Slashdot Mirror

Ninja Master Gara writes "Anime News Network reports New York University is offering a new courses on the anime industry and culture. Anime is slowly expanding from University Clubs into mainstream college courses, many of which begin at the 'What is anime?' level. Several Universities and Community Colleges already offer similar courses, or incorporate anime into existing studies." If any school decides to offer a course on the Gundam series, I'd be happy to teach a class.

Ninja Master Gara writes "Anime News Network reports New York University is offering a new courses on the anime industry and culture. Anime is slowly expanding from University Clubs into mainstream college courses, many of which begin at the 'What is anime?' level. Several Universities and Community Colleges already offer similar courses, or incorporate anime into existing studies." If any school decides to offer a course on the Gundam series, I'd be happy to teach a class.

Ninja Master Gara writes "Anime News Network reports New York University is offering a new courses on the anime industry and culture. Anime is slowly expanding from University Clubs into mainstream college courses, many of which begin at the 'What is anime?' level. Several Universities and Community Colleges already offer similar courses, or incorporate anime into existing studies." If any school decides to offer a course on the Gundam series, I'd be happy to teach a class.

An anonymous reader writes "BYU biostaticians report in Nature their genetic analysis of the insect, known as the 'walking stick', which apparently gives a contrapuntal example of reversible evolution. Called Dollo's Law, the principle holds that the same evolutionary pathway can never be backtracked, because of random mutations. But this insect class first had wings, lost them, then got them back again. So what's next for some humans: a happy return to dragging their knuckles?"

scubacuda writes "Arnold Kling, in his article, Content is Crap, writes, 'While there are many Net-heads who share Dan Gillmor's [and Larry Lessig's] enthusiasm for Creative Commons, I do not. It has little or no significance, because it is based on a strikingly naive 60's-retro ideological view of how content intermediaries function.' He compares artists' works to, well, raw sewage that publishers filter into something that can be later consumed by the public. 'What Creative Commons lets you do as an author is label your stuff before you flush it down the toilet.' Kling points to Bayesian Intermediaries (filters based on flexible keyword weights and 'trained' by user preferences) and weblogs as good ways to filter out the drivel that many content creators produce. (Dan Gilmore and Siva Vaidhayanatha respond, to which Kling responds in his blog."

JakeBullet writes: "Project: Take a standard foosball table and make it a little bit smarter. 1. The table should be aware of who's playing, the score and the status of the game. 2. Take the data from the game and use it to create a stats engine and player ranking system. 3. Project all relevant information about gameplay onto a flat screen. 4. Spend under $50.

kongstad writes "In an issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Siva Vaidhyanathan has some interesting things to say about the concept of Copyright: 'Back in the 20th century, if someone had accused you of copyright infringement, you enjoyed that quaint and now seemingly archaic guarantee of due process. Today, due process is a lot harder to pursue, and the burden of proof increasingly is on those accused of copyright infringement.'" A very good academic look at the recent expansions of copyright law.

david_christie writes "Dan Gillmor has a piece on the economist Yochai Benkler's paper "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm" which examines open source projects asan example of an emerging general model of economic behavior that is neither market nor company based. A previous version of the paper was noted in slashdot back in October, but it's been revised for upcoming publication in the Yale Law Review and is well worth a second look. Benkler attempts to explain why open source projects succeed, without falling back on theories about the special nature of software projects or hacker culture. He suggests that more general economic principles are at work, which are displacing the traditional motivations (market prices and employee relationships) that economists use to quantify individual behavior. If he's right the open source model could spread to other forms of creative work where the output is information or culture (music production comes to mind). The author thinks deeply about the information flows characterizing collaborative projects like free software development ("commons-based peer production"). That distinguishes this paper from the usual economist mumbo-jumbo about price points and such. Like Larry Lessig on the legal side of things, this is a guy who gets it and has thought deeply about how his field relates to it."

Your intrepid reporter took a jaunt down to the H2K2 conference this past weekend, held in the lovely Hotel Pennsylvania. The conference had much more floor space than they had two years ago, and it seemed like more attendance as well. Wireless networks were available, though overcrowded, and if you didn't encrypt your communications, well, you've probably already paid the price. My notes on the conference and the sessions I attended are below, followed by a couple of reader submissions.

The conference took up the 18th floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania[1], with the second floor being devoted to network operations/music/gawking at the old computers. Unlike the last conference, both major session tracks were on the same floor, preventing the logjams that occurred in 2000 when hundreds of people decided to use the elevators every hour between sessions. Lesson learned for future conference organizers: don't split your major crowd-drawing events between floors if you can possibly help it.

Siva Vaidhyanathan was the first keynote speaker. He described the internet as a cynical technology -- a technology which promotes seeing things as they are, not veiled by smokescreen or corporate PR -- and noted the attacks on cynical technologies since Sept. 11, tying that in to the copyright wars with Valenti, the DMCA, WIPO, and so on. It was good, well-reasoned speech, but honestly, Slashdot readers have heard it before so I'm not going to spend much time on it.

Andy Mueller-Maguhn (probably best known to U.S. readers as the European At-Large ICANN representative) and Paul Garrin of Name.space gave a talk about ICANN and the DNS. Mueller-Maguhn described the attendance at ICANN's Montevideo meeting: about 450 people overall, of which 320 were representatives of the Intellectual Property community (RIAA, MPAA, many others), 100 or so from the world's various governments, and even a few technical people. He drove home the fact that the IP people have the funds and personnel to participate in these meetings, and that few other organizations do. Mueller-Maguhn was critical of the recent decisions by various U.S. civil liberties groups to stop trying to affect ICANN (nothing they've done has had any effect) and to start working on the U.S. Commerce department to cause change in the DNS -- Mueller-Maguhn prefers to work within the system, even when his efforts bear no fruit. Garrin talked briefly about Name.space's efforts to provide a free-speech alternative to the current DNS system.

Goldstein and Macki of 2600, and Robin Gross of the EFF, discussed the DeCSS case. Again, this a topic thoroughly covered on Slashdot, so I see no need to recap the talk. They noted that Jon Johansen is still facing charges in Norway, and that the EFF is still interesting in overturning various provisions of the DMCA, so if you have a situation that might represent a good test case, please contact them.

The next day, Eric Grimm and Robin Gross did a presentation on the DMCA, almost a continuation of the DeCSS presentation. Notice and takedown, ReplayTV, the Eldred and Golan lawsuits against the most recent copyright extensions; Slashdot covers these pretty well.

This was followed by journalist Declan McCullagh and cryptographer Matt Blaze, with a talk titled "Educating Lawmakers: is it possible?". McCullagh told his favorite anecdotes about Congressional stupidity, while Blaze described his interactions with the NSA during the dark days of crypto prohibition. Blaze described his work on the Clipper chip, which may be before the time of some Slashdot readers: in a nutshell, the U.S. government decided that they would promote a cryptographic solution which had a Federal backdoor, allowing users to secure their secrets against anyone but the government. Blaze expressed interest in it, and was invited to visit Ft. Meade, where he was given a sample Clipper chip by NSA techies -- except they weren't sure if he would allowed to take it out of the facility. The techies gave him a brown paper bag to carry out the sample -- a burn bag for *classified* materials. Which he successfully carried out, with Clipper chip inside. Blaze discovered major flaws in Clipper's backdoor, which would have allowed anyone to gain access through it, and which eventually helped torpedo the Clipper plan. (Of course, Microsoft's Palladium plan will accomplish much the same purpose: just as the Federal government had final control over the design of Clipper, Microsoft will have final control of your PC, making government wiretapping trivial, so saying "key escrow is dead" is not even close to true.) Blaze concluded by describing his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee: he noted that when he consulted with other witnesses after the testimony, each of them had independently decided to liberate one of the stationery notepads provided in the hearing chamber for a souvenir, and "one of us got the gavel".

Aaron McGruder gave a very interesting speech. I had barely heard of him before (not a Boondocks reader, sorry), so I wasn't sure what to expect. McGruder covered his experiences getting into cartooning, and described getting his thoughts into a few hundred newspapers daily as a "hack," which I suppose it is. His speech was mostly about his cartooning and recent politics -- suffice it to say that he isn't a fan of Bush and the current corporate government.

Philip Kaplan, best known for fuckedcompany.com, talked about the secrets of making money on the net. His secret is basically: when you scratch an itch for yourself, scratch it for others as well, since probably thousands of people worldwide have the same itch you do. He also described some of the trials and tribulations of running his dot-com deadpool site, the inevitable legal hassles, etc.

Jello Biafra wasn't originally scheduled to speak, but happened to be in town. His address last time with the refrain of "Become the media" brought the house down, and he gave a late-night wide-ranging ramble working from handwritten notes which again proved to be quite popular. The talk centered mainly on music, with a secondary helping of politics, touching on his legal troubles with the rest of his former band, current developments in digital music, and ad-busting counter-culture efforts (he was following Mark Hosler of Negativland). Biafra came prepared with some old vinyl albums of corporate morale-boosting and sales songs -- imagine songs composed at corporate retreats and sung by miscellaneous employees, extolling the joys of using company X's products, or a song about the joys of being a Ford employee's wife who (of course) stays home to cook him dinner and bring his slippers when he comes home after a hard day at work. Hilarious stuff.

On Sunday, Maximilian Dornseif gave a talk about digital demonstrations. Obstructive demonstrations and sit-ins are more popular in Europe than in the U.S., and they are branching out into digital versions, electronic sit-ins that attempt to slow down or DDOS targeted websites for political ends. Dornseif described several previous attempts: programs distributed to automatically reload a targeted website, for instance. Some of them were quite sophisticated, including one with smart date-checking to make sure it was used only during the designated protest time. Dornseif described his ideals for an electronic protest, to make it as similar as possible to a real-world one: persons involved should be identifiable, outside observers should be able to know the goal of the protest, etc. Overall, an electronic protest should have strong parallels to physical protests, so that if the judicial system examines the legality of what you are doing, the judge is tempted to find it a legitimate protest rather than an illegitimate attack by cyber-criminals. Dornseif suggested making "slow" connections to HTTP servers ("G" sleep 10 "E" sleep 10 "T" sleep 10 ...), as well as "accept flooding" -- completing the TCP handshake, but not actually making any HTTP request -- these are "slow" versions of regular connections, which make effective DOS's, but also mimic regular users and might find acceptance in the courts as part of a planned protest.

