Blayne Sucks

Unless you’ve been living under a rock on another planet in a parallel universe, you know by now that LeBron James will be playing basketball for the Miami Heat next year. The story is on the cover of basically every newspaper (Favorite: The Cleveland Plain Dealer). ESPN did an hour-long special for the announcement, but I really wasn’t all that interested. The NBA is less fun to watch than college basketball, and since the Pacers weren’t even in the LeBron sweepstakes, I was even less interested. For me the most interesting part of this story is how LeBron James’ decision has devolved into a debate about typography.

One person who probably watched the announcement is Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, LeBron’s former team. He took the news particularly hard and wrote an epic letter expressing his feelings. The letter is a study in how to take the low road. It’s basically a psycho ex-girlfriend letter. More importantly, it’s written entirely in Comic Sans, a surprisingly hot trending topic on Twitter.

When I first read the letter, I thought it was fake entirely because of the font choice. However, the letter is hosted on NBA.com and it’s been covered by ESPN. Thus, it has to be a legitimate letter. Of course, the big question is why did Gilbert choose Comic Sans? It’s such a silly font to use for such an important, multi-million dollar topic. Further, many type designers hate Comic Sans and wish it could be uninvented. There’s even a website about this: Ban Comic Sans.

Vincent Connare, the designer of the Comic Sans typeface, has been giving radio interviews about the choice. When asked about why he though Gilbert picked Comic Sans, Connare said, “You don’t know if he’s being sarcastic, if he’s being angry, or if he didn’t even think about it.” He does think the font choice could work for this kind of letter because it epitomizes the lack of seriousness that the Cavs have for LeBron James now.

I guess I’m left kind of dumbfounded. I sort of thought that Comic Sans on the Internet had gone the way of the blink tag. Let’s hope this doesn’t resurrect it.

If you haven’t seen OK Go’s latest video, it’s an absolute must-see. I tweeted about this when it was somewhat newer, and it holds up as entertaining many viewings later.

I’m posting about the video now because I just stumbled upon an interview with some of the folks that designed the contraption. It turns out that three of them work for NASA JPL:

• Mike Pauken, Ph.D., a senior thermal systems engineer
• Chris Becker, a graduate student at the Art Center College of Design and a JPL intern
• Heather Knight, a former JPL engineering associate (instrumentation and robotics) who is now preparing to start work on a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University
• Eldar Noe Dobrea, Ph.D., a planetary scientist working to study landing sites for the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory.

The interview is short and worth reading.

It’s probably not a stretch to imagine that few people are interested in watching a movie about cryptography. Cryptography isn’t exactly a sexy topic in pop culture, but then again almost every element of World War 2 except cryptography has its own movie. This is somewhat ironic given the huge number of movies set in World War 2 and the incredible importance of cryptography during the war. Enigma is an attempt at a cryptography movie set in World War 2, and I had the opportunity of watching it this past weekend.

Engima is a mixed bag of incredible accuracy and complete fantasy. Perhaps the best example of this is the setting. Although Enigma is set in Bletchley Park, which is where Enigma was actually broken during the war, they don’t even use the actual Bletchley Park Mansion in the film. Almost the entire plot is fictional, but the details about the Enigma machines themselves are extremely accurate. There are a couple of scenes that quickly explain the purpose, construction, and use of the Enigma machines in a concise and easily understandable manner. If you’ve ever tried to do this, you probably know that isn’t easy. The depictions of the huts, bombe, and other elements of Bletchley Park were similarly well done. For example, the windows were shuttered at night to ensure that Bletchley Park wasn’t visible to the Germans from the air. The movie uses this during an excellent depiction of an all-nighter at Bletchley Park.

The main character, Tom Jericho, is based on a real person, Alan Turing. In the movie Tom’s life is turned upside down by a romantic relationship with a Claire, who disappears without a trace. Tom spends most of the movie trying to figure out what happened to Claire, and he ends up falling in love with his primary collaborator in the search. I hesitate to give away much more than that because the movie is primarily a mystery involving spies, codes, and secret love. It’s a fun little movie if you like guessing at what really happened.

Tom’s real-life counterpart, Alan Turing, proposed to Joan Clarke while at Bletchley Park despite being a homosexual. Turing was also famously eccentric. For example, he was an avid runner, but he would sprint anywhere he needed to be regardless of the distance or circumstances. He even ran the 40 miles to London from time to time. As you might imagine, this doesn’t always create a socially pleasant appearance. Alan spent the rest of his (short) life struggling with society’s treatment of his homosexuality. He committed suicide at age 41 in a strange and ambiguous fashion that might best be described in film.

