November 30, 2002
MS to give access to source code to Japanese government
09:34 UTC » Japanese National ID - Japanese Policy - Privacy - Software
Japan TimesThe Japan Times Online Microsoft to reveal source code to Japan, which has eyed LinuxMicrosoft Corp. will disclose the source code of the Windows operating system to the Japanese government in line with the government's e-Japan project, company officials said Wednesday.
I recently made a public comment on the record at the oversight committee for the National ID about Microsoft and trying to get them to open up the source code. I wonder if this had any effect. I guess we must all have had an effect. I assume many people have been saying this. It's a great step forward, even if it is just MS trying to keep Linux out.
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Lessig/Yamagata/Ito discussion for Chuo Koron
09:03 UTC » Intellectual Property - Internet Policy - Japanese National ID - Japanese Policy - Joi's Diary - Wireless and Mobile
So yesterday's discussion with Hiroo Yamagata and Lawrence Lessig went well. It was a lot of fun and I think a constructive discussion. Hiroo was in good form. But he usually is... in person. ;-) He had written something negative about Mr. Ikeda in the afterward of translation of "The Future of Ideas" and had gotten in a dispute with Mr. Ikeda. He had just finished the battle and I guess they have both gotten over it now. Maybe Hiroo was just tired from that. I do generally agree with Hiroo's position, although maybe not the way he said it. I think Mr. Ikeda and others had inferred that Larry was against privacy policies. In a mailing list Mr. Ikeda had said that my efforts to stop the National ID were futile and that we didn't have any privacy anyway. The struggle for privacy is a struggle of data structures and can be achieved without destroying the end-to-end nature of the Net. It think it is simplistic to equate privacy with control of the Net. I just finished reading Hiroo's English translation of his afterward. It's quite good. He should post it on the Net.
Hiroo YamagataFreedom is supposed to be a good thing. People say Communism died and Freedom prospered, so freedom should be good. But when you ask these people to explain the actual benefits of freedom, hardly anyone can give you a meaningful answer. This isn't (necessarily) because they are stupid. It's because freedom itself doesn't do anything. Freedom is just an environment that allows you to do something.
Continue reading "Lessig/Yamagata/Ito discussion for Chuo Koron"
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November 29, 2002
Thanksgivings with the Lessig's
Had the Lessig's, Jiro Kokuryo, Sen, Yoon and Neeraj over for Thanksgivings Dinner. Didn't cook the turkey ourselves this year so it wasn't a REAL Thanksgivings, but it was better than no turkey.
Sen and Yoon... Thanks for doing all of the work.
Funny thing is, I'm seeing Jiro Kokuryo at the i-mode council, Neeraj at a meeting and Larry for an interview tomorrow night. Small world... or maybe just narrow taste in friends. ;-p
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November 28, 2002
The Future of Ideas
I am embarrassed to admin that I had scanned The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig, but had not READ it carefully. I find I do this with books where I know the author's position quite well in an area I know something about. I KNOW that the book is worth reading, but it feels like patting myself on the back. I tend to like reading books written by the enemy. ;-) Anyway, enough lame excuses. Tomorrow, I have a magazine article discussion with Larry and the translator of The Future of Ideas Hiroo Yamagata, who as I've said before, is an intelligent, but ruthless fellow. Hiroo is a menace to those who are unprepared, but is probably one of the most thoughtful people in this space... Anyway, now that I finished the book, I am prepared for tomorrow...
So about the book... everyone has probably read it already so I probably don't need to write a lame book review, but if you haven't read it, I can now urge you to read it. Larry talks about spectrum, code, and content control and calls them the physical, code and content layers. This is exactly how I think of these issues and how everyone should think of these issues. Although he addressed it in his last book, Code, Larry doesn't have time to talk about privacy in this book. I believe that identity and privacy are also important and probably represent for me the other BIG issue.
I had thought through most of these issues already in great detail so the logic was easy to follow and the detail and facts have added new ammunition to my arsenal. What was also interesting was Larry's continued pursuit of balance both politically and technically. When you are under public scrutiny, balance is very important to protect being attacked by people you are trying to change. The difficulty of taking a balanced view is that the message is difficult to deliver, you can sound wishy/washy and at the end of the day, you will end up being attacked by both extremes, the moderates apathetically fading into the background. Or at least that is my experience.
