Out of the Closet: For Howard Dean

As I've mentioned infrequently, I've been doing some volunteer work for the Howard Dean campaign for the past few months. I now have an official title — "Senior Internet Advisor" — so I figure I should come out of the closet entirely.

The title formalizes what I've been doing so far: Sundry writing for the campaign and talking with them about Net issues. I've also done a little speaking on behalf of the campaign — well, once, substituting for Joe Trippi, the campaign manager, at a panel in DC on the Internet and democracy. Now I'll be doing more writing, advising and speaking for the campaign. I'm thrilled, of course.

Why Dean? Because he's the candidate closest to my views who can beat Bush. The Dean campaign has been doing an astounding job of energizing a base of voters who haven't cared enough to come to the polls before. I like that strategy a lot better than trying to get 51% of the center by out-Bushing Bush.

And no campaign has ever gotten the Internet so right. They aren't just working the email lists and using the Net as a way to drive down the cost of mass politicking. From Joe Trippi on down they "get" the Net. They understand that it's about giving voice to the "ends" of the Net (AKA us), that it means they lose some control of their message, that they need to enable groups to self-organize, that it's about listening and conversations more than about center-out broadcasting. This is an end-to-end campaign. The staff is webby to the core. If you met 'em, you'd love 'em.

So, yeah, I'm for Dean. And I'm proud and a-tingle at being to help in some little way.

Chris Lydon on a Roll

Christopher Lydon continues to invent our expectations for audioblogging. Elaine Scarry, Steve Kinzler, the InstaPundit ... this stuff is coming at us like an on-demand radio interview show.

Because I'm on an AOLousy dialup connection this week, I haven't been able to listen, but I listened to Chris' interviews for years on "The Connection" so I feel real confident in recommending them even without having heard them.

Lear in the Berkshires

Over at BlogCritics I've blogged a review of Shakespeare & Co.'s production of "King Lear."

VoIP: Threat or Danger?

The FBI apparently wants to be able to wire tap Internet phone calls by bugging ISPs. But, because phone call bits look just like every other type of bit, this would enable — or require — the FBI to tap all the Internet packets going to or from a particular tappee.

Listen to Small Pieces

You can listen to tracks from the CD called "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" here. (Thanks to Michael O'Connor Clarke.)

I've written to the composer, Vert, to see if it's just a coincidence...

Semantic Web

I like what Earl Mardle has to say about the Semantic Web.

Needed: Free SMTP

I'm away from home for 2 weeks and the free SMTP server I'd been using - softhome.com - seems to have gone belly up. Does anyone know of a reliable free server I can use to send email via Outlook? I just signed up for HotPOP but it's succeeding at sending mail about one in ten times. H-e-e-e-e-e-l-l-l-l-l-lp!

Buy terrorists low, sell high!

Here's an image from the terrorist futures market that you've undoubtedly been reading about. No, it isn't a joke. It lists:

Jordan King overthrown 4th Quarter: $0.24
N. Korea Missile Attack 4th Quarter: $0.15
U.S. Recog. Palestine 1st 04: $0.32
Arafat Assassinated 1st 04: $0.17

(Thanks to Gary Unblinking Stock for the link.)

Developing Pollution

Last night, a friend who's 35-40 years old told me that when he went to high school in Rochester, NY, the water was so polluted by Eastman Kodak that a friend's science fair experiment consisted of developing film by using water from the local river.

Now that's a science fair project!

Help with Movable Type?

Martin Jensen is having trouble installing Movable Type because of the vagaries of his host. He's trying to create a site that will help the "trainwreck" he sees coming to the health care industry because of HIPAA. If there are any MT experts around who'd like to give Martin a hand, you can email him here. (There are some more details in his contribution to discussion board.)

Happy Birthday© to Doc®

"Happy Birthday" words and music copyrighted Mildred J. Hill and Patty Smith Hill, 1934. "Doc" is a trademark of the Walt Disney Company™.

Odlyzko on Price Discrimination and Privacy

Andrew Odlyzko who has the annoying tendency to be right and, worse, fact-based about it has posted a paper called "Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination on the Internet." It is to appear in the Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on eCommerce. From the abstract:

The rapid erosion of privacy poses numerous puzzles. Why is it occurring, and why do people care about it? This paper proposes an explanation for many of these puzzles in terms of the increasing importance of price discrimination.

From the beginning section of the paper:

The key point is that price discrimination offers a much higher payoff to sellers than any targeted marketing campaign. Adjacent seats on an airplane flight can bring in revenues of $200 or $2,000, depending on conditions under which tickets were purchased. It is the potential of extending such practices to other areas that is likely to be the "Holy Grail" of ecommerce and the inspiration for the privacy erosion we see. For it is the privacy intrusion represented by airplane tickets being non-transferable contracts with named individuals that enables airlines to practice yield management in the extreme form it has reached.

In an email to a mailing list Andrew writes: "If you consider the main questions in communications, namely how open or closed networks should be, should the end-to-end principle prevail, etc., they are really questions about price discrimination, as in 'Should your cable TV company be able to charge you more for a bit of voice traffic than for a bit of video?'"

PS: Fun Fact from the paper:

Coca Cola was discovered in 2000 to be experimenting with soda vending machines that would raise prices when temperatures were high.

Small Pieces Loosely Reiterated

Boris Anthony has found a CD called "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," which is also the name of my book. He recommends a google search to get more info about it and writes: "It appears to be some kind of electro music done by a brit in germany and sold mostly in japan... ;)"

According to a review at NZZ Online (and forgive whatever mistakes I make in translating it):

The British, living-in-Cologne multinstrumentalist Adam Butler, alias Vert, loves daring soundworks. His new album, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," is an experimental pop album, moving between spontaneity and discipline, poetry and science, classical beauty and futuristic aggressiveness.

Wow, exactly like my book! (There's a Japanese review here.)

Do you think Larry Lessig (at the new address of his blog site, btw) would agree to handle my law suit?

Three Blind Mice Clicks

I'm on vacation with a bad dialup connection, so I'm passing along these links without having tried them.

Meaning Map apparently is a way of exploring "opinion space," seeing how opinions are statistically related.

Martin Jensen has posted a page about how HIPAA, touted as requirements that will protect patient privacy, is being implemented in a way that will bring the health care industry, and possibly the economy, to its knees.

Chip says that this site will help you select your presidential candidate.

WEASEL WORDS: Don't blame me if you don't like 'em. I'm just the messenger.

Denise on What's Personal

Have I mentioned that I'm sorta kina intermittently on vacation for the next couple of weeks? I'll still be blogging, but I might miss a day or two. Like yesterday. (Actually, yesterday I drove a total of 10 hours for a 2-hour meeting, so we're not counting that as vacation.)

Open Source Opportunism

Care for a little cheap irony?

According to an article in eWeek (July 7) by Peter Galli, "the linux operating system has transformed the digital animation movie business over the past two years..." So, the same entertainment industry that would like very bit on the Internet to be owned and accounted for is happy to reap the benefit of the open source movement.

If, as it has been argued, the "trusted" computing initiative (AKA the Orwellian computing initiative) ends up locking out open source software even as it locks in Microsoft as the player for Hollywood's products, we will go from cheap irony to real irony.

Saddam's biological weapons

I just got a spam trying to sell me the Iraqi Most Wanted deck of cards that actually had a clever subject line:

Saddam's Evil Biological Weapons: His Sons.

Hard to find anything good to say about them. Nor do I want to.

A Marquee Worth a See

There's a story in this photo waiting to be written.

In fact, I bet someone's going to point us to where the story's already been written...

Doc Saves the Net

Doc's Linx Journal article on saving the Net is setting new records for page views and comments. Jeez, all it does is tell the truth. I don't see what the fuss is about :)

The World Votes

Here's a site that lets the world vote in the next US presidential election.

Since the world's vote counts about as much as that of a confused elderly Jewish lady in Dade County, Florida, it's too bad the site is only publishing the results afterthe US polls close when it can have absolutely no effect. (Thanks to Wiebe de Jager for the link.)

Dan on Copyright - Trespassing on the public domain

Dan Gillmor makes the point that we have to keep hammering home: Creators of creative works do not own their works the way land owners own their land. The US Constitution gives authors some rights that land owners have but carefully circumscribes them: creators have a monopoly on the right to publish their works for a limited time (originally 14 years, now life + 70) and within a limited domain (Fair Use).

Is this unfair to creators? Nope, and not just because creating a public domain is a greater good to which the creator must bow. Creators do this funny thing of publishing their works. In making their works public those works cease to be fully private the way land can be. You can't both make it public and demand that the public not use what they've bought. Some leeway is required. Copyright law tries to preserve that leeway, despite the Big Lie of Big Content.

And with digital rights management — or what Dan more accurately calls "digital restrictions management" — on the way, the owners of copyrights will be able to control with near perfect precision how you use what you've bought. Thus, the noble compromise that is copyright will be torn up, leaving the public as trespassers in what used to be the public domain.

Existentialism's answer

Our daughter just selected her courses for her first year at college. Among the four: Existentialism. Which has me a little scared.

Existentialism did a good job on me in my freshman year of convincing me that life is meaningless. I moped. Ordinary objects lost their significance even as I gazed at them. I looked around for a local Seine to plunge into. It took several more years for me to figure out why I think existentialism is wrong: the sort of meaning it laments hasn't been with us since God died, but other (lesser) meaning has always been with us. It's like me saying I'm unloved because Uma Thurman hasn't fallen for me, while ignoring that Ann Geller has. Well, maybe it's a little like that. [Note: I'm Ann's husband.]

I'd been thinking about exisentialism anyway — and why I like it — because of the conversation the Happy Tutor and AKMA had last week. Akma began by being offended by Bush's bald-faced lying. The Happy Tutor wondered how a post-Modernist can distinguish truth and lie, and then reflected further. Akma, disdaining the pomo label, replied. Wonderful stuff.

As the Tutor notes, his words may sound like a personal attack on Akma, but they do not indicate any lack of respect. Truly. Tutor's question is: How can a deconstructionist hold moral truths? Hasn't post-modernism pulled its own ground out from underneath it?

Is there a harder question? In this newly connected world we're more aware than ever that other cultures hold beliefs contrary to ours but with as much conviction. Even after we weed out the cultures that we count as crazy or evil (and that weeding out is, of course, fraught with its own problems), we're left with "legitimate" ideas that others hold and we reject. So, do we let ourselves be paralyzed into inaction? Do we take absolute actions — like killing people in war — as if our beliefs had absolute foundation? Isn't this the story of the past century? Isn't it what western culture has been building to for two millennia?

