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2008-08-07

Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)

Hanging around IP lawyers quickly teaches you that no matter how complex and mind-binding you thought your model of copyright law was,  the real thing is always sixteen times more so.

Regardless of that, I continue to be interested in real human’s naive beliefs about how copyright is supposed to work. Even when they’re wrong about the letter of the law – especially when they’re wrong about the law I think these attitudes illuminate the modern problems the public wants solved with copyright; and why sometimes it is not the best tool.

One behaviour I see a lot is a general tolerance towards copying, mixed with an absolute moral fury at passing-off. The fact that both activities are seen as straightforward violations of IP law both by the general public and by the legal system I think is confusing for everybody.

Let me give an example. I have a friend who is a reasonably successful DJ. Her continuing success comes from the distribution of her mixes, which she lets be passed around online and off. She’ll regularly get gigs from people who’ve heard her tracks, and want her to perform at their event.

A few years ago, she discovered that a Spanish DJ was using her mixes to promote his own career, passing them off as his own. Naturally, my friend was furious, and railed against pirates and all those Internet scum who shamelessly copy her tracks. I pointed out that she had actually encouraged them to do that, that it seemed to be an important part of her marketing, and, anyway, there was a good chance that her entire body of work would be impossible had the artists she worked with demanded the same controls as she was now envisaging.

I think a lot of people would view my friend as either confused, or hypocritical, in her apparent divisions of what is right and wrong in IP. Moreover, where you stand on the IP front determines how you think she should adjust her thinking to be consistent. If you’re for minimalist IP, you’ll conceivably feel that she should continue her art, and not sweat too much the Spanish DJ. If you’re a maximalist, you’ll feel the other way: its her fine comeuppance to be mistreated in the same way as she has flouted copyright law in the past.

I think, actually, that her confusion comes from two very separate matters that get blurred in the idea of “intellectual property”: copying as the tapping point for revenue redistribution, and correct attribution and sourcing as a side-effect of that.

Copying is important in the process of creative remuneration, I feel, because it used to be an excellent tapping point from which to extract value and distribute it back to the creator. Copying cost money, and the only reason you’d do it would be to sell the produced copy for cash. Therefore, it was a perfect statutory location to place a money-pipe back to the artist. Matters blurred when radio broadcasts and performance rights came along, but fortunately the term “copying” could still be stretched to cover these events without anyone feeling too uncomfortable. It always took money and effort to make a copy: costs that you’d almost always only pursue for commercial gain.

In a digital world, many people don’t see the act of copying as a particularly momentous or profitable event. Copying isn’t what we do as an act of purchasing; copying is a thing we do to our valuable artifacts. People are scandalised when its suggested that you should pay for a copy copied to backup drives, or iPods; they’re amazed when vested interests demand that cached copies or transitory files should count as extra purchases. Copying is no longer a good proxy for incoming revenue; which means it is no longer a good place to extract remuneration.

I think of it a little in terms of window taxes. From 1696-1851, Britain had a tax on windows on buildings, not because windows themselves had any particular significance, but because, absent reliable income records, windows served as an excellent proxy for how rich you were. One window: lower middle class. Forty windows: stinking rich.

As time went on, the proxy began to fail. Smart rich people blocked up their windows, flashy ostentacious people built buildings with lots of windows, and windows themselves became cheaper. Rather than acting as a successful measure, it did nothing but warp the revenue system and distort the nature of architecture.

Copyright is a similar tax, imposed for the benefit of artists, and collected at the act of copying. But it has also had another effect: by imposing a charge on copying, we also managed to limit fraudulent representation. If you wanted to claim some work as your own, you would probably have to copy it. If someone was claiming to have created your work, they probably made a copy to sell.

And so the legal management of fraudulent representation became tied up with the basket of legal concepts we now know as IP. Nowadays, copying isn’t always the core part of remunerative creative business. But accurate accreditation very much is.

