Tea Leaves

Events have conspired this week to bring up a topic that I find sort of near and dear to my heart and yet simultaneously deeply depressing. That topic is the state of “classical” music in our modern times. Growing up, my father listened to nothing but classical music in the same way he read no paper except the New York Times. Once you hear the best, he reasoned, nothing else is interesting.

Of course, I’ve recently seen crossover panflute music in his CD collection, so not everything is forever, but that’s another story.

I, of course, did not remain immune to the pop music of the day, but as I got into college and especially graduate school, my music taste tended to drift towards “serious” music, as opposed to “pop” music. So while I try to keep my feet in the pop arena as well, I buy mostly jazz and classical. I go to jazz and classical concerts. I subscribe to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. And so on.

First, let’s get some terms out of the way. When I say “classical” music, I mean specifically music that has evolved from the Western European art music tradition. But I also mean the more modern incarnations of such: orchestral film music, some show music, and so on. Generally anything that would be played at a subscription concert at the PSO falls in line here, except maybe for the Drek that they hoist on the audience for the “Pops” series.

You don’t have to go much further than a PSO concert to get a picture of what the classical music scene is like these days. It’s old. I’m not sure I’ve met a regular concert goer (by regular, I mean at least 12 shows a year, which I used to do before I had a son) younger than me.

You also notice a few things:

1. A lot of the young people are there as a one off, or to see someone famous from their ethnic group. They often have no idea what is going on.

2. Everyone hates the “new” music. Even I, who have sat through 2 hours of Cecil Taylor going completely apeshit crazy free jazz while reciting poetry, think that most of the new music is completely pointless.

3. The whole experience is incredibly ritualistic. We all sit quietly (well, except for the people on life support). We all clap at the right times, we all stand and clap at the end, even when the performance sucks (that’s depressing).

4. Efforts to break up the ritual… the conductor giving little speeches, guest speakers, video of the players, subtitles, and so on, always end up being at best badly produced and at worst insulting. I remember one guest speaker getting up and reading from a paper he had given at some music conference for twenty minutes before the Orchestra came out and just destroyed us with a soul crushingly beautiful performance of the Mahler 9th. I wished they had had a gong to get rid of the guy 5 minutes in.

5. Finally, the programming is depressingly conservative. This is not to say that I wish they’d play more pointless new music. I wish they’d play some of the new music that does exist that is not pointless. 20th century Russian music besides Shostakovich and Prokoviev, central European music, even some of the more interesting film music would be better than the constant stream of unlistenable drek combined with another ditty that Mozart ripped off before he was 12.

All of these things point to a few general syndromes in the classical music world.

1. The audience is often passive, ignorant, closed-minded, and growing old.

2. The people who program the shows think the audience is even older than it is, and are completely paralyzed by it.

3. Classical music, as such, has become completely detached from the fabric of the musical culture of the time. People don’t know what to do with it, and no one seems to have any idea how to make it connect up again.

The third point is the one that has come to the fore this week.

First, the New York Times published two pieces that illustrate better than I possibly can the disconnect between the classical music world and the real world:

First we find out about how this “young” violinist has been putting up with nonsense about the cover photo from her first record for almost ten years.

Then there was this piece about how the New York Phil is trying to attract the geek gadget crowd by giving them Palm Pilots that display live video and program notes:

My feeling is this:

1. Only in the pathetic museum world of classical music would anyone complain about an attractive woman being semi-naked on an album cover.

2. If you have to explain the music to people in real time to keep them interested, you’ve already lost. The problem here is not that the show is no good, the problem is that the people never had an interest in the first place.

This brings us to the third piece of media on this subject, the current episode of STUDIO 360 , which is about the future of the Orchestra. Here, among other things, Daniel Baranboim and Greg Sandow argue over tiny little semantic quibbles, never realizing that they both agree on a central premise: classic music these days is culturally irrelevant.

