Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act which also had problems but which didn't change this specific legal norm.

https://raineyreitman.com/2024/06/11/transaction-denied-my-u...

In this account the U.S. State Department's Internet Freedom Agenda (which many of my friends and colleagues have been directly funded by) is about destabilizing other countries, while Russian or Chinese spies in turn relish American Internet freedoms because they can stir up conflicts here.

I have never endorsed this view but I've run into forms of it again and again and again. Adjacent to it is the idea that some of our prior social harmony was due to a more controlled or at least more homogeneous media landscape.

In the past few months, I've been troubled by one specific part of the Declaration, in the final paragraph:

> We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Specifically, I think the cyberspace civilization, to the extent that it exists, has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense. The author of the linked post might say that this has to do with the need for moderation (indeed this is a big surprise from the 1996 point of view, as there were still unmoderated Usenet groups that people used regularly and enthusiastically, and spam was a recent invention).

I think there are lots of other things going on there over and above the moderation issue, but one is that the early Internet culture was very self-selected for people who thought that the ability to talk to people and the ability to access information were morally virtuous. I was going to say that it was self-selected for intellectualism but I know that early Internet participants were often not particularly scholarly or intellectually sophisticated (some of our critics like Langdon Winner, quoted here, or Phil Agre, were way ahead on that score).

So, I might say it was self-selected in terms of people who admired some forms of communicative institutions, maybe like people whose self-identity includes being proud of spending time in a library or a bookstore, or who join a debate club. (Both of those applied to me.) This is of course not quite the same thing as intellectual sophistication.

People were mean to each other on the early Internet, but ... some kind of "but" belongs here. Maybe "but it was surprising, it wasn't what they expected"? "But it wasn't what they thought it was about"?

Nowadays "humane" feels especially surprising as a description of an aspiration for online communications. It's kind of out the window and a lot of us find that our online interactions are much less humane that what we're used to offline. More demonization of outgroups, more fantasies of violence against them, more celebration of violence that actually occurs, more joy that one's opponents are suffering in some way. (I see this as almost fully general and not just a pathology of one community or ideology.)

I'm troubled by this both because it's unpleasant and even scary how non-humane a lot of Internet communities and conversation can be, and because it's jarring to see Barlow predict that specific thing and get it wrong that way. Many other things Barlow was optimistic about seem to me to have actually come to pass, although imperfectly or sometimes corruptly, but not this one.

If you want to optimize this with software you can apparently get machine-readable topology of the system via

https://www.mta.info/developers

and write your own graph traversal pessimizer for it. (Easier for stops/graph diameter maximization rather than physical distance, which I don't think is included in this particular dataset.)

I guess that branch prediction attacks are an analogous phenomenon, although slightly less physical.

For a purely remote attacker (although maybe we have to get clear on what distance counts as "physical proximity" because we need to clarify what phenomena spy satellites, for example, can observe), it seems pretty straightforward to me that there is such a thing as actually secure software.

You can make a very strong model of what the software computes and then prove that it never does some undesired thing. It's not common to do this at all, and even formal verification work may not use very strong models or models that capture some important part of the behavior, but it is possible to mathematically reason about what software does and doesn't or can and can't do.

To summarize some of the problems that I partly just mentioned (in no particular order)

(1) We may not have the will, the skill, or the economic demand to make software secure in a very strong sense.

(2) Attackers may subvert our infrastructure or organizations so that we don't actually apply the processes or controls, or run the software, that we expect.

(3) Physical proximity (for active or passive attacks) might sometimes include distances that are actually attainable for attackers. Maybe there are passive or active attacks involving lasers that can be mounted from multiple kilometers away, as an example. In that case most software users might not be able to be sufficiently isolated from the attackers to be protected against those attacks.

(4) Software or hardware other than the specific software whose security we're talking about might be compromised in its supply chain in a way that people don't have a plan, or resources, to detect or mitigate.

(5) Some systems might be compositionally insecure (their pieces might be secure in some relevant model, but the pieces might interact in a way that isn't secure overall, for example related to timing and concurrency problems).

(6) Our proofs of security for cryptosystems rely on unproven hardness assumptions for various primitives, some of which might turn out to be wrong.

(7) Some security properties, especially related to communications security, might be inherently unattainable even with correct software. For example, there's an argument that Roger Dingledine (Tor lead developer) once told me about that implies that no anonymity system is perfectly secure in the long run against a very powerful active adversary, unless the system is willing to make extreme trade-offs like shutting down completely in response to any attack. So it might be that we can't actually build any useful communications system that can absolutely guarantee perfect traffic analysis resistance, essentially because of inherent architectural trade-offs.

