a haphazard query. My own guess, following the alliterative style which characterizes the entire work, would be "that the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes"; nevertheless, there is considerable scope for ingenuity and cleverness, as other answers, equally as good or better, might be suggested, like "because Poe wrote on both," "Bills and tales are among their characteristics," "Because they stand on their legs," "Because they conceal their steels" or "Ought to be made to shut up," etc., etc.

We also got to climb up Bernal Hill.

Make BitTorrent accept torrent filenames and URLs on the command-line as the final (or only) argument without --url and --responsefile, so that you can just say "btdownloadcurses foo.torrent" or "btdownloadcurses https://www.example.net/bar.torrent": 

--- BitTorrent-3.2.1b/BitTorrent/download.py.orig	2003-05-03 23:50:30.000000000 -0700
+++ BitTorrent-3.2.1b/BitTorrent/download.py	2003-05-04 13:16:31.000000000 -0700
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 # see LICENSE.txt for license information
 
 from zurllib import urlopen
-from urlparse import urljoin
+from urlparse import urljoin, urlparse
 from btformats import check_message
 from Choker import Choker
 from Storage import Storage
@@ -89,10 +89,13 @@
     if len(params) == 0:
         errorfunc('arguments are -\n' + formatDefinitions(defaults, cols))
         return
-    if len(params) == 1:
-        params = ['--responsefile'] + params
     try:
-        config, garbage = parseargs(params, defaults, 0, 0)
+        config, garbage = parseargs(params, defaults, 0, 1)
+        if garbage:
+            if urlparse(garbage[0])[0] in ( 'http', 'https', 'ftp', 'file' ):
+                config['url'] = garbage[0]
+            else:
+                config['responsefile'] = garbage[0]
         if (config['responsefile'] == '') == (config['url'] == ''):
             raise ValueError, 'need responsefile or url'
     except ValueError, e:

Zooko read my comment on externalities and said

I strongly feel that there is a single consistent moral position on externalities.

I think that all externalities that can be internalized without too much social cost should be and that society as a whole benefits thereby.

I feel so strongly about it because I suspect that successful internalizations are the root of almost all progress, historically. People might not notice because successful internalizations are "normal property" if you were born in a culture that had already internalized it.

This sounds good, but how do we know what "too much social cost" is? In a sense the idea is almost tautologically true if you accept a kind of cost-benefit analysis with regard to externalities.

It seems to me that Zooko's position is kind of like saying that virtue consists in behaving virtuously, or that rational behavior is a matter of doing what's reasonable. It's more interesting than those kinds of assertions, but it still seems to have an element of circularity.

At the Noe Venable concert (mentioned below), I was thinking that every human activity may have some externality -- a frightening thought, a terrifying thought.

In addition to Sam Loyd's answers, quoted yesterday, there are other answers to Lewis Carroll's question.

I got to go to the Noe Venable concert at the Great American Music Hall with Riana. It was great (like the hall itself)! We ran into Cindy and Fred there.

I feel like a proper fan if I can detect minor changes in a song, and I did notice three changes in "Juniper": "the harrowing walk down the narrowing streets" (for "a harrowing walk down a narrowing street"); "my father the thinker, my daughter the song" (for "my father the preacher, my daughter the song"); and a substantial change in the melody Noe sings in between verses. It was still a fantastic performance of "Juniper".

I like "my father the preacher" better; compare the song "Son of a Preacher Man". (My friend Micah is actually the son of a preacher man and was always amused by that song.)

I need to get Noe's CDs.

One of the oddities I noticed when I went to the Supreme Court in October was that the general public was not allowed to take notes on the argument. (Members of the Bar of the Supreme Court, and reporters, were allowed to take notes.)

Lodrina reports from the East Coast that the Supreme Court has finally changed this unpopular policy.

Here's the picture of me dressed up as the Rambam, which, as I said, is the first-ever picture of me with a beard:

It's a shame to give up the ability to say, with Thoreau, that "[i]t is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me".

I read a galley of The Bug, thanks to Sumana, and on Wednesday I went with Will to hear Ellen Ullman read from it at City Lights.

In answering questions, she revealed that the bug described in the book was a real bug in a real system, that it was a bug she herself had encountered as a programmer.

I said "Ethan Levin's name is very phonetically similar to yours -- it would be a good soundex match."

(This turns out not to be clearly right -- I ran them both through soundex and they didn't look as alike as I'd thought.)

But Ellen Ullman went on to say that Ethan Levin's character is based on her, and many of the character's experiences are based on her own.

I was quoted at some length in a Wired News article about the technology formerly known as Palladium. I worry that I was too long-winded because I was interviewed by e-mail instead of on the telephone. I was also a bit formal.

Here are two superstitions you have to deal with in order to make an informed criticism of this technology:

  1. People can't be harmed by being given a new choice or ability, or benefitted by having a choice or ability taken away from them.
  2. Harms are done to people on purpose, or as a result of some individual's nefarious intent.

As to the latter, I think of the phrase "damnum absque iniuria". (I heard about it in a very old court case last fall, when I went to hear the Pavlovich argument; then I went to hear the Eldred argument, and soon I'm going to hear the Bunner argument.)

Maybe these aren't even the right superstitions to be worried about. I'm pretty confident that the first one is important; I have a list of about a dozen metaphors to try to make this point (from time-lock safes to St. Basil's Cathedral to collective bargaining to the game of Chicken on out), but I doubt any of them are immediately intuitive, and I think I'm going to need something much more intuitive.

I missed Dar Williams (alas! the first time in over two years, I think), but I saw the total lunar eclipse from Bernal Hill. If I were looking for a literary device, I would pass back in time to the solar eclipse of May 10, 1994, and the lunar eclipse of January 20, 2000, and describe all the things which happened to me as a result of each eclipse.

On top of Bernal Hill, over a hundred people gathered, and little children ran back and forth.

Boy: I want to look at the town!
Boy 2: It's a country, not a city. We're so high up we can see the whole country.
Boy: We live in a city, not in a country.
Boy 2: We live in a country too, and we can see the country from here.
Girl: Do you even know how big a country is?

The skeptical girl was the first person on the whole hilltop to spot the moon, quite some time after it had risen. (The fog and the sunlight made it hard to make out at first.)

I wonder if people in D.C. went out to the Ellipse to watch the eclipse.

I'm going to Germany in August for the CCC's (blocked by N2H2 as "Illegal"!) biennial Chaos Communication Camp. I've never been to Europe at all. One of my priorities, I hope, will be to visit my grandmother's home town, Herborn. (I didn't know that J. A. Comenius, the human rights and peace advocate, studied there, but I did know about "annihilation of the Jewish Community (1942)".)

I have a recent postcard of Herborn on my wall; the main street looks practically unchanged from the 1920s. I'll have to go see if that's still true.

I've fallen into the famous old trap of writing a really long diary entry covering a long time period, and being unable to finish the descriptions of earlier events before new events popped up.

In the past, this problem once led me to make a collage instead of writing a letter. But in this case, I expect to finish the long diary entry any day now.

In high school I once posted an optimistic rationalist argument calling for replacing more accidental things and institutions with deliberate and designed ones.

My friend Eric Tapley responded:

My only response is this: Butter was found by accident. Is it not good, then?

I'm one of many people to notice and be happy that Salam Pax is alive.

Our brief in the Verizon case is very, very good.

Did you look closely through the list of parties signing on to it? that's right, it's the National Grange!

While we're on the subject of very fine briefs, there's also the matter of the Aimster brief. Nice work (and thanks, Rick).

In connection with the 2.1 release, I had a party and got a good turnout, not to mention coverage on Crummy. It's too bad that Leonard couldn't remember Riana's pirate jokes. I do want to supplement the record with regard to Leonard's pirate joke -- at the time, I alluded to the fact that a nearly equivalent non-pirate joke was made in a book. I have found the precise citation!

Once in Russia, in a physics exam, the professor wrote the equation

E = hν

and asked a student:

'What is ν?' 'Planck's constant.' 'And h?' 'The length of the plank.'

(From Physicists Continue to Laugh, MIR Publishing House, Moscow, 1968, translated from the Russian by Mrs. Lorraine T. Kapitanoff, quoted in R. L. Weber, compiler, A Random Walk in Science, p. 152)

Weber notes: "Astonishingly, this is translated directly from the Russian."

I'm grateful to everybody who turned out to celebrate.

The LNX-BBC got a favorable review in LJ online, but the reviewer spelled the name of the distribution wrong. It's something like doing a review of "RedHat Linux".

About two weeks later, the actual physical discs showed up, and they are really very pretty. If you would like one (and you know me), just ask me. If you would like one and you belong to a LUG, join the lnx-bbc mailing list and wait until we announce what LUGs should do. Otherwise, you can get one through the EFF Store.

When you're in the a store, surrounded by modern technological marvels (as, say, at the Sony Store at the Metreon), and you see the pretty things, and the remarkable things, like a useful portable radio receiver for under $10, remember:

[...] and it is this same joint stock of technology that gives to the modern world's tangible assets whatever use and value they have. Tangible assets, considered simply as material objects, are inert, transient and trivial, compared with the abiding efficiency of that living structure of technology that has created them and continues to turn them to account.

(Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership: The Case of America, p. 65)

Then you might contemplate how much greater an accomplishment Sony's litigation victory over Universal City Studios turned out to be than any single one of its engineering accomplishments in the past twenty years.

I went with Praveen to see the play Partition, which is about the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan. The play was beautifully produced by the Aurora Theatre (a smaller theater in the arts district in Berkeley), and the classicist character Billington was just wonderful (approximately: "I daresay that by the twenty-first century, a literary education will consist only of Latin!"). I thought the play was harsh toward G. H. Hardy. It presented him in what seemed to be a very extreme way.

You would get the impression from the play that Ramanujan and Hardy hardly managed to work together at all. In fact, they co-authored several significant papers. They were productive together and they did not fail to do great mathematical work. I'm afraid the play oversimplified their relationship in search of a depiction of one particular aspect of it.

In the play, Ramanujan complains that "this is not about East versus West", yet Partition often seems to stress cultural differences (and interpersonal conflict) at the expense of depicting useful collaboration and exchange. The play almost seems to claim that Ramanujan had to die before Hardy could have a real relationship or collaboration with anyone -- a very strong conclusion about an actual person and one I'm not sure can be justified by history.

In general, the play and the production were brilliant and highly amusing. It could be improved (at a cost of an extra hour or so) by adding some more nuance to Hardy's and Ramanujan's relationship to show that it wasn't completely dysfunctional.

Fermat was the most comical character in Partition, and his presence and incessant discussion of his Last Theorem reminded me that Hofstadter made a joke where you invert Fermat's Last Theorem to say that

na = nb + nc

has no integer solutions for n > 2. (It appears on pp. 334-5 of Gödel, Escher, Bach, where it is attributed to "Lierre de Fourmi" and captioned "Johant Sebastiant [Fermant]'s Well-Tested Conjecture".)

This is easy to show (how remarkably much easier than the trivially typographically different "an = bn + cn"!).

Suppose that n > 2 and na = nb + nc. Then, if b = c, we have na = 2nb, quod fieri nequit.

So if we continue, assuming without loss of generality that b > c, we can divide by nc and get

na-c = nb-c + 1

or

na-c - nb-c = 1

or

nb-c(na-b-1) = 1

or consequently

nb-c = 1

and taking the logarithm of both sides

b - c = 0

contrary to our original assumption that b > c.

I sent this to Sumana as an "in Soviet Russia" joke, but afterward I wanted to see if it generalizes so that we can say that a power of n can be decomposed into n powers of n, but not into any other number of powers of n. This is true for n=2, as above. In fact the same technique works to prove it in general.

Suppose that

na = nb + nc + nd + ne + ... nz

Now (without even making an assumption about whether b, c, d, etc.,are distinct), we simply assume that a>=b, b>=c, etc. This is no loss of generality because any number of integers can be arranged into descending order. Now divide by nz:

na-z = nb-z + nc-z + nd-z + ... + ny-z + 1

and again

na-z - nb-z - nc-z - ... - ny-z = 1

Factor out ny-z:

ny-z(na-y - nb-y - nc-y - ... - nx-y - 1) = 1

So we conclude that y=z, and we also have

na-y - nb-y - nc-y - ... - nx-y = 1

and we can follow the same procedure by induction showing that x=y, w=x, v=w, u=v, t=u, etc. Thus, whenever a power of n is decomposed into any number of other powers of n, they are all equal powers. Thus, there must be exactly n of them.

A place called Mondo Gelato has opened up in Berkeley, right by the BART station. I've been there twice now, and it's very, very good.

I became mildly obsessed with the geeky project of spelling out words in the MD5 checksums of software releases. If MD5 checksums are really random (statistically uncorrelated with every bit of their input), then you would expect that 1/2 of all MD5 checksums end with the bit "0", 1/2 of those end with "00", 1/2 of those with "000", etc. Similarly, 1/(2n) of all MD5 checksums should end (or, if you prefer, begin) with any chosen n-bit sequence. Famously, you can write words in hexadecimal: dead, beef, feed, deaf, EFF. If you allow "0" for "o", you can write c0ffee. Many people say that the longest English word thus expressible is "acceded" (but others claim "fabaceae", a family of beans).

So if you have a way to partially reverse the MD5 hash, you ought to be able to make your software have a hash which starts with a chosen word. (Adam Back calls this a "partial hash collision" in his papers on hashcash. A "hash collision" is a case where two values hash to the same value; a "partial hash collision" is a case where two values hash to related values. Strictly speaking, Back's hashcash and the hashes I'm searching for are not really "collisions" because there is no original hash value with which the desired new hash value can "collide".)

A straightforward approach to this is to take a given existing file and append random bytes to it until the hash comes out the way you want. That is a kind of brute force search and doesn't rely on any knowledge about MD5. (If you want to square the number of operations required, you could try finding something which has the same first few bits in its MD5 hash and in its SHA1 hash -- I did a few experiments with that.) Adam Back mentions that in an ideal cryptographic hash, there is no way of generating collisions faster than brute force. Some other people have pointed out that, since MD5 is not ideal, there might be some known methods of going faster than brute force. You might find mathematical properties of the MD5 function which let you search a little more efficiently. (Maybe there is a correlation between one bit in the MD5 state some time before the conclusion of the MD5 calculation and a bit in the MD5 result?)

