Steve Reads

Via Slashdot: A few antivirus companies, and router manufacturer Cisco, are working together on a router that will forbid machines to get on the network unless they have appropriate security measures installed (my cache). E.g. — I gather — if your machine doesn’t have proper virus-checking, you won’t be allowed on.

As the Slashdot poster noted, this could be devastating for Unix machines that don’t use virus software. Which is another way of saying: this only happens because Windows machines are insecure. I’m certainly willing to bow before the weight of evidence if someone ever shows me a Unix machine that’s either sending viruses about or so insecure that remote users can execute arbitrary code on it, but I doubt it’ll happen anytime soon. In the meantime, we know that viruses thrive on Microsoft OSes. Doesn’t that suggest that the proper object of our antiviral work is the operating system that allows these viruses to spread? We’d likely get all kinds of side-benefits out of such work, including more secure Web servers. Microsoft might even regain some Web-server market share. Focusing on the OS certainly seems like a smarter bet, particularly when the dangers from avoiding an end-to-end model are so obvious.

As security consultant Bruce Schneier has pointed out, “I have long suspected a cozy little link between virus writers and antivirus software makers. The latter certainly needs the former, both to keep viruses in the news and to provide a steady revenue stream from updates.” I suspect financial interests rather than a desire to make the web more secure.

Via Slashdot: AT&T alleges that eBay and PayPal violate patent 5,329,589 (my cache).

Just to review what eBay and PayPal do, so that the absurdity of the patent will later be clear: eBay is an online auction house. One way of paying is to give PayPal your credit-card or checking-account number, which you then associate with a PayPal username. The next time you go online to buy something, you can pay them through PayPal. That way you’re not passing your credit-card number willy-nilly around the Net. PayPal becomes a trusted intermediary.

Now look at what the patent covers:

Methods and apparatus for employing a communications system with actively connects communicating entities to mediate transactions. Disclosed are general methods and apparatus for mediating transactions, methods and apparatus permitting information from one transaction to be used in other transactions, and methods and apparatus for performing credit card transactions in which the vendee need not disclose his credit card to the vendor. An implementation of a system for performing credit card transactions in a stored program-controlled telephone switching network is also disclosed.

So it’s effectively any system “in which the vendee need not disclose his credit card to the vendor.” When we all see why this is absurd, and when we see why patenting such a thing harms us all, why does it continue to happen? And when will fundamental reform happen? Will it take a few more absurd cases — Eolas and Amazon One-Click weren’t enough, apparently — before the whole system is reformed?

Speaking of Shalizi, he’s got a great intro to Gödel’s Theorem, which he references inside of his probabilistic tweak on the same theorem. I’m especially happy to see Shalizi’s list of good links to other Gödel-related materials, with commentary on each. He seems particularly fond of a proof of Gödel’s Theorem by Dale Myers; I’ll have to dig in and see what that’s all about. He doesn’t take the canonical route of recommending Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter’s masterpiece that I can’t recommend highly enough. I’m sure he’s got good reasons.

Incidentally, he slips in what must be intended as a dig: he writes of Roger Penrose’s book The Emperor’s New Mind that it “Does a marvelous job of explaining what goes into the proof — his presentation could be understood by a bright high school student, or even an MBA.”

Via Cosma Shalizi, whose blog I discovered through Chris Genovese, I’ve discovered a speech that Al Gore delivered on November 9. I think it’s incredibly important, and I’ve reproduced it below. A representative quote might be this:

But a lot of other changes have taken place that a lot of people don’t know about and that come as unwelcome surprises. For example, for the first time in our history, American citizens have been seized by the executive branch of government and put in prison without being charged with a crime, without having the right to a trial, without being able to see a lawyer, and without even being able to contact their families.

 . . . How do we feel about that? Is that OK?

Here’s another recent change in our civil liberties: Now, if it wants to, the federal government has the right to monitor every website you go to on the internet, keep a list of everyone you send email to or receive email from and everyone who you call on the telephone or who calls you — and they don’t even have to show probable cause that you’ve done anything wrong. Nor do they ever have to report to any court on what they’re doing with the information. Moreover, there are precious few safeguards to keep them from reading the content of all your email.

Everybody fine with that?

The whole thing is worth reading. Check below for the speech in its entirety.

(Note that I copied the speech from MoveOn’s site, which apparently used Microsoft Word to type it up. Word’s HTML handling is, if you’re not aware, quite terrible. Hence I had to write some of my own Perl to make the transcript passable, so that I could then run it through HTML Tidy. If anything came through the process badly, let me know.)

