Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 6 June 1998, 8:03 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
(Please note: for the first three days of this week I was laid low with a virulent and explosive form of what my mother would call a ‘tummy upset' but what I habitually refer to using monosyllables that rhyme with ‘fits' or ‘fights'. Thus I didn't actually do anything computer-related until Thursday but for you, distant reader, I'll make something up to cover the missing days. Never say I don't care. RG)
Monday
In an hallucinatory haze brought about by some delicious, yet tainted crabmeat, I dream the FBI and a group of encryption experts were meeting to talk about the never-ending conflict between the U.S. Government and everyone else. Which makes no sense, as everyone knows that the legal side of monitoring our mail is as nothing compared to what the NSA and pals get up to. The fever rises, and in my crustacean-powered craziness I fantasise that an official report to the European parliament, the MEPs were informed that: "Within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the NSA, transferring all target information to Fort Meade in Maryland [the headquarters of the NSA] via the crucial hub of Menwith Hill in the North Yorkshire moors of the United Kingdom.".And that's to say nothing of Echelon (shhh! I said say nothing!).
Clearly, this cannot be so. It must be the work of conspiracy theorists, as must the enormous list of related documents collected at http://jya.com/crypto.htm. Or, if you fancy the real thing, http://www.null.org/psychoceramics/ is very enlightening...
Tuesday
The seafood-splattered brain is obviously still on Cloud Nine: this time, I'm tripping away with the insane notion that a telephone company has done something sensible. Madness! Sprint, the American telco, is saying that it's going to roll out a fab new network where everyone has as much bandwidth as they want whenever they want it and it'll all be much simpler and cheaper for the company to run so it'll all cost everyone much less.
Arrant nonsense. For that, the company would need to have a huge, high bandwidth backbone... oh, it has. Well, it would have to have a whole load of new switching and billing infrastructure, based on ATM... ah, ok, ok. But that's no good without a mixture of fibre and ADSL technology for actually delivering the stuff. Oooookay... but that means Sprint will be delivering raw ATM to the home and you'll be able to use it as one telephone line, or ten telephone lines, or a hundred... or any number, changed whenever you like, and mixed with data, VPNs, video... Sprint will just charge for bandwidth used.
But that would be so sensible, so exciting and create such a flexible infrastructure... nope, still mad with microbes. It can't be true.
Wednesday
The fever abates a little, but I'm still seeing men in black behind every pillar and atop every post. Giggle weakly at Duncan Campbell's piece in the Guardian that points out that the Indians knew exactly when to detonate their nukes: they'd downloaded the top-secret orbital predictions for the American spy satellites off the Internet. They waited for a spot when the various spooksats were all hovering over Penzance and then pressed the button - result, the NSA completely missed Armageddon vindaloo and carried on trying to crack PGP-encrypted love letters sent by moist Cornish denizens of AOL chatrooms.
One would have more respect for the requirements of government security agencies if they'd actually managed to forestall this bad case of nuclear Viagra instead of scaring the populace with tales of naughty dope peddlers setting up shipments via uncrackable email. As if they'd be sending each other postcards saying "Ten tons of best quality Red Leb coming in on flight HA412, Len!" instead...
Thursday
Back at school. Reality is in the house again - Microsoft is being accused (with enormous amounts of facts to boot) of producing ‘kindergarten grade cryptography' with its implementation of the PPTP virtual private network protocol. Microsoft responds by saying it's not important, and even if it was important it's been fixed, and even if it hasn't been fixed it will be, and even if it won't be fixed we're all to keep quiet and not worry our pretty little heads about it.
Quick quiz: when was the last time that Microsoft announced that it had found a security flaw in NT itself?
Friday
Why does this always happen? Byte - the magazine that's been there from the start - has recently been bought by CMP - the American publishers who haven't - who promptly proceeded to sack everyone and shut the whole enterprise down. I should've guessed: I'd been going around telling anyone who'd listen that Byte had improved enormously over the past couple of years and had just become totally indispensable again. And it's true - having given up on the "let's be like PC Magazine" approach, Byte had once again taken up the torch of unimpeachably intense technology reportage. Nobody else tackled the range of basic issues it covered, at least not in that depth. I always found at least five major items of interest in every issue: invaluable.
It's a rule of thumb that whenever I find a magazine particularly interesting, it goes away or changes completely. In this case, though, the loss of Byte is keenly felt. I know it's not normally done to badmouth competitive publishing companies, but in this case I have no hesitation - CMP, you have been thoughtless and clumsy, and the whole industry is the poorer as a result.
Saturday 30 May 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Bank holiday! Lovely. Still recovering from my birthday picnic: one reader did uncover the URL -- as it was his birthday too he was spending the day elsewhere. But take a bow, Bill Pechey of Hayes, whose nose for a party is clearly as keen as Hayes' modems are for gobbling data.
Any rumours that a hardy bunch of picnickers was later thrown out of the Flask pub in Highgate for crimes connected with overrefreshment are false, and should be disregarded.
