Oblomovka

2002-12-11»

Another (slightly trickier) URL hack. Bookmark this google news bookmark in Moz, and give it a shortcut (as in the last entry) - say "gn". Now, if you're at a news article, and you want to see what other news sources have to say about it, just replace the "http://" bit of the URL with "gn ", hit return, and Google News will spew out the cluster of news stories that are similiar to your news article. So, if you were at "http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm", a news story about Yemen, change the URL to "gn news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm" would take you to http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=cluster:news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm which is the index page for all the news stories Google knows about this topic.

This could probably do with turning into a platform-independent bookmarklet. Any volunteers?

Bookmark this link in Mozilla or Phoenix, and then go to "Bookmarks/ Manage Bookmarks", select the new bookmark, choose "Edit/Properties..." then give the damn thing the keyword "ntk". Then, whenever you type in "ntk foobar" into the location bar, you'll search NTK for foobar. Here's another one for Oblomovka.

NTK plugged a Brussels European Parliament meeting on the EU's moves to adopt software patents last month. Here's a summary of what happened there. For those who want the juicy bit (any juicy bit), here's EuroLinux's list of cases where software patents are currently blocking development and availability of free software.

They're giving the EFF ten dollars for every copy sold until the end of December. (From Doc's weblog).

2002-12-10»

The always excellent c't magazine analyses the hypotheticals of the Dutch IP-surveillance scandal:

According to anonymous sources within the Dutch intelligence community, all tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force, is insecure and is leaking information to Israel. How difficult is it to make a back-door in the Dutch Transport of Intercepted IP Traffic system?

Lloyd keeps sending me advance notice of West Coast missile launches from Vandenberg and I keep forgetting to blog them. Heads up, as it were:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 04:22:20 -0800
From: Brian Webb 
To: SeeSat-L@satobs.org
Subject: Vandenberg AFB Missile Launch
Resent-Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 07:19:42 -0500
Resent-From: SeeSat-L@satobs.org

Hi All:

Be advised that a modified Minuteman II missile will be launched from Vandenberg AFB on California's central coast several hours from now.

The vehicle is scheduled to leave northwest Vandenberg on Wednesday morning, December 11 at 00:01 PST (right after midnight), the start of a four-hour launch window. This translates to DEC 11 08:01 to 12:01 UTC.

Following launch, the vehicle will fly a ballistic trajectory and send an unarmed warhead and decoys to the central Pacific as part of a missile defense test. Several minutes later, an interceptor launched from the Marshall Islands will attempt to kill the warhead.

The Minuteman launch should be visible at least as far away as Phoenix, Arizona; Saint George, Utah; and Reno, Nevada. Look for a bright orange "star" in the direction of Vandenberg. If you have binoculars or an astronomical telescope, you might want to use it to view the launch (the view could be impressive).

If you see anything tonight, let me know.

Regards,

Brian Webb

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Viva Memory Hole

2002-12-09»

I went down to the San Jose federal courthouse today with Lisa and watched Dmitry Sklyarov give evidence in the Elcomsoft trial. I've been there before, when Dmitry was in handcuffs and a bright orange prisoner garb. Now he wears a suit, like every non-gangster Russian I've seen wear a suit, like I wear a suit: scruffily.

American courts are, naturally, straight from TV land. This separates them from British courts, which are from period drama TV land. Counsel approaches the bench. Objections are sustained. Truths are pledged. I idly noted that this Federal court has a gold-fringed American flag, which must drive nutty tax protestors even more crazy.

I'm not sure how much I can talk about the case. I suppose a great deal, but my old sub judice instincts kick in, so I'll try not to draw too many conclusions. Here's how the arguments appear to be going.

The Defence

• ... claimed Elcomsoft produced the software to expose weaknesses in e-book products. They introduced Dmitry's Defcon speech as evidence for this. Dmitry's speech is rather dry (apart from a hilarious moment at the beginning where another Defcon attendee forces him to say "Where are the nuclear vessels in Alameda?". I laughed a bit too loudly in court here.)
• ... asserted Elcomsoft deliberately kept the price of software high to reduce the damage to ebook publishers. The claim here is that $100 was enough to dissuade casual copiers of books, but allowed them to release the software into general use.
• ... said that the software in the case - the Advanced Ebook Processor, is essentially the same as the Advanced PDF password recovery program, which Adobe appears to have no complaint with.
• ... and that Elcomsoft (and Sklyarov) intended the software to be used for non-infringing uses: backup copies, blind users, fair use, etc. The backup provision is the most important here. Under Russian law, any computer user can make one backup copy - something they claim would not be possible with a standard Adobe ebook.

