Rob's Rants

There comes a time in every man's life when he must just sit down and throw a fit about something. Indeed, if he is a narcissistic/exhibitionist Computer Geek [TM], he's just as likely to type that fit into the computer and post it on the web. And, indeed, this time may come to a man's life frequently.

Below are some of the rants I have felt compelled, for one reason or another, to post on the web. Well, OK, so right now there's only one. However, I got tired of it being on my homepage, so I moved it out here.

Presidential EULA:

George W. Bush ("The Product") is licensed by the Microsoft Corporation for the use of the citizens of the United States of America for a limited period of four years. Any violation of the terms of this license invalidate this agreement and terminate any rights this license grants to the licensees. Throughout this license period and beyond, all ownership of The Product and its derivatives belongs to the Microsoft Corporation. Any legislation signed into law by The Product is thus the property of the Microsoft Corporation; all rights thereto fall to the Microsoft Corporation. The terms of this license prohibit the licensees from using any such legislation against the interests of the owner of that legislation.

The World is Doomed

If you think about what could happen, September 11 was nothing. A few thousand dead, and the "USA Patriot" act rammed through congress chipping away at civil liberties, an act which would have been considered extreme and unthinkable mere months before. Indeed, doubtless many out there are thinking that people like me are insensitive, comfortable and alive to whine about my freedoms in the face of all the people tragically dead on 2001/09/11.

Weapons of mass destruction are out there, and are getting easier and easier to create or get ahold of every day. During the cold war, only large governments were able to wield weapons of mass destruction; and, as scary as that time may have been, large governments were few and relatively stable. We are getting to the point, however, where individual madmen- of which the world has no shortage- will be able to get their hands on a nuke. Or, perhaps even worse, a virulent biological agent.

When individuals can get their hands on that kind of destructive power, it is only a matter of time until something happens, something that will sicken, sadden, and scare us much more than even the terrorist acts of September 11. No matter how vigilant we are, it is simply a matter of time before somebody blows off a nuke in a large city. Maybe it will be months, maybe years, maybe a couple of decades. But when individuals can get their hands on that kind of destructive power: well, there are a lot of individuals in the world, and it only takes a tiny percentage of them being completely insane for this to be inevitable.

And when it does, the president, whoever he is, will shortly declare martial law. And the citizens, sobered and frightened by what they've just seen, and by the realization of how easy it is for the same thing to happen again, will thank him for it. Freedom to come and go as you please, to travel without authorization and justification, will dissapear: we won't be able to afford it. Surveillance of everybody, all the time, will become commonplace, and we will welcome it. In time, in the interest of stopping terrorism before it happen, people who harbor dangerous attitudes or say alarming things will be watched, then restricted or jailed. And we will thank our leaders for it, because a repeat of the terrorist nuking of a city will be unthinkable.

And, at that point, we will be done. We will be living in a police state. We will almost certainly talk about "protecting our freedom," but during the perpetual state of global emergency, we will no longer be willing to afford actual freedom. Weapons of mass destruction won't go away without enough use of them to send us "back to the stone age". Because their availablity is what will send us into the global police state in the first place, the police state will never go away.

This sounds like a paranoid rant. But I consider it inevitable. At some point in the last few, ten, or fifty years, the world crossed a threshold; it became a very small place, with a very large number of people, any one of whom could do something unthinkable.

Crime Pays

Microsoft was found by the courts to have acted against the law, acting illegally as a monopoly.

The US Justice department, those who accused Microsoft in the first place, have come up with a "settlement" which is little more than a slap on the wrist to Microsoft; and, in any event, costs them far less than what they gained from their illegal monopolistic practices.

Crime, clearly, pays. If the costs of these behaviors were far outweight by the benefits to Microsoft from them, then they were clearly good business decisions. The irony of it is that now Microsoft has demonstrated that illegal monopolistic practises are profitable given the weakness of the penalties they receive, their shareholders could sue them for not doing the same sorts of things in the future!

Apple Patents Stencils and Silk-screens

It's true. They have a patent (number 5379129; you can find it at the USPTO) on doing with computers the same thing that you do with inks and paints when you use a stencil or a silk-screen: using a mask to let part of one image overlap or blend with another. If you have half a brain (as evidently US patent examiners do not) and do any work in image processing, the technique of using mask images becomes bloody obvious very quickly. Since silkscreening and stencils predate 1992, Apple should not have this patent. But, now, this stupid patent is a threat to all sorts of software development. Free software is particularly threatened, since there's no bank of lawyers to fight Apple and no company to pay licensing. It's a problem just ignoring it, since being sued costs money; even if you know you'll win, when you're a little guy the cost of going to court in the first place is enough to let the bully (Apple, in this case) win by default. And if you do go to court, there's always the fear that you're going to get one of the judges in this country who is computer illiterate enough to think that subtraction is novel when "done with a computer." Software patents are a serious problem. And now I'm pissed at Apple. Boycott them right along with bloody Microsoft.

