Some notes on Microsoft viruses, economic history, and the rational side of Luddism, plus another batch of URL's. I received about 60 copies of the latest Microsoft e-mail virus and its variants. How many did you get? Fortunately I manage my e-mail with Berkeley mailx and Emacs keyboard macros, so I wasn't at risk. But if we're talking about billions of dollars in damage, which equates roughly to millions of lost work days, then I think that we and Microsoft need to have a little talk. Reading the press reports, Microsoft's stance toward this situation has been disgraceful. Most of their sound bites have been sophistry designed to disassociate the company from any responsibility for the problem. One version goes like this quote from Scott Culp of Microsoft Public Relations, excuse me, I mean Microsoft Security Response Center: This is a general issue, not a Microsoft issue. You can write a virus for any platform. (New York Times 5/5/00) Notice the public relations technology at work here: defocusing the issue so as to move attention away from the specific vulnerabilities of Microsoft's applications architecture and toward the fuzzy concept of "a virus". Technologists will understand the problem here, but most normal people will not. Mr. Culp also says this (CNET 5/5/00): This is by-design behavior, not a security vulnerability. More odd language. It's like saying, "This is a rock, not something that can fall to the ground". It's confusing to even think about it. Even though Microsoft had been specifically informed of the security vulnerability in its software, it had refused to fix it. Microsoft even tried to blame its problem on Netscape, which had fixed it: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1820959.html The next step is to blame the users. The same Mr. Culp read on the radio the text of a warning that the users who spread the virus had supposedly ignored. That warning concludes with a statement to the effect that you shouldn't execute attachments from sources that you do not trust. He read that part kind of fast, as you might expect, given that the whole point of this virus is that people receive an attachment from a person who has included them in their address book. This particular blame-shifting tactic is particularly disingenuous given that the virus spread rapidly through Microsoft itself, to the point that the company had to block all incoming e-mail (Wall Street Journal 5/5/00). Similarly, CNET (5/4/00) quoted an unnamed "Microsoft representative" as saying that companies must educate employees "not to run a program from an origin you don't trust". Notice the nicely ambiguous word "origin". The virus arrives in your mailbox clearly labeled as having been sent by a particular individual with whom you probably have an established relationship. It bears no other signs of its "origin" that an ordinary user will be able to parse, short of executing the attachment. So what on earth is Microsoft doing allowing attachments to run code in a full-blown scripting language that can, among many other things, invisibly send e-mail? Says the "Microsoft representative", We include scripting technologies because our customers ask us to put them there, and they allow the development of business-critical productivity applications that millions of our customers use. There needs to be a moratorium on expressions such as "customers ask us to". Does that mean all of the customers? Or just some of them? Notice the some/all ambiguity that is another core technology of public relations. Do these "customers" really specifically asked for fully general scripts that attachments can execute, or do they only ask for certain features that can be implemented in many ways, some of which involve attachments that execute scripts? Do the customers who supposedly ask for these crazy things understand the consequences of them? Do they ask for them to be turned on by default, so that every customer in the world gets the downside of them so that a few customers can more conveniently get the upside? And notice how the "Microsoft representative" defocuses the issue again, shifting from the specific issue of scripts that can be executed by attachments to the fuzzy concept of "scripting technologies", as if anybody were suggesting that scripting technologies, as such, in general, were to blame. Microsoft shouldn't be broken up. It should be shut down. Can anyone tell me the origin of the following argument about economic history? Here's the argument. What accounts for the United States' longstanding economic supremacy in the world? War and the other arts of diplomas have certainly been a factor, but surely there is more to it. American legal institutions are given credit as well, but these are shared with other English-speaking countries. One answer is that the United States has grown so economically powerful because it is the world's largest homogeneous market, thereby giving us early experience with economies of scale. Although the United States is obviously not homogeneous in every way, its rapid growth from east to west has meant that its language, laws, media, national identity, ideas, collective memory, and technical standards have been largely shared across the whole continent since the mid-nineteenth century. As a result of this homogeneity, American manufacturers have had much earlier experience than manufacturers of other countries with the technologies of scale. These include mass production, distribution systems, and information technology. They also include the information-based activities that become remunerative if you are manufacturing on a large enough scale: research and development, product design, market studies, management techniques, and organizational innovations. Having mastered these varied technologies of scale, American firms could produce their goods at lower unit prices. They could therefore compete in export markets, and eventually they could transfer their experience with technologies of scale to establish overseas subsidiaries. In particular, American firms pioneered most of the industries that