I failed to update my diary for a remarkably long time. I'm sorry about that. I've been extremely busy. Now that we've filed our broadcast flag comments with the FCC, I should finally get a chance to catch up (and post here again).
Whitfield Diffie (via Electrolite) is interesting:
What people think of as fundamental is what we're used to. The argument about Caller ID a decade ago is an example. Where did the idea come from that you have the God-given right to make an anonymous telephone call? It's an accident of the technology. Yet people were indignant about the fact that they were going to be identified.
What happens if person A is used to X, and person B is used to Y, and X and Y are compatible until a certain time, after which they're increasingly often in conflict?
I feel like this may have happened in copyright law, for example. If we just focus on a particular technology like the audio compact disc (which comes to mind because I'm wearing my NTK "corrupt disc" t-shirt as I write this), computer users are used to being able to get the raw PCM audio bits in CDDA format when they buy music, and sound recording publishers are used to being able to publish discs which the average person can't copy digitally.
But in the past five years, "being able to get the raw PCM audio bits in CDDA format" has begun to imply "the average person being able to copy discs digitally". That, in turn, means that someone's prior experience will change in a way which that person might find upsetting or consider wrong.
What's interesting is that the aspects of prior experience which people focus on are very different. I had another example come to mind in connection with the broadcast flag (to say nothing of ReplayTV). Device manufacturers, at least since Sony, are used to being able to build generally what they choose. Broadcasters are used to being able to broadcast with the assumption that certain activities are inconvenient for the average viewer. If devices become more sophisticated, someone's assumption may break down.
You can interpret the Sony case itself as just such a collision. Sony was used to being able to manufacture useful and innovative products which consumers wanted. Broadcasters and studios were used to home recording capabilities being basically nonexistent. Now what if a useful and innovative product enables home recording? The answer twenty years ago was that the studios sue, basically arguing that home recording didn't exist before and so it shouldn't exist now.
Diffie's suggestion that we believe that what we're used to is right seems to account for the strong faith we have in precedent. It's not just judges and not just lawyers who have such a faith. It's really almost everyone. Our reliance on precedent may be partly a matter of a desire not to appear to be arbitrary. So, for example, consider a parent who worries about setting a precedent about something with a child. The parent and child are both working with the assumption that the parent's responses in similar situation will follow fairly consistent rules and not be totally capricious.
You see a lot more of phrases like semper et ubique in philosophical and political writing of about a century ago. People were comfortable making generalizations then.(me, on the phone)
While I'm at it:
If you went to a former girlfriend's birthday celebration, you might be going to an ex parte.(Ren)
I've been very busy for a couple of weeks. I went to Yale, for the Revenge of the Blog conference, and visited my family in Western Massachusetts. The Revenge of the Blog is pretty well documented on-line, so I'm not sure I have much to say about it. It was my first experience of "live blogging" -- several people in the room were posting articles about the conference as it happened. Perhaps more notably, one of the panelists complained about a story posted by slashdot editor Chris DiBona, who's a friend of mine. I managed to find Chris on-line and talk to him in IRC about the story while the conference was still going on.
You can see pictures of the conference or read about it (some of those links have other links to articles about the event).
After that, I went to CPTWG in Los Angeles and heard proposals for the creation of an "Analog Working Group" or "Analog Issues Discussion Group" to "close the analog hole".
This is a pretty big deal. There's still an outstanding suggestion for EFF to create a site about that discussion, the way we did for the BPDG. I think it's clear that the new site would need to be called Cruelty to Analog. (So, where the bumpersticker about the broadcast flag will read "8/VSB is not a crime", the bumpersticker about the analog hole, should regulatory proposals arise, clearly ought to say "Help stop cruelty to analog" or "I oppose cruelty to analog".)
At the moment, the group is still just a proposal, so there may be nothing to see for the moment.
Riana was back in town for Thanksgiving, and I went to karaoke with her and Biella and Praveen at Amnesia, continuing an occasional tradition.
Gwen hosted a reading group at her place, but instead of reading anything, we watched the movie Real Genius. It's great fun.
But, maybe most significantly, I worked on the EFF broadcast flag comments for the FCC. They were filed on Friday, but haven't appeared in the docket. It seems that a few dozen organizations have filed comments -- and a few thousand consumers.
