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2003-01-11

cryptorights

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.

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2003-01-10

personal stuff

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: massive blip in my graph of incoming messages

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gtkhtml and khtml

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?

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a case of mistaken identity

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.

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2003-01-09

the whole thing gets more and more bizarre

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.

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2003-01-08

magic kingdom is out

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

apple kor

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.

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2003-01-05

more on the pedal-powered internet

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.

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even when early adopting, i’m late

I’ve been settling into a slow lazy orbit of gadget-stasis. After a lifetime of craving all kinds of gizmos, I ended up with a shortlist of things I wanted two years ago. I have since failed to add anything new to it and slowed purchased everything else at bargain-bucket rates when they’ve ceased to be fashionable.

In the end, I realised that there was only one thing left on the list – a USB key drive. You know, one of those 64MB widgets you can hang off a keyring and plug straight into a USB port, where it magically appears as a normal drive on Mac, PCs and Linux. When I first decided I wanted one, they cost hundreds of dollars and were highly first-adopterish. Now they’re cheap and ubiquitous, I thought it was time to take the plunge.

Never quite works that way, does it? About the same time, I read on Slashdot about a new generation of these little drives, with a new generation of chipsets. As well as store files, they could work as MP3 players and voice recorders too. I got the cheapest of these, the splendidly named Yo!Fun 130 for Christmas. It does MP3 playing and voice recording as well as file storage – and it can take SmartMedia cards. It’s also very diddy and wee.

Unfortunately, it’s the strangest engineered piece of consumer electronics I’ve seen. Inside it, I estimate it has an MP3 player/voice encoder chipset tied together with rope to a mass storage chipset, with a complicated pulley and winch to connect one of them to the outside world at a time. Neither know of each other’s existence. You switch one or the other in, you have to crank a switch on the side of the box. If you sniff the USB output, you can watch this happen. One moment, the USB is saying “Hi! I’m a perfectly normal USB storage device made by Dull Company of Taiwan”, the next the winch activates and “Zzzzt! Wait! No! I am, in fact, an MP3 player made by Somebody Different of South Korea”.

Each chipset uses a different storage format. So every time you switch, you have to reformat all the memory. Want to copy some files across, then listen to MP3s? Forget it – you’ll need to delete one or the other before you can move that lever. This isn’t systems integration: it’s systems smooshing.

Yo!Fun also isn’t Linux compatible – not really surprising, I suppose, given that it’s not even compatible with itself. So I took it back, and got a Cendyne Gruvstick. Bit more expensive. Slightly better. At least that presents itself as just one thing to the USB interface. Unfortunately, it’s not anything that anyone outside of its own device driver would care to comprehend.

The Gruvstick uses the STMP3410 chipset which, in theory, supports the USB mass storage protocol (the standard that lets you just slam these things into Macs, PCs or Linux without needing drivers). But the Gruvstick spurns this petty interoperability for what looks like its own magic moon language. Having your own language is, of course, the very definition of proprietary. But I have to say, after poring over dozens of specs and snooped USB traffic – what a weird way of doing things. The standard says, 0x28, when it wants to read some data. The Gruvstick has exactly the same function, only *it* uses something like 0x03. Thus, presumably, doubling the work for the engineers, and rendering it utterly incompatible with anything other than their specially written drivers. Drivers which crashed Quinn’s Windows 2K machine. (I may be wrong about the details of this, incidentally – and this is a blog, so it’s almost obligatory to be a bit wrong. But it still looks like the Gruvstick is being proprietary for proprietary’s sake. And there’s not a single thing its software does that the standard USB storage protocol doesn’t support. Except, I guess, DRM.)

Anyway, the upshot of this is that the Gruvstick needs its own drivers. Drivers you can only get for Windows. Now this makes it useless for my purposes – not just because I’m such a Linux wonk, but because I want to use it as a replacement for floppy disks. How can I transfer files, if I need to install drivers to get the storage device to be even recognised on a foreign machine?

So I took the Gruvstick back. Then, finally, I did the sensible thing. I went to the Linux USB working devices list and searched for what I wanted. There, I found some optimistic reviews of the Daisy Diva MP3 Player/File Store/Voice Recorder/Compact Flash reader. This, it looks like, does it all right. Normal USB Storage protocols; no weird hybrid shit; Linux support – plus, it’s pretty much the same price as the Yo!Fun. And it’s got a slightly less silly name.

I haven’t bought it yet – because I made the mistake of visiting the rest of their catalogue. Now I’m wavering between that, or the Daisy Music Pen, which is all the same stuff (sans CF reader) in a pen-sized form factor. Again, it’s cheaper than the Gruvstick. Or should I really splash out and get the same company’s PhotoClip? Which is – glad you asked – a combined MP3 player, file store/CF reader, voice recorder, still camera, webcam and video recorder. $149, although I don’t know how much of that is Linux accessible.

I’m still in the middle of deciding. But I’ve learnt three lessons: one, the folk who make the sensible engineering choices are probably the smarter and cheaper manufacturers too. Two: you always do your best consumer research in the two hours after you bought the goods. Three: no matter how long you stay out of the gadget rat race, there’s always one more object of desire.

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2003-01-01

lee felsenstein and the jhai remote it project

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.

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:

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 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:

You can PayPal the Jhai Foundation on their 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 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?

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