And in this situation, existentialism offers an answer that is unsatisfactory but is at least self-aware. Sartre knew that he held his beliefs and values largely because of the historical situation into which he was thrown, but he didn't let that keep him from the important work of killing Nazis. He got his hands dirty (directly or indirectly) because there is no choice. He acted absolutely while aware of the limits of his own understanding and the arbitrariness of his own situation.

So, while I disagree with how existentialism understands the problem, I am in sympathy with its "solution." I don't like it. I just don't know of a better one.

Electronic Scandal Machines

Dan Gillmor writes about the scandal about electronic voting machines that's just waiting to happen.

Another day, another linux

Ok, I'm up and running in Mandrake, using kde as my desktop. So far so good...

The only hitch I hit when installing Mandrake was that it asked me for a CD that I didn't have. I thought it must have been the third CD in the set, but I downloaded it twice and burned the image 3 times and it still wouldn't accept it. So, I finally said to just skip it, which it did without complaint. I think it might have been internationalization settings.

The kde desktop looks pretty and the file browser is modeled on Windows Explorer, which isn't a bad thing. Since I'm writing this entry from the linux desktop, I am apparently connected fine.

It looks like it's playing mp3's, which I couldn't get the RedHat distribution to do. Of course, I don't hear any sound, but the file is generated a graphic sound wave in the xmms player, so that's pretty much the same thing as hearing it, isn't it? I refuse to be stopped by details!

The Mandrake Control center tells me that it didn't install samba, required to see the Windows machines on my network. Hmm. I could have sworn that I checked that box during the installation process. Well, it's installing samba now. And it's found the folders on my XP laptop. Cool!

And now it's lost them. Oh well, it was cool for a moment...Wait, they're back!...But it can only see the directories...But it's auto-configured the fstab file.... Alternating fits of coolness...

Linux Reinstall

Since I've been setting up linux on a spare machine simply as a way to explore linux from the point of view of a desktop user, and since I've been having problems with the RedHat 9 desktop environment, I decided to start all over with a clean install of Mandrake's linux distribution, including letting it redo the partitioning. Clean sweep, baby!

So far the installation has gone pretty easily (he said jinxing himself). I hit a bump at the beginning, but I can't blame Mandrake for that. I'd downloaded the CD images and burned them last night. They're readable in Windows and RedHat could see the files, but my linux machine wouldn't boot from them. (It also wouldn't boot from the Mandrake floppy booter I'd made. Odd.) So, I installed a new CD reader, and now it's working fine. (So far.) It does make you wonder if the instability of the RedHat install was related to the flakiness of my CD player, although I'd be happier about that if it were crashing when it was accessing CDs.

Anyway, Mandrake has asked me the expected questions. This time I'm not being stingy about which packages it's installing. It says I have 13 minutes to go...

Previous linux entry is here.

"I did not have uranium with that woman"

The Democratic National Party is soliciting funds to air this commercial.

The ad twice shows Bush saying "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." It then tells us that everyone knew that was false. But the real aim of the ad is, I believe, to hang that phrase around Bush's neck the way the Republicans hung "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" around Clinton's.

And the way the administration tried to wiggle out of it by claiming that the full statement - truncated in the ad - only said that the British had learned this, not that it was true, is more disingenuous than Clinton's "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

All Things Considered on wikis

NPR's All Things Considered ran a commentary of mine last night on wikis and social software. You can hear it by going here to launch the Real or Windows Media Player. Or, you can try clicking here to play it in the Real client.

Donut man

Jason Kottke's got a classic example of how a little trust can double your business. It's exactly the sort of math that so many businesses never think of computing.

(Thanks to Chris Worth for passing along the link.)

Help me understand the Semantic Web?

For the past few weeks I've been noodling with an article on the Semantic Web. At the moment I'm particularly interested in the scope of its ambitions and whether they've changed over time. If you know about this and would like to talk with me, send me an email: self@evident.com.

Thanks.

Congress flattens bikes

According to an article in Salon by Katharine Mieszkowski:

Fresh out of subcommittee, a new congressional transportation appropriations bill will entirely eliminate some $600 million worth of annual federal funding for bike paths, walkways and other such transportation niceties in fiscal year 2004.

Because otherwise the terrorists will have won.

What didn't he know and when didn't he know it?

"The...picture of a disengaged, incurious, passive receptacle for his adviser's machination is so widely accepted around here [Washington] that even the administration officials desperately defending themselves over the crude manipulation of prewar intelligence have in the process depicted Bush himself as little more than a ventriloquist's dummy."

Thomas Oliphant, The Boston Globe today.

Good, clean penguin fun

Give this four seconds and it will make you laugh.

Lydon transcripts

Ryan Irelan has been transcribing Chris Lydon's audio interviews. The transcript of mine is here. (Thanks, Ryan!)

News Zealand

Kath Dewar writes from New Zealand, pointing to a local blog, written by Russell Brown. A quick scan shows that topics range from in-depth discussions of NZ politics to a disquisition on the Japanese and Korean insistence on topping their pizzas with corn.

Kath also points to "our best independent news site here in nz": Scoop. Maybe I visited it on an atypical day, but the two lead stories are on the scandalous truth behind the death of David Kelly and the scandalous truth behind the death of Vince Foster. Also: "Breast feeding mum sells sex legally." It'd be unfair to generalize...

Copies of forgeries

Linuxman Greg points us to scans of the forged documents about the uranium from Niger.

Ken Camp's Eight Questions

Ken asks eight questions of the candidates with regard to their Internet and telco policies. The questions are excellent, each wrapped in a paragraph of exposition. I doubt he'll get answers at the same level of detail since his questions are the type of things campaign staffs (staves?) write policy papers about, and it's still early in the campaign.

Restraining my Windows instincts in a linuxy world

I am sorely tempted to allow my Windows instinct to take over and do a clean reinstall of linux. I know it's the wrong impulse. I just don't know what the alternative is.

My linux desktop continues to lock up, rejecting mouse and keyboard input. This is reproducible. Switching to Ximian hasn't helped. It's clearly a software issue because the system responds to ctl-alt-f3, so it's still getting keyboard input. And the mouse cursor moves; none of the buttons work, however.

So, last night I thought I'd try the kde desktop instead. But I seem to be stuck in a loop. If I use redhat-config-packages and select "kde," it tells me that I need two "cups" apps. I know Ximian installed cups stuff, and printing to a printer hanging off an XP machine actually works. (Cups has something to do with printing.) If I then deselect kde from the package manager and try to install the cups stuff from the RedHat CD, it fails because it conflicts with the Ximian cups stuff. I suppose I could uninstall the Ximian cups stuff by hand and then hope that cups reinstalls from the CD, but I am just about certain to miss some files and miss some file that keeps track of the files because I Don't Know What I'm Doing™.So, just starting over seems like a good idea

Someone stop me before I get all windowsy on linux's ass.

Dean campaign in the fray

I wrote about how remarkable it is that a presidential candidate has found himself thrown into the wildest sort of Internet melee, which led to my blogging about how much is contained in a simple statement by Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's campaign manager, in his totally human comment on that fray.

So, now it's been continued on my own discussion board. Ken Camp criticizes Dean for "walking the fence" on issues. "All I really want is for him to stand up and say something." Seems like an odd complaint addressed to Howard Dean. In any case, Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's campaign manager, has responded. He says, in part:

The easiest thing in the world would have been to tell people on the Lessig blog exactly what they wanted to hear — so I think your criticism of playing the Internet audience is a little off-base. We really were and are trying to open a dialog to help us formulate our policies as we move forward — and to do it from the bottom up.

Ken replies. But I think he's missing the bigger point: Whether you agree with Ken that Dean's blogging at Lessig's site should have had more detailed proposals (and, fwiw, I do not agree) this has never happened before. Here's what's new or at least unusual:

A first-tier — even front-running — presidential candidate has written his own stuff and posted it for the world to see with no focus groups and little or no staff review.

The candidate did not pretend to know more than he does and did not rely on the in-depth knowledge available to him via the policy folks on his campaign staff. He instead asked his readers for help understanding the issues.

A completely open discussion was enabled for the world to see, with no filtering to exclude crazies, political opponents and political operatives.

The candidate and his campaign manager read and responded to that open discussion.

The conversation is now spilling over onto other sites.

Before this, what would you have had to do to get the ear of a potential president of the United States? You could have a column in a national newspaper or you could get a hernia toting sacks of cash to the campaign headquarters.

Can we at least pause for a moment of delight before we become blasé?

Fair Use Thumbnail

Dan Bricklin points to an Appeals Court's opinion on fair use. The court found that it was indeed fair use for a search engine to display thumbnails of copyrighted images in its search results.

Invisiblog

The Village Voice reports on Invisiblog, a site for anonymous blogging. It uses as its example dissidents within the Hasidic community. (Thanks to Bill Koslosky for the link.)

One cool thing about Firebird

On the advice of commenters on my blog about the brokenness of Microsoft IE, I downloaded Firebird, an early build on Mozilla. The UI is minimalist but it has at least one cool feature: Hold down the control key when you click on a link and it loads the page in the background and makes it available to you as part of a tabbed interface.

I've been using Opera as my default browser, and I like it a lot. And it, too, has one very cool feature: by holding down your right mouse button and swiping your mouse this way or that, it does things like closes the page or goes back or forward. I've gotten used to it.

The Brits Made Me Do It

Steve Johnson suggests that we ought to take our cue from our president when forced to lie. For example: "The British government has learned that those pants don't make you look fat at all."

Shocker: Online Discussion Makes Sense

I thought the comments (21 so far) on Gov. Dean's latest blog entry on the Lessig site are generally cogent and Yahoo-free. Maybe the trolls weren't getting the response they wanted. Or maybe they're just taking the night off. Anyway, it's a good discussion of issues around how to widen broadband access and the role of wifi.

The Web in One Line

In response to a comment questioning, in an unnecessarily nasty tone, whether Gov. Dean was the actual author of the posts at the Lessig blog, Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, wrote:

Seth - can I ask you something - don't you think that if we were ghostwriting this stuff we would have come up with something better than that?

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: the entire Wed summed up in one line. Take it in the micro sense and you have the Web's Theory of Authenticity with its corollary that Imperfection Is a Virtue. Take it to the macro and you get the Messy Network Axiom with its corollary that Efficiency is the Enemy of Truth.