I'll write more about this on Consensus at Lawyerpoint as we read through everyone else's comments.
I played a lot of Boggle in November, and I think I've been getting better at it. It turns out that you don't need those high-tech client-server architectures to play a collaborative networked game. You just need ssh, kibitz, and good old BSD boggle. You ssh into a machine with someone, you start a kibitz session, and you run boggle; then you need a locking protocol or a way to do some kind of concurrency control to keep from typing over one another too much.
The LNX-BBC is advancing by leaps and bounds. It's really cool. We really need testers. Try it out and file bug reports.
We got some new build machines set up, new build procedures (like chroot builds), and added some new features. I think we're very close to a release, so we particularly need your testing efforts at this point.
When I last wrote, I was about to try to watch the Leonid meteor shower. (That's a good sign of just how long ago that was.) I wanted to go out with Kragen for his birthday, but I had a cold and I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to keep warm where he was going. Biella and Praveen ended up taking me to a hostel on the coast, where I was able to sleep indoors under a blanket until the shower peaked. Then we went outside for just about five minutes.
The meteors were very nice, but there were many fewer of them visible than I'd been led to expect. It was bitterly cold out (at least by my new Californian standards) and it was nice to get back indoors quickly.
Seth Finkelstein made a good point about the concept of "harmful to minors". He just asked whether a particular book fits within a newly-minted legal definition of "suitable for minors" -- something which might seem straightforward to answer until you consider how a book can have a cultural and ethical agenda.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I read a book called Harmful to Minors. One premise of that book is that a lack of sex education is much more harmful to minors than exposure to sexually explicit images could possibly be. It's interesting to read in parallel with Moral Politics, which also talks about sex ed.
For several weeks in November, I didn't eat any desserts or sodas. I kept this rule very faithfully. I think I broke it only once when I accidentally requested a ginger ale on an airplane.
My arms didn't feel better, but I lost some weight.
Write a portable ANSI C program which can be run multiple times as an unprivileged user and gives different output each time with the same input. For example:
somehost:~$ cc -o random random.c somehost:~$ ./random 0 somehost:~$ ./random 1 somehost:~$ ./random 1 somehost:~$ ./random 0
Well, you say, that's easy, I'll just read /dev/urandom, or I'll be retro and call random(3) and seed it with the current time, the way we did in the old days. But no, you have to follow these conditions:
I found two ways of doing it subject to these constraints. I should make the constraints tougher, and see if it could still be done, but that would be a spoiler for how to do it.
EFF has leased the space next door (at 452 Shotwell), because we're expanding; last night, we had a housewarming party to celebrate, and hundreds of people turned out, including some pretty well-known activists, journalists, and generally interesting people. I got to see several friends I hadn't seen in a while, and was surprised to find that I knew at least 40 of the attendees.
I also co-ordinated my first ever PGP keysigning party, with 9 participants.
I never slept at or near MIT before, and as I tried to fall asleep I was surrounded by thoughts of Jonas Klein's death. Jonas, I thought, studied here, walked around here, used this very subway station, and is dead. I got up, got on-line, and tried to ping spiffy.mit.edu, something I hadn't attempted for several years. This time, though, I discovered something distressing. I had believed -- I thought I had even been told by somebody -- that MIT permanently retired hostnames and IP addresses of students who died while attending school here, and preserved them as a memorial forever. I thought that somewhere in a DNS zone file there was a comment to admonish future generations of sysadmins:
; do not delete -- retired as a memorial
It's not true. spiffy's DNS record is gone now. What I'd thought was an intentional act of piety was merely a mistake. Nobody had gotten around to noticing that the person associated with spiffy was no longer associated with the school. But after nine years, someone seems finally to have noticed, and wiped out the DNS record entirely. Possibly spiffy's IP address has even been reassigned to some other freshman.
What memorial is left? Someone from SIPB told me five years ago that somewhere in a steam tunnel some explorer who knew Jonas has signed in, left a mark on a wall in Jonas's name. There are hundreds or thousands of tunnels beneath the MIT campus; I couldn't be more than a mile or two (and a few hundred vertical feet) away from it as I write this. But I don't think I could ever find it by myself. If you know where it is, please tell me. I want to see it.