Although I really enjoyed Enigma, it mostly left me thinking that someone desperately needs to make a movie about what really happened at Bletchley Park. So much has basically been forgotten or overlooked simply because it is so hard to describe to folks who aren’t mathematically inclined. There’s a common cliché in science fiction films where a geeky guy does some indescribably hard fictional math and saves the day. This usually occupies a tiny slice of the films in between insane computer generated fight scenes. This cliché applies to World War 2 films with two important exceptions. First, the cryptographers at Bletchley Park actually solved some incredibly hard problems. Like, it really, truly happened, and it actually saved the day. Second, World War 2 movies usually don’t even give Bletchley Park a tiny slice of the film in between computer generated fight scenes! As a result, pop culture is ignorant of one of the greatest stories of World War 2.

In short, if you’re interested in a fun, fictional mystery or if you enjoy cryptography at all, then Enigma is for you. However, if you’re looking for a movie that will accurately represent the reality of Bletchley Park’s role in World War 2, then you’re going to have to make it yourself. I recommend starting with some sort of combination of A Beautiful Mind and Saving Private Ryan.

Last week, Apple announced their latest creation: the iPad. For those who have been living under a rock, it is a handheld computer that looks like something straight out of Star Trek. The iPad is a 9.7″ multi-touch display backed by Apple’s custom silicon, the A4 processor. Depending on the exact model purchased, it comes with a 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive and 802.11n wi-fi with 3G support. There are six models with prices ranging from $499 to $829.

There are two big questions to ask of this device. First, what does the iPad mean for the average consumer? Second, how does the iPad change the way we interact with computers? I’m more interested in the second question than the first, but since most people are more concerned with the first question, I’ll start there.

The first rule of buying Apple products for the average consumer is: wait for the second version, and that is my only piece of advice for the average consumer regarding the iPad.

Apple has a history of disappointing early adopters, and there’s no reason to think that won’t be the case with the iPad. Despite Apple’s incredible design team, there are inevitably missing pieces that are corrected or resolved in the second versions of their products. The iPhone 3G was much better than the first version. The MacBook Air prices dropped dramatically in subsequent versions of the product. Even the iPod, which was an almost instantaneous success, improved greatly in subsequent versions. I can’t say specifically what is missing on the iPad. I haven’t even used one, but it’s such a different piece of technology that there are certainly things that aren’t quite right. Here are a few potential examples:

1. No web cam.
2. Not enough storage.
3. No USB ports.
4. No HDMI ports.
5. No multitasking apps.

Now, some of these “obvious” omissions may eventually prove to be brilliant design decisions. Remember: good design is more about leaving things out than cluttering your product with too many features. The problem for early adopters is that we don’t know yet. If you’re an average consumer, then I would hold off.

Of course, if you’re not an average consumer and you have a few hundred bucks to burn on something that might revolutionize the way you live, then suddenly the second question becomes important: how does the iPad change the way we interact with computers? This is an extremely difficult question to answer with any certainty, but we do know that answers to this question boil down into two broad categories: (1) the iPad improves computing and (2) the iPad is a setback for computing.

There are a few important ways that the iPad improves computing. First, as a recovering hardware geek, I was most excited to see Apple use their own silicon on the iPad. It’s nothing all that revolutionary in terms of hardware, but it’s definitely not x86. I generally disfavor computing monocultures. It’s not always that simple (PDF), but the general principle holds up pretty well because nothing innovative happens when everyone makes the same assumptions.

Second, I believe Apple is right there’s a need for some kind of computing device between a smartphone and a laptop. I don’t think Netbooks are the answer simply because they are too similar to laptops. This similarity narrows the utility of a Netbook. I can’t imagine myself reading an electronic book with a Netbook, but I could imagine it working well with the iPad. I’m not sure if the iPad is the answer, but the fact that it is distinctly not a Netbook and distinctly not a smartphone are proof that it’s headed in the right direction.

Third, Apple didn’t include Flash on the iPad. This is the most important argument in favor of the iPad improving computing. It is a sign that openness is winning the web. Adobe Flash is a proprietary, closed-source product that requires a browser plugin to run. Unlike most of the web, you cannot see the source used to render the page you’re viewing if you’re on Flash-based website. View-Source is a good thing. Closed-source development for non-differentiating infrastructure is a bad thing.

