On the history of the telephone

Here's a brief but hopefully not-too-distorted history of the telephone:

In the late 1800's various people hit on the idea of using electricity to transmit sound over wires. It's not entirely clear who did what first, and there is quite a bit of litigation at the time, but in 1875 Bell is granted a patent for "Transmitters and Receivers for Electric Telegraphs". By that point, the basic premise is in place: extend the existing communications technology (wires) to carry a new medium (sound).

At first, telephones are confined to early adopters in places like national capitals and Deadwood, South Dakota (there's a reason they called the dot-com madness a "gold rush"). Connections are originally point to point but exchanges are introduced very soon, providing a means of scaling the network up. To make a call via an exchange, you call the operator there, who then connects you to the person you're trying to call -- or to another exchange, ideally closer to your desired party, if that person doesn't belong to yours.

Adoption proceeds rapidly and vast fortunes are made, but full saturation takes decades even in industrialized countries. Beyond the basic technological leap of transmitting analog sound instead of bits, technological progress is incremental; better phones, switches to automate the exchanges, standards for phone numbers, area codes and so forth.

As the technology matures, reliability becomes a concern. Other features, such as conference calls, call waiting, touch-tone dialing and such are nice to have, but can be dispensed with as long as you can just pick up a phone and expect it to work. The possible exceptions I'd cite would be the answering machine and voice mail, which are more in the "how did we ever do without that?" category. Caller ID is another possible candidate. It definitely changes the interaction, but if I had to pick I'd probably go with voice mail. Your mileage may vary.

Obviously there are several similarities and contrasts to be drawn between the telephone and the web. One that I'd like to draw out here is the pattern of a world-changing new invention followed by incremental refinements.

The idea of serving hypertext over an internet aimed more at file transfer and remote logins shook things up. Compared to that, Web 2.0 concepts like tagging, microformats and social networking seem more like refinements. Useful refinements, to be sure, and ones whose combined effect will help make the web in 2010 noticeably different from the 2000 edition, but I don't see them as revolutionary. One could make a case that improvements in bandwidth (I won't say "broadband" because current broadband will look like a joke in ten years) will have more effect.

Granted, if you put enough incremental improvements together you end up with a qualitative change. Long distance calling today is an entirely different thing from the "have my operator call your operator" scenario I described above, and as a result the world is in a certain sense a smaller place. Nonetheless, I would expect the future history of the web to have relatively few "on this date ..." major moments and more "by the 2010's ..." summaries of progress.

On the economics of anonymity

I'm still trying to get a good handle on the economics of anonymizers [and I'm not alone -- see here for pointers to a discussion in greater depth]. The first clear point is that clients use the service to offload risk, namely the risk of being associated with some particular activity on the web (three guesses what the most popular activity appears to be). When risk is transferred, there will generally need to be some kind of compensation. This is a basic economic proposition, one that's been back in the headlines lately.

But just where is this risk going? The first guess is the exit nodes. After all, it's the exit nodes that actually contact the services being used and would seem to have the most explaining to do if The Man starts asking questions. They also appear relatively easy to find. For example, if I continually send anonymous messages to myself, I should expect to hear from every exit node sooner or later (if the routing prefers a particular path for a particular client or server, compared to random chance, that could be used to narrow down the identities of one or both).

However, if The Man is really trying to find out who's on the other end of the connection, busting the exit node operator is not going to help, except perhaps to weaken the network as a whole. There may be jurisdictional problems as well. This pushes the search back to the clients.

Where we go from here probably depends on exactly how you analyze the anonymizer in question. Let's assume that The Man can make a better-than-random guess as to who's using the anonymizer or not. This seems very likely if relatively few people are using it. This will include pure clients, who only use the anonymizer but don't relay traffic or act as exit nodes, as well as the exits and relays themselves, who as far as I can tell have no way of proving they're not also clients.

Under this assumption, and all other things being equal, the risk is spread evenly among all the nodes, whatever their type. In that case, risk is certainly being transferred, namely from those with more to lose from exposure to those with less, but in a perfect anonymizer it's impossible to tell who is which. The basic arbitrage opportunity is there, but there appears to be no way to exploit it.