Dean's got a hell of a campaign staff, webby to its bones. This is apparent not just in the "end-to-end" architecture that staffer Zephyr Teachout describes at Lessig's site today but in Trippi's attitude. Put it together and you have the beginning of the real Internet revolution in politics.

IE6 Crashing

MSIE 6 has been crashing on me for several weeks now. I've installed the latest patches. I've turned the Java and JIT compiler off and on. But still it crashes on pages that, say, Opera has no trouble with. For example, I can get MSIE 6 to crash by sending it to this page from the Washington Post.

Weird. And annoying.

Lifeline

Ever wonder what your Palm Vx would look like if you backed your car over it?

So, now I'm in the market for a replacement. I use it as a portable copy of my Outlook (shudder) address book. Battery life, easy syncing, and cost all count. (I am not looking for an integrating cellphone.) Suggestions?

Chris Lydon audioblogs me

Chris Lydon, who hosted radio's best talk show, audioblogged me yesterday. This time Chris has divided the interview into three 5-minute segments (1 2 3). We talked about the new enthusiasm for the Web, the Web's effect on Big Media, and why the Dean blog at Lessig.com is historic.

We recorded it at Bob Doyle's place tucked away in Cambridge. The hallway is cluttered. The rug is worn. You open the door .... and you're in a mediatech's pleasure garden. Forty-five computers. Three T1 lines. In the hallway is a working 5-foot model of Merlin, the early electronic game Bob invented - the altar on which I sacrificed too many of my not-so-youthful hours. He also wrote MacPublisher, was a lead reviewer for New Media magazine, has a doctorate in physics from Harvard, etc. He's now founded a company called SkyBuilders the tag line of which I love: "We build community computers."

Lesson: You never know what's behind a door.

By the way, at Chris' site is a photo of Mary McGrath, a name familiar to the listeners of Chris' show. What a pleasure to meet her in the flesh!

Why panels suck

My column in Darwin Mag this month is about why panels suck so bad. Oddly, it includes two limericks.

Reading what isn't there

When I bought the extended warrantee on my daughter's HP laptop, I read the contract but failed to notice what wasn't there. I'd seen that laptops were excluded from the on-site service guarantee. But now that her hard drive has died 7 months into the contract, I've discovered that there's nothing in there about how quickly they're required to fix it. So, the company that provides the warrantee services for TigerDirect has just informed me that I will receive a box to ship the laptop within seven days, should expect the repair (slapping in a new hard drive: 5 minutes of work plus 40 minutes to reinstall from the disk image on a CD) to take "a few days" and then should allow another few days for it to be shipped back.

So the "We'll send a technician to your house" promise has turned into a "We'll eventually send you a box and you'll be without your computer for two weeks, assuming the guy at the local shop we're sending it to isn't on vacation."

Caveat emptor. Remember to read what isn't there.

Linux reboot

The Ximian desktop feels better than the Gnome one that came with RedHat. So far I'm finding it easier to find things. Also, it's done a better job finding my Windows machines on the network. But that good news is balanced by frequent freezes of keyboard and mouse. That may be because I was adjusting the sound properties. But with no mouse and no keyboard, my only input device is the off switch, which is not what I'm looking for in linux.

Another advantage of Ximian is that OpenOffice actually opened. And now that I know how to move files from my XP machines to linux, I could actually open a Word .doc file. Cool. OpenOffice's word processor looks pretty good. Tempting. Very tempting.

New Linux Desktop

I'm continuing to poke around linux.

I'm not finding the Gnome desktop I'm using to be very predictable, so I thought I'd install the Ximian version (free, of course, although they sell a pro version for $99) just to see what it's like. It's a multi-hundred megabyte download that's occurring even as I write this.

I'm getting more comfortable with mounting Windows files. Tonight I almost painlessly mounted the My Documents directory of my XP laptop and moved some files over to the linux machine. (Important lesson: Linux expects the name you gave the Windows directory when you first marked it as shared in Windows, not the actual filename. D'oh!)

Meanwhile, linux is still running like a dog on Valium. While looking around the Web for info on how to list processes (PS: it's "ps" and it likes a nice "-ae" as a parameter), I saw a reference to "top" which dynamically shows the percentage of CPU and memory consuemd by each process. It says that I've got nothing very intense going on, yet the system lags even when typing. So, something funny is up. And not funny ha ha.

Arrogance

There are at least two types of arrogance. One is rooted in a belief in one's own moral superiority. The other is rooted in an inability to recognize ambiguity as a fact of the world rather than as a failure of the intellect.

If I had to guess, I'd say George W. Bush's arrogance is of the second kind while his administration's arrogance generally is of the first kind.

A new type of presidential conversation

Howard Dean's blogs at Lessig's site have been straightforward and — from my point of view — right. I'm thrilled to hear a candidate addressing Net issues on the Net in a Netty way.

And so, whether he expected it or not, he's now been dropped into the middle of the fray. The comments on the discussion board are all over the place from considered disagreements and thoughtful questions, to outright trolling and name calling. Has any presidential candidate ever in history been dropped into a free-for-all quite like this? Could it be any more different than Bush's scripted press conferences and tailored, crotch-enhancing photo opps? Democracy just got a little real-er.

If I were Dean, I'd read the comment board as slashdot without the structure: ignore the thoughtless messages as if they had simply been trapped by the filter. People have a right to their opinions but conversational triage is in order. There's a lot to learn from some of the messages. There are some great questions. I'd be happy to see some members of his campaign staff replying if not Dean his own self.

It'd be easy to read the bluster and invective as a failure of the system. Nah. It is the system. Welcome to the Internet, Governor Dean! You're making history not just with the Lessig guest blogging but with the wild conversation it's ignited. And lots of people are going to love you for it.

Hooking up CA

Dewayne Hendricks (according to an article from Motorola) is heading up a project partially funded by the state of California to bring 1 gigabit broadband access to every person in the state by the end of the decade. The article says:

Hendricks believes that unless the FCC loosens its spectrum restrictions, other less-regulated countries quickly will exceed U.S. technological innovations.

?You?ll see technologies move to countries where there aren?t incumbency issues,? he says. ?Places like Tonga will deploy technology that makes us look like cave people.?

Headlines Perhaps a Tad Meek, Suggests Humble Scribe

Eric Umansky argues in today's "Today's Papers," Slate's daily news roundup, that headline writers are forsaking accuracy in order to soft pedal the Bush administration's problems with the truth. He cites an article in the Washington Post that document's the administrations contradictory statements about how Bush came to lie in his State of the Union. The latest statement from Bush is that the CIA didn't doubt the evidence until after the speech, which is false and inconsistent with the rest of what his administration has said. The headline of the article is: "PRESIDENT DEFENDS ALLEGATION ON IRAQ; Bush Says CIA's Doubts Followed Jan. 28 Address." Umansky suggests a more accurate headline would have been: "WHITE HOUSE OFFERS CONTRADICTORY EXPLANATIONS FOR INTEL CLAIMS."

He continues:

Another example of why the papers should consider sending their headline scribes to journalism reeducation camp: The NYT's David Sanger...reconstructs the path the bogus intel took and details how the White House's various stated defenses don't hold up: "Many are still asking how a White House aware of the doubts could have shown such caution in October, and thrown it to the winds in January." The mushy headline, "A SHIFTING SPOTLIGHT ON URANIUM SALES." Headline writers—typically copy-editors—have an obligation to give readers the most accurate sense possible of an article's conclusions, regardless of how poorly those conclusions reflect on our nation's leaders. They're frequently failing.

Let the class warfare begin!

The latest Denouncement continues the proud Net tradition of mocking AOLers:

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-WA, announced today that the "Blogosphere Purity Act" would in effect ban America Online "from encouraging, facilitating, or otherwise supporting the creation of web logs, or blogs, among its users."

More here.

Iranian Bloggers

Hossein Derakhshan lists all the English language Iranian blogs he knows of, providing a good place to dive in.

Stupid stupid Dreamweaver

I've actually written about this before, but I find it so annoying...

I like Dreamweaver. I generally like the improvements made in the new version (MX). I hate how they changed the smallest nit of the preferences dialog.

It used to be that there was a place to choose whether you want the default extension for the Web pages you create to be ".html" or ".htm". Now if you want to change it, the preferences dialog says "You can change the default extension in the document type XML file." This is linked to a help page that lists 20 xml pages you can visit. Even if you pick the right one, you are confronted with an uncommented XML file that nowhere has a line that says "default extension." Instead you have to figure out that you have to change the list of "winfileextension" so that "html" precedes "htm." Then you have to save, exit and restart Dreamweaver to find out if you guessed right or if you just screwed up your config file.

I would have loved to hear the discussion between Engineering and Product Marketing on this one! I'm no Jakob Nielsen, but I feel a low-graphics confidence when I say: Your users manual should never contain a line that begins, "Simply edit the XML file..."

From RB's Heart

Rageboy tells us this bad news about Ann Craig better than I could.

PoliLaffs

Republicans for Sharpton is a pretty funny site.

And the video in the upper right of this page is somewhat satisfying to the likes of me. (Thanks to Jean Camp for this link.)

Illegal Art

Not angry enough yet for a Monday? Read the Boston Globe's excellent article by Chris Gaither on the Illegal Art exhibit at the Artists Gallery of the Museum of Modern Art in SF. The exhibition purposeful uses copyrighted imagery to push against the strictures of copyright. The anger-making part is the pettiness of some of the copyright holders such as Mattel that sued Tom Forsythe for selling his photographs. called "Food Chain Barbie," of Barbie in kitchen appliances. The article explains that a facet of the law called acquiesence means that a copyright holder has to fight every supposed infraction or else they are presumed to have given up their rights. But Mattel sued, lost and is appealing.

Then, to top off your morning depression, you can read in Scott Kirsner's column about the demise of small ISPs. On the one hand, I respond by thinking that these dial-up ISPs are doomed because we're making the transition to broadband. On the other, I think that it's too bad the high-speed infrastructure wasn't opened up for competition by small providers offering features like reasonable service.

[Note: The links to the Globe will break in a few days.]

Commons Creativity

Larry Lessig offers one more blog entry before Howard the Dean steps in as a guest blogger for a week. Lessig points to a guitar track Coliln Mutchler posted to Opsound under a Creative Commons license that allows it to be shared so long as attribution is given. Cora Beth, a 17-year-old violinist then added a violin track, resulting in this.

Stuff like this enriches the world the way that that owned and defended music just can't.

