Spooky

I learned two things tonight.

One: cats are scary, but posterized cats are even scarier.

Two: candy can disappear at a rate approaching 2 gallons per second if you are foolish enough to tell a large crowd of children that they had “better take a lot” or you’ll “have too much left over.”

Filed under: cats

The revolution will be public-key encrypted

Ogged has a post up about Iranian blog cafés, which are a heartening sign that some utopian ideas about how the internet might be used as a tool for the promotion of liberty are not totally bongological. And he wonders if I might expand on something I said in the comments:

Easy, secure, and anonymous-but-authenticated communication really could change the world, if enough people can get their hands on it.

How? Why? Simply, because propaganda works. And because people follow orders more often when they think that other people will follow them too.

If you control what people know, then to a very great extent you control their behavior. Preventing the free flow of information and ideas is on the list of top jobs for any repressive regime. For most of human history, it was also a pretty easy job, because whatever mass media there was, was centralized and non-anonymous. But that is just on the cusp of changing.

For example. In repressed societies, one thing that no one knows is how pissed off everyone else is about being repressed. You can’t tell your neighbor, because your neighbor might be in the secret police. And he can’t tell you for the same reason. If there were a way for you to tell him how pissed you are, without anyone knowing it was you, that would help. But he has to be able to read about how pissed you are without anyone knowing that he’s done so. And your neighbor is a moron, so whatever the means of communication may be, it can’t be too hard to use, either as a reader or a writer. And as your conversation develops, he has to be sure that the messages that seem to be from you (whoever you are) really are from you (whoever you are), and haven’t been forged by the secret police. And last, of course, the way you talk must be a mass medium, because otherwise how will you find each other? (And otherwise, you non-mass-medium users will stick out like a couple of thumbs that will soon be wishing they were only sore.)

Five years ago, you and your neighbor were screwed. Your choices: stew in silence, or risk exposure by talking openly.

Today, your fate depends on your technical ability. if your neighbor is capable of generating a PGP key and sending an email, you are only screwed on the reading side. You can both sign up with invisiblog, and easily post articles in very great safety, if you don’t post any personally identifying information and are careful about reading your own blog.

And if your neighbor can run freenet, you are really in business: you and he can join up with an end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer network and exchange files safely and anonymously, and without much fear of anyone connecting you with what you post or what you read.

Neither of those is quite easy enough to use, yet, and neither is perfectly secure from the secret police. They can see what you read at invisiblog. And they can see that you are running freenet.

So we aren’t quite there yet. When there is a conduit as secure as freenet that doesn’t require running a server of your own, is indistinguishable at the packet level from ordinary web or email traffic, and can be posted to as easily as blogger from an internet café—then you and your neighbor will be able to start talking. And if you both happen to be, say, Colonels in the Uzbek army who are sick of seeing dissidents boiled alive? Or two of hundreds of thousands of angry students in Iran? Or two parents in North Korea who don’t know that yours are not the only starving children?

I’m not going to say: then the Dear Leaders will be done for. But the scales will tip a little bit against them.

Filed under: politics

This is only a test

Many around the blogosphere, my livingroom, and apparently around Georgetown dinner party tables as well, are speculating about why President Bush said what he said about the “Mission Accomplished” banner. Why lie so blatantly and so unnecessarily about something so minor and so easily fact-checked? Was it arrogance? Stupidity? Both?

Nope. It was a test. Bush is certainly aware that the only thing that kept Al Gore from walking away with the election in 2000 was his press-manufactured propensity for minor, unnecessary, easily fact-checked lies. Most of which weren’t lies at all, but forget about that. A Bush-friendly, lazy press made them lies, and puffed them up until they became not just lies, but an indictment of Gore’s character and sanity.

The fundamental character of the press hasn’t changed in 3 years. So if their true bias is for the easy and amusing story, the sharks should be all over this banner business, with front page stories in the New York Times and round-the-clock pundit denouncements of Bush’s mendacity. But if that doesn’t happen—and it looks so far like it won’t—Bush can be confident in a press corps that will hammer his opponent for every misstatement, while giving him his usual free pass. Because that would empirically demonstrate that their pro-Bush bias is the stronger. So, especially this far out from the election, a little white test lie is quite safe and could generate some very useful information.

Ok, ok—just kidding. Obviously it was a graceless moment of cowardice under fire. He got an unanswerable question—either he admits the sign was premature, and thus that the war has not gone according to plan, or he sticks by the sign and looks callous and out of touch—and he panicked and blamed the nearest fall guy.