Or at least, no way for an outside observer to exploit it. If I'm, say, running a relay node but also using the anonymizer to do something truly hairy, I can be reasonably sure I have more to gain than someone just sitting at work perusing material that violates company policies. In effect, most of the clients are acting as a smokescreen for my activities. That in turn makes it worth my while to contribute greater-than-average resources to the network. At least, if I can do so without anyone noticing.

That seems a plausible story, but I'm not at all confident that I've understood the full implications here.

Clouds and onions

Hal Finney comments, correctly, that the story I told in Anonymous Three-Card Monte misses a couple of significant points. So here's an attempt to rectify that.

Generally, when you use an anonymizer, you talk to the anonymizer -- that is, to some set of hosts participating in the anonymizing. After several carefully managed intermediate steps the anonymizer -- that is, some participating host -- talks to the service you're really interested in. To that service, it looks like the request came from the IP address of that host, not yours, because that's indeed who's talking to it.

One way to look at this is to consider the anonymizer as a "cloud". You don't really know what goes on inside. An outside observer would see traffic between you and the cloud and between the cloud and the real service. It would also see a lot of random encrypted traffic among the hosts in the cloud, but as long as there are enough users (or at least computers spitting out random encrypted bits and pretending to be users) for the "I'm Spartacus" effect to kick in, that outside observer can't connect the you to your real service.

Good anonymizers use multiple hops inside the cloud, each of which is unaware of the rest of the chain, to provide multiple layers of protection, like layers of an onion.

The hosts, called "exit nodes", that talk to real services have to use their own IP addresses. Because of this, an outside observer could say "at such and such time, someone at this IP address connected to this Very Bad Site." If you're just using the anonymizer, but not participating in the cloud, there's zero chance that your IP address will be connected directly to the Very Bad Site. In effect, the exit nodes have collectively taken on that particular risk for you.

On the other hand, if you're using an anonymizer, you should probably pessimistically assume that an outside observer could tell which hosts are in the cloud. That is, you should assume that people can tell you're using the service. You should also take care that you use an encrypted connection to your real service. The exit node can only do what you (indirectly) ask it to, and if you don't ask it to use encryption, someone watching could say "I don't know who's at the other end of this connection, but whoever it was logged into this Very Bad Site under the name of ..." Caveat browsor.

So where does that leave the original story?

Well, IP addresses are being pooled, but among exit nodes, not among exit nodes and users. If you're an exit node, your IP address will be directly associated with the activity of random people whom, if the system is working, you have no way of identifying. This means you may have some explaining to do, more or less as described in the punchline. And you may have less explaining to do if your node has an IP address from a country that doesn't keep close track of who's using what address. Assuming there are such.

If you're running an anonymizer and not charging money for it, you might consider requiring anyone who uses the service to be prepared to host an exit node as well [It's not clear how you'd convince someone they wanted to do that. See this later post, for example.]. This, arguably, distributes the risk fairly. As a corollary, it also produces the "big pot of IP addresses" scenario that I originally described.

However, if you're just using such a service and not acting as an exit node, you shouldn't have to explain much more than why you're using an anonymizer. Beyond that, you can shoot yourself in the foot in a variety of ways, whether by failing to encrypt your connection to your real service, or by giving away more information than you think you are, or confiding in someone who turns out not to be who you thought they were or by some similar mistake. But the anonymizer can't help you there.

The larger point here is that you should be good and sure you understand what an anonymizer can and cannot do before you decide to use one.

Barristers and bloggers

Picking up where I just left off ...

Some professions seem fairly immune to technological change. The law is one. As the man said, lawyers find out still litigious men. If automobiles supplant buggies and consign the buggy whip makers to a small niche, chances are everyone involved will want to consult a lawyer sooner or later.

Which brings up a question: In the spectrum from buggy whip makers through blacksmiths, brewers and bakers to lawyers, where do writers fit in? My fond hope is that it's closer to the lawyer end (at least in terms of viability), and I think there's some evidence for that.