Finally we come to some of the most interesting presentations. The lockpicking presentation, by Barry "The Key" Wels and Mike Glasser, was given to an utterly packed room. Wels and Glasser described many common and uncommon types of locks, and proceeded to pick them with great success. Those combination Master locks that are so popular on high school lockers? Takes one second to open any of those with the proper tool, a bent piece of metal that allows the shackle to simply pop out. You might want to invest in better protection for your varsity jacket. Thought your bicycle U-bolt lock was too strong to cut? It only takes ten seconds to pick it with the right tool, a circular pick that mimics any key. This might help explain the two bicycles I've had stolen in New York City. Normal house deadbolts? Maybe 30 seconds. They covered an assortment of high-security locks, such as ones with side dimple keys instead of teeth, 3 or 4-edged keys, disk keys, locks with magnetic pins, and so on. It was a remarkable presentation, and Mr. Wels especially represents a true hacker in every good sense of the word. He suggested starting at locktools.nl or security.nl or lockpicking.org if you'd like to try your hand.

Douglas Rushkoff was next with a wide-ranging speech about the true role of hackers in modern society. I probably can't do justice to his argument - read through his website, which has a lot of various essays and articles, if you want to get a sense of it -- but essentially he made a very Matrix-like argument about hackers, storytellers, the media, and empowerment. Starting from a premise that stories control reality (as an example he used the Ewoks in Star Wars, who were convinced to die for the Rebellion by the stories told to them by C3PO), he said that recently we have been empowered to alter and participate in our own stories (empowerment through devices such as the joystick, remote control and computer keyboard, each of which allows us to control our experiences), but this time is now ending. We are currently in a Golden Age of interactivity, where most of the attackers that attempted to control computing and the internet in round 1 have been beat down (the dot-com bust), but they're coming back, and hackers are the only ones who have the ability to see through the veils (computer GUIs and the like) that blind us to true reality. Very fun to listen to, and way too full of information to summarize effectively. I'll leave you with one memorable analogy -- Rushkoff said business and government were like bacteria and fungus, they have to stay in balance and if you suppress one of them the other one grows out of control. Not a bad analogy at all considering the times we live in.

Eric Blossom gave another fascinating presentation about GNU radio, whose goal is to develop a Free software-defined radio system that runs on commodity hardware. Software-defined radios are a tremendous concept which are going to cause revolution when they are deployed. Think about a PC or other electronic device that has complete access to every bit of information in every radio-frequency wave passing through it, in constant wireless communications with any nearby similar device. Maybe if the devices are close, they adopt a high-frequency unlicensed band to communicate, if they're farther apart they pick a lower frequency ... Slashdot gets a lot of Ask Slashdot questions which say roughly "What open source software project should I work on?" or "I know I like computers, what should I do in college?" We delete most of them. Here is the answer for everyone who asks those questions: software-defined radio. Trust me. It's going to be big. The GNU radio people are concentrating mainly on television applications right now, because the tuners and such are readily available, and they have a lot of pieces which each work but still have a lot of work to do to create a turnkey system.

Ryan Lackey and Avi Freedman talked about the past, present and future of Sealand. We've covered this pretty extensively on Slashdot. Havenco is doing acceptably well, with their only significant problem being that the major European ISPs keep going bankrupt. They hinted that they are planning to do more things to promote free speech in the very near future - they already run an anonymous remailer and host a copy of DeCSS. An offhand comment by Freedman gave me a very good idea of what they're planning, but I'm not going to spoil their surprise by mentioning it here.

And finally, the time-honored Social Engineering panel. Again, the largest conference room available was packed with attendees. After a few funny stories about legendary hacks, Goldstein read the AT&T memo and noted, "If that's not an invitation I don't know what is." Coincidentally or not, the two lines which Verizon had installed in the conference room were mysteriously unable to dial long distance numbers or AT&T, though they had been able to yesterday. (Um, the phone companies are slow but they're not stupid - when a conference of phone hackers wants phone lines installed, it has to set off a few alarm bells somewhere.) When Goldstein eventually got an AT&T operator, she was suspicious and refused to assist him - obviously she had read the memo. :) Goldstein decided to hit easier targets, and starting paging through the phone book, eventually settling on a Starbucks outlet. He was able to get a Starbucks employee to provide him with customers' credit card information, without much difficulty. If you used an American Express card to make a $3.57 purchase at a Manhattan Starbucks on Sunday morning, you might want to check your next statement (although the A/V crew kept the card number from being heard by the crowd). Next up was the Russian Tea Room, a high-class restaurant in Manhattan, where Goldstein had no difficulty in changing some poor woman's reservations and getting her phone number, then calling her and notifying her of the changed reservations, due to a "health inspection". He said he'd call and change them back to the original time, showing the hacker's spirit: inquisitiveness without destructiveness.

Overall, I had a great time at the conference, and so did a couple of non-computer geeks that I dragged along with me. I'm looking forward to H2K4 already.

[1] That's the third time I've linked to that Dave Barry piece, and it's still funny.

Reader lokii202 takes a look at the Social Engineering presentation: lokii202 writes "I attended the Social Engineering panel discussion today at the H.O.P.E. conference, and thought it might be nice to follow up on the previous article about AT&T's Hacker Warning memo. The AT&T security number was tried and the attempt failed, although one of the members of the large crowd in attendence offered up an AT&T HRID number. The operator got suspicious and shut us down.

However, no fair 'cause they were ready for it. Starbucks, to our enjoyment, had no such warning memo circulating, and here are the results...

Our panelist made a call over a standard phone line to a Starbuck's store using a calling card. Asked the underling if they were having network problems. Underling, following the standard underling procedure, got the Assistant Manager. AM told us that yes, they were having problems with the credit card system. Oops. Within about 5 minutes he was reading off transaction times, dates, and more chillingly an American Express card number and expiration date. Our panelist stopped the guy before he exposed the whole number (the phone was hooked into a P.A. system for the conference and the experiment). The point was made very clearly.

Next, our guy called up the Russian Tea Room, which is a pretty classy joint in NYC, and posed as the flustered husband who needed to change dinner reservations for this evening. He had no names, no prior knowledge, etc. He managed to get some poor guys' reservations changed to 9pm and also got the guy's cell number. Next, he called the guy and posed as a Russian Tea Room host and apologized that his reservations were changed to 9pm, due to a health department inspection.

That was kinda funny.

High tech gizmos and uber-gear might get one pretty far, but when you come down to it security starts with the user. This demonstration, and others like it at H2K2, made it embarassingly apparent that to obtain sensitive data one only needs a little ingenuity and some acting skills."

Reader weave takes a look at the whole conference (this may seem repetitive, but it's good to look at things through others' eyes...) He writes "H2K2 (or HOPE 2002 or Hackers On Planet Earth 2002) was held this past weekend in New York City at the Hotel Pennsylvania. I've been to previous HOPE conferences and this one was much better than ones in the past, but it still had a few problems.

Aaron McGruder, the creator of Boondocks comic strip was keynote. Jello Biafra makes a repeat appearance as well as some other past favorites, such as the "former spy" Robert Steele, as well as some surprise guests such as former Taliban fighter, Aukai Collins.

This is my personal review of h2k2. There were so many things happening at once that one person can't obviously see it all. This is based on what I saw, experienced, felt, and my personal opinions.

Keynote Speaker: Aaron MgGruder, author of Boondocks, spoke on Saturday. This was my favorite speaker and worth the price of admission. He was invited because he did a short sequence of strips covering the DeCSS subject and, as Emmanuel Goldstein said, "the only person in popular media to get it right." Aaron was very articulate, intelligent, and of course, opinionated. What I liked most about him was his admitting that he does not know it all. He made fun of political experts who sit around and debate political topics based on what they are spoon fed by popular media. He says there is not much difference between us and people who live in censored countries except they KNOW they aren't getting the full story. We all think we are smart and know it all. His advice to people who love to rant about political topics, "Shut the hell up, you don't know anything."

McGruder thinks our society is falling apart and the only thing that can fix it is revolution. He has hope, but not much. He spoke about Bush's line that countries that hurt American are going to have to pay, which means we kill a bunch of their innocent civilians so they get to claim that we will then have to pay, where they kill a bunch of us. McGruder's solution is that people should just go kill the leaders of these nations. He then back-pedaled (remembering the place was probably full of feds) and disclaimed that he wasn't advocating that anyone go out and shoot Bush (who he has no love for). He reminded us that if Bush was killed, we'd be left with Cheney, who is far far worse in his opinion. "If Cheney was President, Afghanistan and Iraq would be glass, and we may give the neighboring countries 30 minutes of warning to get away from the borders."

Jello Biafra: Jello was keynote at H2K in 2000 and returned this year to speak late Saturday night. He was well loved by most people there, based on the reactions I saw that night. I didn't like him. He reminded me of Rush Limbaugh except on the left side. Loads of rhetoric, wild claims, and positioning himself as an expert. He was supposed to speak for one hour, and then the film "Freedom Downtime" was to be shown. He rambled on for two and a half hours, then took his shoe off and asked for donations for his legal defense fund involving his former record label. People flocked up and stuffed it full of money as he started to spin records. At this point it was 12:30am and I gave up and went to my room and and got some sleep.

Robert Steele : Former spy, and backer of a concept called "Open Source Intelligence" where countries share intelligence information freely with each other and their citizens. His speech on Hacking National Intelligence was, to me, frightening. He claims that 9/11 involved a serious failure of our intelligence network and Washington is trying to whitewash it all. He also claims that he has no doubt at all that New York City will be the target of another terrorist attack soon. "When foreigners think of the U.S. they think of New York City. It is the center of capitalism." He is an excellent speaker. I hope he returns next time.

During his talk, he introduced Aukai Collins who told us of his experiences fighting for bin Laden (during the 90s when we were paying bin Laden's salary and he allegedly was a good guy). When the embassy bombings started to occur, he went to the CIA and offered himself as an intelligence source. He worked for them and the FBI a few years and during that time was invited by bin Laden's runners to come work closely with him. When he bought this opportunity to get close to bin Laden to his superiors, they told him not to go. He feels we lost probably our only opportunity to get one of our guys close to bin Laden. He has written a book on this called My Jihad.

If this so far sounds like h2k2 was more politics than tech, I got the same impression. I skipped out on most of the DMCA updates and other legal updates. They were hosted by members of EFF and their lawyers. The small bits I saw sounded very informative and I applaud their works in these areas. Since I've kept up on all the news on these cases, I decided to skip these forums.