The Prosecution

• ...pointed out that Dmitry didn't write a program that exclusively produce copies in accordance with fair use (ie allow you to cut and paste just a few pages, output only in braille, etc.) Dmitry answered this by pointing out that there'd be no point - after a few uses, you could essentially decrypt everything.
• ...asked why, if they wanted to draw attention to the flaws in Adobe's ebook, why Dmitry hadn't released his exploit on Bugtraq. This is a fascinating attack, given that it seems to imply that it would be *better* for Elcomsoft to release flaws on Bugtraq. Given that many people believe that releasing such circumvention code on Bugtraq is a breach of the DMCA itself, this seems kind of a weird condemnation. The point wasn't examined in detail by either prosecution or defence. Dmitry said that Elcomsoft didn't want to damage ebook publishers by publically releasing the exploit.
• ...said that by reverse-engineering Adobe's ebook reader, Sklyarov had breached Adobe's download license. Dmitry pointed out that reverse-engeering for compatibility reasons was legal in Russia, so that part of the license didn't apply.

This last point lead to the biggest soundbite of Sklyarov's evidence, where the prosecution asked him "Did you care whether you broke US law when you wrote this program?". Dmitry said no, he didn't care. Prosecution, in a real TV Land moment, seized the opportunity to say "no further questions, your honour", dramatically shuffled their papers and sat down. Defence leapt up and attempted to clarify what Dmitry had said. Dmitry rather stubbornly insisted that he didn't care, and said that he was rather more concerned about whether he was legal under Russian law, which he was convinced it was.

Speaking personally, and given the "Alameda" yukfest at the beginning of the evidence, I would have taken this opportunity to cry out "In Soviet Russia, broken US laws do not care about you!". I guess this is why I'm never asked to be an expert witness.

I missed the second witness, the MD of Elcomsoft. By all accounts, he played one of the better cards of the defence, by revealing that the vast majority of Elcomsoft customers were law enforcement and in the security field.

I'll try and pop along tomorrow, although I'm now a bit late filing for my real work this week.

Quinn wanted a distributed project to synthesise all possible music, and hand out the copyrights to whoever has the screensaver running at the time. This man clearly needs a distributed project to synthesis all human thought, and good luck to him.

At Biella's house last night, somebody was looking for 37,000 signatures to get a proposition onto San Francisco's ballot. Cory wisely suggested that this was too humble: why not seek out 37,000 propositions, and then get each of the proposers to sign each others' propositions? Everyone wins! San Francisco's a creative place, after all, and everyone loves a denial-of-service attack on democracy. My suggestion at this point was to construct a distributed project to generate all possible signatures (therefore guaranteeing all future propositions would be automatically included), then, once that was achieved, a distributed project to generate all possible propositions. Perhaps we could even copyright them all, and win some cash whatever the political outcome.

After that, I fear, the suggestions became quite impracticable.

2002-12-07»

Nick Szabo has written a layman(ish) guide to smart contracts on First Monday. Which I will read, oh yes. Just after I've ploughed through Design Patterns, a cheapo copy of which turned up yesterday. It was getting too embarassing to admit I've never read it. It's a great book for explaining to you what you already knew at some level - and I mean that as a compliment. There's stuff that these patterns solve that I consistently get wrong, fix, and relearn, only to forget again the next time. Hopefully having a vocabulary will staple this into my head.

2002-12-05»

David Docherty, a man who, when he wasn't bemoaning the immoral anarchy of the Net , was hiring "viral marketeers" to spam newsgroups with fake environmental groups to plug his new novel, finally departed his job at Telewest. His title was "Head of Broadband Content", which is like being "Man In Charge Of What People Should Say On The Telephone".

In his parting shot in the Guardian, he says that we're a "cookie monster" generation, who want everything to be free. He says that the programmers behind P2P are "like Fagin in Oliver Twist - they just want to pick a pocket or two". And that's why broadband has failed, apparently.

I can't think of a single word to say, except: how did he last so long? See ya, Chicken Dance Elmo. Hope you do better in a market intended to promote fictions.

Summary: we don't know, even if some people claim to. Energy-industry sponsored researcher Mark Mills told everyone it was around 13% of the total U.S. electricity output, in stories like the famous Forbes cry "Dig more coal -- the PCs are coming". The figure was bandied around as a reason for the California blackouts - even as it become obvious that the crazy power prices were down to a faulty deregulatory market and outright manipulation by Enron. Now WSJ columnist David Wessel points to a competing Berkeley report that says its closer to 3%. And admits that the chances are we don't know. But what's important is to admit we don't know.

