Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

Recently we at the EFF have been trying to fight new rulings about the power of U.S. customs. Right now, it's been ruled they can search your laptop, taking a complete copy of your drive, even if they don't have the normally required reasons to suspect you of a crime. The simple fact that you're crossing the border gives them extraordinary power.

We would like to see that changed, but until then what can be done? You can use various software to encrypt your hard drive -- there are free packages like truecrypt, and many laptops come with this as an option -- but most people find having to enter a password every time you boot to be a pain. And customs can threaten to detain you until you give them the password.

There are some tricks you can pull, like having a special inner-drive with a second password that they don't even know to ask about. You can put your most private data there. But again, people don't use systems with complex UIs unless they feel really motivated.

What we need is a system that is effectively transparent most of the time. However, you could take special actions when going through customs or otherwise having your laptop be out of your control.

A brunch was planned for my mother's house on Sunday, but being 2,500 miles distant, I decided to try to attend by videoconference. Recently Skype has started supporting what it calls a "high quality" videoconference, which is 640x480 at 24 to 30 frames per second. At its base, that's a very good resolution, slightly better than broadcast TV.

This requires fairly modern hardware, which my mother doesn't have. It needs a dual-core processor to be able to compress the video in real time, and a decently fast processor to decompress it. It wants 384K of upstream bandwidth, but ideally even more, which in theory she has but not always. It demands Windows XP. And artificially it demands one of three of Logitech's newest and most expensive webcams, the Orbit AF or the Quickcam Pro for Notebooks or Pro 9000 for desktops. These are the same camera in 3 packages -- I took the Orbit AF which also includes a pan/tilt motor.

Skype's decision to only work with these 3 cameras presumably came from a large kickback from Logitech. Admittedly these are very nice webcams. They are true-HD webcams that can native capture at 1600x1200. They are sharp and better in low light than most webcams, and they come with a decent built in microphone that appears as a USB audio device -- also good. But they aren't the only cameras capable of a good 640x480 image, including many of Logitech's older high-end webcams. They retail for $100 or more, but via eBay sellers I got the Orbit AF for about $75 shipped and the Pro for Notebooks shipped quickly within Canada for $63. Some versions of Skype allow you to hack its config file to tell it to do 640x480 with other quality cameras. That is easy enough for me, but I felt it was not something to push on the relatives quite yet. On the Mac it's your only choice.

Testing on my own LAN, the image is indeed impressive when bandwidth is no object. It is indeed comparable to broadcast TV. That's 4 times the pixels and twice the framerate of former high-end video calls, and 16 times the pixels of what most people are used to. And the framerate is important for making the call look much more natural than older 10fps level calls.

A recent story today about discussions for an official defense Botnet in the USA prompted me to post a question I've been asking for the last year. Are some of the world's botnets secretly run by intelligence agencies, and if not, why not?

Here's my latest assembled panorama, of the main square of Munich, known as Marienplatz, taken from the St. Peter's Church bell tower just to the south.

It seems that half the programs I try and install under Windows want to have a "daemon" process with them, which is to say a portion of the program that is always running and which gets a little task-tray icon from which it can be controlled. Usually they want to also be run at boot time. In Windows parlance this is called a service.

I learned today that there is an exhibit about my father in the famous creation museum near Cincinnati. This museum is a multi-million dollar project set up by creationists as a pro-bible "natural history" museum that shows dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, and how the flood carved the Grand Canyon and much more. It's all completely bullocks and a number of satirical articles about it have been written, including the account by SF writer John Scalzi.

I'm scanning my documents on an ADF document scanner now, and it's largely pretty impressive, but I'm surprised at some things the system won't do.

Double page feeding is the bane of document scanning. To prevent it, many scanners offer methods of double feed detection, including ultrasonic detection of double thickness and detection when one page is suddenly longer than all the others (because it's really two.)

PCs can go into standby mode (just enough power to preserve the RAM and do wake-on-lan) and into hibernate mode (where they write out the RAM to disk, shut down entirely and restore from disk later) as well as fully shut down.

I've been ranting of late about the dangers inherent in "Data Portability" which I would like to rename as BEPSI to avoid the motherhood word "portability" for something that really has a strong dark side as well as its light side.

