Clippings On Clipper

Back in the 90's, there was a proposal from the U.S. government to allow encryption and surveillance to co-exist. It was called "Clipper." And it worked like this: the government got some cryptography experts to create an encryption system on a microchip. Any company that wanted to make any sort of encrypted communications equipment could use this chip in their computers, phones, whatever. But the catch is that each chip would have a unique code that could be used to decrypt communications using that chip. An independent organization would keep a big list of all the chips and their respective codes. When law-enforcement needed to eavesdrop on someone's communications, they'd get a warrant, and present it to the code keeping organization, who would then hand over the code to that person's chip.

Techies of the time howled in protest. The basic idea of allowing warrant-based spying wasn't so bad, but there were a lot of flaws:

• We have to use this government-approved encryption, and just hope that it doesn't turn out to be flawed later.
• We have to trust that this private organization will hold everyone's codes securely.
• We have to hope that the government doesn't change the terms later, say by deciding they don't really need a warrant.

But more than anything, it just seemed presumptuous that the law had a right to listen in on us (even to a liberal like myself.) With no one in tech willing to go along, the idea died.

That incident comes mind because we essentially ended up with Clipper anyway, since backdoors got built-in to all our encryption products. Only we didn't even get the warrant protection. To me, that's the most disappointing aspect to all this: the debate on Clipper didn't matter.

But what we should have done was have a wider discussion on encryption and surveillance back then, rather than a small talk in the tech sector.  Even now that the issue has been pushed on us, we as a society are only slowly realizing that we have to confront these questions.

Moving Architecture

Recently I read about the city of Kiruna, Sweden.  It's famous for starting the first ice hotel.  But now it's in the news because they may have to move the downtown.  See, the area is also known for mining, and that mining has destabilized the ground under the centre of the town.

It's unfortunate, because there are a few old buildings that will be lost.  But at the same time, a lot of cities would benefit from a second chance to build part of the city. You could skip trying to make an urban mall work, cut back on the condos or office blocks, or take a Mulligan on zoning that Planet Hollywood.

Or you could just keep it the same, but put it in a more appropriate place.  Screw with those suburbanites by dropping the downtown right next to the latest subdivision.  Kitchener-Waterloo could call a truce and build one new downtown on a neutral location.  Or we could move Cambridge up between KW and Guelph to make one big city.

So good luck to Kiruna.  It sounds like a pretty cool place. Coming up with the ice hotel is the sort of winter adaptation Canada could use, as I complained about earlier.  And I see on Wikipedia that it's even the home of Borje Salming.  What else...it even has its own spaceport?  That's it, I've found my new home!

He's Not Just Tough, He's Sold

Tonight, country singer Will Hoge performed on Letterman. I had not heard of him before, but he just got one line out of his mouth before I - along with most of the viewers, I'm sure - said, "it's the pickup commercial song!"

Of course, we're getting used to the idea of commercials using songs from less-famous artists. But still, this song, glorifying a hard-working, reliable truck-owner, seemed to mesh with the truck ad atmosphere so well, I assumed it had been custom-written for the ad campaign.

I'm not sure artists are going to be totally happy with the close association with products. Musicians got comfortable with the idea of selling music to commercials a while back, around the time changing media made it harder to make a living off CD sales, and to get their music discovered by listeners. But it can't be good for your career when people heart your song and think of trucks, not you.

Life Is A Bowl Full Of Cherrys

It hit me that every sport has its advocates for toughness and less rules.  It seems like any time there's a borderline call by the officials, one of the commentators or analysts will complain that the sport is being neutered, these are men, it's not for the faint-hearted etc.

That attitude is not really surprising, but what's odd is when you consider them all together, you realize that there are soccer fans who want more contact, along with football fans who want to be able to decapitate on the field.  And those  soccer fans that lean towards rough play are asking for a level of violence that would seem gentle compared to football.