I feel that the problem with the Internet isn’t that it creates so many damn copies: if it was, then we would have a nigh-infinite universal disaster, unsolvable except by closing the whole damn digital thing down. At least one societal problem we have is far more minor than that: that the opportunity and instruments for fraudulent behaviour have changed, and we need legal tools to deal with that which don’t obsess about who copied what bits and when.

I’ve often felt that if we could strengthen the pursuit of fraudulent claims in other parts of the law, then we could satisfy what many ordinary people want from IP, without pandering to pipe dreams of centrally controlling and taxing every act of copying in the digital world.

Of course, there’s also the remunerating problem, which is perhaps far harder to crack. But we mustn’t confuse the two, as IP has done for so long.

15 Comments »

2008-08-06

Wherever you go, that’s where the edge is.

A few people pointed me to Chris Brogan’s report about Nick Saber, a guy who got locked out of Google Apps. It’s a useful example in favour of keeping data on the edge, rather than locked up in Google’s datacenters.

They’re right of course, but I am nothing if not alive to irony, and the fact that I’m currently locked out of my home server (which has wedged itself after an argument with a USB drive while I’m 50 miles away) stops me crowing too hard.

As I travel back to give it a boot, I was thinking a little about what our modern Internet architecture (and its future) means for where you place your data. I’ve been assuming up until now that the parlous nature of the edge (sucky latency, sucky upstream connectivity, sucky servers that crash without attrackive rack-mounted sysadmins with gleaming skintones to reboot them for you) is one of the reasons why people have tended to store data in the cloud. But as my pal John Kim pointed out, that can easily work the other way. Google can lock you out, but so can your crummy last mile connectivity. There’s not much point having five nines of uptime for your data, if you and others have far lower rates of access from your position on the bleeding, bloody, frustrating edge.

Really, what you want on a slow, unreliable network (which for all intents and purposes the Net will be for the foreseeable future, God bless it) is for data to migrate to where it’s being most used. That’s partly what we see as our shared data moves off into the cloud. You want it there because that’s half-way between you and your other accomplices: or you at home (checking your Gmail) and you at work (checking your Gmail).

But we should all be aware of the Wisest Adage of Network Storage ever: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway”. Especially if you’re in the stationwagon with the tapes. If I can lug my data around with me, and have it always connected, then my data will naturally migrate to me. The latency and throughput on the edge sucks, but only to other people. For me, it’s zero and ethernet speed respectively.

I say this, realising that most of my data has migrated to my (encrypted, backed up) laptop, not my home server. And that I idly walked around with a 250GB drive in my jacket pocket for a week or so before I even noticed it. And that most of us carry multi-gigabyte, alway-on, networked and server-capable smartphones with us most of the day. And that if *that* crashed, I wouldn’t be swearing at Google or my USB drive — I’d just reboot my pocket.

4 Comments »

2008-08-05

owning the edge

(I’m going to be at LinuxWorld tomorrow at the Moscone, working the EFF booth and playing “spot the Don Marti“. Come and say hi!)

An important reason why the edge is so underexploited is because of the lack of accurate resource planning by telcos and other broadband providers. Planning the Internet is hard in face of little history, and poor statistics, especially when you’re a near-monopoly with no-one else to accurately ape. I still dine out a little on my trip to Martlesham Research Laboratories in 1995, when the man from British Telecom said they were intending to roll out DSL with a 28.8Kb/s upstream bandwidth. That’s right: modem speed uploading! But how were they to know?

It seems to me that the most efficient thing to do in these circumstances is to actually offer as wide a range of possibilities for all comers as possible (ADSL, sure! Fiber? Okay, but it’s going to cost you, etc), and tie the prices close to cost plus a margin. That’s of course hard to do with a telco monopoly. Costs aren’t always obvious, you’re often eating your own lunch in another sector if you do, there’s no compelling reason to provide all possibilities in all markets, and anyway you’re probably under a bunch of government requirements that wouldn’t let you do it even if you wanted to. Plus you’re trying to run a tight, nationwide, ship here. There’s no point stringing fiber to all of Gwent if the real sweet spot is DSL in Hackney.

