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After great pain I’ve got tc working on some Linux routers. The difficulty with limiting an ADSL link is that the ADSL modem has significant buffers and the link between the Linux machine and the modem is significantly faster than the ADSL upstream channel. This means that the transmission speed needs to be artificially limited, a speed of about 95% the maximum channel speed is often recommended. As ADSL upstream speed often varies (at least in my experience) that means that you must limit the transmission speed to 95% of the lowest speed that you expect to see – which of course means a significant drop in performance when the ADSL link is performing well.
I use the HTB queuing discipline to limit the transmission rate. My transmission speed varies between 550kbit and 680kbit in my rough tests. So I start by limiting the overall device performance to 550kbit. Then I have three different classes with IDs 1:10, 1:20, and 1:30 with rates of 64kbit, 480kbit, and 128kbit respectively. It is often recommended that the inferior classes have a total bandwidth allowance that is equal to the allowance for the overall link, but I have the three inferior classes allocated with 672kbit – I think that this will work as it will be quite rare that all classes will be in operation at the same time and fairly unlikely that I will ever have all three classes running at maximum speed. I will be interested to see any comments about this, I might have misunderstood the issues related to this.
Each class has a SFQ queue discipline associated with it for fair queuing within the class. It might be a bit of overkill, I expect to only have one data channel in operation on the VOIP class so it probably does no good there and my usage pattern is such that if the 480kbit connection is anywhere near busy then it’s due to a single large transfer. But with the power of a P3 CPU applied to the task of routing at ADSL speeds it really doesn’t matter if some CPU time is wasted.
Then the tc filter lines associate iptables marks with the classes.
Now this is only a tiny fraction of what tc can do. But I think that this basic configuration with the rate limits changed will suit many ADSL router configurations, it may not be an ideal configuration for most ADSL routers but it will probably be a viable configuration that will be better than having no traffic shaping. Below is the shell script that I am using:
#!/bin/bash -e
DEV=ppp0
tc qdisc del dev $DEV parent root handle 1:0 2> /dev/null | true
tc qdisc add dev $DEV parent root handle 1:0 htb default 30
# limit the rate to slightly lower than DSL line speed
tc class add dev $DEV parent 1:0 classid 1:1 htb rate 550kbit prio 1
# sub classes for each traffic type
# 10 is VOIP, 20 is default, 30 is the test network
tc class add dev $DEV parent 1:1 classid 1:10 htb rate 64kbit burst 6k prio 2
tc class add dev $DEV parent 1:1 classid 1:20 htb rate 480kbit burst 12k prio 3
tc class add dev $DEV parent 1:1 classid 1:30 htb rate 128kbit burst 12k prio 4
# use an sfq under each class to share the bandwidth
tc qdisc add dev $DEV parent 1:10 handle 10: sfq
tc qdisc add dev $DEV parent 1:20 handle 20: sfq
tc qdisc add dev $DEV parent 1:30 handle 30: sfq
tc filter add dev $DEV parent 1: protocol ip prio 1 handle 1 fw classid 1:10
tc filter add dev $DEV parent 1: protocol ip prio 2 handle 2 fw classid 1:20
tc filter add dev $DEV parent 1: protocol ip prio 3 handle 3 fw classid 1:30
iptables -t mangle -F POSTROUTING
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -j MARK --set-mark 2
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -p tcp --sport 22 -j MARK --set-mark 3
iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -d $VOIPSERVER -j MARK --set-mark 1
Don Marti has written an amusing and informative little post about the way that ill-educated people use phrases in print [1]. The one example that didn’t fit with the tone of his post was the use of “half mast” to refer to a flag on land, that one is used often enough (both in print and verbally) that intelligent people will make that mistake.
Here are some that he missed:
- The expression “bailing them out” can be used to refer to someone who helps someone escape from a difficult situation. That might refer to bailing water from a leaky boat or might refer to posting bail to secure someone’s release from prison while awaiting trial. It certainly doesn’t refer to baling which is the creation of a bundle (such as a bale of hay). I’m sure that a farmer would appreciate some help at baling time, but such help would hardly qualify as rescue from a difficult situation.
- The expression “woe is me” is used (usually in a sarcastic manner) to refer to someone who feels that their situation is sorrowful. It is not “whoah is me“, I suspect that the word whoah was invented long after the expression “woe is me” became commonly used.
- Made up words such as worserer and worstest. I can understand that people such as Keith Olbermann [2] may find it a challenge to describe some of the bad people in the world, but he is articulate enough to rise to that challenge while using real words.
