Anonymity at the source

One of the longer and more intricate threads on this blog has been anonymity. One of my early aha! moments in tracing that thread was realizing that being anonymous comes of having other people who could be you. Perhaps more precisely, saying that an anonymous person did something means saying that there are a number of people who could have done it. The more the better. Later, I learned that this concept has been formalized under the name of anonymity set.

I also learned that, since anonymity can have value, there are economic considerations involved.  If someone is going to willingly belong to an anonymity set which could be associated with some nefarious deed, they'll want to be compensated for that risk. Following this through, it would appear to be fairly difficult to get a robust and secure anonymous network set up.

These two insights gave me some confidence in understanding the broad outlines of anonymity in general, and some assurance that anonymity on the web has much in common with anonymity in the world at large. However, there's at least one case in the real world that doesn't seem to carry over well to the web: radio.

A radio receiver is passive. Absent fairly high-powered eavesdropping equipment, no one knows what station I'm listening to at any given time. Web browsing is active. If I'm listening to web radio, the server knows exactly what content it's sending where. If I want to listen anonymously, I have to associate myself with a set of other people who also might be listening to my particular station and then obscure my connection with the server so that any of us might be the one accessing that particular content.

With radio, even if I am the only person in the world listening to radio, no one need know I'm listening and I could still be listening to anything. The only way to know that people aren't listening to some particular content is to crack down on possession of receivers and to go after the broadcasters, who may be out of jurisdiction. Both of these are done, but not entirely successfully.

The only analog I can think of on the net would be to stream everything to everyone and leave it to the clients to filter out exactly what was of interest. This pushes anonymity back to the source. Instead of having a number of people who could be listening to a particular channel, the necessary confusion comes from not knowing which channel a particular listener might be listening to. As with radio, even if there were only one client in the world, there would be no way to tell just what that client was accessing. Keeping the source of the content anonymous is still an exercise in the familiar sort anonymity, but that much is the same in the real world.

Since this comes at the price of bandwidth, it will generally not be an attractive option. This is one place where the distinction between true broadcast (radio) and point-to-point (the net) really matters. The closest real-world example of radio-like anonymity I can think of -- and I may well be missing something -- would be Usenet news [If you're reading this now, there's a good chance you've never used or heard of Usenet.  Technically, Usenet still exists as of this writing.  Nonetheless, I've changed the verbs in the next paragraph to past tense -- D.H. Sep 2018].

Depending on the settings, the news server at your particular site might well have been grabbing the entire hierarchy, from sci.math to alt.you.really.dont.want.to.know. Anyone who trusted (or controlled) the news server could then read whatever they wanted. If your news server was owned by your academic department, you were probably on solid ground, but if you were using a web interface to access some public server, you were in the same spot as with anything else on the web.

I should say here that, as always, technical considerations are not the only ones that matter. In practice, the web seems to be a fairly open place with reasonable assurances of privacy. Likewise, in practice there is never a foolproof guarantee of anonymity, on the web or off.

More undead technology

For whatever reason, I found myself browsing through the upcoming generation tall buildings the other day. The Burj Dubai [Now the Burj Khalifa --D.H. June 2015] still has pride of place, but the one that caught my eye was the Tokyo Sky Tree. With a shape suggesting a huge Katana, the Sky Tree was considered necessary because the existing Tokyo Tower isn't tall enough to broadcast over Tokyo's latest skyscrapers.

So Japan, one of the more wired nations on earth, is spending hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to build a new structure to broadcast radio and TV over the air. Another case where the surprise is that it's not surprising. Evidently the transition from broadcast to internet audio and video has a ways to go yet. Assuming it ever happens completely at all.

Deja vu by satellite

As I wrote the post We want the world and we want it reasonably soon, it became clearer and clearer that I'd run across the scenario before. By the end, I was pretty sure where, and when I asked around, sure enough, it was Geocast (the name has since been recycled).

Ironically, I remember discussing the concept at the time with a friend who was directly involved and my not quite getting it. Technically, it may have been ahead of its time, but there was also the problem of content providers not being comfortable sending out semi-permanent copies to all and sundry. That part is arguably more of a problem with bigger cheaper storage.

On the other hand, worthy ideas have a way of coming around again ...

We want the world and we want it reasonably soon

One of the nice features of digital TV is that you can decide when to watch a given program. This isn't a new feature, but digital delivery makes it a lot easier. Anyone remember VCR Plus?

In fact, you can time-shift in two different ways with a typical digital cable setup (at least, I think mine is fairly typical):

• Record a program and watch it at your leisure
• Get it on demand

In either case, you watch the show when you want. The difference is when the bits arrive. In the first case, they arrive when the broadcaster decides to send them. In the second case, they arrive when you ask for them.

What determines which way the bits get to you?

• Storage space: Your DVR will only hold so much. If you try to record everything you might possibly be interested in, you're liable to run out of space. This factor is rapidly changing.
• Broadcast bandwidth: There's only so much spectrum available. With infinite bandwidth, a provider could broadcast every piece of video/film ever made at 1,000,000x speed on an infinite loop and everyone could grab what they wanted as it came by [See this post for some implications of that].
• Copy protection: A provider might prefer that you not store a copy of the bits. Instead, it would prefer to send encrypted bits to a box that decodes them, without offering a ready way to store the results. This factor is also subject to change as the whole copy protection issue shakes out.
• Time sensitivity. A live event has to go out live. Even pre-recorded material can have more impact if everyone gets it at the same time -- the water-cooler effect.

