Emergent Chaos

That’s the key message of Ethan Zuckerman’s post “Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention.” I’ll repeat it: “We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.”

It’s a long, complex post, and very much worth reading. It starts from the economics of running an ISP that can provide circumvention to all of China, goes to the side effects of such a thing (like spammers using it), and then continues to ask why we want circumvention anyway.

Take some time and go read “Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention.”

The lead of this story caught my eye:

(CNN) — Legislatures in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico met in 2009, leading to the enactment of 40,697 laws, many of which take effect January 1.

That’s an average of 753 laws passed in each of those jurisdictions. At 200 working days in a year, which is normal for you and me, that’s nearly 4 laws per day.

Now, there’s a longstanding principle of law, which is that ignorance of the law is no excuse. That goes back to the day when laws, like the code of Hammurabi, were inscribed at a rate of about 4 letters per day. The laws were posted in the city center where both of the literate people could read them.

Joking aside, at what point does knowledge of the law become an unreasonable demand on the citizenry? Civil rights lawyer Harvey Silvergate has a new book, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. I haven’t read it, but as I understand, it’s largely about the proliferation of vague laws, not the sheer numbers.

A few years back, Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Cranor calculated the cost of reading and understanding the privacy policies of the sites you visit. It was $365 billion. It might be interesting to apply the same approach to the work of legislatures.

The paper is here.

The very sane opening paragraph is:

On December 12, 2009, we factored the 768-bit, 232-digit number RSA-768 by the number field sieve (NFS, [19]). The number RSA-768 was taken from the now obsolete RSA Challenge list [37] as a representative 768-bit RSA modulus (cf. [36]). This result is a record for factoring general integers. Factoring a 1024-bit RSA modulus would be about a thousand times harder, and a 768-bit RSA modulus is several thousands times harder to factor than a 512-bit one. Because the first factorization of a 512-bit RSA modulus was reported only a decade ago (cf. [7]) it is not unreasonable to expect that 1024-bit RSA moduli can be factored well within the next decade by an academic effort such as ours or the one in [7]. Thus, it would be prudent to phase out usage of 1024-bit RSA within the next three to four years.

It’s an interesting read if factoring fascinates you.

So the 2016 Olympics will be in Rio de Janeiro. Some people think this was a loss for Obama, but Obama was in a no-win situation. His ability to devote time to trying to influence the Olympics is strongly curtailed by other, more appropriate priorities. If he hadn’t gone to Copenhagen, he would have been blamed for not caring. If he went, he’s blamed anyway. In reality, he does have some control over what happened. He could have fixed the “harrowing experience” we show the world under the ironic words “Welcome to the United States:”

In the official question-and-answer session following the Chicago presentation, Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, asked the toughest question. He wondered how smooth it would be for foreigners to enter the United States for the Games because doing so can sometimes, he said, be “a rather harrowing experience.” (New York Times, “Rio Wins“)

Ironically, the President has experienced harrowing nonsense at borders, see “US Senators Detained In Russia.” He should put someone on fixing the Customs and Immigration service before it costs us even more.

However, it’s really unclear if the “loss” is a loss. “No Games Chicago” was a citizens group advocating against destroying Chicago’s parks and budget for the Olympics, and according to CNN, 45% of the city’s residents didn’t want the games. And as the AP documents in “Olympics Aren’t Necessarily an Economic Bonanza,” the outlandish “economic benefit” numbers that Olympic advocates usually throw around are based on a “multiplier effect” of around 3. Me, I know what an Olympics event costs–Montreal taxpayers paid off the ‘76 Olympics in 2006.

So congratulations, Rio. I hope you don’t bulldoze the less waelthy neighborhoods, and I hope you’re all paid off by 2030 or so.

Once apon a time, I was uunet!harvard!bwnmr4!adam. Oh, harvard was probably enough, it was a pretty well known host in the uucp network which carried our email before snmp. I was also harvard!bwnmr4!postmaster which meant that at the end of an era, I moved the lab from copied hosts files to dns, when I became adam@bwnmr4.harvard…wow, there’s still cname for that host. But I digress.