The best of the tech presentations was Fun with 802.11b hosted by Dragorn, Porkchop, and StAtic FuSIOn. (I sometimes hate silly handles). During the days before h2k2, they mapped out over 400 open wireless networks accessible from within three blocks of the hotel in midtown Manhattan. They demonstrated passive snoopers like kismet and showed us different directional high-gain antennas. Their recommendation for a good PCMCIA 802.11b card was Cisco's 352, which I of course didn't have. I ran out and bought an SMC card for my company laptop before the conference and had a tech load Linux on my laptop. I told him he could pick the distro of his choice, but unfortunately he picked the one I'm least familiar with, Slackware. I could not get the damn card working for the life of me. I wanted to scream.

A big disappointment was the Cult of the Dead Cow Extravaganza . It was to be held down on the lower level in the network room and broadcast up to the conference rooms on the 18th floor. Well, it didn't work. I was upstairs and they mucked with the equipment for an hour trying to get a a/v feed going. After all this time of wondering whether we should fight our way downstairs to watch it in person, we got an announcement. "Sorry, but we can't get it to work. Oh, by the way, they have already started downstairs."

Urge to kill. My friend and I wondered how they screwed this one up and traced the wires to a display table and behind a closed stairwell door. We looked at each other and said "Nooo". We popped into a neighboring stairwell as everyone fought for the elevators. We went down one floor then popped over to the stairwell that we saw the wires going down. Sure enough, they had run the wires down the open portion of the stairs so they were hanging by their own weight for a distance of about 22 floors (the hotel has 18 number floors, about 4 lettered floors like A, B, C, D, a mezzanine floor, and lobby floor). I'm not sure what the stress would be introduced by a cable hanging by its own weight for that kind of distance, but I bet the center copper core couldn't bear it and broke inside.

So we run downstairs and saw some talented but unwanted female singing about how great the CDC was. Then someone else got up and swung a black briefcase looking device around. Had no idea what it was because we couldn't understand squat in the back. Basically we said to hell with them all, and left.

So while the presentations were hit and miss, the overall best part of the conference were the attendees. Freaks, geeks, and misfits everywhere, all being good to each other, curious, intelligent, and sometimes a bit too paranoid. Of course it was mostly guys, but there were women as well as one person who had a male voice but noticeable breasts and a feminine face and shape. Many other guys dressed up a bit too flamboyant for my tastes as well. My point being, everyone was accepted for who they are and all got along great together. I didn't meet a single person who I talked to who was rude, or unwilling to strike up a conversation. The network room had wired and wireless internet access and was open 24 hours a day and the source for some of the most fun at the conference. But by all means, the best part of h2k2 was the attendees and they are the reason why I will want to go again in the future."

Jason Haas (haaz) sent us the transcript below of an in-depth interview he conducted with copyright critic and author Siva Vaidhyanathan. It's worth your time to read -- Vaidhyanathan makes some interesting arguments, concentrating on online consequences of current copyright laws (and bills), but with some interesting digressions. He isn't shy about the effects of laws like the CBDTPA.

Jason Haas writes: "While bad copyright laws such as the DMCA are having strong negative consequences, an even worse bill, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), is now before Congress. The CBDTPA would have radical effects upon many of the devices that we take for granted -- including the computer you are now reading this on. Bad copyright law is among the many things that we talked about. Siva Vaidhyanathan has a thing or two to say about this. An avid defender of peer-to-peer, Siva recently debated one of the MPAA's top lawyers on copyright law. A recorded version of this will be available on the web in late May.

Furthermore, he has written Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, the first fully fleshed history of American copyright law ever to be put in book form. The cool thing about this book is that although it's about copyright law, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand it. Copyrights and Copywrongs covers American copyright law's origins in seventeenth century English law, tracks Mark Twain's efforts to extend copyright in the nineteenth century, and ends at the dawn of the twenty-first century with the rise of Napster and the DMCA."

Jason Haas: How are you?

Siva Vaidhyanathan : Stressed. I'm trying to finish my second book, which will likely be called "The Anarchist in the Library." Basic Books will publish it next year.

JH: That sounds like it may be of interest to Slashdotters.

SV: Probably. I lifted many of the insights from Slashdot posts. The book will be an examination of the battles between efforts to centralize information and efforts to decentralize information. It starts with peer to peer, and moves on to battles over encryption, the commercialization and regulation of science, the regulation of algorithms, and the efforts to fight terrorism using information policy. One of the most interesting stories I'm following is the role that encryption plays on both sides of these battles. Some efforts to centralize and control information rely on encryption. For example, DVDs, and some efforts to distribute and liberate information (Freenet) depend on encryption.

JH: Your book, Copyrights and Copywrongs, covers the evolution of copyright law from its origins to the late twentieth century. Where did you get the idea for this?

SV: From rap music. I grew up with rap music. But in the early 1990s I noticed the music was changing. Everyone else was paying attention to the lyrics -- the sexism and the violence and the anger. I was observing how the underlying body of samples were getting thinner, more predictable, more obvious, less playful. I had heard that there had been some copyright conflicts in 1990 and 1991. So I suspected that lawsuits had chilled playful and transgressive sampling. I was right. The courts had stolen the soul. And rap music is poorer for it. We used to get fresh, exciting, walls of sound that were a language unto themselves. By the mid-1990s, all we got were jeep beats and heavy bass.

JH: Are you dissing Ice Cube?

SV: [laughs] No! He's an O.G.! He and other artists are handcuffed by the law. From my research on rap, I got curious about the evolution of American copyright law and how it altered and got altered by the rise of different media technologies and forms of expression. So I traced the changes from the 19th century publishing industries through the rise of film and television, through blues, jazz, rock, and rap, and finally to the digital moment.

JH: The book ends just after the DMCA has gone into effect and Napster has begun its rise. What's happened since then?

SV: I knew that Napster would radically change the ways we interact with the copyright system. And I knew the DMCA would radically undermined the democratic safeguards that were built into our copyright system. But I knew that there was much more to this story. So I wrote an article for The Nation which defended Napster and peer-to-peer. I used this as the starting point for what would become the second book.

JH: In your first book, you refer to the DMCA as an example of what you call a "thick" copyright law. Can you explain the difference between "thick" copyright law and a "thin" law?

SV: I think the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is misnamed. I don't consider it a copyright act. I consider it an anti-copyright act. Copyright is a fluid, open, democratic set of protocols. Conflicts are anticipated by Congress and mediated by courts. The DMCA wipes out the sense of balance, anticipation, and mediation, and installs a technocratic regime. In other words, code tells you whether you can use a piece of material. Under copyright, you could use a piece of material and face the consequences. The DMCA replaces the copyright system with cold, hard technology.

It takes human judgment out of the system and drains the fluidity out of what was a humanely designed and evolved system.

But getting back to thick and thin copyright.

One way to measure the thickness of a copyright law is to look at the duration of protection. If works enter the public domain before an author's life expectancy expires, then it's a thin and democratic system. If the duration of copyright protection is absurdly long and potentially indefinite, then it's way too thick.

JH: Senator Fritz Hollings' has introduced a new copyright bill to Congress, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. What what would it do? Is it another "thick" law?

SV: Yeah, it would be as thick as the Berlin Wall. But again, it's the extension of a technocratic control regime and a further abandonment of real copyright. All the attention this bill has received has generated an impressive movement for users' rights. People are finally waking up to the fact that their rights to make private, non-commercial use of material they buy is in danger. I think we should all thank Senator Hollings and the MPAA for sparking a revolt against copyright tyranny.

The title of the bill implies that by giving movie companies what they want, they will give us this wonderful library of streamed films, and we will finally have a reason to sign up for and pay for broadband. Paradoxically, nothing sells broadband like peer-to-peer, which is exactly what it would try to stop.

JH: CBDTPA would make a new computer ship with copy protection. What would it do to things like the iPod?

SV: The iPod would be hard to justify under the new law. But the real issue is the personal computer. The computer does three basic things: it does math, it stores data, and it copies data. A computer can't operate without those three basic functions. The law would limit these three basic functions, thereby cutting the Achilles heel of the PC. It would be just another appliance.

JH: It's that bad?

SV: Yes. If the law passes, I could send you a file that I made, but the machine would prevent you from making copies of just about anything else, including sound from web sites, video from web sites, etc. The law works completely for the benefit of big media companies that can afford to conform to the licensed encryption standards of the industry. Only the big boys could benefit from this law.

The law would only affect new stuff, so it'd be your next DVD players, your next TiVo, your next PC. The stuff you have now is going to do more and work better than any hardware that anyone could roll out after the law passes. But there's another, bigger issue. According to an early version, the bill covers not just hardware but software. Under it, you can't distribute a software package that has copy features. Furthermore, how in the world can anything released under the GPL have closed copy-protection standards embedded in it? It can't. It would make the GPL illegal, and future versions of Linux illegal. Even if Congress focused on hardware and excluded software, we all know that distinction is a matter of modular convenience and industry practice rather than a natural distinction. But nobody ever accused the U.S. Senate of understanding technology or thinking through long-term effects of tech policy.

JH: What can people do to stop this bill from passing?

SV: The first thing people should do is check out and support such organizations as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, digitalconsumer.org, and publicknowledge.org. The latter two are fairly new. And they are a sign that people are getting angry and active about these issues. I am particularly excited about publicknowledge.org, a public interest advocacy group that is coordinating and publicizing the concerns of a wide array of concerned citizens and groups.

But just as importantly, discuss this measure with your local librarians. Librarians are very active in opposing it. In 1998, very few groups actively opposed the DMCA, but librarians were at the front lines of its opposition. And once again, librarians are our best friends in this battle. And of course, the simple answer is, write members of the Senate Judiciary Community. [The American Library Association is a national organization of librarians that is active in defending freedom of information and access. The Senate Judiciary Committee can be found over here.]

If public anger doesn't stop this bill now, then we know that the corrupting power of the entertainment industries is at crisis level. The changes in copyright have not been great for our culture and our democracy. But I am optimistic that this new level of awareness and activism will make a difference.

Jason Haas retired from the computer industry in April 2001, and now juggles being a student, fatherhood, and progressive political activism.

This past year, Siva Vaidhyanathan has been an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, but is moving to New York University in the fall. The web page for his book, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, is at NYU Press.

Jason Haas (haaz) sent us the transcript below of an in-depth interview he conducted with copyright critic and author Siva Vaidhyanathan. It's worth your time to read -- Vaidhyanathan makes some interesting arguments, concentrating on online consequences of current copyright laws (and bills), but with some interesting digressions. He isn't shy about the effects of laws like the CBDTPA.