Barenboim observed, correctly, that even the elite of our time, the most educated and succesful could get to be 30 or 40 and know nothing about classical music. He phrased this as “knowing nothing about music”, which isn’t quite right. But the point stands. This music is not the central pillar of the culture the way it used to be.

Sandow then “disagreed” with Baranboim while having made exactly the same point: he said that people in his audiences with degrees in English literature didn’t seem to understand that there could be this music with a complex narrative structure, like a novel or film… but that these same people could be serious consumers of jazz, pop, folk music, and so on.

I think that this is basically the same point, and the basic reason why classical music is dead. We live in a world where even if you have great interest in music overall, classical music can completely miss your radar screen.

I don’t think there are simple solutions to this. Certainly “education” and “outreach” are not enough, unless you can reach out and educate 2 generations of parents who have grown up on pop music and album oriented rock. I am pessimistic that this is the world we are stuck in and it’s not likely to get a lot better. I mean, I don’t even make it to the PSO shows anymore since I have a two year old. They are just too tiring. And I like the stuff.

I think for the music to survive and continue to be relevant, we need more parents like my dad, and you aren’t going to get that with some new outreach program and a few Palm Pilots.

I’ve invited psu to join me in this little writing adventure, which means the name — Tea and Peterb — will no longer be appropriate.

Besides, secretly I hated that name anyway. Suggestions are welcome.

In the mid-80’s, Saturday’s were for going over to Junot Diaz’s apartment (yes, “that” Junot Diaz) where we’d go into the basement and play role-playing games. I’d say we played “all day and all night,” but really they played all day and all night, and I’d play for just a couple of hours until my mother called and yelled at me to come home, because she thought it was unhealthy for a teenage boy to spend 14 hours in the basement playing D&D (personal to mom: OK, 20 years have passed and I can admit it. You were right.)

Nexus

Saturdays were, in other words, geek days. We didn’t actually play D&D; typically we played in various intricate universes that Junot had created, using Rolemaster or Spacemaster from a company called Iron Crown Enterprises to resolve the combats. These systems focused on lovingly gory descriptions of exactly what happened when you hit your opponent, so you’d roll a die and look up column “D” on the “slash critical” table to find out that your opponent had severed your achilles tendon, causing you to fall to the ground in agony, or you’d look in column “E” on the “pierce critical” to see that your arrow went straight through the enemy horseman’s eye and into his brain, killing him instantly. There were critical tables for bludgeoning, burns, explosions — it was fun. Characters didn’t tend to live very long. Roleplaying games, pizza, coca-cola, and comics books — lots of comic books.

I have always been an avid comic book reader. I learned to read at an extremely young age primarily so that I could read comic books. To this day, I’ll read anything I can get my hands on. Danny Clowes, Robert Crumb, Superman, Archie and Veronica — it doesn’t matter. I am egregiously unselective about it. Something about the medium moves me.

Nexus (click to enlarge)

One in-joke in our group used had to do with a comic book character Junot introduced me to called Nexus. Nexus was basically Space Ghost with angst. He had strange dreams of mass murderers, feeling the death throes of every one of their victims, which tortured him until he assassinated the killers. The first mass-murderer he killed was his own father (paging Dr. Jung, white courtesy telephone). He could fly, he shot energy beams that could travel around corners, he was practically invulnerable. So when someone was about to get stomped in our game in a particularly brutal way, the joke was to lift your arms, angle your hands together down at the target and say “Fwhoooooosh!”, thus implying that a Nexus-level amount of death and carnage was about to happen.

Later, when I got to college, I could play all the games I wanted, whether they were role playing games or computer games, without my mom calling and yelling at me. One of the games I was involved in was called “Champions,” which was basically a build-your-own-superhero sort of thing. I played with a bunch of other freshmen and sophomores on the verge of failing out of CMU. My character for that campaign was a thinly-disguised version of Nexus: I had adopted Junot’s hero as my own.

Which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation to City of Heroes, a massively multiplayer onling role playing game whose conceit is: be a superhero.