If blaming the troops for your mistakes is honor and integrity, let’s have some more blow jobs from interns, please.

Filed under: politics/2004

Circle of life

Barton Gellman continues his evisceration of the Bush administration’s credibility on the subject of pre- and post-war WMD claims in tomorrow’s Washington Post.

According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration’s prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.

Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq’s nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.

Pretty damning. But at least these revelations are revelations of an honest misjudgement, right? I mean, they went in searching hard for dangerous, proliferable nuclear technology like those aluminum tubes we heard so much about—they just never found any.

Participants in the Pentagon-directed special weapons teams, interviewed repeatedly since late last spring, noted that Kay’s operation has taken no steps to collect the estimated 20,000 tubes in Iraq’s inventory[.]

On the ground in Iraq, one investigator said, the nuclear investigation began as and remained “the least significant of the missions.”

Ok, maybe not. So the clear implication of that would be:

“They’re not acting as if they take their own analysis seriously,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “If they were so worried about these tubes, that would be the kind of sensitive equipment you’d think the administration would want to seize, to prevent it from going somewhere else—Iran, Syria, Egypt.”

And what about those terrible, dangerous, incrimintating aluminum tubes? The ones that were only suitable for use in nuclear centrifugery? The ones we never bothered even to collect? What ever happend to them?

Scavengers most likely have “sold them as drain pipe.”

I see. So they are now as full of shit as Bush himself. In the end as it was in the beginning. Cute.

Filed under: politics/war

Window poseurs

They’re not as serious as they look in this picture. In fact, just after the shutter clicked, Linus hit the Professor in the face with a cream pie.

Filed under: cats

Rocket

From the “things I never thought I’d do” file: rooting for the Yankees. I grew up hating them. I still hate them. That one team so dominates baseball, and pretty much always has—they have been in 40%, and won over 25%, of all World Series—is an indictment of the major leagues, if not the sport itself. And they beat the Red Sox in almost unspeakably cruel fashion, this year and pretty much every year.

The Marlins are equally hateful, the lucky johnny-come-latelies who somehow ended up at the big dance with Chicago’s girl. So in part I am rooting for them to lose.

But mostly I’m rooting for the Yanks for sentimental reasons: I want Roger Clemens to go out a winner. If not in the literal sense of winning his last game, at least to end one of baseball’s great pitching careers in some way other than in a roomful of petulant losers and unpopped champagne. In my formative teenage years, after Yaz retired, Clemens was baseball to me. I’d like to see him go home with a ring this time, the way he should have in 1986.

This it, though: last one. After this year, no more champions from NYC until everybody else has a chance to catch up.

Filed under: culture/sports

Not "Fired" -- "Sacked"

Stupid, stupid, stupid. ESPN, which publicly supported Rush Limbaugh's blatant racism until his co-anchors forced the issue, has swiftly and sneakily fired Gregg Easterbrook for getting over-excited about bad movies. Ok, ok -- it was more than that. But as an actual, bar mitzvahed member of the international banking conspiracy, I would like to say that Easterbrook's original column was no more offensive than anything Joe Lieberman has had to say about violence in the movies. It was dumb and remarkably tone deaf, but it was not anti-semitic. Anyway, I don't think it was his generic swipe at money-hungry Jewish producers that got him in trouble. Why did they really fire him? Matthew Yglesias nails it, like a Ticonderoga-class lineman breezing in untouched to sack Chris Chandler into retirement (an event Bears fans have at least a 60% chance of witnessing this weekend):

ESPN is owned by Disney which also owns Miramax, both of which were slammed in the controversial Easterblogg post.

And indeed, Easterbrook calls out Michael Eisner, his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, by name, in the offending column.

My only quibble is with Matt’s post title. I mean, come on. The guy was—and I hope, will be again—a football columnist. How can you blow an opportunity like that? If the ball hits you in the hands, you have to catch it.

Filed under: culture/sports

I am Monty Hall

What's behind that curtain? Will it be door number two, or the mystery box? In the feline version of Let's Make a Deal, your chances of winning don't improve with a second guess. Whatever you pick, the prize is the same: one insane cat.

Filed under: cats

"Noted"

From the October 13, 2003 edition of the Note [no permanent link until 10/14], ABC‘s daily “inside baseball” politics report described by many as scrupulously nonpartisan, and by me as the David Broder of the new century, on the Plame Affair:

The White House seems to be seeking to suggest (and Newsweek seems to be buying) that if officials simply called reporters to call attention to the Novak column and what it said about Wilson’s wife the Agents Identities Act does not apply. This seems wrong.

