Oblomovka

2003-01-13»

A friend of Rupert Goodwins fell and broke his leg while skiing in the Alps over Christmas. The good news: he could still reach and activate his mobile phone to call for help. The bad news: it was a Microsoft Smartphone.

The next time I looked at the phone it appeared to have turned itself off -- so I tried switching it on again. When it eventually came to life I could not get it to dial -- a closer examination revealed the legend 'Radio off' displayed very legibly on the SPV's excellent screen. No amount of menu searching let me find anything that would turn the phone's radio back on. At this point I remember making a few comments about the dubiousness of Bill Gates' parentage. I eventually managed to flag down a passing skier who let me use her Nokia phone (which switched on immediately) to call for help. Later analysis revealed that the problem arose because of the SPV's implementation of the ON/OFF button.

2003-01-11»

On Wednesday, I went to hear Lee Felsenstein speak on the Jhai PC project. Some questions that people have hurled at me recently were answered; quite a few new ones were raised. I spoke briefly to Lee Thorn, the head of Jhai, who said that the last he heard, some $6000 had been raised over paypal. He'd just received a check for $500 through the post, and was very puzzled about how people had found out about it. I somehow goofed managing to tell him. Now I feel like Peter Parker or something. I'm going to keep tracking the project. So many of my friends sent in money that I feel I have an obligation to both report on what they're doing, and keep some semblance of objectivity. I don't know whether they'll succeed or not, but they seem to be learning about something important. Twenty-five thousand dollars doesn't seem too much for an experiment like this; twenty-five dollars would seem too much if it affected the villages negatively. It's a tricky row to hoe.

I'd arranged to meet Dave Del Torto at the meeting. He's one of the main figures behind CryptoRights, a long-mooted organisation which has just collected $250,000 in funding. This will relieve a lot of people who I think got a little drained listening to Dave constantly hussle for cash at geek conventions. I spoke to him briefly about CR's plans now they have the backing. As usual, what follows are my disordered notes, which I'll shuffle up into a coherent piece for the Irish Times for next Friday. There's little editorialising here: I'm just jotting down what I thought DDT said. Don't take as gospel.

Some background: Dave was one of the first employees of PGP, worked under Chaum on anonymous digicash, organises the cypherpunk meatspace meetings here in the Bay, and is co-author of RFC3156.

DDT got first involved in crypto in the early Eighties. He was an architect doing hacking CAD at Berkeley; he was looking for a way of authoritatively signing blueprints and got suckered into the research during that exciting period in cryptography. His father is a mathematician, who had left a project when the DoD wanted him to work on securing nuclear launch codes. So DDT was familiar on both the practical uses of Deep Math, and the dangers thereof.

Cryptorights started at Financial Cryptography 1998, during the moment of the solar eclipse (so we can precisely pin this down to 1436, Thursay 26 February 1998). DDT was talking to John Gilmore and ???? about the necessity of an organisation to defend cryptographer's rights, as well as spread information about crypto to human rights organisation. "Security for Human Rights Workers and Human Rights for Security Workers", as the slogan goes.

The funding for Cryptorights came from the Alexa users vs Amazon and Alexa privacy settlement. Lawyers on both sides voted unanimously to vote Cryptorights the highest sum of quarter of a million. (So, ironically, this is another project that Brewster Kahle has funded - albeit by a class action lawsuit against his own company).

The main thrust of their work is providing authentication, security, and privacy to civil rights groups working in repressive regimes. I'd heard about DDT's work teaching PGP to legal groups in Guatemala; they also work with environmental investigators in St. Petersburg, and peace groups in the middle-east.

DDT ran through his plans for future R&D projects. They're pretty ambitious - it's partly that, I think, that led to them getting the grant money. You can see a lot of them listed at CryptoRight's research pages. DDT spoke of some others, but I'm going to have to double check on which were embargoed. There's stuff there like a wearable computer for humanitarian groups, and a global non-governmental public key infrastructure. The most practical of these, and fortunately I think the first project they're taking on, is Highfire, the Human Rights Firewall system - a little net applicance that provides secure channels and authentication systems for NGOs.

