[{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc9622/","summary":"","title":"An Abstract Application Programming Interface (API) for Transport Services"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc9621/","summary":"","title":"Architecture and Requirements for Transport Services"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc9308/","summary":"","title":"Applicability of the QUIC Transport Protocol"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc9312/","summary":"","title":"Manageability of the QUIC Transport Protocol"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc9217/","summary":"","title":"Current Open Questions in Path-Aware Networking"},{"content":"That people \u0026ldquo;disappear\u0026rdquo; into Google after joining (especially from academia) is a complaint so often told that it\u0026rsquo;s nearly a cliche\u0026hellip; says the Googler whose last blog post, about joining Google, was over two and a half years ago.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t just go down the rabbit hole of compute infrastructure at Google in the intervening quarter-decade. I also picked up a synth or six, and, as a bonus, some actual rabbits.\nAlas, most of the delay was needing to actually find an uninterrupted chunk of time where I didn\u0026rsquo;t have anything better to do and during which the weather was uninspiring enough to keep me inside, to allow me to do various IT backend things to get the blog back up on its feet due to drift in its dependencies (a Christmas tradition around here). An oncall shift on what would have been a day off, traditional November grey, and (motions at the global pandemic, round four) did just the trick.\nBut first things first.\nThe Job I haven\u0026rsquo;t written much about the new gig on this blog, and I won\u0026rsquo;t, for various reasons. However, I can report the following:\nSuccessful infrastructure SRE in a large organization has a lot more in common with Internet infrastructure research to support evolvability than I\u0026rsquo;d originally thought it would: in both cases, the job is essentially one of managing change in a technical and political maze of historical dependencies. The day-to-day work of SRE, at least as I do it, is more research than operations or development \u0026ndash; in order to manage said change, you need to know the state of the world, and in order to know you\u0026rsquo;re spending time on changing the right thing you need to know the value of that change. Fortunately, the tools at Google for doing this research are\u0026hellip; really good, and unlike Internet infrastructure research, you don\u0026rsquo;t have to spend a lot of time developing and maintaining the measurement infra1. It mostly Just Works. I still have time to work, occasionally, on ongoing Internet engineering stuff too \u0026ndash; TAPS and the QUIC work on manageability, both themes from the ETH and MAMI days, are both moving inexorably toward publication at the pace of volunteer-driven IETF work. The occasional feeling of pointlessness in research is gone. At the end of the week, I know what I\u0026rsquo;ve done, even if I am occasionally quite tired. The Rabbits What would a rabbithole be without actual rabbits?\nOne thing about being a working geek during a global pandemic is that every day becomes live, via Internet, from the Hammock2, timezone weirdness included if you work SRE with a sister team in California.\nThe other thing is you spend a lot more time at home and a whole lot less time traveling3, so things that were impractical become less so. Like animals, and animal logistics, and learning that the game is over once the animals learn that if they jump through the electric fence there is no path to ground and they are home free.\nThere will be more rabbit stories in subsequent posts.\nThe Music Just before the pandemic hit I was thrown (back) down another rabbithole by a colleague at the office: electronic music. I\u0026rsquo;ve always been inclined to be a not-very-good musician, from my time in a Memphis high-school living room jam band as second rhythm guitarist, to exasperated attempts to program a very used Yamaha SY55 without the manual, to equally exasperated attempts to get a Roland MC-303 not to sound like an MC-303 back in Pittsburgh. I picked up a Novation Circuit and realized well, you didn\u0026rsquo;t actually need to be all that good at music to make electronic music that sounded nice. Then the pandemic hit, and my modular problem started.\nI got started in modular because even a standalone groovebox like the Circuit needs a fair amount of interaction with a computer to change samples or program patches, and I spend enough time staring at a screen in this room for money that I\u0026rsquo;m not inclined to do it for fun. I kept going because staying inside doing nothing during a global pandemic is a great way to amass surplus fun money, and Eurorack is a great way to get rid of it. I did the standard buy-too-much-stuff thing half because I forgot about having a useful musical vision, and half because I was still trying to figure out what my musical vision is. But it\u0026rsquo;s calmed down now to the point that I know enough about what I\u0026rsquo;m doing to actually make music, on which more on the music site.\nThe Blog And now I\u0026rsquo;m back, again again. The technical underpinnings of the blog have been cleared of their bit rot, I have a few things to say about old topics4 and new. See you in subsequent posts.\n(1): unless you\u0026rsquo;re on a measurement infra SRE or dev team, of course; I\u0026rsquo;m not.\n(2): usually not literally from the hammock, though there are a few people from my team who do so regularly. I haven\u0026rsquo;t yet brought my hammock indoors to be able to play along in the winter\u0026hellip; though I am thinking about it.\n(3): this year, especially, I have come to realize the extent to which my \u0026ldquo;surviving November in Zurich\u0026rdquo; plan used to be \u0026ldquo;don\u0026rsquo;t be in Zurich\u0026rdquo;.\n(4): who in Switzerland, who has seen the intentional executive mediocrity built into the federal government working as intended during the pandemic, doesn\u0026rsquo;t have something to say about Swiss politics these days?\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2021/12/down-the-rabbit-hole-part-one/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThat people \u0026ldquo;disappear\u0026rdquo; into Google after joining (especially from academia)\nis a complaint so often told that it\u0026rsquo;s nearly a cliche\u0026hellip; says the Googler\nwhose last blog post, about joining Google, was over two and a half years ago.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI didn\u0026rsquo;t just go down the rabbit hole of compute infrastructure at Google in\nthe intervening quarter-decade. I also picked up a synth or six, and, as a\nbonus, some actual rabbits.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Down the Rabbit Hole, Part One"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc8546/","summary":"","title":"The Wire Image of a Network Protocol"},{"content":"A couple of months ago, I posted about leaving academia. Two weeks ago, I joined Google as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) manager. I\u0026rsquo;ll be working to keep bits of Google\u0026rsquo;s technical infrastructure running smoothly, at least once I\u0026rsquo;ve learned enough about how it works and what all the various switches and levers do to be dangerous. The past two weeks have been a deluge of new things to learn, but I\u0026rsquo;ve finally got my head far enough above water to reflect on things a bit.\nWhy? This was my favorite informal question during the interview process(1): why Google, why SRE, why management? The leap from curmudgeonly pseudoacademic to technical manager isn\u0026rsquo;t as far as it could be, but \u0026ldquo;academia\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;industry\u0026rdquo; are often treated as completely separate tribes(2).\nThe most interesting part of this question \u0026ldquo;why SRE\u0026rdquo;. I was a sysadmin for a few years in college, running UNIX (and UNIXy) things for the Civil Engineering department at Georgia Tech, and while none of my ops horror stories are truly terrible(3), the responsibility-without-authority that characterized late-90s sysadmin was not something I was eager to continue after leaving school. The SRE model is different, and actually reminds me a lot of what I\u0026rsquo;d wished that job could be. \u0026ldquo;SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team\u0026rdquo;, as Benjamin Treynor Sloss says in the introduction to the book. I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t go so far as to call the process I used \u0026ldquo;software engineering\u0026rdquo;, but \u0026ldquo;why manage systems when you can write Perl(4) scripts to manage systems\u0026rdquo; was pretty much my mantra back then.\nI spent the last few years of my research career trying to make (small parts of) the Internet easier to measure and manage, and SRE is an approach to measurement-driven, progressively automatic management of large-scale systems. I\u0026rsquo;m really excited to learn, hands-on, how it\u0026rsquo;s done out in the \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; world. I really get the feeling that I\u0026rsquo;ve left a university to go back to school: everything here is a little different, and looking after bits of it requires that one be an expert in how it works and how it can break. That\u0026rsquo;ll take some time.\n(1): I actually liked a lot of the questions, though it\u0026rsquo;s still a hard day: after finishing my onsite I went directly home, promptly fell asleep at around seven, and didn\u0026rsquo;t move for thirteen hours.\n(2): I spent an embarrassing amount of time my first week walking into doors: it\u0026rsquo;s been a long time since I had a badge.\n(3): I do have a pretty good story about that time we required everyone to change their passwords (you know, for security) after I accidently rm -rf /etc\u0026rsquo;d the production mailserver as root.\n(4): I did say late 90s.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2019/03/noogling/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA couple of months ago, I posted about \u003ca href=\"/post/2019-01-09-leaving-academia\"\u003eleaving\nacademia\u003c/a\u003e. Two weeks ago, I\njoined Google as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) manager. I\u0026rsquo;ll be working\nto keep bits of Google\u0026rsquo;s technical infrastructure running smoothly, at least\nonce I\u0026rsquo;ve learned enough about how it works and what all the various switches\nand levers do to be dangerous. The past two weeks have been a deluge of new\nthings to learn, but I\u0026rsquo;ve finally got my head far enough above water to reflect\non things a bit.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Noogling"},{"content":"About three years ago I started working part-time (20%) on SCION, a secure, available future Internet architecture. Since I wasn\u0026rsquo;t around much, I was given a nice easy project that wasn\u0026rsquo;t on anyone\u0026rsquo;s critical path: desigining the naming system for SCION (as to that time it was assumed SCION would just use DNS with new RRTYPEs to handle the new address families it introduces).\nAfter a few months of part-time thinking about (and rejecting) blockchains and distributed hash tables, I arrived at the design of RAINS, whose recursive acronym ostensibly stands for \u0026ldquo;RAINS, Another Internet Naming System\u0026rdquo;, but is really a comment on the weather in Zürich in November. RAINS, as it turns out, looks a whole lot like DNS. Given that DNS itself is in a state of more flux than it has seen in decades \u0026ndash; witness the DoH versus DOT controversy, fretting about the unmanageable complexity that DNS has become, and efforts to disrupt the logjam holding back DNS evolution \u0026ndash; it seems to me that examining the ways RAINS is different than DNS might be useful in the effort to evolve and improve DNS.\nThe most important difference between the design of RAINS and DNS is \u0026ldquo;signatures or it didn\u0026rsquo;t happen\u0026rdquo;: an assertion about a subject name or address must have a valid signature by an authority for that name to be returned as an answer to a query about that subject. This also implies that RAINS, unlike DNS, has no relative clocks: the DNS TTL is replaced by the absolute validity timestamps on the signature. This has two advantages: first, making security non-optional avoids the poor deployment curve and the poor tooling situation plaguing DNSSEC. Second, as with DNSSEC, having the answer to a query have an absolute validity time and a signature verifiable independent of its origin separates that validity from the identity of the specific bit of infrastructure from which it was received. The guidance to DNS here is make DNSSEC non-optional, which I guess the DNS community already knows, but which is far easier said than done.\nThe second feature of RAINS is explicit context: replacing the various forms of implicit inconsistency in the DNS (split DNS, geolocalized DNS, captive portal interactions and so on) with an explicit form of inconsistency, essentially by allowing any authority over any part of the global namespace to mint an unlimited number of private namespaces, identified by the \u0026ldquo;context-part\u0026rdquo; of a name. I have to admit that I\u0026rsquo;ve been staring at this design for a couple of years and I still don\u0026rsquo;t grasp all of the implications of it, but one of the important ones is that together with \u0026ldquo;signatures or it didn\u0026rsquo;t happen\u0026rdquo;, RAINS can completely separate the \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rdquo; of an assertion from the \u0026ldquo;where\u0026rdquo;, allowing topologies and protocols for name services wildly different from those predominant in the DNS.\nA third but still important feature is that RAINS\u0026rsquo; design separates information model from data model from protocol mechanics (or, for OSI fans, has distinct application, presentation, and session-layer parts). This seems to me to merely be good protocol engineering in the 21st century, and something not available to work on DNS because of the inertia of its legacy. (I for one find DoH\u0026rsquo;s design hilarious in that a DoH query contains a base64-encoded normalized DNS packet in its URL. Elegant given the constraints of the requirements, yes, but to me that design says more about the evolvability of DNS than any snarky blog post ever could.)\nFor the rest, go have a look at the draft.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2019/01/hitting-dns-with-a-sledgehammer-for-fun-and-profit/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAbout three years ago I started working part-time (20%) on\n\u003ca href=\"https://www.scion-architecture.net\"\u003eSCION\u003c/a\u003e, a secure, available future Internet\narchitecture. Since I wasn\u0026rsquo;t around much, I was given a nice easy project that\nwasn\u0026rsquo;t on anyone\u0026rsquo;s critical path: desigining the naming system for SCION (as to\nthat time it was assumed SCION would just use DNS with new RRTYPEs to handle the new\naddress families it introduces).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Hitting DNS with a Sledgehammer (for Fun and Profit)"},{"content":"Looking back over the arc of my career in pseudoacademia, especially over the last three years of digging into transport stack evolution with the MAMI project, there are a few bits of work I\u0026rsquo;m especially happy to have been a part of. One of these is the inclusion of the spin bit into the QUIC transport protocol. The spin bit was conceived as the minimum useful explicit signal one could add to a transport protocol to improve measurability, the benefit for the overhead is IMO quite worth it. Though it exposes \u0026ldquo;just\u0026rdquo; RTT, latency (together with data rate, which is available simply by counting packets and bytes on the wire in any transport protocol that is not hardened against traffic analysis to the point of uselessness) is the most important metric for understanding transport layer performance diagnosing all matter of transport-relevant network problems, and the spin signal itself can also be observed to infer loss and other issues with network treatment of a packet stream. The definition and deployment of the spin bit will therefore make network protocols more measurable while preserving privacy gains from encryption, and is a clear win for network operations and management.\nThe spin bit is the intersection between what it is currently possible to standardize and a more comprehensive vision of measurability (or, since it\u0026rsquo;s m followed by eleven letters followed by a y, \u0026ldquo;m11y\u0026rdquo;) in protocol design. In a world where our estimation of the Internet threat model didn\u0026rsquo;t include nation-state actors bent on pervasive passive surveillance(1), some of the more ambitious ideas in the Principles for Measurability paper might be tenable. But here we are.\nMore formally, a transport protocol is fully measurable if all of the useful metrics about its operation can be derived from observation of its wire image. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m too focused on transport, but since transport layer protocols map to the abstractions application developers use to interact with the network \u0026ndash; sockets or connections(2) \u0026ndash; these are the abstractions that matter for diagnosing problems with services running over the network.\nPerfect measurability is hard to achieve in the Internet because of the tension between designing metric exposure into a protocol\u0026rsquo;s wire image, and the desire to make the wire image less useful for traffic analysis approaches that attempt to infer higher-layer behavior and semantics \u0026ndash; semantics that end-to-end encryption has been applied to protect from passive surveillance activities. RTT being basically useless for pervasive passive surveillance while being useful for network operations is the reason we have a spin bit.\nI\u0026rsquo;m an Internet measurement researcher (at least, I am until next Thursday afternoon), so deriving metrics from traffic is interesting to me as an end in itself. However, its primary utility is in network and application monitoring and diagnostics: determining whether some service is functioning properly and with performance acceptable to its users, and if not, why not. Here, measurability is closely related to observability (or, following convention, \u0026ldquo;o11y\u0026rdquo;(3)). My own definition of a fully observable system at the application layer would be one that logs exactly enough information to diagnose any arbitrary future failure, but nothing more. This perfect optimum is of course impossible to achieve, but practically useful observability is a matter of careful engineering and, perhaps more importantly, a change in application engineering culture that de-emphasizes experimental reproduction of faults in favor of keeping enough state around to allow fault tracing and identification after the fact.\nThe tradeoff with observability is different than that with measurability. Observability generally applies within a single administrative domain: it\u0026rsquo;s not necessary to treat your logging infrastructure as if it might be controlled by an attacker(4), as one must with observers in the case with measurability. But the tradeoff is equally difficult: one must know enough about how a system is likely to break to log the right things, or the logging overhead has a disproportionate impact on system performance.\nThese two concepts are points on a continuum, and can be used to reinforce each other. A measurable protocol that remains contained within a given domain could carry decryptable identifiers linking to log entries of an observable system, to allow passive measurement devices to correlate exposed transport metrics with appliction-layer events. A protocol running over the Internet could augment the information in its wire image with diagnostic information sent to a third-party logging provider, that could be made available to a network operator for connection diagnostic purposes after the fact. The ideas here are inchoate (and I\u0026rsquo;d love pointers to work I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen yet developing them further), but I look forward to finding some time to work them out a bit more in the future.\n(1): That the Internet engineering community has bent over backward to address a seven-year old release of information about a decade-old subset of the capabilities of a couple of state security agencies, while possibly losing focus on other threats to privacy and security in the Internet, is the subject of another rant or three.\n(2): One could make an good argument that applications-over-transport is stuck in a pre-Web time, and that applications have moved on, as most of them are built around resources as opposed to connections, using HTTP as a session and presentation layer. From a network standpoint, I think measurability still binds to transport, especially as HTTP is and should be behind the encryption veil due to its semantic content.\n(3): I\u0026rsquo;m claiming \u0026ldquo;m11y\u0026rdquo; for myself; \u0026ldquo;o11y\u0026rdquo; appears to have been coined by honeycomb.io\u0026rsquo;s Charity Majors.\n(4): You do have to treat your logging infrastructure as if it can fail, but that\u0026rsquo;s a different problem.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2019/01/m11y-and-o11y/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLooking back over the arc of my \u003ca href=\"../2019-01-09-leaving-academia/\"\u003ecareer in\npseudoacademia\u003c/a\u003e, especially over the last three\nyears of digging into transport stack evolution with the \u003ca href=\"https://mami-project.eu\"\u003eMAMI\nproject\u003c/a\u003e, there are a few bits of work I\u0026rsquo;m especially happy\nto have been a part of. One of these is the inclusion of \u003ca href=\"../2018-03-29-and-yet-it-spins/\"\u003ethe spin\nbit\u003c/a\u003e into the QUIC transport protocol. The spin\nbit was conceived as the minimum useful explicit signal one could add to a\ntransport protocol to improve measurability, the benefit for the overhead is IMO\nquite worth it. Though it exposes \u0026ldquo;just\u0026rdquo; RTT, latency (together with data rate,\nwhich is available simply by counting packets and bytes on the wire in any\ntransport protocol that is not hardened against traffic analysis to the point of\nuselessness) is the most important metric for understanding transport layer\nperformance diagnosing all matter of transport-relevant network problems, and\nthe spin signal itself can also be observed to infer loss and other issues with\nnetwork treatment of a packet stream. The definition and deployment of the spin\nbit will therefore make network protocols more measurable while preserving\nprivacy gains from encryption, and is a clear win for network operations and\nmanagement.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"m11y and o11y"},{"content":"The IETF uses Jabber for instant messaging during working group meetings, as does the IAB for its own teleconferences and meetings. Since I didn\u0026rsquo;t really feel like shopping around for a Jabber account, and XMPP integration with Google Talk shut down in the middle of the decade, I decided a few years ago to run my own server, which I pretty much only use for connecting to IETF conference rooms and for chatting with IETF folks as a backchannel during meetings. Prosody is a pretty nice piece of software, so after a little work to get it up and running (IIRC, most of this was getting used to the fact that the configuration files are written in Lua) it\u0026rsquo;s basically stayed up flawlessly since then.\nUntil I ran apt update \u0026amp;\u0026amp; apt upgrade last week to upgrade the Debian testing box on which it was running. And then it didn\u0026rsquo;t.\nOkay, troubleshooting things is fun \u0026ndash; indeed, the whole point of running Debian testing is to have fun troubleshooting things. So, let\u0026rsquo;s have a look. Prosody fails to start because it doesn\u0026rsquo;t like my certificate. Okay, I guess I don\u0026rsquo;t like my certificate, either \u0026ndash; it\u0026rsquo;s an old StartSSL cert (for which read dodgy), which I only failed to replace with a LetsEncrypt cert due to problems with some clients not trusting the LetsEncrypt root a while back.\nPoint to the new cert, delete the old one, systemctl restart prosody and we\u0026rsquo;re up and running again\u0026hellip; but wait, I can talk to some people but not to others, and attempts to join any chat room on jabber.ietf.org fail. Okay, let\u0026rsquo;s go have a look at the log. A little grepping about shows that connections to jabber.ietf.org fail with dh key too small.\nWell, okay, thanks, but that wasn\u0026rsquo;t a problem until the upgrade. Nothing changed in the Prosody defaults configuring ciphers, so why break now? Oh, right. Prosody uses OpenSSL, and OpenSSL has system-wide as well as application-provided configuration (in a file whose opening header helpfully, but a little misleadingly, explains \u0026ldquo;this is mostly being used for generation of certificate requests\u0026rdquo;). A little more poking about yields this line in /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf:\nCipherString = DEFAULT@SECLEVEL=2 Sure enough, Debian upgraded the default OpenSSL system security level to 2 (security levels being, ahem, clearly documented in the manpage for SSL_CTX_get_security_level()), upping the minimum security level to 112-bit equivalent, and causing any connection that can\u0026rsquo;t negotiate at least that to fail. Since I hadn\u0026rsquo;t changed my OpenSSL system-wide configuration on this box, apt happily updated it. And the result was an interoperability failure with one of an XMPP server that\u0026rsquo;s kind of the whole reason I run Jabber, caused by one committer on a large open-source project faithfully following the Internet security community\u0026rsquo;s best current advice on the configuration of cryptographic protocols.\nHow\u0026rsquo;d I fix it? Easy:\nCipherString = DEFAULT@SECLEVEL=1 I get it. Ratcheting security up on the Internet is important. 80 bits isn\u0026rsquo;t enough today against a well-motivated attacker, and as available compute power continues to scale, the amount of motivation required to break the confidentiality or integrity (in this case, of my connections to other Jabber servers) will only go down. But between 80 bit security and a broken service, I know what I choose. If we move the ratchet too quickly, we risk being ignored by people who just want things to work. I\u0026rsquo;m ignoring us, and I\u0026rsquo;m one of us.\n(Indeed, I\u0026rsquo;m apparently not the only one for whom this broke something important: the change has already been backed out on Debian unstable.)