August 2005. Byte.com, USA. Innovation After Grokster. Will the Supreme Court's Grokster decision throttle innovation in video search, podcasting, and other emerging technologies?.
June 23, 2005. TechWeb / Security Pipeline, USA. Opinion: Getting "Beyond Fear": A Security Expert's Prescription for A Safer World . Open source pioneer Lynne Jolitz turns a skeptical eye toward airport security, wondering if all the pat-downs and X-rays are good policy. While politicians and the public debate whether the searches are too intrusive, Lynne says that's the wrong question. The real question is whether the searches are cost-effective. Are they the best way we can be spending our security effort and money? (See at "Security Pipeline | Opinion: Getting "Beyond Fear": A Security Expert's Prescription for A Safer World")
Opinion: Getting "Beyond Fear": A Security Expert's Prescription for A Safer World
Not too long ago, actress Patti LuPone was subjected to a public pat-down at a Florida airport with no explanation provided by screeners.
"I kept going, 'this is really rude, what is going on? What is going on?'" LuPone told "Good Morning America" (Nov. 24, 2004). "I was shocked that I had been felt up."
Pat-down searches are more difficult for women than for men. Women object the most to "the groping nature of the searches," and complain that male colleagues "scoffed at their complaints, calling a physical pat-down a small price for security," according to the New York Times.
But do pat-downs make us more secure? While every American should be concerned about the intrusive aspect of body searches, we should also be focused on whether this security approach is the best strategy and a cost-effective way get the desired results.
I can identify with Ms. LuPone's concern about personal body privacy. As a mom, I also think about the bad guy striking at any time in any place. The very nature of global terrorism and orange alerts and the undefined ambiguous elements of a society in which we are expected to blindly trust authority, lead women in particular to experience feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.
But as a technologist who studies and writes about security, I am struck by how little ordinary folk feel they can do to protect themselves and their families--and that just isn't right. The fruits of security are reaped every day, in airports and subways, malls and homes, and the very intrusive nature of security can result in a backlash from the very citizens and businesses we aim to protect.
Perhaps if we placed more effort into communicating our needs to an informed populace before the crisis starts, we'd face fewer security debacles. But how do we teach people about the practice of security when what they really want to know is how to take control of their own fear and lives?
Getting Sensible About Security
There are ways to quickly and simply assess security, including whether you're getting your tax money's worth, without resorting to jargon and doublespeak.
We shouldn't be asking, "Are intrusive pat-downs too personally intrusive?" Sometimes security is personally intrusive. The question we must ask is "Are these intrusive airport pat-downs making my community, schools, and family more secure?" In other words, is what I'm going through sensible, fair, and right?
Which brings me to why I got on this topic. As I was browsing Bruce Schneier's latest book "Beyond Fear," I found it interesting how much his book spoke to the concerns of America's security-conscious Moms and Dads — and how few of them had even heard of the book.
This isn't surprising — the book cover is garish orange, the artwork like something off a Tom Clancy novel. Don't people judge a book by its cover? Most do, and this one says "hands-off unless you're a security geek."
But notice the subtitle: "Thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world." "Sensibly," huh? That doesn't sound like a shoot-em-up. "Beyond Fear" is actually intended to teach ordinary people how to ask the right questions and get the right answers about security, the real story behind security success stories, and, most importantly, provide a straightforward discussion of security geeks who fool themselves and make our world less secure under the color of making it more secure. Bad Security Impacts The Pocketbook
So what does Schneier, a well-known security expert, say about airport lap dances? Plenty. He breaks down the broad category of airport security into the players: the pilots, the flight attendants, the government officials, the FAA, the airlines and even the customers. He points out that when government wanted to ban laptop computers (which can easily contain bombs), the airlines "screamed that doing so would enrage their highest revenue generating passengers: business travelers." And the heaviest users of business travel are men.
