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Peter Wayner writes: "In all of the scary stories Hollywood circulates about copyright piracy, nothing could be scarier that the gang of file swapping, copyright circumventing hackers in the new movie 'Enigma'. They laugh and love a bit, but mainly they spend their time building a big whirring and clicking machine to smash a copyright protection mechanism. When the machine delivers, they put the results into a Gnutella-like file sharing system called Ultra so their friends can track down the original artists and kill them." (Read on for the rest of Peter's review.)

Ooops. Wrong generation and wrong spin. "Enigma" is about good codebreakers -- the mathematicians and clerks of Great Britain's Bletchley Park who helped the Allied cause during World War II by breaking the German coding machine known as "Enigma." It's a wonderful story that's been told as non-fiction several times before by serious historians. This time around, the former newspaper columnist Robert Harris created a thinly fictionalized novel filled with composite characters based on reality. While the result is not factually perfect, it is close enough to capture the dangerous era. Abandoning the literal truth also allowed him to build a richly plotted yarn that evolves cleanly and smoothly.

The film closely follows the novel, although it does eliminate a few of the more subtle complexities. It was wildly popular in Britain when it was released there last year, probably because the story is told with gorgeously detailed sets dressed with nostalgia for a time of British patriotism and success. The film's costumes are lavish, the extras are everywhere, and the look is close enough to reality that the best complaint one ex-translator stationed at Bletchley Park could offer was that the canteen in the film was much nicer. Even Mick Jagger, one of the film's producer, couldn't resist the spirit and gave himself a cameo appearance as an officer relaxing in a club.

This film could represent the cultural high point for codeslinging nerds and other Slashdot types. Jagger produced this film with another cultural icon, Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels. If you secretly spend your days dreaming of strutting around the stage like Mick Jagger, you can now take some pride in the fact that Mick Jagger spent at least a few days dreaming of playing a code geek. And why not? According to one of the characters, the women go weak in the knees when they get to talk to codebreakers like the protagonist, Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott).

This movie is about sex and mathematics and the crucial satisfaction that comes from understanding the depth of their power. The two main threads of the film track Tom Jericho's search for 1) a missing lover (Saffron Burroughs) and 2) a new way to break the Germans' four rotor, Naval Enigma system known as Shark. His lover may have been mixed up in Germany's sudden decision to abandon the old codes and all of this must be untangled or else the war could be lost. Tom Stoppard, the screenwriter also responsible for Shakespeare In Love, weaves these two threads together with car chases, kissing, train whistles, moonlit nights, illicit file swapping and a few other romantic chords.

It seems like a lot of things happen in four days, but we must remember that this plays out in an era when people weren't couch potatoes taught that ignoring advertising is forbidden. The pacing is the biggest problem with the film because there's too much action packed into 117 minutes, leaving some transitions a bit confusing. The jumps are often too quick and in some places it's hard to know when the flashbacks begin and end.

Despite that, there's much for a geek to love in this movie. Both the Enigma machine and the cryptanalytic attack developed by the British are described in fairly good detail. We learn, perhaps too quickly, that much of the game is finding a crib, a term the codebreakers used to refer to a word or phrase that must be somewhere in the scrambled message. A weather broadcast, for instance, would include the word "rainy" on a wet day and the codebreakers would examine the possible combinations that might produce that word. That was one weakness the folks at Bletchley Park were able to exploit before Jericho's girlfriend disappeared.

Some of the other mathematical details are accurate but not explained in enough detail to be easily understood. Once the crib was identified, the codebreakers relied heavily on the fact that the Enigma machine could not encode one letter into itself. This weakness allowed them to eliminate many of the potential cribs quickly. Then they spent their time looking for potential "loops" in the coding. In a simple case, a loop is formed when the letter A is encoded as an R and a few letters later, an R is encoded as an A. Most of the loops are a chain of several letters strung out in an odd combination. This pencil-and-paper work by the codebreaker is turned over to a big machine that uses the loops to eliminate many of the potential positions of the rotors. The rest are tested quickly with plenty of whirring and clicking. On a good day, and there were many of them, the right settings for the rotors popped out and let the Allies read the encrypted traffic.

You get to see all of this in action, although the film does not describe much of it in the hopes of sparing those unanointed with the knee-weakening, code smashing gene. It's not really fair for me to concentrate on the machines and ignore the actors because most of the movie revolves around the emotional battles for the characters and their conflicting desires. These passions are well-constructed and intelligently arranged. Dougray Scott plays the mathematician with enough dash and sophistication while Kate Winslet fills out the role of the mousey clerk and co-conspirator. The real star is Jeremy Northam, who plays a sophisticated Foreign Office spy with the right amount of oily charm. He, like everyone else in this movie, is fighting a private little war which may or may not fit in with the larger battle between the Allied and Axis forces.

Some of these battles are so crucial to the plot that it's impossible to comment on them without spoiling the ending. For this reason, I'm including several links for you to click after seeing the movie ( first, second, and third.) as well as a sentence encrypted with an Enigma simulator:

FBZ DDE NZA DJN PNI POH YBF NJR QFP DDZ TVP IHN YSJ IXX UAH YXF BZT ZXW BXS GES GYD IFO VXQ KHU LMA SYX YEG MGK

Using Enigma as a digital rights management device is not new-- Harris includes an encrypted dedication in the novel-- but it raises an interesting question: Is the movie and its detailed description of breaking the Enigma in violation of the DMCA? Is the extra detail in the movie just a cookbook for those who want to pirate the sentence I encrypted above? If so, should I be able to shut it down? While some reviewers may dream of writing something so powerful that it closes a movie immediately, I would hate to do it to this one. It's a pretty, nostalgic thriller that makes a good date movie--especially if you happen to be a knee-weakening, codebreaking type.

Peter Wayner's latest books are Disappearing Cryptography, an exploration about how to disguise information and Translucent Databases, a practical description of how to use encryption algorithms to protect sensitive information like credit cards and medical records. If they ever get made into a movie, he wants to be played by Keanu Reeves -- the one who played Ted "Theodore" Logan, not the one who played Neo.

Peter Wayner writes: "A friend of mine who works as a public defender knows a thing or two about selling fear to the jury filled with doubts. Several months before December 31st, 1999, he asked me if we should be worried about the Y2K disasters. My answer was: The machines crash every day. Why should it matter if it happens on December 31st?" This time around though, the fears are of a different nature and scope: Peter reviews below Edward Yourdon's latest book Byte Wars, one aimed at everyone concerned about online terrorism in the post-9/11 climate. Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11 on Information Technology author Edward Yourdon pages 300 publisher Prentice Hall rating 7 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0130477257 summary Plainspoken but fear-centric advice for reducing the dangers of vandals or terrorists to online systems.

My friend who nodded as if this was the same game he played every day in the courtroom. If no one knew what was going to happen, the jury's instincts could be manipulated with a mixture of fear, sympathy and tribalism. Juries were always afraid of watching a good, relatively innocent man lose everything, he explained. Corporate executives were just as worried of the same thing happening to them.

The Y2K binge is long gone and the biggest effect on computers seems to be found in the bits representing the bank accounts of Y2K consultants. Gimmicks may fade but human nature and human fear remains the same. The destruction of the World Trade Center has given new life to the fear mongers who worry that someone may obliterate our electronic infrastructure. Edward Yourdon, the old school computer consultant who made plenty of noise about Y2K, is back with another book, Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11th on Information Technology .

When I say old school, I mean that he started programming and writing about programming in the mid 1970s and this shows in the way he spells ( "Obe Wan Kenobee") and talks about "paradigm shifts" instead of "memes." He comes from the age group that decided how much to spend on Y2K and he knows how to talk to the group that will control how much we spend on our fears of terrorism.

There is no mention of his record on Y2K on the book cover or the biography, but if you're interested, the net never forgets. The book does mention the scary days of December 1999 a bit in passing, but only to note that there was "very little awareness in the media" that some "small organizations did suffer moderate-to-severe Y2K problems." He also notes with some pride that many companies survived the turmoil after the World Trade Center attack because they made so many preparations for the turn of the millennium.

This time around Yourdon is blessed with a much more concrete threat and this both helps and hurts his cause. On one hand, no one can debate the power of airplanes as weapons in the same way we can still debate whether Y2K would make a difference to embedded controllers. On the other hand, it's not really clear what the latest attacks have to do with computer networks. He even notes that the DOD's computers were relatively unhurt by the destruction of the Pentagon. How many web sites or e-commerce sites can anyone knock out with a box cutter? One company I knew with offices on the 81st floor of the World Trade Center used a co-lo facility that survived. Their web site kept on pumping out hits even after their entire office turned to dust.

Yourdon dodges all of this by being politely vague and abstract. His chapter on risk management, for instance, counsels that we should find a "realistic assessment of risks" and weigh the probability against the danger. If we develop a process to deal with the risk, then we can ensure that the risks are shared between the stakeholders. Most of the chapter could have been written at any time about any risk , but he makes it all a bit more current by including a few references to kamikaze players who are shifting the paradigm.

Some of his advice gets so abstract that it's hard to know exactly what he is suggesting. He tells us to "examine the practical impact of increased security and decreased privacy." To him, that means warning people who rely upon the social freedom of "don't ask, don't tell" to realize that so much information about us will eventually be documented by the new security state. "Now is the time to think about such matters, not two or three years from now when you suddenly find that you can't get a job, or can't buy a house in a particular neighborhood." Should we rise up or acquiesce? Which side is he on? I'm still not sure. He does such a good job playing to everyone's fears.

Occasionally, he doles out some practical advice that is close to the needs of managers worried about the aftereffects of 9/11. We are told that terrorists may be posing as "ordinary employees" or even government employees who've "risen to high levels of trust and authority." He reminds us that "hardly anyone watches the programmers." Is some terrorist slipping in a buffer-overflow loophole? Or maybe just a crook? One of the most practical suggestions is that corporations should do more code reviews.

He's also hip to some of the latest intellectual fads. Emergent organisms like Napster can be useful and resilient. He's a big fan of empowering employees by cutting away bureaucracy so the organization can evolve some emergent intelligence. Of course, we must also be ready for more scrutiny from the security bureaucracy checking to ensure that the emergent organism isn't evolving buffer-overflow backdoors. This gets a bit confusing and he waves away much of conflict with abstract calls for balance.

In the end, Yourdon can't offer many answers because there aren't many answers to give. We had risks, terrorism, info warfare, bombs and whatnot before September 11th and we'll meet them again despite the security. Anarchists detonated a horse powered wagon filled with explosives in front of the NY Fed in the 1920s. Not much has really changed and the book ends up being a distilled version of the inchoate fears that haunt us.