The end result is that telcos usually end up wearing blindfolds and sticking a pin on a donkey marked “consumer bandwidth provision”. That all goes fine until suddenly everyone is using iPlayer or hitting YouTube, or uploading every day to Flickr, or expecting zero latencies playing real-time games.

That’s one of the reasons why Derek Slater and Tim Wu’s ongoing research into consumer-owned fiber is fascinating to me. If telco companies — who now appear to be the de facto ISPs for most users — aren’t willing to string up high bandwidth to the last mile, then maybe we can start stringing fiber up the other way, adding fiber “tails” to our homes to add to their resale value, or working together as communities to exploit the municipally-owned fiber out there.

As Derek says, it’s not something that would work everywhere, but it’s worth looking into an experiment. And that experiment is already starting in some places:

This may all sound rather abstract, but a trial experiment in Ottawa, Canada is trying out the consumer-owned model for a downtown neighborhood of about 400 homes. A specialized construction company is already rolling out fiber to every home, and it will recoup its investment from individual homeowners who will pay to own fiber strands outright, as well as to maintain the fiber over time. The fiber terminates at a service provider neutral facility, meaning that any ISP can pay a fee to put its networking equipment there and offer to provide users with Internet access. Notably, the project is entirely privately funded. (Although some schools and government departments are lined up to buy their own strands of fiber, just like homeowners.)

The first part of it would be to try and gauge how much something like that would cost. Unfortunately, the best people to know answers like that are the telcos, and right now either they don’t know, or they won’t say. Governments and monopolies alike would like to have a well-mannered market for planning purposes; when the market isn’t like that, it’s probably worth looking into other ways of satisfying demand — or at least probing to see whether it is there.

1 Comment »

2008-08-04

pomp; patry; gconf-watcher

Second Circuit Judge Pierre Leval once said that the best way to know you have a mind is to change it, and I have tried to live by that wisdom… There are positions I have taken in the past I no longer hold, and some that I continue to hold. I have tried to be honest with myself: if you are not genuinely honest with yourself, you can’t learn, and if you worry about what others think of you, you will be living their version of your life and not yours.

— William Patry

I didn’t know of Bill Patry before he started blogging, but once he did, I started seeing his name everywhere. Mainly on huge multi-volume collections of hardback legal tomes, titled “PATRY ON COPYRIGHT”. He’s given up blogging because people would insist on quoting his blogging opinions as though they were an official pronouncement of his new employers, Google. Also, the current state of copyright law (and he actually contributed to drafting a chunk of it when he worked for Congress in the Nineties) depressed him too much.

Fortunately, I am never depressed by copyright, and I am confident you will never confuse my pronouncements here with any of my employers, because I have a little box down there that says so. So we are stuck with each other.

Today is column day, which means I have to save my most potentious stuff for one of said employers instead of you. It also means that I have been procrastinating all over the Net. Patry’s mum told him you must learn something new every day: today I learnt that the best way to poo-poo a fusion project is to say “Feh, you’ll never fix the Bremsstrahlung” (and the best way to help is to start a fusor in your home town). I read the best defence ever of a children’s book that has gay marriage in it, and added another Hari Seldon-style modern psychohistory attempt to my list. I also learnt that other far more esteemed columnists look exactly as bad as me on column day.

But if you wanted to know that stuff, you would have Googled for it. What you want to know is this: if I’m using GNOME, and I’m futzing about with my preferences, how can I easily note them down so that I can recreate what I’ve done when I accidentally delete my home directory (again)?

That’s what you were Googling for, my friend. Run this code in the background as you merrily click on Gnome options in most programs, and it’ll spit out a set of commands that if you run will recreate your clicking. Useful for finding where the hell Gnome is hiding certain preferences, or what exactly certain programs are changing behind your back. You’ll need to install python-gtk in Ubuntu and Debian. And probably a bunch of gotchas that I have pigheadedly ignored and which you will find in the comments below from smarter, friendlier people than me.