\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2019/01/on-the-security-ratchet/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe IETF uses Jabber for instant messaging during working group meetings, as\ndoes the IAB for its own teleconferences and meetings. Since I didn\u0026rsquo;t really\nfeel like shopping around for a Jabber account, and XMPP integration with Google\nTalk shut down in the middle of the decade, I decided a few years ago to run my\nown server, which I pretty much only use for connecting to IETF conference rooms\nand for chatting with IETF folks as a backchannel during meetings.\n\u003ca href=\"https://prosody.im\"\u003eProsody\u003c/a\u003e is a pretty nice piece of software, so after a\nlittle work to get it up and running (IIRC, most of this was getting used to the\nfact that the configuration files are written in Lua) it\u0026rsquo;s basically stayed up\nflawlessly since then.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On the Security Ratchet"},{"content":"I always love going to Schloss Dagstuhl, a retreat for computer scientists in the middle of nowhere in Saarland, Germany. It\u0026rsquo;s a little difficult to get to, but the train ride (Wallisellen to Saarbrücken via Zürich and Mannheim) is a nice, slow way to step back from whatever context-switching overhead is dominating my days at the moment and start thinking about the theme of the workshop.\nLast October, I went to what\u0026rsquo;s probably my last Dagstuhl seminar for a while, spending three days around the billiard table and in the wine cellar figuring out whether there\u0026rsquo;s anything to be done about Encouraging Reproducibility in Scientific Research of the Internet. The seminar ended up focusing of a few themes of deep interest to me, one of which being how to fix academic publishing (at least with respect to computer networking research) so that it works better for researchers, science, and society as a whole, a theme which I\u0026rsquo;ve written about before. tl;dr I\u0026rsquo;m hopeful: for more on our vision for this which came out of the workshop, see our upcoming editorial note in ACM CCR.\nThis was my last Dagstuhl seminar for a while because I\u0026rsquo;m leaving academia. There are a few reasons for this, all of which are more or less personal, all of which boil down to \u0026ldquo;there is no future for me here.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m not writing to complain about this. I\u0026rsquo;ve read a few such farewell letters to the academy tell stories of dreams and hopes dashed against a fundamentally broken system filled with broken people, of abuse and worse. That\u0026rsquo;s not my story. I\u0026rsquo;ve been incredibly fortunate in my career as a pseudoacademic, backing into a research-engineering job from a post-dotcom-bust software engineering consulting contract, swinging from there to an industrial research position hosted at a university, having a chance to publish enough to essentially become a postdoc with a BSc. All of these steps were essentially a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and I\u0026rsquo;m incredibly grateful for everyone who\u0026rsquo;s helped me get here. I\u0026rsquo;ve had a chance to think deep thoughts about the Internet and its future, to measure aspects of its evolution in a way that I hope will have some lasting impact, to travel the world and to build interesting collaborations and make great friends. The (pseudo-)academic life I\u0026rsquo;ve had has a lot to recommend it.\nIt also has zero job security. I haven\u0026rsquo;t had a permanent job since 2008, which due to the vagaries of Swiss immigration law would cause me some trouble had I not already become a citizen. I\u0026rsquo;m a bit of an anomaly in that not having a degree (\u0026ldquo;postdoc with a BSc\u0026rdquo;) means I can\u0026rsquo;t really easily be hired anywhere else for the position I already have. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t even expecting to make it this far; the project that funded me through the end of last year was basically the result of Mirja and I writing down an idea we had for a thing we wanted to do, pulling together a small consortium of people we wanted to work with, sending it in to the European Commission, then going and looking for real jobs because there was no chance at all of our proposal being accepted — the chances, of course, that a pseudoacademic would get a contract without paying their own way (and then some) being nil. It turns out we\u0026rsquo;re apparently better at writing proposals than we are at guessing the ratings of same, which was a happy surprise.\nI could have gone back for the degree and become a proper academic, which might even lead to a funded position someday. I seriously considered this. ETH even graciously (if provisionally) accepted me to start a PhD after a ten-year career in research, and it might have been fun. But maybe it\u0026rsquo;s one of those midlife crisis things to consider what happens next, and the prospect of becoming an itinerant postdoc in three years at best, at the age of 44 with two kids and roots in Zürich, appealed less and less the more I thought about it. In the immortal words of Roger Murtaugh, I\u0026rsquo;m getting too old for this shit.\nSo I\u0026rsquo;m starting 2019 with one last month here at ETH to wind down various projects, then I\u0026rsquo;ll take a month off and it\u0026rsquo;s on to the next thing. Watch this space.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2019/01/leaving-academia/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI always love going to \u003ca href=\"https://dagstuhl.de\"\u003eSchloss Dagstuhl\u003c/a\u003e, a retreat\nfor computer scientists in the middle of nowhere in Saarland, Germany. It\u0026rsquo;s a\nlittle difficult to get to, but the train ride (Wallisellen to Saarbrücken via\nZürich and Mannheim) is a nice, slow way to step back from whatever\ncontext-switching overhead is dominating my days at the moment and start\nthinking about the theme of the workshop.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Leaving Academia"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/cccp-ccr-2019/","summary":"","title":"Open Collaborative Hyperpapers - A Call to Action"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/spinbit-imc-2018/","summary":"","title":"Three Bits Suffice - Explicit Support for Passive Measurement of Internet Latency in QUIC and TCP"},{"content":"A year and some after Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s plucky protofascist poster art collective cum Trumpist political party, the SVP (Swiss People\u0026rsquo;s Party), screamed Verfassungsbruch! (lit. \u0026ldquo;Constitution break!\u0026rdquo;; fig., accusative: \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rsquo;re breaking the Constitution!\u0026rdquo;) on the floor of Parliament at the admitted non-implementation of their unimplementable vandalism of the Swiss constitution in the name of nativism, they\u0026rsquo;re back at it again with the almost-reasonable-sounding Selbstbestimmungsinitiative (lit. \u0026ldquo;self-determination initiative\u0026rdquo;; SBI if you\u0026rsquo;re into hashtags). One has to read the details to see how broken it is. Let\u0026rsquo;s have a look.\nIn Article 5 \u0026ldquo;Principles of the Rule of Law\u0026rdquo;, text in italics would be added (translations mine):\n(1): The actions of the state are based on and limited by the law. The Federal Constitution is the highest source of law in the Swiss Confederation. (4): The Swiss Confederation and the cantons observe international law. The Federal Constitution is above international law, subject to the mandatory provisions of international law. Par for the course for SVP initiatives, the text in clause 4 now appears to contradict itself. How can the Swiss Confederation observe international law (in the sense of being bound by it, implied by beachten in the German text) if the Federal Constitution is above it? How can the Federal Constitution be above it if it is \u0026ldquo;subject to the mandatory provisions\u0026rdquo; thereof? The addition to Article 5 Clause 1 further seems to be superfluous, due to Article 3 (my translation):\nThe cantons are sovereign, as long as their sovereignty is not limited by the Federal Constitution. They exercise all rights not assigned to the Confederation (implied: by the Federal Constitution, ed.). Three, as my daughter would insistently correct you since she was two, comes before five, so anyone who has read the constitution in the customary order should already know this. The authors seem to want to make a statement about sovereignty here, without having read the document which anchors the concept in Swiss constitutional law.\nOkay, so far so confused, next:\nArticle 56a \u0026ldquo;Obligations under International Law\u0026rdquo; would be added in full, to follow Article 56 \u0026ldquo;Foreign Relations of the Cantons\u0026rdquo; (translations mine):\n(1) The Confederation and the cantons will not enter into any obligations under international law that contradict the Federal Constitution. (2) In case of contradiction, they will adapt their obligations under international law to the requirements of the Federal Constituion, if necessary by abrogating the relevant international treaties. (3) The mandatory provisions of international law shall remain reserved (i.e., are not subject to clauses 1 and 2) On first reading, this article looks like a no-op, aside from that pesky abrogation bit. And that\u0026rsquo;s the knife-edge of the initiative: it takes the job of balancing the will of the people (as reflected in changes to the constitution by referendum) and obligations prior and future the state has entered on behalf of the people away from the judiciary, and sticks it in the constitution. The outcome of that is not clear to anyone, really, which is why the Ja and Nein campaigns don\u0026rsquo;t even really seem to agree on the facts, a relative novelty in Swiss politics.\nTo understand why the SVP wants this text in the Constitution (for reasons other than sheer vandalism), you have to go back and look at the SVP\u0026rsquo;s entire policy platform has been for at least the past decade I\u0026rsquo;ve been paying attention to it.\nFirst of all, the SVP hates foreigners, which becomes relevant in the following paragraphs.\nSecond, the SVP hates the EU, and in this context the SBI is best interpreted as a mild step toward Swexit, the end of the bilateral agreements that meant that, even prior to Brexit, should it come to pass, Switzerland is de facto more subject to European regulation than the UK. Much of the policy platform that hasn\u0026rsquo;t been directed toward protecting Switzerland from evil foreigners is directed toward driving a wedge between Switzerland and the EU. While the EU doesn\u0026rsquo;t really like the exceptional nature of its relationship with Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s relationship, change is not really on the agenda, and the status quo is relatively stable. Neither an end to the bilateral agreements (let\u0026rsquo;s call that \u0026ldquo;hard Swexit\u0026rdquo;) nor full membership (let\u0026rsquo;s call this \u0026ldquo;accession\u0026rdquo; because \u0026ldquo;Swentrance\u0026rdquo; is hard to say) is capable of getting a majority in a referendum in Switzerland. It\u0026rsquo;s not clear why the SVP remains obsessed with staying out of Europe, beyond the obvious issue that Europe is full of foreigners, together with a fundamental misunderstanding of physics.\nThird, the SVP is not a big fan of judges or the legislature, largely because judges and the legislature have not really been all that helpful in the SVP\u0026rsquo;s quest to rid Switzerland of foreigners and the EU, and most recent SVP proposals feature some automation-of-law, removing judicial oversight from individual cases. The last time the SVP endangered the bilateral agreements with the Masseneinwanderungsinitiative, which featured all three of the themes above, parliament simply failed to implement it (hence \u0026ldquo;Verfassungsbruch!\u0026rdquo;), more or less since implementing it would force abrogation, which nobody aside from the SVP wanted to do. In this light, the SBI is best understood as an attempt to keep Parliament from doing that again. It is not at all clear from the confused content of the initiative that it would.\nThat is reason enough to reject the initiative: regardless of what one\u0026rsquo;s actual aims are, it\u0026rsquo;s not really well-written enough to know what it will achieve, though we do know what its authors want, and in any case mucking about in the circuitry of international relations without knowing what you\u0026rsquo;re doing is potentially dangerous stuff.\nCompounding this, the SVP also seems to be rejecting its calling as a protofascist poster art collective. For this campaign, they\u0026rsquo;ve given up the 1930\u0026rsquo;s red-white-black color scheme and are trying out a softer What-The-SVP-Thinks-Average-Swiss-People-Look-Like-Saying-Yes motif:\n(Side question, asked earnestly: how many of those international treaties the SVP wants to be able to automatically abrogate does it take for a Swiss person to safely drive that truck in one of the rallyes it was clearly built to run?)\nNow this campaign doesn\u0026rsquo;t do that much for me, because I know what it\u0026rsquo;s trying to sell me, but I\u0026rsquo;m afraid the low-on-facts, high-on-the-Swiss-equivalent-of-motherhood-and-apple-pie angle might resonate with enough of my fellow citizens to let this one accidentally squeak by. This continuation of the SVP\u0026rsquo;s program of the Americanization of Swiss politics, assault on the foundations of the pluralistic, democratic rule of law enjoyed by Switzerland is worth opposing vigorously even if current polling gives it very little chance. At least 50.1% No is necessary to keep this initiative from damaging Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s international relations, intentionally or no. A more thumping repudiation (say 71% No, as we saw with the NoBillag attempt to lay the groundwork for a Fox-Newsification of Swiss media) won\u0026rsquo;t make the SVP go away, but it would make it clear, again, that Switzerland isn\u0026rsquo;t interested in yesterday\u0026rsquo;s solutions to nonexistent problems.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2018/10/just-say-no-to-swexit/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eA year and some after Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s plucky protofascist poster art collective\n\u003cem\u003ecum\u003c/em\u003e Trumpist political party, the SVP (Swiss People\u0026rsquo;s Party), screamed\n\u003cem\u003eVerfassungsbruch!\u003c/em\u003e (lit. \u0026ldquo;Constitution break!\u0026rdquo;; fig., accusative: \u0026ldquo;you\u0026rsquo;re\nbreaking the Constitution!\u0026rdquo;) on the floor of Parliament at the admitted\nnon-implementation of their \u003ca href=\"/2014/02/on-vandalist-politics/\"\u003eunimplementable\nvandalism\u003c/a\u003e of the Swiss constitution in the\nname of nativism, they\u0026rsquo;re back at it again with the almost-reasonable-sounding\n\u003cem\u003eSelbstbestimmungsinitiative\u003c/em\u003e (lit. \u0026ldquo;self-determination initiative\u0026rdquo;; SBI if\nyou\u0026rsquo;re into hashtags). One has to read the details to see how broken it is.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s have a look.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Just say no to Swexit"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/tracing-tma-2018/","summary":"","title":"Tracing Internet Path Transparency"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m writing today from Berlin, after an excellent Passive and Active Measurement conference and a very long but fruitful week in London for IETF 101, which, for me, came to be dominated by the The Spin Bit.\nThe spin bit is an explicit signal for passive measurability of round-trip time, currently possible in TCP but not in QUIC due to lack of acknowlegment and timestamp information in the clear. It\u0026rsquo;s an example of a facility designed to fulfill the principles for measurement as a first class function of the network stack we laid out in an article published last year. I won\u0026rsquo;t go into the details of how it works or why it matters here; read the draft or watch the presentation for that.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s taken about a year of discussion and research to refine the proposal to add this facility to the QUIC protocol, and we\u0026rsquo;re still not done: agreed in London was the reservation of three bits for experimentation with passive RTT measurement, with the result of this experimentation to inform an eventual working group decision to include the bit in the \u0026ldquo;shipping\u0026rdquo; version 1 of the protocol, scheduled to be complete by November 2018.\nOn this point, Geoff Huston writes:\nA cynical view would see the IETF as being incapable of holding the line that the end-to-end control state should be completely withheld from the network, and this spin bit is just one more step along an inexorable path of compromise that once more ends up gratuitously exposing user’s actions to the network. There is probably a less cynical view as well, but I just can\u0026rsquo;t think what it may be!\nThis article attempts to present one such less cynical view.\nWire Images of Network Protocols Those of us who work with Internet infrastructure have had decades to get used to the idea that what you see in a protocol\u0026rsquo;s headers, on the wire, is what you get. IP and TCP, as Geoff points out, expose all the information required by their operation to any observer along the path, which can leak sensitive, user-linked metadata. TCP options and timestamp rate drift, for example, can be used as part of relatively unique device fingerprints.\nThe creation of transport protocols like QUIC, which encrypts its headers, splits the wire image of the protocol \u0026ndash; what it looks like on the wire \u0026ndash; and the information used by the protocol in its own operation. This is new, and provides us as protocol engineers an opportunity to design the protocol\u0026rsquo;s wire image to expose exactly what we want the wire to see. See the Internet-Draft for more on wire images.\nExplicit signaling for better efficiency and privacy The spin bit, as designed, leverages an engineered wire image to get a large win \u0026ndash; passive latency measurement on a per-flow basis at one sample per RTT, which can be used to drive a large variety of measurement tasks on an Internet connected network without the overhead or uncertainty of active measurement methods \u0026ndash; for minimal overhead \u0026ndash; three bits per packet that would be wasted anyway, and a trivial amount of additional code in each QUIC endpoint that doesn\u0026rsquo;t even need access to internal, encrypted protocol state to operate. As to the safety of round-trip time information, well, that\u0026rsquo;s why I\u0026rsquo;m in Berlin, to present our paper on the subject at PAM 2018. The summary findings: Internet RTT is not useful for locating endpoints that have known IP addresses or inferring endpoint activity, as the per-hop variance and error compounds very quickly.\nIn summary, it\u0026rsquo;s a low-risk, high-utility way to continue to support passive RTT measurement in a world in which TCP is displaced by QUIC \u0026ndash; the world we\u0026rsquo;ll be in in a few years, if QUIC is as successful as we hope.\nA spinning slope? Is it \u0026ldquo;one more step along an inexorable path of compromise\u0026rdquo;? Normally I share Geoff\u0026rsquo;s cynicism on most things networking, but that sounds a little nihilistic, even to me(1).\nThe truly useful, transport-independent signals that one can place in an engineered wire image are quite limited. RTT is one of them, since it is a property largely determined by the network, and the spin bit is a very good signal for RTT measurement.\nWe might want to revisit a \u0026ldquo;clear path state\u0026rdquo; signal, replacing TCP FIN/ACK, as we discuss in the paper that sums up our findings from our work on the PLUS proposal. This seems especially useful for long-lived connections where either side, not just the initiator, may want to resume sending after a delay \u0026ndash; 0RTT resumption will perform well when it\u0026rsquo;s always the client resuming, but does nothing for two-way application protocols.\nBeyond that, though, we may well be done. Arrival information as we proposed in the principles paper would be nice to have for end-to-end loss measurement, but we\u0026rsquo;re still working to find mechanisms that have acceptable overhead/utility tradeoffs for arrival information and loss/reordering metrics. In any case, the spin bit itself can be used for loss measurement between two vantage points. Measurement techniques that get deeper into the operation of the transport protocol, replacing retransmission detection as in TCP, are very brittle, and don\u0026rsquo;t give actionable data, and I don\u0026rsquo;t really see the point.\nSo I can\u0026rsquo;t share the cynical view here: if it\u0026rsquo;s an inexorable path of compromise, it\u0026rsquo;s a very, very short one.\n(1) Indeed, I\u0026rsquo;ve been accused of nihilism \u0026ndash; live, on video, on this very subject, last week.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2018/03/and-yet-it-spins/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m writing today from Berlin, after an excellent \u003ca href=\"https://pam2018.inet.berlin\"\u003ePassive and Active\nMeasurement\u003c/a\u003e conference and a very long but\nfruitful week in London for \u003ca href=\"https://www.ietf.org/how/meetings/past/101/\"\u003eIETF\n101\u003c/a\u003e, which, for me, came to be\ndominated by the \u003ca href=\"https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-trammell-quic-spin\"\u003eThe Spin\nBit\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe spin bit is an explicit signal for passive measurability of round-trip\ntime, currently \u003ca href=\"/publication/qof-tma-2014/\"\u003epossible\u003c/a\u003e in TCP but not in QUIC\ndue to lack of acknowlegment and timestamp information in the clear. It\u0026rsquo;s an\nexample of a facility designed to fulfill the principles for measurement as a\nfirst class function of the network stack we laid out in \u003ca href=\"/publication/ipim-ccr-2017/\"\u003ean\narticle\u003c/a\u003e published last year. I won\u0026rsquo;t go into the\ndetails of how it works or why it matters here; read the draft or \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQq6Z4_HBaY\u0026amp;feature=youtu.be\u0026amp;t=1276\"\u003ewatch the\npresentation\u003c/a\u003e\nfor that.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"And yet, it spins"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rttpriv-pam-2018/","summary":"","title":"Revisiting the Privacy Implications of Two-Way Internet Latency Data"},{"content":"I don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve ever written a completely optimisic post about politics, but today seems as good a day as any to try. Today was an Abstimmungssonntag (\u0026ldquo;referendum Sunday\u0026rdquo;) here, and the most important question before Switzerland at the national level was a revocation of the federal government\u0026rsquo;s authority to levy a compulsory television and radio fee: NoBillag. I\u0026rsquo;ve already written about this referendum, and how it represented not a mere return of four hundred francs per year to every household, not a mere privatization of a few television and radio stations (one of which I\u0026rsquo;m listening to right now), but a frontal assault on public media and an attempt to drive the country\u0026rsquo;s media landscape into low-information territory; in other words noch ein Schritt zum kriechenden Beitritt der Schweiz in die vereinigten Staaten(1).\nThat\u0026rsquo;s not going to happen, at least not today. 71% of Swiss voters, myself included, said no to this one. While the polling had tended in this direction for a while, this was a far more decisive result than anyone was expecting, and \u0026ndash; here\u0026rsquo;s where I get optimistic \u0026ndash; I think this might mean something about Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s struggle with its inner fascism.\nThe Swiss People\u0026rsquo;s Party (Schweizerischer Volkspartei, SVP) is usually described in the English-language media as \u0026ldquo;far-right\u0026rdquo;, back before \u0026ldquo;far-right\u0026rdquo; was the scary new thing in Europe. I\u0026rsquo;ve described them in the past as vandalist; now \u0026ldquo;Swiss Trumpist\u0026rdquo; is a useful if not entirely accurate abbreviation for an American audience(2). The primary unifying theme of SVP politics as long as I\u0026rsquo;ve been here has been unrelenting hostility to people who are not Swiss, with a relatively restrictive understanding of the term \u0026ldquo;Swiss\u0026rdquo;.\nOne particular piece of this hostility was the Ausschaffungsinitiative (\u0026ldquo;Deportation Initiative\u0026rdquo;), which foresaw automatic loss of right to remain and subsequent deportation in case a noncitizen was convicted in Switzerland of murder, rape or other sexual assault, robbery, human trafficking, drug dealing, breaking and entering; or when said noncitizen abused social insurance (AHV/IV, \u0026ldquo;Social Security\u0026rdquo; in American English) or social assistance (the part of the social safety net that comes under \u0026ldquo;Welfare\u0026rdquo;), curiously, whether convicted thereof or not. The theory here was that since foreigners commit all the crime and steal all the welfare (which, actually, they don\u0026rsquo;t), if we just kick them out then there won\u0026rsquo;t be any more crime or welfare fraud.\nThe initiative passed in November 2010, 53-47. There were of course the usual problems with law by vandalism, such that nobody can be convicted of breaking and entering because no such particular offense exists in Swiss criminal law. There was also the matter that the complex set of treaties governing Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s relationship with the EU already regulated when EU citizens could be deported from Switzerland. There was the further matter that the automatic deportation foreseen by the initiative was fundamentally incompatible with the role of the judiciary in a state subscribing to the rule of law. Parilament duly implemented the initiative without all these unimplementable bits, which the SVP saw as a violation of the rights of the people (in this case, their base, plus the fifteen additional percent of the population they\u0026rsquo;d scared into voting for the Ausschaffungsinitiative by waving posters of Ivan S. at them) to self-determination through the initiative process(3).