Dr. Dobb's Journal December 2000
Webcasting is usually a hit or miss prospect (our own Technetcast service, http://www .ddj.com/technetcast/, notwithstanding, of course :-)). For just about any session, you butt heads with overloaded servers, incompatible plug-ins, and network congestion. Whatever the problem, the result is the same -- high-blood pressure and wasted time. Still, there's no question that webcasting is important now, and will become even more so as broadband (DSL and cable modem) Internet access and streaming media tools proliferate.
Two recent events brought home the reality of netcasting -- a Harvard Law School debate between Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig; and NIST's announcement concerning the Advanced Encryption Standard. Interestingly, the topics both webcasts addressed will affect the lives of everyone for years to come, yet neither are getting much play outside the Internet.
The Harvard Law School debate, entitled "The Future of Intellectual Property on the Internet" and sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, promised fireworks, as Lessig and Valenti have strongly conflicting views of how the Internet should evolve, and what the balance of control should be between publishers and readers. The discussion was more than academic sophistry, as evident by Lessig's active role in defining cyberspace and constitutional law, and the MPAA's aggressive DeCSS stance (for Valenti's confusing and contradictory DeCSS deposition, see http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/NY/depositions/valenti.html), and its position on Napster, iCraveTV, 2600 magazine, RecordTV.com, and the like. In addition to interested folks who attended on-site, Harvard's servers had some 300-plus simultaneous viewers during the live event. All in all, more than 2000 user sessions were served during the evening.
Putting aside Valenti's self-effacing mantras ("I don't know what you're talking about," "I need a lawyer with me to answer that," and "You should obey the law"), the debate quickly focused on a core issue -- fair use. Clearly, both men support fair use. Where they differ, however, is in what the heck that means. To Valenti's way of thinking, fair use constitutes only what an author explicitly authorizes; this is in line with the contentious Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Lessig, on the other hand, supports the less restrictive view that the public should be able to use copyrighted material for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Although the original Copyright Act does not define "fair use" per se, copyright owners by law consent to fair use of their works by others.
Valenti's other recurring theme was that if you don't like the law, call your congressman and change it. He ought to know how this works, since buying off Congress is what he and his cohorts have been doing for a long time. (According to Roll Call, "the" party at last summer's Republican National Convention was hosted by Valenti, the MPAA, and large entertainment/media companies.) This is easier said than done for normal citizens, however -- unless you have a pocketful of cash.
In all likelihood, the debate didn't resolve any issues, nor change many minds. That's not the point. What is the point is that dialogues such as this debate should be bright dots on everyone's radar since they affect us all. However, you won't see coverage like this on any TV channel -- broadcast, cable, or otherwise. Low-cost, widely available webcasting will be the only outlet for widely distributed narrowcasting such as this. And unlike TV, archives of most netcasts are readily available, enabling you to view the event at a time of your choice. For the Lessig versus Valenti debate, for instance, go to http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/futureofip/archive.asp.
Alas, the other important webcast -- NIST's announcement of the AES winner -- didn't happen. In truth, the NIST-planned webcast, which announced the winners of the three-year competition to replace the venerable DES, was a press event for editors and reporters. However, because of NIST server problems, the webcast didn't come off and those of us at remote locations had to make do with a conference call. What the phone didn't provide -- which a webcast would have -- were slides and related graphics detailing the selected algorithm.
In any event, what was important was the topic at hand -- the AES winner. As it turns out, the winning algorithm is Rijndael (pronounced "Rhine-Doll"), developed by DDJ authors Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. Moreover, the algorithm is based on a block cipher algorithm described in their October 1997 DDJ article "The Block Cipher Square Algorithm" (coauthored with Lars R. Knudsen). More details are available in "News & Views" of this issue (see page 18) and at http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~rijmen/rijndael/. The algorithm has been implemented in C, Java, and assembly language, and is already supported by third-party SDKs. And as for the aborted webcast itself, NIST promises to provide the archives of the event at http://www.nist.gov/aes/.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com