The real challenge is determining how much fear we should have. Yourdon is far from the only person who automatically assumes that the attacks on New York mean more attention to cybersecurity. All of the major beltway consultants near Washington are gearing up with the new tools. The more I read the book, the more I began wondering why. Why do some kamikaze hijackers mean that the web needs to be locked down? Who really has time to worry about some al Queda l33t d00dz owning my site when so many people are dying true deaths that can't be fixed with backup tapes?

At the end of one of the chapters, Yourdon exhorts us to get our act together and secure our home computers. Our old, pre-9/11 computing style was equivalent to "living in a house with the doors and windows wide open", he says, something that was "a pleasant way to live if you were in a small town in the 1950s."

Ah, the 50s. He and everyone else should rent a copy of George Lucas's pre-Star Wars classic, "American Graffiti." In one scene, the teenagers cheerfully drop a cherry bomb down the school's toilet. In another, they destroy a police car by wrapping a chain around the rear axle. The laugh track blessed both events in the movie, but all of us know that they would bring out the SWAT teams today.

The movie managed to avoid much of the discussion about Eisenhower, Francis Gary Powers, the Russian H-Bomb, or any of the other fears rippling down our spines. The 50's seem so much more fun after editing out the fact that the Russians had (and still have) fusion bombs on the tips of missiles. No amount of frisking by airport security can keep them out of our airspace. Yet we survived and managed to laugh about kids trashing police cars.

Another solution is not to quiver and worry about Osama bin Hacker's script kiddies. We can redefine the terms of engagement in much the same way that the cops in the "American Graffiti" just laughed at those impish kids. Hacked web sites are easy to restore if you have adequate backups. Denial of service attacks from zombies on cable modems sound threatening, but they rarely last longer than Friday evening rush hour.

It's hard to argue with much of the plainspoken, largely abstract advice offered by Yourdon. All of it makes good sense. The harder problem is finding the right attitude to carry us through the night. This book is filled with worry for our future and awe of the unseen l33t d00dz hiding under the bed. There are bits of light and a stab at optimism near the end, but most of the book trades on the thoughts that will keep us up well past midnight.

Peter Wayner has two resilient books emerging this spring: Translucent Databases , an exploration of database security, and Disappearing Cryptography: Information Hiding, Steganography and Watermarks , the second edition devoted to hiding secret messages in plain sight. You can purchase Byte Wars from bn.com. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Peter Wayner writes: "A friend of mine who works as a public defender knows a thing or two about selling fear to the jury filled with doubts. Several months before December 31st, 1999, he asked me if we should be worried about the Y2K disasters. My answer was: The machines crash every day. Why should it matter if it happens on December 31st?" This time around though, the fears are of a different nature and scope: Peter reviews below Edward Yourdon's latest book Byte Wars, one aimed at everyone concerned about online terrorism in the post-9/11 climate. Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11 on Information Technology author Edward Yourdon pages 300 publisher Prentice Hall rating 7 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0130477257 summary Plainspoken but fear-centric advice for reducing the dangers of vandals or terrorists to online systems.

My friend who nodded as if this was the same game he played every day in the courtroom. If no one knew what was going to happen, the jury's instincts could be manipulated with a mixture of fear, sympathy and tribalism. Juries were always afraid of watching a good, relatively innocent man lose everything, he explained. Corporate executives were just as worried of the same thing happening to them.

The Y2K binge is long gone and the biggest effect on computers seems to be found in the bits representing the bank accounts of Y2K consultants. Gimmicks may fade but human nature and human fear remains the same. The destruction of the World Trade Center has given new life to the fear mongers who worry that someone may obliterate our electronic infrastructure. Edward Yourdon, the old school computer consultant who made plenty of noise about Y2K, is back with another book, Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11th on Information Technology .

When I say old school, I mean that he started programming and writing about programming in the mid 1970s and this shows in the way he spells ( "Obe Wan Kenobee") and talks about "paradigm shifts" instead of "memes." He comes from the age group that decided how much to spend on Y2K and he knows how to talk to the group that will control how much we spend on our fears of terrorism.

There is no mention of his record on Y2K on the book cover or the biography, but if you're interested, the net never forgets. The book does mention the scary days of December 1999 a bit in passing, but only to note that there was "very little awareness in the media" that some "small organizations did suffer moderate-to-severe Y2K problems." He also notes with some pride that many companies survived the turmoil after the World Trade Center attack because they made so many preparations for the turn of the millennium.

This time around Yourdon is blessed with a much more concrete threat and this both helps and hurts his cause. On one hand, no one can debate the power of airplanes as weapons in the same way we can still debate whether Y2K would make a difference to embedded controllers. On the other hand, it's not really clear what the latest attacks have to do with computer networks. He even notes that the DOD's computers were relatively unhurt by the destruction of the Pentagon. How many web sites or e-commerce sites can anyone knock out with a box cutter? One company I knew with offices on the 81st floor of the World Trade Center used a co-lo facility that survived. Their web site kept on pumping out hits even after their entire office turned to dust.

Yourdon dodges all of this by being politely vague and abstract. His chapter on risk management, for instance, counsels that we should find a "realistic assessment of risks" and weigh the probability against the danger. If we develop a process to deal with the risk, then we can ensure that the risks are shared between the stakeholders. Most of the chapter could have been written at any time about any risk , but he makes it all a bit more current by including a few references to kamikaze players who are shifting the paradigm.

Some of his advice gets so abstract that it's hard to know exactly what he is suggesting. He tells us to "examine the practical impact of increased security and decreased privacy." To him, that means warning people who rely upon the social freedom of "don't ask, don't tell" to realize that so much information about us will eventually be documented by the new security state. "Now is the time to think about such matters, not two or three years from now when you suddenly find that you can't get a job, or can't buy a house in a particular neighborhood." Should we rise up or acquiesce? Which side is he on? I'm still not sure. He does such a good job playing to everyone's fears.

Occasionally, he doles out some practical advice that is close to the needs of managers worried about the aftereffects of 9/11. We are told that terrorists may be posing as "ordinary employees" or even government employees who've "risen to high levels of trust and authority." He reminds us that "hardly anyone watches the programmers." Is some terrorist slipping in a buffer-overflow loophole? Or maybe just a crook? One of the most practical suggestions is that corporations should do more code reviews.

He's also hip to some of the latest intellectual fads. Emergent organisms like Napster can be useful and resilient. He's a big fan of empowering employees by cutting away bureaucracy so the organization can evolve some emergent intelligence. Of course, we must also be ready for more scrutiny from the security bureaucracy checking to ensure that the emergent organism isn't evolving buffer-overflow backdoors. This gets a bit confusing and he waves away much of conflict with abstract calls for balance.

In the end, Yourdon can't offer many answers because there aren't many answers to give. We had risks, terrorism, info warfare, bombs and whatnot before September 11th and we'll meet them again despite the security. Anarchists detonated a horse powered wagon filled with explosives in front of the NY Fed in the 1920s. Not much has really changed and the book ends up being a distilled version of the inchoate fears that haunt us.

The real challenge is determining how much fear we should have. Yourdon is far from the only person who automatically assumes that the attacks on New York mean more attention to cybersecurity. All of the major beltway consultants near Washington are gearing up with the new tools. The more I read the book, the more I began wondering why. Why do some kamikaze hijackers mean that the web needs to be locked down? Who really has time to worry about some al Queda l33t d00dz owning my site when so many people are dying true deaths that can't be fixed with backup tapes?

At the end of one of the chapters, Yourdon exhorts us to get our act together and secure our home computers. Our old, pre-9/11 computing style was equivalent to "living in a house with the doors and windows wide open", he says, something that was "a pleasant way to live if you were in a small town in the 1950s."

Ah, the 50s. He and everyone else should rent a copy of George Lucas's pre-Star Wars classic, "American Graffiti." In one scene, the teenagers cheerfully drop a cherry bomb down the school's toilet. In another, they destroy a police car by wrapping a chain around the rear axle. The laugh track blessed both events in the movie, but all of us know that they would bring out the SWAT teams today.

The movie managed to avoid much of the discussion about Eisenhower, Francis Gary Powers, the Russian H-Bomb, or any of the other fears rippling down our spines. The 50's seem so much more fun after editing out the fact that the Russians had (and still have) fusion bombs on the tips of missiles. No amount of frisking by airport security can keep them out of our airspace. Yet we survived and managed to laugh about kids trashing police cars.

Another solution is not to quiver and worry about Osama bin Hacker's script kiddies. We can redefine the terms of engagement in much the same way that the cops in the "American Graffiti" just laughed at those impish kids. Hacked web sites are easy to restore if you have adequate backups. Denial of service attacks from zombies on cable modems sound threatening, but they rarely last longer than Friday evening rush hour.

It's hard to argue with much of the plainspoken, largely abstract advice offered by Yourdon. All of it makes good sense. The harder problem is finding the right attitude to carry us through the night. This book is filled with worry for our future and awe of the unseen l33t d00dz hiding under the bed. There are bits of light and a stab at optimism near the end, but most of the book trades on the thoughts that will keep us up well past midnight.

Peter Wayner has two resilient books emerging this spring: Translucent Databases , an exploration of database security, and Disappearing Cryptography: Information Hiding, Steganography and Watermarks , the second edition devoted to hiding secret messages in plain sight. You can purchase Byte Wars from bn.com. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Peter Wayner writes: "A long time ago, I posed for a portrait at a church fair. The priest wandered by, paused for a second, and then caught up to me later. "Do you like the picture?" he asked. When I said it was fine, he told me, "Oh, I think its terrible. It doesn't look like you at all. But that doesn't matter. The artist is supposed to create a picture of what you think you look like." Read on to see what this has to do with robots as Peter reviews Rod Brook's new book. Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us author Rod Brooks pages 260 publisher Pantheon Books rating 8 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0375420797 summary A charming look at an unconventional (and powerful) way to think about and design robots.

In a way, robots are portraits of humans. Machines are just machines and assembly lines are just assembly lines. The buckets of bolts don't become robots until they start to take on some of the characteristics and a few of the jobs of humans. A drill for tightening a bolt may replace a biceps, but it's just a motor until it's on the end of a fancy mechanical arm that positions it automatically. Then it's a robot ready for a call from central casting.

Defining just what is and is not a robot is not an easy job for technologists because the replicants and androids are a touchstone and a benchmark for measuring our progress toward the future. It's 2002 and everyone is asking: Where's mad Hal steering a space craft to oblivion? Or more importantly: Why am I still vacuuming the floors and mowing the lawn by myself?

If you are asking these questions, then you might want to read the answers Rod Brooks, the director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, offers in his charming book, Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us. The book is half a thoughtful biography of the various robots created by his graduate students and half a philosophical explanation of what to expect from the gradual emergence of robot butlers.

