iMovies anyone?

I recently learned about Podzilla -- a Linux distro for the iPod. iPod already has some recording support, but here's the kicker -- you can pay the $50 for the iPod recording hardware and get 16-bit recordings at 8kHz (telephone-ish quality) or you can install Podzilla for free and record whatever you want at up to 96kHz (DVD audio quality).

Why is recording crippled on the iPod? Well, part of the answer is that the market for voice recording hardware is pretty small. Dedicated voice recorders are incredibly expensive, and Apple is not at all in that market. They're out to sell their iPods and get people to use iTunes. Furthermore, voice recording doesn't need amazing quality, so the low audio rate is sufficient for most.

However, this is not a market issue. If Apple really wanted to make an iPod capable of high quality recording, they could have. Their competitors, such as Creative, Archos, and iRiver, have MP3 players full quality MP3 and WAV recording (44kHz, CD quality). My Creative Jukebox 3 even has digital recording inputs. In fact if Apple was concerned about being competitive, they would have included high quality recording in the iPods from the very beginning.

Which leads me to an interesting conclusion: Apple was pressured by the RIAA and big music distributors to disallow high quality recording on iPods. If you're the RIAA, you're worried that someone can take a CD, plug it's output right into an iPod, then play the CD and end up with MP3s on the iPod (or AACs or whatever their damned format is). Worse yet, someone can bring an iPod to a concert with some microphones and make great quality bootlegs (because bands haven't learned that if they could make live concert CDs on the spot, they could rake in the money).

I think Apple was either told by the RIAA no recording on the iPod or intentionally crippled it to avoid the wrath of the music industry in the first place. Think about the case if Apple had allowed high quality recording... "Sorry big music distributors, but we released our tiny music player with the ability to record the same music of yours that we sell online. We know people will record music themselves and avoid paying you the royalties you so desperately want. But we don't really need the iTunes store to sell iPods because we're Apple and people will buy our hardware since it looks cool, is vastly overpriced, and has less features than our competitors." Or something like that.

All of this makes me wonder about the iPod photo, or whatever that new device is. Already most of Apple's competition has moved on to portable movie players, some of which even record video, so why is Apple just moving to photos and not movies? My prediction is that Apple will have a movie playing iPod just as soon as they create iMovies (or iFilms or something like that, like iTunes but for movies... call it Quicktime?) and sort out the issues with the MPAA and big movie distributors.

To put this another way, if Apple doesn't get into movies, then it's because they couldn't line up the studios. I think most people are comfortable making MP3s from their CDs now, but Apple would have to overcome a huge hurdle to get DVD ripping software on everyone's computer. Why would you buy iTunes if you already own the CD? Likewise, why would you want to buy videos online when you already own the DVDs? The MPAA has harshly attacked anyone releasing DVD ripping software, so Apple would have to get their blessing before the iPod + video or iMovies comes out.

But that's just my opinion. Back in reality, I don't know of any other portable music player manufacturers that also have a vested interest in selling online music except for Sony, but then Sony has been very quiet about their efforts, and they own the music they're selling anyway. Since Steve Jobs is already in bed with the movie studios (Pixar) and since iTunes has been more successful than anyone could have predicted, I'm sure he'll be able to convince the other big movie studios to fall in line with the portable revolution. The iTunes store is as important to iPod's success as the iPod itself -- both for the RIAA's blessing and the iPod's overall success -- so a movie version of iTunes would be equally essential for Apple to break into the handheld movie player market.

I'm certain this isn't the only instance of the RIAA and others putting pressure on big software companies to bow to their whims. Microsoft wholeheartedly jumped onto the DRM bandwagon, much to the delight of the media industry, with recent versions of their Windows media formats. I just wonder if MS did that before or after their conversations with those companies. I wouldn't characterize these as "alliances" as much as "necessities for doing business." If MS hadn't bowed to the pressure of the RIAA and others, then someone else would have. Therefore, I say MS and Apple both made the right decision for their business, much to the detriment of all the people stuck with their hardware and sofware. Pressure like this goes beyond software and hardware, but I'll deal with those aspects some other time.

I'll give you one other similar example. There's a Palm device -- the Treo 650 -- that was made specifically for Sprint and is pretty much a combo cell phone and PDA. The 650 came crippled in that you couldn't use its Bluetooth to connect to the Internet. Why would Sprint let you do that anyway? Someone hacked it and enabled that feature; supposedly it was always there but just hidden. That same person also figured out that you can use an SD WiFi adapter with some driver hacks -- a wifi adapter that Palm wouldn't release drivers for. Sprint certainly pressured Palm just like the RIAA pressured Apple; both Sprint and Palm want to milk the cell phone market for everything they can.

Back to Apple... Based on what Apple did before, I bet their iPod photo already has video support. It's just crippled. And so if you're patient enough, wait for a version of Podzilla to uncripple the video playback support built into their new iPod. It's either that, or wait until a sanctioned, overpriced, under-featured iPod video finally comes out. Or just pick up one of the non-Apple portable media players that already support video playback and avoid the whole iPod thing in the first place.

Marvel Comics jumps the shark.

Marvel Comics just announced they're suing Cryptic Studios, Inc. and NCsoft Corporation, the makers of the game City of Heroes. For those of you out of the loop, City of Heroes is an online role playing game that allows you to play as superheroes complete with superpowers and costumes befitting their super-ness. You can then take your newly created super hero along with thousands of other players and kick thug and villain butt in Paragon City for about $15 a month.

So why is Marvel suing them? City of Heroes comes with a well designed character creation system that lets you tweak nearly every aspect of your superhero -- size, colors, uniforms, you name it and you can change it. Of course, this means that you can conceivably make a character that looked like an existing comic book hero, say The Hulk, give him powers just like The Hulk, and call him The Hulk, then let him loose on the virtual streets of Paragon City.