In particular, the open standard for the PNG file format, used for many of the images on this web page, is threatened by this standard. If you're using a current browser with full PNG support (i.e. something newer than Netscape 4.7), you'll see the effects of transparency on the two cat images (the photo and the drawing) in the sidebar. Here is a site trying to collect prior art in computer image processing that would hopefully invalidate this patent.)

Software patents are troublesome. Many of them out there, being actively enforced by various companies, are based on techniques that become obvious to anybody who does any work at all in the relevant area. It is clear indicates that the US patent office is not qualified to decide what is a novel invention. I sometimes wonder if I should submit basic personal hygiene patents; they may seem obvious to us, but I bet once the patent office learned about them the place could start to smell a whole lot better.

The SSSCA

There's a new law in the works, the SSSCA which will probably be proposed to the Senate in the next month or so. This law, lobbied for by the "digital copyright industry" (the movie, recording, and publishing industries) seeks to require that every piece of computer hardware and software be required to be certified by the government as including mandated security technology that prevents unauthoraized copying. The passage of this law would be a calamity for those of us in the USA who still value individual freedom of thought and speech.

This is "policeware," which would have to go on every single computer, simply because somebody somewhere might be considering using that computer for copyright violation. I know the digital copyright industry is worried about "piracy" (which might better be described as "bootlegging" or "gatecrashing", since no loss of life is involved, and indeed nobody even is deprived of property). But this is going much, much too far. They are talking about regulating our intellectual activity simply out of a fear of loss of profits to copyright violation. An analogy might be requiring that anybody driving be required to have a policman in his back seat, watching his every move, just because sometimes people use cars to drive to banks and rob them.

I am particularly concerned about this law because it would spell the death of free software as we know it in this country. No longer will you be able to download a software package with the source code, open for tweaking and adapting as you see fit. Before you're allowed to use it, your tweaked version will have to be certified by this government panel. Sure, Microsoft and those guys will easily be able to put in place mechanisms to get thier software approved. But the little guy, the individual with a computer who likes to program, will no longer be able to distribute those programs or put them on a computer he connects to the internet. This law is so contrary to the very principle of freedom in this country that it saddens me that any of our elected lawmakers would even be considering it. I am further saddened looking back at the DMCA, and realizing that this law, or some "comprimise" which restricts our intellectual activity nearly as much, is very likely to be passed. When it is, I will probably flee the country.

On September 11, we witnessed some pretty terrible things. Lawmakers have come forward saying that we will not let the fear of terrorism weaken our resolve for freedom. I hope that they stand by this, and do not use terrorism as an exuse to remove our freedoms and civil rights. But, meanwhile, it looks like many of these same lawmakers are ready to completely sell out our freedom not out of a fear of terrorism, but out of a fear of the mere possibility of copyright violation.

Intellectual Property 2

A good article in Discover Online by Jaron Lanier about the whole Napster business presents a rather extreme but depressingly plausible dystopian future in which individual freedoms are severely curtailed, as a result of the current path we seem to be following in order to allegedly "protect copyright holders rights".

One of the most important bits in that article is the last paragraph, an excerpt from which I've quoted at the top of this page. The problem is that right now, we're introducing legislation which will incidentally quash individual's freedom of expression, so that we can artifically preserve the business models that let some people make a lot of money today. The argument of the recording industry is that by allowing the new technology to fully express itself, we will be destroying the ability of musicians to create. But that's much like arguing that nobody would have been able to make money on transportation if we didn't legislate the survival of the buggy whip industry at the beginning of this century. Things change. People adapt. Industries become obselete and die, but new ones come and take their place. In the digital world, if we allow freedom, there will be doubtless all sorts of opporunities we haven't even thought of. Trying to force old business models on an environment where they no longer make sense, by making illegal the things that do make sense, only causes individuals to suffer.

Intellectual Property 1

One of the most important issues facing the USA (and indeed the world) today is that of intellectual property, and preserving the individual's right and ability of free expression in a digital world. The digital world in many ways enhances and empowers individual expression, and large, centralized powerful entities who control a lot of intellectual property today (read: large software companies, large motion picture companies, and large record companies) don't like this. As a result, technological and legal measures have been and are being developed that give these large centralized power bases more and more control over what individuals can and can not do- so that, perversely, individual expression will be more controlled in the digital world than it was before the widespread advent of digital technology.

While this may sound minor in comparison to some of the other crises of the world, I think most people would agree that individual freedom, and freedom of expression, is one of the pillars on which today's Western Civilization is built. We value it, and it is crucial that we insure that it survives. Those freedoms are currently under assault in ways which are not immediately obvious to many people. This issue worries me enough that I'm about ready to become a "single issue" voter.