Maybe it's because Larry is a law professor, but he is able to navigate the detail and the logic well... But as the issues become more and more complex and one realizes that the government and public opinion become more and more obtuse, one ends up becoming VERY despressed as Larry appears to be by the end of the book.
I think Larry's mission, shared by most of the intelligent people that I know is one of the most important missions today. The commons and innovation are threatened by the old power structures which are more and more able to stay in power than ever before. I believe that a similar struggle is going on in the field of energy technology. Big oil protecting its interests and waging war.
Innovation in information technology and energy (See ECD) has the power to solve many of the problems we face today, yet this innovation is faced with great resistance. The public, which at the end of the day is the only group capable of causing real change, sits watching apathetically. How depressing.
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November 27, 2002
Joi's Moblog
I've been meaning to try to aggressively blog with my new phone and Justin's article and his phrase "moblog" pushed me over the edge. My guys set up this "moblog" for me. It's still a test site, but you get the idea...
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Presenting our vision to Nagano
 Tanaka-san's office is in a see-through case in the waiting room of the prefecture building. |  Tanaka-san greets our team |  Presenting our vision to Governor Tanaka and the division heads |
My pitch was/is heavily influenced by the discussion with David about who should run the network and Larry Lessig's thoughts on The Commons. I talked about trying to get an experiment going in Nagano involving VoIP, high powered 802.11, UWB and non-phone number based voice calls. (No Australian ENUM please!) With Tanaka-san's no-compromises reform position and the support of the reformists inside of the bureaucracy, I think we might have a chance of creating an interesting network in Nagano where voice will be free, and high powered WiFi and eventually UWB will allow networks to propogate without relying on the phone company. This is quite a subversive project, so please keep this confidential. ;-p
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November 26, 2002
Roger Clarke on ENUM
22:16 UTC » Computer and Network Risks - Japanese National ID - Privacy
Roger Clarke, one of my favorite privacy experts and the person I learned the notion of separation of "entities" and "identities" has written a paper about the problems with ENUM. I wrote about ENUM when Australia announced their initiative. I am on a mission to make sure that Japan doesn't try to link ENUM with the national ID...
Roger ClarkeFrom: Roger Clarke
Subject: Glitterati: ENUM: Case Study in Social IrresponsibilityI've just finished a paper on a proposed Internet scheme that will have extremely serious implications if it's implemented:
ENUM - A Case Study in Social Irresponsibility
http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/enumISOC02.htmlAs always, constructively negative feedback much appreciated.
Abstract
ENUM is meant to provide a means of mapping from telephone numbers to IP-addresses: "today, many addresses; with ENUM, only one", as its proponents express it.
Any such capability would be extremely dangerous, providing governments, corporations, and even individuals, with the ability to locate and to track other people, both in network space, and in physical space. The beneficiaries would be the powerful who seek to manipulate the behaviour of others. It would do immense social, sociological and democratic harm.
The astounding thing is that the engineers responsible for it are still adopting the na・e position that its impact and implications are someone else's problem. With converged computing-and-communications technologies becoming ever more powerful and ever more pervasive, engineers have to be shaken out of their cosy cocoon, and forced to confront the implications, along with the technology and its applications.
Contents
Introduction
Outline Description of ENUM
The Context
Implications of ENUM
Responses by the ENUM WG
Conclusions
References--
Roger Clarke http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/
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November 24, 2002
DARPA pays SRI $60,000 to try to rid Net of anonymity
Heavy bloggers will have already seen this article. As we push for more privacy in Japan and I try to get the Japanese government to take a serious look at the value of anonymity, this sort of thing makes it difficult. It looks like a the group of experts were about to be "looks like co-option" fodder, but managed to make enough noise to get word out. I wish I had collaborators like these on my study groups in Japan.
