Both the US and Europe are terrible, but Europe definitely gets the short end of the stick. In the US, the primary model for cell phones is a long-term contract with a cheap (or free phone), and relatively cheap rates for service (plans are sold as a bulk $X/Y min per month, but most divide out to $0.04-$0.05 per minute), plus free long distance, free calls after 9 pm, on weekends and to other phones on the same network. In return for these perks, you’re stuck with the same carrier for up to 2 years, and God have mercy on the poor soul who tries to get out of his cell phone contract.

In Europe, the dominant model is a pre-paid plan. Rates are comparatively terrible (€0.10 – €0.30) even before the exchange rate. They vary widely depending on whether you are calling to a land-line or another mobile number, and even depending on which mobile carrier you are calling. Nobody in Europe has ever heard of free nights and weekends, and roaming charges when you cross international borders can quickly become astronomical. The last time I was in Europe, at one point I was getting charged €1.10 per minute for making calls with a British phone from Germany. It’s even more outrageous when you consider the fact that many European countries are smaller than most US states. The EU finally stepped in and capped roaming rates at €0.49 to make a call and €0.24 to receive. That’s still obscenely high in my mind, and it makes me wonder why EU regulation was even necessary. US carriers used to have roaming fees, but now they all offer free long distance. There’s clearly pretty major market failures in the EU telecom industry.

In theory, mobile phone networks in Europe are more “open” than those in the United States. All handsets use the GSM standard, and from a technical standpoint, it’s possible to easily swap a new SIM card into any handset to switch it to a new network. In practice, however, here in the Netherlands, I had been finding it extremely difficult to find an “unlocked” cell phone, which can accept any SIM card. At all the big stores here, the phones are sold in combination with a SIM card for a certain network, and the phone is “locked” to that service provider.

Trying to find an unlocked phone in the Netherlands is ridiculous. Whenever I asked at the major stores if I could buy an unlocked phone, they reacted as though I had asked if the phone could be used to call in a mob hit. Their voices would drop 10 dB and they’d say, “No, we don’t sell any phones like that here.” I need an unlocked phone so that when I leave the Netherlands, I can swap to a new SIM card for the next country and not pay roaming fees. On the advice of a Dutch local, today I went to a tiny, back-alley phone shop with a Turkish proprietor. Bizarrely, in Holland, buying an unlocked cell phone seems to carry a greater stigma than buying marijuana. While the coffeeshops, sex shops and prostitute windows are frequently out along fairly major thoroughfares, I really had to get lost to find this phone shop.

“Your phones, do you sell them unlocked?” I asked.
“Let me say, they can be unlocked,” he replied.
“Fine, what’s the cheapest one you have?”
“This one is 30 euro.”
“I’ll take it.”

He then unwrapped the phone from its box and followed an arcane procedure where he took the battery from the back of the phone, and socketed it into a black device with two wires protruding from it. One these was a standard Ethernet cable, the other was some sort of proprietary connector he plugged into the back of the phone (behind the battery socket). At one point he pulled out a knife and used it to either pare down or clean the connectors which fitted to the phone. To the Ethernet cable, he then connected a small silver cube with an Ethernet jack on the side of it. Finally, he pressed a button on the black box, and then gave me my phone and its charger. My interpretation of this procedure was that the small silver cube likely contained the unlocking codes for a variety of phones, and that the black box (powered by the phone battery) transferred them to the phone.

He seemed reluctant to give me the phone box and accompanying documentation until I asked for them. Perhaps this was because the box has a seal along the top which reads “Do Not Accept If Seal Is Broken: A broken seal indicates the contents have been tampered with, etc.”

The insane thing is that unlocking phones is explicitly legal in almost every country, including the Netherlands.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that I finally have a phone, it is unlocked, and I did not pay a fortune for it. However, you cannot call me because I still need to get a SIM card for it.

Reactions like these betray a fundamental and all-too-common misunderstanding of who hackers are and what they do. At its most basic, a “hacker” is one who hacks. The word ‘hack’ originated at MIT in the 1960s and 70s, where it meant something like “messing around”. One of the earliest applications of the term was for students who explored locked parts of buildings or steam tunnels under the campus. This was known as “tunnel hacking”.  Later, the word came to refer to elaborate and intricately planned pranks orchestrated by MIT students. The Jargon File (an invaluable repository of hacker culture) lists examples such as putting a police cruiser on the roof of a building, or inflating a huge ‘MIT’ balloon at the 50 yard line during the Harvard-Yale football game.