Can anyone add any more to this list?
Russ Allbery has written about the hostile reactions of sci-fi fans toward the delay of a book release [1]. Russ makes some good points regarding the issue of whether paying $100 for some books entitles a reader to have the rest of the series written (in summary – no, the author owes the fans nothing). Russ also notes that when someone makes a public promise to do something (such as writing a book) they will probably be feeling bad about being unable to live up to that, and harassing them about it is not going to make them feel any better – or make them better able to do the work.
Charles Stross has written a blog post about this topic, he makes some interesting points and the comments illustrate most of them [2]. One comment claims that the author of the delayed book in question “flaunts his NFL watching” while the same person also criticises the author for writing a blog. This level of contempt for the author amazes me. In case anyone is interested I watch The Bill and Desperate Housewives every week. Anyone who wishes to criticise me for watching soapies instead of documentaries is welcome to do so. But I will not make any apologies for spending some of my time doing things other than coding. If I watch Desperate Housewives instead of fixing a bug that inconveniences you then you just have to deal with it. I believe that taking a regular break from work is a basic human right, apart from which there is evidence to show that working excessive hours decreases the quality and quantity of work that is completed [3].
It seems to me that members of the free software community are in a better position regarding fans than most creative people, and that this is largely due to how transparent the development process is. The most influential members of the user (fan) base are software developers. While people will be disappointed when software is not released on time or has some bugs many users know what is involved and understand that no testing will find all bugs. Even some basic shell scripting can teach people the difficulties of programming and convince them to have a little more patience than they might otherwise have. So the typical user of free software will have some idea of what is required to write software while the typical reader of a novel has no idea of what is involved in writing a book.
Another benefit for the free software community in this regard is the open development process. When users are unhappy about release delays (as some Debian users were before Lenny was released) they can easily look at the bug list. If a user is pushy they can be invited to fix some bugs themselves, if they investigate the matter and discover that the bugs are too difficult for them to fix then they will probably feel compelled to stop hassling the people who can fix the bugs. Complaints from users regarding the release process can be turned around with “the software is late because YOU haven’t fixed any bugs”. Please note that submitting bug reports is NOT criticism, it is in fact helping the development process (particularly when the bug reports contain information on how to fix the problems).
This exposes another significant difference between writing software and writing a book. Even if I was a talented author I would not be able to offer any assistance to an author who had trouble completing a work simply because I wouldn’t have the same vision for the plot of a book. But it’s not uncommon for software development projects to be “forked” if the users are unhappy with some aspect of how they work, and it’s also not uncommon for a programmer to voluntarily give one of their projects to another developer – sometimes developers try and convince other people to take projects from them when they don’t have enough time. Even without changing the ownership of a project, anyone can submit a patch. The patches that I have received from users of my software have generally been of a high quality and it has taken little work to merge them.
A final difference is that any programmer can produce a private fork of a project. I have lost count of the number of times that I have produced custom versions of free software for my own personal use or for the use of my clients. Sometimes the modifications that I made were unsuitable for wider use (IE they broke things for usage cases that I didn’t care about) so I just privately made the software do what I needed. This makes the upstream developer (or team) and other contributors irrelevant to fixing the problem in question.
Now this is not to say that the free software community is perfect. But it seems that certain types of bad behavior that we see demonstrated in the sci-fi fandom circles are uncommon and the people who demonstrate them are significantly outnumbered by people who oppose such actions. Publicly criticising a programmer for watching the NFL in their spare time is akin to holding a sign saying “kick me”.
As I am a fan of science fiction (and hope to write some in the near future) I wonder whether the sci-fi community could be changed to have a culture more like that of the free software community.
The web site 365tomorrows.com publishes a short sci-fi story every day [4], they have been doing this for a few years now. They started out publishing work by a small team of authors with the aim of writing a story a day for a year. Now they also take submissions from users and they have a forum for budding authors to discuss their work. The site Protagonize.com is based on the idea of collaborative fiction [5]. I wonder whether the increasing number of sci-fi fans who join such forums will change the nature of the community. Maybe when a book is delayed the fans could take comfort in an increasing amount of fan-fiction based on characters from that book, I expect that the fan fiction will probably not impress all authors – and some may be offended by having their characters used in pornographic fan fiction. But that might just lead to a market shift towards authors who are not overly concerned about such things.
