"Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception."

This is an excellent question. I'd love to see this happen, but I think the obstacles boil down to the following:

• People don't care.
• People aren't going to do extra work or incur any additional inconvenience for extra security. (Unless they get burned, at which point they become true believers...)
• Mail User Agent (MUA) vendors target the 98% of people who don't need security, don't want security, are oblivious to risks and think their mail is already secure, or think that governments and criminals will always magically be able to hack the encryption (thanks to Hollywood).
• Effective use of encrypted mail for day-to-day use requires a network of enabled participants. Getting all your recipients to agree to use encrypted mail would be just as challenging as trying to get all your friends to switch to your preferred instant messaging service.
• Providing real security is hard, and encouraging the use of encrypted mail without considering the considerable challenges of securing endpoints may provide a false sense of security. Until common operating systems become sufficiently secure, it's a hassle to find a safe place to store your keys, or a safe terminal from which to enter your passphrase.

These are not insurmountable challenges. I think over time we could could make this happen. It won't be easy or happen quickly, though.

I recently listened to an excellent Software Engineering Radio podcast on this very subject: Episode 148: Software Archaeology with Dave Thomas

This guy has a lot of good pointers. (No pun intended. ;)

Yeah, from what I can tell, this is a completely benign move to make a public-private partnership operate more effectively, and doesn't affect anyone except the volunteers. I'm as suspicious of the government as any of us, and I can see how the wording leads some people to think "Oh noes! Nightwatch!". If the FBI started asking InfraGard members to inform on their co-workers or used InfraGard to establish some sort of hiring favoritism, then we'd have reason to be worried. People working together to achieve a common goal is nothing to worry about, though. Let's save our energy for when the government is actually screwing us.

The problem is, with all the bureaucracy and legal requirements for proposing such information collection, it's hard for these government types to not come across as sounding vaguely sinister.

I agree.

I'm actually offended by the notion that a mental process could be considered cheating in a game that is supposed to have at least some element of skill. It seems that most of the engineer-centric Slashdot crowd agrees. However, I have had people try to tell me that counting cards in your head is indeed cheating. I suspect that to much of the world outside of Slashdot, such mental exercises seem like mystical voodoo.

I lived in Birmingham back in '96. It always seemed to me that there were some forms of nature that were actually *more* dense in the big city than in the smaller rural towns -- like roaches. At least, in the corner of Southside that I lived in. It's sad to hear that downtown still becomes a ghost town after 5pm.

I got a kick out of your colorful description of nature constantly encroaching on man. I felt the same way when I was growing up in the South. Feel free to visit Colorado sometime; I've found it to be radically different. Being outside is actually enjoyable here.

My first computer was also an MC-10! (You, me, and maybe ten others, heh...) My realization came when I was typing in a text adventure game from the back of a book, and got the dreaded "out of memory" error. :)

I hear you about needing a new computer... the 5GB of memory in this Mac Pro starts feeling tight after running a few Firefox, Eclipse, and VMWare processes...

Sounds like that wolf crying again...

Seriously, I've been hearing that long distance bandwidth is plentiful, it's just the last mile that is the limiting factor.

I've lived in a lot of places (although not New York or Texas), and I think every place certainly has its pros and cons. Many times, I think that places could learn a lot from each other and whittle down the cons while boosting the pros. However, if I suggested that my previous city had an idea that my current city could benefit from, I imagine people would think I'm just suffering from this "the old grass was greener" mindset, even if I'm not at all suggesting any sort of overall superiority.

So, I'm wondering how cross-pollination of ideas between cities can happen without sounding like an ass.

I saw a demonstration of Basil earlier this month at the event mentioned in the article, and the Gundersons explained some of the technology and what they are trying to accomplish.

There is nothing special about the sonar -- it's just a simple low-bitrate input scheme. The Gundersons are focusing on solving the problems of environment perception by focusing on a cognitive model instead of throwing horsepower at interpreting the input in fine detail, as computer vision or perhaps some sort of advanced sonar would. The robot manages an internal model of its environment, and compares the input to its expectations instead of continually trying to reconstruct a scene. Perhaps it distinguishes a chair from a person with clues (a chair doesn't move on its own, for instance).