I’m not saying that no one should ever produce closed source content because it is somehow inherently evil, but I am saying that it’s just not a good idea unless you know that whatever you’re spending money on will actually increase your net revenue compared to your competitors. It makes sense to ensure that whatever you’re spending resources to produce is actually a business differentiator. For web-based technologies, Flash is no longer a business differentiator. As Gruber says here:

Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells. [...] Developers go where the users are.

—John Gruber

Flash used to enhance the web experience by creating interfaces that weren’t otherwise possible, but now open technologies have basically caught up. YouTube and Vimeo were previously the quintessential Flash-based websites, but they are both already offering HTML5-based video. Heck, there’s even an open-source Flash runtime written in javascript. (It’s called Gordon, as in Flash Gordon…)

Most of the geek backlash against the iPad focuses on things that are missing, like Flash, but one of the key arguments geeks have made against the iPad is that it has a closed-app ecosystem. This is the key, critical way that the iPad is a setback for computing. As Tim Lee points out, closed-app ecosystems are top-down approaches that go against powerful economic forces, which favor an open development environment.

It’s interesting that Apple got open development 100% right with their more traditional computers. While Microsoft forced developers to pay for Visual Studio, Apple ensured that every developer who wanted the best available Mac development tools could do so by registering on their website and downloading the tools for free. This is still true for the iPad. The SDK is available now. The problem is in the installation process. Apple’s more traditional computers can purchase and install applications from anywhere on the Internet. (Also, the actual installation process is much easier than Windows. There’s no registry, and applications are almost always completely self-contained and installable by dragging and dropping them somewhere on your file system.) However, this freedom isn’t available for the iPhone and the iPad, which are stuck with the bottleneck of a top-down app store.

When I talk to non-techies about things like the iPad’s closed-app setup, their response is usually something along the lines of this: “But I’m never going to build my own applications, so why do I care?” This is a fair question to which there are a couple of important responses. First, users still care about the applications they use, but the closed app store model puts the actual decision regarding what’s available in the hands of Apple rather than the users. Even if you never actually build an application that you would use regularly, you still want the pool of developers who might to be as large as possible because someone else might.

Second, the closed app model doesn’t just restrict applications; it also restricts data use. The iPad uses digital rights management (DRM) to ensure that the books, movies, and other content users enjoy has been legitimately purchased. In an ideal world, this would be a good thing. No one wants thieves to prosper (except perhaps the thieves…), but the problem is that DRM doesn’t actually do this in the real world. In fact, DRM breaks more than it fixes because it restricts the rights of legitimate users. It enables censorship, limits free-market competition, and even allows Apple to delete content off your device without notice. Don’t think something like this could happen? Think again. For these reasons, Defective by Design has a petition against the DRM restrictions on the iPad. If you’re interested in more information on the perils of DRM, then I would recommend reading some of the more than 200 excellent posts on the topic by the folks at Freedom to Tinker.

So what’s the overall verdict? One thing we know for sure is that the iPad is distinctly different. Consider this quote:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

—George Bernard Shaw

Steve Jobs is a famously unreasonable man, and as a result, Apple has had some mega-hits, like the iPod, and some mega-flops, like the Lisa. The iPad is destined to be one or the other, and that’s far better than just another boring computer gadget.

We also know that the iPad influences two separate platforms: an open web platform and a closed hardware platform. If you think the open web aspects of the iPad is more of a benefit than the closed hardware, then this is a great development for open technologies. However, if you think reverse that opinion, then the iPad is definitely a bad development for open technologies. Currently, I’m leaning towards the latter, but that’s more of a prediction than an actual opinion. We may have to wait and see what changes Apple makes in the second version of the iPad before we really know how this device will affect computing.

On Friday, December 11th, my MacBook Pro stopped working properly. I couldn’t get video regardless of what I did. I took it to the Apple store the next day, where I learned that my graphics logic board was the victim of the infamous NVIDIA recall. I was told that it would take up to 10 days to get it repaired. Just as I was starting to recover from the shock of being without my computer for 10 full days, the Apple employee who examined my laptop said they would need my username and password to complete the repairs.

