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There’s an interview with Ken and Harry on the “Let’s Talk Computers” show, which is aimed at a general audience. Our show (officially dated August 23, 2008) is a friendly conversation, mostly about privacy issues.

Also there’s a well researched NPR program on cloud computing in which Harry is quoted. Laura Sydell, who did the research and interviewing, is a terrific radio journalist.

We noted yesterday that McCain’s campaign has been promising a technology policy for a long time. It was finally put up on his web site today.

For the most part, it isn’t really a policy. It’s mostly vague, aspirational statements, many of which are in flat contradiction with each other. Example: (a) “John McCain will focus on policies that leave consumers free to access the content they choose”; (b) “He championed laws that ‚Ķ protected kids from harmful Internet content”; (c) “John McCain has fought special interests in Washington to force the Federal government to auction inefficiently-used wireless spectrum to companies that will instead use the spectrum to provide high-speed Internet service options to millions of Americans.” All fine things, if that’s all that is said. BUT the “policy” fails to note that the laws referred to in (b) have been overturned by federal courts because they unconstitutionally make (a) impossible. And the plan referred to in (c) is the one we blogged about several weeks ago, for a public Internet censored so ruthlessly that it couldn’t even carry an email that would be inappropriate for a 5-year-old.

These issues are not simple. Blown to Bits is largely about how hard it is to reconcile conflicting values. They can’t be reconciled by apple-pie rhetoric that leaves doubt the candidate even recognizes the tensions exist. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to complain about this sound bite from the prologue: “In the last decade, there has been an explosion in the ways Americans communicate with family, friends, and business partners; shop and connect with global markets; educate themselves; become more engaged politically; and consume and even create entertainment.” Nice metaphor, there.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing to me is the “policy’s” posture toward intellectual property: that it is something to protect. Does he realize how the explosion happened? McCain seems to be in the grip of the entertainment industry and the law firms. The Internet is the greatest thing ever invented for inventiveness by small businesses, and this is a big-business policy platform. Invention is being choked by our intellectual policy apparatus, and this platform would strengthen it, not relax it. I am not surprised by the absence of actual proposals about democratic empowerment, collaboration, and civic engagement that the Internet might support. But does McCain even realize that digital technology is going to be the wellspring of economic growth in the U.S. — and that won’t come just from making Disney and Comcast yet more powerful?

For an even more intemperate response to this long-awaited policy, read David Weinberger’s blog.

We talk a lot about how digital technologies are improving, and in particular making it possible to do automated language-processing tasks that used to require human intervention. A couple of nice examples that the technologies are not perfect yet. First, a reminder that automated language translation still requires human checking, especially if the output is going to be publicly deployed:

Or this attempt at automated cake decoration, which triggered an error message in the decorating software:

Thanks to Adweek for the restaurant sign and to Livejournal for the cake.

Peter Gordon of the Hong Kong Standard has a nice article about the book, and its relevance to a variety of issues facing Hong Kong.

The three MIT students are talking a bit more about what they did and did not intend to say at the talk in Las Vegas last Sunday, before it was blocked by a judge’s temporary restraining order. The Globe and the Tech both have informative stories. The slides of the talk itself were distributed to registrants at the conference before the students and MIT had been sued. They are worth perusing (pdf here). You don’t need to parse the cryptography slides to be interested in the photographs of physical insecurities: unlocked doors, unattended equipment, etc.

Yesterday’s Herald story is also well-informed. And the comments seem to be running about 4:1 against the MBTA. Of course, the MBTA is a favorite whipping boy in the Boston area. This is the same organization that earlier in the summer went after Legal Seafoods, the great seafood restaurant chain, for some ads that teasingly compared MBTA conductors to halibut.

Media Nation has the right take on this. “Charles Evans Hughes forgot something when he wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark¬†Near v. Minnesota decision in 1931.¬†The chief justice listed national security, obscenity and the imminent threat of violence as essentially the only three reasons that the courts could ever step in and order someone not to exercise his right to free speech. What he left out: information that could result in the MBTA’s losing some fare money. What a bonehead, eh?” The Media Nation post goes on to note that the judge who issued the TRO has a history of offenses to the First Amendment.

Discussions of security problems at places like DEFCON enhance security. Let’s suppose the T had answered their phone when the students first tried to contact them and the whole thing had gone no farther than that. Then the T would have had the benefit of what those three undergraduates had learned. With a discussion at the conference, they would have had the ideas debugged by many far more experienced security experts too. Openness is the way to the truth; stifling free speech makes matters worse, not better.

Last month, Governor Patrick was being discussed as a possible Supreme Court nominee under an Obama administration. He knows about this case; supposedly he weighed in on it. The MBTA reports to him. He supposedly cares about education, and constitutional liberties. Get going, Mr. Governor. Tell Daniel Grabauskas, the T head, to drop the suit. And to stop complaining about fish jokes, too, and get his organization focused on locking its doors, at least!

The Chronicle, or Carbuncle as it is sometimes known, is the major weekly higher-ed newsletter. Today it web site features a 9-minute audio podcast with Hal and Harry, about Blown to Bits.

After yesterday’s heavy post, I thought I’d go with something lighter today. Google News accompanied a story on the conflict between Russia and Georgia with a map locating the battles in the American South!