1 Comment »

2008-08-03

disloyalty: namu amida butsu

I’m very disloyal. As soon as I start attaching my flag to some particular standard, I start trying to fault it. My hope would be that libertarianism is full of equally disloyal types, but actually there’s quite a lot of dedication to the cause.

And yet, a couple of weeks in, I do keep on having blasphemous thoughts. That’s not to say that I don’t enter any belief-space with as much gumption as I can muster. I try to approach any new idea with a respectful degree of naive enthusiasm.

I’ve been reading The Probability Broach, which is about as gung-ho a depiction of anarchocapitalism as you could imagine. It’s a fun read, very much of it’s time: full of Heinleinian gee-whiz dialog and Eighties fandom wish fulfillment. The alternate universe anarcho-capitalist America is full of people wearing SCA outfits and curing injuries with nutritional supplements.

But that’s by-the-by: what I want from reading political utopias (or dystopias) is to feel when the rings of falsehood peel out. It lets me suss out what my own beliefs about the invariants of the world are. I can buy a world where everyone wears funny kilts and monkeys can talk; but if one of the tenets of your story is that having everybody armed to the teeth makes for a polite and civil society, I’m going to have to be taken by the hand and talked-very-slowly-to until I get it. Or left for a very long time until I invent some crazy reasoning myself.

I don’t know whether this is a good procedure for a belief system or not. One always puts oneself through the Godwin time-vortex into Nazi Germany. What would you think of a German that sat in the back of Nazi party lesson going, “Okay, the uniforms I admit are kind of cool. But run me through how the Jews ruined everything one more time?”. I’m not exactly Schindler, am I? Or to spin it the other way: I’m in 17th Century Britain, and someone is telling me that universal suffrage is a good idea. Should I dump the whole crazy idealistic movement, just because I can’t seriously imagine near-universal literacy?

I don’t think opting out of idealism is a solution either. I see every political position overtly adopted as an act of idealism, because most of the time, we don’t act consistently with even our most pragmatic political stances. We don’t act with any conscious consideration at all. We talk of sharing, and save the best chocolates. We talk of communal standards, and litter when no-one is looking. We rail against the awful sweatshop standards of Nike, and then buy illegal drugs purchased through a network of intimidation and poverty.We’re irrational beasts in everyday life. Every statement of coherent political attachment is an act of hope that we’ll somehow lower our hypocrisy ratio by coming clean about what we want to believe; a battle against our own innate disloyalty to any simple set of rules.

Having said all that, I haven’t really mustered what my problems with libertarianism are yet. So, instead, here as your Sunday text, is a transcript of a playful discussion of the problem by Robert Anton Wilson:

Namu Amida Butsu

My favourite religion is actually Shinran Buddhism. I was married in a
Shinran Buddhist church thirty-five years ago. The great thing about Shinran
is that it’s an off-shoot of Amida Buddhism. Amida was the Buddha who refused
to enter Nirvana until all sentient beings could enter Nirvana with him. He
reincarnates perpetually to bring everybody to supreme enlightenment. A lot of
the teachings of Amida Buddhism is if you call on Amida Buddha once with true
faith, that’ll be enough. Even if you screw up this life entirely, in your next
life you’ll do better and in the life after that you’ll do better until
eventually you do achieve total detachment and nirvana. All you’ve got to do is
say, in Japanese, “namu amida butsu”: “In the name of Amida Buddha”. If you say
it with true faith, you will eventually be saved.

And in the 12th Century a monk named Shinran meditated on this until his heart
broke. He thought that this was just not fair to those people who can’t muster
a true faith. There are some people who are always asking questions, never
satisfied, always asking the next question, always a little bit sceptical. I’m
one of them. We just can’t manage true faith; we’re always wondering — maybe
there’s an alternative, maybes there’s another way of looking at it.