From this early use, the term spread to the MIT AI lab, which was one of the major hotspots of early computer and software development, and one of the birthplaces of computer hacking. It was there that “hacker” took on its current meaning. The exact definition depends on who you ask, the jargon file lists eight separate meanings, but others would claim fewer, MIT hacker Phil Agre is quoted as claiming that, “The word hack doesn’t really have 69 different meanings. In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation.”

To me, the key thing that makes something a good ‘hack’ (and its perpetrator by extension, a ‘hacker’) is that it involves cleverness and elegance (either in the form of clean efficiency, or intentionally absurdest inefficiency). Brian Harvey of UC Berkley (another important site in the history of software) argues that what makes a hacker, is at its core, an aesthetic judgment, and I’m inclined to agree. One of the best (although not necessarily most succinct) expositions of what it means to be a hacker is given by Eric S. Raymond. He lists the central tenants of hacker philosophy as:

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

There are many people who will claim that, “hacker” refers unambiguously to noble, ethical, hobbyist-tinkerers. They argue for the use of “cracker” to refer to malicious computer criminals. Leaving aside the fact that cracker already has a much better-established slang meaning, in my opinion, the people who argue the loudest in favor of “cracker” tend to be IT nerds who want the cred that comes with the label “hacker”, but don’t want to accept the moral ambiguity and anti-authoritarian connotations that come along with it. Just because you write code for a living, it doesn’t make you a hacker. In fact, it may even be a mark against your hacker-dom. A true hacker doesn’t write code to make a living, s/he codes to solve an interesting problem in an elegant way.

The truth is that “hacker,” encompasses both ethical coders and malicious criminals. Some criminals have been very inventive and creative in their efforts to compromise systems. By the same token, most computer criminals are not all that clever. It is a simple matter to download ready-made tools which can be used to, crack wifi encryption, or orchestrate a DoS attack, for example. These people are not hackers, they are script kiddies.

My preferred nomenclature is the one which uses “Black Hat,” or “White Hat Hacker” for cases where it is necessary to distinguish and separate hackers who engage in criminal behavior from those who do not. I feel that this terminology preserves the full range of meaning for “hacker” and doesn’t resort to silly invented (as opposed to organically developed) terms like “cracker” to draw the distinction.

If this all seems a bit complicated, it’s because it is. To help clarify things, I made a little Venn Diagram:

Then, the security line was held up because the X-ray machine needed to be rebooted. It was a Windows XP-based system by L-3 Security and Detection Systems. The reason I know who made it is because they actually had the scrolling marquee screensaver announcing it. I have no idea why you would use something as complex and insecure as windows to run an X-ray machine. That’s the kind of place you should be using something like VxWorks or an embedded UNIX-based system.

My friend Danny rented a car, so he was nice enough to pick me up at the airport. We’re staying with a guy from couchsurfing. He was really nice; he showed us around the place and then took us on a driving tour to Playa de Pinedo, one of the beaches near Valencia and then drove us out to Bruño so we’d know how to get there Wednesday. The only slightly weird thing is that he gave us the keys to this apartment, and then took off until tomorrow afternoon. We had assumed that he lived here too, but the evidence suggests otherwise. The kitchen was completely empty, and there’s no clothes in the master bedroom. No idea what the real story with the apartment is (usually rented out, kept for mistress, something else?), but it’s a nice enough place. There’s good wifi, and digital TV (with English sound). Plus, Spain is about 15 degrees warmer and 70% sunnier than the Netherlands, so that’s always good.

The terminals are connected to a wifi network which is locked (WPA encryption), and “not ready” for guests to use until October, so they won’t give us the key, which is very strange. BUT, there are wired ethernet jacks underneath each terminal. I’m assuming there used to be computers connected with ethernet here, but the jacks are still live so I pushed the keyboard and mouse from the non-functional terminal out of the way and set up my laptop. Since setting up here, I’ve loaned my laptop to like 5 different people to check their email or banking stuff.

Also, I am apparently the only person in the world who carries an ethernet cable along with my wireless-capable laptop. Maybe it’s just because I’m kind of a geek, but that seems very strange to me. There are still plenty of places where there’s no wireless, and carrying a patch cable just seems like carrying the power cord  to me.

