The short version is:
For Net Neutrality –> For FCC regulation of internet service providers
Against Net Neutrality –> Approximately for the status quo

Most neo-cons are against, liberals are divided, the usual.

The weirdness starts when the libertarians get involved. Their position?
Screw the politics –> develop an independent, near-unregulated internet

The most vocal element of net neutrality support is represented by savetheinternet.com – they’re a pretty typical liberalish organization, petitioning Congress to enact legislation to allow the FCC to regulate service providers (a power which the Supreme Court has struck down).

They’ve been mostly unsuccessful thus far, partly because of a rather vocal group of libertarians. The libertarian approach is neatly summed up in this post by Eric S. Raymond. The basic idea amounts to this: the telcos have previously used regulation to increase their last-mile monopolies. Thus, more regulation would only increase their hold on the market. The purposed solution is to ignore the entire political situation, de-license the airwaves, and work on wireless mesh networking. (ESR explicitly insists that the political battle is unwinnable.)

Which sounds great to some people’s ears. A year ago, I’d have mostly agreed – who really wants more government regulation?

Except… the current state of wireless mesh networking is nothing more than a lab experiment. Universities are playing with it; there aren’t any real large-scale products available. There aren’t even any official standards for it yet. Other alternatives are much the same way. And in all honesty, to get any sort of distributed networking system working will likely require government support, if only to subsidize widespread adoption.

Which leads me to this conclusion – when your wonderful new wireless system finally becomes feasible, who do you want to be in control of the Internet – The feds, or AT&T/Verizon/Level 3? I’m not saying that regulation is perfect – but let’s face it, the regulation of telephone lines has ensured that you can call someone almost anywhere in the world without difficulty. Why should internet access be any different?

Whoops!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everyone! Today, I’d like to talk about the woman who, more than anyone else inspired me to go into computer science, Joanna Rutkowska. Joanna Rutkowska is a computer security researcher. Simply put, she tries to find new ways to break into a computer, so that the bugs which allowed the break-in can be fixed. And she is very good at it. Her original claim to fame was the Blue Pill, a virtualization rootkit. Basically, it uses hardware present in newer processors to take over a computer. (If you want to know more, read her blog post, but be warned – it’s very complicated!) The Blue Pill sparked a bit of a media frenzy – not to mention controversy (over whether is was really undetectable). Now, she is the CEO of Invisible Things Lab, a computer security research company.

At the time the blue pill was released, I was fascinated by the whole situation, and by Joanna. If you think about is, most of the really well known people in technology are teachers, especially for women. And yet, here was a woman who essentially, A: wrote some brilliant code, and B: gave a little presentation about it. And it was a big deal. More than that, and despite all the media craziness, I got the distinct impression that Joanna didn’t really care about the whole circus, not really – she just wanted to hack computers!

Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with teaching – but I personally don’t like it, and have no desire to teach. It felt strange to me that almost all of the women in technology I read about were teachers. And so, Joanna has become a tremendous role model for me. She’s a programmer, a researcher, she’s brilliant, and she’s just really, really… cool! (After all, that’s what technology is in the end – finding cool new things to do!)

So thank you, Joanna, and all of the other women we’re honoring for Ada Lovelace Day. Thanks for being an inspiration and for simply doing what you do best!

(Crossposted at Fourth Wave)

If you’ve been anywhere near a computer in the last 10 years, you’ve probably heard of something called Java. It’s a programming language and run-time environment, which, over the last 14 years, has gone from being non-existent to being the most popular programming language in the world. Much of Java’s popularity can be attributed to a woman named Kim Polese. Often described as a ‘one woman marketing team’, she insisted that Sun release Java technology without charging royalties: according to this interview, she said, “…it became pretty obvious to me that’s[royalties] a good way to kill a new language. People just won’t pay royalties. I was very insistent about that, and also about getting the source code out there.”

It’s no understatement to say that releasing Java in this way has revolutionized the software industry.

If you’d like to read more about Kim Polese, some other good interviews are here, here, and here. She is currently CEO of SpikeSource, an open source software company.

(Crossposted at Fourth Wave)

One of the hazards of being an aspiring woman in technology (and I speak from personal experience here!) is that you spend a great deal of time on related websites, forums, chat rooms, and other ‘geek related’ sites. And women in most of these places are non-existent. Not vastly outnumbered, not ignored, but non-existent. Try posting something, anything on, say, Slashdot with a female user name. Here are the responses you’ll get (unless things have greatly changed in the last 2 years – which I doubt). If you’re lucky: “OMG! A girl” or “It’s the only girl on /.” If unlucky? “Pix pls!” or “Wanna Cyber?”.

Lovely, isn’t it? You quickly learn to use a male pseudonym.

