Author Archives: Jeff Porten

Idiot, indicted, and just maybe, telling us what we need to know

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Gary McKinnon is an idiot. Or he’s the most dangerous hacker who has ever penetrated US military systems.

Evidence for idiocy comes from Slashdot’s discussion of McKinnon’s failed attempt in a British court to block his extradition to the United States.

Evidence for danger comes from this BBC report that the US claims he caused $700,000 in damages hacking military and government computers.

A few thoughts, off the cuff:

No question, we’re talking grade-A idiot. For one thing, he was looking for hidden UFO data. For another, he was spelunking about in US military systems and got caught using off-the-shelf monitoring tools, rather than hacker tools that might at least have given him a shot at covering his tracks.

But is he dangerous? And more importantly, is there anything we should be taking away from this story?

For one thing, if McKinnon’s claims are true that he accessed some of these systems and found that they had no password protection, that’s something we need to be looking at very strongly. I don’t think it excuses his actions (neither does his stupidity, for that matter), but there’s not a great deal of difference between what McKinnon did to NASA and what you’re doing to jeffporten.com right now. That is, the difference isn’t “hacking”, but rather that I want you here, and the NASA computer is more obscure than my site. But still findable, and still on the Internet.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re using a computer with nmap installed, and you type in the following command:

nmap -sS 209.124.50.132

What you will get back is a list of protocols on which my website is willing to talk to you. Now let’s say you do this instead:

nmap -sS 143.84.24.*

and you’re stupid enough to do this from somewhere other than someone else’s Wifi access point. What you’ll get back is a list of people in dark suits with badges who are suddenly interested in what you’re doing. Because now you’re mapping a block of sites that includes the Army Research Laboratory, whose scary warning I blogged a while back.

Note that I have not actually run that command and I don’t think you should either. You’ll end up scanning 256 computers that are most likely all military, and for all I know some of them are not supposed to be accessed by guys without uniforms. But all of them are on the Internet, and all you’ve done so far is walk up to all of them and say, “Hi! What services are you running?”

So let’s say you’ve done this, and somebody over in the Double Secret Probation Security Department decides to figure out if you’re an idiot or a true threat. He gets a team to trace your traffic. But you used several of nmap’s standard obfuscation techniques (which I’m not going to document for you; they’re easy enough to find), so it takes them a week to figure out which logs apply to you. Then they have a map of IP addresses from which Internet providers you used, so they ask an FBI type to go knocking on ISP doors and connect those to physical addresses.

Then they set up a surveillance team and nail your ass.

No, I’m not running off on some paranoid fantasy. I’m just working some numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and doing a few sums in my head, and the figure I come up with is that what took you about five seconds to do, cost about $25K for the US government to nail you for, just in terms of salaries for the people involved. Probably higher since my numbers presume that these computer techies and FBI types don’t have any supervisors and prosecution is done pro bono.

That’s why I’m, well, skeptical when I see numbers like “$700,000 [in] damage to military and NASA systems”. I remember seeing reports of attacks on military computers from the 1990s, designed to scare the hell out of Congress, where the exact line of code I listed earlier would have been counted as 16,777,216 separate attacks on military networks. Under extremely vague statutes in force today, opening your laptop in the wrong part of Washington DC, and accidentally handshaking with an open government Wifi base station, could constitute a terrorist attack.

Which is not to say that I think this is a secret government plot to throw all computer users in Gitmo. Every server I run is attacked on the order of 1,000 times a day by automated attacks, and I’m guessing that any government system gets hit far worse. Most folks fly way beneath the radar even if they are terminally stupid, and I presume that McKinnon did something to set off an alarm bell or two.

But if he is right, and he did find services that were inadequately protected, then it would be awfully nice if the process of prosecuting him also exposed these problems and caused them to be fixed. Because it’s axiomatic that if he found them, he wasn’t the first nor the last. Somehow, I don’t expect that kind of open trial is going to take place.

And I gotta say… the worst hack in US military history came from a UFO nut in London, working alone, and cost only $700K to fix? Man, that’s the most reassuring news I’ve heard in years.

More on wiretapping (or moron wiretapping) your calls

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So, on Monday I paraphrased Mort Halperin as saying that “all of the [Bush] administration’s statements concerning which information is targeted [for wiretapping] were specifically about this particular initiative [monitoring overseas calls]; … most expert observers believe that there is at least one more program, and possibly more, whose scope has not yet been revealed.”

