Society's Bullies Hide Behind Secrecy

This week I had the privilege of being present at a discussion with Ladar Levison at a meeting of the North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG), his first public appearance since the court documents related to his fight with the FBI were made public.

For those not familiar with the case, Levison is the owner of Lavabit, a web-based email service designed to be secure against eavesdropping, even by himself. On August 8th this year he suddenly closed the service, posting an oblique message on the front page of the Lavabit website. The message explained only that he had closed the service because he had been left with a choice to "become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit."

There has been much speculation over the last couple of months that he had closed the service over a subpoena related to Edward Snowden's use of the service, and that an attached gag order similar to a National Security Letter (which were found to be unconstitutional in 2004) prevented him from speaking out about it.

Much of that speculation was confirmed last week when the courts unsealed the documents relating to Levison's appeal of a July 16th court order, which required him to turn over cryptographic keys that would allow the FBI to spy on all of the service's traffic, not just the information specific to Snowden's use of the service, which was specified in the original warrant. Wired Magazine published an article last week with most of the known details of the case, so I won't go into much more detail about that.

What I'd like to highlight is the danger to information security, consumer confidence, and the technological economy as a whole, should Levison lose his fight with the FBI.  The keys being requested by the FBI would allow them access not only to all of the information related to the individual targeted by their warrant, but also every other customer's data, and the data of the business itself.   This is highly reminiscent of recent revelations regarding the NSA and the scope of their data collection.  If that sort of wide net is supported by the courts, the fight for any kind of personal privacy will be lost, and consumers will never be able to trust any company with ties to the United States with any data at all.

This isn't just a problem in the United States.  Many of our online services eventually have dependencies on US companies.  In Canada, a huge percentage of our network traffic crosses into the US in order to cross the continent rather than remaining in Canada when moving between cities.  In other countries consumers rely on some of the more obvious US-based services (Facebook, Twitter, Google) but also many other services have less obvious dependencies, such as with services hosted by US-based data centres or on so-called "cloud" services with ties to the US.

As Andrew Sullivan comments during the Q&A, overreaching orders such as these are an attack on the network, as surely as any criminal trying to break a network's security.  Our personal privacy and the security technologies that guarantee it face attacks by those who want easy access to everyone's information, under the pretence of protecting the very people whose privacy is being violated.  It is vitally important that other business owners, like Levison, step up and fight orders such as these, so that a real public debate can happen over whether we still feel personal privacy and personal freedoms still trump the government's desire to have it easy.

At this point it is impossible to know whether any similar services have been compromised in the way the FBI has attempted with Lavabit.  I applaud the principled stance Levison is taking against this intrusion, and hope that, should I ever be in a similar position, I would have the strength to endure the long fight necessary to see it through.

Using Subversion With the Kobold2D Game Engine and Xcode

I've been messing about with some basic MacOS and iOS game development lately, and at the moment I'm working with the Kobold2D game engine, which is (mostly) a refinement of cocos2d.  I've found however that in Kobold's quest to make initial setup of a project easier, it sidesteps some of the normal setup that Xcode does when you add a project or file.  Some of this, such as Project Summary info like the Application Category and Bundle Identifier is easily fixed after the fact.  Version control setup, on the other hand, is marginally more complicated than normal (at least with Subversion).

With a bit of trial and error I think I've got a working procedure to get a new Kobold project to play nicely with Subversion.  Here are my assumptions for these instructions; the more you deviate from these the less this will be relevant, and I'll leave variations as an exercise for the reader:

1. You're running Xcode 4.6 (I'm testing with 4.6.3)
2. You've got Kobold2D 2.1.0
3. You already have a repository set up and waiting at version 0 (zero)
4. We're creating a pong clone called  -- oddly enough -- "pong"

Any text here in fixed width is intended to be cut and pasted directly into your Terminal if you desire.  However, I won't be held responsible if anything goes awry... I'm trusting that you're using your head and paying attention before you run any of these commands.