Seeing Windows in linux

My nephew the linux guy has posted instructions that have my linux computer looking at Windows files elsewhere on the network. Cool! I can only do it within a terminal window - Gnome doesn't think it has GUI access - but it's pretty satisfying. In fact, I've copied over a bunch of MP3s and thus have a new project: finding an mp3 player for linux. The media player that comes with RedHat says that because of a licensing dispute, it won't play the little sweethearts.

SW is political

John Naughton in The Guardian seems to have discovered Lessig's Law. Naughton writes:

,,,software determines the architecture of cyberspace, and thus determines what you can do with and in the space.

Software is political. He has a good column about it that includes Ed Felten's suggestion that the open source community come up with filters as an alternative to the opaque commerical filters libraries can now be required to use. (Thanks to Alice Marshall for the link.)

Note: I don't know what Lessig's Law is. I made it up figuring that if anyone deserves to have a law named after him, it's Lessig.

Howard Dean Guest Blogs for Lessig

Larry Lessig is going on vacation and Howard Dean will serve as a guest blogger for a week starting on Monday.

AOL Blogs, um, Journals

According to a column by Leslie Walker in the Washington Post, AOL's v.9 will bring free blogging to its 34 million users, including RSS support. AOL is calling them "journals" because its market research showed that AOLers don't understand the word "blog." (Thanks to Bill Koslosky for the link.)

Linux on a Saturday Night

Continuing my evening attempts to get all linux-y... [Previous entries here: 1 2 3 4 5]

One of the commenters on previous postings said that I really have to get over my Windows-based instinct to reboot whenever I have a problem with linux. But I just switched the monitor over to the linux box for the first time since last night and my screen is frozen. Keyboard and mouse input do nothing. So, I can't see anything to do but press the Off switch. I can't say that so far linux has been a never-reboot experience.

This time, GRUB the boot loader showed me two linux installations I could boot from. What's that about? Is it because I updated the kernel during the previous session? I let it choose whichever it counted as its default.

Tonight I'm going to see if I can make any progress seeing files on the Windows machines on my network. I have instructions from my nephew, who is a serious linux admin, about how to do this. First, I check to see if Samba is installed by going to the services panel under system settings. Nope, it's not there as "samba" or as "smb."

I try browsing for more info, but I forgot that last night I unplugged the ethernet cable. I plug it back in. Linux doesn't recognize that I've done so. (XP does.) I know how to force XP to recognize a new connection but I don't know how with linux. It's here somewhere but I don't even know where to look. Aha! Network Device Control. It sees the ethernet. Click to activate. Nope, can't activate it. I don;t know why. Press configure. Tell it to get the DNS from the server, although it concerns me that that wasn't the default config I'd been using. Confirm. And, baddabing, I'm back on line.

Now Add/Remove Packages. RedHat is checking which packages are installed. Windows File Server isn't. Also, it looks System Tools may be needed. I'll install them off the RedHat disk. RedHat computes the dependencies among the packages; apparently doing this by hand is a major pain in the butt. But the installation program terminates abruptly and then it stops recognizing my mouse. So, I tell it to log me out, but it does a full cold boot. I have to say that I'm doing more reboots than with a normal XP install, although that may be due to Gnome (the desktop GUI) and in no small part is due to Stupid User Syndrome.

Ok, re-do the Add/Remove Packages. It seems to have worked the last time. And I can now see files on my Windows machines. Yeah!

When I try to open an html file on one of the XP machines, the linux apps say they can't access files at smb locations. Go to System Services and turn on smb...it's now listed. Still can't open the files though. On the advice of my nephew, I go to LinuxQuestions.org where there are detailed instructions - not quite detailed enough for the likes of me - on how to do mount a samba share. Hmm. It won't let me mount the share unless I'm root but it's rejecting my password as root. Yet it accepts that pwd when I login as root for other admin activities. Odd. I've just added myself to the adm group but that did nothing obvious. So, I'm logging in as root. And the mount command seems to have taken; smbfs is listed when I do a "mount." But when I navigate there through the GUI, I still can't open the file.

Meanwhile, another window refuses to close. This happened a couple of nights ago, too. I don't see it listed in the System Monitor. Oops, it's gone away now. I re-open it - it was the System Settings panel - but now Gnome tells me that Nautilus (its Explorer) has no viewer capable of opening the applets. Funny, they opened before.

Gnome seems really flaky. Far worse than XP. One of the comments to an earlier blog recommended I install a different desktop manager, but even after only a few days I feel like I've invested too much in Gnome to switch right now. So, off to bed and still not able to open files on networked XP machines. But the linux workgroup is showing up on the XP machine; it can't get any further than the workgroup icon, but that's progress.

Scott McCloud

Akma points us to Scott McCloud's online comic. I'm a fan of McCloud's stuff in one of the PC gaming mags I read. So, I signed up with BitPass; you use PayPal to give them, say, $5, and they pay McCloud $0.25 for each of the three chapters you read.

Good story and I love the way he draws. Totally worth a quarter.

Order of Magnitude Puzzle

On the NPR sports program "Only a Game" this morning, while interviewing the author of Uneven Playing Field (?), a book on racism in sports, the author pointed out how wildly wrong many people's estimates are of the total number of African-American professional athletes there are in this country. "All sports, all teams," the host added. Can you guess within an order of magnitude?

To see the answer, drag select the seemingly-blank space between the x's:

X one thousand, two hundred X

disPlayDoh!

After blogging about the ghosting I was getting with the hardware switch that's supposed to let me plug two computers into one monitor, and after getting the usual helpful advice from y'all - how exactly did you get to be so smart - I've discovered that my monitor has a second set of video inputs. Look, it's a big-ass monitor that's angled into a corner and can't be moved without rollers and mules, ok?

Anyway, there's one of them 5-input connection sets in the back, which apparently is called BNCx5 or RGBHV (are those two the same?) and after poking around in Google Groups - always an experiment in guessing contexts - it seems that I should be able to get a cable that converts from the usual 15-pin video out into the 5-strand video in that I need. It also seems that the BNC will give slightly better quality at 1600x1200, so I should I attach my Windows machine with the high-end graphics card into it, not my new, minimal linux box.

How wrong am I getting this?

Linux time

It's 8:30pm so I'm back on the Linux machine. Just messing around. And crashing.

Thanks to advice from vthe comment board, I found out that I should be using Samba to enable linux to open files on the XP machines on my network. I got the Samba file easily enough. Unlike in XP, double-clicking on a downloaded file in Opera doesn't launch the app you need to open it, at least not with compressed files. But doing so in the Gnome equivalent of Windows Explorer does. So, the files unzipped nicely. (I'm creating directories in my tree as if I knew what I were doing; I don't know what the expectations are for where you put downloaded executables.) But when I doubleclicked on one of the files, I got a segmentation fault from Gnome for nautilus-text-view. At least it didn't bring down the entire system, but XP handles crashes pretty well, too (in my naive experience).

Now I'm trying to read the pdf doc for samba, but the pdf reader (ghost viewer) is unable to open it. Sigh. But xpdf does fine. Oy veh, it's an 85 page manual that first wants me to run ./configure in my source directory, but I don't know how to get to a command line. Aha! Found the terminal. Navigate to the directory. Tab completion works! I'm feeling like a regulah unix hacker here. Run ./configure...and it fails because "no acceptable cc found in $PATH." I have no idea where a cc is except in an email msg and I somehow doubt that that's what it's looking for. So, I'm hosed. No samba for me. Wait, maybe it's already compiled. There's a RedHat directory. It doesn't open with the "text viewer" app on te popup menu, but it does with gedit. The readme says that I can produce the RPMS just by typing "sh makerpms.sh." I have no idea what an RPMS is, but apparently I want one, so back to ther terminal. And...it can't find the right directories and it doesn't like the parameters. Thus ends my Samba adventure for tonight.

My system is running slow for a 1.7mh machine. There's lag even when typing. I think something isn't right, but I don't know where to turn...all part of the discomfort and fun of traveling to lands where you don't speak the language.

Grid Pornography

According to an article by John Schwartz in The NY Times: Richard Smith, the guy who tracked down the Melissa virus and who exposed unwanted snooping by some big companies, has discovered a particularly pernicious scam by which pornographers hijack computers and use them to serve up their goods. The hijackees don't even know they've been hijacked.

(Fun Fact: Richard is the father of one of my daughter's very best friends.)

Security Snake Oil

Those of you with a legalistic bent may enjoy an article by John Michener, et al., of BBX, called "Snake-Oil Security Claims: The Systematic Misrepresentation of Product Security in the E-Commerce Arena." From the abstract:

The authors provide an overview of important issues concerning security-relevant functionality, including critical functionality for security product merchantability. The authors also review certain critical issues concerning vendor development and management processes that are necessary for a vendor to have any understanding of the security properties of his product. Unless a vendor takes appropriate actions concerning these and related issues, the vendor has little, if any, basis for claiming secure products. Thus, there is a high likelihood that representations concerning security and the basic merchantability of security-dependent functionality are misleading, at best...

VGA switch

My linux experimentation is being hampered by the fact that I only have one monitor. I bought a Linxcel VGA switch so I can switch my monitor between the two machines but it causes ghosting even with just one computer plugged in. That can't be inevitable, can it? Does anyone have a brand/model of VGA switch that she recommends?

Everything's now an adventure

[The series of entries on installing linux begins here.]

Linux sees the other computers - all XP - on the network. But when I try to open an html file on my laptop, it tells me:

"htmlview can't open "index.html" because thmlview can't access files at "smb" locations. Would you like to choose another application?

Foolishly thinking that this error message is telling me that htmlview just isn't up to the task, I click on the box that lets me associate html files with something other than htmlview. Now all I have to do is figure out which directory Opera installed itself into. It's been a long time since I've poked around a unix directory. But, what the heck. And sure enough, there it is, in usr/something/something. I'd be more specific, but the file browser has frozen so I can't get past usr. I also can't close the windows. Sure wish I knew how tro list and kill processes in linux. Looks like I'm headed for another forced re-start.

Nope. It was a hidden dialog box that needed attention. Windows obscuring their own child dialog boxes? What does linux think it is, Windows??

Writing an entry in Linux

...or with Linux, or on top of Linux, or under Linux. I'm not sure, but here I am with my gnome desktop on top of RedHat 9. I've got everything to learn. Unfortunately, I have to start at the most superficial and least interesting aspect of Linux: the desktop UI. I'm assuming that I'm going to find ways to peer under the desktop at Linux itself. Learning how to find a tool on the desktop that will tell me how much space I have left on my drive isn't very rewarding. But that's where I have to start. For example, I just figured out where Gnome hides the connection to my home network; this tells me nothing about Linux but a little about Gnome.