What a difference three days makes. Boom, brand new program that doesn’t discriminate too much about whether you’re a US citizen or inside US borders.

I have little interest in the metaphysical debate over whether the Fourth Amendment covers the use of government computers, rather than government humans, listening in on your calls. I have little interest because I’m damn sure it should. The claim that computer monitoring is somehow not an unreasonable search into your papers is as ludicrous as if James Buchanan had claimed ponytapping was Constitutional because he used slaves instead of white people.

What I’d instead like to draw your attention to is this quote from Reuters:

“The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities,” Bush told reporters at a hastily called session aimed at damage control. “We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.”

And that’s highly interesting, because it’s a lie. Not an evasion, not a spin, not a misreading, but a damned lie. Specifically, the phrase “we’re not mining.” It’s a shame he didn’t stick with “trolling,” because one could argue that they’re not literally using giant fishnets or trying to pick up women in bars.

But mining, well, that’s exactly what you have to do with the largest database in the world, and it’s pretty much the exact definition of “using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.”

So, to recap — we have this program over here that monitors the actual content of phone calls on overseas lines, which is revealed by media investigation, and which Bush claims (without providing evidence) is strictly limited in focus. Then we have that program over there that monitors pen traces of domestic calls, which is also revealed by media investigation, and which is arguably what Bush claimed he was not doing when he was exposed the first time.

When that hits the news, he simply lies about it.

That’s the problem with circumventing the rule of law; once you’ve decided you’re above it, there just aren’t any limits. Or, to quote Al Gore, “Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is ‘yes’ then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?”

These surveillance programs ran simultaneously. To state that there are others which we don’t know about is a given; that’s the point of intelligence agencies. The sole question about the others is their scope. Considering the scope of the programs we do know about, I don’t see any conceptual line being drawn as “information about Americans that the government has no right to know.”

So — an open question to anyone in the “nothing to hide” community who’s stopping by this week. Where’s your line? How do your Fourth Amendment rights protect you? If you’re not disturbed about your phone calls, how about your emails? Private documents? What doesn’t the government have the right to know about you?

The Moussaoui verdict

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I’ve recently had to resurrect a line when discussing Zacarias Moussaoui that I originally used when discussing Timothy McVeigh — that is, I’m morally opposed to the death penalty, but you wouldn’t catch me with a sign protesting the night this particular guy got the hot shot.

So I was pleasantly surprised last week, wandering by a CNN broadcast at the CFP hotel, to see that our national drive for blood revenge took a brief recess. As I’ve discussed before, much of our military action since 9/11 has been as much (or more) driven by a need to “get the bastards” as by a real understanding of what needed to be done to protect ourselves in the future, or to bring the right bastards to justice. I assumed that Moussaoui, as the only 9/11-related case to be brought to trial, was toast.

And that’s the tricky thing about justice — it just gets so messy when you involve judges and juries and the need to make a coherent argument. Especially when your prosecutors taint the evidence. But thanks to Mark Kleiman for pointing out an interesting blowback effect from our war on terror and its concomitant war on legality.

As Michael Isikoff notes in the linked video, Moussaoui isn’t the only guy we have in custody, but he’s the only guy who’ll be going to trial. And that’s because our trial system doesn’t allow for waterboarding, genital electrocution, or imprisonment without trial. By our own definitions, it’s impossible to bring the rest of the 9/11 conspirators to justice, because we ourselves have violated our standards for justice.

Kleiman shows he has a great sense of humor by suggesting that we can send these people to the International Criminal Court for trial for war crimes. Anyone care to lay me the odds of that happening before 2009?

Debunking the nuclear “bunker buster”

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I find it hard to believe that it’s still necessary to make the argument that “nuclear weapons are bad”, but apparently half the country still hasn’t gotten the memo. Worthwhile reading is this Harper’s essay discussing why a nuclear earth penetrator is neither clean nor efffective.

[A] 400-ton explosion would have to occur a full 600 meters underground in order to be “contained.” These guidelines also stipulate a carefully sealed burial shaft to contain the blast, not a maw. Even the B61-11, at its current, inadequate impact speeds, does not burrow a clean rabbit-hole in the ground but rather kicks up a crater like a meteorite; any faster-moving penetrator would do so to a still greater degree.