Amida, the Buddha of boundless compassion – can he possibly leave us out of it
if he intends to bring all beings to perfect bliss and enlightenment? Shinran
decided that was impossible. So shinran Buddhism is based on the teaching that
if you say “namu amida butsu” once, whether you have faith or not, it’s enough.
You’ll be saved eventually.

I think that is the most merciful, the most commonsensical, the most generous,
the most noble religion ever invented — or at least it seems that way to those
of us who are incapable of true faith in the traditional sense.

I have said “namu amida butsu” with some degree of faith, and a great deal of
scepticism on numerous occasions. I’ve never managed total faith, but I like to
say it, because Shin Ran says whether I believe it or not, it will work.

So I’d like to leave everybody with those words: “namu amida buttsu”. Say them
once, and whether you believe it or not, it will work, and all your problems
will be solved. It may take a thousand incarnations, but eventually you’ll get
there. And, hey, we’ve got lots of time!
— Robert Anton Wilson

6 Comments »

2008-08-02

Love, the Internet

We saw a biplane flying an advertising banner over San Francisco today. I asked Ada what she thought it might be saying. She thought it probably said “Write more blogs! See you later, love, the Internet”.

Sadly I think it was actually telling people to drink more beer. I do agree that the Internet would be just the sort of thing to send up biplanes with its messages. I remember when Doug Lenat was first hinting that Cyc, his damn near immortal AI project, might soon be able to parse freeform English text and learn from it. It must have been around 1991. Somebody suggested they fork it, and feed one version carefully scanned in mass media, and flush the other’s brains out with a full USENET feed. When people anthropomorphise the Internet, it’s that crazy sibling that I imagine.

That image will be merged now with my experience earlier this week. I was walking back from a dental appointment downtown when I was overtaken and jostled by a bunch of people carrying placards, dressed badly in black, and wearing masks. I was walking behind them, so it was a little hard to tell at first, but I finally worked out they were Anonymous, walking back to the BART after a protest outside one of the SF Scientology centers. The teenage Anonymouser who bumped into me was incredibly apologetic, in an overly formal, kneejerk sarcastic way, which was delightful and just how I imagined Anonymous would be in real life. “Oh, did I accidentally kick your precious toes? I do so apologise — would you like me to pay you cash money for your slight inconvenience?” Maybe scattering its biplane pronouncements with obscure quotes from bash.org.

I love how things can be Internet things: that it has a strange, distorted culture of its own, still. After all these years, it has failed to become a backgrounded, telephone kind of technology, but something that can still maintain an inner life of its own. I love how there are Internet jokes that barely work outside of the Internet, yet are delightful when they do. They seem like private jokes, widely-held.

Slightly embarrassing to write these things and then backdate them an hour. I’m sure no-one will notice. Wait — is this keyboard still on?

3 Comments »

2008-08-01

Transatlantic Splits

Having lived in two countries means constantly living in a world of extended metaphors. First of all, you struggle to understand your new country in terms of the one you have left, so you create analogies to help bridge the gap. My favourite British->American yardstick is the “Edinburgh”. This is what people living in the South East of England (ie London and beyond) use to comprehend US distances. A trip from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, about 650 miles, for instance, is unfathomably far until it can be broken down into “My goodness, that’s over one and a half trips to Edinburgh!”. That’s to say: “think of the furthest distance you can possibly imagine, and then add a half”. To Americans, who famously will travel fifty miles to find a decent burger, this is akin to meeting a culture that counts “1, 2, 3, many”.

After a while, you forget these training metaphors, and begin to live in the cultural context of the new country. You still remain with one foot in your other land. That gives you the special power to explain each country to the other. I revel, for instance, in trying to explain attitudes to guns in the two nations. I can’t quite convey the American stance in English terms here (I sense it still requires several pints and some hand-waving), but my potted description to Americans begins: “Imagine if a foreign country had a special part of its constitution devoted to the individual right to own poisonous snakes”, and then goes on to describe the inexplicability of the “National Viper Association”, the apparent nonsensicality of arguing the importance in using snakes to defend oneself against political tyrants, and the seemingly obvious dangers of cities filled with unlicensed reptiles. It’s a brief moment when you hope to show one country not what others think of it, but what it would think of itself, if it were looking from the outside.