The biographical part is probably the most enjoyable. He and his students have produced more than a dozen memorable robots who've crawled, rolled and paced their way around MIT. One searched for Coke cans to recycle, one tried to give tours to visitors, and another just tried to hold a conversation. Brooks spends time outlining how and why each machine can into being. The successes and more importantly the failures become the basis for creating a new benchmark for what machines can and can't do.

An ideal version of this book should include a DVD or a video cassette with pictures of the robots in action because the movement is surprisingly lifelike. Brooks is something of a celebrity because a film maker named Errol Morris made a droll, deadpan documentary that cut between four eccentric geniuses talking about their work. One guy sculpted topiary, one tamed lions, one studied naked mole rats, and the fourth was Rod Brooks, the man who made robots. Brooks minted the title for the film, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, a phrase he uses to describe his philosophy for creating robots. The movie tried to suss out the essence of genius, but it makes a perfect counterpoint for the book by providing some visual evidence of Brooks' success.

One of the stars of the movie was a six-legged robot called Genghis, a collection of high-torque RC airplane servo motors that Brooks feels is the best or most fully-realized embodiment of this fast and cheap approach. The robot marches along with a surprisingly life-like gait chasing after the right kind of radiation to tickle the IR and pyro-electric sensors mounted on whiskers. If you've seen the film, it's hard to forget his gait.

Brooks says that the secret to the success of Genghis is that there is no secret. The book's appendix provides an essential exploration of the design, which is short and very simple. The soul of the machine has 57 neuron-like subroutines, or "augmented finite state machines" in academic speak. For instance, one of the AFSMs responsible for balance constantly checks the force on a motor. If it is less than 7, the AFSM does nothing and if it is greater than 11, the AFSM reduces the force by three. That's doesn't seem like very much intelligence be it artificial or real, but 57 neuron-like subroutines like this are all it takes to create a fairly good imitation of a cockroach.

Brooks calls this a "subsumption architecture" and the book is most successful describing the days that he spent with his graduate students building robots and seeing what the architecture and a handful of AFSMs could do. He half mocks the roboticists who load up their machines with big computers trying to compute complex models of the world and all that is in it. In his eyes, the lumbering old-school machines just move a few inches and then devote a gazillion cycles to creating a detailed, digital description of every plant, brick or wayward child in the field of view. After a few more gazillion cycles, the machine chooses a path and moves a few more inches. Even when they find their way, time passes them by.

There are no complex control mechanisms sucking down cycles on the machines from Brooks' lab, the source of the claim that they're "out of control". It's just AFSMs wired together. One of the robots fakes human interaction by tracking fast motion and flesh colored pixels. Brooks marvels at how a few simple rules can produce a machine that is remarkably life-like. If you're not sure, they have video tapes of lab visitors holding conversations with the machine, who apparently takes part in the conversation with the patient interest of a well-bred host. As if by magic, the AFSMs are creating enough human-like movement and visitor in the tape begins treating the robot like a human!

If you're still not sure, you might buy a "My Real Baby" doll designed by Brooks with the help of the adept mechanical geniuses in Taiwan. The story of taking a highbrow concept from MIT to the local toy store is a great part of the book. The so-called toy is filled with AFSMs that tell it when to gurgle, when to pout, when to sleep, and when to demand sustenance. Alas, the toy makers tell Brooks that the market can't stomach so much innovation. One new thing at a time.

So are these machines truly successful simulacra? Are they infused with enough of the human condition to qualify as the science-fiction-grade robots or are they just cute parlor tricks? Some readers will probably point to the AFSMs and scoff. Seeing the code is like learning the secret to a magic trick.

Brooks, on the other hand, is sure that these machines are on the right track. In a sense, he makes it easier for his robots to catch up with humans by lowering the bar. On the back of the book, Brooks ladles out the schmaltz and proclaims, "We are machines, as are our spouses, our children and our dogs... I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines." That is, we're all just a slightly more involved collection of simple neurons that don't do much more than the balance mechanism of Genghis. You may think that you're deeply in love with the City of Florence, the ideal of democratic discourse, that raven-haired beauty three rows up, puppy dogs, or rainy nights cuddled under warm blankets, but according to the Brooks paradigm, you're just a bunch of AFSMs passing numbers back and forth.

If you think this extreme position means he's a few AFSMs short of a robot professor though, don't worry. Brooks backs away from this characterization when he takes on some of the bigger questions of what it means to be a human and what it means to be a machine. The latter part of the book focuses on what we can and can't do with artificial intelligence. He is very much a realist with the ability to admit what is working and what is failing. His machines definitely capture a spark, he notes, but they also fall short.

He notes with some chagrin that his robot lawnmower leaves behind tufts of uncut grass. Why? It uses a subsumption-like algorithm that doesn't bother creating a model of the yard. The robot just bounces around until the battery runs out. Eventually the laws of random chance mean that every blade should be snipped, but the batteries aren't strong enough to reach that point at infinity. A model might help prevent random lapses, but that still won't solve the problem. Alas, the machines themselves are limited by the lack of precision. One degree of error quickly turns into several feet by the other end of the yard. A robot wouldn't be able to follow a plan, even if it could compute one.

What's missing, Brooks decides, is some secret sauce he calls "the juice". Computation and AFSMs may work with cockroaches, but we need something more to get to the next level. Faster computers can do much more, but eventually we see through the mechanism. Genghis looks cool, but learning about the 57 AFSMs spoils the trick.

The standard criticism of Brooks' machines is that they don't scale. There is no superglue juice that can save a scaffolding built of toothpicks. The AFSM may produce good cockroaches, but that's just the beginning of the game. Humans are more than that. Eventually, the AFSMs become too unwieldy to be a stable programming paradigm. In fact, Brooks sort of agrees with this premise when he suggests that Genghis is his "most satisfying robot." It was also one of the first. The later models with more AFSMs just don't rank.

But humans and other living creatures don't scale either. We may be able to run 20 miles per hour, but only for 100 yards. We may be able to troll for flames on five bulletin boards, but eventually we get our pseudonyms confused. Limits are part of life and we only survive by forgiving them. To some extent, the lifelike qualities of his robots are direct results of the self-imposed limits of the AFSMs.

Your reaction to these machines will largely depend upon how many of the limits you are willing to forgive. Stern taskmasters may never be happy with a so-called robot, but a relaxed fellow traveller may ignore enough of the glitches to interface successfully. Some will see enough of themselves to be happy with the whirring gizmos as a portrait of human and others may never find what they're looking for. That's just the nature of portraits. For me, this book is an excellent portrait of a research program and the collection of questions it tried to answer. You may look in the mirror and want something different, but it's worth taking a look at these machines.

Peter Wayner is the author of two books appearing this spring: the second edition of Disappearing Cryptography , a book about steganography, and Translucent Databases , a book about adding extra security to databases. You can purchase Flesh and Machines from Barnes & Noble. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Peter Wayner writes: "A long time ago, I posed for a portrait at a church fair. The priest wandered by, paused for a second, and then caught up to me later. "Do you like the picture?" he asked. When I said it was fine, he told me, "Oh, I think its terrible. It doesn't look like you at all. But that doesn't matter. The artist is supposed to create a picture of what you think you look like." Read on to see what this has to do with robots as Peter reviews Rod Brook's new book. Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us author Rod Brooks pages 260 publisher Pantheon Books rating 8 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0375420797 summary A charming look at an unconventional (and powerful) way to think about and design robots.

In a way, robots are portraits of humans. Machines are just machines and assembly lines are just assembly lines. The buckets of bolts don't become robots until they start to take on some of the characteristics and a few of the jobs of humans. A drill for tightening a bolt may replace a biceps, but it's just a motor until it's on the end of a fancy mechanical arm that positions it automatically. Then it's a robot ready for a call from central casting.

Defining just what is and is not a robot is not an easy job for technologists because the replicants and androids are a touchstone and a benchmark for measuring our progress toward the future. It's 2002 and everyone is asking: Where's mad Hal steering a space craft to oblivion? Or more importantly: Why am I still vacuuming the floors and mowing the lawn by myself?

If you are asking these questions, then you might want to read the answers Rod Brooks, the director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, offers in his charming book, Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us. The book is half a thoughtful biography of the various robots created by his graduate students and half a philosophical explanation of what to expect from the gradual emergence of robot butlers.

The biographical part is probably the most enjoyable. He and his students have produced more than a dozen memorable robots who've crawled, rolled and paced their way around MIT. One searched for Coke cans to recycle, one tried to give tours to visitors, and another just tried to hold a conversation. Brooks spends time outlining how and why each machine can into being. The successes and more importantly the failures become the basis for creating a new benchmark for what machines can and can't do.

An ideal version of this book should include a DVD or a video cassette with pictures of the robots in action because the movement is surprisingly lifelike. Brooks is something of a celebrity because a film maker named Errol Morris made a droll, deadpan documentary that cut between four eccentric geniuses talking about their work. One guy sculpted topiary, one tamed lions, one studied naked mole rats, and the fourth was Rod Brooks, the man who made robots. Brooks minted the title for the film, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, a phrase he uses to describe his philosophy for creating robots. The movie tried to suss out the essence of genius, but it makes a perfect counterpoint for the book by providing some visual evidence of Brooks' success.

One of the stars of the movie was a six-legged robot called Genghis, a collection of high-torque RC airplane servo motors that Brooks feels is the best or most fully-realized embodiment of this fast and cheap approach. The robot marches along with a surprisingly life-like gait chasing after the right kind of radiation to tickle the IR and pyro-electric sensors mounted on whiskers. If you've seen the film, it's hard to forget his gait.

Brooks says that the secret to the success of Genghis is that there is no secret. The book's appendix provides an essential exploration of the design, which is short and very simple. The soul of the machine has 57 neuron-like subroutines, or "augmented finite state machines" in academic speak. For instance, one of the AFSMs responsible for balance constantly checks the force on a motor. If it is less than 7, the AFSM does nothing and if it is greater than 11, the AFSM reduces the force by three. That's doesn't seem like very much intelligence be it artificial or real, but 57 neuron-like subroutines like this are all it takes to create a fairly good imitation of a cockroach.

Brooks calls this a "subsumption architecture" and the book is most successful describing the days that he spent with his graduate students building robots and seeing what the architecture and a handful of AFSMs could do. He half mocks the roboticists who load up their machines with big computers trying to compute complex models of the world and all that is in it. In his eyes, the lumbering old-school machines just move a few inches and then devote a gazillion cycles to creating a detailed, digital description of every plant, brick or wayward child in the field of view. After a few more gazillion cycles, the machine chooses a path and moves a few more inches. Even when they find their way, time passes them by.