I wrote a Python program, and then ported it to C. I originally used Peter Deutsch's MD5 implementation, but Jef pointed out that OpenSSL contains a fast assembly implementation of MD5, so I changed the code slightly so it could link against OpenSSL.

The result of all of this is fun: all of the LNX-BBC builds since the evening May 29 now have checksums starting with "bbcbbc". A typical example is "bbcbbc2a348c82f5f0b907c7a7da4f5d". For official releases, we will try to put the version number in -- for example, LNX-BBC 2.1 ought to have started with "bbc210".

Zack is threatening to write a distributed collaborative partial hash collision client so that people on the Internet can donate computer time to search for how to modify LNX-BBC releases to have checksums starting with longer words. 48 bits is about the most I currently dare to hope for. I can find a 24-bit prefix in a few seconds on one computer!

If you maintain a free software project, why not get my code and spell some words in your next couple of releases' checksums? c0ffee, f00, c0de, maybe "abbe" in honor of my friend Abbey...

I got to go to Tu Lan and to the arcade with Sumana, who just started a new job at Salon and is performing that great ritual of leaving Berkeley for San Franisco. She seems optimistic about this change, and it was great to see her. At the arcade I played Bubble Bobble -- an old favorite of mine from when I had a Nintendo -- and air hockey. The Metreon's arcade has a "Retro Room" where you can play pre-2001 video games. I thought each one should have a sign above it indicating how many bits the microprocessor handles at once. Bubble Bobble would be "8". Air hockey would be "0".

I was in a little earthquake which I'm too lazy to look up again at the moment.

My mom is putting on an international Virginia Woolf conference at Smith College this week. Congratulations, mom!

It looks like the conference will be a great time for all involved.

The Golden Gate Bridge had what I think was its 66th birthday on May 27, and, in keeping with my annual tradition, I walked across it. This year, Riana was my walking companion.

We stopped in the middle to sing "Happy Birthday" to the bridge. Riana observed that, even though nobody else was around, this might be considered a public performance.

The transcript the May 9 hearing at which I testified is now available. It has some errors. For example, the third word of my testimony is misstated. (I said "Register" and the reporter transcriber "Registrar".)

My testimony begins on page 141. One of my favorite moments:

MR. CARSON: Is it more likely than not that the FCC will issue a regulation requiring [the] use and recognition of the broadcast flag?

MR. SCHOEN: So it's obviously -- there's never any way to predict what an agency is going to do while they're in the middle of a proceeding.

MR. CARSON: We'll prove that.

(Transcript, p. 159, line 2.)

I'm very glad I got to participate.

I went to court to hear arguments in Bowoto v. Chevrontexaco, in which I filed a declaration in opposition to the defendant's motion. The case is before Judge Susan Illston and could go to trial later this year; as with other cases in which I've been involved, it's had several years of pretrial motions. I got to meet several lawyers for the plaintiffs.

I also went to court (about a week later) to hear arguments in DVD Copy Control Assn. v. Andrew Bunner. It was my second time at the California Supreme Court; the first time was for an argument in a related matter (DVD Copy Control Assn. v. Matthew Pavlovich). Alex Macgillivray, whom I saw there, wrote about the hearing. California's Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, appeared and argued as an amicus for DVD CCA. His remarks mainly centered on the importance of trade secrecy to California businesses, and didn't really address the specific facts of the Bunner case. Lockyer's argument appeared to be that weakening trade secret law would harm businesses in California, and that California had an interest in preventing that from happening. David Greene of the First Amendment Project, arguing for Bunner, responded that there are no reported prior California cases parallel to this one (in which a trade secret claimant seeks a preliminary injunction against a third party republisher of information), so ruling for Bunner couldn't really weaken trade secret law.

My biggest frustration during the argument came when Robert Sugarman, arguing on behalf of DVD CCA, suggested that the Court should not pay much attention to Bunner's first amendment claims, since a large number of "creative" people from the entertainment industries had filed briefs in support of DVD CCA. Sugarman appeared to be suggesting that, if the "creative community" had no problem with the injunction, the injunction must not offend the first amendment. I call this the "we own the first amendment and you can't have any" argument; it is peculiarly common in cases in which copyright is implicated. If a defendant claims a first amendment interest, an entertainment plaintiff will retort that the first amendment is actually about protecting the expression interests of, say, movie studios. The subtext is that other speakers do not have free expression interests worth protecting.

Sugarman actually took a very peculiar position with respect to the first amendment, claiming that the first amendment was meant basically to protect political speech and debates about matters of public concern. Speech on other topics, he suggested, was not really what the first amendment was about, and speech calculated to produce a result was far away from that amendment's purpose. It can only be described as bizarre to hear entertainment lawyers, lawyers for movie studios, maintaining that the first amendment is really about protecting political speech and not necessarily other kinds of expression, that the first amendment is really very narrow. This is, of course, exactly what people seeking to censor sexually explicit or violent expression in the movies always say -- that the first amendment is supposed to protect expression of beliefs, and political and perhaps religious arguments, and pictures of naked people or pictures of people getting shot are neither of those. Why, aside from their duty to maximize profits, movie studios would contemplate applying the first amendment to depictions of sex but not to descriptions of algorithms is simply beyond me. Technical speech -- as an important subject of major political and religious conflict, and a major source of social change in Europe not long before the adoption of the first amendment, must have been more obviously "expressive" at that time than sexually explicit visual images, which law and custom continued actively to suppress for many years. Or are Copernicus and Galileo to receive lessened protection for their expression because they had the "functional" goal of allowing people to calculate the positions of the planets?

I find it offensive that works like those in Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers are implicitly called uncreative and unexpressive by Sugarman. They contain more artistic and intellectual originality (and, one might say, courage) than some recent studio products.

The California Supreme Court is very informal compared to other courts. Before the beginning of arguments, the clerk came out to chat with the members of the public sitting in the gallery. He started off by giving some of the history of the Court, and at the end asked whether anyone had any questions!

It was odd to see on successive days two EFF clients named Andrew Bunner and Andrew Bunnie (Huang). It was even odder to see each in the company of John Hoy, the president of DVD CCA. We invited Bunnie to the ARDG meeting to give a talk about hardware reverse engineering, and the following day Bunner's case was heard before the California Supreme Court. The parallelism, if only in their names, was eerie.

I was interviewed on The Linux Show, talking about technology mandates and SDMCA. I urged concerned listeners to go talk to someone offline about copyright issues instead of joining another Internet flamewar. Listen to the MP3 archive, if you want. (I was hoping there would be an Ogg archive, since there was an Ogg stream, but it looks like there's no such luck.)

I also got quoted in an IEEE Spectrum article, whose author used my comments to draw a conclusion different from the one I would have drawn. (The article claims that "new standards, like DVD-Audio and Super-Audio CD [...] will contain robust copy protection, putting the issue to rest." I doubt whether the issue will be "put to rest" so easily as that. The DVD-A and SACD business is is a disturbing example of a recent pattern, though.)

David Alpert came by from the East Coast and invited me to help run a puzzle hunt at UC Berkeley put on by friends of his. (This is the genre where you find a series of clues, and each clue gives you information about where to find the next clue.) When the hunt started to wind down, around 10:00 p.m., David and I decided to attempt to solve it for ourselves, so we grabbed the first clue and started puzzling. We finished a little after midnight, having had an unfair advantage on a couple of clues. It was great fun, and I think I ought to look for treasure hunts to try solving for real. It looks like they happen regularly in the Bay Area.

I saw Spellbound with Zack. The Spellbound we saw is the recent documentary Spellbound, not the classic movie Spellbound. This one is about students competing in the national spelling bee. It's really excellent.

When I recognized a word, I spelled along with the competitors during the documentary, and got quite a few words wrong. I was known as a good speller in elementary school, but it seems I'm practically no speller at all compared to these kids.

The parents are the surprise stars in this film, I thought -- their attitudes about what a spelling bee is and why it's important are really interesting. They, and the really energetic kid. (Surely every geeky boy played at being a robot -- but surely not a musical robot.)

Alex reports on the Dastar decision, including a remarkable passage in which the Supreme Court seems to recognize that (as James Boyle quoted Northrop Frye) "poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels".

You can get my partial hash collision code out of CVS. I need to fix it up quite a bit and merge some code from Jef which allows fairly efficient loops using multi-byte arrays as loop counters. (For one thing, this lets us search over 2^32 possibilities, which my current code can't do.)

The 7th Circuit did not accept our amicus brief.

Aaron attended the argument and wrote a bit about it.

Happy birthday (June 3) to Larry Lessig. As a birthday present, he requests that you sign the Eric Eldred Act petition. I'm not sure the petition format is best for this, but it's what we've got, so you should do this.

What I regret is the constraints of the Berne Convention. As I said in my petition signature (I am signer 1054), copyright law had more useful tools available to it before the Berne Convention -- most especially registration and deposit. My father used to tell me that the Library of Congress had every work published in the United States, and that used to be approximately true -- when he was growing up.

In other areas where there's no Berne Convention to constrain the law, we have a filing requirement (patent and trademark), filing fees (patent and trademark and copyright, but you don't have to file copyrights), and renewal requirements and renewal fees (currently only trademark). That, in turn, helps make it clear to the public whether anyone cares about preserving some monopoly right -- and who it is who cares. If, for example, a trademark is completely disused, it will lapse. (I wish the law were more aggressive about encouraging trademarks to lapse -- but lapse they do.)

The Eric Eldred Act is the economically reasonable and useful thing which can be done quickly within Berne to have a dramatic effect and keep the public domain growing rapidly.

I have also suggested that copyrighted works being out of print at all should be seen as a problem by copyright law. For one thing, a copyright holder should not be able to use copyright to suppress a work and make it unavailable to the public; for another, if one publisher is unwilling to exploit a market, another publisher may well wish to do so.

Sumana is signer 8076, just two spots away from Jim Fruchterman.

"I saw a young woman tell the soldiers that they are the people's army, and that they mustn't hurt the people," a young doctor said after returning from one clash Sunday. "Then the soldiers shot her, and ran up and bayonetted her. I ran away, so I couldn't tell if she lived or died."

I've had an arm injury for three years as of today.

I saw Rachel Chalmers and told her about the disparity in the size of the Free Dmitry movement as compared with other movements, like the anti-war movement. And I mentioned that the Eldred petition had been signed by about 10,000 people -- and that this is thrilling, but really pretty small by PetitionOnline's standards.

(It's still about ten times as many as ever participated in any political movment I organized, so I have no small amount of respect for this accomplishment.)

Rachel pointed out that the small Free Dmitry movement was nonetheless large enough to free Dmitry, where the huge anti-war movement was too small to stop the war. So seid nun geduldig.

At a party on Friday we played a bunch of geeky songs. If I were to try to build up a canon, I would start with

I had proposed to do this way back in September 2001. Maybe I'm too easily impressed by remixes of things I care about and am interested in.

My proof about sums of powers is wrong! Sorry for leading you astray.

bê d' akeôn para thina polufloisboio thalassês.

(Iliad I, 34)

We have to touch people.

(Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 374)

If we think of dead people as ceasing to exist in death, then they must become non-existent. Some people think that, philosophically, only people and things who exist can properly be the subjects of present-tense verbs (or at least that sentences which make them the subjects of present-tense verbs will be false). This leads to strange problems.

There are already lots of thorny problems in the philosophy of language surrounding using a noun phrase like "the present king of France" (most famously, in a sentence like "the present king of France is bald"). But it almost seems that it gets thornier if you use a noun phrase which refers to someone who used to exist and who no longer exists. (Another twist: is there a grammatical distinction between people who once existed and then stopped existing, and people who, like the present king of France, have never existed at all?)

For that matter, if it's not legitimate to say "he is tall", or "he is friendly", of someone who's dead, why is it legitimate to say "he is dead"?

On June 2 I presented a proof of a toy theorem which inverts Fermat's Last Theorem. Matthew Loran sent me a criticism of the proof, which I misunderstood, and then Andrew Cairns sent me a counterexample along with a similar criticism.

The proof is wrong. The problem is that I went from

ny-z(na-y - nb-y - nc-y - ... - nx-y - 1) = 1

to conclude that

na-y - nb-y - nc-y - ... - nx-y = 1

where I should have concluded that

na-y - nb-y - nc-y - ... - nx-y - 1 = 1

which is very different.

Andrew Cairns points out that some of the powers might be distinct and others might not. For example, we might have 128 = 64 + 32 + 32 (or, 729 = 243 + 243 + 81 + 81 + 81). What I think survives the error in my proof is the conclusion that a power of n (for n>2) cannot be decomposed into m distinct powers of n (or into m identical powers of n) if m does not equal n.

The Illegal Art exhibit is coming to San Francisco in July! This is going to be very exciting. I'm "planning to try to go to pretty much everything associated with it".

Some other EFF staff members and I went to the EFF Supporter Meetup event in the Haight, and had a nice time hanging out and chatting with people. It looks like this is going to be a monthly event.

I had a party to celebrate the expiration of the U.S. patent on Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression. Several people brought very nice party GIFs.

Unfortunately, software patents in Europe are at risk of appearing in the near future. If you live in Europe, please see if you can do anything about this.

Burn All GIFs also urges people to continue to refrain from using GIF in their web sites because LZW patents in other countries are in force.

I bought a copy of the game U.S. Patent Number 1 for everyone to play at the party, but we didn't get the chance. I hope to try out the game pretty soon.

Martin found and briefly quoted an LWN piece on the implications of Caldera/SCO's claims about software development.

The piece makes a good point, which I'll discuss in a moment.

What I find most remarkable about the Caldera/SCO statements is that they seem to revolve around an intuitive idea of "ownership" of technology. In the free software world, most informed people have been led to place great emphasis on the fine distinctions between copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and contract (and other areas of law). For example, copyright, patent, and trademark are "rights against the world"; trade secret and contract are not. Copyright and patent are temporary; trademarks must be renewed; trade secrets and contracts are potentially temporary but may be destroyed in certain ways. Independent re-creation is a defense to copyright infringement (and, in a slightly different sense, to trade secret misappropriation), but not to patent or trademark infringement.