\nThe SVP\u0026rsquo;s response to this was the Durchsetzungsinitiative \u0026ldquo;Implementation Initiative\u0026rdquo;, which would have directly added text to Article 197(4) of the Constitution stating exactly which sections of the criminal code counted toward deportation, further stating that the power of deportation was retroactive for ten years, further explicitly ignoring the bilateral agreements on the status of EU citizens, and further allowing exceptions only in cases of self defense. tl;dr: \u0026ldquo;we fucking mean it, throw out the fucking foreign criminals, right fucking now.\u0026rdquo;\nAll right, here comes the optimism:\nIn contrast to the 52% Yes from the former intitiative, this one failed, a little over two years ago, with 60% No. This is somewhat unprecedented: Switzerland is famously conservative. Eight percent of the population doesn\u0026rsquo;t usually change its mind in the space of five years. It failed because it \u0026ndash; finally \u0026ndash; went too far. It was arbitrary, as the set of deportable laws and retroactivity clause meant that someone who had a single relatively minor crime in their youth could be deported a decade later, this itself being again a product of the medocrity of law by vandalism. It was incompatible with the rule of law, first by replacing the Parliament\u0026rsquo;s function in implementing provisions of the Constution by (poorly) writing exactly the law they wanted right in Article 197, second in removing the ability of the judiciary to do any actual judging, third by ignoring and thereby endangering the Bilateral treaties(5) with the EU, which a majority of Swiss people still think are a pretty good deal, on balance. It was protofascist, a point memorably made by an anti-initiative ad turning the Swiss cross into a swastika, to hit people over the head with the parallel to \u0026ldquo;two-class justice\u0026rdquo; as practiced in Nazi Germany.\nSwiss politics from the center-right to the hard left breathed a sigh of relief when the Durchsetzungsinitiative failed. We\u0026rsquo;re still hearing the echo of that relief with the decisive No on NoBillag. Though the initiative\u0026rsquo;s proponents come from the youth wing of the Free Democratic Party, the politics are out of the SVP playbook: a frontal assault on the intitutions of the state and the political center, hastily written and ultimately mediocre text that has no place in the Constitution. I believe that we, the people of Switzerland, or at least the majority who dwell closer to the center of the political landscape, are learning to recognize these plays for what they are, and to reject them for the danger1 they represent.\n(1)\u0026ldquo;The creeping admittance of Switzerland to the United States.\u0026rdquo; The SVP, in particular, hates the EU, and the idea that Switzerland might have one day joined it, and fights against anything that smells like getting closer to it (\u0026quot;\u0026hellip;creeping accession\u0026hellip;\u0026quot;). I could be generous here and say that this has something to do with a deep and abiding commitment to the idea of national sovereignty \u0026ndash; whatever that really means for a state without economic or cultural dominance of its environs and/or a blue-water navy in the 21st century \u0026ndash; but I think it has more to do with a (correct) fear that, subjugated to a larger political order, the SVP would disappear as a very mediocre fish in a very large pond. I digress.\n(2)Indeed, \u0026ldquo;vandalist\u0026rdquo; is a pretty good description of Trumpism for someone who\u0026rsquo;s never seen The Apprentice, has no Twitter account, and has pointedly ignored English-language news for the past two years.\n(3)This is the same pattern followed with the equally unimplementable Masseneinwanderungsinitiative, the blowback from which will arrive in 2018, but this is the optimistic post, remember?\n(4)Everything temporary in the Swiss constitution happens in Article 197. This generally involves things like delays in the effect of other articles added or changed, and how to handle certain details during the implementation of an initiative.\n(5)Ignoring and thereby endangering the Bilateral can either be seen as an avocation of the SVP, or as the entire strategy thereof; see (1).\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2018/03/a-little-optimism-about-swiss-politics/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI don\u0026rsquo;t think I\u0026rsquo;ve \u003cem\u003eever\u003c/em\u003e written a completely optimisic post about politics,\nbut today seems as good a day as any to try. Today was an \u003cem\u003eAbstimmungssonntag\u003c/em\u003e\n(\u0026ldquo;referendum Sunday\u0026rdquo;) here, and the most important question before Switzerland\nat the national level was a revocation of the federal government\u0026rsquo;s authority\nto levy a compulsory television and radio fee: NoBillag. I\u0026rsquo;ve \u003ca href=\"/post/2018-01-17-on-billag\"\u003ealready\nwritten\u003c/a\u003e about this referendum, and how it represented\nnot a mere return of four hundred francs per year to every household, not a\nmere privatization of a few television and radio stations (one of which I\u0026rsquo;m\nlistening to \u003ca href=\"http://www.radioswissjazz.ch/en\"\u003eright now\u003c/a\u003e), but a frontal\nassault on public media and an attempt to drive the country\u0026rsquo;s media landscape\ninto low-information territory; in other words \u003cem\u003enoch ein Schritt zum\nkriechenden Beitritt der Schweiz in die vereinigten Staaten\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e(1)\u003c/sup\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A little optimism about Swiss politics"},{"content":"My opinion on Billag(1) is complicated. It seems like it could fairly simply be replaced by payments from the general fund, overseen by a non-political body to evaluate applications for funding from SRF and regional providers. What we have in NoBillag, instead, is an attempt to Americanize the Swiss media landscape. Thankfully, I\u0026rsquo;m not the first to point this out, and I hope I won\u0026rsquo;t be the last. tl;dr, hey Switzerland, you want Bundesrat Trump? Because NoBillag is how you get Bundesrat Trump.\nAdmittedly, I\u0026rsquo;ve long failed to see, in a media environment in which radio and television ownership no longer correlate with public media consumption (and, indeed, in which the benefits of the information service provided by said public media accrue even to those who don\u0026rsquo;t consume it), why we need 230 semi-polite, semi-privatized bureaucrats to spot-enforce a regressive tax.\nThe NoBillag initiative before the Swiss people in March, however, is simultaneously far less well thought out and far more sinister than a simple reform to this system. It is, in essence, a frontal assault on media independence disguised either as a market reform, or as a 350 franc-a-year rebate for a television channel that doesn\u0026rsquo;t provide the Swiss right wing with the propaganda boost it seems to feel it deserves.\nI\u0026rsquo;m voting No, and you should too, if you have the right. A Switzerland with this initiative\u0026rsquo;s text added to its constitution will be a Switzerland without public media. While a Switzerland without public media will, indeed, still be Switzerland on the day after SRF shuts down, America\u0026rsquo;s experience with political media privatization to date calls into grave question the ability of a multiparty democracy to survive in the long term without some consensus as to what the truth is, and independent(2) political news in the form of public media with a legal duty to provide information as a public service goes a long way toward keeping that consensus from decaying.\nLike, I suspect, most Americans who have a smartphone, I spent way more time in 2017 rage-refreshing Twitter to catch up on the ongoing collapse of the institution of the Presidency of the United States than is probably healthy. I\u0026rsquo;m going to do less of that sort of thing this year: no amount of my attention from here in Wallisellen will change the fact that American democracy, in its present form, is a complete write-off, and will need to be rebuilt from the grassroots up with a revised political culture. I\u0026rsquo;m not optimistic that significant progress will be made here during my lifetime.\nThat political culture itself, though, is exportable, and remains a danger for any nation with politicians who seek power and can comprehend enough English to read and understand its propaganda. And the dominant event that amplified the least responsible voices of that political culture was the 1987 repeal of the Federal Communications Commission\u0026rsquo;s Fairness Doctrine. It would only be a minor overstatement to say that when the Reagan-and-Nixon appointed Commission repealed the doctrine, their decision itself based on the First Amendment, it was only a matter of time before a populist television star backed by a right-wing noise machine on the fringes of the Republican Party became President.\nWhile right-wing ethnic nationalism is by no means a uniquely American phenomenon, I\u0026rsquo;d argue that the prosecution of it through entertaining disinformation(3) has been perfected there in the three decades since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and it is in this way that NoBillag, as proposed, is especially dangerous.\nSupported as it is by those with apparent far-right sympathies, the NoBillag initiative smells less like a well-intentioned but uninclusive and generally incompetent attempt at administrative reform, and more like an attempt to give Switzerland its own Fairness Doctrine, to open the door for the profitable replacement of news with newsertainment, and the destruction of the common information base necessary for the functioning of a participatory democracy.\nThe world has one America, and I hope it finds its way one day. Let\u0026rsquo;s not build another here.\n(1): For my non-Swiss readers who wonder what the hell I\u0026rsquo;m talking about: Switzerland has a compulsory radio and television licensing that works out to about 350CHF a year per household, for which, confusingly, you don\u0026rsquo;t even really need a radio or a television to be liable for. What this means is that, instead of an annoying pledge drive every so often on your public radio station, once a decade you get a guy ringing your doorbell at nine in the morning to ask why you haven\u0026rsquo;t paid, and when you explain that you\u0026rsquo;re in the same household with your wife, who forgot to change her name after marriage in her licensing record (which, indeed, is at the same address, which can be verified by reading her madien name, which is on the door, right next to yours), he asks you (only as politely and apologetically as required by law) whether she\u0026rsquo;s divorced you yet. On reflection, in terms of net mean annoyance over time, it\u0026rsquo;s probably better than the pledge drive. And yet\u0026hellip;\n(2): on which see Hanretty, C. The Political Independence of Public Service Broadcasters, 2009 PhD thesis, DOI 10.2870 / 13655\n(3): from this week\u0026rsquo;s Economist, on Trump\u0026rsquo;s media consumption: \u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip;Fox News, an entertainment channel\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2018/01/on-billag/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy opinion on Billag\u003csup\u003e(1)\u003c/sup\u003e is complicated. It seems like it could\nfairly simply be replaced by payments from the general fund, overseen by a\nnon-political body to evaluate applications for funding from SRF and regional\nproviders. What we have in NoBillag, instead, is an attempt to Americanize the\nSwiss media landscape. Thankfully, I\u0026rsquo;m \u003ca href=\"https://www.republik.ch/2018/01/13/kolumne-binswanger\"\u003enot the\nfirst\u003c/a\u003e to point this\nout, and I hope I won\u0026rsquo;t be the last. tl;dr, hey Switzerland, you want\nBundesrat Trump? Because NoBillag is how you get Bundesrat Trump.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On Billag"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/plus-cnsm-2017/","summary":"","title":"A Path Layer for the Internet - Enabling Network Operations on Encrypted Protocols"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc8272/","summary":"","title":"TinyIPFIX for Smart Meters in Constrained Networks"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/repro-sigcomm-2017/","summary":"","title":"Challenges with Reproducibility"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/copycat-anrw-2017/","summary":"","title":"copycat - Testing Differential Treatment of New Transport Protocols in the Wild"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/pathspider-anrw-2017/","summary":"","title":"Tracking transport-layer evolution with PATHspider"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/post-fit-2017/","summary":"","title":"Post Sockets - Towards an Evolvable Network Transport Interface"},{"content":"Tomorrow, I\u0026rsquo;ll take part in a panel discussion at ETH Zürich, entitled \u0026ldquo;Internet and Trust\u0026rdquo;. From the flyer for the discussion: \u0026ldquo;The Internet relies on so many layers of trust that one is sometimes surprised that [it] actually works\u0026rdquo;. This is true, but I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s a property of any system of sufficient complexity, when viewed by someone who understands it well enough to know how much bubble gum and duct tape is used to hold it together.\nLooking back on it, working to make the Internet more trustworthy has been a theme of my career, and I suspect, the careers of many who\u0026rsquo;ve worked on it. Internet measurement is largely concerned with bringing transparency to the opaque inner workings of a massively distributed, administratively disjoint system. And the Internet, after all, was born of a paradox of trust: in its earliest days, it was an academic project run by people who knew mostly each other and mostly liked each other and shared more or less the same values1. Everyone running a node connected to the Internet could be trusted to know what the right thing was, and to do it, in any particular situation. This level of trust was what made it possible to scale the Internet out in its early years - anyone could learn to play by the rules, and anyone who could play by the rules was welcomed to.\nThis trust was reflected in the protocols that drove the early Internet, and to a large extent drive them today. This is where the problems start. Authentication and confidentiality were added up and down the stack later2, when at all, and made optional. So many of the most basic problems we have with trust in the Internet, from routing operations and BGP hijacking to email and spam, derive precisely from this presumed trust among participants in the early experiment that became the predominant global communications network.\nA fair amount of effort has gone recently into the judicious application of cryptography between the Internet\u0026rsquo;s transport and application layers, largely centered around increased deployment (and revision) of the TLS protocol. This effort has accelerated after Edward Snowden\u0026rsquo;s revelations made it clear how pervasive surveillance was on the Internet. This provides some assurance that you\u0026rsquo;re connected to the server you think you\u0026rsquo;re connected to, and that nobody can see or change the content of your communications with it3, which is exactly what you need when your threat model is an indiscriminately snooping nation-state.\nIt does nothing, though, about whether you can trust that server, or the infrastructure or the people behind it. Indeed, this cryptography can get too tightly locked down, for example allowing an app to communicate with its publisher without its user being able to see the contents of that exchange. In this case the user is left with to choice but to trust the app, or not to use it at all. This is where the question of \u0026ldquo;what does it mean to trust the Internet?\u0026rdquo; gets interesting, and is indeed where much of the current discussion about trust in the Internet leads, to what we in the protocol engineering community refer to as the Political and Economic layers of the stack.\nHere there are no easy answers at all.\nConfidentiality is the opposite of transparency. Confidentiality is necessary to protect Internet communications against unauthorized third parties. On the other hand, transparency is necessary to build trust between a first and a second party whose interests are not necessarily aligned, which is the case of most of the business models driving Internet content today. The questions need to be more nuanced here: transparency of what? Confidentiality from whom? Our protocols probably need knobs that are finer-grained than those we have in order to find the right balance.\nAll of which we may or may not get into during Tuesday\u0026rsquo;s talk. In any case, if you\u0026rsquo;re in Zürich, and this is at least a little interesting to you, please do drop by at 17:30 Tuesday 9 May, ETH Main Building, room HG G60.\n1: See Richard Stallman\u0026rsquo;s writing on the birth of GNU at the MIT AI Lab, and early ARPANET node, for a counterpoint to this utopian oversimplification.\n2: To some extent, this was born of technical inadequacy as much as it was of wide-eyed trust. Until the end of the 20th century, the simplest asymmetric cryptosystem remained patented, and ran slowly on computers of the time, which limited the deployment of cryptographic protocols. In addition, even uselessly rudimentary cryptographic technology was export-restricted by the United States until about this time.\n3: It does this if you trust the Web PKI, which is another question entirely. Fortunately there\u0026rsquo;s a lot of work going on to make this work better as well, e.g Certificate Transparency. And it helps if you trust the routing infrastructure, too, which I won\u0026rsquo;t talk about here because it\u0026rsquo;s an incredible mess, held together only through the heroic efforts of the people who make it work.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2017/05/what-does-it-mean-to-trust-the-internet/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eTomorrow, I\u0026rsquo;ll take part in\n\u003ca href=\"https://www.gess.ethz.ch/news-und-veranstaltungen/sip-talk/sip-talk-1.html\"\u003ea panel discussion\u003c/a\u003e\nat ETH Zürich, entitled \u0026ldquo;Internet and Trust\u0026rdquo;. From the flyer for the discussion:\n\u0026ldquo;The Internet relies on so many layers of trust that one is sometimes surprised\nthat [it] actually works\u0026rdquo;. This is true, but I suppose that\u0026rsquo;s a property of any\nsystem of sufficient complexity, when viewed by someone who understands it well\nenough to know how much bubble gum and duct tape is used to hold it together.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What does it mean to trust the Internet?"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/ipim-ccr-2017/","summary":"","title":"Principles for Measurability in Protocol Design"},{"content":"Internet architecture and Internet-centered research being a global enterprise, I spend between four and seven weeks a year on the road, depending on which year, your definition of road and your definition of week, and a fair amount of time in teleconferences in various timezones in the time in between. One of the fixtures in my calendar is the thrice-annual meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), taking place right now in Chicago. I\u0026rsquo;ve only missed three such meetings in the past dozen years, and each time I do I attempt to take part via Internet as best I can. Here are my reflections about well it\u0026rsquo;s working this time around, how it\u0026rsquo;s improved, and how it could improve further. For in a world where those who steadfastly believe in borders and walls seem to be gaining the upper hand, it seems prudent to prepare to do the work of Internet architecture, engineering, and standardization without the benefit of free movement of the people doing it.\nFirst, the technical: I\u0026rsquo;ve been using MeetEcho to attend the working group sessions, and a combination of a Revolve Robotics Kubi foe video and Cisco\u0026rsquo;s Webex for audio, bridged to whatever early-aughts era teleconferencing phone it\u0026rsquo;s plugged into, for the IAB sessions. I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing this on a few-years-old Macbook Pro (because I\u0026rsquo;ve been a fanboi since I got my Apple IIgs in \u0026lsquo;87) and a newish Linux box (to see how well it works).\nThe good: Meetecho Just Works on Firefox on Mac and Linux. a testament to the hard work of the Meetecho crew on site, the engineering of the product, and the WebRTC technology it\u0026rsquo;s based on. It even Just Works if you\u0026rsquo;re running three meeting streams at once, presuming your Internet connection can handle it.\nThe bad: Webex on Linux is a screaming nightmare, because Java, so I gave up and have been running the Kubi stream either on Linux or one Firefox tab on the Mac, and the Webex app on the Mac regardless. All of the standard complaints about conference-room phones placed ad-hoc in biggish conference rooms apply as well.\nThe Kubi is cute, in that it lets you point an iPad around the room so you can \u0026ldquo;look\u0026rdquo; at who\u0026rsquo;s talking, and everyone in the room has a point of reference for \u0026ldquo;where Brian is\u0026rdquo;, but the controls are not great for swinging around the room quickly, and I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a bit too much time feeling uncomfortably close to whoever happens to be sitting next to the thing. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure whether this is an execution thing, or just a fundamental problem with telepresence-via-iPad-on-a-stick, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure it\u0026rsquo;s a significant improvement from a laptop in a corner or the Voice from the Heavens, for the remote participant at least.\nNone of the technology fixes the fundamental problem of timezones, though, and attending a meeting in Chicago from Zürich kind of destroys the evenings, and while I can nudge my clock toward Central Daylight Time, my family doesn\u0026rsquo;t. Having jet lag at home is a little weird. Dinner last night had a distinct F1 pit-stop feeling to it, as I raced through it in a few-mintes break between two meetings1.\nAnd as for that Experience: Attending via Meetecho from the comfort of your own home and hammock is vastly superior to having to run between rooms in a conference center in order to wedge yourself into the Standard Issue Hotel Conference Center Chair. For actually tracking what\u0026rsquo;s going on in the meetings, and even for interactive discussion at the mic via the remote queue, it\u0026rsquo;s basically as good as being there, especially in standing-room only rooms. The audio is usually good, the seating is way more comfortable, and there\u0026rsquo;s no need to complain about the temperature2. The experience this time was smooth enough that I would even consider remote charing via MeetEcho, should I need to miss another meeting.\nBut the important part of the IETF, for me, isn\u0026rsquo;t the working group meetings: the serendipitous meetings in the hallway between them are generally more productive3 than the working group meetings themselves, the informal time is important to catch up with colleagues and friends I see only three times a year, and the frantic energy of the place is missing on my balcony. Until we find a way to replace that, a post-airline IETF remains firmly in the future.\n1 On further thought, this does kind of feel like the afternoon cookie scrum at the IETF, so I guess it\u0026rsquo;s part of the Experience.\n2 Unless, of course, you live in an unheated / uncooled house in a region where heating/cooling is necessary, but that\u0026rsquo;s hardly the IETF\u0026rsquo;s fault.\n3 In the sense that they lead to more interesting work, which admittedly may not be the lowest-stress definition of \u0026ldquo;productive\u0026rdquo;.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2017/03/live-via-internet-from-the-hammock/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eInternet architecture and Internet-centered research being a global enterprise,\nI spend between four and seven weeks a year on the road, depending on which\nyear, your definition of road and your definition of week, and a fair amount of\ntime in teleconferences in various timezones in the time in between. One of the\nfixtures in my calendar is the thrice-annual meeting of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.ietf.org\"\u003eInternet\nEngineering Task Force (IETF)\u003c/a\u003e, taking place right now in\nChicago. I\u0026rsquo;ve only missed three such meetings in the past dozen years, and each\ntime I do I attempt to take part via Internet as best I can. Here are my\nreflections about well it\u0026rsquo;s working this time around, how it\u0026rsquo;s improved, and how\nit could improve further. For in a world where those who steadfastly believe in\nborders and walls seem to be gaining the upper hand, it seems prudent to prepare\nto do the work of Internet architecture, engineering, and standardization\nwithout the benefit of free movement of the people doing it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Live, via Internet, from the hammock"},{"content":"On the shores of Lake Sarnen in central Switzerland, there\u0026rsquo;s a museli factory. (Of course there is.) It makes many different kinds of muesli for various markets. One of these is an organic chocolate-amaranth concoction that\u0026rsquo;s basically the only thing my daughter will eat for dinner this week. I happened to glance at the ingredients, and it occurred to me that there are basically three kinds of people in the world.\nOne reads the ingredients, which, being sold organic in an organic-happy, staunchly locavorous market, naturally lists the countries of origin, realizes the amount of sheer effort that has gone into this seemingly simple, seemingly made-in-Swizterland bag of muesli, and is astounded at the wonderful, terrible machine that is the global economy. Most days, this is me: you can\u0026rsquo;t really work on the Internet and really think about the capacity for connection it represents without being an avowed globalist of one kind or another.\nThe second reads the same ingredients and comes to an altogether more pessimistic conclusion: that the ridiculously intricate supply-chain management this list of ingredients represents is unscalable and unsustainable, a terrible waste of effort and energy, that it can\u0026rsquo;t possibly last so we might as well burn it down now, that Swiss beet sugar is probably just as good as the Paraguayan raw cane anyway.\nThe third looks at the ingredients, rumples his forhead at all the words, flips the bag around, looks at the picture, thinks, \u0026ldquo;oooh, chocolate\u0026rdquo;, and has a bowl of muesli. And there\u0026rsquo;s nothing wrong with that, in the small. Many people strive for that kind of living in the present, and never get there.