Jason Haas writes: "While bad copyright laws such as the DMCA are having strong negative consequences, an even worse bill, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), is now before Congress. The CBDTPA would have radical effects upon many of the devices that we take for granted -- including the computer you are now reading this on. Bad copyright law is among the many things that we talked about. Siva Vaidhyanathan has a thing or two to say about this. An avid defender of peer-to-peer, Siva recently debated one of the MPAA's top lawyers on copyright law. A recorded version of this will be available on the web in late May.

Furthermore, he has written Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, the first fully fleshed history of American copyright law ever to be put in book form. The cool thing about this book is that although it's about copyright law, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand it. Copyrights and Copywrongs covers American copyright law's origins in seventeenth century English law, tracks Mark Twain's efforts to extend copyright in the nineteenth century, and ends at the dawn of the twenty-first century with the rise of Napster and the DMCA."

Jason Haas: How are you?

Siva Vaidhyanathan : Stressed. I'm trying to finish my second book, which will likely be called "The Anarchist in the Library." Basic Books will publish it next year.

JH: That sounds like it may be of interest to Slashdotters.

SV: Probably. I lifted many of the insights from Slashdot posts. The book will be an examination of the battles between efforts to centralize information and efforts to decentralize information. It starts with peer to peer, and moves on to battles over encryption, the commercialization and regulation of science, the regulation of algorithms, and the efforts to fight terrorism using information policy. One of the most interesting stories I'm following is the role that encryption plays on both sides of these battles. Some efforts to centralize and control information rely on encryption. For example, DVDs, and some efforts to distribute and liberate information (Freenet) depend on encryption.

JH: Your book, Copyrights and Copywrongs, covers the evolution of copyright law from its origins to the late twentieth century. Where did you get the idea for this?

SV: From rap music. I grew up with rap music. But in the early 1990s I noticed the music was changing. Everyone else was paying attention to the lyrics -- the sexism and the violence and the anger. I was observing how the underlying body of samples were getting thinner, more predictable, more obvious, less playful. I had heard that there had been some copyright conflicts in 1990 and 1991. So I suspected that lawsuits had chilled playful and transgressive sampling. I was right. The courts had stolen the soul. And rap music is poorer for it. We used to get fresh, exciting, walls of sound that were a language unto themselves. By the mid-1990s, all we got were jeep beats and heavy bass.

JH: Are you dissing Ice Cube?

SV: [laughs] No! He's an O.G.! He and other artists are handcuffed by the law. From my research on rap, I got curious about the evolution of American copyright law and how it altered and got altered by the rise of different media technologies and forms of expression. So I traced the changes from the 19th century publishing industries through the rise of film and television, through blues, jazz, rock, and rap, and finally to the digital moment.

JH: The book ends just after the DMCA has gone into effect and Napster has begun its rise. What's happened since then?

SV: I knew that Napster would radically change the ways we interact with the copyright system. And I knew the DMCA would radically undermined the democratic safeguards that were built into our copyright system. But I knew that there was much more to this story. So I wrote an article for The Nation which defended Napster and peer-to-peer. I used this as the starting point for what would become the second book.

JH: In your first book, you refer to the DMCA as an example of what you call a "thick" copyright law. Can you explain the difference between "thick" copyright law and a "thin" law?

SV: I think the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is misnamed. I don't consider it a copyright act. I consider it an anti-copyright act. Copyright is a fluid, open, democratic set of protocols. Conflicts are anticipated by Congress and mediated by courts. The DMCA wipes out the sense of balance, anticipation, and mediation, and installs a technocratic regime. In other words, code tells you whether you can use a piece of material. Under copyright, you could use a piece of material and face the consequences. The DMCA replaces the copyright system with cold, hard technology.

It takes human judgment out of the system and drains the fluidity out of what was a humanely designed and evolved system.

But getting back to thick and thin copyright.

One way to measure the thickness of a copyright law is to look at the duration of protection. If works enter the public domain before an author's life expectancy expires, then it's a thin and democratic system. If the duration of copyright protection is absurdly long and potentially indefinite, then it's way too thick.

JH: Senator Fritz Hollings' has introduced a new copyright bill to Congress, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. What what would it do? Is it another "thick" law?

SV: Yeah, it would be as thick as the Berlin Wall. But again, it's the extension of a technocratic control regime and a further abandonment of real copyright. All the attention this bill has received has generated an impressive movement for users' rights. People are finally waking up to the fact that their rights to make private, non-commercial use of material they buy is in danger. I think we should all thank Senator Hollings and the MPAA for sparking a revolt against copyright tyranny.

The title of the bill implies that by giving movie companies what they want, they will give us this wonderful library of streamed films, and we will finally have a reason to sign up for and pay for broadband. Paradoxically, nothing sells broadband like peer-to-peer, which is exactly what it would try to stop.

JH: CBDTPA would make a new computer ship with copy protection. What would it do to things like the iPod?

SV: The iPod would be hard to justify under the new law. But the real issue is the personal computer. The computer does three basic things: it does math, it stores data, and it copies data. A computer can't operate without those three basic functions. The law would limit these three basic functions, thereby cutting the Achilles heel of the PC. It would be just another appliance.

JH: It's that bad?

SV: Yes. If the law passes, I could send you a file that I made, but the machine would prevent you from making copies of just about anything else, including sound from web sites, video from web sites, etc. The law works completely for the benefit of big media companies that can afford to conform to the licensed encryption standards of the industry. Only the big boys could benefit from this law.

The law would only affect new stuff, so it'd be your next DVD players, your next TiVo, your next PC. The stuff you have now is going to do more and work better than any hardware that anyone could roll out after the law passes. But there's another, bigger issue. According to an early version, the bill covers not just hardware but software. Under it, you can't distribute a software package that has copy features. Furthermore, how in the world can anything released under the GPL have closed copy-protection standards embedded in it? It can't. It would make the GPL illegal, and future versions of Linux illegal. Even if Congress focused on hardware and excluded software, we all know that distinction is a matter of modular convenience and industry practice rather than a natural distinction. But nobody ever accused the U.S. Senate of understanding technology or thinking through long-term effects of tech policy.

JH: What can people do to stop this bill from passing?

SV: The first thing people should do is check out and support such organizations as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, digitalconsumer.org, and publicknowledge.org. The latter two are fairly new. And they are a sign that people are getting angry and active about these issues. I am particularly excited about publicknowledge.org, a public interest advocacy group that is coordinating and publicizing the concerns of a wide array of concerned citizens and groups.

But just as importantly, discuss this measure with your local librarians. Librarians are very active in opposing it. In 1998, very few groups actively opposed the DMCA, but librarians were at the front lines of its opposition. And once again, librarians are our best friends in this battle. And of course, the simple answer is, write members of the Senate Judiciary Community. [The American Library Association is a national organization of librarians that is active in defending freedom of information and access. The Senate Judiciary Committee can be found over here.]

If public anger doesn't stop this bill now, then we know that the corrupting power of the entertainment industries is at crisis level. The changes in copyright have not been great for our culture and our democracy. But I am optimistic that this new level of awareness and activism will make a difference.

Jason Haas retired from the computer industry in April 2001, and now juggles being a student, fatherhood, and progressive political activism.

This past year, Siva Vaidhyanathan has been an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, but is moving to New York University in the fall. The web page for his book, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, is at NYU Press.

akb writes: "Most of the RF spectrum in use is licensed for exclusive use. What do we get? Inefficient use through spectrum hoarding, political finagling to abuse the regulatory system to gain competitive advantage and access to the airwaves for only a few players. A good article over at CNET picks up on the example of 802.11b in using spread spectrum technology and unlicensed bands and proposes that model be applied to the rest of the spectrum. For the hardcore check out NYU law professor Yochai Benkler's writings, particularly this article (pdf) and Durga Satapathy's papers for the tech end of things."

Reader samjam sent in an interesting piece about his dream handheld PC, sort of a cross between a subnotebook and a wireless web pad, with the kitchen sink thrown in. Mmmmm, light-emitting polymers. I can't decide if this kind of thing is right around the corner or just a fantasy - after all, normal notebook computers sell, and at a nice high premium - and web pads are less than successful - why would anyone spend the money to develop a device like this? samjam writes: "My dream handheld is not available though some things come close. The technology is becoming available.

Though it may take a few months, here is what I would put together if I had the chance. Including Bluetooth, IButtons, solar panels and light emitting polymer screens...

For links to other linux handhelds, try linuxdevices.com.

My ideal handheld is the size of an A4 pad of paper, so I have to hold it on my left forearm with the fingers of my left hand curled over the end. A4 gives me plenty of screen space for watching real TV, reading real books, writing real emails, browsing real web pages and doing some real showing off.

The front cover is a solar panel, but I can't decide if the cells should be on the inside or the outside to help charge it while I use it or while I'm not using it. Hard one that.

The screen is not heavy-breakable LCD but LEP (brief technical primer, more on Google) or perhaps Xerox Electronic Paper seemingly available under the name Gyricon, pictures here and slight details here.

The choice of processor doesn't bother me much; I'd like to think there are many versions available of my handheld by many manufacturers (to drive the price down) and so many processors will be available but let's pretend the first release will run on a Transmeta just to keep excitement running high.

60 GB or so should be plenty of disk space, 2.5" IDE to keep weight down.

Input via stylus or sticky finger of course, with support for Graffiti, as used on the Palm and many others, also Quickwriting as featured on Slashdot as well as regular handwriting recognition (take your pick) and other pluggable input modules with popup keyboard for those times when you just can't manage to input a tilde (~) or backtick (`) properly.

Connectivity will be provided via a multitide of USB ports (where real keyboards can be plugged), Bluetooth (useless link) in action (good link), wireless ethernet as well as perhaps as many as 4 PCMCIA slots for things that change a lot like GPRS adaptors &c, or radio and TV tuner cards. Yeah! Why not add some Compact Flash while I'm at it? And boring 100 base T ethernet.

In fact I'm going to use the mobile phone card, along with my sound system to make the whole thing into a mobile phone for voice, not just data access. Talking of phones, the built in web cam can be used for video conferencing with (for example) Gnophone.

Better stick some firewire ports on there, too, for good measure, along with a few IRDA ports pointing in a few different directions for those more subversive inter-classroom networks as well as controlling my grannies telly to show off. And talking to my old non-bluetooth mobile which I can't afford to upgrade cos I spent it all on my handheld.