Nexus, in-game

I’m not much enamoured of playing games with people I don’t know, so for my tastes the adjective “massive” when applied to an online game is generally a derogatory term. In the context of this game, however, it works. What makes comic books — and here I’m generally speaking of American “hero” genre comic books — work is the way that deep cultural archetypes are, quite literally, worn on the sleeves of the characters, often in bright colours with festive silk trim. And this is what I enjoy about City of Heroes: gawking at the characters other people come up with, as well as, truth to tell, coming up with my own. Here’s my heroic shadow for the world to see: I can play Nexus in a videogame now.

The Overanalyzer

Of course you see lots of people emulating their favorite heroes from comic books they’ve read. I’ve seen at least one Superman, a few Spider-men, and Santa Claus, and of course I’ve already talked about my version of Nexus. But it’s the heroes people create themselves that are the most fun. There’s the four foot tall gray haired old lady with the spider on her chest, named “Grandma Death”. There’s the angst-ridden teenage girl with a big letter “O” on her costume named “The Overanalyzer.” Occasionally you see people who coordinate their costumes, which makes an already surreal world even stranger. My contribution to the oeuvre is Harriet Houdini — great-granddaughter of the famous escape artist and medium debunker, she was debunking a presumed charlantan’s seance when she discovered that this one was real; a few psychic transfusions from an evil ancient Egyptian god later and, ta-da! A brand-new superhero is born. As much fun as the costumes are, I admit I love the names people come up with, too. Fearleader. The Guy. Darth Mall.

The actual game portion of City of Heroes isn’t very much fun: you run around kicking ass by pointing your mouse at villains and repeatedly pressing buttons to activate your Mysterious Powers, and then wait for them to recharge. Then, like a rat pressing a lever hoping for a food pellet, you press the button again. The strange thing is, although it’s not much fun to play it’s a heck of a lot of fun to watch. It’s fun to just find a safe perch and watch the fireworks fly.

Grandma Death

The developers have done a good job of coming up with interesting super powers. They’ve divided up superheroes into five rough archetypes. Blasters are frail but do a lot of damage by shooting ice, fire, electricity, or guns from a distance. Controllers can brainwash, use telekinesis, control gravity, and similar psychic-like powers. Tankers can take a lot of damage in melee, and scrappers can dish out a lot of damage in melee. Lastly, defenders provide support and healing for their team members. Many of the more interesting powers have the restriction that you can’t use them on yourself, but may only use them on a team member, so there is some incentive built in to the game for taking on the (repetitive, boring) missions as a member of a team.

Dr. Raven Darktalon Blood

As you level up you will have the opportunity to gain more powers, but most archetypes are interesting right out of the box — the game manages to avoid the trap of “The first few levels are boring” by giving every archetype some neat powers right away. While you can’t be flying or leaping tall buildings right away, you can reach those heights in relatively short order. And while you’re floating along, you will continually encounter heroes and personalities you never expected to meet such as Penny Arcade’s Dr. Raven Darktalon Blood.

A super team

Is it worth it, either in time and money? I’m not sure. I love the configuration tool that lets you define what your hero looks like; you can literally spend hours and hours adjusting the finest details of your little dollie’s clothing, trying on different shoes, belts, spandex, appliqués, and other accessories. But if you want to play, you have to pay: $50 for the game, and a $15 / month, with the first month’s fee being include in the price of the software. If you don’t have an account, you can’t even get to the hero creation screen, so once you decide you’ve had enough of the game you won’t even be able to enjoy any aspects of the game offline. I find that pretty off-putting. For now, I’m enjoying the exposure to other people’s wish-fulfillment fantasies, but I don’t know how long that will keep me paying $15 a month.

It’s the first (for pay) online RPG I’ve been willing to play since A Tale in the Desert, though, and I think that says something positive about it.

And even though I hate to admit it, every time my avatar flies through the air, I start grinning.