But about 3 people have seen me with the laptop and been like, “Oh, is there wifi?” and I go, “No, but you can plug in right here.” and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have a cable.”

Anyway, this XKCD is incredibly resonant.

I downloaded it, I tried it, and I’ll say it right now: it’s good. Very good. The interface is clean and intuitive, it uses the WebKit engine also found in Apple’s Safari, which results in fast, accurate page renders. I didn’t run any memory comparisons (I’m sure hundreds of people are doing that already), but it feels much snappier and more responsive than Firefox 3, especially on Vista (I tested on XP and Vista; Google claims Linux and Mac versions are on the way). In many ways, Chrome combines the speed and responsiveness of Opera with an interface I much prefer. The startup page displays your 9 most frequently visited sites, a nice feature ripped off from Opera.

In short, it’s clear that Google put a lot of time and effort into this, which actually makes me very suspicious. Why go to all this trouble? What do they have to gain? It’s not like the world needs another web browser (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany and K-meleon have that covered, thanks). Google’s released it under a free software license, so they aren’t trying to sell it. They already own the search market, and they pay a lot of money to Mozilla in order to be the default search engine for Firefox, so it’s not like they need Chrome to be a trojan horse for their search engine.

The only thing that makes any sense to me (and the part that makes me really suspicious), is the inclusion of Google Gears support in the browser. Gears is a Google-developed framework for web applications, and it looks to me like their goal with Chrome is to make Gears a must-have application platform. This is a really, really bad idea. It will complicate the lives of web developers endlessly, and you’ll start to see sites that are designed for Gears, not according to common web standards.

The entire thing smacks of Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy, where they would move into an area where open-standards prevailed, embrace and support the standards, but then add their own non-standard extensions until those extensions became widely adopted. Then, change their extensions in such a way as to break compatibility with competitor’s products. This looks eerily like what Google’s going for with Gears. Now, Gears is BSD licensed, so it would be very hard for Google to deliberately inhibit compatibility with competing products without changing the license. But even if they don’t break competing products, they will still be in a position of power controlling a “standard” developed internally, by one company, that already has a great deal of power in several key internet sectors (search, context-ads). You’ll likely never be “forced” to use Chrome, but if Google is successful it’s entirely possible you’ll start to see websites that just don’t quite look or work right in other browsers. It will mark a regression, not a progression in the browser market (which has in recent years trended toward ever-greater standards-reliance). It will be like the bad old days when sites were “Designed for Internet Explorer” or “Designed for Netscape Navigator”.

You can only download it using their special download manager, which you then have to keep installed in order to have it check for authorization in order to keep playing the game. If you download it, there’s no provision for a refund in case the game doesn’t run well on your machine, or you just don’t like it for some reason (unlike the DVD hard copy version which can be returned for up to 15 days after purchase). Furthermore, if something happens to your harddrive (or you just need to delete the game for some reason), you can only re-download it for up to 6 months after the initial purchase. If you’re willing to pay an additional $5, you can extend that to two years.

In any case, it’s probably good that I don’t buy Spore right now. It would be pretty lame to waste my amazing time traveling playing a computer game. Still, I am sorely tempted, and this will probably be one of my first purchases on returning to the US.

The game has been in development since around 2000, and the release date has been pushed back again and again. The Sims holds the record as the most profitable video game ever made, so that bought Will Wright a considerable amount of freedom in terms of dictating when he wanted his game to come out.

It has been the subject of an enormous amount of hype ever since it was first announced, and there’s almost no question that it won’t live up to all of it. Nevertheless, Spore is revolutionary in a number of ways that will almost certainly change the way computer games (and possibly other fields like 3D animation or simulations) are approached in the future.

The most important thing to understand about Spore is that ALL of the content in the game is generated proceedurally. The best way to understand what this means might be to compare a recipe to a finished meal. Most computer games are the equivalent of a finished meal: the way your character looks and moves (usually absent some minor customization) is already pre-programmed, the music and sounds were already recorded in a studio somewhere; the game developers sat down and coded all of the interactions your character is capable of, and what should happen when you do those things.