It will have integrated Ibutton support for security and authentification, maybe even built into the BIOS.

What more do I need? Oh yes, an Operating System. Pick your own.

I shall be running Linux with Ximian Gnome because it looks cool (and Bill Gates was nearly right, eye candy counts for a lot if only not to distract you by means of ugliness). I will be running redhat because I find up2date (or redhat channels of RedCarpet) invaluable effort-free way to remove those exploits, and I will finally get round to playing with Rebol.

The first thing I will need to develop is some network scavenging software to grab internet connectivity where it can for syncing imap folders and news, updating "offline web pages" [yikes! MS concept there]. Code to hi-jack available SMTP relays (*cough*). Does this smell a bit like Jini or something like it? I'll need to register my changing location for Gnophone so callers can find me. Perhaps the first thing for company visitors in the future will be to checkin their Ideal Handheld to the company network.

I will load all my favourite books into it as well as the entire classical Mormon works, copies of conference talks Doctrines of Salvation, Journal of Discourses etc, along with the Bible, Book of Mormon, and all of Project Gutenberg.

What will you do with yours? Have I missed any gizmos out? Or gadgets even?"

Duncan Lawie brings to the stage another dark-and-creepy sounding Science Fiction work: this time it's Bruce Sterling's latest, Zeitgeist, which may mark a departure for someone looking for "just another Bruce Sterling book." Hint: it's set in the past, not the future.

Zeitgeist author Bruce Sterling pages 304 publisher Bantam rating 8 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0553104934 summary Strange, possibly great, probably not SF; a remarkable new book from

"Bruce Sterling" and "seminal" never seem to be too far apart. His name is one of the great peaks of cyberpunk, not least as the editor of Mirrorshades, and he is renowned in the online world for his work in writing The Hacker Crackdown. Neither can Sterling be accused of standing still, having initiated the Viridian movement. An effect of this may yet be to repeat H.G.Wells, where his fiction becomes a servant of his increasing interest in adjusting the social fabric.

Sterling's latest novel, Zeitgeist, is set in a recognisable 1999 and filled with recognisable twentieth-century character types: the hobo, the drug smuggler, the secret agent, the enforcer. In fact, its twentieth-century characteristics are at the heart of this novel. Sterling has written a requiem for a dirty, rotten century; a description of a planet gorging on its own filth, stumbling from the bizarre, to crisis, to senselessness. It is a portrait of a world in turmoil told from the perspective of Leggy Starlitz, a latter-day man of a thousand faces.

Starlitz previously appeared as a rather opaque figure in the short stories such as 'The Littlest Jackal.' He slips through the edges of an increasingly regulated world, "rewriting his own narrative" to suit the circumstances. At the start of the book, he manages G-7, an all-girl marketing troupe. The satire of a band created solely to move merchandise -- and this is no synonym for records -- could easily be lost when the pop charts seem to be full of such arrangements, but Starlitz is there as part of a bet. This doesn't work terribly well as a plot driver, but Starlitz's involvement with a Turkish pop promoter who wants to control the group lights the touchpaper, and the appearance of Starlitz's family breaks open the storyline. Involvement with his daughter deepens Starlitz's character and pushes him into much greater connection with the ordinary world.

The book is a whirlwind tour through the dominant images of late twentieth-century society and a slingshot into the potential of the twenty-first. A central idea is that after Y2K everything must change -- the new century will have different characteristics and we must adapt to survive. Starlitz's own close identification with the twentieth century seems destined to hold him back, whilst he sees his daughter as a natural denizen of the next era. To an extent, this is a reflection of Sterling's own Viridian manifesto, contrasting the dark heart of the Atomic age with the new, clear era in front of us, which will be populated by people for whom 1999 will only ever be history. His message of hope is that we can transform ourselves, but his use of a literal interpretation results in a centrepiece for the book which sounds very much as if Sokal's application of pseudo-science is accepted as reality. This is as close as the book comes to science fiction -- it is more likely to find itself marked "magic realism," or possibly even "literature."

Though slow to start, Zeitgeist has a lot to offer -- locations from Cyprus to Hawaii and Istanbul to Colorado, a glancing blow from (at?) ECHELON, and discussions on the nature of pop and the malleability of reality. Setting the book in our own world and time gives it a curious edge for an SF reader reading an SF writer -- it is framed by events recognisable from news broadcasts but already part of history. The transformations in this book must be personal, or located at the edges of consensus reality, rather than a complete inversion of society. The message floats at or near the surface and the book concentrates significantly on its own style. It is sometimes overly clever but remains taut, interesting and, occasionally, amazing. As such, Zeitgeist catches the ghost of that remarkable century we have just escaped from.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Aaron Hertzmann writes: "My collaborators and I will present a paper called Image Analogies at SIGGRAPH 2001 this summer, where we describe a machine learning method for 'learning' image filters for example. For example, given a Van Gogh painting, the algorithm can process other images to look somewhat as if they were painted by Van Gogh."

"It can also 'texturize' images based on a sample textured image, e.g. to create landscape photos. It can do many other types of filters, as long as you give appropriate 'before' and 'after' examples to learn from." I especially like the idea of inferring a high-resolution image from a low-res one. The software is available for Windows and Unix, and "the source code is freely distributed for educational, research and non-profit purposes."

Aaron Hertzmann writes: "My collaborators and I will present a paper called Image Analogies at SIGGRAPH 2001 this summer, where we describe a machine learning method for 'learning' image filters for example. For example, given a Van Gogh painting, the algorithm can process other images to look somewhat as if they were painted by Van Gogh."

"It can also 'texturize' images based on a sample textured image, e.g. to create landscape photos. It can do many other types of filters, as long as you give appropriate 'before' and 'after' examples to learn from." I especially like the idea of inferring a high-resolution image from a low-res one. The software is available for Windows and Unix, and "the source code is freely distributed for educational, research and non-profit purposes."

Aaron Hertzmann writes: "My collaborators and I will present a paper called Image Analogies at SIGGRAPH 2001 this summer, where we describe a machine learning method for 'learning' image filters for example. For example, given a Van Gogh painting, the algorithm can process other images to look somewhat as if they were painted by Van Gogh."

"It can also 'texturize' images based on a sample textured image, e.g. to create landscape photos. It can do many other types of filters, as long as you give appropriate 'before' and 'after' examples to learn from." I especially like the idea of inferring a high-resolution image from a low-res one. The software is available for Windows and Unix, and "the source code is freely distributed for educational, research and non-profit purposes."

Aaron Hertzmann writes: "My collaborators and I will present a paper called Image Analogies at SIGGRAPH 2001 this summer, where we describe a machine learning method for 'learning' image filters for example. For example, given a Van Gogh painting, the algorithm can process other images to look somewhat as if they were painted by Van Gogh."

"It can also 'texturize' images based on a sample textured image, e.g. to create landscape photos. It can do many other types of filters, as long as you give appropriate 'before' and 'after' examples to learn from." I especially like the idea of inferring a high-resolution image from a low-res one. The software is available for Windows and Unix, and "the source code is freely distributed for educational, research and non-profit purposes."

Aaron Hertzmann writes: "My collaborators and I will present a paper called Image Analogies at SIGGRAPH 2001 this summer, where we describe a machine learning method for 'learning' image filters for example. For example, given a Van Gogh painting, the algorithm can process other images to look somewhat as if they were painted by Van Gogh."

"It can also 'texturize' images based on a sample textured image, e.g. to create landscape photos. It can do many other types of filters, as long as you give appropriate 'before' and 'after' examples to learn from." I especially like the idea of inferring a high-resolution image from a low-res one. The software is available for Windows and Unix, and "the source code is freely distributed for educational, research and non-profit purposes."

pjones writes: "This just in! Open Source is bad for companies and countries too. In a New York Times article (registration required), John Markoff reports that: "In a speech defending Microsoft's business model, to be given on Thursday at the Stern School of Business at New York University, Craig Mundie, a senior vice president at Microsoft and one of its software strategists, will argue that the company already follows the best attributes of the open-source model by sharing the original programmer's instructions, or source code, more widely than is generally realized." Singled out for particular rebuke and scorn are IBM and the famous GPL and its author Richard Stallman. Who will be there to cheer Craig on?" See also ESR's dispatch on same. (Read below for update with time and place.)

Update: 05/03 01:55 PM by T : cananian points to this announcement on time and place. The upshot: from noon to 1:30 p.m, in room 1-70 of NYU's Kaufman Management Center (KMEC), 44 West 4th Street.

pjones writes: "This just in! Open Source is bad for companies and countries too. In a New York Times article (registration required), John Markoff reports that: "In a speech defending Microsoft's business model, to be given on Thursday at the Stern School of Business at New York University, Craig Mundie, a senior vice president at Microsoft and one of its software strategists, will argue that the company already follows the best attributes of the open-source model by sharing the original programmer's instructions, or source code, more widely than is generally realized." Singled out for particular rebuke and scorn are IBM and the famous GPL and its author Richard Stallman. Who will be there to cheer Craig on?" See also ESR's dispatch on same. (Read below for update with time and place.)

Update: 05/03 01:55 PM by T : cananian points to this announcement on time and place. The upshot: from noon to 1:30 p.m, in room 1-70 of NYU's Kaufman Management Center (KMEC), 44 West 4th Street.

Robots have been around in concept for longer than the word itself has been used to describe them, and for most of this century they've had a fair hold on the public imagination as either Utopian saviors or inexorable villains. Reader mtDNA sent in the evaluation below of a book called Robo sapiens: Evolution of a new species which may be the basis for a more realistic and neutral understanding about Robots, especially well suited to non-experts in that field. (I also found the other books in the series excellent.)

Robo Sapiens author Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio pages 240 publisher MIT Press rating 8.5 reviewer mtDNA ISBN 0-262-13382-2 summary A coffee-table survey course in words and pictures on the state of robots at the turn of the century.

Robo sapiens is the latest offering in the "Material World" series produced by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, which includes Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1995) and Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects (1998). On the outside, Robo sapiens is an ordinary coffee table book. On the inside, however, is something different. Robo sapiens sets out to document the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence by talking to over fifty active researchers and photographing them with the tools of their trade. The book succeeds brilliantly. With sharp, beautifully reproduced photographs and engaging, well composed text, Robo sapiens provides an overview of robotics research that is simultaneously surreal, comically entertaining and dead serious.

The book is motivated by two main questions: What are robotics researchers working on? and Where are robots headed?