The odds seem good that there will continue to be viable business models in which writers get paid, whether it's through advertising, or as part of the production of interactive games and experiences or perhaps some other way. Certainly people still seem interested in text and in scripted entertainment.

And yet the writing game must surely be changing. Consider blogging. That's something radically new and different, right? Well, it depends. Certainly the medium is new, but just how has it changed the game?

For example, this blog, along with many others, is basically a column. The genre has been around for quite a while. The present example owes as much to E. B. White (at least as a model to strive toward) as it does to the pioneers of the web (to whom it also owes much).

What about political bloggers, with their game-changing, king-making deal-breaking influence? Is this a new phenomenon, or is it just political activists -- players in another very old game -- making use of the latest technology? (Let me add that when I say the game is old, I'm not claiming that all political bloggers are working for a particular party. Grass-roots activism has its own long pedigree.)

What about the celebrity and gossip blogs? Again, I'd argue that's an old genre in a new medium, and similarly for music blogs, personal journals and much if not all of the other material I've run across in the blogosphere.

What about the web of reactions among blogs? Surely this is new, could only have happened on the web. Well, no and yes. No, because deliberative exchanges in writing are most likely as old as writing itself. But yes, because the ability to quickly build up such a discussion, and to easily navigate through it later, is new and has a very web-ish flavor.

So what am I trying to say here?

• Writing as a profession seems to benefit from the web, rather than being marginalized by it.
• The web offers new media for writing, but the genres are probably largely the same.
• Web media offer new possibilities but, IMHO, the similarities to old media are at least as significant as the differences.

On that last point, I might liken the situation to 3-D movies vs. traditional ones. Yes, there is a difference, but the basic experiences are more similar than different.

Buggy whips and blacksmiths

Pity the poor buggy whip, the icon of technology's scrap heap. Do you miss the sturdy heft of the old WE302 telephones? Alas, they've gone the way of the buggy whip. Can't stand the latest annoying gadget? Don't worry, the paradigm will soon shift and it, too, will go the way of the buggy whip.

Just what is a buggy whip? As the name implies, it's a small whip used to drive the horses pulling a buggy or carriage. Buggy whip manufacture used to be a prominent industry, but that changed when the automobile came along.

The implication is that when a new technology comes along, older ones are left in the dust. Consider blacksmithing. Look up at the older buildings in many cities and you're likely to see a lot of wrought iron (wrought iron is worked by hammers and such, while cast iron takes its shape from the mold it's poured into). That iron was likely worked by small armies of blacksmiths under the supervision of a master smith.

Blacksmithing was an important profession anywhere there was iron, which was a large portion of the world. In smaller towns, the smith would also act as a farrier, shoeing horses. But all that's gone the way of the buggy whip. With newer machining and manufacturing processes available, why would anyone take the time to work iron by hand, at least in the industrialized world?

Except ... blacksmiths are still very much around, and doing reasonably well for themselves. What do they do? Apart from producing pure sculpture, they build fences, handrails, window bars, fireplace tools, weather vanes and anything else that can usefully be made of wrought iron. Generally a hand-wrought item will cost more than something from the local big-box store, but it will also look better, custom-fit the site and provide a one-of-a-kind design. Enough people like that enough to keep modern blacksmiths in business.

The same has happened with many of the traditional crafts. Witness the resurgence of local breweries and bakeries, which are now called microbreweries and artisan bakeries, much as guitars are now called acoustic guitars. There are any number of other examples. Free associating from "acoustic guitars", drum machines were supposed to put drummers out of work, but they didn't.

That's not to say that new technology is necessarily good for old technology. There are, after all, many fewer blacksmiths, brewers and bakers than there used to be. But neither is it a death sentence. It's also worth noting that many modern blacksmiths use gas forges and power hammers, and state-of-the-art brewing and baking equipment is, well, state-of-the-art.

Not even the buggy whip has gone the way of the buggy whip, if that way is supposed to be extinction. They're still made, just not as many or by as many people.

What does this have to do with the web? I'm getting to that ...

Scented junk mail. Oh dear.