Really, I wanted to talk about a report, passed on by Steven Johnson and Gunnar Peterson, that Vint Cerf said that if he were re-designing the internet, he’d add more authentication.

And really, while I respect Vint a tremendous amount, I’m forced to wonder: Whatchyou talkin’ about Vint?

I hate going off based on a report on Twitter, but I don’t know what the heck a guy that smart could have meant. I mean, he knows that back in the day, people like me could and did give internet accounts to (1) anyone our boss said to and (2) anyone else who wanted them some of this internet stuff and wouldn’t get us in too much trouble. (Hi S! Hi C!) So when he says “more authentication” does that mean inserting “uunet!harvard!bwnmr4!adam” in an IP header? Ensuring your fingerd was patched after Mr. Morris played his little stunt?

But more to the point, authentication is a cost. Setting up and managing authentication information isn’t easy, and even if it were, it certainly isn’t free. Even more expensive than managing the authentication information would be figuring out how to do it. The packet interconnect paper (“A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn) was published in 1974, and says “These associations need not involve the transmission of data prior to their formation and indeed two associates need not be able to determine that they are associates until they attempt to communicate.” That was before DES (1975), before Diffie-Hellman (1976), Needham-Schroeder (1978) or RSA. I can’t see how to maintain that principle with the technology available at the time.

When setting up a new technology, low cost of entry was a competitive advantage. Doing authentication well is tremendously expensive. I might go so far as to argue that we don’t know how fantastically expensive it is, because we so rarely do it well.

Not getting hung up in easy problems like prioritization or hard ones like authentication, but simply moving packets was what made the internet work. Allowing new associations to be formed, ad-hoc, made for cheap interconnections.

So I remain confused by what he could have meant.

[Update: Vint was kind enough to respond in the comments that he meant the internet of today.]

He said the criteria used by the Smart Choices™ Program™ were seriously flawed, allowing less healthy products, like sweet cereals and heavily salted packaged meals, to win its seal of approval. “It’s a blatant failure of this system and it makes it, I’m afraid, not credible,” Mr. Willett said.

[...]
Eileen T. Kennedy, president of the Smart Choices™ board and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said the program’s criteria were based on government dietary guidelines and widely accepted nutritional standards.

She said the program was also influenced by research into consumer behavior. That research showed that, while shoppers wanted more information, they did not want to hear negative messages or feel their choices were being dictated to them.
“The checkmark means the food item is a ‘better for you’ product, as opposed to having an x on it saying ‘Don’t eat this,’ ” Dr. Kennedy said. “Consumers are smart enough to deduce that if it doesn’t have the checkmark, by implication it’s not a ‘better for you’ product. They want to have a choice. They don’t want to be told ‘You must do this.’ ” (“For Your Health, Froot Loops™“)

Yes, every single one of these is a better choice than a petri dish full of salmonella. Guaranteed, or your money back.

I’ve added ™ marks where I think the New York Times™ should have included them.

Via JWZ.

Ten years ago, I left Boston to go work at an exciting startup called Zero-Knowledge Systems. Zero-Knowledge was all about putting the consumer in control of their privacy. Even looking back, I have no regrets. I’m proud of what I was working towards during the internet bubble, and I know a lot of people who can’t say that.

We struggled with the tremendously hard problem of privacy. We did it for something bigger and more important than ordering your groceries online. We didn’t succeed at the first business plan, or the second, but we plugged away at it, listened to prospective customers and partners, and the company is still in business and going strong as RadialPoint.

We learned an awful lot. We learned that people are awfully passionate about privacy. Hundreds of thousands of people signed up to try our software. We had a guy who called support after buying a new computer to get privacy. I remember the woman who took his call telling me how sad she was she had to get off the phone and take other calls. And we learned that what we meant when we said privacy wasn’t what other people meant.

I think too much of today’s privacy debate is wrapped up in a similarly nebulous term, identity theft. It’s hard to address a problem that’s so vague. But that’s a post about today, not about ten years ago.

We hired a lot of great people who I knew. I met a lot of great people, too. Went to work with one of them, Dave Clauson at another startup, Reflective. Work with some of them again (Hi Christian! Hi Stefan!).