There are no complex control mechanisms sucking down cycles on the machines from Brooks' lab, the source of the claim that they're "out of control". It's just AFSMs wired together. One of the robots fakes human interaction by tracking fast motion and flesh colored pixels. Brooks marvels at how a few simple rules can produce a machine that is remarkably life-like. If you're not sure, they have video tapes of lab visitors holding conversations with the machine, who apparently takes part in the conversation with the patient interest of a well-bred host. As if by magic, the AFSMs are creating enough human-like movement and visitor in the tape begins treating the robot like a human!

If you're still not sure, you might buy a "My Real Baby" doll designed by Brooks with the help of the adept mechanical geniuses in Taiwan. The story of taking a highbrow concept from MIT to the local toy store is a great part of the book. The so-called toy is filled with AFSMs that tell it when to gurgle, when to pout, when to sleep, and when to demand sustenance. Alas, the toy makers tell Brooks that the market can't stomach so much innovation. One new thing at a time.

So are these machines truly successful simulacra? Are they infused with enough of the human condition to qualify as the science-fiction-grade robots or are they just cute parlor tricks? Some readers will probably point to the AFSMs and scoff. Seeing the code is like learning the secret to a magic trick.

Brooks, on the other hand, is sure that these machines are on the right track. In a sense, he makes it easier for his robots to catch up with humans by lowering the bar. On the back of the book, Brooks ladles out the schmaltz and proclaims, "We are machines, as are our spouses, our children and our dogs... I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines." That is, we're all just a slightly more involved collection of simple neurons that don't do much more than the balance mechanism of Genghis. You may think that you're deeply in love with the City of Florence, the ideal of democratic discourse, that raven-haired beauty three rows up, puppy dogs, or rainy nights cuddled under warm blankets, but according to the Brooks paradigm, you're just a bunch of AFSMs passing numbers back and forth.

If you think this extreme position means he's a few AFSMs short of a robot professor though, don't worry. Brooks backs away from this characterization when he takes on some of the bigger questions of what it means to be a human and what it means to be a machine. The latter part of the book focuses on what we can and can't do with artificial intelligence. He is very much a realist with the ability to admit what is working and what is failing. His machines definitely capture a spark, he notes, but they also fall short.

He notes with some chagrin that his robot lawnmower leaves behind tufts of uncut grass. Why? It uses a subsumption-like algorithm that doesn't bother creating a model of the yard. The robot just bounces around until the battery runs out. Eventually the laws of random chance mean that every blade should be snipped, but the batteries aren't strong enough to reach that point at infinity. A model might help prevent random lapses, but that still won't solve the problem. Alas, the machines themselves are limited by the lack of precision. One degree of error quickly turns into several feet by the other end of the yard. A robot wouldn't be able to follow a plan, even if it could compute one.

What's missing, Brooks decides, is some secret sauce he calls "the juice". Computation and AFSMs may work with cockroaches, but we need something more to get to the next level. Faster computers can do much more, but eventually we see through the mechanism. Genghis looks cool, but learning about the 57 AFSMs spoils the trick.

The standard criticism of Brooks' machines is that they don't scale. There is no superglue juice that can save a scaffolding built of toothpicks. The AFSM may produce good cockroaches, but that's just the beginning of the game. Humans are more than that. Eventually, the AFSMs become too unwieldy to be a stable programming paradigm. In fact, Brooks sort of agrees with this premise when he suggests that Genghis is his "most satisfying robot." It was also one of the first. The later models with more AFSMs just don't rank.

But humans and other living creatures don't scale either. We may be able to run 20 miles per hour, but only for 100 yards. We may be able to troll for flames on five bulletin boards, but eventually we get our pseudonyms confused. Limits are part of life and we only survive by forgiving them. To some extent, the lifelike qualities of his robots are direct results of the self-imposed limits of the AFSMs.

Your reaction to these machines will largely depend upon how many of the limits you are willing to forgive. Stern taskmasters may never be happy with a so-called robot, but a relaxed fellow traveller may ignore enough of the glitches to interface successfully. Some will see enough of themselves to be happy with the whirring gizmos as a portrait of human and others may never find what they're looking for. That's just the nature of portraits. For me, this book is an excellent portrait of a research program and the collection of questions it tried to answer. You may look in the mirror and want something different, but it's worth taking a look at these machines.

Peter Wayner is the author of two books appearing this spring: the second edition of Disappearing Cryptography , a book about steganography, and Translucent Databases , a book about adding extra security to databases. You can purchase Flesh and Machines from Barnes & Noble. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Peter Wayner writes: "Metaphors drawn from biology have always fascinated computer scientists. No one speaks of subroutines that cp themselves through undocumented remote procedure calls because talk of 'computer viruses' carries all of the portent and weight of polio, anthrax, German Measles and tuberculosis. Invoking these mysterious and deadly images is more colorful than tech speak, even if most of the so-called viruses are closer to the common cold than the black plague. Why use a three-letter acronym when a biological metaphor is available?" Wayner wrote the following review of Peter J. Bentley's book Digital Biology, which may just answer that question. Digital Biology author Peter J. Bentley pages 272 publisher Simon and Shuster rating 7.5 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0-7432-0447-6 summary Does a good job of bridging the analogical gap between the worlds of computers and biology; may not be deep but will probably enlighten readers with an interest in either or both of these fields.

It should come as no surprise that the infatuation is requited because some biologists are just as fascinated with the bits that live in computers. They love to wonder whether the software crosses the line and become a sentient being, whatever that may be. They want to know whether a programmer can play Dr. Frankenstein and create life or at least an indistinguishable imitation. They are entranced with the computer's ability to boil vast amounts of data into a coherent answer and they want to harness this power to solve problems about truly organic creatures.

Peter J. Bentley's new book, Digital Biology is a lively tour through some of the research that joins both of these worlds. It's a quickly paced, colorful examination of how computer scientists and biologists can share metaphors like "the immune system" or "growth." If both groups sit down and compare metaphors, computer scientists may learn something about building robust, self-healing, self-reproducing software from looking at carbon- based creatures while biologists will learn something about creatures by studying them with silicon-based software software.

The book is aimed at the same market that embraced the meme of "Chaos" through reading James Gleick's book. The book is light on equations and heavy on showmanship. In many cases, this is more than satisfying. One description of digital flocks of birds describes how three simple rules can keep the birds floating and swarming with all of the coordinated rolling and swooping. There's no need to invoke numbers or distance measurements to convey what's happening.

At other times, the examples can be so tantalizing that the lack of depth can be a bit frustrating. Bentley promises "The number of different applications that we have successfully used evolution for is immense." To explain this, he offers an example of a coffee table designed by a computer program mixing, matching and cross-breeding varieties. After each generation, the computer cuts some desks apart, creates new combinations and then uses an equation to find the most fit and desirable desks. Eventually, a reasonable candidate emerges. After explaining that genetic algorithms may find patterns of credit card fraud and help us find better jet turbine blades, there's no space to tell us the finer details. We do learn that stunning results can emerge when computer programmers mix the three principles of inheritance, variation and selection. But no book can include everything.

While the book is aimed at a broad market, it does not come with many of the traditional flourishes of journalism. Bentley is research fellow at University College in London, not a newspaper hack who churns out stories for a living. So when he introduces other researchers and colleagues, he doesn't bother with dressing them up with details about their homes, their wives, or the usual chestnuts journalists offer in the hope of humanizing the subjects. The book focuses on the ideas and metaphors themselves and doesn't bother with the window dressing. The names are just incidental markers to give credit and a pointer for further research. Scientists will love the lack of distraction, but casual readers looking for colorful anecdotes about the wacky geniuses in labcoats will need to look elsewhere.

The book, as expected, is generally enthusiastic and heavily invested in the field. Software modeled on biological systems, we are told, will, "detect crime for us, identify faults, ... design new products for us, create art, and compose music."

Despite this partisan flavor, the book shines in the few paragraphs where Bentley pauses to discuss some of the limitations of the systems. "We cannot prove that evolution will find us a good solution-- but it almost invariably does. And we certainly cannot predict that solutions that evolution generates," he notes as a caveat to everyone planning to use genetic programming to solve world peace.

At one point, he discusses one of the principle criticisms of the entire area. After describing flourishing digital forests filled with fractal ferns, problem solving viruses, and swooping swarms of evolving birds and insects, he pauses and offers this quote from another biologist: "Where's the experiment?" He notes that most of these creatures are flights of our imagination untested in the lab against real ferns, viruses or birds. Nor is there any real way to test a fern hypothesis. The digital versions look real, but there's little gritty lab work to establish them as true metaphors for sussing out the secret laws of nature. Is looking real enough? Can you measure verisimilitude? Do any traditional experiments measure anything better than the quality of a simulacrum? Is appearance enough or is it only skin deep? After a pause, though, the book is on to more talk of big payoff and grand promises.

In its heart, the book is more a document that shows evolution of problem solving techniques. If you want to get the sales pitch from the computational biology world, you can turn to this book. When there were no machines, scientists used symbols, algebra, calculus and other mathematics to describe the world. Biologists have long employed differential equations to describe the booms and bust in ecologies of predators and prey. Now that we have computers capable of billions of operations in a second, we don't need the old school of mathematics to provide a closed-form solution. The computers can just simulate the world itself. There's no need to struggle for a set of equations that is both easy-to-solve and appropriate. We can just use little worlds of sims creatures, sim fronds, sim viruses, and sim antibodies.

Bentley's book is an ideal way to learn just how and why some biologists are absolute enraptured with the new powers discovered by these computer simulations of genetics, growth, flocking and other natural phenomenon. These models don't offer the kind of concrete certainty of mathematical models, but there's no denying that something is somehow there. Is it as much a breakthrough as Bentley believes? Well, maybe you the reader can create a genetic experiment to cross fertilize the ideas from the book with the ideas in your experience. After a few generations of thought, perhaps a few generations of beer, an answer might evolve.

Peter Wayner is the author of Free for All, a book on the open source software movement and Disappearing Cryptography , the second edition of a book on steganography expected to appear later this spring. He is also the author of several articles on simulation including studies of studies of the relationship between sex and AIDS , segregation , and the length of baseball games. (Each of these links includes a Java applet so you can run the simulator from your browser.) You can purchase Digital Biology from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Peter Wayner writes: "Metaphors drawn from biology have always fascinated computer scientists. No one speaks of subroutines that cp themselves through undocumented remote procedure calls because talk of 'computer viruses' carries all of the portent and weight of polio, anthrax, German Measles and tuberculosis. Invoking these mysterious and deadly images is more colorful than tech speak, even if most of the so-called viruses are closer to the common cold than the black plague. Why use a three-letter acronym when a biological metaphor is available?" Wayner wrote the following review of Peter J. Bentley's book Digital Biology, which may just answer that question. Digital Biology author Peter J. Bentley pages 272 publisher Simon and Shuster rating 7.5 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0-7432-0447-6 summary Does a good job of bridging the analogical gap between the worlds of computers and biology; may not be deep but will probably enlighten readers with an interest in either or both of these fields.

