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I've just finished reading Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, a provocative, well-reasoned, well-informed and sometimes frustrating book about the power of the Internet to allow people to be more effective at taking action -- whether that action is good or bad.
Zittrain talks about the principle of "generativity" in technology: the capacity of some technology to allow its users to make new things out of it, things the designer never anticipated, and does a very good job in enumerating the characteristics that make a technology more or less generative. Zittrain is more-or-less in favor of generativity: he talks about all the amazing things that the human race has accomplished by using that most generative of technologies: the public Internet and the general-purpose PC.
But Zittrain points out that generativity contains the seeds of its own destruction, because it allows bad people to leverage their malicious intentions -- with malware, spyware, DDoS attacks and so on -- to the point that an average person using the Internet is at constant risk from creeps and thugs. And what's more, all average people use the Internet because it's been so thoroughly woven into our lives.
Zittrain fears that the power of the Internet to let creeps do bad things will lead to a regulatory backlash and a series of Draconian laws that take away all the social benefits of the Internet, and that this will be enabled by a consumer backlash against general-purpose PCs in favor of "tethered appliances" -- TiVos, iPhones, etc -- that grant a measure of security by taking away the user-modifiability that is at the heart of the principle of generativity.
Here's where I started to get a little frustrated. I agree that the legislative backlash is here -- it's impossible to miss -- but I disagree that it's being driven by identity thieves and spyware vendors. I think it's being driven by the same authoritarian urge that gave rise to all the other spying and control laws that have been passed for centuries. Net-creeps may be the rubric, but that's as far as it goes.
More importantly, I disagree about the security offered by tethered appliances. Zittrain identifies the particular risks of these technologies that spring from governments and commercial partners remotely reprogramming them to attack their users -- for example, a court ordered EchoStar to remotely disable its PVRs, Google locked Google Video customers out of their purchases, the FBI has forced car-vendors to use OnStar to spy on drivers' conversations and location.
But that's only a tiny piece of the risk arising from "tethered appliances." The DRM wars have shown us that motivated attackers can always break code-signing trusted hardware platforms, given enough motivation. Tethered appliances are designed to allow remote parties to enforce policy on them without the knowledge or consent of their owners -- they're designed to treat their owners as attackers. So while it's possible to torque a PC into attacking its owner with spyware, it's even more possible with tethered appliances, because once you figure out how to slip inside, the whole device is designed, from the ground up, to stop the user from interfering with the "authorities" who have the keys.
Take CALEA, the law that forces phone-switch manufacturers to build in back-doors that allow cops to snoop on voice-traffic without physically accessing the switch. It's pretty implausible that the "police override" built into phone switches has never leaked outside of the police force. After all, the police leak all kinds of "confidential" information (ask a private eye, off the record, how easy it is to get a cop to look up a license plate number). All it would take is one leak to organized crime and the bad guys would have the same off-site phone-monitoring capability as the folks in blue.
I think that Zittrain takes the security claims of appliance vendors at face value, and that this really undermines the argument. Appliances are neither generative nor secure, and it's likely that appliances will be broken in more interesting ways by more creeps as they increase in value as targets. The backlash against PCs will be quickly met with another backlash against everything else, and no one is going to be able to opt out of the system altogether.
Nevertheless, the principle of generativity is a powerful lens through which we can view proposals for regulating and policing technology. The last third of the book offers "solutions" -- more like "directions in which solutions may reside," really -- that look to mitigate the harmful effects of generativity without clobbering the good effects.
The book is a cracking read -- smart and engaging as Zittrain himself is in person and at the podium -- and while I didn't agree with everything in it, it got me thinking about 200 miles a minute, and that's always a good thing.
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Update: The whole book's also downloadable under a CC license!
Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing GadgetThe hard drives come out of the cage in mid-write, heads skittering across platters. Doesn't matter. Can't bother with an overwrite now. Terabytes stacked on terabytes, all into the Fujitsu ME-P3M. The big old machine that Sarah had helped carry down here. Laughing at the hand crank, screwing her face up as she pantomimed. Amazed at the grant for $35,000, but proud that she'd wrangled it. Please be dead, Sarah. Be dead and asleep.