There is no valid reason Apple needs a username and password to repair a graphics logic board. This is a basic principle of computer security: Do not give anyone your username and password. I asked why they wanted it, and I was told that they needed to be able to log into the machine to verify that it works. This is simply false, and I’m disappointed that Apple would claim it was true. Graphics can be tested in a variety of ways without using an existing username and password. First, they could have used the guest account on the machine. Second, they could have booted into an operating system on a CD/DVD such as Knoppix. Third, they could use a bootable USB drive. Fourth, they could boot from an external hard drive. These options are even documented on their website. Needless to say, I refused to give them my username and password. They refused to send the computer off to be fixed. I asked if there was anywhere else I could get it fixed. To their credit, the Apple store employees were prepared to give me a recommendation to Ten Plus Systems.

I knew almost immediately after walking into their store that Ten Plus Systems was a quality computer repair shop. First, I saw one of the technicians talking with the receptionist about a repair. They were clearly organized, and my gut told me immediately that the technician was a genuine computer geek. Second, they were selling an original, fully restored 1984 Macintosh. It was absolutely beautiful. It looked almost new, and a great deal of care clearly went into restoring this machine. I strongly believe that people who are experts in their field have an intuitive sense that allows them to identify other experts rapidly. (Read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell if you are interested in exploring this concept.) As a computer science PhD student who has built at least a dozen computers from parts, I consider myself an expert in this field. I could tell this store was run by experts.

I arrived Monday morning and my computer was fixed 26 hours later. It was basically a one day turn around on a repair that Apple said would probably take 10 days. They didn’t need my username or password. They didn’t even ask. Ten Plus Systems is an Apple-certified repair store, which means that any machine covered by AppleCare can be repaired there. They also repair Apple and PC machines not covered by AppleCare, and they recycle old computer parts for their customers. If you are near Raleigh and need computer repair work done, I would strongly recommend Ten Plus Systems based on my experiences with them.

Disclosure #1: According to the relatively new FTC rules for bloggers, I should disclose my connection with the companies I’m endorsing. I haven’t been paid for this post. I haven’t been given any gift of any kind for this post. I haven’t had an out-of-body experience in which I was in any way compensated for this post. (At least, not yet…) I’m just a genuinely satisfied customer.

Disclosure #2: I agree with Adam Thierer: the relatively new FTC rules for bloggers are almost completely unenforceable.

Last week Bruce Schneier commented on a story about a prison that let an inmate convicted of credit card fraud reprogram a prison computer. Schneier believes this sort of thing should be an “obvious” no-no, and I agree. However, it isn’t obvious to a lot of intelligent and well-intentioned people. In fact there’s consistently been debate on whether or not criminals should be hired for computer security positions. There are people who fervently believe the myth that being an excellent criminal carries over into being an excellent law enforcement officer or security adviser.

Unfortunately, pop culture continues to prop this myth up with TV shows like the USA Network’s upcoming White Collar. The show is about an FBI agent who teams up with his nemesis-turned-good-guy to solve crimes that no one else could solve. Another TV series, called Dexter, which appears on Showtime, portrays a forensics expert who secretly murders the criminals he finds through his work. Both of these shows operate on the premise that experience committing crimes is useful in preventing them.

In reality, committing crimes and preventing crime are fundamentally different activities not because of the skill sets but because of the motivation and interests involved. In fact, the skill sets may be strikingly similar in a lot of ways. Some pirates are excellent sailors, some outlaws can shoot extremely well, and some hackers know a lot about computers. Don’t focus on asking whether the skill sets overlap. Instead, focus on questions like these: Are they dependable? Can they work well with other people in your particular work environment? How do you know they are actually interested in helping your organization? How do you know they are truly reformed?

After focusing on these questions, the truth comes to light: it is very rare that an excellent criminal history translates to an excellent crime-prevention future. There is a reason that police departments do a criminal background check before hiring someone. There is a reason that day care providers don’t hire convicted child molesters. There is a reason that banks don’t hire convicted felons to do security. Why wouldn’t the same rationale carry over to information or computer-based crimes?

Now, there are instances of convicts making amends and turning their lives around. Frank Abagnale is perhaps the most famous of these reformed con men. Hollywood capitalized on his story with the highly successful movie Catch Me If You Can. I know several people who have heard him speak at security conferences, and they have told me that he continues to apologize for his life of crime at the beginning of his talks, decades after they occurred. In fact, he may be a good model of how to lead a life of contrite contribution to law enforcement after being an extremely skilled criminal. He worked long and hard to earn the trust of banks and the FBI. He was initially paid only for positive results, and used the money he earned as a security consultant to pay back his debts.

