The second boy is half price

Quite the deal they have going this weekend at a store in the local shopping mall:

Peer-to-peer means many things

I have a bone to pick with New Scientist’s headline writer. For an article about Google’s blocking of certain search terms in their instant results, the headline reads thus:

Google censors peer-to-peer search terms

In fact, the article tells us that the terms in question relate to torrent downloads. The article doesn’t mention peer-to-peer at all; it’s only in the headline. And the headline gives the wrong impression.

Peer-to-peer is not synonymous with file sharing of questionable legality. In fact, it’s not synonymous with file sharing of any kind: file sharing is one application of peer-to-peer protocols, but there’s a lot of other stuff on the Internet that works peer-to-peer.

Some examples:

• Instant messaging
• Networked games
• Many voice-over-IP systems
• Any other SIP-based application

Many of these services put two end-user systems in touch with each other, and then use peer-to-peer protocols, keeping any central servers out of the picture — and out of interference, eliminating any bottlenecks that a server might cause.

The fact that many people violate copyright by using peer-to-peer file sharing to pass around copyrighted material sometimes gives peer-to-peer a bad name. But a lot of useful stuff that’s legally solid and non-controversial is peer-to-peer as well. Let’s not tar all of those with the same brush.

Challenger: 25 years

Rain, reign, rein

I was going to give today a miss, but then I read, for the 17,248th time, I think, the phrase given free reign. And now I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more.^[1]

There’s rain, the water that falls from the sky. That can be free, but no one thinks that he was given free rain means anything interesting.

There’s reign, the rule of a king, or the metaphorical equivalent. One can be given the freedom to reign, I suppose, but think about it: what does it mean to be given free reign?

Then there’s rein, the strap by which we control a horse. When we pull the reins in, we control the horse more tightly. When we let up on the reins, we exert less control. And when we give [the horse] free rein, we let it do as it pleases.

The phrase is given free rein.

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^[1] No, it’s just a Network reference.

When do your wacky ideas get in the way of your job?

There’s been a lot of talk around blogland about the case of Martin Gaskell. Dr Gaskell is an astronomer, and was, in 2007, up for a position at University of Kentucky, where he would be director of the MacAdam Student Observatory. According to all reports, he was highly qualified, and would have been likely to get the job. They then, as we Internet technologists refer to it in very technical terms, Googled him, and found aspects of his religious beliefs that led them to hire someone else.

This, of course, is where the accounts begin to differ. Dr Gaskell sued the University of Kentucky on grounds of religious discrimination; the university said that it wasn’t his religion, in general, that was a problem, but his specific views on things like the age of the universe, things that have direct bearing on the job at hand, that informed their decision.

In November of 2010 (things don’t always move quickly in the court system), a federal judge ruled that the case could go forward, and a date was set for February. Last week — what has prompted the new interest in talking about it — they settled out of court, ending the legal proceedings. The University of Kentucky will pay Dr Gaskell $125,000, without making any admission of wrongdoing.

Paying to make the problem go away is common, but unfortunate: it leaves everything fuzzy. Dr Gaskell’s supporters will claim that they won, and that there was, indeed, improper discrimination against him. His detractors will say that he extorted money from the university. Neither is really true.

More broadly, though, this case isn’t just about Dr Gaskell, and settling with him leaves open the question of when a person’s beliefs — religious or otherwise — make it reasonable to rule that person out for certain jobs. And should religious beliefs have any more protection in that regard than beliefs rooted elsewhere?

Richard Dawkins, in a BoingBoing guest post, has given his opinion on the matter. I mostly agree with him, but I can’t say that unequivocally. Read his essay, either now or after you’re done here.

I’ll answer the second of my questions two paragraphs up before I discuss the first: No, I do not think the reason one believes what one does has any bearing on how we should treat that belief. If you believe, say, that people should be at peace with each other, and that war is always evil, it shouldn’t matter whether you’re a Quaker or you come by that from somewhere else. If you’re vegetarian, what’s the difference whether it’s because you’re Hindu or because you simply can’t bear to see animals die? If you believe that the Universe is about 6000 years old, whether you get that from the bible, from a science fiction story you once read, or from a private sense that came to you one evening, it’s all the same. We shouldn’t be any more critical of what you think because you learnt it in church... but neither should we be more tolerant of it for that reason, if it gets in the way of what we’re working with you for.

And that leads us to the other question: When is it acceptable to say that what you believe is inconsistent with the job we’re hiring you for? Can a vegetarian expect to get a job as the sole food critic for a small newspaper? There’s an obvious issue there, but, surely, a vegetarian Hindu couldn’t reasonably sue the paper and claim religious discrimination. You have to be able to do your job.

Of course, there’d be no reason to prevent a vegetarian from, say, being the director of a university astronomical observatory. It’s likely we’ll all agree on that point.

At issue here, though, is that certain beliefs can damage your credibility to the point that, while they might not stop you doing your job, they could easily make it impossible for people to take you seriously in it. Were I, for instance, to apply for a job as Internet technology advisor for a right-wing tea-party senator, I might very well be able to give sound technical advice while choking back my revulsion to the senator’s political agenda... but could the senator ever trust that I wasn’t trying to undermine her in some way, given what I’ve written in these pages? Of course not.