It's harder than it looks, but it starts to turn. Ten or twenty seconds should do it. There's a sort of machine song now, the whirr of the Fujitsu's degausser, the bang of the ram, metal on metal, the small scream of the lock, giving. It's all but dark now. The flashlight illuminates only itself, fading like the data on the hard drives inside as they are elementally scoured in a magnetic gale.
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The soul recoils and throws up a bit as it thinks of some beautiful typewriter's tattooed ivory teeth being pried out with a flathead screw driver to make buttons, earrings and necklaces, but the results are undeniably striking.
Previously, the FCC told the MPAA that this was a dumb idea and to get lost, but Hollywood is nothing if not persistent (as is amply demonstrated by the number of Police Academy sequels produced). The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed some great comments in the docket:
Right now, your consumer electronics are designed by the consumer electronics industry, which reacts to consumer market demand in choosing how to innovate. That consumer-focused approach makes sense. But if the MPAA has its way, however, we'll be well on the way to a world in which every new feature to every home theater product has to be pre-approved by the content industry.Link
Link“‘I suffer from attention surplus disorder,’ jokes a character in Anathem. Attention surplus is exactly what Stephenson teaches his readers, in a book so tightly crafted it rewards instant rereading.” - Stewart Brand
“It is a great story, set in an alternative reality where people take long-term thinking seriously.” - Danny Hillis
“Long Now’s 10,000-year clock inspired Neal Stephenson’s new story, Anathem, and now Anathem is inspiring the Long Now. In ten centuries, no one will be sure which came first.” - Kevin Kelly
See also:
Ask Neal Stephenson questions about Anathem
Spooky, wonderful music CD in Neal Stephenson's new novel
Long Now clock souvenir
Unveiling of second Long Now clock in Bay Area: photos
Since we are asking you to bring your own equipment to work with, the class will be structured into two parts:Link (Thanks, Michele!)First, a lecture covering the high level topics involved in setting up NAS at home and online. We’ll discuss the structure of the Internet, routers, IP addresses, DNS, dynamic DNS, and how you can configure many different kinds of computer systems to run the necessary services for access. There are some limitations however, and we’ll discuss those too.
Second, we’ll break into groups to work with the equipment you’ve brought. We’ll be setting up everything we’ve just discussed on the machine network and making a plan for what you’d need to do at home to get it working.
The exhibits are a nice mix of technical and historical, ranging from a truly impressive collection of memorabilia related to Winston Churchill (who visited Bletchley and congratulated the women and men there on their excellent work), including his school report-card that makes him out to be a villainous, disruptive and scattered child; to a series of exhibits of vintage wartime toys. There's a museum of ancient cinematographic equipment complete with a beautiful little theatre that shows reels of vintage newsreels and propaganda films. And of course, there are the computers and related devices.
The cipher machines and radio equipment naturally form the centerpiece of the museum, and there's an entire computer history museum onsite (it was closed, with the strangest sign I've ever seen, words to the effect of, "This site is closed for maintenance. Enter at your own risk. You may be escorted off the grounds by security if you are caught here." Huh?) along with the notorious Nazi Enigma machine that was kidnapped in 2000 and ransomed back (the crime was never solved). The historic material on the Enigma (which began life as a commercial product before the war!) is really excellent, as are the technical explanations of how it worked.
But best of all are the "rebuilds" -- reconstructions from plans of the bombes (parallel decoding machines) and Colossus (the massive and gorgeous machine that was one of the earliest general-purpose computers. These hulking beasts are real artisanal pieces, with the hand-crafted, prideful look of devices built by loving and obsessive engineers who really, really care about their work.
Walking the grounds, I got a real sense of the lives of the people who'd worked at Bletchley, through a series of exhibitions that included quotations from oral histories about the dress, romance, food, family life and internecine conflict that characterized Bletchley Park during the war years. The exhibit on clothing was especially memorable, if only because it could bring home the gold for Britain in the 2012 Scariest Mannequin event, as was the astoundingly cool room devoted to the wartime use of messenger pigeons, including replicas of the awards given to especially brave and dedicated birds.