Given that a million tech-interested teenagers are spending their formative years at these sorts of places, I wouldn’t be surprised if this “women don’t exist on the Internet” attitude wasn’t primarily responsible for the overall lack of women in technology. You see, everyone’s heard of Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, and a dozen women Google and Microsoft employees, but they’re just not… cool. They don’t have much geek cred., if you will.

Enter Limor Fried, geek goddess extraordinarie!

Her biography page says, “Hello, my name is Limor & I’m an engineer,” She’s an EE (electrical engineer), she has a masters from MIT, and she has one of the most interesting tech websites anywhere.

Her site contains an immense number of original, useful, and fascinating projects, from SIM card readers to a universal TV power button. She has a company, adafruit industries, which sells kits for electronic projects, and she operates one of the most intelligent (high SNR!) electronics forums I’ve ever seen. Her pages on multimeter use and PIC vs. AVR microntrollers are currently the most popular on the Internet.

Her original claim to fame was the wave bubble, a portable cell phone jammer. She wrote an amazing thesis for MIT about the jammer (she calls it ‘electrical engineering art’) It basically posits that technology is taking over our lives, and we need to be able to control it. Thus, the jammer (and a pair of TV darkening glasses). I highly recommend reading the thesis – it’s excellent, and not boring at all.

In short, Limor Fried is one of the coolest people on the Internet. Oh – and she happens to be a woman!

(Crossposted at Fourth Wave Feminism)

It’s common knowledge that the power supply on a computer is usually the source of any strange ringing sound. However, one usually expects that the ring would appear under load – i.e. increased power = increased ring.

I just found a PSU that doesn’t ring under a small amount of load, using the integrated video card. When I installed a video card, it rang as long as the card was idle. When I put the card under load, it stopped. I thought it was the video card or the PCI-e interface. Guess what! It was the PSU. It only rang in a small power draw range.

The moral of the story: If you have a ringing computer, it’s probably the power supply, no matter how irrational the observed behavior!

Update: Replacing the power supply seems to have fixed all of my problems with JACK xruns, too – go figure. (if you don’t know what that means, just ignore it…)

We had a quiz in Java class today. It was easy – I already know 99% of the material – but the test was on objects. This made me think about OO programming in general, which made me think about C++, which lead to yet another search for information on the efficiency of Vector objects, which led me to the C++ FQA, which finally convinced me that my inability to learn C++ was not because I’m a stupid idiot, but rather because C++ is a stupid language. (See, how I’m working my link theory in here…)The C++ FQA lead me through a string of usenet post, blogs, and finally to a wiki, which had a link to the story of Mel – a Real Programmer.

I wish I knew somebody like that. Somebody who has the capacity and focus to keep that quantity of logical information in their head. Even the best professors in my CS department don’t even come close. Really, the only person I know who even comes close to that kind of insane intelligence, is not even a programmer! (she’s an activist type, and her ability to manipulate huge annoying organizations while simultaneously have a perfect understanding of individual interpersonal relations – that sentence was intentionally complex – is strikingly similar to Real Programming. It’s Real Human Programming, if you will.)

Anyway, Mel is completely obsolete. He was obsolete when the article was written in 1983, and his few replacements are widely scattered. It’s not surprising. Even I, with my mostly self-taught student programming skills, could write a blackjack program, with full color graphics, a selectable win percentage, and a computer opponent that hurls insults at the player, in less than an hour! The skills Mel required to develop perfect software has long been made useless by faster computers, shorter deadlines, and a greater tolerance for software that ‘almost works’ (thank you Microsoft!) Even hardware development is dominated by huge test suites, complicated CAD tools, and large teams of people working in a well-lit environment, where they have weekly meeting to discuss goals and throw around buzzwords like ‘Agile’ and ‘Extreme Programming’. Mel is gone, and his replacements are faster, ‘happier’, and more like ordinary businesspersons.

In a strange way, though, I still want to be Mel. No, I don’t want to program a RPC-4000. I don’t want to use machine language. Heck, I don’t even want to use assembly any more than I can help! But I want to do clever things in ways that nobody can understand. Fuck documented, elegant, happy interfaces! I want to have loads of obscure knowledge in my skull, confident that I am doing things in the best way possible, regardless of appearances. I want to be the woman who hides in the dark back room of some company, performing vital, yet inscrutable tasks, who doesn’t have to explain to some manager why she’s doing it that way – just producing results. I want to accomplish things that couldn’t have been done any other way! It doesn’t even have to be a programming thing, or even a computer thing – it’s really about the sense of gruness, if you will.

I don’t suppose this will ever happen. Everybody wants accountability. Most cool things are too big for one, or even two people to build. And I have far too great a sense of community, of sharing, of teaching to ever really pull it off. But the appeal still remains.

I want to be a Real Programmer.