produce the technologies of scale, and through intellectual property protection and network effects were able to establishing a long-lasting dominion in those industries. That's the argument. I cannot possibly be the person who originated it. But I can't find it in print, and neither do the people I know who work in the relevant fields. Does anybody find this argument familiar? Any leads much appreciated. I spoke with a reporter recently about David Noble, whose skeptical studies of computing in higher education I have distributed here. Although the reporter was trying to remain objective, he was clearly having trouble. At one point he asked me a question that would be hard to paraphrase closely. On a rational level its point was: isn't Noble really setting himself up for criticism by not using e-mail?, but that version doesn't do justice to the bewilderment in his voice. Think of it: he doesn't use e-mail! He's clearly off the deep end. But I was not impressed. Dave's point is not that technology is a bad thing, but rather that faculty should be able to make their own judgements about what technologies to employ in doing their work. It is the faculty who know the classroom, and it is the faculty who know their research, and if somebody else is making the decisions then we are certain to get bone-headed schemes that sound nice at a distance but are disconnected from reality. It happens every day. So I said, look, David Noble has published five books. He teaches classes. He gives lots of talks. He is involved in university affairs. Who's to say that he's not doing his job? If David Noble judges that having to read and answer his e-mail every day would, notwithstanding the real advantages of the medium, nonetheless have the net effect of slowing him down, who am I to tell him he's wrong? E-mail is a complete mess. It doesn't work very well, it requires a lot of infrastructure and maintenance and overhead, it is subject to security attacks, and it encourages people to send you lots of junk just because they can send whatever they've got to stuff to lots of extra people at no charge. It would make my life easier if Dave used e-mail, but Dave's job is to change the world, not not to make my life easier. Leave him alone. In recounting my interactions with the disciplines of Werner Erhard, I said: while I regard cults as dangerous and destructive, I appropriated several aspects of Wernerism that seemed useful. One of these is the idea that you can improve people's lives by providing them with a conceptual framework with which to reflect upon and become aware of their own experiences. I think I already knew this, actually, but they reinforced it. One person responded the idea I got from Wernerism already exists, and is called philosophy. Little does he know. The idea that philosophy is a way of reflecting on yourself, becoming aware of your experience, and making yourself a better person is a popular idea, and not a bad one, except that it has not described the reality of philosophy for at least hundreds of years, if not thousands. Martin Heidegger, whose work the Erhard people drew on, actually did believe something similar to this, although he thought of philosophy as bettering a collective way of experiencing oneself and one's life. But even he got this kind of motivation not from philosophy but from religious mysticism. The problem with philosophy is exactly that it has gotten utterly detached from human experience. This first happened with the arid metaphysics of the middle ages, and then it happened much more profoundly with the professionalization of American philosophy a century ago (see Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). The "analytic" style of philosophy that long dominated the English-speaking world is almost completely without value, much as Ludwig Wittgenstein tried to breathe life into it, and while a great deal of valuable philosophical scholarship is being done these days, very few philosophers are making anyone's life better. Pets.Com Sock Puppet in Defamation Suit Shocker! For details, see http://www.latimes.com/news/state/updates/lat_puppets000504.htm which includes, among other priceless passages: Thus some industry analysts think there is far more potential in the firm's sock puppet than in its pet supplies. Let's not gloat. Back when the AOL/Time Warner merger was announced, I wondered out loud whether AOL would end up with any real control over the Time Warner companies. What does AOL know about running Time Warner? But there was a fallacy in my argument: if AOL and Time Warner are both old-media companies, as I say, then why shouldn't AOL run the place? And indeed, it's been announced that Bob Pittman, who AOL hired from MTV, is the big winner in the post-merger turf war, and that Ted Turner is the big loser (Wall Street Journal 5/5/00). Some URL's. How New Is the New Economy? http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19990923042F Notes on the Cyber Patrol Case http://ritter.ist.psu.edu/cyber-patrol/cyber-patrol-case.html Host Name to Latitude/Longitude http://cello.cs.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/slamm/ip2ll/ AOL's "Youth Filters" Protect Kids from Democrats http://www.news.com/Perspectives/Column/0,176,421,00.html American Geosynchronous SIGINT Satellites http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/sigint/androart.htm Lost Art Internet Database http://www.lostart.de/ Clandestine Radio Intel http://www.qsl.net/yb0rmi/cland/ Report Shows Internet Approaching Oligopoly http://www.isp-planet.com/research/census_q12k.html The "mstream" Distributed Denial of Service Attack Tool http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/mstream.analysis.txt Britain Moves Forward With Plans for a Major E-University http://chronicle.com/free/2000/05/2000050201u.htm Transmeta's Magic Show http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/publicfeature/tran.html International Association for the Study of Common Property http://www.indiana.edu/~iascp/descript.html hours of fun with domain names http://www.nameboy.com/ end