It should come as no surprise that the infatuation is requited because some biologists are just as fascinated with the bits that live in computers. They love to wonder whether the software crosses the line and become a sentient being, whatever that may be. They want to know whether a programmer can play Dr. Frankenstein and create life or at least an indistinguishable imitation. They are entranced with the computer's ability to boil vast amounts of data into a coherent answer and they want to harness this power to solve problems about truly organic creatures.

Peter J. Bentley's new book, Digital Biology is a lively tour through some of the research that joins both of these worlds. It's a quickly paced, colorful examination of how computer scientists and biologists can share metaphors like "the immune system" or "growth." If both groups sit down and compare metaphors, computer scientists may learn something about building robust, self-healing, self-reproducing software from looking at carbon- based creatures while biologists will learn something about creatures by studying them with silicon-based software software.

The book is aimed at the same market that embraced the meme of "Chaos" through reading James Gleick's book. The book is light on equations and heavy on showmanship. In many cases, this is more than satisfying. One description of digital flocks of birds describes how three simple rules can keep the birds floating and swarming with all of the coordinated rolling and swooping. There's no need to invoke numbers or distance measurements to convey what's happening.

At other times, the examples can be so tantalizing that the lack of depth can be a bit frustrating. Bentley promises "The number of different applications that we have successfully used evolution for is immense." To explain this, he offers an example of a coffee table designed by a computer program mixing, matching and cross-breeding varieties. After each generation, the computer cuts some desks apart, creates new combinations and then uses an equation to find the most fit and desirable desks. Eventually, a reasonable candidate emerges. After explaining that genetic algorithms may find patterns of credit card fraud and help us find better jet turbine blades, there's no space to tell us the finer details. We do learn that stunning results can emerge when computer programmers mix the three principles of inheritance, variation and selection. But no book can include everything.

While the book is aimed at a broad market, it does not come with many of the traditional flourishes of journalism. Bentley is research fellow at University College in London, not a newspaper hack who churns out stories for a living. So when he introduces other researchers and colleagues, he doesn't bother with dressing them up with details about their homes, their wives, or the usual chestnuts journalists offer in the hope of humanizing the subjects. The book focuses on the ideas and metaphors themselves and doesn't bother with the window dressing. The names are just incidental markers to give credit and a pointer for further research. Scientists will love the lack of distraction, but casual readers looking for colorful anecdotes about the wacky geniuses in labcoats will need to look elsewhere.

The book, as expected, is generally enthusiastic and heavily invested in the field. Software modeled on biological systems, we are told, will, "detect crime for us, identify faults, ... design new products for us, create art, and compose music."

Despite this partisan flavor, the book shines in the few paragraphs where Bentley pauses to discuss some of the limitations of the systems. "We cannot prove that evolution will find us a good solution-- but it almost invariably does. And we certainly cannot predict that solutions that evolution generates," he notes as a caveat to everyone planning to use genetic programming to solve world peace.

At one point, he discusses one of the principle criticisms of the entire area. After describing flourishing digital forests filled with fractal ferns, problem solving viruses, and swooping swarms of evolving birds and insects, he pauses and offers this quote from another biologist: "Where's the experiment?" He notes that most of these creatures are flights of our imagination untested in the lab against real ferns, viruses or birds. Nor is there any real way to test a fern hypothesis. The digital versions look real, but there's little gritty lab work to establish them as true metaphors for sussing out the secret laws of nature. Is looking real enough? Can you measure verisimilitude? Do any traditional experiments measure anything better than the quality of a simulacrum? Is appearance enough or is it only skin deep? After a pause, though, the book is on to more talk of big payoff and grand promises.

In its heart, the book is more a document that shows evolution of problem solving techniques. If you want to get the sales pitch from the computational biology world, you can turn to this book. When there were no machines, scientists used symbols, algebra, calculus and other mathematics to describe the world. Biologists have long employed differential equations to describe the booms and bust in ecologies of predators and prey. Now that we have computers capable of billions of operations in a second, we don't need the old school of mathematics to provide a closed-form solution. The computers can just simulate the world itself. There's no need to struggle for a set of equations that is both easy-to-solve and appropriate. We can just use little worlds of sims creatures, sim fronds, sim viruses, and sim antibodies.

Bentley's book is an ideal way to learn just how and why some biologists are absolute enraptured with the new powers discovered by these computer simulations of genetics, growth, flocking and other natural phenomenon. These models don't offer the kind of concrete certainty of mathematical models, but there's no denying that something is somehow there. Is it as much a breakthrough as Bentley believes? Well, maybe you the reader can create a genetic experiment to cross fertilize the ideas from the book with the ideas in your experience. After a few generations of thought, perhaps a few generations of beer, an answer might evolve.

Peter Wayner is the author of Free for All, a book on the open source software movement and Disappearing Cryptography , the second edition of a book on steganography expected to appear later this spring. He is also the author of several articles on simulation including studies of studies of the relationship between sex and AIDS , segregation , and the length of baseball games. (Each of these links includes a Java applet so you can run the simulator from your browser.) You can purchase Digital Biology from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Peter Wayner writes: "Metaphors drawn from biology have always fascinated computer scientists. No one speaks of subroutines that cp themselves through undocumented remote procedure calls because talk of 'computer viruses' carries all of the portent and weight of polio, anthrax, German Measles and tuberculosis. Invoking these mysterious and deadly images is more colorful than tech speak, even if most of the so-called viruses are closer to the common cold than the black plague. Why use a three-letter acronym when a biological metaphor is available?" Wayner wrote the following review of Peter J. Bentley's book Digital Biology, which may just answer that question. Digital Biology author Peter J. Bentley pages 272 publisher Simon and Shuster rating 7.5 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0-7432-0447-6 summary Does a good job of bridging the analogical gap between the worlds of computers and biology; may not be deep but will probably enlighten readers with an interest in either or both of these fields.

It should come as no surprise that the infatuation is requited because some biologists are just as fascinated with the bits that live in computers. They love to wonder whether the software crosses the line and become a sentient being, whatever that may be. They want to know whether a programmer can play Dr. Frankenstein and create life or at least an indistinguishable imitation. They are entranced with the computer's ability to boil vast amounts of data into a coherent answer and they want to harness this power to solve problems about truly organic creatures.

Peter J. Bentley's new book, Digital Biology is a lively tour through some of the research that joins both of these worlds. It's a quickly paced, colorful examination of how computer scientists and biologists can share metaphors like "the immune system" or "growth." If both groups sit down and compare metaphors, computer scientists may learn something about building robust, self-healing, self-reproducing software from looking at carbon- based creatures while biologists will learn something about creatures by studying them with silicon-based software software.

The book is aimed at the same market that embraced the meme of "Chaos" through reading James Gleick's book. The book is light on equations and heavy on showmanship. In many cases, this is more than satisfying. One description of digital flocks of birds describes how three simple rules can keep the birds floating and swarming with all of the coordinated rolling and swooping. There's no need to invoke numbers or distance measurements to convey what's happening.

At other times, the examples can be so tantalizing that the lack of depth can be a bit frustrating. Bentley promises "The number of different applications that we have successfully used evolution for is immense." To explain this, he offers an example of a coffee table designed by a computer program mixing, matching and cross-breeding varieties. After each generation, the computer cuts some desks apart, creates new combinations and then uses an equation to find the most fit and desirable desks. Eventually, a reasonable candidate emerges. After explaining that genetic algorithms may find patterns of credit card fraud and help us find better jet turbine blades, there's no space to tell us the finer details. We do learn that stunning results can emerge when computer programmers mix the three principles of inheritance, variation and selection. But no book can include everything.

While the book is aimed at a broad market, it does not come with many of the traditional flourishes of journalism. Bentley is research fellow at University College in London, not a newspaper hack who churns out stories for a living. So when he introduces other researchers and colleagues, he doesn't bother with dressing them up with details about their homes, their wives, or the usual chestnuts journalists offer in the hope of humanizing the subjects. The book focuses on the ideas and metaphors themselves and doesn't bother with the window dressing. The names are just incidental markers to give credit and a pointer for further research. Scientists will love the lack of distraction, but casual readers looking for colorful anecdotes about the wacky geniuses in labcoats will need to look elsewhere.

The book, as expected, is generally enthusiastic and heavily invested in the field. Software modeled on biological systems, we are told, will, "detect crime for us, identify faults, ... design new products for us, create art, and compose music."

Despite this partisan flavor, the book shines in the few paragraphs where Bentley pauses to discuss some of the limitations of the systems. "We cannot prove that evolution will find us a good solution-- but it almost invariably does. And we certainly cannot predict that solutions that evolution generates," he notes as a caveat to everyone planning to use genetic programming to solve world peace.

At one point, he discusses one of the principle criticisms of the entire area. After describing flourishing digital forests filled with fractal ferns, problem solving viruses, and swooping swarms of evolving birds and insects, he pauses and offers this quote from another biologist: "Where's the experiment?" He notes that most of these creatures are flights of our imagination untested in the lab against real ferns, viruses or birds. Nor is there any real way to test a fern hypothesis. The digital versions look real, but there's little gritty lab work to establish them as true metaphors for sussing out the secret laws of nature. Is looking real enough? Can you measure verisimilitude? Do any traditional experiments measure anything better than the quality of a simulacrum? Is appearance enough or is it only skin deep? After a pause, though, the book is on to more talk of big payoff and grand promises.

In its heart, the book is more a document that shows evolution of problem solving techniques. If you want to get the sales pitch from the computational biology world, you can turn to this book. When there were no machines, scientists used symbols, algebra, calculus and other mathematics to describe the world. Biologists have long employed differential equations to describe the booms and bust in ecologies of predators and prey. Now that we have computers capable of billions of operations in a second, we don't need the old school of mathematics to provide a closed-form solution. The computers can just simulate the world itself. There's no need to struggle for a set of equations that is both easy-to-solve and appropriate. We can just use little worlds of sims creatures, sim fronds, sim viruses, and sim antibodies.

Bentley's book is an ideal way to learn just how and why some biologists are absolute enraptured with the new powers discovered by these computer simulations of genetics, growth, flocking and other natural phenomenon. These models don't offer the kind of concrete certainty of mathematical models, but there's no denying that something is somehow there. Is it as much a breakthrough as Bentley believes? Well, maybe you the reader can create a genetic experiment to cross fertilize the ideas from the book with the ideas in your experience. After a few generations of thought, perhaps a few generations of beer, an answer might evolve.

