Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 24 October 1998, 12:31 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
There was a conference today, called the International Commerce Exchange. At it, the DTI announced the Millennium Bug And Electronic Commerce Bill, to come in ASAP (and you can bet Mandelson's last pair of Lycra cycling shorts it'll be here before the FoI). One of the things the MBECB sets out is the way digital signatures will be accepted by the courts as proof of a document's trustworthiness.
Here's the critical chain of reasoning:
- If you want your electronic documents to be accepted by the courts, they'll have to be digitally signed with a signature key.
- An acceptable signature key is one provided by a State-licenced digital signature company. Oftel will be managing this.
- If you are a licenced digital signature company, you'll also have to be licenced for any other confidentiality service you offer. And if you're licenced for encryption, you'll have to keep copies of the keys that all your users use.
- If you hand over those keys to the police, you're forbidden by law from telling your client.
Step 3's the nasty one. What have confidentiality keys got to do with signature keys? Nothing. What happens if you give your encryption keys to a third party? They are no longer confidential. You have lost control of your own information, just in order to give the Government and the judiciary the ability to decode your messages, whether or not you are doing anything wrong. Nobody, but nobody, believes in this idea -- called key escrow -- except the spooks.
This bill will only work if people don't twig what's going on, and don't kick up a stink. Your job, distant reader, is to find out what's going on and, if you don't like it, do that stink thing.
For more information, go here. Please read it. Tell people about it. Whatever your views, it's wrong that such a fundamental power should be presented in such a sly manner.
We'll keep you up to date.
Tuesday
Voice controlled cars are the stars at the Birmingham Car Show, I'm told. I know next to nothing about cars and care slightly less, although finding out that Top Gear comes second only to Baywatch as the most watched show in the world is rather pleasing. No wonder Loaded does so well.
One small thing worries me. Danny Baker. OK, so he's not a small thing, but this erstwhile DJ has a record of messing with other people's technology. Once he triggered the Local Traffic Information signal on Greater London Radio, causing car radios all over the capital to switch to GLR from whatever they were listening to: "We have control of your radio!" he cackled, before switching it all back off.
So what's going to happen when he's talking on the radio in a voice-controlled car? You'll find yourself in reverse with the aircon and windscreen wipers on while the volume of the radio itself has gone up to eleven. We really must watch the way all these systems interact. There'll be trouble... you mark my words.
Wednesday
DSL Update! A week on, and... nothing has happened. Well, they did say ten working days: I've taken to getting down on my knees by the telephone socket at home and whispering "soon, soon, my little chum... soon you will fly!".
It's a good job I live by myself.
I say that nothing has happened, but that's not strictly true. A friend signs up for the trial almost a week after I did, and gets a reference number just fifty higher. Can this be true? Is nobody bothered? I suppose BT has done almost no publicity for this -- well, have you heard anything about it on the radio or telly? -- and there's also evidence that it's caught in a trap of its own making. Ask yourself: who's going to be keen to get on the trial? The early adopters, that's who -- people like you and I who leap at the chance to play with version 0.9 of anything cool. Early adopters are now part of the parlance of marketing men the world over -- we get the groundswell going, start the talk, spread the word on the ground. We're natural beta testers, the perfect triallists: we use the system, forgive it its foibles, provide informed feedback.
The trouble with the early adopters for the BT DSL trial is that many of them have just early-adopted Home Highway. And the DSL trial doesn't work with Home Highway.
D'oh!
Thursday
Talk about a long day! Out of the goodness of my heart (and not because I'm a media tart who'll do anything to get behind an open mike), I appear to have agreed to be a pundit on Wake Up To Money, on Radio 5. At a quarter to six. In the morning. And, at 7pm, I'm due on a discussion panel show for the Sky channel dotTV, talking about privacy and the Net. Which things nicely book-end a full day's work in the office. Phew, eh, readers?
The radio goes swimmingly, and not just because nobody gives me any coffee and I've had three hours sleep and everything's swimming.... I head into the office. Then, at three PM, dotTV calls and cancels. Apparently, someone in an upper echelon at Sky has decided they want a suit to balance the non-corporate members of the panel and as I was the last one to be invited, I'm the first to be dropped in favour of The Man From EDS. Which is annoying, but that's showbiz. I allow myself a moment of petulance on the phone to the producer, and immediately feel like a prize berk. Just one of those things, eh? How can I work with these... AMATEURS! Get my agent!
So I calm down -- as I must, not being Chris Evans -- but then I talk to a friend who's also a regular on dotTV. He's thinking of giving it up, after a rather strange incident where he was talking jocularly about the way the Sky Digital set-top box uses the phone line (which it does). The program is on tape and finished to the satisfaction of all -- except, guess who, someone in an upper echelon. Who takes exception to the reference, and demands it removed, which it is.
People talk boldly about editorial independence and proprietorial interference, as if they were easy to define. When is something entertainment, and when is it information to be trusted? The lines get ever more blurred; the difficulties in deciding where to draw the line increase. In the end, it's up to the people who do all this to say what it is they're doing: whatever it is I'm doing at Ziff I'm glad it's not liable to be squelched by The Man.