City of Heroes is a pastiche of every superhero thing the makers thought they could put into a video game. If there's anything Marvel can rightfully be unhappy about, it would be people using their character names (for which they do have valid trademarks) in game. They've invested lots of time and money in Wolverine, and if a CoH character tried to play Wolverine like the comic book Wolverine, I would hope other players kick his butt for not being original using the superhero creation kit and absolutely give him the smackdown if he deviates even the slighest from character. However, I wouldn't have an issue with a CoH character Wolverfellow that was a lot like Wolverine, that everyone knew was based on Wolverine, but that everyone knew wasn't Wolverine but merely an homage to the character. For you CoH players, how many other players have you seen that look a lot like existing Marvel or other comic book characters? In general, how many comic book super heroes have you seen that have similar powers or seem almost exactly alike?

With respect to designing characters like ones that already exist, I say there's a limited set of superpowers (ice, fire, energy, telekinesis, etc.) and so characters will repeat or at least seem a lot alike after the 10,001st one is created. Super strength and flying are common among superpowers, but that doesn't mean that every superstrong flying character is modeled after Superman. And yes, DC Comics did sue Marvel in the 1940's over the character Captain Marvel because his powers were too much like Superman's. I'm certain that since then Marvel and DC have made other characters that were very similar but decided a lawsuit wasn't worth the effort.

(An aside: Marvel and DC already claim they own the trademark "super heroes," but I don't know if that will hold up much longer. A quick search of the City of Heroes website turned up many references to the term "super heroes" but only on the user forums and in review quotes -- none made by the game producers. You gotta wonder if they're trying to avoid the term altogether so they won't get sued.)

I guess this means that Pixar is Marvel's next target. The powers of the characters in that movie resemble those of the Fantastic Four (no spoilers -- Elastic Girl = Mr. Fantastic, their daughter Violet = Invisible Woman, and Mr. Incredible = The Thing) so Marvel should sue the shit out them, right? Those characters and the other references like the X-Men movie and characters, and, well, I don't want to ruin the references, but there are many they're all homages, not bait for infringement lawsuits.

But my greatest worry is that this is the tip of an iceberg of intellectual property lawsuits. Should Izzy Stradlin be able to sue Fender Guitars for making instruments that other people can use to learn and imitate his riffs? Maybe the makers of City of Heroes can sue Microsoft for making tools that let other people make games like City of Heroes. Or anyone can sue makers of CAD software because you can design nearly anything with those tools.

They're blaming the toolmakers, not themselves. We can't have a system where we always point the finger at the toolmakers when the blame lies with the tool users. This doesn't absolve the toolmakers entirely -- they still have to act responsibly and reasonably when issues like this come up. So for everyone from Google to gun manufacturers, peer-to-peer application and video game makers, we need to distinguish between people who make tools, people who use tools, and the tools themselves. Analyze the situation and blame the dumbasses appropriately.

Marvel is the dumbass in this affair, not the toolmaker or tool users. Marvel was dying until their movies resurrected them (check how their stock rebounded after the X-Men movie was released in 2000). Get a clue Marvel. Be happy with the royalties you're getting from the movies and leave it at that. If anything, you can get some accounts in City of Heroes to steal new character ideas from existing characters in the game. And then the game users can sue you for improperly appropriating their creations. We all know you haven't created any good characters since the new X-Men in 1975 and you ostracized all your good artists in the 90's who reacted by ditching your lame ass company. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Just for that, I'm not going to pay to see the next Marvel character based movie. Then again, I didn't pay to see Daredevil, Punisher, and Hulk either, but they all sucked ass, so maybe Marvel's problems run deeper than just a video game.

"Google hacking" gets a new connotation

I tried to install Google's new desktop search tool, but the installer didn't work. It said I didn't have enough hard drive space to install it, despite the fact that I had more than enough hard drive space to install it. After submitting the bug report, I got a response a week or so later that essentially said too bad.

Their tool captures everything you do on your computer, including emails sent and received, browser history, and all textual information on your hard drive (except WordPerfect documents apparently). It can take that information and let you run searches on your PC just like searching on Google's web site, then combine those results with a search of the Internet, reporting your query to Google as well.

Google is going to be deluged with individual search habit information to a degree that they've never seen before. They (probably) know how people search the Internet, but now they know how people search their own computers. And the resulting information and popularity of the tool will put Google years ahead of any of their closest search engine competitors.

I don't want a search engine on my computer, regardless if Google gets my search information or not, so I guess I'm happy that the tool didn't work. But faster than you can say "script kiddie," there are hacks for providing remote access to your computer's Google desktop searches. One of these sites that described the trick warned that you shouldn't use it for malicious purposes. Like that's going to keep the hackers from using this.

Let me explain my fear. Google releases a tool that lets you search (almost) every document on your computer including, say, your Excel spreadsheet that contain password lists, your cached browser page that has your social security number on it, or the email that you got with your username and password for a shopping website. Just Google your machine for "password" or "username" or "SSN" or "credit card number" or "billing address" and see what comes up.

And now there's an exploit that lets other people remotely query your machine using Google's tool. People worry about what if they get a virus that turns their computer into a spam spewing zombie. Now you can worry that you'll get a virus which will allow someone to search away on your PC for any information about you. I can't wait until the first viruses that install Google's new tool after infecting your machine. Just think of the rise in identity theft, stolen credit card numbers, cases of blackmail, and so on scaling in proportion to the rise of desktop search tools.

(Note: I'm calling this an exploit even if Google doesn't (actually, I don't know what they call it). If this was Microsoft, that's what it would be called. As I see it, Google's good name is the only thing keeping this off the radar.)