\nI\u0026rsquo;m guessing if you\u0026rsquo;ve read this far you, like me, find yourself somewhere on the continuum between the first two kinds of person. What we need to realize is that today, in the post-factual democratic West, all of the really important decisions are being made by the appointed delegates and elected representatives of the third kind.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2017/03/three-kinds-of-people/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOn the shores of Lake Sarnen in central Switzerland, there\u0026rsquo;s a museli factory.\n(Of course there is.) It makes many different kinds of muesli for various\nmarkets. One of these is an organic chocolate-amaranth concoction that\u0026rsquo;s\nbasically the only thing my daughter will eat for dinner this week. I happened\nto glance at the ingredients, and it occurred to me that there are basically\nthree kinds of people in the world.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Three Kinds of People"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc8095/","summary":"","title":"Services Provided by IETF Transport Protocols and Congestion Control Mechanisms"},{"content":"Wasting time at Christmas by burning the site to the ground and starting over seems to be a tradition around here\u0026hellip;\n\u0026hellip;and far be it from me to argue with tradition.\nI didn\u0026rsquo;t post a single thing to my rebooted-five-years-ago blog last year. 2016 was kind of a rough year, on which more later, but I\u0026rsquo;d like to think this is mainly because I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing more productive things with my time than blogging about the end of the world, tempting though that often was. I\u0026rsquo;ve rebooted the site to give a fuller picture of what I\u0026rsquo;ve been up to of late. Most of this has been professional, but the beer\u0026rsquo;s coming along nicely, too.\nDetails for geeks: I\u0026rsquo;ve ditched Wordpress for Hugo and Apache for nginx. Markdown and GitHub make a better backend for blogging than MySQL and a WYSIKWYG editor in the browser. The conversion from Wordpress has a couple of rough spots that I\u0026rsquo;ll be fixing piecemeal over the coming $long_time_interval. The nginx thing was more of a whim.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2017/01/another-year-another-website-redux/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWasting time at Christmas by burning the site to the ground and starting over\nseems to be a tradition around here\u0026hellip;\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Another year, another website, redux"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/bonding-anrw-2016/","summary":"","title":"UDP Bonding at Layer 3"},{"content":"Wow, that year went quickly, on which more later.\nI\u0026rsquo;d wanted to try my hand at brewing for a while, but was put off it by the (accurate) fear than ninety percent of the work was washing bottles and cleaning pots. Then, last winter, as a newly-minted father of a baby with an age measured in weeks, life consisted mainly of sterilizing bottles and not sleeping. I made an offhand comment to the effect that if I was going to spend so much time boiling glass I might as well make beer. Ariane gave me a starter kit, and a year later I\u0026rsquo;m about seventy liters in and think I have a reasonable clue what I\u0026rsquo;m doing.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve finished two extract batches I\u0026rsquo;d call pretty good, recipes below.\nSmooth Valley Traffic Jam Ale (No. 2) The brewery\u0026rsquo;s named after a blues club I used to fantasize about opening on those days when everything about research seemed utterly pointless, itself named after a literal translation of the name of the region of Zurich I live in (Glatttal). And the beer is named after one of the things the Glattal is known for: the stretch of the A1 that runs past Wallisellen is the busiest road in Switzerland.\nSteep 100g Carapils (5 EBC) + 250g CaraAroma (350 EBC) crushed caramel malt for 30 minutes in 5L at 80°C. Bring to a boil, add 1000g dry malt extract (6 EBC), boil 60 minutes. Add hops: At 0 minutes, 15g Pacific Jade (14% AA) pellets At 30 minutes, 15g Amarillo (10% AA) pellets At 40 minutes, 15g Citra (15% AA) pellets Add another 2000g dry malt extract, top up to 5L, boil an additional 5 minutes. Take off heat and cool rapidly to ~34°C. Add 15L cold water (16°C) to yield 20L at 20°C Pitch Safale US-05 yeast (11.5g dry, rehydrated for 30min before pitching) This yielded an measured original gravity of 16.0°P. This seems high; given the content I\u0026rsquo;d have expected less than 14°P, so I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I trust this measurement (and the result certainly didn\u0026rsquo;t have more than 7% ABV). Fermented for 10 days at about 24°C, bottled on 3 March. I intended to mix in 140g of cane sugar for carbonation before bottling, but due to a measurement error ended up with 170g: this is a good deal fizzier than I intended.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s pretty malty, too — the caramel malt adds a lot of body. The hops are there, but very subtle. The maltiness also masks the 6-7% alcohol content, so Traffic Jam can be a little surprising to drink.\nSmooth Valley Straight 16 (No. 4) Straight 16 is a proposed departure route for Zurich Airport, the first few kilometers of which are shown on the label.\nSince that red line continues out over some breathtakingly expensive real estate, I don\u0026rsquo;t suspect the proposal will ever come to fruition, so two 380s a day will keep making their hard left turns over the garden. No worries, they\u0026rsquo;re a lot of fun to watch.\nWhat? Oh, yes, the beer. This is basically the same recipe as Traffic Jam (since I\u0026rsquo;m working with the same ingredients), but lighter both in color and gravity, the better to enjoy during the summer, and will different hops (since all of these came in a sampler pack put together by my brew shop, which is why all the quantities top out at 15g.)\nSteep 250g Carapils (5 EBC) + 50g CaraAroma (350 EBC) crushed caramel malt for 30 minutes in 5L at 80°C. Bring to a boil, add 800g dry malt extract (6 EBC), boil 60 minutes. Add hops: At 0 minutes, 15g Centennial (9.6% AA) pellets At 30 minutes, 15g Mandarina Bavaria (8.1% AA) pellets At 40 minutes, 15g Simcoe (14.4% AA) pellets Add another 1700g dry malt extract, top up to 5L, boil an additional 5 minutes. Take off heat and cool rapidly to ~35°C. Add 16L cold water (16°C) to yield 21L at 20°C Pitch Safale US-05 yeast (11.5g dry, rehydrated for 30min before pitching) Measured initial gravity 11.5°P, which is more believable. Fermented 12 days at about 23°C, bottled on 1 May with 145g of cane sugar for carbonation for the batch. This one is a good deal lighter, but the relative lack of malt means some of the fruity ester taste from the yeast comes through (or, as a friend of mine said, \u0026ldquo;that tastes a little Belgian\u0026rdquo;).\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s next? For now, more of the same, as I\u0026rsquo;m using up the pile of ingredients I have. Continuing the trend of naming these after mildly annoying things about Wallisellen, the next one (which went into bottles last week) is called November Fog, and is pretty much the halfway point in the parameter space between Traffic Jam and Straight 16, but with more hops (to balance out the high gravity of the boil), and fermented at the 17°C I can provide in the new cellar. It went into the bottle on 28 November, so if it\u0026rsquo;s drinkable, it\u0026rsquo;ll get a post here in Feburary. If not, we\u0026rsquo;ll pretend it never happened.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2015/12/a-year-in-beer/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWow, that year went quickly, on which more later.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;d wanted to try my hand at brewing for a while, but was put off it by the (accurate) fear than ninety percent of the work was washing bottles and cleaning pots. Then, last winter, as a newly-minted father of a baby with an age measured in weeks, life consisted mainly of sterilizing bottles and not sleeping. I made an offhand comment to the effect that if I was going to spend so much time boiling glass I might as well make beer. Ariane gave me a starter kit, and a year later I\u0026rsquo;m about seventy liters in and think I have a reasonable clue what I\u0026rsquo;m doing.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Year in Beer"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc7663/","summary":"","title":"Report from the IAB Workshop on Stack Evolution"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc7624/","summary":"","title":"Confidentiality in the Face of Pervasive Surveillance - A Threat Model and Problem Statement"},{"content":"This is the most recent academic paper describing an ongoing project. The measurement tool developed by Damiano Boppart for this work became PathSpider. The MAMI project published a follow-up study in June 2016, showing continued linear adoption of ECN. This paper, and the follow-up study, were cited in Apple\u0026rsquo;s WWDC announcements of client-side default support for ECN in macOS and iOS. Measurements continue with PathSpider.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/ecn-pam-2015/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis is the most recent academic paper describing an ongoing project. The\nmeasurement tool developed by Damiano Boppart for this work became\n\u003ca href=\"https://pathspider.net\"\u003ePathSpider\u003c/a\u003e. The MAMI project published a\n\u003ca href=\"https://mami-project.eu/index.php/2016/06/13/70-of-popular-web-sites-support-ecn/\"\u003efollow-up study\u003c/a\u003e\nin June 2016, showing continued linear adoption of ECN. This paper, and the\nfollow-up study, were cited in Apple\u0026rsquo;s WWDC announcements of client-side\ndefault support for ECN in macOS and iOS. Measurements continue with PathSpider.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Enabling Internet-Wide Deployment of Explicit Congestion Notification"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/itu-pam-2015/","summary":"","title":"Transparent Estimation of Internet Penetration from Network Observations"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m off to New York in a couple of weeks to present a paper at PAM (which I mentioned here, though sadly the flashy automated demo I was hoping to build was a bit optimistic). The question: \u0026ldquo;is it safe to turn on ECN on client machines by default, completing the end to end deployment of a simple fifteen year old protocol to give us a better way to signal network congestion than simply dropping packets on the floor?\u0026rdquo; The answer is: \u0026ldquo;define safe.\u0026rdquo; Our key findings:\nMore than half of the Alexa top million web servers (600k accounting for duplicate IPs) will happily negotiate and mark ECT0 if you ask nicely (at least as of September 2014). This mainly reflects people upgrading Linux servers to kernels where tcp_ecn=2 is the default, and strongly validates changing default configurations as a method for increasing ECN deployment. 0.42% of these webservers will fail to connect if you try to negotiate ECN, but simple ECN fallback as in RFC 3168 (retransmitted SYN ECE CWR sent as SYN) commutes this to a risk of slightly increased handshake latency. A vanishingly small number (15 / ~600k) of these have different ECN connectivity dependency depending on where you connect from, indicating that the box breaking ECN is not directly adjacent to the server. A third of these (6) are GoDaddy parking sites. There is more mangling of the ECN IP header bits than connectivity dependency, and successful negotiation does not always mean successful marking. About 2% of IPv4 servers and 15% (!!!) of IPv6 servers signal in other than expected ways, indicating that negotiated ECN might not be useful. We appear to have seen two (count \u0026rsquo;em, two!) CE markings in the wild, both from the same webserver (www.grandlyon.com) when probing 600k IP addresses 3 times from 3 different locations (i.e., 2 out of 5.6 million flows). This is neither encouraging nor surprising. Bottom line, the risk to connectivity of turning ECN on by default in clients is vanishingly low, though not yet in the one in ten million range, when simple fallback as in RFC3168 is implemented. Modern Windows and Mac OS X do this; Linux doesn\u0026rsquo;t yet, though we have a three line patch (which, anecdotally, I\u0026rsquo;ve been running without incident on my desktop at the office for the past half year).\nGiven the signaling anomalies, especially on IPv6, defining simple methods to detect and dynamically ignore anomalous signaling at the endpoints is probably the next area of work to getting ECN deployable.\nSo now I know what I\u0026rsquo;m doing with the rest of my copious free time\u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2015/03/making-the-internet-safe-for-ecn/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m off to New York in a couple of weeks to present a \u003ca href=\"http://ecn.ethz.ch/ecn-pam15.pdf\"\u003epaper\u003c/a\u003e at PAM (which I mentioned \u003ca href=\"/2015/01/on-repeatable-internet-measurement-interlude\"\u003ehere\u003c/a\u003e, though sadly the flashy automated demo I was hoping to build was a bit optimistic). The question: \u0026ldquo;is it safe to turn on \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_Congestion_Notification\"\u003eECN\u003c/a\u003e on client machines by default, completing the end to end deployment of a simple fifteen year old protocol to give us a better way to signal network congestion than simply dropping packets on the floor?\u0026rdquo; The answer is: \u0026ldquo;define safe.\u0026rdquo; Our key findings:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Making the Internet Safe for ECN"},{"content":"In German, there\u0026rsquo;s a word for an organization which takes its mission very seriously but is adorably incompetent at it: \u0026ldquo;Kaninchenzüchterverein\u0026rdquo; (lit. \u0026ldquo;rabbit-breeding club\u0026rdquo;). There\u0026rsquo;s another word for an organization which is bad at what it does because nobody cares: \u0026ldquo;Saftladen\u0026rdquo; (lit. \u0026ldquo;juice shop\u0026rdquo;).\nIf you can\u0026rsquo;t decide what kind of amateur hour you\u0026rsquo;re dealing with, though, and suspect an undercurrent of moral reprehensibility to boot, may I suggest just crossing the two, arriving at \u0026ldquo;Kaninchenentsaftungsanlage\u0026rdquo; (lit. \u0026ldquo;bunny-juicing facility\u0026rdquo;).\n(Image credit © JJ Harrison, CC-BY-SA 3.0)\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2015/01/what-kind-of-bureaucracy-are-you-dealing-with/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn German, there\u0026rsquo;s a word for an organization which takes its mission very seriously but is adorably incompetent at it: \u0026ldquo;Kaninchenzüchterverein\u0026rdquo; (lit. \u0026ldquo;rabbit-breeding club\u0026rdquo;). There\u0026rsquo;s another word for an organization which is bad at what it does because nobody cares: \u0026ldquo;Saftladen\u0026rdquo; (lit. \u0026ldquo;juice shop\u0026rdquo;).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"What Kind of Bureaucracy Are You Dealing With?"},{"content":"The issues identified in of part one of this post led to yet another search for solutions to the problem of making (especially passive) measurement repeatable. Of course, this has been done before, but I took as an initial principle that the social aspects of the problem must be solved socially, and worked from there. What emerged was a set of requirements and an architecture for a computing environment and set of associated administrative processes which allows analysis of network traffic data while minimizing risk to the privacy of the network\u0026rsquo;s end users as well as ensuring spatial and temporal repeatability of the experiment. For lack of a better name I decided to call an instance of a collection of data using this architecture an analysis vault.\nThe key principle behind this architecture is if data can be open, it should be; if not, then everything else must be.\nCertain types of data are not at all threatening to privacy, e.g. simple active latency measurements between networks. To advance Internet measurement as a science, such data should be made as open as possible to as wide a community as possible; this is the approach taken by RIPE Atlas. However, data derived from passive measurements must be handled more carefully, and can never be completely opened. In order to support science with these data sources, all other aspects of the analysis must in these cases be made open.\nThis model relies on the use of analysis source code being openly licensed and made publicly available, along with the parameters for each particular analysis. Analyses are submitted by trusted researchers to a vault by repository URL and checked against a user-provided hash of the contents to verify integrity, as experiments within the mLab project. This repository contains all necessary parameters for running the desired analysis. Analysis code is reviewed for being obviously benign and following the principle of least access: if there is any doubt as to whether a given analysis is designed to only use and produce the minimum information necessary for its stated task, the analysis will not be run.\nOf course, this model is only applicable to improving the repeatability of measurement if multiple vaults are built containing the same kind of data.What follows is as far as I got with the high-level design of these analysis vaults last year, followed by a quick subset of the reasons they\u0026rsquo;ll never work. But I hope this post will inspire others to consider the construction of similar vaults around currently closed or partially open data sources, and I stand ready to assist in the creation of communities around this model of data exchange.\nA Process for Building and Operating Analysis Vaults An analysis vault is a collection of data stored in some published format, or available via a certain application programming interface (API), which for some reason cannot be openly published. In the context of this work, this is generally because the data collection as a whole contains privacy-sensitive information, e.g. mobility data (which can be used to track the movements of mobile phones, and therefore their owners) or packet header or network flow data (which can be used to track the behavior of users of the network).\nAn analysis vault is made available by a provider, who owns the data within the vault and makes it available to a community of analysts. While analysis vaults do provide both technical and administrative protection against privacy risks, the providers must trust the analysts somewhat more that they would random people on the Internet. A coordinator manages building these communities of trust around sets of providers and analysts: introducing analysts to providers and vouching for analysts based upon their history of responsible use, matching research questions with data that can answer them, and so on. The coordinator also assigns code reviewers to each project, who are responsible for signing off that the analysis source is obviously benign.\nEach analysis vault is built upon a minimal amount of technical infrastructure. Each vault is built from a base image, a virtual machine image providing the basic operating environment plus any tools or API implementations for the data format that will be provided. From the base image, a reference image is derived which additionally includes some test data, which can be used by analysts to test the correctness of their analysis code.\nTo run an analysis, the analyst submits to the coordinator or provider:\na URL for a public source code repository containing the source code, human-readable description, build instructions, and parameters of the analysis, including any necessary identifier of branch / tag / commit.\nsome cryptographic assurance that the identified source is what the analyst intended to submit (e.g., a GPG-signed hash of a tarball containing a clean working copy).\nOnce the submission is made, the coordinator checks to see if the code in the indicated repository differs from code that has already been reviewed, and if not, sends it to the reviewer(s). Unless the reviewers are certain, based on the source code, build instructions, and parameters provided, that the analysis is benign – i.e., will return an appropriate amount of appropriately aggregated or anonymized data for visualization, further analysis, or publication, for the stated purpose, explicitly avoids any obfuscation that would indicate an attempted side channel in the output, and so on – then the analysis request is rejected.\nShould an analysis request be accepted, the reviewers and/or provider also review the output data after the analysis runs, to ensure that it meets the expectations of volume, content, format, and so on from the code review. For analyses resulting in wider publication (e.g. at academic conferences or in journals), the reviewers and/or provider can also review the final product, according to each provider\u0026rsquo;s policies.\nThe output of this process is intended to be intermediate, that is, input to some visualization, aggregation, publication, or further analysis process which can take place in a less restricted environment. The intermediate results may not necessarily be non-sensitive enough for unrestricted publication, but should at least be able to be shared with other researchers and/or providers in contact with the same coordinator. It is these intermediate results, together with open sharing of the code and parameters that produced them, that allows this model to achieve repeatability in Internet measurement.\nSpecifically not part of this model is a requirement to use a specific restricted query language, or restrictions on the languages or platforms which can be used to perform an analysis. As long as any software beyond what is in the base image is available from a published URL in source form, and the provider and reviewer are comfortable with it, the analysts can use their own favorite language. The only technical requirements on the source repository are that they must contain the following three items:\na portable POSIX shell script build.sh which will retrieve and authenticate any necessary software beyond what is provided in the base image.\na portable POSIX shell script run.sh which takes an parameter indicating the data to operate on (filesystem path or URL for an API) and which itself contains any necessary parameters for the analysis, including clear indications of where on the filesystem intermediate analysis products will be stored.\na README.txt, README.html, or README.md file containing a human-readable description of what the analysis is supposed to do, and any other information about the analysis and its assumptions.\nNothing is to be assumed about the provider execution environment except that it contains all the software included in the base image, and that the build script will be run once, followed by the run script.\nThe inherently batch-process-based workflow required within an analysis vault is apparently difficult to reconcile with tight cycles most scientists use when investigating new and unknown problems. Further, the additional requirement for code review, and the administrative overhead required to coordinate and perform these reviews, make this process significantly less flexible than processes allowing direct access to raw data. I would argue that the ability to expand data access to more parties, allowing reproduction of passive network measurement studies, is worth the additional cost. Further, by designing studies to perform analysis in a dedicated data reduction stage before performing iterative exploration, this exploration can be performed on the intermediate results in a less restrictive environment.\nEncouragement of Best Practices In addition for reviewing the proposed analysis code for being obviously benign, the coordinator and reviewers are well-placed to encourage research projects targeted for execution within analysis vaults to follow best practices in research data curation. The requirement for analysts to open analysis source code and to publish it in a publicly accessible repository, along with a single entry point to run an analysis, enforces design for repeatability. This model moves the burden of data curation from analysts to the providers and coordinator; maintenance of metadata along with data should be encouraged by coordinators bringing new providers into a community, and community resources should include detailed information about data quality issues. Beyond this, coordinators should maintain their own set of best practices, perhaps using Paxson as a starting point, which they encourage within their community of providers and analysts.\nChallenges to Analysis in the Vault This model as proposed has a few open issues which must be resolved before it is to be workable.\nFirst, the proposed solution to the problem defines two new roles not currently part of most research workflows: code reviewers and coordinators. Both roles require a fair amount of expertise, and neither role is well-aligned with present incentives for researchers. Finding people to perform these tasks will therefore either rely on altruism, adjustment of incentives, or money (i.e. the universal incentive adjuster). Indeed, a project I was working on last year to build a pilot analysis vault fell apart in part over cost uncertainty in the coordination role. Convincing funding sources that this is a working solution to a relevant problem (indeed that is it a relevant problem at all) would be neither easy nor quick.\nSecond, while this model replaces technical controls which have been shown to be ineffective with contractual and social controls which I hope will be more effective, it remains that at the end of the day it is (1) naïve trust and (2) the threat of expulsion from the community and potential civil and criminal penalties that will keep researchers in line. When the only effective sanction is so drastic, it is natural to ask whether it will be used when it needs to be. A more gradual continuum of sanctions would make responsible oversight more likely.\nThird is the question of who provides compute services for the first stage analysis in the analysis vault? The answer to this question nowadays is almost always The Cloud, which would also fix the problem that the academic publishing schedule tends to impose a rather bursty demand curve. However, cloud services cost money – indeed, for covering baseline demand, rather more money than a large organization would spend on the maintenance of equivalent infrastructure, which is why there\u0026rsquo;s a market for cloud services in the first place. Charging researchers for compute cycles would be a natural model here, though this seems very close to a \u0026ldquo;pay to play\u0026rdquo; model which feels antithetical to the spirit of open scientific investigation. The data provider would pay for storage costs, but this raises the bar for participation as a data provider. It also raises the question of whether it is appropriate for data providers to place data on storage in the cloud that they cannot simply make openly available to trusted researchers.