So, I was at that ITIC conference, and thought a bit about the language people use when talking about standards -- for example, the different standards people have of what makes something an "open standard". I think I can identify something like eight different meanings of "open standard" (and, for that matter, several different meanings of "standard").
One of the points of contention at the conference was between consortia and formal standards bodies; some people from the formal standards world argued that the output of a consortium was by definition never a "standard".
There was also a panel on patent licensing, and Tim Berners-Lee was there and stood up a couple of times and confirmed my great respect for him.
I had a nice time with my family, and I got to see Annalee, who is a Knight Fellow at MIT this year; we went out on the town and ran into my high school classmate Tom.
I went downtown by myself late one evening and walked around (dierchomenos gar kai anatheôrôn ta sebasmata, I suppose). I had dinner by myself at the Boston Public Library (sitting on the steps). I also got to visit the offices of the Free Software Foundation and hang out with Bradley Kuhn and his cohorts.
Finally, I got to go to Quincy Market with my family and have lunch there. It's a great experience, reminiscent of the Emeryville Food Court (except that Quincy Market looks like a piece of American Revolutionary history and the Emeryville Food Court looks like an aircraft hangar).
There was a huge storm here, and our plane landed right in the middle of it, producing what might be the worst turbulence I've ever felt on a plane. It was really scary. The plane was shaking back and forth right up to the moment we landed, making me worry about whether we could miss the runway. But ultimately everything went well for us.
The same storm, however, caused a few blackouts during the evening, and probably cause me to lose some e-mail. It also caused the upper half of the neighbors' tree to fall into our back yard. The view from my window is much different now. And I learned from Ronnie that the storm took down both trees in her backyard, one of which is a redwood. That redwood had been standing in her yard, or what became her yard, for over a century, and this storm was enough to destroy it. That's quite a storm, and I feel sorry for Jason and Ronnie, because the redwood was one of the most wonderful things about their house.
I used to remark that in California it was even possible to have a redwood in your backyard. Perhaps it's no longer possible these days.
On my trip out to Boston, I read The Princess Bride; as Fred said, it's a lot darker than the movie. On my trip back, I borrowed and read Cory's copy of Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. The story had two defects as fiction (which are understandable in that it wasn't fiction): first, the gamblers didn't use any technology to help them -- no computers in the shoe or anything like that. Second, they quit almost as soon as frightening things began to happen to them.
If there were a movie version, as I understand there may be, I'd expect them to have computers in their shoes, to spend a long time creating the user interface, and to try at length to catch the people who are harassing and threatening them.
When I got back to California, I went to the Creative Commons launch party.
As Danny explains:
Lessig, to follow up on his triumph of getting Milton Friedman and Ursula Le Guin to join forces in Eldred, got video pledges of support from John Perry "Intellectual Property is an Oxymoron" Barlow and Jack "I 0wnz0r Y0ur C0mm0nw3al" Valenti. Together - AT LAST.
It's true. Valenti appeared on tape and gave Creative Commons his support (if perhaps with a subtext of "I'm glad you created something to satisfy those weird people who want to give their property away").
I saw literally dozens of people I knew. It was the place to be.
"We can at least say, if nothing else, that copyright law is getting trendy." (me, to Drew Clark, on Eldred v. Ashcroft)
Aaron asked: if we're supposed to give an equal amount of money to the EFF when we watch a movie, what is the EFF supposed to do when it watches a movie?
The question was not just theoretical.
EFF actually did go to watch The Two Towers, which was followed by an EFF holiday party. I enjoyed the movie, although I thought there was remarkably little material on Sauron. It might as well have been The One Tower.
The ending of the battle at Helm's Deep was kind of a cop-out; there's a cut at one point and then we hear people talking about the outcome, but we never see it.
Also, if Gandalf can defeat a balrog, why does he fight orcs hand-to-hand? For that matter, why are they not more afraid of him? (In the first movie, the orcs themselves all fled from the balrog. If -- and I know it's a bad assumption -- mightiness is transitive, or rather susceptible of well-ordering, they ought to be especially frightened of Gandalf.)
