Stanford Center for Internet and Society

HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) Number Six wrapped up Sunday in New York.

The conference name dates back to the first meeting in 1994 and was in use by this crowd long before then. Organizers and attendees are proud of the label, but it can be a little confusing around laypeople. My friends who don't know about HOPE have been asking what it was like to spend the weekend with evil hackers, since I design and build security software. The answer is that if evil hackers were there, and a few probably were, I didn't see them. They were crowded out by students, corporate IT types, security people like me, and activists of many persuasions (mostly liberal, natch). Speakers included computer forensics guys, the people behind Make Magazine, cryptographers, anti-fraud experts, authors, computer collectors and hobbyists.

"Rules" and "physical laws" are two powerful, immediate, external influences on our behavior.

At its heart, a rule is little more than a suggestion backed by a threat. A rule's power comes from outside itself, through enforcers who detect and punish violations. Without support, a rule can be freely ignored, or at least "bent" a little.

By contrast, a physical law is a sort of self-enforcing rule. Physical laws are obeyed not because they threaten punishment, but because they're either impossible to violate, or because violation will assuredly cause immediate pain or damage. Drivers run red lights all the time, but nobody hides from gravity.

Live anywhere long enough and you evolve a few personal rituals. Until yesterday, one of my favorites was to take the T to the center of town, and browse in the shopping mayhem of Downtown Crossing, the most "big city" part of Boston.

At Macy's, normally, you'd see a pretzel stand and a sausage sandwich stand. Not healthy, but tasty.

Yesterday, I found the pretzel and sausage guys. But I also found a Boston Police Dept surveillance truck prominently parked across the sidewalk, with an imposing camera mounted on a tall tower, watching us all.

Can't say I felt too good about that. Matter of fact, I wanted to cry. I'll spare the homily since this tale has been written a thousand times already by others.

I believe a great many problems on the net and in the world could be mitigated if more thought were given to effective, clear communication.

Here's a quote from someone who doesn't actually know the meaning of the words he's just said, cribbed from TheStreet.com, Feb 28, 2006:

"Google finance chief George Reyes, speaking at a Merrill Lynch conference Tuesday morning, said that "clearly our growth rates are slowing."

"You can see that each and every quarter... We are going to have to find new ways to monetize the business..."

"... We're getting to a point where a law of large numbers starts to take root. At the end of the day, growth will slow..."

Online music sales, copyright, media aren't my main focus as a CIS Fellow, but I do burn a fair bit of time exploring the issues. I recently designed some micropay techniques that might help the matter a bit, leveraging behavioral econ and regular econ and some other stuff (it's not going to market for now, so more on that some other day)... the matter is complicated. The industry doesn't want to kill itself by accident, but has also been reluctant to even experiment with anything other than more-restrictive technologies, which we know by now, really annoy people. Annoyed people aren't good for business.

People make mistakes: errors of judgement (say, choosing a vote counting technology that is unreliable or open to fraud); and errors of execution ("pushing the wrong button" causing votes to be lost). I suppose VTP is fundamentally about the design of voting processes that stand up reasonably in the face of inevitable execution errors, whatever the cause.

Voting presents a particularly unique challenge to mistake-handling - the anonymous ballot changes just about everything you'd otherwise intuit about how to tally, record, and audit votes.

Designers of complex systems - e-commerce web sites or vote counting machines or airplanes - may design with an expectation of frequent human execution errors, trying to protect us from inevitable mistakes - or may design with the sentiment that "user error" is solved by blame-placing and re-training, because the human "failed to perform correctly" in a pristine process and that the fault lies in the human rather than the system.