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.
[Main]
Contact: Seth David Schoen
