90% Crud

Best Xmas Present

Sometimes when you go a long time without blogging you don't want to post because you feel like you need to say something important on your return.

Luckily I have something not only worthy of breaking blog silence, but worth overly large text and even the blink tag:

She said yes! We're getting married! I love you Jenny!

I won the Pizzigati Prize for my work on CitizenSpeak!

I'm completely stoked that I won the first annual Pizzigati Prize for non-profit open source software for my work on CitizenSpeak! The family of Antonio Pizzigati established the prize to reward open source developers in the non-profit sector.

First off, thank you Jenny for all your love and support that made all of this possible. I want to thank the Pizzigati family, the advisory panel and the Tides Foundation—especially Sarah Lohrius—for this tremendous honor. I also want to thank Jo Lee for guiding the project, Eric Gundersen at Development Seed for his design work and technical help with the site and Pablo Calamera for developing the original CitizenSpeak. It's because of all of you and all the people I'm forgetting that CitizenSpeak is what it is.

I know it's cliché to say it's just an honor to be nominated, but come on, look at the other finalists! CivicSpace and CiviCRM are huge successes, and both are part of the ecosystem that CitizenSpeak swims in. Another developer for Martus won a MacArthur Genius award! How can you not be excited to be in such heady company?

Finally, note that this is the first annual award. Open source developers: I strongly recommend you look in to submitting your work for the 2007 award. Anyone interested in non-profit tech: The Tides Foundation is looking for ways to make next years award even better, and they need your help. They're looking for donations (they are a non-profit, after all), people to spread the word about the award, and feedback from the community; so go to their forums and let them know what you think!

HOWTO: Make a weblog a gopherlog

For April Fools Day I redirected http://george.hotelling.net/ to gopher://george.hotelling.net/. It's the sort of joke that doesn't have a punch line... I think they're called "unfunny." I thought I was being pretty original until I found out Matt Haughey did it 4 years ago for MetaFilter on Internet Jackass Day, and apparently someone other than me invented the Gopher protocol, like 10 years ago!

Still, if you're looking to turn your weblog into a gopherlog (or rlog for short) I will pull back the curtains and show you how I set up my gopher server. It's not the best way (it's actually quite an ugly hack), but I only had a few hours to set things up.

First, you need to get and install PyGopherd. It's fairly simple, just download it and follow the instructions in the manual to install it, then configure a directory for it to serve. I told it to serve ~/public_html/gopher/ but any directory will do.

Then, download feedparser, html2text and this script of my own design to create text files from an RSS feed. Set the output directory to the same one that your gopher server is using, set the RSS feed to your RSS feed and you're more or less done. For extra fun, put the script in a cron job so that it will keep updating with new items. If you do that, you'll also need to rm the old files (which really should be done in my script, but see the part above about this being a hack that needed to work in a couple hours).

There's plenty of room for improvement. For instance you could write a Python script for PyGopherd to parse the RSS feeds, which would cut down on all sorts of problems and be useful to literally tens of people. Still, if you want to turn dial on the old wayback machine you could do worse than to turn your weblog into a gopherlog. OK, probably not.

What's the Deal?

Happy 2005! One of the things I noticed in 2004 is the growing disconnect between what's hot with the cool kids online and what the majority of people online actually have heard about and understand. This year I'll try to write posts explaining what these cool things are and why they're cool/important/useful. My goal is to write a persuasive argument for my parents to, if not try the technology in question, at least understand it.

I'll be posting them in the What's the Deal category, which I hope will allow me to address the quality of airline food when the time comes. My first post in the series is about blogging, and I hope to cover wikis, RSS, del.icio.us, BitTorrent and more.

Update: I picked blogging as my first topic. I figured "I'll just write a quick overview of blogging" which is kind of like saying "I'll just write a quick overview of every aspect of Roman society and culture." I need to stop myself whenever I use the modifier "just." I've got it written but it's an incredible act of hubris on my part to say "this is blogging" so I keep rewriting. Sorry for the delay.

I got 101 problems but Apple ain't one

I've closed comments on this because a lot of people seem to want to focus on whether Konfabulator and Watson are rip-offs or were ripped-off. Instead, I'm trying an experiment and have moved everything to a Wiki page so people can contribute evidence about each item in the list. What's a Wiki?

So Matt Haughey was looking back on a 1997 article from Wired giving 101 Ways to Save Apple and since he's into hippie copyrights he won't mind me stealing his blog post idea. (You too can steal future blog ideas at del.icio.us's toblog tag)

Remember that the list was written in 1997, before the iPod, before the MP3 revolution, before even the Bondi Blue iMacs. As far as anyone could tell, Apple would be dead within a year.

Reading through the suggestions, there are a lot that were amazingly prescient, specifically numbers 4, 7, 10, 12, 14, 19, 23, 25, 29, 37, 40, 50, 62, 70, 77, 83, 98 and 100. None of these predict the iPod as a way to turn the company around, but who could have?

91. Start a new special projects group led by either Jobs or another passionate and creative designer to create the next "insanely great" technology. This time, focus on rolling the technology into the existing Mac line; make sure developers are inspired and in the loop.

It's not exactly marketing genius to say "you need a killer product." However, the Senior Director of the Special Projects Group is Tony Fadell, the man who came up with the idea of creating an MP3 player tied to a downloadable music store. You can read about how he came to be at Apple at Wired's article on the history of the iPod.

70. Simplify your PC product line. Reduce the number of Apple motherboards and the number of distinct Apple system models.

Apple definitely did this, you can now choose between an iMac, PowerMac, iBook, PowerBook and eMac. Of course there's still some confusion, I'd be hard pressed to tell you the advantages of a 12" G4 PowerBook over a 12" G4 iBook.

7. Don't disappear from the retail chains. Rent space in a computer store, flood it with Apple products (especially software), staff it with Apple salespeople, and display everything like you're a living, breathing company and not a remote, dusty concept.

That's a big affirmative. Apple started in 1997 by putting Apple sections in CompUSA stores, and in 2001 they opened the first Apple store. They now have over 90 stores and the devotion Apple fans have to the stores can be seen in this video of the line for the grand opening of the Ginza Apple store in Tokyo.

98. Testimonials. Create commercials featuring real-life people in situations where buying a Mac (or switching to a Mac) saved the day.

Apple's Switch campaign from 2003 was a huge success, making a minor star out of at least one switcher. There was an absolute flood of parodies, which is a good measure of how influential an ad has been.

37. Take advantage of NeXT's easy and powerful OpenStep programming tools to entice a new generation of Mac software developers.

OS X (the reason I own a Mac) is a direct descendant of NeXT and was a revolution for MacOS. Apple acquired NeXT in early 1997, you would do well to find out where OS X came from.

14. Do something creative with the design of the box and separate yourselves from the pack. The original Macs stood out because of their innovative look. Repeat that. Get the folks at Porsche to design a box. Or Giorgio Giugiaro. Or Philippe Starck. We'd all feel better about shelling out the bucks for a Power Mac 9600 if we could get a tower with leopard spots.

I don't even need to provide links for this. In 1998 Apple introduced the iMac, which ushered in a new era for Apple. Since then Apple's industrial design has been consistently top notch. This was probably the most important thing to turn Apple around, more than OS X, more than the iPod. The iMac gave Apple a new lease and the momentum to pursue the things people think of as Apple now.

Of course not all the suggestions were as good. These are some that the opposite was done to Apple's success, or simply weren't tried, or were tried and cancelled or some other sort of negative outcome.

One of the most prolific memes is the idea of getting MacOS to run on Intel chips:

34. Port the OS to the Intel platform, with its huge amount of investment in hardware, software, training, and experience. Don't ignore it; co-opt it. Operating systems are dependent on installed base; that is your biggest hurdle now. It is not the head-to-head, feature-set comparison between Windows and Mac OS.

60. Abandon the Mach operating system you just acquired and run Windows NT kernel instead. This would let Mac run existing PC programs. (Microsoft actually has Windows NT working on Mac hardware. It also has emulation of Mac programs with NT running on both Power PC and x86.)

76. Make damn sure that Rhapsody runs on an Intel chip. Write a Windows NT emulator for Rhapsody's Intel version.

94. Maintain differentiation between Wintel and Apple. Cross-platform means Apple OS on Intel boxes, not just add-ins to Windows. Making the Mac more like Windows, or making all technologies "cross-platform," is a going-out-of business strategy. Extend and improve the Mac's capabilities to handle Wintel data and emulate Wintel for those applications that require it.

It's almost like Slashdot wrote these, because whenever the topic of OS X comes up someone invariably says "I'd love to run OS X, why won't Apple put it on my cheap, home-built x86 box?" Since it's a Slashdot troll question, I'll let Slashdot answer: "Silly idea," "Doesn't make sense," and a bonus "No Intel On OS X Part I: Economics 101."

Apple is definitely in the hardware game, they're not going to port to Intel. Do you see that dot after the word "Intel"? It's a period, the argument is over. But because there are idiots out there who like to point to the x86 port of Darwin as evidence, let me add that if by some cosmic collision Apple decided to throw out all software that had been written for OS X/PPC and put OS X on x86 you'd be no more able to run it on your home-built system than you are able to run OS X/PPC on a non-Apple PPC. Which brings us to our next collection of bad business ideas:

1. Admit it. You're out of the hardware game. Outsource your hardware production, or scrap it entirely, to compete more directly with Microsoft without the liability of manufacturing boxes.

36. Clone the PowerBook. When the shabbily made 5300s started to fall apart, catch on fire, and explode, a lot of Apple customers were forced to turn to Wintel for laptops. There was no place else to go. If clones had been available, the users might have stayed in the family.

It's understandable that people would think that cloning would save Apple at the time this was written. Microsoft was doing well, Apple wasn't, people used install base as a measure of success. However, Apple lost money on clones so Steve Jobs killed the clone program when he came back to Apple.

3. Start pampering independent software vendors. Your future depends on strong, user-friendly software. ISVs are losing confidence and crossing over to the Dark Side to take advantage of Wintel's market share. Remember what happened to OS/2 - not enough applications, updates too late, scarce industry support. And all the marketing dollars IBM threw at it couldn't help.

I don't think it's exactly "pampering" 3rd part developers when they feel ripped off, like in the cases of Watson, Konfabulator and Netflix Fanatic. There's some counter-arguments, but I guarantee that those developers have soured on the idea of developing for OS X in the future.

13. Exploit every Wintel user's secret fear that some day they're going to be thrown into a black screen with a blinking C-prompt. Advertise the fact that Mac users never have to rewrite autoexec.bat or sys.ini files

That doesn't exactly go along with the Unix/NeXT/Darwin strategy. On the plus side, virtually all the people who go into Terminal are there because they want to be, not because their computer broke. Also, remember that this was 1997 when Windows 95 still felt like it was running on top of DOS.

59. Invest heavily in Newton technology, which is one area where Microsoft can't touch you. Build voice recognition and better gesture recognition into Newton, making a new environment for desktop, laptop, and palmtop Macs. Newton can also be the basis of a new generation of embedded systems, from cash registers to kiosks.

Yeah, that happened. Of course, hope springs eternal.

72. Try the industry-standard serial port plug. RS-422 should be a last resort.

Apple has gotten in the habit of dictating industry standards instead of following them. The iMac brought USB to the masses, the iBook brought WiFi to the masses, and, uh, the G5 may bring Bluetooth to the masses (but don't count on it).Stephen pointed out that Apple also brought Firewire / IEEE1394 to the huddled masses. What he didn't point out was that Apple also won a Grammy for Firewire.

87. Price the CPUs to sell. Offer novice users the ability to enter the Mac market at a competitive price point and move up the power curve as their level of sophistication increases. The initial price keeps new buyers away.

A lot of people associate Apple with high prices, which I think helps Apple to a degree by making them a premium brand. The reason for the high prices is that, unlike PC makers like Dell and Gateway, they don't have to worry that if they overprice their computers you'll go buy the parts and build it yourself. I think the evidence for this is in the portable arena, Apple's notebooks are quite competitive with Windows notebooks. This isn't because Apple lowered their portable prices, but because the Windows laptops don't have to compete with home-built systems so they can raise their prices.

93. Develop a way to program that requires no scripting or coding.

Admittedly I never used it, but wasn't that HyperCard?

That's pretty much all I'm willing to write on the subject. This isn't a complete list of anything, so feel free to take this, wikify it or build on it or tear it down with counter arguments. Matt's not the only one with a hippie license.

Why hasn't Google stopped comment spam?

[Update: They did something! Google, MSN and Yahoo! now disregard links with nofollow in the rel attribute of a link. Example: <a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">. Go grab a plugin for your blogging system and stop supporting comment spammers! Like the TiVo permalink thing, any relation between the deployed solution and my proposal is largely coincidental and likely detrimental to the solution. People far smarter and more elequent than I came up with the rel solution before me and argued effectively for it. Thank you mysterious strangers!]

That's right, Google.

Comment spam is a problem for lots of people and there are (at least) two parties responsible for each piece of comment spam posted: the comment spammers and Google. Because of their positive image, very few people (with exceptions) look at Google when discussing comment spam. Plenty of people explain that comment spammers are trying to exploit PageRank, but no one complains that Google isn't patching an obvious vulnerability. If this were Microsoft there would be three duplicate posts about this a day until it was fixed.

Why am I focusing on Google? Comment spammers are trying to get links to their sites in order to boost their PageRank. Google doesn't offer a way to opt out of contributing to PageRank, they only offer a way to opt out of indexing all together with robots.txt.

What can they do to stop it? Offer a way for a link not to contribute to PageRank. Use VoteLinks or something like it and I will personally write the Movable Type filter that adds rel="vote-abstain" to all links in comments.

One thing that VoteLinks doesn't address is notifying comment spammers that their asshattery is ineffective before they submit comments. It would be nice if there were a way for comment spammers to check an attribute, like in a <div> around the comments field, that would say "no links in here will contribute to your PageRank." Without that piece the comment spammers will continue their shotgun approach to reciprocal linking in hopes of finding still-vulnerable weblogs. I don't imagine that those vulnerable weblogs will ever go away, but I'm just trying to avoid having to clean up after comment spammers on my own site.

So Google: Don't be evil, clean up the mess you've created.

Kryptonite's implications

The Kryptonite story is pretty played out right now although more stories about other tubular lock vulnerabilities (via) will surely pop up. There's a lot to be learned by reflecting just on what happened to Kryptonite.

About two weeks ago videos of someone opening a Kryptonite bike lock using a Bic pen in 30 seconds showed up online. A lot of people were incredulous, which is great, but they were easily able to replicate the experiment and news quickly spread. When the New York Times writes about security flaws, it's no longer the domain of locksmiths. Kryptonite is doing the Right Thing™ and replacing vulnerable locks.

The computer security world has been wrestling with full disclosure since day one. Full disclosure claims that the best way to report a security flaw is to make the report public and include a way to replicate the flaw.

The argument for full disclosure is that malicious hackers will find out about the code anyway, so they gain very little. Also, people are best able to protect their systems when they can see the full impact of the flaw on their own and vendors have a history of needing to be shamed into fixing problems. The argument against is that by showing the public how to replicate the flow, malicious hackers can now exploit it with ease.

Apparently the Kryptonite flaw has been known since at least 1992 (via) and is only being fixed now. Why so long? Until now Kryptonite hasn't been shamed publicly for the flaw. Meanwhile people have had their bikes stolen because they treated their lock as secure, until they found out that their bikes weren't safe and haven't been safe for at least 12 years.

The video was the equivalent of exploit code in computer security, and accomplished the aims of full disclosure. People found out what bike thieves already knew, were able to protect themselves, and the vendor is finally addressing the issue.

Another important parallel is with DRM and the DMCA (thanks to getlucky for the idea). I know it's a Slashdot cliché to apply the DMCA to anything and everything, but there's actually a good parallel here. Let's pretend that the law treated the Bic pen vulnerability the way it treats decrypting DVDs.

First, the person who discovered the flaw has his home raided by police and goes through two trials in as many years. Next, everyone linking to the video is sued, although the New York Times is spared. Finally once all the lawsuits had gone through their motions, Kryptonite congratulates itself on a job well done. Of course the don't fix the lock, but since it can silence anyone who talks about how to break the lock they don't need to.

To see how the DMCA affects computer security, the Kryptonite saga is a great metaphor. A lot has been said about leaky abstractions, and most of it applies in this instance. For instance people using Bic pens to open bike locks generally don't own the bike; people decrypting DVDs generally own the discs.

Laws like the DMCA, in fact all intellectual property laws, rely on metaphors and don't address the fundamental differences between physical objects and ideas directly. These laws pretend that ideas are physical objects and subject to physical constraints, but strain so hard in doing so that the absurdity is clear when you try to map a law like the DMCA back onto a physical counterpart like a bike lock.

I like to think that I'm on the tail end of the last generation that treats ideas as abstractions. The internet forces people to deal with ideas as they are instead of tied to physical objects like paper or vinyl. The kids right now, the kids who will take the internet as a given for the rest of their lives, they have the best chance of interacting with ideas without abstraction.

How the Internet is broken, how to fix it, and why that's not going to happen

The Internet is broken. Not in a "I-put-the-Internet-in-the-recycle-bin" kind of way, in the "data-won't-go-from-one-computer-to-the-other" way. You probably don't believe me, which is understandable considering that you're reading this over the Internet. Let's try a little experiment.

Chances are you're behind a router. Open up AOL Instant Messanger (or a reasonable facsimile) and try to send a file to someone else behind a cable modem. Chances are it won't work, because the Internet is broken. This is one example, there are plenty others. Enabling computers to talk to each other is the fundamental purpose of the Internet, but as it stands personal computers have to go through servers to talk to each other.

What's happened is these NAT routers that enable multiple computers to connect to a single cable modem aren't a perfect solution. They're a horrible solution, in fact. The networking equivalent of using water in your radiator - it'll work in the short term but come winter your pipes will explode. John Walker, creator of AutoDesk, has written about this and other threats to the Internet in The Digital Impimatur.

The typical home user never notices NAT; it just works. But that user is no longer a peer of all other Internet users as the original architecture of the network intended. In particular, the home user behind a NAT box has been relegated to the role of a consumer of Internet services. Such a user cannot create a Web site on their broadband connection, since the NAT box will not permit inbound connections from external sites. Nor can the user set up true peer to peer connections with other users behind NAT boxes, as there's an insuperable chicken and egg problem creating a bidirectional connection between them.

Sites with persistent, unrestricted Internet connections now constitute a privileged class, able to use the Internet in ways a consumer site cannot. They can set up servers, create new kinds of Internet services, establish peer to peer connections with other sites--employ the Internet in all of the ways it was originally intended to be used. We might term these sites "publishers" or "broadcasters", with the NATted/firewalled home users their consumers or audience.

There's a lot of things that you can do with an Internet connection that you can't do with a NAT connection - for instance sites like LegalTorrents give preferential treatment to people on Internet connections and gamers behind NAT connections can't host games. So why do people use NAT routers?

Most ISPs only give their customers 1 IP address, which allows a computer to communicate on the Internet. If you want to hook up more than one computer, you either need to buy a NAT router or more IP addresses, assuming that your Internet provider even offers them. ISPs are only stingy with IPs because IP addresses aren't as plentiful as they once were.

Routers typically assign their computers addresses that start with 192.168, 172.16 or 10. These are parts of the Internet dead zone - it's impossible to communicate across the Internet to these addresses. Since you can't reach them, routers use them as private addresses. So even though your computer has an IP address 192.168.0.2 and your friend's computer is 192.168.0.3 they can't talk to each other because they're on private networks. That's why your file transfer fails.

The current system the Internet uses is IP version 4, which is limited to roughly 4 billion addresses, give or take. While that seems like a lot, think of how many IP addresses you personally have. There's your computer at home, your computer at work, your cell phone (yup, they have IPs), your TiVo (it updates over the Internet) or your XBox or your PocketPC or anything else that uses the Internet. Suddenly 6 billion people sharing 4 billion addresses doesn't seem that plentiful.

It seems odd that something as ethereal and arbitrary as IP numbers could be scarce. After all, if we run out can't we just make more? Unfortunately, that would be a bit like printing your own form of currency when your run out of money. No one would know what to do with the new stuff, so it would be worthless. What's needed is a new set of IP numbers that have enough addresses for now and the future. Geeks reading this already know what I'm getting to: IPv6.

IPv6 has roughly 1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses to IPv4's 4,000,000,000 addresses. If we used IPv6 instead of IPv4, every computer on the Internet would have its own IP address and we could freely send files or host games on our XBoxes or do any number of things that come with being a real Internet citizen. Great, so where do you sign up? Not so fast.

The good news is that most operating systems support IPv6 - Windows XP and 2000, Mac OS X and (unsurprisingly) Linux. Unfortunately, there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem with IPv6. IPv6 doesn't have backwards compatibility built in, so people on IPv6 networks can't talk to the IPv4 Internet. Since few people are using it, there aren't many services for it. And since there aren't many services for it, few people are using it. The NAT router solution is "good enough" for most people, and they don't know that things could be better.

OK, hopefully I've convinced you that there is a problem with the Internet. Luckily, there's a way to slowly migrate from IPv4 to IPv6 - upgrade Linksys NAT routers.

While I can't find the market data, my own experiences tell me that Linksys is the most popular NAT router provider for people on home broadband. They pick up one of Linksys' little purple boxes, plug it in and it works. They make a quality product and its hard to argue with that.

There's a program called 6to4 that will allow IPv6 networks to talk to each other through a gateway. If Linksys were to start installing this software by default on their routers and providing a gateway to connect their users, this would jump start the IPv6 revolution.

If they included IPv6 software, not much would be different from the perspective of users. People would still just plug it in and it would still just work, but it would also be assigning compatible computers IPv6 addresses in addition to those 192.168 IPv4 addresses. That would provide enough of a market to get a few niche applications ported. Suddenly people who were using IPv6 AIM would be able to transfer files, or IPv6 XBox Live would allow anyone to host a game. That would be enough to drive the push to IPv6, and within a few years cable and DSL providers would start offering IPv6 addresses.

Now I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, but the people over at Linksys are much smarter than me, especially when it comes to networking. They've most likely thought of exactly this plan (if they haven't they are more than welcome to implement it with my blessings). So why haven't we seen any movement on this front?

Linksys is the biggest provider of NAT routers, and NAT routers are a huge part of Linksys's customers. When IPv6 finally comes into its own, no one will need routers. That will put a huge dent in the bottom line, and could possibly shut them down. So what incentive does Linksys have to take the initiative on this front, if IPv6 will ruin their business? To me, it seems like a classic market faliure (unlike QWERTY) and I have serious doubts as to whether we'll ever get IPv6 addresses.

HOWTO: How and Why You Would Want To Get Ogg Vorbis on iTunes

OGG? OGG? WTF is OGG? I'll get to that in a moment, and then after I've gotten to that I'll get to two methods for getting Ogg Vorbis files to play in iTunes. One method is insanely easy but will take a while, the second method is much quicker and somewhat harder. Now, I get to the getting to that.

Ogg Vorbis is a free competitor to MP3. "But wait," you say on cue, "MP3s are, err, free-ish. I don't have to pay anything to legally encode my legally purchased CDs on a computer that I certainly didn't win in a bar bet in Tijuana." That's right, you don't have to pay anything, but someone does.

A company called Faunhofer owns several patents that are used with MP3s, and so every time you download an MP3 playing program the maker has to spend money. If you still hate Apple after all they've done for you you could download iTunes several billion times and drive them into a much-predicted bankruptcy. (Probably not)

If you or one of your geeky friends wanted to make your own MP3 player you'd have to pay Fraunhofer, even if you gave it away for free. Sure that seems unlikely - considering the free mp3 players available for download - but my girlfriend seems to insist on cooking from scratch when there's perfectly good meals available in my supermarket's frozen foods and cereal aisles. My point is that people make all sorts of crazy things from scratch, except she doesn't have to pay royalties on her excellent pasta salad.

(Aside: MP3 is short for MPEG Audio Layer 3, and MPEG is an acronym for Motion Picture Experts Group. Does that mean that MP3 expands to "Motion Picture 3," even though it's an audio format? What's the matter, did I just blow your mind?)

Am I against giving Fraunhofer their due? Not really, but I'm not champing at the bit to give them money for something the Vorbis people are able to do for free. Should you get rid of all your MP3s and re-encode all your albums as Ogg Vorbis? If you've got that much time on your hands, I guess, but I'm not doing it.

What should you do with Ogg Vorbis? If you're part of the 83% of musicians that provides music online consider putting up Ogg files. When you rip your new music, rip it as Ogg Vorbis. Or you can just listen to LiveJournal Phone Posts and make fun of people for all their drama.

More importantly, why should you use Ogg Vorbis? Well it sounds better. Also, copyright protections are eroding our rights and by using an open format you know that it won't track users. If you don't think that file formats are that important, Larry Lessig puts forward an excellent case in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace for how computer code is creating laws that no citizen can protest.

So now that the advocacy for Ogg Vorbis is out of the way, continue reading for how to get it going in iTunes.

I promised an easy way and here it is: Contact Apple and tell them that you want Ogg Vorbis support in their products. I told you it was easy, and I also said it would take a while. A long while considering iTunes 4.5 just came out, I wouldn't expect to see iTunes 5 for 12 to 18 months. But this part is key: in their most recent iTunes conference call, Apple said that they don't support Ogg Vorbis because no one is asking for it. Let Apple know that you don't want to rent music, you want to own it. Apple admits that you* are the reason that it doesn't support Ogg Vorbis.

If you don't want to wait for Apple to officially support it (and I don't blame you if you don't), you can still get it working by going to the QuickTime Components project and downloading the Ogg Vorbis plugin for Windows or Mac OS X. Exctract the file and either put it in C:\Windows\System32\QuickTime (Windows) or /Library/Quicktime (OS X) and restart. iTunes will start playing Ogg files! Awesome. That wasn't that much harder than writing Apple, and it's got a much faster payoff. Of course, following both methods yields best results.

*: Yes you. You personally. They named you but Gizmodo wanted to spare you the wrath of Apple zealots and didn't print your name. You should thank them. [back]

Why isn't Election Day a national holiday?

It seems like it should be fairly straight forward. Celebrating Election Day with a national holiday is fundamental to celebrating democracy. As it stands, the law establishing federal holidays has been amended several times to create new holidays. Why do we celebrate our independence, our presidents and our flag, but not our democracy?

Election Day falls on the first tuesday after the first monday in November, basically the tuesday from November 2nd through the 9th. This is actually a pretty crowded time for holidays, Veteran's Day is November 11th and Thanksgiving is usually 16 days after election day. What I would like to see happen is moving Veteran's Day to Election Day, to celebrate the men and women who protect our democracy as well as the central tenet of that democracy.

By giving people the day off we would be making it easier for people who have less free time between work and family life to contribute to democracy. We would also be sending a national message that choosing our government is important enough to take some time off.

I'm certainly not the first person to have this idea, but its time has come. The Atlantic covered this in a story in 1998. Still, we install democracies all over the world, yet we have one of the lowest voter turnouts in the world.

Of course there are still some questions to answer. Do you have the party annually or bi-annually, when congress is elected? The Atlantic article suggests that Election Day be moved to a Saturday, but I don't like that because it doesn't have the same celebration for Democracy that creating a holiday does. And by combining it with Veteran's Day, there's not a net increase in holidays, which means no additional cost to taxpayers.

If you think that this is something worth doing, please spread the word. Spread it on your weblog, spread it to your friends and family and coworkers. Spread it to your government. I think this is an idea whose time has come.

On a related note, something I personally will be doing is having an Election Day party, where entry will hinge on having an "I voted" sticker. I can think of few better reasons to have a party than to celebrate democracy.

[Update: Eric posted some more information including information on Bill S.726 which aims to do just what this post suggests.

Goodspeed Update is also looking at this, which will hopefully encourage Ann Arborites to contact Senator Stabenow.]

The (poor) state of copyright activism

I just read The state of copyright activism by Siva Vaidhyanathan and am impressed with the points made. It goes over well trodden ground, talking about how copyright has been eroded over the past 30 years. It talks about the Electronic Frontier Foundation, DigitalConsumer.org and Public Knowledge and what they are doing for us. It also covers recent events like Eldred vs. Ashcroft.

What makes this paper unique is that I've never seen one that argues for the public to take the fight up. Many of us who are interested in taking back our rights are some of the most wired people on the planet. Why haven't we been able to take our message to the streets where people will understand just how far censorship is going?

What we are missing are two things: a leader to organize the fight and a coherent movement to rally around. The Dean campaign had Joe Trippi managing a swarm of volunteers and creating an army from the ground up. We need a Joe Trippi to define our copyfight, to create something that people can say "I support the copyfight" on their bumper-stickers or their lawns or to their coworkers.

Why don't we have a DeanLink that connects people interested in taking back the commons? Why don't we have a DeanSpace that lets anyone create a copyfight group? Where's our Meetup? The EFF one isn't that well attended. Where's our manifesto? How can we have a revolution if we don't have a manifesto? It just wouldn't be proper!

In his paper, Siva Vaidhyanathan outlines four things that seem essential to the copyfight:

• The principle of fair use — at its base a legal defense against an accusation of copyright infringement.


• The principle that after the "first sale" of a copyrighted item, the buyer could do whatever she wants with the item — such as making a hat, or a broach, or a pterodactyl — save publicly performing the work or distributing unauthorized copies of it for sale. The first sale doctrine is what makes the lending library possible.


• The concept that copyright protected specific expression of ideas, but not the ideas themselves. This is the least understood but perhaps most important tenet of copyright. You can’t copyright a fact or an idea.


• The promise that copyright would only last — as the Constitution demands — "for limited times," thus constantly replenishing the public domain.

The copyfight is about something that should be easy to understand, but usually isn't. Lawyers and legalese scare people away from protecting what is ours: our culture. Up until now our culture has been held hostage by copyright, and any child understands what it means when you take their favorite book away from them. How is taking the Grey Album away from the public any different?

Individual shots in this fight have already been fired. DeCSS. Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Dimitry Skylorov. But the people who benefit from owning our culture have shot back. The DMCA. State level Super-DMCA legislations. Digital Rights Management.

We have a number of groups that have both the wherewithal and the respect to get this going. The EFF already has their action center, why not give an identity to the people who already take action? Instead of being a place that I send my money and tells me what good things it does, why not help me organize an EFF house party?

We already have people like Lawrence Lessig and John Walker telling us that the Internet doesn't ensure freedom. We have to fight for it. So who's going to step up to the plate and lead the thousands (or even millions) of people to take back our culture?

[Update: Copyfight proclaims that activists for copyright reform are Copyfighters]