Where I see this individual freedom as being under attack is in terms of increasingly draconian controls on Intellectual Property. I intend to write many more rants on this in the future. In the mean time, I would point you to this article by John Gilmore of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Biometrics: A Terrible Idea

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning (2000 November 12) inspired me to write this. We are starting to hear more and more buzz about how "passwords' days are numbered," and how user authentication will be done using biometrics. This is a system whereby you use the retinal pattern, the fingerprint, the voice pattern, or even something as basic as DNA keying of individuals to let them access their bank records, computer accounts, etc. On the face of it, it seems like a great idea. Passwords can easily be stolen or guessed; your fingerprints, your DNA, they're yours, and they're a lot harder to steal. Passwords can also easily be forgotten; you don't forget your fingerprints, you always have them with you.

Whenever I read about biometrics in the media, the only drawback that is ever mentioned is that until very recently, the technology for using them was too expensive. Otherwise, it's presented as a win-win situation. It's much easier, as the masses won't have to remember a whole bunch of different PIN numbers and passwords, and it is always presented as much more secure.

There's just one very big problem with biometrics, as compared to passwords you have to know, which is best summed up as this:

Yes, sure, a password can be stolen. Somebody can see you type it, or can use a network monitor to steal it from the network wires. But, if your password is stolen, you can change it. If your ATM card and PIN number is stolen, you can have the old number invalidated, and a new PIN issued. The crook who stole your old password can't use it any more. Stealing fingerprints may be a lot harder, but once somebody figures out how to steal yours, you're done. Either you can't authenticate yourself anymore, or you will forever be at the mercy of the crook who figured out how to spoof your fingerprint.

Sound paranoid? I will admit that stealing a fingerprint (or other biometric information) is harder than stealing a password. But you are naive if you think it can't be done. Right now, the equipment necessary to pick up a fingerprint and create something that could spoof a fingerprint reader is probably something that only organizations like the FBI have access to. But will it always be so?

More to the point, there are easier places to attack it. Consider trying to access your financial records over the internet. You put your finger (or your eye, or whatever) into your biometric reader on your computer. Your computer sends the information across the internet to your bank, and you're given access. If somebody wants to access your records, they don't have to figure out how to spoof the biometric reader on your computer. They only have to figure out how to fake the information which your computer sends to the bank! Unless the system is very well designed (using the equivalent of public key cryptography and a challenge-response system), this could be very easy, requiring only a computer and a well-placed network connection. "Packet sniffers" on the internet today steal huge quantities of passwords in just this manner. (And if this happens to you, change your password!)

Regardless of how hard you think it is to steal biometric information, the fact remains that once it's stolen, there's nothing you can do. A password or PIN number can always be invalidated, and you can always get a new one. For this reason, I will be very alarmed if the world moves to using only biometrics for authenticating people. I wouldn't object if we also used passwords- indeed, that would probably greatly increase the security of the passwords. But biometrics alone is not enough.

The Web Is A Crock!!!!

Here's the biggest problem with the web: all those companies have hired techno-geek webmasters with ISDN lines at home and ethernet lines at work, and high-paid art-school designers who insist on fully graphic beautiful sites.

The result? Beautiful, highly graphic web sites which run just fine on the techno-geek's computer and which take BLOODY FOREVER for those of us with modems (even 33.6K modems) to load! And what's more? FORM OVER FUNCTION. Sites are beautiful. In fact, they look as good as the advertising hype brochures you can get at computer stores... or as TV ads. And they contain about as much information.

What particularly irks me is most computer company web sites. I want to know what all the jumpers on my SCSI hard drive do... or the escape sequences for my printer. Can I find that on the company's web page? Only about a third of the time. The no-brains types they have creating their web pages have no CLUE about the potential power of the web. They could save money on technical support if they would just answer simple questions like this on their web pages!!

Indeed, rather than a useful information resource, most computer companies' web sites are useless bandwidth-wasting gratuitous collections of pablum much like this page you are reading right now.

My current Typical Web Crock Site: Canon. To navigate from each page, you have to load an imagemap to get to the next page. What's more, they don't even bother to use ALT tags in their images, so you have to load ALL the big images just to figure out which one is the one you want. Do they have alternate text menus for people who've turned off image loading (or, heavens, who are using Lynx)? Nope! Do we modem users at home want to sit through that image loading to get what we want? No way! And that's even when some trick the web site tries to use doesn't crash that piece of bloatware known as Netscape (whose primary redeeming feature is that it is not published by Microsoft). And can you find technical information you're after (in my case, the escape sequences) about your Canon printer? Nope. Amazing. Ridiculous.

The site, in my opinion, would be infintely better, and would have left me with a far better opinion of the company, and it been all simply text, not visually beautiful... but practical to navitage over a modem and with some of the actual information which you can't get out of an ad or out of the manual. (For that matter, there's no excuse for the information I am looking for to not be in the manual. I miss the good old days of C=64's when this kind of technical information would always be in the printer's manual.)

Rob Knop