Of business travelers, men take more business trips a year than women do — an average of seven business trips as compared to four for women, according to statistics compiled from non-partisan departments of the U.S. government and research organizations by the Gender Issues Research Center.
While men may not object to pat-downs, they certainly would object to a laptop ban.
But simple statistics can be deceiving. For example, statistically speaking, men place greater importance on the quality of airline's food, while women care more about how they're treated by employees, according to recent studies on customer satisfaction in U.S. domestic air travel conducted by management and marketing experts at Rice and Cornell University.
In other words, if men get treated badly, they eat. If women get treated badly, they remember.
Well, why should this matter to the travel industry? After all, don't men fly more often? Well, yes, but women buy the tickets, and do more online research about travel, too, according to a study by Burst! Media. So follow the money — you can't treat women badly, in the name of security or for some other reason, and not breed resentment resulting in lost future revenue.
Which gets to the point of the issue: where is the voice of the customer — or in the case of pat-downs, the female customers? Since women haven't appeared to be the primary "money-making" customers, they don't have corporate advocates.
And, as Schneier points out, "you and I, as ordinary citizens have so little power as individuals, we have almost no control over most of the major security systems that affect our lives...You can either fly or not."
How Much Security Is Good Security?
Schneier does think we should be checking out everyone — even the elderly and children — precisely because making exceptions creates flaws in a security grid. This does make sense. If Grandma is allowed to get around routine searches, everyone else notices this, especially the bad guys, and this isn't good for Grandma or the rest of us. Terrorists can figure out who is subject to lighter screening, and find ways of using that knowledge.
Recent efforts to exempt some groups from being searched — such as children or old people — don't solve the problem. Security must be even-handed to be effective. Women, even Grandma, should be subject to searches, otherwise Grandma will be coerced or tricked into acting as a terrorist tool.
The question isn't "can't we excuse women and children because searches are too humiliating?" but instead "are these searches catching the bad guys?" In other words, are the costs (real as well as psychological) getting us a return on our investment?
But how do we get answers when there is no advocate to hear the questions? We know that other countries have for many years, with great success, conducted routine body scans without resorting to routine physical pat-downs Why can't we learn from their best practices? It's hard to get a straight answer, even if you're informed. Security is often used, not to protect, but to intimidate, and it's hard to ask reasonable questions in an environment predicated on fear — even if it hurts us all.
Getting Beyond Fear
Yet, as Schneier notes, we are not just individuals cowering in our homes. We are also "consumers, citizens, taxpayers, voters, and, if things get bad enough, protesters. Only in the aggregate do we have power, and the more we organize, the more power we have." And the best way to start is to get informed.
So I'm going to be blunt. Get a copy of Schneier's book for your spouse, child or parent. Take off the stupid paper cover — it is misleading. And make everyone read it before you take that summer cruise to the Mediterranean or the family trip to Yellowstone. And then talk to them about it.
Our fear of the bad guy is not mediated by some mythic force of nature, nor is the response by government and commercial interests all knowing and monolithic. It is only mediated by our minds, and tested by the unknown. Thus, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet (Act IV, Scene V): "We know what we are, but know not what we may be."
Lynne Greer Jolitz is CTO of ExecProducer, a real-time video production company, and co-creator of the open source Berkeley Unix operating system.
May 2005. Byte.com, USA. Search Engine Quirks and Search Engine Jerks. Search engines can seem almost human in their obsessions, preferences, and desires. But it's the real humans who can use search techniques to threaten a site or a business.
January 2005. Byte.com, USA. The Year Ahead.Lynne predicts that 2005 will bring us more spam, less security, and maybe some shake-ups in search—but each of these fields holds opportunity for technical innovation.
November 2004. Byte.com, USA. The Problems of Personalization.Online retailers are crowding onto the "personalization" bandwagon—with humorous and occasionally insulting results.
October 2004. Byte.com, USA. Buffer, Buffer, Where is the Buffer?.With so much of modern technology concerned with buffers, buffering, and the dreaded buffer overflow, Lynne asks: Can we build a better buffer?