By the way, now that Linux and I are on a first name basis, I'm going to lowercase it.

Up and running with Linux

[Continued from here.] I've gotten to the desktop (GNOME). And things are moving slowly. Very slowly. So slowly that 5-10 seconds pass between the time I click into a field in Mozilla and when the text cursor appears in that field. It's painting graphics slowly, too. I've tried telling it that I have a slightly different graphics card than it thinks I do, but that hasn't helped. As a rank newbie, I don't know where to look for diagnostic tools that could help me. I'll keep poking around.

Meanwhile, I'm trying top open OpenOffice, the free word processor that isn't MS Word, but it seems to have hung on the splash screen. Am I headed for my first Linux crash and reboot? I think so, but only because I don't know how to kill a process in Linux on or off the desktop.

The OpenOffice splash screen is still up although clearly nothing's going on with it. Somehow my random clicking seems to have opened up a view onto my home network. All the computers are visible, although it's hanging as it tries to see the directories on my main NTFS machine.

Before I reboot, I thought I'd change the desktop image. Might as well focus on the important stuff first. The mouse is laggy, though, and the OpenOffice splash screen insists on being the topmost window, making it a little tough. Logging out...

I put in my old video card (Creative Annihilator - what a terrible product name!) instead of using the on-board video. Starting up again. It's noticed the hardware change and is installing the drivers. Cool. But now it's going through the same initial setup steps, asking me to test the sound card, etc. Worrisome. And it just gave me an error while installing the RedHat documentation off the CD; the second time, it works fine.

The system seems more responsive this time. Just for fun, I'm going to download Opera, which I use as my browser on Windows. Unfortunately, the Opera for Linux download screen wants to know which type of Linux I have: deb, rpm or tar.gz. But wait a sec, a tar file is a compressed file, not a type of Linux. I'm confused about my confusion. I'm guessing at the one that says RedHat8.1. Anyway, I seem to have guessed right because it's installed just fine.

OpenOffice launches this time. Nice. But the system fonts are really and truly ugly. ClearType is a nice thing on XP. The big test for me will be whether it does a better job with tables than Word does. It's hard to believe how badly Word tables suck given how long tables have been in the project. I frequently have to save my Word document as HTML just so I can regain control of a table. Word tables separate across pages for no known reason, and pity the fool who forgets to leave some empty paragraphs after a table for they can't be inserted if you forget. The only thing worse than tables in Word are embedded graphics. I've been using the product for about 15 years, I count as a power user, and I still can't figure the little f*ckers out.

Installing Linux Again

It's 8:30pm, which means I'm allowed to do hobby things, right? So, I'm going to try again to install Linux (RedHat 9) on a spare computer. Last time, I wasted several hours trying to install it. It turns out that, despite what the Linux boosters say, you can't install it on any old computer you have lying around. For example, the computer has to have a functioning motherboard. Take that, Linux heads!

I spent the past hour putting in a new motherboard, cpu and power supply. The thing actually works. It's a 1.7mh Celeron with 128M of RAM. The motherboard has sound, video and networking built in, not like when I was a lad and the only way to hook up a monitor was to attach 256 filaments to a breadboard using a shoulder-mounted soldering iron.

In the time it's taken me to write the above two paragraphs, RedHat has seemingly partitioned my hard drive and is installing the default set of packages for a desktop configuration. Cool. The UI is a little techier than I'd give my mother (well, Mom's dead, but you get my drift), but if you just keep hitting the "Next" button, it seems to work. At least so far.

RedHat says I have 12 minutes and change before the OS is installed. I'm excited. Really.

12:15am: I'm up and running, although still a few screens short of a desktop. It would have happened a couple of hours sooner but we went to see Searching for the Friedmans or whatever the name of that documentary is. Excellent. I came back a minute ago and immediately checked the progress of the install. Basically done. RedHat is asking me a couple of questions, has had me register (I like their privacy statement) and now is checking to see if any of the packages I installed need updating. Still some needlessly obtuse moments: I don't know what RPMs are, but I trust that it doesn't mean Rape and Pillage Machines so I'm just clicking Yes whenever I can.

It seems to have done a good job figuring out what hardware I have, but so does XP at this point. And it's put me on the network with no fuss, but so does XP. I haven't yet gotten to the point where I can see whether Linux will see the other machines on my home network, all of which run XP.

FreeNet vs. RIAA

Declan runs an email conversation between Freenet's Ian Clarke and the RIAA's senior vice president of business and legal affairs. I only wish there'd been more back and forth on Declan's excxellent questions. (Thanks to Jeff Chapman for the link.)

Dave and Chris go audio

Chris Lydon, who shows some raw talent as an interviewer :), talks with Dave Winer. You can get the mp3 file here. Really interesting conversation.

[SN] Panel: FCC

Because Bob Pepper is sick, Kevin is asking the FCC people in the audience to form a panel. They gamely do.

Amy Wohl asks what they think about Reed Hundt's idea of moving money from over-the-air digital tuners to a project that provides broadband to everyone. The panelists are being evasive and then negative. "I don't know that people need that much bandwidth today," one says. I ask how much bandwidth people need. He points to a report that said we need to look at how much we need for today's apps and for tomorrow's. We have enough for today's, he says.

Cory asks why they've taken on the role of legislators and ignored 750,000 messages opposing the media conglomeration decision. FCC person says that the FCC is appointed by elected officials and that now it's easier than ever to communicate with the FCC. [Accessible but not responsive.] Cory says that Congress is sending the FCC issues that they don't want to touch. Thus, the FCC needs to respond like representatives. FCC replies that it's very hard for an administrative agency to be contacted by the public that expects to have an impact on the complex issues that are before the agency. Traditional legislative lobbying tactics are being addressed to a policy agency set up to dive into a nuclear toxic waste area. It's a "data point" that 750,000 Americans feels one way, but at the end of the day it's more important to work with someone with expertise working out a compromise.

What about the broadcast flag? FCC says the broadcast industry doesn't want to move into the digital age because they don't want their stuff copied. The rule is pending. The transition to digital TV is an area of high interest to Chairman Powell.

Kenn Coukier asks about open spectrum. What is the process for going forward to make a decision about spectrum? Kevin explains that the FCC has a task force but Bush just announced his own. The FCC report covered issues around commercial and public safety. It covered interference protection, access protection. They came up with bold suggestions that they are implementing. The report suggests opening up some spectrum and creating underlays. They also suggested an easement by which software-defined radios could sense and use unused bandwidth. Now they're in the implementation phase. More studies are going on about cognitive radio, interference temperature...The president's commission parallels this.

An audience member asks how changes in the industry and market are handled when they cross organizational boundaries. How can you make the regulatory landscape more consistent across wireless, wireline, etc.? The FCC guy says that the question is right and it's really hard. "The regulation is in terms of the service seen by the end user, not by the technology." The Europeans have implemented a truly tech-neutral policy.

The FCC guy now tells us that they don't hear enough from the likes of us to help understand what's possible now. (My shouting out, "So, let's set up a meeting" didn't go over real well.) We don't hear nearly enough from ISPs, etc. I'm a populist, he says, and wants to get the broadest public input. We need to be listening to those 750,000 voices. Another guy says that the FCC can be cloistered so it's important for them to conferences like this. Another one says, helpfully, that they can tell us how we can get ourselves invited in while following the government regs.

Cory, in the Joi Ito IRC, says that it's a bad thing that an expert commission is getting thrown issues too hot for the legislative branch to handle.

[SN] Panel: The Next Communications Industry

Paddy Holahan of NewBay thinks that camera phones will change everything. As the data from voice declines, the telcos are looking for data apps to fill the pipes and the coffers.

Raju Gulabani of Telesym focuses on delivering voice over wifi.

Louis Holder of Vonage says that they offer phone service over a broadband connection. [Unfortunately, it's not available in Boston, unless you're willing to get a new phone number. I checked a couple of months ago.] They have about 33,000 customers. You get unlimited calling for $40/month, including long distance. Now they're adding services.

David Isenberg of David Isenberg asks which we would choose if forced, telephone or email. Most of us in the audience would give up our email instead of our phone. In fact, these days we set up long phone calls through IM or email. The era of voice is over. SIP will do for communications what HTML did for documents. And don't forget to keep the network Stupid!

Raju agrees that voice is undergoing a transition and that the idea of charging more for distance is going away. But we're going to have more phones and more talk than ever before. But don't underestimate the power of a disruptive business model.

The audience argues about whether voice is dead, or exactly how dead it is. More minutes. Fewer lines to homes. David clarifies: The era of voice-only is dead.

Arnold Kling asks if the last mile has to be wireless. General agreement on the panel.

A Conference Limerick

Joi Ito's IRC channel is encouraging the writing of limericks. Here's another:

There once was a conference with voice
where the dominant speakers were the boice.
They nattered and boasted
and insulted and roasted
and turned sociability into noice.

This does not refer to the conference I'm at.

Poetical Dubya

Michael O'Connor Clarke has had a poem burst fully formed from his forehead. Make sure you get to the punchline.

[SN] List of bloggers

There's a list of people blogging the SuperNova conference here.

[SN] Tech Policy Outlook

[I missed the beginning due to an interesting hallway conversation with an FCC guy.]

Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge was finishing up when I came in. She was asking why the FCC keeps holding back policy to protect the 10% of Americans who don't have cable. Bruce Mehlman of the US Dept. of Commerce says that the broadcast flag is a reasonable solution to the problem of copyright violation. And he likes technology that keeps digital recorders from working in theaters.

Blair Levin of Legg Mason likes all that stuff too because Wall Street would like it.

Bruce says that the tech community needs to speak in one voice. He also refers to the 750,000 messages to the FCC as "spam." [Why should we have one voice?]

Q&A

Arnold Kling says that he'd rather subsidize content producers directly than pay an indirect tax that will affect behavior.

Cory tells Bruce that he's proud of file sharers because we've made accessible the 80% of creative works that are no longer published but have been locked away by copyright. Where in history have we had a successful regime in criminalizing a sixth of the population for a federal crime that you say should be investigated by the FBI. Bruce replies that authors expect and deserve to be paid for their labors. Cory says that DRM won't put a nickel into the pockets of an artist because 90% of people with contracts make less than $600. Compulsory licenses like the one we did for Internet radio puts money into the hands of artists.