I’m in some new land now. I’m slowly assimilating into America. I’ve been here eight years now, very nearly as long as I lived in London. From the moment I seriously considered putting syrup on pancakes that had bacon touching them, I’ve felt my natural, instinctive understanding of Britain losing its hold.


img:howzey / cc:by-nc-ndI think it’s less forgetting your roots,though, and more like having you and your country take slowly diverging paths. The contemporary landscape becomes slowly peppered with alien artifacts, like someone has gone back in time and fiddled with the past. My London doesn’t have 30 St Mary Axe in it: every time I see it, it’s like somebody clumsily photoshopped it to make the skyline for a futuristic London movie.

I left too early for “chavs”, or at least for it to be semi-socially acceptable to call people that. My only solid referent for that is the guy who randomly punched me in the head when I bumped into him on Oxford Street in 2002. Everyone agreed that he was a chav; I was bemused. At the time, it was like being told I’d been accosted by a kobold , and then being hurried out of the country before I could really find out what that was. I don’t need chav explained to me, not any more: I think what needs explaining is how society shifted to the point where they could so freely discuss an underclass with such a dismissive and yet helpless — well, glee is perhaps too strong a word, but there’s definitely a peculiarly British pleasure in the compartmentalisation and birdwatcher-like identification of its values. It’s like the class system is slowly, so slowly draining out of British society, but leaving a concentrated residue of all its worst aspects (from all sides) at the bottom of the basin. I’m not saying things have gone downhill, or uphill — they’ve just moved collectively further in a direction that I haven’t. I basically departed at the point after the 1990s were clearly about to hawk up something, but before anyone felt comfortably naming and then alienating the problem.

I wonder what is slowly becoming invisible to me about American culture; backgrounding itself as it becomes second nature or I meekly follow the standards that surround me. “Sincerity” doesn’t seem so much of a swearword any more, but I’ve been expecting that sacrilegious shift. It’s probably something to do with attitudes to children. I’ve only been a parent in America, and I can sense something discontinuous about British child-raising and how I raise Ada. I don’t know what it is, but then it’s always a sign of a profound cultural difference when there’s no word for what you can barely still see — in any dialect. My mother can see it, I know; but as much as I try to look through both eyes, I just see children and parents.

This must be what it feels like to learn a second language. I guess I’m going to find out soon: my daughter starts school soon, and she’ll be learning Spanish. Which means I’ll be learning Spanish, too, or risk being the Foolish Father Who Knows Nothing About Homework (El Papá Muy Tonto Que No Sabe Nada de la Tarea).

8 Comments »

2008-07-31

in it for the longhaul

(For those of you who complain that these status updates don’t really count as proper blog entries, here’s another piece from the Linux User & Developer backpage back catalog: Slower, Pussycat, Kill, Kill. Oh, and this week’s Irish Times column on Dan Kaminsky is briefly out of its subscription firewall)

Thanks to Struan, Richard, James (twice), and Chris, I am now obliged to blog for another month, so do blame them when I burn out horribly — also, any of you should mail me with your URL if you want linkage in the sponsor’s sidebar.

I’ve changed the “sponsorship levels” a little — getting an NTK special issue and NTK podcast are now lowered to five memberships, because an NTK issue would be pretty easy, and me and Lee secretly want to do an NTK podcast. We haven’t asked Dave though, because he no longer exists (if he ever did).

Saying what I really feel about Andrew Orlowski has been taken off the tally, because I have a feeling I have no actual control over whether I do that any more. One day it will just happen, like road rage or a stroke.

