reworld.org

I’m currently reading one of Alan Lightman’s curious little books, Einstein’s Dreams. Published in 1993, it’s a quirky mixture of philosophical thought experiments illustrating various models of time, which twist and wriggle into riffs on life and love. One of them, a condemnation of social climbing, doubles as a satire of a movement that didn’t even exist when the book was written:

In this world, it is instantly obvious that something is odd. No houses can be seen in the valleys or plains. Everyone lives in the mountains.

At some time in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the father from the center of the earth. The effect is miniscule, but it can be measured with sensitive instruments. Once the phenomenon was known, a few people, anxious to stay young, moved to the mountains. Now all houses are built on Dom, the Materhorn, Monte Rosa, and other high ground. It is impossible to sell living quarters elsewhere.

Many are not content simply to locate their homes on a mountain. To get the maximum effect, they have constructed their houses on stilts. The mountaintops all over the world are nested with such houses, which from a distance look like a flock of fat birds squatting on long skinny legs. People most eager to live longest have built their houses on the highest stilts. Indeed, some houses rise half a mile high on their spindly wooden legs. Height has become status. When a person from his kitchen window must look up to see a neighbor, he believes that the neighbor will not become stiff in the joints as soon as he, will not loose his hair until later, will not wrinkle until later, will no lose the urge for romance as early. Likewise, a person looking down on another house tends to dismiss its occupants as spent, weak, and shortsighted. Some boast that they have lived their whole lives hight up, that they were born in the highest house on the highest mountain peak and have never descended. They celebrate their youth in their mirrors and walk naked on their balconies.

Now and then some urgent business forces people to come down from their houses, and they do so with haste, hurrying down their tall ladders to the ground, running to another ladder or to the valley below, completing their transactions, and then returning as quickly as possible to their houses, or to other high places. They know that with each downward step time passes just a little bit faster and they age a little more quickly. People at ground level never sit. They run, while carrying their briefcases or groceries.

A small number of residents in each city have stopped caring whether they age a few seconds faster than their neighbors. These adventuresome souls come down to the lower world for days at a time, lounge under the trees that grow in the valleys, swim leisurely in the lakes that lie at warmer altitudes, roll on level ground. They hardly look at their watches and cannot tell you if it is Monday or Thursday. When the others rush by them and scoff, they just smile.

In time, people have forgotten the reason why higher is better. Nonetheless, they continue to live on the mountains, to avoid sunken regions as much as they can, to teach their children to shun other children from low elevations. They tolerate the cold of the mountains by habit and enjoy the discomfort as part of their breeding. They have even convinced themselves that thin air is good for their bodies and, following that logic, have gone on spare diets, refusing all but the most gossamer food. At length, the populace have become think like the air, bony, old before their time.

Caloric restriction, eat your heart out.

Wired Magazine is a funny publication. It is particularly entertaining to compare the total number of mentions of the names “george bush” (57) and “al gore” (307) in the magazine to date[1].

Upon consideration, this situation is easy to understand. It isn’t that Wired has fought to keep the flickering candle of democracy alight after Florida in 2000, a cause embraced by few aside from Michael Moore. It’s that George W. Bush has never used the word “Internet” in a State of the Union speech. Not once.

Al Gore, on the other hand, has found his true calling: using the power of technology to save the world.

[1] A note that makes this observation only slightly less funny: if the search includes all of the common variations on Bush Jr’s name (george bush, george w bush, president bush) and one then discards mentions of his father, there are something like 150 hits for Bush. Still a 2:1 ratio in Gore’s favour.

A couple of years back, Jack Valenti argued that copyright law was supporting terrorism. Well, approximately. He argued that terrorists must be making money from piracy, which is really the same thing. He admitted to having no evidence for his claims, but if we presumed they were nonetheless true, criminal profits from piracy wouldn’t be possible under a sensible copyright system like an opt in universal license or a universal public funding system. In the same way that Prohibition in the 1930s funded crime by driving certain markets underground, modern copyright can fund crime too.

All of that is fairly straightforward. What is not so straightforward, dear readers, is the emerging possibility that attempts to enforce copyright are starting to protect paedophiles.

How is that? The most sophisticated attempts at DRM, based around trusted computing and some degree of tamper resistance, have a central tenet: provide a mechanism for denying local users full access to and control of their own computers. There must be cryptographic keys which are stored in the hardware but inaccesible to “unauthorised” applications, so that the user can’t get uncontrolled access to the decrypted versions of media files.

Precisely the same “trusted computing” mechanisms can be used to prevent someone who seizes your machine from performing any forensic investigation of it. Microsoft’s BitLocker project is just such an application. At the moment, encryption software is available to hide the contents of your hard disk. But BitLocker prevents two of the more obvious methods that law enforcement (or someone else) can use to defeat disk encryption: brute force attacks on passphrases, and software keystroke logging.

Apparently, some European computer police are very angry that Microsoft is making BitLocker widely available. They’re convinced that it will prove invaluable for paedophiles. Which, occasionally, it may — and also for political subversives, whistleblowers, and other questionable sorts.

To sum up: Hollywood’s push for DRM has lead Microsoft (with help from Intel and others) to build powerful privacy-protection tools that police believe will turn into a haven for paedophiles.

One wonders how long it will be before governments want their hands all over the private keys in the Trusted Platform Module in your PC. Apparently, China is already planning to prohibit the importation of trusted computing hardware that wasn’t made there. If this comes to pass, the only viruses, keystroke loggers and malware that will be able to infect your computer for any length of time will be the friendly goverment approved versions.