Additional Resources

Look! Up in the sky!

• Junot Diaz is the author of Drown, and would probably be mortified to know that I talked about him reading comics and playing D&D with a bunch of whiteboys.
• Nexus was created by author Mike Baron and artist Steve Rude
• You can learn more about City of Heroes at the web site
• The new name of fear: Dr. Raven Darktalon Blood

Mail.app is a desktop mail application for NeXT/Macos with a long development history. It does POP, IMAP, and so on. Has a rich UI. But it blows and Google mail does not.

I’ve been using Mail.app day in and day out for the last 3 or 4 years, as my current job involves working with Macs a lot. I’ve come to a sort of grudging peace with the application, not pushing beyond the functionality that I know works fairly well. Not trying to make it do things I know that it just won’t do.

I use it to read IMAP mail at work and at my personal ISP mail account. I have five or ten thousand messages stored in it. It generally works pretty well, it is fairly flexible, doesn’t crash a lot.

But it sucks anyway. It really doesn’t do mail the way I want. It makes you set up byzantine filters and rules to organize mail automatically. It forces you into a hierachical network database sort of mindset that should have died in the 1970s after SQL took over. And, the UI is a bit odd. Things you do a lot are not quickly found. You do a lot of clicking. The main window doesn’t show you enough. The mailbox drawer is stupid. And so on.

All this from an app that has a development history that reaches back at least 10 years.

Compare and contrast with the recent Google Mail beta. You have to figure Google has been working on this for maybe a year or two. Yet the UI is much more streamlined. Common operations have quick single letter key commands. Nice touches abound. Example: when you read a message, there is a blank text box at the end under the reply links. You click in the box and it bounces open with the reply template right in place. No new windows, no muss, no fuss. You can also hit the reply/reply all links, or hit “r”. Having multiple ways to do things, all of which are fast, is nice.

The top level UI shows you a lot of information at once. The threading even kind of works without being stupid. Overall, it just feels more polished. And then you realize that you are using it in a web browser. This is an amazing accomplishment. You almost don’t realize you are using a web page. And, as a bonus, this web interface will work from almost anywhere. No need to lug the laptop along just to read mail.

One of the many minor things Gmail does better that Mail is address completion. You start typing your address, and you get a little javascript menu that updates in real time. The menu is organized by which names you used most often.

Mail has something like this too, but it has a tendency to pick a name at random for you before you realize what has happened. Gmail has a bit of a delay so you don’t accidentally send mail to the wrong Steve.

One of the major things Google does better than Mail is search. Considering that Mail has the complete strength of local Macos behind it and gets to store all of your mail on the local hard drive, you’d think that it could build a good text search index. But it can’t. Hits displayed in a completely random order. It doesn’t find messages that should be hits. It finds tons of messages that are not hits.

Google is, of course, as good as google. You type in words, it shows you the hits you wanted. Basically, it crushes Mail.app even though it is indexing the mail of thousands of other users in addition to mine.

Filters are much better in Google mail because they are not based on the idea of moving mail to folders. You tag mail with labels and then your “folders” are just google queries against the labels. This is far superior. Not only do you not waste time filing mail away into useless hierarchies, you can do things like label messages with multiple labels and compose complex queries that are more useful than any given folder might be. It’s like relational vs. non-relational databases. It’s just clear what the right answer is.

The one thing Google needs to fix is the spam filtering. It sucks. Nuff said.

Summary: I wish I could use google mail for everything I do with e-mail. Sadly, I’d get fired if I put my work mail there. Oh well.

This story makes me angry. It’s about vegans who feed their cats vegan diets.

Cats, you see, are obligate carnivores. Feeding them a diet without meat (or rather, with amino acids that are only found in adequate quantities in meat) is abuse. I can understand people who don’t eat animal products because they think it is cruel or exploitative, even though I don’t share that belief. But I have nothing but contempt for people who have ethical objections to eating any animal product, but delight in torturing their pet.