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t have have good answers to these questions, which is, to be honest, why you\u0026rsquo;re reading about this on my relatively insignificant blog as opposed to in a more respectable academic venue. But I suspect I\u0026rsquo;ll continue working in passive measurement research, and I\u0026rsquo;ll take every opportunity I find to nudge us closer to a model that, at least in its goals of repeatability, looks like the one here.\nAcknowledgements Thanks to the many people who have tolerated my rants about how ruined things are over the past year or so, and discussed ways to make it better: the Bernhards Ager, Plattner, and Tellenbach, Richard Barnes, Elisa Boschi, Alberto Dainotti, Alessandro Finamore, Joe Hildebrand, Diana Joumblatt, Alistair King, Mirja Kühlewind, Franziska Lichtblau, Matt Mathis, Stephan Neuhaus, Ilias Raftopoulous, Florian Streibelt, and Ariane Trammell.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2015/01/on-repeatable-internet-measurement-part-two/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe issues identified in of \u003ca href=\"https://trammell.ch/2014/12/on-repeatable-internet-measurement-part-one\"\u003epart one\u003c/a\u003e of this post led to yet another search for solutions to the problem of making (especially passive) measurement repeatable. Of course, this has been done before, but I took as an initial principle that the social aspects of the problem must be solved socially, and worked from there. What emerged was a set of requirements and an architecture for a computing environment and set of associated administrative processes which allows analysis of network traffic data while minimizing risk to the privacy of the network\u0026rsquo;s end users as well as ensuring spatial and temporal repeatability of the experiment. For lack of a better name I decided to call an instance of a collection of data using this architecture an \u003cem\u003eanalysis vault\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe key principle behind this architecture is \u003cem\u003eif data can be open, it should be; if not, then everything else \u003cstrong\u003emust\u003c/strong\u003e be\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On Repeatable Internet Measurement: Part Two"},{"content":"Part one of this post painted a somewhat bleak picture of the state of Internet measurement as a science. The dreariness will continue later this month in part two. And yet there seems to be quite a lot of measuring the Internet going on. It can\u0026rsquo;t all be that bad, can it?\nWell, no.\nCAIDA has been beating this drum far longer than I have, makes a great deal of raw data available, and has set up a clearinghouse for others to report metadata about data everyone can use, thereby solving the problem of not knowing what\u0026rsquo;s available or where, but not doing much for the underlying problems of incentives.\nAnd there are a few measurement infrastructures out there based on software that works and data everyone can use. The \u0026ldquo;everyone can use\u0026rdquo; part is much easier to achieve if one limits oneself to a relatively restricted set of active measurements. RIPE Atlas, run by the RIPE NCC, is a shining example of how to do this right: a network of lightweight hardware probes, on a common software base, centrally managed, globally distributed free of charge, running on a diverse-if-Eurocentric set of network connections donated by probe hosts. The measurements these probes can perform are selected in part to be those whose results are freely publishable, because they expose nothing personally identifiable or privacy sensitive. This does limit the types of measurements that can be done, but the risk-utility tradeoff has a wider sweet spot in active measurement.\nThe most recent paper we\u0026rsquo;ve published, \u0026ldquo;Enabling Internet-Wide Deployment of Explicit Congestion Notification\u0026rdquo;, is also based on active measurements, and we\u0026rsquo;ve tried our best to walk the walk. The analysis uses the open-source QoF flow meter and the ECN-Spider tool, both developed with a focus on usability and stability. Data collected during the study is available in raw CSV files, along with the IPython notebooks used to run the analysis: anyone can check our work on our data. By the time we present the paper at the Passive and Active Measurement Conference1 next March, we hope to have enough tooling that we can rerun the measurement and analysis with a single invocation of a script hosted on a virtual machine somewhere.\nThis may be a way forward, in fact: for many types of active measurement research, it is probably more appropriate to publish the measurement as running code than as an academic paper. This brings with it the obligation to keep the code running for as long as the measurement is relevant, which is indeed a lot more work, but with the reward that the results are accessible, verifiable, and easier to build on.\nWatch this space.\n1: We note happily that PAM does its part for data availability by only giving the best paper award to those papers which make their data available.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2015/01/on-repeatable-internet-measurement-interlude/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://trammell.ch/2014/12/on-repeatable-internet-measurement-part-one/\"\u003ePart one\u003c/a\u003e of this post painted a somewhat bleak picture of the state of Internet measurement as a science. The dreariness will continue later this month in \u003ca href=\"https://trammell.ch/2015/01/on-repeatable-internet-measurement-part-two\"\u003epart two\u003c/a\u003e. And yet there seems to be quite a lot of measuring the Internet going on. It can\u0026rsquo;t all be \u003cem\u003ethat\u003c/em\u003e bad, can it?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On Repeatable Internet Measurement: Interlude"},{"content":"Mail is broken.\nThis is nothing new. RFC 822, after all, wasn\u0026rsquo;t the beginning of Internet e-mail, merely an attempt to fix it, which admittedly worked reasonably well for a while. But even with all the brokenness of mail, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t expecting to dig into my Postfix logs today to find that USENIX couldn\u0026rsquo;t send me mail because the firm they\u0026rsquo;ve outsourced to was too lazy to create IN PTR records for their nodes in the cloud.\nMore annoying than the fact that the IN PTR records aren\u0026rsquo;t there, though, is that best practice (i.e., fighting spam) dictates that they should be. Considering adding \u0026ldquo;think about fixing messaging\u0026rdquo; to the list of Futile Things To Do in 2015.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2015/01/a-tiny-rant-on-mail/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMail is broken.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is nothing new. \u003ca href=\"https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0822.txt\"\u003eRFC 822\u003c/a\u003e, after all, wasn\u0026rsquo;t the beginning of Internet e-mail, merely an attempt to fix it, which admittedly worked reasonably well for a while. But even with all the brokenness of mail, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t expecting to dig into my Postfix logs today to find that \u003ca href=\"http://www.usenix.org\"\u003eUSENIX\u003c/a\u003e couldn\u0026rsquo;t send me mail because the \u003ca href=\"https://www.getpantheon.com/\"\u003efirm they\u0026rsquo;ve outsourced to\u003c/a\u003e was too lazy to create \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_DNS_lookup\"\u003eIN PTR\u003c/a\u003e records for their nodes in the cloud.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Tiny Rant on Mail"},{"content":"\nIn the back of the pantry at the house I grew up in in Memphis, there was always a stack of little plastic tubs of dried candied \u0026ldquo;fruits\u0026rdquo; of various colors (I say \u0026ldquo;colors\u0026rdquo; because the flavor was invariably \u0026ldquo;sugar\u0026rdquo;). My mother was never much of a baker, except at Christmas, when the baking would take two forms: fruitcake and stollen, both of which were filled with candied fruit. I\u0026rsquo;d try Mom\u0026rsquo;s fruitcake, the main ingredient of which seemed to be brandy, about once every five years to see if I was finally old enough to enjoy it. I never quite made it.\nStollen, on the other hand, was the main course of most breakfasts around Christmas. This was a bit odd in Memphis, doubly so because we didn\u0026rsquo;t have any particularly German ancestors; Mom just saw the recipe in a magazine sometime in the late 70s or early 80s and decided to make a tradition out of it. So I was thrilled when I moved to Switzerland and found out you could buy stollen in the grocery store at Christmastime. Almost as thrilled as I was disappointed when I found out that \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; Stollen is basically a marzipan delivery system.\nSo this year I decided to try my hand at tweaking the basic recipe for stollen to see if I could come up with something that tasted like Christmas back home. Starting from a BBC recipe and editing mainly by omission, this is what I came up with:\nIngredients Dough: 500g finely ground white flour (in Switzerland: \u0026ldquo;Zopfmehl\u0026rdquo;) 100g caster sugar (\u0026ldquo;Feinster Zucker\u0026rdquo;) 10g salt 14g dry yeast 150g butter 250mL milk Filling: ground cloves (\u0026ldquo;a pinch\u0026rdquo;) nutmeg (offically \u0026ldquo;a pinch\u0026rdquo;, but as Mom generally used as much nutmeg as she could get away with before people started hallucinating, \u0026ldquo;more than a pinch\u0026rdquo;. I used a 3:1 ratio to the cloves.) seeds from 1/2 pod vanilla 50g thinly sliced almonds 100g candied lemon peel 100g candied fruit 150g raisins (of which 75g dark and 75g light) Glaze: Powdered sugar Thinly sliced almonds Preparation Mix all filling ingredients together in a bowl, let stand.\nMix 1tsp sugar, 50mL warm milk, and yeast, let rest a few minutes. Combine flour and sugar in bowl. Add salt to one side of bowl and yeast to other side. Add softened butter and milk, stir together. Knead dough ca. 7 min. on a floured surface.\nFold mixed filling into dough and knead to thoroughly mix filling into dough. Form two balls, let stand ca. 1 hour until risen to double size. Form each ball into a long loaf, bake in non-preheated oven 190°C ca. 1 hour.\nMix powered sugar with a few drops of water at a time to make a thick glaze. Brush this glaze over each loaf before it cools, and press sliced almonds into the glaze. Let dry and cool.\nServing Slice ca. 1cm thick, butter, and broil slices until light brown.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/12/weihnachtsstollen-nach-memphiser-art/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Stollen\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/stollen.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the back of the pantry at the house I grew up in in Memphis, there was always a stack of little plastic tubs of dried candied \u0026ldquo;fruits\u0026rdquo; of various colors (I say \u0026ldquo;colors\u0026rdquo; because the flavor was invariably \u0026ldquo;sugar\u0026rdquo;). My mother was never much of a baker, except at Christmas, when the baking would take two forms: fruitcake and stollen, both of which were filled with candied fruit. I\u0026rsquo;d try Mom\u0026rsquo;s fruitcake, the main ingredient of which seemed to be brandy, about once every five years to see if I was finally old enough to enjoy it. I never quite made it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStollen, on the other hand, was the main course of most breakfasts around Christmas. This was a bit odd in Memphis, doubly so because we didn\u0026rsquo;t have any particularly German ancestors; Mom just saw the recipe in a magazine sometime in the late 70s or early 80s and decided to make a tradition out of it. So I was thrilled when I moved to Switzerland and found out you could buy stollen in the grocery store at Christmastime. Almost as thrilled as I was disappointed when I found out that \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo; Stollen is basically a marzipan delivery system.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Weihnachtsstollen (nach Memphiser Art)"},{"content":"I spent quite a lot of time in 2014 thinking about the following problem: if I hand you a paper that claims something about the Internet, based on data I cannot show you because I am bound by a nondisclosure agreement due to corporate confidentiality or user privacy issues, generated by code which is ostensibly available under an open-source license but which is neither intended to run outside my environment, nor tested to ensure it will produce correct results in all cases, nor maintained to ensure it is compatible with newer versions of the compiler, interpreter, or libraries it requires, what reason have I given you to believe what I say?\nThis question may be somewhat exaggerated; not every measurement study suffers from each of these problems. However, data availability and tool quality are two of the most important challenges in turning the art of Internet measurement into a science, and make verification of results difficult enough that it is attempted less often than it should be. The incentive to take published results at face value that the current situation contributes to may be damaging to our understanding of the Internet.\nRepeatability in general is a current topic in science in general. Mininet, a VM-based environment for network emulation, was built in part to make \u0026ldquo;runnable papers\u0026rdquo; about networking possible, and has been applied to allowing students to build simple reproductions of well-known results in networking. In the larger context, a growing realization that lack of reproduction contributes to erosion of the trustworthiness of research findings has led to a broader movement to increase repeatability in research in general.\nWhat follows was originally written as a research proposal for a project which, for various reasons, will not happen. Today\u0026rsquo;s post is more or less the problem statement. The next in the series will present the solution we proposed and why it wouldn\u0026rsquo;t work. And the one that follows that (if I make it that far) will consist on musings about what I think this means for the future of the science of Internet measurement.\nRepeatability and Privacy In 2004, Vern Paxson published Strategies for Sound Internet Measurement, a collection of proposed solutions the myriad and sundry problems he and his collaborators had run into over a career of trying to measure the Internet. Almost a decade later, most of this advice still rings true: measurement experiments and tools require calibration, studies should be designed for repeatability, and given that the devil is always in the details, metadata is at least as important as data. While it is instructive and disappointing how little has changed in the intervening decade, there have been attempts in the measurement space to improve the situation.\nThe most important barrier to repeatable measurement using passively-observed traffic data is the availability of data to multiple researchers, made more difficult by the confidentiality of network traffic data. This is not an accidential or arbitrary constraint: unrestricted analysis of end-user traffic poses a grave threat to end-user privacy, a fact which has recently become better appreciated in civil society. Such analysis therefore carries additional legal and regulatory requirements, and often occur only under restrictive agreements between data providers and researchers.\nFor much of the past decade, the anonymization of user-identifiable information was seen as the best way to protect user privacy, though at a cost to the utility of the anonymized data for analysis (see Burkhart et al The Risk-Utility Tradeoff for IP Address Truncation). A summary of these techniques as applicable to passively measured flow data is given in RFC 6235. Anonymization can be thought of in terms of two utility functions: the utility of the data to the analysis at hand, and the utility of the data to the attacker attempting to break anonymization and account traffic to specific addresses and users. Burkhart et al (with a slightly different \u0026ldquo;et al\u0026rdquo;, including myself) showed in The Role of Network Trace Anonymization Under Attack that for traffic collection on the public Internet, it is always easier for the attacker to increase her utility than the researcher, making \u0026ldquo;anonymize and publish\u0026rdquo; an unacceptable model for making data freely available. If a data set is to have utility to any but the narrowest of analysis tasks, technical means of data protection must be supplemented with social, regulatory, or legal means.\nSo, if data cannot be mobile, analysis must be. The simplest method for analysis mobility today is analyst mobility: researchers visit other institutions which have access to different data, and work on that data there. While this arrangement does allow network measurement researchers to see the world and collect valuable frequent-flyer miles, it does not scale particularly well. Nor does it necessarily allow the publication of studies spanning multiple data collections, subject to the terms of the agreement(s) under which the traffic data is collected and made available for research.\nFor example, the Trol project was designed to create a \u0026ldquo;privacy-safe\u0026rdquo; language for network data analysis, allowing analysis to proceed on unprotected data, with guarantees about the privacy impact of the intermediate results. This is but one example of a whole class of restricted domain-specific languages, each of which suffers from the fundamental risk-utility tradeoff that plagues anonymization: either a restricted language is too restricted to do interesting work in, or not restricted enough to automatically protect the intermediate or final results from deanonymization attacks.\nA new approach to this problem appears to be necessary.\nRepeatability and Code Quality Assuming a solution to the privacy problem, there is still little incentive for researchers to think about the meta-problems of research, and to do the engineering necessary to support responsible data curation and access to make Internet measurement studies repeatable and comparable. First, the primary incentive for researchers is publication and citation, and while the additional work required to make research repeatable and maintainable often does lead to better results, it tends to have diminishing returns in publication terms. Second, in an environment where analysis mobility means analyst mobility, the people who wrote the code are always available to fix problems that may arise during analysis, and the fact that the devil is in the details virtually guarantees that problems will arise.\nIndeed, many such problems result from the difference between the analyst\u0026rsquo;s iniital assumptions about the network under measurement and the actual conditions of the network or the effects of measurement errors. However, this need for flexibility during the initial development of an analysis should not be mistaken for a sign that this workflow is the only way to perform traffic analysis research.\nIf we accept, as in the previous section, that fully automated approaches to data protection in network data analysis will not work, and that analyst-mobility approaches do not scale, then we can solve both problems at the same time by developing a manually-assisted approach which is designed to encourage code quality for repeatability alongside privacy; one such approach will be the subject of the next post Update: post after next. (The next post is a quick interlude to talk about active measurement, specifically, and what we\u0026rsquo;re doing to address the problems raised here in a active measurement study recently accepted to PAM).\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/12/on-repeatable-internet-measurement-part-one/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI spent quite a lot of time in 2014 thinking about the following problem: if I hand you a paper that claims something about the Internet, based on data I cannot show you because I am bound by a nondisclosure agreement due to corporate confidentiality or user privacy issues, generated by code which is ostensibly available under an open-source license but which is neither intended to run outside my environment, nor tested to ensure it will produce correct results in all cases, nor maintained to ensure it is compatible with newer versions of the compiler, interpreter, or libraries it requires, what reason have I given you to believe what I say?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On Repeatable Internet Measurement: Part One"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/flows-ieee-2014/","summary":"","title":"Flow Monitoring Explained - From Packet Capture to Data Analysis with NetFlow and IPFIX"},{"content":"This paper led to the Substrate Protocol for User Datagrams and Path Layer UDP Substrate BoFs at IETF meetings in Dallas and Berlin, respectively, and the path layer effort in general. The initial focus on the non-evolvability of the APIs in this paper inspired work on Post Sockets as well.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/udp35-ieee-2014/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis paper led to the \u003ca href=\"https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-trammell-spud-req\"\u003eSubstrate Protocol for User Datagrams\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-trammell-plus-abstract-mech\"\u003ePath Layer UDP Substrate\u003c/a\u003e BoFs at IETF meetings in Dallas and Berlin, respectively, and the \u003ca href=\"/project/path-layer\"\u003epath layer\u003c/a\u003e effort in general. The initial focus on the non-evolvability of the APIs in this paper inspired work on \u003ca href=\"project/post-sockets\"\u003ePost Sockets\u003c/a\u003e as well.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Evolving Transport in the Internet"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc7373/","summary":"","title":"Textual Representation of IPFIX Abstract Data Types"},{"content":"\nShamelessly inspired by Alexander Calder, who I followed from Atlanta to Pittsburgh to Zürich, and inexpertly crafted from stuff I found at Migros, I present my first attempt at a mobile.\n(And for those of you who have not yet heard, yes, this commission has a customer: we\u0026rsquo;re expecting a daughter in a few weeks. We won\u0026rsquo;t be boring the Internet at large with piles of baby pictures, though.)\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/08/a-degenerate-binary-tree/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"A Degenerate Binary Tree\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/Degenerate-Binary-Tree.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShamelessly inspired by \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Calder\"\u003eAlexander Calder\u003c/a\u003e, who I followed from \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/8974194521/\"\u003eAtlanta\u003c/a\u003e to \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/elston/38241312/\"\u003ePittsburgh\u003c/a\u003e to \u003ca href=\"http://www.schoenewiese.com/index.php?showimage=1003\"\u003eZürich\u003c/a\u003e, and inexpertly crafted from stuff I found at Migros, I present my first attempt at a mobile.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(And for those of you who have not yet heard, yes, this commission has a customer: we\u0026rsquo;re expecting a daughter in a few weeks. We won\u0026rsquo;t be boring the Internet at large with piles of baby pictures, though.)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Degenerate Binary Tree"},{"content":"This is going to make me sound somewhat more libertarian than I actually am, but here goes:\nThe most important duty of a state is its effective control over and responsible application of the monopoly on violence, delegated to it by its citizens, in the service of the protection of its citizens, and the protection of all people present within its territory.\nAll the other trappings of statehood — a currency, a post office, universal healthcare, the name of your state on a placard at the UN General Assembly, some transportation infrastructure of some sort, passports, some stamps you can apply to passports issued by other states, a national Olympic team and/or Eurovision Song Contest entry (as appropriate), a flag — are nice to have, but not really essential.\nUsually when the words \u0026ldquo;failed state\u0026rdquo; get thrown around, it\u0026rsquo;s due to that effective control of the monopoly on violence bit. Of course, you can\u0026rsquo;t apply this statement absolutely. A bar brawl in Cleveland doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean you get to stop filing 1040s. But do you have a chronic, widespread problem with marauding gangs of murderers? You might be living in a failed state. (I\u0026rsquo;d love to see this definition of failed-statehood expanded to include the in the service of protection bit, but I\u0026rsquo;m not enough of an optimist to believe we\u0026rsquo;ll get the arbitrary and capricious application of state-sponsored violence considered universally unacceptable in any real sense during my lifetime.)\nI\u0026rsquo;m having a hard time seeing the creeping militarization of law enforcement, as exemplified by what (mediated by the media an ocean away) looks like the armed occupation of Ferguson, Missouri by its own local police, as anything other than the loss of control of the monopoly on violence by the governments of the State of Missouri and of the United States. I\u0026rsquo;ve been uncomfortable about the apparently arbitrary and capricious application of state-sponsored violence by American local police forces for some time, even though there\u0026rsquo;s very little chance it will be arbitrarily and capriciously applied against me: let\u0026rsquo;s face it, I\u0026rsquo;m a white guy with US passport who doesn\u0026rsquo;t speak Spanish, and I spend my increasingly rare time on American soil in the company of other mostly-white people in mostly-white parts of whatever town I\u0026rsquo;m in. The Dallas police aren\u0026rsquo;t going to raid the IETF meeting next March for illicit standards development, no matter how much weed certain Internet-Drafts may appear to have been inspired by.