Where I have a little trouble fully agreeing with Professor Dawkins is about where we draw the line. Between beliefs that can live in the background without having any effect and those that clearly whack one’s job in the face, there’s a continuum, and we have to decide when there’s enough effect to matter.

To be sure, we often think of college professors as being a bit kooky. It’s clear to me that the University of Kentucky people made a reasonable decision in this case, and it bothers me that they had to agree to pay Dr Gaskell off. But other cases are bound to be less clear, and it may be fine to hire the professor with the nutty ideas sometimes... even if the students do have a laugh once in a while, he’ll still have enough credibility to teach them what needs to be taught.

Ideally, of course, I fully agree with Professor Dawkins: we want clear thinkers in our universities, and accepting people who support discredited or fringe ideas in areas not connected to their main expertise still pollutes the clear-thinking pond. We’d like to select, say, Holocaust denialists, moon-landing skeptics, homeopathists, and idiots who still think that President Obama was not really born in Hawaii, and make sure none of them are teaching at our colleges and universities. It’s a nice goal. In practice, though, we have that sort of situation all the time, and I’m not sure how rigorous I want to be in avoiding it. Should Stanford University have distanced themselves from William Shockley because of his ideas about eugenics? Perhaps, perhaps not.

What’s clear, though, is that we have to prevent every employment decision from being the basis of a religious discrimination suit. In this case, the judge who allowed it to go forward made the wrong choice. It only cost the university $125,000, but it’s set a precedent that makes me very queasy.

Not with our drugs, you won't!

Those of us who abhor execution have gotten some temporary good news: Hospira, the only U.S. company that manufactures sodium thiopental, has ceased its production:

The sole American manufacturer of an anesthetic widely used in lethal injections said Friday that it would no longer produce the drug, a move likely to delay more executions and force states to adopt new drug combinations.

The manufacturer, Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., had originally planned to resume production of the drug, sodium thiopental, this winter at a plant in Italy, giving state corrections departments hope that the scarcity that began last fall would ease.

But the Italian authorities said they would not permit export of the drug if it might be used for capital punishment. Hospira said in a statement Friday that its aim was to serve medical customers, but that we could not prevent the drug from being diverted to departments of corrections and the company did not want to expose itself to liability in Italy.

It’s temporary, because states are likely to approve alternative drugs — Oklahoma already uses pentobarbital — but according to the Times, the delay could be considerable because of the process required to get changes approved. Some states (such as Texas, which seems to have an insatiable itch to kill prisoners) clearly will push a new protocol through as quickly as possible, while others may be in less of a hurry.

This is also interesting as a demonstration of how one country can affect another through its policies. We’re used to using embargoes for this, to varying effect, but the problem with embargoes is that they often cause pain to the populace without resulting in policy changes in the government. In this case, Italy’s approach was simple, targeted, and effective.

Five years

Today is the last day of the fifth year of these pages. As always, thanks, everyone, for reading and commenting over the years.

I started out with a goal of posting every day, and have mostly met that goal — I figure that out of 365 days, I post on at least 330 of them, and probably more. (On the other hand, I’ve just missed two days in a row, this past weekend.) Since 25 January, 2006, there have been 1826 days and 1909 entries in these pages (counting this one), averaging more than one a day... so, the days that got multiple posts outnumbered the ones where I missed.

I posted a lot more about politics in the earlier years, during the Bush administration, when I had more to be outraged about. That’s not to say that I’m thrilled with how things are going now — to be sure, there’s still plenty of political stuff to be discussed — but, somehow, I feel less moved than before to spend the time writing about it.

And, in general, while I still want to write here, I’m feeling less moved to do it every day, seven days a week, 365-ish days a year.

I’ll announce, then, officially, that every day is no longer the goal. I’ll still post on most days, I think, but my stated goal will go down to, say, three times a week. I’m sure I’ll exceed that goal most of the time. But if you visit and don’t see anything for a day or two, don’t be concerned: there’ll probably be something here on the day after. And if you’re using the RSS/Atom feed to follow what’s here, you probably won’t even notice.

Again, thanks to all of you for reading and commenting, and I hope you’ll continue.

Breaking the wind

How did I miss this?

Joe Barton is the congressman from Texas who apologized last June to BP for how badly we were treating them in the wake of the oil spill. That was enough to bring him out as a bozo, but I expected nothing else from a Tea-Party congressman from Waco, who represents part of the Dallas-Ft Worth area.

Thing is, he chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee from 2004 through 2006, and has just been given the committee's title of Chair Emeritus, what with the Republicans controlling the House again. And, so, we wonder just what he knows about energy.

That’s when we get to the question of how I missed this, his concern about using wind power, which he voiced early last year:

Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.

Wind power is a finite resource. Using wind power slows the wind down, which causes the temperature to go up. Presumably only in the areas where it’s hotter; in the areas where it’s cooler, it only makes sense that they’d stay cooler. I guess. So, in other words, we can interfere with God pretty easily, omnipotent being that he is, just by putting up some windmills. Yes, indeed, it’s just something to think about.

I want to leave this country and move someplace sane.