Peter Wayner is the author of Free for All, a book on the open source software movement and Disappearing Cryptography , the second edition of a book on steganography expected to appear later this spring. He is also the author of several articles on simulation including studies of studies of the relationship between sex and AIDS , segregation , and the length of baseball games. (Each of these links includes a Java applet so you can run the simulator from your browser.) You can purchase Digital Biology from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Peter Wayner writes: "Metaphors drawn from biology have always fascinated computer scientists. No one speaks of subroutines that cp themselves through undocumented remote procedure calls because talk of 'computer viruses' carries all of the portent and weight of polio, anthrax, German Measles and tuberculosis. Invoking these mysterious and deadly images is more colorful than tech speak, even if most of the so-called viruses are closer to the common cold than the black plague. Why use a three-letter acronym when a biological metaphor is available?" Wayner wrote the following review of Peter J. Bentley's book Digital Biology, which may just answer that question. Digital Biology author Peter J. Bentley pages 272 publisher Simon and Shuster rating 7.5 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0-7432-0447-6 summary Does a good job of bridging the analogical gap between the worlds of computers and biology; may not be deep but will probably enlighten readers with an interest in either or both of these fields.

It should come as no surprise that the infatuation is requited because some biologists are just as fascinated with the bits that live in computers. They love to wonder whether the software crosses the line and become a sentient being, whatever that may be. They want to know whether a programmer can play Dr. Frankenstein and create life or at least an indistinguishable imitation. They are entranced with the computer's ability to boil vast amounts of data into a coherent answer and they want to harness this power to solve problems about truly organic creatures.

Peter J. Bentley's new book, Digital Biology is a lively tour through some of the research that joins both of these worlds. It's a quickly paced, colorful examination of how computer scientists and biologists can share metaphors like "the immune system" or "growth." If both groups sit down and compare metaphors, computer scientists may learn something about building robust, self-healing, self-reproducing software from looking at carbon- based creatures while biologists will learn something about creatures by studying them with silicon-based software software.

The book is aimed at the same market that embraced the meme of "Chaos" through reading James Gleick's book. The book is light on equations and heavy on showmanship. In many cases, this is more than satisfying. One description of digital flocks of birds describes how three simple rules can keep the birds floating and swarming with all of the coordinated rolling and swooping. There's no need to invoke numbers or distance measurements to convey what's happening.

At other times, the examples can be so tantalizing that the lack of depth can be a bit frustrating. Bentley promises "The number of different applications that we have successfully used evolution for is immense." To explain this, he offers an example of a coffee table designed by a computer program mixing, matching and cross-breeding varieties. After each generation, the computer cuts some desks apart, creates new combinations and then uses an equation to find the most fit and desirable desks. Eventually, a reasonable candidate emerges. After explaining that genetic algorithms may find patterns of credit card fraud and help us find better jet turbine blades, there's no space to tell us the finer details. We do learn that stunning results can emerge when computer programmers mix the three principles of inheritance, variation and selection. But no book can include everything.

While the book is aimed at a broad market, it does not come with many of the traditional flourishes of journalism. Bentley is research fellow at University College in London, not a newspaper hack who churns out stories for a living. So when he introduces other researchers and colleagues, he doesn't bother with dressing them up with details about their homes, their wives, or the usual chestnuts journalists offer in the hope of humanizing the subjects. The book focuses on the ideas and metaphors themselves and doesn't bother with the window dressing. The names are just incidental markers to give credit and a pointer for further research. Scientists will love the lack of distraction, but casual readers looking for colorful anecdotes about the wacky geniuses in labcoats will need to look elsewhere.

The book, as expected, is generally enthusiastic and heavily invested in the field. Software modeled on biological systems, we are told, will, "detect crime for us, identify faults, ... design new products for us, create art, and compose music."

Despite this partisan flavor, the book shines in the few paragraphs where Bentley pauses to discuss some of the limitations of the systems. "We cannot prove that evolution will find us a good solution-- but it almost invariably does. And we certainly cannot predict that solutions that evolution generates," he notes as a caveat to everyone planning to use genetic programming to solve world peace.

At one point, he discusses one of the principle criticisms of the entire area. After describing flourishing digital forests filled with fractal ferns, problem solving viruses, and swooping swarms of evolving birds and insects, he pauses and offers this quote from another biologist: "Where's the experiment?" He notes that most of these creatures are flights of our imagination untested in the lab against real ferns, viruses or birds. Nor is there any real way to test a fern hypothesis. The digital versions look real, but there's little gritty lab work to establish them as true metaphors for sussing out the secret laws of nature. Is looking real enough? Can you measure verisimilitude? Do any traditional experiments measure anything better than the quality of a simulacrum? Is appearance enough or is it only skin deep? After a pause, though, the book is on to more talk of big payoff and grand promises.

In its heart, the book is more a document that shows evolution of problem solving techniques. If you want to get the sales pitch from the computational biology world, you can turn to this book. When there were no machines, scientists used symbols, algebra, calculus and other mathematics to describe the world. Biologists have long employed differential equations to describe the booms and bust in ecologies of predators and prey. Now that we have computers capable of billions of operations in a second, we don't need the old school of mathematics to provide a closed-form solution. The computers can just simulate the world itself. There's no need to struggle for a set of equations that is both easy-to-solve and appropriate. We can just use little worlds of sims creatures, sim fronds, sim viruses, and sim antibodies.

Bentley's book is an ideal way to learn just how and why some biologists are absolute enraptured with the new powers discovered by these computer simulations of genetics, growth, flocking and other natural phenomenon. These models don't offer the kind of concrete certainty of mathematical models, but there's no denying that something is somehow there. Is it as much a breakthrough as Bentley believes? Well, maybe you the reader can create a genetic experiment to cross fertilize the ideas from the book with the ideas in your experience. After a few generations of thought, perhaps a few generations of beer, an answer might evolve.

Peter Wayner is the author of Free for All, a book on the open source software movement and Disappearing Cryptography , the second edition of a book on steganography expected to appear later this spring. He is also the author of several articles on simulation including studies of studies of the relationship between sex and AIDS , segregation , and the length of baseball games. (Each of these links includes a Java applet so you can run the simulator from your browser.) You can purchase Digital Biology from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Peter Wayner writes: "Metaphors drawn from biology have always fascinated computer scientists. No one speaks of subroutines that cp themselves through undocumented remote procedure calls because talk of 'computer viruses' carries all of the portent and weight of polio, anthrax, German Measles and tuberculosis. Invoking these mysterious and deadly images is more colorful than tech speak, even if most of the so-called viruses are closer to the common cold than the black plague. Why use a three-letter acronym when a biological metaphor is available?" Wayner wrote the following review of Peter J. Bentley's book Digital Biology, which may just answer that question. Digital Biology author Peter J. Bentley pages 272 publisher Simon and Shuster rating 7.5 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0-7432-0447-6 summary Does a good job of bridging the analogical gap between the worlds of computers and biology; may not be deep but will probably enlighten readers with an interest in either or both of these fields.

It should come as no surprise that the infatuation is requited because some biologists are just as fascinated with the bits that live in computers. They love to wonder whether the software crosses the line and become a sentient being, whatever that may be. They want to know whether a programmer can play Dr. Frankenstein and create life or at least an indistinguishable imitation. They are entranced with the computer's ability to boil vast amounts of data into a coherent answer and they want to harness this power to solve problems about truly organic creatures.

Peter J. Bentley's new book, Digital Biology is a lively tour through some of the research that joins both of these worlds. It's a quickly paced, colorful examination of how computer scientists and biologists can share metaphors like "the immune system" or "growth." If both groups sit down and compare metaphors, computer scientists may learn something about building robust, self-healing, self-reproducing software from looking at carbon- based creatures while biologists will learn something about creatures by studying them with silicon-based software software.

The book is aimed at the same market that embraced the meme of "Chaos" through reading James Gleick's book. The book is light on equations and heavy on showmanship. In many cases, this is more than satisfying. One description of digital flocks of birds describes how three simple rules can keep the birds floating and swarming with all of the coordinated rolling and swooping. There's no need to invoke numbers or distance measurements to convey what's happening.

At other times, the examples can be so tantalizing that the lack of depth can be a bit frustrating. Bentley promises "The number of different applications that we have successfully used evolution for is immense." To explain this, he offers an example of a coffee table designed by a computer program mixing, matching and cross-breeding varieties. After each generation, the computer cuts some desks apart, creates new combinations and then uses an equation to find the most fit and desirable desks. Eventually, a reasonable candidate emerges. After explaining that genetic algorithms may find patterns of credit card fraud and help us find better jet turbine blades, there's no space to tell us the finer details. We do learn that stunning results can emerge when computer programmers mix the three principles of inheritance, variation and selection. But no book can include everything.

While the book is aimed at a broad market, it does not come with many of the traditional flourishes of journalism. Bentley is research fellow at University College in London, not a newspaper hack who churns out stories for a living. So when he introduces other researchers and colleagues, he doesn't bother with dressing them up with details about their homes, their wives, or the usual chestnuts journalists offer in the hope of humanizing the subjects. The book focuses on the ideas and metaphors themselves and doesn't bother with the window dressing. The names are just incidental markers to give credit and a pointer for further research. Scientists will love the lack of distraction, but casual readers looking for colorful anecdotes about the wacky geniuses in labcoats will need to look elsewhere.

The book, as expected, is generally enthusiastic and heavily invested in the field. Software modeled on biological systems, we are told, will, "detect crime for us, identify faults, ... design new products for us, create art, and compose music."

Despite this partisan flavor, the book shines in the few paragraphs where Bentley pauses to discuss some of the limitations of the systems. "We cannot prove that evolution will find us a good solution-- but it almost invariably does. And we certainly cannot predict that solutions that evolution generates," he notes as a caveat to everyone planning to use genetic programming to solve world peace.

At one point, he discusses one of the principle criticisms of the entire area. After describing flourishing digital forests filled with fractal ferns, problem solving viruses, and swooping swarms of evolving birds and insects, he pauses and offers this quote from another biologist: "Where's the experiment?" He notes that most of these creatures are flights of our imagination untested in the lab against real ferns, viruses or birds. Nor is there any real way to test a fern hypothesis. The digital versions look real, but there's little gritty lab work to establish them as true metaphors for sussing out the secret laws of nature. Is looking real enough? Can you measure verisimilitude? Do any traditional experiments measure anything better than the quality of a simulacrum? Is appearance enough or is it only skin deep? After a pause, though, the book is on to more talk of big payoff and grand promises.