The broadcast-and-record model doesn't require a data network. Traditional TV/Radio broadcasting, whether from towers or satellites, works just fine. VHF and UHF together comprise around 3GHz of bandwidth, readily available without building out a "last mile". At the moment, that's still quite a bit of bandwidth. Even if the broadcast is via a data network, there's no requirement that said network be connected to or behave like the internet.

The downside is that (for the most part) you don't get to choose when the bits are sent. But how much of a downside is that? It's not a problem for live content -- quite the opposite. It's not a problem for not-so-live content either, as long as you can still choose when you watch.

Again, the connection between receiving and watching has been loosening over time as storage gets cheaper and easier. Maybe this is just me, but if my favorite show comes in while I'm asleep and I can watch it whenever I want the next day, I've got no problem. On the other hand, if it's something that everyone just absolutely has to watch at a given time, that's essentially live content.

The upshot is this: Given ample cheap storage, it would appear worthwhile to broadcast anything new that lots of people want to see, regardless of whether they want to see right at that moment.

I haven't paid a lot of attention to satellite TV lately, having had cable for the past few years, but I could imagine someone shipping out a set-top box pre-loaded with a huge video library and space for plenty more. Only new content gets broadcast.

Live content comes in as it happens. Pre-recorded content comes in whenever the bandwidth is available. Everything gets stored on the box, using double-secret heavy encryption mojo. You can have whatever you want, and reasonably soon. The result would be pretty much indistinguishable from a cable set-up.

You would even have on-demand viewing. This difference is that instead of demanding the bits, you're demanding authorization to decrypt the bits (for a while, at least). You might well obtain the decryption key via the web, in which case the web handles the transaction, but the heavy lifting of moving large hunks of video around can happen elsewhere if that makes sense.

Such a scheme would also have all of the usual data-protection problems, notably including analog conversion, but that comes with the territory. Whether it's less secure than an existing on-demand service depends on just how good the double-secret heavy encryption mojo is. I can see content providers being nervous about putting the keys to the kingdom directly in the hands of millions of subscribers, however well protected the data may be. But on the other hand, isn't the whole point of mass media to get the bits to as many people as possible?

Digital vs. interactive vs. internet vs. broadcast

There's a lot I don't know about the brave new world of electronic media, but a few things are starting to stick in my brain:

• Video is the 500lb gorilla. Everything else we currently do takes much less space and bandwidth.
• Unless you have fiber or something similar, video is pushing the limits of your bandwidth (*)
• Even if you do have fiber, you can use up large chunks of it with bigger and shinier video, or more channels, or better-than-real-time downloads.
• TV in the US is set to go digital in the next couple of years. This frees up large chunks of bandwidth for other uses (**).

That last chunk of bandwidth is primo stuff. It was originally allocated to TV exactly because it's suited to transmitting video images into buildings and across wide swathes of rural land.

Now let's look at video in the internet world, as opposed to old-fashioned TV with rabbit ears (Dad, what are "rabbit ears"? Well, in the olden days TVs had antennas sticking up on top of them ...):

• It's digital. That means, subject to various legal and technical restrictions, you can make exact copies of it, save it, view it and edit it with a plain old home computer.
• It's available on demand (or at least, upon polite request with money attached). You don't have to wait for your show to be on.
• It can be interactive. You can do video conferencing, for example.

The interesting thing is that none of these requires the internet. It's been possible for years to record video digitally with a camcorder, make your own DVDs, and so forth. You can (again subject to legal and technical restrictions) digitally record TV programs received via cable, satellite or over the air. Video on demand is a standard feature of cable service. Video conferencing can be done (and in some cases is done) via closed circuit.

This is not to say that the internet can't add value, for example by making video conferencing available to everyone instead of just to parties who happen to have the infrastructure for it. The point is that much of the goodness of new media is not strongly tied to the net, nor is it, as is sometimes implied, a direct consequence of the net being involved.

The internet is inherently point-to-point. Your basic internet packet has a single destination address. You can also specify broadcast and multicast addresses, but those require extra thought and machinery to handle efficiently. The internet is also symmetrical in structure. Anyone can send to anyone. The other party might not listen, but that's a different story.

Broadcast TV, on the other hand, has a very different structure. One party broadcasts to many. It does so very efficiently and scalably. Someone puts up a tower. As many people as want to buy receivers. This can be and is being done for digital video as it was for analog. Traditional cable TV -- everything but the on-demand part -- is somewhat less easily scalable, but it still has the advantage of having only one fixed route: from the broadcast center out to the viewers.

Why should we persist in using old distribution machinery when we've got the infinite flexibility of the net? For one thing, people remain interested in live TV coverage. If I want to watch the NCAAs and a million other people do as well, then why bother the internet backbone about it when the network can just beam the games up to a satellite or broadcast them over the cable network.

The one-way broadcast model still works just fine in cases where you might well want digital content, but don't care about interactivity. In fact, it should generally work better, and using it offloads traffic that would otherwise have to go through the backbone.

Which leaves me to ponder what really ought to end up happening to all that prime broadcast bandwidth.

(* A standard DVD plays back about 4 hours of video from about 8GB of data, or about half a megabyte per second. This is curiously close to the bandwidth of my cable internet connection, and in fact video full-screen comes across more or less OK, but not dazzlingly well. It's interesting to note that the same cable can also keep at least 3 tuners happy showing and/or recording TV shows with good fidelity. It's almost as though cable companies are in the TV business, but I digress ...)

(** Most of it was bought up by Verizon, with Google only putting in a minimum bid. More could be said ...)