Someone follows up: Why should I respect the rights of copyright holders when they don't respect our rights by asking that copyright be expanded into perpetuity. Bruce replies that this is the law that Congress passed. Compulsory licenses are worth discussing. It's good to protect IP; the question is (Bruce says) whether the protections undo the point of protecting IP in the first place. [By gum he's got it!] If there were a reasonable marketplace, Bruce says, file sharing wouldn't be an issue.

[SN] Simon Phipps

Simon is Chief Technology Evangelist at Sun. He's talking about why social software is taking off now since it consists mainly of technology. Answer: the audience has changed, not the technology. It's taken ten years for "The network is the computer"® to become the pervasive reality. It's not enough to be massively connected. It's also go to be based on shared, open, royalty-free and loosely standards.

We shouldn't worry about the network's center or edges. Instead, worry about whether there will be a digital ID scheme that anyone will use. [This is addressed to the presentation I just gave.]

Sun believes that innovation happens elsewhere because you most smart people don't work for you. Open Source is beta for commercial software. [See correction below.] Ultimately, what matters about OS is that the license and freeness enables a community to come together to define the software for users. We should look past "free" and look into the community-based software model. There's a big change there in how we develop software and how we own things.

A Sun experiment called MadHatter is going to see if community-based development can build enterprise-class software.

Weblogs have come into existence without working out formats and standards ahead of time. Echo is the beta test for the development of standards in a massively connected world. Now we can get everyone in the room at the same time.

Simon doesn't worry much about digital ID. When Scott said "You have no privacy. Get over it." he meant that we've given up so much privacy in the real world, why are we worrying about this next step on the Web. But we should worry about the unintended consequences of digital ID.

Q (Dan Gillmor): What are the unitended consequences of weblogging?

A: I know everything bad Dave Winer has ever said about anyone.

Q (Donald Weightman): How are blogs different from bulletin boards, etc.?

A: Only because they're still developing.

Q (Geoff Cohen): What's the John the Baptist out there, announcing the next big thing?

A: We haven't begun to see what will happen when mobility and computing are blended together.

In the comments section, Simon corrects my paraphrasing:

I think actually I said that open source is the late beta test (release candidate?) of a methodology for software development in a massively connected world, and that necho is an early alpha test for standards development in a massively connected world...

Thanks, Simon.

[SN] Me

I just gave a talk on why digital ID makes me nervous. It wasn't an argument against it, just an attempt to figure out why my stomach gets upset every time someone talks about it.

[SN] Panel: Security and Identity

Two companies in the identity space and two on security. Kevin Werbach Himself is moderating.

Jim Kollegger, CEO of BBX Technologies. Security is getting dicier. BBX locks down servers, rolls back to the previous version, and puts the invading executable up against a wall with a blindfold around its eyes and its pants down at its knees. [This is my way of putting it.]

Marc Hedlund of Sana Security. There are security companies that are doing exceptionally well because the threats are so real. His company uses biological models to improve security. [My personal favorite: Playing dead. But that's just because I have a thing about being sniffed by wild animals.]

Joe Hildebrand, chief architect of Jabber. "When you talk about knowledge workers, all you have is your reputation." But reputation is extremely complex, what with people moving around and all. The edges of the network matter. You have to make decisions out there. But reaching them can be a challenge.

Nikolaj Nyholm of Ascio Technologies. He begins by apologizing on behalf of the identity industry for working on the wrong problems. He's unhappy with federated ID systems because they create a layer on top of the Stupid Network. It'd be like asking mail servers to federate. Instead, I need an identifier and a way to authenticate that identifier.

Q (Amy Wohl): We have multiple identities. And we need to solve the problem of needing separate passwords for every account.

A: (Joe) We need to disambiguate "identity." All we need is identifying information for the different types of transactions.

A: (Nikolaj) We need to authenticate that you have possession of a particular identifier, just as you type in a PIN when you use your ATM card, enabling your bank to authenticate that it's you using your card. That's missing on the net.

Q: What will drive people to want this stuff?

A (Kevin): Spam.

[SN] Dennis McGinn

Dennis McGinn is a retired vice admiral in the US Navy.

He says we built a Coalition Wide Area Network in the PAcific Rim. It was built with commercial, off the shelf software. Best of all, the Navy moved to rapid prototyping, supplying 60-70% of needs fast, enabling "self-organizing information exchangers" to coordinate themselves. "It broke the old mold of centralized planning and centralized execution." There was little training provided. "Pretty messy." But it worked. It was flexible and agile in a world that is chaotic. "If the war's gonna start in a chatroom, please make sure I'm in that chat room."

Random points:

In the Network-Centric Innovation Center, people were charged with using existing technology but innovating in organization and tactics.

The military is facing the same problems as the corporate world: Security of information. Need bandwidth on demand.

Common Relevant Operational Picture: People need the same picture/database. For example, if there's an underwater reef, it should show up in the maps everyone in the fleet uses.

"It's all about standards. But not about standardization."

In the Iraqi War, casualties were proportionally lower than ever before, but the proportion of friendly fire casualties was higher, clearly something that better info could help.

Q: COTS won't do it. Need GOTS (government-generic off the shelf) products because COTS isn't secure enough.

RB on Blogging

RageBoy compares and contrasts New Age narcissism and blogging.

[SN] New User Experiences

Cory Doctorow, who thanks to Atkins now weighs less than what I ate for lunch, is the moderator. The topic is innovation. Panelists: Merrill Brown of RealNetworks, John Ko of Cincro Comms, Kevin Lynch of Macromedia, RJ Pittman of Groxis and Mena Trott of Six Apart.

Mena: Interoperability is key. We have what we call the Philosophy of Yes. We say yes to just about everything our users ask for, and much of what our competitors ask for. We've had export in our tool from the day that it shipped.

RJ: Grokker organizes search results contextually, semanticallly, and does entity extraction. And can show you 5,000 results in a usable UI.

Kevin: We should have apps that rely on the local processing power of computers, not just servers.

Cory: What's your blue sky conquer-the-world scenario? What does the world look like then?

RJ: We're seeing the notion of the web browser starting to dissolve. HTML can be in lots of devices, but we're even moving off of HTML. They're building self-adjusting user interfaces.

Mena: In the future there has to be more transparent use of tools. Multiple devices, not just browsers.

Kevin: I hope everyone who uses the Web will feel like they have an awesome experience, which isn't true now. And that we'll see the Flash player in every device on the planet.

Q (Donald Weightman): MovableType is cool because it's so modular. [Sorry for the disconnected threads, but it's a hard panel to generalize about.]

A Limerick

This is in honor of the very lively chat going on during the Supernova conference. The unflattering reference is not to this conference, however.

There once was a conference that worked
even though the panels circled and jerked
The panelists spoke
unaware of the joke
that would have made them thoroughly IRC-ed

[SN] IRC

The ubiquitous Joi Ito has initiated an IRC chat that has lots of people on it. Start up your IRC client, got to freenode and join #joiito. See you there.

[SN] John Blair

John Blair of Kenamea:

The reality of distributed computing today is that the network is intermittent, latency is indeterminate, the network is open, the topology is ad hoc, there is no administrator, transport cost is unpredictable.... Occasionally Connected Computing (OCC) apps work regardless of network connection status. Server-centric web architectures can't handle these realities. We want to have distributed, composite applications that are off-line capable and on-line aware and that work across heterogeneous networks, platforms and devices.

He's now doing what seems to be a product demo. And now it's an architectural drawing of how the product demo worked. [Kenamea is one of the sponsors of Supernova, for which I thank it.]

David Isenberg responds, at the behest of Kevin W: All innovation has occurred on stupid networks, which yours is not. The stupid network isn't dying because it can't do some things well. It's succeeding wildly because it can do everything badly.

Halley's Achilles High Heels

Halley just came into the Supernova conference. In a wheelchair. I'm sure she'll explain in her blog, but she just gave me a note that says something about vaulting over a fence in the dark and landing on a nail.

Get hale soon, Halley!

[SN] Panel: Wireless

Marko Ahtisaari of Nokia (the Insight & Foresight Unit) points to the social implications of wirelessness.

John Chapin of Vanu builds generic devices that can receive and transmit wireless signals based on how they're programmed. Among other things, that means that a single device can be your radio and your garage-door opener. Or your phone can download the European GSM software so it will work when you travel. You also get much better usage of spectrum through dynamic allocation. But flexible RD hardware is expensive.

Tren Griffin of Microisoft: "Wireless mesh is a major area of research at Microsoft Research." Why? Because they believe in empowering the edge.

[I conked out. Sorry. Up too early to get here on time. There is a list of live blogs here.]

Freelists needs help

Freelists.org is in bad shape. A lightning bolt on July 4 melted its server. They need hardware and money. Freelists has provided sophisticated mailing list services for free to tech newsletters (including mine). If you use Freelists or just want to support some Good Guys of the Net, check their home page to see what you can do.

Mapping Fears

According to an article by Laura Blumenfeld in the Washington Post, a graduate student's dissertation maps the critical points in the physical network. Does he publish it?

Very interesting. [Thanks to Greg for the link.]

[SN] Google

Craig Silverstein, director of technology at Google, looks like he may be giving the same talk he gave at O'Reilly Emerging Technology, in which case I have already blogged it here.

Preemptive blogging!

Q: What about image search?

A: Most image search engines just look at the text on the page. The ability to recognize objects in images isn't ready for prime time.

Q: What about Blogger?

A: (Sergei Brinn) We've been focused on getting the new release of Blogger out. You'll see more innovation.

[SN] Panel: Investing in a Changed Environment

Moderated by James Surowiecki who writes about business/finance for the New Yorker. (I am an admirer of his writing.) It's a panel on the investment environment.

One of the VC's puts it baldly: his role is to put out as little money as possible and get as much control of the funded company as possible. Everyone is being more hard-headed about investments, looking for markets that are emerging, management teams that work, etc.

James: In a truly decentralized model, can you VCs make the sort of money you want to make?

Various answers. E.g., you can't be something to everyone in a decentralized environment.

James: Are your ambitions less than a few years ago? Or are you going after particular niches?

Mike Hirshland of Polaris: "The interest in each of these cases is to invest in the winner, the one that defines the platform." But only a few companies can do that directly. You need a "go to market" strategy. [Jeez do I hate that phrase. Allan Karl explains in a chat that it means that they're not looking for innovation.] Says another VC: Home runs are not required; singles and doubles are ok, but they still look for big winners. [Sorry to be vague about who's speaking but there are no name placards.]