Create a Kobold2D Project

Run the Kobold2d Project Starter app.  Select the appropriate template (I'm going with Physics-Box2D) and set the project name to 'pong'.  You can also set your own Workspace name here if you want.  Make sure you uncheck "Auto-Open Workspace" because we don't want to have that open quite yet.  Click on the "Create Project from Template" button.

Import the Project into Subversion

In Terminal, set ~/Kobold2D/Kobold2D-2.1.0 as your current directory

cd ~/Kobold2D/Kobold2D-2.1.0

Make a new directory structure with the usual 'trunk', 'branches', 'tags' directory structure in it

mkdir -p pong-import/{trunk,branches,tags}

 Move your new 'pong' project into the new trunk directory

mv pong pong-import/trunk/

Change directory into pong-import and import the project and directory structure into your repository

cd pong-import; svn import . https://svn.mydomain.com/pong/ -m "Initial import"

Now delete this directory structure

cd ..; rm -Rf pong-import

That's it for the Terminal.

Add The Repository to Xcode

This is the only step that's exactly as it would usually be.  Go to the Xcode Organizer (menu Window -> Organizer) and select the Repositories tab.   Click on the + in the bottom left corner of the window and select Add Repository.   Follow the prompts to name the repository, give it the URI to the repository, add your authentication credentials, etc..  For the purposes of the example, let's say the URI for your repository is "https://svn.mydomain.com/pong/".

Check Out a Working Copy

While still in the Xcode Organizer Repositories tab, click on the expander arrow to the left of your 'pong' repository.  It should show four folders:  'Root' in purple, and your 'Trunk', 'Branches' and 'Tags' directories in yellow.  Select 'Root' and then click on "Checkout" in the button bar across the bottom of the Organizer.

This will open a standard Save dialogue.  Browse your way to ~/Kobold2D/Kobold2D-2.1.0/, type 'pong' into the Save As field, and click on Checkout.

Clean Up Your Workspace

Return to your Kobold-2.1.0 folder in the Finder.  Open the "Kobold2D.xcworkspace" workspace, or your custom workspace if you created one.

You'll see your pong project listed, but it'll be in red.  That's because the files aren't where the automatically-created workspace expects to find them.   Right click on that and select Delete.

Then, right-click again and select Add Files to "Kobold2D" (or whatever the name of your workspace is).  Browse to ~/Kobold2D/Kobold2D-2.1.0/pong/trunk/pong, select 'pong.xcodeproj' and click on Add.

You're Done!

You should now have a functioning Kobold2D project with all of the usual Xcode internal Subversion support available.  You should be able to pick a random file from your 'pong' project files, right click it and go to Source Control -> Update Selected Files and cause Xcode to check if there are updates available for that file.  

Good luck, and good gaming.

Patronage in the Modern Era

Jack Conte, probably best known for popularizing the VideoSong music format with his catchy, clever songs, has launched a new service that might change the way artists of all kinds bring home the bacon.

For years now, the issue of easily copied and distributed data has been plaguing artists and other copyright holders.  The arrival data and media sharing systems like BitTorrent and YouTube have been alternately heralded as the death of the music industry as we know it, and as field-levelling tools that would allow new artists of all kinds to connect with their fans.

Either way, many people in film and music have been struggling with the problem of creating new funding models that don't rely on every fan paying a fixed fee for a CD or DVD, and that allow for fans to freely share media (because they're doing that anyway) while still letting the artists pay the rent.

I've often thought one potential solution, however amusing it may sound, is to return to the centuries old practice of patronage.  In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and earlier in Japan and other Southeast Asian countries, it was common for a wealthy individual to support an artist (or two) allowing them to produce plays, music, books, poetry, or paintings that wouldn't otherwise generate an income for the artist.  The model worked because artists could create art for art's sake without having to worry about whether it could be easily sold, the the patron received recognition for supporting a vital part of society.

Conte seems to agree that this could work again, and has built a service to make it possible.  Patreon allows fans to pledge an amount of money they choose, to be paid to their favourite artists every time the artist produces a piece of content.  It's crowd-sourced patronage that Conte likens to an ongoing Kickstarter for smaller projects, and several artists are already using it to get funding that would have been difficult or impossible to get before.