More police behaving badly

It’s been a while since I’ve written about rape (some of the most significant ones are here,here, and here). But via BoingBoing I’ve just read about a case in San Antonio that’s unusually disturbing: a police officer on duty handcuffed a suspect — a transgender prostitute — then drove her off to a quiet spot and forced [her] to commit multiple sex acts.

It’s disturbing that it happened, that a law officer would do such a thing. But what’s more disturbing is that the prosecutor charged him not with felony rape, despite the DNA and GPS evidence supporting the victim’s story, but with misdemeanor official oppression. Craig Nash lost his job and was sentenced to one year in jail.

One year, for violently abusing the trust we gave him as an officer of the law.

From what we’re given in the news article, it appears that the victim’s story is legitimate. In addition, a second victim, from a couple of years earlier, came forward. Nevertheless, the prosecutor gave the (former) cop a plea bargain, agreeing to charge him only with the misdemeanor and not to pursue the second accusation.

WTF?

Apart from that, even if the sex had been consensual, an on-duty officer having sex with a suspect is sufficiently wrong at so many levels as to warrant a penalty of much more than a year in jail. Think of the opportunities for abuse that crop up here: threatening women with arrest in order to get sex,^[1] releasing arrested suspects in exchange for sex, and so on.

It makes no difference how good a police officer he was in other ways or at other times. It certainly makes no difference how good a family man he is. None of that mitigates this crime.

We place a great deal of trust in police officers, and we give them a great deal of power. They must be held accountable for the misuse and abuse of that trust and power, and the punishments must be serious, not just slaps on the wrist. Dismissal, of course, but then real prison time, not just a token jail sentence. We have to show no tolerance for abusive or illegal — not to mention vile — behaviour.

I’ll note the related case from Custer County, Oklahoma, wherein former sheriff Mike Burgess had established a systematic system of sexual abuse. He got 79 years in prison.

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^[1] Personally, I consider this to be fully fledged rape, using a threat of arrest instead of, say, a knife or a threat of a severe beating. I’m not sure where the law would stand on it.

As a pedant, I...

My town is moving into the 21st century, beginning a program wherein we can sign up to receive our property tax receipts by email. Of course, we have to mail them a piece of paper in order to sign up, but let’s not expect the moon, eh?

The letter announcing this and containing the form to send in begins this way:

As the Receiver of Taxes, it has been important to provide you with first-rate customer service as well as up to date and cost effective office practices.

Ms Breining, our Receiver of Taxes, has fallen into a very popular pit, one containing enough writers that I think she should be able to climb out on the others’ backs.

Any sentence that begins with as [role] must go on to have a subject that matches the role. I am the author of this entry. If I should say, As the author of this entry, I must be the subject of the rest of the sentence.

Correct: As the author of this entry, I think that getting language right is important.

Incorrect: As the author of this entry, getting language right is important.

The subject of the incorrect sentence is getting language right, but that is not the author of this entry.

It should be easy to get this one right, but it seems to be hard. A common error with the as [role] construction happens when there are two people involved, and the as gets attached to the wrong one:

As the representative on duty, call me if you have any problems.

The implied subject here is you (you call me), but it’s the me who is the representative on duty. Rewrite it one of these ways:

As the representative on duty, I am on call in case you have any problems.

As the representative on duty, I invite you to call me if you have any problems.

I am the representative on duty; call me if you have any problems.

In fact, it’s often best to avoid the as [role] thing. It’s prone to error, and it’s often awkward or stilted anyway. But if you want to use it, please use it correctly.

As the Receiver of Taxes, I consider it important to provide you with first-rate customer service as well as up-to-date and cost-effective office practices.

Maybe we’ll talk about the demise of the hyphen another time (she did use it in first-rate, but left it out of the other compound modifiers).

Customer service

I’ve recently had to deal with a customer service issue with a large company (from the customer side) that’s worked out like about 80% of the customer service issues I’ve had with large companies. I figure that my customer service experiences go something like this:

• Around 10% are resolved straight away.
• Around 10% are never resolved to my satisfaction.
• Around 80% work out roughly as I’m about to describe.

We can quibble about the particular balance, and perhaps yours balance very differently. But here’s what recently happened:

I went to the store with my issue, and talked with an associate. The associate was neither sympathetic nor helpful, and denied that there was a problem. I asked to speak with a manager.

The manager was, in this case, neither sympathetic nor helpful, and treated it the same way the associate did. Usually, the manager is at least sympathetic or apologetic, but not this time. There was nothing, he said, that he could do. I asked to speak with the store manager, who turns out to be out until next week.

I called the chain’s customer service line by phone, the next business day. The customer service representative said she was sorry I wasn’t happy, but, as those at the store did, merely explained why it was not really a problem. I asked for a supervisor.

The supervisor was also sorry I wasn’t happy, but accepted that a problem existed. Nonetheless, he said there was nothing his department could do. He referred me to another department, giving me their phone number.

That department was sorry, acknowledged the problem, and offered to buy me off with a store credit, which I declined. She understood why I declined, and said that she could escalate the problem and have someone call me back. I thanked her for the help and confirmed phone numbers.

The call-back came the same day, and the problem was immediately resolved entirely to my satisfaction, with apology for the inconvenience and thanks for doing business with their store.