Q: Any windfalls coming?

A: Spectrum allocation.

[SN] Panel: Investing in a Changed Environment

Moderated by James Surowiecki who writes about business/finance for the New Yorker. (I am an admirer of his writing.) It's a panel on the investment environment.

One of the VC's puts it baldly: his role is to put out as little money as possible and get as much control of the funded company as possible. Everyone is being more hard-headed about investments, looking for markets that are emerging, management teams that work, etc.

James: In a truly decentralized model, can you VCs make the sort of money you want to make?

Various answers. E.g., you can't be something to everyone in a decentralized environment.

James: Are your ambitions less than a few years ago? Or are you going after particular niches?

Mike Hirshland of Polaris: "The interest in each of these cases is to invest in the winner, the one that defines the platform." But only a few companies can do that directly. You need a "go to market" strategy. [Jeez do I hate that phrase. Allan Karl explains in a chat that it means that they're not looking for innovation.] Says another VC: Home runs are not required; singles and doubles are ok, but they still look for big winners. [Sorry to be vague about who's speaking but there are no name placards.]

Q: Any windfalls coming?

A: Spectrum allocation.

[SN] Conference Chat

There's a chat goin' on among Supernova attendees and non-attendees here.

[SN] Clay Shirky

Clay begins by reminding us of the French "green screen" system, Minitel. When it was created, it was the right answer. The Internet made it the wrong answer that "cost them an enormous cycle of innovation." "Our Minitel is twisted pair" and is all the policies that say that it's a good idea to run a circuit-switched, metered, analog, voice-optimized network.

The situation is dire. But why aren't more people up in arms about it? One reason: our habitual techno-optimism. Engineers see two entities: the network and the things plugged into it. We have incredible PCs and unimaginable lengths of fiber. But politically we are in a three entity world: netword, edge, phone company (i.e., "the people engaged in monopoly rent extraction for the twisted pair that goes into your basement"). The separation between local and long distance has created a gap: a "creamy" core of fiber and a "crunchy" shell of copper going to your house. We have a zone of high speed connectivity in the home (e.g., plug your camera into your PC) and a zone of high speed connectivity in the core connected by a thin line of copper.

Why do the phone companies stifle innovation? They're just responding to business conditions. Clay uses Vonage (a voice over IP system) and three months later cancelled his long distance carrier. The erosion of voice traffic is a death knell because they lose $2 of voice revenue for every $1 of IP they sell a customer. Clay says he thus disagrees with Reed: the incumbents can't be protected.

What to do about this? Clay doesn't know. As long as IP is the third rail — as soon as the phone company touches IP, their revenues fall faster than costs because vboice revenues are artificially high — the phone companies will fight innovation. "If we do nothing, nothing will happen": nirvana for incumbents.

There are only two ways out of this, says Clay. 1. Functional competition. 802.16, powerline Internet, municipal fiber to the home, etc. Clay isn't optimistic about any of these within 5 years. 2. Change the regulatory environment, which is tough in this company. "We'll let shoe stores fail. We'll let drugstores fail." But we won't let agriculture fail and we can't imagine a country in which the telephone company fails. "Challenges to the phone companies are viewed as scams." They should be force to account on replacement value.

There's always option 3: stagnation. We are below #15 in growth of high speed access. We are fallling behind because we don't have the political will to connect center to edge directly. The political shape (3-entity) is more important than the engineering shape (2-entity). We aren't going to get there soon because twisted pair is our Minitel.

Q: Multi-terabyte storage changes everything.

A: Yup.

Notable quote: "You run into a restaurant and say that you're going to get French fries off the menu. You'll call them 'freedom fries.' But you forget that it's still called a 'restaurant' and it's still called a 'menu.'"

[SN] Reed Hundt

Hundt is the former chairman of the FCC. He asks what we're doing to stimulate demand for technology.He says we need a new universal service policy for broadband: 100% of households with real broadband. It would throw money at the problem and increase the scale of the solution, and it would create a new platform for new services. And, it would require an upgrade in the ability of technology to do this effi iently. But, he says, we should be careful not to destroy cable and telephony. He would have the government give everyone in the US $20/month until the "sunk costs" are paid off. Then the company can charge maintenance costs. It'd cost $50B over 3 years. It'd all be done through fiber [What about open spectrum?] And he'd remove the subsidies for voice transmission.

He says that we have a policy that charges a surtax on TV's in order to pay for something no one wants: tuners capable of receiving digital over-the-air broadcasts. It'll raise $40B, or about what it'd cost to provide broadband fiber to every household.

Other countries will provide broadband nationally. This will in fact be the smallest of the steps they take. We don't want to fall behind.

Wouldn't it be nice, he asks, to throw money at problems that can be solved, e.g., $50B to research cars that won't contribute to global warming, $50B to end cancer, etc.

Q (Adina Levin): You say we should speak up about these policies, but that seemed to make no difference to the latest FCC ruling on media consolidation.

A: It may look like it may not have done anything, but when those emails poured in it became that there was an issue here. There is a strong sense in Congress that the FCC as an unelected group went too far.

Q (Arnold Kling): Why cable? Why does the government think it knows best about how to deliver connectivity?

A: It would stimulate demand even if the infrastructure it built isn't the right one in the long term. A pure physical link (fiber) would be a good bet for providing a good-enough infrastructure. Likewise, when the highway system was built, there was a dispute over whether asphalt or concrete would be best. Hundt would be happy to open it up for competitive bidding, let municipalities aggregate, etc.

Q (me): Is there a hope in hell that this will happen?

A: Yes, but not necessarily in a timely fashion. If Voice over IP were to strip revenues from the telephone industry, you'd see government step in to put a safety net under the industry. It depends on what crisis you imagine.

[SN] Supernova intro

I'm at the SuperNova conference, Kevin Werbach's confab on a universe of distributed apps and ideas. There are about 100 peoplehere from a more diverse set of backgrounds than often is the case at tech conferences. In particular, there are a bunch of government regulators here. Should be interesting.

The conference weblog is here. There you'll find links to a wiki where you'll find a list of live bloggers and a group weblog via trackbacks.

(Thanks to Scott Johnson of Feedster for helping me get my wifi working.)

Coulterism

Joe Conason does a number on Coulter's defense of McCarthyism. (It requires a subscription to Salon.)

That we are even discussing why McCarthyism was a bad thing is pretty depressing.

Three blogs

Miles who created TinyApps.org has been quoting passages from the likes of Plutarch and Buckminster Fuller in his blog.

Pito Salas, former CTO of eRoom, has started a blog also.

Meanwhile, over at his blog, Ken Camp has posted a chunk of his excellent book, IP Telephony Demystified.

RB

RB on psychology, despair, fascism and human voice.

Also, there are some cool photos of him in the entry right below that one.

Camp Jabberwocky

I can't tell you what's wrong with Ronnie, although something manifestly is. But it's easy to tell you one thing that's right withh Ronnie: He can stand in front of a crowd of 1,500 and sing a hymn with his arms and heart wide open. His voice may be in the middle of the bell curve but you would weep with joy to hear him.

It's hard to know how to react to Ronnie and the other 50 campers at Camp Jabberwocky. They are all profoundly disabled, from cerebral palsy sufferers twitching in their full-support wheelchairs to those with diminished intellects and emotional inflammations. But you won't hear words like "disabled," "sufferer" and "diminished" at Camp Jabberwocky. Not because the place is politically correct. Quite the contrary. No one there pretends that the campers are just like the rest of us. The campers are who they are. But for much of their lives, they've been treated as less than what they are, for most of them wear their troubles in their faces and shambling bodies. Shall we call it a human impulse to turn away from them?

And then Ronnie gets on stage. He is accompanied by a local resident who happens to be a well-known pianist. He sings a song and we hear him for exactly who he is, which is more than we thought he was. And that is a joy that will make you weep.

The story of Camp Jabberwocky makes no sense. It was founded 50 years ago on Martha's Vineyard, although "founded" is too strong a word: Helen Lamb — universally known as Hellcat because of her determination — got it in her head that it'd be good to bring 6-8 people with cerebral palsy to the island for a week or two. So she got a 15-year-old friend of hers to volunteer and together they just did it, schlepping 6-8 kids in wheelchairs down the steps to the beach at Oak Bluffs, taking them on the Flying Horses. No money, no plan. And that's how Camp Jabberwocky has proceeded and grown for 50 years. No one pays, no one is paid. There's precious little solicitation. It just happens.

It doesn't happen in a vaccum. The Vineyard, for all its preppy reputation, has a history of being diverse, open and accepting. For example, when in the 1900s there was an abnormal number of children born deaf, rather than segregating them, the community learned to sign.

But it's not just the Vineyard. Shall we call it the human impulse to connect once we allow ourselves to?

Here are some photos of the Fourth of July Parade and the 50th anniversary celebration.

(small)

Guimp is the world's smallest website

Meanwhile, TinyApps.org has added a section of tiny apps for Palms.

Why so much?

Massport, the state agency that runs Logan Airport, is going to spend $1.5M wifi-ing three terminals of the airport. From the article in the Globe, it sounds like this will be pay-per-hour for airport passengers. (I read the article quickly so I may have gotten this wrong.)

Why does it cost so much to do wifi the terminals?

Glenn "Where's the Wire" Fleishman answers the question.

PC Prices

$499 for a Dell desktop with a 2.2gh processor, 40gb hard drive, 256mb RAM, operating system and starter software pack, video, sound, 10/100 network, and a 15" flat panel display.

It's been a while since I checked PC prices. They've entered the color tv range. Wow. It's soon not going to take much money to cross the digital divide in this country.

Finding stuff

Like everyone else who's been on the Net for more than a year, I have in effect lost virtually all my emails, at least in terms of an operational definition: I need a search engine to find anything that came in more than three hours ago.

I've been quite happy with Find, a fast seach engine that also indexes your desktop files. I've been using it since it was in beta and have watched the product team sand down the rough edges.

A new version is now coming out. I haven't tried it because I'm still being extremely cautious about what I load onto to my fragile PC, but I will as soon as a week or so has gone by without a major system crash.

For reasons that surpasseth understanding, Find at find.com has been renamed to X1 (as in the plane that first broke the sound barrier) at www.x1.com I can only assume the company was sued.

Windows craps out, too

Linux boosters (and aren't we all?) should be slightly cheered to know that my rebuilt basement PC failed to install Windows 2000 in the same way it failed to install Linux. Looking very much like a hw issue. I've just the flashed the BIOS, but now we're leaving for the 4th so I won't know if it worked for a few days.