This focus on these distinctions is significant in two ways. First, it promotes a better understanding of the actual state of the law. Second, and in my opinion possibly more importantly, it leads to a certain kind of scorn toward claims of "ownership" in technology. If we learn distinctions among bodies of law relating to proprietary control of technology, we cultivate an intuitive skepticism toward "ownership" claims. When someone makes such a claim, we first demand to know which body of law the claim is rooted in; then we point out the particular limitations which are inherent to that particular body of law. And in the absence of a specific legal claim, we recognize that the default is a lack of proprietary control over technology. That is, there is no "ownership" of technology except whatever "ownership" might be for an uncertain time granted by some statute, and then that "ownership" is constrained to the particular enumerated rights provided for in the statute. And outside of that, the "owner" has nothing.

Caldera/SCO's intuition appears to be the opposite -- it appears to be that technology can be owned in a very broad sense, including, for example, some kind of proprietary right in designs and APIs (outside of patent), and some kind of derivative-work right outside of copyright and potentially outside of trade secrecy. I say this not because of something they've said in court, but simply because of things they've said to the press.

One way to counter that intuition is to ask whether the ownership is a matter of copyrights, patents, trademarks, or trade secrets.

In an interestingly disguised piece of Christian evangelism called The Best Things in Life by Peter Kreeft (it doesn't quite advance Christian theology, just undermine some of its traditional cultural rivals), a closely parallel strategy is used by the character of Socrates.

Socrates: What kind of love did you make?

Felicia: Do you want details? Why, that's none of your business, you dirty old man!

Socrates: I mean, was it agapê or philia or storgê or eros?

Here the point isn't just to get Felicia to answer the question, but to try to undermine her impression that she understands what love is. Since she doesn't even know the distinction between these four kinds of love, she may start to doubt her former confidence and to think that the question is more complicated than she had realized. (Of course, that's precisely what does happen to her.)

The Free Software Foundation advocates drawing these distinctions, but first and foremost as a way of promoting clear thinking. But elsewhere, people have attacked the term "intellectual property" as a harmful propaganda term. Among other things, it tries to induce us to see these legal interests as a sort of moral entitlement rather than as a government subsidy, like farm subsidies, to promote certain kinds of behavior. There's been a lot of discussion of this tendency, but too little discussion of just how the fine distinctions undermine it.

One way that I think they tend to disparage the interests of the "owner" is by letting the air out, so to speak, of a puffed-up rhetorical version of exactly what the owner's interest was supposed to have been. In other words, clarifying the distinctions exposes an illusion:

The Lion thought it might be as well to frighten the Wizard, so he gave a large, loud roar, which was so fierce and dreadful that Toto jumped away from him in alarm and tipped over the screen that stood in a corner. As it fell with a crash they looked that way, and the next moment all of them were filled with wonder. For they saw, standing in just the spot the screen had hidden, a little old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face, who seemed to be as much surprised as they were. The Tin Woodman, raising his axe, rushed toward the little man and cried out, "Who are you?"

"I am Oz, the Great and Terrible," said the little man, in a trembling voice. "But don't strike me -- please don't -- and I'll do anything you want me to."

Our friends looked at him in surprise and dismay.

"I thought Oz was a great Head," said Dorothy.

"And I thought Oz was a lovely Lady," said the Scarecrow.

"And I thought Oz was a terrible Beast," said the Tin Woodman.

"And I thought Oz was a Ball of Fire," exclaimed the Lion.

"No, you are all wrong," said the little man meekly. "I have been making believe."

"Making believe!" cried Dorothy. "Are you not a Great Wizard?"

"Hush, my dear," he said. "Don't speak so loud, or you will be overheard -- and I should be ruined. I'm supposed to be a Great Wizard."

"And aren't you?" she asked.

"Not a bit of it, my dear; I'm just a common man."

"You're more than that," said the Scarecrow, in a grieved tone; "you're a humbug."

"Exactly so!" declared the little man, rubbing his hands together as if it pleased him. "I am a humbug."

(L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)

(The movie version is interestingly different from this.)

As to what LWN actually had to say about free software, I urge you to read Martin's excerpt, or subscribe to LWN and read the article. The main point is that Caldera/SCO's litigation against IBM doesn't show that free software licensing is risky so much as it shows that proprietary software licensing is risky. The defendant in the litigation is not a free software licensee, but a proprietary software licensee, accusing of breaching a proprietary software license by making unauthorized derivative works. The conclusion is that making derivative works of proprietary works may be much riskier than making derivative works of free works. The LWN editorial makes this point much more forcefully.

A more general and conventional point would be to remind people that the GNU GPL is much less restrictive than any proprietary license, because it tries to grant rights not granted by copyright, whereas most proprietary licenses purport to abrogate by contract rights already granted by copyright. And most proprietary licenses completely forbid making derivative works, whereas the GNU GPL simply imposes restrictions on making derivative works. But I think LWN's point is much more interesting. As Martin quotes it:

We all owe SCO a debt of gratitude for showing us how unsafe proprietary software can be. That company is using proprietary licensing to press a truly staggering set of claims over the work of others and power to disrupt organizations worldwide. [...]

SCO, it would seem, owns everything. Compared to that claim, the allegedly "viral" nature of the GPL (if you distribute something derived from a GPL-licensed product, the derived product must also be licensed under the GPL) seems weak indeed. SCO is laying claim to decades of work done by dozens of proprietary Unix vendors, and that's just the starting point.

Riana and I took a round trip on the Sausalito ferry on Saturday, and I got a bit sunburned. The view out on the water is wonderful, and we passed close by Alcatraz and got to see the buildings there and try to imagine what it would be like to spend many years stuck on a single island.

After the ferry trip, we met up with Nick and all set off to explore the new BART extension, which officially opens today but which was carrying throngs of curious passengers out to the new stations for free Saturday.

First, we rode to SFO, got off at the new SFO station, and took the AirTrain shuttle all around the airport. (The AirTrain runs on a track, but has rubber tires. I'm not sure whether I've seen anything quite like it.) We were suitably impressed by the grandeur of the station and by the sight of all the ramps dipping under and over one another -- a huge knot of some complexity and a great engineering accomplishment even without the transit modes which actually run on the ramps. The AirTrain gives great views because it's built up on top of the airport -- it practically runs on the roof, and you have to take stairs or elevators down to the terminals.

We then rode over to Millbrae and saw the CalTrain connection (although CalTrain wasn't running, because it's a weekend!). We eventually took BART back to the San Bruno and South San Francisco stations.

Nick took pictures in every station, on the AirTrain, and in several of the tunnels. I hope his pictures come out well. Overall, the BART to SFO extension is just beautiful. Nick admired the modern tunnels and the craftsmanship and engineering which go into building something like this, and he regaled us with anecdotes about transit and rail history.

BART to SFO from where I live takes only 24 minutes and costs around $5, a much better deal than any other way of getting there, and much, much faster than the AirBART to Oakland. I fear for the Oakland Airport now -- I used to use it all the time because of AirBART, but now I guess its only advantage to me is the discount carriers like Southwest and JetBlue. That is still an advantage, but BART to SFO is just so great.

If you live in the Bay Area, you should try out BART to SFO as soon as you get the chance. I'm sure you'll be amazed, as we were.

I have a bunch of first-day memorabilia which I'm mainly planning to send off to Kate, who couldn't make the first day on account of being off in New Jersey.

The new BART map is inspiring, because it shows a Bay Area positively blanketed in transit (except for little things like the whole of Marin, the western half of San Francisco, and so on). The BART district also follows a clever strategy: in addition to the actual lines, they always have their maps show dashed lines for routes they're still considering. It will say something about the environmental review, or the study, or the funding, and so remind people that future BART extensions are very real possibilities -- and set them to thinking about what it would be like. The current BART map now depicts the still-hypothetical BART to San Jose extension.

I'd love to see BART to San Jose, although I wish they could complete the loop down the Peninsula. That would make being a computer geek in the Bay Area and not knowing how to drive even more convenient.

Praveen told me about "Find the Longest Path", a song about computational complexity.

The Supreme Court very unfortunately upheld CIPA.

My deep respect goes to everyone who had worked to overturn it.

There are lots of theories about what's proper regarding libraries and the use of censorware. To oversimplify, let's consider four:

(One of the several points where there's more subtlety is what's meant by "Congress may require" -- is the requirement a condition of Federal funding, or a matter of criminal law?)

I asked a lawyer which view is supported by the United States v. ALA decision. He said the plurality endorses the view that Congress may require the use of censorware, and that the majority, perhaps contrary to Mainstream Loudon, endorses the view that the library may choose to use censorware.

Looking over the opinion, it seems that only Souter and Ginsberg believe that libraries may not use censorware at all. Stevens in dissent and all the concurrences do not seem to have a problem with it. Perhaps Mainstream Loudon has just been overruled (except that there's also this business about facial versus as-applied challenges, as Mainstream Loudon seems to be an as-applied challenge to censorware, where U.S. v. ALA was a facial challenge).

A thread about the proper interpretation of Sony in Lessig's blog made me think about structural problems and substantive problems in both copyright-oriented technology regulation and Internet censorship. The substantive problems, which get the most attention, are the effects on fair use (etc.) and the effects on free speech. (If Congress tries to impose technology mandates or broad secondary liability with a technology mandate-like effect, fair uses will be harmed; if Congress tries to require or even merely to permit the use of censorware in public libraries, free speech and the right to read will be harmed. These can be called substantive effects.) Less attention by far is directed to the fact that both copy controls and censorware diminish user control over technology: as technologies of control, they require for plausible effectiveness that users be deterred from modifying their technology or getting access to other technology which can remove its limitations.

In the DRM context, you can point to the concept of "robustness rules" (which all commercially-licensed DRM has -- they are requirements to make technology which its owners can't change or fix, which is the most significant possible change I can think of in the public's relationship to its technology, yet one which DRM licensees and licensors have treated remarkably casually). You can also point to anticircumvention legislation. In the contributory liability case, I wonder what is lurking as a technological matter behind Doug Lichtman's suggestion that it might be appropriate to require P2P technology creators to implement filtering. (Presumably, if the filtering is "effective", in the more ordinary sense of the term, something has to be done to prevent users from defeating or evading it, which I also assume means "robustness" again.) If I have liability for publishing a non-filtering P2P client, because the goal is to create an incentive for me not to make technology available which can facilitate copyright infringement to a certain extent, then shouldn't I also have liability for publishing a filtering P2P client which is easy for users to modify, or which has a very modular design? If that's the case, my relationship to the users of my technology has been fundamentally altered (now I have to treat them as an adversary in doing security engineering!), and their relationship to that technology has obviouslly been altered in the same way.

How about in the censorware context? Since there are lots of means of defeating and circumventing censorware, plausibly "effective" censorware has to be built to restrict users not only from removing the censorware, but even from installing new software which might help them evade control. (For instance, I must not be allowed to use VPN software, because I could use it to access an uncensored network. In the general case, in the presence of anti-censorship proxies like those Peacefire members and the CIA and the Voice of America have been developing, I should probably not even be allowed to use SSL encryption at all, because it is somewhat trivial for me to use an SSL-based proxy to escape control.)

Beyond that, as Seth Finkelstein has pointed out very clearly and eloquently, censorware which hopes to work can't allow any escape from control, not just as a matter of controlling installation of software on a client machine, but far beyond that:

For censorware to perform its intended task (the control of information) there must never be any escape from that control. Thus it must ban any site which has the effect of allowing a person to receive information outside of the tracking of the censorware program. So sites which provide privacy, anonymity, and even language translation, must be banned. This is an absolutely necessary feature of censorware which deserves more emphasis in the discussion [...]

It should be stressed again that these bans are considered a feature, a necessary and integral part of the functioning of censorware. The LOOPHOLE category cannot be de-activated. Once more, you cannot choose not to use it. Indeed, from the point of view of the imperatives of control, what authority would allow a subject such an escape?

This also is an important structural change. ("It is designed to control what people are permitted to read. That is a very different problem.")

I doubt there's anything here which isn't implicit in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, but I thought it had to be said, and it ought to be said from a programmer's point of view. If programmers -- especially in the free software world -- are going to try to control what users can do, it's going to be a major change which is necessarily going to affect much more than just what the users can do. It's going to affect how we make, experience, use, and improve technology, and at what points control over our activities can be imposed and by whom.

Remember the song which started out life as a speech? "Whenever there's a technology, whenever there's a way / That disables control..."

Do you think the point about pig Latin and Napster (or pig Latin and Bess) is facetious or trivial? How much do you know about DVD recorder patent licensing?

I'm having a huge amount of trouble with my arm injury again.

I took an interesting two-day course on effective communication. One particularly useful part was that the instructors videotaped me speaking on various topics and then watched the videotapes with me -- like a sports coach -- and commented on how I did.

I learned, for example, that I normally only gesture with my left hand. (I'm left-handed.) I look much better as a speaker when I gesture with both hands. That's just one example.

A friend, hearing my description, characterized these courses as "anti-intellectual". People might get that impression because the courses are really more like acting courses, stage presence courses, or showmanship courses -- yet they are described as courses in communication. If we think of communication as being the same as (or being mostly contained in) showmanship, we tend to marginalize substance.

Remember what Postman said about the Lincoln-Douglas debates? There was a time when people had long attention spans, and, we suppose, they would focus on the substance of what was said. In fact, the instructor of the class I attended suggested that television debates had completely changed the way presidential campaigns work (and the way candidates are selected). I think Jerry Mander makes exactly the same thing, and considers it a very bad thing -- but speaking courses now seem to treat it merely as a fact with which we must contend and which we shouldn't spend a great deal of time regretting.

Socrates famously criticized the Sophists, perhaps the antecedents of the effective communication instructors, for training people to making weak arguments appear strong (something Socrates was himself accused of doing). This sets up an extremely important example of the classical opposition between appearance and reality. A philosopher (or any virtuous person) wishes to be right, to have a valid argument; a sophist, or an effective communicator, under this theory, wishes to seem right, to appear to have a valid argument. Everyone grants that you can learn to appear to seem right, just as you can learn to appear to do other things. There's an actor's art to learn to appear to be a particular character. (As Mary Renault pointed out somewhere, the ancient Greeks were actually very offended by the idea of producing plays in which people literally looked and spoke like the characters they portrayed. Instead, they prefered to use highly stylized masks, known later in Latin as per-sonae.) There's a sleight-of-hand art which lets us appear to perform physical impossibilities.