I think this could be the first of a series of similar tools that threatens privacy, security, and more. Well, maybe it's not the first either. Gmail and other web-based email tools have a great exploit too -- using search engines to answer the "security question" like "What's your mother's maiden name?" or "What's your dog's name?" when some of that information is easily searchable on the net. I know I'm not the first person to suggest that exploit, but what you should realize is that while the migration of search to the desktop gives you better access to your information, it also gives others better access to your information, your search habits, and, if used for bad purposes, your private information. Compared to Google's desktop tool, RFID is just a UPC code.

Google scares me. Not because they're evil, but because they're throwing tools onto the 'net without any regard for, well, without regard for anything as far as I can tell. The word "irresponsible" comes to mind. They're like kids playing chemistry with the chemicals under the kitchen sink. Maybe there's value in using the Internet as a research or marketing setting on a mass scale. But "beta testing" with anybody who wants to play with their tools means we can find the bad parts of their technology before they can fix them.

Now everyone is speculating on where Google is going next. Rumors include a Google branded browser or instant messenger. Google doesn't want a browser. There's enough competition in that market without Google; their toolbar is as involved as they want to get with the browsers. What Google does want is to be your portal to all the information on the Internet, your computer, and everything. They have two extraordinarily valuable assets besides their name - search technology and storage capacity. These assets stick out in all of their tools -- the search engine, Orkut, Gmail, Froogle, image searching, etc.

If they are creating a "browser," it's not in any traditional sense of the word. I hate fortune telling, but I have a vision of something with IM and chat (based on Jabber that remembers and makes searchable all your conversations), community and social networking services (Orkut but using community information tied to their search engine info), email (Gmail), location based services (my sleeper prediction for their next avenue, eventually tied into community and general searches), and brute force searching power (including the not mentioned yet desktop and Internet searches) all built into a single (web?) application like Gmail. IBM had a prototype of parts of this in their Remail tool. Unlike IBM, if there's anyone who can pull this off, it's Google. And if Google can't pull that off all at once, just watch the next few applications they release and you'll see where they're headed. Yahoo will be kicking themselves in the pants if (more accurately, when) Google gets to it first.

But if Google seems intent on throwing a new application to the world without some due diligence on their part, they're only deluding themselves. And so I want to repeat my earlier comment. Google, the Internet is not your beta testing environment. You deserved more flak than you got after you released Gmail for the privacy concerns in that software, and I can only hope that your future technologies are put under even more scrutiny. Your glory days will not last forever, so you had better start thinking of new markets to wind your way into not based on your search or storage technologies. And Google, start thinking about social responsibility before you unleash these beasts into the wild.

Finally, when you get around to it, could you please fix that bug in the desktop tool installer? I've got some friends that I want to send it to so I can keep an eye on them...

When does 1/2 and 1/2 equal 1/4?

Watching the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour a while back, I saw two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee talking about the report they completed regarding intelligence failures relating to the war in Iraq. They claimed part of the culprit was a groupthink mentality where everyone viewed the evidence with a predisposed conclusion that weapons of mass destruction must exist in Iraq. My immediate reaction was how 1984-ish the term "groupthink" is and whether or not I should just tune out the report altogether.

But then I listened a little more and was surprised at what was said. Apparently all the reports about unmanned vehicles spraying deadly chemicals or reconstituted nuclear arms programs or mobile biological weapons factories were tagged with caveats that were ignored to reach the conclusion that Iraq must be doing something bad. In other words, there was a possibility -- or better yet a probability -- that there were no unmanned vehicles or nuclear bombs and the like.

And finally the reasoning and logical part of my brain kicked in. If there were warnings that these reports could be false, then the probability of them all being true is less than any one of them being true. Remember probability? So take two bins, each with half red and half blue socks. You take a sock from one, then a sock from the other. The probability of picking two red socks is... 25% since it's 50% for each bin, then you multiply the two together to get 25%. In other words, it's less likely you'll draw two red socks when you combine the probabilities.

Replace my above example with "true" for "red" and "false" for "blue." So the reports of Iraq's weapon stockpiles were possibly true or possible false, then the likelihood that all of the reports were true is less than the probability of any one being true. This triviality of mathematics didn't stop the government from presenting all of this evidence to the United Nations as fact and reason for war. Nor did I see any other nation call the U.S. this. I suppose there weren't any math majors as analysts in either the U.S. or any other countries.

All you conspiracy theorists need to take some math lessons too. Recent scares are building up to the moment when a world government will form and stamp out all freedoms? Chemicals in the water and subliminal messages on TV keep us subdued and pacified? Tin foil hats can reflect electromagnetic waves that aliens send down to brainwash us? That's about as likely as frozen Walt Disney driving around America with Spuds MacKenzie and zombie Ronald Reagan running people down in their '68 Cadillac Eldorado convertible.

We as humans somehow buy into these conspiracies. Magic bullets, the Illuminati, Santa Claus -- they're exciting compared to the dullness of reality. We're willing to suspend our disbelief even if a situation is completely improbable. We're creatures of suspicion; the simpler an explanation is for a situation, the less likely it's the real answer.

Rather than plea to simple reason, we argue from fear, misunderstanding, and complexity. We've been doing this for ages, holding on to ideas that we laugh at today -- that the sun revolved around the earth; UFOs crashed in the desert and were taken to Area 51; that Bert and Ernie are gay.

It's harder to accept a simpler explanation due to pressures at the time keeping those explanations as the "truth" -- because the earth was created by God and therefore must be at the center of the universe; that the government would obviously cover up the alien landings with a blanket of lies; two men who share a bed for decades (yet miraculously stay the same age) must be gay.

