New site, now using dreamweaver (the best tool ever). It took me about 3 hours to rebuild this site using dreamweaver. It took a few days using emacs. Who has that much time to waste?!? Maybe now I'll actually update once in a while...

Unfortunately, I did lose my old news (this is not a tragedy of epic proportions).

DRM. Palladium. TCPA. These are potentially very bad things. John Markoff's article in the NYT explained some of the TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Alliance) plans to introduce 'trusted' hardware into your computer. Unfortunately, it's not you that the hardware is designed to trust. Russ Anderson's whitepaper presented a frightening scenario (he also has a nice FAQ on Palladium/TCPA issues). He also mentions that Sony used the DVD CSS algorithm in the Playstation 2 memory hardware, so reverse-engineering is illegal under the DMCA. That's a very dangerous precedent.

The TCPA is pushing a hardware standard needed to make Microsoft's Palladium initiative a reality. Someone seems to have convinced Steven Levy to overlook the dangers of Palladium - calling his MSNBC article one-sided would be an understatement. Dave Coursey was more balanced. Cringely calls it the Militarized Network Architecture, and I think he's not far off.

The TCPA hardware / Palladium software combination allows a 'trusted' system to be built. On the one hand, this is a very good thing for internet security. Secure hardware solves all sorts of problems. On the other, it could allow the MPAA / RIAA to really do the DRM thing when Fritz's bill doesn't go through. They want this to happen. You could end up locked out of your own computer. Thomas Greene presents a potential scenario where even the GPL won't help us.

This definitely isn't vapor. An article at ExtremeTech has technical details about AMD's initial work on implementing TCPA standards. And something interesting showed up in the new MS Media Player EULA. There is some argument as to whether the TCPA is meant to be used for DRM. Apparently these people haven't read the 'scenarios' in the TCPA whitepapers. Luckily, Bruce Sterling is sponsoring a contest for 'genuinely trustable, cheap, well-designed, rugged, sexy, accessible computer system that is owned, manufactured and operated for, well, Global Civil Society'.

And if you think the government would never allow this kind of thing, maybe you want to look into SCMS on DAT tapes. Maybe.

Interactive Screen ends tommorrow. I will be happy. Not that it isn't interesting - but I've been sitting for 10+ hours a day since forever. It will be good to, you know, stand. I didn't have time to take advantage of being in banff. My outdoor experiences consisted of seeing Lake Louise (it's purdy) and sitting around a campfire until 4:30 in the morning. Irish drinking songs were sung. Tequila was consumed. Did you know they don't have smores in Europe? What a strange place...

Blob's wedding was last night. It was pretty cool. Pauline wore a dress. (honest, we have photographic evidence.)

Interactive Screen is over, I'm back in Calgary (thanks Heike). I think I got a lot out of the conference. Like religion (Props to JC). I still don't understand the 'New' in New Media, but there are a lot of cool projects happening around the world. I may even end up involved in one of them. I talked to artists, which is something you don't really get around to doing when you sit in front of a computer all day. They have an entirely different perspective on damn near everything. Seeing and hearing them seems to have had some fundamental effect on me, because now I have all these damn questions about what the hell I am doing with my life. Maybe that's the point.

Oh, and I got some money. (I was just kidding about the religion...).

I've been reading Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. I just got to the chapter where he starts applying his findings to nature. He makes an interesting point about Chaos Theory. Chaos theory is based on the idea that if you make arbitrarily small changes to the input of some system, you can get large changes in output. This is not what we expect most of the time - we expect small changes to have small effects. Wolfram claims that the random output that chaotic systems produce is due to random input. The random 'chaos' isn't real, it's just randomness transfered from the random input.

Chaos in the real world is too hard to isolate, but chaos on the computer can be analyzed. Generally, computer-generated chaos comes from small programs. You fiddle with an input parameter, sometimes the program is stable (there is a common bifurcation pattern that eventually repeats itself), and sometimes the program explodes into random output. Wolfram says that the random output is due to the input bits, not the actual number. Some decimal numbers can be accurately represented by a certain number of bits or a repeating bit pattern. Others have a completely random bit pattern. So when you throw in numbers with random bit patterns, you get random output. Repeating bit patterns produce stable output. Acoording to Wolfram.

I'll buy it for now, but he makes a side-observation that is actually more profound, IMHO. He says that we make the assumption that it is physically possible to make arbitrarily small changes in input. Of course this is possible in mathematics, but he's talking about the real world. We just sort of assume that the universal XYZ position of an atom can take any value. But is that a valid assumption?

My knowledge of quantum physics is meager, but it seems like whenever physicists get down to the lowest levels, the universe is discrete. Photons are emitted in quantized packets. You can't have a photon with one and a half 'units'. It's all or nothing. Electron orbits are separated into 'levels', with no electrons in between levels. The very definition of 'quantum' implies countability.

We come up with continuous mathematical abstractions, but how misleading are they? The whole purpose of Wolfram's book is to do away with the math and describe the universe with simple sets of rules. He uses Cellular Automata (CA's) to define his rules, but he also shows that the behavior can arise from all sorts of other rule-based systems. Rob says that Bertrand Russell showed that mathematics can be built on basic boolean logic (Edit: I stand corrected). CA's can be described the same way, except you have to add memory. Wolfram is big on hunches. My hunch is that the math and the CA's are compatible. Perhaps math needs a memory.

