You are describing the Macintosh Script Editor, except for the fact that it's not always on. You turn it on or off when you want to record a script for a particular repetitive task. When you're done recording, you can edit, modify and save the script as an application. I use it all the time.
Excelent! I did not know that, it sounds cool.. Is it as powerful as say Perl or something? The always on part may not be a good idea anywho.. it makes life easier, but ONLY if the AI is good enough. Now, it sounds like maybe ApleScript could be designed to nudge the average user into using the scripting langauge, i.e. it should be mildly in your face so that people actually use it, just not so much that it interfers with life, but that is sorta just cosmetics. I'll look at this langauge next time i'm arround a Mac.
Now, there is something to be said for having data abstractions available.. Dose AppleScript just simulate ckicks and stuff or do aplications provide a higher level interface to themselves? One of the things we may see eventually is derived user interfaces, i.e. the aplication provided ONLY the higher level access and ``themes programms'' or something would actually derive the interface from it. A system like this, if possible, would be especially ammenable to GUI scripting langauges since once you understood kinda how the interface derivation worked you would understand something about all your applications.
Have you seem the Plan9 interface? It is kinda interesting.. All the menus are built on the cut and paste. The idea being it is better to just make cut and paste efficent enough to simulate menus then actually create seperate menuing stuff.
Ok, I guess I have not made myself clear enough.. My point is not that every computer should be used for everything, but that people get so much more out of having the power of a pogramming language to tie together the things that they use the computer for (like using perl -e now).. and that the development of psudo-programming langauages with: (a) power (like perl), (b) connection to the applications and data the person uses (like scripting langauges in general), and (c) a smoth learning curve (so that even people who can not just go out and learn to programm will eventually see how to make there lives better by getting the computer to do some grunt work for them) Is ultimatly more importent the any ammount of push button prettiness. Th reason for this is that the Church-Turing Thesis say that the push button prettiness can not make people's lives better in the way that a programming langauge can.. while there is no known limit on the smoothness of the learniong curve associated to a langauge, i.e. We should be spending more time making the programming easier.. not the initial usage.
As for your palm pilot example: more efficent data menipulation tools would probable be a welcome extension.
Here is an example of something that could make life easier for everyone.. an X-Windows based AI script writer. It just sits in the corner of your screen making scripts to do everything you are repetitvly doing (like clicking on mp3s to DL them); then when you find yourself doing something repetitive, you just click over to the script writer and modify it's half writen script to meat you specific criteria. What would happen is the script writer would no understand why you were doing what you were doing (like how you picked the files to DL), but it would have pre-writen some of the grunt parts of the algorithm.
There is a lot of talk about how importent it is to make things easy to use, but unfortuantly most of the people talking (like Jobs) do not really understand what a computer is.. (Now, that I have your attention I can make my point)
A computer is not a typewriter.. it is not a video game.. it is not a spell checker.. and it is not all of those things. It is a machine which represents a model of computation equivelent to a turing machine.. meaning that it can run any algorithm, i.e. do anything you can figure out how to tell it to do. The importent part of this is the ANYTHING part. Jobs may make a few simple jobs (pun) easier for a few stupid people.. and this is a good thing.. but it is not what we CAN do with a computer.
The truth is NO ONE can make a ``supper easy to use'' model of computation equivelent to a turing machine.. Not Jobs.. not Bill Gates.. Not Anybody. Note: ``supper easy to use'' is DEFINED to mean no need to understand logic or basic flow control of some sort in this statment. This is just the Chuch-Turing Thesis applied to user interface design.
The real break through in user interface is not some push button GUI.. it is a Programming Langauge which has a really good learning curve.. and that has access to all the information the user wants to menipulate. Light weight programming needs to be something a user can not help but do in there every day life..
I'd say the closest thing we have to this today is shell scripting and maybe Excel type things, but one day programming should be though of like driving a car is today.
This is interesting, but will not make spacetravel more cost effective. We can make Diamond's now.. we make industrial grade ones allthe time, but they place a market in them to keep from putting the diamond cartel (which uses slave labor to get the natural diamonds) out of buisness. I've personally always though that it was morally reprehensible for the indutrial diamond makers not to flood the market with cheep machine made diamoned and put the sleeze bags who run the diamond cartel out of buisness.
I wish I could remember the name of the "multiple-password" encryption system I read about (you encrypt multiple plaintexts with multiple passwords into one ciphertext - each password unlocks a different plaintext; under duress you choose which password(s) to give away... coupled with steganography this is very powerful).
SegFS for Linux implements this on top of an ext2 and I was proposing a related file system for PDAs in my first post, but I had not considered using it in a communication protocoll.. which is a briliant idea.
We could set up a simple email network based on the pgp key servers and a modified version of pgp (add support for multilayer encryption). You would run a daemon on your system to find people from the pgp key server who supported this network and randomly send them encrypted mail. Now, if you ever had anything real to send to anyone you would just use a higher stenography/encryption level (which no one can prove exists).
The only problem with this is that your recepiant must know the higher level exists so they must reveal it's existance to there computer (which could be bugged) every time they want to check for a higher level in a message. It also creates a lot of spam, but I suppose your mail reader could automatically determine the message was meningless once you gave it your key's password.
Another really great thing about this system is that it makes traffic analysis difficult as well. Traffic analysis can also be fought by making everyone a non-anonymous remailer.
Internet chat programms could also use the same ideas. Quesion: Do encrypted IRC clients exist? It would seem pretty simple to implement. The clients would automatically exchange public keys with everyone on the channel.. shit you could even generate a new public key every few min. Plus, the client could participate in random other conversations without the trash message actually rolling accrostthe channel. If you were really serious about security many conversation channels could be routed into one IRC channel to hide who was talking to who (which would be great for people in places like China). Shit, with the multilayer stuff you could have it que up messages and send a higher layer message on top of a lower layer message.. so the cops could participate in an encrypted conversation and still have no idea about what is really going on.