The reality of the situation may be boring, but at least we're more sure of this than the previous theories -- the earth revolves around the sun; a high altitude weather balloon crashed in the desert; Bert is a figment of Ernie's imagination like that character Brad Pitt played in Fight Club.

Besides the human instinct to believe the unbelievable, two other related culprits at work here. The first is an error of selective judgement where, given a set of facts and observations, you come to a conclusion that is isn't supported by those facts and observations. You can omit parts of your observations when coming to this conclusion, but the error is entirely in your reasoning about those observations rather than the observations themselves. You know, like how O.J. Simpson got off for murdering his wife. Of course he did it. All the evidence pointed to him. The gloves were "too small?" Yeah, right. The only person who didn't know that O.J. did it was... well... who didn't believe that O.J did it? I rest my case.

The second and far worse error is selective observation. Rather than coming to the wrong conclusion given a set of facts, the result of selective observation is a set of facts and observations that can lead only to a specific conclusion. Often this information is skewed, removes any observations that don't support the conclusion, or even has fabricated information inserted when the results didn't come out as expected. How about the Kennedy assassination? We all know there had to be multiple gunmen, but the government only believes in magic bullets so that's what they concluded. Maybe once all the people involved die we'll find out the truth.

The reason selective observation is worse than selective judgement is that when you make the wrong judgement, you can always go back to the facts and draw a new conclusion. When your observations are skewed, then there's no way to guarantee a correct (or at least a better) judgement from those observations. In other words, the information that you chose not to commit (or to commit incorrectly) means all results based on that information is flawed.

Taking this back to the case of war in Iraq, certainly there was selective judgement on the part of the Bush administration to take and present the intelligence as fact without caveat. From the perspective of everyone else, we cope with the observations given to us by Bush et.al.; if we're to believe what the government tells us, we have no other conclusion to draw except that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Unless, of course, we believe the U.N. weapons inspectors.

Maybe given more time, the U.N. inspectors would have turned up something. So here's the final flaw that felled Bush's arguments. Given this premise -- Iraq has weapons of mass destruction -- proving the affirmative is much more difficult than proving the negative. A word-bender for you: we can never be certain that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction. Think that over a few times. Said differently, we can never be certain that Saddam was right when he said Iraq destroyed all its WMD. However, we can easily prove they did have WMD simply by finding them. Some might claim that's impossible too, but I say proving Saddam right is the more difficult proposal of the two. We can keep searching Iraq forever for WMD and never find them. And we will never be sure that there were never any WMD unless we find them.

Most people probably won't think this deep about Iraq, probability, logic errors and the like (nor work themselves into confusion like I did in that last paragraph). However, I would desperately hope that our government is doing this kind of thinking. I like to believe that the steady decline in Bush's job approval and agreement (or rather disagreement) on whether the country is headed in the right direction is the result of the American people are grading him on his logic and coming to a new conclusion of their own.

My political persuasions aside, the lesson here is to please take the time and become more math and logic literate. There is no better pleasure than laughing in the face of a person who can't make a coherent argument or understand facts, statistics, and probabilities. Or make up words. Like "Kosovians" or "resignate" and "subsidation" or "subliminabable." Because even if George W. Bush doesn't excel at logic or statistics or forming cohesive statements, at least we know he's creative.

It's about five dollars

This saga starts at the San Francisco Farmer's Market. It's held at the Ferry Building, at the north end of Market Street in downtown. Every weekend hundreds (thousands?) of people and dozens of booths make this a nice place to do your shopping for fresh foodstuffs if you live in the city. There was no lack of tasty treats for whatever your appetite desires from what I saw.

As I was walking over to the building, I passed by some artists showing their wares and a randomly parked BMW Z3. The BMW was being offered in a raffle. The only requirement for entry is writing down your name, phone number, address, and a couple of other random pieces of information (like age, email) on a little sheet of paper then putting that paper in the appropriate box.

That's all? Just a little information about myself? Hm... Well, I'll probably get some telemarketing calls and maybe some junk mail, but for the chance to win a nice, new BMW...

But wait a minute. They're giving away a BMW for nothing. I mean, I'm not stapling a $5 to the sheet I drop in the box. And the car costs a lot of money. I don't know exactly how much, but I'm sure it far exceeds what's in my bank account right now.

So, the BMW-giver-awayers must be getting something of value to cover the cost of the car, right? In other words, if all I'm giving them is my name and such, then that must be worth something. Something as in dollars.

Like five dollars.

Random uninformed numbers to make my argument seem logical: Say they're giving away a $25,000 car. 5,000 people enter. That means the value of each name is about $5, and certainly more because the people giving away the car must be making profit on our names and information or they wouldn't have much incentive to invest the $25,000 to invest in the car in the first place.

Your personal information has value. Whole industries are built on this -- collecting information about you, what you buy, your demographics, your friends, and what raffles you enter where you give out your name and address.

Another example: Some guy was out on the street giving away free Domino's personal pizzas to whoever would fill out his little form, presumably for a credit application or something similar. Again, about a $5 investment because us students are high risk for credit card companies, where the credit card company is sure to make back that $5 investment in interest payments. And I was hungry too...

While those are examples of giving out information, most "invasions" of privacy are much more subtle: associating your credit card number with your grocery purchases to build a profile of your shopping; using cookies or spyware to track your web surfing habits; the cameras the government planted in my glasses to keep track of everything I see and do.

Now that I think about it, those "savers cards" you get at the grocery store that they use to track you usually save me about $5 when I use them...

