Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

April 1, 2006, San Francisco, CA: In a surprise move, Department of Justice (DoJ) attorneys filed a subpoena yesterday in federal court against the National Security Agency, requesting one million sample Google searches. They plan to use the searches as evidence in their defence of the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act.

Next week (Mon-Tuesday) I will be speaking at David Isenberg's "Freedom To Connect" conference, on an open net, in Silver Spring, Maryland (Washington DC.)

April 10 I will be at UCSB's CITS conference (Santa Barbara, obviously) on growing network communities.

The next week April 19-21 sees the annual Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop, always a good time.

See you there.

Today many services offer MRI scans for a fee. DNA testing services are getting better and better -- soon they will be able to predict how likely it is you will get all sorts of diseases. Many worry that this will alter the landscape of insurance, either because insurance companies will demand testing, or demand you tell them what you learn from testing.

Jeff Pulver is a giant fan of the SlingBox, a small box you hook up to your TV devices and ethernet, so you can access your home TV from anywhere. It includes a hardware encoder, infrared controllers to control your cable box, Tivo or DVD player, and software for Windows to watch the stream. The creators decided to build it when they found they couldn't watch their San Francisco Giants games while on business trips.

And I get that part. For those who spend a great deal of time on the road, the hotel TV systems are pretty sucky. They only have a few channels (and rarely Comedy Central, which has the only show I both watch on a daily basis and which needs to be watched sooner rather than later) as well as overpriced movies. But at the same time you have to be spending a lot of time on the road to want this. My travel itineraries are intense enough that watching TV is the last thing I want to do on them.

But at the same time it's hard not to be reminded of the kludge this is, especially hooked to a Tivo. And if you have a Tivo or simliar device, you know it's the only way you will watch TV, live TV is just too frustrating. I don't have Tivo any more, I have MythTV. MythTV is open, which is to say it stores the recorded shows on disk in files like any other files. If I wanted to watch them somewhere else, I could just copy or stream them easily from the MythTV box, and that would be a far better experience than decoding them to video, re-encoding them with the SlingBox and sending them out. Because of bandwith limits, you can't easily do this unless you were to insert a real-time transcoder to cut the bandwidth down, ideally one that adapts to bandwidth as the Slingbox does. And I don't think anybody has written one of these, because I suspect the MythTV developers are not that too-much-time-on-the-road SlingBox customer.

(Admittedly the hardware transcode would be useful, but a 3GHZ class machine should be capable of doing it in software, and really, this should just be software.) For watching live TV, if you cared, you probably could do that in Myth TV. If you cared.

So the SlingBox...

Two thoughts today related to global warming.

Many people fear that as the developing world starts developing more, it's going to want more fossil fuels, and will burn them like crazy and add more CO2 to the air. China is the country feared the most. As you can see in my many pictures from there they burn a lot of coal there and the air is most often hazy from it.

As I've written before, Google's Adsense program is for many people bringing about the dream of having a profitable web publication. I have a link on the right of the blog for those who want to try it. I've been particularly impressed with the CPMs this blog earns, which can be as much as $15. The blog has about 1000 pageviews/day (I don't post every day) and doesn't make enough to be a big difference, but a not impossible 20-fold increase could provide a living wage for blogging.

I've done a few threads on eBay feedback, today I want to discuss ways to fix the eBay shipping scam. In this scam, a significant proporation of eBay sellers are listing items low, sometimes below cost, and charging shipping fees far above cost. It's not uncommon to see an item with a $1 cost and $30 in shipping rather than fairer numbers. The most eBay has done about it is allow the display of the shipping fees when you do a search, so you can spot these listings.

For some time in my talks on CALEA and VoIP I've pointed out that because the U.S. government is mandating a wiretap backdoor into all telephony equipment, the vendors putting in these backdoors to sell to the U.S. market, and then selling the same backdoors all over the world. Even if you trust the USGov not to run around randomly wiretapping people without warrants, since that would never happen, there are a lot of governments and phone companies in other countries who can't be trusted but whom we're enabling.

New York, March 22, 2006 (CW) Bell South and AT&T, two of the remaining Baby Bell or "iLec" companies announced today, in conjunction with GoodPackets Inc., a program to charge senders for certified delivery of internet packets to their ISP customers.

William Smith, CTO of Bell South, together with AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, who will be his new boss once the proposed merger is completed, made a joint announcement of the program together with Dick Greengrass, CEO of GoodPackets.

Very technical post here. Among the children of Unix (Linux/BSDs/MacOS) there is a convention that for a program to open a TCP or UDP port from 0 to 1023, it must have superuser permission. The idea is that these ports are privileged, and you don't want just any random program taking control of such a port and pretending to be (or blocking out) a system service like Email or DNS or the web.

This makes sense, but the result is that all programs that provide such services have to start their lives as the all-powerful superuser, which is a security threat of its own. Many programs get superuser powers just so they can open their network port and, and then discard the powers. This is not good security design.

While capability-based-security (where the dispatcher that runs programs gives them capability handles for all the activities they need to do) would be much better, that's not an option here yet.

I propose a simple ability to "chown" ports (ie. give ownership and control like a file) to specific Unix users or groups. For example, if there is a "named" user that manages the DNS name daemon, give ownership of the DNS port (53) to that user. Then a program running as that user could open that port, and nobody else except root (superuser) could do so. You could also open some ports to any user, if you wanted.