But I don't want to lose sight of the idea that you can actually meaningfully reason about what software does and so there is such a thing as the software being correct or incorrect, relative to some specification or goal for its behavior, and correct software actually does exist (which computes correct outputs for every input).

You're also invited, but not required, to look over the edge of the dam from the top, which is also very far down.

(Statue (of a man (blinded by a flag (put up by Banksy)))) in central London

It is intended to be

((Statue (of a man (blinded by a flag))) (put up by Banksy)) in central London

https://turismoitaipu.com.br/en/

Get the "special tour" which takes you inside the dam. An absolutely incredible spot and incredible achievement. They will take you into a room with a turbine shaft that's mechanically transmitting 700 MW of power.

A friend of mine spent a week in the hospital recently after crashing his new e-bike almost immediately after buying it. One interpretation of his accident is that he didn't have some of the right instincts for riding a bicycle at that speed.

I don't actually have a clear sense of the breakdown of risk attributable to the different factors of lack of appropriate cycling infrastructure, lack of appropriate rider training or experience, lack of appropriate rider expectations, or inherent safety or stability problems of some designs. My friend whom I mentioned above said his doctors told him that they had been seeing a lot of patients who'd crashed e-bikes (as well as electric mopeds and electric skateboards) at speeds that produced fairly serious injuries.

What I know less about is how much time or effort that multilingualism took, whether peer pressure forced some reluctant kids to stick with languages they were otherwise less interested in, and whether there are any hidden costs.

An example could be replacement of some native vocabulary by English vocabulary (which is happening in many languages). This is a benefit for many people who work internationally, but it probably harms intergenerational understanding on some topics. For example, a Brazilian friend of mine gave a computing history lecture where he noted that Brazilians briefly used Portuguese vocabulary for computer engineering in the 1970s before it was supplanted by English loanwords. That change might mean that older speakers would understand younger speakers less well on some technical topics, or that younger speakers would have a harder time reading older technical documentation. From the point of view of monolingual Portuguese speakers, the internationalization of that vocabulary might not seem like a pure advantage.

I also know that some majority language speakers in Finland (who probably expect to speak English with non-Finnish speakers) greatly resent having to spend a lot of time studying Swedish, the "other national language", if they don't anticipate using it in their day-to-day lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Swedish

In that case, it feels to some of them like the government is requiring them to be multilingual in a specific way that isn't their own preference or that doesn't align with their existing sense of ethnolinguistic identity. It doesn't seem like it's doing any kind of long-term harm, but I guess having any mandatory school subject that you don't enjoy can be pretty unpleasant, and maybe give you a more negative experience of formal education in general.

Some of the Swedish minority there doesn't prefer a future in which Finnish speakers only speak English to them (a phenomenon that already exists and that I think is growing over time). Even though it's officially legally protected, the practical status of their local minority language is being eroded by international culture.

I also have a native Finnish-speaking friend who enjoyed learning Swedish as a foreign language as a child, and ended up moving to Sweden and becoming a university lecturer (who usually teaches in Swedish). Foreign language learning can always be a benefit to anyone of any background.

To again brainstorm trade-offs, it's possible that that outcome is a bit disagreeable to her family back in Finland (who might have preferred her to stay closer to where she grew up, which might have been more likely if she had been more monolingual).

I guess one thing that leads to divergent attitudes about multilingualism and language planning is people's different intuitions about whether bilingualism is easy or hard. Some people feel bilingualism is literally automatic (just have children regularly spend time in different language environments), while some people feel it's expensive or prone to failure modes where some children favor one language or another, suffer cross-linguistic interference (which might not harm their intelligibility at all in their own immediate environments, but might be at odds with language planning goals), or become less than fully fluent or less than fully literate in one or more languages.

I was taught the "bilingualism is automatic" view and I know there's a lot of scientific consensus behind it, but it also seems like the fine details are complicated: not all children and not all adults will be enthusiastic about achieving and maintaining equal fluency in languages they use in different contexts, or necessarily about following a national or international standard to maximize understanding with outsiders!

My father's family (in New York) stopped speaking German in his generation, so I'm not a native German speaker, as my grandfather was. I've been sad about this, especially with the intuition that I could "easily" have been a fluent native German bilingual speaker "for free" with no adverse consequences to my English proficiency. But maybe that's not literally true (maybe my English would have been more idiosyncratic and less standard, maybe I would have lost interest in German as a child and become bad at it, maybe I would have divided my reading time between languages and ended up with a slightly smaller English vocabulary?).

> Linnaeus is designated as the type specimen for the human species, Homo sapiens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2008/11/16/the-mensa-diet/

(If the nutritional calories in the drink had been only the same number of thermodynamic calories, the drink would have been energetically negative for the body because of its low temperature.)