Oblomovka

2002-12-16»

Matt's amazing warchalking meme makes it into New York Times Idea of the Year list (I am so proud I got to be the first to rub my hands in glee). It's a great list, incidentally - as it would have to be, with "Pokemon Hegemon" as one of the headings.

2002-12-14»

One more thing I'm going to have problems explaining to my daughter: what "cc:" stands for.

Hmmm. Some buzz going about Ronald Rivest's new startup, a cryptographically secure micropayment protcol. My spider-sense is tingling about online payment systems in 2003. Oh, boy, another opportunity to look stupid in twelve month's time. Scott Loftesness is a good news-aggregating blogger on this topic and quite a few others.

2002-12-12»

So, last week's ST column was about RSI (I'm slowly crippling myself with mouse shoulder, so I'm trying to stop doing Bad Things). Gary Marshall wrote a very kind mail listing all the trick he's been doing to fend it off. I said that it'd be great if he through it up on the Web, and he did, so I'm linking to it: Gary Marshall's Guide to RSI.

Great short piece from the New Yorker wondering what Philip K. Dick would make of the Total Awareness Office. I came because the title of the piece - Too Much Information - which is fun. I blogged because of the fantastic payoff in the last paragraph. Sometimes you suspect people write whole columns just to be able to finish them on flourishes like that. Or, as in this case, you just know they did.

Small tweak to the bookmarklet below - I've stuck in an escape function call to cope with news URLs with GET parameters. The bookmarklet will still have problems with URLs that willfully stick in user information into the URL (like MSNBC), but it'll do much better with quite a few others.

Here's your Google News bookmarklet, courtesy of the amazing (and currently not quite as lazy) Rod Begbie.

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.