In contrast, Spore is much more like a recipe, or a framework for a game. Rather than programming what the characters look like, and how they behave, Will Wright and the Spore developers have left that entirely up to you (and the thousands of other players). The game includes a series of intuitive editors which allow players to construct their own characters from a near-limitless set of options. Want to make a twelve-legged alien with two heads? Go for it. The game then figures out (based on its internal recipe) what to do with the ingredients you’ve given it. It will figure out how such a creature should walk, and run, and jump and eat. If you want to see for yourself how this works, you can download a free trial of the creature editor, or watch one of the thousands of youtube videos.

Not only are the characters and animations procedurally generated, the music in the game was developed by Brian Eno (who also did the Windows 95 startup sounds, among other things), and it is also entirely procedural, based on player input in the editors. For example, if you make a more aggressive, carnivorous creature, the music will be “scarier”.

The other part of Spore that’s revolutionary is the level of community interaction. Even though Spore is a single-player game, the content that makes up the world you play in is the content that’s been created by all the other players. So, for example, if the game needs a carnivorous predator to round out the ecosystem on your planet, it simply fetches one another player made. Here, too, the procedural nature is an advantage, because the data to represent the creature is only the “ingredients” (a few 100 kB), and all of the actual animation is done on-the-fly by the game. Good news for people with slow connections, and for EA’s servers.

If you really want to get a good sense of just how vast the scope of Spore is, and why it’s awesome (and you’ve got a lot of time to kill), here is a very long demo given by Will Wright to a game developers’ conference in 2005:

Digital dreams?

I’ve noticed that for most people in my age and socioeconomic cohort (basically, upper-middle-class college kids and early-20-somethings) their laptop is easily their most treasured possession. I imagine it occupies the place held by the stereo for kids coming of age in earlier generations.

When I was in college, the first thing everyone did when moving into their room at the start of a semester, before putting sheets on their bed, before putting away their clothes, before plugging in a lamp, was set up their laptop. Similarly, at the end of the year, the very last item to be packed away was invariably the computer.

For most kids, their laptop has become the catch-all indispensable device for living. A person in their 40s might read a newspaper to get the news, organize photos in an album or scrapbook, watch television shows on cable, and movies on DVD, listen to music on the radio or a CD player, and only sit down at their computer to get work done. For a 20-year old, all those activities are handled with their laptop.

Is it any wonder, then, that we take our laptops to bed with us? That we consider internet connectivity a utility on par with water and electricity? That we define ourselves through our files? That a dead hard drive is a disaster equivalent to your room burning down?

I’m in no position to say whether this represents an unhealthy dependence on, or obsession with technology, but I do think kids in my generation, who grew up with computers, relate to them as more than just tools.

The directives seem to be written with the mistaken idea that the ISP market looks like the mobile phone market, with only a few, large providers. Of course, if small ISPs are driven out by the costs of trying to comply with the directive, then that’s what the ISP market will look like.

Sadly, my computer is now totally dead. The hard drive had been behaving much better, lending further creedence to the loose-connection theory. However, today, it started freezing during bootup at the “Checking NVRAM…” stage of the POST. It’s completely unresponsive. Even more bizarre, if I try to enter the BIOS, it prompts for a password, and I’ve never set a BIOS password for this machine.

I’ve been in touch with tech support via email, and they claim there’s no easy way to reset the BIOS, no reset jumpers like on a desktop. The machine is still under warranty, so I’m hesitent to start tearing it apart and shorting EPROMs based on suggestions from the internet (or Italian hackers). Tech support keeps giving me variations of, “just bring it down to the store”, despite the fact that I’ve told them I’m traveling.

I’ll see if I can get them to pay for repairs at a computer shop here. Alternatively, I may wind up shipping it back the US for warranty service, and then just buying the cheapest thing I can find here, since I’ll be looking at a least a month round-trip. The ASUS eee PCs can be had for around €250, and they’re kind of trendy so I’m sure I could re-sell it easily if/when I got my machine back.

Ugh, super frustrating. If anyone has ideas or suggestions, I’m open.

So, first, the Italian Hackmeeting. My biggest impression on first arrival was just how cool the location was. I think I mentioned this earlier, but the story I heard was that the place was built as a party mansion for a guy with mafia ties. It was pretty huge, with at least two main levels, plus the roof and the basement. There was also a good-sized coutyard with gardens and mosaic tiled fountains that I’m sure were quite impressive at one time. The place now is appropriately graffitoed (Italian word!) and grungy, with some pretty cool artwork and berpunk junk lying around. All in all, an excellent venue for a hackmeeting.