Still, as a general rule, it should be obvious that hiring anyone convicted of computer fraud to do computer security work is a bad idea. Why take the risk? There are a lot of extraordinarily talented computer security experts who do not have the baggage of a criminal record. If you find, after searching for a non-felon, that you need the particular skills or expertise of a convicted computer fraudster, then don’t put them in a position of power. Don’t trust them without oversight. Don’t get caught up in the Hollywood story. The Frank Abagnales of the world are exceedingly rare; hiring a felon to do computer security almost never ends well.

Recent cryptography news serves as a microcosm of the development of computer security technologies. The discovery of fully homomorphic encryption by Craig Gentry, a Stanford PhD student working at IBM this summer, is by far the biggest headline in cryptography theory this week, month, year, and (probably) decade. Essentially, fully homomorphic encryption can perform arbitrary computations on encrypted data while preserving the encryption. For example, a spam filter could be used to identify encrypted emails containing spam, or an audit logging system could append an entry into an encrypted log file without decrypting it and then re-encrypting it.

Now, nothing is perfect right out of the gate, and there are caveats to this discovery. For the scheme to work, one must know in advance the maximum number of computations that can be performed on an encrypted file. It’s not practical; the discovery shows only that it is possible. Last but not least, we’ve already developed schemes that allow some limited operations, such as search, on encrypted data. These have been around for years, and some have even been reported on technical news sites. But even taking these concerns into account, the discovery is legitimately headline news.

The media loves to report juicy computer security stories, particularly relating to the discovery of new cryptographic techniques. Unfortunately, these headlines distract from the primary concern of the average computer security professional: We are just not using the tools we have! Consider last summer when a flaw in the DNS protocol became huge news. It was a problem that could have been completely avoided using existing cryptography. We just weren’t using it. In fact, despite Dan Kaminsky’s recent efforts, we still aren’t using it. Here’s a great quote from Dan:

DNS is the world’s largest PKI without the ‘K.’All DNSSEC does is add keys.

Why haven’t we “added the ‘K’” yet? DNSSEC has been sitting in a drawer, and even after last summer, it doesn’t appear to be a priority. It is designed with security in mind from the start; it is real, practical, and can be implemented without another breakthrough in cryptography. Only, we aren’t using it. And this has been the pattern of cryptography technologies for the last few decades:

1. Some smart people create something like public key encryption and/or fight against ludicrous export controls on cryptography tools.
2. The story becomes headline news for a day or two, and we all walk around feeling great about how we ‘solved’ the security problem and we’re all going to be ‘safe’ soon.
3. A few weeks pass and we find that no one is actually using the inventions that were just created and/or saved from oppressive regulation.
4. Eventually, we start all over from Step 1 with a new miracle discovery in computer security. That’s what happened this week.

Consider email encryption. Gmail (and most other webmail providers) still doesn’t support GPG. Gmail also doesn’t use persistent SSL connections by default, which means that your emails are delivered to your web browser in plain text when there’s a cheap and effective form of encryption that could easily be enabled. This was old news when I blogged about it here nearly two years ago, but Google is “looking into whether it would make sense” only recently, perhaps because of a letter organized earlier this month by Chris Soghoian and signed by numerous computer security experts.

I’m not saying that fully homomorphic encryption isn’t important, or that solving this longstanding, open academic question isn’t an achievement. It is important, exciting, and a huge achievement. All I’m saying is that fully homomorphic encryption, or any security technology, won’t solve computer security and privacy problems unless we start using the tools we have.

Edited to add: Here’s a nice piece by Brian Krebs that talks more about the letter sent to Google about ecrypting by default. In particular, I love this quote:

“What we’re saying in this letter is that as an iconic service, and one that professes to be concerned about user safety, Google could set a good example and set the right defaults, and if users want to switch back to something less secure, then they can.”

Dr. Eugene Spafford

(Full Disclosure: I am working with Dr. Spafford this summer at CERIAS on campus at Purdue University.)

Recently Google made a particularly big announcement concerning the Google App Engine: it will support Java. This announcement comes shortly after announced support for Groovy. Google has been making a serious effort to “win” the cloud computing wars, but this is the first time I’ve really seen a path to victory.