The Act was specifically drafted to cover a situation where a person conveys information other than a name which has the effect of identifying someone as a covert agent. That is what the statutes says “discloses any information identifying such covert agent” rather than “identifies a covert agent.”

A reporter reading the Novak column would have no way to know if the fact reported was correct. However, after the phone call he or she would know it was correct and hence would have the identity of a covert agent.

Nor can the administration claim that because the name appeared in the paper once it was no longer classified and that the government was no longer keeping it a secret. This Administration (and past ones) has often argued that something is still secret even if it was published once without collaboration. The government in fact still asks people not to use the name and still take the position that the fact of whether or not she was or is a covert agent is still classified.

Just ask the CIA.

The White House spin has evolved from “who cares?” to “it never happened” to “she wasn’t covert anyway” and now to “we’ll never find out who” to “they didn’t mean to!” over the past 11 or 12 weeks. With the Note—and by extension, the Washington press corps—setting those last two aside, by making it clear that the CIA takes Rove’s post-Novak calls as seriously as the mysterious Novak call, it should soon be “you can’t prove it anyway,” swiftly on to “we deeply regret any harm” to “spending more time with the family.” At which point, if Bush has any kind of brain, he will cut the culprits loose any let them go to jail, rather than sacrificing his Presidency to pardon them. I wouldn’t take that bet either way.

Filed under: politics

Clever but useless

While we’re on the subject of copy protection, Ogged writes about a new game copy protection system called Fade. Fade introduces false errors onto the disc, which can’t be copied by conventional cd burners, because they get error-corrected away. The game then looks for those errors, and if it doesn’t find them, turns off most of the game content:

The idea is that people will be able to play the game long enough to get hooked, so they’ll buy a copy when their’s begins to degrade. I don’t know about that, I think that someone unwilling to pay for a game is unwilling to pay, period[.]

This is a clever and relatively user-friendly way of keeping kids from giving your game to their friends: turn the copies into shareware!

But it doesn’t address the real problem, which is industrial copying for money, not teenagers copying for free. If the folks using Fade think that their fake errors, which are stamped onto cds by industrial cd stamping machines, can’t be reproduced by other clever folks with industrial cd stamping machines—well. If your game is big enough to be an attractive target for industrial piracy, disc twiddles aren’t going to help you.

And: how much money did Macrovision spend to develop Fade? What’s the license fee per copy? How much extra time do game makers have to spend hooking into the system, deciding what content to degrade, and testing to make sure legitimate buyers don’t get Faded while copycats do? The chances are very good that, like all game copy protection schemes before it, Fade can’t compete in the marketplace against guilt and authenticated online play, the only things that have ever saved more in “lost” sales than they cost to implement.

Because Ogged is right. Casual copiers don’t pay for games. The only shareware games that have ever been successful are Doom (because it blew everyone’s mind) and Ambrosia’s better games for the Mac (because there are no other games for the Mac). Speaking as a wildly unsuccessful shareware game author, and former employee of what was the last of the true independent game companies, I can tell you that I made more money in one day at one job than I did in three or four years of the other—despite making games that were pretty good (for the time), well reviewed, and played by tens of thousands of people. Of whom roughly 100 bought the full version, of anything, ever. Shareware isn’t magic. Fade is a fancy, expensive shareware regime. Why spend millions to back yourself into a business model that doesn’t work?

Fade is up there with the Talking Moose. Clever but useless.

Filed under: copyright

Extra innings, extra cats

The Professor demonstrates that he can sleep through any game, no matter how tense, unless it involves a catnip mouse. Meanwhile, Linus demonstrates his excellent fielding abilities on a long fly well it's not exactly a ball, but he's too small to pick up regulation Wilson. And as a bonus, here's Linus doing his best Ron Santo imitation as the Cubs blow a late lead. (Though as I type this, Doug Glanville has just hit a run-scoring triple in the 11th! Holy Cow!)

Filed under: cats

Further signs of the end times

Cubs and Red Sox both in playoffs, genuine penant contenders. That was the first sign that the world is obviously not long for itself. As it were.

Second sign: grad student sued for holding down ‘shift’ key:

SunnComm believes that Halderman has violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by disclosing unpublished MediaMax management files placed on a user’s computer after user approval is granted. Once the file is found and deleted according to the instructions given in the Princeton grad student’s report, the MediaMax copy management system can be bypassed resulting in the copyright protected music being converted or misappropriated for potentially unauthorized and/or illegal use. SunnComm intends to refer this possible felony to authorities having jurisdiction over these matters because: 1. The author admits that he disabled the driver in order to make an unprotected copy of the disc’s contents, and 2. SunnComm believes that the author’s report was “disseminated in a manner which facilitates infringement” in violation of the DMCA or other applicable law.

