Envelope-to: mattd@useoz.com X-Sender: mattd@pop.useoz.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.0 Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2001 06:40:56 +1000 To: mattd@useoz.com From: mattd <mattd@useoz.com> Subject: inneresting tale
Liberty and safety in conflict Tuesday 04 September, 2001 By NATHAN COCHRANE Between them, the views of engineer Dave Farber and columnist Dan Gillmor reach into the homes, coding dens and boardrooms of the people who build the technology that surrounds us. The trends they see fill them with deep disquiet, tinged with some hope of a better future. And by some cosmic coincidence, they were brought together last week, holidaying at adjacent hotels just up the road from the Opera House in Sydney. "The enabling of retro-active ethics generated by these enormous files of information are just dangerous, dangerous to a free society," Farber says of the accumulation of private details in huge databases. "Because some day you could run into a person who knew how to use them: a government, a demagogue." He says one way to protect our privacy would be the use of digital rights management technology, which, under international copyright laws, makes it a criminal offence for anyone to break. Despite this, the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), to which our own Digital Agenda Bill strikes an uncanny resemblance, is "asinine" and "encourages sloppiness" in crypto systems, he says. "That (DMCA) law is incredibly damaging ... to just about every part of the Bill of Rights," Farber says. " It's sufficiently asinine so it will probably be struck down. "If I were a country who isn't committed to it, I would start thinking, well, what are you trying to protect? "(You) will have the cost transferred from the company to law enforcement. I would look very, very carefully at what you're buying for that and what you're losing. I think you lose too much." Gillmor, on a mission to "excise" Microsoft from his personal life, recommends people wait until next year to buy a new PC. At home he runs a Mac, mostly for his music, which he once played professionally, and Sun's StarOffice on Linux to write his IT column. "... (This) is not the news the industry wants, but ... I would wait until probably March until I bought a new computer system ... with (Windows) XP on it because I would not be very trusting of its reliability." Farber is blunt: "Don't touch it". "It's different to (Windows XP) Professional; fundamentally different," Farber says. "Apparently, it's a bad scene ... and if you look in the manual, you cannot upgrade from Home to Professional. And that's sort of strange." While others claim to be Father of the Internet, Farber, the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Pennsylvania, could at least claim to be its eccentric uncle. This elder statesman of the digital age was the primary thesis adviser to Jon Postel, who died in 1998, who authored the first handbooks for driving the Internet: the RFC or Requests for Comment series. He has been labelled "powerful" and "visionary" by industry sources. But when Farber talks in his broad New Jersey accent, geeks, suits and silks do listen, as happened when he witnessed in the Microsoft anti-trust trial and when he was the US Federal Communications Commission chief technologist. Moderated postings to his Interesting People e-mail list go to more than 25,000 subscribers several times a day. Gillmor's column in Silicon Valley's local newspaper, San Jose's Mercury News, and his online weblog at siliconvalley.com, poke fun and a dose of serious inquiry at the heart of the IT industry. "Desktop computing has been emptied of innovation because people realised there's no way to make money out of it, so it's all moved to the new platforms, which is the Internet, which is the one thing so far Microsoft doesn't control," he says. Farber greets with a homemade business card, printed on a budget inkjet printer, which bears his caricature. He answers his mobile phone with a snapped "Dave", and delights in unique turns of phrase that one day should be gathered into a FAQ for posterity. His favorite quote is from US revolutionary, inventor and Declaration of Independence signatory Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." "I put myself now in the future and I say if you had a rational (anti-communist US Senator) Joe McCarthy who wasn't drunk all the time, what could he do in the current world? Phenomenal," Farber says. "He wouldn't have to say with a haze: `Did you ever meet ...?' He could now say: `You traded electronic mail; you visited this website', which is now 20 years later declared subversive." He fears the technology being invented at the world's research institutes will be turned on its creators and the rest of us. "At a certain company in Redmond, I said a good idea was to read two books," Farber says. "One is one of my favorites (Neal Stephenson's), Snowcrash. The other is re-read (George Orwell's) 1984 and make sure you're not putting in everything necessary to make that happen." Gillmor has concerns about Microsoft's push to control the Internet through its .NET initiative, and believes recent attempts by the Linux GNOME user interface founder, Miguel de Icaza, to support it are "naive". "My chief concern on .NET right now is the authentication structure that requires the use of Passport, which is completely undocumented technology and completely proprietary and the only allowed authentication system," Gillmor says. He says individuals should "triangulate" to subvert the influence of big companies. His personal computer is a Mac, he uses the services of the US number-three ISP, and gets his pay-TV from satellite rather than the dominant cable operator. "It would be helpful for everybody if lots of people made decisions not solely based on what's the easiest thing to do today," Gillmor says. "My deepest worry is citizens have actually concluded they're willing to sacrifice their liberty for this illusion of safety." Farber: "Someone sent me a note saying, `You know, Australia was very lucky; they sent you (the US) the Puritans and us the criminals'. "Sounds like you've got a lot of Puritans also." LINKS Dave Farber - www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber/ Dan's column - www.siliconvalley.com/opinion/dgillmor/
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