If this were 1776, I and 200 of my closest friends would be crouched with muskets taking pot shots at someone in a red coat over nonsense like this.
Goverments never give people fredoms.. they mearly discover too late that they have accedentally given them freedoms. This is what happened with the American revolution and it is what has happened with the internet, but unfortunatly realitivly few people have experenced the Internet freedoms. Hopefully, this will happen when we make a permenant Mars/Moon collony or soemtihng too. Send up lots of non-religious responcible pseudo-libertarians and discover that they don't need much of a government. They will be the ones who laugh at the U.S. for not having a constitution which is good enough to keep stupid laws from being passed.
The flip side to all this optimisim is that people find it hard to comprehend and fight for a freedom they have never experenced. If there were a way to let people exprence freedoms via communication then I suspect the human race would evolve (cognitivly) much faster. Hmm.. Maybe we could publish lots of children's books about human rights to give to people in repressive countries? Interesting experement.
The executive branch (NSA, DoJ, etc.) don't really care that people *can* get encryption.. They are happy with just making it hard for people to get encryption and suppressing public intrest and research in it. Example: PGP is not that big a threat to them since they can always obtain the keys through some legal action (the 5th ammendment says that you should not be required to divulge your keys, but I believe there are ways arround this), they could get a court order to wire tap your computer, and PGP only protects a limited class of communications. What they are really scared of is mass use cryptography. Just imagine if everyone carried a miniture computer on a card with them to do encryption (i.e. your private key never leaves the card and you type your password into the card directly). We could even use a stenographic filesystem on the card which would make it impossible to prove that you had hidden data which you were not revealing.
This kind of system would be great, everyone would opnly need a few passwords and there would be much less hacking and fraud (example: all hacking based on social engenering would stop since no one knows a password to anything but the cary they carry), but the gov. would rather indanger US buisnesses and finantial infrastructure then allow people to protect themselves. Can anybody say treason.
Now, it seems that they are willing to throw corperations a bone so long as open source cryptography dosn't spread to fast and the people are still kept in the dark.
Solutions: A good way to fight the U.S. policies is to incurage the development of cryptography in other countries. U.S. citizens who want to work on crypto sould be incuraged to move to less repressive countries and other countries should be incurages to make life easier for crypto development and implementation. Also, we need to make it less profitable for the gov. to keep encryption hardware out of circulation. I think the two big steps here would be installing encryption into all the internet fone programs and writing crypto software for PDAs to allow them so surve as login devices. It would be really cool if one of these PDA-Cellphones would be powerful enough to be turnned into a PGP fone through software.
I think there is also a lot we can do to make it easier to install cryptography on Linux. It would be really nice if some Denbian and RedHat people would maintain cryptography enabled packages with were always up to date and easy to install (replay and people tend to lag behind in versions) and if the post install email to root or whatever would include an explination of how to download and install the replacment packages. It would also be nice if RedHat would have seperate US and international versions of it's CD. Plus, SSH, Apache-SSL, the JavaSSH client, an encrypted digital fone program, and software to use a PDA as a login device would give many people a reason to buy the CD.
May I ask, since when dose/. cover a joke site (and a pretty funny one), call it a hoax, and harass the authoer of the site? The two refrences to this wsite on/.'s homepage have been quite agressive. I assume this is all because someone with the power to aprove articles got his christian panties in a wad, but this is highly inapropreate and just down right rude. Now, I don't mind harassing some guy who really is making a distro under BSD, since that would violate the GPl, but it was clear that this was a joke.. so the only explination for the hostility in the articles is that someone was offended by this page. Ok, that's fine.. but you shouldn't raise it to the level of making script kiddy threats on/.'s home page.
I just hope the guy who runs this site has some way to cash in on the hits he is recieving now.
There are lots of people that simply don't care enough about Civil Liberties. They just don't understand what is happneing. People need to understand how much not being able to talk about your work affects your life.. I know I studdy mathematics and it is hard to find people to talk about it with in the first place. It would be nice if the Gov. had a harder time getting technically competent people, but I'd really be more concerned about them getting the few exceptiopnal people they have. I know of mathematicians who have been forced to stop publishing their research.. and are then hired at the NSA. These people probable should have taken them to court or moved to another country.
All that having been said, there is some hope i nthe form of a philosophical shift. More people are beginning to value communication.. and these people can not work in secret. Example: when you read a book by a really good author you think a little more like that author.. and if you understand this much is not a big jump to say "I want to have that kind of effect on other people." (See Churh of Virus, Meme's, etc.)
Hopefully, NSA style serecy will be unstable or self-destrctive because the more open ideologies will get to people first. Course it don't hurt to instill a dislike of the NSA, CIa, etc. in the younger generation of Technical people. It would be really nice if the Internet would give large numbers of kids access to these ideas sooner.
Jeff
BTW> It wouldn't hurt to pass a law making it illegal to hide abstract math or pure science from the public.
First, they very well might have a P-time algorithm for factoring. They might just know what lines of research would lead to in and suppress them in ggeneral mathematics. They have been known to force mathematicians to stop what they are working on and not talk about it any more. This is unlikely, but possible.
Second, a P-time algorithm it's self may not exist and it might not be dangerous even if it did (due to a large constant). What we need to worry about are the really good aproximation algorithms. The existance of really good NP aproximation algorithms is (as I understand it) part of why we have no encryption based on P != NP. Again, they may be supressing the number theory that would lead to these algorithms.
I really don't care much if they ``can'' crack codes, but I care a great deal about how they restrict and hide the development of theory. This is just plain evil no matter how you look at it.