"When people hear a statistic that matches their assumptions about how the world is going, they tend not to question it," Mr. Koomey says. That was especially so during the euphoria-induced gullibility of the late 1990s, when WorldCom Inc.'s UUNet subsidiary started an avalanche with the catchy, but false, claim that Internet traffic was doubling every 100 days.

Old assumptions demand re-examination. Are forecasts for electricity demand proving wrong? Some issues demand debate. How much potential does conservation really have? What's the wisest way to be sure we have enough energy for the future? What should government do or not do to ensure that our children and grandchildren live better? What is best left to the market?

But no good comes from pretending we know more than we do or from treating suppositions as truths.

So Quinn and I went over to the Internet Archive and interviewed Brewster Kahle about - well, whatever he wanted to talk about. I started with a list of the current Brewster projects I knew about - the Internet Archive, his donation of a copy of the Internet Archive to the Library of Alexandria, the Internet Bookmobile, his plan to light up most of San Francisco with free WiFi, his amicus curiae in the Eldred case, the September 11th archive, the Wayback Machine... he picked the bookmobile, and we talked binding technology, how books on demand now means its a buck-a-book at quantities of one or more, the future role of librarians, the collateral damage of the 1976 copyright law, how to get kids printing Dickens instead of selling drugs, and what happens if he got run over by a bus.

I'll try and put up my notes after the Irish Times piece is finished, but if I don't, here are the key blogworthy bits:

Firstly, the Internet Archive is in San Francisco's Presidio which is a historic ex-military post that magically turned into a park in 1994. I don't yet have an easy way of describing the feel of the place, but my notes say "Like a colonial version of 'The Prisoner'" and "Americana-ville, Federalsburg". It has its own law enforcement, fire and medical services. It's very hard to estimate who lives there: my guess was all the ex-presidents, from Washington onwards. I expected to see Thomas Jefferson pass me on a golf cart.

The Internet Archive office looks like the village schoolhouse. I meant to ask Kahle how they snagged an office there, but we forgot. I forgot a lot of things; he's somewhat of a firehose. Usually it's pretty hard for an interviewee get a word in edgeways with me, but Brewster managed it.

Remember Rafe's blog entry about how 93% of pre-1946 copyrighted films are unavailable? I told Brewster and he said, well, they're doing better than the world of books. 98% of currently copyrighted books are out of print and effectively unobtainable.

Of course, there's not much he can do about the stuff imprisoned in copyright. But there's still the public domain. The Archive has plans to scan 1,000,000 public domain books by 2005. If you'd like to contribute your own, pre-Disney works, just scan 'em in page by page as TIFFs and send them to the Archive. They'll keep them for you, and for the whole of posterity.

He also wants to help libraries to start scanning in their PD collections too; make librarys' access to their works a two-way street. He quotes Michael "Project Gutenberg" Hart:

We have the technology to take the history of the world to your town, and the history of your town to the world.

It's a tragedy that children don't have access to the whole of the public domain. This is what the Bookmobile jaunt was for - to show people the value of the public domain. (The Bookmobile would drive up to schools, set up their satellite dish, let a kid pick a book, and print and bind it for them, then and there. Cost a buck a book. They paid a dollar, and got to keep a book for the rest of their life.)

He talked about his grandfather's book collection, how so many of those books are unavailable now. He wants to give the collection to his children. But he has two children. Where is he going to get another copy of these out-of-print books? His grandfathers been dead forty years: his library should have passed onto everyone.

"The history of libraries is this: they get burnt down. By governments. I'm not anti-government: I'm a librarian, not a libertarian. But that's the truth."

And lots, lots more. I keep hearing him say "we can make a different world, by building it", which sounds clumsy copied from my notes, but in context, spoken by Brewster Kahle in an old wooden house with a bunch of commodity web servers in one corner, a whiteboard with plans to scan a million books on the wall to the left, and shelf with a freshly minted Alice in Wonderland and his federally-printed submission to the Supreme Court behind me, it made me think of Patrick and Theresa Nielsen Hayden's motto:

Work like you were living in the early days of a better nation

I need to record these things on tape and upload them, don't I?

2002-12-04»

Much more detailed info than the keynote is Trevor Marshall's talk on security and antenna design and how not to leak signals in directions you don't want. Or, alternately, given that Marshall designed a parabolic feed that secured a 125Km WiFi link using standard Cisco cards, how to leak in exactly the directions you do want.) I suspect the talk is similiar to the one he gave to the SoCal Wireless Users group, which is streamed on the Linux Public Broadcasting Network if you want to learn more.