In its heart, the book is more a document that shows evolution of problem solving techniques. If you want to get the sales pitch from the computational biology world, you can turn to this book. When there were no machines, scientists used symbols, algebra, calculus and other mathematics to describe the world. Biologists have long employed differential equations to describe the booms and bust in ecologies of predators and prey. Now that we have computers capable of billions of operations in a second, we don't need the old school of mathematics to provide a closed-form solution. The computers can just simulate the world itself. There's no need to struggle for a set of equations that is both easy-to-solve and appropriate. We can just use little worlds of sims creatures, sim fronds, sim viruses, and sim antibodies.

Bentley's book is an ideal way to learn just how and why some biologists are absolute enraptured with the new powers discovered by these computer simulations of genetics, growth, flocking and other natural phenomenon. These models don't offer the kind of concrete certainty of mathematical models, but there's no denying that something is somehow there. Is it as much a breakthrough as Bentley believes? Well, maybe you the reader can create a genetic experiment to cross fertilize the ideas from the book with the ideas in your experience. After a few generations of thought, perhaps a few generations of beer, an answer might evolve.

Peter Wayner is the author of Free for All, a book on the open source software movement and Disappearing Cryptography , the second edition of a book on steganography expected to appear later this spring. He is also the author of several articles on simulation including studies of studies of the relationship between sex and AIDS , segregation , and the length of baseball games. (Each of these links includes a Java applet so you can run the simulator from your browser.) You can purchase Digital Biology from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

You may remember Peter Wayner as the author of the Slashdot-reviewed books Free for All and Disappearing Cryptography (Version 2 due this spring); he's also the author of seven other books. Wayner recently inteviewed Stanford's Internet and legal luminary Lawrence Lessig; their conversation is below. Lessig touches on some ground familiar from his recent Slashdot interview, but also explores a few issues you may not have heard him delve into before.

Peter Wayner: You offer a number of proposals for keeping the layers of the Internet and the software world independent. The U.S. tried to pursue these same goals in the early part of the 1900s in the hope of limiting trusts and conglomerates, but much of that spirit has faded. Can you draw many lessons from the past?

Lawrence Lessig: Innovation always and only happens when the new is protected from the power of the old. The internet could take off only because the telecoms were not allowed to kill the competition; cable TV could thrive independent of the networks because copyright law was narrowed to mean that broadcasters couldn't leverage their power in broadcasting into control of cable.

PW: So it's not about monopolies or cartels as much as as the past and the future.

LL: Yes, these examples are not so much about "trustbusting" legislation. They are all about limitations on the power of the past to control the future.

PW: But surely the people who worked so hard in the past must be given something, if only to encourage new developers who want to have something when today and tomorrow becomes the past?

LL: I'm all for making sure that the "people" who "worked so hard in the past" be given "something." That's different from giving the companies of "the past" the power to stifle new innovation. We didn't give the horse-and-buggy industry the power to stop cars; or the railroads the power to crush commercial trucking. Why should we give (through government granted monopolies called "copyright") the labels the power to stop a new way to produce and distribute content? Or cable television the power to tilt the internet against new forms of video competition?

PW: Sometimes the future even helps the old alliances, if only because they're best prepared to take advantage of the competitive opportunities. The local phone companies complained about the Internet, but they've made a fortune on second lines. The coming of cable and satellite television has really helped everyone except the old broadcast networks and even they've benefitted. NBC has several cable channels. ABC is tightly aligned with ESPN. Is it possible that loosening copyright's grip might actually help the music industry?

LL: Would my proposals be "good for the industry itself?" Who's the industry? If you mean the existing labels? Then no, my proposals won't benefit them. If you mean artists and consumers, yes, the changes I describe would enable much greater innovation than is allowed just now, and that would benefit creators and consumers. I am not someone who believes that the future produces no losers. I just believe that the losers should not control the future.

PW: You open the book with a great example of the legal shackles that bind the film makers in Hollywood. I love the story of the chair designer who sued because his chair was in a film without his permission. Does it really make sense for an industry to push so many legal rights for artistic creations?

LL: It makes sense for those who can benefit, relative to others, from cumbersome legal regulation. Who is that? Old industries, protecting themselves from the new. A world where you need a lawyer to sneeze is a world where only the large and entrenched have the freedom to breathe.

PW: But sometimes the small fry can succeed. The freelance writers dealt the New York Times a big blow. I keep imagine that some coalition of artists will find a way to grab large, six figure damage awards from a label that underreported royalties. Do the large companies need to be wary of being branded pirates?

LL: There is a strong movement growing to resist the labels. In February, there will be a benefit for artists opposed to the RIAA, and there are many others who are increasingly frustrated with the existing system. But I'm not yet convinced the resistance will be enough.

PW: Could a car maker copyright their car and use the anti-piracy laws to destroy the competitive marketplace in replacement parts? Could they stop remanufacturing parts to save money? Do they have the power now to treat wrenches and screwdrivers as pirate tools? Does the DMCA apply to a car if you consider the fact that cars come with dozens of CPUs and millions of lines of code embedded in ROM?

LL: If the lawyers at Sony could convince Sony management that they should threaten legal action against an owner of the Sony dog, Aibo, then I imagine it is just a matter of time before car manufacturers start thinking "creatively" about ways to inhibit creativity in their field too. I would expect such claims to fail, however. Car companies have lots of lobbyists; lobbyists protect their clients against bad and destructive legislation well. Now if only WE could get some lobbyists...

PW: The computer industry used to work hard to expand the demand for their products. Intel used to claim that wooing new customers for the Intel PC platform made more sense than battling AMD. Where are their lobbyists now? The PC is about to be turned into a cable television box as the content industry pushes to destroy the power of the desktop boxes.

LL: For some reason, the computer industry has been cowed into believing that the future will only be allowed if computers perfectly enforce the control of content by copyright holders. Perfect control might protect the "architecture of revenue" (as John Seely Brown describes it) of these dinosaurs, but it will not produce the fastest growth for this industry.

PW: The car industry used to strive to destroy the replacement part market so they could make bigger profits off of their users. Now Ford, Honda and others are actively sharing information with the parts industry in the hopes of encouraging people to add some zip to their cars. They realize that the coolest customers demand an aftermarket for parts with enhanced performance and the only way they can satisfy these people is to support the marketplace. Does the car industry know something that the music industry doesn't?

LL: I think it is less about learning something than it is about facing real competition. Businesses are great innovators when the market truly disciplines them. The music industry (unlike the artists) has not yet had to face the market.

PW: The fashion industry is one of the last manufacturers left to afford New York City's astronomical rents. Yet they have no copyright protection for their creative work. Do you think that the lack of legal armor leaves them better prepared to compete in the world?

LL: Yes. What we have got to learn again is that ours is a system that favors competition, not monopoly. The free market is all about inducing competition, not about granting protections from competition. Sometimes, small exceptions to this principle are needed. But they must be kept small if they are to remain exceptions.

PW: I like to think of this as the Napster recession. If you plot the stock markets before September 11th, you can see that the crucial court rulings are almost like hinge points where the market bends up or down. The stock prices go up after a favorable ruling for Napster and drop afterwards. It's probably a bit silly to ascribe all of the market's zeitgeist to one company, but the end of Napster is really the biggest roadblock for the personal computer. Until Napster crashed, everyone kept predicting more, bigger and better things for the humming space heaters under the desks.

LL: This is an important and under discussed point. We have seen a dramatic crash in the market. Why? Most attribute it exclusively to "irrational expectations." But meanwhile there has been a very dramatic change in the legal environment within which the take-off occurred. This change must have had an effect.

PW: We've also lost the rational exuberance. Now, we've got to ask mother-may-I before developing any neat software? Why bother? Can we blame Hollywood for this?

LL: While it would be irresponsible to try to say with any precision how much is a function of the content industry lawyers, it is also irresponsible not to at least acknowledge that some part of this decline is due to the different way the law regulates the net. Laws protecting dinosaurs from the content industry are killing the opportunity for growth. Why? Only because the only thing worse than well paid lobbyists is well paid lobbyists with movie stars.

PW: Several people have suggested that it is silly for the computer industry, which generates hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue, to cower before the world of Hollywood which generates only a few billion dollars. Can you think of ways for Intel, Dell, Gateway and perhaps IBM to get together and buy out the recording industry? Maybe Intel could distribute grants or gifts to recording artists that let their music flow freely over Napster? Or perhaps they could sponsor their concert tours? Or maybe just buy a few record labels and put them out of business?

LL: Wait. There's "Hollywood" or "the labels" on the one hand, and then there are "artists" on the other. They are not the same. I think there is a rich and vibrant future for artists; it would be richer and more vibrant if it were not exclusively controlled by the labels. The problem today is that "the labels" have been held to have in effect the legal right to veto the future they don't want. This is the consequence of concentrations of almost perpetual copyrights. If they couldn't veto the future, then there would be many competing to attract artists and consumers, with the result that both would be better off relative to where they are today.

PW: My understanding is that the record labels at AOL Time Warner make little money. Maybe AOL should just roll all of that music into the extra content provided by the monthly subscription price?

LL: AOL could help define a great future, if it built off of the instincts from its past. Make it easy for consumers to get access to communities and content: here's the important feature that Napster and AOL shared.

PW: Many of the effects of laws are strange, disconnected and lingering. The Dutch, for instance, are big publishers of books in English, a language that isn't really their official tongue. Even today, some of the biggest publishing firms are in Holland, not London or New York. Some date this juggernaut to the days of the English star chambers where secret courts told printers what they could and couldn't print. In light of historical examples like this, do you think the content czars in Hollywood are behaving rationally and trying to maximize their shareholder's profits?

LL: Yes, they are. But "their shareholder's profits" is not the same as the profits of a nation as a whole. Protectionism always harms the nation to benefit a favored few.

PW: But I would argue that the protectionism even hurt the British publishers too. I think it's kind of odd for a small country with a different official language to have such a large presence in English language publishing. But they do. And the German presence is substantial too. Shouldn't the British publishers wonder whether all of the protectionism robbed them of the ability to fend off the folks from the continent?

LL: The problem is protectionists will always think that any problem is caused by imperfections in protectionism, not by the imperfections of protectionism. We need to give up the idea that they will ever understand what good policy is, and focus instead on what good policy is.

PW: A few of the hottest directors in Hollywood are coming from countries with no tradition of respecting copyright. Should we view the success of directors like John Woo and Ang Lee as proof that pirate dens like Taiwan and China are comfortable spawning grounds for artists?

LL: That's too big a jump for me. I don't believe the choice is between zero protection for copyright and perfect protection for copyright. That's the choice Valenti and Rosen would have us make. I think there is an important role for a strong but limited copyright law to play; I therefore don't think people should get away with massive and broadscale piracy of other peoples' work. But I also don't think it is piracy whenever I use someone's work in a way that person hasn't authorized. Perfect protection kills innovation, just as the perfect absence of protection kills innovation.