For me, the key lesson was to really drink deep of your prospective customer’s pain. To accept that they may have a label that you really understand better than them (“privacy”) and that it doesn’t matter. What matters is how they see it, and how they understand your solution. Zero-Knowledge made me skeptical of great technology as a problem solver, when the customer is asked to understand it or care. Your customers never care about your technology anymore. They care about what pain it solves.

I’d love to go back and tell myself ten years ago to love the customer better. There’s other lessons. I’d love to seized the day and some of its opportunities better. But in the end, that flight to Montreal put me on the path to where I am today.

So a huge thank you to all of our customers and prospective customers. Thank you to Ian for introducing me to Austin. Thank you, Austin and Hamnett for offering me the job. Thank you to all of my co-workers, employees and friends of the company.

So I was thinking about the question of the value of privacy, and it occurred to me that there may be an interesting natural experiment we can observe, and that is national security clearances in the US. For this post, I’ll assume that security clearances work for their primary purpose, which is to keep foreign intelligence agents out of sensitive jobs. But articles like this indicate that it’s worth a $5-15,000 salary premium.

Part of the premium is getting a clearance for an employee is slow and expensive, as this Govcentral article says, “…it can take noncleared employees between six months and two years to receive a new clearance — an unacceptable time frame for many organizations that have significant contracts to deliver in the near term. In addition, the clearance process often is very expensive.”

But even with that issue, has the number of jobs requiring a clearance gone up that quickly as to create that degree of salary imbalance? At some point, the number of cleared people should catch up with the surge in government employment. At that point, the difference between a cleared and uncleared employee is down to (1) the cost of getting a clearance and (2) the market impact of having your life examined and judged by strangers.

Is that $1,000 a year for being unable to select the strangers?

Thoughts?

I remember when Derek Atkins was sending mail to the cypherpunks list, looking for hosts to dedicate to cracking RSA-129. I remember when they announced that “The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage.” How it took 600 people with 1,600 machines months of work and then a Bell Labs supercomputer to work through the data. I had a fun little stroll down memory lane reading about average machines not having more than 16MB of ram, and how they borrowed a server with 2, later 3 900 MB disks. 129 decimal digits fits in 430 bits. The RSA-129 paper concludes:

We conclude that commonly-used 512-bit RSA moduli are vulnerable to any organization prepared to spend a few million dollars
and to wait a few months.

Fast-forwarding to this week, David Molnar mentions that “We’re living in the future now:”

The 512-bit RSA key used for signing applications and firmware updates for the TI-83 has been factored. By some person working on his or her own. With one computer.

David links to “Calculator hackers crack OS signing key, opening a closed platform,” and following links, we get to “fun number theory facts:”

Gentlemen,

A mathematical morsel for your entertainment and edification.

The number
6,857,599,914,349,403,977,654,744,967,
172,758,179,904,114,264,612,947,326,
127,169,976,133,296,980,951,450,542,
789,808,884,504,301,075,550,786,464,
802,304,019,795,402,754,670,660,318,
614,966,266,413,770,127

is the product of
5,174,413,344,875,007,990,519,123,187,
618,500,139,954,995,264,909,695,897,
020,209,972,309,881,454,541

and
1,325,290,319,363,741,258,636,842,042,
448,323,483,211,759,628,292,406,959,
481,461,131,759,210,884,908,747.

New things resemble old things at first. Moreover, people interpret new things in terms of old things. Such it is with the new Google Chrome OS. Very little I’ve seen on it seems to understand it.

The main stream of commentary is comparisons to Windows and how this means that Google is in the OS business, and so on. This is also the stream that gets it the most wrong.

It’s just another Linux distribution, guys. It’s not like this is a new OS. It’s new packaging of existing software, with very little or even no new software. I have about ten smart friends who could do this in their sleep. Admittedly, a handful of those are actually working on the Chrome OS, so that somewhat weakens my comment. Nonetheless, you probably know someone who could do it, is doing it, or you’re one of the people who could do it.