Friday
I spend a brief moment in conversation with Chris Lewis, The Man at ZDNet UK. Here at Ziff we've just upgraded our dial-up stuff that we use to connect to the work LAN when we're out and about, and he's been trying to sort out his ISDN router link from home to work. Last night, he managed it -- well, it was 6am when he got it going, but he started it last night. "The saddest thing is," he said in a sleep-deprived voice, "I had to take my Linux box down to plug in a new network card. Three and a half months of uptime down the drain". I consoled him, telling him that if his machine had been running without a reboot for nearly a third of a year it would probably have been happy to see in the Millennium. And since I don't expect my computer to stay up for a third of a day, Windows being what it is, I can't sympathise too much.
Which doesn't alter the fact that Chris, a consummate expert, had spent a good eight hours faffing around with boxes, all of which supposedly used the same standards, in order to make them do a reasonably simple thing that we are repeatedly told is both important and easy to do. I've said it before and I'll say it again: what chance do the punters have?
(Captain's Log, Supplemental: According to an otherwise well-done Star Trek: Voyager page a species called the Nyrians once tried to take over the ship with an elaborate centrifuge. But they were probably just spinning a tale...)
Saturday 17 October 1998, 7:02 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Uh-oh. Lotus Notes is about to sprout RealAudio streaming video and audio. Which means that when I email the office saying "I've got the lurgy, I'm dying here, I'm working from home. Aren't I noble?" I'll have to accompany it with a streaming picture and streaming noises of my streaming nose. The world doesn't need this. The world doesn't want this. Although it does raise interesting issues for those tabloid agony aunts who specialise in sexual dysfunction and now appear to have email addresses...
Tuesday
Do you want an MP3 player? I do. But the music industry doesn't want me to have one, because it will turn me into a wicked stealer of bread from the mouths of starving musos. The industry points with a finger fair quivering with emotion to the gigabytes of illict MP3 albums clutting university FTP sites across the Net: if I choose to download these to a credit-card sized MP3 player I'll never buy the albums, they say.
Which would probably be true: on the other hand, if I'dve known just how dull most of the music I end up buying is I wouldn'tve bought it anyway. Who doesn't have a yard of 15 quid CDs gathering dust, bought on the strength of one track or a favourable review, but that turn out to be mostly filler?
This is what the industry really fears: if we can sample our music before buying it online, we won't buy it. Me, I want the convenience of solid-state recording, and to pay a fair price for music I'll enjoy. MP3 (or something else like it) will let me do that - and, truth to tell, I can't see the industry stopping it happening. What will they do when PDAs get good enough to run MP3 software? Ban PDAs? Better they get into the new markets first and start offering value for money than stand around with their fingers in our ears.
I feel so strongly about this, that I'm embedding a (perfectly legal) tune in this diary. See if you can spot it!
Wednesday
Mammoth excitement! BT has finally got around to telling us all about the splendid new DSL service it's been cooking up in the labs. And on the slab tonight is 2 megabits of raw IP power, hurtling down a telephone line near you - but only if you live in West or North London. Which I do! Hurrah! Emergency calls are placed to any BT press relations person I've ever bumped into, web site registration forms are filled in at the speed of light... but what's this? Prices for the 2Mbps service range from £410 to £30 a month? For the same thing?
I talk to the BT ISN (for such ‘tis called) marketing manager, who politely yet circuitously avoids addressing this remarkable discrepancy. "We only wholesale the lines to the ISPs", he said. "Since we run the basic network, we never have anything to do with the consumers of Internet connectivity."
"How about Click?" I ask, unable to resist disinterring my very favourite telco monster.
"I don't think I should talk about that" he replied, with a rapidity that said he really meant it.
More news as it happens: but if the £30/month service is what it appears to be, and if other ISPs can offer the same class of product, and if it carries on at that sort of price after the trial, we'll have what will be one of the best consumer Internet structures on the planet. And I will be extraordinarily delighted to say very nice things about BT. Only one but and three ifs.
Thursday
Nothing happened on Thursday.
Did you know that Brian Eno was commissioned in 1984 by Sony to write a piece of music that would show off the sheer length of the then-new CD format? He responded with "Thursday Afternoon", 60 minutes of ambient chiming and burbling, , that gently slip from non-event to non-event without a break. It's very nice, like hanging motionless in a crystal-clear ocean while sunbeams dance from the surface above.
And that's what this Thursday afternoon was like. Except for the sunbeams.
Friday
Thanks but no thanks this week to: Finjan, makers of Internet security systems, who spammed a load of journalists with a megabyte file of that bleedin' dancing baby and then followed it up with a note telling them off for downloading it. "Could've been dangerous", said the follow-up. "It's going to be dangerous for ***** Finjan", said the journalists, especially those who pay for their own modem downloads.... TBNT to Intel, for creating a huge great 3D model of the Millennium Dome which managed to cause the badly-spelled message "ERROR: MILLENIUM NOT FOUND" on my browser. I'm Mandy, load me... TBNT to the CIA for saying that Britain ‘gained its independence' in 1801 on its web site. And these people have guns? TBNT to Gateway for saying its new 450MHz Xeon computer is for the "hard core enthusiasts": my, that's a big hard disk, boys.