When attending sci-fi book signings I’ve noticed fans who appear to have stalking tendencies. I have been wondering how much of this is another symptom of the same problem and how much of it is due to science fiction attracting some people who don’t understand the concept of personal space and who haven’t considered the mathematics of interactions between famous people and fans – as one of many fans the famous person will not remember your fan letters or whether they have met you before, it’s not possible.
I look forward to the day when a well known author can have lunch with some fans after a book signing and not be afraid of weird fans. I wonder if Cory Doctorow [6] already has such cool fans, Cory seems to be one of the leaders in the new open way of writing and releasing sci-fi so it seems likely that he would be among the first to reap the benefits. I’m sure that most authors would like to have lunch or dinner with their fans if they could be assured that the probability of getting stuck with a nutty fan was extremely low.
 
I have just got a LG U990 “Viewty” mobile phone [1]. It’s a 3G phone and came free on the $29 monthly cap plan from “Three” (minimum monthly spend is $29 – but this is free if you use $29 per month). My previous plan was the $29 cap but had a minimum spend of $20 per month, as I never happened to use less than $29 per month I am not paying more.
For a modern mobile phone the actual phone functionality is a sideline. If a device was strictly designed to be a phone then I think it would be very similar to the Nokia phones that were available 5+ years ago – the Nokia I had in 1999 performed every phone function that I desired of it.
Like most modern phones the LG U990 “Viewty” suffers in it’s phone functionality from the desire to make it do non-phone tasks and from the desire to cripple it to meet the desires of the carriers (not the desires of the users). For example the “home” screen will always have at least two buttons for paid Three services and I have no configuration option to remove them. Replacing them with speed dial options for a couple of numbers that I regularly call would be handy. As the main screen is a touch-screen there is no excuse for this, they should allow the software to be reconfigured with more useful options. Eventually the Android will kill most of the other phones and this problem of phones being designed to suit the telephone companies instead of the users will be solved.
One of the most annoying mis-features of the phone is that it doesn’t properly handle address book entries with multiple phone numbers. One of my friends turns his mobile off when he is at home, so I regularly call his mobile and then immediately call his home number if the mobile is unavailable. With my previous two mobile phones I could press the “dial” button to bring up the list of previous calls and then use the arrow buttons to select from the other numbers that are attached to the same address-book entry, so with three button presses I would be dialing his other number. With the Viewty I have to go back to the address book.
The compelling feature of the Viewty is the camera and display. It has a 5MP camera which makes it the second highest resolution camera-phone offered by Three – the LG Renoir (KC910) has 8MP but needs a $99 plan for it to be free. It also has a 240*320 resolution touch-screen display (in a quick search in January when I bought my phone the best resolution display I could find on a phone is 240*400 in the LG Renoir).
While the camera is documented as being 5mp there are no specs available about the resolution of the CCD. I want to use the native resolution of the CCD for pictures (I think interpolation is a waste of space). The CCD might actually be 5mp, a picture of the 1400*1050 resolution screen on my Thinkpad allows me to read all the text even when small fonts are in use, so the CCD resolution must be significantly greater than 1400*1050. This is a really important feature as the Viewty will work well for making screen-shots for bug reports about crashed computers (several of my clients have expressed interest in getting one after seeing such a demonstration). One annoying problem is that the camera software takes a while to load, my trusty Sony digital camera starts a lot faster and the LG U890 phone I used for the past two years is also a lot faster and more convenient. This won’t work well for photographing unexpected events. When I am traveling by public transport I will photograph the relevant pages of my street directory as I can zoom in to photos of the maps and read the street names, it saves some weight when traveling. The 2G micro-SD card (which incidentally cost $10 from OfficeWorks) will allow me to store a lot of maps.
One interesting feature is the video recording capabilities. It can do 640*480 resolution at 30fps (which is pretty good) and 320*240 resolution at 120fps (they claim that you can film a balloon popping). In my quick tests the standard 640*480*30fps mode works well, but the 120fps mode requires much brighter light than most of my test environments, so I have not yet got it working properly.
The phone has a reasonable voice recording function, it can record considerably more than 34 hours of audio and the quality is reasonably good if you use an external microphone. It is however quite poor if you use the built-in microphone for a dictaphone function, it seems that quality is poor at any distance. I had wanted to record my LCA mini-conf talks with my phone but unfortunately forgot to bring the adapter for the external microphone. It’s a pity that the phone doesn’t have a standard microphone socket as I have misplaced my Viewty microphone, when designing the phone they should assume that misplacing attachments is a common occurrence and design it to use common parts.
I recently spoke to a journalist who uses his mobile phone to record interviews. He said that his phone supported phone calls, voice recording, and taking pictures – all the essential tasks for his work. It seems that the Viewty would be better than most phones for journalistic work apart from the issue of low quality voice recording when you have misplaced your external microphone.
The text editor is unfriendly in the keyboard mode (I have not tried hand-writing recognition), one thing I don’t like is the fact that the letters jump when you press them. This does allow changing a letter by moving the stylus before releasing the press (some people consider this a great feature). There are no cursor control keys (which is a serious omission), and the keyboard doesn’t resemble a real keyboard. My iPaQ is far better for writing (I once wrote a full-length magazine article on an iPaQ).
The stylus is quite strange and interesting. In the picture of the front of the phone the stylus is compacted with it’s lid on. In the picture of the back of the phone the stylus is extended with the lid off. The end of the stylus clips in to the lid so that removing the lid drags the central part out of the body. It’s an interesting design and with the string on the lid allows the stylus to be attached to the phone when it’s not being used. But I have never used it. Even with an iPaQ (which had a proper stylus that attached firmly inside the body of the device) I often used a fingernail on the touch screen. I have not felt the need to ever use a stylus with my Viewty.
One final noteworthy thing is the support for Google services. It seems to have client support for YouTube, Google Maps, GMail, and Blogger. This seems to be a major win for Google, the Viewty is one of the most popular phones at the moment and I expect that lots of people who buy them will now have an incentive to use the Google services. Between these sorts of deals and the Android I think that it will be necessary to have some sort of anti-trust action against Google. Google are generally doing good things for the users. I have been quite satisfied to use Google search, Google advertising on my blog, and Gmail. Also I have been moderately happy with Blogger (it was good when I started blogging) and Google Maps is useful on occasion. So generally I am happy with Google, but monopolies are bad for the users so I think that if things continue on their current trend then Google may have to be split into several little Googlets some time in the next few years.
An interesting opinion post in the NY Times describes the research on early education and how it can affect IQ [1]. Among other things children from poor families who are adopted into upper middle-class families tend to end up with higher IQ scores. The article notes that half the population in 1917 would be regarded as mentally retarded by today’s standards – finally we have an explanation for WW1!
Two Dominos employees tarnish the brand’s image with a prank video on Youtube [2]. The next obvious step is for activists to seek jobs at such companies for the purpose of influencing companies. The animal rights protesters outside KFC stores haven’t achieved much, but if they worked for KFC and made some nasty videos they would really encourage a change of action. I predict that chain stores will be spending a lot more on security and background checks for their employees in the near future.
Cory Doctorow has written an amusing article titled “Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It’s 1996” about how the entertainment industry is killing itself by conducting back-room negotiations about new copyright laws [3].
Nate Silver gave a TED talk about racism in elections [4]. The most interesting point was demonstrating statistically that people who don’t meet people of other races tend to be more racist. It seems to me that the use of the X-Face: header in email and the use of HackerGotchi in Planets can help reduce the level of racism on the Internet.
Cory Doctorow writes about his Geeky writing [5]. His idea for an organised system for donating books to libraries will hopefully be fully implemented soon – it should be easy to do and the incremental costs will decrease as the scope increases.
Cory Doctorow writes about the perverse laws that protect criticism of copyright works but stifle praise [6]. In a similar note he has documented a plan for trademark and copyright holders to allow fans to create derivitive works while preserving the original rights AND sharing the profits [7]. So if Cory’s idea became popular someone who wanted to create some art work based on a Coke bottle (which is trademarked) could pay the Coca-Cola company a reasonable rate, include an appropriate disclaimer, and things would work out well for everyone. Also this would allow small artists to develop new products that could be used by the large companies (I’m sure that anyone who legally released an artwork that turned out to be an effective advert for Coke would receive a lucrative job offer).
Bruce Schneier’s blog has an interesting article about the poor quality of software used for breath alcohol detectors [8]. It’s a great concern that innocent people are being punished due to bad software, but it’s only a small part of the problems with the legal system.
Mary Roach gave a TED talk “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm [9]. Not as insightful as the usual TED talk, but strange and interesting.
There is currently some discussion about a talk which used pornographic imagery and jokes to illustrate points about Ruby programming [1]. A similar event happened in 2006 here is the description of the event from the author – which includes an unreserved apology [2].
It seems to me that the current discussion focusing on what is inappropriate for a public lecture is the wrong way to do it as there is a vast range of inappropriate material. I suggest that instead a white-list of appropriate references to porn in lectures will be more effective – if nothing else it makes for a much smaller list. Here is a first draft of such a list:
- Pornographic web sites handle a lot of traffic. There are significant technical problems that need to be solved. A lecture from an employee of an Internet porn company which covers the solutions to those technical problems would be of interest to many system administrators. Of course such a lecture should not promote the Internet porn company or show any samples of their products.
- Digital processing of images is an interesting topic. Having a digital editor from a magazine such as Vogue describe in detail how they do their job would be really interesting. There is a lot of overlap between the range of pictures displayed in Vogue and those displayed on porn sites. Having an employee of a porn company demonstrate how they touch up the picture of a fully clothed model would be an interesting technical topic, but of course it would be totally inappropriate to make any specific mentions of how the parts of the picture which are not PG-13 rated are edited. Even showing a picture of a porn star might be controversial, but I’m sure that the same work could be reproduced with a photo of someone who has a more respectable career. Touching up a picture of RMS to make him look like a politician would make for a challenge for the presenter and an interesting lecture.
- The image known as Lenna is a photograph of a Playboy model named Lena that is widely used to test image compression [3]. While the image remains controversial, it seems to me that it would be impossible to give a complete and factual account of the history of image compression without mentioning it.
- The police have great discretionary powers to determine which crimes should be actively investigated. Senior police decide how many resources to assign to each case. I believe that in many jurisdictions the police will assign a much lower priority to a hacking case if the victim is running a porn service. Rumor has it that porn sites put a lot more effort into system security than most Internet services, partly due to not having as much protection from the police as other industries and partly because their customers don’t want to be identified. I would be very interested in attending a presentation about practical computer security by a system administrator from a porn site. As an aside I’m always interested in talking to people who do security work, so I would like to have a chat with someone who does such work for a porn site.
- A few years ago I attended a lecture about the security implications of porn surfing. It had some scary statistics on the number of porn sites that try to deploy malware on the computers of the people who view porn, and it made a good business case for banning porn at work without reference to HR issues (which is very relevant for the jurisdictions where viewing porn at work is not considered to be a social problem). I would like to see a new version of that talk with statistics based on more recent research, my theory is that modern porn sites are more toxic than the old ones due to the general increase in criminal activity on the net – but I have no evidence to support it.
Of course in all cases jokes about porn are not acceptable, mentions of porn need to be strictly on the basis of historical analysis or the description of technical and legal issues which are relevant to the audience. Delivering a talk about porn without inappropriate jokes would take a great deal of effort, but it can be done (and I’ve seen it done once). For these five cases (and the few others that will probably be suggested in comments) it would probably be best if the conference organisers viewed the talk first to ensure that there was no misunderstanding about what is appropriate.
I think that comparing a short list of specific cases where porn can reasonably be mentioned in a public lecture with the vast number of potential inappropriate references illustrates the probability of a random porn reference being acceptable. The probability of making a random porn reference that is appropriate is probably slightly less than that of winning the lottery.
All security problems are to some degree people problems. Code may be buggy, but it was written by people who could have been better trained, had more time to spend on code review, etc. When there are multiple programs, OSs, libraries, etc to choose from then choosing a suitable combination of software is a matter of the skill and background knowledge of the people involved.
There are issues of software choice where there is no provable benefit of making one particular choice, EG choosing between a popular product that is OK and for which it is easy to hire skilled people to use it and a less popular product that has better security features but less public knowledge. But this is minor compared to other security problem.
I believe that the greatest security problem is stupid people. Stupid people in technical positions write buggy code and configure servers to be insecure. In consulting and analysis roles they develop bad procedures. In management they hire bad people to do technical work.
The vast majority of security problems can be fairly directly and immediately traced back to stupidity. In the corporate environment that is stupid programmers, stupid managers who hire people who are obviously stupid, and often stupid executives for mandating that software that everyone knows to be insecure should be used across the entire enterprise. In both the home and corporate environments there are a huge number of people who run machines that they know to be compromised. Apparently using a computer that is known to be under the control of an unknown hostile person is something that they don’t consider to be a problem – in spite of the obvious risks of fraud, data destruction, and risk of being implicated in crimes such as the distribution of child porn.
I’ve previously written about memory squeeze problems in a Xen Dom0 when large amounts of memory were assigned to DomUs [1]. In summary the Dom0 would have problems if started with default options and the majority of the RAM was later assigned to DomUs, but if the memory of the Dom0 was limited by the dom0_mem parameter to the Xen kernel then things would work well.
Fatal server error:
xf86MapVidMem: Could not mmap framebuffer (0xfae80000,0x80000) (Invalid argument)
I have since found another exciting bug with Xen. I was in the process of upgrading an AMD64 workstation to using Xen so that I could test other versions of some software in the background. The first stage was to install the Xen kernel and the Xen enabled Linux kernel and boot the machine. Unfortunately I then received the above message when trying to start the X server. I discovered the solution to this in the comments section of Different Colours blog post about Virtualisation on Lenny [2]. It seems that there is a problem gaining mmap access to MMIO memory regions in Xen and that restricting the memory of the Dom0 is a work-around.
My AMD64 workstation has 3G of RAM because the motherboard can’t support more than 3.25G and buying 4G of RAM to have 3.25G usable would be an expensive way of doing it. So I used dom0_mem=1500M and now X works again. I have yet to discover if anything strange and exciting happens when I create DomUs on the machine. I don’t have any immediate plans for running Xen on the machine. It’s main uses at the moment is torcs (a slightly realistic 3D car racing game), supertuxkart (a cartoon 3D car racing game), and mplayer so it doesn’t really need a lot of RAM.
I like to keep my options open and have all my machines capable of virtualisation apart from routers.
I’ve just bught an NVidia video card from Computers and Parts Land (CPL) [1].
I asked for a PCIe*8 card but was assured that a PCIe*16 card would work. However when I got it home I discovered that it would not fit, the size difference was obvious enough that I didn’t even need to unwrap the new card.
According to the Wikipedia page for PCIe (PCI Express) [2] it is quite legal to have a motherboard implement a slower version of PCIe but have the full slot width, so a motherboard could have PCIe*1 implemented but have a socket that will fit a PCIe*16 card. The motherboard and the card will negotiate the capabilities that they both support. But there is no requirement to have a larger socket than required to use the capabilities of the motherboard.
The CPL salesman assured me that any PCIe*16 card will fit into any PCIe*8 socket. I presume that he is used to white-box gear manufactured by companies that can save a few cents on the sockets if they make them all the same size. The Dell PowerEdge T105 that I own has PCIe*8 sockets that do not fit PCIe*16 cards.
So now I have to return the card, and the CPL web site doesn’t even give the hours that the store is open, so I have to call them. Sigh.
Update: I returned the video card, first I had a debate with the CPL guy who had sold it to me regarding whether such PCIe sockets exist. He suggested that I had mistaken a PCI slot for a PCIe slot and was not convinced until I showed him a picture I had on my phone. He then claimed that Dell made sub-standard machines for not using a PCIe*16 socket for PCIe*8 connectors – so it was Dell’s fault not his fault for delivering me a PCIe*16 board when I asked for a PCIe*8. He told me that no-one had ever made a PCIe*8 video card. Then he told me that I was lucky to not have a re-stocking fee (they sold me a device that was not what I asked for, I returned it in perfect condition on the same day and I was lucky to not pay them for the privilege). They gave me a credit note for the value of it (not a refund).
I recommend never doing business with CPL if you can avoid it. I will make exactly one more purchase from them, that will be to use the credit note.
Bruce Schneier has written about the foolish actions of Justice Antonin Scalia [1]. Antonin made some comments opposing the need for greater privacy protection, most people could get away with doing that, but when a Supreme Court Justice does so it gets some attention. In response to this Fordham University law professor Joel Reidenberg assigned his class a project to discover private information on Antonin using public sources. The class produced a dossier of such information which was then offered to Antonin [2], but which was not published.
Now anyone who knows anything about how the world works would just accept this. Among other things Antonin now knows what is publicly available and can take steps to remove some public data according to his own desires. But being apparently unaware of the Streisand effect [3] Antonin went on to say the following:
It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any.
This is of course essentially issuing a challenge to the entire Internet to discover the information that the Fordham students discovered. Of course doing so would not be fun unless it was published. The meme of 2009 has yet to be defined, it might be discovering and widely publishing personal information about Antonin.
Already one of the comments in Bruce Schneier’s blog suggests that activists should do such research on all senior figures in the US government to encourage them to take privacy more seriously. I expect that the first reaction of the legislative branch to such practices would be to enact special laws to protect their own privacy while still allowing large corporations (the organisations that pay for the election campaigns) to do whatever they want to ordinary people.
It’s an interesting situation, I predict that Antonin will regard this as one of the biggest mistakes he’s ever made. I’m sure that there are many more LULZ to come from this.
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