Donna Wentworth is blogging a conference on spectrum policy. She has complete notes of Larry Lessig interviewing Yochai Benckler. She points out that it’s also being webcast.

[I’m on the road again today. Light blogging ahead.]

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There’s an excellent article on Open Spectrum by Sir Lawrence Lessig. For example:

Property systems are not free. To make sense, their benefits must outweigh their costs. Party members count two sorts of benefits from a property regime. The first is coordination?making sure that users of the spectrum don’t conflict with each other. The second is allocation?making sure that the right to use a bit of spectrum is given to the highest valued user. Both benefits are indeed important. Yet both come at a cost. And if we could achieve at least some of these benefits without suffering the worst of these costs, then the gain from propertizing spectrum becomes harder to justify.

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I loaded the 3DNA demo off a gaming magazine CD just for the heck of it. It replaces your desktop with a 3D environment you can navigate to find your files and applications. This appeals to me because lo these many years ago (i.e., around 1992), for comic relief at a users conference I hacked together a demo of what the Interleaf desktop might look like someday. I replaced Wolfenstein 3D’s bitmaps with my own document management ones so you could stroll down a corridor, enter rooms that were the equivalent of file folders, visit the poor saps stuck in the FrameMaker jail cell, and at the end get shot by a Nazi representing the Secure Computing Environment. Hmm, maybe I can sell the idea to Microsoft.

Anyway, 3DNA is just about completely unappealing to me, and since I can’t find a lot specifically wrong with itI guess it’s the 3D-ness of it that bothers me. There are certainly some nice touches: your Web favorites list becomes a wall of TVs, each showing what’s up on the site. But moving through space rather than “teleporting” via mouse seems like a lot of work with no particular pay-off. It’s a bad way to traverse lots of information.

There’s a free version and one without ads and some additional features for $30.00.

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From Risk Digest, via a mailing list:

ATM vulnerabilities and citibank’s gag attempt

Ross Anderson
Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:58:47 +0000

Citibank is trying to get an order in the High Court today gagging public disclosure of crypto vulnerabilities:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_gag.pdf

I have written to the judge opposing the order:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_response.pdf

The background is that my student Mike Bond has discovered some really horrendous vulnerabilities in the cryptographic equipment commonly used to protect the PINs used to identify customers to cash machines:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-560.pdf

These vulnerabilities mean that bank insiders can almost trivially find out the PINs of any or all customers. The discoveries happened while Mike and I were working as expert witnesses on a `phantom withdrawal’ case.

The vulnerabilities are also scientifically interesting: http://cryptome.org/pacc.htm

Source URL: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/go/risks/22/58/6

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Dan Gillmor explains the latest FCC “compromise” that actually is a near-total victory for the incumbent telcos. Want to guess who the big losers are? Got a mirror handy?

Writes Dan:

Spinning this as a victory for any party but the regional Bell monopolies is a big mistake. Competition for tomorrow’s data access just took an enormous hit.

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Eric has been working hard on SourceID, “an open source community focused on digital identity infrastructure.” Open Source digID has to be better than the alternatives, and now there’s The Place to Go for all your Open Source Digital Identity Needs.

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Borland offers its antique compilers and development environments — Turbo Pascal and Turbo C in particular — for free at their museum site. I was one of the first customers for Turbo Pascal when it was a $29.00 wonder and hadn’t yet been acquired by Borland, so I’m looking forward to the musty rush of nostalgia.

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So, the tech industry and the US military have come to a compromise that opens up more spectrum for wireless communications while preserving the slice the military uses for some of its delicate radar. Here’s what I don’t understand: If the military equipment is so sensitive to “interference” that it requires no other device broadcast at that frequency, why isn’t it incredibly vulnerable? Isn’t this really a strong argument for moving to an Open Spectrum policy?

Over at GreaterDemocracy.org, Jock Gill blogs on why inteference is a dangerously misleading metaphor.

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I just got a copy of The Wireless Networking Starter Kit by Glenn Fleishman and Adam Engst. I’ve thumbed through it and it looks like a clear and lively explanation of everything you wanted to know about goin’ wifi. Maybe now I can find out how my PPPoE bone connects to the Tx bone.

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Steve MacLaughlin suggests we haven’t seen the last of Ted Turner:

So now the 64-year old Turner is stepping down from his executive role at AOL Time Warner, and many think he will fade away into the sunset. Off to work on his philanthropic endeavors or perhaps to write his memoirs. But I believe that Turner has spent too much of his life in the arena to just walk away. Having watched most of his personal fortune go down the tubes thanks to the AOL whiz kids, Turner might be game for a little revenge. I wouldn’t be surprised if Turner is the first person to pull out his pocketknife to help carve up the media giant’s fallen carcass. Play ball!

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