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?
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 equationE = 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".
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 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
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.
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 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!"
Contact: Seth David Schoen