Now, on the one hand, I am happy that they sorted things out. But I have too much experience with this sort of thing, and I’m well aware of both why they handle it this way, and what the problem is with that way of handling it.

They do this because they know that most people will stop after one or two levels. Even persistent folks will likely stop by the third, and almost everyone will take the store credit, which mostly guarantees that they’ll come back to the store to spend it. Those who give up (or those who take the store credit and don’t use it) don’t cost them any real money. In other words, for most people who call with these sorts of complaints, the business never has to make it right.

The problem with that is that it creates ill will. It leaves customers feeling angry, frustrated, cheated. They end up with people who are not inclined to go back to the store. Even if one sticks with it, as I did, until someone agrees to resolve the issue, the customer is left with a bad taste and a low opinion of the business.

Of course, exactly because it’s a national chain, they don’t care, at least not at the micro level. The loss of my business means nothing to them, and they will not get enough complaints and enough disaffected customers to amount to anything, really. And because it’s a big store that sells a lot of things, it’s likely that even most of the annoyed customers will be back anyway, despite themselves.

And, so, whenever I have to deal with a real customer service problem — not a simple return (most places handle those just fine), but a problem that one has to explain and get someone to fix — I enter into the process steeled for talks with four or five people. I’m always polite, but firm and clear about what I expect.

And when it turns out to be among the 10% where the first person responds, I’m sorry for the problem, Mr Leiba, and I’ll take care of it for you right away, well... then I’m very happy.

He had a dream

In honour of today’s remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr, today’s entry is a pointer to a Fresh Air radio program to air today, a talk with Clarence Jones, who helped write Dr King’s famous I Have a Dream speech.

Text without context, in this case especially, would be quite a loss. One might imagine standing before an audience and read­ing Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech verbatim, but it is a stretch to believe that any such per­formance would sow the seeds of change with, as Dr. King put it that day in Washington, the fierce urgency of now. The vast crowd, the great speaker, the words that shook the world — it all comes as a package deal. We are truly fortunate to have a record.

The IETF at 25

The first meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was held on this day in 1986, making today the IETF’s 25th birthday, in some sense.

The IETF is the organization that’s developed and documented most of the standards that the Internet runs on, from the protocols that define how data is transferred, to those that get the data packets to the right place, to those that specify how to send and retrieve email. A visit to these pages involves the use of dozens of IETF standards — along with some standards produced by other bodies, such as IEEE and W3C — that work together flawlessly (mostly) to let you read what I’ve written.

Getting all that standardized to make everything interoperate is a sometimes difficult task that can be frustrating and fun at the same time. I’ve been working with the IETF for about two thirds of those 25 years, and it’s the part of my job that I enjoy the most.

Many folks wonder if the Internet isn’t finished, and ask why the IETF is still around. The answer is that new features are always needed as new applications and new technology push the limits of what we have, and demand updates to old standards and creation of new ones.

So, happy birthday to the IETF... and thanks to all my colleagues who’ve devoted a great deal of their time and expertise to this work.

Neighbours

No interlopers, these:

Watson and Jeopardy!

Today, the folks at Jeopardy! will be recording the competition, to be aired on 14-16 February, between IBM’s Watson computer and two of the game’s biggest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. I’m told that the Watson Research Center lab is closed to employees today, and that employees were asked to work from home or make other working arrangements for the day.

They did a practice round that Watson won, and you can watch some video of that in the ZDNet article. In that round, no one answered any questions wrong — it will be interesting to see how it all works out when the errors start coming in — and it looks like Watson has an edge on the buzzer timing.

Some observers are not impressed by all this. One commenter to the ZDNet article says, This is not progress. I’ve talked with others who think the whole thing is a WOMBAT.^[1] And, indeed, one has to wonder about an expenditure of a million dollars on a replica Jeopardy! set (according to CNN Money).

But, of course, they want to make a spectacle of this, just as they did with Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov.

Spectacle aside, though, is this just a silly waste? We’ll have to see what comes of the technology after the Jeopardy! match. It’s not directly clear what IBM did with the technology that went into Deep Blue, but it’s unlikely that the technology that has gone into Watson will languish. If all these projects do is produce machines that can play chess or Jeopardy!, then, indeed, they’re wasteful, no more than novelties.

But, surely, technology that can understand human-language questions and answer them has many practical uses. Such a system could be a useful front-end to many systems that have to direct people to the right experts, diagnose problems, and answer common questions. Of course, on the other side, many of us might find ourselves more frustrated than we are already, when it becomes even harder to get a real human on the phone.

Though, might we be getting closer to passing the Turing test? Perhaps before too long we won’t be able to tell whether we have a real human on the phone or not. And if that computer, Watson XVII perhaps, can answer our questions and give us a smooth and pleasant experience in the process, does it matter?

It’s clear that, while word processors and spreadsheets are useful, it’s games that have really pushed and expanded the limits of technology. 3-D graphics rendering, hand-held motion sensors, and even parts of the underlying network technology are where they are because of games. If we take advantage of where the games move us and use the technology beyond the realm of entertainment — by, say, rendering images of heart scans in 3-D to give doctors diagnostic capabilities that our parents’ doctors couldn’t even dream about, and allowing them to perform surgery with amazing levels of precision — then what we spent on the frivolity of the games was well worth it.