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s probably no use appealing to federal authority to roll back this creeping militarization, since in many cases it\u0026rsquo;s the federal government who supported the transfer of military hardware to local law enforcement in the first place. America continues to reap the fruits of its wholly overblown fear of things that do not exist. And I know there\u0026rsquo;s nothing I\u0026rsquo;m saying here that John Oliver hasn\u0026rsquo;t already said better. But I hope, as life in Ferguson slowly returns to a semblance of normal and all that military hardware goes back into storage, that we don\u0026rsquo;t forget what happened there as a warning that maybe it\u0026rsquo;s not such a good idea to flood areas of even minor conflict with completely unnecessary and irresponsibly controlled arms.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/08/the-measure-of-a-state/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis is going to make me sound somewhat more libertarian than I actually am, but here goes:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe most important duty of a state is its effective control over and responsible application of the monopoly on violence, delegated to it by its citizens, in the service of the protection of its citizens, and the protection of all people present within its territory.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAll the other trappings of statehood — a currency, a post office, universal healthcare, the name of your state on a placard at the UN General Assembly, some transportation infrastructure of some sort, passports, some stamps you can apply to passports issued by other states, a national Olympic team and/or Eurovision Song Contest entry (as appropriate), a flag — are nice to have, but not really essential.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Measure of a State"},{"content":"\nSo it hasn\u0026rsquo;t been all work: the weather (though it\u0026rsquo;s tragic today) has cooperated with my calendar on occasion, and I\u0026rsquo;ve had a few chances to throw the boat on the water. So this begins what I home will become an occasional series on paddling around Switzerland with a sea kayak.\nThe weekend before last, I decided to try out the Pfäffikersee (\u0026ldquo;Lake Pfäffikon\u0026rdquo;, though the lake isn\u0026rsquo;t really big enough to warrant a translation). At 2500m x 1200m, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to do a full roundtrip around the lake in about an hour without pushing too hard.\nAccess is something of an issue. First, the Pfäffikersee is a nature reserve, unlike many lakes in the Mittelland surrounded by a sizable wetland. The lake is open April through October, though much of the shoreline is closed throughout the year, so it\u0026rsquo;s important to stay on the middle-of-the-lake side of the orange buoys (see the flyer on the nature reserve, in German). This means the possibilities for throwing a kayak on the water are also limited.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a low quay on the promenade in Pfäffikon, which is a reasonably short walk to the train station, and would be an option for bringing a smallish folding boat via S-Bahn. Parking is severely limited in Pfäffikon itself, though, and there does not appear to be any access for boats near Pfäffikon\u0026rsquo;s Seebadi. There also appears to be kayak-friendly access at Seegräben, but parking is also generally limited by the proximity to Jucker Farmart and there\u0026rsquo;s a 10% grade down to the lake over about 220m.\nSo I put in at the Seebad on the southern shore of the lake in Robenhausen (Wetzikon), with ample free parking and a small boat launch maintained by the sailing club. There\u0026rsquo;s even a small patch of grass well-sized to assemble the Feathercraft.\nThere was light sailboat and rowboat traffic on the lake, with rowboat rental from Pfäffikon\u0026rsquo;s promenade, and even another canoe and another seekayak (a fiberglass Prijon) out on the water. The lake is far enough up in the Zürcher Oberland that there\u0026rsquo;s a decent view of the mountains, though that was a bit limited by the weather last weekend.\nVerdict: definitely a nice afternoon paddle if you\u0026rsquo;re already in Wetzikon.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/07/dschwiiz-inerem-schiffli-pfaffikersee/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"Lake Pfäffikon\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/img/pfaeffikersee-1.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo it hasn\u0026rsquo;t been all work: the weather (though it\u0026rsquo;s tragic today) has cooperated with my calendar on occasion, and I\u0026rsquo;ve had a few chances to throw the boat on the water. So this begins what I home will become an occasional series on paddling around Switzerland with a sea kayak.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe weekend before last, I decided to try out the Pfäffikersee (\u0026ldquo;Lake Pfäffikon\u0026rdquo;, though the lake isn\u0026rsquo;t really big enough to warrant a translation). At 2500m x 1200m, it\u0026rsquo;s possible to do a full roundtrip around the lake in about an hour without pushing too hard.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"d’Schwiiz inerem Schiffli: Pfäffikersee"},{"content":"I recently gave a full-day course on flow measurement at the University of Zürich\u0026rsquo;s IfI summer school. The course itself was more or less a stack of my current research interests stapled together; one product was a nice summary version of a tutorial on the IPFIX protocol (on which I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on and off for the past nine years), together with an iPython notebook on the subject.\nSlides are here, and the notebook is here. The live version is available from GitHub in the britram/ipfix_tutorial repository.\nAnd as a bonus on the subject, here\u0026rsquo;s a video of me giving an interview about all this last year in Berlin on way too little sleep.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/07/a-quick-introduction-to-ipfix/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI recently gave a full-day course on flow measurement at the University of Zürich\u0026rsquo;s IfI summer school. The course itself was more or less a stack of my current research interests stapled together; one product was a nice summary version of a tutorial on the IPFIX protocol (on which I\u0026rsquo;ve worked on and off for the past nine years), together with an iPython notebook on the subject.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A quick introduction to IPFIX"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/mplane-ieee-2014/","summary":"","title":"mPlane, an Intelligent Measurement Plane for the Internet"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/qof-tma-2014/","summary":"","title":"Inline Data Integrity Signals for Passive Measurement"},{"content":"Well, it\u0026rsquo;s official. I\u0026rsquo;ll be joining the Internet Architecture Board for a two-year term starting at IETF 89 in March. Among other things, the IAB provides architectural oversight of IETF protocols, which are surprisingly coherent given the nearly perfectly bottom-up nature of the process that produces them. I look forward to the challenge in meta-cat-herding.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/02/joining-the-iab/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWell, it\u0026rsquo;s \u003ca href=\"http://www.iab.org/2014/02/14/nomcom-announces-iab-appointments-2/\"\u003eofficial\u003c/a\u003e. I\u0026rsquo;ll be joining the \u003ca href=\"http://www.iab.org/\"\u003eInternet Architecture Board \u003c/a\u003efor a two-year term starting at IETF 89 in March. Among other things, the IAB provides architectural oversight of IETF protocols, which are surprisingly coherent given the nearly perfectly bottom-up nature of the process that produces them. I look forward to the challenge in meta-\u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8\"\u003ecat-herding\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Joining the IAB"},{"content":"Putting aside the discomfort of being an immigrant in a mildly xenophobic land, and the hypothetical ballistic solution to Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s furr\u0026rsquo;ner problem, I\u0026rsquo;ll add my voice to the growing chorus of confusion and ask what, in reality, just happened. So here, translated into English, is the new Article 121a of the Constitution of the Swiss Confederation:\nArticle 121a Immigration Control\nSwitzerland controls immigration independently. The number of residence permits for foreigners in Switzerland is limited by annual quota and a maximum limit. The maximum limit applies to asylum-seekers as well. The right to settlement, family union, and access to social services are subject to limitation. Quotas are to be defined to the advantage of Swiss citizens in the economic interest of Switzerland. Cross-border commuters are covered as well. The application of an employer, level of integration in Swiss society, and financial independence are especially influential criteria [in the decision to grant a residence permit]. No treaty may be signed in opposition to this article. The details are a matter of law. 121(a)2 and 121(a)3 define the high-level framework for immigration control. For countries that do limit immigration, the arrangement here is not particularly controversial. \u0026ldquo;Limitation of social services\u0026rdquo; would be a dog-whistle to the right wing, were it not being shouted through a megaphone, and is predicated on the assumption1 that migrants come into the country for the welfare. But otherwise, so far, so good.\nHowever, quotas aren\u0026rsquo;t really the point, as made clear by 121(a)1 and 121(a)4: the issue isn\u0026rsquo;t immigration, it\u0026rsquo;s Europe and Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s place therein. This article was designed for one reason alone, to force a showdown with Brussels. 121(a)5 seems to acknowledge this: it\u0026rsquo;s completely superfluous and serves only to underscore that the initiants, lead by the Swiss People\u0026rsquo;s Party (SVP), don\u0026rsquo;t care about the details. The details are a mess to be cleaned up by others.\n121(a) is not democracy in action. It\u0026rsquo;s vandalism by poster campaign.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s the same kind of vandalism that SVP-authored Article 72.3 (\u0026ldquo;The construction of minarets is forbidden\u0026rdquo;) is. And since the treaties that are now forbidden under 121(a)4 don\u0026rsquo;t just cover immigration, but trade, education, research, power, transport, and so on, Switzerland is now in the position of being surrounded by a jurisdiction with which it has no secure legal relationship. The treaties are still in place (the temporary conditions in the initiative include Article 191.9.1: \u0026ldquo;Treaties that contradict Article 121(a) are to be renegotiated to conform thereto within three years of ratification\u0026rdquo;), but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t appear to me that Brussels has any incentive whatsoever to renegotiate them. Indeed, given the nativist wave sweeping the continent it\u0026rsquo;s unclear that free movement of persons, one of the core ideals of the EU, would survive the political firestorm unleashed by the EU allowing Switzerland access to its markets without Switzerland allowing EU citizens to live here. So even if negotiation were possible in happier times, Brussels has a strong incentive to take a hard line now.\nThe initiants joyously celebrate their victory for Swiss independence and the principle of sovereignty, dismissing my line of reasoning as something between paranoid and unpatriotic, and will tell anyone who takes them seriously enough to listen that Switzerland is in the strong position here, that Europe needs Switzerland more than Switzerland needs Europe, and other such flagwavery. I hope for our sake that they\u0026rsquo;re right, that we didn\u0026rsquo;t just watch trillions of francs in trade in goods and labor go up in smoke. But it still sounds to me like the type of inward-looking willful ignorance that you\u0026rsquo;d expect from someone who talks about an accidental trip to Basel Badischer Bahnhof2 in the mid \u0026rsquo;70s as \u0026ldquo;won i mal im Dütsche gsi bin3\u0026rdquo;.\nSo, what now?\nI\u0026rsquo;m guessing that, as usual, my most paranoid analysis of the situation will turn out to be overblown, that economic conditions in Switzerland will not get as bad as they did the last time Switzerland rebuffed an invitation to join a customs area by which it was surrounded, that we will not have to start planting potatoes in the street4.\nThe present situation is painted as a showdown between Switzerland and the EU, which is a little simplistic, but let\u0026rsquo;s go with it. If the EU blinks, things get much more complicated for migrants in Europe, but this might in the long term work out for the best: the vision in Brussels of a Federal State of Europe was always a little aggressive and lacking in democratic legitimacy, regardless of its good intentions. Simply declaring that there is no difference between Portugal and Estonia, between Ireland and Croatia, between Germany and France, does not make it so, and we probably need a few generations to better mix the societies before we finish the project of mixing the politics.\nIf the EU holds to its principles, though, my left-field prediction is this will be the moment that Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s accession to the European Union became inevitable. Post-1848, the idea of an Independent Switzerland has always been more of a patriotic fantasy than a description of reality. Since we set off down the Bilateral Way, the Swiss economy has simply become too integrated to turn back without a whole lot of pain, and people will always vote their pocketbook when they have to, even people less fundamentally practical than the Swiss. While I\u0026rsquo;d appreciate the irony of the SVP forcing Swiss accession, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure I\u0026rsquo;d appreciate the result.\nBut we shall see.\n1 While families \u0026ldquo;with an immigration background\u0026rdquo; receive benefits at a higher proportion than their population would suggest, immigrants as a whole are net-contributors to the social insurance scheme, so as with most things in politics, you can cite data here for any viewpoint you care to have.\n2 Basel has two \u0026ldquo;main\u0026rdquo; train stations. Basel Bad is so named because it was built by the State Railways of the Grand Duchy of Baden, which through a series of consolidations and privatizations became Deutsche Bahn. The treaty between Baden and Basel is still in effect, and leads to the station being partially extraterritorial: it\u0026rsquo;s on Swiss soil, but is part of the German (and therefore EU) customs area.\n3 \u0026ldquo;That time I went to Germany.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m honestly not sure anyone in Switzerland is this inward-looking, though, no matter how well the image of fierce indifference to things across the Doubs or the Rhine plays in politics.\n4 Surrounded by the Axis, Switzerland got very serious about food security in 1940, eventually nearly tripling its cultivated land area. We were locavores way before it was cool.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/02/on-vandalist-politics/","summary":"\u003cp\u003ePutting aside the \u003ca href=\"/2014/02/come-for-the-chocolate-stay-for-the-xenophobia/\"\u003ediscomfort\u003c/a\u003e of being an immigrant in a mildly xenophobic land, and the \u003ca href=\"/2014/02/insel-schweiz/\"\u003ehypothetical ballistic solution\u003c/a\u003e to Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003efurr\u0026rsquo;ner\u003c/em\u003e problem, I\u0026rsquo;ll add my voice to the growing chorus of confusion and ask what, in reality, just happened. So here, translated into English, is the new Article 121a of the Constitution of the Swiss Confederation:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eArticle 121a Immigration Control\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSwitzerland controls immigration independently.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe number of residence permits for foreigners in Switzerland is limited by annual quota and a maximum limit. The maximum limit applies to asylum-seekers as well. The right to settlement, family union, and access to social services are subject to limitation.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eQuotas are to be defined to the advantage of Swiss citizens in the economic interest of Switzerland. Cross-border commuters are covered as well. The application of an employer, level of integration in Swiss society, and financial independence are especially influential criteria [in the decision to grant a residence permit].\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNo treaty may be signed in opposition to this article.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe details are a matter of law.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e","title":"On Vandalist Politics"},{"content":"In order to outline a more effective defense against Ausländer than the Masseneinwanderungsinitiative can provide, and with a deferential nod to Randall Munroe, I decided to do some back of the napkin estimates of what it would take to make Switzerland a literal island. tl;dr: it\u0026rsquo;s probably not worth it.\nThe project as envisioned requires two phases: separating Switzerland from the Earth\u0026rsquo;s crust, and moving it to a point off a continental shelf somewhere where it could be an island. Separation is easy: Switzerland is good at digging tunnels, so we\u0026rsquo;ll just need to dig down to the right depth then dig a tunnel from France to Austria that\u0026rsquo;s three degrees of latitude wide and six degrees of longitude long. Given that we\u0026rsquo;re unlikely to be able to negotiate transit rights with the European Union to move the separated mass over its territory as part of this project, I\u0026rsquo;ve decided that the best way to do the actual moving is ballistic: sticking rockets in the tunnels and imparting about 2.3 km/s of delta-v — what it took to get the Mercury-Redstone missions into the middle of the Atlantic — to the mass.\nWe have to make a few assumptions here. First, let\u0026rsquo;s presume that the crust of Switzerland has an average depth of 1km (less in the flatland, more in the mountains), and that we want to move the entire country and not just the bits where people live, work, and complain about insufficient space in the commuter trains (after all what is Switzerland without its Alps?). Since we\u0026rsquo;re guessing, let\u0026rsquo;s also presume the crust has the approximate density of granite. Overjoyed that I\u0026rsquo;d finally found a use for Wolfram Alpha, I plugged in these assumptions and came up with a mass to move of 1.073 x 1017 kg. To put this into terms almost nobody will intuitively understand, this is 10 times the mass of Mars\u0026rsquo; larger moon Phobos.\nOne tenth of a Switzerland (Phobos, credit JPL, via Wikipedia)\nFurther down the rabbit hole of dodgy assumptions, let\u0026rsquo;s take the figure of 1010 CHF for the cost of the Gotthard Base Tunnel and reason rather implausibly that all the various technology we\u0026rsquo;ll need to prepare Switzerland for a ballistic launch in the tunnels we need to build will replace all the rails and signaling equipment that we don\u0026rsquo;t. 1010 CHF bought us about 5 x 106 m2 of tunnel, for a cost of 2 kCHF per m2. So given that we need tunnels under the entire area of Switzerland, we\u0026rsquo;ll need to budget 82.5 trillion CHF for tunneling and technical work for the separation part of this project. This works out to about 145 years of nominal 2012 GDP, or 16 times the assets under management in Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s financial sector. Compared to phase two of this project, this actually seems realistically doable.\nGuide to large projects in Switzerland: Step one: build tunnel, step two: plan project. (cc-by-sa 2.5 by Wikipedia user Cooper.ch)\nAnd now for phase two. We\u0026rsquo;ll want liquid-fueled rockets, since we\u0026rsquo;ll need differential thrust to control something as big as Switzerland through its ballistic path. I\u0026rsquo;ll ignore possible advances in rocket technology that will happen over the century of tunneling and note that we haven\u0026rsquo;t managed yet to do better than the RS-25 SSME in terms of efficiency in cryogenic liquid fueled rocket engines: it develops 1.8 x 106 N of thrust with a specific impulse of 366 seconds at sea level.\nSSME test firing (NASA image, public domain, via Wikipedia)\nTo counteract the force of gravity on our newly-separated Switzerland (let\u0026rsquo;s say 1.05 x 1018 N), we need 600 billion RS-25s. To get the thrust to weight ratio up to a reasonable 1.5, we\u0026rsquo;ll need to order 300 billion more, and since we\u0026rsquo;re placing such a large order anyway let\u0026rsquo;s go ahead and up it to a trillion to make the math work out easier. At $40 million a pop, this would work out to $40 quintillion. I\u0026rsquo;m going to assume we can work out some sort of volume discount and cost savings based on the fact we\u0026rsquo;ll only need them to start once, and that for such a large order the nice folks at Rocketdyne will throw in installation labor for free, so let\u0026rsquo;s budget $20 quintillion (18.5 quintillion CHF, or about enough cash to tunnel under 225,000 Switzerlands, though I\u0026rsquo;m guessing that forex trading of that volume will distort the market somewhat.) At this point we can hide the tunneling budget in the accounting errors of the rocket budget.\nNow we have to turn our Raketenschweiz into Inselschweiz, which is where Tsiolkovsky will have his way with us. To calculate the total mass of LH2 and LOX we\u0026rsquo;ll need to get our Switzerland up to 2.3 km/s, we take a conservative estimate of 390 s specific impulse over the path and solve for:\nAssuming we\u0026rsquo;re dealing mainly with 16O and 1H here, we\u0026rsquo;ll need 7.878 x 1016 kg of oxygen and 9.84 x 1015 kg of hydrogen. We can readily extract this from the oceans, which have approximately 1.189 x 1021 kg and 1.487 x 1020 kg of each, respectively. Indeed, the draining of the oceans needed to make the fuel would only reduce sea level by about 24 cm. Electrolyzing that much water, though, will take 1.166 x 1024 J, which we can get by burning all the fossil fuel on Earth, followed by the all the fossil fuel on the next 29 Earths we happen to come across.\nWe are therefore sadly forced to conclude that, however difficult it may seem, Switzerland must find a nuanced political rather than a brute-force physical solution to the fact that it is surrounded by Europe.\nUpdate: In an earlier version of this post, I forgot gravity, which led to the result that we needed an order of magnitude more oxygen than available in the atmosphere to manufacture the fuel. The right numbers make this a slightly less impossible project, but still an astonishingly expensive one. I stand by the original conclusion that it\u0026rsquo;s probably easier to leave Switzerland where it is.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/02/insel-schweiz/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn order to outline a more effective defense against \u003cem\u003eAusländer\u003c/em\u003e than the \u003cem\u003eMasseneinwanderungsinitiative\u003c/em\u003e can provide, and with a deferential nod to \u003ca href=\"http://what-if.xkcd.com\"\u003eRandall Munroe\u003c/a\u003e, I decided to do some back of the napkin estimates of what it would take to make Switzerland a literal island. tl;dr: it\u0026rsquo;s probably not worth it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Insel Schweiz"},{"content":"Every time the Rovian Swiss People\u0026rsquo;s Party (often described as \u0026ldquo;extreme right\u0026rdquo; in the English-speaking press, though they\u0026rsquo;re really more nativist than explicitly fascist) manages to ram one of its populist cries for attention through the initiative process, I wonder why I, as a foreigner, insist on staying in a country so intent on doing silly and dangerous things to its constitution in service of its hate of us. Over time, Switzerland feels less and less welcoming. But self-deportation is exactly what they want me to do, a fact that strengthens my resolve to stay here long enough to become the aged burden to the social-insurance scheme the political discussion here assumes that I am.\nToday\u0026rsquo;s acceptance of the _Masseneinwanderungsinitiative _(\u0026ldquo;Initiative on mass immigration\u0026rdquo;) does not change the score for the dumbest sentence in the Swiss constitution, a contest still handily won by Article 72 clause 3 (\u0026quot;The construction of minarets is forbidden\u0026quot;). But what Article 121(a) lacks in stupidity it makes up for in dangerousness. The article anchors a requirement for numerical limits on immigration in the Constitution, and further forbids the implementation of any treaty incompatible with those limits, and requires renegotiation of such treaties already signed.\nThe issue here is that, while Switzerland is not a member of the European Union, it has signed a set of bilateral agreements therewith which essentially integrate its economy with Europe. This has, for the most part, worked. A cornerstone of this arrangement is the free movement of people, both temporarily (via the Schengen treaty) and permanently: Europeans have, or rather, had, the right to come to Switzerland to work, and Swiss the same in Europe. These bilateral treaties will need to be renegotiated (per Article 121(a) clause 4 and Article 197.9 clause 1).\nThe problem with this is that the European Union has made it very clear to anyone who cares to know that it has no interest whatsoever in renegotiating just the clauses related to immigration, that any renegotiation will essentially involve starting from the beginning, and that it has come to regret special treatment for Switzerland in the first place. So, most probably, what this means is the collapse of the entire framework of Swiss-EU relations, followed by their replacement by\u0026hellip; something else, and what that something else is is at the moment completely uncertain. This uncertainty touches everything, from customs to research agreements to the openness of the borders, and will most probably take a very long time to resolve.\nOne thing which is certain from simple geography is that Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s future lies with the EU (at least exactly as much as the future of the rest of the EU member states lies with the EU):\nOrange: Switzerland. Green: the European Union. (Source: Wikipedia; public domain)\nAt least, I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure there\u0026rsquo;s not enough geothermal and/or gravitational potential energy in Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s mountains and glaciers and/or enough gold of uncertain provenance in its banks to afford to be able to dig a giant ditch at the border, stick rocket engines under the country, and launch it into an ocean in which it could be the literal island its nativist right wing wishes it were.