More From Yesterday's Paper

Buried on Page 18A:

“County officials challenge state over voting machines”
Santa Clara county officials are pushing back against California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's directive to require security measures to safeguard the integrity of electronic voting systems. Officials in 9 other counties are supporting Santa Clara. All of these counties recently bought new touch-screen voting machines.

Why the pushback? Simple bureaucratic politics is my guess. Someone or some group in each county authorized the purchase of these machines and stands to get blamed if the machines are found to be flawed or unusable.

Now, I don't subscribe to any conspiracy theories about the Diebold voting machines. Various companies, including Diebold, rushed these machines into production after the 2000 election debacle because they saw a chance to make a quick buck. The investors out for a quick buck couldn't care less about security issues or quality software development processes; those things just cost more money and delay the release of the product. So the engineers - who probably don't have much experience in or knowledge about building secure systems - realized that the thing is badly flawed and will constantly need to be fixed using field-expedient methods. So they put in things like wireless network cards and simple locks that make it easy to replace memory cards and firmware.

When the CEO of Diebold promises to deliver Ohio to the Republican Party in the next election, he's acting as conventional party power broker, not as some sort of evil conspirator who's deliberately created a system he knows his co-conspirators can hack.

When the Diebold folks deny that there are any problems with their systems, they're not engaged in some systematic and well-organized coverup. They're clueless. Dismissing all the evidence of any problems is nothing more than the simple human act of denial.

When California county officials complain about the Secretary of State's directives about security, they're engaged in a bureaucratic turf war. They're not participants in a massive conspiracy to alter the results of elections.

Never ascribe to malice that which can explained by simple incompetence.

It's apparent that no matter how many times independent security experts point out how badly these machines are flawed, there will be no stopping their adoption and use. I'm beginning to think that the best thing that could happen is for a group of white-hat hackers to alter the results of an election in some ridiculous and undeniably obvious way (like having Mickey Mouse be the winner of some race in a Los Angeles county election) and then announce exactly how they did it.

Of course, that would be wrong. And the government and media would probably focus on what a horrible crime had been committed and prosecute the hackers to the full extent of the law (perhaps adding some new provisions to the Patriot Act to allow even greater punishment of the offenders), thus drowning out the issue of how insecure and untrustworthy these machines are.

Instead, it'll be the black-hat hackers who compromise these systems. They'll do their best to cover their tracks. And they'll probably get away with it. All we can hope for is that they're incompetent, too, and that they'll mess up and get caught.

I just found out that the Diebold machines use Microsoft Windows as their OS. So even if you remove the wireless card and the ability to remove and change memory cards and firmware, you still have all the vulnerabilities of the world's most popular and insecure operating system. Unbelievable. What was behind the choice of Windows? Surely, more incompetence. No reasonably knowledgeable software system architect would ever make such a choice.

Yesterday's Paper
Yesterday, I sat down with an actual newspaper (the San Jose Mercury News) while I had a late lunch at my favorite Greek restaurant, and read these tasty tidbits.

“Former CEO of Enron may face criminal indictment”
Yup, they're finally going to go after after Skilling. Looks like the official announcement will be later this week.

“Clinton pushes philanthropy at a personal level”
I've always been ambivalent about Bill Clinton, who I find fascinating but deeply flawed. But I find it ironic, and not a little bit amusing, that the policies and actions of the current administration are probably doing more to rehabilitate his reputation than any words or actions of his supporters.

“Almost all Iraqui exiles misled U.S., officials say”
What? Next you'll tell me that there's no WMD, either! And that it's all the intelligence community's fault!

Two things that distinguish this administration is its near-absolute refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of its policies and its ability to manipulate the tools of large-scale public relations. This is yet another example.

What distinguishes our mass media is the inability to offer any kind of intelligent analysis of how this administration (or the previous one, and any future one) operates.