But all these arts, in this story, are deceptive because they are based on substituting appearance for reality, or form for substance. That's the intution people in this tradition will have about effective communicating classes and that's why they're going to think of them as anti-intellectual (a polite word for sophist, right?).

In the class I took, the claim was presented that the content of a presentation only makes up 7% of the presentation's influence. (Maybe it was that there is only a 7% correlation between the quality of the content and the degree to which listeners remember or believe the message.) That leaves 93% which is supposed to be based in form or style. So the obvious conclusion is that we need to improve the form. Improving the form would be 13 times more effective than making an equivalent improvement in the substance.

This makes me think of Alan Sokal's hoax, where he submitted a pretty but ridiculous paper to a journal -- including appropriate buzzwords and gestures -- in order to make the journal appear ridiculous, and, of course, to suggest that it favored form or fashion over truth or serious inquiry. Is there an equivalent hoax in the world of public speaking, where someone confidently delivers a nonsensical presentation and sees how persuasive it turns out to be? (I remember that a left-wing group sent an impostor to a meeting to give an "over the top" speech and see whether he'd be detected, but that's not necessarily exactly what I have in mind.)

But let's say we had someone give a talk including blatant examples of classical logical fallacies, in a confident and conventionally interesting style. Would it be persuasive? Would people notice the fallacies? Is there a time in the past when listeners might have noticed the fallacies, where they might not notice them today?

I think this class, of which I've just been so skeptical, was very useful to me, and I'm glad I got to take it. The people in the class with me were interesting, too -- their backgrounds were very different from mine, and they spoke about subjects I don't normally get to hear about at all.

I was just thinking of writing a response to Professor Lichtman (see "Indirect Liability in Copyright: Napster and Beyond") and then yesterday morning RIAA went and announced a plan to sue direct infringers and I argued and thought about this almost all day for two days.

I guess my response to Lichtman will have to include something about the forthcoming stream of actual direct infringement lawsuits.

Via Copyfight: an interesting piece by Zittrain about the source of scholars' attitudes toward copyright law.

The Supreme Court today finally overturned Bowers v. Hardwick by deciding Lawrence v. Texas in favor of the petitioners.

I went out to the Castro after work to see how people were celebrating. I wandered around for a while looking at smiling people and hearing honking car horns.

Then I stopped into A Different Light and bought a copy of The Hours and a couple of postcards of San Francisco. As I walked out of the bookstore, I heard

Freedom is coming,
Freedom is coming,
Freedom is coming,
Oh yes, I know!

It was the Lesbian and Gay Chorus of San Francisco on the march. I followed them back to Market and Castro, where they gave a half-hour-long impromptu public concert by Harvey Milk Plaza. It was just beautiful. Eventually a crowd gathered around and enjoyed the music (and suffered from the oppressive heat).

It was a historic moment which most people present will remember for their entire lives.

In the near future, I need to post something here about what I found interesting in Scalia's dissent.

I signed up on Friendster and have been enjoying it very much. Friendster is a networking service (with a dating focus) where you map networks of your friends and can conceivably meet people based on mutual acquaintances.

It's really fun. One thing I enjoy is seeing the variety of ways in which I'm connected to someone.

The dating service is a huge draw, but it seems to me that the Friendster people are thinking small. What about PGP key exchange? Also, what about visualizations of the graph of friends?

What most bothers me about Friendster is the note at the bottom of each page: "Patent Pending."

The idea of the "personal network" is something of a sham. Because the world is so small and we're all so closely connected, my "personal network" is already more than 1/8 of all Friendster users. Since some Friendster users are fake accounts (like "Sushi"), the true proportion is even higher. I've only been using Friendster for a few days, and already I have access to perhaps 15% of its users, a percentage which I believe tends to grow as more people sign up.

A team of four of us entered the Park Challenge as Team Ishmael. (I couldn't think of what to call the team, so I made use of a grand tradition.)

It was great fun and pretty challenging. The coolest puzzle, in my opinion, was "Color By Number" (known to the organizers as "Primeary Colors"). We were given a sheet of paper with regions containing numbers. We quickly noticed that all of these numbers were composite, that each was a product of exactly two distinct primes, and that all possible products of pairs of the six smallest primes (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13) were represented. We were also given a box of crayons and a sheet which explained what colors the products of particular primes should be, based on what colors the primes themselves were.

Of course, the sheet didn't explain that that was what it was for. It just said things like (red)(orange) = (black). There were 15 such facts, which we realized was exactly the number of possible pairs of primes from among the six smallest primes. The trouble was that we didn't know which color went with which prime. We tried various theories, such as the theory that the order of the crayons in the box from left to right corresponded to the order of the first six primes from least to greatest, and several other more esoteric and ingenious theories.

It turned out that the answer was that the croquet balls we had used in a game of croquet we'd just played in order to get the "Color By Number" clue had had numbers on them; those numbers were all prime and the color of each croquet ball corresponded to the prime written on it. We didn't solve that one.

(So, to recap: we were supposed to note the colors and numbers of the croquet balls, factor the numbers in the grid, and look up the factors on the chart using the croquet balls, then color the grid based on the chart. Then the grid would reveal a word which was the answer to the clue.)

I'm not sure that was a very clear explanation -- the role of the color code chart is somewhat difficult to explain. Maybe I can scan it, if I haven't lost it.

We didn't come close to winning, but we had a good time and got to see a lot of Golden Gate Park.

A different group of us went out to the Pride Parade on Sunday and watched the last few hours of it. It was a pretty impressive parade and people were pretty happy.

We were pretty amused by the slogan of the gay employees of the San Francisco Chronicle: "We come out every day!"

Michael Geist draws a contrast between 1997 and 2003 -- suggesting that Internet regulation, which used to seem impossible, is proceeding apace.

In fact, a lot of changes in the Internet which previously seemed impossible have come to pass or are coming to pass or might soon come to pass if you're not careful.

I remember that, soon after I met Nick Moffitt, he made an allusion to the Hunter S. Thompson line about "a high and beautiful wave". He predicted that we would look back with some nostalgia and regret at that time (the years immediately after 1997). Nick was talking about free software, not specifically about free expression, but I still remember being concerned about the end of that "high and beautiful wave". (If you've never read the passage, do a Google search.)

I'm still concerned.

I seem to be in a song about the DMCA. There are a lot of samples from a Free Dmitry protest, and I'm one of the samples! My colleague Lee Tien is also sampled: "Between 1947 and 1975, the National Security Agency intercepted every single overseas telegram...".

I was very startled, because I was told to listen to the song because Lee was in it, and then I heard my own voice right at the end. I remember when I visited my father during the Free Dmitry campaign: he told me later that he said goodbye to me, dropped me off at the airport, turned on NPR as he was driving home, and heard me interviewed.

Martin Pool favorably reviews a book by Eric Raymond called The Art of Unix Programming. I took a look, and I think TAOUP is full of wonderful stuff. I would eagerly purchase a copy if it came out in paper.

In general, it collects stuff that you have an intuition about after working with Unix for a while, but might not have formalized anywhere. And it's just plain fun and interesting (and doesn't claim that Unix got everything right).

In other Martin news, I'm very pleased that Martin likes my code!

Here are two opposite sentiments which form an interesting pair:

Amicus Plato, magis amica veritas.

(This is given in several forms and attributed to several different people. "Plato is [my] friend, but the truth is [my] better friend.")

Errare, mehercule, malo cum Platone quam cum istis vera sentire.

(This is definitely due to Cicero. "By Hercules [we might say 'by God'], I would rather be wrong with Plato than be right [believe the truth] with them..." Some translate: "I prefer to err with Plato...")

These two are sometimes contrasted, but I think not usually mentioned alongside one another.

"We were ORDERED not to do [cryptographic] research and innovation in the Internet project [...]"

The Illegal Art exhibit is really great. I got to go with Aaron and Riana, and saw lots of people I knew, and also attended part of the panel discussion.

The Illegal Art CD omits some works I might have included, but is interesting; "Bittersweet Symphony" and "The Motorcade Sped On" were my favorite tracks. The latter was moving to me even though Kennedy died before I was born.

I also got the Illegal Art DVD, and got it autographed by Carrie McLaren! (I gave her an autographed LNX-BBC in exchange.) I haven't watched it yet, because I don't own a DVD player.

I'm going to go with my mom to the Illegal Art film exhibitions later on this month. July is a whole month of illegal art for those of us in the Bay Area, and my mom is coming to visit.

Apparently the City and County of San Francisco realizes what a bad idea anticircumvention is. They posted this sign in many places around the city:

[NO 12:01A]

(Thanks to Cory for taking this picture after I pointed this out to him.)

I received a note urging me to use the robots.txt mechanism to prevent Microsoft's search engine from indexing my site. My response is that creating a search engine is a virtuous and charitable thing, and an ease to the people.

The impulse to decide which search engines are legitimate based on who owns them seems to me less like an ordinary boycott and more like, and closer to, a pattern of subdividing the net into small parts which can't talk to each other. "A strange game -- the only way to win is not to play."

Among those through whose hard-won precedent
We feel secure when we invent
Was Sony's lawyer, Dunlavey.
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Inside the park past which his streetcars run,
Since eighty-nine's quake basking in the sun,
A street sign honors Donald Chee:
Timor mortis conturbat me.

I took a vacation in Washington, D.C., which is incredibly hot and humid. Sorry for the long gap in posts here; I'm back now.

One of the people at Microsoft I've dealt with about trusted computing put me down as a recipient of an electronic survey as part of his performance review. So I was supposed to evaluate him on a series of (ASP-based) web forms.

I was particularly amused by

71. Develops an actionable strategy

Somebody really needs to reword that question.

The RIAA is sending subpoenas to a lot of ISPs to try to identify people. As we previously explained in an amicus brief, the procedure they're using for this, created by 17 USC 512(h), lacks a lot of procedural safeguards normally associated with subpoenas.

I've looked at a large number of the subpoena requests. They're obviously generated by a script -- "mail merge", as they used to say -- and that's a good thing from a certain point of view, but it's kind of frightening. Your identity is essentially being requested by a computer, and then Yvette Molinaro is in the loop seemingly for the sole purpose of signing her name to attest, in effect, that the computer was programmed properly.

It's almost as though you could have XML-RPC or some other function call through which the RIAA could get the user's identity.

In fact, there are many press reports to the effect that the D.C. District Court is overwhelmed by having to process all of these subpoenas -- already in the dozens per day -- and if the court is having so much trouble just stamping and scanning and docketing, think about the compliance burden for the ISPs. Perhaps RIAA hopes that ISPs will eventually decide to create automated mechanisms, through private agreements with RIAA, in order to keep this out of the courts and lower everyone's costs. An ISP could set up a particular e-mail account. RIAA would send signed e-mail attesting that a particular user's identity was sought for the purpose of enforcing copyrights; the ISP would respond automatically, identifying the user. It could work.

This has happened in other contexts. Under the current 512(h) regime, there would seem to be a strong incentive for ISPs to negotiate private alternatives, which would be cheaper but typically even less privacy-protective than the status quo.

It is troubling to think that a single typo would now result in the automatic exposure of an Internet user's true name and contact information. Suppose the RIAA transposes two digits in the IP address. Now the ISP is likely to disclose that other user's identity instead of the identity of the person who was actually sought, and there is likely to be no review and no recourse. In fact, the user who's wrongly identified might never know (unless he or she is subsequently sued).

These errors are pretty easy to make, and the subpoena power is very strong. There are lots of ways to mitigate this harm somewhat, but those which don't involve politics mainly involve effort by ISPs. The cheapest course for the ISPs might just be to give up and not do anything to protect their users' privacy. That would make the entertainment industries' frequent claim that you aren't anonymous when you use the Internet become much closer to the truth.

Anyway, I got to do some fun coding as a result of this and learn about Python's modules for CGI scripting and MySQL access. It's surprisingly easy. Dan Moniz created a nice front-end to the database we built, and now you can search to see whether your identity has been subpoenaed.

I think it's silly that people are only searching for their KaZaA usernames and the like. The ISPs won't identify you by your KaZaA username, even if you're a KaZaA user, because the ISP doesn't know your KaZaA username or whether you're a KaZaA user. The ISP will identify you by your IP address, because that's what the ISP knows. And the ISP will identify you by your IP address whether you're a KaZaA user or not, whether you're a copyright infringer or not. The risk of misidentification is extremely great -- especially with this prelitigation subpoena process -- and all Internet users should be concerned, not just copyright infringers.

Bill Frantz has a signature file which says "Due process for all used to be the American way". I don't think he has these subpoenas in particular in mind. But you are now, right this moment, a single typographical error away from being identified, possibly without your knowledge.

United Airlines has a great feature where they let you listen to the radio communications between the plane and the air traffic controller. I don't fly on United very often because it seems expensive compared to airlines like Southwest and JetBlue, but whenever I fly United, I find this feature endlessly fascinating. You can predict what your flight is going to do, because certain actions are almost never taken without instructions from the ATC (like significant altitude changes).

(Pretty much all of my assertions about aviation below are based on my experiences listening to the radio during flights; some of them might be wrong, since I don't have any formal aviation training and am not a pilot.)

There's a whole jargon and set of conventions used in communications between pilots and the ground. For example, there are all the phrases like "climb and maintain flight level X", rules about how to address planes and how to identify yourself, ways to instruct a pilot to contact a different controller, and so on. You can pick up quite a lot of it quickly by listening to the various towers encountered on a transcontinental flight or two. And it's really fun to know when your plane is about to go up or down or turn.

At least in some parts of the world, the pilots and the controllers have a really endearing habit of saying "good day" to one another, which originally made me wonder if they were all Australian. (They're not.) They also like to call one another "sir" and "ma'am". They're very polite and very, very terse.