My other major early observation was that Italians eat like crazy. The first night, not everyone had arrived yet (I got in on Wednesday and the hackmeeting didn’t officially start until Friday), so there were only about 20 people to go out to dinner. A sizable number, but enough that we could all sit at one big table at a restaurant. First, we went to a sandwich place called Mr. Pannini. I’m not a big fan of the Italian almost-raw prosciutto, so I ordered the quattri formage…which also came with prosciutto, whoops. This was sort of a stand up/take it and go sandwich place and it took a long time for everyone to get their sandwich. So as we’re leaving the sandwich place, somebody goes, “Hey, you wanna go for pizza?” and most people were enthusiastic about a second dinner. We went to “Times Square Pizzaria” across the street from Mr. Pannini. They served individual 7-inch (18 cm?) pizzas. I got the “Empire State” which was basically a vegetable supreme. The pizza was very good, but it was in no way New York style pizza.

So then, as we’re leaving the pizzaria, another person is like, “Let’s get gellato and coffee!” So we had to go get that, too. In summary, I have no idea why Italians don’t all weigh 300 pounds.

The meetings were pretty cool. I frequently found myself wishing I spoke Italian. Among the presentations I watched, there was one on asymmetric encryption that was pretty interesting and seemed to do a good job of covering some of the history of crypto. I also saw one about some new P2P technology based on bittorrent, but apparently better in ways that were unclear to people who didn’t speak Italian. There was some stuff with ham radio that was pretty cool too, but again difficult to follow.

I had expected the meeting to be a little bit more international in character. There were a couple of Brazilians (from Indymedia, they had also been at the Budapest meeting), one German, and one other American there. The American guy spoke Italian, though. He was a pretty cool guy, but he was also prone to saying things like, “All currency is false currency,” which sounds sort of profound and radical, until you realize that it doesn’t mean anything unless you have rigorous definitions of “currency” and “false”. Now, I’m sure this guy did have those. But they’re so open to arguement that it pretty much defeats the point of having a pithy opening statement.

On Saturday night, they had a band play at the squat, and later I went into town with a guy named Gioseppi, who wore a denim jacket and was really into early-90s grunge and Kerouac. He told me he wanted to visit Seattle because, “That’s where grunge is from,” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the grunge scene in Seattle has been dead since almost before Kurt Cobain’s body was cold.

Almost everyone was quite friendly and welcoming, and willing to try to talk to me in English, but not everyone spoke English well. It was quite isolating, and in some ways stressful to be surrounded 24 hours a day by people speaking a language you can barely understand. My stress was compounded by my laptop’s complete and utter failure on Friday. Some of the hackers were actually really cool about helping me look at my dead machine. I had initially felt bad about asking them about it. End user support is generally considered irritating and not worth the time by most people who actually know something. Plus, it makes me look like a “why can’t you fix your own computer?” moron.

I managed to get several people interested in it as a fun, curious challenge. Especially cracking the mysteriously-created BIOS password. One guy eventually guessed the password: all 0’s. Whether that comes about as the result of failing memory zeroing out values, or is some sort of default built into the BIOS, I don’t know.

Nobody could actually fix it, but they at least confirmed for me that it’s a pretty serious hardware failure that demands OEM servicing.

Also in the lame and irritating category, I slept on a couch of uncertain providence and awoke the next morning to find my hands and forearms covered with small itchy insect bites. I’m assuming bedbugs (couchbugs?). They’ve stopped itching now and have mostly healed, but it’s a week later and they’re still slightly visible. Lame.

There were a lot of cool things at the conference, however.

As part of a tradition at these hackmeetings, the DHCP was disabled, and anyone who wanted to use the network had to go up to a table where the “DHCP Umano” sat, provide him with your hostname, and he would tell you your IP address. I found this charmingly archaic.

They also had delicious pasta meals made twice a day by a group of volunteers. Anyone who wanted to eat kicked in €3 and was served. In the spirit of the free software movement, every day the pasta recipes were posted outside the kitchen, so that anyone who cared to could inspect the source code and make the food themselves if they liked a particular one.

All in all it was a really good time. It would’ve been better if I spoke Italian, but I met some cool people, including one guy who invited me to stay with him in Rome when I pass through that city.

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