The phone companies failed at the fiber to the curb promise in most of the USA and many other places. (I have had fiber to the curb at my house since 1992 but all it provides is Comcast cable.)

You may be familiar with Stegonography, the technique for hiding messages in other messages so that not only can the black-hat not read the message, they aren't even aware it's there at all. It's arguably the most secure way to send secret data over an open channel. A classic form of "stego" involves encrypting a message and then hiding it in the low order "noise" bits of a digital photograph. An observer can't tell the noise from real noise. Only somebody with the key can extract the actual message.

I wrote an essay here a year ago on the internet cost contract and how it was the real invention (not packet switching) that made the internet. The internet cost contract is "I pay for my end, you pay for yours, and we don't sweat the packets." It is this approach, not any particular technology, that fostered the great things that came from the internet. (Though always-on also played a big role.)

A buzzword in the cable/ilec world is IPTV, a plan to deliver TV over IP. Microsoft and several other companies have built IPTV offerings, to give phone and cable companies what they like to call a "triple play" (voice, video and data) and be the one-stop communications company.

In most browsers, the default style presents text adjecent to all sides of the browser window, with no margin. This is a throwback to early days of screen design, when screen real estate was considered so valuable that deliberately wasting it with whitespace was sacrilige.

Of course, in centuries of design on paper, nobody ever put text right up to the margins. Everybody knows it's ugly and not what the eye wants. Thus, when you see a web page using the default style, which I end up with myself out of laziness, people have a reaction to it as ugly.

George Carlin once proposed a system where people would shoot suction cup darts at cars when they did something annoying, like cutting you off, and if you got too many darts the cops would pull you over. Another friend recently proposed a lot of interest in building some sort of reputation system for cars using computers.

Though Carlin's was a satire, it actually has merits that it would be hard to match in a computerized system. Sure, we could build a system where if somebody was rude on the road, you could snap a quick photo of their licence plate, or say it into a microphone or cell phone for insertion into a reputation database. But people could also just do this to annoy you. There's no efficient way to prove you actually were there for the rude event. The photos could do that but it's too much work to verify them. The darts actually do it, since you could not just stick them on my car when I'm stopped, or I would pull them off before driving.

One problem I want to solve with such a system is the selfish merge. We've all seen it -- lanes are merging, and the cooperating drivers try to merge early. Then the selfish drivers zoom ahead in the vanishing lane until they get to its end. And always, somebody lets them in. Selfishly zooming up does get you through the jam faster, but at the same time these late mergers are a major contributor to the very jam they are bypassing.

We'll never stop people from letting in the drivers, and indeed, from time to time innocent drivers get into the free lane because they are not clear on the situation or missed the merge.

...More...

When I was in high school, I did a project on PRT -- Personal Rapid Transit. It was the "next big thing" in transit and of course, 30 years later it's still not here, in spite of efforts by various companies like Taxi 2000 to bring it about.

With PRT, you have small, lightweight cars that run on a network of tracks or monorail, typically elevated. "Stations" are all spurs off the line, so all trips are non-stop. You go to a station, often right in your building, and a private mini-car is waiting. You give it your destination and it zooms into the computer regulated network to take you there non-stop.

The wins from this are tremendous. Because the cars are small and light, the track is vastly cheaper to build, and can often be placed with just thin poles holding it above the street. It can go through buildings, or of course go underground or at-grade. (In theory it seems to me smart at-grade (ground-level) crossings would be possible though most people don't plan for this at present.)

The other big win is the speed. Almost no waiting for a car except at peak times, and the nonstop trips would be much faster than other transit or private cars on the congested, traffic-signal regulated roads.

Update: I have since concluded that self-driving vehicles are getting closer, and because they require no new track infrastructure and instead use regular roads, they will happen instead of PRT.

Yet there's no serious push for such systems...

Read on.

I'll admit that female endocrinology is not something I know a great deal about, but I do know that most of the birth control pills today follow a general strategy of fooling the body into thinking it is pregnant. This stops ovulation and implantation.

Looking at printed wedding gift ribbon some time ago, Kathryn thought it would be amusing to put the 4th amendment on the ribbon, and tie it around our suitcases.

That turned out to be hard to make, but I did make a design for shipping tape which you can see below. The printed shipping tape has the text slant so that as the pattern repeats, the 4th amendment appears as a long continuous string, as well as a block.

Password security on the web is a troublesome issue. We have hundreds of web accounts, some of them with access to all our money, and it must be secure, not just from phishers and people snooping the web line, but from viruses and keyloggers that can take over our own computers or roaming computers we want to use to access password protected web sites.

The only way to be secure if you can't trust the very computer you're logging in from is to have a security dongle which contains the real secrets and does the logon negotiation, plus confirmation of any big actions like large cash transfers. People have carried login dongles for years, typically which have a screen with a constantly changing number (securid) or which can do challenge/response.

Most of the world is moving now to having a smart phone, in particular one with a standardized data protocol such as bluetooth. I propose a protocol so that web sites can, given a limited channel to the phone, do a login dialog with the phone. The computer would just be a conduit for the data, it would not matter if it were compromised, as the passwords would not be sent in the clear.

More thoughts...