I think we seriously need to do something about the NSA. One thing we can do, is express the importance of being about to talk about your life to people.. you are what you communicate to other people. I've known people who worked in black programs.. and it really dose ``tear out a piece of yuor soul'' (drama alert). Another thing we can do it cut funding.. I would like to see a good long list where the Echelon money comes from so I can call my congressmen arround budget time. (I know much of it is comes from the DOD.. err.. maybe that's the CIA.. but if we can find the parts of the DOD that pay for it we can go after them) We can also make it easy for people to screem ``help help I'm being repressed'' if the NSA comes nocking (like the cell phone makers or the occasional mathematician that gets too close to something they don't want known)
Any branch of the pseudo-military that can say no to an information request from congress needs to be shutdown.
Jeff
BTW> Hey, funny conspiracy theory.. maybe we think there is no polynomial time algorithm for factoring since they shutdown research into anything that gets close. I suggest we all keep a very close key on the job changes (or deaths) of the people involved in Quantum Computing.
The problem is that the players only support one type of media.. sound. If x11amp and winamp were to adopt a system which allowed the inclusion of diffrent content into the MP3 (like art, advertising, or links to additonal things to buy) and a few big name artists released MP3s with addiotnal information that people actually want (like lyrics or art), then everyone would start using a player which supports the addional content and artists could just give away music to get people's attention.. The artists could make lots of money this way.
First, this player may have a copyright system based on watermarking---the only really effective way to do it, so this may just be another attempt by the music industry to leverage SDMI. The whole idea of a watermarking system is to play mp3s which came from older CDs without the watermark and not play the ones that come from newer CDs. I will feal much better about this when we have reliable ways to break whatever copyprotection they install.
Second, the real solution to making money off of MP3s is the allow the artist to add aditional content, i.e. allow them to place a small web page or something in the front of the MP3. If the players would have a feature to interpret a tarball in the header and pass it to a browser. Needless to say the open source players would all have a way to turn this off, but many people would want to see the art, lyrics, and ads that came with the songs. The artists will make money directly off the advertising (click here to visit our sponser) and will have a hotline to merchendising (click here to buy shirts, CDs, and other MP3 version of this song).. no radio stations.. no labels. Maybe someone will add this stuff when they improve the file formats.
It is likely that much of what the NSA dose it treason.. That is to say it should be unlawful for the U.S. gov. to hide philosophy, theorey, or motivations from the public (during peacetime).. and it should never be able to prevent the development of things in the public sector. The NSA occasionally comes in and tells some mathematician to stop work on whatever he is working on and not to talk about it. This is wrong in so many ways.. All I can say is, if your thinking about working for the NSA, you should serious reconsider.. just imagine not being able to talk about what you do all day. That is not living.
Anywho, very few things piss me off quite as much as the though that the NSA developes things which could help us all and then sits on them.. that is treason.
Jeff
BTW> Not being able to talk about your life is even worse if you take memes or related ideas seriously (ala Church of Virus). The idea is that a very importent part of you is contained in the content of your thoughs (as opposed some metaphyiscal mumbo-jumbo) and communicating with other people is a kind of imortality (maybe the only kind you would want anyway). The point being it really sucks to dedicate most of your life to something that will sit in a box.
It's kinda funny.. the OS is frequently like one of the most secure links in the chain on either Linux or NT. It's oftin the custom software which is vulnerable.. PHP's default behavior for example is to place all form variables into the global name space. Not a big deal to fix since you can always initialize a variable before you use it if it should not be comming from a form, but it is dangerous.. I seem to recall VBScript having related problems.. and I could be wrong about this, but I believe itwas a pain in the ass to even SQL safe form vars in VBScript. Just think of how many credit card taking pages out there are in VBScript.
Now, people worry more about OS/daemon hacks since then script kiddies can use them, but the serious cracker who really wants to fiddle with your data driven site can do wonders.. What would be especially cool is to see an AI that could crack database driven VBScript pages by guessing probable programmer mistakes.. and say propogate it's self as an ActiveX control into the pages. Now, that would be beautiul since there wouldn't really be crap MS could do about this little worm.. it's the developers fault.. never mind that MS didn't give them the tools to try and prevent it.
Anywho, the point being.. we should expect more serious exploits of this form in the future.
Jeff
BTW> It would be kinda cool to write a PHP script analysis program which looked for security holes.
Fuck em.. let everyone take pictures of the bases. Hey the Ruissian's need money and they probable have spy sat.s Maybe they could set up a web site which gave real resolution pics for like $500 or something. That would be great..
Hmm.. I could be mistaken, but I believe RMS has complained about RedHat stealling brand name value away from GNU.. same as with the GNU/Linux stuff. Plus, I was under the impression that he was somewhat sparing in praise for the Linux co.'s in general. I could be compleatly wrong however.. I dont really know anything specific.. just gossip. No disrespect intended to RMS by the post, but the point about the value of testing the GPL in court still stands.. RMS was just a victim of my tring to make the point that it dose say soemthing for a co. to be willing to foot the bill to create the precedent.
this looks like it could turn into an opertunity for one of the real linux co.s (VA, Redhat, etc.) to hurt the competition (Corel), get more good publicity, and put contribute some legal precedent to supporting the GPL. I'd like to see RMS bitch about RedHat or whomever if they are the ones who end up giving the GPL some much needed combat experence.
Let look down that list of experts and see who we can influence. I have gone through my copy and removed the names of professors and anyone who is on our side (ACLU rep.). Most of them are Europeans, but a few look particlearly easy to influence.. like:
John B. Rabun --- Vice President and COO, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Arlington, USA. You can send an email to hotline@ncmec.org saing you hope that NCMEC is not stuping to incuraging censorship and talk a lot about Bartalsmann's conenction with the Nazi's. If they are not on our side (they havn't writen me back yeat so I don't know) you can go complain to there sponsors. There are a lot of computer co.'s on the list and they probable don't want to loose server sails because fewer people can put content on the net.
