...more recent posts
Well, it must really be the Christmas season now. We went to a party last night in Brooklyn that turned out to involve everyone being assigned a part in the play "A Christmas Carol" which we then proceeded to read aloud. One act before dinner and one after. I'll admit to rolling my eyes and feeling slightly trapped when I learned of the evenings entertainment, but like so many things it turned out to be fun once we got going. I was Fezziwig, the second businessman, and the boy at the end to whom the transformed Scrooge gives money to buy a big fat turkey for the Crachets ("The one as big as me, Guv?") I kept thinking of Alex's appraisal of the story as one of the classic conversation tales of our culture. And it really is pretty good. I think Alex also said something about not being able to screw it up too much - due to the strong story line - but I'm not as convinced about that point. Fourteen unreheared rather drunken party-goers can do some dramatic damage. Still, thanks to a very good Scrooge and Marley we managed to hobble through. Certainly we all nailed that last line: "And to all a good night."
Another very bad idea for protecting digital content. Sounds like the big players are onboard (et tu, IBM?) but I'll eat my hat if they can get this through. Full backwards compatibility seems like a must, and I don't think this plan has it. (from HTP)
It's mid-month time, so that means the new crypto-gram is out. This month Bruce Schneier (the encryption and computer security guru) talks about voting and technology (plus a bunch of other stuff.) He points to this site by Rebecca Mercuri, calling it "...*the* web site on electornic voting...." As I thought, the experts are all horrified at the thought of computer (and especially internet based) voting schemes. As Schneier puts it:
"Online voting schemes have even more potential for failure and abuse. We know we can't protect Internet computers from viruses and worms, and that all the operating systems are vulnerable to attack. What recourse is there if the voting system is hacked, or simply gets overloaded and fails? There would be no means of recovery, no way to do a recount. Imagine if someone hacked the vote in Florida; redoing the election would be the only possible solution. A secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers."This is a really hard problem to think of a solution for.
Lots of people seem impressed by the new google toolbar which plugs into Internet Explorer 5.x running on Windows. If I ran Windows I would probably check this out. There are some privacy concerns, but Google is very upfront about what it is tracking, and they have such a good reputation that it's hard even for someone usually suspicious (like me) to get too worried about this case. And anyway, you can turn off certain features that work by knowing your surfing history and the toolbar will still be useful without any sort of tracking (even anonymous) going on. Let me know if anyone tries this out.
Magical weather day here in NYC.
This site is very cool. Inspirational even. Sort of like a jodi.org creation (is it?) It's amazing what can be done with so very little (bandwidth-wise) if your stuff is good. Or maybe all that dancing is going to my head. (via metascene)
I don't know if it's the holiday season or what, but these are some strange days indeed. I keep finding myself at dance parties. How does this happen?
Here are my two computer gripes of the day:
My video card is too fast when scrolling text - I can't stop it at the right point, because the text is flying by in a blur. And why does Navigator pop up a box when I try to reload a page that contained some sort of form data which gives me only 'repost form data' or 'cancel' as options? Where's the option to reload the page (obviously what I meant to do since I clicked on 'reload' to get to this point) without the form data? To do this I have to cancel, then click in the location field to make that active, and then go to my keyboard and press enter. That is not acceptable. Does IE do it differently?
Great interview with Eban Moglan, the Free Software Foundation legal counsel, and Columbia University law professor. Kind of long, and a little technical, but you really should find the time to read this. He is very clear about many very difficult to think about issues.
"What we have here are two different structures of the distribution of cultural product. You have a set of people whose fundamental belief is that cultural products are best distributed when they are owned, and they are attempting to construct a leak proof pipe from production studio to eardrum or eyeball of the consumer. Their goal is to construct a piping system that allows them to distribute completely dephysicalized cultural entities which have zero marginal cost and which in a competitive economy would therefore be priced at zero, but they wish to distribute them at non-zero prices. In the ideal world, they would distribute them at the same prices they get for physical objects which cost a lot of money to make, move and sell, and they would become ferociously profitable. They are prepared to give on price, but at every turn, as with the VCR at the beginning of the last epoch, their principle is any ability of this content to escape their control will bring about the end of civilization."From what I can see, Moglan is the main legal mind behind a huge change in society of which the Napster story and the Decss case (making DVD's play on Linux machines despite industy efforts to stop this) are just the tips of the iceburg. Some people think he goes too far (for instance, in another place he makes the very curious argument that all digital content, by virtue of being digital, exists as long strings of zeros and ones, or in other words, all pieces of digital content - things like programs, music, movies, ebooks - are really very long numbers, and it shouldn't be possible to copyright a number) but I think it would be more true to say that most people aren't aware of how fast, and how radically, the world is changing. Of course I could be wrong. I don't think Richard Stallman is a crackpot either, so what do I know? Anyway, read this article, I think Eban Moglan knows.
The "trusted client" is upon us. Wes is right on it as usual. First he points to the classic Richard Stallman piece The Right to Read. The key passage in this dystopian short story is: "Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger." And then Wes points to this fine print on the Adobe eBook (a new format for publishing books in electronic form) website:
" If you are a software programmer, you should note that the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader's security implementation does not allow program debuggers to be executed on the machine while the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader is running."Not quite threatening prison terms yet, but the idea that Stallman's fears are looking a little more reasonable is very scary indeed.