September 2004. Dr. Dobbs Journal, USA. Free Culture And the Internet. Lynne Jolitz reviews the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. See also Free Culture and the Internet
Free Culture and the Internet
Copyright (C) Dr. Dobb's Journal, September, 2004
The Internet of today doesn't much resemble the Internet of decades ago. It wasn't developed with the express purpose of distributing works by artists, or making money off of sales of music CDs, or even for sending video on demand. The Internet, as Vincent Cerf said, was merely an attempt to "get a bag of bits from one point to another with a greater than zero percent chance of getting there." The fact that we can do this so reliably is a tribute to the Cerf-Kahn algorithm (TCP/IP) and the work of technologists who turned this lab experiment into a practical mechanism.
Yet, success does breed its own failure. In the circumscribed world of the early Internet, there was little need to build in control over work, code, and access. Ideas such as open source and file sharing and e-mail sprang from the desire to communicate ideas-not control them. The question of mediation of works was left unresolved.
So, as we watch the lawsuits and public policy debates grow ever more vitriolic, the stakes over the control of copyrighted works grow ever greater. Now, as Lawrence Lessig of the Stanford University Law School so aptly demonstrates in his new book Free Culture, the stakes are driven by interpretations of the U.S. Constitution itself. According to Lessig, we are engaged in nothing less than a war waged by the "monopolists of culture":
"To fight "piracy," to protect "property," the content industry has launched a war…As with any war of prohibition, these [direct and collateral] damages will be suffered most by our own people."
Lessig's book is a dark reading of traditional forces arrayed for battle, using lawyers, lobbyists, and money to rewrite laws to suit their immediate interests while placing barriers in the path of others through onerous lawsuits, criminal actions, and increased penalties for perceived non-sanctioned use of properties. Lessig argues that the erosion of copyright and fair use through these tactics is undermining our intellectual commons.
Free Culture at its core is the story of the personal battle Lessig took before the U.S. Supreme Court and the well-written and clear arguments that underlie his convictions are fascinating reading. Surprisingly, the actual case that resulted in the "Eldred Decision" takes up very little of the book, perhaps because it has been extensively written about elsewhere. However, since few people have been allowed to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, a more intimate account and background of the Justices and their questions would have been most welcome for those of us who aren't "Court TV" junkies.
Lessig's candor in discussing his loss is refreshing, with little of the self-pity you might expect in such a one-sided (seven to two) Supreme Court opinion. He admits that he should have focused more on the question of harm, as his legal advisor suggested, instead of on the larger Constitutional issues he favored. In other words, better a narrow victory than a broad defeat.
However, "like a professor correcting a student," Justice Kennedy's invitation to discuss the "obvious and profound harm" was declined, in fact, Lessig took it further, stating, "Nothing in our Copyright Clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion of impeding progress," which in retrospect he thought "was a correct answer, but it wasn't the right answer." Chief Justice Rehnquist, in particular, whom Lessig had hoped to appeal to per his earlier Lopez ruling, apparently wasn't very friendly either: "To him, we were a bunch of anarchists." Who says warfare only happens in chess?
Lessig's vision was large even by Internet standards, and perhaps it was just too much for the U.S. Supreme Court to accept. The question of harm, a public policy migration strategy, might still be the correct course of action to sew back together various factions. But like a failed grade on a student's exam, this question is quickly forgotten, left as an exercise to the reader.
In the end, the Internet may simply be viewed as another phone network, and much of this legal upheaval may vanish into the well-understood and arcane realm of telecommunications law and regulation. Recently, for example, the New York State Public Service Commission ruled that Vonage Holdings, a VOIP company, is actually a telephone company in disguise and is thus subject to state regulation. It may not be a visionary decision, but it is an understandable one.