Legally, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces. While I agree, I think that anytime it takes more than an individual human's effort to track what you do, it should be illegal. In other words, computers have made "invasions" into privacy much easier -- storing your purchases in a big database available at the click of a mouse. If a person was following you around, writing down by hand everything you did, I would be OK with that. But if it took two or more people to do it, or one person plus a computer (scanning your groceries at the register), then no -- that's too much. Anyway, I think it would be funny if you went to the grocery store, picked up a basket or cart, and then picked up your person to follow you around and record all your purchases.

But again, we value our privacy, and our privacy has a value. Therefore, that grocery store guy can follow me around and write whatever he wants, but I get a free pound of tuna steak. That's right -- tuna steak. I can't afford the good eats on my income (or lack thereof). My grocery store privacy is worth at least $15 of tuna.

My Internet privacy is up for sale too. You can have it at the small cost of a high-speed dedicated connection (DSL or cable modem, your choice) plus $1 per hour of surfing payable to my PayPal account or in Amazon.com gift certificates. And I promise you it's good stuff too.

Anyone else interested in buying other aspects of my privacy can inquire via email using the email link at the main menu. Other suggestions include: friends and associates, music listening, TV watching, sleeping, and eating habits (including restaurants, alcohol, and snacks -- it's a bargain!).

What? They're already tracking that information? Shit... In that case, live streaming videos from my apartment are available at the low, low cost of $5 a month. Though I promise you nothing worth even that much is going on here...

You knew this was coming...

My fear, noted in my previous rant, has been realized. In short, the choir was in attendance at the 2004 Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference and was summarily preached at. Not even Slashdot, stalwart of (libertarian?) technology news, had a story on CFP. I suppose conferences are not the proper venue to invite the general public to learn more about these issues.

A friend of mine would quickly add that the troops need time to discuss strategy among themselves, to be made aware of the goings-on in their individual camps. While I agree, this raises the question of when should the focus change from rallying the troops to stirring passion on the home front.

The realization that my fears had come true occurred as I was having a conversation with a non-technical non-lawyer after the conference proceedings. He noted the lack of a primer for people interested in these issues such as himself; even if you're interested in the issues, most of the conference will go over your head if you don't understand the vocabulary we use or if you're not aware of the current events or if you don't know the laws and policies involved.

So several of us will take it upon ourselves to find a solution to this problem. This gets back to that previous rant, namely coming up with ways to get other people to care. Education is a necessary part of that. The lack of pedagogy is alarming to me, and (of course) I defer voicing my opinion on pedagogy until some future rant.

But here are the major themes as I saw them that were presented at the conference as well as questions I was left with, including extra cynicism (cynicism you've all grown to love and cherish by now I hope...).

• The lack of coordination between law, policy, and technological efforts

  I think someone at every session suggested or outright said that we need more interaction between the different camps (lawyers, policy makers, technologists, industry, etc) to reach better solutions. But wasn't this the point of CFP in the first place -- to foster exactly this communication? If so, then why is this communication not happening? My guess is that we're too busy in our own little worlds to find time to do this large scale coordination... Maybe they'll fix this by the next CFP (yeah, right).

• "National security" as the new Catch-22

  Any time that something seemed questionable, like collecting databases with info about you and using them together to determine if you're exhibiting terrorist behavior, the "national security" exception was invoked. You can't question this without being unpatriotic, and no patriotic person would question the need for greater national security, right? "National security" is also like that newsgroup law about Hitler -- as soon as you mention Hitler, the conversation is over because there's nothing you can say to come back against Hitler (just like from Office Space -- "You know, the Nazis had pieces of flair that they made the Jews wear"). Once someone cites "national security" as the justification for action, all other arguments lose merit.

• Lack of research funding, interest in pursuing such research, and research in the wrong areas

  Doug Tygar, U.C. Berkeley professor, hit the nail on the head with this one. Nearly all of the problems presented at CFP would benefit from deeper research. Not only do we need to find money and people to pursue these topics, that also implies we should trim other less fruitful but related areas of research (trusted computing comes to mind).

• "Clarifying" versus "disagree"

  The conference was remarkably civil, despite the very brave representatives from Microsoft, DirecTV, the Bush Administration (the Department of Justice), and more willing to play in the lions' den. Rarely the civility broke down and people got a little angry. But the essence of this comes down to one word: "clarify." If I disagree with you, I start a comment with "I want you to clarify..." rather than "I don't agree..." because I assume some people have to try really hard not to start a Jerry Springer-like moment while on a conference panel, no matter how funny such an event would be.

• Definitions

  For a conference called "Computers, Freedom, and Privacy," I only know what computers are. Freedom and privacy are too broad and relative to discuss without having definitions for them. This is especially important as those definitions change in different contexts -- privacy in email is much different than privacy in web surfing habits. I've got a rant around here somewhere that deals with the definition of freedom -- I'll get around to it some other time...

• Unsophisticated users, sophisticated systems and laws

  Users are stupid. Technologies are too complicated and arrive too rapidly for individuals to learn to use them successfully with respect to laws and privacy and the like. Also, most users don't understand laws, licenses, copyrights, and legal issues surrounding these technologies. Are we somehow responsible for teaching people these issues? Or should we aim for the lowest common denominator and dumb down technologies and laws? I am truly dumbfounded for how to solve this, but get me a bottle of whiskey and a computer and I'll gladly provide words on the subject... or just wait a few more weeks until I formulate a legitimate opinion and put it up here.

