Michael is editor-at-large for DDJ. He can be contacted at [email protected].
For a few days there, it seemed that everyone I knew was talking about Ginger. Not Ginger the movie star on "Gilligan's Island;" Ginger the secret project of inventor Dean Kamen. Ginger the invention also known as "IT."
This invention, according to the inventor, who ought to know, will "profoundly affect our environment and the way people live worldwide. It will be an alternative to products that are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities." Steve Jobs, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and venture capitalist John Doerr have invested millions in IT. Harvard Business School Press has reportedly paid $250,000 for a book about IT. Jobs said, "If enough people see [IT] you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It'll just happen."
Wow.
Last I knew, nobody was really sure what IT was, although Kamen's patents and past inventions argue for it being something along the lines of a gyroscopically balanced scooter, possibly using a Stirling engine. Everybody, including the inventor, agrees that the hype got a little out of control. My personal guess, based on nothing at all, is that ITs sport waist-high impact-absorbing bumpers, so that they can ram each other like bumper cars without injuring their passengers. I think IT would need some such safety feature, but mostly I just like the image of cities full of bumper-scooter riders bouncing off one another on their way to work or the 7-11.
What really intrigued me about the story, though, was this comment, buried in one of the reports: "[H]is father helped start Mad Magazine — Kamen is...Alfred E. Neuman." [Bob Metcalfe, "From the Ether," InfoWorld, November 22, 1999.]
If Dean Kamen is the living embodiment of Alfred E. Neuman, that would explain a lot. Personally, though, I think that Steve Jobs is the living embodiment of Alfred E. Neuman.
What, Me Worry?
Jobs took the stage at this year's MacWorld Expo San Francisco amid the usual exclamations of adulation. Brushing off two successive bad quarters, the first loss in years, the sad state of the stock price, the loss of leadership in the education market, Motorola's inability to deliver faster microprocessors, and renewed doubt about the company's long-term viability, he moved right into the announcements.
What, Steve worry? Not visibly, anyway.
Briefly, Jobs announced a release date for MacOS X; detailed the changes Apple was making to the operating system after listening to user feedback; announced new, faster G4 PowerMacs based on faster CPUs that Motorola was finally promising to deliver; announced a crowd-pleasing new thin notebook made of titanium; described several new software products for handling music and movies; and laid out the company's vision for the future. I'll say just a bit more about the product announcements, and quite a bit more about the vision thing, which in my opinion is the biggest challenge facing Apple today.
Most of the OS X changes are modifications to the user interface, and most of them are designed to appease those who want to keep familiar features and behaviors of the existing Mac OS. The Apple menu is back, although it contains different things and is no longer user modifiable. This is in keeping with the move to make the Finder more explicitly just another application; Jobs even hinted that there could be multiple Finder-like applications.
Complaints about the limitations of the dock have been partly answered by letting dock items display hierarchical pop-up menus. Folders show subfolders this way, and applications show their open documents in pop-ups.
Users complained that the Finder toolbar was clunky and didn't contain the right components; it's now remarkably customizable. You can drag and drop items to it, arranging them as you like. It's smaller, too. QuickTime movies continue to play in the dock, but get this: They also continue to play as you drag their (translucent) icons around the screen. This kind of attention to user interface detail won't help you balance your books, but it might help Apple balance its books. People who buy Macs do care about such subtleties, Jobs figures, and he's probably right.
MacOS X will be out about the time this issue is. I'm curious whether the technology a friend of mine has been working on will make it into the first release. It's potentially pretty cool stuff that Apple isn't saying anything about, and since I want my friend to keep his job, neither will I.
The new PowerMacs were really an announcement that Motorola was now committing to ship faster processors. But not many of them, given that Apple is initially offering the new machines in single-processor configurations where it had been shipping dual-processor machines. And the titanium slab — but you've already read about it. Suffice it to say that it really does blow away the Sony Vaio and is beautiful and looks nothing whatsoever like an iBook.
The rest of the announcements are best considered in the light of Jobs's stated vision for Apple's future.
The Vision Thing
I have written elsewhere (http://www.macintoshdeveloper.com/) about Jobs's vision of the personal computer's — especially the Mac's — role as the digital hub for the emerging digital lifestyle. The idea is that the PC, far from being dead, is beginning a transition to a new role as the device that ties together all the digital gadgets that give meaning to our otherwise drab lives.