The book attempts to answer these questions through a sequence of profiles. Each profile is roughly two to three pages long and includes an interview, a description of a specific robot of interest and one or more relevant photographs.

The interview with Cynthia Breazeal, the creator of Kizmet (a robot that specializes in communication through facial expression), is typical. It includes Kizmet's basic specifications, photos of Kismet partly disassembled, a photo of Breazeal working on Kismet and several photos of Kismet in action. An interview with Breazeal discusses the general motivations for making a robot use facial expressions and her general approach to artificial intelligence.

Menzel is a terrific photographer, and every shot reflects attention to detail. Menzel tried to capture each robot with its designer (preferably while they were interacting) but there are plenty of photos of bots on their own. Some of my favorites were of BIT (a baby-doll-bot), Kismet (a face-bot with expressions) and Robopike (a fish-bot that swims). Several of the pictures, like the face robot on the cover, the surgery robot in the front pages and the baby (BIT) robot on the back cover are nightmarish or psychadelic, but these are the minority. All of the photos are at least slightly staged, but for the most part they are documentary and stylized only for added interest. Several photos from the book can be found on the Robo sapiens web page.

Research-based approaches to robotics vary widely, and the range of interviews in Robo sapiens varies accordingly. Many of the major players in robotics and artificial intelligence are represented: Ronald Arkin, Rodney Brooks, Raymond Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Marc Raibert are there, to name just a few. A number of people not usually considered to be roboticists, like Robert Full and Paul McCready, are positive additions to the book's broad scope.

The interviews are surprisingly candid and telling. At one point, Rodney Brooks concedes that he could be wrong about behavior-based subsumption being fundamental, and that he might just be "a grumpy old asshole." (his words, not mine). At another point, two researchers (Eric Baumgartner and Terry Huntsberger) scramble to explain why their Mars rover is tethered, which would seem to be a problem on an interplanetary mission (it's to allow emergency shutdowns during testing). An inspiring feature of every interview is the enthusiasm that shines through. These people are having a darn good time and they make you want to join in the fun.

The answer to the first question posed by the book, "What are robotics researchers working on?", is well answered. In a series of six chapters (Electric dreams, Robo sapiens, Bio logical, Remote possibilities, Work mates and Serious fun), Menzel and D'Aluisio document a diversity of approaches that is truly remarkable in both behavior and mechanism. They range from Mark Tilden's primitivley elegant analog BEAM-bots to Honda's computationally brutish P-series. Robots that swim, walk, crawl, roll, swing and fly are all described. The conclusion is that research in robotics and artificial intelligence is far more diverse than most people would expect: applications range from human-bot social interactions to dynamic prosthetics to meteorite hunting.

The answer to the second question posed by the book, "Where are robots headed?", is less clear. This question is asked in many of the interviews explicitly and answers vary across a spectrum. Some interviewees, like Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick, seem convinced that robots will eventually supplant or subsume the human species. Others, like Rodney Brooks and Mark Tilden, are more skeptical. One of the funniest interviews is with Tilden, who describes how he built a robot butler that ran into trouble with cleaning. The butler-bot couldn't tell the difference between dirt and cat food, so it vacuumed up the food and the cat went hungry. Tilden's point isn't that nobody can build a bot that can distinguish dirt and cat food, but that endowing bots with the kind of abstract intelligence that comes naturally to humans is a serious problem. It is clear that future directions include the development of new forms of intelligence, but it is unclear what forms these intelligences will take.

My main critism of Robo sapiens is its treatment of points of disagreement in the field. The question of whether robots will take over the world is presented as central, but in reality that question is only of marginal (if any) real interest to professionals. More important controversies, such as about the best way to implement artificial intelligence, are easy to find. One question that could have been asked is, "How is intelligence constructed?". Hearing the perspectives of people who actually design and build serious bots would be interesting. For example, some discussion of the differences between traditional sense-model-plan-act models of intelligence and newer behavior-based subsumption models by the people that actually use them would give a good idea of the practical constraints of each approach, as well as possible compromises. It would easily have been possible to discuss some of these issues without going over the heads of ordinary readers. One simple, illustrative observation would be that increases in the performance of artifical intelligence have not been described by Moore's Law. Why not? Speculation on the answer could only be informative.

Other minor shortcomings of the book are its lack of attention to the roles of history and non-professional researchers in the field. For the ordinary person, the mention of robots and artificial intelligence evokes images of HAL, Rosie, C3PO or even Frankenstein's monster. These images are an important consideration in the development of the robots we see today and in their general role in public life. Why isn't an airplane autopilot called a robot pilot? These issues are mentioned, but only briefly. Discussions with academicians and industry specialists dominate the book but sophisticated hobbyists are a significant presence in the real world. It's a shame not to give them some space.

Most of the deficiencies of the book are resolved by a quick look on the internet. Many of the researchers profiled in Robo sapiens have homepages that provide online versions of their technical articles and further information. Information about the work of amateurs and hobbyists is abundant online as well. Fred Martin's Handyboard, for example, has been integrated into all kinds of interesting projects. While Robo sapiens is directed at the educated layman and thus not a good source of technical information by itself, the book could be a useful starting point in finding robots and researchers in specific categories.

If you're propeller-head to the point of pathology, be warned: Robo sapiens isn't a technical document and may be disappointing. For the rest of us Robo sapiens is outstanding and at $29.95 (USD) it's a bargain. I heartily recommend Robo sapiens to anyone who even has a passing interest in who robotics researchers are, what they are doing, or where robots are headed.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Robots have been around in concept for longer than the word itself has been used to describe them, and for most of this century they've had a fair hold on the public imagination as either Utopian saviors or inexorable villains. Reader mtDNA sent in the evaluation below of a book called Robo sapiens: Evolution of a new species which may be the basis for a more realistic and neutral understanding about Robots, especially well suited to non-experts in that field. (I also found the other books in the series excellent.)

Robo Sapiens author Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio pages 240 publisher MIT Press rating 8.5 reviewer mtDNA ISBN 0-262-13382-2 summary A coffee-table survey course in words and pictures on the state of robots at the turn of the century.

Robo sapiens is the latest offering in the "Material World" series produced by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, which includes Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1995) and Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects (1998). On the outside, Robo sapiens is an ordinary coffee table book. On the inside, however, is something different. Robo sapiens sets out to document the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence by talking to over fifty active researchers and photographing them with the tools of their trade. The book succeeds brilliantly. With sharp, beautifully reproduced photographs and engaging, well composed text, Robo sapiens provides an overview of robotics research that is simultaneously surreal, comically entertaining and dead serious.

The book is motivated by two main questions: What are robotics researchers working on? and Where are robots headed?

The book attempts to answer these questions through a sequence of profiles. Each profile is roughly two to three pages long and includes an interview, a description of a specific robot of interest and one or more relevant photographs.

The interview with Cynthia Breazeal, the creator of Kizmet (a robot that specializes in communication through facial expression), is typical. It includes Kizmet's basic specifications, photos of Kismet partly disassembled, a photo of Breazeal working on Kismet and several photos of Kismet in action. An interview with Breazeal discusses the general motivations for making a robot use facial expressions and her general approach to artificial intelligence.

Menzel is a terrific photographer, and every shot reflects attention to detail. Menzel tried to capture each robot with its designer (preferably while they were interacting) but there are plenty of photos of bots on their own. Some of my favorites were of BIT (a baby-doll-bot), Kismet (a face-bot with expressions) and Robopike (a fish-bot that swims). Several of the pictures, like the face robot on the cover, the surgery robot in the front pages and the baby (BIT) robot on the back cover are nightmarish or psychadelic, but these are the minority. All of the photos are at least slightly staged, but for the most part they are documentary and stylized only for added interest. Several photos from the book can be found on the Robo sapiens web page.

Research-based approaches to robotics vary widely, and the range of interviews in Robo sapiens varies accordingly. Many of the major players in robotics and artificial intelligence are represented: Ronald Arkin, Rodney Brooks, Raymond Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Marc Raibert are there, to name just a few. A number of people not usually considered to be roboticists, like Robert Full and Paul McCready, are positive additions to the book's broad scope.

The interviews are surprisingly candid and telling. At one point, Rodney Brooks concedes that he could be wrong about behavior-based subsumption being fundamental, and that he might just be "a grumpy old asshole." (his words, not mine). At another point, two researchers (Eric Baumgartner and Terry Huntsberger) scramble to explain why their Mars rover is tethered, which would seem to be a problem on an interplanetary mission (it's to allow emergency shutdowns during testing). An inspiring feature of every interview is the enthusiasm that shines through. These people are having a darn good time and they make you want to join in the fun.

The answer to the first question posed by the book, "What are robotics researchers working on?", is well answered. In a series of six chapters (Electric dreams, Robo sapiens, Bio logical, Remote possibilities, Work mates and Serious fun), Menzel and D'Aluisio document a diversity of approaches that is truly remarkable in both behavior and mechanism. They range from Mark Tilden's primitivley elegant analog BEAM-bots to Honda's computationally brutish P-series. Robots that swim, walk, crawl, roll, swing and fly are all described. The conclusion is that research in robotics and artificial intelligence is far more diverse than most people would expect: applications range from human-bot social interactions to dynamic prosthetics to meteorite hunting.

The answer to the second question posed by the book, "Where are robots headed?", is less clear. This question is asked in many of the interviews explicitly and answers vary across a spectrum. Some interviewees, like Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick, seem convinced that robots will eventually supplant or subsume the human species. Others, like Rodney Brooks and Mark Tilden, are more skeptical. One of the funniest interviews is with Tilden, who describes how he built a robot butler that ran into trouble with cleaning. The butler-bot couldn't tell the difference between dirt and cat food, so it vacuumed up the food and the cat went hungry. Tilden's point isn't that nobody can build a bot that can distinguish dirt and cat food, but that endowing bots with the kind of abstract intelligence that comes naturally to humans is a serious problem. It is clear that future directions include the development of new forms of intelligence, but it is unclear what forms these intelligences will take.

My main critism of Robo sapiens is its treatment of points of disagreement in the field. The question of whether robots will take over the world is presented as central, but in reality that question is only of marginal (if any) real interest to professionals. More important controversies, such as about the best way to implement artificial intelligence, are easy to find. One question that could have been asked is, "How is intelligence constructed?". Hearing the perspectives of people who actually design and build serious bots would be interesting. For example, some discussion of the differences between traditional sense-model-plan-act models of intelligence and newer behavior-based subsumption models by the people that actually use them would give a good idea of the practical constraints of each approach, as well as possible compromises. It would easily have been possible to discuss some of these issues without going over the heads of ordinary readers. One simple, illustrative observation would be that increases in the performance of artifical intelligence have not been described by Moore's Law. Why not? Speculation on the answer could only be informative.