New York Times
SURVEILLANCE
Agency Weighed, but Discarded, Plan Reconfiguring the Internet
By JOHN MARKOFF
he Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible.The idea, which was explored at a two-day workshop in California in August, touched off an angry private dispute among computer scientists and policy experts who had been brought together to assess the implications of the technology.
The plan, known as eDNA, called for developing a new version of the Internet that would include enclaves where it would be impossible to be anonymous while using the network. The technology would have divided the Internet into secure "public network highways," where a computer user would have needed to be identified, and "private network alleyways," which would not have required identification.
I saw it first on Werblog
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November 23, 2002
Moblogs
Justin does a good job describing blogs and what happens when they go mobile.
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The Hydrogen Economy
This week was an energy week for me. Stan Ovshinsky, the CEO of ECD, Bob Stempel, the Chairman (and the former chief executive of GM) and Iris Ovshinsky, the co-founder of ECD and Stan's wife were visiting Tokyo this week. We talked a lot about the relationship between energy and information and the fact that information was codified energy. The more I think about it the more it all starts to fit together into an amazing unified image.
The picture above is ECD's vision of the Hydrogen Economy. Get Carbon out of the picture. Reduce the cycle to the basic elements of the universe. Photons creating energy to break H2O into Hydrogen and Oxygen. Oxygen goes back to the atmosphere and the Hydrogen is stored and transported in the Hydride material. The Hydrogen is later extracted to create energy through combustion or through the creation of electrical energy with a fuel cell. This electricity can be stored in a Hydride battery which is also based on Hydrogen. The electricity obviously can be used for propulsion or be converted into meta-energy, or information. Photos->Hydrogen->Electrons->Bits that’s all we need. No CO2, fossil fuels, Uranium or any of the non-big-bang stuff please. Oh and by the way, the basic material and the phenomenon used to store hydrogen in a solid, the convert hydrogen in to electricity and the store electricity in hydride batteries is the based on the same basic science.
It is almost like the relationship between the mind and the body. The true cost of information is cost of the carrier which is based on the creation of energy. Just as the spirit lives in the mind which is carried inside of the body, Information is carried in bits which are carried on wires by electrons, thrust forward by some sort of energy source.
When I was talking to the Tokyo Power Company information division folks the other day, I realized an interesting thing... Just as the telephone company can provide flat fee traffic over their leased lines because they own the wires and fiber, the power company can provide data center and wires for free because they make money on the power consumption.
At a lunch with Jack Welch, he once said, "I love the Internet because it consumes energy and I sell more turbines."
Because power companies don't have legacy information businesses, they can jump into the information and telecom business unencumbered. If you also consider that the phone company is so leveraged and losing so much of their core revenue, such as voice, I can imagine a world where energy and power is the whole game and IT is just like an appliance that you OWN and only pay to power it. And... eventually with photovoltaics, we'll just have to buy energy conversion devices and get our energy from the sun...
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Met David S. Isenberg
08:28 UTC » Energy - Joi's Diary
 (picture by Carver Mead's Foveon Camera) |
David was extremely bright and gave me an interesting view into the "prosultants" (vs "consultants") who are smart researchers who trying to figure things out and convey them to people and companies. I guess that's what I try to do in my own small way. He invited me to several interesting conference and I hope to see him more often more now that we are linked.
I was so excited while talking to him that I forgot to take a picture. I had to steal the picture from his web page.
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H.I.H. Prince Takamado Norihito passed away
08:00 UTC » Joi's Diary - Photo
 A picture of the Prince that I took with my P504iS just several hours before he passed away |
The Prince was a very approachable, intelligent and kind man. He liked technology and gadgets very much. He had recently published a book of his own photographs of his travels. Last year, in his speech he talked about cells phones and "wangiri". (Wangiri became a big problem this year. Wangiri is when people call and let the phone ring once and leave their caller ID on your phone to get you to call them back. It has become a type of spam.)
The day before yesterday, I was showing him my new P504iS phone with the two cameras and we discussed what sort of possible uses there might be for having two cameras. I showed him my phone and took this picture of him, which might be the last picture taken of him.
His death is a great loss to Japan and I will personally miss him very much.