As for the universe being discrete. Well, it sort of makes sense, doesn't it? The universe is simply a big voxel grid. The voxels are just big enough to hold one fundamental particle. Certainly makes computer graphics a lot easier - but we're going to need more memory. Maybe the guys doing FEM, level sets, and discetized volume graphics had it right all along.

Oops, my bias is showing...

I'm back in Banff. I don't have anything to do yet. Maybe I should write something. Or maybe I'll just redesign this page...

Oh, here's something for the nerds:

There are only 10 types of people in this world: those who understand
binary and those who don't.

This story was in the New York Times today (free reg required). The main point seems to be that the proliferation of personal information on the net is a bad thing. Like when petitions you signed 20 years ago start showing up on web sites. But it gets worse - even if you convince the webmaster to take that information off the net, it might still be in a Google cache, or some other larger archive. So anyone can find out personal details about you, then discriminate at will. The horror.

I think the reality might be somewhat different. First of all, it's rarely that easy. The people singled out in the article had distinct names that made them simple to find. In reality, when I search for 'Ryan Schmidt' on Google, I only come up as one of the first 10 hits, and it's my homepage. I tried a few of my friends and had the same luck. So to track down all the personal information that's out there, I'm going to have to put in a lot of time. And the more information that shows up on the web, the worse it gets. Lee claims that 'practical obscurity' - due to the footwork required to track this public info down in the real world - doesn't exist on the web. That seems like a temporary problem. If anything, the web will be a nightmare compared to the physical archives we have now. The physical archives are sorted (usually). Unless what you're looking for has a specific on-line database devoted to it, you're reduced to Google, which is going to find everything.

The idea that the net is going to cause a 'return to the village, where everyone knew everyone else' is ludicrous. Real people have better things to do than trying to dig up a bit of mundane information on the neighbors. I see the same problem with surveillance-society paranoia. Once we can all watch eachother, I think we'll discover that we're all pretty much the same. Even worse, we might notice that none of us are particularly interesting. Do you really want to watch your neighbor watching someone else? Maybe there's something else on...

True, if everyone can find out about what you do, you might be less likely to do anything extraordinary or outrageous. Signing a petition that condemns the war on terrorism - what will the neighbours think? But consider another possibility. If all the skeletons are out of the closet, doesn't that level the playing field? You need viagra, that's not her real nose - Who cares? If we can't hide the petty differences, we'll just have to get past them. We'd have to learn to actually practice tolerance and acceptance, instead of just giving it lip service. Maybe we'd be better off.

Am I saying that loss of privacy isn't necessarily a bad thing? Crazy.

I recently took Daniel Canty's course, Writing for Interactive Media, at the Banff Centre. It was great, if you're ever here you ought to take it. I don't know anything about writing and I still enjoyed it. I even got to make up a story. It was kind of depressing, seeing just how bad what passes for 'interactive' really is. The best web stuff I saw was probably Henry Kuo's site (the interface is great) and Share My World by Wayne Dunkley. Share My World had an immediate and profound effect on me. It is very, very intense - you've now been warned - but you have to read it. I said so.

My shiny new laptop came with a NVidia Geforce4 Go, and a demo of EarthViewer 3D. They have satellite image and relief mapping of the entire world, and you can fly around. The resolution isn't the same everywhere - You can see cars in Tokyo, but Calgary is a big brown splotch. It's fun to play with, and there is a free 14 day trial. It has landmark stuff built in, so you can find every McDonald's on earth.

Ronald Fedkiw has some incredible movies on his page. He's a researcher at Stanford, he does physically based animation/simulation using level set techniques. It's about the coolest thing ever.

That is all. You may go now.

It'd be nice if we could say "this won't happen in Canada". That's a dangerous assumption, IMHO. (Courtesy of the New York Times).

==========================================
July 26, 2002
The Societal Costs of Surveillance
By MICHELE KAYAL, Honoluly

Helena Blazkova had come to kick me out.

It was 1992, and I had been renting her apartment in Prague for about a
year. I had gone to the former Eastern Bloc shortly after graduate
school on a United States government fellowship, and I felt it my duty
to show by example how the free world worked. I thought I had been a
model tenant. I kept the place neat, I paid my rent faithfully, I even
made sure to put out fresh flowers when I knew she was coming over.

But that was the problem: I didn't always know she was coming over. She
used to come in when I wasn't home, on tips from the neighbors.

When Helena -- my age and, I thought, my friend -- came that night to
tell me to leave, she laid down a litany of charges: You shower too
often. You talk on the phone late at night. You leave your pajamas out
and the bed unmade. You've had men here. You have a cat.

Oddly, that was the charge that stunned me most. I had minded a friend's
cat for a weekend once. How could she possibly know all this, I
wondered. The neighbors had told her, I learned. They had called her to
say I had a cat.

It had never occurred to me the elderly lady next door was spying...

(the rest of the article is at the following link:)

<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/26/opinion/26KAYA.html>