Oblomovka

2003-02-15»

For those of you who've seen the pictures of the Jhai PC in Laos, and read the note that said that the hardware wasn't working on the launch date, here's the full skinny, quoted from the mailout the Jhai people sent out this week:

Jhai Remote Village IT System Launch Delayed

At 4:30 a.m., Tuesday, 11 February, 2003, in Vientiane, Lao PDR, Jhai Foundation concluded here that the scheduled launch date could not be met.

The Problem

The original design was modified three weeks before launch to include a flashdisk (a data storage device that has no moving parts) at the village computer in Phon Kham. To include the flashdisk required a PCMCIA card. This was a solution developed in order to provide space for the size of the localized KDE, the Linux-based productivity suite, and related software so that the software more closely matched the hardware's ability to do the job the villagers wanted it to do. To integrate this device and this card into the system will take more time due to a variety of issues. The manufacturers are cooperating with the Jhai team on this effort, but the time required for integration is substantial.

This night the data on two hard drives needed for development were corrupted. And a Jhai PC was rendered inoperable. Although data and programs were saved on CDs, the time lost due to this accident makes it impossible to meet our deadline.

"From our team's perspective," says Jhai chairman, Lee Thorn, "the design of the Jhai PC and communication system is more than sound - it remains the best solution we know to meet the needs of the villagers in the Hin Heup district and perhaps to meet the needs of many poor rural people worldwide.

The problem is not the design.

The problem is a combination of factors - money constraints, constraints on volunteers' time, and my insistence on a deadline that turned out to be too optimistic. The responsibility for this delay is mine. I regret any inconvenience my decision has caused others. Any loss of face is my loss and should not be imposed on other members of our team.

Seeking Counsel From The Community

"We will be going to the villages today to seek their counsel on how to proceed from here. We hope to solve our problems before the rainy season begins in mid-April. This is a hope, not a prediction. However, we will not announce a launch date until more information is in hand.

"Jhai Foundation is about reconciliation and this is a reconciliation project of the Jhai Foundation. What is most important to us are our human relationships. We will remain true to our values and true to our friends here in Laos and elsewhere. As my fellow veteran, Kurt Vonnegut, once said, 'The thing is to be honorable.' We will continue to be honorable and we will continue to seek reconciliation of whole - and flawed - people with one another. The opposite of this is war and we will not go down that road. We will do this thing together. It will simply take more time."

Lee Thorn, chairman of Jhai Foundation

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.

2003-01-05»

I've just found out that Lee Felsenstein will be talking about the Jhai remote IT project at Stanford this Wednesday, 2003-01-08, 4.15pm. If you're in the area, it should be an interesting talk.

It's also Saint Joshua Norton's birthday deathday. I shall have to find a way to pay my respects at the Bill Gates Building.

2003-01-01»

It was back in February of 1998, and I'd written a throwaway line in NTK about a story I'd heard regarding John Carmack, creator of Quake.

... JOHN CARMACK wins $20,000 at Blackjack by making himself
"consistently behave like a robot" (donates it to Free
Software Foundation) ...

A few days later, I got an email. From Richard M. Stallman. He'd had my rumour forwarded to him. Would it be possible for me to put him in contact with this John Carmack, so they could confirm that he'd like to make a donation, and work out the best way of doing so?

So I found myself writing a reply to Richard Freaking Stallman, with Only Bloody John Carmack in the cc: field. It ended:

Mr Stallman, meet Mr Carmack.

Bcc:d on the same mail was almost everybody I knew in the whole world ever.

I was grinning for days. I had done practically nothing, of course - but what a great way of doing nothing: putting other people's money, opportunities and genius together and then standing well back.

Which is why Lee Felsenstein is such a personal hero to me. As the moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club, Felsenstein made it his life's work to introduce opportunity to genius, in a framework where everyone benefitted - and maybe made money too. He pushed Jobs and Woz closer together, stitched together alliances between dozens of fledgling Silicon Valley companies in the Seventies, and encouraged them all to co-operate openly, without proprietary controls. He saw his job as putting the right people together to make the world a better place.