Apparently, the advent of email has reduced the volume of snail mail. I say "apparently" because my own mailbox never seems empty. In an effort to counteract this trend, the British Royal Mail has, on advice from an Oxford consulting firm, opted to try "reinventing" mail, taking it from a two-dimensional medium to a "three-, four- or five-dimensional medium."

I'm not making this up. You can read it here.

How to do this? Traditional mail is aimed at the visual system because, well, the visual system seems particularly well tuned to the kind of information we want to convey with mail. That's why we have text. But in this modern, digitized age, that's not enough. Modern mail must be enhanced by adding elements of sound, smell and taste

The Royal Mail is on the case with a sales force of 300 dedicated to helping businesses develop, and decide that they need to send "noisy, smelly junk mail" (That's probably not the designation the consultants at Brand Sense had in mind, but it seems apt).

As far as I can tell, the underlying rationale is that the mail needs to compete with email, and its unique advantage lies in being able to engage all the senses. Since email can send sound and video just fine -- more conveniently, one could argue -- that really leaves smell, taste and touch.

On the radio piece I heard, the Brand Sense spokesman described using scent not just in a literal way, as with perfume or dish soap, but more abstractly. Use citrus scents if you want to convey freshness and excitement, for example. Intriguing, to be sure, but just what need are we trying to fill here?

The whole idea of the state-run mails competing with email seems strange. If there's less need to send paper around thanks to email, that's a good thing, not a problem that needs to be solved by inventing new kinds of paper to send around, much less expending resources actively trying to convince people to do so.

Mind, I expect the consultants would have a different take.

An editorial note

On re-reading my first post on Richard Stallman and trusted computing, I found myself unsatisfied with the way I had represented FSF's position on software copyrights. My first impulse was to fix the text, and indeed I did just that.

The result was even more unsatisfying, not because it was wrong -- as far as I can tell it was better -- but because, even though I clearly noted that I'd made the change, it just didn't fit with my view of what a blog should be.

This is a blog, not a wiki. On a wiki, the edit history is readily available. On a blog, it's not (even to me, as far as I can tell). In this case, I could

• Quietly change the text. I do this routinely with typos I catch on re-reading, or missing or inconsistent tags, or prose I just don't like. For example, I've tightened up the punchline of Anonymous three-card monte at least twice. But in this case, the change was substantive. Quiet, substantive changes seem out of bounds.
• Make the change and mark it as such. That's what I originally tried, but that left only my description of the original text, and that didn't seem right, either.
• Use strikethroughs, italics and such to show the changes explicitly. Frankly, by the time I considered that, I was tired enough not to want to bother with it. It would give the fullest disclosure, but it would also be well down the road of trying to make a blog into a wiki.

So instead I put the text back as best I could and put in a note linking to a later post that (in my opinion) handled the topic better. This seems like a good balance to me, and I think I'll stick with it. Purely editorial changes will continue to go in quietly, in a lame attempt to present myself as a more careful writer than I actually am.

Substantive mis-steps will stay in place [but I may comment on them later --DH 9 Sep 2010]. If a later post or comment adds something significant to an existing post -- whether the existing post is wrong or for some other reason -- I'll try to put in a note the next time I review. Naturally, the backlink feature is useful here as well, but a nice, visible [italicized note] should make things clearer.

That is all. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Sixty-year-old computer slower than modern emulator. Film at a 11.

I suppose that's not really a fair summary of this BBC article on a commemoration of the cracking of Nazi codes by Colossus, one of the first modern computers (depending on one's definition of "computer"). Still, it hardly seems surprising that an emulator running on a laptop would be faster than the 1940's original.

Re-assembling Colossus and getting it running, though -- that's a neat hack. Especially since the original machines were cut into pieces after the war.

Laptop orchestras. You read that right.

The University of York has been getting publicity lately for its Worldscape Laptop Orchestra, currently billed as the world's largest, though not the first. Others include the Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra and Princeton's PLOrk. Create Digital Music has a good summary. [There doesn't seem to be a good permalink for the Worldscape site yet -- I'll have to remember to fix the link when there is one][I've updated the link from York Music's home page to the press release for Worldscape. They still don't seem to have their own page, which leads me to wonder if they're still around].