Robert Glass Doesn't Get Open Source
Robert Glass is one of my favorite writers on the subject of software development, and 10 years from now his book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering will still have an honored place in the "always relevant" section of my technical library. But, alas, he doesn't understand the relevance or importance of Open Source in any way, shape, or form:

“...open source is most prominently about building software products for no financial compensation...There is a faint whiff of Communism about the concept of working for no financial gain”

Wrong. Open source is primarily about programmers building products for themselves and for other programmers. If you don't get that, you don't get Open Source. There's nothing particularly altruistic about this, and it's worth noting that all of the successful OS projects are meritocracies. It's also worth noting that the best known advocates of Open Source and free software - Eric Raymond and Richard M. Stallman - are libertarians, not communists. The comparison to Communism is a cheap shot - the kind Darl McBride would make - not a serious comparison or analogy.

A much better analogy would be to the writers and scholars of the early Renaissance. They didn't support themselves by publishing their writings and they didn't expect to. The wrote and studied because it was what they did. They supported themselves by seeking the patronage of the wealthy and the powerful. This isn't too different from what Linus Torvalds does, and there's no better example of a wealthy and powerful patron than IBM, which supports a wide variety of OS projects and programmers.

And what kind of things are these programmers building for themselves and others? Tools. Not applications. Tools. Tools made by craftsman, for other craftsman, so that all of these craftsman can get down to the serious work of creating applications for paying customers. In a few short hours, I or any other aspiring programmer can download and install all of the tools they need to create any kind of application for free. I don't need to fork over several thousand of my own dollars for someone else's ideas about what kind of tools I need. I can get the ones I want - for free - from my peers, who have a far better understanding of what I need than the program managers and marketeers in Microsoft Developer Relations. This, surely, is a motivation that anyone can understand.

Glass then goes on to natter about the “...critical importance of the economic model to the open source movement”. Critical to who? Not to the Open Source developers themselves. The “economic model” was invented by the VCs and execs who wanted to exploit the Open Source phenomenon, not by OS developers and users. Linus Torvalds isn't going to stop working on Linux 2.6 if all the companies selling Linux go under.

Glass makes a more interesting point when he compares OS to SHARE, one of the user organizations that thrived in the late `50's and early `60's before the Justice Department ordered IBM to unbundle software from hardware sales. He states that “for those of us who lived through the era of software that was free and open because there were no alternatives, a return to the notion of free and open software feels like a huge regressive step”. Perhaps it does. But having begun my career in a proprietary marketplace in which the most basic tools - like a C compiler - cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, the availability of thousands of tools, libraries, components, and code snippets is a kind of Utopia. And having to go back to proprietary toolkits is unthinkable.

Weekly News Roundup, with your anchor George Orwell

<G.O., speaking directly to camera #1:>
President Bush, appearing on Meet The Press with host Tim Russert:

<roll tape>
Russert: How? why, as a fiscal conservative as you like to call yourself, would you allow a $500 billion deficit and this kind of deficit disaster?

President Bush: Sure. The budget I just proposed to the Congress cuts the deficit in half in five years.

Now, I don't know what the assumptions are in the GAO report, but I do know that if Congress is wise with the people's money, we can cut the deficit in half. And at that point in time, as a percentage of GDP, the deficit will be relatively low.

<jump cut>
Russert: But your base conservatives and listen to Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, they're all saying you are the biggest spender in American history.

President Bush: Well, they're wrong.*

<G.O. does quarter turn in his anchor chair to face camera #2 and intones:>
In other news, the American Bar Association announced that a top lawyer at Microsoft has been named to chair the Antitrust Committee for the ABA.**

<Cut to commercials -

#1 How Walmart helps communities,
#2 shows an oil company helping to preserve the environment,
#3 is a lite beer commercial with a flatulent horse.

Return to G.O. facing directly to camera #1>
In tonight's final story, Diebold, makers of new high-tech touch screen voting systems announced last week that “Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment for March Primary”.***

<Cue music, cut audio, pull back to wide shot and then go to commercial>


*“There's the overstatement of the current deficit in order to make plausible the claim that they will cut it in half in three years.”

** No links needed. Welcome to the post-ironic age.

***"We were genuinely surprised at the basic level of the exploits that allowed tampering". Just for fun, search Google for "Diebold, Maryland, Raba" and look at how the mainstream media outlets reported this story.