Even supposing that the missile’s point of entry were miraculously neat, a nuclear blast at the depths a real missile could attain would invariably breach the surface of the earth, expelling a hot fallout cloud in what is known as a “base surge.” Base surges are more dangerous than traditional fallout clouds because they are more toxic, containing irradiated particles of dirt and rock. They also spread more quickly, sweeping across the surface of the earth in every direction, outward rather than upward. Bunkers are usually built in urban areas, so many thousands of deaths would be a virtual certainty. Even a 1-kiloton bunker buster–a relative firecracker, with a tiny fraction of the explosive power of the high-yield RNEP–detonated at fifty feet underground could eject about 1,000,000 cubic meters of radioactive soil.

My CFP coverage in TidBITS

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My coverage of the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference has just been published at TidBITS. The conference was chock-full of information and I’ve got more to say about it, which had to be cut from the article to keep this issue from becoming 30,000 words long, or from taking on more of a political tone than is usually the case. I’m still catching up on a pile of work from last week, so feel free to keep checking the CFP topic here to see my new articles as I post them.

Thanks go out to Adam Engst and the rest of the TidBITS crew for asking me to cover the conference, and to the Association for Computing Machinery for putting it on in the first place. As I say in the article, if you’re in the least bit interested in these topics, by all means come to Montreal next year.

Another shout-out goes to my buddy Brian Greenberg, who surely is shocked as hell to read this. The reason? Because Brian was the audience I had in mind when writing the article; he’s my standing skeptical sounding board on issues related to privacy and whether the current administration is living up to Orwell’s 1984, and I consciously wrote my piece with the hope of convincing Brian — and others like him — why these topics are important.

I’m sure he’ll tell me if I succeeded. Hope you do too.

Sleep is for the weak

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Fascinating science reporting can be found in Sleep Retardant Properties of My Ex-Girlfriend, which proves once again that CMU researchers have a sense of humor, and really need one:

I spoke to Hermina and explained my study and its results, as well as the importance of getting sufficient sleep. I concluded by explaining that, due to her sleep-retardant properties, I could not continue to sleep with her, an act she termed “breaking up”.

When Tom, who I mentioned earlier in the paper, discovered that Hermina and I had broken up, he expressed interest anew in sleeping with her. I attempted to warn him about Hermina’s sleep-retardant properties. In response, he referred to me as an “idiot”. This clearly demonstrates his lack of understanding of the value of sleep.

How people find me, April version

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My favorite search terms that brought people here, in order of Google PageRank:

1. flying hoverboards (5/10,900)

2. pookaliscious (6/80)

3. atlantic city slots players on september 11 2001 (8/348,000)

4. jeffrey wing war of world (10/16,500,000)

5. jewish deli montana (20/212,000)

6. bryan greenberg said (28/998,000)

7. coolest website (31/17,800,000)

8. perry como gettysburg (not in the top 100 out of 174,000)

9. sick canary (not in the top 100 out of 828,000)

10. sign of the coming apocalypse (not in the top 100 out of 5,260,000)

And oddly enough, for the popular search for “jeff is an idiot”, I’ve dropped from first place to not even in the top 100.

More to come on CFP

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I had expected to post more this week while I was at CFP, because, well, I am an utter blinkin’ moron. This is the busiest conference I’ve attended in a long time, and that is saying something.

Rest assured, I have much to say on the topic, but I’m going to hold off on commenting more here until my article gets published in TidBITS. When it is, I’ll continue here with the sort of editorial commentary that really isn’t appropriate over there.

But as a teaser, I’ll mention that after hearing from DHS about their plans to keep us safe, this is looking like an awfully fine time to move to Canada.

Lunchtime notes, CFP day 1

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Quote of the day, from a T-shirt sported here: “Every time Linux is booted, a penguin gets his wings.”

Opening speech this morning from Senator Leahy, from the great state that will not apologize for its cheese. Full text available here, shorter: “Security good. Privacy good. I’ll elide my role in passing legislation that eroded the latter and didn’t do much for the former. The Bush administration went too far. We need more hearings, discussion, and bipartisanship.” Before passing more laws eroding privacy (Jeff addendum).

More shortly from a panel discussing federal regulation.

My day at the NSA

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You know it’s an interesting day when you start at the National Security Agency and end at Public Citizen.

