The Call of the Open Sidewalk

Oh, what a week it's been!

So we've learned that an intelligence agency called the NSA that is run by one of the more popular countries has pretty much converted the Internet into a huge Super-Orwellian surveillance system. Breathtaking in scope but we more or less knew that already. Then last week we learned that we had to promote NSA to supervillian level status.

It turns out that the NSA has been actively working to degrade and destroy the use of encryption on the Internet. It appears in retrospect that they have been very effective at this. The best guess as to why they are doing this terrible thing is to make it easier for them to do surveillance. So not only is the NSA engaging in evil against the whole world, they are doing so for a reason that would only make sense in a Saturday morning cartoon. Presumably they were also planning to eventually use this advantage to steal all the money in the world, or at least to show everyone what the G.I. Joe's look like in their underwear...

The story so far:

A low level IT tech discovers that he has more or less been contracted out to Cobra Command. But this is no ordinary IT tech! Using his superior skill and wit he tricks the evil organization into giving him access to definite proof of their nefarious schemes. Taking this proof with him he goes on the run. This is with the knowledge that he will never see his girlfriend again and that he might actually die.

Again using his superior skill and wit the IT tech devises a way to leak the proof in a way that is impossible to ignore and that keeps him out of the way of retribution long enough to make such retribution pointless.

Now it is up to the geekiest of the geeks to save the world! Those few cryptographers not yet co-opted by the evil organization are banding together to meet this threat. The fate of the world literally rests on their shoulders!

posted at: 06:03 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry

This was in response to someone on Reddit who suggested that software patents on video compression methods were somehow more reasonable than other software patents because it was hard to come up with such methods. It seemed blogworthy.

Digging a trench is really hard too. How long does the trench have to be before I can get a patent and prevent anyone else from digging a trench that long?

Video compression patents are an excellent example of why software patents don't really make sense. If I somehow decode some compressed video the result is a bunch of coloured dots on a screen representing a moving image. The output is pure unmitigated data.

Now the people that believe in software patents will tell me that I can't use my computer to interpret the H.264 bit stream in the H.264 way without the permission of the 1600 or so patent holders. I can interpret it in an infinite number of other ways. That is OK. Just not the one way. That is even if I have read the standard and do the programming myself. There is just something magic about the one interpretation.

I happen to believe that the invention of the general purpose computer is on a similar level to that of the invention of fire. If I believe in software patents I also have to believe that I can only use this incredibly powerful invention in very circumscribed ways. Imagine the reaction if the people that used to spend time tenderizing meat with rocks tried to get a royalty from the people using fire to do the same thing. The fire users might patiently explain that the world had changed in a very fundamental way. They might instead suggest that the people trying to make their wonderful new thing as useless as the old thing just go fuck themselves. I will leave it to you to decide which group I fall into...

At any rate, suggesting that software patents are real in some way is deeply offensive. You should expect to get called on it...

posted at: 17:22 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry

I sold my car the other day. I wasn't really using it. This has forced me to deal with some day to day issues in a different way. Every month or so I would take the car to a large supermarket and load it full of all the heavy stuff I did not feel like carrying home from a more local store. This is no longer possible.

They make something for this application. A classified ad web site and $5 got me this:

It worked. It lacked both the capacity and the load carrying capacity of my car trunk. The solid wheels meant that I had to pay attention to avoid having the cart hit discontinuities in the pavement. Having to pay attention to the surroundings seriously detracts from a walk. It also had an associated old lady vibe. I am an old man. That is entirely different.

Here is my current grocery hauler after a triumphant trip out and back:

It is rated at 360 KG (800 lb). The pneumatic tires simply glide over discontinuities in the pavement. Once you get it up to speed you can hardly tell it is there. This is how a guy gets the groceries home from the store.

The wagon shown was originally sold as something to help with the incomprehensible things people do to interfere with the plant life in their yards. As a result it would be quite reasonable for people to assume that my super hot and high maintenance trophy wife had simply taken the BMW and left me with the shopping.

On the way home from my first shopping trip with the "garden cart" I had a realization that made me feel a little less superior to conventional shopping cart users. A light, two wheeled cart was simply essential to grandma's mission. The environment had changed in a significant way and I had not noticed. Grandma had to deal with curbs.