SCO Follies continue
I never liked Ayn Rand's writing and I was never able to finish Atlas Shrugged. But it occurs to me that Darl McBride is exactly the kind of pseudo-capitalist that Rand railed against. She had a word that she lumped people like Darl under:

Looter

It's hard to say what Rand would have made of Open Source software. But if you think carefully about it, you'll come to the conclusion that Open Source is an engine of creativity and innovation that adds considerable value to many - and perhaps eventually most or all - of our industries and enterprises. Just ask IBM. They're even willing to pay for Super Bowl ads to promote it.

You might even draw the conclusion that Linus Torvalds has a little in common with John Galt.

The other conclusion you might draw is that IBM doesn't seem very worried about being sued by SCO.

Update: I originally wrote this on 1/26, but hadn't gotten around to publishing it. But SCO's latest bit of nonsense led me to finish it. The best source of what's going on with the SCO-IBM case is, as always, Groklaw.

Finally
Brad DeLong points to this Washington Post article that reports we're one step closer to bringing Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling to justice. Andrew Fastow is going to jail and is reportedly cooperating with investigators seeking evidence against former Enron Chief Accounting Officer Richard A. Causey. The next link in the chain after Causey? His boss, Jeffrey Skilling.

It's about time.

A Comment on Era Transitions vs. Transformations

My friend T lends us his thoughts about the state of the era we're in. He also has some thoughts on hosting a good story.

“Writing about the rapid change of the era in which we are now has become almost trite these days. It was 1970 (the year of this author's birth) when Alvin Toffler put his finger on the idea that people are more behind the times than ahead of them in his book Future Shock. That was 34 years ago, and the pace of change that he was writing about is nothing compared to what has been happening since then. We all know the times are in rapid change. Fine.

A more interesting thought, is that not are we merely in the throes of all this change, but the true era change many talk about is only just approaching mankind. I would contend that what we are going through right now is merely the staging time for the era change that is about to rock the world in the next 15 to 25 years.

The reason that I write this is that we are in a time when we are starting to complete the technologies (or at least evolve them to such a level as necessary for the revolution) that enable the era change that is to come. With the abilities that we have been developing over the last 150 years, with the revolutions in metallurgy, biomedicine, communications and computational power, we are setting the stage for such things as the bio-technical and nanotech revolutions. Not only have we evolved the technology to support the coming massive leap, we are developing the mental/psychological necessities to do so.

It's been a long road. From developing a system of government, economics, security, mass production, distribution, transportation, communications, information management we can support the kinds of research that will bring sweeping revolution. We have moved beyond a time where we can only know what our god given senses limit us to. Now that we can measure the unseen, we are able to think far beyond our human condition.

The changes that we have seen to get us to this point will be, upon future reflection, small compared to how the human condition will change after the nanorevolution. The radical changes to human life will go far, far beyond the changes that we have recently seen. When achievements start rolling in from such fringe fields as biotechnology and nanotechnology, life will be almost so different as to be unrecongnizable from today. Hold on! We're just getting started!”

Now, we both think we're in an era transition. But we have a subtle disagreement on what really constitutes the era transition. T thinks it happens when a host of revolutionary technologies come on-line. I think it really happens before then, and the revolutionary technologies are the effect, not the cause, of the era transition.

Now, if I'm right, the era transition may have already happened and this is a moment of stasis before an explosive (and probably very difficult) period of near-chaotic change - as surely as Reformation followed Renaissance. Note that this period of stasis may be measured in decades (or may not, if we're especially unlucky), and the changes to follow will be spread out over many more decades. This, admittedly, is a pessimist's viewpoint.

T, on the other hand, is more of an optimist. He's talking about the cool stuff - the stuff that lets us be something more than we our today. And he believes that we're developing the mental and psychological facilities that will allow us to move beyond the flesh-and-blood limits of our current condition. And, in his view, that's the real transition - to what amounts to a posthuman age.

Some other very smart folks - like Vernor Vinge and Bill Joy - believe the same thing but interpret it in a way that makes me sound like a pollyanna. Vinge pulls no punches:

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

The implication is that we ordinary humans get replaced - very swiftly - with some super-intelligent post-human. I can't buy that. I think an era transition will be messy, dangerous, and difficult. But no more so than the original Reformation. And it'll probably be even be less hazardous than, say, the Black Plague of the mid-14th century (which harmed China and Islam even more than Europe). I think we'll transition into post-humanism in stages, and we'll bring most everyone who survives the wars/plagues/pogroms/riots (which will be a large majority) along.