So let’s see what’s next for the Watson technology after Jeopardy!

We’ve come a long way since Eliza.

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^[1] WOMBAT = Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time

Badges? I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.

Bruce Schneier points out this paper (pdf here) that analyzes the ease of getting fake law enforcement credentials and then using them successfully.

Today, badges convey that the bearer is granted the authority to enforce laws established by a governmental or quasi-governmental entity and are cherished by law enforcement officers. The issue is that there are over 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States all with different badges and credentials issued to their personnel. This is not including, the over 70 different federal law enforcement agencies that issue badges and/or credentials. And in there lies the problem. How do you know a cop is a cop?

The most common response to that question is usually, if they walk like a cop. Talk like a cop. And look like a cop, then they are a cop. The assumption is further built upon when being presented with a badge and identification card. But that is not always the case.

It’s probably not surprising that they found it easy to obtain, cheaply, fake badges, and that those badges then allowed them pretty much unimpeded access to whatever they wanted. In other words, real badges provide little real security.

As someone who’s worked in secured facilities, where badges are required for access, I can say that how well all of this works very much depends upon how the badges are used, and the bottom line is that it’s useless to expect reasonable enforcement by having people look at others’ badges. They will too often fail to look, and when they do look they will be unable to detect the fakes.

But not all setups rely only on visual inspection. At one facility, a guard eyed your badge at the gate, but that was designed only to block tourists — to keep arbitrary curious people from wandering onto the premises. But to actually get into the building, everyone had to pass a badge reader and enter an identification code on a keypad, a two-factor authentication process (something I have, and something I know). The reader validated the badge, making it harder to get a fake through. The identification code made sure that I matched the badge — not just that I bore a passing resemblance to the guy in the photo, but that I actually knew the code that was stored in the database for that particular badge.

That defeats attempts to clone a badge, or to put arbitrary information (or none at all) on the magnetic strip. Getting through that system would require compromising an individual and specifically stealing or copying his credentials and obtaining the corresponding identification code... or, alternatively, finding a way to get in that bypasses the badge readers. There might have been such a way, but none was apparent to me.

Once inside, we’re back to the visual checks again, so one can wander unimpeded through much of the building. But the process at the entrances repeats for access to certain areas of the building, again requiring either badging in (with reader and ID code) or opening a lock with a combination unique to that area.

I don’t think there’s any way to completely get rid of visual inspection of credentials, but we have to minimize it. The public is especially vulnerable, in cases where someone dresses like a cop and has something that looks like a badge. But for official buildings and other secured areas we do have alternatives, and we should be using them rigorously.

Network neutrality: the battle begins

Via BoingBoing, I saw this article about T-Mobile U.K. and their new fair-use policy. It relates to the recent FCC rules that give mobile carriers a pass on network neutrality, allowing them more flexibility — we might say, allowing them to violate neutrality. While the U.S. Federal Communications Commission rules obviously don’t apply to a carrier in the United Kingdom, the tone that it sets, the tone that the Google/Verizon agreement set, is felt throughout the world.

Here’s what T-Mobile is saying in the U.K.:

From the beginning of next month, the policy will limit customers to 500MB a month, down from 1GB or 3GB, depending on the contract. If you want to download, stream and watch video clips, save that stuff for your home broadband, a document on the T-Mobile site said.

A T-Mobile spokesperson has said the new policy will apply to all customers, including those who have already signed contracts with a higher cap. A message on the company’s official Twitter account said: We have to give you reasonable notice that our fair use policy is changing.

T-Mobile is touting the change as a benefit for customers, saying they won’t be charged for going over that 500MB limit. Instead, they’ll simply be banned for the rest of the month from downloading large files or viewing video via their handsets.

Browsing means looking at websites and checking email, but not watching videos, downloading files or playing games, the company claimed. We’ve got a fair use policy, but ours means that you’ll always be able to browse the internet, it’s only when you go over the fair use amount that you won’t be able to download, stream and watch video clips.

This kind of thing is exactly what many of us fear from any rule that distinguishes wireless/mobile Internet from home broadband. Had these sorts of restrictions been in place for wireline Internet access, many innovations, many services and web sites that we take for granted now would never have been able to exist. By implication, putting such restrictions on mobile access to the Internet will block new and innovative uses and services, keeping them from ever getting off the ground.

Think about some of the stuff we’re used to, that millions of Internet users depend on every day. Oversimplifying, a bit:

1. YouTube was enabled by the lack of limitations on data transfer. If you have to pay by the megabyte, watching videos, even low-quality, highly compressed ones, gets too expensive too fast.
2. Facebook was enabled by the elimination of time constraints on online use. Remember when you got 50 hours a month of Internet access, and had to pay by the hour (or minute) for more?
3. Twitter was enabled by the always on aspect of Internet access. It just wouldn’t have ever worked if when you got the urge to tweet you had to go to your computer and dial up through your modem.

The wireless carriers want to change at least some of those aspects, and if we accept their doing that we’ll accept the limitations on technology development that goes with it.

Watch YouTube at home, not on your mobile, says T-Mobile U.K.

Bollocks!, we need to say back. Change carriers while there’s still a choice, and show the other carriers what we think of that sort of policy. Even if you’ll never use more than 500 MB in a month, find a new carrier that doesn’t have this limitation. Take a stand on network neutrality before it’s too late to.

Winter cleaning

I’m doing some clearing up around the house, and last night I decided it was time to get rid of a bunch of old reel-to-reel tapes with music recorded on them. My reel-to-reel tape deck hasn’t worked in years (I brought that to the electronics recycling center over the weekend), and, what with changes in technology, I hadn’t been missing it, and would be unlikely to listen to the tapes again anyway.

With the assumption that no one else will want them either (or, rather, that it would be too much trouble to try to find them a home), I took out some packing tape and bound them together in stacks of ten. It turns out that I have 138 of them. They’re recorded at 3¾ inches per second (not the audiophile method, but I wanted more music on each tape), making it three hours per side, 6 hours per tape. Each was recorded by hand from LPs (Remember them?), and, so, 138 tapes times 6 hours each comes to well over 800 hours spent making them.

They were packed for the trash inside of fifteen minutes.

Even though I haven’t listened to them in more than 20 years, even though I would never be listening to them again, even though it felt good to see the space they took up become empty, I still felt a little sad to think about those many hours I spent on them, and to realize that at least half were probably never listened to even once after they were made.

It makes one think a bit about what one spends one’s time on.

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P.S. It's 11:11 on 1/11/11.

Safety, congressional and otherwise

Eliot Lear comments about this CNN article, which says that members of Congress are looking into increasing their own personal security, after the shooting of Representative Giffords. Eliot’s comment is this:

What about the rest of us?

This guy went in and legally bought a 9mm Glock with ammo, even though his friends and schools knew he was a little nutty. All of the dead people weren’t in Congress. They were collateral damage. What about them?

Indeed. It’s long past time to be looking at reasonable gun control, coming up with reasonable compromises between freedom to own guns and the danger which that freedom poses to society. Even a Republican congressman from Arizona, who probably supports the NRA and is against gun control, recognizes that allowing everyone to have guns is not a good idea. Here’s what Representative Jeff Flake says about threats to legislators:

But the danger is, some of these people you dismiss as crackpots, you know, a crackpot with a gun is dangerous, and that — that is worrisome. And I think what really hit home to all of us on Capitol Hill yesterday was that you’re not only putting yourself in danger if you ignore these kind of threats; you’re putting staff in danger, as well.

And not just your staff, Congressman. Film crews. Bystanders. Everybody.

Only, Mr Flake is, probably unintentionally, putting the blame on the right people for the wrong reason: it is, indeed, members of congress who are putting people in danger. But they’re not doing it by being out in public, by not having enough security, or anything like that.

They’re putting all of us in danger by not enacting legislation to limit the availability and use of guns.

Arizona passed legislation in 1994 that makes legal the carrying of concealed weapons. The shooter this weekend may have been carrying his gun legally. Even if not — if he didn’t have a permit — making it common to have people carrying guns makes it hard to sort out where the threats are and aren’t. The gun-carry proponents tout their ability to stop attacks with their own defensive weapons, but we can see how well that works in practice.

We can — and we will — fight about the Second Amendment and those pesky commas until we’re out of breath, but the reality is that we do restrict access to arms. We don’t allow certain types of weapons. Fully automatic military rifles are prohibited, and we don’t allow people to own, say, nuclear devices and other bombs. Those are arms, too. Some jurisdictions require licenses in order to own guns. Many don’t allow them to be carried around from day to day.

Until we put gun ownership in context and accept that more limitations on it are necessary for a free and safe society, we put everyone at risk.

More on search warrants and electronic data

Varying a bit from this item, last week the California state Supreme Court decided that police can seize and search a mobile device that an suspect has with him when he’s arrested.

This differs from the first decision in a couple of ways. For one thing, the former was by the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, a court that covers Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee; California is covered by the Ninth Circuit, and the Sixth Circuit’s decision is not binding there. For another, this decision is by a state court, not a federal one, so it applies in the state of California only.

But more significantly, this is specifically about things that someone who’s arrested has on his person at the time of arrest. The decision is based on a more general rule that police are allowed to examine whatever a suspect has when he’s arrested:

Under U.S. Supreme Court precedents, this loss of privacy allows police not only to seize anything of importance they find on the arrestee’s body ... but also to open and examine what they find, the state court said in a 5-2 ruling.

The majority, led by Justice Ming Chin, relied on decisions in the 1970s by the nation’s high court upholding searches of cigarette packages and clothing that officers seized during an arrest and examined later without seeking a warrant from a judge.

As in many other cases, this highlights a need to be clear that data storage devices and devices that can access online information are not like cigarette packages and clothing. I don’t think any of us doubt that the police can and should look for cocaine hidden in a cigarette pack, or a switchblade in the back trouser pocket. But if I’m carrying my laptop when I’m arrested, do they have reasonable access to all my stored email and other personal and financial information?

The minority of two justices say no, as do I:

The dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn’t be extended to modern cell phones that can store huge amounts of data.

Monday’s decision allows police to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee’s person, said Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, joined in dissent by Justice Carlos Moreno.