\nThere are also not enough Swiss doctors1 and nurses to keep us all healthy, Swiss engineers to build and maintain infrastructure and exports of technical goods and services, Swiss researchers and educators to keep the country academically competitive, or even native Swiss skiers to defend the country\u0026rsquo;s Olympic honor2. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t even account all the other jobs done by immigrants everywhere like gardening, fruit picking, hoteliery, food service, and so on. If you thought Los Angeles seemed empty without immigrants, try Zürich.\nOver the past five and a half years, Zürich has become my home. Some days I feel more welcome, and some days less. And Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s got its problems, sure. Many of these can be explained by the inappropriateness of policies and cultural norms applicable to pre-industrial village life in a post-industrial country, but this will be the subject of a future rant. The loudness and backwardness of the right-wing politics here is nothing especially loud or backward in global terms, and is a far cry from the full rejection of the ideals of the Enlightenment that has marked America\u0026rsquo;s Republicans of late. But it\u0026rsquo;s hard to ignore the reflexive xenophobia as a good foreigner to whom it does not apply when, as today, the noise machine manages to do real and perhaps lasting damage to Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s economy, society, and foreign policy.\n1: Admittedly, Switzerland could solve this problem in a few years by dropping its numerus clausus for medical students, which it will have to seriously consider doing after adopting a numerus clausus for essentially everyone without a passport.\n2: Congratulations to Dario Cologna, born in Graubünden to immigrant Italian parents, naturalized Swiss citizen3, on his gold medal today in cross-country skiing.\n3: Swiss citizenship, unlike American citiztenship, is jus sanguinus, a situation which leads to about five percent of the population, a little under half a million people, being culturally Swiss, born and raised in the country, but without citizenship.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/02/come-for-the-chocolate-stay-for-the-xenophobia/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5;\"\u003eEvery time the \u003ca href=\"http://open.salon.com/blog/lost_in_berlin/2010/01/14/the_swiss_right_identifies_a_new_scapegoat_-_germans\"\u003eRovian\u003c/a\u003e Swiss People\u0026rsquo;s Party (often described as \u0026ldquo;extreme right\u0026rdquo; in the English-speaking press, though they\u0026rsquo;re really more \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_right_in_Switzerland\"\u003enativist\u003c/a\u003e than explicitly \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partei_National_Orientierter_Schweizer\"\u003efascist\u003c/a\u003e) manages to ram one of its populist cries for attention through the initiative process, I wonder why I, as a foreigner, insist on staying in a country so\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5;\"\u003e intent on doing silly and dangerous things to its constitution in service of its hate of us. Over time, Switzerland feels less and less welcoming. But \u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5;\"\u003eself-deportation is \u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan style=\"line-height: 1.5;\"\u003eexactly what they want me to do, a fact that strengthens my resolve to stay here long enough to become the aged burden to the social-insurance scheme the political discussion here assumes that I am.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Come for the chocolate, stay for the xenophobia"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc7119/","summary":"","title":"Operation of the IPFIX Protocol on IPFIX Mediators"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc7125/","summary":"","title":"Revision of the tcpControlBits IPFIX Information Element"},{"content":"Over the past couple of days, this article has been brought to my attention from multiple angles. The basic idea — that the US Postal Service\u0026rsquo;s collapse and the problem of banking deserts in America\u0026rsquo;s poorer and more rural neighborhoods are two problems with a single solution — is an intriguing one. As an American emigrant customer of the Swiss post bank, it seems like a good idea, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure the history of American and European financial services are similar enough to allow us to predict the success of the former from the latter.\nFirst, I should say I\u0026rsquo;m not a customer of PostFinance by choice. They\u0026rsquo;re essentially the bank1 of last resort for foreigners right off the boat (both UBS and Credit Suisse had fee schedules and deposit requirements for new immigrants which I found as insulting as they were impractical). After the imperialist evil that is FATCA passed, leveraging access to American markets to expand the presumed regulatory competence of the United States Treasury Department well beyond the de jure bounds of its sovereignty, every bank in Switzerland decided that the lowest-risk course of action was to kick all their American customers to the curb. PostFinance remained true to its position as a safe harbor, though I can\u0026rsquo;t hold any financial asset more complicated than a savings account that pays negative annual interest in real terms, and most of my correspondence from them about my regrettable Americanness is written in a tone that it might as well start off \u0026ldquo;Dear Tax Evader\u0026rdquo;.\nI\u0026rsquo;m being tedious about this because of difference number one between Swiss and American finserv: access to banking services is more crucial here because you simply cannot function in the formal economy without a bank account. Checks are rare enough that bank employees have to consult a manual to figure out what they are. Have a job? The first thing your employer asks for after the equivalent of an I-9 is a bank account number. To pay bills, you get an inpayment form the biller, which contains their account number as well as some invoice identifiers, which you generally use as input to a domestic wire transfer. Yes, you can pay these with cash by bringing the inpayment slip to any post office, but few enough people do this anymore that the post office has started charging for it.\nThis is, by the way, why Switzerland (as well as many other European countries) has a postbank: the offering of financial services came out of the infrastructure for domestic payments, which itself was built out of a desire to move money around without having to put pieces of paper in envelopes2. As the efficient movement of payments was seen as a necessary underpinning of the economy, and as Switzerland is in Europe, where \u0026ldquo;statist\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t even a word, much less an insult, it was a natural choice to build this infrastructure under the state PTT3.\nThe advantages an American postbank would have are universal physical presence and, honestly, pressure to do it right brought on by the fact that unless they come up with some other way to be useful, they\u0026rsquo;ll be crushed to death between a Randite Congress and whatever replaces email. The USPS maybe isn\u0026rsquo;t the most valuable brand when it comes to trustworthy customer service, but they do a much better job than they get credit for, and they might even pick up quite a few customers from well inside the margins of the formal economy due to lingering damage to banks\u0026rsquo; reputations from the collapse of 2008. The advantages they would bring to banking deserts would be access to formal financial services, displacement of predatory lenders5, and eventual integration of residents of these areas into the formal economy simply by providing an alternative whose business model isn\u0026rsquo;t \u0026ldquo;screw the customer as long and hard as possible6.\u0026rdquo;\nWhat they\u0026rsquo;re missing is natural growth from already running a working payment infrastructure. Unlike Europe, the payment infrastructure in the formal economy in the United States is heavily tied to the consumer credit industry7. Payday loan sharks might not have much political pull at the national level — though I\u0026rsquo;d still expect at least one congresschild to apply the putative adjective \u0026ldquo;job-destroying\u0026rdquo; to a postbank and decry its impact on small business owners — but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t take much looking at the thoroughly bipartisan structure of e.g. Visa\u0026rsquo;s political contributions to realize that trying to build a public alternative to the American payment oligopoly would be one of the few things Congress could agree was A Bad Thing, perhaps even to the extent that they could manage to pass legislation against a postbank by executive order.\nSo, like functional private funding for health care, I\u0026rsquo;m afraid a postbank might be one of those nice things that America just can\u0026rsquo;t have.\n1 Technically, PostFinance only got a banking license last year. Before this they were a pseudo-bank, with a rather complicated line between what they could and could not do, leading to such ridiculousness as their offering a savings account which they by law could not call a savings account.\n2 Yes, the USPS provides postal money orders, which are by far the most efficient way to send US dollars domestically to people who don\u0026rsquo;t trust you, but this still involves literal paper-pushing.\n3 The PTT has since been divested and split into Swisscom and Swiss Post, and Swiss Post has further been split into its mail-and-package, financial services, logistics, and bus4 services, but the ownership structures of all of these are such that calling these companies truly private is a bit of a stretch.\n[4] Since the mail had to go everywhere, and transportation of people to and from places mail had to go was also seen as a fundamental and necessary underpinning of the economy, it was natural to move people and mail using the same vehicles. PostAuto\u0026rsquo;s yellow buses remain the backbone of the public transport network everywhere in Switzerland without a direct rail connection.\n[5] This assumes that turning the USPS into a bank wouldn\u0026rsquo;t turn all their employees into, you know, bankers.\n[6] There\u0026rsquo;s a slow education process here too: imagine how much less you\u0026rsquo;d trust your bank if the words LOAN SHARK were printed in big yellow letters right on the front door.\n[7] Not that European banks aren\u0026rsquo;t trying: Ariane keeps getting stuff with her statements trying to convince her that it\u0026rsquo;s really okay to buy that two-franc box of gum with her credit card, which she simply shakes her head at and throws in the recycling pile.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/01/an-american-postbank/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOver the past couple of days, \u003ca href=\"http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116374/postal-service-banking-how-usps-can-save-itself-and-help-poor\"\u003ethis\u003c/a\u003e article has been brought to my attention from multiple angles. The basic idea — that the US Postal Service\u0026rsquo;s collapse and the problem of banking deserts in America\u0026rsquo;s poorer and more rural neighborhoods are two problems with a single solution — is an intriguing one. As an American emigrant customer of the Swiss post bank, it seems like a good idea, but I\u0026rsquo;m not sure the history of American and European financial services are similar enough to allow us to predict the success of the former from the latter.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"An American Postbank"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that keeping the blog up to date wasn\u0026rsquo;t actually a resolution of mine for last year, because I did as well as, well, one usually does with one\u0026rsquo;s New Years\u0026rsquo; resolutions. So here\u0026rsquo;s all the stuff I didn\u0026rsquo;t post last year.\nWinter We celebrated New Year\u0026rsquo;s 2013 at a party thrown by some of Ariane\u0026rsquo;s friends in Cologne. New Year\u0026rsquo;s Eve in Germany seems\u0026hellip; dangerous, if only on account of the mixture of narrow streets and drastically overprovisioned fireworks. As for the rest of the winter, it\u0026rsquo;s kind of a blur. My calendar tells me I went to some meetings, made a wedding ring, and gave a talk in broken German about network neutrality at the Bundeshaus.\nmojo design, Winterthur, 13 January 2013\nSpring The main event this spring was a trip around the world — the wrong way, my winding count is now negative — to an IETF meeting in the trackless Disneyfied suburban wasteland southwest of Orlando, Florida (the only redeeming quality of which was excellent strip-mall Cuban food), to the PAM conference at the Hong Kong Polytechnic in Kowloon, and on to two months as a visiting departmental associate at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.\nTsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, 20 March 2013\nAuckland is a beautiful place, but I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t recommend it without a car and/or a sailboat. My host there cycles into the university most days, so I presumed I\u0026rsquo;d be able to too. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;ve been spoiled by life in Zürich (rated Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s worst cycling city, with a route network so spotty I\u0026rsquo;ve signed a petition in hopes of improving it), but after one look at Remuera Road I stuck to a combination of pedestrian and public transit.\nThe time difference — twelve hours (on top of six months) — made this the most productive five weeks of the year (indeed, probably since 2006), as I was so far offset from most people who send me email that I was done with the queue by nine in the morning and could get down to work. The bulk of QoF was written in Auckland.\nAuckland, New Zealand, 29 March 2013\nAfter that, Ariane and I spent two weeks driving around the North Island on a pre-wedding honeymoon, and flew back to Zürich with a one-hour layover in Shanghai (note to future self, that\u0026rsquo;s way too much time on airplanes with way too little time not on airplanes — next time take a couple of days in Hong Kong or Singapore).\nMotorua, Bay of Islands, Northland, New Zealand, 7 May 2013 (you can charter the boat if you like)\nSummer Ariane and I got married in Obwalden on the Summer Solstice 2013. Much of the end of spring was taken up with wedding logistics, and here, as always, the little things are the most effort. See the rose bush on the left edge the photograph below? That\u0026rsquo;s what took up most of the week before the wedding.\nLandenberg, Sarnen, 21 June 2013 (© Izedin Arnautovic)\nBeyond that, we spent a lot of time outside, on which I\u0026rsquo;ve already written; I took a trip to Berlin during which I further confirmed that I don\u0026rsquo;t really sleep in Berlin; and Ariane started jumping in equestrian events again, so I\u0026rsquo;m getting some practice shooting horses.\nSunnebüel, Wallisellen, 31 August 2013\nAutumn My aunt Mike couldn\u0026rsquo;t make it to the wedding due to the birth of her third grandchild (and my third second cousin) Warren, and so postponed her trip to September. We showed her around Zürich and Central Switzerland a bit and returned to the Paxmontana for a third luniversary dinner.\nRapperswil, 20 September 2013\nBeyond that, I spent a lot of time on airplanes, as I usually do. November in Switzerland is traditionally marked by crappy weather in the flatland and crappy weather in the mountains, so the only way to escape is to leave the country entirely. Usually, there\u0026rsquo;s a combination of conferences and meetings that can keep me away, and this year was no exception: IMC in Barcelona, IETF in Vancouver, Supercomputing in Denver, and a seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl gave me an excuse to miss the November grey\u0026hellip; which, this year, was unusually sunny, while Vancouver was soaked and Denver alternately cooked and froze. So your mileage may vary on that whole escaping the weather thing.\nBarcelona, 24 October 2013\nAside from that there was a whole lot of work; it kind of struck me looking back over the year how much I\u0026rsquo;ve been concerned with questions of work, both big (so what is it I want to do after my contract at ETH is up?) and small (what should we name this class in the reference implementation of this protocol?). If anything I\u0026rsquo;d say one of my resolutions for 2014 is to prioritize: pay more attention to what\u0026rsquo;s more important and less attention to what\u0026rsquo;s less important. But since resolving to do something on the second of January is an excellent way to ensure you don\u0026rsquo;t do it, I\u0026rsquo;ll just leave it off.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2014/01/2013-in-review/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that keeping the blog up to date wasn\u0026rsquo;t actually a resolution of mine for last year, because I did as well as, well, one usually does with one\u0026rsquo;s New Years\u0026rsquo; resolutions. So here\u0026rsquo;s all the stuff I didn\u0026rsquo;t post last year.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"2013 in Review"},{"content":"One can debate the usefulness of the traffic-traffic metaphor in network engineering. On the one hand, speed limits make a nice illustration of fairness in the network neutrality debate. On the other hand, motorway congestion and the effect of queueing in network congestion control look nothing like each other, at least until we develop motorways that change their length during rush hour, and we decide we\u0026rsquo;re okay with cars that take too long to get to their destinations being crushed and disposed of en route. One must carefully consider how well the metaphor fits reality before using it to explain or reason about anything important.\nI\u0026rsquo;m wondering how subtly the third Merkel cabinet considered this when they created a single Federal Ministry for Traffic and Digital Infrastructure. I suppose it\u0026rsquo;s better than taking a suggestion from American politics and creating a Federal Ministry of Tubes.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2013/12/is-traffic-traffic/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOne can debate the usefulness of the traffic-traffic metaphor in network engineering. On the one hand, speed limits make a nice illustration of fairness in the network neutrality debate. On the other hand, motorway congestion and the effect of queueing in network congestion control look nothing like each other, at least until we develop motorways that change their length during rush hour, and we decide we\u0026rsquo;re okay with cars that take too long to get to their destinations being crushed and disposed of en route. One must carefully consider how well the metaphor fits reality before using it to explain or reason about anything important.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Is Traffic Traffic?"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading Tom Standage\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Writing on the Wall\u0026rdquo; of late, which I can heartily recommend. It\u0026rsquo;s less subtle than \u0026ldquo;The Victorian Internet\u0026rdquo;, which counts among my favorite books of all time, but that was written before Twitter, and Twitter\u0026rsquo;s made us all less subtle, I think. What strikes me about his new book is not his thesis — that the \u0026ldquo;social media revolution\u0026rdquo; is nothing really new, just the application of new technology to our apparently instinctive love of gossip — but how well it illustrates that much of the present public policy debate over new media technology is very, very old.\nHere I refer to AGUR12, a recently concluded working group on copyright in Switzerland. The working group was convened ensure equitability and efficiency in collective copyright management schemes, but discussed wider issues around the intersection of new media technology and _Urheberrecht1 _as well. The effort made headlines in 20 Minutes a couple of days ago (\u0026ldquo;Like Watching Television in the Last Millennium\u0026rdquo;), when the state-sponsored broadcaster suggested banning time-shifting television because it would threaten their advertising revenues. Setting aside the fact that the state-sponsored broadcaster is already richly funded by a compulsory licensing scheme, which one would hope would make advertising unnecessary, this was already an obviously stupid idea the first time I heard it from Turner Broadcasting\u0026rsquo;s chief of programming back in 1999.\nThe question of how artists and creators should be compensated for their work in light of the fairly complex ecosystem of mass- and not-so-mass media, the giant remixing of inspiration and product that we call \u0026ldquo;culture\u0026rdquo;, and the effect of technologies that reduce the effects of scarcity in the economy of information, is a very complicated one which I don\u0026rsquo;t really have a deep grasp on. The history of technology would seem to suggest that the future holds a fair amount of continued disintermediation, as publishers who used to be necessary either find a new niche from which to provide value, or die trying. I applaud AGUR12 for attempting to answer small slices of this question.\nBut the working group lacked any representation from organizations with significant Internet expertise, and this is reflected in their recommendations concerning the Internet, which range the gamut from incredibly dangerous to merely completely infeasible.\nRecommendation 9.3.5. \u0026ldquo;Data Processing\u0026rdquo; is the most patently offensive, as it would allow \u0026ldquo;[r]ights holders\u0026rdquo; (read: movie studios, record labels, other dying media industries, and the collective organizations that represent them) to \u0026ldquo;process internet connection data (in particular, dynamic and static IP addresses) for the purposes of investigating copyright infringement\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo; By \u0026ldquo;connection data\u0026rdquo; they presumably mean at minimum a set of records describing which customers contact which servers. This requires in-band passive monitoring. So, a more sensationalist yet technically accurate way to frame this recommendation is that the Working Group wants Hollywood to be able to spy on your network connection the same way the NSA does. Setting aside how difficult and expensive this would be — building monitoring infrastructures is hard work — it does not seem to be compatible with the most basic principles of privacy protection, and frankly seems a bit tone-deaf to recommend in a post-Snowden world.\nLess dangerous but still impractical is Recommendation 9.3.4, which would require operators to \u0026ldquo;block access to web portals that feature obvious illegal sources by means of IP and DNS blocking\u0026rdquo;. DNS blocking would break DNSSEC and is therefore impossible if you want DNS integrity (which, trust me, you do). This is one of the things that killed PIPA. IP blocking drastically increases the costs of network operations and network security, and, in a world where \u0026ldquo;illegal content\u0026rdquo; moves around dynamically, ineffective.\nAt least the Working Group seems to recognize there is a problem here with the next sentence: \u0026ldquo;\u0026hellip;blocking measures\u0026hellip;may not compromise the technical functionality of the IP or DNS system,\u0026rdquo; This is a plain contradiction that nullifies the rest of the recommendation. The working group also attempts to address the inherent cost externalization problem with \u0026ldquo;rights owners must adequately compensate access providers for the costs incurred for blocking access,\u0026rdquo; which, given the costs involved, practically nullifies the recommendation again.\nWere these two recommendations put into law, they would represent a significant competitive disadvantage for the Swiss Internet industry as a whole, and the entire ecosystem of communications innovation built around it, as the \u0026ldquo;rights holder\u0026rdquo; organizations effectively externalized the costs of propping its business model up onto the network operations community. This represents same old backward-looking business-model protectionism that, in the United States, gave us the doomedSOPA and PIPA efforts. Standage\u0026rsquo;s book has given me new appreciation for how long this tradition of legal attempts torestrict innovation in media technology is: it is as old as literacy itself. While in the past these have had an aspect of political control as well as revenue protection, present attempts to legally enshrine particular business models for the dissemination of arts and entertainment are just as inappropriate in a free society, especially as they threaten the technical underpinnings of our most successful communications technologies. I should hope that such foolishness will eventually fall onto history\u0026rsquo;s ash heap, just as the licensing of presses and stamp taxes of the past have.\n1 Literally, \u0026ldquo;the rights of authors\u0026rdquo;, but more generally \u0026ldquo;intellectual property law\u0026rdquo;, whether the rights are held by their authors or not.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2013/12/a-media-policy-for-the-17th-century/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve been reading \u003ca href=\"http://tomstandage.wordpress.com/\"\u003eTom Standage\u003c/a\u003e\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Wall-Social-Media-First/dp/1620402831\"\u003eWriting on the Wall\u003c/a\u003e\u0026rdquo; of late, which I can heartily recommend. It\u0026rsquo;s less subtle than \u0026ldquo;\u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteenth--line/dp/0802716040/\"\u003eThe Victorian Internet\u003c/a\u003e\u0026rdquo;, which counts among my favorite books of all time, but that was written before Twitter, and Twitter\u0026rsquo;s made us all less subtle, I think. What strikes me about his new book is not his thesis — that the \u0026ldquo;social media revolution\u0026rdquo; is nothing really new, just the application of new technology to our apparently instinctive love of gossip — but how well it illustrates that much of the present public policy debate over new media technology is very, very old.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Media Policy for the 17th Century"},{"content":"The weather\u0026rsquo;s finally cold enough that there\u0026rsquo;s time to pour a cup of glühwein, put the feet up by the fire, and finish blog posts about all the being outside this summer that got in the way of posting stuff about being outside on the blog.