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November 21, 2002
Gen Kanai on smoking in Japan
Gen KanaiUpdate on Japan smokingLA Times - The Land Cigarettes Call Home
In Japan, half of all men smoke, and lung cancer is a leading killer. But then, the government owns 67% of the big tobacco seller.
The Finance Ministry owns 67% of Japan Tobacco, or JT, which until 1985 was a government monopoly. In an era of tight budgets, tobacco contributes $19 billion a year to government coffers in taxes and dividends, making it among the largest revenue sources. The ministry, not health authorities, controls tobacco policy, and promotion of the industry is an explicit national goal.
...
Japan's warning label is among the world's weakest: "Please remember to follow good smoking manners. As smoking might injure your health, please be careful not to overdo it."
...
The greatest source of industry clout is the Tobacco Business Law, one of a string of related measures dating to 1904. The law says the government must own at least 50% of JT in perpetuity and, as a matter of national policy, "promote the healthy development of the tobacco industry and ensure stable revenue in the interest of a sound national economy."
...
In contrast to the Finance Ministry's large tobacco section, the Health Ministry doesn't have a single full-time official working on smoking issues ・even though smoking accounts for the nation's highest level of premature deaths, triple the number of suicides and nine times that of traffic fatalities.
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The national health budget this year for anti-smoking awareness is $180,000, for a practice that kills 95,000 Japanese a year. By comparison, the budget for the prevention of AIDS, which kills approximately 45 people a year, is $94 million.Horrific stuff- gruesome. I don't even know where to start pulling it all apart.
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November 20, 2002
Beyond PC's
22:24 UTC » Consumer Electronics
Today I was hanging out with Leonard Liu, one of my good friends, investors in Neoteny and advisory board members. He was once the chief architect for hardware and software at IBM and architected SNA and SQL. He later became the chairman of Acer and is now the chairman of the ASE group which is one of the biggest IC testing and packaging companies in the world. Anyway, he is one of the most energetic and thoughtful computer scientists I know who can actually run companies.
He said an interesting thing that is sort of obvious, but quite exciting. He said that we still have mainframes, but everyone writes stuff for PC's because there are several orders of magnitude more PC's. Game machines are built cheaper and better because there are a lot of them too. Networked consumer electronics will probably exceed PC's in number and a similar effect of application developers shifting to these CE devices may happen. We talked about how this might happen in the next two years. Will Intel and MS be able to keep up? Will a completely new architecture win? For some reason, it sounds more convincing when Leonard says it...
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November 19, 2002
Cool aluminum case for Powerbook G4
14:02 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
There is a cool site in Japan that sells a great aluminum case for G4 Powerbooks. I just ordered one. Hirata turned me on to these...
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Kung-Log an MT client for OS X
12:53 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
Our guys just upgraded our server to MT 2.5 and I just installed Kung-Log on my Mac. It's nice with all kinds of pull down menus and stuff. It makes up for the fact that one click URL'ing doesn't work in MT on the Mac.
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Just pre-ordered my Ginger
I just ordered my Segway Ginger on Amazon.com. They say delivery will be 2003. So I have the rest of the year to figure out how to smuggle it into Japan...
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Palm watch
I definitely DON'T need one of these. WHAT is palm thinking?
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November 18, 2002
A comic strip about "What is a blog?"
20:01 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
We've been debating in Japanese about what a blog is and whether it is any different from diary sites or other web pages. I've had quite a difficult time defending the position that blogs are really anything special. Here is a funny comic strip of a discussion between a grumpy girl and a questioning ant on that topic.
Seen first on for the sake of clarity.
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Japanese government considers dumping Windows
I just gave my opinion at a government meeting about considering alternatives to Windows. I've been pushing them to do this for years. I'm glad they are finally taking a serious look at it. China is far ahead with their Linux project, but it's never too late to start!
Kyodo NewsGov't considers abandoning Microsoft Windows
Sunday, November 17, 2002 at 07:30 JSTTOKYO The Japanese government is reviewing the possibility of no longer using Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system as part of its plans to boost computer security within the government, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported Saturday.
Most of the government's servers and personal computers use Windows software.
But the government is interested in studying alternative operating systems, especially open-source programs such as Linux, the newspaper said.
