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.
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.
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#!/bin/sh<br/>
###<br/>
# Switch to a screen or do something<br/>
###<br/>
if!wmctrl-a$1;then$2;fi
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.
So I didn’t get an iPhone 3G, because really I couldn’t bring myself to sign up to a bunch of AT&T years. But when I saw the refurbished iPod Touchs for $199 on the Apple site, I admit I caved. It’s sort of the sad halfway house for those of us who are strong in spirit, but weak in the flesh. It’s currently sitting next to my far more pure N810. I am rubbing them together in the hope that some of the nice implementation in the Apple product rubs off into the Nokia open source experiment.
I am sort of enjoying the flashy brattiness of the Touch, but I fear he is putting up a spirited fight against my Linux set-up, and thus rendering himself useless. Sure, people have Pwnage 2.0 now, so you can ssh into it, and have all the freedoms that Apple don’t want; but the latest firmware update also changed the hash value that the iPod software uses to check the “integrity” of the iTunes database. If you want to copy over music from a Linux machine on an iPod Touch/iPhone 2.0 firmware, you’re out of luck for now. Maybe not for long, as it didn’t take them very long to break the hash when Apple created this little roadblock. I will continue to lurk around on #gtkpod for the good news.
I’m racking my brains to understand a good argument (not any argument, a good argument) for why Apple would put a concealed checksum in the database in the first place. It doesn’t protect the music, or any copyrighted material that Apple might have a contractual agreement to protect (the music is still in the clear, AFAIK — it’s just the database that’s checked). It’s not part of the phone locking system, which again Apple can claim it needs to protect for a continuing business relationship. And it certainly doesn’t have a consumer-friendly reason, like making sure the database data is coherent — if the database is corrupt, iTunes doesn’t offer to reinstall your music, it demands you restore your entire iPod (actually losing your purchased music or apps whatever in the meantime).
The only reasoning that makes sense is that Apple dearly wants iPod and iPhones locked ever-more tightly into iTunes. Obviously, I’m shocked, shocked. But if I was Apple, I’d try and come up with another cover story quick before the regulators start sniffing…
I grew up in Essex. One of the many exciting things about Essex is that it is tremendously flat. My aunt and uncle lived in Derbyshire, and when we went there for holidays, I marvelled at the ravishing exoticness of real hills. Now I live in San Francisco, and I have my own hill, called Bernal Heights, which has wild flowers, one (1) microwave tower, coyote, lesbians and illegal soap-box derbies. I actually don’t live on Bernal Heights, being none of the preceding: I live in the neighbourhood of Precita Valley, which is about two foot away from Bernal Heights. (San Francisco neighbourhoods are about five feet by ten feet, and are mainly differentiated by differing property prices, native language, and whether their climate is tropical rainforest, saharan, or fogbound arctic tundra.)
Anyway, today Liz wondered what Precita meant in Spanish, and looked it up in a book. “Dude,” she said, “It means ‘damned‘. You live in the valley of the damned.” I refused to believe this, and looked it up on the Internet itself. People who live in Precita deny this, and claim we live in the Valley of the Dammed. The confusion between dammed and damned may have come from the location of San Francisco’s first sewer, which, as explained in this beautiful description of the city’s adventures in sewerage, was both.
We also discovered that Bernal Heights still has a few of the old prefab earthquake cottages that were built to house the homeless after the 1906 quake. We drove to a nearby shack (maps), and hummed and ahhed at its brutal simplicity and hardiness, and I took several photographs. When we got back we realised that we’d got the address wrong and we’d been admiring somebody’s very expensive apartment instead. It’s a fine line between shack and des. res. in SF.
Perhaps while attempting to decide my entire political framework was not the best moment to go and see The Dark Knight. That Joker chap certainly makes a persuasive argument.
Followers of the warrantless wiretapping program in the US should note that, yes, that was Senator Leahy who simultaneously stood against telecom immunity in the Senate, andstood up to the Joker in the fundraising scene. Wonder if he demanded another notable particular plot twist in the last moments of the film?
I have two minutes to post this in time for Saturday, so quickly: if you’re using Ubuntu Hardy, and you have libflash-support installed because you want sound and Flash (greedy), try this out. There’s a bug in Adobe’s closed source flash plugin which makes it crash frequently with libflash-support, but using nspluginwrapper will stop it taking out the entire browser when it dies.
I’ve found it kind of odd to watch in myself that for the past decade I’ve steadfastedly declined to announce my politics to anyone, even to close friends. It’s not because I’m indifferent about politics; it’s because I’ve felt that about the best label for what I believe has been tarnished by association.
So, here is what I whisper to myself at night, and get teased by my partners for slyly adopting at home and furiously evading the rest of the time. I guess I’m a… No, dammit, I am a libertarian.
I’m just not that sort of libertarian.