Big Pretty Sky Sparks

A long long time ago, in a public school not too far from where I live now, what little we know about how lightning works was explained to me.  Apparently we still don't know a lot about how it works, but it seems we're a lot better at observing it than we used to be: I never actually got to see this particular behaviour of lightning in action before today.  My brother sent me a link to this video this morning.. it's a brilliant high-speed capture of a negative stepped ladder coming down from the clouds.  One branch makes contact with the ground and creates the path for a major return stroke.  This 33 second video covers about 0.13 seconds.

The One Where I Talk About A BBS Game

20 years ago I was, along with many of my friends, spending quite a lot of time on computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). Most of us had already been doing this for many years, and there were people out there who'd been doing it even longer. The BBS scene at the time was pretty sophisticated we thought.. it was becoming possible to do some really great things!

One of the things that I thought was really great was playing computer games against other people in different places. This idea was still pretty novel, as computer networking, the way we think of it today, simply wasn't possible with most home computers – what few even existed. Most BBSes only had a single phone line for people to connect, and so out of necessity virtually every BBS game was turn-based, usually allowing a single turn per day. So, every day, I had time set aside to dial in, see what had transpired since the previous day, and take my turns.

One of my favourite games, and one of the few that I remember in any detail, was Esterian Conquest. It was a multi-player take on some of the early empire-building 4X games, set in a small two-dimensional galaxy, where each player had to build a fleet of ships, and go forth and conquer by force or diplomacy. Don't let the simple idea fool you though.. EC was a beast of a game, with simple rules that allowed for a plethora of complex results. Early on, my nightly turn would take but a few minutes to think about and execute, but later in the game I could literally spend hours pouring over reports from my fleets, hand-drawing maps on graph paper based on the information they contained, and then planning out and tediously punching in new orders for all of my fleets and planets.

About four years ago, while cleaning out boxes that had been in storage for ages, I came across a folder containing papers from the last game of EC I ever played. There were printouts of reports covered in pencil notes about possible actions to take, maps with quick calculations of how long it would take my fleets to reach some hot-spot in the game galaxy, and sheet after sheet of new orders.

Fleet 66 join fleet 47

Fleet 32 reduce speed to 5

Fleet 73 move to star at (12,41)

Everything about the game came back, and I started to wonder if it could somehow be resurrected. I had heard years before that the source code to EC had been lost in an all-too-unfortunate hard drive crash, but digging around in more boxes I did manage to find a floppy disk with the copy I had for the BBS I'd briefly run myself. Sadly, it proved to be more work than I had time for to get a computer running that could both run modern networking and connect that to an old DOS game. So I decided that instead, I'd just write my own.

I spent the next few months mapping out the game I'd like to create.. what I thought at the time was probably the first ever Turn-based Strategy MMO. I started writing documentation: how would I like the game to work? After chatting about the idea with a friend of mine, he gave me a photo-copy of an old table-top game he'd played called Stonova for ideas (it was based on Chris Wilkes' "Nova"). I worked out plans; I taught myself the math I'd need for three dimensional navigation (I wanted my game to take place in a realistic three-dimensional galaxy). But, when I really got down to it the game I had in mind would have required programming skills, particularly in the area of graphics, that I just didn't have the time to acquire. The idea was grand, but it was beyond me at the time. So I put the idea away for a while.

A couple of days ago, for no particular reason I can recall, I started thinking about this again. My original idea had been too grand for my meagre programming skills. But what if I scaled it down? In the last few years it's been proven that web-based games can work, and do attract players. So what if I ditched the desktop game idea, and went with the much easier to program web-based game? Games like Travian certainly seem to attract players, and as the basic concepts go it isn't all that different from what I had in mind.

My game will be simpler than EC in places, and more involved in others.

In EC it was possible to send your ships to any point in the galaxy, and along the way they would send back reports if they came within sensor range of any other passing ship. You could interrupt their orders mid-trip and have them pursue whom they spotted, or run away, or slow down and quietly follow at the edge of sensor range. I think I will simplify that a lot, and very likely only allow travel to other stars, not the spaces between them. Fleets will report on other fleets they find in their current star system, but I think I will drop the requirement to calculate intersecting flight paths, and handle changes in destination mid-flight.

