metachronistic

I just saw this quote on BoingBoing from Michael Massing of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric’s salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news.

Pretty unbelievable. Imagine how much actual news CBS could report if they didn’t have to sink all that money into the mouthpiece of the drivel they do report on.

A Federal judge in Vermont ruled today that a defendant can’t be compelled to reveal the password used to decrypt files on his or her hard drive. From the ruling:

Compelling Boucher to produce the password compels him to display the contents of his mind to incriminate himself…The foregone conclusion doctrine does not apply to the production of non-physical evidence, existing only in a suspect’s mind where the act of production can be used against him.

This is good news for electronic privacy. Unfortunately, there is already precedent allowing law enforcement to install a key logger on a suspect’s computer to obtain the encryption password without the suspect’s knowledge. So I guess this ruling (for as long as it stands) just protects us when law enforcement wasn’t smart enough to install a key logger before charging us with a crime and seizing our computers.

I wonder what, if any, case law exists to compel a person to reveal the code used to encrypt a hand-written diary? Do we have more privacy rights now that our PGP/GPG keys are part of our fifth amendment right not to act as a witness against ourselves?

I got my first Baffler in the mail yesterday from dusty groove america, Issue No. 17, Superslayer Storybook. The cover shows an armored guy standing over another decapitated guy. Strange.

Then I started reading it, beginning with The Gilded Mean by Thomas Frank. It’s an indictment of the centrist philosophy that has strangled the Democratic Party (no, not the Democrat Party you nitwit) since Reagan was in office. Here’s a fantastic section, taken from his review of David Harvey’s Brief Review of Neoliberalism:

His new book achieves the effect it does through the simple device of speaking plainly about the momentous economic and political change that, beginning in the seventies, swept over America and then the rest of the industrialized world.

It is a story we all know instinctively, and it’s not a very centrist affair. We have loosed the forces of the market, and this is what the market has done to the United States: It has destroyed manufacturing and enthroned finance; beaten organized labor almost to death; demanded round after round of tax cuts; defunded public services while raising the price of education and health care to inaccessible levels; decoupled wages from productivity, allowing wages to erode to a level lower today than in the early seventies despite all the advances in worker efficiency. We are often told that we live in a time of otherworldly prosperity, but what has changed the most, Harvey tells us, is distribution, not production. Our new economy is a banker’s triumph, not an engineer’s. Today the nation’s affluent areas glitter, it’s blue-collar neighborhoods crumble, and its rich people are richer, as measured by their percentage of the national income, than they have been since the twenties. The class divide has returned with a vengeance, with one class consistently getting what it wants while another just as consistently loses out. (Page 7)

Damn!

I haven’t read much of the second essay yet, but it’s equally strong-worded and honest about how screwed up industrialized society is today:

Consider this single fact: It took ten years, almost all of the nineties, for the median family income to get back to the same level that it was, in real terms, in 1989. But in 1999, when we got to the same income level we had in 1989, this same “median” family had to work…six more weeks a year. (Page 14)

I think I’m really going to enjoy (and really not enjoy, if you know what I mean) reading this magazine.

Apparently one of the encryption keys for the high definition DVD (HD-DVD) format has been discovered, and is now appearing and disappearing all over the Internets. The organization in charge of “administering” the encryption scheme has started sending out Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices to Internet Service Providers and corporations whenever they find the key on a website. Here’s one such notice sent to Google. The incredibly stupid part about this document is that it contains the key they’re trying to hide in the letter, officially putting it in the public record.

The whole thing is ridiculous. If I buy an HD-DVD disc, I’m not allowed to make a copy of it in case my copy gets scratched or broken because doing so would require “breaking” the encryption which is a violation of the DMCA. The key is part of this process, so the content corporations are trying with all their might (and their lawyers in concert with the DMCA) to keep the key a secret so that people can’t make backups of the items they have purchased.

But you can’t take back a secret once it’s out. And even if you could, it’s ridiculous that it’s possible to shut down a web site because it contains a simple string of letters and numbers that by themselves mean absolutely nothing. Or a photograph of something that happens to contain the string (click on the image for a whole set of these from Flickr). The string isn’t copyrighted, and it’s not a trademark. It seems like free speech means I ought to be able to print this string of letters and numbers.

[Update: There's a great legal discussion of the issues at the Electronic Freedom Foundation's web site. The link is 09 f9: A Legal Primer. The gist is that putting the key on the Internet serves no other purpose than to aid in circumventing protected content, and thus, posters can be sued for “trafficking.”]

Here’s the secret key, which I’ve converted to bits and then encrypted: 00010011 11110010 00100010 00000101 00111010 11101001 11000110 10110111 10110000 10000010 10101101 10001010 11000110 10101101 00010001 10000000. Is this a violation of the DMCA? It’s not actually the key and thus is useless to someone who wants to exercise their right to make a backup of something they’ve purchased because I’ve “encrypted” it (does x << 1 mean anything to you?). Because I’ve encrypted it, does that give me protection under the DMCA? If I get a takedown notice, that implies that the laywer sending the letter has circumvented the access controls to my copyrighted data (because this post is Copyrighted, and so the bitstring is too).

When will this insanity end?

Michael Pollan was interviewed for the April 2007 issue of The Believer magazine. I’ve been a fan of his writing since The Botany of Desire, and although I haven’t gotten around to reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, from reading the interview, I’m sure I’ll like it.