Marie-The're`se Huppertz (Microsoft Europe, European Affairs Office, Bruxelles) and Clare Gilbert (Vice President, General Counsel, AOL Europe, Lon- don, Great Britain) should also hear from/. And anyone who lives in Europe should look at the list of European law enforcement agencies that showed up.
There are plenty of ``just plane evil'' people there like the Internet Content Rating Association. If you want a good list of companies to boycott or call and threaten to boycott ceck out there sponcers list at www.icra.org.
Let look down that list of experts and see who we can influence. I have gone through my copy and removed the names of professors and anyone who is on our side (ACLU rep.). Most of them are Europeans, but a few look particlearly easy to influence.. like:
Marie-The're`se Huppertz (Microsoft Europe, European Affairs Office, Bruxelles) and Clare Gilbert (Vice President, General Counsel, AOL Europe, Lon- don, Great Britain) should also hear from/. And anyone who lives in Europe should look at the list of European law enforcement agencies that showed up.
There are plenty of ``just plane evil'' people there like the Internet Content Rating Association. If you want a good list of companies to boycott or call and threaten to boycott ceck out there sponcers list at www.icra.org.
Jeff
IP addresses and Countries..
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Ok, so if they are doing it by meta tags then we can just move all content to SSL and avoid backbone filtering. Now, if we can figure out what IP addresses are in what countries we can make an Apache module to filter out ALL censorship meta tags when the packet is going to another country.. or just lie an rate everything G. unless it is gong to your own country, in which case you follow the law. This would make it MUCH harder to actually prosicute people for miss-rating.
Jeff
BTW> On a compleatly diffrent note, has anyone writen an ActiveX control to disable the Censorware programs which are out there? My limited knoladge of ActiveX is that it is not secure, you just have to register the control with M$.
Ok, so what do we do about it..
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I suppose we can all stop buying Random House books and those of us who live in Germany can raise a stink about it directly, but what can people in other countries do? Example: if you live in England or some other european nation it might help to call your representitives and tell them that you do not want a unified censorship system because you don't want Germany/France/etc. to have control over your speach.
Also, how much of this will be non-legislative cowaperation from the other companies at the conferance? And what can we do to fight that? It would be nice to see something of a list of companies that were there next to there compeditors who were not.. then I could just call up said company and tell them I'm switching to there compeditor because they support censorship.
Also, what kind of protocoll modifications are we looking at here.. Linux/Apache may own the server world (as in NT no longer sold at all) before this is implemented.. could we make support for the protocoll modificatios a highly non-standard and difficult to install patch? Would it be prudent to adjust the Licenses of these programs to restrict censorship support? (Linus/Apache Team save us!)
Can will hurt Bertelsmann (boycott Random House?). How can I make shure I don't buy anyhting that comes thourgh them? Would someone like to set up a FAQ or site on how to avoid givng them any money. Could we watch them very closly and gradually make the net anti-Bertelsmann? I notices a link to there holdings here.
Finally, we should keep in mind that this will hurt everyone execpt the few companies that are large enough to censor themselves.. and we should be selling Bertelsmann hate in whatever way people will be most receptive. Example: If you live near a smaller publisher you can perhaps get them to call elected officials (who don't want to put the constituants out of work) and complain.
A cool thing about flat screens is that you could get the edges down REALLY thin and then start placing them next to each other.. so that the cost of you desk top would go up linearly in the number pixiles or quadratically in the dimention.. and there would only be a thin line between pannels.
A cool thing about massivly computerized houses is the opertunity to script things (I use cron for an alarm clock now) and apply AI's. Plus, E will stop complaining about men ot aving any beer in the fridge once it can talk to my fridge.
..since it can help you and me in our everyday lives. How many of you had to suffer through writing long lab reports in your engenering classes.. half of which was simply a question of sticking to a predetermined form. This technology can be developed to the point where you can outline what you want to say and hae a machine actually say it. Just imagine if the free software projects could document themselves mearly by making detailed notes of why they did what they did with the source code. What needs to be worked on here is interaction between human and computer.. humans do the initial layout and then the computer dose the grunt work while the human adjusts what it has to say. The issue here as I see it is really one of use interface. AI's are nice, but an AI that dose what you probable would have done anyway and then lets you fix it would be awsome.
In mathematics we are beginning to see theorem proving software that can do a little bit of the grunt work involved in proving some types of theorems, but the limiting factor is still partly user interface and partly the difficulty of learning how to interact with the AI, i.e. designing your notation so that the AI can work on it. I expect the problems in computer generated documentation will also be that the human author needs to express him/her self to the machine in a way it can understand.. and the machine needs to give sufficent feedback so that the human dose not end up fighting the machine to keep it fvrom writing down a specific path.
This is sorta like the research into functional programming langauges. You write your code in a provably correct specification langauge and then have the compiler make it efficent.. but imagine how a compiler which inserted optimization hints into the functional code so that you could come along and adjust it later.
Jeff
BTW> I wonder why no one has writen an AI to check C source for buffer overflows.
Understanding of the world can never be `evil'' and I do not believe that his development of the H bomb was a bad thing. Now, perhaps deployment of the H bomb and Teller's incuragement of it as a deterent or Teller's ideas about nuclear excavation are a bit stupid, but the publicashion of the ideas of involved (and maybe a little bit of initial testing) is a good thing. Yes, lots of people could have died, but the potential for nuclear wepons exists wether Teller had done what he did or not and we need to learn to live with them sometime.. the only real issue was wether we would have been better off waiting a few more years and letting a little more sanity creap into the cold-war.
If it is part of nature we should try to understand it.
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You are describing the Macintosh Script Editor, except for the fact that it's not always on. You turn it on or off when you want to record a script for a particular repetitive task. When you're done recording, you can edit, modify and save the script as an application. I use it all the time.