So just what is a laptop orchestra? A bunch of people clicking "play" on some mp3 files and listening to the results? Not at all. Worldscape and its cousins are bona fide orchestras, making live music, often collaborating with more traditional instrumentalists and at least in the case of Worldscape, requiring a conductor. There is also at least one club sponsoring open jam sessions where anyone can show up with their gear, plug in and play.

The key here is the interactive element. An instrument in a laptop orchestra isn't just spewing out pre-programmed bits. It's responding to the musician's input, whether through specialized controllers, gestures grabbed by a video camera, or whatever else. As with any other orchestra, the musicians respond to each other, to the conductor (if any) and to the audience. The result is a genuinely live musical performance.

One telling detail: How do you record a laptop orchestra? You might think you'd just capture the digitized sounds the laptops are producing and mix them down. That's certainly possible, but if you want to capture the experience, it's better just to put mics in the house and record what the audience is hearing.

That's not to say you couldn't do the same thing online. I've heard of small-scale live musical collaborations over the net (though I can't remember where). I suspect, however, that keeping an orchestra of fifty in sync online is going to be a problem. I doubt you could just put everyone on one big Skype conference call, but if it's been done on that scale I'd be glad to be proved wrong.

A bit of clarification on anonymity

In previous posts (like this one, this one and maybe this one) I've taken a fairly skeptical tone concerning anonymizers and such. I wanted to take the opportunity here to clarify that a bit.

It might seem that I think that tools like anonymizers are a waste of time or that only miscreants are likely to use them. That's not what I think.

There are certain situations where anonymity is extremely valuable. Real journalism requires anonymous sources. Some crimes and abuses will only be exposed if those in the know -- including both victims and perpetrators -- can come forward without risk of identification. Political action sometimes requires anonymity. The Federalist Papers come to mind.

So when I take aim at certain quirks and pitfalls of anonymity, I'm not trying to write off anonymity entirely. I'm just trying to point out aspects of anonymity on the web that are trickier than they might seem (and therefore, frankly, fun to write about).

Wikipedia's angle on anonymous IP addresses

I'm not sure when this kicked in, but the message you now get when you edit a page anonymously is intriguing ...

You are not currently logged in. While you are free to edit without logging in, be aware that doing so will allow your IP address (which can be used to determine the associated network/corporation name) to be recorded publicly, along with the dates and times at which you made your edits, in this page's edit history. It is sometimes possible for others to identify you with this information. If you create an account, you can conceal your IP address and be provided with many other benefits. Messages sent to your IP can be viewed on your talk page.

So in other words, if you have a user name, you're more anonymous than if you don't. It's an interesting angle.

From its beginnings, Wikipedia has been beset by anonymous vandals who find out about Wikipedia's "anyone can edit" ethos and think "Whoa, dude, I can totally write 'My math teacher sucks' here and no one will know who did it", or something similar, but generally less sophisticated and coherent.

Fortunately, a number of Wikipedians have taken it upon themselves to make life better for the rest of us by constantly scanning the change logs for such drivel and reverting it back. One does occasionally run across vandalized pages, but in general vandalism gets reverted within seconds. And may I join the rest of the community in repeating my sincere thanks for that.

With that for background, it's easy to see why the community would want to discourage anonymous editing in the first place. On the other hand, it wouldn't do to ban it entirely. Anonymous editing (and editing by registered users who, erm, forget to log in from time to time, not that anyone would do that ...) is a valuable part of the process. Trying to prevent it while still promoting anything like an open culture would be an exercise in frustration as vandals worked out ways of gaming the system anyway.

And thus the current formulation, part carrot -- register and you can create your own persona and reap other benefits -- and part stick -- misbehave and people may well be able to track you down. Oh look: all those nasty edits to the page on FooCorp are coming from BarCorp's IP addresses.

It also warns legitimate anonymous editors that they may not be as anonymous as they think. If you're blowing the whistle on FooCorp, do it from a cybercafe or public library, not from your office at FooCorp (well, you knew that anyway, didn't you).