They're very aware of the dual-use of some of this tech: they have a lot of military groups looking over their work. They're going to keep it all open source. They're not anti-spooks, says DDT: they're anti-bad guys. A lot of the time, the bad guys switch from law enforcement and back again. Last year's members of the secret police are next year's narcotraffickers. There are good people, too, on both sides.

Some minor patches to Some Past And Future Cliches Regarding (GNU/) Linux, top of the hit parade in 1999.

This is what you get for turning on mail updates for the STAND protest:

2003-01-10»

Something I didn't realise until now. GtkHTML, Gnome's HTML widget, was originally a port of KTHML too. It's wandered alot since then, but that does imply that the interface itself might be compatible.I wonder if GNOME will be able to suck down Apple's improvements?

So the UK government has been proposing what they call an Entitlement Card - a universal ID card for every man, woman and child in Britain. Every government seems to propose this the moment they get into office, and ever since 1952, the voters have rejected it. It's one of those things that civil servants like to slip into the "TODO" list while the Minster isn't looking.

The usual way of stopping it is to complain that there's no mandate. The present government are getting around this by holding a "Public Consultation", where they write a 13MB PDF document (here's an HTML version we hacked up) talking about how great ID cards would be. They then solicit comments. The government is very pleased with this scheme. Lord Falconer, the government's ID card point man, keeps talking about how the majority of responses have been positive (they've had over 1500 so far).

I'm not so sure that's true. NTK subscriber Dan Blanchard emailed them to complain about the proposals, and got a nice mail back saying "Thank you for your e-mail in support of the introduction of an entitlement/identity card scheme.". Whoops.

Now I can't be sure they're miscounting here. I am pretty sure that there's a large number of people who are anti-ID cards, but haven't spoken up. So we've set up an easy front-end to their consultation process: you can just check the boxes, add your own comments, and mail the consultation email address automatically. We're counting all the messages that are against the proposal, and we'll see how they match up against the government figures.

Also, I can't help thinking that 1500 replies is pathetic compared to a good slashdotting. I think the blogosphere might be able to swing the balance around in a week or so.

Anyway, if you're British and you don't like the ID card proposal, have a look over the site and make your voice hear. We've only been going for a few hours, and we've already got around three hundred responses.

Oh, almost forgot to add: Bwahahahahaha.

So they're calling up the reservists in the UK. The Ministry of Defence is sending out notes to them on Monday, but wanted their employers to know that this might happen before that. So to get the word out, they spammed 100,000 random addresses in the UK. Even stranger, they paid a German company to do it.

Ah, the mastery of the tools of the high-tech info-war. I fear this is going to go down in history as one of those Spanish-American, Lions-Led-By-Donkeys affairs.

2003-01-09»

Cory's first novel is out. Buy it, then download it for free. It's a fun, geekazoid read. I romped through it on the Caltrain back around Codecon (if you're an NTK email subscriber, you can find a mention of Whuffie hidden in the X-Excuse header around about that time.) The next day, I shimmied up to Doctorow at the conference and insisted that I was the book's first fan. I began quizzing him on ridiculously fine-grained plot points. He seemed very touched, and answered my questions perfectly civilly even when I went on far too long and the whole thing become very tedious. "How was that?", I asked, before returning the conversation to more normal lines. Fine, he said, kind of fun. "Good. Welcome to the rest of your life."

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2003-01-07»

I for one, welcome our new Konqueror implementation. Actually, it does explain why David "Chimera" Hyatt went over to work at Apple. From a posting of his back in June:

What Gecko has going for it is correctness (and a very large range of implemented standards!), but I'd rather see someone try to do it better. A browser on OS X done right should be able to dust Gecko in terms of speed and footprint. It should be able to just smoke Gecko in startup time and page load time. The fact that this hasn't been done yet doesn't mean it can't be done.

I guess he went over to see if it could be done.