Apparently, for these people “vegan” means “against animal cruelty where the cruelty is fast enough that I notice it.” If your cat goes blind over a 3 year period because you were abusing it, though, that’s fantastic.

I’m so enraged I can hardly see straight.

A number of people have commented on my mockery of “Cousin Lovin’ Poetry,” responding with detailed and impassioned screeds about how I don’t understand genetics, how the Bible thinks that people who have sex with their cousins are morally superior to those that don’t, how in Saudi Arabia cousin-lovin’ is the norm, how Europeans are so much more sophisticated than Americans about this issue, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. The lack of perspective on this is hilarious.

One poster says:

There are no contemporary studies that indicate cousins have children with significantly higher than normal birth defects.

And then, two paragraphs later, says:

Fact: Children of non-related couples have a 2-3% risk of birth defects, as opposed to first cousins having a 4-6% risk.

On my planet, that’s a pretty significant additional risk. As one of the commenters below observes, it is in fact double the risk of birth defects.

But I don’t want to get bogged down in the genetics argument. It is, frankly, a sideshow. Let me be perfectly clear: my main concern is not that you will create a child with genetic defects by marrying your cousin, but that by breeding you might pass on your condition that results in your having a complete lack of any sense of humor.

I think that revulsion of cousin couples in the US is based not in some sort of genetic fear, but in more commonplace concerns: the mores and traditions of the culture in which we actually live (yes, yes, I’m glad for you that inbred Hapsburg royalty married their cousins, but we’re not in Austria). Citing the Bible on this topic is just silly: frankly, I’m not about to take any moral cues from a book that says we should kill gays and witches, but handing your daughters over to be raped by ruffians is just fine.

There are any number of different cultures which have varied and differing approaches towards marriage. I’m not a fan of arranged marriage in general, but I know quite a few couples who have had them. They love each other; they learned to love. And I think that learning to love someone is indeed possible; I’m inherently suspicious of some versions of romantic love because it is accompanied by much braying and posturing about how this person is the only person I could ever possibly have fallen in love with, and they are unique as a special little snowflake embossed with pink unicorn designs. So when I hear someone talking about their cousin this way — someone in our culture, in our times — I go straight to the conclusion: “This person didn’t get out of the house very much.”

To be more specific, I think that you are projecting your anima (or animus, as appropriate) on a close relative specifically because you’ve had projections on non-relatives dissolve, leaving you feeling betrayed and empty (”How dare that person not match the image I had of them?”). In many (not all, obviously) cousin relationships, the female cousin is much younger. This is not a coincidence: a man’s anima image will typically be of a younger woman, representing the sacred feminine he was forced to abandon during adolescence, while a woman’s animus will be of a father figure, representing the force that forbids that has always seemed beyond her control. Eventually, over time, those projections too will dissolve (as they must), leaving you no nearer wisdom then you were when you decided “Hey, it would be a really good idea to marry someone I’m closely related to.”

That will be $135, please. Make the check out to Dr. Jung.

There’s another issue lurking in the background, which is that there are areas in which family members look out for one another and try (one hopes) to build trust. Most of the child sexual abuse in America is not performed by gay boy scout leaders or priests molesting young children. Most of the child sexual abuse in America is committed by family members against younger family members. Courtship and mating rituals in our culture can at least try to provide some protection for those participating in them by balancing the interests of each (potential) lover’s family. When one’s son is out on a date with someone not in the family, presumably everyone is aware and somewhat on guard. When he is merely “playing with his cousin,” that’s less likely to be true.

So to that extent, I have an instinct that some “cousin couples” are exploiting the trust that comes with a family bond with potentially disastrous consequences. Obviously, we can always construct counterexamples (”I’m 35, my cousin is 38, and we’re both divorced, grown adults…”) but given that many of the cousin couples I see do, in fact, have at least one partner who is a minor, I think sexualizing this relationship in our culture is fraught with peril. And is very unwise.