• The Internet and computers have a long and deep memory

  Exemplified by Gmail (1 GB of email storage) and the Internet Archive (storing the web since 1997), people don't realize that pretty much everything that we do on the Internet or computer networks is stored somewhere. Even if this is mostly limited to the web now, it will very quickly expand (if not there already) to email, instant messaging, voice-over-IP (Internet telephony), and all other present and future net communications, and even things we don't usually associate with computers like your purchasing records, travel plans, health information, financial statements, and so on. The scariest example of how information like this can be used against you at the conference was how your credit information can be used to deny you insurance or even jack up your rates if your credit history makes you seem like an at-risk individual or how that credit info can be used to discriminate against groups. Even though nobody explicitly stated the problem as I did here, this is the sleeper issue that worries me most from the conference. Information can be used against us just as it can be used to help, but what if information is permanent and can be collected from disparate sources? Think if Orkut and Gmail shared information and fear Google. I think I'll revisit the information permanence problem later...

• Can or should digital technologies reflect analog systems?

  This is the big question I left with after the conference. Many of the presentations implied that while we want the benefit of digital systems, we also want all the capabilities of physical world systems. For example, electronic voting systems should have some human verifiable or auditing method for performing recounts just like recounting paper ballots. Can we really have it both ways in every case? If we can do it, that doesn't mean we must do it...

• The philosophers, social scientists, economists, average joes, etc...

  Much of the conference focused on three things: law, policy, and technology. This ignored many important other parts like social repercussions of technology, law, and policy change, economic aspects that affect the development of such things or measurable results of changes, philosophies that underlie our beliefs, or even the beliefs of everyday people (not in attendance at the conference). Many important opinions and points of view were missing from the conference as a result. Hopefully future CFPs will take this into account when inviting panel participants. On a similar note, I don't think I heard the word "ethics" mentioned once, even if that was the subject of nearly every discussion.

I leave you with the eternal question that plagues my mind: If nobody cares about these issues, should we do anything about them? Most people scoff at the question -- "Well of course we should do something" in the kind of way that implies we know what's better for them than they do for themselves. The deeper implication of the question is whether or not everyone should care about these issues. If so, what can we do to achieve that?

Answers, of course, are left as an exercise to the reader.

Home is a feeling

I wrote this a few years ago on a previous incarnation of the web site. I was reminded of it because of some recent events so here it is again. Minor edits made, mostly grammar stuffs.

I was inspired by something I read today to write about homesickness. First, let me be clear that I am NOT homesick; I enjoy Austin alot and would much rather be here than there (except for Monday nights at the Flying Saucer). But anyway, time for a meloncholy digression.

So about being homesick... that was me when I went to college. Yes, I cried when my parents left (no, I'm not ashamed of it, well, not any more). But there was more to it than that. I hated the high school I went to because it was full of fake people -- not fake as in non-existant people, but fake as in "daddy bought me a brand new mustang for my 16th birthday" people. I didn't belong to that click; I had my own friends, all of whom fell outside the Plano preppy-kid norm by quite a bit.

So when it came time for me to choose a place to go to for college, I decided to go anywhere that wasn't Texas so I could migrate away from the Plano stereotypical people and branch out from my old friends. Most of my other high school friends chose to go to UT or stay close to home, and I can't blame them either. I live in Austin now and this is a great place, but college was my first opportunity to get out of the nest and away from all of that for the first time, and I wasn't about to pass it up.

And I ended in St. Louis, Missouri. And I cried when my parents left because they were the last tie I had to anything - ANYTHING - that I knew in my 18 years previous to then. For the first time in my life, I was truly on my own.

Then there was the bout of homesickness. Homesickness isn't wanting your mom and dad or your friends - it's about wanting something familiar. The intersection you drive by every day. Watching a video with your friends. The feeling you get when you know exactly where you are beacuse you know the roads or the buildings that well...

Homesickness lasted a while, but then I started meeting more people and growing new friendships - the exact reason why I decided to go somewhere far away from the rest of my friends. And my new freinds and I bonded and had fun, and the unfamiliar became familiar, and the homesickness faded.

And then came the first big homecoming - Thanksgiving. Everyone went home to see their folks and friends - and for me, this was the first time I visited home since I left school. It wasn't quite what I expected.

The first thing I noticed were the little things - oh, he got his ear pierced. Wow, Texans really do have accents (you pick up on the slightest twang when you've been away from it for four months). Hey, how have you been? You know the routine...

Then I started noticing something different - like all the old bonds that we used to have weren't quite there. That even though we were all still good friends, something was missing. I had missed 4 months of their lives as they were going through the same growth that I had.

But then I realized the biggest change - my own change. Even in a short 4 months, I had become a little more jaded, a little more grown up... And with my new freedoms at school, home just wasn't the same place that it used to be. Sure it was home, but it didn't carry the same weight that it used to. School offered something different -- something unlike anything else I had experienced up to that point. I was more eager to get back to school than I was to catch up with my old friends...

And that was about it. I briefly caught up with my old friends then went back to school. When I got back to school, I had a disjoint sense of what home was. Home/school wasn't home - it was my occupation for 9 months then I returned to home/home. And home/home was a temporary location until I went back to school... It didn't offer the same sense of home-ness that it used to.

Now, Austin is home. It feels 'right' when I get back here. It welcomes me back when I walk off the plane or drive over the border or even going around town. Home/home is still home, but more in a nostalgic sense. My parents, the dog, old friends... That's not to slight my friends in any way - I love them to death, but I'm only a guest when I visit now, not a resident. It offers a complacency that I can't get anywhere else, but it's not the same home that it was during my 18 years of living there.

Home is a feeling. It's a place that you feel safe and happy in. I had no home for my college years only because it was too disjoint - family and old friends and new friends and new experiences. Now that I have some more permanence in my life, this feels like home.

And because I believe in not repeating what someone else said better...

When I see a place for the first time... I notice everything, the color of the paper, the sky, the way people walk, doorknobs, every detail.

Then, after I've been there a while, I don't notice them anymore. Only by forgetting can I remember what a place is really like... so maybe for me forgetting and remembering are the same thing.

David Byrne, True Stories

and homesickness is forgetting and remembering those details...

