I’ve switched around my desktop a little, to see if it will encourage me to write more blog entries. I now have a tab on my terminal window dedicated to my latest blog entries, like Dave does, only with less outlining and more vim.
Looks like there’s a large-scale DDOS going on. Rumour has it that it’s a Microsoft SQL worm. Certainly looks kinda nasty.
I’m going to sleep now, so I bet this post will look really stupid in the morning when we find out that it was actually aliens.
`
As a result of my previous lifestyle as dramatist, impresario and monologuist, I have a wide array of glamourous and alluring British celebrity colleagues. But by some quirk of circumstance that I cannot fathom, the stars who I truly bonded with were not the type who hung out at top London nightspots and graced the front covers of GQ and the Evening Standard Magazine. They were the ones who sat at home of an evening, playing Everquest and downloading pornography. So, for instance, while I have worked many times with my marvellous beautiful and generous co-host Sara Cox, the closest we ever became, as friends, was when she got the director to ask me to stop staring at her during a “shoot”. On the other hand, Richard Herring was always very close, frequently calling me up to fix his computer and clarify more abstruse details of Star Trek chronology. A true friend, and never one to be put off by a little friendly staring.
Anyway, Richard Herring has a new and very funny blog. Another thing we have in common! I must email him or something. He’ll remember me, I’m sure of it.
If you’re stuck for anything to do tomorrow (Monday) evening, may I suggest stumbling toward the Silicon Valley World Internet Center in Palo Alto, CA for around seven? I’m speaking to the Software Development Forum’s International SIG entitled “Divergence: How European and American tech markets are growing apart and what kind of headache that gives me in the morning.“. I’m writing the presentation now, and if I don’t start editing soon, it’ll be about Roombas, Warblogs, 802.11b, Wired UK,”Moore Or Less’s” Law, First Tuesday, Opera, Bulgaria, Googlism, and the Sunnyvale Corn Palace. $15 if you’re not an SDForum member or a student, but don’t worry – I won’t see a penny of it.
On this sad day, at least somebody knows how to follow the instructions and stole that book.
Apple’s done a sterling job popularising and now extending wireless use among computer users recently. But they’ve had a long history of doing the same thing. Back in 1995, when precious few people were considering the topic, they were lobbying the FCC to set aside some unlicensed space for data comms. Here’s a report from the EFF newsletter of the time:
Apple’s petition states:
“The NII Band would promote the full deployment of a National Information Infrastructure (“NII“), extending the effective reach of the NII by making possible high-bandwidth access and interaction throughout a limited geographic area — where mobility is key — both on a peer-to-peer, ad hoc basis and through wireless local area networks. Moreover, it would provide for unlicensed, wireless, wide area “community networks” connecting communities, schools, and other groups underserved by existing and proposed telecommunications offerings.
(The irony is that the frequency that Apple successfully lobbied for is, I believe, the same frequency that 802.11a now lives within. And 802.11a is the standard that Apple has pretty much killed by supporting the speed-bumped 802.11g in its Airport Extreme. Turned out that 2.4Ghz was good enough.)
The STAND campaign is beginning to be picked up by the media. We’ve swung the vote from 2:1 support to nearly 2:1 against in four days.
I’m interested in seeing how the government replies to this. Officially, the consultation is just that, a consultation. The Home Office civil servants are still very insistent that there are no official government proposals on ID cards yet.
That position, unfortunately, was belied by Lord Falconer’s (and Downing Street’s) own press release in December that said:
Public support is growing for the government’s proposals on entitlement cards. The response so far to a public consultation on the scheme shows a two-to-one split in favour of the plans.
… which, really, is why STAND got involved. Public consultations aren’t referenda; but if you want to puff them up as such, you do have to live and die by the numbers. There’s no groundswell of support for ID cards, and the government knows it. There might be, if they actually engaged the public in a discussion. But that’s hard, and central government really have less experience in doing that than you’d hope. They’re also, admittedly, often not in the best place to do so. Who ever trusts a government document? The ID card doc tried very very hard to be an impartial, depoliticised document, and it fell over for two reasons. Firstly, and most crassly, because Falconer decided to politicise it. And secondly, and more subtly, because one of the interested parties in creating an ID card is the civil servants themselves. With all the objectivity in the world, that interest leaked through every page of the consultation doc.
In other news, Alan Mather, who works for the e-envoy (Britain’s Minister for The Bleepy Things), has spotted STAND for the first time. “I didn’t come across them during the RIP hoo-ha.”, he says, which is funny, because I’m pretty sure we started it. Hi, Alan!
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.
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: 