US District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock has issued a temporary restraining order (pdf¬†here) to MIT students to prevent them from speaking at the DEFCON Conference in Las Vegas about how cracking the fare card systems used by our local mass transit system, the MBTA. According to the MBTA‚Äôs complaint (pdf¬†here), the students were working under the supervision of Professor Ron Rivest of MIT, a pioneering figure in the the modern development of cryptography. The complaint and the restraining order are directed against MIT as well as the three undergraduates, because ‚ÄúMIT has been unwilling to set limits on the MIT Undergrads‚Äô activities.‚Äù Imagine — a university not telling its students to hold their tongues about their discoveries.

The story is covered in the Boston newspapers (Herald story here, Globe story here). The most complete account is in the UK Tech site, The Register.

Prior restraint of speech is serious business, especially for the press and for academic researchers. A quick reading of the documents in this case suggests that this order is wrong. No human lives are at stake here, just the revenues of the MBTA, which are threatened not by the students’ acts but by the MBTA’s technical incompetence.

Ironically, the court has made public a document the students submitted in response to the complaint. This document (PDF here, courtesy of Wired) reveals a great deal of what the students were going to say. Similar information was apparently included in a class presentation that has been publicly available for weeks, and in materials thousands of conference registrants received on checking in. The injunction against speech is, if nothing else, moot.

Though details matter, the students seem fundamentally to have discovered a hole in the security fence and now are being taken to court for their plan to tell people about it. The most gaping hole the students report in the MBTA’s security system is that Charlie Tickets (paper tickets with a magnetic stripe) use a laughably weak form of security, which does not deserve to be called encryption. To guard against someone altering a few bits on the card to increase its value, the card includes a “checksum,” just a sum of all the bits, keeping only the lowest-significance six bits of the sum. If you imagine the data being in decimal rather than binary, this is equivalent to adding up a column of numbers and appending to the column the last two digits of the sum. Then if you wanted to check whether any of the numbers had been altered, you could compute the sum yourself and see that the last two digits matched what was on the card. Of course, if you knew how to alter the checksum too, you could easily defeat this crude check. And with only a hundred possibilities, it’s pretty easy to figure out how the checksum is computed and to forge it as well. (With six bits of checksum, there are only 64 possibilities to test.)

There will be a lot of fallout from this case. To be sure, the students might have used a more academic tease than “Want free subway rides for life?” to draw in an audience. And they may be in hot water for going into the MBTA’s network control rooms in the course of discovering that they were routinely left unlocked — a huge security problem. On the other hand, the statute the MBTA complains the students have violated — the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — hardly seems applicable. The MBTA is claiming that the transmission of the vulnerability from the lips of the students to the ears of the listeners falls under a statute designed to outlaw fraudulent electronic attacks over computer networks.

At its core, the situation has arisen because the MBTA violated one of the basic principles explained in Chapter 5 of Blown to Bits: Kerckhoffs’s Principle. A security system is more likely to be secure if everyone knows what it is. Keeping the design secret is an invitation to crack it — if the students hadn’t done it, then criminals would. History has countless examples. What the MBTA should have done is to post its security design on its Web site and challenge all the world’s students to crack it. Technologies exist for secure data encryption. Keeping your bright idea on how to do it secret is not the way to get a good design.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is defending the students. In the meantime, I would note one interesting detail. According to the Register’s report, when the students met with an MBTA representative earlier this week, “The MBTA official made clear the level of concern reached all the way up to the governor’s office.” Governor Patrick has styled himself a champion of personal freedom. Mr. Governor, you can call off the dogs. This is not the way to solve the state’s problems.

That’s the name of a “crowdsourcing” Web site, whoissick.org. It’s a work in progress, so slow, but go try it. You type in a zip code and you find out the symptoms of people in your neighborhood. And the data comes from you too; you submit your observations of your own symptoms, or those of someone you know. Weird. The origin tale is peculiar too — the site’s creator waited with his sick wife for four hours in an emergency room, only to be told that she had the same symptoms as lots of other people in the area. He wouldn’t have bothered if he knew what was going around.

The site illustrates two developing trends. The ease with which mashups can be thrown together (including this one, from the Huffington Post site, with wonderful depictions of your neighbors’ political allegiances, drawn from public databases). And the ease with which we can now try to channel large numbers of voluntary, amateur observations into widely useful knowledge.

No, not John McCain, the candidate; “John McCain,” the words. Politico reports that it costs twice as much to buy “John McCain” on Google AdWords as “Barack Obama.”

As we explain in Chapter 4 of Blown to Bits, the text ads that appear on the right of a page of Google searches are brought up in response to the words you’ve searched for. Since there is only so much real estate on the screen, there is a continuous auction for words, with the ads for the highest bidders being displayed. The advertisers set a budget and every time one of their ads is clicked on, the budget is decremented by the bid amount. That’s how Google makes its money. Particular terms can go for anywhere from a buck a click, to thousands.

According to the story, McCain’s name costs up to $470 per click, while Obama’s tops out at $250. Why? Perhaps because McCain’s campaign is itself bidding up the price. Apparently it also buys “Barack Obama” clicks — with ads reading “Obama for president? Why not learn more about John McCain for president?”