Today was the first day of CFP2006, and my first activity was the guided tour of the NSA. Or so we thought. Our first stop was at the entrance to the barbed wire fences that surround the NSA parking lot, where security boarded the bus to check the IDs of 50 privacy advocates. We were then warned to leave behind all cameras and electronics on the bus, especially cell phones and pagers, before going to the Visitor’s Center.

nsa.jpgI was towards the rear of the line (having a cigarette and vaguely wondering if a Zippo was a weapon), so I didn’t get to see the inside of the Visitor’s Center before the front of the line was sent back out—we actually hadn’t been cleared to be visitors. So we all tromped back to the bus, with a quick pause while another attendee grabbed a few telephoto shots of the Death Star building through the inner line of fencing.

I was left to wonder about the security precautions for the Visitor’s Center. You can’t see it in this Wikipedia shot; it’s a small building in the center of the parking lot, below the lower right of the photo here. It’s completely separate from the main building; I’ve been closer to the interior of the White House standing on Pennsylvania Avenue. So why are cell phones forbidden? My best guesses are: 1) greater concerns over Nokia bombers than shoe bombers; 2) just because; and 3) it makes (most) visitors feel really special to be seen as security risks, or reassures them about NSA security. As critical as I am of the NSA, I would generally give them the credit not to have anything in the Visitor’s Center too sensitive to be near a camera or an open phone line. I hope.

In any case, we tromped back aboard the bus, drove back out through the barbed wire, past the Shell station (20 cents a gallon cheaper than in DC), and to the National Cryptologic Museum, where we were supposed to be in the first place. “Can we bring our gadgets?” “Bring anything you like, this time.”

vigilancepark.jpgSuitably equipped with implements of destruction, we were all treated to a fine tour of the museum. We had already seen National Vigilance Park on the drive over, a re-creation of three planes that had been shot down during intelligence missions over the years. Those engagements, as well as others that cost the lives of NSA personnel, are commemorated in Memorial Hall, the first room we saw.

We were then conducted into a treasure trove of geek mathematical history, including a collection of Enigma machines and the Bombe that was used to decode them. An Enigma on display is exposed, so you can type in whatever you like and see the lights flash on as it is encrypted. I asked our guide how much they had to do to keep it working. He said, “It just works. We have 50,000 visitors a year, and kids love to bang on it. Every once in a while we have to change the light bulbs.” The machine continues to be battery powered, as per its original design, and could still serve as a 35-pound spy laptop.

The tour discussed the breaking of WWII German and Japanese codes, the security of the equivalent American codes after 1943 (which were used through the early 60s), and showed an array of fascinating artifacts from throughout the 20th century.

Almost. The notable thing about the NCM is that history ends in 1972 or so. If there’s anything there regarding satellites or the Internet, I missed it. Certainly nothing regarding wiretapping or other present-day issues. And of course, one wouldn’t necessarily expect to see such things at a museum that’s meant to give a positive impression of the Agency.

Which it does, and which is largely deserved. I recommend the NCM to history and technology buffs alike, and the underlying message—that the NSA has a history of serving its country well and with sacrifice—is worth repeating. Which is perhaps why one might regret that its present day actions are not similarly untarnished. I look forward to visiting the museum again in 2036 to see what it says then.

Postscript: as we were driving into the NSA, a wave of laughter passed through the bus because one of the cars there had a vanity license plate which was very amusing in the context of the NSA. I had originally intended to include it here, but I thought twice about it. Certainly, if this person does not want it widely known that he works at the NSA, his choice of vanity plates (and his parking near the visitors’ entrance) is extremely unwise. And yet… someone knows this plate and knows who drives that car. Perhaps that someone shouldn’t know where that car is driven to. So I’ll refrain from passing along the joke, just in case.

Twain. Mencken. Colbert.

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Who says there’s nothing entertaining on C-SPAN? Tune in to Stephen Colbert’s address to the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner for the most scathing satire I’ve heard in many years. Co-starring Helen Thomas as the Terminator.

The video is in two parts — the video itself is SFW, but the site that hosts it may have some, er, interesting stills on the rest of the page. Part one, part two.

jeff@themovies: Protocols of Zion (2005)

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A few years ago, I attended a conference in Europe where one of the participants was an Egyptian graduate student. As it turned out, she was also an outspoken anti-Semite, as we found out shortly after she made the mistake of assuming that the redheaded guy from Texas was a safe person to talk to. Apparently in Egypt there are no Jewish redheads.