Other minor shortcomings of the book are its lack of attention to the roles of history and non-professional researchers in the field. For the ordinary person, the mention of robots and artificial intelligence evokes images of HAL, Rosie, C3PO or even Frankenstein's monster. These images are an important consideration in the development of the robots we see today and in their general role in public life. Why isn't an airplane autopilot called a robot pilot? These issues are mentioned, but only briefly. Discussions with academicians and industry specialists dominate the book but sophisticated hobbyists are a significant presence in the real world. It's a shame not to give them some space.

Most of the deficiencies of the book are resolved by a quick look on the internet. Many of the researchers profiled in Robo sapiens have homepages that provide online versions of their technical articles and further information. Information about the work of amateurs and hobbyists is abundant online as well. Fred Martin's Handyboard, for example, has been integrated into all kinds of interesting projects. While Robo sapiens is directed at the educated layman and thus not a good source of technical information by itself, the book could be a useful starting point in finding robots and researchers in specific categories.

If you're propeller-head to the point of pathology, be warned: Robo sapiens isn't a technical document and may be disappointing. For the rest of us Robo sapiens is outstanding and at $29.95 (USD) it's a bargain. I heartily recommend Robo sapiens to anyone who even has a passing interest in who robotics researchers are, what they are doing, or where robots are headed.

You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Chris writes "GameSpot has posted a feature story that details the entire development process for Peter Molyneux's new PC game Black & White. There are a lot of quotes from Molyneux as he takes you through the whole three years they spent making the game. A lot of interesting stuff about the philosophical underpinnings of how the game judges you good or evil."

mattkime asks a question that's faced each and every one of us: "You can argue over which processor is best or which operating system is most 31337, but when it comes down to it, no matter where you stand on the issues, you need a good power strip. Alas, this area of computing seems well equiped for only two ends of the spectrum - the high end power backup and the low end power strip. I have six transformer blocks under my desk in addition to 4 3-prong power cords- which power strip can handle such madness? Belkin #F5H300 seemed like a perfect fit, but I can't find any place that sells them." The ideal power-strip is a strip with wider outlets to accomodate said "transformer blocks" without losing an outlet on the strip. The car commercials said it best: "Wider is Better!". Have any power strip manufacturers learned this lesson yet?

Eloquence writes "As reported on infoAnarchy, Publius has been awarded the 'Inaugural Annual Award' for 'Best Circumvention of Censorship' by the British magazine Index on Censorship. Publius is a censorship-resistant, anonymous publishing system that spreads uploaded files over several servers. A special award for services to censorship goes to the UK Ministry of Defence for prosecuting 'whistleblowers' under the Official Secrets Act."

Slashback has for you tonight the usual tasteful spread of updates, corrections, and things to think about as you settle in to sleep. (And a Merry Christmas for those who celebrate it.)

The world will beat a path to their doors. parvati writes: "This is the follow-up to an unusual contest mentioned on Slashdot a few months ago. A Princeton neuroscientist, John Hopfield, created a neural network modeling how the brain interprets sensory input, posted it on a website, and invited others to deduce the basis behind the way the network "thought". There is now a winner--David MacKay's group at Cambridge University--and the results will be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in a bit. Preprints are available from the website that contains the information about the network."

Cuchulainn also passed on word of this NYTimes story on the two winners of the contest.

Who's spamming who, on the freeway of love? jamie passed on this email from Bennett Haselton, who runs Peacefire.org, as a followup to the recent story of his about the traffic-blocking capabilities (and implementation) of Above.Net.

I've found out why I haven't been getting any email from the gilc-plan or ifea-plan mailing lists for several weeks now.

The hosts where these mailing lists are run is connected to the Internet via HIS.com, which is connected to the AboveNet backbone. Peacefire's ISP is on AboveNet's "boycott list", which means all their downstream customers are blocked from accessing our Web site or sending email to peacefire.org addresses. (To them, it just looks like the site is down -- "the server is not responding...", or "Returned mail: host not responding...")

AboveNet does not publicize that they do this, and in fact I called AboveNet pretending to be a naive customer and asked them whether they blocked their users from accessing anything on the Web. All five employees that I talked to in sales and tech support, said "No". Although when I talked with a high-level technician and showed him the evidence, he did admit that AboveNet blocked sites on the boycott list.

I talked to several AboveNet users affected by the block, and they had no idea that AboveNet was filtering their Web access; most were pretty pissed off about it.

When Slashdot published a story about this, AboveNet immediately re-opened their customers' to our ISP's web sites: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/12/13/1853237 but I don't know if the un-ban is temporary or permanent. Currently we are detecting when customers connect to our site from an AboveNet-controlled IP address, and opening a separate window to warn them that AboveNet has been blocking their Internet connection for the last several months, and that they may be entitled to sue AboveNet for censoring their connection without their knowledge.

AboveNet is participating in a boycott of our ISP, organized by the Mail Abuse Prevention System, because of sites like http://209.211.253.69/ which sell mass email software (but does not spam or use spam for advertising). I think this distinction is important (there are many sites that host software programs with far less ethical uses, however, the hosting ISP's aren't the ones responsible), but never mind -- there's nothing wrong with a boycott as long as it's voluntary. AboveNet, however, is co-opting their users into the boycott involuntarily, knowing that 90% of their customers would never agree to have their Web access censored if they knew what was going on. AboveNet admitted it has nothing to do with protecting customers from spam (obviously, since they're blocking Web sites, and the targeted servers aren't spamming anyway); it's just a way of putting pressure on the ISP by threatening to cut off their customers' access to their sites.

We also contacted the boycott organizers to ask why they didn't just remove Peacefire's IP address from the list and block the others in the same range, and they said it was technically possible, but they wouldn't do it -- unless we joined the boycott by going to another ISP.

For the time being, I can get mails from the gilc-plan and ifea-plan lists. If AboveNet re-instates the ban after the controversy dies down, I'll re-subscribe to the lists under a different email address.

-Bennett
bennett@peacefire.org http://www.peacefire.org

Anyone care to ante up 1/6 for an MP3? minard writes: "I have on my shelf an example of a wax drum (forerunner of the vinyl record) that had been sold in Britain circa 1905. I just noticed a label on the side I hadn't really paid attention to before. It says:

"This record is sold by the National Phonograh Co Ltd upon the condition that it may not be sold or offered for use by the original or any subsequent purchaser (except by an authorized factor to an authorized retail dealer) for less than 1/6 each. Upon any breach of said condition the license to use and vend this record implied from such sale immediately terminates."

1/6, by the way, would be about 10c. Not sure how much that would be today. Basically this is a license restriction that enforces pricing controls (completely legal at the time). I'd always assumed these were a new thing. Guess not."

You look a little down in the Mouth ... The seventh in our continuing reprint of Jon Katz's "Voices From the Hellmouth" series is now online.

Stanford University held a workshop last Friday - The Policy Implications of End-to-End - covering some of the policy questions cropping up which threaten the end-to-end paradigm that serves today's Internet so well. It was attended by representatives from the FCC, along with technologists, economists, lawyers and others. Here are my notes from the workshop. I'm going to try to skip describing each individual's background and resume, instead substituting a link to a biography page whenever I can. (Part two of two - part one ran yesterday.)

The final segment of the morning covered caching. The main issue centered around transparent caching, where users ask for certain content but their request is silently fulfilled by a caching proxy server instead, generally without the user having any way to detect this. The standard concept of caching has the user being presented with the same content she would otherwise have gotten from the requested site, but that need not be true - Singapore, China and Australia have all used transparent caches to censor their citizens. This can also be a security violation (are you really talking to the secure server on stupidpettoys.com, or a proxy in between? Most users won't notice the difference.). Ann Brick noted a subsidiary issue - big commercial players have the ability to pay for their sites to be cached, while individuals do not. Similar to the QoS issue, this might be used to discriminate between paying, fast, commercial sites, and sites owned by individuals or even competitors.

David Clark made the insightful observation that dollars spent on caching don't go to general network improvements -- one small piece of the network is improved by caches, but the same money spent improving the whole network could improve it for everyone. Timothy Denton concluded this segment with the characterization of transparent caching as the difference between "form follows function" and "function follows form": the mere presence of caching and the ability to interfere with content delivery in the middle of the network destroys end-to-end and creates opportunities for mischief.

In the afternoon, there were two larger sessions covering broadband and wireless Internet access. In both areas, the companies controlling these access methods have strong motivations to violate end-to-end principles.

Jerry Duvall led the broadband discussion. He presented a rather fascinating economists' view of the situation -- an economists' world being solely concerned with customers, producers and markets. Laws are necessary to enable markets -- contract law, commercial law, fraud law, and so on are needed in order for markets to function. He summoned up the ghost of Adam Smith with a brief review of capitalism: producers always conspire against the public to get more profits from them, only competition keeps them in check. Marketing, lock-in, monopolization, and predatory pricing are always used by producers. He denied that end-to-end represented any sort of a perfect competitive market, however, suggesting that customer wants cause problems -- in some cases, customers actually want bundles from a single provider, and may actually prefer non-end-to-end Internet access. From an economist's point of view, end-to-end is only a means to an end. The end in this case is creating value for the customer. If that involves end-to-end Internet access, fine. If it doesn't, still fine. The value to the customer is paramount, engineering elegance is secondary.

Duvall also suggested that many observers have a naive view of regulation. With regard to the debate over open access to cable systems, he stated that there was no easy way for regulators to "come in and fix it." Regulation implies overcoming the resistance of entrenched players, and in the case of open access to cable systems, AT&T and other cable giants have proven adept at fighting lawsuits in support of their ability to keep their systems closed.

As we've seen previously, there was discussion of the reasons why end-to-end can be violated: sometimes customers want it, but (probably more often) the wants of companies are the driving force. Duvall suggested the external value of end-to-end in fostering competition and democratic values isn't adequately valued in most considerations of the economics of broadband. That is, the cost of violating end-to-end is spread out among many users of the network, but the benefits from that action accrue mainly to individual companies -- in economic parlance, this is called externalizing costs.