The main activity of pilots at cruising altitude on long flights, at least during days with substantial "chop", seems to be changing altitudes to avoid turbulence. It's not permitted to change altitudes without prior permission, so pilots have to figure out exactly what altitude they want, and then request it. If the altitude is available, the tower will usually allow the requesting pilot to take it. Different altitudes at a single location will have dramatically different amounts of "chop", and the level turbulence at a particular place will be fairly steady at a particular altitude for what is apparently a period of several hours.

Therefore, pilots are always giving each other reports, and asking for reports, about what (empirically) the flying conditions are like along various routes at various altitudes. If one pilot says an altitude is good, other pilots following behind will want to use that altitude; if a pilot says an altitude is very choppy, other pilots will want to avoid it.

When pilots are concerned about turbulence, then, they want the controller to do work for them (inquiring about and tracking the weather conditions), but they need the controller's help and don't want to be pests. They're dependent on the controller's kindness and goodwill, since the controller could simply say that permission to climb or descend to a particular flight level was denied. The controller does not have to justify his or her decisions at all. The authority of the tower is quite profound, at least if pilots are operating under flight rules in which the tower has to approve their decisions.

So a pilot has a self-interested reason to want to ask for weather reports (and associated changes in altitude or flight path) as frequently as possible, but it would really irritate the tower if every pilot did so at every opportunity. The tower just wants to get rid of planes quickly and safely, and isn't extremely interested in how much turbulence particular planes experience -- mild turbulence is unlikely to cause any harm, but merely makes passengers uncomfortable.

The pilot and the tower have a mutual interest in having a good working relationship, and so the pilot tries to be friendly to the tower by controlling the frequency of requests, and the tower tries to be friendly to the tower by researching weather conditions and granting requests whenever possible. This informal negotiation is very interesting. Imagine it were your job to approve requests, and it didn't cost you anything but your time to do so. But many, many people depended on your approval, and were constantly clamoring for your attention. Managing these requests would be an intricate and challenging responsibility -- given that some of them are mutually incompatible -- and the requesters would quickly discover that it wasn't in their interest to annoy you, wouldn't they?

I wish that an anthropologist would do a study of the culture of air traffic control communications. It's a totally oral culture, it's a worldwide culture, it's a fairly old modern technical culture, and it has its own extensive jargon and is totally unfamiliar to most people. There are relatively very few participants, they deal with each other very frequently, and they might not even know one another's names. They would probably not recognize one another if they met on the street. They're partly accountable to various bureaucracies, but nobody can really tell them what to do. (Well, I guess Ronald Reagan can fire them all, which might count as telling them what to do.)

It would be interesting to read a description of the jargon and of the kinds of social practices which can occur in these terse, static-filled, utilitarian bursts of communication. Is there a subtext? Can pilots tell when the tower is annoyed or overworked? Is there an informal quid pro quo? Do participants even realize when they are participating in an exchange of value or power? Are there rivalries and friendships? Where did all of the jargon come from, and how do participants learn it?

My desire for that particular study reminds of other things I'm curious about, outside the fascinating world of ATC. I want someone to study the role of cranks, for example, in fields which are more contested and less contested. I should write something about cranks to explain more clearly what I mean.

The AP did an article on anonymous file-sharing and quoted me:

"I'm not aware of independent testing or review to verify the claims that people are making," he said.

The article as a whole seems to suggest that anonymous file-sharing may be impossible. But I think it's perfectly possible: I would just be worried about trusting your privacy to Brand X File-Sharing Software without having a clear idea of how it tries to protect your identity and whether that method is secure against attacks you're concerned about.

One important lesson of security and privacy is that things marked "Secure" or "Private" need not be.

I'm off to Germany for the Chaos Communication Camp. I'll be back in a week.

I am in a field in Germany. This field has better Internet access than most universities.

I'll try to post some photos tomorrow.

This trip was just wonderful. Perhaps you'd like to look at my pictures.

I might re-organize these, so I encourage you not to consider these links permanent and not to bookmark them. (If I do re-organize them, I'll provide a new link, which should be more permanent.)

I also have a separate series taken at the House of the Wannsee Conference in Wannsee. Because of the serious subject matter, I want to separate these from my other photos and will post them on a different date and with their own page.

I'm back now, and somewhat jetlagged, and extremely happy to have taken the trip.

I got spam using the word "ichneumon". Of course, I had only ever seen that word one place before:

For he killed the Ichneumon rat very pernicious by land.

I wish spammers were quoting Christopher Smart, but it looks like they're just using word lists to try to trip up Bayesian filters.

It occurs to me that Dar Williams figured out the problem with remote attestation and interoperability in 1997, in her album End of the Summer:

If I wrote you, if I wrote you,
You would know me
And you would not write me again.

("If I Wrote You")

"It's the end of the summer..."

I miss Christoffer.

The Fellini quotation he had on his home page reminds me of

Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht.

Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt.

Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.

(Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.4311)

Let me try:

"Death is no life-experience -- we do not 'experience' death. When we think of eternity not as an endless span of time but rather as freedom from the nature of time, then we should say that whoever lives in the present lives forever. That is: our life is endless just as our field of vision is boundless."

Since Google completed its historical Usenet archive, it naturally turns out you can read Jonas Klein's Usenet posts. From these we learn that he pursued an insane number of geeky projects, that he last posted to Usenet about three months before his death, and that he apparently wanted the Linux mascot to be an aardvark (not a penguin).

Proposing splicing a modulator into a coax cable in order to create his own local unauthorized amateur cable TV system, he notes:

besides, I highly doubt that anyone from NMH or the local cable company reads usenet.

I had a nice visit to Seattle recently, thanks to Mako and Mika (and litigation).

Mika has made available some pictures from the trip. I had never been to Seattle before.

The Elliott Bay Book Company is impressive competition for Powell's, as far as it goes (it felt like it could have been almost 1/3 the size of Powell's).

I turned 24 yesterday. Nobody risked a lawsuit from AOL Time Warner by singing "Happy Birthday" to me in public.

I contemplated doing an art project called The Method of Loci in which I would be photographed on my birthday at intersections along 1st Street, 2nd Street, 3rd Street, etc., up to 24th Street, and at each intersection holding and wearing artifacts from the corresponding year of my life. I prepared a partial list of events, artifacts, and intersections, and tried to match them up in my head. I didn't actually manage to go out and take the photographs. Numbered streets seem like a very practical way of thinking about time in physical terms -- a favorite scheme of museum curators, too, producing timelines big enough to walk on.

In my timeline, I start out near the Ferry Building, move to Massachusetts around St. Francis Place, start school around the CoffeeNet, start programming and get a little sister before Tu Lan, become a vegetarian by Linuxcare, fall in love and start attending academic summer programs by the Costco and the freeway overpass, enter high school somewhere around Rainbow Grocery, graduate high school somewhere around the Abandoned Planet, move to California and drop out of college by the EFF offices, date, develop a typing injury, and become involved in free software and copyright activism on my way home from work, and climb a mountain, date again, and visit Germany around Cala Foods, arriving home in the present day. I think it might be rather more vivid with the photographs.

While cleaning my room, I found a note which I had passed to a lawyer while we were waiting for a hearing in a court case a while ago. Before the case we were interested in came up, other matters were heard, mainly the acceptance of a large number of plea bargains. Typically the defendants pled guilty to something wholly other than what the government had accused them of doing. One person who was apparently suspected of dealing drugs pled guilty to being in the country illegally -- not a word about narcotics was spoken by any party during the whole ordeal.

I had written to the lawyer that the "Dies Irae" says "iudex ergo cum sedebit / quicquid latet, apparebit", which is to say "and when the judge is seated, / he will uncover whatever is hidden". Now, Thomas of Celano was referring to a divine judge, but it seemed to me that this was the very opposite of what regularly happens in earthly courts.

Wow, I made the Herborner Tageblatt!

Here's an attempt at a translation, with lots of help from Babelfish and Cassell's:

Herborner Tageblatt, Sept. 10, 2003, p. 14:

"Rose Schnittert accompanied Seth Schoen on the trail of his Jewish ancestors

The American had come to Herborn for one day in the course of a business trip"

HERBORN (klk) -- Only seldom does a visitor find his way to the old Jewish cemetery on the Austraße in Herborn; and if the visitor, following Jewish custom, leaves behind a stone, then memories or family ties bind him to the weathered graves, on which the chiseled Hebrew characters are barely legible after many decades.

The name "Sternberg" particularly interested the 24-year-old U.S. resident Seth Schoen when he briefly made an excursion to Herborn during a business trip to Berlin. Together with Rose Schnittert, who lives in Greifenstein today and was a former neighbor of Schoen's great-grandparents, he found four stones which bore the names of his ancestors, but he could not identify the people behind the names.

Schoen's great-uncle Leo Sternberg was, as Rose Schnittert explains, on a business trip to America well before the 1933 Nazi seizure of power, when he read Hitler's Mein Kampf and interpreted the signs in time, persuading his his family to emigrate to America before the Nazi repression against the Jews made this impossible.

The Path Leads to the Austraße

His parents had operated a kosher butcher shop at Austraße 12, "where they performed ritual slaughter, as the Muslims do today", explained Rose Schnittert, standing by the building, in which only a bricked-up entryway recalled the former storefront.

The Salomon family, likewise Jews, bought the butcher shop at that time from the Sternbergs, recalls Rose Schnittert. The Salomon family was only able to save its son, by sending him to England; all the other family members were probably murdered in a concentration camp, she says.

Schnittert's grandfather had built the house at Austraße 18 in 1914, and her grandmother Sophie Meckel was a good friend of Leo Sternberg's sister Betti, a piano teacher.

Rose Schnittert had to disappoint Seth in his hope that perhaps he could still find students of his grandmother Betti's: "I don't know any more -- they would have to be well over 70 years old now." But she showed him his great-grandparents' house and the Jewish cemetery, and also another house on the Marktplatz, right across from the City Hall: "Here was Rheika, a men's apparel store, that the wife of Leo's brother Bernard operated."

She is also named Betti and she is the last survivor of this generation: she celebrated her 90th birthday on August 15 in America. Her husband, several years deceased, was a popular cattle dealer in the Westerwald (especially with the girls); and, as the two of them left Germany late, they had to suffer some evils under the Nazi terror. As a result, Rose Schnittert told Seth, Betti never again wanted to return to her homeland.

Plum-cakes for Memory

From England, this Betti even got her parents out of Germany, but they had to leave all their valuables behind so that it would look like they were making only a short trip. And so the largest piece of luggage they had was a basket full of plums, so that they could still bake a genuine Plum-cake as they had in Herborn. From England they went on to the USA, and their paths never brought them back to Germany.

It seemed different with Seth's parents: his father Kenny, who operates a rare book store specializing in the subject of Judaica and National Socialism, came to Herborn in the middle of the 1960s on the trail of his ancestors. Leo Sternberg visited his home as early as the 1950s, and he was in Berlin for the last time about three weeks before his death in 1990. "So for the first time he had his daughters Patsy and Ann with him", remembers Rose Schnittert.

Seth knew Greifenstein from the memories of his great-aunt, who visited the castle ruins with her school class. He also knew something of the Comenius plaque at the high school: having previously bought a book about Comenius, he was happy to see it, said Rose Schnittert. Perhaps he can learn more on his next visit: "Maybe City Archivist Rüdiger Störkel knows who the Sternbergs in the cemetery are." And then Seth will learn for whom he placed a stone on the grave.

(Not all the details about my family are quite right. I'm honored to see this article, and I would be honored to meet Stadtarchivar Rüdiger Störkel.)

"Maybe you have a Trojaned version of SubSeven."

Setting the record straight: Mike Godwin (not Pam Samuelson) came up with the phrase "the coming of the anti-Feist" to refer to "database protection" legislation.

That legislation has reared its head again. I'm not sure what the best place to link to about that would be. The ALA database page hasn't been updated recently (it doesn't discuss the current database legislation), and that's where I first think to look. I don't think EFF has a more current page on this, either.

Aha, Peter Suber has something on it. First he invents Nomic, then he helps us keep track of database legislation hearings.

Peter Suber and a few other leaders of the movements he keeps track of make clear that changes in how people are thinking about creativity and intellectual activity are not just about software. It is easy to forget that if you get enmeshed in the free software community's issues. But other disciplines, activities, and communities are rediscovering some of their best traditions, and Peter Suber is helping keep track of the process.

Recently I joined Americans United for Separation of Church and State after reading a great deal about the Roy Moore case. I encourage you to join Americans United also; they really need moral and financial support right now.

I've written something about establishmentarianism and Roy Moore, but I still need to finish it.

One interesting thing the United States doesn't have today is open public debate about the merits of rival religious beliefs. There are some journals, there are some Internet mailing lists and old Usenet groups, and there are lots and lots of missionaries. The missionaries will come to your house if you ask them (or even if you don't); they'll stop you on a street corner in certain major cities, especially, in one case I can think of, if you have a beard. There are also plenty of institutions designed to promote belief among people who are already members of a particular community or tradition, and increasingly many to try to retrieve or recover "lapsed" members. (I described in my old Advogato diary attending a seminar put on one such project called Aish Ha-Torah.)

Some groups also have rallies or revivals, but these, too, seem mostly to target current or past members of these groups. Also, there's nobody at a revival meeting presenting a contrary view!

What we don't seem to have are many public debates, or newspaper op-eds, or apologetics books sold outside denominational bookstores, or anything like that. (I guess the dueling missionary web sites sometimes come close, if they deign to respond to one another, but I don't imagine a lot of people are reading these "discussions".)

I wonder if people are afraid that overt conflict over religious belief will lead to some of the horrors and atrocities it's provoked in the past -- if people will start to kill one another because they disagree about the divine. The Statistical Abstract of the United States says there were 1,385 reported hate crimes in the U.S. motivated by religion in 1997 (the last year available in the edition I have). Almost all of them (1,087) were "anti-Jewish"; 28 were "anti-Islamic" and 3 were "anti-atheism/agnosticism/etc.". I'm afraid the anti-Islamic figure must have increased substantially since 2001.

I wonder if there is a secret, unspoken, and pervasive terror that these figures would skyrocket if there were more open disagreement about religion -- if people fear that debaters would be murdered in bars or lecture halls, or that religious controversialists would be assassinated. We have made religion such a private matter, and not primarily by separating church and state. We aren't as afraid to talk about other things this way, are we?