The new promised feature I’ve added is interesting, if only for historical value. As some of you may know, me and Merlin Mann somewhat abortively attempted to do a “Life Hacks” book a few years ago. Though in the end we decided to shoot said thrashing mutation in the head just before it ripped out the throat of a long-suffering O’Reilly editor (hi, Brian!), I do still have about half a book written and sitting on my hard drive. I haven’t looked at it in a couple of years, so it may have dated horribly, but for ten ORG subs, I’d be happy to dig it up and put together a mini-version. There are a few external contributors whose gave their time to it as well: I’ll check with them, and maybe put their hacks up here too. (For the best description ever of why the book was fated never to be made, listen to Merlin’s perfect summary, The Perfect Apostrophe. )

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2008-07-30

following the referers to the edge

My day job and my current obsession conveniently criss-crossed today: Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices, and one of the most perceptive commentators on the international Net writing in English, wrote a thoughtful piece on the edge, and Silicon Valley’s benevolent dictatorship. As a suddenly-outed lbrtrn, of course, I must tow the party line and say that, despite Rebecca’s concerns, capitalism really can bring freedom to everyone (in the event of capitalism failing to comply, please return within 7 days in original packaging for full refund and your ecology back).

More sceptically, I do marvel how much we currently depend on the fair-weather compliance of others to preserve our privacy and our liberty — both from corporations and from individuals.

It’s not just Google suddenly throwing up its hands and going “Alright, sinister government guy, take everyone’s data, see if we care.” If you’ve ever spent any time as a systems administrator or helping out one, you’ll (briefly) know the power those individuals wield.

If you are a sysadmin, you’ll no doubt be heartedly sick of that power. You’ve been handed huge amounts of power, and responsibility — and nobody else but you seems to care.

There’s a good reason why sysadmins and doctors share the same morbid, callous sense of humour — both groups find themselves dealing with more responsibility towards others than you can reasonably expect a sane human to take. (At least doctors can expect their customers to understand what they might be palming off to another person.  Sysadmins have to live with the equivalent in medical terms of somebody leaving a naked body on the doorstep at 9AM, with a Post-IT note attached to it saying “Had sex with twenty people last night and now I think the kidney isn’t working. Could you get this back to me with my IQ intact for my 10AM appointment?”)

Like doctors, sysadmin’s throwaway jokes usually hide a very serious attention to protecting the privacy and dignity of their users. What that means, among other things, is that they try very hard not to accidentally lose millions of social security numbers. But what are they doing with access to that data in the first place? Well, because we hand it to them. We fob off that power to them, with very little support, both legally, infrastructurally, and frankly, without much emotional support either.

When you have that amount of responsibility, it’s very hard to conceive of reducing your power. That’s not because of greed: it’s because you don’t want people to get hurt, or company’s to go bust. Terry Childs, the San Francisco sysadmin who refused to handover passwords to anyone but Gavin Newsom, even after being jailed, wasn’t holding back because he wanted to hurt someone. He was holding back because the only way he could take on the responsibility he’d elected to assume was by also asserting a fantastic amount of control. Great power, great responsibily can get very commutative at times.

One of the fun parts of my job has been going around to conferences like LISA and MySQLcon, and encouraging – okay, I admit it, begging – sysadmins to turn off logging. Pervasive logging is a civil liberties trainwreck waiting to happen. The list of data that the data retention directive requires ISPs to collect is derived, in part, from the data that ISPs would expect to collect anyway. Business practice now determines later what courts and intrusive governments imagine is “reasonable” to obtain. One of the most chilling conversations I’ve had recently is with Charles Miller, the Secretary to the Data Communications Group at the UK’s Home Office — basically the folk who determine the policy and ethics of interception and surveillance. He had been talking about the data that ISPs now collect as part of the data retention directive. I wanted him to confirm that this data, whose retention was ostensibly for the investigation of serious crime only, was also available to civil litigants. Of course, he said, a civil court order can reach anything that’s reasonable.

What’s reasonable? Think how much more others know about you — and expect to know about you, because Apache has generally shipped with logging turned on, instead of off. What governments will want tomorrow will be based on what your software’s defaults were yesterday.

