Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt

But James Fallows’s July 1982 article on how he came to love his obsolete computer is wonderful. Extract:

My system of writing was to type my way through successive drafts until their ungainliness quotient declined. This consumed much paper and time. In the case of that article, it consumed so much time that, as the deadline day drew near, I knew I had no chance of retyping a legible copy to send to the home office.

I turned hopefully to the services sector of our economy. I picked a temporary-secretary agency out of the phone book and was greeted the next morning by a gum-chewing young woman named Darlene. I escorted her to my basement office and explained the challenge. The manuscript had to leave my house by 6:30 the following evening. No sweat, I thought, now that a professional is on hand.

But five hours after Darlene’s arrival, I glanced at the product of her efforts. Stacked in a neat pile next to the typewriter were eight completed pages. This worked out to a typing rate of about six and a half words per minute. In fairness to Darlene, she had come to a near-total halt on first encountering the word “Brzezinski” and never fully regained her stride. Still, at this pace Darlene and I would both be dead — first I’d kill her, then I’d kill myself — before she came close to finishing the piece. Hustling her out the door at the end of the day, with $49 in wages in her pocket and eleven pages of finished manuscript left behind, I trudged downstairs to face the typewriter myself. Twenty-four hours later, I handed the bulky parcel to the Federal Express man and said, “Never again.”

This brings back memories. I used to type my newspaper column over and over again, then cycle to the station, send the piece by Red Star to London on the next available train. It would then be collected from King’s Cross station by a truculent youth on a motor-cycle who would ferry it to the office….

Webcasters appeal Copyright Office ruling on royalties
Wired report.

Cod sayings, No. 13465

“If I could drop dead right now, I’d be the happiest man alive.”

-Samuel Goldwyn, movie producer (1882-1974)

He is also reputed to have said: “A lot of water’s been passed under that bridge”, and: “That hydrogen bomb — boy, it’s dynamite!”

Bruce Schneier’s first comment on Palladium

~”For now, I leave you with my three main questions. One: security for who? Looks like this system is more about security for Microsoft and Disney than security for the owner of the computer. Two: Does Microsoft realize that fancy crypto hardware doesn’t automatically fix software bugs? Do they remember the bugs that plagued their last attempt at code signing: ActiveX? Three: what are the antitrust issues surrounding taking public protocols and replacing them with Microsoft-owned protocols? Still, there are a lot of really good ideas in Palladium, if we can ensure that they’re used in the right ways.”

Web radio stations appeal fees ruling
“NYT” report.

Thoughtful piece by John Patrick on the implications of Spam

A sobering essay on Spam and its implications. It’s the equivalent of cybervandalism gone mad, and of course the only way of stopping it probably involves authentication. ;-(

Excellent AP article about integrity in search engines and the US Federal Trade Commission. “Google was the only search engine that appeared to meet all the criteria laid out by regulators.”

Computerworld: Users Must Beware of Legal Trends. Dan Gillmor. The IT user community has never thought of itself as making laws, except to the extent of setting down rules inside the enterprise. This is a natural consequence of doing a particular job. Maybe it’s time to think more broadly. The way you do your job is going to have more impact on society at large than you may want to know. [Tomalak’s Realm]

My Observer column about the strange phenomenon of digital photography is on the Web.

The conflict between freedom and efficiency

In an editorial about the suggestion that ID cards would be introduced for UK subjects. the Economist of July 6 2002 puts the issue starkly (but accurately):

“The reason the government is computerising all this information is not because it is bent on attacking personal freedoms, but because it wants to make its systems work more efficiently. This is something every taxpayer also wants….

Yet there is a trade-off between efficiency and liberty. An inefficient state can never repress its people as effectively as an efficient one. What, then, is the citizen supposed to hope for? A government with effective, and therefore potentially dangerous, machinery, or government that doesn’t work very well?”

This is a great statement of the problem. But the paper then loses it in the next para.

“The only way of reconciling efficiency with liberty is to balance the government’s new powers with new rights. Let the databases grow. Let the computers talk to each other. Let the ID cards be issued. But give citizens the right to see any informtion the state holds about them.”

What a cop-out. Fancy imagining that a state which is acquiring this kind of surveillance power would give people access to what it knows about them. And even if it would, what difference would that make? The Economist could do better than that if it really tried.