I ordered four Noe Venable CDs (Down Easy, Boots, The World is Bound by Secret Knots, and a second copy of the latter, which turned into a birthday gift for Wolfgang early in September). I think they're a bit uneven, which is a famous limitation of the album format -- even a reason some people are rejecting albums altogether -- but in general I'm very happy to have them and feel like a proper Noe fan new. I've seen her in concert three or four times now (and she's been up for a Pacific Northwest tour recently, so Oregonians and Washingtonians may have had a chance to hear here).

My biggest disappointment is that there isn't a recording of "Juniper" with just Noe and a guitar. (There is one on her web site, and this is the first song I ever heard her perform, and she did an even better job live in San Francisco than in the Santa Barbara recording on her web site. Also, she changed "my father the thinker" to "my father the preacher", something I think I've already mentioned I consider a poor choice.) And "Is the Spirit Here?", a thrilling, stirring, piercing song, is somewhat more thrilling, stirring, and piercing in concert than on The World is Bound By Secret Knots. But many of the songs are very familiar from Noe's concerts and really quite good. On Secret Knots, are several treasures. "Simple Song", "Wings Again", and "Lilies" are a wonderful group right in a row.

and beauty is tired of playing dead
and beauty is tired of hiding her head...

On Boots, I have to recommend "Boots", "Prettiness", "Look, Luck", and "Don't Stop Crying".

I also got a limited edition Noe Venable feral cat dream pillow (#2 of 50). It's supposed to contain herbs that promote vivid dreaming, including catnip. Sure enough, I've been having vivid dreams ever since. Of course, I've been in acupuncture, too.

Riana helped me find the original German of my father's favorite part of The Trial in my copy of the German, and I transcribe it below.

"In dem Gericht täuschst du dich", sagte der Geistlich, "in den einleitenden Schriften zum Gesetz heißt es von dieser Täuschung: Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter. Zu diesem Türhüter kommt ein Mann vom Lande und bittet um Eintritt in das Gesetz. Aber der Türhüter sagt, daß er ihm jetzt den Eintritt nicht gewähren könne. Der Mann überlegt und fragt dann, ob er also später werde eintreten dürfen. 'Es ist möglich', sagt der Türhüter, 'jetzt aber nicht'. Da das Tor zum Gesetz offensteht wie immer und der Türhüter beiseite tritt, bückt sich der Mann, um durch das Tor in das Innere zu sehen. Als der Türhüter das merkt, lacht er und sagt: 'Wenn es dich so lockt, versuche es doch, trotz meinem Verbot hineinzugehen. Merke aber: Ich bin mächtig. Und ich bin nur der unterste Türhüter. Von Saal zu Saal stehen aber Türhüter, einer mächtiger als der andere. Schon den Anblick des dritten kann nicht einmal ich mehr vertragen.' Solche Schwierigkeiten hat der Mann vom Lande nicht erwartet, das Gesetz soll doch jedem und immer zugänglich sein, denkt er, aber als er jetzt den Türhüter in seinem Pelzmantel genauer ansieht, seine große Spitznase, den langen, dünnen, schwarzen, tartarischen Bart, entschließt er sich doch, lieber zu warten, bis er die Erlaubnis zum Eintritt bekommt. Der Türhüter gibt ihm einen Schemel und läßt ihn seitwärts von der Tür sich niedersetzen. Dort sitzt er Tage und Jahre. Er macht viele Versuche, eingelassen zu werden und ermüdet den Türhüter durch seine Bitten. Der Türhüter stellt öfters kleine Verhöe mit ihm an, fragt ihn nach seiner Heimat aus und nach vielem anderen, es sind aber teilnahmslose Fragen, wie sie große Herren stellen, und zum Schlusse sagt er ihm immer wieder, daß er ihn noch nicht einlassen könne. Der Mann, der sich für seine Reise mit vielem ausgerüstet hat, verwendet alles, und sei es noch so wertvoll, um den Türhüter zu bestechen. Dieser nimmt zwar alles an, aber sagt dabei: 'Ich nehme es nur an, damit du nicht glaubst, etwas versäumt zu haben.' Wärend der vielen Jahre beobachtet der Mann den Türhüter fast ununterbrochen. Er vergißt die anderen Türhüter, und dieser erste scheint ihm das einzige Hindernis für den Eintritt in das Gesetz. Er verfluht den unglücklichen Zufall in den ersten Jahren laut, später, als er alt wird, brummt er nur noch vor sich hin. Er wird kindisch, und da er in dem jahrelangen Studium des Tërhüters auch die Flöhe in seinem Pelzkragen erkannt hat, bittet er auch die Flöhe, ihm zu helfen und den Türhüter umzustimmen. Schließlich wird sein Augenlicht schwach, und er weiß nicht, ob es um ihn wirklich dunkler wird oder ob ihn nur die Augen täschen. Wohl aber erkennt er jetzt im Dunkel einen Glanz, der unverlöschlich aus der Türe des Gesetzes bricht. Nun lebt er nicht mehr lange. Vor seinem Tode sammeln sich in seinem Kopfe alle Erfahrungen der ganzen Zeit zu einer Frage, die er bisher an den Türhüter noch nicht gestellt hat. Er winkt ihm zu, da er seinen erstarrenden Körper nicht mehr aufrichten kann. Der Türhüter muß sich tief zu ihm hinunterneigen, denn die Größenunterschiede haben sich sehr zuungunsten des Mannes verändert. 'Was willst du denn jetzt noch wissen?' fragt der Türhüter, 'du bist unersättlich.' 'Alle streben doch nach dem Gesetz', sagt der Mann, 'wie kommt es, daß in den vielen Jahren niemand außer mir Einlaß verlangt hat?' Der Türhüter erkennt, daß der Mann schon am Ende ist, und um sein vergehendes Gehör noch zu erreichen, brüllt er ihn an: 'Hier konnte niemand sonst Einlaß erhalten, denn dieser Eingang war nur für dich bestimmt. Ich gehe jetzt und schließe ihn.'"

I'm astonished at the richness of this parable. "Er vergißt die anderen Türhüter, und dieser erste scheint ihm das einzige Hindernis für den Eintritt in das Gesetz." This is true (I would have put it in my collage if I had known about it, and if my collage had been created with my perspective today instead of my perspective three years ago). "He forgets about the other doorkeepers, and this first doorkeeper appears to him the only obstacle to his entrance into the Law."

A pilot reader, noting my curiosity about the air traffic control system, answered some of my questions and pointed me to a series of columns about ATC written by an actual controller. It's called Say Again.

This is really pretty cool. My reader also helped me understand the difference between a tower, a center, and an approach control facility. (He explained that airspace is dividing among controllers not only horizontally but also vertically, so that two different controller might control airspace at different altitudes above a single point on the ground. This makes me wish for a three-dimensional map of U.S. airspace showing which ATC facility is responsible for controlling flights through each point.)

An "actionable strategy" means "a strategy which can get you sued". But some business people have, amusingly enough, started to use the word "actionable" to mean "practicable". So "actionable strategies" are seen as good things in business jargon.

I found this funny when I completed a questionnaire about Microsoft's Peter Biddle, which asked me whether he was good at creating actionable strategies.

Speaking of Peter, we have just posted a position on trusted computing as well as a position on VeriSign's Site Finder service. I wrote both of these. You should be able to find the trusted computing position from the EFF home page.

Ren found this cool site on plane curves with a lot more detail on methods of generating new curves from old than I'd ever seen anywhere. Some of this is in Gardner (for example, deltoids, cycloids, evolutes, and involutes), but not nearly all. If you liked the Spirograph toy, you'll love this site!

The debate between me and Mike Wolfe of Microsoft is no more -- it's been cancelled by SDForum.

I went to SFOBUG this evening to hear Ryan Lackey speak. He talked a lot about techniques for running secure applications in other people's colocation facilities. He has different solutions for different threat models and levels of paranoia. One example is using transparent disk encryption with keys stored only in RAM. If the machine reboots at all, it won't be able to access its disks; the person who knows the keys has to supply them again over an SSH session and can investigate the cause of the reboot before doing so. (It's somewhat hard to get keys out of RAM or subvert security policies, even given physical access, without a reboot. Having keys only in volatile RAM makes it likely that a reboot will be remotely visible.)

Ryan seemed to describe this mechanism as the lowest level of security precautions he had deployed recently when colocating a server.

We had an interesting discussion about trusted computing. Ryan likes having components capable of remotely proving their identity and integrity to him, because he can colocate them far away and protect them against all sorts of attacks. That doesn't mean he's a fan of initiatives like TCG and NGSCB, however. In fact, he's a skeptic. To overstate and oversimplify my case slightly, he's also only concerned about having machines he owns prove their integrity to him. He isn't trying to deploy applications with security models in which other people's machines prove their integrity to him or his machines prove their integrity to other people; at least, he didn't mention any such applications.

That superficially suggests that (contrary to some skeptics) trusted computing systems, even including attestation, are genuinely useful to security, and that (contrary to other skeptics) if they are, having attestations useful only to the computers' owners or their agents does not destroy the utility of the attestations. Of course, this is oversimplifying. For one thing, the attestation capabilities of a deployed TCPA TPM simply do not meet Ryan's needs; he's already buying more elaborate hardware for this purpose.

One thing I hadn't realized is that EFF's new sysadmin is the president of SFOBUG. I remarked that you can work with someone for weeks and not realize what he's president of.

In "Mortal City" by Dar Williams, there is a scene in which the two characters decide to sleep in the same bed during a storm. The song says that

If there was ever any thought of what would happen in that bed tonight
There was no question now

I have always assumed that Dar intended for her listeners to have "no question" either, and for it to be obvious. But it's never been obvious to me.

If you've heard the song, do you take "no question" to mean there was no question that it would happen (since the characters' intimacy had developed rapidly), no question that it wouldn't happen (since "they were wrapped up like ornaments / waiting for another season"), or no question for the characters themselves but lingering uncertainty for us as listeners?

Since a registered Republican voter once lived here, we recently received a California Republican Party mailing urging people to vote Arnold Schwarzenegger for Governor. (The plurality sentiment in our household appeared to be that members of it "liked [Gov.-El.] Schwarzenegger better as an indestructible robot", as Zack put it.)

The mailing is very interesting and quite different from most of what we receive, since most of the people who have ever registered to vote at this address registered as Democrats, and some people belong to organizations or subscribed to magazines that sold their mailing lists to Democratic Party organizations (grumble grumble grumble).

Anyway, at the bottom of the mailing, it says

Paid for by the California Republican Party [...] Major funding by Chevron/Texaco and William Lyon Homes, Inc.

Oddly enough, the Charlotte Observer reports that

As governor, Davis has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from chemical, oil, timber and development concerns that have broken anti-pollution laws or been embroiled in disputes with environmentalists.

Among Davis' contributors are Dow Chemical, Enron, Duke Energy, Pacific Lumber, Georgia Pacific, Chevron, Tosco, Monsanto and Waste Management.

Why did ChevronTexaco donate to both campaigns? Is it just demonstrating to politicians its ability to have a "major" influence on campaign finance in future elections? Or does the Observer mean that ChevronTexaco donated to the original Davis election campaign but not to his anti-recall campaign?

I just posted an Advogato article asking programmers and technologists there to help oppose the broadcast flag.

I'm asking you to do the same.

I am apparently not the only one of my friends to have been mistaken for a lawyer.

If you could find and read old shell history files of mine, you would see many enormous strings of commands something like this: 

w
who
df
finger
w
w
ls -l
ls
df
ls -l
ls
ps x
w
w
df
ls -l
w
w
who
ls -l
finger
df
ps x

I would habitually run simple status-reporting commands whenever I had nothing else to do. As a result, I would gradually absorb information about the state of the system, getting a deeper sense of what was going on, and quickly noticing certain kinds of problems if they arose.

When I used GUIs, I would do a somewhat similar thing -- I would constantly pull down all the menus and submenus of each GUI application, and then close them. Or I would do a "Help About". You could call it a nervous habit. Some people watching me found it very confusing or distracting. I thought it was a great and altogether natural way to get to know the computer better.

I seem to remember that Neal Stephenson wrote something about computer users who like to receive status information constantly from their computers and other computer users who find it frightening or disconcerting (because they assume that something is wrong, or lack context to interpret the status information to decide whether something is wrong). I just re-read much of "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" in the hope of finding this passage, but it didn't turn up.

I argued to various people that constantly playing with your computer and trying to get it to elicit status messages or at least to disclose interface elements would give you a much deeper familiarity with it -- that it was a good way of learning even while you were doing something else, or while you were doing nothing at all. And it was a good way of getting closer to the machine. ("It is only by amusing oneself that one can learn." Cited by Kasner and Newman.)

I noticed that, although I am still very active whenever I use a computer, I rarely type "w", "who", "finger", or "ls" unless I specifically need the information provided by these commands. (I still type "df" and "ps" and "ps x".) I wondered what had changed to alter my Unix habits so significantly.

I thought of four relevant changes:

  1. The shared-access system I started to use most had more than one screenful of simultaneous users. So typing "w" or "who" or "finger" became annoying, because I would only get to see a tiny fraction of the total activity (and it was in some sense a random fraction rather than interesting fraction). "w" is much more comprehensive on a lightly-used system than on a heavily-used system. "w | less" takes far too long and is not consistent with browsing for idle curiosity.
  2. My home directory and most subdirectories grew to have more than one screenful of files. Thus, just as the output of "w" would scroll off the screen, the output of "ls -l" would scroll off the screen.
  3. I started to read weblogs and frequently-updating news sites, where I would find frequently-updating information by following my "linkers" (what many other people call a "blogroll") or by telling my browser to reload. This provides a different kind of interesting "idle" activity to compete with simply examining local machine state.
  4. I started to use screen, so that I was less often at a shell prompt and more often inside an application like mutt or lynx (because I didn't have to quit one application in order to start another application, as I did before I started using screen).

I have been very excited about the Hashcash approach to fighting spam.