You know, compared to the early 1960s, the percentage of our income that goes to food has fallen from 18 percent to less than 10 percent today. We’re paying less for food than anyone on Earth, anyone in the history of our planet, in fact. But in that same period, the percentage of our national income that goes to health care has risen from 5 percent to 16 percent today. Some of that increase, not all of it, is the result of eating terrible, cheap food. If we spent a few more percentage points of income on food, we could surely spend a few percentage points less on health care. What I’m suggesting is that spending more on food, as a society, will not end up costing us more overall.

Yesterday we got rid of some of our electronic waste. Interior Alaska Green Star has an annual recycling program so that all this stuff can get disposed of properly instead of winding up in the landfill, or on it’s way to third world countries. Andrea volunteered at yesterday’s event and dumped off two of our old computers, three CRT monitors, a printer, a VCR, cordless telephone, DVD player and a CD player. The total cost was $75.

Some of the people who showed up didn’t know there was a charge, and at least one guy who wound up leaving said, “Why should I pay when it’s free to go across the street and throw it in the dumpster?” I have no doubt that’s where his electronic waste wound up; on it’s way to the landfill, right next to the Tanana River. According to the Wikipedia article, e-waste represents only 2% of the garbage in our landfills, but is responsible for 70% of overall toxic waste. That’s a pretty big externality, totally unrepresented in the low cost of these items.

I’m glad these recycling programs exist, but I also wish there was a way to encourage electronics manufacturers to make products that were designed for longevity rather than low cost. Some of the things we got rid of were simply obsolete (why keep a seperate CD player when our current combination VCR & DVD player can also play CDs?), but the majority were broken and because replacements are so cheap, it didn’t make sense to repair them. All those low prices we’re paying for our stuff today may turn into a pretty big cleanup bill in the future, whether we’re paying it or not.

I remember when I moved to California being surprised that leaves and grass clippings were “cleared” using what we called leaf blowers. If you happen to live in an enlightened area where people still clean up their leaves with a rake or a mulching lawnmower, a leaf blower is a two cycle engine that blows a high volume of air out a wand that the operator uses to move leaves around. They’re incredibly noisy (50 feet away they’re about 100 times louder than World Heath Organization recommendations for outdoor sound levels), and cause an unbelievable amount of air pollution (up to seventeen times the amount a modern automobile produces).¹

Recently, I had the same surprise on campus when Facilities Services at UAF started equipping their sidewalk cleaners with the same devices, except now they’re using them to blow snow. I don’t have the data to perform an economic analysis of this decision, but I guarantee that when you add in the externalities of noise and air pollution, engine maintenance, the damage done to cars when they blow gravel into them, and the impact of burning fossil fuels on the global climate, a shovel starts looking pretty cheap.

They also don’t do a very good job because they can’t remove snow that’s been packed down at all. Check out all the footprints in the image. I can’t help but wonder, once again, if some problems are better solved with less modern technology.

¹These figures come from a variety of sources, referenced on this site. It’s a biased site, but I trust the cited sources.

I’m probably not going to say anything you haven’t heard before from someone before, but I have to wonder about people and their obsessive cell phone use. This afternoon on my way home from work, there was a little furball of a dog running around the shoulder of Farmers Loop Road. The speed limit is 50 miles per hour, it was snowing, getting dark, and just before rush hour. There wasn’t any danger I would hit it, but I looked around trying to see if there was a potential owner around. About 100 yards down the nearest cross street was a girl, head tilted, arm up to her head, completely oblivious to the world around her.

I realize that there are important reasons for cellular telephones. I often wonder what I would do if I hit a moose in the early morning when I go to work. And cell phones are really handy when you’re traveling. But does a person really need to be in constant contact with everyone all the time?

Someday I’ll probably get one.

But if I do, don’t call me.

Please.

I’ve been reading William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central, which is a historical fiction concerned with the Soviet and German regimes of the middle 20th century. It’s really good so far, but as with a lot of Vollmann’s fiction, it’s helpful to read some actual history to fill in the blanks. For example, he continually refers to Hitler as “the sleepwalker”, and to this point it’s not clear why (syphilis, methamphetamine addiction?).

While trying to figure out who the brownshirts were and why Hitler had someone named Röhm killed, I came across this quote by Hitler on July 13, 1934 after the Night of Long Knives purges.

If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people.
—William L. Shirer. 1959. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Simon and Schuster. New York, quoted in the Wikipedia.

Hmm. A powerful member of the executive branch of government breaking the law without judicial oversight. Sound familiar?

A week ago I posted some data from the Statistical Abstract of the United States. On today’s local newscast there was a story about cancer rates in Alaska and one of the people interviewed mentioned that cancer is the leading cause of death in Alaska. In the U.S. heart disease kills 26% more people than cancer. But the numbers for Alaska are quite different than the national averages.

Here’s the same table I showed last week, except from 2001, and including Alaska, and Alaska’s rank for some causes:

The values are deaths per 100,000 residents, so they’ve already got population size factored in. The Alaska rankings are interpreted such that a low number means Alaska has much lower rates for that cause relative to the rest of the United states. Alaska ranks number one (lowest deaths per capita) overall, and for the individual causes of heart disease, cerebrovascular diseases, and diabetes. And we’ve got the third lowest death rate due to cancer and lower repiratory diseases. Alaska ranks pretty low (high death rates) for accidental death and suicide, however. The extreme environment and very long winter probably contribute to both of these higher death rates.

So more Alaskas do die from cancer than anything else, but relative to the rest of the United States, we have remarkably low death rates. Perhaps there is something to all the open spaces and the clean air and water that keeps the average Alaskan healthy?