I like what Bruce Sterling writes about a post-human future:

Posthumans aren't content with human achievements. They're better at posthumanity than we are...[But] The posthuman condition is banal. It is astounding, and eschatological, and ontological, but only by human standards. Oh, sure, we may become as gods, but the thrill fades fast...By the new, post-Singularity standards, posthumans are just as bored and frustrated as humans ever were. They are not magic, they are still quotidian entities in a gritty, rules-based physical universe. They will find themselves swiftly and bruisingly brought up against the limits of their own conditions, whatever those limits and conditions may be.

A condition that sounds so...human.

The Fiscal State and Our State
Peter Drucker:

“The two world wars of this (previous) century transformed the nation-state into a 'fiscal state'...They (nation-states) have all come to believe that there are no economic limits to what government can tax and borrow, and, therefore, no economic limits to what government can spend. Under the new dispensation, which assumes that there are no economic limits to the revenues it can obtain, government becomes the master of civil society. The sole result of the fiscal state has been the opposite of what it aims at...In every single developed country, governments have reached the limits of their ability to tax and their ability to borrow. The fiscal state has spent itself into impotence.

Worst of all, the fiscal state has become a 'pork-barrel' state...government spending becomes the means for politicians to buy votes...In the fiscal state, the looting [of the public treasury] is done by politicians to ensure their own election...Democratic government rests on the belief that the first job of elected representatives is to defend their constituents against rapacious government. The pork-barrel state thus increasingly undermines the foundations of a free society.

Joseph Schumpeter warned in 1918 that the fiscal state would in the end undermine government's ability to govern. Fifteen years later, Keynes hailed the fiscal state as the great liberator; no longer limited by restraints on spending, government in the fiscal state could govern effectively, Keynes maintained. We now know that Schumpeter was right.”

Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, quotes from pages 125-135

You can see this in the small - if the phrase "the fiscal state has spent itself into impotence" doesn't apply to California, I don't know what does - and in the large, as the federal deficit zooms out of control. Just look at the new Medicaid bill, which manages to spew pork in all directions while providing little to no actual benefits to ordinary citizens.

What got me on this track was reading about our Governor's new budget. As some wag pointed out, it's probably almost identical to the budget Gray Davis would have produced. The most salient points to me were the reliance on a $14 billion bond issue and the transfer of an extra $1.3 billion in property tax revenues from cities and counties to the state. There's very little that sounds like trimming the fat off the pork, unless you consider education and health services wasteful and unnecessary. I find it impossible to believe that there aren't billions of dollars in truly wasteful corporate and special interest welfare that can't be cut.

What would real reform look like? Well, it might start by dealing effectively with the problems described here. And it might end with a significant transfer of both funds and responsibilities out of Sacramento and back into local governments. It would be the end of the fiscal state.

And that end will come. It's just a question of whether it will be a difficult transition (the best case) or a painful, revolutionary upheaval.

I don't believe that our new Governor will lead us into that transition. For all the talk of a revolution in California politics, I think that Arnold's election is an end, not a beginning. It's an end because the only way one group of entrenched power interests in this state (the Pete Wilson Republicans) could get elected was to use a popular cultural icon as their frontman. But what happens if the frontman's administration is as ineffective and unpopular as the previous administrations?

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”
The Who, Won't Get Fooled Again

Is it just me, or does Instapundit seem to be getting a little meaner, a little more ideological, a little more self-righteous, and a little more poorly written as the months go by? It's all very predictable and tiresome. I read blogs to learn something new and/or to get exposed to different points of view, not to be beat over the head with someone else's ideology and agenda.

Nevertheless, it's fascinating to observe what Oliver Willis calls the "Instapundit crowd". To their opposites on the ideological divide, they're yet another right-wing conspiracy. But they're not. They're a damn good example of how a social network works. And their mass and influence should tell us all something.