Excelent! I did not know that, it sounds cool.. Is it as powerful as say Perl or something? The always on part may not be a good idea anywho.. it makes life easier, but ONLY if the AI is good enough. Now, it sounds like maybe ApleScript could be designed to nudge the average user into using the scripting langauge, i.e. it should be mildly in your face so that people actually use it, just not so much that it interfers with life, but that is sorta just cosmetics. I'll look at this langauge next time i'm arround a Mac.
Now, there is something to be said for having data abstractions available.. Dose AppleScript just simulate ckicks and stuff or do aplications provide a higher level interface to themselves? One of the things we may see eventually is derived user interfaces, i.e. the aplication provided ONLY the higher level access and ``themes programms'' or something would actually derive the interface from it. A system like this, if possible, would be especially ammenable to GUI scripting langauges since once you understood kinda how the interface derivation worked you would understand something about all your applications.
Have you seem the Plan9 interface? It is kinda interesting.. All the menus are built on the cut and paste. The idea being it is better to just make cut and paste efficent enough to simulate menus then actually create seperate menuing stuff.
Jeff
Ok, I guess I have not made myself clear enough.. My point is not that every computer should be used for everything, but that people get so much more out of having the power of a pogramming language to tie together the things that they use the computer for (like using perl -e now).. and that the development of psudo-programming langauages with: (a) power (like perl), (b) connection to the applications and data the person uses (like scripting langauges in general), and (c) a smoth learning curve (so that even people who can not just go out and learn to programm will eventually see how to make there lives better by getting the computer to do some grunt work for them) Is ultimatly more importent the any ammount of push button prettiness. Th reason for this is that the Church-Turing Thesis say that the push button prettiness can not make people's lives better in the way that a programming langauge can.. while there is no known limit on the smoothness of the learniong curve associated to a langauge, i.e. We should be spending more time making the programming easier.. not the initial usage.
As for your palm pilot example: more efficent data menipulation tools would probable be a welcome extension.
Here is an example of something that could make life easier for everyone.. an X-Windows based AI script writer. It just sits in the corner of your screen making scripts to do everything you are repetitvly doing (like clicking on mp3s to DL them); then when you find yourself doing something repetitive, you just click over to the script writer and modify it's half writen script to meat you specific criteria. What would happen is the script writer would no understand why you were doing what you were doing (like how you picked the files to DL), but it would have pre-writen some of the grunt parts of the algorithm.
Jeff
There is a lot of talk about how importent it is to make things easy to use, but unfortuantly most of the people talking (like Jobs) do not really understand what a computer is.. (Now, that I have your attention I can make my point)
A computer is not a typewriter.. it is not a video game.. it is not a spell checker.. and it is not all of those things. It is a machine which represents a model of computation equivelent to a turing machine.. meaning that it can run any algorithm, i.e. do anything you can figure out how to tell it to do. The importent part of this is the ANYTHING part. Jobs may make a few simple jobs (pun) easier for a few stupid people.. and this is a good thing.. but it is not what we CAN do with a computer.
The truth is NO ONE can make a ``supper easy to use'' model of computation equivelent to a turing machine.. Not Jobs.. not Bill Gates.. Not Anybody. Note: ``supper easy to use'' is DEFINED to mean no need to understand logic or basic flow control of some sort in this statment. This is just the Chuch-Turing Thesis applied to user interface design.
The real break through in user interface is not some push button GUI.. it is a Programming Langauge which has a really good learning curve.. and that has access to all the information the user wants to menipulate. Light weight programming needs to be something a user can not help but do in there every day life..
I'd say the closest thing we have to this today is shell scripting and maybe Excel type things, but one day programming should be though of like driving a car is today.
Jeff
This is interesting, but will not make spacetravel more cost effective. We can make Diamond's now.. we make industrial grade ones allthe time, but they place a market in them to keep from putting the diamond cartel (which uses slave labor to get the natural diamonds) out of buisness. I've personally always though that it was morally reprehensible for the indutrial diamond makers not to flood the market with cheep machine made diamoned and put the sleeze bags who run the diamond cartel out of buisness.
Jeff
I wish I could remember the name of the "multiple-password" encryption system I read about (you encrypt multiple plaintexts with multiple passwords into one ciphertext - each password unlocks a different plaintext; under duress you choose which password(s) to give away... coupled with steganography this is very powerful).
SegFS for Linux implements this on top of an ext2 and I was proposing a related file system for PDAs in my first post, but I had not considered using it in a communication protocoll.. which is a briliant idea.
We could set up a simple email network based on the pgp key servers and a modified version of pgp (add support for multilayer encryption). You would run a daemon on your system to find people from the pgp key server who supported this network and randomly send them encrypted mail. Now, if you ever had anything real to send to anyone you would just use a higher stenography/encryption level (which no one can prove exists).
The only problem with this is that your recepiant must know the higher level exists so they must reveal it's existance to there computer (which could be bugged) every time they want to check for a higher level in a message. It also creates a lot of spam, but I suppose your mail reader could automatically determine the message was meningless once you gave it your key's password.
Another really great thing about this system is that it makes traffic analysis difficult as well. Traffic analysis can also be fought by making everyone a non-anonymous remailer.
Internet chat programms could also use the same ideas. Quesion: Do encrypted IRC clients exist? It would seem pretty simple to implement. The clients would automatically exchange public keys with everyone on the channel.. shit you could even generate a new public key every few min. Plus, the client could participate in random other conversations without the trash message actually rolling accrostthe channel. If you were really serious about security many conversation channels could be routed into one IRC channel to hide who was talking to who (which would be great for people in places like China). Shit, with the multilayer stuff you could have it que up messages and send a higher layer message on top of a lower layer message.. so the cops could participate in an encrypted conversation and still have no idea about what is really going on.
If this were 1776, I and 200 of my closest friends would be crouched with muskets taking pot shots at someone in a red coat over nonsense like this.