We spent three hours on site and barely scratched the surface. We had hardly any time to look at the war-plane, didn't get to the gigantic model railroad exhibit, didn't see the whole film presentation at the Enigma theatre, and only got the most hurried of walks around the American Gardens -- and we missed the mansion tour altogether. I could have easily spent eight or more hours there, and still wanted for more. Just the tantalizing mini-lecture I got on the Colossus rebuild from one of the electronics engineers who worked on it was enough to pique my interest, and I could have spent an hour looking at the details in Turing's office.
The Trust that runs Bletchley Park has done a really fine job, and is clearly thinking creatively about the best way to continue to fund their operations. The mansion's slate roof is in need of a multi-million-pound replacement, and they're selling "genuine fragments" of the existing slate -- holy relics of crypto's formative years, as well as soliciting donations and selling memberships. But most intriguing was the idea of renting out part or all of the site for parties and weddings -- maybe for my 40th birthday in three years...
Link, Link to my photos
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The instructions supplied explain how Pocket Enigma works and take the user step-by-step through the process of coding and decoding. Worked examples and carefully annotated figures illustrate how the Key and Message Setting are used, and there is a trouble-shooting table to help with common errors. For young readers there is also a simplified way of using it called Junior Pocket Enigma making it suitable for all ages who can read and write their own messages.
The group stayed at the disco for at least two hours. One senior aide was approached by an attractive Chinese woman. The couple danced and later disappeared together.Link (via /.)The security official said: “In these circumstances it was not wise. Nobody knows exactly what happened after they left. But the next morning he came forward and said: “My BlackBerry is missing.” The prime minister’s Special Branch protection team were alerted.
Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets, we saw that the Duke Nukem trailer is the best thing at E3; that the Psystar case could be a mistake for Apple; and that LED candles can look nice after all.
John took a look at the awfully-named Zen Krystal "sports" MP3 player and a GPS car-tracker that's making a liar out of a traffic cop; Joel saw Ubisoft distributing crackers' fixes for video games and a neat look at design trends in Apple's official iPod docks; and Rob procrastinated and went to the DMV.
We learned the pros and cons of walled gardens; saw Sesame Street rescue a song ruined by use in an iPod ad; and watched the Fraunhofer institute wave an iPhone in sync with Radiohead's open-source music video.
Radioshack is to redesign its stores; Nvidia and ATI/AMD aren't looking so hot in the courtroom; and there are Guitar Hero-style T-shirts for all the instruments under the spittle-flecked ceiling
Link (Thanks, Patrick!)
As a promo for Tor.com, we asked Donato to paint an Asus mini computer which you, yes you, can win! To sign-up, go to Tor.com.The first time I watched this I realized what makes Donato Donato. There's a point about third of the way through where I thought he was done....and then he keeps painting.
The computer is in my office and is supposed to be on display at ComicCon. It's been hard to bat co-workers away from it. Should it go missing, my list of suspects is long.
The AMD social networking site lets visitors "tag" themselves based on a diverse set of interests. Old-school hackers, network security experts, cryptographers, political activists, law geeks, lockpickers, reverse engineers, bloggers, privacy advocates, and far more—visitors can label themselves with multiple interests, to become discoverable by fellow visitors from around the world with similar interests, in the same room or across the building. Attendees can then use email or text messages to "ping" the people they discover on the site—new contacts and old friends alike.Link (Thanks, aestetix!)The AMD site connects visitors to the many talks and events occurring during the conference, too. The same interests tags are used to highlight events and alert visitors to something they might otherwise miss—a vital feature for such a large conference. Attendees can also use the interactive schedule to select events they want to attend, and receive alerts before those events begin.
The site also provides visualizations of activity on the conference floors. Website users can watch the real time positions and movements of people across the Mezzanine, revealing the group dynamics of a massive number of people and instantly identifying the hotspots. Users can also click on any conference room to see its current event, speakers, and attendees.
Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we saw these good-lookin' helmets from Jérôme Coste (which sadly do not include a face mask); an austere camper made from a Unimog; tape that makes perfect garden rows more simple; a Bioshock Big Daddy from scrap metal; the clever hacks of German prisoners; a single drawer which no one else thought was handy but me, apparently; a pocket watch with a gun inside; and a robot that was not a robot.
We got a little preoccupied with videogaming, as is our wont: EA harshing on the iPhone's accelerometer hardware (they're wrong, in my opinion); Sony claiming the PSP is dying because of piracy (here comes the PSPhone!); and a Wired blogger got a little too presumptuous in his Fallout 3 preview for some, although I think he's getting hung out to dry a bit.
John took umbrage with the claim that the mouse is dying and noticed that quad-core laptop chips are coming. Rob noted that a judge isn't having ATI and Nvidia's nonsense about trade secrets and that French women like to use their phones in the bath.
The Japanese did something weird/awesome. (Surprise!) That ripped cord flash drive is now for sale. The saga of an iPhone clone maker continues to be full of pathos. Nerds attacked. Someone put a USB hub in a VHS tape. And I — oh I — I dealed everything that you want me to. Ooh ooh.
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Before we start, let's be clear that this is not a tutorial in how to build an oscilloscope. Tennis for Two is supposed to display on a 'scope, so beg, borrow, or buy one if you don't have one handy. Older low-end analog scopes like mine (a Hameg!) usually go for $50-$150, and if nothing else, you can always make a Scope Clock out of it later.There are three parts to the electronics that we're building. First, there is the AVR microcontroller-- the brains of the outfit. The specific variety that we're using is the ATmega168, the same chip used in (for example) the Arduino platform. Secondly, there are two handheld controllers that connect to the ATmega168 microcontroller. Each handheld controller has a knob and a button. Third, there is the digital to analog converter that takes the output from the AVR and uses it to drive the scope.
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They very first piece of commercial Apple software — a primordial flavor of BASIC originally released in 1976 that took thirty seconds to load — has been perfectly and authoritatively extracted from a yellowing audio tape and converted into a 38 second MP3, playable in iTunes. Plucky, hyper-intelligent beardos are now dissecting the file and learning its secrets, but their findings are a bit above my head.
Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets, we saw new laptops from Sony and Lenovo, a space-age travel mouse, and an apoplectic video game fan.
Joel wants to know about home automation platforms, John needs Fallout 3, badly, and Rob, well, Rob's been playing with the robots.
And what robots! Pittsburgh's BigBots mini-festival is on, so we got electric lawn-mowing sheep, strange humming cables, cellular automata woodblock creatures, and, strangest of all, a clubhouse full of cool 1980s trash, inhabited by animatronic roadkill.
Back in the tubes, we saw SenseSurface stick-on screen knobs; Dell's $300 subnote; and the bright future of experimental solar energy.
ReadyBot is ready to see you; the springy Zing! spoon is ready to fling food at you; and Art Lebedev's new keyboard won't be ready for ages. Whether Psystar is ready for Apple's inevitable lawsuit remains to be seen!
Thinking of trying to combine your Gmail-based life with all of MobileMe's new stuff? Think again.
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The Nekura series breathes fresh life into traditional time telling and is certain to be a fashion trend this season. Tumbler features a rotating disc effect, similar to that of a combination lock, with a vivid white dial beneath black glass and inscribed numerals which rotate to present the time.
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AT A recent international bridge match the problem of letting people watch the play without interfering with the players was satisfactorily solved by the use of a horizontal periscope with one end suspended over the table and the other fitted through one wall of the room, so that the observers need neither be seen nor heard by the players.From the observer’s standpoint this method of watching a bridge game is more satisfactory than standing by the table, as it permits a view of the cards held in all hands as well as a better look at those played.
See also: Rube Goldberg Cream Egg killer
Etsy user tinyminds makes cheap, wonderful solar-powered robots for between $60-$80 each, but the one pictured here is christened after Lord Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft's sickly spawn of the stars. The Cthulhu bot sleeps until he soaks up enough light... at which point, he begins to madly thrash around his many sucking, tentacled limbs. "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn..." as the ancient prophecies write. Roughly translated? In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits recharging.