Wouldn't it be better for each of them if everyone would just move up a sport? Say, if you're always complaining that basketball players should be tougher, wouldn't you be happier watching football?  If football and hockey are not enough, move up to mixed marshal arts.  And if you are an MMA fan and that's not enough, then kindly turn yourself in to the authorities.

Muad'Dib, Eh?

A few years ago I read the science fiction classic Dune. It's set on a planet that's entirely desert (hence the name, "Dune.") And this planet is inhabited by people called Fremen, who have adapted their lifestyles to the extreme environment they live in. They treat water with religious reverence, they have a system of underground hideouts, and they have clothes that recapture the moisture from their bodies and turn it into drinkable water (and the less you think about that concept the better.)

It occurred to me that we Canadians are sort of like the Fremen, only with a different environmental extreme to deal with.  Sparsely populated, in a land most people wouldn't choose.

Except that, really we're not. It's actually surprising how little Canadians alter the basic North American lifestyle to suit our climate extremes. We haven't shaped our roads, streets and sidewalks to reduce the amount of snow that accumulates, we just shovel a lot. We think nothing of commuting hours to our jobs, even though it's hard to drive for a third of the year.  Heck, we haven't even adapted Roomba technology to snowblowers yet.

Maybe it'll just take a while. After all, Dune did take place 10,000 years in the future. Maybe, given that much time, Canadians would develop a more sensible approach to winter, with underground, geothermally-heated cities, cars that convert into snowmobiles on command, and genetically-engineered crops that grow year-round.

Who's In Centre Field?

The American Dialect Society has chosen "because" as its word of the year.  I know, you were expecting either a young-people's slang term, or a tech term that some editor thinks is about to take off.  So, they chose a word that has existed since time immemorial.  As you might guess, a Dialect Society is a little more sophisticated than a mainstream dictionary, so they are not choosing a word so much as a use of a word.

They're choosing its new and trendy use as an agrammatical expression of vague explanation, as in, "I'm writing about words because boredom."

It's interesting because just the other day, I had one of my epiphanies where I suddenly and immediately get tired of a trend.  I read yet another tweet using "because reasons," and I was finally done with it.  This use of because can be useful to ridicule lack of reasoning, (e.g. "because science") but it's just become a grating way to excuse laziness.  So I'm going to create my own uses of words, result fame.

Baku: The Future

I wrote a few weeks ago about that ultra luxury condo in Miami with the car elevator. I'm disappointed with things like that because they're so unnecessary. I don't have a problem with rich people buying luxuries; I don't expect them to live in squalor and give everything to the poor. But you can only really spend a few million dollars on yourself. Beyond that, you're just spending money for the sake of spending money, buying things like this Bugatti belt buckle.

I'd like to think that if I were super duper rich, then I'd use my fortune to do positive things for humanity, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Or maybe investing in technologies that are too risky for others, like Elon Musk has.

But if I wasn't that charitable, a reasonable second best use of wealth might be going on in Azerbaijan. Business tycoon Ibrahim Ibrahimov is building a new city on the artificial Khazar islands in the Caspian Sea down the coast from the capital Baku.

If that sounds like something Dubai and the United Arab Emirates would do, there are some similarities. Like the U.A.E., Azerbaijan was a poor, not particularly advanced country off the beaten track, with no reason for the rest of the world to take notice. And then they found oil. And money. And an ego.

Building a city isn't the most altruistic thing you could do with your fortune. But at least it's something that could end up benefiting others. Even if it is just encouraging everyone to learn to spell Azerbaijan (remember, the "i" goes before the "j".)  I've always been intrigued by planned cities, but the fact is they often don't work that well.  Still, it's an interesting idea, and our timid world perhaps needs people to just try something adventurous.

So I think it would be nice if more of the super-rich did stuff like this. But given the number of super-rich in the world, vs. the number of crazy-audacious construction projects, it looks like there are way more Porsche elevators than island cities. So how do such boring people make so much money?