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January 27, 2003
Kerry Nitz, who started a blog recently (welcome to blogland, Kerry!), recommends a survey in the Economist called “The Internet Society”
Far from being over, the computer and telecoms revolution that created the internet has barely begun. These technologies will change almost every aspect of our lives?private, social, cultural, economic and political. In some areas, the changes may be marginal, but in most they will be profound, and unprecedented.
It’s called “Syberia.” It’s lovely to look at. And it’s a pain in the frigging ass to play.
“Syberia” is an adventure game. It opens in a tiny Alpine town, home of the world’s most charming automata. You are a comely and highly professional lass out to close a deal with the automata factory’s owner. But mystery ensues, something about a lady who may be dead or not but in any case used to draw pictures of wooly mammoths in a cave in the forest.
Oh, the mystery ensues alright. It ensues for hour after pointless hour as you ensue your ass off fetching a large and entirely arbitrary set of objects in precisely the right and arbitrary order. Failure to do so means that you will have to traverse the entire freaking landscape yet again. You can run but you can’t just go from A to D without first passing B for the twentieth time and C for the thirtieth. And every time you think you’re at the end of a chapter and the goddamn train is going to leave the goddamn station, the no-longer-charming a-hole of a conductor — an automaton, of course — tells you about some other random hurdle you must jump. And to jump it, you have to go back to D through B and C and don’t forget to give the retarded little Momo character a good thwack on the back of his annoying little head.
Thank goodness for the Universal Hint System. If I have no idea where to get the ink for the stamper for the permit for the ticket for the conductor of the train, UHS will tell me just enough to keep me from going back to the dam where Momo is waiting with another of his long boring stories or to the twisty maze where nothing happens.
This game is so annoying it might actually force me to go read a book.
January 26, 2003
A posting from Peter Kaminski to a mailing list (with permission):
It’s a thing of terrorbeauty, this Slammer/Sapphire/W32.SQLExp.Worm. Weighing in at 376 bytes of assembly language code, it is shorter than some email signature blocks. Shorter than the next paragraph.
It fits entirely within one UDP packet. The packet goes into a Microsoft SQL Server box, and boom, the machine turns into a zombie, spewing the same packet back out at random IP addresses, over and over and over and over, running in a tight 23-instruction loop, cycling fast enough to fill the network it’s connected to with the tiny replicates of itself directed anywhere and everywhere on the net.
Here are some more links:
cstone’s annotated disassembly
archived version of the Matrix graph
the slashdot thread
NGSSoftware advisory on the Microsoft SQL Server exploit, 2002-07-25
Adina blogs interestingly about the social augmentation of reality.
If “democracy” is government by the demos (people) and “aristocracy” is government by the aristos, then what would you call a government formed by the connections among people? That’s the question I posed, more or less, to the blogiverse’s resident Greek-Latin-Aramaic-French-German-Hebrew scholar, AKMA. He responds bravely to my question:
There’d be a form of metechein, so “metechocracy.”
Zeugnumi or synzeugnumi mean “join,” or “yoke”; what about “zeugnocracy”?
Power to the Zeugnoids!
AKMA has posted a sermon he gave on Thursday about The White Guy’s Burden. (This doesn’t do it justice; you’ll have to read it for yourself.)
January 25, 2003
David Stephenson sends me an email:
I feel like an idiot: I know we have 12 allies against Iraq, but I can’t name them all!
I have to admit it: this is a sad commentary on my lack of knowledge of the world. I only count 7. Can you help me with the other 5?
Andorra
Brunei Darussalam
Djibouti
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Monaco
Sao Tome and Principe
No, problem, David. The other five are:
Grumpy
Dopey
Sneezy
Sleepy
Bashful
Doc has a trick knee and Happy is in rehab.
Glad I could be of help.
Bob Frankston has a new essay that makes the case that the current spectrum management system unduly restrains free speech. He writes:
It’s as if we were having a party and someone came into the room and told everyone to be quiet and gave out pieces of paper with a time and a place telling each person when and where they could talk. If there were a possibility young people would overhear you couldn’t use certain words even if there were no other venues and even if you felt the language was appropriate for them.
Put that way it seems outrageous. Yet if we communicate using radio waves instead of sound waves that is precisely what the FCC is doing.
The FCC was in 1934 created to deal with a technological limitation of radios of their day. Frequencies had to be assigned exclusively to broadcasters to optimize reception. That meant that access to the “public airwaves” was gated by corporations with enough capital to build expensive transmission systems. The government over the years has recognized that this is a problem, legislating ameliorating solutions. But modern technology means that we don’t need the broadcast chokepoints. All that’s keeping the public from using the public airwaves are regulations based on outmoded assumptions about technology. Our free speech is being restrained.
Bob also points to an essay by Yochai Benkler and Larry Lessig posted by the New Republic: Will technology make CBS unconstitutional? A snippet:
Our argument is straightforward: The FCC regulates speech. It says that, if you want to speak on 98.6 FM in Boston, you must get a license (or, now, buy one). If you speak on 98.6 without a license, you will have committed a crime. The FCC will prosecute you and seize your transmitter. All this despite the fact that the First Amendment to the Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” What gives?
Both of these articles are must-reading. This issue is really beginning to boil…
(Don’t forget the two articles at GreaterDemocracy.org: Reframing Open Spectrum and an Open Spectrum FAQ.)
January 24, 2003
What a welcome addition you‘ve been to the blogiverse. Here’s looking forward to many more years of your unique bloggery.
Eric is getting all fin-de-siecle on us in two excellent essays: here and here.
Eric and I agree on almost everything. Our values are in sync around digital ID issues. But we disagree in one important way. Eric is convinced that digID is either going to come from the top down and be way ugly, or we’re going to take the initiative and building something that protects the rights of users first and foremost. So, Eric’s time and words are where his mouth is as he helps to craft a digID system that’ll be better than what the Big Boys are already implementing. I, on the other hand, am unconvinced that any digID system brings more benefit than risk to users. I don’t want the Big Boys’ system, that’s for sure. But I also can’t get real excited about efforts to craft a digID infrastructure whose chief virtue is that it’s less bad. (We actually have a second disagreement: Eric sees more positive good in the less-bad systems than I do.)
In sum: I want to have it both ways. I want to stand on the sidelines and say “DigID is dangerous! Boo!” and count on good-hearted, smart people like Eric to build a bulwark that’s better than what’s being foisted on us.
Mitch has what he calls a rant on the need to build a connected government in the face of a toxically disconnective administration. If I say it’s too coherent to be rant, I hope I’m not offending him.
Of course I agree with Mitch’s vision. But for a couple of years I’ve felt that despite the gloriousness of loose connections, political movements online as well as off benefit from having a leader. We need one now. Where is the leader who stands for online rights? Who stands for the online world that has so frightened the forces of greed and power? Where? Who?
Please send your answers to:
You Already Be a Leader Contest
Battlecreek, MI
Britt Blaser summarizes emails circulating among a few of us (Doc, Adina, Marc Canter, as well as Mitch and Britt), about Mitch’s post.
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