Saturday 10 October 1998, 8:33 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Hi honey, I'm home! The move to Isleham went swimmingly, even if it involved me planting nine trees, tuning three videos, programming six telephones and sitting in the back of a small car for seven hours with two very annoyed cats. I also got my father signed up for the Dixons' Freeserve internet access scheme, and was pleasurably impressed by its simplicity and speed of access. It works, too -- which probably worried BT Click Plus and Demon in equal measure.
I celebrate my return to the Smoke by leaving again, this time to go to Brighton for the Telecommunications Managers Association show. TMA is an annual event beloved of suits, where communications companies show off their wares to large people with larger corporate chequebooks. Brighton is a lovely town -- visiting it always leaves me feeling ten years younger -- but awkward for a big show. TMA's there, so industry myth has it, so that the managers can spend a dirty weekend with their secretaries 'on business', although it would be uncouth for me to report on any such naughtiness. Suffice to say that it definitely puts the Rs in PRs.
I wander around from exhibition centre to hotel to storm-lashed beach. Some good wireless stuff, lots of Home Highway, and IP, IP everywhere...
The day is rounded off by a fish, chips and champagne supper hosted by Alcatel at the end of the pier. The only bone in the fillet happens right at the end: there'll be a coach at 10:30 to get everyone back to London, the company says. Indeed there is -- but no kudos to the Alcateliers who decide to go on and have a little more fun, finally turning up at the coach at 11:15. I get back to London way past the last tube, and spend fifteen minutes in the rain at Victoria Station waiting for the world's most expensive cab. Atchoo!
Tuesday
Gah! Lotus!
Let me ask you a question: have you ever chosen a Lotus product for yourself since the days of (lest we forget) 123? I'll bet that most people who use Lotus software had no choice in the matter, and with today's little fiasco I'll bet that continues.
The task? Install and run eSuite, Lotus' Java-based set of productivity tools. According to the company, eSuite 'lowers the cost of software, boosts productivity and speed deployment of business critical applications'. And version 1.5 has just been released, and I have half a page to fill - which should've been filled with something else I didn't do, so I'm in thrice the hurry.
Guess what happens? Installation fails: no error messages, no help files with anything useful, just a diskful of software that starts to run and then quietly stops running without error message or reason. No matter, think I, cutting edge software and all that. I'll just get some help. Oh, nobody at Lotus HQ seems to know about it... and the Web site? Ten minutes battling through its byzantine structure gets me to a page seductively labelled "eSuite Technical Support" -- that produces Error 500:Notes Database Is Corrupted. Followed rapidly by Error 501: Notes User Not At All Surprised.
Needless to say, I don't get my review done. Some time later, Eamonn Sullivan, would-be recipient of my copy, tackles a contact at Lotus:
"What's the status with eSuite 1.5?"
"It's not quite out yet"
"But it's launched! Your Web site says so!"
"Depends what you mean by launched. It's not actually available yet, as such. But it's going to duplication"
Still, Lem Bingley reports that when it works, it's rather good. I'd be impressed too, if I saw it working...
Wednesday
Today's lesson: If you find an NT server apparently doing nothing but with an occasionally flickering disk drive light, don't press the reset button. Even if you've been told it's doing nothing and nobody appears to be connected to it, still don't press the reset button. Even if you've got a review to do, have been told that you can use the server and have checked all around the labs, definitely don't press the reset button.
If you heed not this advice and do press the button, you will cause to be summoned a gibbering demon fron ZDNet UK who will scream something about spending four hours installing Citrix ICA services. The demon will then be sentenced to spend all night reinstalling NT and its bits. He will then store up glowing coals to heap upon your head at a later date (to be determined).
Perhaps I should give up with this game and go and learn how to grow carrots...
Thursday
Hurrah! The 1998 Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded, at a reportedly rumbunctious ceremony in Harvard University. These are a glorious tradition, being the scientific community's recognition of results that cannot, or should not, be repeated. Four genuine Nobel laureates presented the prizes in an evening that also included an opera in praise of duct tape, a contest to Win-A-Date-With-A-Nobel-Laureate (prize: Richard Roberts, Physiology or Medicine 1993), and many paper aeroplanes.
Space is too short to file a full report, but highlights included the Biology Ignobel to Peter Fong of Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac; the Statistics Ignobel to Jerald Bain of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski of the University of Alberta for their carefully measured report, "The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size." (the laureates all wore gigantic shoes for this award); and the Literature Ignoble to Dr. Mara Sidoli of Washington, DC, for her report on "Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread."
Want more? Those whose thirst for knowledge remains unslaked should sup at www.improbable.com
Friday
Film Of The Week: Elizabeth. OK, so it's a little incoherent and a touch cliched, but for rollicking court drama, great acting and Eric Cantona's Amazingly Mutable Moustache it can't be beat. What's more, it's a film both boys and girls will enjoy! Just make sure you don't watch any Blackadder II before you go and see it...