I thought of some problems with it. I think most of these problems have been considered by the promoters of hashcash, and I hope to find out if they have good ways of dealing with them. (Briefly, the idea of hashcash is to try to get people to attach "postage" to their e-mail, at least when they're mailing people with whom they've never corresponded. That would make spam uneconomical. Mail without any postage could be rejected, or treated more skeptically, by the recipient. But to avoid having to create a financial payment infrastructure, the postage is not actually money, but rather "proof of work" -- easy-to-verify solutions to very difficult math problems. In order to see whether a message contains valid postage, you simply verify whether the math problem solution attached to it is correct. If it is, it serves to prove that whoever is mailing you spent an economically significant amount of computer time to solve the problem, so that it's very unlikely that the message is spam.)

So here are the problems I know of.

  1. Spammers taking over other people's PCs to force them into service generating hashcash. Spammers are already breaking into other people's PCs to force them to send spam to third parties; what would stop them from breaking into a large number of computers and making those computers turn out valid hashcash postage all day? Then the hashcash is still "proof of work", but it's not work done by the spammer -- it's work done by random people whose computers the spammer broke into!
  2. Hardware acceleration. Hashcash would be more easily calculated by FPGA arrays than by computers. Indeed, an EFF-sponsored project used a single self-contained custom machine to outcompete a network of many thousands of volunteers' computers -- including mine! -- in a brute-force cryptographic key search problem, which is very similar to the problems proposed for use as hashcash. What would stop spammers from building machines to calculate lots of hashcash more quickly and cheaply than PCs would? In effect, these would be counterfeit hashcash mints -- they would falsely appear to represent a substantial amount of computer time.
  3. Mailing lists. It's easy to make hashcash compatible with mailing lists (when people subscribe to the list, they promise to accept all messages from the list without demanding any hashcash). The trouble is that any list subscriber can still spam the list. And there are bots capable of subscribing to many mailing lists automatically and then spamming them all. How can a mailing list have a policy capable of making spamming the mailing list uneconomical? (Would a CAPTCHA test to subscribe to a mailing list help solve this problem?)
  4. Falling off the technology curve. If computers get faster, there will be an inflationary effect -- hashcash will become easier and cheaper to generate on modern machines. This is already well understood, and there's a mechanism for recalibrating by adjusting the amount of hashcash you demand (so as it gets easier to make, you can simply ask for correspondingly more of it). Isn't there a problem in that it will become increasingly difficult for non-spammers who are poor to get their messages through when richer non-spammers are willing to spend so dramatically much more computer time generating hashcash to get their own messages through? There are plenty of Nigerians who want to communicate with Americans, and we need mechanisms that won't prevent this entirely simply because a few Nigerians send 419 scam letters to many Americans. Moore's Law seems to make this complicated (but perhaps not catastrophic): it seems that you have to spend exponentially much more time generating hashcash to match what other people can do, if you can't upgrade your computer. That will become catastrophic at some point, if Moore's Law continues to hold and many people can't upgrade their computers regularly!

There's also a metaproblem common to many spam countermeasures: it's a chicken-and-egg deployment problem. MUAs won't attach hashcash until there are a lot of recipients who demand it, but recipients can't demand hashcash until a lot of senders are willing to provide it, right?

Network effects!

Many congratulations to PLoS Biology on its launch!

One thing I didn't realize about PLoS journals is that authors have to pay $1,500 to have their articles published. (The articles are peer-reviewed; it isn't vanity publishing as we understand that term.) I had assumed that the foundation grants supporting PLoS would also take care of the expenses so that authors wouldn't have to pay to publish, but that turned out not to be the case. I suppose this is because many foundations hate to pay for "operational expenses" or "recurring costs", and presumably the costs of reviewing and publishing papers are nothing if not operational and recurring.

Peter Suber thinks this is not such a big problem, for many reasons.

For its part, PLoS says that

a new business model for scientific publishing is required that treats the costs of publication as the final integral step of the funding of a research project.

This model is different from some other open-access publishing, which may not have any "funding" in the first place. It really seems that the relevant costs are coming from the formal peer review and formal editing steps.

I was just re-reading a whitepaper on DRM by Alex Alben. Alben notes that DRM is very controversial, but jokes in a footnote that at least "[a]ll the parties to the debate can agree that DRM stands for 'Digital Rights Management'".

Amusingly enough, Alben is wrong! Thousands of uses of the expansion "digital restrictions management" are attested, possibly inspired by the FSF's suggestion that we that phrase. Many copyright activists are concerned by the use of "rights" to mean "policies" (I am trying to avoid that usage in "How to Abuse Trusted Computing"). Among other things, this might be because "right" (and its equivalents in other languages) has connotations of "justice", and the enforcement of some policy might not have any connection to justice.

Of course, this usage might not have been created solely to polish the image of policies associated with documents by publishers -- since it's also true that "right" has come to mean "policy" in some parts of security engineering. But it always grates on me when somebody describes a way of transmitting or enforcing policies like copy-control policies as "rights expression", "rights management", "rights enforcement", etc. This usage seems especially common among DRM vendors and customers.

I just found it funny that the only thing Alben could find that everybody agreed on isn't actually agreed on at all.

As I mentioned when I first met him, I think Daniel Ellsberg is "a great hero of the American people".

Praveen and I went to hear Ellsberg speak in Berkeley on Friday. I got an autographed copy of Secrets and a story I think is worth mentioning in my discussion of the Wannsee Conference House.

This reminded me that I really ought to finish my Wannsee essay and post it along with my Wannsee pictures. You might recall that I took those pictures but have yet to post them on-line. But I'm thinking that maybe I should read Eichmann in Jerusalem first. It may be that essentially everything I want to say about Wannsee is already there in some form. I suppose that doesn't make my saying it superfluous.

Neil Postman has died. I'm sorry that I never met him.

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow and Ashcroft v. ACLU. I don't feel very optimistic about either of these, although I feel more optimistic about Ashcroft than about Newdow.

I hope to go to D.C. to hear the Newdow argument.

Danny wrote an interesting piece about the difference between privacy and secrecy, and how we have no conventionally private interactions on the Internet, but only secret ones.

I think this is fascinating. The discussion of "register" is particularly interesting; I know I have wished for the ability to have private and not secret on-line conversations, in Danny's sense.

My own web diary, which you are now reading, is a funny example of some of Danny's concepts. I used to write a great deal about things of mainly personal interest -- you can find entries literally about what I had for dinner. On the other hand, I got a lot of public interest when writing about free software politics (a legacy of the Advogato origins of my diary, but also because I care about this). And I got a tremendous amount of public interest when I started to write about trusted computing. Indeed, I have a copy of a message showing that there are or were people at Microsoft who counted regularly reading this diary among their job duties.

I invented Owner Override one year ago today. The original formulation was very different -- it involved dumping the contents of RAM onto removable media -- and it's interesting to compare that description with the description in "Trusted Computing: Promise and Risk".

In several senses, Owner Override remains a thought experiment. Before it can be implemented, trusted computing vendors would need to make a conscious decision explicitly not to support "DRM-like" application security models, including lock-in, adware, spyware, forced upgrade, and forced downgrade behaviors. After making this decision, trusted computing developers would have to devise a particular mechanism and user interface for an Owner Override-like function.

Since a year ago, I have not proposed a specific user interface for Owner Override.

I think the insight that "as a technological matter, the functionality which unambiguously protects an end-user can be separated from the functionality which ambiguously protects the end-user" remains true. And this is a central point. The mechanism of making this separation is really less significant at this stage than the possibility of doing so.

I have an article on Owner Override in the December Linux Journal. It also doesn't describe a mechanism beyond the requirement that the computer owner be entitled to select the PCR values provided in an attestation if there is some reason that attesting to the actual PCR values would be against the computer owner's interest.

Stefan Bechtold has posted some informed criticism of Owner Override.

Happy birthday, Owner Override!

Aaron and I went over to the Seventh Circuit for a bit of judicial tourism. The Seventh Circuit seemed very small and casual. It doesn't have its own courthouse, just the top floor of the Federal Building in Chicago. It was mostly empty, and somebody was vacuuming down the hallway.

At the Clerk's Office, they said I couldn't take pictures, by order of Chief Judge Flaum; sorry to disappoint you.

The Seventh Circuit hurt my ratio for showing ID to get into courts. The court itself didn't seem to care who I was, but the marshalls or FPS people on the ground floor of the Federal Building wanted to see ID before we could go anywhere upstairs.

I've had to show ID to get into: Northern District of California, San Francisco venue (several times). Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

I've not had to show ID to get into: Northern District of California, San Jose venue. California Court of Appeal, Sixth Appellate District. Supreme Court of California (twice). Supreme Court of the United States.

I'll be in Illinois through Sunday; I'm speaking at UIUC on Saturday, and currently staying with Biella and Micah.

I'm back in San Francisco, after visiting Chicago and Urbana, IL. I saw Aaron, Biella, Micah, Brian, Vanessa, and Barbara Simons. I got to speak at Reflections/Projections 2003 on "How to Abuse Trusted Computing" and "Working Security for a Working Environment".

The Reflections/Projections and UIUC ACM people were really nice, and I had a great experience speaking at the conference.

Champaign Willard airport is the smallest airport I've ever been to. They have three airline counters and one terminal which is a single room with five gates. They are served by three airlines, with scheduled service to three cities. There is one baggage carousel. The people are very friendly and there are no lines for anything. (It's quite the astonishing contrast to fly from there to O'Hare, which is one of the three places you can possibly fly to from CMI. O'Hare is the largest airport I've been to, unless perhaps LAX is bigger.) Previously, the smallest airport I had been to was ONT, which feels about as big and about as busy as Bradley was when my family originally moved to Massachusetts.

The most amazing thing about Willard Airport is that the ticket agent didn't ask me what my destination was. That's because each of the three airlines operating from Willard flies only to one destination.

I'll try to get some pictures up when I get the camera back.

A Microsoft manager beats up on Apple's media format (AAC) for being proprietary and not interoperable. He then proposes using Microsoft's media format (WM9) instead, because it is more popular.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a drawback for Windows users, who expect choice in music services, choice in devices, and choice in music from a wide-variety of music services to burn to a CD or put on a portable device. Lastly, if you use Apple's music store along with iTunes, you don't have the ability of using the over 40 different Windows Media-compatible portable music devices. When I'm paying for music, I want to know that I have choices today and in the future.

Interoperability isn't a popularity contest. It's about the answer to this question: What does a prospective implementer have to do in order to make the implementation work? "Read the public specification" is the right answer. Answers involving signing contracts and paying money are the wrong answer. Microsoft and Apple both have media formats with the fatal defect of an attempt to require contractual privity with implementers. (In the free world, that attempt will fail, but that's little comfort to us in the United States.) Here Fester is suggesting that Microsoft's media format is obviously preferable because more implementers have signed Microsoft's license than Apple's.

His argument is not logic. It is Vae victis!

I went to Stanford with some of my EFF colleagues to hear Guido van Rossum speak. He was apparently your architypical "I am just a nice guy who happened to create a major part of the world's IT infrastructure" sort. (Andrew Tridgell also comes to mind in this capacity.)

I had actually heard Guido speak at a Linux event sometime around 1999, before I became a Python programmer. At that time, people kept asking him why there was a string module rather than having strings be objects with methods to perform common string operations.

Of course, that eventually got changed: 

[schoen@zork(~)] python1.5
Python 1.5.2 (#0, Jul  5 2003, 11:45:08)  [GCC 3.3.1 20030626 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2
Copyright 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam
>>> dir("foo")
[]
>>>
[schoen@zork(~)] python2.3
Python 2.3.2 (#2, Oct  6 2003, 08:02:06)
[GCC 3.3.2 20030908 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> dir("foo")
['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__getslice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__str__', 'capitalize', 'center', 'count', 'decode', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdigit', 'islower', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill']

What's more, the string module (in which you find all these functions in Python 1.5) has been deprecated and is slated to be removed entirely in Python 3.0. So I guess the people at that old talk got their wish!

Anyway, when I heard Guido speak in 1999, I had little or no idea what he was talking about. All I knew was that Python was a language many of my friends were getting interested in, and this guy was responsible for it. This time around, I was an actual Python programmer. I found the substance of Guido's talk quite clear and helpful. Among other things, he spent a good deal of time explaining the motivation for and implementation of generators.

A generator is a Python function that uses the "yield" statment. (Well, technically it's the object returned by calling such a function.) It allows you, in a succint way, to write a function with a complicated internal state that returns values sequentially in such a way that they can be used by another complicated function. Without generators, you would probably need to have a complicated data structure to save state in order to switch back and forth constantly between the complicated function and the thing it's callig. With generators, Python saves that state for you. Of course, Lisps had something like this first.

I haven't thought of a non-trivial application for generators, but maybe I would if I were writing some non-trivial programs. (All the things written about generators use parsers as a sample application, but as it happens I never seem to write any parsers...)

It's fun to have the language implementer himself explain language features to you!

Leonard is going to Arkansas to work for Wesley Clark. He decided to do this pretty suddenly. I once thought of moving abruptly all the way across the country to do some work, but I decided against it (not being, apparently, so courageous as Leonard).

I wish Leonard all the best for his experience in Arkansas.

I am apparently likely to write a book. The prospect of writing a book seems very exciting to me, although I think the idea that something I write can be a real book (publisher, ISBN, LOC record, binding, in libraries and bookstores, doncha know) is still very foreign to me and may continue to be foreign until it actually happens.

I recently met with a bookstore owner and a publisher who are both really excited about what they do. (The bookstore owner is, by her own admission, particularly insane because she is selling only new books. Of course, all new book dealers' inventory is essentially the same in the sense that they all can order any book in print at the same price through the same wholesalers. And many of them display essentially the same things in their windows and shops, although there is some small room for creativity there. Used bookdealers at least have unique and widely varying inventory and ability to obtain particular titles.) It's really encouraging to me to find that people are still excited about these businesses.

Both publishing and book retailing have become extraordinarily concentrated. (Remember "media concentration"?) Despite many obstacles, and many economic challenges, people are still going into these fields (outside of the giant consolidated firms) and still finding them rewarding and meaningful.

