Oblomovka

2002-06-30»

Previous post notwithstanding, I'm disturbed to discover that I had literal nightmares about Palladium last night. And sensible ones too (in the sense that they didn't consist of Steve Ballmer chasing me across a landscape made of giant naked librarians).

I'm still clarifying my thoughts on this, but Palladium appears to involve sacrificing liberty (the liberty to choose what runs on my computer) for some temporary security. And the more I think about it, the more I don't like it. Ryan Lackey, in more forthright terms, agrees.

In his fascinating summary of what is to be done, Ryan discusses mass public rejection of Palladium, and I currently see this as the best solution. But I'm still trying to bring together my thoughts to convey why - and I worry that many geeks don't instinctively understand the risks.

Before they were slapped into wakefulness by the wet trout of legislation, many knowledgeable people assured me that information could never be controlled, because the PC was, de facto, an open system.

Worse, there was a tacit assumption by a lot of (especially software) folk that over time, everything was an open system - that people wouldn't stand for anything else, and that if nothing else the ingenuity of the black market would guarantee our freedoms. As someone who has watched Rupert Murdoch succesfully introduce a completely closed, cryptographically secure, digital content-provision system to 40% of UK households, I know that isn't true. There's a lot of (illicit) money to be made cracking the Sky Digital box, and it hasn't been yet. Open systems are the exception, not the rule.

Palladium would install a closed environment on every usable desktop on the planet. Who entered and what exited that environment would not be controlled by the owner. Your programs would not run there, except at the behest of Microsoft. Software that did run there would be hidden from your sight by strong cryptography, so there would be no way of knowing what it was doing in the Palladium. And all the vital parts of your computer - the low-level hardware, a chunk of your RAM, a slice of your harddrive, even perhaps a sizeable amount of your networking capability - would only be accessible from within the Palladium. The Palladium is like Shakin' Stevens "Green Door". You don't know what they're doing, but they certainly are laughing a lot behind it.

Cory talks about the universal Turing machine as a unique object, that differs from the rest of our consumer electronics. Intel exec Leslie Vadasz warns of "neuter[ing] the personal computer to be nothing more than a videocassette recorder". But the hardest part of this fight will be explaining to the media and the politicians (and maybe the public, although I think they have a better grasp than the rest) what the difference is. And why putting this tiny little poisoned and closed chalice into every PC destroys what has driven so much of the innovation of the last thirty years.

2002-06-29»

You know, when people say I'm paranoid about all this surveillance legislation, I like to point them to this analysis of the RIP legislation (bottom left, near back end of cat). Now, that's paranoid. (Found on a flyer handed to Andrew Brown yonks ago).

2002-06-27»

So Oblomovka finally appeared in the Google rankings - with the cached copy containing my recent whinging. Justice!

If you do the search yourself, watch out: it's Google Dance time. That means Google will return different results depending on which set of servers you access. This happens once a month, as Google rejigs its page rankings. It's a Saturnalia for searches.

I am so shooting myself in the foot publicising this: an auction this Sunday of tinkey-toy molecular models, demonstration-size slide rules, and "portable potentiometers" from the attic of Berkeley Physics Department.

Typical Swedes: think everything can be solved with a nice sauna

A Swedish clinic says it has developed a highly effective treatment for anorexia and bulimia, eating disorders affecting many thousands of people, especially teenaged girls.

The treatment involves training patients in normal eating habits then making them sit down to rest in rooms with a temperature as high as 104 Fahrenheit.

2002-06-26»

The desperate traffic in illicit goods across America's borders continues. With Kinder Eggs.

Kinder (pronounced as in kindergarten and meaning "children" in German) can't be sold legally here because the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says the toy is a choking hazard. The Food and Drug Administration also objects, deeming the thumb-sized plastic capsule that contains the little toy an illegal, "embedded" nonfood item.

For years, Americans who returned from Kinder lands supported a small market here in the illegal eggs, and the feds were prompted to make periodic crackdowns against importers, often ethnic food shops. But in the past year or so, scofflaws have risen to a new level of Internet-fueled defiance, touching off a lucrative Kinder boom. Web sellers buy the candies -- which are the size of a hen's egg, with milk chocolate on the outside, white chocolate on the inside -- and charge from 80 cents to $2 or more per egg.