They argued that police should obtain a warrant - by convincing a judge that they will probably find incriminating evidence - before searching a cell phone.

The courts need to sort out these differences, and set up a legal understanding of where personal effects end and private data begins. Unfortunately, the current U.S. Supreme Court does not have the composition to come up with a reasonable answer to that question.

Downloading photos

Over time, I’ve run across a few people who have posted photos to Flickr, set the Flickr option to disable downloading, and then been dismayed to find that people were saving copies of their photos anyway. They told Flickr not to allow downloading, and people can, apparently, still download.

Some of these had set the option a long time ago. With recent changes to Flickr, they’ve made it a little clearer that this isn’t a security feature, but even with that, people don’t understand what’s going on, and how others can still download their photos.

Here’s how the Flickr setting works:

You’re looking at a photo on Flickr, and you view a specific size (click on the photo or click the Action pull-down, then select view all sizes). Above the photo in the view all sizes screen is the license information and a list of sizes, and between them it says Download and supplies a download link. Also, if you right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) on the photo, there’ll be a save image selection on the menu.

If the owner of the photo has disabled downloading, the Download line will say The owner has disabled downloading of their photos, and there will be no save image option on the pop-up menu (on some browsers it may be there, but it won’t work).

What’s important to understand is that that’s all the option does: it removes the ability to save the image (photo) using the standard browser interfaces. That is, it makes it less convenient to save the image.

But any image that’s displayed by your browser has an img tag in the HTML source, and that tag has the URL for the image. For example, if we look at this photo that I’ve posted to Flickr, and then view the HTML source for the page,^[1] you’ll see the following:

<div id="allsizes-photo">
<img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3136/3047554534_723e36b41f_b.jpg">
</div>

You can put that URL into your browser and get directly to the image. Of course, it doesn’t matter, because you can just right-click the image on the all-sizes page and save it. But if I had disabled downloading, when you looked at the page source you would see this:

<div id="allsizes-photo">
<div class="spaceball" style="height:768px; width: 1024px;"></div>
<img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3136/3047554534_723e36b41f_b.jpg">
</div>

That extra line, the one with class="spaceball", is what blocks the right-click from being able to download the photo. But the URL is still there, and the URL still works. Anyone can still download my photo by going to the HTML source and finding the URL for it there. It would be very easy to write a Firefox add-on that would do this automatically and re-enable a save option on the pop-up menu, and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone had already written one. I haven’t looked, because I don’t really care to download everyone’s Flickr photos.

Here’s Flickr’s warning about this:

Enabling this setting also places deterrents to discourage downloading of your other sizes. (And we really do mean discourage. Please understand that if a photo can be viewed in a web browser, it can be downloaded.)

Is that sufficient? Clearly not; people are still surprised when they find that their photos are freely accessible to anyone who can get to the pages to view them. But if the web browser can retrieve the photos to show them, then they can be saved — if nothing else, they’re saved in the user’s browser cache, and a savvy user can snag them thence.

I’ve been talking about Flickr, specifically, but there’s nothing here that’s really specific to Flickr. It’s true on any web site: anything a user can view, the user can save.

There is an exception to that: there are photo sites that use Flash to show the photos. Flash is a browser plug-in that runs programs that are sent from the web server. The Flash program that displays the photos does it in a way that the browser itself is unaware of (only Flash sees it), so the browser never has the photo, nor even the URL to it. Unless someone can hack the Flash program, there’s no way the user can save the photo directly.

But even in this case, a user can capture a screen image while the photo is being displayed. The Mac’s Preview program makes it easy; use the File -> Take Screen Shot option in Preview’s menu. In Windows, pressing the Print Screen key on the keyboard will copy the screen image to the clipboard, and you can then paste it into a program such as Paint, PowerPoint, or PhotoShop. There are also plenty of other programs (I like Hypersnap, but many others are fine) that give you more flexibility.

In other words, again, anything a user can view, the user can save.

So, in general, we get back to advice that you’ve seen many times in these pages: If you want something to be private, don’t put it on the Internet.

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^[1] It’s easy, from the browser’s menu: in Firefox, use View -> Page Source; in Chrome, View -> Developer -> View Source; in Safari, View -> View Source; in Internet Explorer, View -> Source.

Sleep and work

In a recent TED talk,^[1] Arianna Huffington comments on the importance of getting enough sleep.

Because the essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic. And we’ve had far too many icebergs hitting our Titanics. In fact, I have a feeling that if Lehman Brothers was Lehman Brothers and Sisters, they might still be around. While all the brothers were busy, you know, just being hyper-connected 24/7, maybe a sister would have noticed the iceberg because she would have woken up from a seven-and-a-half- or eight-hour sleep... and have been able to see the big picture.

This prompts me, in a round-about way, to talk about having worked from home for almost two years, now.

Since I left IBM at the end of February, 2009, I haven’t worked in an office — I’ve been working at home for 22 months. There are both advantages and disadvantages to that situation. I miss some of the structure of going to the office, but mostly I miss the people.

I miss the specific people I used to work with, of course, but, more broadly, I miss seeing people and getting the social interactions in the work environment. I miss having coffee and tea with people, having lunch with people, having people stop in my office and having an opportunity to stop into theirs. Sharing a laugh with a colleague, batting around an idea, or just hearing about his weekend for a few minutes personalizes the work experience in a way that seems important.