In the space of about an hour, those of us at the conference who were Jewish became palpably aware of it, both in ourselves and in our acquaintances. It’s not that we suddenly distrusted the goyim—in fact, the universal rejection of this woman’s beliefs at an international conference was highly encouraging—but for an American who happens to be Jewish, it was a sudden reminder that others see me as a Jew who happens to be American, should they happen to care.

At the end of that conference, I had a long conversation with one of its organizers, who had been hidden during World War II from Nazi sympathizers. He is secular and (so far as I know) staunchly agnostic, but he’s from a Jewish family, and he would have died at the age of six if a few dozen people hadn’t given him a place to be. During this conversation, I commented that as an American, I think of anti-Semitism as a largely historical artifact.

He responded, in essence, that I had the luxury of believing this because I was young and naive, and that I lived in a place that temporarily allowed me to remain ignorant. If I were lucky, I could remain so, but he didn’t expect this would happen.

This experience has informed my view of both Judaism and anti-Semitism since, and it’s with this in mind that I think every Jew should be required to watch the HBO documentary Protocols of Zion. I think it’s a fairly important movie for everyone in the anti-hate community, Jewish or gentile, but for us it’s compulsory. Especially for those of us living in urban areas where being Jewish is so common that we forget for years at a time that it makes us different. Separate. Apes and pigs, in the words of one three-year-old interviewed in the documentary.

The thing about being Jewish is that we forget that it’s not us who decides whether it matters. I’ve been called a kike from time to time, but so far as I know I’ve never been discriminated against, nor do I think it’s in the least bit likely. But cultures have a way of changing course, and I note how simple it has been to flare up anti-Muslim hatred in the last five years. It seems to me to be a short step from hating the followers of Allah to hating the followers of, well, the same God but without the Jesus part. It’s something I think about when evangelicals use the language of religion in the pursuit of political office. It’s something I think about when I hear hateful, and sometimes justifiable, things being said about Israel in regards to their Palestinian policies.

In 1990, I got lost on the Leningrad subway, and a local who spoke English escorted me halfway across town and spoke with me for nearly an hour. I introduced myself as an American. He introduced himself as a Jew. He planned to emigrate to Israel, where he would then be regarded as Russian, and probably persecuted for that. He was teaching his children self-defense, because the one thing he knew is that they would be in many fights at schools in both countries.

He didn’t decide that he was a member of something Other. That was done for him. And while I still think it ludicrous that my own ancestry might ever do the same to me here, history has a tendency of surprising the hell out of many people who felt the same way I do.

Protocols of Zion is available on Cinemax on Demand through May 10th.

About the Cult of Macintosh

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You can rapidly judge whether an argument is emotional or rational by the amount of backstory that’s necessary to justify it.

This argument will require a lot of backstory.

I’m replying to Brian’s Being All That Apple Can Be essay here, and I can already tell that I’ll spend as much time talking about the “Apple community” and my experience working with Apples (dating back to 1981 or so) as I am going to discuss these nifty new machines that can boot Windows. In fact, in this essay, the Mac community is all I have room to discuss.

We’re Not Zealots, We’re Fanatics

The first thing I’d like to address is the term “zealot”. Yes, Apple users are, well, emotionally involved with their computers. Actually, all computer users are emotionally involved with their computers, and if you don’t think so, then you’ve never seen an undergraduate have a breakdown in a computer lab when his senior thesis got eaten by a power surge.

We’re all human (most of us, anyway), and we anthropomorphize the technologies we rely on. We name our cars. We customize our cell phones. And we chant reassuring incantations to our computers to encourage them to do what we want.

What differentiates Apple users from the superset of all computer users is that we attach our pet concepts to the brand name. I doubt that there’s any computer user on the planet who hasn’t verbally attacked his computer—brand name notwithstanding—when it foiled his plans for the day. But what Apple users have noticed is that we seem to say nice things to our computers more often than the rest of you.

Perhaps that’s no longer true. Perhaps there are thousands of Windows XP users out there who have named their laptop “Strawberry” and who sing metaphorical lullabies to it when it goes to sleep. All I can say is that I haven’t met those people, but I meet their Apple counterparts on a daily basis.