Another panelist emphasized the democratic value of open systems, a recurring topic in Lessig's writings. There was a bit more discussion of bundling-as-an-aid-for-novice-users vs. bundling-as-a-way-to-lock-in-customers. Jerome Saltzer reiterated the time-tested solution for monopoly problems: separate the content from the content-carriers. Deborah Lathen, acting perhaps as devil's advocate, asked why the builder of the pipe shouldn't be allowed to monopolize it. Duvall noted that no matter what the FCC might do to regulate cable carriers, that economic theory doesn't hold much chance for relief -- any time there's a monopoly (over the cable pipe), the monopolist is going to be able to extract monopoly rents, one way or another. If regulation affects a certain aspects of the business, the monopolist will find some other way to leverage the monopoly for greater profits. The only sure remedy is eliminating the monopoly.

Further audience discussion raised the idea that the concept of "an ISP" is a odd sort of legacy brought about by the necessity to have an intermediary between the telephone network and the TCP/IP network. In the future, the concept of an ISP may change radically. A question was asked: what benefit does the public get by allowing the cable companies to monopolize access? There were no good answers.

Mark Laubach gave a good overview of the architecture of cable Internet access, referring to the DOCSIS standard, which wasn't designed with open access in mind. Laubach stated that "basic IP dialtone" -- that is, a simple TCP/IP Internet connection without frills or bundled services -- should be a consumer right, which should apply to every broadband service regardless of delivery method: cable, DSL, wireless or satellite services.

Peter Huber summarized the open-access debate as it affected phone companies. The phone companies had a 1Mhz twisted pair of copper strands that they swore up and down couldn't be shared. They were ordered to share it, and now are doing so: local and long-distance competition, shared data/voice over that tiny line, co-location at central offices, etc. Now the cable companies have a 750mhz copper wire that they claim is "impossible" to share. Huber emphasized that whatever the regulations, cable and phone companies should be treated equally. Currently there are disjointed regulations, which (depending on your viewpoint) either unduly hamper phone companies or leave cable companies unfairly unrestricted.

Further discussion brought out the case of Stockholm, Sweden. Stockholm and certain other cities have taken on the job of laying fiber-optic cable as a municipal service, similar to sewer service or water or roads. Since the municipality built the pipe to the home, there is no issue of a company attempting to monopolize the pipe, and any company which wants to offer Internet service over the pipe may do so. As a result, Stockholm residents are getting extremely fast access speeds at prices less than U.S. residents pay for cable Internet access, and customers don't have to worry about the cable monopoly steadily reducing their upstream speeds, or banning servers, or whatever other crackdown U.S. cable providers have thought of most recently. The panel then debated whether (and how) it would make sense to move the U.S. to that sort of municipal model. A panelist threw out the figure that true open access to cable pipes might require a choice of 400 ISPs. An audience member suggested that as things are currently going in the U.S., there might be a choice of five ISPs at most, hand-picked by the cable provider.

David Clark added that whatever solution is proposed, it must be an ongoing process -- since cable Internet access is certainly not going to be the final stage of bandwidth development. Finally the broadband session closed with a pithy statement that, despite claims to the contrary, content is not king -- there is, and always has been, more money in individuals talking to each other than in one-way content distribution. The question that remains is how to convince broadband providers that there is more money to be made in selling large quantities of low-profit services rather than small quantities of more profitable ones.

The day concluded with a session about wireless Internet access. Unsurprisingly, WAP was the first topic to come up: a closed, end-to-end-unfriendly, expensive protocol that is all but deceased in the market, yet still actively promoted by companies that hope to benefit from controlling wireless Internet access.

Karl Auerbach had an insightful comment about why to use plain vanilla TCP/IP instead of a bespoke wireless protocol. Similar to the argument raised by Bruce Schneier and others that using a proven crypto algorithm makes sense because there are a lot of bad protocol writers in the world, Auerbach posited that freely available TCP/IP stacks have had the bugs beaten out of them, but the average proprietary protocol hasn't. The topic shifted to the location information that is now required to be built in to mobile phones. The panel discussed the control issues inherent in different network architectures: location information could be built into the phone, and controlled by the user, or it could be built into the cell towers, and controlled by the phone company (or law enforcement, or advertisers). It looks like the second architecture will be the one that is deployed.

Yochai Benkler brought up the issue of spread spectrum changing the rules for FCC frequency allocation -- more communications may shift to frequencies where the FCC does not require licenses to broadcast. Dewayne Hendricks gave a lengthy and interesting description of how amateur radio is currently being used in a manner similar to the venerable Fidonet to pass packet data over the short-wave frequencies via a store-and-forward system. The interesting part is that Amateur Packet Radio has been around for 15 years or so. Hendricks' concept was that the first truly free network would be one composed of independent wireless spread-spectrum devices creating an ad hoc network which could not be censored or controlled by any entity whatsoever. One audience member quipped that disruptive technologies always appear to incumbents as toys.

Hendricks noted some other wireless WANs, such as one in the San Francisco Bay area using Breezecom wireless cards and antennae. (Coincidentally, Salon did a story on wireless WANs just a few days ago.) Dale Hatfield noted that Hendricks' network could be created today using licensed spectrum, and noted that the greatest danger is incumbent spectrum-holders pushing regulations which protect their investments by making it difficult for the FCC to open up or use sections of the spectrum for these innovative uses.

Towards the end, one member of the audience (and I do apologize for not catching who it was), pulled everything together by noting the convergence between end-to-end as a technological issue, open access as an economic issue, and democracy and public debate as a political issue. The idea of eliminating "gatekeepers" on the internet is important for a great many reasons, whether you look at it as a technological issue of promoting progress and innovation, or as an economic issue of fostering competition and preventing monopolies from abusing their power, or as an issue of promoting free and unrestrained speech on the communications media of the 21st century. This is certainly one of the most important issues facing the country today, but relatively few people know anything -- even a smidgeon -- about it, or at most they've read a few news reports about the AOL/Time Warner merger. I'm glad to see such a diverse and intelligent group working on the issues, and if they don't yet have all the answers, it's only because they want to get it right.

SiliconRedox writes: "The New York Times has an article on the efforts of the Web3D Consortium to update and reinstate VRML as a viable language for Web-based 3D. As with other standards it faces a tough challenge: it isn't HTML. Not many people are keen on rewriting an entire site in a shakey language."

The Metahacker writes: " A Princeton professor and his former student have created a 'mouse' (really, a neural net) that recognizes the word 'one' as spoken by a variety of speakers. The interesting part? They're challenging the neurobiology community to discover the mechanism it uses, using only the tools available to analyze live patients - observation and experimentation. You can upload your own sound files to test the mouse, and view experiments other scientists have performed. Cash prizes will be awarded to those who explain the mouse's behavior or can train the same number of neurons to perform a new task. You can read the New York Times article about it (free registration), or go directly to the site."

qbasicprogrammer writes: "Vital Source Technologies is now providing time-limited medical textbooks to universities. Password protected books as predicted in The Right To Read by Richard Stallman are finally becoming a reality." Starting on Oct. 28, (when the other part of the DMCA comes into effect), you could face a civil lawsuit and criminal penalties of up to five years in jail and a fine of $500,000 for reading someone else's textbook. See the NYU FAQ, the Advogato discussion, or the company crowing about new revenue opportunities.

joseph writes: "This article on C|Net announces Publius, a system similar to Freenet, meant to battle censorship on the Internet. What makes this approach interesting is its backing from AT&T Labs. Of particular interest in the article are the safeguards against the common opposition to such projects, like their use for piracy. Publius features no search utility and a maximum file size of 100k."

Ukiah writes: "Publius is a Web publishing system that is highly resistant to censorship and provides publishers with a high degree of anonymity. Publius was the pen name used by the authors of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison." Check out the system's home page or a Washington Post story. I just volunteered to host a server, so be sure to load up the system with bootleg Metallica mp3's - your chance to send a Slashdot author to jail, not something you get to do every day...

Nanotechnology writes: "Available here, The molecule was developed by adding copper ions to a derivative of the amino acid methionine. The investigators were then able to switch the molecule's chirality by the addition or removal of an electron. Furthermore, they found that the molecule's chirality could be switched repeatedly, and that the two forms of the molecules polarized light in opposite directions." Especially interesting is this line from The Canary Lab's home page ("Research"): "We are also scrutinizing other aspects of signal detection technology. We prepared a new polymer very similar in structure to polyaniline ... The new polymer was designed to serve as a molecular wire for attaching electrochemical sensor molecules to electrodes."

patSPLAT submitted this artful submission: "I'm asking Slashdot: What kind of box does Linux need to handle the Slashdot Effect? I'm an artist, and I'm working on a sculpture which will be self-documenting with a running server/webcam. Since the server will be a part of the piece, I don't want to spend more than I need. I do want it to be able to handle a heavy load if my piece is well recieved. I'm planning on getting a 10/100 Ethernet, but I'm wondering about processor and memory. Could I get away with an older Pentium? Would a Celeron running in console mode do the trick? 64MB? 128? What do you think I could get away with? The website on the piece would be no larger than 5 megabytes, and webcam would obviously require some resources. I'm not sure how much the webcam would take yet, so give me the minimum and I'll go up a step to account for the webcam. "

thal asks: "With the apparent inevitability of taxes on transactions over the web, what exactly will/should be defined as private transactions that are not to be taxed? Obviously, if you buy a gadget from gadgetseller.com with your credit card, you will be taxed. But what about baseball cards sold on Ebay? What about a garage band who asks you on their website to send in a $5 bill for a copy of their CD? These types of sales between two people have historically been, at the very least in practice, exempt from taxes, but will/should sales on the internet automatically be considered taxable?"

thal needs help with the following issue: "I just installed the VMWare for Linux demo on my Pentium II 233 with 64 Megs of RAM to make a virtual machine for my Win95 partition. What I'd like to do with it is use the Cakewalk Win95 multitrack music recorder inside of the virtual machine so I don't have to reboot. I know that I'll have to upgrade my processor and memory to do this well, but I want to know for sure it will work well before I put down the cash. With my current setup, giving Windows 32 Megs of RAM, I can't even get an .MP3 file to play without sounding a little bit choppy. Is this an inherent problem with VMWare's interaction with the audio hardware, or is this something I can fix by throwing money at it? Would a Pentium II 450 with 128 RAM suffice? Or should I just scrap the VMWare thing and buy a simple dedicated machine for this task? "

An anonymous coward writes "A team at NYU has developed a new text entry system for the palmpilot. It is much different than graffiti, and takes a little getting used to, but it is much much faster than graffiti. You can download it and play with a java demo here It seems pretty cool. "