I’m a libertarian not because I think that white Western males like me are suffering under some terrible yoke of hardship: I’m a libertarian because I think that I’m extraordinarily privileged in terms of the freedoms that I do have; and that I believe that it is this privilege that provides the engine of my many other advantages. As someone who believes that, I naturally seek to spread that as much freedom to as wide a group as possible.
I sort of get the fist-waving anger at high taxes and your right to smoke down the pub, but it’s not really what I’m here for. I’m a low-hanging-fruit kind of guy, so I believe in crafting tools for people that will expand their freedom more widely, and building a culture and institutions that permit the maximum amount of freedom and the minimal amount of coercion. I’m an optimist, ultimately, about the power of self-determination to make the world a better place.
What I see online presents another view of the inhabitants of Libertaria. A lot of self-identified libertarians present themselves online as a victim of government and of other tyrants in the world (including, but not limited to, liberals, conservatives, the mainstream media, feminists, Christians, Muslims, immigrants, workers, the elite, and people who censor comments on their noticeboards). At the same time, others’ misfortunes are presented as their own personal responsibility, for which no-one else can and should give a flying Philadelphia fart. Charity should only be dispensed to the truly hopeless; changing the conditions of the hopeless is an impossible task we should leave to the fates, not each other, and certainly not the speaker.
I don’t think any of those positions automatically arise from a belief in freedom. I do think they lead you to be a bit of a dick.
When you actually meet a libertarian, much of the time, you’ll find the online stance gives an incredibly misleading impression. If anything, they seem more optimistic about how the world works, and more understanding of their own good fortune and the tribulations of others. They’re smart, and charitable and generous, and less doctrinaire than most political thinkers on every point. Also fun. Obviously, they then accidentally shoot you with their concealed firearm and then finish you off with second-hand smoke, but, hey, you should see what the Randians would do to you.
Of course, you also meet libertarians that are dicks, too, but not really in any higher proportion than any other group. (I’ve long ago abandoned my search for a set of ideological principles that magically turn you into a nice person: I think the final straw was meeting a total arse of a Quaker. How can you be a Quaker, for God’s sake, and still be horrible? Truly, God is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a tortilla.)
Anyway, I think I would have still come out as a libertarian, if it hadn’t been for the tremendous schism in the libertarian community over the response to 9/11 and the Iraqi war. If you knew a real libertarian, dear reader, you would be amazed by how many came out in support of Operation Flail Like A Dangerous Hyperpowered Idiot. If, by contrast, you gained your knowledge of libertarian thought post-2001, you’d assume that they were all about the “anti-idiotarian” flag-waving.
The split freaked me, and many of my friends, the hell out. Nothing to me seemed more counterintuitive, more contradictory, more challenging to my own beliefs than seeing libertarians who devote their life to campaigning for the minimization of the State’s involvement in their lives enthusiastically encouraging the world’s largest State military to rampage in the lives (and deaths) of thousands of individuals as a co-ordinated response to the murderous actions of a handful of extremists with no connection to those targetted. If this was performed by a non-State actor, would they have supported it? If so, would they accept the same action taken upon themselves?
And yet, somehow, this became the dominant idea in Net libertarian circles in both the US and the UK. In the end, I had to admit to myself that most of the libertarians I knew worked on a moral calculus that was unconnected to their love of freedom. Which is fine, but it’s not my moral calculus — or indeed my cultural bent. If I was going to identify as libertarian, I’d end up being painted as a special kind of traitorous, deluded, idiotarian, Dhimmist pseudo-libertarian, and frankly if I wanted that kind of ostracisation, I’d join traditional political in-fighting.
Now, it’s my suspicion that I’m not the only one in this position. I think that the whole Ron Paul movement was representative of the wish many to have a libertarianism they could trust not to claim that “using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors is our only practical instrument of self-defense” is an honorable view. I’m not a Paulite, but he definitely appealed to a similar bloc of believers. What I think needs to happen is for this group of exiles to coalesce; after that I think that the moment is ripe for the flurry of ideas that marks the beginning of a new (or revitalised) political position.
I guess it’s because I’ve been waiting for that coalescence for so long that I’m finally admitting that I want to be a part of it.
(I hereby pre-emptively declare this “Post I will most regret having comments on”)
Here’s the Zapruder footage of my talk about the cloud and the edge. And, yes, I do appreciate the rich rich irony that I’m hosting this on a video-sharing site, and apologies if it makes you a bit travel sick. Be warned that it cuts out at about 24 minutes, just when I manage to get vaguely serious — the points I make after that are covered in just as rambling way in the original posts.
Not much blogging for the next 24 hours, as I’m about to disappear off to have a (non-scary) medical thing done, for which I will be pleasantly sedated. With a bit of luck, I’ll be deluded enough to blog while on fentanyl, and we can all have a laugh.
So somebody reading this blog joined the Open Rights Group and sent me their confirmation code, even though I have already received enough notifications to be forced to write daily for this month. Sheesh. People, this is the Internet: have you not heard of free-riding?