If you have never heard of the Google App Engine, it is basically a way for developers to build web applications that will be hosted in a distributed “cloud computing” fashion by Google. There are quotas and application limits, but it is possible to try things out for free. If your application becomes a big hit, then you can scale using Google’s infrastructure. You can find out more here.

Google App Engine is a big deal to developers because the worst part about developing web applications is that deployment, maintenance, and installation are the job of the developers rather than the users. End users like web applications because they are available everywhere they can find a computer and Internet access, but also because they no longer have to do any installation or software maintenance like patching or upgrading. Google App Engine makes all of this dead simple for developers as well.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this announcement are its impacts on “cloud computing.” Cloud computing is the worst-defined buzzword since network neutrality, so perhaps that’s why they are staying away from it. I’m using it to refer to any web application where the vast majority of the data needed to run the application is stored by the server. The infrastructure and hardware that store this data and run the web application are a complete unknown to the end users. Furthermore, this infrastructure can scale dynamically as it is needed and without end user knowledge. There are all kinds of things that would fall into this category: Gmail (or really any web-based email), Apple’s MobileMe, Dropbox, or Mozy. Truly, the list could go on and on.

The only “real” competition that Google has in this space is Amazon Web Services. (I’m sure that others will emerge, but developers can use the Google and Amazon offerings now.) Developers can use AWS API to manage data and payment services, but they still have to install, host, and maintain the hardware for their application on their own.  There are some platform-specific hosting providers built on top of Amazon Web Services that can help developers on that front.  For example, a Ruby on Rails developer could host an application on Heroku, which uses Amazon Web Services. By default though, there is no “platform” built into Amazon Web Services as there is with Google App Engine. Google App Engine is the only wholly-owned development platform native to the “cloud,” and it just got a lot better for developers.

And that is how Google could win the cloud computing wars. There’s actually precedence for this if you take a look at Java. Java “won” the language wars of the 1990s not because of its beautiful syntax (blech!) or because of its amazing GUI frameworks (hah!) but because of its universal JVM. This is why so many dynamic languages are being built or ported to the JVM. Look at JRuby or Groovy for examples. It’s really only a matter of time before Ruby, Python, Groovy, and JavaScript are all as fast or faster on the JVM than they are in their native environments. Other dynamic languages, like Scala, are being built specifically for the JVM. In short, the platform was everything in the language wars of the 1990s, so why would we expect it to be any different in the cloud?

Below is a (hilarious) video about executing ideas that I saw thanks to Merlin Mann’s posting of it at the beginning of the year. Warning: this video is possibly not safe for work watching due to some language.

[Side note: If you've never heard of Ze Frank before, then I would recommend Ze Frank's TED talk.]

One of the things I would like to focus on is a quote from Ze Frank that Merlin highlighted as well. This quote from the middle of the video:

And the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should executed…But the bummer is most ideas kind of suck when you do them.

I love this quote and really the whole section in the video where Ze talks about ideas. There’s something both true and subtle in what he says. Think about everything you’ve ever seen, read, heard, or come across that made you think, “Wow, that’s clever.” You would never have felt that way without someone else executing their idea. Here’s the subtle part: How many ideas are just as clever, but were not executed upon by their thinker?

Good economists recognize the possible value in unrealized potential. Bastiat may have been the first to write about what is seen and what is not seen. Essentially, his argument boils down to this: Fixing a broken window may appear to be productive, but if that were really the case, then we should all break every window we can find to help improve the economy. In reality, the money spent on fixing the window could have been spent on something else that would have improved the world before the window was broken.

Although Bastiat was talking about the allocation of resources generally across industries, I think his argument applies equally well at the personal level. We need to allocate our resources on things that are actually productive and not just on things that appear to be productive. We need to stop convincing ourselves that our ideas are inherently valuable when they are actually not. If you convince yourself that you should hold off in executing on your idea until you’ve completely thought it through, then you will never realize the potential of the idea. It’s not enough to stop being actively unproductive; we have to force ourselves to continually produce.

Paul Graham has an excellent essay on ideas for startups that also touches on the value of an idea without execution. The hardest part of founding a successful startup is not generating the idea, it is executing the idea. In other words, there’s no such thing as a million dollar idea. Google was not a million dollar idea. Facebook was not a million dollar idea. Graham’s proof of this is dead simple:

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here’s an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

In other words, Google and Facebook are examples of million dollar execution, and I believe this concept is just as important at a personal level. Executing ideas is much harder than not executing them. There are all kinds of blogs out there that are devoted exclusively to dispensing advice on how to be more productive. It is easy to feel productive by reading them. It is easy to feel like you’re working on stuff. We humans are extraordinarily good at distracting ourselves or, as Ze Frank pointed out, convincing ourselves not to act, which is probably why executing ideas is so valuable.