2002-06-25»

Owen Thomas' Ditherati.com just got domain-jacked. And there continues to be a pattern. I'm not sure, but I'm betting that the new whois owner:

Administrator:
Huang ming drc@vip.163.com 13018501730
Huang ming
gd
Guangzhou,gd,CN 510000

is another fake, but convincing-sounding, international address. Just like hoopla.com and smug.com. I feel like I'm in some clumsily-updated Agatha Christie novel, where a mysterious stranger is knocking off all my favourite Websites, one by one. Except the real criminal here is no stranger at all. Is there a security hole in Network Solution's system, being exploited by one group of domain thieves? Or even an exploit script doing the rounds? Hard to tell - but I wouldn't be surprised. Those incompetent, money-grubbing, secretive little fatcats at NetSol have sat in luxury so long they couldn't even secure their own disgusting little monopoly.

Update: it expired. Reminder got lost in the post. Netsol let off hook. Daaamn them!

VerisignOff - it's the only solution.

And do you know what really pisses me off? The one thing that ICANN could have done, should have done, within a week of its existence, was shut down Network Solution's (now Verisign) .com monopoly. The rest of that quango's job is, as so many people say, merely what Jon Postel did alone at his workstation for decades. But when ICANNwere first given power, for a brief moment they had the political mandate to cut NetSol down to size, and spread the registry out. And no matter what they claim, they fumbled that chance. And within a year or so, they were the absolute creature of Verisign.

There's a expiry time for top-up credits. And, it appears, an expiry time for the phones themselves. Nick found the the FAQ:

Q. Is there a minimum amount I need to Top-up?
A. The minimum amount you can Top-Up at a time is $20. As long as you add at least $20 every 90 days your account will stay "Current."
Every time you Top-Up your 90 days starts over. If you forget to Top-Up at all in 90 days, your account becomes "Past Current" and you won't be able to make or receive calls.
60 days after your account becomes "Past Current" your account will expire. But you don't want that to happen because expired accounts lose their phone numbers.

Ah well. This isn't that bad, but it's still nothing like the straightforward nature of Virgin's deal in Britain. One more catch and they're out, I suppose. I did worry that they'd get screwed over by the American telcos.

The customer support voicemail is Very Virgin as well: 1-888-322-1122, if you're in the US. This is not necessarily a good thing.

Biella, who runs the best reading group in the universe, and is the Bay Area's free software community's very own anthropologist, now has a blog. This is good news for me, because it means I can secretly discover what The Ruckus Society is without having to ask.

Evil twists that killed Internet radio. Mark Cuban, the man who cut the Yahoo!/RIAA deal that the US Library of Congress ruling was based upon, admits that it was designed to destroy competition in the Internet radio market.

The Yahoo! deal I worked on, if it resembles the deal the CARP ruling was built on, was designed so that there would be less competition, and so that small webcasters who needed to live off of a "percentage-of-revenue" to survive, couldn't.

2002-06-24»

There's something a bit awry with Google's indexing of my site. Which is to say - it ain't doing it. Despite Googlebot sniffing around, it's only indexed a few of the static pages.

Of course, some of that might be down to Oblomovka's singular lack of Google Juice, but I'm thinking maybe it's also my code. Each of the day entries also shows the subsequent seven days of entries, which a lot of the pages appear rather similar to each other. Could the bot hive mind think I'm trying to game the ranking? There's not an easy hack to fix this - I'm going to wait a week and see if anything turns up.

So it turns out that under Virgin Mobile USA, you still pay for incoming and outgoing calls - even though the FCC okayed "calling party pays" three years ago. Strike one. Next question: do prepaid minutes last forever, or do they expire after a couple of months, like every braindead US prepaid phone scheme until now?

After all the confusion during the RIP Order debate, I've written a first approximation of who can get hold of your communications data (like Web logs, e-mail addresses, etc) from your ISP. It's up on the STAND site now.

2002-06-23»

Oh, at last. Virgin Mobile's introducing a UK-style pay structure to the US mobile phone network. No contracts, 10 cents a minute after the first ten minutes. It's a bit pricey, but it does mean that I no longer have to deal directly with US cellphone providers, their insane contracts, and the most fucked-up unuserfriendly corporate customer relations I've ever encountered. Our household has been trying to cancel a phone contract with Worldcom for eight months without success. Fuckers don't even answer the phone.

I can't tell whether Virgin US still has the US airtime system of charging, where you pay for incoming calls as well as outgoing. It'd be fantastic if they junked that too.

pleasedon'tscrewthisupvirginpleasedon'tscrewthisup

The folk who brought you the The Circle (a P2P network with some intriguing properties) have just finished their first round of funding. To get the cash, they used one of their other innovations - a tweak of Bruce Schneier's Street Performer Protocol that, they say, gives better incentives to freeloaders to become contributors. They call it The Rational Street Performer Protocol.