Today, they're jumping all over Paul O'Neill (with a few swipes at liberal scum Molly Ivins and Wallace Shawn*). Meme Of The Day: He (O'Neill) gave out transcripts of a secret NSA meeting! That's as bad as outing an undercover CIA agent! No, it's worse!

Never mind that the document in question was released to the public 6 months ago. It's all about spreading the meme. And unlike Ivins, they never apologize for their gaffes or bad jokes.

Now compare that to what Josh Marshall writes:

“So now the White House has pilloried Paul O’Neill as a sorry doofus and, by all appearances, launched a punitive investigation against him.

How about denying any of his claims or those in Suskind’s book?

Just a thought ...”

An appeal to objectivity and facts? What, no slams of straw men or idiots? No simple-minded sound bites to stick in peoples' heads? This is why the left is losing.

*(And, yes, I think Shawn is an idiot. Ivins, on the other hand, is a terrific writer and journalist who occasionally sticks her foot in her mouth, an old and honorable Texas tradition. Her gaffes shouldn't obscure that fact that 95% of the time she's funny as hell.)

LOTR, Pt. III
I finally saw the Return of the King. I didn't like it quite as much as the first two - it departs from the book more than I liked - but it's still marvelous entertainment. Some people have complained about the multiple endings, but I liked them (except for the absence of Saruman's scouring of the Shire and its rebirth).

It's been raining a lot and when I left the theater I expected to walk out into a downpour. Instead, the sky was clearing after a fresh rain. I walked through Bookshop Santa Cruz and saw a rainbow to the south as I came out the back, the clouds low and gold in the west in the setting sun.

Transformation vs. Era Transitions

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to write about, and there's something I'd really like to explore over the next few years. I've been strongly influenced by two books - W.R. Clement's Quantum Jump: A Survival Guide to the New Renaissance and Peter Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society. I've written a little about Clement's book here before, but just to sum up, his basic thesis is that we are currently in the midst of an era transition brought about by a rise in the level of abstraction. That rise in the level of abstraction sets in motion a cascading wave of ideas and events that sweep away the existing status quo and create a new world-view. The only comparable event to this in our experience was the original Renaissance, in which the discovery of perspective "brought on a vigorous and profitable series of invention cycles through applications of the new science" and largely created the world we live in today.

Drucker's thesis isn't as radical as Clement's; the changes he sees are the kind of transformation in Western society that happens every few hundred years, and he gives the examples of the re-emergence of the city in 13th Century Europe, the period from the invention of the Printing Press to Luther posting of his 95 theses (1455-1517, the peak of the early Renaissance), and the events of 1776 (not just the American Revolution, but also James Watt's Steam Engine and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations). 40-60 years after the beginning of one of these transformations, "there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born".

It's almost a cliche to say that we're living in a time of rapid change; most people seem to have accepted this as the norm. But I don't think they expect (much less want) really profound change. Someone (I can't remember who) once said that it wasn't that a few people were ahead of their time so much as it was that most people were behind theirs. And I think that's the case here; profound changes are coming, will occur in my lifetime (in fact, have already begun), and will reshape society, polity, and, most of all, our worldview and our epistomology (how we know what we know).

So the question in my mind is: Is this a transformation - a regular occurrence to be expected every 200-300 years or so - or an era transition? An era transition is a much rarer and more profound event. Human nature being what it is, I prefer the more dramatic interpretation of events - it's more exciting to believe you're living in one of those epochal eras of history. But it seems to me that if we can carefully examine what's going on in the world and somehow manage to shed some of our cultural baggage in order to think more clearly and dispassionately, we can at least glimpse the outlines of what's happening and what the magnitude of change really is.

The idea of an era transition seems exciting but Clements points out that, based on previous experience, era transitions are dangerous and difficult times. It's no accident that his book's subtitle includes the words "survival guide". One way we can detect whether or not we're in a real era transition is the level of danger and difficulty.