(Link via Slashdot.)

SunComm somehow fails to mention in their press release that you can accomplish the same “circumvention” by a) holding down ‘shift’ as you put in the cd; b) using Microsoft’s own tweakui to turn off autorun; or c) getting yourself a real computer or at least a real OS.

This suit is garbage, and a perfect demonstration of the chilling effect that the DMCA has on all kinds of computer science research. Not to mention on me and my blog, should SunComm’s lawyers ever read this post. Yes, that’s right—this post, because it mentions the shift key “circumvention,” is potentially in violation of US the civil code. Thank heavens I don’t have one of those paypal donation buttons, or I could be looking at 5 years in the slammer.

UPDATE: The Daily Princetonian (Halderman is a Princeton grad student) reports that SunComm has dropped plans to sue. SunComm CEO Peter Jacobs had this to say:

I don’t want to be the guy that creates any kind of chilling effect on research.

Which is an admirable sentiment, and one that I wish people like Jack Valenti, John Conyers, Howard Berman, and the rest of the luddite crowd would adopt.

Filed under: technology

SGI to SCO: thank you for playing!

Groklaw’s reporting and commentary on the SCO intellectual property landgrab/stock pump scheme has been universally excellent, and this article is no exception. It brings the happy news that SGI has called SCO‘s bluff:

The big news is that SGI has looked at and compared System V code and Linux, and they say they have only found trivial snips that could arguably overlap

And those trivally-overlapping code snippets are a) probably public domain, and b) no longer included in the Linux kernel anyway. This leaves only some ridiculous derivative-works nonsense in SCO‘s hand, and means that their despicable, oughta-be-illegal game is just about over.

Filed under: technology/linux

Cubs win!

Maybe Linus is not a Cub fan. Maybe he just likes sitting on the TV because it’s warm, and he thinks he’s the center of attention. And that we’re yelling at him, which he likes—though that would mean his name was “Mark” and we for some reason were very anxious that he “strike the bastard out!”

But then, how can you explain a cat doing the “cap chop” all night long? Reader, I invite you to prove that he wasn’t. If the Cubs can go up 2–1 over the Braves in a playoff series, I say, anything is possible.

Filed under: cats

Jigsaw

I cheat at puzzles. There: I admitted it. I can’t help myself. I look at the picture on the puzzle box while I’m doing the puzzle. A cardinal sin.

Or so I’ve been told by aficionados who would burn the box if they didn’t need something to put the pieces back into. You’re not allowed to look at the picture, you see, because then you can guess where the pieces go—just by lookin’ at ‘em! Context changes the nature of the problem.

Is George W. Bush a jigsaw puzzle aficionado? Maybe not in his living room. But when making a case, or an apologia, for war, he displays a familiar concentration on the pieces at the expense of the whole.

That was made very clear today by his statements about the Kay report:
bq. Let me tell you what the report said[.] It states that Saddam Hussein’s regime had a clandestine network of biological laboratories. They had a live strain of deadly agent called botulinum; that he had sophisticated concealment efforts — in other words, he’s hiding his programs; that he had advanced design work done on prohibited long-range missiles. [New York Times] [Link added.]
And:
bq. His interim report said that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program spanned more than two decades. . . . He says that the WMD program involved thousands of people, billions of dollars and was elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In other words, he’s saying Saddam Hussein was a threat, a serious danger[.] [Washington Post]
Sound familiar? During the runup to war, Bush and his henchmen played the same game. They slapped down puzzle piece after puzzle piece: no record of destruction of arms; past history of use; snippets of incriminating phone calls; aluminum tubes; one Al Qaeda guy who took in the buffet at the Baghdad Hilton. From this they arranged a portrait of a necessary war.
Now they want to defend the necessity and justice of that war with the same technique. Only now, their duplicity is exposed, because we can all see the picture on the box, not just the pieces they want us to see. We can see the public Kay report, where he says that Hussein’s much-touted nuclear program was in “the very most rudimentary state.” We can see that Kay has found no chemical or biological arms, and no evidence for the existence of a credible program to produce either. [Washington Post]
Kay has validated the work of the UN weapons inspectors. He has proved, beyond any doubt, that there was no need for the war to begin when it began. He is well on the way to proving that it need not have begun at all. Bush’s selective emphasis on those parts of the picture that he likes can’t convince anyone of anything but his fundamental dishonesty and affection for propaganda.

Filed under: politics/war