One useful aspect about the RSSP is that even if you understood none of the above, you can still use it. Basically, the RSSP says that if you are providing a regular service (like a Web comic, or software maintenance) you should get people to pledge you money in the form:

I will donate one dollar in every $____ raised over $____ up to a maximum contribution of $____

I still don't quite understand the logic here (which never bodes too well for economic ideas that rely on "rational" consumption), but at least it's easy implementable. Also, it somehow reminds me of sponsored swims at school.

2002-06-21»

I'm still pretty enthusiastic about SpamAssassin even though I spent last night fixing bugs in its 2.20 version, and unentangling one commonhouse user who was sick to death of it. Now there's a version out that Outlook users can install onto Windows. I know that SA won't be the final solution for spam, but I hope it might have the effect of making spam better written and less cliched.

2002-06-20»

Killer asteroids and killer flu viruses, all in one day. What did I do?

2002-06-19»

Argh. One of those days where I haven't done a thing but answer mail, and it's already 2:30pm. Not even any time to check out Paco Xander Nathan's postmodernist Google competition entry (via Missing Matter), nor the lab notebooks of Linus Pauling, now scanned and online (via Robot Wisdom).

2002-06-18»

I've just sent a very STANDish mail out to the people who helped with the campaign against the RIP Standing Order that would give dozens of government departments access to traffic data without a warrant. It's all very quiet-pat-on-the-back for everybody involved.

This, however, is my personal Web site, where I'm allowed to say:

Holy fucking batshit, we won!

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett (equivalent, I suppose, to John Ashcroft in the US) actually came out and said that the government had "blundered", and was "wrong". The BBC just ran a news story (needs Real player, and will go out of date at 1230BST on Wednesday 19th June - I'll get hold of an MPG shortly) about how the majority of pressure came from e-mail and faxes from ordinary Net users.

After a hardcore Internet campaign, they withdrew the whole goddamn proposal, at a stage where it was only a week away from becoming law.

People keep on saying "unprecedented U-turn" and "unusual government honesty". I'm trying to work out how we can turn this into everyday politics.

2002-06-17»

From Peter Seeger, via Techdirt, via Bifurcated Rivets:

When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930s, he used to mail out a small mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs, On the bottom of one page appeared the following: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." W.G.

So we were talking about Gary's responses to the anti-RIP campaign on Cal's Web forums. Here's what Gary said:

Gary, 20:00 14 June 2002: Big deal! If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear. Simple. People who start big campaigns about little things like this need shooting.

---

ell, 02:43 15 June 2002: Gary: Go read George Orwells' "1984", then tell us we have nothing to fear. :P

---

Gary, 13:18 16 June 2002: Not read the book but I'm sure a work of fiction like that is hardly worth getting over-exited about. Big Brother is watching? Of course they are! They HAVE to. In this post-September 11th time, every avenue of attack needs to be considered and monitored INCLUDING those that people are getting over excited about - if we want to live in a safer country without fear of being attacked on the scale of what happened on September 11th we MUST be prepared to allow the Government to intercept all forms of communication and associated evidence - and then act on it if they see criminal activity. Like I say, if you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear.

Cal wondered if we were in a minority being worried about these issues. I said:

The particular form of this argument makes it smell like a troll, but there are people with this opinion around. I don't think they're in the majority though.

It's one of those areas where people will often exaggerate their own position when knocking off a one-liner, but don't actually reflect that attitude when they're living their day to day life.

In my experience, you get people saying this to strangers on Web forums, in taxi cabs, on TV vox pops, but if you actually engage with them on private e-mail, from the back seat, or after they've said it on camera, they quickly back down from their position to something more moderate.

The problem with a lot of politics is that most people see it as a specialised form of small talk: you state your opinion to get a reaction from your friends. It's like talking about football or religion - the more separated you are from the ability to do anything about the topic, the more extreme and opinionated you become. Helplessness breeds extremism.

I never know whether I'm being hopelessly optimistic (or deluded) when I say things like this. I've spent so much of my life - as have we all - subtly floating away from those who disagree with me. I spend a lot of my time wondering whether I'm wrong; whether I've become an extremist; whether the other side has a point. I don't see this as paralysis, I see it as critical thinking. It's one of the many reasons I like the Web - watching people change their minds, even if they change it from what I believe to another point of view. I bet, for instance, there are a lot more British people who believe in widespread gun ownership than there ever was before the Net introduced them to the real opinions of "those crazy gun whackos". Ultimately, I still think they're crazy gun whackos, but at least I've engaged with them.