Experience feuding over copyright policy can make us less than respectful of publishers. Entertainment publishers, of course, are our regular villains in the sense that they are constantly engaged in trying to make really bad law. And other people have criticized them on many other grounds than copyright. (Oddly enough, copyright hardly came up in the debate over the FCC's media concentration policies. People were talking about access to channels of publicity, and about editorial power, and things like that.) There are nonetheless some publishers out there who are (1) not trying to create insane copyright policy and (2) personally invested in their books and trying to get interesting and meaningful things out to the public and (3) loving it.

It would really be very interesting to be a part of that in a small way as a published author.

I was in Berkeley for Halloween and had a nice time.

Dudeney's 536-puzzle collection has an interesting problem about an analog clock. (I don't think digital clocks even existed when Dudeney wrote the problem.) Suppose you have a clock with identical hour and minute hands. Some times are unambiguous. For example, if you see one hand pointing directly to the right and one hand pointing directly up, you know it is 3:00; there is no other interpretation possible. (It can't be that the hand pointing straight up is the hour hand, because it would have to be 1/4 past the hour, whereas in that impossible interpretation it is right on the hour.) Dudeney asks what the first time after midnight when an ambiguity occurs will be -- when you can't tell what time it is by looking at the clock.

I haven't solved this yet, but I did discover precisely when all the times are at which the hour and minute hands co-incide. Of course, this happens 13 times from midnight until noon (including both midnight and noon), because the minute hand will have to cross the hour hand once each hour. The first of these times after midnight is 1 hour and 1/11th hour past midnight (around 1:05:45).

I finished Eichmann in Jerusalem on Saturday. (I lost my original copy in L.A. last week, so I had to buy a new copy to finish the book.) The Holocaust in Eichmann in Jerusalem is a lot more subtle and complex than the Holocaust I had heard of before -- for example, take the "deportations" sections, with their discussions of various countries' responses to Nazi requests. You might have thought that, roughly speaking, other European countries, when asked by Nazi Germany, largely all rounded up their Jews right away and shipped them off to concentration camps (with the exception of Denmark, right?).

But the countries actually exhibited a bewildering variety of behaviors in response to the German demands. Some complied eagerly, some dragged their feet, some (not just Denmark) resisted, and one, Arendt says, was so zealous in killing Jews that the Nazis actually intervened to get them to tone it down a little. The factors that went into these decisions were incredibly many and directly affected who lived and who died.

This is just one of the complexities Arendt raises in her account of the Eichmann trial.

What I would like to do now is finish my essay about my visit to the House of the Wannsee Conference and post it together with my pictures of the same.

Seth: I don't really know much about Wesley Clarrrrk, other than that he is a general.

Riana: You mean that you have only a general knowledge of him?

They've adopted the broadcast flag rule!

I got to see Annalee for the first time since she got back from her year at MIT. Welcome back, Annalee!

I really like William Wu's riddle site. A lot of the riddles are classics (things you might find in Gardner or Dudeney) and a lot are really straight CS problems, but the whole is full of great stuff. I enjoyed figuring out "Sink the Sub":

An enemy submarine is somewhere on the number line (consider only integers for this problem). It is moving at some rate (again, integral units per minute). You know neither its position nor its velocity.

You can launch a torpedo each minute at any integer on the number line. If the the submarine is there, you hit it and it sinks. You have all the time and torpedoes you want. You must sink this enemy sub - devise a strategy that is guaranteed to eventually hit the enemy sub.

I got to hear a Noe Venable concert at the Great American Music Hall on Tuesday (the second time I've heard her perform there). I was hoping to get dinner beforehand at Golden Era, but they were closed (perhaps for Veterans Day/Armistice Day), so I went to the Tenderloin Pakwan instead. Sad to say, nobody joined me, but I still had a nice time. Noe is remarkably talented, and I feel fortunate to have become a fan.

I'm putting in a request for a new feral cat dream pillow because we used my original one successfully to catch a real live feral kitten who was living in the EFF office. (The dream pillow contains catnip; the kitten was a fan.)

The kitten is now named Midnight and is living (happily, we hope) at a staff member's home. The pillow is in need of replacement.

A homeless veteran sold me a newspaper and pointed out that it was Veterans Day. Then he started to tell me some stories about Vietnam. His mother had apparently threatened him: "If you get killed in Vietnam, I'll kill you!" He attributed his survival to his terror of his mother's retribution.

The veteran also suggested that I call my father to tell him I was proud of him, if my father had been a Vietnam veteran. In fact, my father was a Vietnam-era antiwar activist and alternative-service CO. I am proud of him, and I will call him to tell him so.

I know some people in the Armed Forces: the several alums of my high school who went off to the United States Naval Academy each year, and Eric's brother Scott, who is an activated Army reservist. If I knew how to get in touch with any of them, I would let them know that I'm hoping for their safety.

What a great idea is Wikitravel!

I had a good time giving my trusted computing talk at the SDForum security SIG in Mountain View. I spoke right after Whit Diffie, went on for a long time, and got a variety of interesting questions (though questions fairly similar to the ones I'd gotten by e-mail after the publication of Trusted Computing: Promise and Risk).

Co-incidentally, "Give TCPA an Owner Override" is now available on-line, or in print in the December Linux Journal.

Now I know how to make a Thai curry. I used this recipe I found with a Google search. (I added basil, baby corn, chili pepper, and bamboo shoots.) I've made this curry twice, and it's good.

I never understood cooking with coconut milk before. It seems that it's not a good idea to make the coconut milk boil.

I have often heard that erasing (not storing) data is what unavoidably consumes energy. I never heard quite so picturesque an explanation of why as this one, seen on slashdot:

For example, when a computer erases something, what it does physically is ground one part of a circuit that holds a charge, in effect converting the stored energy -- and the information it represents -- into heat, Frank said. When chips perform millions or billions of erasing and other operations in a short time, the total heat becomes substantial, limiting both the performance of the chip and the number of chips that can be packed together in a small space, he said.

I am still troubled that CodeCon continues to discriminate against attendees on the basis of age. I want to know: What is CodeCon doing to try to find an age-neutral venue?

I disapprove of the routinization of identification, and I disapprove of age discrimination. I'm saddened but not surprised when corporate event producers encourage age discrimination and ID demands (they have paranoid lawyers who advise them in the service of increasing shareholder value to the exclusion of all other values). But I am surprised when world-renowned activists for anonymity and privacy continue to choose venues for their own events that exclude minors and that demand government ID.

SDForum, where I spoke Wednesday, didn't ask for ID (despite being held inside a corporation's offices!). SVLUG, where I've spoken twice before, didn't ask for ID (despite being held inside another corporation's offices). BALUG, where I've also spoken twice before, didn't ask for ID (despite being held in a restaurant where alcoholic drinks are served). DEF CON doesn't ask for ID. Computers, Freedom, and Privacy doesn't ask for ID (although a conference hotel recently made the mistake of asking CFP guests for ID to stay there). HOPE (etc.) don't ask for ID. CCC doesn't ask for ID. Several conferences on telecommunications policy I've attended recently didn't ask for ID (despite the presence at the conferences of actual civil servants who have made extremely unpopular political decisions). The student-organized conference at the University of Illinois where I spoke two weeks ago didn't ask for ID. Some of these events are smaller and lower-budget than CodeCon. All of them have somehow succeeded in finding venues accessible to the general public.

What is CodeCon doing to try to find such a venue?

I went with Ren and Laura to hear Brian Eno speak at Fort Mason on Friday. He spoke well about the Long Now and played a little of his music.

I filled out a guest comment card and now an on-line survey to let the Four Points Sheraton LAX know that I will try to use a different hotel in the future because they made me show government-issued photo ID in order to check in.

I recommend that other people also avoid this hotel for this reason.

I still feel guilty for carrying government ID at all. I really believe that this decision on my part is causing externalities that harm the public. I would like to write about that in connection with trusted computing (because the problems are closely related, from a certain perspective), but the trouble is that very few readers may have a strongly negative view of ID cards. If they don't agree that ID cards are problematic, an analogy between attestation and ID cards could be unhelpful (or even counterproductive) for describing why attestation might be problematic. It might be ignotum per ignotiora.

"How can being able to prove what's true harm me?"

A colleague in Miami says "it's a police-state down here" (in connection with the FTAA meeting).

So instead of going to Miami for the FTAA meeting, I'm going to Chicago tomorrow.

On November 21, 1993, about 1356 hours eastern standard time, a Piper PA-28-161, N3011F, collided with a free-falling parachutist while in cruise flight over the Northampton Airport, Northampton, Massachusetts. The airplane subsequently impacted terrain during an uncontrolled descent and was destroyed. The certificated private pilot and the three passengers were fatally injured, and the parachutist received serious injuries.

Jonas Klein died ten years ago today. I am writing a book, so I will finally get to use the dedication I wrote a very long time ago.

Briefly, Jonas was a gifted and curious technologist and steersman who touched the lives of many people who met him or (as I did) only spoke to him. He was also a master at spreading enthusiasms. It happens that he was the first person to explain to me how the Internet works.

Does anyone know Jonas's birthday? I would like to be able to use it in my dedication.

Wolfgang has been writting a weekly column in the California Aggie.

I used the Social Security Death Index to find that Jonas Klein's birthday was August 16, 1975. I think my dedication is finally complete -- now I just have to finish the accompanying book.

Some Talmudic scholars should open an Indian restaurant. They could call it Tandoor Achnai.

How did we know the president of the MPAA was wrong when he said the VCR would destroy the movie industry?

Because, as the saying goes, Valenti non fit iniuria.

I filed our ARDG comments, containing a brief discussion of the process of hiding watermarks from detectors without actually removing the watermarks. I allude to the fact that analog encryption (including encryption schemes that don't expand bandwidth or dynamic range) was well-developed in the past. Today it seems out of date because digital encryption is so much more efficient, but the old analog encryption techniques could find new life if many devices start looking for watermarks.

The ARDG comments should be up on EFF's web site after the Thanksgiving weekend, and also included in the ARDG report early next year.

I haven't posted here in a while -- I have some long and incomplete entries I've been working on.

There's been a lot of nice news in copyright this past week, including the second acquittal of Jon Johansen in Norway, and Verizon's victory in the D.C. Circuit.

I'm at home in San Francisco after a lot of trips to various parts of the country -- but I'll be going back on the road in January.

I felt the earthquake on Monday but escaped the blackout over the weekend. That earthquake was felt strongly in Los Angeles; it's really hard to imagine the scale of something that you could feel from Los Angeles all the way to San Francisco.

Happy new year.

I have been on vacation for a while. I had my best-ever NetHack game (killed by an Archon on the Elemental Plane of Air, with the Amulet), saw several friends, and bought a 54-volume set of the Great Books of the Western World. (This is an early edition. Britannica now sells the expanded 60-volume set for $1,195 new -- or slightly more than the cost of a whole OED.)

The Great Books series was the brainchild of Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, whose careers have been discussed extensively by Martin Gardner. (Among other things, they are the subjects of "The Strange Case of Robert Maynard Hutchins", reprinted in The Night is Large". Gardner supplements the story in "The Strange Case of Robert Maynard Hutchins" by reporting in From the Wandering Jew to William F. Buckley, Jr. that Mortimer Adler converted to Catholicism in 1999 after years of what might be called flirtation, or perhaps better intellectual struggle. He admitted that he was a theist sometime before that and, as Gardner notes, even earlier claimed that Catholicism was true but without proclaiming himself a Catholic.) Hutchins died in 1977 and Adler in 2001 (after the publication of The Night is Large).

Sometimes it seems like everybody has a reason to dislike Hutchins and Adler (or at least their projects and their ideas). I can think of at least half a dozen reasons people might have problems with them.

Gardner is unhappy with the central place Adler gave to Thomas Aquinas and with Hutchins's refusal to study contemporary science or philosophy. (Aquinas gets both volumes 19 and 20 of the Great Books of the Western World, an honor accorded only to him, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Gibbon. Galileo -- like Copernicus and Kepler -- has to share a single volume with two other authors, and Newton has to share with one other. No theological work by anyone from the Jewish or Muslim traditions is included, unless you count Spinoza, which I wouldn't. There is a brief sort-of apology in the first volume for the omission of Muslims, but none for the omission of, for example, the Talmud. Even if it took Adler until 1999, you can sort of see where he was going, as Gardner certainly did. Gardner wonders whether it could be "that behind the Hutchins-Adler rhetoric for the Great Books was an unstated motive [and] the motive, especially in Adler's mind, was not so much to introduce students to the great ideas as it was to introduce them to the great Roman Catholic ideas". This is not to suggest that the Great Books series suppresses critics of these ideas: for example, it prominently features Marx, Darwin, and Freud, occasional bogeymen of some religious conservative traditions.)

William F. Buckley, Jr., wondered why Gardner cares so much about other people's religious beliefs. Many Gardner essays, and the entire quasiautobiographical Flight of Peter Fromm (which includes some more Hutchins & Adler material) deal with Gardner's religious beliefs, other people's religious beliefs, the logical consistency of Gardner's religious beliefs, the logical consistency of other people's religious beliefs, the logical consistency of the negation of Gardner's religious beliefs, the logical consistency of the negation of other people's religious beliefs, what can be inferred from famous people's writings about their religious beliefs, and what various famous people would think of various pieces of possible evidence against their religious or other metaphysical beliefs. In fact Gardner is part of a rare group in the U.S. that actively engages in nonevangelical religious polemic. He defends this activity, among other things, in a passage in "The Strange Case of Robert Maynard Hutchins" where he quotes approvingly from G. K. Chesterton:

But there are some people, nevertheless -- and I am one of them -- who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.

The religious views of Hutchins and Adler and the question of whether those views empowered or handicapped them (and the vast numbers of people who came under their intellectual influence) turned into a major controversy. You might say that many people have seen it as "the most practical and important thing" about both men. The New York Times obituary on Adler refers slightly obliquely to the question of whether he was philosophically backward or inflexible (for sticking to the straight Aristotelian-Thomist line against modernism and postmodernism alike), and none other than William F. Buckley, Jr. (!), criticizes that same obituary for failing to mention that Adler ended his life as a Roman Catholic.

I'm grateful to Hutchins and Adler for putting together the Great Books of the Western World, and I'm extremely excited to own the set.

Vitanuova for 2003
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Contact: Seth David Schoen