I’m still in communication with colleagues constantly, of course, through email, instant messaging, and telephone. Having an IM window pop up that says, Hi, Barry. Do you have a few minutes to talk about [some topic]?, or Hey, did you have a good weekend?, does have similarities to the in-office visit. But it’s not really the same, and I do miss doing that face to face.

On the other hand, my job requires a lot of time reading, writing, and thinking, and I don’t miss the interruptions that come with the office environment. That very visit by a dear colleague can, when it comes at an inconvenient time, dislodge critical thoughts and derail a writing session. Sometimes, one has an ephemeral idea in one’s head that’s flowing onto the paper phosphor, and even a brief distraction will ruin the subtle wording that was happening in the head, before it ever makes it to the hands. It’s nice to have the quiet and privacy, and to know that I can maintain it as long as I need to, uninterrupted.

But what I really do not miss is the commute, and actually going into the office. I’m saving over an hour a day of entirely wasted time. And my commute, a half hour or so each way, is much less than that of some. I got to listen to the radio — NPR, usually, except when they were begging having a membership drive — so that was something, but it didn’t really count for much. I just considered the drive to and from work a necessary annoyance, and a complete waste of time.

So I save the hour a day, and I also save the fuel for the car — about a gallon and a half a day, 7.5 gallons a week... at current local prices that’s nearly $25 a week — and the wear and tear, as well. But what I didn’t expect is that I save wear and tear on myself.

It’s not just your car that’s stressed by a drive to work; you get the effects as well. It pushes the stress up. And getting up to go to the office can get in the way of getting enough sleep. That part surprised me. It’s only an hour of time, and my days almost always had some down time, so I would never have thought that going to the office was making me sleep less (or less well). But between the time saved and the stress saved, I am getting more sleep and feeling more rested than I have in many years.

The effects are clear to me. I feel better, and I think I work better. I can keep my mind on things more effectively, I don’t have an afternoon low period, and I’m happier.

Ms Huffington is right: get enough sleep, and don’t get caught in the I need less sleep than you do! macho trap.

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^[1] This is a good opportunity to throw in a plug for TED, which, in case you don’t already know, has a bunch of wonderful talks, all by good speakers and all short enough that they won’t cut into your time too much. Many of them are worth watching.

No soap, radio?

There are a lot of back to basics movements out there, involving all aspects of one’s life. I know a family of nine in my area that’s chosen to make their own clothes, heat their water on the stove, and such. There are lots of diet alternatives, including veganism, raw-food diets, and various attempts to eat only what cavemen did (and never mind that the lifespan of the caveman wasn’t so long).

I’d never heard, before, though, about folks who don’t use soap. But BoingBoing can always be relied on to find the interesting and the strange. The comments are very mixed, with many strongly supporting the idea, some saying I haven’t touched soap in [however long].

I get the concept, but I don’t really see how it works with the way we currently live. Probably no one cared whether the cave man was clean, but we do, and a good rinse and a wipe with a wet cloth doesn’t always do it. Surfactants may remove body oils, important or not, as sort of collateral damage... but they also help us get the crap off of us. What does one do when one has sworn off soap and one gets really grimy?

My favourite comment is number 20:

I really would not want to eat dinner at this man’s house.
No, it’s okay, I rinsed the chicken blood off my hands with pure, clean water! My skin is so soft and smooth, why would you worry about food poisoning?

Indeed.

Свободного программного обеспечения

Interesting: Vladimir Putin has signed an order to move the Russian government to free software over the next four years.

The transition to open-source, or free, software will begin in the second quarter of 2011, with the Ministry of Communications examining what base software packages are needed for government agencies, according to the documents. During the same quarter, the ministry and other agencies will develop proposals for user support centers and for mechanisms to support software developers, the documents said.

Russian agencies will also begin an inventory of their IT assets during the second quarter of 2011, the documents said. Pilot agencies will begin using a basic package open-source software in the second quarter of 2012, according to the transition schedule.

Official adoption of Firefox has been going around here and there, but this goes way beyond that, with plans to deploy Linux in place of Windows, to replace Microsoft Office, and so on. The order talks of replacing proprietary software with free software, including operating systems, drivers for hardware and application software for servers and user workstations.

On the other hand, while Computerworld’s report mentions open-source software, I’m not sure about the idiom. The word the order uses, свободного (genitive of свободный), seems to mean free as in unrestricted, which is the same sense as it’s used by the Free Software Foundation — not free of charge, so much as free access. There are differences between free software and open-source software; they’re similar, but they’re not the same. Because I don’t know Russian, I can’t tell whether the Russian term (used here in the title, the words taken from the official plan) applies to the latter or not.

Deep discounts

What a great sale they had going at Sears the other day!:

There were also some wildly misleading signs, like the one that was above the Dockers shirts saying that Dockers neckwear was 40% off. The ties were nowhere nearby, and the shirts were, indeed, selling at full price, no discount.

Caveat emptor.

1-1-11

No matter how you write the date, there are a lot of ones today. It's a binary sort of day.

Happy new year!