I think I'll e-mail Gary and ask him what he thinks.

In case you were wondering: Dave Winer's in hospital.

2002-06-15»

I'm trying to not clog up the STAND blog with minutiae while we're still getting visitors looking for info on how to protest the the RIP bill extensions. But I had to put this link somewhere: it's the new website of the sinister Surveillance Commissioners: judges, jury and administrator for all RIP-style spying on the British public:

This website is primarily designed to be used by those who authorise and conduct covert surveillance operations and covert human intelligence sources (as informants and undercover officers are now known). It shows you how to carry out these activities in compliance with the powers granted by Parliament, and how the OSC monitors the exercise of those powers. By way of practical help we have identified some key points, some sources of advice, and some examples of good and bad practice.

I hope that the website will also be useful to members of the public who are interested in finding out about covert surveillance.

Sir Andrew Leggatt
Chief Surveillance Commissioner

Yeah, but how much are we allowed to find out?

2002-06-14»

In China, teen girls see hunks as dreamy, and route their way towards them:

Nonetheless, the craze blossomed here and in Beijing. "There was no way they could block [Taiwanese boy band "Flowers Four", and their TV show "Meteor Garden"] here. This is Shanghai," said Zhang Lulu, a 19-year-old devotee of the group.

She maintained that government bans cannot work in a society that also tolerates widespread pirating of compact discs and videos: "When girls like us have needs, there is nothing anyone can do to stop us."

So not only do I live in the future; I live in a Bruce Sterling future.

I really have to get myself a MacOS X box. The peer pressure of so many hackers moving over to fiddle with this platform is growing fiercer and stronger. And now I discover the ultimate in hacker cool - you can overclock the new iBooks in software. Change 600Mhz to 700Mhz with the click of an option button! 700 to 800Mhz! Either to 2GHz, thus busting your machine and your warranty! Oh, the illicit thrill of it!

2002-06-13»

I don't know what comet flew over Europe, but something's giving the cybberrights community there a new lease of life. At XCOM, we relaunched STAND to be more of a umbrella blog for all the different UK orgs (this the subject of my elliptical blog entry a fortnight ago). The same week, Caspar Bowden left FIPR, the main parliamentary lobbying group on tech issues - a real shame, but perhaps it'll lead to a refreshing shake-up in that organisation. And now, some of the cooler activist orgs in Europe - including the Chaos Computer Club, rivacy International and Denmark's Digital Rights) - have co-operated to form European Digital Rights, a pressure group working from Brussels.

The need for cooperation among European organizations is increasing as more regulation for the internet, privacy and interception is originating from the European Union. Especially since 11 September the pace in which civil rights threatening regulation has been passed demands unified action from civil rights defenders. Some examples of regulations and developments that have the attention of European Digital Rights are data retention requirements, telecommunications interception, the cyber-crime treaty, initiatives for rating and filtering of internet content, notice and takedown procedures of websites and fair use restrictions.

2002-06-10»

Woah. I'm still a little in shock over XCOM. If you can measure success by numbers, we did extraordinarily well - over 1000 people turned up. There were queues outside before eleven, and they had to stop people from coming in for a while in the afternoon.

I've been wanting to be a part of something like this ever since I dragged Lee Felsenstein for lunch years ago, and talked with him about putting together all the different tribes of geekdom. It was a little unsettling seeing it take off so close to my face, though.

At the end, Dave and I did one of our standard schticks we've done at previous NTK Live shows. It felt very different. Those older shows were pretty clearly meetings for fans of NTK - and this was something much much bigger. Who were these people banging on about an ASCII e-mail when there were giant BBC Microcomputer art-robot video installations machines ridden by WiFi-wielding teenagers dressed in clothes they'd made themselves out of origamid loyalty cards to talk to? Even Dave, who (with the excellent mute posse), pretty much single-handedly organised much of the show, seemed a bit dwarfed by the magnitude of what he'd done. It was all about five times bigger, and ten times weirder than I'd ever imagined it to be.

And of course the irony is that I was rushing around so much, I didn't actually see much of it. If want to know what it was like, check out the coverage by Cory and Tom Coates and Neil McIntosh. There are some photos too!