Goverments never give people fredoms.. they mearly discover too late that they have accedentally given them freedoms. This is what happened with the American revolution and it is what has happened with the internet, but unfortunatly realitivly few people have experenced the Internet freedoms. Hopefully, this will happen when we make a permenant Mars/Moon collony or soemtihng too. Send up lots of non-religious responcible pseudo-libertarians and discover that they don't need much of a government. They will be the ones who laugh at the U.S. for not having a constitution which is good enough to keep stupid laws from being passed.
The flip side to all this optimisim is that people find it hard to comprehend and fight for a freedom they have never experenced. If there were a way to let people exprence freedoms via communication then I suspect the human race would evolve (cognitivly) much faster. Hmm.. Maybe we could publish lots of children's books about human rights to give to people in repressive countries? Interesting experement.
Jeff
The executive branch (NSA, DoJ, etc.) don't really care that people *can* get encryption.. They are happy with just making it hard for people to get encryption and suppressing public intrest and research in it. Example: PGP is not that big a threat to them since they can always obtain the keys through some legal action (the 5th ammendment says that you should not be required to divulge your keys, but I believe there are ways arround this), they could get a court order to wire tap your computer, and PGP only protects a limited class of communications. What they are really scared of is mass use cryptography. Just imagine if everyone carried a miniture computer on a card with them to do encryption (i.e. your private key never leaves the card and you type your password into the card directly). We could even use a stenographic filesystem on the card which would make it impossible to prove that you had hidden data which you were not revealing.
This kind of system would be great, everyone would opnly need a few passwords and there would be much less hacking and fraud (example: all hacking based on social engenering would stop since no one knows a password to anything but the cary they carry), but the gov. would rather indanger US buisnesses and finantial infrastructure then allow people to protect themselves. Can anybody say treason.
Now, it seems that they are willing to throw corperations a bone so long as open source cryptography dosn't spread to fast and the people are still kept in the dark.
Solutions: A good way to fight the U.S. policies is to incurage the development of cryptography in other countries. U.S. citizens who want to work on crypto sould be incuraged to move to less repressive countries and other countries should be incurages to make life easier for crypto development and implementation. Also, we need to make it less profitable for the gov. to keep encryption hardware out of circulation. I think the two big steps here would be installing encryption into all the internet fone programs and writing crypto software for PDAs to allow them so surve as login devices. It would be really cool if one of these PDA-Cellphones would be powerful enough to be turnned into a PGP fone through software.
I think there is also a lot we can do to make it easier to install cryptography on Linux. It would be really nice if some Denbian and RedHat people would maintain cryptography enabled packages with were always up to date and easy to install (replay and people tend to lag behind in versions) and if the post install email to root or whatever would include an explination of how to download and install the replacment packages. It would also be nice if RedHat would have seperate US and international versions of it's CD. Plus, SSH, Apache-SSL, the JavaSSH client, an encrypted digital fone program, and software to use a PDA as a login device would give many people a reason to buy the CD.
Jeff
May I ask, since when dose /. cover a joke site (and a pretty funny one), call it a hoax, and harass the authoer of the site? The two refrences to this wsite on /.'s homepage have been quite agressive. I assume this is all because someone with the power to aprove articles got his christian panties in a wad, but this is highly inapropreate and just down right rude. Now, I don't mind harassing some guy who really is making a distro under BSD, since that would violate the GPl, but it was clear that this was a joke.. so the only explination for the hostility in the articles is that someone was offended by this page. Ok, that's fine.. but you shouldn't raise it to the level of making script kiddy threats on /.'s home page.
I just hope the guy who runs this site has some way to cash in on the hits he is recieving now.
Jeff
There are lots of people that simply don't care enough about Civil Liberties. They just don't understand what is happneing. People need to understand how much not being able to talk about your work affects your life.. I know I studdy mathematics and it is hard to find people to talk about it with in the first place. It would be nice if the Gov. had a harder time getting technically competent people, but I'd really be more concerned about them getting the few exceptiopnal people they have. I know of mathematicians who have been forced to stop publishing their research.. and are then hired at the NSA. These people probable should have taken them to court or moved to another country.
All that having been said, there is some hope i nthe form of a philosophical shift. More people are beginning to value communication.. and these people can not work in secret. Example: when you read a book by a really good author you think a little more like that author.. and if you understand this much is not a big jump to say "I want to have that kind of effect on other people." (See Churh of Virus, Meme's, etc.)
Hopefully, NSA style serecy will be unstable or self-destrctive because the more open ideologies will get to people first. Course it don't hurt to instill a dislike of the NSA, CIa, etc. in the younger generation of Technical people. It would be really nice if the Internet would give large numbers of kids access to these ideas sooner.
Jeff
BTW> It wouldn't hurt to pass a law making it illegal to hide abstract math or pure science from the public.
First, they very well might have a P-time algorithm for factoring. They might just know what lines of research would lead to in and suppress them in ggeneral mathematics. They have been known to force mathematicians to stop what they are working on and not talk about it any more. This is unlikely, but possible.
Second, a P-time algorithm it's self may not exist and it might not be dangerous even if it did (due to a large constant). What we need to worry about are the really good aproximation algorithms. The existance of really good NP aproximation algorithms is (as I understand it) part of why we have no encryption based on P != NP. Again, they may be supressing the number theory that would lead to these algorithms.
I really don't care much if they ``can'' crack codes, but I care a great deal about how they restrict and hide the development of theory. This is just plain evil no matter how you look at it.
Jeff
I think we seriously need to do something about the NSA. One thing we can do, is express the importance of being about to talk about your life to people.. you are what you communicate to other people. I've known people who worked in black programs.. and it really dose ``tear out a piece of yuor soul'' (drama alert). Another thing we can do it cut funding.. I would like to see a good long list where the Echelon money comes from so I can call my congressmen arround budget time. (I know much of it is comes from the DOD.. err.. maybe that's the CIA.. but if we can find the parts of the DOD that pay for it we can go after them) We can also make it easy for people to screem ``help help I'm being repressed'' if the NSA comes nocking (like the cell phone makers or the occasional mathematician that gets too close to something they don't want known)
Any branch of the pseudo-military that can say no to an information request from congress needs to be shutdown.