But it's also important to come up with an alternative. I think the best alternative may lie in what I would call a "data deposit box" (formerly "data hosting.") It's a layered system, with a data layer and an application layer on top. Instead of copying the data to the applications, bring the applications to the data.

A data deposit box approach has your personal data stored on a server chosen by you. That server's duty is not to exploit your data, but rather to protect it. That's what you're paying for. Legally, you "own" it, either directly, or in the same sense as you have legal rights when renting an apartment -- or a safety deposit box.

Your data box's job is to perform actions on your data. Rather than giving copies of your data out to a thousand companies (the Facebook and Data Portability approach) you host the data and perform actions on it, programmed by those companies who are developing useful social applications.

As such, you don't join a site like Facebook or LinkedIn. Rather, companies like those build applications and application containers which can run on your data. They don't get the data, rather they write code that works with the data and runs in a protected sandbox on your data host -- and then displays the results directly to you.

To take a simple example, imagine a social application wishes to send a message to all your friends who live within 100 miles of you. Using permission tokens provided by you, it is able to connect to your data host and ask it to create that subset of your friend network, and then e-mail a message to that subset. It never sees the friend network at all.

Been getting a bunch of calls from reporters this weekend. Our good friend spam turns 30 in a couple of days, and a few years ago I did some research and became an authority on the history of the term and the phenomenon. Since everybody else is doing it, I though I should point to my various articles on the history of spam, as well as some updates I just wrote for the 30th.

I've spoken about the Web 2.0 movement that is now calling itself "data portability." Now there are web sites, and format specifications and plans are underway to make it possible to quickly export the personal data you put on one social networking site to another. While that sounds like a good thing -- we like interoperability, and cooperation, and low barriers to entry on new players -- I sometimes seem like a lone voice warning about some of the negative consequences of this.

Ok, this would be a cool application for iPhones, Pocket PC and the like -- a dialer which presents an old style rotary phone dial, and you have to put your finger in it and spin it around the center, and then it slowly twists back and plays the sound of a dial returning. A bit like how you control an iPod, but slower.

Completely useless, other than for having fun and explaining to kids why we call it "dialing" a phone.

With sadness I must report the passing of William C. Tate, my stepfather, on Thursday. Bill and my mother met and fell in love when I was a young teenager. He was a neighbour, and I had met him, and even stayed over at his house with his son before they would meet, which is a bit unusual. He was kind and generous and supported her and our family for many decades. While he died from cancer, it came upon him quite suddenly and he was fortunately strong until near the end.

Ok, admit it, who likes blogging in to a vacuum. You want to know how many people are actually reading your blog.

I have created a simple Perl script that scans your blog's log file and attempts to calculate how many people read the blog and the RSS feeds.

You can download the feed reader script. I release it under GPL2.

Recently, while keynoting the Freedom 2 Connect conference in Washington, I spoke about some of my ideas for fiber networks being built from the ground up. For example, I hope for the day when cheap kits can be bought at local stores to fiber up your block by running fiber through the back yards, in some cases literally burying the fiber in the "grass roots."

It was good to see a major newsmagazine like Time do its cover story on the corn ethanol scam this week. I've been worried about corn as a source of biofuel for some time. So far, it makes no sense, and is only used because of the power of the corn lobby and senators from agricultural states. I've read various arguments (all with political agendas) about just how much petrofuel is burned in order to make corn based ethanol.

No, I don't mean dissolve congress. Rather I propose a different way to run a legislature in the modern world.

Note to new readers: This article explores the consequences of using so much fuel to produce our food. If you come out of it thinking it's telling you to drive rather than get some exercise, you didn't read it! But if you like surprising numbers like this, check out the rest of my Going Green section and other sections.

Pundits like to point out when some new media technology changes seriously changed politics. When I was young, everybody talked about how the Kennedy-Nixon debates ushered in the era of the TV candidate and changed politics forever. (It did indeed seem unlikely a candidate in a wheelchair from polio could win today, but in fact in Bob Dole and John McCain we have two candidates without full use of their arms.)

No doubt when radio came into play there was similar commentary.

Quite some time ago, I challeged readers to come up with a better word than The Singularity to describe the phenomenon, famously named and described by Vernor Vinge, of a technological gulf so wide that it is impossible to understand and predict beyond it.