Moreover, Chrome OS isn’t an OS in the way you think about it. Google isn’t going to provide any feature on Chrome OS that they aren’t going to provide on Windows, Mac OS, Ubuntu, Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Palm Pre, Blackberry, and so on.

Consider the differences between the business model of Microsoft and that of Google. Microsoft believes that it should be the only software company there is. Its actual historic mission statement says that its mission is to push its software everywhere. Its mission does not include “to the exclusion of everyone else,” it merely often acts that way. Google’s mission is to have you use its services that provide information.

To phrase this another way, Microsoft gets paid when you buy Windows or Office or an Xbox, etc. Their being paid does not require that you not run Mac OS, or Lotus, or PlayStation, but that helps. Google gets paid when you click on certain links. It doesn’t matter how you clicked on that link, all that matters is that you click. Google facilitates that clicking through its information business facilitated its software and services, but it’s those clicks that get them paid.

The key difference is this: Microsoft is helped by narrowing your choices, and Google is helped by broadening them. It doesn’t help Microsoft for you to do a mashup that includes their software as that means less Microsoft Everywhere, but it helps Google if you include a map in your mashup as there’s a chance a paid link will get clicked (no matter how small, the chance is zero if you don’t).

I don’t know whether it’s cause or effect but Microsoft really can’t stand to see someone else be successful. It’s a zero-ish sum company in product and outlook. Someone else’s success vaguely means that they’re doing something non-Microsoft. Google, in contrast, is helped by other people doing stuff, so long as they use Google’s services too.

If I shop for a new camera, for example, the odds are that Google will profit even if I buy it on eBay and pay for it with PayPal. Or if I buy it from B&H, Amazon, etc. So long as I am using Google to gather information, Google makes money.

Let me give another more pointed example. Suppose you want to get a new smartphone. Apple wins only if I get an iPhone. RIM wins when I get a BlackBerry. Palm wins if I get a Pre or a Treo. Nokia wins a little if I get any Symbian phone (most of which are Nokias, but a few aren’t). Microsoft wins if I get any Windows Mobile phone, of which there are many. But Google wins not only if I get an Android phone, but also if I get an iPhone (because the built-in Maps application uses Google), or if I install Google Maps on anything. One could even argue that it wins more if I get a non-Android phone and use their apps, because the margins are higher on the income.

This openness as a business model is why Microsoft created Bing. Partially it is because Microsoft can’t stand to see Google be successful, but also because Microsoft envies the way Google can win even when it loses, and who wouldn’t?

Interestingly, Bing is pretty good, too. One can complain, but one can always complain. Credible people give higher marks to Bing than Google, even. This puts Microsoft in the interesting position of being where Apple traditionally is with them. They’re going to learn that you can’t take customers from someone else just by being better.

But this is the whole reason for Chrome OS. Chrome OS isn’t going to make any money for Google. But it does let Google shoot at Microsoft where they live. When (not if, when) Chrome OS is an option on netbooks, it will cost Microsoft. Either directly, because someone picks Chrome OS over Windows, or indirectly because Microsoft is going to have to compete with free. The netbook manufacturers are going to be only too happy to use Chrome as a club against Microsoft to get better pricing on Windows. The winners on that are not going to be Google, it’s going to be the people who make and buy netbooks, especially the ones who get Windows. The existence of Chrome OS will save money for the people who buy Windows.

That’s gotta hurt, if you’re Microsoft.

This is the way to look at Chrome OS. It’s Google’s statement that if Microsoft treads into Google’s yard, Google will tread back, and will do so in a way that does not so much help Google, but hurts Microsoft. It is a counterattack against Microsoft’s core business model that is also a judo move; it uses the weight of Microsoft against it. As Microsoft moves to compete against Google’s services by making a cloud version of Office, Google moves to cut at the base. When (not if) there are customers who use Microsoft apps on Google’s OS, Microsoft is cut twice by the very forces that make Google win when you use a Google service on Windows.

(Also, if you’re Microsoft you could argue that Google has been stepping on their toes with Google Docs, GMail, etc.)

Someday someone’s going to give Ballmer an aneurysm, and it might be Chrome.