Aaron Swartz came along to the movie and our party, and I got to talk to him for a little while. Then he visited me, and was visited in turn by Leonard and Sumana, the honor of whose collective company I hadn't had for a while. I spent a fair amount of the time cleaning up, but I enjoyed the visit. (As you can see from Aaron's web site, he had an extremely busy schedule in California.)
There's a Finnish civil liberties group called EFFI (not affiliated with EFF). At the EFF housewarming, I met Ville Oksanen of EFFI. He was wearing one of the EFFI t-shirts, and he gave me a copy (it's the "Choose" shirt). I especially like their copy protection shirt; I feel like it works better in the U.S. than it does in Finland!
Elcomsoft was acquitted, and we had a party to celebrate! It wasn't quite as well attended as the party which celebrated Dmitry's return to Russia (I think it had about 30 people instead of about 100), but it was a good feeling, and Alex Katalov, about to return home himself, dropped by. Don and Tabinda organized the event, which was held at the EFF office. We posted a few historic "Free Dmitry" flyers for the occasion.
Don argues that the jury's decision to acquit -- after Judge Whyte rejected jurisdictional and constitutional arguments -- shows that ordinary Americans think the DMCA has gone too far. It's hard for me to know what the jury was thinking, but that interpretation seems especially plausible since the jury foreman said jurors were troubled at the lack of rights afforded to readers under the law.
Could it be that they believed that "reading is a right, not a feature"?
The whole affair lasted almost exactly 17 months (mid-July 2001 to mid-December 2002). I don't think we'll forget it any time soon.
Praveen and Linda and I went out for Indian food. (Getting Indian food has worked well for me in the past on major Christian holidays.) We went to the Al Hamra restaurant on 16th between Valencia and Mission. It was great, and surprisingly cheap. The restaurant advertises "Indian/Pakistani" food, and has an Arabic name, but most all of the menu is the same as that of most "Indian" restaurants I've seen. (If you want a significantly different selection, walk a block up to the Pakistani restaurant Pakwan between Valencia and Guerrero. But Pakwan, unlike Al Hamra, was closed for Christmas.)
What do humanities and sciences have in common?
They tell us that making sense out of our experiences is an intricate task -- you might say "a difficult task", but I think the point is more fundamentally about complexity than about difficulty.
They also tell us not to despair, because they allow us to imagine the possibility of making sense of our experiences.
The epigraph to Neil Gaiman's Coraline is
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.(G. K. Chesterton)
But there is a cautionary note in these fairy tales: even if the world is ruled, or our lives are ruled, by some order, the world is very large, and larger than you expected.
Atom from atom yawns as far
As moon from earth, or star from star.
(R. W. Emerson, "Fragments on Nature and Life")
There's a lot of space everywhere. I just re-read Gardner's wonderful essay "Surprise". I still say you can only do that essay justice by reading it all by yourself at midnight on a train ride across the country. (Come on, what are you waiting for? Get the book, book your ticket.) There's a lot of space everywhere.
Bob Frankston just said something which I felt had the potential to become almost as much of a philosophical classic as Jon Postel's "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send". (Observers seem to disagree about whether Postel meant that deliberately to have broad philosophical connotations, or whether that was inadvertent and uninteded.)
What Bob said was
As long as people ask for solutions instead of opportunity [we] will get what we ask for and no more.
I'm having terrible trouble with my arms again. I hope it passes. There are many possible reasons for it. It might be partly because of this horrible NewTouch keyboard.
I'm in Boston again, and I'll give an update soon. Briefly: I saw Annalee, and I saw Mother Goose's grave, and my arms hurt.
I went to see Bowling for Columbine, which looks like a fascinating documentary, but I had to leave after I started to feel ill. Since I don't watch television, I don't see quite as much violence as other people might, or at least I don't see violence very regularly, and I'm just not used to it. Also, since I don't watch television, I had never before seen video footage of United 175 striking the World Trade Center. (I've seen lots of still images, but never the video.) Moore decided to include that in his documentary, and I'm pretty sure it was the first time I'd encountered it.
When I saw it, I thought "I just watched Christoffer die", and I started to cry.
Contact: Seth David Schoen