Open-source programs do not require licensing fees and can be modified because their source codes are made available for free.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport will set up a panel of experts to study the alternatives and what systems other governments use in the next fiscal year beginning April 1, the newspaper said.
The ruling Liberal Democratic Party's panel on promoting electronic government asked the government in August to develop or introduce an open-source program for security reasons, it said.
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November 15, 2002
My new P504iS
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Okada-san and Suzuki-san from METI
13:18 UTC » Japanese Policy - Joi's Diary - Photo
 Okada-san is on the left and Suzuki-san is on the right |
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November 14, 2002
Samsonite suitcase with bluetooth
Found this on IP...
Samsonite's 625 Series Hardlite ICT has bluetooth built in. It supposedly keeps track of your travel info, owner info and has an alarm mechanism for theft control... I wonder if I need one...
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November 13, 2002
Hiptop Nation Halloween Scavenger Hunt
14:53 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
Hiptop Nation is a blog forDanger's Hiptop owners. They recently had a Halloween Scavenger Hunt. Smartmobs blogs about it and one of the members of one of the teams has written a paper about it.
Teams, games, wireless devices, photos. Cool stuff for blogs moving forward.
Speaking of games, although this is a bit old, I thought Survivor Blog was very cool.
We have a lot of different wireless devices in Japan that let you take pictures and email them. We should try to think of some cool games too.
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November 12, 2002
Net Culture.... sigh...
08:33 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
Since I live in Japan and most people here read mostly Japanese, I've been trying to write in Japanese and read Japanese blogs. (Although I speak Japan fine, my reading and writing has never been that good.) I just spent the last few hours reading a bunch of articles and entries about myself and my friends that were quite negative. I'm pretty good at taking criticism and I actually believe that reading it is important for self-improvement. Having said that, it's quite tiring. Especially in Japanese.
One thing I've noticed is that people have more "local conversations" behind your back and tend to be a bit more personal and biting in their criticism than in the US. (Although it was sort of personal when Tim May came after me for being on a government crypto committee...) I wonder which is worse, getting really negative people writing comments in your blog, being ripped apart in a mailing list, or having to hunt down negative comments... Anyway, I blogged a rather negative comment I found by an intelligent sounding guy on my Japanese blog and pinged him for a response. Let's see if this turns into a mess. An experiment in the strength of weak ties... ;-p
What I am often criticized about is trying to "take all of the credit" or creating some sort of power structure or insider group. It's really frustrating because that's exactly what I am trying fight against. How do you try to evangelize when the people you are trying to reach react negatively towards people who get attention? It's quite a dilemma. This sort of thing does exist in the US, but I think to a lesser extent. For instance, I find that the Linux community in Japan is much more closed and populated by many people who pride themselves in how much they know, happy that so many people can't use Linux. I think there is much less evangelizing to the masses.
I wonder if this us/them closed mentality is what keeps Japanese from being more politically active. It reminds me again of Toshio Yamagishi's discussion about how Japanese come from a "closed" culture...
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Top 10 English and Japanese Pages according to Google
Saw a cool trick on Boing Boing. If you search for "http" on Google, the results are sites ranked by page ranking. As Boing Boing notes, the tops sites are search site. Asahi.com, the online news paper is number one and that most of the top Japanese sites are mass media sites. I love that tabi no madoguchi makes it into the Top 10 in Japan. It's a great site and is all about conversation on the living web come true.