Jeff
BTW> Hey, funny conspiracy theory.. maybe we think there is no polynomial time algorithm for factoring since they shutdown research into anything that gets close. I suggest we all keep a very close key on the job changes (or deaths) of the people involved in Quantum Computing.
The problem is that the players only support one type of media.. sound. If x11amp and winamp were to adopt a system which allowed the inclusion of diffrent content into the MP3 (like art, advertising, or links to additonal things to buy) and a few big name artists released MP3s with addiotnal information that people actually want (like lyrics or art), then everyone would start using a player which supports the addional content and artists could just give away music to get people's attention.. The artists could make lots of money this way.
Jeff
First, this player may have a copyright system based on watermarking---the only really effective way to do it, so this may just be another attempt by the music industry to leverage SDMI. The whole idea of a watermarking system is to play mp3s which came from older CDs without the watermark and not play the ones that come from newer CDs. I will feal much better about this when we have reliable ways to break whatever copyprotection they install.
Second, the real solution to making money off of MP3s is the allow the artist to add aditional content, i.e. allow them to place a small web page or something in the front of the MP3. If the players would have a feature to interpret a tarball in the header and pass it to a browser. Needless to say the open source players would all have a way to turn this off, but many people would want to see the art, lyrics, and ads that came with the songs. The artists will make money directly off the advertising (click here to visit our sponser) and will have a hotline to merchendising (click here to buy shirts, CDs, and other MP3 version of this song).. no radio stations.. no labels. Maybe someone will add this stuff when they improve the file formats.
Jeff
It is likely that much of what the NSA dose it treason.. That is to say it should be unlawful for the U.S. gov. to hide philosophy, theorey, or motivations from the public (during peacetime).. and it should never be able to prevent the development of things in the public sector. The NSA occasionally comes in and tells some mathematician to stop work on whatever he is working on and not to talk about it. This is wrong in so many ways.. All I can say is, if your thinking about working for the NSA, you should serious reconsider.. just imagine not being able to talk about what you do all day. That is not living.
Anywho, very few things piss me off quite as much as the though that the NSA developes things which could help us all and then sits on them.. that is treason.
Jeff
BTW> Not being able to talk about your life is even worse if you take memes or related ideas seriously (ala Church of Virus). The idea is that a very importent part of you is contained in the content of your thoughs (as opposed some metaphyiscal mumbo-jumbo) and communicating with other people is a kind of imortality (maybe the only kind you would want anyway). The point being it really sucks to dedicate most of your life to something that will sit in a box.
It's kinda funny.. the OS is frequently like one of the most secure links in the chain on either Linux or NT. It's oftin the custom software which is vulnerable.. PHP's default behavior for example is to place all form variables into the global name space. Not a big deal to fix since you can always initialize a variable before you use it if it should not be comming from a form, but it is dangerous.. I seem to recall VBScript having related problems.. and I could be wrong about this, but I believe itwas a pain in the ass to even SQL safe form vars in VBScript. Just think of how many credit card taking pages out there are in VBScript.
Now, people worry more about OS/daemon hacks since then script kiddies can use them, but the serious cracker who really wants to fiddle with your data driven site can do wonders.. What would be especially cool is to see an AI that could crack database driven VBScript pages by guessing probable programmer mistakes.. and say propogate it's self as an ActiveX control into the pages. Now, that would be beautiul since there wouldn't really be crap MS could do about this little worm.. it's the developers fault.. never mind that MS didn't give them the tools to try and prevent it.
Anywho, the point being.. we should expect more serious exploits of this form in the future.
Jeff
BTW> It would be kinda cool to write a PHP script analysis program which looked for security holes.
Fuck em.. let everyone take pictures of the bases. Hey the Ruissian's need money and they probable have spy sat.s Maybe they could set up a web site which gave real resolution pics for like $500 or something. That would be great..
Jeff
Hmm.. I could be mistaken, but I believe RMS has complained about RedHat stealling brand name value away from GNU.. same as with the GNU/Linux stuff. Plus, I was under the impression that he was somewhat sparing in praise for the Linux co.'s in general. I could be compleatly wrong however.. I dont really know anything specific.. just gossip. No disrespect intended to RMS by the post, but the point about the value of testing the GPL in court still stands.. RMS was just a victim of my tring to make the point that it dose say soemthing for a co. to be willing to foot the bill to create the precedent.
Jeff
this looks like it could turn into an opertunity for one of the real linux co.s (VA, Redhat, etc.) to hurt the competition (Corel), get more good publicity, and put contribute some legal precedent to supporting the GPL. I'd like to see RMS bitch about RedHat or whomever if they are the ones who end up giving the GPL some much needed combat experence.
Jeff
I accedentally posted this thing twice.. I hate it when people do that. It would be nice if Rob would give us a way to delete our own post.
Jeff
Let look down that list of experts and see who we can influence. I have gone through my copy and removed the names of professors and anyone who is on our side (ACLU rep.). Most of them are Europeans, but a few look particlearly easy to influence.. like:
/. And anyone who lives in Europe should look at the list of European law enforcement agencies that showed up.
John B. Rabun --- Vice President and COO, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,
Arlington, USA. You can send an email to hotline@ncmec.org saing you hope that NCMEC is not stuping to incuraging censorship and talk a lot about Bartalsmann's conenction with the Nazi's. If they are not on our side (they havn't writen me back yeat so I don't know) you can go complain to there sponsors. There are a lot of computer co.'s on the list and they probable don't want to loose server sails because fewer people can put content on the net.
