Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

End to end encryption should be the default, but it’s not.  So, I find it interesting to look for the drivers that might change that.  What will create strong enough demand that it will become unacceptable to ever allow any data to move thru public networks in the clear?

Fear of identity theft is one such driver.  A significant portion of the public lives in fear that their identity is at risk because we regularly hear reports of data that has gone missing in transit.  Public fear raises the temperature; but it is a very diffuse driver.
Recently the US congress has been rushing to pass a bill that might create another driver.  Unlike the fear of the general public this bill should scare all of us who move bits around.  Who are these intermediaries?  Well of course it’s the telecommunication companies and the internet service providers.  But, it also all of us who kindly let random visitors use our internet connections.  So if you ever let a visitor to your house use your Wifi you are at risk.  The stick in the bill is a huge fine; 150 thousand dollars for the first offense, and 300 thousand dollars for the second offense.

The kindest way to describe this bill is that if you witness a crime and then you fail to report it you maybe fined.  For example say you glance at your logs and you see some suspicious behavior.  The bill requires that you report that suspicious behavior.  It’s slightly more specific, having a focus on child porn, but it’s also extremely weak on exactly what amounts to suspicious.

My point is not to point out what a obnoxious law this is, but rather to point out how this creates demand for better encryption.  I want a toggle I can throw on my wireless access points that says “Pass no data in the clear.”  Since with such a toggle I can then assert there is zero chance I even had the opportunity to observe the crime.

I think that’s neat.  A driver for a better safer default that targets the intermediaries.  Since I think they are the folks likely to be able to change the default I think this law offers up an interesting class of moves in the game we are playing.   It leads me to a more general question.  What can we do to create incentives for intermediaries to drive the defaults toward safer settings?

The first sentence reads:

It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, …

This is bull.  Speaking as a practicing dyslexic it should say that dyslexics are driven into running their own business.  The rising idiocy which is the meritocracy movement drives out of the main stream talent with any learning disability that runs counter to their fetish for testing.

That’s my opinion.  I have experience; and I have considered numerous hypothesis over the decades.  Many of which I’ve discarded and some I still nurture.  I certainly don’t have data from well run experiments.  This article, in the New York Times, pretends it’s reporting a legitimate conclusion.  But yeah, the  article stands upon the result of one question in one survey of small business owners.  Here’s that result:

35 percent — identified themselves as dyslexic

And it’s off to the races … the author, and possibly the researchers doing the survey, decided to adopt the Pangloss position.  Sweet of them.  They then called around and collected quotes from various successful dyslexics.  Who, understandably, got with the program.  It is certainly in our best interest to pump up the impression that we bring some secret talent to the party, and no doubt we do.  But, it ain’t got nothing to do with some magnetic attraction to running a business.

I did take some delight in reading between the lines.  The various “dyslexics speak” pull quotes are a study in one of the talents dyslexics have; that most anything they say has layers of hidden meanings.  I enjoyed the subtle undercurrent of bemusement at the invitation to play into this farce.  The best is this quote the article ends with; I’m quoting this a bit out of context but this is from the last quote in the article:

Actually, it’s baloney. But that’s what our marketing people came up with.

Exactly.

This is a delightful sentence:

I have a T-Mobile cell phone, which uses GSM technology; it works all over the world — and in parts of New Jersey. - Paul Krugman

It’s delightful, of course, because New Jersey is the home of Bell Labs.  Paul’s posting is a short musing on the current state of play in the standards battle about cellular phone.   He’s sense is that European standards practice appears to have bested the Americian ones at this point.  Maybe so, I tend to agree.

There are lots of aspects to this story.  For example an interesting one is how American standards practices appear to give us the upper hand the computer industries standards battles.  While it is my impression that the European approachs have given them the upper hand in industries that are evolving more slowly.   Another aspect of this is an American affection for that oxymoron: multiple standards.  That tends to blind us to the winner take all nature of these things - these are standards battles and wars, not competition in the commodity market sense.

T-Mobile positioning in the US market is as a second or third tier player. The different vendors in the US have core markets which overlap less than one might expect.  T-Mobile’s focus is on down market urban customers.  Their network’s coverage is great in cities, and pretty lousy in the suburbs, and it’s useless in the country side.  You become quite aware of that if you use t-mobile’s cheapest offering, prepaid, as I do.  If you take the path of least resistance (monthly subscription/lock-in, loss leader phone, 2 year contract, screw you occasionally on overcharges) then you get access to the emerging AT&T GSM network; which has more coverage.  Though still it’s useless in rural locations.
GSM was designed with a higher population in mind.  In Europe those higher density venues aren’t as down market as they are in the US.