Top 10 Overall
1. Yahoo!
2. Google
3. Microsoft Corporation
4. Adobe Systems Incorporated
5. AltaVista - The Search Company
6. My Excite
7. Amazon.com--Earth's Biggest Selection
8. CNN.com
9. Lycos Home Page
10. MapQuest: Home
Top 10 in Japanese
1. Asahi.com
2. Yahoo! Japan
3. Tabi no madoguchi (a travel site with customer feedback)
4. Fresheye
5. Nikkei Net
6. goo
7. Yomiuri Shimbun
8. Microsoft Japan
9. NHK Online
10. Recruit ISIZE
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November 10, 2002
Lunch at the new Marunouchi Building
18:18 UTC » Photo - Wireless and Mobile
Mizuka and I went to the new Marunouchi Building built by Mitsubishi Jisho and had lunch with her parents. It was VERY flashy and expensive looking and jam packed with tourist types. Some restaurants are booked through the end of the year, which is rare in Japan. It is also probably one of the most expensive office buildings right now. On the first floor was a weird "XBOX Cafe" where people could play games and there were some huge screens running game demos. I guess if you have $40bb, you can afford to have a game cafe in the most expensive real estate in Tokyo. Also, everything was VERY high tech - steel, glass, concrete. It really reminded me of the Dogs and Demons book. All of the people lining up in front of the elevators watching impressive ads ABOUT nature on the HDTV displays...
The other amazing thing is that such a tall building was allowed to be built overlooking the Palace. In Japan, you are not supposed to "look down on" the Palace. I heard someone mumble, "Only Mitsubishi could do this..."
Anyway, it is obviously the "Thing to See" right now. It will be interesting to see what happens when all of the other new buildings open next year... Like the huge Roppongi Mori Building. Next year is supposed to be a big year that may crash the office building business because there are so many sky scrapers opening... What a strange thing to be happening during an economic crisis...
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Putting The Boots In - Photo Lab Grasses Up Pot Growers
07:14 UTC » Gadgets - Humor - Privacy
PlasticPutting The Boots In — Photo Lab Grasses Up Pot Growers found on BBC News written by holgate, edited by John (Plastic)excerpt
A house in Leith, near Edinburgh, was raided by police, leading to the arrest of five people, and the seizure of marijuana plants 'valued' at £15,000, after receiving a tip-off from photo-processing staff at the local branch of Boots. It's believed that a lab technician identified the plants when developing a set of prints, and got on the phone to the boys in blue.
"While you can understand photo-labs wishing to protect themselves from obscene images, given that there are specific laws prohibiting the possession and reproduction of such images, it's another thing entirely to call in the police, based solely upon the perception that photographs record something illegal: that is, recognizing a few tell-tale leaves. Undoubtedly, the pot-growers in question weren't the sharpest knives in the box, but is the knowledge that random people may take moral outrage at your photographs another reason to add that digital camera to the Christmas list?"Yup. Exactly why I first got into digital cameras. I remember one lab which was part of a franchise. I knew the owner fairly well. Anyway, the owner once thanked me for using their service, even though I hadn't told anyone. Also, I had several rolls of film where I had visited the same place several times. The photos of the place were arranged together instead of in the order they appeared on the negatives. It really hit me that someone was "looking" at my pictures... Which makes sense if you think of how a lab works. Now I generally focus on landscape on film. ;-)
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November 9, 2002
Photo.net
08:02 UTC » Cool Web Sites - Photo
 Floor of temple in Koyasan taken while listening to a speech by a monk about the mandalas |
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Dinner at Gonpachi
07:10 UTC » Eating and Cooking - Photo
 That's Yanai-san on the left and Hasegawa-san on the right |
Hasegawa-san is an a amazing guy and I'm a big fan. His company, Global Dining, runs Gonpachi as well other famous chains of restaurants including Cafe La Boheme, Zest, Monsoon Cafe, etc. Global Dining also runs Tableaux, on of my favorite restaurants. Hasegawa-san has a very unique management style for Japan where most of his staff are part time, but very motivated. He has a very open and competitive management style. Global Dining is also famous for being the first company to go public in Japan without a single college graduate on the board!
It's nice beening outside board members of companies that do real things like sell concert tickets and run restaurants. ;-)
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November 8, 2002
Trying "The Switch"
Just installed OS X 10.2 and am trying to "Make the Switch"... I'm using Mizuka's old Powerbook G4 with the broken "/" key, not the cool new one that just came out. I just ordered office and all of the Adobe stuff, so until that arrives, I can't completely switch. I feel totally screwed up right now though. I have a Sony Vaio C1MRX with a great form factor and excellent battery life, I have a Dell Latitude coming that I'm going to configure with with Windows 2000 in a very security conscious mode (after talking to Chris Goggan about what the most secure PC setup was...) and now I have this PowerBook. I hope I am only using one of these a month from now and I HOPE it is going to be the PowerBook.