He also has some ugly-ass plots of PCMCIA antenna signal strengths (below - the two colours are different polarisations). WiFi card signals are all over the place, which I found out to my cost when I was trying to write a triangulating utility a while back.

I'm blogging Sky Dayton's keynote at 802.11 planet. There's not been much that's new, but it's a nice overview of Sky's take on the market.

Sky's "ah-ha" moment was when he was in Aspen, and he saw three APs in his hotel room. Two turned out to be wireless ISPs - both of whom starting scrapping between each other to talk to him. Reminded him of early days of Earthlink.

Survey says: 97% of travelling businessmen would alter their plans to gravitate to high-speed access (high-speed access is more important to them than wireless access)

Ubiquity in laptops - Dell will be putting WiFi in their laptops by default, new iPaq will have WiFi built in.

He sees WiFi in cellphones, cars, gameboys. How low can the power go on these things, I wonder? There must be some physical limit. Maybe we just need more sensitive APs? Sorry, mind wandering - back to Sky.

Only 3,000 commercial hotspots in the US - about a million potential locations (212 conference centers, 3032 train stations, 5352 airports, 72,720 business centers, 202,600 gas stations, 480,298 restaurants and cafes, 1,111,300 retail stores. Wow. There are more airports than train stations in the US.)

But how do you get to ubiquity?

Dayton compares it to early days of ISPs ("Nobody knew who was their customer and who was their competition"). Back then, everybody tried to do everything - owning the wires, the network, and the brands. Eventually each company concentrated in one area - end users are AOL, MSN, networks are UUNET etc, wires are the telcos. (Hmmm. Has this happened in broadband yet?)

Dayton's division in the WiFi market is: Venues (Mariot, Hilton, Borders, etc). Hot Spot Operators: "(Wayport, T-Mobile, Surf and Sip, etc). Aggregators, who take the fragmented networks and provide cohesion: Boingo, GRIC, iPass. And brands: Boingo, T-Mobile, Earthlink, Sprint, Cingular, AT&T.

Big potential, says Sky, is in Hot Spot Operators. Two aggregators max. But he would say that...

He believes that no one HSO (Hot Spot Operator) will be able to deploy more than 10% of the total footprint - because WiFi's short range, low barrier to entry, and venue fragmentation. If your brother runs a chain of coffee shops, you could set up a HSO and roll it out, and steal past any bigger HSO. That's why aggregators are necessary.

Mac version of Boingo sniffer in Q1 2003. Not much talk about *how* it aggregates with HSO.

Some nattering about Hot Spot in a Box - allows any access point becomes a commercial hot spot. Costs $500 includes hardware, will drop to $300 as they talk to major manufacturers -- any broadband end point could become a hotspot. There must be a way of turning that into a software app. What kind of cut do these Boingo resellers get?

Hardware with Boingo built-in: Nomadix, Colubris, and Vernier. Fairly minor players. Client software carried with Orinoco, D-Link, SMC, Netgear, HP laptops, Earthlink (doh), Fiberlink. Yeah, but who pays attention to the CDs in the box?

Audience seem a bit underwhelmed. You can see that WiFi is taking off: lots of low-attention-span wide-eyed MBA wolverines sniffing and snarling their business plans on the floor. They already know Sky's overview - they want to know what everyone is going to do for them, or what they can do to everyone else.

The conference is much much bigger than last year, but I think the smarts has got a bit more dilute. Ah, well - once more into the J-curve...

Now, should find Glen and feed him some Theraflu?

A friend wrote asking me if a petabyte would be an affordable amount of disk storage in five years time. Blowed if I know, but in scrabbling to answer, I did find this great projection of the next twenty years of magnetic storage. It contains this graph which is based on IBM estimates of future storage capacity and price. (which I couldn't be bothered to convert into HTML - hey, but maybe you will and sent the text to me. Updated 2004-07-11: For my birthday, Adrian Furby sent me this HTMLised. Thanks, Adrian!)

As you can see, a petabyte will still cost about $70,000 in 2008. Consolation prize: a terabyte will sell for $70. Better start saving those files now!

According to a cursory IMDB search, Jason Schultz has discovered that 93% of the movies released from 1927-1946 are unavailable (it'd be interesting to include current TV showings in this - what was that site that let you grep through US TV listings for keywords?). As an interesting aside, the IMDB has 36,386 titles for that period. The copyright office says there are 37,144 - which means that the IMDB, a largely amateur effort, has snagged 98% of the titles. All goes to show that Kevin Kelly's assertion that enthusiasts might be better at preserving film history than paid copyright holders might turn out to be true. (Off of the rc3.org)