Forward Lateral

I’ve commented some at Bruce Schneier’s blog. Bruce does a great job of writing about cryptography. He also covers privacy issues and, unfortunately, isn’t nearly as thorough. To be sure, it is a thorny problem and it seems to bring the ideological kooks out of the woodwork. This makes “rational debate” quite difficult.

My concern is that changing technologies are presenting new privacy issues that are being ignored. For example, while video cameras have been around for a while, digital technology continuously reduces the cost — virtually to zero. Storage and network capacity grows exponentially, and we now have the ability to link all video cameras into a large network. We also have the technology, using facial recognition, triangulation, and other new approaches, to recognize individuals on camera and link them into a centralized database.

Without any constraints, we could be headed towards a dystopic future depicted in Orwell’s 1984 or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In these worlds, video surveillance is covert and pervasive, and those in power have the ability to use this information to their advantage. Is this an unrealistic scenario? I think not.

You’ve avoided learning the ins-and-outs of the Unix find command because it doesn’t play nice within your Subversion and CVS working directories? Well then, I’ve got just the solution!

Don’t want to read my ridiculous blathering? No problem! Just download the free, open source code that “fixes” find.

Hello, world! — A fitting title for a first post. And not coincidentally, it is the default title given by WordPress to the out-of-the-box sample post. Traditionally, computer programmers learn a simple Hello world program when facing an unfamiliar computer language.

While we’re on the subject of WordPress and blogging software, let me take this chance to say “Hello, world!” and “Thank You!” to the creators of this free, open source software.