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National ID and privacy issues continue
06:13 UTC » Japanese National ID - Joi's Diary
 Facing off with the bureaucrats.. |
Yesterday, I started the day with a meeting of our anti-national ID group. I reported on my thoughts of how we should connect the privacy movement with the whistle blower protection law. Since I had the second National ID security oversight committee meeting later in the day, I wanted to get an update from everyone on where things were. One of the things that many of the local governments were asking for was the right to allow their citizens to choose whether they use the National ID system to receive local government services. The ministry had been telling them that that this was not possible. Also, there were some comments that the government was planning to use an extended National ID number as a tax tracking number, which currently is not allowed under the law.
Later in the day, I attended the committee meeting. I made several points. Since they are using Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, I mentioned that the recent ruling by the DoJ against MS had a clause that made me worried that maybe the US government might include some malicious code in Windows. (There is a clause that says, "any API, interface or other information related to any Microsoft product if lawfully directed not to do so by a governmental agency of competent jurisdiction." Dan writes about it.) Even if they do not, I mentioned that Japan should make an effort to get MS allow us to do a security review of Windows and possibly swap some modules that we do not feel good about. I mentioned that China has successfully made demands on Microsoft and that China was working on desktop Linux for the government.
I told them that should not use the local government ID as the taxpayer ID and that it should be a separate, and hopefully a non-human-readable number.
I mentioned the whistleblower protection bill I was working on and that we should consider building in anonymity and pseudonymity into the law. I said that I thought people should be allowed to anonymously receive clarification on laws and procedure and that they should be allowed to pseudonymously receive guidance and counseling on issues before "going public" with their case, for instance.
Finally, I asked why numbers could not be "opt-in" for the local government ID. I did not receive a satisfactory answer and said that I would like them to explain this to me "off-line".
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November 6, 2002
CPSR-Lessig Dinner
23:00 UTC » Joi's Diary - Photo
 Hiroo and Larry with the hand on the chin "intelligent" look |
Part of the discussion was a continuation of last night's discussion. Why aren't Japanese active? (As in "activists") Listening to the other CPRS folks talk about this made me think that maybe it was a bigger issue than I thought. There are many intelligent people who don't feel like making a big deal about stuff. How can you be AWAKE and still bear not to say anything? Reminds me of The Matrix
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November 5, 2002
Dinner with Lawrence Lessig
Just finished having dinner and am in the cab on the way home... DInner was so interesting that I forgot to take a picture. Joi "always-takes-a-picture" Ito forgot to take a picture. Oh well. You all know what he looks like and we ate in the same restaurant that I took Dan and Noriko to.
It's really great having someone like Larry in Japan. Kara, Megan, Dan... We're on a roll!
Larry can really help push some of the issues I find most frustrating working in Japan. Japanese lawyers don't understand technology and technologists don't understand law. IP is still not considered a very important social issue and the value of "public domain" is greatly un-appreciated in Japan. Also, I think that the one of the biggest risks for Japan is to become irrelevant. Having great thinkers like Larry experiencing Japan ang leaving with an understanding of the issues, but a appreciation for our real assets will be one of the things that will save Japan as we go through the massive changes ahead.
Larry will be in Japan for a few more months. I hope I get to see him again and introduce him to the folks he won't meet at Tokyo University. ;-)
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Protecting Whistleblowers
15:49 UTC » Japanese Policy - Privacy
I'm sitting on the inquiry committee where we are revising the consumer protection law. We're discussing provisions to protect whistleblowers. I'm very passionate about this issue. I think that with increasing ability to track people and profile them, we need to protect the identities of whistleblowers. I am proposing that anonymity and pseudonymity using privacy technology should be considered when writing the new law. Certain types of interactions with the government should be allowed in an anonymous way. Currently all whistleblowing and FOIA is on a fully disclosed ID basis without clear protection of the "list" that is created as a result...
The press are here in numbers. Probably because whistleblowing is more common in Japan these days and it is quite clear that they need to be protected.
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