So take this however you will. Just remember that a place is only as much a home as you make it.

CFP 2004: Preaching to the choir

The Computer Freedom and Privacy Conference for 2004 is quickly approaching and I'm pretty pissed off. This is a conference for exploring issues in, go figure, computers, freedom, and privacy. To me, it's as much a catch-all as "alternative rock." Sure, freedom and privacy are important, but then again...

I was checking the list of speakers to find the interests represented at the various sessions during the conference. I estimate that at least 3/4 of the participants are representing left-leaning organizations or universities (and university types tend to also sway left). Occasionally there's a government official or corporate interest represented, but largely this is a "pat yourself on the back" kind of clinic for the liberal-type front line fighters in the freedom and privacy battle.

So who in their right mind would defend less privacy or less freedom? Of course everyone wants freedom and privacy. Just like mom and education and apple pie, nobody could defend decreasing freedom and privacy and live to tell about it, especially at a conference held in Berkeley.

Is this the most self-serving conference ever? I would absolutely love the opportunity to go and (fraudulently) profess my hatred of freedom and privacy. You know -- explain to everybody how futile their efforts are and destroy their dreams that they're actually "making a difference." Bring blight and strife across the lands and leave a swath of destruction in my wake.

But I digress... I feel sorry for any representitives of the MPAA or RIAA and the like. They're outnumbered and certainly will have many hard fought arguments ahead of them during that week. I'm on their side -- not that I agree with their point of view, but I like rooting for the underdogs.

This conference is the ultimate collection of subjects that the left-leaning people care about that everyone else doesn't care about. Does this mean we shouldn't care about these issues? Of course not, but we don't have solutions to most of the problems. Will open source software fix the issues with electronic voting systems? Absolutely no, and most people wouldn't know the difference between an open-source powered electronic voting system versus a proprietary one.

My concern is the lack of concern about these issues. Surprisingly, there's only one session about organizing people for protest and change, but that was about sites such as MoveOn.org and the like. The conference presenters are ice skating uphill; they don't realize that most of their problem isn't solving the issue at hand but rather creating a movement behind their beliefs.

And this brings me back to where I started from. Bring in more RIAA people, more anti-privacy folks, more anti-freedom advocates. Make them show their true colors. Piss people off. Generate a following of others not part of the intellectual elite or conference participants. These people are trying to start a rebellion but don't realize it. Don't they understand that the issues they're fighting for can stir the passion of everyone in this country or maybe even start a worldwide movement?

I suppose not... Instead, they'll enjoy buffets and organized discussions and leave the conference with "contacts" and not come to any new conclusions about how they can achieve their goals. If these issues are so fundamental to every person in this country, then why don't most people care? Or do they care and are apathetic to the calls to fight?

Lawyers and technologists make bad evangelists. I think I'll hire Mr. T or someone of similar standing when I start my campaign. At least then people outside those who already care might actually listen...

I have a +3 Vorpal Sword of Civil Disobedience and a +5 in Nonviolent Protest

I have many friends who play MMORPGs -- Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games -- and have always wondered what it is about them that turns my friends into computer gaming addicts. Is it the way that the games allow you to interact with so many other people in a computer generated fantasy realm? Maybe its the fetish for leveling up, twinking, and creating the greatest character ever. Perhaps these people just want to get the most for their monthly fees.

But tonight I don't seek to explain the behaviors of these people. Instead, I want to focus on what makes an online world and how to overthrow Everquest. For those of you out of the loop, Everquest is one of many online role playing games where you play the part of a character in a fantasy realm, complete with cities and magic and other players. You fight monsters and complete quests and work on your abilities, earning experience and money and items in an effort to become the best whatever-you-choose-to-be. The game ends once Sony decides to shut it down or until you stop paying your bill, whichever comes first.

Back to the issue at hand. How much of the game comes from the players themselves? Sure, you pay $10 a month to play the game, but you go on missions with your friends and have a clan and enjoy the group aspects of the game more than roaming on your own. Without you and the interaction of your fellow players, the game would be no fun at all.

You make the game.

So why not take it back?

Let's overthrow Everquest. I've got a few ideas for how we can do this...

• Make an emulator:

  Even though Sony's terms of service prohibit reverse engineering and emulator creation, it's still well within your rights to create a system that recreates the Everquest server. This task will be time consuming and difficult, but well worth it once you don't have to pay your monthly fee any more.

• Strike:

  Get as many people as you can online at once, find a nice spot in the world, and bring everyone to that spot. Then do nothing. For a very long time. Keep your connection up for as long as possible to waste the server bandwidth. Make Sony waste their money supporting the servers while and use their processing power and bandwidth to the fullest. Furthermore, you'll bring all other activity on the server to a standstill. Hopefully this will teach them some lessons.

• Go do something else:

  You're a nerd. Leave the game. Find something else to do like play another game, find online porn or music, or start a web site to do your own blathering. At the very least, go outside every so often. The sunlight will do you good. Plus you can spend your extra $10 a month on a movie or sunscreen lotion.

So it's not an amazing list, but you get the point. This leads to the next question -- what do you do once you have your own virtual world? I'll answer the question with a question -- what do you do in your world now? Can a virtual world designed for fantasy role playing evolve to support people with jobs, bars with healthy attendance, religious organizations, law enforcement, fast food restaurants, governments, and all the other aspects of life that we've come to expect day to day?

Yeah, there's already Second Life and similar wanna-be reality games out there (The Sims anyone?). Do these games really model reality? How much of it? How much of the world do you have to program to satisfy an individual's perception of reality?