So in honor some of this topic rearing its ugly head again, I am posting: Cousin Poetry II: Electric Cousin Haiku!

The first ones are my fault:

Uncle’s daughter laughs
our love no one understands
snow falls on sorrow.

My one true lover
If we were fraternal twins
That would be sooooooooo hot

There’s a place for us
Our love can speak its name there
sweet West Virginia

Anonymous contributor #1 writes:

Daughter of my aunt
Will you give me a son?
Please don’t tell me no

Can our hearts be far
when we share a quarter of
genetic makeup?

inbreed, inbreath, well
both are pressing needs, so come
let’s press nether parts

sprite writes

Three hundred percent
(of toes) comes to dozens and
dozens. Quod erat.

who needs statistics.
drink, smoke, eat mercuric fish,
have your cousin’s kid.

Anonymous contributor #2 writes

Oh how I wish to
Kiss you gently cousin
What, is that so wrong?

jch writes

spring is sprung, the grass
is riz, come my sweet cousin,
i’m dyin’ to jizz

(”What, you don’t like rhyming haiku?”)

no-one can deny
our child has both our eyes. and
extra fingers too.

star-cross’d lovers we
but shakespeare said nothing ’bout
having cross-eyed kids

kosak writes:

You are so lovely.
You remind me of myself.
Our kids: of E.T.

If you like, you can read the original article that spawned this controversy.

Microsoft has released their first downloadable content for Project Gotham Racing 2, including a bunch of cars I’ll never be able to afford and a whole new city: Paris.

Paris Comparison (click to enlarge)

I don’t particularly care about the new cars — Gotham already has more than enough cars to hold my interest — but I’ve been eager to drive down the Champs-Elysées since I got the game. The developers did a great job of bringing the city to life. Although bereft of pedestrians and slightly greyer in tone than I expected, the feeling is overall that of the final day of the Tour de France. The textures on the road are good, and the tracks are challenging (and mostly short) — there’s quite a few tricky chicanes and odd-angled corners here. You’ll be firmly in center “Tourist Paris” here, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Tour Eiffel — no left bank cafés for you, young artist. And in one slightly sad twist to the tale, you can only drive a sunny, daytime Paris; there is no night time in the City of Lights. While this makes sense from an actuarial standpoint — this download content is mostly for online play, after all, and I can count the number of night time or rain races I’ve played online on one hand — it is disappointing on an emotional level. Despite that drawback, this download was well worth the $4.99 Microsoft charged.

The next release is rumoured to be Los Angeles, more specifically Long Beach. I’ll be buying that one, too.

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: Once again the consumer bit of my brain has gotten the sickness, and I have the urge to upgrade my “gaming” PC. I am fighting it tooth and nail.

Those really are derision quotes around “gaming,” since most of the games I actually want to run on my PC — like Warlords II — don’t actually run on modern versions of Windows. And because I never use my gaming PC because it is loud, and takes 5 minutes to boot up, and is in the wrong room, and is big and ugly, and because I can’t play on the couch, like I can with the Xbox.

But, stupid is as stupid does. I’m trying to remind myself that all I’ll accomplish by upgrading is I’ll waste time and money and I still won’t be playing any good games on it, since there will no doubt be some odd compatibility glitch between whatever OS/video card combination I have and whatever game (City of Heroes? Maybe) I decide I must obsess over.

Also, the calculus that said upgrading would be “worth it” assumes that my PC133 RAM from ages ago would still work so I could continue to do this piecemeal. I bet that’s not true anymore. Everytime I read some article about how you should spend more on some motherboard because this time the new super CPU slow format will guarantee forward compatibility, I want to punch someone.

Hold that ball really still, Lucy — here comes Charlie brown to give it a good swift kick.