The vast majority of my interaction with “average” computer users is at Starbucks and other public Wifi points. All I can report on is this anecdotal experience. There was once a time when I would frequently be the only Apple user in the store. Today that ratio is closer to 50% or greater. Apple users talk to each other; the glowing bat-signal on the case is a beacon that invites conversation. I’ve seen this rarely with Palm users; never with Windows laptops.

The distinction between zealots and fanatics is that zealots are engaged in religious battles. Fanatics have reasons, however tenuous, for their devotion. The Apple community does have its zealots, no question; arguably, this dynamic was created when the zealots of the 1980s believed that any computer with a graphic interface was a “toy”. But most of us do stick with Apple for sound reasons, and most of us do note when Apple makes a misstep.

Our Relation to the Mothership

There’s no doubt that most computer companies do not have users sticking decals on their cars. Few non-Mac users ever cared about the loss of graphic doodads on their computers like we noted the discontinuation of the rainbow Apple and the happy Mac.

But we also remember, and not with fondness, John Scully and Gil Amelio. We remember the proliferation of beige boxes with incomprehensible numbers and completely different architectures. We remember the twelve different versions of System 7.

Which is why we treat Steve Jobs like a demigod: not because he is the head of Apple, but because he remade Apple into the company we wanted it to be.

And what do we want it to be? Brian accuses us as follows:

Among the most brand-loyal consumers on the planet, the Zealots believe that Apple is a different kind of company.  Nicer.  Purer.  Out for something more than generating profit for its shareholders.  Out to make the world a better place.  The only company on the planet that would willingly forego something profitable for something “cool.” The Luke Skywalker to Microsoft’s Darth Vader. The Ben & Jerry’s of personal computing.

This is almost entirely accurate. Apple isn’t alone in this, either; Ben & Jerry’s does quite nicely on its own corporate benevolence policies, and there are even organizations that promote the idea that turning a profit should not be the be-all and end-all of a corporation, as heretical as that might seem in the halls of Wharton.

Where it is inaccurate is the belief that we don’t care whether Apple turns a profit. You can’t go out today and buy a Timex/Sinclair, or an Amiga, or a SpectraVideo, despite the fact that each of these computers had some rather nifty features. If Apple collapses as a company, then the day comes when we can’t go out and buy a Macintosh. I am seriously invested in using Macintoshes; this is something I care about.

But let’s explore the idea of “cool” for a moment. No, Apple didn’t invent the GUI, but Apple did popularize it. Apple did set the standard for twenty years (and counting) of what a computer should do. Apple also introduced trackballs and palm rests into their laptops. Apple arguably set the stage for Palm devices. Apple was the first to popularize Wifi computing, and the first to build Bluetooth into an entire line of laptops.

Are these merely cool features? Hardly. These are affordances; design choices that allow the average person to do things with technology that were previously impossible. These things did not happen because they were guaranteed to be profitable; they happened because the designers at Apple do think that they are working towards some goal that is higher than the pursuit of profit.

I don’t know what the accountants in 1993 had to say about the profitability of the palm rest design. What I can say, with little fear of contradiction, is that having worked with Apple laptops for 13 years, 10-12 hours per day, seven days a week, I probably owe my lack of a crippling RSI injury to some anonymous industrial designer working at Apple when I was an undergraduate. Now that these are the industry standard, so does nearly every other laptop user.

As Brian points out, Apple enjoys a level of rockstar coverage in the tech world and mainstream press that is far out of proportion to its market share. Is that because the news media has been brainwashed by the Jobs Reality Distortion Field, like we are? Or because it’s generally recognized that when you go to an Apple announcement, you are likely going to see something that makes news, even for non-Apple users?

This is why we give allegiance to Apple. Making the world a better place should not be an accusation.

Safety in (Low) Numbers

Which brings us to the perennial market share argument. A few years ago, I found myself quoted extensively on the Internet with the line, “Yes, it’s true: Windows has 50,000 applications you will never use, while the Macintosh has only 10,000 applications you will never use.” From the user perspective, the market share argument has much the same dimensions.

No question, there are more Windows users out there than Mac users, by some vast number. There are constant arguments about what percentage of people use Macs, since market sales overlook the fact that Macs have longer lifespans than Windows machines.