Tuesday
Yikes. International Computers Limited -- Britain's answer to IBM in the days when we built jet airliners and had a space programme, a car industry and absolutely no sense of style - has thrown its lot in with Microsoft. The press release talks in glowing terms about jobs created (500 in the UK), people trained, citizen-centric computing
Saturday 23 May 1998, 8:02 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Monday
It's out! Our fab and groovy IT Week newspaper is printed and on the desks of thousands. Damn fine stuff, even though we say so ourselves.
The launch party is splendid too. You'll have seen the photographs online
Saturday 16 May 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Over in the US, ZD-TV has started broadcasting. The world's first 24-hour TV channel all about computers. Golly. Will anyone watch? They'd better... but as part of the great experiment, 10,000 Webcams have been distributed to the masses over there so they can all visibly interact from their front rooms.
I like this idea. Perhaps we could run magazines that way. All we'd have to do is make sure that the readers had a computer, and a word processor, and an email account... hey, hold on, you do, don't you?
So next week's diary will be a Readers' Special. If you have a particularly fun - or bad - day, write to me. Fame (but no fortune) can be yours...
Tuesday
Bloke on the blower from the Beeb: "Can you pop in and do something for Radio 5 Live on Microsoft Versus The American Government?." Er, yes. (It finally pans out on Friday morning at 07:45am. Last week, they asked me to do something at 05:45am, but I was so soundly asleep that I missed the phone calls, the taxi at the door and the Very Anxious Vibes transmitted by megawatt amplifier from Broadcasting House. But don't tell anyone. I think I'm forgiven).
How do you compress the whole story of Microsoft - for this anti-trust lark is merely the bursting-out of many, many years of consistent business policy - into two minutes? Is Microsoft guilty of restrictive practices? Crikey. Try answering that on nationwide radio without thinking of lawyers. The fact is, as far as I can tell, that Microsoft is harming the industry - but mostly just by being so big and so focused. At developers' conferences now, the independent software houses queue up to ask MS what it isn't going to develop - because nobody can afford to risk competing with the robocops from Redmond. Is that harmful? Of course it is - there's no other way to look at it. But the only way MS could avoid that would be to stop developing stuff at all... which seems a tad harsh.
The various tales of heavy-handed behaviour may or may not be true, and if they are then MS should stop them at once. No question. It won't help much, though.
Wednesday
Ya want the three hot topics for the end of this year? PDA, DSL, VPN. Don't get them wrong, otherwise you end up with VPL and PD NADS. And there's no way my nads are ending up in the public domain, VPL or not.
Nevertheless: reports reach me that a large multinational bank discovered with considerable horror that lots of its PDA-toting staff had hooked up a modem at their desktops and were dialling in from outside. This connected their palmtop, wherever it may have been, directly to the PC and thus the corporate LAN - bypassing firewalls, access logs, or anything else that might protect the family jewels from intruders. The solution? Encrypting virtual private networks, that's what. VPNs. Security so strong that you can wrap up your innermost secrets and broadcast them across the networks. If the PDA has the decoding software, it doesn't matter how it gets the information.
And DSL? Well, if all goes well with the Universal ADSL Working Group (see Monday's news), it'll be the next modem standard. And that means you can take your PDA, plug it into the wall in a hotel or a friend's house or an airport lounge, and have a megabit link back to base. As far as I can tell, everything for this is getting very close indeed - and try telling me you don't want it.
Thursday
Technology is wonderful, but it can only do so much. For example, there's nothing much a scheduler can help with -- no matter how wonderful -- if you entered the time of your 11:30 am meeting as 4:30pm. And so it is a rather dishevelled Rupert who says (embarrassingly audibly) "Who?" when informed by reception that a certain Dirk Gates and entourage is in reception for him. Dirk Gates, extremely dapper and disturbingly youthful CEO of Xircom, that's who: fortunately for my nerves, he proves to be delightfully enthusiastic and -- at heart -- the true geek.
We rattle through the presentation and dive into business. Xircom's main problem is that its speciality -- PC Cards -- has evolved pretty much as far as it's going to, and the days when it was difficult to put an Ethernet adaptor into a laptop have gone. Nobody's surprised when a card with GSM adaptor, 100Mbps network, 56k modem and ISDN appears. It turns out that what's been hurting Xircom the most is the X-Jack -- a little spring-loaded socket that pops out of the side of 3Com's modem cards. People hate carrying modem leads around, and the X-Jack means you can use an ordinary telephone cable.
Xircom's solution? Make the end of the PC Card twice as thick, so the card takes up two slots, and put proper sockets in. I sigh inwardly for the days of red-hot electronic technical innovation, and try to get excited about the fact that Xircom has patented 10mm thick end connectors, thus cleverly nobbling 3Com which only has rights to 5mm.... or something.
So's you don't forget here's that hot tip again: PDAs. And VPNs. And DSL.
Friday
IT Week is finished! At around two o'clock, the final page disappears down the line to the printers and that's it. We've done Volume 1, Number 1 of our weekly. Now it gets printed on Saturday, sent out on Sunday (and don't ask how we persuaded the Post Office to do that) and will be on people's desks for Monday morning. Including ours - I've seen some black and white proof pages, but the first time any of us on the paper see the final product will be exactly the same time you do.