PW: Much has been made about the decline of CD sales since the destruction of Napster. I think the problem is deeper. While they sell plenty of CD's, much of the growth comes from higher prices. There are other indications that the industry is losing the ability to engage the fans. The concert business is in a real slump. Most of the bands playing arenas and summer pavilions are leftovers from the 1980's. There just aren't that many bands that manage to get people to stand in line for tickets. Why can't the industry produce stars anymore? Is there no economic incentive? Or does the increasing concentration of power destroy the artistic marketplace's ability to discover talent/value?

LL: There is a deep cynicism about managed culture, and this is our modern popular culture. A kind of sovietism that worked. Passion for artists is reserved for those artists who have made it outside the managed track. There are many such artists, who promise a greater threat to the managed label system than the internet itself.

PW: Ah, sovietism. That's an excellent word. There really is that committee-made feeling about the packaged quality of modern music. The music industry likes to borrow many words and metaphors from the free market people. They talk about efficiencies of scale, synergy and distribution mechanisms, but in the end there's just a small committee deciding what we hear. It 's not really a marketplace anymore.

LL: It is control by a relatively few, in a world which could allow much greater freedom to the many. What possible justification could there be for protecting the power of this few, when the technology could allow so much more for the many?

Many thanks to Peter Wayner for conducting this interview.

For years, the GNU Public License -- the copyleft which Linux has flourished under -- has lived a life that is close to charmed. Talk has surfaced of a possible upcoming court challenge to the GPL, but author Peter Wayner looks here slightly further into the future, speculating on what changes might preserve the GPL against other marketplace challenges as well. Richard M. Stallman has doubtless been wrestling with the issues presented here since before he released the GPL at all; I hope that Wayner's thoughts will raise discussion that will strengthen the GPL as it evolves.

For the last several weeks I've been thinking about the word "distribution" because the meaning of that word and the way we interpret are going to be one of the most important debates for the free software movement in the next several years. The problem is that a loose definition of the word opens up many loopholes in the GNU General Public License, both for corporations and average Internet users.

The word is crucial because it lies at the core of one of the most distinctive requirements of one of the most distinctive open source licenses. If you modify software protected by the GNU General Public License and then distribute the new version, you must also distribute the source code.

On the face of it, this requirement sounds pretty easy to satisfy. Every time you give someone a copy of the binary version of the code, you give them a copy of the source code. The two should travel together or at least in close proximity.

The main reason the clause is part of the GNU GPL is because Richard Stallman, the license's principal author, believes that anyone who drinks from the commonweal should give back. If you benefit from the sharing of others, then you should make sure to give something back.

But, if you dig a bit deeper, the notion of distribution becomes a convoluted. Some of the ways that people share software with each other may not really count as distributions.

The distribution requirement is one of the concessions that Stallman made to the users and their sanity. You don't need to share all of the changes you make to the code -- only the code you distribute. Sharing everything might unleash a painful process, one that would push too much untested code on the world. Do we really want everyone sharing their files everytime they save a copy to do a new compile? The compromise, which sounds reasonable, only requires you to share the source code when you share the software.

The problem is that the act of giving someone a copy is getting a bit harder to define, because of the new features embedded in operating systems, the near omnipresence of the Internet, and the new interest by corporations in the phenomenon of open source software. Many of these new wrinkles are confusing because they push the boundaries of both technology and license.

The biggest problem is that new features are making it easier and easier for two programs to work in synchrony without being formally linked together. You might use one piece of GPL protected software to edit files and one proprietary program to process them. The GPL embraces these sorts of bright lines between programs; mixing closed source programs with open source ones is not forbidden.

However, it's easy now for people to write scripts that link seemingly disparate programs -- thousands of them, even -- and then execute them in concert. I know one company that uses Adobe Photoshop to process images created by a proprietary, in-house tool. Is the software linked together? The process is entirely automated and works with no human intervention once initiated.

The line blurs elsewhere, too. On some cool multiprocessor machines, two supposedly separate and independent programs can execute on different processors and send messages back and forth. Where do we draw the line?

The process is getting even more confusing when the Web gets involved. Imagine one programmer who creates a tight weather prediction package for the Web that stores the forecast in a GPL-protected database. The programmer links all of the proprietary code together with the database. The result is a new package that extends the database and thus must be shared completely with the world according to the GPL. This is certainly fair. If anything, the GPL-protected database code is doing the bulk of the work. The programmer succeeded by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Now, consider a different programmer who, for the sake of example, stores the database of forecasting information on one Web server in California. The main website which dispenses the data to the world sits in NYC on the other end of a fast backbone. The main Web site uses the proprietary code to look up data in California before publishing it on the Web.

Should this programmer be forced to share the NYC code with the world? Let's say the programmer starts selling the package as a $10,000 proprietary package for adding cool weather graphics to a Web site. Anyone who buys it must install the GPL-protected database and make sure that it's always running. But are the two programs technically linked together? The California server might be GPL-protected, but does this extend to NYC? The NYC site certainly can't operate without the California server, right? What would happen if the server was right next door? What if it was running on the same machine under a different user's login?

Stallman anticipated this problem and offered a Lesser version of the GPL which would let people link with GPL-protected libraries without releasing the software to the larger program. But that lesser version, known by the acronym LGPL, is a bit rare.

I don't envy the people who try to make sensible decisions about what counts as a distribution and what doesn't. Stallman has done as good a job as he possibly can. He sensibly recognized that GPL-protected code was going to have to live in close proximity to non-GPL code. He realized that these programs might be linked together by shell scripts and other tools. But where do you draw the line?

The problem is being stretched as the world of corporate computing discovers open source software. In the past, the definition of "distribution" was easy because everyone was just an individual hacker. If you gave a program to your buddy, you distributed it.

But imagine that MegaSoft decides that it really needs an internal editing system for filling out proprietary MegaSoft paperwork. The programmers love Emacs so they take GNU Emacs and add a few tweaks for providing the user with forms. Some of it is written in Emacs LISP and some of it requires a few neat extensions to the basic Emacs module. Everyone loves the software and they start shipping it to all of the PCs in the corporations.

Is this a distribution? Some might argue that it isn't. A corporation is just a legal fiction for a single person. It's not much different than Bob the hacker writing the code for his own use. Bob doesn't need to share the source code until Bob starts giving it to Alice, the other hacker. By this argument, MegaSoft doesn't need to share the source unless MegaSoft ships the software to another company or non-employee. Even if there are 100,000 employees in MegaSoft, there hasn't been a distribution.

There are millions of problems with thinking of a corporation as a single hacker. What if the corporation splits in three like AT&T? Do all three get the code? Should only one? What if the corporation is aquired by SuperMegaSoft? Is this a distribution? What if the form-enabled Emacs was the only reason that MegaSoft was worth anything because the rest of MegaSoft wasted the rest of their VC money on a plan to sell clothing advice to fashion victims? (www.DrBoo.com)

But there are other problems with forcing corporations to share all of the code all of the time. Are corporate teams that much different than free software teams? Shouldn't they have the freedom to work for several months without distributing the changes? It saves us from buggy pre-alpha code and it saves them from repetitive bug reports. ("It crashes when I start it.") Where do we draw the line? Why can't they enjoy the same freedom as individual hackers to make a few, krufty changes to the source code and leave it at that?

There are deeper problems in corporations. By many measures, Tivo is a good example of the power of free software. The digital video recorder for television signals runs on top of the Linux kernel. The only reason anyone knows this is because Tivo gives Linux credit and it shares copies of the changes it made to the Linux kernel. In many ways, it's a model of a great corporate citizen in the world of free software.

But Tivo didn't share the source code to their television recording front end. It's a separate program running on the machine. No one's gotten in trouble for running proprietary code on top of a GPL-protected kernel.

The Tivo, though, is different. It starts up the proprietary code when it boots and the user has no way to communicate directly with the kernel. The user can't use any of the standard UNIX commands to control the machine. The user can't do anything that the proprietary front end doesn't allow. This will probably save millions of users the grief of reformatting their hard drive.

But is this really fair? If the user can't pry apart the Tivo front end from the Linux kernel, are the programs intertwined enough to become the same program? If so, shouldn't Tivo be releasing the source code to the front end as well?

There are deeper problems on the horizon. Some companies are now "loaning" or "renting" software. In some cases, you don't even keep copies on your local machine. You just download it from the server and use it for a bit.

Is this a distribution? On one hand, the user doesn't get to keep anything. On the other hand, who do we think they're fooling? The whole system is just ephemeral clouds of bits flying around. To think that anyone "owns" something as abstract as software is like saying that someone "owns" a cat.

In fact, we can take this one step further. What is the real difference between using the software on their server and downloading it? Is there much difference between using the Hotmail web-based email system or running Eudora on your desktop? There isn't much difference to the user, even though there are big legal differences. In one case, Hotmail still owns the software and it's all proprietary. In the other, Eudora sold you a copy. Well, maybe they sold you a license. Well, who really knows?

I won't try to find answers for any of the questions about distributions. This is, in some respects, a chicken's response. There are millions of ways to find things wrong with the world. A real leader would find solutions. But it's also important for these answers to come from the community at large. There should be a long debate that focuses on the needs of the users and the creators of free software.

The biggest problem is that the answers are more political than technical. It's easy to define what an piece of software should do if it, say, encounters a request to divide by zero. It's much harder to handle definitions of what is and is not a distribution.

The community needs to weigh two different features of free software: On one hand, there's the fun of taking apart the source code and fixing it. On the other is the responsiblity for contributing back to the common code base. Stallman chose to tie these two together by requiring programmers who benefited from GPL protected software to share their source code when they "distributed" the new version.

The notion of distribution was a simple notion that worked well when the typical coder was just an individual hacker spinning code and sharing it with his buds. Now the game is bigger, and much more complicated. We need to find a new mechanism that balances the freedom to hack with the responsibility to give back. We need to find a better, more clearly defined line to draw.

For the record, here are my proposals:

1. Corporations (and everyone) should be required to release the modifications to their source code every six months to a year, if the modified versions are shared with more than, say, three people.

2. Two piles of code are considered linked if one will crash or cease to provide more than 90% of its functions without the other. Note that this doesn't mean that any piece of software running on a GNU/Linux machine is considered linked to the GPL-protected kernel. If the software can be moved to a different OS, then it doesn't depend on the kernel.

I think each of these proposals will create more questions than they answer, but I didn't want to be a chicken and dodge the question. Please let me know if you have similar thoughts or proposals.

Tune to http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/ for information on Wayner's book on Free Software. It launches in July 2000.