antikoan

 |::| Monday, July 15, 2002

 |::| xibalba.Net  5:00:33 PM 

In the future, everyone will define their existence relative to an ocean of thoroughly controlled information. Most people will swim continually in that ocean, with the only uncontrolled thoughts residing (for now) in their own minds. To escape the grip of the waters, you will have to either rise above them (which will cost you), or sink below them into the digital underworld. And as with all underworlds, the cost of the latter will be high.

"The good/bad news: As described, Palladium won't meet most of the hyperbolic claims being made for it." (Paul Boutin, Wired News, "Palladium: Safe or Security Flaw?")

I take it as given that there are interests that would prefer information to be controlled, and those that would prefer it to flow freely. Hackers tend to assume that anything the interests of control can create, they can put asunder.

For various reasons, it seems clear to me (and, it would seem, to a relatively few others) that this is basically mistaken. The hackers need to apply one of the most basic principles of market success in computing: Good enough is good enough. Here, it means that if you can control the actions of enough people to drive the desired concensus -- or even if you can just tie up enough of the capital reliably -- you've got control.

Palladium, and the current trend toward embedding DRM into everything that will handle an e-text (where text is understood very broadly), will essentially embed the control of information flow so deeply into the digital landscape (which will include all retailed music, as well as all film and most broadcast media, and hence is the only landscape that will really matter) that only a privileged or highly educated few will be able to circumvent it.

In other words, the hackers may create techniques to crack DRM technologies, but that doesn't mean either that people will know about them, be able to get them, or know how to use them if they've got them.

With luck, Palladium (and all other industrial DRM technologies) will indeed prove hackable with relative ease. With luck, concepts like the Cult of the Dead Cow's peer-to-peer "Six/Four" encrypted communications protocol and their "Camera/Shy" steganography app will be able to run without being recognized by Palladium and similar OS/environments. But if they are recognized, the new environments would be able to report the suspicious software usage to the "appropriate authotities." And there's every likelihood that in the new, "less permissive" (i.e., more restrictive) social and political environment, use of technologies to securely ensure privacy will be tantamount to possession of munitions.

But that's a slippery slope we've got a long time to slide on before our downward path is unrecoverable. Right now, we suppose that those proper authorities our embedded DRM software automatically reported to would be governmental; but the more damaging prospect, really, is that they'd be private. Unless and until the Fed gets the right to selectively suspend rights (which we can, at least in principle, stop it from doing), the private entities are more dangerous because they don't have to permit due process. Private citizens are not generally provided with legal representation for civil cases (though the right to that representation has been upheld in civil court). With the proper tacit approval from the governmental sector, the privates can pretty much do whatever they want. As though that's news to anybody right now...

Palladium: Safe or Security Flaw?. Microsoft's new project could offer virus protection, control over personal information, even spam blocking. Or maybe it's a giant boondoggle. By Paul Boutin. [Wired News]

A New Code for Anonymous Web Use. The political hacking group known as Hacktivismo is about to unveil a peer-to-peer system that will shield online identities and permit secure, anonymous Internet use. Noah Shachtman reports from New York. [Wired News]

The Hackers Who Ate New York City. It's time once again for Hackers on Planet Earth, a convention of coders, security professionals, federal agents, quasi-social misfits and random brainiacs. Michelle Delio reports from New York. [Wired News]

 |::| "Comrade Smith, your son tells me you spoke ill of the Vice President at dinner last night..."  3:50:17 PM 

It's all coming together for me, now -- I think I'm finally seeing the light...

From the Sydney Morning Herald (via Boing Boing [dicussion] and DayPop [link ranking on DayPop]), "US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies" (direct link at Morning Herald).

Why do I suspect that there will be relatively little traffic on this story in the US? Will there really be so few of us who don't see that this makes us little different from the former Soviet Block regimes who recruited children against their parents?