These games prove two things to me. First, reality is relative, so these worlds are as real as there are hundred of thousands of participants worldwide using them and individuals known for their role playing characters' exploits rather than their own. And second, the corollary, people are very willing to suspend their perception of reality when they're paying $10 a month to use a computer generated fantasy world, no matter how much their real life suffers as a result (and no matter how much that virtual world is total crap).

Once again I'm not going to delve into the psychology of the individual who wants to spend all of his or her time playing these games. If someone can find their emotional and mental well being through a computer, who am I to complain?

Ok, I'll complain. But I'll save that for another evening.

Ralph Kramden joins NASA, uppercuts astronauts into orbit.

I find the history of space endlessly fascinating. If you're interested, find a book about the history of western science. Suffice to say, many ideas about the nature of space and the universe were proposed. For the history books, please remember that Copernicus was part of a religious sect that believed that the sun was the embodiment of God and, therefore, the center of the universe.

But tonight's digression is a little more modern. A friend of mine loves space and satellites. He told me the reason he got interested in space was Star Trek. He also told me the history of satellites. Apparently Arthur C. Clarke, writer of the famous 2001 series of books, wrote an essay basically describing the modern satellite. The only different between his description and the eventual reality was that Clarke envisioned people living in the satellites replacing the vacuum tubes as they burned out. Then again, the Greeks believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe. I suppose we can't always be correct.

Still, an overriding goal throughout the history of mankind was to find a way to send humans into space. The curiosity of humans drives us to explore places that we cannot otherwise reach. And so, in the tension formed after World War II, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. found themselves showing off their nuclear delivery technology by strapping people in a cockpit where a warhead would normally go. This dual nature of the space program is often forgotten; instead the triumphs (and certainly the calamities) are remembered in the history textbooks as triumphs are much more in line with the human spirit, rather than the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Today, manned space flight is in serious trouble. The returns on investment are pitiful, and having people in space no longer carries the same meaning as it once did. Suddenly George Bush, readying his 2004 election campaign, uses NASA as leverage to further his base of support. A trip to Mars? A base on the moon? And with a price tag of only $800 million, it's a deal you can't refuse!

Man was not meant to be in outer space. If we had, then our bodies wouldn't need absurd amounts of protection to survive in the lack of atmosphere. Even worse, we don't have the technology to protect the passengers on a trip to Mars from the deadly radiation astronauts would be exposed to over the 6+ month, possibly several year, journey. But for the rest of this argument, let's assume that we do have the technology, and that the technology won't fail like the last few Mars rover missions have.

So first, let's get the facts straight. Neither teflon, velcro, nor Tang were the results of space flight. Each was invented before astronauts took to the skies. In general, most innovations that made it to the space program were not invented for the space program. For that matter, many of them were not made by Americans either. The developments from manned space flight are questionable at best. I can't name anything that came from a space shuttle trip that has affected my life.

And the costs... Remember that $800 million is only for planning and preliminary research. I don't know the numbers, but I would estimate the cost of a manned space flight is many (hundreds?) times greater than an unmanned flight. Go back to Clarke's satellites -- think of how much it would cost to keep a person alive in a satellite, including food, pay, entertainment (after all, it does get boring in space alone), and eventually getting that person back from space. That's to say the least of a satellite much larger (5-10 times larger), much more expensive, and much more prone to problems than an unmanned satellite. If you don't believe me, do some research on the budget overruns of the International Space Station.

So we went to the moon, but for some reason it was decided to keep going back to space. I suppose we needed to keep paying all our scientists to stop them from going to one of the communist countries. Another reason was to further the dreams of Americans, but somehow space lost its romance after we went to the moon. Today, a space shuttle getting destroyed is a tragedy worthy of weeks of news coverage, but another space flight is a 20 second news item on the 6 o'clock news.

And so NASA is set to receive some $14 billion this year. This may be adjusted because the Bush administration has little affinity for the ISS -- deciding to scale back the station in the face of budget shortfalls in the rest of the government. I couldn't be happier. Putting a person in space was a noble act but largely brought upon by tensions between the U.S.S.R. and the United States (in short, one-upsmanship).

The ultimate failure here is that the goals of manned space flight are not in line with any other goals of the space program or even goals of Americans as a whole. People live in many uninhabitable environments: Antarctica, under the ocean, and in trees, and we don't care about those people at all. Likewise, we don't care about the space shuttle. We don't care about the ISS. We won't care about a base on the moon. We might care about man on Mars, but getting there is infeasible currently. Perhaps the best way to state this case is to ask yourself which you would rather have: $800 million spent on the planning stages of a moon base and Mars trip or $800 million spent on education?

If money was abundant, I would be more than willing to revisit this argument. Given the state of things, I can only hope Bush gets ridiculed mercilessly until he pulls the plan. Bush already had to take that plan out of the State of the Union speech after being pressured by his fellow Republicans, afraid that it would be fiscally irresponsible to propose such a plan given the current economic conditions. No shit -- I can spell "political suicide" even if Bush can't.

So what should we do in space? Satellites are fine. Maybe people up there would be nice eventually. I feel that the time and money spent on manned space flight could have been better spent making huge strides in technology for unmanned space devices.

But above all, why the hell should we keep going to space when we can't even get things right on Earth? Maybe the people in government and at NASA know something we don't -- that we must go to space because we've royally fucked things up on Earth past the point of repair. The first resident of the new moon base will be George Bush, and he'll have a front row seat to the destruction of the earth a few hundred thousand miles away. I can see the advertisements now: Watch the Earth crumble under the rule of humans from your own suite in the GWB Moon Base! Act now and get your own lunar rover!

But I digress. Be very sceptical of the space program. The way I see it, we should only allow people in space, underwater, and other places only if I can afford it. That means you might have to wait until I die to get back to space. For that matter, you might have to wait a while to travel by plane. I hope you're patient.