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I’m buying tickets home for Thanksgiving on Greyhound, and it’s actually rather expensive — $41 for a round-trip ticket. This isn’t really all that much, but I took a Fung Wah Bus between Boston and New York City for $21 round-trip recently. Granted, one of the bus’s tires popped along the way, and we sat on the side of the road for two and a half hours (the ride back was fine). You get what you pay for. Greyhound buses are, presumably, more reliable. But the fact remains that bus rides are essentially a fixed cost: once they decide to put a bus on the road in the first place, they’ve spent more or less all the money they’re going to spend: gas, the driver’s salary, prepping the bus to go on the road, etc. Gas costs might increase slightly because of the weight of the additional passengers, and they might have to pay more insurance if their average passenger load is higher, but it seems that most of their costs don’t change all that much as a function of the number of passengers they carry. Which is to say: the more people are on the bus, the more profit they’re making off me.

So I started to wonder whether there’s a way to do a RideBoard-type thing combined with some sort of reputation service. There are all kinds of ways that we handle reputation on the Net now: 1) you buy a used item on Amazon, and you get to see what other buyers have said about that seller; 2) my being friends with someone through Friendster vouches for my friend; 3) my having signed someone’s key in PGP certifies that the key with his name attached belongs to the person that the name refers to; 4) my having linked to someone through Google is — in some undefined sense — a vote of confidence for that person.

It would make sense to combine this with a RideBoard. Want to find all the people going from Boston to Vermont, but don’t know whether to trust them? Joe offers a ride. Joe knows Mary, Mary knows Roger, and Roger knows me. Maybe I ask Roger how much he trusts Mary, and whether he’s ever met Mary’s friends. If Mary generally has a set of non-psychotic, reliable friends, then I might not have any problem riding with Joe.

I don’t really know how to measure trust that many steps away. It’s an interesting problem, and one whose solution would many a lot of distributed stuff on the Internet work more smoothly.

I’m glad I could help you in your search, but I might suggest a better use of your time: actually reading the book. A Fine Balance is one of the best character studies I’ve ever read, and is positively heartbreaking. Given that you’re searching for Cliffs Notes, you’re almost certainly in school and looking for an easy way out. I understand the desire, but let me shed what little wisdom I have: high school and college are some of the only times in your life when you will be expected to read great books. After that, it’s unlikely anyone will be kicking your butt to make it happen, and if you’re like most college graduates you will probably not pick up a book for pleasure-reading for years; according to a New York Times article I read a while ago, the conventional wisdom throughout the publishing community is that half of all adults haven’t read a single book for pleasure since they left school.

So you have this remarkable opportunity to read fantastic books and think about them. True, you’re probably also being asked to write fantastically dry essays about, say, why Holden Caulfield thinks everyone around him is a phony. You’re probably much more focused on getting good grades and learning the list of AP English-approved books than you are on actually learning to appreciate good literature. It has probably never crossed your mind that you are engaging in a conversation with all of humanity that has spanned thousands of years and enfolds some of our species’ greatest minds. Indeed, you’ve probably not even considered that our ability to write works of such beauty is what makes us different from every other species. Instead you’re looking for Cliffs Notes.

I don’t mean to be condescending but  . . .  no, wait: yes, I do mean to be condescending. To paraphrase John von Neumann (he was this guy, and he wrote some books): anyone who reads Cliffs Notes in lieu of actual thinking is, of course, in a state of sin. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I’m reading Judge Richard Posner’s book The Economics Of Justice right now. It’s very thought-provoking, but  . . .  ultimately seems naïve, I guess.

Posner starts from the principle of wealth-maximization: policies are desirable inasmuch as they maximize societal wealth. In turn, Posner defines voluntary transactions between humans as wealth-maximizing, because neither party to the transaction would agree to it unless it were making him better off. This is more or less the standard capitalist ideology, so I’m suspicious of it.

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Via the Bookslut: lots of prominent authors are trying to save a financially ailing bookstore (my cache). The eBay auction starts Saturday. I’m not sure if the items will be cheap, but if a) they are and b) you’re looking for some books, then c) why not participate in a good cause?

My friend Sarah mentioned a collection of Gandhi’s works that sounds really intriguing. I’d like to start reading it soon. I’d especially like to contrast it with Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched Of The Earth, which is essentially the anti-Gandhi; it argues that violence is sometimes the only way to make colonialized people feel whole again — that violence is psychologically necessary. My friend Sharon says that Gandhi didn’t answer any of the questions that Fanon created; I’d like to see whether I agree with her.