Good. I could stand the break. Damn computers. Damn Intermenet!

The Dean Difference

Jock Gill - who is definitely not non-partisan on this topic - writes well about why the Dean campaign is different. (I've lightly edited it.)

1] READ THE COMMENTS from the [Dean] blog visitors! This is the best way to understand that the campaign represents a new politics: Connected, Open and Participatory. We are now all becoming PRODUCERS, not merely passive consumers.

2] Dean's campaign shows the smart mobs, hive minds, have more benefits, power, energy, vitality and adapability than the single mind of any political advisor — Karl Rove comes to mind.

3] As evidenced by the front page story in the NY Times this AM, most folks simply do NOT GET IT! The Dean campaign is the announcement that we are at The End of Broadcast Politics with its base of passive consumers. The NY Times item is all from the point of view of broadcast politics: its about counting money. No! It's about counting donors. It's about energized hope, passion, citizens from around the the country who believe in America...<\P>

The Dean campaign is being real smart about the Net and for the right reasons, I believe: they're viewing the Internet not as a cheap way to reach the masses but as a way to let us talk together. And self-organize. Plus, I love the real voices of the staffers who write the campaign blog.

Installing Linux: Part 2

Continuing from last night's humiliating defeat....

I booted from the floppy this morning and rooted around, so to speak, just to see what I could see. It seems like something is installed on the hard drive, but I can't tell if the kernel is.

What I used to know of unix is coming back to me. It's just like riding a bicycle: if you don't do it for a long enough period, you get too stupid, fat and old to be able to do it again.

I'm reinstalling now, using the "noprobe" parameter, although I think the problem is in my hw. Sigh. I'm telling the RedHat installer to install only the GUI desktop packages, hoping to get through an install without something blowing up...

It got through the installation but now warns me that no kernel packages were installed on my system so my boot loader won't be updated. I don't know if that means that no new kernel packages were loaded or that I'm truly a boy without a kernel. I guess I'll find out in a minute when I reboot.

Nope. Booting from the hard drive still causes the system to hang: black screen with a flashing underscore cursor. I've got to go. I'll try again later...

Schumer's Anti Spam Bill: A question

Sen. Charles Schumer of NY is proposing a 6-part anti-spam bill. I have deeply mixed feelings about such legislation if only because it's so non-end-to-end. Among other features, Schumer's bill would require spammers to preface their subject line with "ADV".

So here's my question: I assume Senator Schumer uses his franking privileges to send out postal mail to his constituents. When he does the equivalent via email in order to save some trees, is he going to label it "ADV"?

(Reminder: I'm on The Connection on NPR this morning at 10 EST talking about spam's effect on us.)

Linux ate my hard drive?

It started off well. I dragged an old computer up from the basement, put in a brand new hard drive, and started to install RedHat 9 fresh out of the box.

Actually, it wasn't quite that simple. The BIOS is from 1999 and it doesn't know how to boot from a CD. But the Norton Ghost floppy I'd made boots into PC DOS which then recognizes the CD, and we were off and running.

But RedHat reported that the second CD was corrupt, which I find unlikely since it's fresh out of the sleeve and has no obvious scratches. But, well, what the heck. I'll just reboot and start again. Heck, it's just like installing Windows after all!

But Linux has killed my hard drive. My system tries to boot from it but hangs. The BIOS is old enough that I can't force it to boot from the floppy. [Note: Ok, so I just found where in the BIOS it lets me boot from the CD. I'm not as screwed as I'd thought.]

I was so excited as the first CD was chugging away. Now I'm a bitter, cynical old man who is forever going to chase children off his lawn.

LATER: Booting from the CD. Let's see how well RedHat recovers from its maybe bogus problem with the second CD. I'm excited again.

LATER: Before the first disk finished its re-install from scratch, my system went back to terminal (non-graphical) mode and told me that install has terminated abnormally, right after X server started succfessfully. It's unmounted a bunch of filesystems and is telling me I may safely reboot my system. So, I don't know if it's broken or not...

It's not booting from the hard disk. I'll move on to attempt #3.

I just ran linux rescue. It seemed to work, or at least it didn't complain. But I can't see that it did me any good. I'm rebooting and starting to reinstall.

This time I've told RedHat that it's an upgrade, not a reinstall. It's at least asking me about boot loaders. Maybe this time the hard drive will learn how to boot itself rather than going into the terminal twitches. Hmm, now it tells me that "No kernel packages were installed on your system. Your boot loader configuration will not be changed."

Ooh! Ooh! It's asking me if I want to make a boot diskette! The massive oak door of Linux is about to swing open. I'm about to be given the key! It's also further than I've gotten so far in this multi-try installation. In fact, RedHat is announcing that the installation is complete. I must be missing a heck of a lot of packages, though, since I only made it through Disk 1.

Damn. It's still not booting from the hard drive. And with the bios set to boot from the CD first, the system is hanging if the CD is empty. I'll switch the boot order and try booting from my spiffy new Linux floppy.

Booted from the floppy. It's now noticing (for the first time?) my mouse and USB ports. Progress, I assume. Damn, now it's asking for localhost login, but I never gave it a user name or pwd and I don't know what the defaults are. Googling it on my Windows machines takes me to redhat.com where it almost explains it: If I didn't create a user account during the installation (which I didn't because installation terminated abnormally), I can log in as root and use the pwd I created for the system. Ok, but it's not real clear how to log in as root. So, I'll do the obvious thing and type "root." And it works. It doesn't even ask me for a pwd. But, now what? I'm at a command prompt and about all I remember from Unix is that "ls" lists files and "rm *.*" probably isn't a good idea, and it would be an even worse idea if I remembered the parameter that makes it recursive.

My nephew, Greg LinuxMan Cavanagh, who administers Linux clusters for a place where you need special clearance, suggests that I try telling the bios that my disk is smaller than it is since Linux just needs to install a loader and will figure out the actual size once it loads, which is pretty cool. But, unfortunately, changing the disk size has no effect.

Onto my 4th attempt to install it. This time I'm telling it to switch from the GRUB boot loader, hoping that this will force it to load a frigging boot loader. Also, I'm telling it I want to configure which packages should be installed, again hoping that this will force the RedHat installer out of its complacency. I've just told it to install all 4.5 gig of packages, figuring that if I pick and choose, I am guaranteed to fail to pick the ones I need. It's chugging along. I'll try to stay up long enough to see if it rejects the second CD again, but it's getting late and I have to get up early tomorrow...

Disk 2 is in and this time it's working. (So far.) I think I'll head off to bed.

One more quick check...and it seems to have frozen while installed "evolution." I'm not going to blame Linux for this. Could be a hardware problem. Nope, still not booting from the hard drive.

Good night.

Me on the Radio on Thursday

I'm going to be on the first hour of The Connection on Thursday morning, talking about spam. The show was prompted in part by a commentary by Adam Hanft - who is also going to be on the show - on Marketplace, which you can listen to here. I disagree with it a lot, although I am firmly uncommitted on its main call for action: whether spam should be legislated against or left to the market to handle.

Fooling Bayes

I was curious why an email the subject line of which is "Watch these girls flash their racks for each other" got through Popfile, my Bayesian spam filter. Popfile is remarkably accurate at sniffing out the spammers. In this case, though, the message consists of a small graphic ("sg-titties-graphic") — with my email address encoded in the link so if I click on it, they know I'm alive and horny — and some invisible text that says:

beefer segregates intrust yardsticks strangles RzneXfrysRzneXrivqrag.pbzRzneX ethel myrtle cruxes ceremonies disbands cooling computable hotly autopilots interrogating commencements halters clarified incidence cavern

I'm assuming that those words are rare in pornospam and thus successfully fooled PopFile. It'd be nice if PopFile recognized invisible text as invisible...

Busted

Richard Smith, who tracked down the Melissa virus creator and caught the hands of Microsoft, RealNetworks and DirecTV in the privacy cookie jar, now has discovered that the Blair administration has been lying about how its Iraqi WMD info got, um, adjusted. The background, from Richard:

Back in February 2003, 10 Downing Street published a dossier on Iraq's security and intelligence organizations. This dossier was cited by Colin Powell in his address to the United Nations the same month. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, quickly discovered that much of the material in the dossier was actually plagiarized from a U.S. researcher on Iraq.

As Michael O'Connor Clarke writes:

As you'll probably recall - when it was revealed that the dossier was a work of creative cut & paste, the response of the PM's office was to feign ignorance of the source, bluster, obfuscate, blame the spooks, and generally wash their hands of the whole thing.

The Blairies posted the document to the Web as a Word file. Smith looked inside and saw that Word had automatically tracked the changes made by four named users. As Michael says: "...as Richard's excellent digging reveals - far from being the spooks, it was people very, very close to the PM who pulled this thing together."

Michael's done his own detective work on a different topic. Having noticed several sites that babble like a brook, he decided to check who owns them. He finds links to Scientology. Yikes.

This reminds me of the shortwave radio stations that do nothing but read lists of random-sounding numbers.

The unspoken of groups

Clay Shirky has posted his seminal keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference:

I want to talk a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy."

So I just posted my comments from the same conference which were in some ways a response to Clay's presentation:

I want to suggest there's a reason why we keep making the mistake that Clay specifically points to: the failure to adopt a group "constitution." It's not because we don't learn. It's because of the importance - in even the most vocal groups - of the unspoken.

Little but useful

Alex Vallat has useful little utilities, many of them freeware, on his site. I'm using CopyPath that copies to the clipboard the full path of the currently selected item in Internet Explorer.

Do Not Call

The federal Do Not Call registry is open and accepting phone numbers you want removed from the clutches of spam dialers. It is remarkably easy to register. Nicely designed.

Outlook, Special Kafka Signature Edition

Step-by-step instructions:

1. Re-install Outlook for the 43rd time

2. Open an email from someone not in your contact list.

3. With the cursor in the person's email address, select "Add new contact"

4. Type in a business phone number

5. Click out of the business phone number field

6. You will get a window called "Location Information" that will ask you for information about your current location. Click "Cancel."

7. You will get a window called "Confirm Cancel" that warns you that failure to enter information into "Location Information" may result in the auto-dial feature not working.

8. Because you don't dial from Outlook, follow the instrucions and click "Yes" to cancel the "Location Information" window.

9. In "Location Information," click "close.

10. Go to step 7.

11. Repeat until your fingers are nubbins.