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
- Is Apple actually going to do this? (The VNUnet article is about how Gartner thinks Apple could do something, not how Apple is going to do it.)
- How well would the TPM would for this application?
- What applications of the TPM are related to this application?
- What other hardware approaches can be used that don't require a TPM?
- What kinds of attacks are possible in order to make MacOS run where Apple doesn't want it to? How expensive are they?
- How does this relate to other efforts to force people to use (only) particular software with particular hardware?
- How does this relate to other efforts to force people to use (only) particular hardware with particular software?
- What effect will this have on emulator developers? How will the emulator developers respond?
- Do some emulator developers want to have a friendly relationship with hardware manufacturers? With proprietary software publishers? An adversarial relationship? An "incomplete antagonism"?
- What would the law in various jurisdictions have to say about various attempts to make lawful copies of MacOS run on hardware where Apple didn't want it to run? Does it matter which techniques are used?
- What do our law and culture say about technology "tying" in the absence of market power as antitrust law now understands it? Why is there such a large gap between various views of such tying (say, my view, Jamie Boyle's view, and Jon Johansen's view on the one hand, and game console manufacturers' view and many industry journalists' view on the other hand [cf. this Boing Boing article])?
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.
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