DSL's Back
And it only took SBC/Pac Bell 27 days (after I moved a mile and kept the same phone number) to get my DSL turned on. A co-worker just returned from a trip home to India and informed me that Reliance, the big Indian telecom conglomerate, now offers wireless (home) telephone service that they can turn on in 4-5 hours after you order it. Granted, wireless is simpler than DSL. But wouldn't you expect better service here in the NorCal Riviera, just over the hill from Silicon Valley, compaed to a land still notable for its crushing poverty and widespread corruption. (Sorry, apologies to my Aryan/Hindu/Punjabi/Tamil brothers and sisters. The corruption is just as widespread here. But it's better integrated into the system. No tacky direct bribes for us, just routine corporation transactions).

Part of the problem, I'm sure, is that I order DSL through Cruzio, the local ISP, who then buys the service from the local monopoly. I'm guessing that SBC/PacBell puts those orders in the back of the queue and services direct orders first. But I prefer being shielded from SBC/PB's billing system - you know, the one where they lose your payment and then threaten to cancel your phone service as well as your DSL unless you pay a estimated year's rates in advance. I'm pretty that particular class action suit is still ongoing.

Bam, Iran
The recent earthquake in Iran is a sobering reminder of how the rest of the world lives. What's only of passing interest here - a 6.5 earthquake 200 miles away that makes your office building sway for 10 seconds - is an unbelievably deadly killer half a world away when it hits a city of 100,000 whose buildings are made out of dried mud and bricks.

6.5, baby
OK, it took an earthquake to get me blogging again. It lasted about 15 seconds or so; I heard something that sounded like some heavy equipment was getting rolled on the floor above ours, then a sound like flakes of plaster falling. I didn't realize what it was until Les, whose cube faces mine, said "earthquake". We all stood up and you could feel the building swaying. I called S. in Santa Cruz, who was standing in line at the Post Office. She said she didn't feel a thing. Mike H.'s wife in Fremont didn't either. But Les' wife did in San Mateo and so did someone in the 23rd floor of an SF office building.

Update: The epicenter was apparently about 11 km NE of San Simeon. The USGS is now reporting a 4.7 aftershock in the same area. Go here for more details. Apparently they felt it in LA, too.

Update: The official count is now 11 aftershocks of magnitude 3.9-4.7. I wonder what's it like to watch Hearst Castle sway?

Local Hero
Santa Cruz librarian Anne M. Turner wins Jane Magazine's Bad-Ass Loudmouth (scroll down about halfway) award for “reinforcing her citywide policy to shred library records every day in protest of the privacy-invading PATRIOT Act, which gives the government the right to find out which books people check out and anything else they're curious about”.

Another new blog
Terry Teachout's About Last Night, a journal on art in that Big City On The Other Coast. Courtesy of Asymmetrical Information.

Apparently, I too would be the The GashlyCrumb Tinies if I were an Edward Gorey Book. "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who wasted away. D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh..."

New Blog
Here's a really interesting new blog I just discovered, courtesy of Halley Suitt's weblog. Read this and then this.

More John Adams
The thing I don't admire about Adams was his support, however reluctant, for the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Collectively, they were the Patriot Act of their day. Adams let himself be persuaded into signing the bills by the High Federalists (led by Hamilton), his wife Abigail (whose usual good sense was trumped by her anger at the scurrilous criticism of her husband in Republican papers like the Aurora), and Adams' own vanity. While he proved mostly unwilling to use the provisions of the acts to either expel aliens or suppress dissent, his support for them ultimately hurt him. The Sedition Act was used to justify the arrests of 25 men who were either editors or associated with Republican newspapers. The men were jailed and their papers shut down. This resulted in a public outcry against the acts and contributed to the victory of Jefferson and the Republicans in the election of 1800.

There was little doubt then, and none now, that the Acts were designed to destroy opposition to the Federalist party and its agenda. Adams was not complicit in this; but he let himself be used. Fortunately, the effort backfired. But the passage of the Acts set a precedent that has, at least implicitly, been used to bulwark similar efforts of questionable constitutionality.

Japes, ribald
Sweet Fancy Moses is back, just when I'd given it up for dead. OK, it came back 3 weeks ago, and I'm as out of it as ever. But you might find this amusing.

Now, if only Suck would come back.

Desktop Linux
David Weinberger echoes my misgivings about Linux as an OS for non-geeks, this time from the point of view of a regular user.