Oh, but there's more. Felsenstein wasn't just a co-ordinator of genius: he was an engineering genius himself. He designed the Osborne-1, the first popular portable computer. He was rolling out free networked public-access terminals in the Bay Area in 1972. In 1993, he wrote a piece for Dr. Dobbs Journal, whose mere title should give you a taste of how far-thinking it was. It was called "The Commons of Information", and it ended with this call to arms:

Our task, as technologists, is to build the tools that get us through ... to the future we want. We've already done half the job by creating the personal computer such that it took on a life of its own and evaded capture. Now the task of furnishing the agora remains. Anyone up for another adventure?

I often wondered what adventure Felsenstein was up to these days. Earlier this year, I got a chance to interview him and find out. A lot of the details are in this Irish Times piece, but here's the capsule summary:

Felsenstein's friend, Lee Thorn, was a bomb loader on an aircraft carrier in 1966 and participated in the US bombing of Laos, between Thailand and Vietnam. Years later, he formed the jhai.org/">Jhai Foundation with a Laotian refugee, by means of small reparation. Last year, he approached Felstein with a challenge: could he spread the power of his revolution to the agricultural communities of Laos?

Felsenstein got to work. He's built the solution. It's a bicycle-powered, ruggedised luggable, with a localised version of Linux and constructed from cheapo commodity parts. It's got an aerial, too: it uses WiFi to connect to a central Internet hub in the market town.

Using it, villages that currently have no electricity, telephone or decent roads can monitor the prices of crops, negotiate group purchases with other villages, and make business deals without spending days away from the farm. And with email and built-in VoIP, the families will be able to make direct contact for the first time with the Laotian Diaspora - the relatives who left the war-torn zone to earn money in the capital and beyond.

It's an incredible project. The New York Times named it one of its best ideas of 2002. And Felsenstein, using his old-style Silicon Valley wiles, has brought the cost of full five village system to just $25,000.

Unfortunately, it looks like the international grants they secured to do this won't come through in time before the first Monsoon rains begin in May. So they're scouting around for this tiny amount, before the whole project gets flooded out.

Here's Lee's email plea in full. Here's his list of what the money can do:

Your donation will pay for:

• $10 20 lbs. shipping costs
• $25 Keyboard
• $50 Headset
• $75 Antenna
• $100 Battery
• $250 Bicycle Powered Generator
• $450 CPU or Mountain Top Solar Panel
• $850 Base Station
• $1,000 One RT US-Laos Trip for One Technical Consultant
• $1,500 One Complete Jhai Computer
• $2,500 One Complete Village Set-up
• $3,000 Relay Station
• $25,000 The Full 5 Village System

You can PayPal the Jhai Foundation on their jhai.org/donations.htm">donations page (mention that it's for "Remote IT").

Better still, send them ten bucks or more and then blog about it.

You see, I'm no good at this. I'm trying to give the foundation publicity, but I've already screwed up. I must have scared away 99% of the potential donators just by talking about Stallman and Carmack. I wrote the Irish Times piece too early - and I even mispelled the name of the Foundation in the print version. This entry is too long. It's in this titchy little font. Dooomed!

But you - you're good at this meme-spreading thing. Your blog has bazillions of readers. They're all rich, sensitive, and good-looking just like you. You can just link to jhai.org/donations.htm">the Jhai donation page and mention the project and why it's cool, and it will become cool, and have enough money to make it to Lhaos before the rainy season. Put in a link to the New York Times piece or my Irish Times piece for more info, if you like.

And remember, because this is charity, you don't have to worry about how popular it is. You can blog it even if it's already on Daypop! Everyone will still love you and admire your charity. Lee Felsenstein, the rabble-rousing fomenter of the digital revolution, and you, the best goddamn fomenter in the Distributed Republic of Blogistan, working together at last. Or, in other words:

Mr and Ms Blogger, meet Mr Felsenstein.

Anyone up for another adventure?