The Cult of Done is the only example I can find that might (maybe) take executing ideas a step too far. They take an extreme position on doing things rather than thinking of things to do. (Here’s a good analysis on the Cult of Done.) We certainly need to emphasize actual execution of ideas since most people fall so far on the side of thinking and not even close to the side of doing. Perhaps adopting the spirit of The Cult of Done wouldn’t be a bad thing. After all, Ze’s right: most ideas really do suck when you do them, and the only way to find out is through execution.

Our government requires transparency to operate as a functional participatory democracy. It’s not optional. If we do not have an informed citizenry, then we don’t have a participatory democracy. The Sunlight Foundation considers improving transparency to be a key reason for their existence. Larry Lessig wants to improve transparency in congressional funding to Change Congress. Hugo Teufel, the former Chief Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security, considers transparency to be the most important principle when it comes to privacy in the war on terror.

The first step in transparency is access, so let me ask a simple question: Are U.S. Government documents copyrighted? More specifically, Are State or Federal Laws protected as copyrighted works in and of themselves? Oregon decided to use copyright law to protect their statutes from being posted online. In this case, Carl Malamud of Public Resource fought back. If your intuition is telling you that laws are in the public domain and not subject to copyright, then you are correct for the most part, but the situation is really quite a bit more complicated than that.

To investigate a bit of this complication, consider the way the government publishes the law. It’s done in a piecemeal fashion, one law at a time. Yes, there is some structure to the publishing process, but you don’t have to read much of a law to realize that there are a zillion cross references to other laws. This doesn’t even begin to include case law, which clarifies the interpretation of a legal text. Ed Felten poses the scenario thusly:

Suppose I gave you a big stack of paper containing all of the laws ever passed by Congress (and signed by the President). This wouldn’t be very useful, if what you wanted was to know whether some action you were contemplating would violate the law. How would you find the laws bearing on that action? And if you did find such a law, how would you determine whether it had been repealed or amended later, or how courts had interpreted it?

Companies like Thompson West have made billions of dollars publishing information to guide lawyers that must answer questions like this. Typically, these summaries and indices are protected under copyright law as extra-value content. Thus, for virtually all practical purposes, U.S. Government Documents are copyrighted. If you are interested in more information on this, I would highly recommend James Grimmelman’s primer on the subject.

Of course, it’s not just legal texts that are technically in the public domain, but remain plagued by access problems. Court records are also public documents. Once again, this is critical to the very structure of our government. The words “secret government trial” should send chills down the spine of any American. However, as Joe Lieberman recently argued, they are still “behind a paid firewall.” (This firewall apparently comes complete with a government website from 1999.) Carl Malamud of Public Record is once again on the case.

Side note: Carl Malamud is running a campaign to be nominated by the Obama administration as the Public Printer of the United States. He’s garnered the support of Larry Lessig, Tim O’Reilly, and the EFF. (Not to mention Canadians like Cory Doctorow and Tim Bray!) You can read more about his campaign at Yes We Scan.

Technology is changing the landscape of transparency in government documents rapidly. Many of the problems are already solved. The cost of maintaining a website “containing all of the laws ever passed by Congress (and signed by the President)” is orders of magnitude cheaper than managing all this information in print. Ed Felten’s group at Princeton has argued extensively for an open government model that would just give us the data.

Yesterday the Obama administration announced that Vivek Kundra will be the “Chief Information Officer” for the United States. If you are interested in more information on Kundra, I would strongly recommend this excellent podcast on transparency in the Obama administration from the Technology Liberation Front. They discuss their thoughts on the position, his experience as the CTO for the city government of Washington DC, and several other aspects of transparency in the Obama administration.

The future is quite interesting for the development of transparency in government documents. Personally, I think dramatic improvements in public access of U.S. government documents are inevitable, whether they come from individuals like Carl Malamud, corporations like Thompson West, or from the government itself. The only question left is when…

[Update: The Technology Liberation Front posted another podcast today about PACER and accessing online court records. It features Tim Lee, James Grimmelmann, and Steve Schultze. I highly recommend it!]