Marie-The're`se Huppertz (Microsoft Europe, European Affairs Office, Bruxelles) and Clare Gilbert (Vice President, General Counsel, AOL Europe, Lon- don, Great Britain) should also hear from
There are plenty of ``just plane evil'' people there like the Internet Content Rating Association. If you want a good list of companies to boycott or call and threaten to boycott ceck out there sponcers list at www.icra.org.
Jeff
Let look down that list of experts and see who we can influence. I have gone through my copy and removed the names of professors and anyone who is on our side (ACLU rep.). Most of them are Europeans, but a few look particlearly easy to influence.. like:
/. And anyone who lives in Europe should look at the list of European law enforcement agencies that showed up.
John B. Rabun --- Vice President and COO, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,
Arlington, USA. You can send an email to hotline@ncmec.org saing you hope that NCMEC is not stuping to incuraging censorship and talk a lot about Bartalsmann's conenction with the Nazi's. If they are not on our side (they havn't writen me back yeat so I don't know) you can go complain to there . There are a lot of computer co.'s on the list and they probable don't want to loose server sails because fewer people can put content on the net.
Marie-The're`se Huppertz (Microsoft Europe, European Affairs Office, Bruxelles) and Clare Gilbert (Vice President, General Counsel, AOL Europe, Lon- don, Great Britain) should also hear from
There are plenty of ``just plane evil'' people there like the Internet Content Rating Association. If you want a good list of companies to boycott or call and threaten to boycott ceck out there sponcers list at www.icra.org.
Jeff
Ok, so if they are doing it by meta tags then we can just move all content to SSL and avoid backbone filtering. Now, if we can figure out what IP addresses are in what countries we can make an Apache module to filter out ALL censorship meta tags when the packet is going to another country.. or just lie an rate everything G. unless it is gong to your own country, in which case you follow the law. This would make it MUCH harder to actually prosicute people for miss-rating.
Jeff
BTW> On a compleatly diffrent note, has anyone writen an ActiveX control to disable the Censorware programs which are out there? My limited knoladge of ActiveX is that it is not secure, you just have to register the control with M$.
I suppose we can all stop buying Random House books and those of us who live in Germany can raise a stink about it directly, but what can people in other countries do? Example: if you live in England or some other european nation it might help to call your representitives and tell them that you do not want a unified censorship system because you don't want Germany/France/etc. to have control over your speach.
Also, how much of this will be non-legislative cowaperation from the other companies at the conferance? And what can we do to fight that? It would be nice to see something of a list of companies that were there next to there compeditors who were not.. then I could just call up said company and tell them I'm switching to there compeditor because they support censorship.
Also, what kind of protocoll modifications are we looking at here.. Linux/Apache may own the server world (as in NT no longer sold at all) before this is implemented.. could we make support for the protocoll modificatios a highly non-standard and difficult to install patch? Would it be prudent to adjust the Licenses of these programs to restrict censorship support? (Linus/Apache Team save us!)
Can will hurt Bertelsmann (boycott Random House?). How can I make shure I don't buy anyhting that comes thourgh them? Would someone like to set up a FAQ or site on how to avoid givng them any money. Could we watch them very closly and gradually make the net anti-Bertelsmann? I notices a link to there holdings here.
Finally, we should keep in mind that this will hurt everyone execpt the few companies that are large enough to censor themselves.. and we should be selling Bertelsmann hate in whatever way people will be most receptive. Example: If you live near a smaller publisher you can perhaps get them to call elected officials (who don't want to put the constituants out of work) and complain.
Jeff
A cool thing about flat screens is that you could get the edges down REALLY thin and then start placing them next to each other.. so that the cost of you desk top would go up linearly in the number pixiles or quadratically in the dimention.. and there would only be a thin line between pannels.
A cool thing about massivly computerized houses is the opertunity to script things (I use cron for an alarm clock now) and apply AI's. Plus, E will stop complaining about men ot aving any beer in the fridge once it can talk to my fridge.
Jeff
..since it can help you and me in our everyday lives. How many of you had to suffer through writing long lab reports in your engenering classes.. half of which was simply a question of sticking to a predetermined form. This technology can be developed to the point where you can outline what you want to say and hae a machine actually say it. Just imagine if the free software projects could document themselves mearly by making detailed notes of why they did what they did with the source code. What needs to be worked on here is interaction between human and computer.. humans do the initial layout and then the computer dose the grunt work while the human adjusts what it has to say. The issue here as I see it is really one of use interface. AI's are nice, but an AI that dose what you probable would have done anyway and then lets you fix it would be awsome.
In mathematics we are beginning to see theorem proving software that can do a little bit of the grunt work involved in proving some types of theorems, but the limiting factor is still partly user interface and partly the difficulty of learning how to interact with the AI, i.e. designing your notation so that the AI can work on it. I expect the problems in computer generated documentation will also be that the human author needs to express him/her self to the machine in a way it can understand.. and the machine needs to give sufficent feedback so that the human dose not end up fighting the machine to keep it fvrom writing down a specific path.
This is sorta like the research into functional programming langauges. You write your code in a provably correct specification langauge and then have the compiler make it efficent.. but imagine how a compiler which inserted optimization hints into the functional code so that you could come along and adjust it later.
Jeff
BTW> I wonder why no one has writen an AI to check C source for buffer overflows.
Understanding of the world can never be `evil'' and I do not believe that his development of the H bomb was a bad thing. Now, perhaps deployment of the H bomb and Teller's incuragement of it as a deterent or Teller's ideas about nuclear excavation are a bit stupid, but the publicashion of the ideas of involved (and maybe a little bit of initial testing) is a good thing. Yes, lots of people could have died, but the potential for nuclear wepons exists wether Teller had done what he did or not and we need to learn to live with them sometime.. the only real issue was wether we would have been better off waiting a few more years and letting a little more sanity creap into the cold-war.
If it is part of nature we should try to understand it.
Jeff