These talks incidentally have a field effect of about 24 hours for most people, I estimate. You have some guy in an EFF t-shirt telling you about awful things that might happen in Uzbekistan if you even mount /var/log, and you go home and maybe have a few nightmares. Then, freaking PHP starts leaking memory and dragging down one of the servers again, and dammit, where are yesterdays logs? Where is my information? Noo! My precioussss!

I’m sympathetic: I wish our law gave them more power to say no to their bosses (though it’s always worthwhile in some cases to point out that the FTC can kick asses if you violate your own privacy policy). But more and more, I wish that we had alternatives to handing that power out to others, willy-nilly, and got to keep more for ourselves. I think the standard unit that it’s healthy for anyone to be responsible for that much. The interests of a person keeping tabs on a million people’s data is different from a person keeping tabs on their own.

The other reason why it’s good to have alternative power bases is highlighted by this piece by Rachel Chalmers, where she points out that if we can fall back on our own devices, corporations will be rather more civil to us: and hopefully compete on privacy and responsiveness as much as other values:

Software vendors got away with some pretty coercive licenses for many years by making the assumption that users didn’t care all that much. Richard Stallman helped change all that. Not everyone cares about software licenses today, but many do, and any OS vendor that regards such concerns as external to their business is clearly wrong. Cloud providers who assume that their users won’t care how their data is handled are likely to find themselves equally mistaken. These issues have to be quantified somehow and included in the cost-benefit analysis.

We’ve seen flickers of this: a few search engine companies have overtly competed with Google on their privacy practices. But to bring the full pressure of the market to bear, the real power we need as consumers is the ability to take our ball and leave the market entirely, not just go next door to the second-worst provider.

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2008-07-29

rag and bone scripts: switchto

So I feel a bit bad because I have two half-written long thoughtful posts, but this evening was games night at the EFF’s hollowed-out mountain headquarters, and after a bit too much Settlers of Cataan, beer, Rock Band, and beer, I strangely cannot be bothered to finish those entries. I will just repeat for the record that you have not seen rules lawyering until you have seen EFF’s litigation team play AD&D. I still admire Quinn for daring to DM them.

Anyway, instead, let me fob you off with a couple of tiny hacks I use pretty frequently on my Linux desktop.

They all gank their usefulness from wmctrl, which is a fantastic command line utility for almost any Linux desktop, and lets you control windows and focus from the command line. You can install it from that webpage, or just do apt-get install wmctrl on Debian/Ubuntu.

I save the above script as ‘switchto’, and use it in GNOME’s keyboard shortcuts like this:

That should set some options in the standard GNOME editor to run
switchto "Mozilla Firefox" "firefox"
whenever you hit Alt-F. It works with metacity and compiz, which is probably what you’re running with GNOME. Other desktops will have other ways to create keyboard shortcuts — I seem to remember that KDE’s one rocks.

Now, whenever I hit Alt-F on my keyboard, my desktop will switch focus to the first window it finds with “Mozilla Firefox” in its name. If it can’t find one (ie I’m not yet running Firefox), it starts it up for me. One key press gives me a Firefox window, either way. Here’s another one:

This is the poor man’s QuickSilver — it pops up a box, and switches your focus to a window that matches the text you type into it. It needs a program called Zenity which comes by default on most GNOME desktops.

Actually, I don’t actually use the second of those that much, but I do have a bunch of scripts like the first, setting up command keys to always switch to certain programs like the Terminal (try switchto "termi"), or IRC or Kontact. Your fingers quickly learn the motion, and finding your key applications even in a mass of desktops becomes instinctive.

I’ve always felt that that was the real power of QuickSilver as a window finder — Alt-Tab never lets you learn a consistent muscle memory to switch to a particular program, so you’re constantly derailing your thought by peering at icons to navigate around. I’d also encourage you to play around with wmctrl on the command line — you may be able to think of other desktop tricks that you can turn into simple keypresses.

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