It makes a certain amount of sense. Cellular phones, PDAs, MP3 players, televisions, and such gadgets are all commodity products sold in competitive markets. There is a lot of pressure to produce these things economically, which means that you put the smallest screen you can get away with on that PDA, that you don't build in features and capabilities that aren't needed for the device's real function. So for all the processing you'd like to do with that digital data, and to tie together all those digital devices, you need a hub: some kind of device that knows about all the necessary formats and protocols and that can run mainstream software and that has a full keyboard and adequate monitor and a large capacity, cheap storage device. That's a personal computer. And it makes especially good sense for Apple, a company whose primary markets (home, education, content creation) are preternaturally interested in digital media, that owns the hardware and the operating system, and sometimes the key application programs.
In this context, Jobs's introduction of iTunes, iDVD, and the SuperDrive were not so much product announcements as they were claims staked in Digital Hub territory. The software products — one a do-all music application that imports music from CDs, plays MP3s, helps you maintain a music library and playlists, acts as an Internet radio tuner, lets you drag-and-drop tunes to a USB-connected MP3 player, displays trippy visuals as the music plays, and burns audio CDs; the other a movie product that does much the same for digital movies, including burning DVDs — are free. By giving away these impressive tools, Apple has moved the line between what Apple supplies and what it leaves as an opportunity for third-party developers. And the SuperDrive — which does it all, reading and burning CDs and DVDs — is built into new top-of-the-line Macs; soon, probably, to move downstream into more models. As usual, Apple is making life interesting for independent software developers. With the new products and the new vision of the personal computer as digital hub, it's making life interesting for consumers, too. What I wonder is, with what digital media product will Apple stake its next claim? Maybe a comprehensive digital telephony application called iPhone?
The Secret of NIH
Another strategic direction for Apple, not so clearly articulated, is that Apple, which used to pour a lot more money into research and development, is buying many of its innovations these days. Let's examine the evidence:
Last April, Apple acquired DVD authoring software products and associated technology from Astarte GmbH. Astarte's authoring tools included DVDelight, which featured a simple drag-and-drop approach to creating DVD videos. Guess where Apple's iDVD came from. Astarte's engineering team came along with the software, so I guess iDVD was developed at Apple; it just wasn't invented there.
The other free software product that Jobs announced was iTunes, a nifty tool indeed. It was also nifty when it was Casady and Greene's SoundJam MP. And the music visualizer that Jobs demoed is reported to be based on the G-Force plug-in for SoundJam. Also nifty, also not invented at Apple.
The SuperDrive, of course, is from Pioneer. Jobs made that clear. And why not? Apple is not in the disk-drive business. Of course this acquiring of products didn't start when Jobs became CEO. It's how he got to be CEO, in fact. He was in the package, like the prize in the Cracker Jack box, when Apple bought its next operating system a few years ago.
And why shouldn't Apple acquire new technology? The company can be a lot more responsive that way than if it had to depend on its own research and development. Of course, my friend's aforementioned secret technology is being developed within Apple, and will be nifty. If they ever let it out.
Steven Levy's Crypto
I get a lot of books for free, but I actually paid for this one, in hardback, and had the author sign it. Although on closer examination I see that he merely initialed it. Hmm. I could be offended, but given the book's subject matter, this might just indicate paranoia rather than insufficient deference to a probable reviewer.
The book in question is Steven Levy's Crypto (Viking Press, 2001; ISBN 0-670-85950-8). The subtitle is "How the Code Rebels Beat the Government — Saving Privacy in the Digital Age." Twice in the book Levy quotes a famous 19th century cryptographer. Well, he was famous, and he was sort of a cryptographer. "It may roundly be asserted...that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve," Edgar Allen Poe asserted roundly, and apparently incorrectly, although see below.
It may just as roundly be asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a technical subject which human ingenuity cannot explain to the general public, and that assertion would probably be wrong, too. Certainly Levy doesn't always succeed, although some of his explanations are excellent.
After describing the setting of the wheels on the WWII German Enigma code machines, he introduces digital keys in terms of that easy-to-visualize physical system: "With computers, the equivalent of Enigma settings would become a digital key, a long string of numbers that would help determine how the system would transform the original message." And here's a nice explanation of an important point about RSA: "Thinking of it another way, on its way to ciphertext, the original message was intimately intertwined with the product of the two primes. What made the information in the plaintext unreadable was a mathematical transformation involving that large product — a transformation that could only be reversed if you knew what those two primes were."