Maybe it's all just part of our new, more devout religious climate; after all, as Jesus said:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.
-- Matthew 10:34-42 (RSV) (see also (compare at Blue Letter Bible)

If we put that together with the Reverend Justice Scalia's admonition that the true faithful owe their first allegiance to the State (as the duely-appointed "minister o' God", then we can see that it's only right that we should be reduced to a nation of sniveling informers and Aristocrats of Pull.

ADDENDUM: Ritt Goldstein, the author of the piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, is apparently being vilified as a wacko, but the citizencorps.gov website does really exist. And it does still make a strange, frighteningly poetic kind of sense...

 |::| Father Scalia  3:45:51 PM 

Justice Antonin Scalia recently spoke publicly with implications regarding his views on religion and government. Naturally he claims that his firm belief in one nation under God doesn't color his legal opinions, but I think this public statement is important background information on the man who'd almost certainly be nominated for the Chief's slot if Rehnquist retired. First, here are a few select comments on the speech from a recent New York Times op-ed by historian Sean Wilentz [free registration req'd]:

Earlier this year Antonin Scalia decided to share some aspects of his worldview with the public. His inspiration seems to have been the death penalty: recent debates with his colleagues on the Supreme Court and his general reflections on the legitimacy of the state taking to itself the power to kill a citizen. Justice Scalia spoke on these matters at the University of Chicago Divinity School in January, beginning with the ritual disclaimer that "my views on the subject have nothing to do with how I vote in capital cases"; his remarks appeared in the May issue of First Things: The Journal of Religion and Public Life. They are supplemented by his dissent to the court's decision on June 20 that mentally retarded people should not be executed. Justice Scalia's remarks show bitterness against democracy, strong dislike for the Constitution's approach to religion and eager advocacy for the submission of the individual to the state. It is a chilling mixture for an American.

Because Mr. Scalia is on the Supreme Court, and because President Bush has held him up as an example of judicial greatness, his writings deserve careful attention.

Mr. Scalia seems to believe strongly that a person's religious faith is something that he or she (as a Roman Catholic like Mr. Scalia) must take whole from church doctrine and obey. In his talk in Chicago, Mr. Scalia noted with relief that the Catholic Church's recent opinion that the death penalty was very rarely permissible was not "binding" on Catholics. If it had been, Mr. Scalia said, this teaching would have led the church to "effectively urge the retirement of Catholics from public life," given that the federal government and 38 states "believe the death penalty is sometimes just."

Mr. Scalia apparently believes that Catholics, at least, would be unable to uphold, as citizens, views that contradict church doctrine. This is exactly the stereotype of Catholicism as papist mind control that Catholics have struggled against throughout the modern era and that John F. Kennedy did so much to overcome. But Mr. Scalia sees submission as desirable _ and possibly the very definition of faith. He quotes St. Paul, "For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God."

...

One senses that Mr. Scalia's true priority is to get secular humanists off the federal bench. In his dissent to Atkins v. Virginia, the recent decision against executing mentally retarded criminals, Mr. Scalia wrote, "Seldom has an opinion of this Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members." The ones he had in mind were not all the members, just the six who disagreed with him. Mr. Scalia dissents vigorously against them for letting their personal notions infect the law.

In Chicago Mr. Scalia asserted, not for the first time, that he is a strict constructionist, taking the Constitution as it is, not as he might want it to be. Yet he wants to give it a religious sense that is directly counter to the abundantly expressed wishes of the men who wrote the Constitution. That is not properly called strict constructionism; it is opportunism, and it threatens democracy. His defense of his private prejudices, even if they may occasionally overlap the opinions of others, should not be mislabeled conservatism. Justice Scalia seeks to abandon the intent of the Constitution's framers and impose views about government and divinity that no previous justice, no matter how conservative, has ever embraced.

Scalia's speech is as long and as abstruse as most sermons, but here's what seems to me to be the section that Wilentz is really talking about:

Few doubted the morality of the death penalty in the age that believed in the divine right of kings. Or even in earlier times. St. Paul had this to say (I am quoting, as you might expect, the King James version):

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. (Romans 13:1-5)

This is not the Old Testament, I emphasize, but St. Paul. One can understand his words as referring only to lawfully constituted authority, or even only to lawfully constituted authority that rules justly. But the core of his message is that government -- however you want to limit that concept -- derives its moral authority from God. It is the minister of God with powers to "revenge," to "execute wrath," including even wrath by the sword (which is unmistakably a reference to the death penalty). Paul of course did not believe that the individual possessed any such powers. Only a few lines before this passage, he wrote, "Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." And in this world the Lord repaid -- did justice -- through His minister, the state.