The local disabled community fought long and hard in the battle against curbs. Today there is not a single significant discontinuity from my stairs to the aisles of a supermarket 1.4 km away. That is kind of remarkable and represents a triumph. I now feel a bit bad about sitting out the conflict.

The morals to this story:

Sometimes different communities have more in common than they realize.

Some unintended consequences are good.

The pneumatic tire is a really clever and significant invention.

posted at: 12:58 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry

I recently had to design a reflector for a light fixture. After I was done I ended up with two dimensions that depended on one another. After some thought I had a true mathematical insight. The solution to my problem was the same as the solution to the intersection of a line and a cone. After futzing with the rotations (nothing was at right angles) I would of ended up with two equations in two unknowns. Using the more or less mechanical process of algebra I could of solved those equations.

My abstraction led to algebra. That is because I spent a lot of time as an undergraduate in the faculty of engineering. As a result the fact that I have access to a computer did not really help that much.

So what would I of had to know to be comfortable in solving this problem by programming?

1. Addition and scaling.
2. Cartesian coordinates.
3. Distances in 3D Cartesian space.
4. Simple iterative optimization.

That is pretty much it. I didn't even have to know about real numbers if I knew anything about scaling integers. Note the absence of geometry or algebra.

My point is that if we want to teach people how to solve problems with computers we still have to teach them math. But it would be different math. That is more or less the dilemma we face.

Anyway, in the end I solved the problem with some stiff cardboard and scissors. I learned how to do this quickly and accurately from my father. I guess there is some sort of moral here too...

posted at: 08:15 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry

This was originally a Reddit post. As so often happens when I reread something I wrote it just seemed to get better. It would be a shame to starve this blog of such insightful commentary:

Up to four years ago the CRTC was more or less harassing the monopoly telcom companies and leaving the new ones alone. The theory was that with enough leveling the new ones would get significant market share, the CRTC could step back, and Canada would have a competitive telcom market.

It didn't really work for reasons that are not important anymore. When the government forced the CRTC to let up on the monopoly companies the obvious happened. The market went from sorta competitive to not at all competitive. The results of many years of effort were reversed in a few years.

It seems that the government was being willfully stupid in this. I guess we can only hope that they have some clever long term plan to let things get so bad that the political will will arise to actually fix things.

Simply allowing more foreign competition as the report suggests will only mean that the names of the companies will change. We don't need more competition. We need to make competition possible.

When the US government broke up AT&T back in the 80's they didn't just stop at that point. They worked to create a legal and technical environment that would allow competition. In particular they created standard interfaces on both sides of the monopoly company. On the phone side they created the phone jack. On the long distance side they enforced technical standards that allowed any company to provide long distance service. Competitive markets erupted and the cost of phone equipment and long distance fell dramatically.

Things are simpler these days. Everything is data. We need a standard interface for access to last mile infrastructure. The government should simply prohibit the connection of buildings to the curb unless the resulting infrastructure can be shared in a competitive way. We need a phone jack for the data age.

This should not only apply to fiber but to radio based connectivity. Spectrum is a limited resource. Simply giving new spectrum allocations to companies who might someday provide some sort of service is irresponsible and wasteful. Voice is just a application.

This was a response to a CBC article about a report. As so often happens with the CBC the article seemed to be all about how bad the Conservative government was. I think I have to give them this one. This was an instance of policy that made me wonder if the government was really run by space aliens bent on the destruction of the human race.

After having thought about this a bit the interface stuff seems easy. Ethernet jacks can transfer 10Gbps in an entirely standard way. Just encapsulate standard size Ethernet frames in jumbo frames with a service number. TV stuff does multicast (the local telephone company does this already for their TV service). No one cares anymore about separate phone service. There; the technical part is done. If someone like myself can come up with something that works off the top of their head then it is not a hard problem. We just need to do the political stuff. Perhaps the "We need a phone jack for the data age." statement can be used as a rallying cry.

Currently the CRTC just comes down from heaven from time to time and forces the people with stuff like fiber to the curb to allow their competitors to use the system. Without the technical standard this ends up being kind of counterproductive. It is always treated as a pollitically motivated surprise by the owners of such infrastructure. As in "surprise sex". A huge battle ensues.

Really, how hard can this be?

posted at: 23:20 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry