Entries from August 2002 ↓

Maybe you’ve seen them: a series of public service ads launched in the US on July 4 with the theme of “Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it.” The 6 PSAs (RealMedia format), with the titles of “Main Street USA“, “Church“, “Library“, “Diner“, “Arrest“, and “Choice“, are simple, understated, quiet, and amid an ocean of noisy advertisements, screaming for our attention, their subtlety should grab the viewer.

Of the ads, I find “Library” most chilling. A young man walks up to a library info desk and tells the middle-aged female librarian that he can’t find the books on his list. Taking the list from the man, the librarian begins typing into the computer whose screen we cannot see. She gets a strange look on her face, looks past him, and tells him that these books are no longer available. “I didn’t know,” he says. She asks for his name, and he asks what for, then starts to leave, nervously looking around. His exit is interrupted by two suited men who rise from tables along the aisle. He protests, and they say, “We just want to ask you a few questions”, while we see the saddened look on the librarian’s face. A title is superimposed, saying “What if America wasn’t America?”, before fading to a waving flag and the “Freedom…” tag phrase.

The other story-like spots — churchgoers having to meet clandestinely, men afraid to talk dissent in public, a kid being arrested for trafficking in newspapers — seem far-fetched, and their “What if America wasn’t America?” tagline seems to strengthen the dystopic fantasy. But the “Library” spot… there’s nothing fantastic about it.

The USA PATRIOT Act, passed hurriedly in response to the events of September 11, gives law enforcement agencies broad powers to obtain library and bookstore records regarding who is reading what. According to James X. Dempsey, writing the the Winter 2002 issue of the American Bar Association’s Human Rights magazine, the FBI

… can go into a public library and ask for the records on everybody who ever used the library, or who used it on a certain day, or who checked out certain kinds of books.

They can do this “… merely on the claim that the information is ‘sought for’ an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” There is no warrant necessary, no probable cause, no prohibition against “shopping expeditions”, nothing that requires — in fact, a prohibition against — notifying the subject or subjects of the search at any time in the future. “What if America wasn’t America?”, indeed.

Learned something today about guns. I’ve always been opposed to handguns, never having seen any purpose to them other than killing another person. I’ve read the statistics about how the US has the highest (by far) rate of handguns per capita and handgun deaths per capita. I’ve always believed in an outright ban on all handguns. I’ve been re-evaluating that position lately, but today, I learned how emotional and knee-jerk my attitude towards handguns has been.

I’m quite sure I’ve said, “If we’re not going to ban all hanguns, at least let’s ban automatic and semi-automatic weapons.” Reading in the Volokh Conspiracy today, I realized that, as far as semi-automatics go, I had no idea what I was talking about!

If you see a cylinder above the trigger, it’s a revolver, because when you shoot, the bullet leaves the gun and the cylinder revolves to put the next bullet in place.

If you don’t see a revolving cylinder, it’s a semi-automatic. Why do we call it a semi-automatic? There’s a magazine — that’s what holds the bullets — which you stick into the handle of the gun. But you can’t shoot bullets that are in the handle of your gun! So there’s a mechanism to move the bullets from the magazine into the chamber. When you shoot the gun, the bullet leaves the gun, the metal case is ejected (wear eye protection!), and an extra bullet is automatically moved from the magazine into the barrel. But when you pull the trigger once, you only shoot once. Hence, semi-automatic.

So, anyway, don’t use “semi-automatic” to mean “an especially scary gun”! Almost any handgun out there is a semi-automatic.

A long time ago — 1990 –, in a galaxy far, far away– Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn to be exact — I was a high school teacher. One day, after arriving early, I slipped on some spilled coffee in a stairwell and went down a flight of stairs on my back. I was out of commission for a couple of months with herniated and dessicated disks, unable to make the hour-long trainride from Huntington, Long Island into school. Eventually, I was able to get past the pain. I used the time I spent at home well, learning the computer and teaching myself to be an expert in graphic design and desktop publishing software. When I was able to, I set up my own business doing newsletters, brochures, posters and the like for all the small businesses in our town. Things led to things, and after a couple of stops, I wound up here in Maryland as a multimedia developer with an e-learning company.

Friday night, we had family staying over, and realizing I had left the caged cat’s food downstairs, I headed down the two flights to the kitchen, leaving the lights off so as not to disturb anyone. (You can see it coming, can’t you?) Portia, the little female cat was sleeping on a step as she often does, and I, in the darkness, realized that I was just about to step on her. Yanking my foot back, I lost balance, slipped on the carpet, and flailed my way down the remaining 14 steps, landing in a crumpled heap on the kitchen linoleum.

I waited a moment, replaying the events of the last couple of seconds. It seemed, even though I was in total darkness, that I had watched myself falling, viewing a montage of quick-cuts from several cameras, seeing my arms wind-milling, my legs scrambling, blurred into cyclonic fury like some cartoon character. It was my own “Odessa Steps” sequence.

I didn’t move for a couple of minutes, afraid to find out that maybe I couldn’t move. I heard Jenn come downstairs, asking, “Are you okay? What happened?” “I’m okay,” I said. “I just tripped. I’ll be up in a minute.” I pulled myself up, feeling it in my back, right where I’d felt it the last time. Grabbing the cat food, I headed back up the two flights of stairs, grimacing with each step. It wasn’t until I bent down to take off my shoes that I realized how serious it was. My vision narrowed down to a tunnel as the pain radiated up my neck and down my legs. I don’t know if I made any noise, because Jenn had fallen mostly back to sleep by then. When I finally managed to get my clothes off, I slowly lowered myself into the bed and passed out, flat on my back.

The rest of the weekend was a blur of icepacks and frequent naps. I tried to be a good uncle, but there was no way I was going to be able to handle going to the National Aquarium with my nieces. They went, and I spent the time sleeping. They left early Monday, after I went to work.

Getting into my car on Monday morning was the first time I’d sat down since the injury. It didn’t feel good. Nor did it feel good sitting in my crappy chair in my cubicle. I kept thinking of the two dozen Aeron chairs sitting unused in one of the conference rooms upstairs, and wondering whether anyone would say anything if I was to go steal one.

First thing I did after 9 a.m. came around was call the chiropractor in the shopping center near my house. He was able to fit me in at 3:30, so I endured until then. He took some x-rays, gave me he ultrasound and electro-stim treatments, then some point manipulation (which hurt!), and he scheduled me for another appointment this morning.

Looking at the x-rays this morning, I found out that the disc between my L5 vertebra and my sacrum is compressed and somewhat deteriorated, probably as a result of my earlier injury. But no nerve damage, nothing broken, no need for surgery! Just a few weeks of chiro visits. Still, it’s pretty scary…

Since Amazon.com released its Amazon WebServices, several developers have been making some interesting use of the technology.

Paul Bausch’s “Weblog BookWatch” surveys the recently-updated blogs list at weblogs.com, searching their pages for links to Amazon (using the Google API). It then takes the 10 most-mentioned books, looks them up on the Amazon site and presents the list, with pictures, book & buying info, and links to the blogs which mentioned the book. (Paul is probably happy right now that the book he co-wrote with Matt Haughey and Meg Hourihan, We Blog, is at the top of the list.)

Kokogiak.com has Amazon Light, a simple interface to Amazon’s data. It returns search data from Amazon without all of the visual clutter (and without the selling opportunities for Amazon’s seemingly endless group of stores). There’s even source available for the .asp pages which drive the site.

Another fun one is Quasimondo‘s Flash-based amazonSearch. After returning your data from a search, it displays the bookcover and related books, drawing lines between the books to represent the relationships. Click on a book and retrieve it’s related books, move the covers around, find data on the books in a resizable panel. Very cool!

Erik at Mockerybird.com (a very interesting combination of blog, wiki and online novel) maintains a list of applications developed using the Amazon Web Services. I’m sure his list is going to keep growing.

Now, since my wife works for Amazon’s main competitor, I feel a little strange linking to the Amazon site when I discuss books. Maybe B&N will release its own webservices soon, or maybe Powells will, or CDNow, or Blockbuster or Best Buy…

Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware introduced a bill in April called “Anticounterfeiting Amendments of 2002“. The bill, as originally written, was designed to provide new penalties for counterfeiting music, software and movies by duplicating or bypassing security measures. But, in July, the bill was quietly revised to remove reference to physical bypassing of these measures, thereby making it a felony to traffic in measures or methods of bypassing digital rights management technologies.

The fear is that this law could put me in jail for, say, using the black magic marker trick on a copy-protected CD and then giving it to a friend. Or as Cnet’s Declan McCullagh reports

“Say I’ve got an MP3 collection and I buy a new nifty player from Microsoft that only plays watermarked content, and I forge the watermark to allow my legal MP3 collection to play,” says Jessica Litman, who teaches intellectual property law at Wayne State University. “It is certainly the case that if I pass that around, I could be trafficking (in violation of the law).”

But here’s another scenario — and maybe I’m just being paranoid, but — when Rebecca Blood’s excellent weblog links to an article on the New York Times’ free-registration-required site, she provides a name and password for the visitor to use. Is she trafficking in authentication-defeating information?

I guess that would depend on the definition of “computer program” — does that definition apply to a web page? — and “authentication technology” — does that apply to username/password schemes? “Trafficking”, as we’ve seen in the “No Electronic Theft Act“, doesn’t require any monetary exchange for infringement to occur.

What other interpretations will this law be open to? Is it possible it could be expanded to prevent swapping of supermarket loyalty cards? Logging in to my nephew’s UltimaOnline account?