I probably can't claim the number of scripture-hours that justice Scalia can, but I know a suspect reading when I see one. An acquaintence more familiar with the history of biblical interpretation has been good to supply a critique that upholds my gut instinct: Scalia's interpretation is just plain silly, and Paul was not advocating subservience to righteous pagan Roman authority.

And I find it particularly telling, and particularly frightening, that the nation's most powerful Strict Constructionist should prove so transparently self-serving and so profoundly a-historical in his interpretation of the basic text of his own religion.

Finally, I wonder what bearing Justice S. might find Matthew 10:34-42 to have on this discussion...

 |::| Word for the Moment: CONSERVATIVE  2:52:47 PM 

conservative (n.) A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
-- Ambrose Bierce (Devil's Dictionary)
(from RWA)

 |::| B All U Can B  2:43:41 PM 

Divide Is More Than Digital. Vayu Kieta grew up in one of Boston's poorest areas -- now he refers to himself as a 'master of Dreamweaver' and hopes Intel's Computer Clubhouse will help him parley his skills into a profession. By Dustin Goot. [Wired News]

From the article:

Yet Kieta has struggled to gain professional experience in Web development, despite applying for several positions in that area. One job he did get -- at the Museum of Science's Cahners Computer Place, a type of Internet cafe -- he later quit, saying that he was misled about the responsibilities he would be given.

"They told us we'd be doing basically what we're doing in the clubhouse," Kieta said. "All they did was give us three passwords. When someone wanted to use the computer, we were supposed to go type in the password."

Breslow acknowledged that it is not uncommon for clubhouse members to be underestimated, in part because of biases people have about children who come from poor or troubled backgrounds. Even in cases where clubhouses have set up internships with local businesses, she said many kids "have felt bored by the work."

Pardon me if I sound like an old-timer, but some things just ought to be earned. Why should one kid get a dev job when plenty of kids (like the ones I worked with at the U of Rochester's CLARC or supervised at Nazareth College) have to earn their right to more responsibility by typing in passwords for clueless users?

I'm all for education that helps bridge the digital divide. But outside of a brief period from about 1996 through 2000, being a "master of Dreamweaver" and a couple of bucks would buy you a decent cup of coffee in America. And (aside from the price of coffee) I don't see why there's a problem with that.

 |::| Crap Software of the Day: SCREEM  1:34:21 PM 

Imagine a car that required you to specify the type of journey and expected destination, number of passengers, and type of engine (electric, or internal combustion?) you'd be using every time you wanted to start the engine. And whenever you mentioned this problem to friends who claimed to drive the same car, they'd scoff at you and give one of two answer:

1. That's just the right way to do it, dammit. You should just suck up and deal.
2. There's a special way to turn the key that bypasses all that stuff. (No, they don't know what it is, because they always start the car the right way.)

That's pretty much how SCREEM seems to work. When you start the program, you get a splash display; you have to manually elect to display the editor. When you do, you can't actually edit anything, unless you've automatically opened up a "project". You can't just use SCREEM as an editor without first setting up a dummy project of some sort. Then you have to know enough to make that particular dummy project open on startup.

And, of course, in good Unix/Open-Source tradition, you've got to figure all that out for yourself. (And they wonder why Linux doesn't catch on quicker....)

SCREEM offers a profoundly mystified interface with no visible advantages over, say, the much more usable (and yet still rather annoying) Bluefish. Neither even begins to approach the utility of Windows based editors like TextPad or Homesite.

 |::| Quote of the Moment  12:09:19 PM 

Stonehenge: Where the demons dwell,
Where the banshees live, and they do live well...
-- Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins, This Is Spinal Tap