Displacement of Concepts

There are times that technology actually changes things. As Michael Froomkin of discourse.net tells it, “To Really Foul Up Requires a Computer” (citing theinquirer.net):

You can’t make this stuff up.

Secret Airforce One flight data sent to Suffolk tourist web site:

SINCE 2001, the US air force has been sending highly confidential emails including the flight plan for the presidential jet, Air Force One, to an English factory worker who runs a Suffolk tourism website.In the late 1990s, Gary Sinnott, of Mildenhall in Suffolk, near Cambridge, set up the website www.mildenhall.com, to promote his hometown. He soon became inundated with emails meant for airmen at the US airbase at RAF Mildenhall, where personnel email addresses end in mildenhall.af.mil.

It was all harmless enough when the emails were mundane messages to friends and silly videos, but soon Sinnott discovered that he was also getting battlefield strategies and military passwords sent straight to his inbox.

Note: theinquirer.net, a mildly scurrilous but generally well-informed British technology e-rag is not to be confused with a supermarket tabloid of a similar name.

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From the Telegraph:

A man will become the first person in the UK to stand trial next month accused of harassing a woman on Facebook.

Michael Hurst has pleaded not guilty to harassing ex-girlfriend Sophie Sladden via the popular social networking website.

This, to me, isn’t particularly news. Someone has harassed someone else. They’ve used Facebook to do it. Was it important that it was Facebook? No (so the specific technology in question isn’t particularly important). Is Facebook itself alleged to have done anything wrong? No (so the technology’s operators are not somehow at fault). Is this something that could have occurred without Facebook. Yes (so it is not a “new” crime). Did Facebook make it easier to commit the alleged crime? Perhaps.
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Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors writes:

“Viola’s Bookshelf is a new project blog dedicated to publishing altered out of copyright, or creative commons licensed fiction, where the character’s genders have been reversed. The idea behind this is to help provide an understanding of gender construction in fiction and to an extent in everyday life.”

Viola’s Bookshelf is here. Via Hoyden About Town.

Once electronic textbooks are more usable and adaptable, it would be interesting to do some gender bending of the language of judicial opinions, to see if holdings, and the rules derived from them, still sound reasonable and just. See generally.

This is a fascinating exploration, and I’m looking forward to reading some of the pieces. One thing that strikes me about it, however, is that it is one of those things uniquely facilitated by information technologies. Without an electronic (or online) and easily adaptable version of the text, this exercise is much harder. Not impossible; one could retype (using a typewriter, perhaps) a published book, being careful to make all the changes required. But it would be a long, difficult, paintstaking process. But because of information technology — specifically computers — you can do search and replace, checking each one to see whether context dictates a change. That is, the plasticity of electronic versions allows us to more easily adapt them to our own ends. Then, because of the Internet, you can distribute it widely for others to consider. Excellent.

A few days ago, Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker wrote about a new paper he and eight other authors have written concerning the ability of an attacker (physical) to access all the contents of an encrypted hard drive (the paper is linked from here). He followed up with a second post to clarify some things that had arisen in response to his initial post. For me, the most interesting bit is this:

“Fundamentally, disk encryption programs now have nowhere safe to store their keys. Today’s Trusted Computing hardware does not seem to help; for example, we can defeat BitLocker despite its use of a Trusted Platform Module.”

This ties in to posts I have made in the past about the “Trusted Technology Fallacy.” The basic premise is that we are wasting our time in searching for technology that we can trust to solve our problems. In fact, technology is not even particularly good at solving the problems that it itself has created.

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