So, anyway, to burn up any remaining goodwill, for the forseeable future, if you now join ORG at the tenner-a-month rate (or up your payment by a fiver), send me your confirmation code, and then tell me which of the following you’d like from me. Choose from:
Another month of blogging (worth five ORG memberships) [no. of votes so far: 3]
A special one-off issue of NTK (worth ten ORG memberships) [no. of votes so far: 1]
A special podcast issue of NTK (ten ORG memberships)
What I really think of Andrew Orlowski (five ORG memberships, even though I know I should probably price this one higher)
I envisage you’ll be able to move around your vote when it’s clear I won’t reach any of these, but I’ll do that only at certain points, like in Mike Reid’s Runaround, so think carefully.
As a show of goodwill on my part, here’s Flowers for Debian, a piece I wrote a few years ago for Linux User and Developer.
One of the funnier conversations I watched at BlogHer was between some big league blogger talk to a small crowd. The big leaguer was talking about how she’d built up traffic by creating a community around her, and linked to everyone else, and written positive comments across the Net, and held carnivals, and proptly replied to email from visitors. She then explained that she was now really guilty about all the mail she didn’t answer, and how her community was always needed tending because some drama was blowing up, and how much time she had to spend reading and commenting on other people’s posts. The listeners looked in horror; eventually one hesitantly said “So I write online because I’m introverted. Why would I want to deal with anyone else?” Cue buzz of agreement from everyone else hiding under the desk, including me.
Speaking from adjacent experience, I’d say that one of the pains of doing something for fame and fortune (apart from the usual lack of fortune), is that the incredibly low quality of mass-produced fame. I may have mentioned tangentially before, but if you scale up who knows your work, you often end up with fans whom you can’t stand. For many, this is quite disheartening. How are you supposed to value your own work when it appears that most of the people who love it are idiots?
If anything, the effect of this online is worse than in Ye Olde Traditionale Media. We all know people who produce great work, but are afflicted with cesspits of comments that hang on their every word. The beauty of new media is that you’re in direct contact with your readers: the horror is that you’re in direct contact with people who you never want to meet, but who feel that they have some sort of relationship with you.
In the end, the conversation moved away from “building traffic” and we ended up talking about how slowly you can grow a blog: avoiding ending up with a mass-produced audience, and instead taking the time to organically grow a smaller, perhaps more costly, but ultimately more satisfying bunch of readers.
I got two surprise packages today. One turned was a pile of Jazz disks and semi-ancient copies of Analog from my past, which my old flatmate Gavin was relaying back through time to me. The other was a completely mysterious consignment of dalek cookies from New York. Given that in today’s mail I’d also managed to be mentioned in Those Slightly Mispelled Anonymous Internet Threats, I had a moment of mild paranoia. Surely if you were going to poison someone, you wouldn’t actually go to the extent of cooking them in the shape of daleks? But then, maybe that’s exactly what they want you to think. Maybe the design was supposed to lull me into a false sense of fannish security…
I spotted the Free Software Foundation trying to gently explain to people why the iPhone wasn’t something you’d want to buy. I know the standard response to this which is — oh, but man, it’s lovely! The counter-response is often something like ACTUALLY I THINK YOU’LL FIND THAT YOU CAN DO JUST THE SAME WITH A NEO FREERUNNER WITH GNOME ON IT AND THEN SOME SORT OF USB 3G DONGLE SELLOTAPED TO IT.
My official line on inter-platform rivalry, inherited from the NTK position paper on the topic, is that all software sucks and all hardware sucks. After years of using all kinds of shonky equipment: proprietary, non-proprietary, simple, or hallucinogenically complex, my main rule (like Mark Pilgrim’s) is simply to maximise the amount of unique and valuable data i can extract when the platform inevitably turns into the steaming pile of inoperable blast furnace slag that is the fate of all operating systems. It’s one of the more practical reasons why I’ve ended up edging toward open source: in the end proprietary set-ups grows so keen to trap you, that I end up being cornered in the corner using Vim and mutt, and if that’s all I’m doing, I might as well go to the happy place where noone wil actively attempt to step between me and my bits when it all goes to hell.
That said, I do agree that MacOS and the iPhone, on a “ooh that’s nice” level, really do kick the living shit out of open source platforms at the moment. It’s not all fancy pyrotechnics and the Steve-Jobs-As-Hypnotoad. And, frankly, I am totally willing to entertain that Jobs-built kit will continue to win on that front.
It’s like if I was to concede that a benevolent dictatorship is a far more effective model for a political system than a liberal democracy. The problems you hit in that context is when the dictatorship slides from benevolence (or effectiveness), or you need a new dictator in a hurry. I love having Steve Jobs at Apple: I just can’t quite believe the odds that the next Steve Jobs will be at Apple too, and the one after that. I want to move my data seamlessly where the best ideas and implementation move.