Occasionally, though, he gives a simple idea an unnecessarily wordy treatment: "Once again, factoring is a mathematical problem tied to the use of prime numbers. A prime number, of course, is one that cannot be arrived at by multiplying two numbers together (the lone exception being the prime itself and the number one)."
But I'm impressed that he does as well as he does in putting across some of the core ideas. The range of technical and academic subjects that must be broached to discuss cryptography intelligently in all the ramifications that Levy explores is daunting. Among the topics that Levy tackles are anonymous remailers, block ciphers, digital currency, DES, differential cryptanalysis, digital signatures, discrete exponentiation, escrow systems, factoring, knapsacks, linear cryptanalysis, NP-complete functions, one-time pads, one-way functions, public key cryptography, quantum computers, RSA, SSL, Skipjack, tempest technology, trapdoors, virtual private networks, wiretapping techniques, and zero-knowledge proofs of identity.
Generally he does well enough for the general reader with these topics, although he doesn't say much about quantum computing, which is the technology most likely to prove Poe correct. Since there are no working quantum computers yet, that's not a serious lapse.
The Granola Reference
So let's get to the really serious question: What does this book have to say about Dr. Dobb's Journal? I gulped when I read: "Dr. Dobb's Journal (a sort of programming guide for granola-chomping hackers)..." Levy was recounting how Dr. Dobb's published, in 1984, an article that described an implementation of the RSA public-key cryptography system for microcomputers, including a discussion of the fundamental algorithms, generation of keys, and the use of digital signatures, complete with full source code. This article put Dr. Dobb's on the ramparts of the fight for free crypto, and I was a little annoyed at the characterization, particularly since I was the editor-in-chief of Dr. Dobb's in 1984. He later referred to DDJ as "a computer hobbyist magazine."
A trip to the magazine vault here at Stately Swaine Manor revealed that "computer hobbyist magazine" is a fair description of this magazine in the early months of 1984. Granola, however, didn't enter into it. We weren't antigranola; we simply took no position whatsoever on granola. My vault research also revealed that, whatever my memory might tell me, I personally had nothing to do with the publication of the RSA article, which appeared in March and April of 1984, as I joined the magazine with the May issue. You may regard my acknowledging this fact as endearing modesty or as a craven attempt to establish plausible deniability. Because this stuff is — or was — a hot potato.
Tales From the Crypt
In Crypto, Levy tells a dramatic David and Goliath story of two academics (later, others joined the fight) taking on the vast and secret powers of the National Security Agency, and winning. This story begins with renegade Whit Diffie tirelessly researching crypto when all the developments are locked up and none of the developers want to talk, and later hooking up with earnest Martin Hellman to publish the paper that changes history. It details the careful and ultimately futile dance the NSA engaged in as it tried to suppress knowledge of encryption technology without looking like the thought police out to crush academic freedom and protect its right to monitor every citizen. And it ends with a peek inside the closed world of official, government-controlled crypto.
Along the way, the book tells the stories of some pretty interesting people: Diffie and Hellman; Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adelman of RSA fame, who took public-key crypto from academic proof-of-concept to practical algorithm; PGP's Phil Zimmerman, who became the poster boy of free crypto; and brave John Gilmore and cautious David Chaum and ubiquitous Ralph Merkle and poor Dorothy Denning (who became known as the "Clipper chick" for her staunch support of that bad idea). Some surprising names appear, too: I was unaware of the crypto role of Apple and Atari pioneer Al Alcorn, or of then-Representative and now-Senator Maria Cantwell. Ray Ozzie's early attempts to put encryption into Lotus Notes turns out to have prompted a lot of the NSA's dance steps. Levy is good at telling a story, good at portraying the people, and has done his research well. Crypto is not the only good book on crypto, nor the best (David Kahn's The Codebreakers has to be the king for the sheer enormousness of his effort). But it is a must-read for anyone interested in the subject, or in personal liberty, privacy, or censorship. Crypto has been called the "Soul of a New Machine" of crypto. Actually it's the "Hackers" of crypto. And that says a lot.
Levy, however, doesn't say much about quantum crypto, which, if and when it becomes a practical reality, could blow the locks off all encrypted information. All the NSA secrets, all the e-commerce protections, laid open to every quantum cracker. "[H]uman ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve..." Too bad we didn't know about quantum crypto when we committed to the current lock boxes, huh? Could get interesting. But what, me worry?
DDJ