On the confusingly named Google Blog — the one not run by Google — Aaron Schwartz opines that gmail’s security isn’t strong enough:

…[Gmail] should use public-key encryption. (This part will be a
bit technical.) When you create a Gmail account, your computer creates
a keypair. The public key is sent to Google. The private key is
encrypted with a password you choose, and the encrypted version is sent
to Google. (Important: Google never gets your password.) When an email
is received for your account, the server encrypts it with your public
key before saving it. When you log into read it, you download your
encrypted key, decrypt it with your password, and then your computer
decrypts your mail with the resulting key as it’s downloaded. (Already,
all your mail goes through Gmail’s JavaScript client to get processed
and turned into HTML, so this won’t be too hard to add on the
client-side.) In this way, your mail is never stored in a way Google
has access to.

This is a really bad idea. SSL — which gmail provides — is a no-brainer, but this is a bad idea.

Really, you’re saying “You will need your private key on your computer
in order to read mail,” (since you can’t public-key authenticate
without your private key) which is a shorter way of saying “you’ll need
to carry your private key around with you, either on a disk or a
smartcard or some similar device,” which is a shorter way of saying
“since no one wants to do this, really, I want an implementation of
gmail that makes it a pain in the ass to access my account from more
than one computer” which is a longer way of saying “I want a version of
gmail that no one will want to use.”

Second, the whole point of gmail is that Google has access to your
mail. I say this not as an ominous “I hate Google” statement — I
actually have a gmail account — but as a statement of fact. Apart
from Google’s desire to sell you ads, one of the things that makes
gmail useful is that you get to have Google index your mail to make
things easily searchable. If what you’re storing on gmail is
encrypted, it’s not searchable anymore. So encrypting the mail on
Google would destroy another aspect of the product.

Thirdly, I think you’re missing the bigger issue, which is that even if
we did everything you suggested — PKI, SSL, super-hyper-secret
encryption from the NSA — random people on the internet would still be
able to read your mail, because eventually it would have to be
transferred to or from the recipient on the other end, which would be
going over SMTP in the clear. Of course, you can talk about using
public key encryption end-to-end, a la PGP, but basically the market
has spoken: normal people hate the public key encryption alternatives
they’ve been given, because they make email effectively unusable.

So in summary, I think Google did exactly the right thing by punting on
this problem for now. In today’s internet, email between two untrusted
parties who aren’t both willing to use the same pain in the ass public
key software ain’t secure. That’s the reality.

The real solution, in my opinion, is for PKI to be deployed in the core (pretend for a
moment that (a) there is a such a thing as “the core” and (b) that
changing SMTP to support PKI and then getting it deployed there was
actually reasonably possible, which it isn’t) and then for mail clients
(web mail, IMAP, or others) to use SSL to access their mail stores.
This would reduce the window of vulnerability from “anyone with access
to a machine on any network my packets go through” to “untrustworthy
administrators and/or compromised machines that my mail is actually
stored on.” That’s a pretty significant reduction in threat. Since I now work on filesystems and don’t go to IETF anymore, for all I know there’s a working group on this topic that has already decided that my strawman idea is unworkable and stupid. I’ll look into this and try to circle back to the topic soon.

Additional Resources

• Aaron’s original article
• There’s an official Google weblog, also

I normally don’t just link to other people’s entries. It’s against my philosophy. But rules are made to be broken. psu goes completely insane about how P.F. Chang’s (and its equivelent alter-ethnic wannabe brethren) are destroying the American palate and wallet, and it’s just such a righteous rant that I have to share it with you:

Lost in all of this is the fact that even in a relative backwater like Pittsburgh there are smaller, cheaper, better places that are far more deserving of your dollars. They are found on the sides of roads, in shopping centers, and off of highways. They are run by real people who care about making decent food that is not so much Authentic as at least genuinely distinctive and fresh. But, the tide is against places that serve Real Food because they don’t have the connections needed to get the huge spaces and exposure that even a crappy shithole like P.F. Chang’s can manage just on sheer volume. This is just another case where the Big Evil Coporation is crushing the forces of light and goodness.

Read the whole thing at Mixed Logs.

Testify!