Free Culture
Lawrence Lessig
Penguin Press, 2004
345 pp., $24.95
ISBN 1594200068
July 11-17, 2004. Tech Trek Science, Math, & Computer Camp, Stanford, CA. Girls Just Want to Have Astro Fun. Theory and practice of astronomy and physics in a one-hour powerpoint presentation loaded with cool video of NASA launches and space exploration, plus a bit of the physics of magnitude and distance. Rebecca Jolitz (age 9) demonstrates how to use a Schmidt-Cassagrain (SCT) telescope. Multiple talks. Sponsored by the AAUW. 125 seventh graders attended from all over California.
June 2004. ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2004). National University of Singapore, Singapore. Lessons Learned in Massive Video Production (MVP) for University Alumni Outreach. In this paper, we describe lessons learned in creating a Massive Video Production (MVP) mechanism and filmography environment for the University of California at Berkeley. The goal was to provide a university department mandated to expand alumni outreach with personalized university-branded alumni VideoGreetings using a convenient and dynamic alumni outreach tool with modern multimedia production standards coupled with commonplace digital camera raw clips with no intervention on the part of the alumni coordinator and department other than editorial approval of the finished production. The actual mechanism consists of a hosted production engine, filmography and search environment, review and editorial functions, and subscription and protection. See also Lynne Jolitz Invited to Present at ACE2004
and retail version of this service can be found at "MinutePitch - Your Video Screen on the Web!", quick pitch ("Just Add Message ... That Easy!"), with details of what it provides ("What does MinutePitch do for you?"),
what it does for you("Get the Most out of Video") and the point of using it ("Getting the Most out of Your Marketing and Sales Budget")
May 2004. Digital Technology Center Intelligent Storage Workshop 2004, Minneapolis, MN. All You Need is TCP: EtherSAN and Storage Networks(With William F. (Bill) Jolitz). In this proposal, we discuss applying the end-to-end principle and a patented low latency TCP mechanism to create a global storage network architecture we call EtherSAN.
October 11, 2003. Vintage Computer Festival 2003. Computer History Museum. Before 386bsd: The Symmetric 375 Computer and Berkeley Unix(With William F. (Bill) Jolitz). Symmetric Computer Systems, a venture-funded company founded in 1982 by William Jolitz, was a contender in the hot race to produce a personal BSD Unix system. The Symmetric 375 was the first system out the door with hardware floating point and virtual memory, beating Sun by years. It was the first system with open source supplied, integrated, and tested, from EMACS to SPICE for use in scientific and engineering work. And it was the first to ship systems with all software fully installed and tested, ready for use immediately. Join William and Lynne as they discuss the design and development of the 375 computer and its influence on 386BSD - the first open source BSD system for the X86 released a decade later.
See the article “Talk About Legacy Machines”.
September 15, 2003. San Francisco Chronicle, Technology and Business Section page E1. USA. Paving the Way for ‘Systers’. On Sept. 9, Anita Borg, a well-known computer scientist and champion for the advancement of women in the technology industry who died in April, was eulogized by colleagues at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium. Here are the thoughts of Lynne Greer Jolitz , who has spearheaded several Silicon Valley Startups. Article also posted on SF Gate, among the top five newspaper-affiliated web sites in the U.S., with 4.9 million users and 58 million page views per month.
September 2003. Byte.com, USA. Memories and Cookies. The optimism and untethered ambition of the dot-com boom may have vanished from the face of the Internet, but it lingers on in cookie files. Special Feature.
February 2003. Byte.com, USA. DDOS: Just a Matter of Resource. Why are we so vulnerable still to distributed denial-of-service attacks? Because the Internet has no policy for monitoring service and isolating misbehaving network elements. Special Feature.
Spring 2002. San Jose State University. Instructor, Unix System Administration. Professional development aimed at career enhancement with evening course. Teaching Linux and UNIX to accomplished professionals for certification in cross-platform network administration. Introduction to command line, file handling, management, and network operations. Instruction and laboratory hands on experience with the instructor. Emphasis on system administration, server, network engineering.