I’ll leave that aside for now; pick your pundit and run with his numbers. I’ll just return to Starbucks. In Washington DC, New York, and Philadelphia, at Wifi hotspots, the number of Apples has been steadily growing for years. It’s not uncommon to only see Apples in such places. Maybe all the Windows users have desktops. Maybe Windows has complete market domination of the red states. Maybe the Mac users like their laptops more and bring them with them to coffeeshops in greater numbers. Doesn’t much matter; the community is visibly growing and has been for some time.

There are two viewpoints a current Mac user could bring to this phenomenon:

1) They might like being part of a small, special clique, a member of the “rest of us”, and view with some suspicion any move by Apple that will grow the market share quickly.

2) They might just like using Apples and talking to other people who use Apples, and the more, the merrier.

Of course, I’m firmly in the second camp. I make my living selling clever ideas to people who use Macs, and every new Mac user is part of Jeff’s expanded target market. However, all of us in camp 2 share some concerns with camp 1:

1) If Apple expands their market by creating radically different computers (i.e., computers that suck), then since we have to buy those computers eventually, we fear that someday our computers won’t be as enjoyable to use.

2) A flood of new people means people who don’t enculturate into the existing community as smoothly. Cf. the “Christmas modemers” of the late 1980s who changed the nature of many BBS systems, or the AOL onslaught that caused the “death of USENET”. Mac users are self-selected, and so part of why we have a community is because we might share some things in common. Expand that community rapidly, and the commonality fades.

I personally don’t think either is likely; Apple’s next computers are different, but they don’t suck and I don’t expect that to change. And I’ll worry about the community changes that come with larger market share when it happens; that would alter the community, but there will be concomitant benefits.

In my next essay, I’ll cover technical details that Brian brings up, and get into more detail about shipping hardware.

jeff@themovies: The Aristocrats (2005) and Jesus is Magic (2005)

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This is apparently my week for truly sick comedy. Warning to all readers: these are two very funny movies. Provided you like the sort of humor where you’re constantly saying, “I can’t believe she just said that.” If your sense of humor is not sufficiently twisted, then move along, there’s nothing to see here.

That line came to mind because the South Park urchins make an appearance in The Aristocrats, along with just about every other name comedian of the last two generations. Give producers Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette props for thoroughness, since this comedy documentary includes talent from the Borscht Belt, 80s “where are they now” folks, and current HBO headliners. If you missed the reviews, the movie tracks what is widely considered to be the filthiest joke in history through the improv variations given it by various comedians; along the way, we get several interesting commentaries on the nature of comedy and the business. And a mime act that nearly made me burst a lung.

For my part, the film reminded me of something I’ve learned from spending time with several insanely talented comedians, artists, and actors: it just sucks that I don’t have any talent. Because when you’re performing, you then get to hang afterwards with other professionals as they do their damnedest to make beer shoot out of your nose. Stand-up comedy is probably the hardest job on Earth, but these people seem to have more fun after the show than any one human being should have.

And if I were in the industry, I’d definitely want to meet Sarah Silverman. Sure, she’s got that cute Jewish thing working, but more importantly, she’s smart and funny. You can pick up most (but as Ebert points out, not all) of her act in Jesus Is Magic. Like the Aristocrats, this is comedy for limited (i.e., sick and twisted) tastes; Silverman does material on rape, the Holocaust, and AIDS. Oh, and infant mutilation.

The downside of this film is that it suffers from HBO-itis; has there ever been a “comedy special” where the crap they bookended the show with was funny? Here, unfunny material bookends and is interspersed throughout the movie; the show would have been far better if they just let the stand-up, er, stand up on its own.

Regardless, this is well worth 70 minutes of your time, and be sure to stick around for the encore and the funniest performance of Amazing Grace you’ll ever see.

Activist notes

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Some interesting events on this week’s agenda:

Tomorrow, the Rally to Stop Genocide will be holding a march in Washington, and in other cities around the country. I’m swamped with client work this weekend, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to attend, but if I do I’ll report back here with interesting doings from the DC version. If anyone is going to this one or one of the local rallies, please let me know.

Starting Tuesday I’ll be attending the CFP2006 conference. I’m doing an article about the conference for an online publication, but if anyone has anything in particular they want to hear about, just let me know.

At the end of the week is the National Intelligence Conference; I’m not (yet) invited, but I have a friend who is and I’ll see if I can’t crash a few parties.