2002-06-08»

So I'm late up writing the dumb jokes that I'll use to cover up our usual poorly planned, dazzlingly executed (or vice versa) Happening, The Festival of Extreme Computing. As usual, Dave explains it all much better than I ever will, in this terrifying Guardian dump of his current mindstate:

It is forward-looking too, but focusing on innovative uses of existing technologies instead of just "buy another upgrade and your life will be better". As Orwell put it, "he who controls the past, controls the future" - clearly a big fan of the Terminator films.

Sorry about the interruption in services. I'm currently recovering from one of those nasty bacteria-laden infection things that killed off all the martians in War of the Worlds, but has so far left me with merely an ongoing fever, an inability to concentrate for more than thirty seconds, and a strong tendency to begin every conversation with "Oooh, I'm very ill, you see".

It was worth the wait though. Look! Picture of a really old TV licence!

We stumbled on this because Cory was chortling at the modern equivalent sitting on Manar's desk we're both staying at for XCOM. You need to pay a small annual tax to own a TV in the UK, a fact which most North Americans generally find terribly amusing. The tax goes to fund the BBC, which is free for all, has no advertising and charges no subscription.

Actually, this older forebear is not a licence for owning a TV, it's a licence for building one. Which makes me think of my father, who built his neighbourhood their first television, and put it in an box that used to hold oranges. And built me my first computer when I was eight, and put it a cardboard box, with a hole cut out for the keyboard, and plugged it into a ready-made television, and lifted me up onto his shoulders and carried me into a new world.

2002-06-04»

The NSA is running "loose lips" ads in military magazines and as posters in military facilities. More pictures #1, #2, and #3 (shown), and #4.

This is the first time the NSA has ever commissioned an outside ad campaign, said NSA spokeswomen Marti Mercer. Like all aspects of budget for the ultra-secret NSA, the advertising campaign's cost is classified.

Very early attempts to analyse the structure of Simmish, the language of the Sims. Not very detailed, but I appreciate learning the canonical spelling of "Dis graw is fredeshay".

A lot of birthdays coming up: Ditherati, NTK, and Netscape 4.0 are all five, osil8 is six, Zeldman was seven. And Mozilla, hopefully, will be either zero, or too many years old, depending on how you look at it.

Things that should have an RDF feed, number one.

2002-06-03»

Dorodango! The shiny ball of mud that kids (and cheating adults with electron microscopes) go crazy for!

Onion prefigures future: Meg's fall from vegetarian grace leads ineluctably to I Desperately Need Bone Marrow.

BrainHeart is the strangest magazine I read these days. It's a glossy Swedish magazine funded by one of the big Euro wireless venture capital firms. It has this crazy aspiration to be a muddy mix of Wallpaper*, Red Herring, Fast Company, Wired, and What Mobile?. All the articles are written in a eurojetsetting Scandlish intonation: perfectly grammatical with a plodding sing-song quality. "Let's assume that we would like to take a wireless tourist tour through Stockholm's 750-year-old Old Town, Gamla Stan. What would the tour look like?", begins one rip-roaring read. Every cover has a man and a women from the endlessly dull business world of Swedish telecoms, wearing these perfect clothes, perfectly photographed in perfect settings. The articles are all about building telcos "with brain and heart", but it's mostly just "wouldn't it be great if we could all be nice to one another, and guess how many Kronor I just spent on my new headset?". I can't put it down. I haven't been as simultaneously revolted and fascinated by a publication since the rise of the Mexican Death zine. Get a BrainHeart subscription for free, and share my confusion.

I've rather foolishly hacked DeadHorse (this site's PHP blogging system) to cope with multiple entries in one day. It was a bit of a struggle, frankly, but it works - although the entries within a day are no longer in reverse chronological order, which ain't the blog way. DeadHorse's design is collapsing under the strain. I'll have to refactor it, which if previous experience is to go by, means migrating it from PHP to something a bit less clunky.

update: Oh, it does work. I was just writing backwards. Excellent.

2002-06-02»

Quinn says it's funny that Metafilter should run

"since", she says, "Metafilter is the ultimate BBS tribute site".

Just a datapoint: with rebates, WiFi cards are now down to $35 in the US.

Nick Szabo, one of the more precise extropian thinkers, has sketched out a formal language for defining contracts. I'd love to hear what a lawyer (preferably a lawyer with some knowledge of computer language theory) thought of this. He also has a lighter piece on Medieval clocks and economics. - from Seth

Shades of Henry Ford: one of those "bad UI" moments.