EC had a small number of fixed ship types that you could build, and assemble into fleets. I think I'd like to have a bit more range in this area, so I'm going to design a technology research system that will allow players to concentrate on improving certain aspects of their ships. Are you a fan of big weapons? What happens when you go up against your opponent who has put all their research into heavily armoured ships? Or, maybe you just want to build really fast ships that can run away easily when threatened.

EC had no system of trade that I can recall. My game will allow players to trade resources, and might even have some sort of in-game cash economy. Perhaps you won't build warships at all, but will instead build big, fast transport ships and survive by supplying everyone with what they need... and paying tribute for "protection" where necessary.

So, I've started working on the idea again. I have no idea what will come of it, or whether I'll even finish. I haven't even got a name for it yet.. but I'm curious to see what I can come up with.

Wherein I Keep My Stuff Dry in a Downpour

Last week I rode my bike from Toronto to Québec City and back for the 81st IETF meeting.  This is only the second long ride I've done (the first was to Ottawa in May), and the first where I didn't have complete control over which days I'd be on the road – and thus, no control over what weather I'd be riding in.  Seeing as it was a work trip, I'd have to carry my laptop, and so some means of keeping it dry would be necessary.

Since a laptop won't fit in my wee Ogio saddle bags, and neither they nor my laptop backpack are waterproof (and I didn't want to wear a backpack for 900km anyway) I needed something I could strap to my bike that would fit a long narrow piece of electronics, and keep it dry.

Rain gear, water, and street boots in the saddle bags, spare gloves,
camera, maps, etc. in the tank bag, everything else in the Seal Line

My usual stop for such things is my local MEC, as they rarely disappoint.  This visit was successful as always, and I walked out with a 75 litre Seal Line zip dry bag.  At first glance in the store, and while packing, it seemed to be the ideal bag for what I wanted.  It's flat and wide, carries easily, holds a week of clothes plus my laptop, laptop bag, and some assorted cables and other gear, and most importantly zips air tight.  In fact, after strapping it to my bike I found I had to unzip it to let it deflate a bit.. this made the difference between it poking me in the back all the time and compressing neatly out of my way up on the passenger seat.  But, it hadn't really been tested yet... and it would be tested.  Oh, how it would be tested.

On the ride home this past Friday, on the leg between Ottawa and Toronto, I ran into a pretty nasty rain storm.  Rain wasn't entirely unexpected.. I'd been watching some weather move East toward me from Toronto for a couple days.. but the amount of rain was a huge surprise.  I haven't even been outside in a rain storm like this in a long time, let alone out on the highway.   As I was passing North of Kingston on Highway 7, Kingston was busy closing down several streets due to flooding. It was some nasty rain.

But lo, and behold, upon my arrival home I found the inside of the dry bag to be.. well.. dry.  Bone dry.  Where the Ogio bags and me were both soaked, and even my supposedly rain-proof tank bag had some moisture in it, my laptop was saved.   Success!

Now if only I could solve the problem of drying out the inside of my helmet in the middle of a downpour.

Screencasting for OSX

I spent some time this afternoon evaluating several screen casting apps for my Mac. It cost me a bunch of time, and a little bit of money, so I thought I'd share my notes to potentially save someone some grief in the future.

For those who haven't seen the term before, "screen casting" is recording video of all or part of a computer display, usually with some sort of voice over, for the purpose of doing a demonstration to be viewed at a later date. It's often done to demonstrate the use, or features, of a piece of software, but lately it's also gaining popularity for sharing things like gaming experiences on video sharing sites like Youtube and Vimeo.

There appear to be all sorts of applications for doing this today, where there were only one or two a couple of years ago, and they have a fairly wide range in features and quality. Some of the applications I looked at also do "screen grab" (capturing a still image of the display) but I pretty much ignored this in all of them since MacOS comes with a perfectly good utility for this (Grab.app). Full reviews below the cut.