I have this idea for an interview persona, one that I would affect if I were more ballsy than I am. His name is Chet Gumption; he wears a string tie. He’d stride (Chet can only stride or strut, not saunter or even walk) into an interview, pump the interviewer’s hand (using his left hand to hold a glass of straight whiskey) and say, “Hi, I’m Chet Gumption. I’m a straight shooter. I don’t mess around. Now let’s get down to business.” The interviewer would ask him some basic questions about himself, such as where he’s from, why he wants the job, what his experience is and so forth, and at every turn Chet would say something like, “Listen, are we gonna pussyfoot around, or are we gonna get down to brass tacks?” If possible, Chet wouldn’t answer a single question. Eventually he’d storm out (because even though he can’t saunter, he can storm), announcing on the way that he doesn’t want any bellyaching from a bunch of pussyfooters.

This is the personality that I would affect, but I doubt I have the chutzpah to ever pull it off.

I’m subscribed to my alma mater’s weekly newsletter. The latest one, which isn’t yet up on the website, reads, in relevant part (with links added),

NASA APPROVES PHYSICS PROF’S PROPOSED STUDY OF DARK MATTER

NASA has selected a proposal by Carnegie Mellon Physics Professor Richard E. Griffiths to use X-ray telescopes in a mission to measure the dark energy that makes up most of the universe. Griffiths’ proposal, “The Dark Universe Observatory” (DUO), is one of five candidate missions approved for NASA’s Explorer Program of lower cost, highly focused, rapid-development scientific spacecraft.

—NASA intends to select two of the five proposals by fall 2004 for full development as Small Explorer missions. The two missions developed for flight will be launched in 2007 and 2008. The selected proposals were judged to have the best science value among 36 submitted to NASA in February 2003. Each proposal will receive $450,000 to conduct a five-month implementation feasibility study.

I don’t question the value of this — I’m as fascinated by cosmology and dark matter as a lot of people. What I’m curious about — because I have no experience writing grants — is how an “implementation feasibility study” could cost $450,000. My vision of how this would work is that a guy — or maybe a few people — would sit around a table ($800) and draw out ($5, including pencils) the telescope, maybe call some companies ($8 in long-distance) to see how much the parts would cost, then write down a number and put it in the mail ($0.37) to NASA. Maybe they’d tack on some insurance ($1), just to make sure it got there safely. I’m not clear on where $450,000 goes. Maybe it funds the professors so that they can work on this without needing to depend on a university salary. Fair enough. But it’s 5 months. A well-paid professor gets $100,000 per year; if this stipend were meant to cover him during his time off, that would be $50,000.

Can someone with more experience in such things explain to me where all the money goes?

There have been a couple weird problems with the entriescache plugin, such that a great many of my posts appear to have been written on October 22 and November 5. I’m far too tired to handle this right now, so I’ll just say: if you think I wrote 150 posts on a given day, I must be doing something wrong.

It turned out to be irritating to maintain two sets of templates for this site, so I decided to bite the bullet and just edit the site “in place” — i.e., edit the version that everyone sees, rather than a test version. It’ll be ugly for a while, but alas.

I’m working on a redesign of this site (which is currently in hyper-super-wicked-rough-draft form), the main goal being to make it less cluttered generally, with a subgoal being to get rid of the enormous list of links to your left. It’s just too messy. I’m looking at sites like Meg Hourihan’s for guidance. If you have any suggestions, feel free to pass them my way via the comments.

Check out the sonograms of my niece (below). She’s something like negative-five months old. I’m incredibly excited (as, I’m sure, are my brother and sister-in-law).

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I’ve often repeated the statistic that Apache is the world’s most popular web server — that’s more or less common knowledge — but I never saw just how strong the numbers actually were:

Microsoft is not invincible. If the world’s computer users were aware of just how little dominance Microsoft holds in the server market, I think we might have an easier time getting Linux on desktops.

I was having some troubles with the new RSS feed, but I seem to have fixed those. I’ve also set up Apache so that anyone trying to access the old RSS feed will be redirected to the new one. If you have any problems, let me know; I’m still working out the kinks.

In a discussion of Amazon’s new Look Inside The Book program — which contains the full text of over 100,000 books — someone noted that the Authors Guild has protested: they claim that publishers don’t have the right to authorize the LITB program without the authors’ consent. Someone responded by pointing out the Authors Guild’s objections when Amazon started selling used books (my cache). I find their complaints pretty ridiculous, but I welcome defenses.

Neat! It turns out that Rael wrote a plugin to preserve the timestamp on a blog entry, even when the user has edited it.

This new blog package is great, but it’s creating some formatting issues. I think the interface here is way too busy: links for “other posts in this category,” permalinks, comments, and 88 links in the sidebar. My formatting hasn’t caught up to my content. I hope to restructure it shortly to be more readable; I’m looking at Kieran’s site as a model of clean design. Jason Kottke’s site is pretty good, too, though less visually interesting to me than Kieran’s.