(although, even as I type, pictures are being relayed from our Cornish printing presses via ISDN back to the office. Our production director, the redoubtable - and I mean that most sincerely - Joanne Hurst - is shown pointing at the cover as it appears from the machines. It's very exciting!)
And now, if you'll excuse me, there are a few crates of cold beer waiting for us and the rest of Ziff-Davis UK.
Saturday 9 May 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
So I spend the time playing with radios. I'm an anorak - used to be G6HVY until I forgot to renew my licence one day and they wouldn't let me back in without a note from my mother - and still get a lot of fun by just poodling around on the airwaves. I currently live on top of a huge hill overlooking London, which is good, but right next to a pager transmitter, which is bad. Paging signals are huge great raucous beasts which go ripping through anything in their paths - my tv, my cable installation, the lot.
Out of curiousity, I talk to a rather secretive friend. "Interesting thing," he said, "is that there's free software on the Internet that lets you capture and display pager messages. All you need is the right radio, which can cost as little as a tenner, and a soundcard."
"Surely not!" I say. He insists, and demonstrates. This breaks at least two laws, so don't try this at home, but it's true. Moral? If you have a pager, assume it can be intercepted anywhere in the country. Because it can.
Tuesday
Getting to grips with the Linux thang, which seems to have turned into one hell of a religious revival. So if this free software's so good (and it is), how come there are no mainstream applications for it? "But there are, Rupert..." say the fans. Well, there's a pageworth but aside from Adobe you'd be hard pushed to find any mainstream names there - and an Acrobat reader doth not a rich selection make.
Why is this, I ask my Unix chums. "It's the Gnu General Public Licence", they say. "If you use anybody else's code in your product and the other code is under GPL, you have to make your source available. And who wants to do that?"
I investigate. I read the GPL. I read the Library GPL, which is designed to let you sort of use other code without having to give everything away. I wish I was a lawyer (it's OK, the feeling went away). I pop online and find fierce discussions going on between the sort of people I'd normally expect to know the answers to such dilemmae... but it would be sad if Linux was being held back not for technical reasons (and technically, it's excellent) or support issues but because people just couldn't write commercial applications without worrying about the legalities.
Meanwhile, an evil friend suggests that the best way for Microsoft to scupper Linux would be to give away millions of copies of the OS absolutely free. "The way it is at the moment," he said, "all those bright-eyed naïve users would feel totally compelled to install it, and would trash their machines utterly. They'd come running back to Uncle Bill for good..."
Wednesday
Apple! You crazy animals you! It seems that someone somewhere noticed that there is little point in making the coolest product for years (the eMate expanded Newton in a wonderfully curved green translucent case) if you then refuse to sell it to anyone. And yes, Apple has refused people's money because, as the company tirelessly states, "it's for the education market and you're not in education".
However, enter the iMac (spot the similarity in the name?) This tantalising (not till August) product is a Macintosh-like beast in a curvy semi-translucent blue case with no floppy disk but Internet connectivity coming out of its every port. It looks luscious. The specs look luscious. I'd love to be able to bung an Internet appliance this sexy on the desk of every cyberLuddite in the country... so what will Apple do to mess this up? What if they... you know... don't?
Thursday
Don't-Spend-It-All-At-Once department. Cliff Stanford, ex-Head Demon, announces that he's taking half of his £33 million stash and putting it up for the benefit of British inventors and cash-strapped companies with good ideas. His outfit, RedBus, will also offer advice and practical management help along with the dosh, in exchange for equity and a place in the company name.
Question is: is £15 million enough? It'll probably cope with about 20 proper launches... of which by far the greater number will fail. As a correspondent on Cix remarked, it reminds him of the lottery winner who gave away around a million in response to begging letters before he realised that they weren't even bothering to send him thank-you notes...
Nevertheless. The Goodwins File Of Top-Notch Ideas is being dusted off. Cliff, you have mail... (look, the world needs stripy tomato ketchup. It worked for toothpaste...)
Friday
There goes Corel, giving away the source to its Linux port for the NetWinder computer (ya gotta, ya see, under the Gnu General Public Licence). Seems like it's getting fashionable, now that Netscape's done it - so why am I reminded of sea cucumbers? These knobbly animals, looking like nothing so much as giant gherkins of the deep, have a habit when attacked of pausing for twenty seconds and then autoeviscerating. In one violent spasm, they throw out their guts in a sticky mass, leaving the attacker to try and get the mess off while the sea cukes spring (OK, slowly slide) away.
The effect on the massed Linux online hoards? "Like, awesomely cool!" And, breaking cover for a very rare outing, one Linus Torvalds pops up on a ZDNet discussion group accusing us - us cuddly Ziffies! - of being "one of the most shamelessly biased (anti-anything-but-wintel since the mid-80s) gossip-mongerers in the computer rag business" Shame! We like Linux. We like it a lot.
I feel all hurt now. I think I'll go out and buy a Skoda.
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