\nSo. My first piece of advice to anyone seeking to cross their home country on muscle power alone: move someplace tiny with a complicated border. Like Switzerland.\nOn the first of September, we rode cycle route 86 from Winterthur to Schaffhausen, via Andelfingen, 31 reasonably-flat-for-Switzerland kilometers, and closed the last gap in an unbroken, muscle-powered trip from St. Louis, France to Gaißau, Austria, across Switzerland.\nThis is not all that impressive, in that we did it in stages, in no particular order, over several years. The rules are simple though: draw an unbroken red line on a map from France to Austria, such that a red line only gets drawn when we\u0026rsquo;re moving only under human power or gravity. In order to close a gap, we have to cross the exact point we passed before.\nHighlights of the ten stages, in chronological order:\nZürich Oerlikon—Würenlos—Zürich Höngg This was basically a quick half-day loop ride from to my old flat in Höngg along cycle route 5 (the \u0026ldquo;Mittelland Route\u0026rdquo;, or, more honestly \u0026ldquo;Flat, But A Little Boring\u0026rdquo;) through fields and past a golf course to a town best known for the fact that it has a hideous blue rest area from the early 80\u0026rsquo;s straddling the A1 motorway, which I\u0026rsquo;ve always thought of as The Gateway to Aargau.\nTotal length of this segment: 17km (of a 31km loop).\nWürenlos—Lenzburg—Aarau This ride somewhen in the late summer of 2012, mainly along the banks of the Aar, was chosen to extend the previous ride in Wallisellen to the house Ariane grew up in in Unterentfelden, to try out my then-shiny-new bike, and to support crossing the country in the other direction, connecting a 2010 ride from Lucerne to Lenzburg via the Seetal and a 2012 ride from Sachseln to Lucern with the Route 29 from Wallisellen to Eglisau via Höhentengen via the Glatt River.\nWe still haven\u0026rsquo;t made it any further than Sachseln on the south side, because Sachseln is about as far as you can go in the direction of Italy before it starts getting uncomfortably steep, and most of the nice pass roads are plagued either by terrible weather, insane motorcyclists, or Dutch campervans seeking a shortcut.\nAt some point in the indeterminate future there will be a From Germany to Italy post, though, and then you\u0026rsquo;ll know we\u0026rsquo;re in much better shape.\nTotal distance of this segment: 46km.\nZürich Oerlikon—Wallisellen—Winterthur Late in 2012, we took this ride to Winterthur, mainly because the weather was good and we heard there were bagels.\nTotal distance of this segment: 24km. Total bagels eaten: 2.\nKreuzlingen—Arbon—Gaißau—St. Margarethen This was the beginning of the 2013 cycling season. We wanted something nice and flat along Lake Constance to start riding again after the long winter in Switzerland and fall in New Zealand. Around about Arbon (which is really surprisingly nice and changed my general impression of little towns in Thurgau), we realized we were feeling fit enough to try to make it all the way to Austria, and make it to Austria we did, crossing the Rhine from Rheineck to Gaißau, stepping off the bikes, realizing we didn\u0026rsquo;t have any Euro to buy anything at the one little café across the bridge, and turning right back around to the safety of Switzerland. This was the point at which we decided to cross the other way.\nTotal distance of this segment: 51km. Total time in Austria: 1 minute.\nAarau—Schafmatt—Liestal From here on out it gets serious, because the goal (which we\u0026rsquo;d just a couple of weeks before decided was a goal) was in sight. We\u0026rsquo;d made it as far as Aarau, and we needed to get over to Basel, which is the closest point to Aarau that\u0026rsquo; s on the French border. The problem with this is that the Jura\u0026rsquo;s in the way, and while the Schafmatt is a relatively low pass (at only 820 meters), it\u0026rsquo;s still a pass. On the way up, we learned that we\u0026rsquo;re going to have to get in much better shape before we can do the north-south transit. On the way down, we learned that riding downhill is awesome.\nTotal distance of this segment: 34km. Total stops for air on the way up: 5.\nKreuzlingen—Ermatingen—Berlingen Switzerland is not really a country for sea kayaking, to the point that when I went to go visit the guys on Granville Island who built my kayak, they knew exactly which boat I was talking about, and asked me to send their greetings to the guy who sold it to me.\nWhich is a shame, because it has a lot of beautiful flat water to paddle. This segment was the first one way trip of any length that we took in Switzerland, on a bright, cloudless, windless day, from the border at Kreuzlingen, through the middle of Constance on the Seerhein, then along the Untersee (lower Lake Constance) to Ermatigen for lunch and on to Berlingen.\nBerlingen, Switzerland, 14 July 2013\nTotal length of this segment: 14km. Maximum temperature on the boat deck: 37°. New limit for maximum ambient temperature for middle-distance kayak trips on windless days: 24°.\nBerlingen—Wangen—Stein am Rhein Not too long after I started kayaking in 2004 I set as a goal crossing a border under paddle. My original target for this is still not something I would consider doing without a support boat: the 40-something kilometers from Erie, Pennsylvania to Long Point, Ontario over the open Lake Erie. I know someone who did this once for a charity event in Erie; they were unable to get the necessary permits to do this legally so they just loaded a kayak on the motorboat, crossed in the middle of the night, threw the kayak in the water at Long Point, and paddled back over the next seven or so hours, crossing back into US water before daybreak. I don\u0026rsquo;t know that I\u0026rsquo;d risk this nine years later: America seems to take its borders ever more frighteningly seriously.\nCrossing from Switzerland to Germany on the Untersee (lower Lake Constance) is, on the other hand, not at all a big deal. But it\u0026rsquo;s an international border, and I was in a kayak, so it counts. We started where we\u0026rsquo;d left off in Berlingen, paddled behind and across an amateur regatta, landed briefly in Germany at Wangen, had a sandwich, and paddled into the Rhine just above Stein am Rhein.\nTotal length of this segment: 16km. Border crossings: 2.\nLiestal—Basel—St.Louis After a bit of paddling, it was time to get on the bike again. From Liestal, where we\u0026rsquo;d stopped after crossing the Schafmatt, it\u0026rsquo;s a quick dash to the French border at St. Louis, with the Basel appears from a traffic standpoint to be two cities overlaid on each other. One is a nasty car-ridden mess, and one is much more bicycle friendly than Zürich. Unfortunately, there\u0026rsquo;s quite a bit of construction going on in the center of Basel, and we got turned around and stuck in the nasty car-ridden mess version of Basel, not realizing we were one or two blocks away from a much nicer path most of the time. We then crossed the Dreiländerbrücke into Germany for a few dozen meters before crossing back to Kleinbasel and catching a train home.\nSt. Louis, France, 11 August 2013\nNow we had both ends, and just had to plug the middle.\nTotal length of this segment: 29km.\nStein am Rhein—Diessenhofen—Schaffhausen Kayaking the Rhine is a completely different experience than kayaking the Allegheny and Monongahela, where I got my start in Pittsburgh almost a decade ago. For one you can generally see the bottom of the river, as the water\u0026rsquo;s extremely clear. For another the bottom of the river goes flying by quite quickly, as the current is quite swift. This made the landing in Diessenhofen for lunch somewhat more challenging than I\u0026rsquo;m used to, but we managed it, and sat down to a refreshing Orangina and a plague of wasps.\nTotal length of this segment: 16km. Total wasps drowned in one tiny bottle of Orangina: 7.\nWinterthur—Andelfingen—Schaffhausen The original plan was to do this on the boats again, from Andelfingen to Eglisau on the Thur. We\u0026rsquo;d already ridden from Wallisellen to Eglisau along the Glatt (route 29) a couple of years before, then we\u0026rsquo;d only have the short gap between Andelfingen and Schaffhausen to do. But the Thur is one of the few uncontrolled rivers in Switzerland, with widely variable flow, and it was too low to paddle. So we hopped a train to Winterthur, rode to Andelfingen to have lunch with friends, then on to Schaffhausen, where we declared victory.\nSchaffhausen, Switzerland, 1 September 2013\nTotal distance overall: 278km. Total distance pedalled: 233km. Total distance paddled: 45km.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2013/12/from-france-to-austria/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe weather\u0026rsquo;s finally cold enough that there\u0026rsquo;s time to pour a cup of glühwein, put the feet up by the fire, and finish blog posts about all the being outside this summer that got in the way of posting stuff about being outside on the blog.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo. My first piece of advice to anyone seeking to cross their home country on muscle power alone: move someplace tiny with a complicated border. Like Switzerland.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"From France to Austria"},{"content":"The QoF TCP-performance-aware IPFIX flow meter I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on, on and off, for about a year, now seems to produce halfway plausible results and hardly crashes at all anymore, which means it\u0026rsquo;s time to follow the path of real artists immemorial and ship it already: see here, or if you\u0026rsquo;re really serious about it, just track master on github.\nFor now, the best way to get started is to have a look at the HowTo in the wiki at github.\nSpecial thanks to Chris Inacio and Emily Sarneso at the CERT Network Situational Awareness Group for keeping YAF in such good (and extensible!) shape.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2013/11/qof-0-9-0-albula-released/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe QoF TCP-performance-aware IPFIX flow meter I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on, on and off, for about a year, now seems to produce halfway plausible results and hardly crashes at all anymore, which means it\u0026rsquo;s time to follow the path of real artists immemorial and ship it already: see \u003ca href=\"/software\"\u003ehere\u003c/a\u003e, or if you\u0026rsquo;re really serious about it, just track master on \u003ca href=\"http://github.com/britram/qof\"\u003egithub\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"QoF 0.9.0 (“Albula”) released"},{"content":"Bear with me here for a minute, and this rant will get to the point.\nI was trying to explain the government shutdown to an Italian friend of mine last night (\u0026ldquo;so have you fixed the Silvio problem yet?\u0026rdquo; was my first-pass attempt to not talk about US politics before getting drunk enough to keep it from depressing me; I failed). I\u0026rsquo;ve come to realize that a successful overturn of the ACA by the petulant child wing of the Republican party would be an act of illegitimacy on the order of the appointment of George W. Bush as president by the Supreme Court in 2000.\nNow, I\u0026rsquo;m not a fan of ACA either – in trying to halfway reform the system while keeping most of the players who are the cause of the problem in the first place happy, it ignored the structural failures and misalignments of interest in health financing, and will end up being an incredibly expensive way to insure a few more people against medical bankruptcy while continuing to line the wrong pockets, but it is what it is, and it is the law of the land, and this is not how you go about changing the law of the land.\nThere are too many root causes of this problem, any one of which alone leads to an ungovernable country. The gerrymandering of safe congressional districts means the only thing that the petulant children have to fear is a primary challenge from even more petulant children. Those who have decided to overturn the ACA at all costs have absolutely no incentive to consider anything else, and, I suspect, are too ignorant1 to realize the gravity of the situation they are provoking. The lack of any real political journalism in the American mainstream means that public opinion is no longer held by an informed electorate, it is manufactured by political marketers. The drive toward \u0026ldquo;balance\u0026rdquo; in about half of what pretends to be political journalism means that the actual narrative (\u0026ldquo;legislative process held hostage by extremist minority\u0026rdquo;) is obscured by the fictional one (\u0026ldquo;there are two sides to every story\u0026rdquo;). If anyone sees a way out of this that doesn\u0026rsquo;t involve two generations of education, more prior restraint than is prudent, and a new constitutional convention, I\u0026rsquo;d like to know what it is, and if not, I\u0026rsquo;d like to go ahead and get on with rebuilding the system from scratch, thank you very much.\nI really don\u0026rsquo;t care about the budget that much. I send my money and my hundred-page stack of forms to the IRS every year, enriching a very nice expat tax accountancy outside Basel in the process, then forget about it. Basically the only services provided by any level of government in the US that I actually have occasion to use are air traffic control and consular services, both of which are still open. Closing the national parks and taking all the various websites the government runs with decent science on them down makes America look like a partially failed state abroad, which I guess is at least honest. The fact that almost 90% of the Department of Homeland Security has managed to convince the rest of the country that it is \u0026ldquo;essential\u0026rdquo; is appalling but, given the twelve-year-long-and-counting fear bender America\u0026rsquo;s been on, utterly unsurprising. But the last time we went through this back in the \u0026rsquo;90s because Bill wouldn\u0026rsquo;t let Newt sit up front on Air Force One, the world didn\u0026rsquo;t end, and it won\u0026rsquo;t end this time.\nThe budget ceiling is a little different, because nobody really has any idea what will happen if the US defaults, and anyone who pretends to is lying to themselves. I would be shocked if the set of contractual obligations triggered by a US default is anywhere close to internally self-consistent. If we learned anything over the past five years about the effects that financial markets have on the real economy in the face of widespread uncertainty, I think the reality-based community can agree that we don\u0026rsquo;t want to go there.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s one possible endgame I see:\nThe standoff continues. The House whips fail to get the votes to authorize a debt ceiling increase. To avoid a the uncertainty of a default, the Treasury department holds a bond auction anyway (I presume this would be the 30-year TIPS auction scheduled for 17 October) violating the debt ceiling. The executive branch will now have clearly violated the law; let\u0026rsquo;s assume that Treasury wouldn\u0026rsquo;t do this on its own, so this would have to be on the direct orders of the President. President Obama is impeached by the House of Representatives. Since impeachments are, always have been, and ever shall be political, President Obama is acquitted by the Senate. I have fairly serious disagreements with the President, most of which have to do with the fact that his administration been as thoroughly compromised by the national security state as everything else has. But on balance, it looks like this would be a plus for him, and I\u0026rsquo;m okay with that. Given the choice between impeachment and being the guy with his hand on the tiller when the economy crashed again, I\u0026rsquo;d take impeachment. The petulant children in the House aren\u0026rsquo;t going away, so he\u0026rsquo;s not going to get any of the various things on his agenda done anyway. The Clinton impeachment taught us that absolutely nobody of any consequence will care about it, but it will be a nice long winter\u0026rsquo;s entertainment and a perfect honeypot to occupy the attention of the petulant children, half of whom would probably be and/or act confused why impeachment doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean the automatic end of the ACA.\nIf we\u0026rsquo;re going to have bread and circuses (hold the bread) instead of a government, let\u0026rsquo;s do it right, shall we?\n[1] \u0026hellip; or are playing too ignorant for the benefit of the constituency that elected them: the effect is the same \u0026hellip;\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2013/10/the-impeachment-of-barack-obama/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eBear with me here for a minute, and this rant will get to the point.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI was trying to explain the government shutdown to an Italian friend of mine last night (\u0026ldquo;so have you fixed the Silvio problem yet?\u0026rdquo; was my first-pass attempt to not talk about US politics before getting drunk enough to keep it from depressing me; I failed). I\u0026rsquo;ve come to realize that a successful overturn of the ACA by the petulant child wing of the Republican party would be an act of illegitimacy on the order of the appointment of George W. Bush as president by the Supreme Court in 2000.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Impeachment of Barack Obama"},{"content":"So I complain about a lull in the news about the more-or-less complete compromise of the Internet by the National Security Agency et al, and then this goes and happens.\nOne of my old standard interview questions for people applying for jobs with some responsibility for information security was \u0026ldquo;are you paranoid\u0026rdquo;? When the lighting was good, and my eyes bugged out just right, this could be a little scary. It\u0026rsquo;s time to retire this question, I think, because the answer would seem to be \u0026ldquo;no, I am clearly not paranoid enough\u0026rdquo;, unless the applicant shows up to the interview in a tin-foil hat.\nOkay, I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be\ntoo alarmist about it: the theoretical underpinnings of public-key cryptography are probably secure, so some implementations of some protocols using some ciphers are probably still trustworthy. And there is nothing new to the revelation that the NSA spends ridiculous amounts of money every year trying to break cryptosystems both in theory and in practice: this is, after all, exactly what the NSA was chartered to do. But there is now a great deal of public uncertainty about which communications channels are safe. Add to this the fact that the NSA has an asymmetric ability to compromise physical infrastructure on American soil and/or owned by entities subject to American jurisdiction, and the United States just became a much less attractive place to do any kind of business which involves (1) any communications network and (2) any sort of secrecy whatsoever (i.e., most kinds of business). This effect will not be immediate. But I fear it will be prove to be devastating.\nAs for Schneier\u0026rsquo;s call to make the upcoming IETF meeting in Vancouver about engineering resistance to pervasive surveillance into the Internet, well, I\u0026rsquo;m doing my part. The outcome of this work will probably be an exploration of exactly what information radiates off IETF protocols, leading to recommendations to protocol designers to:\nUse transport-layer security everywhere. We\u0026rsquo;ve been moving in this direction for quite some time. There are serious problems with the certificate authority system — stemming in large part from the decision to include support for the CA business model in the design requirements – which current work in DANE is attempting to address. Use end-to-end security for protocols which use multiple hops at the application layer. SMTP is the big one here, and here we have a problem: S/MIME and PGP are concerned with protecting message payload, leaving headers (addresses, subjects, etc.) unprotected. Addresses need to be left in plaintext to route messages to their destination, so for electronic mail, anyway, there are design changes that need to be made. Resist protocol fingerprinting by adding randomness to metadata everywhere we can: to interpacket times (as in the SSH timing hack), packet and flow sizes (as used, e.g., by the snack Skype detector). There\u0026rsquo;s lots of work to do here. Add indirection to the network where possible to make it difficult to associate network addresses with physical locations, organizations, or individuals. Tor does this, but has the problem of directing all anonymized traffic through a set of exit nodes, which represent tempting targets for state security services. So there\u0026rsquo;s probably lots of work to do here, too. Design for end-to-end \u0026hellip; Editor\u0026rsquo;s Note: the rest of this point was presumably eaten by the Wordpress-to-Hugo conversion process. Sorry about that. Working to change the Internet to actively resist an adversary intent on widespread, pervasive surveillance will be hard work. It will involve tradeoffs for latency and bandwidth. It will make life easier for those who wish to stay hidden from authority, and will make the job of those authorities – even those with a legitimate interest in protecting the security of their citizens – more difficult. But if the Internet is to continue to form the basis of a trustworthy global communications network, it is necessary.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2013/09/active-resistance-against-passive-surveillance/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSo I \u003ca href=\"http://www.trammell.ch/2013/08/the-freedom-panopticon/\"\u003ecomplain\u003c/a\u003e about a lull in the news about the more-or-less \u003ca href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-internet-nsa-spying\"\u003ecomplete compromise of the Internet\u003c/a\u003e by the National Security Agency \u003cem\u003eet al\u003c/em\u003e, and then \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?hp\"\u003ethis\u003c/a\u003e goes and happens.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of my old standard interview questions for people applying for jobs with some responsibility for information security was \u0026ldquo;are you paranoid\u0026rdquo;? When the lighting was good, and my eyes bugged out just right, this could be a little scary. It\u0026rsquo;s time to retire this question, I think, because the answer would seem to be \u0026ldquo;no, I am clearly not paranoid enough\u0026rdquo;, unless the applicant shows up to the interview in a \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_foil_hat\"\u003etin-foil hat\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Active Resistance against Passive Surveillance"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc7015/","summary":"","title":"Flow Aggregation for the IPFIX Protocol"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc7013/","summary":"","title":"Guidelines for Authors and Reviewers of IPFIX Information Elements"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc7012/","summary":"","title":"Information Model for IPFIX"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc7011/","summary":"","title":"Specification of the IPFIX Protocol"},{"content":"This is the fourth post I\u0026rsquo;ve started on the pervasive, indiscriminate, uncontrolled surveillance of electronic communications by the ministries of state security of the North Atlantic world. I stopped writing each of the last three either because the rant got too paranoid, or further revelations showed that the rant was not yet too paranoid enough.\nBut the stream of new information seems to have dried up a bit, as the news cycle has distracted itself with something called a Miley Cyrus, whatever that is, so I\u0026rsquo;ve had a chance to catch up a bit. And as a researcher in network measurement who left a job funded by security-academic-industrial-complex money to move to Europe to work on a project seeking to apply technical privacy guarantees to network monitoring systems (which ironically was named PRISM, and which I must forevermore footnote on my CV as \u0026ldquo;no, not that PRISM\u0026rdquo;), I feel I should make some statement on all of this. So here it is, predictable and unoriginal though it may be:\nPervasive surveillance is anathema to a functioning democratic society, and nations which do not exercise effective civilian oversight of their state security apparati end up being controlled by them.\nThis is simply the way of the world. You can\u0026rsquo;t have a freedom panopticon. You actually do have to choose one over the other. As for my personal opinion of whether it\u0026rsquo;s too late for the United States to co-opt its part of the Internet back from the state security apparatus, to pull out of its dozen-year-old fear-of-terrorism induced tailspin, well, I\u0026rsquo;ve already voted with my feet, and I\u0026rsquo;m still not coming back. But I do truly hope I\u0026rsquo;m being too pessimistic.\nBack in the good old days, when my habit of pausing my Skype conversations to ask the NSA analyst assigned to review my Skype conversations how she was feeling today was just a paranoid affectation, I actually didn\u0026rsquo;t worry too much about this. I was concerned about how easy it was to get money from the US government by slapping a counterterrorism sticker on whatever it was you wanted to sell, and I\u0026rsquo;ll admit, mildly amused when the American state security establishment gave 1% of the population security clearances then wondered why it had so many leaks.\nOnce the state security apparatus got caught compromising service providers to get at higher-value information — which admittedly has a much better return on investment than just capturing everything and sifting through it, which they also got caught doing — then started detaining the journalists involved in catching them at Heathrow as terrorists, that\u0026rsquo;s the point the good old days ended. These are not the actions of governments operating in good faith under the rule of law. These are the actions of states that are enemies of their people, to be expected of regimes generally thought of as authoritarian, but unacceptable in a functional democracy.\nI\u0026rsquo;m willing to accept that the various agents and analysts of the various security agencies genuinely believe they\u0026rsquo;re doing what they can to save us from terrorists. On that point, I can agree to disagree about the threat actually posed by terrorism as they define it. But good intentions do not excuse the overreach into the realm of surveillance that has the power to destroy what\u0026rsquo;s left of civic discourse through its chilling effects and creeping self-censorship of speech deemed politically sensitive, overreach into active disruption of the operation of the free press which represents the last hope of oversight of their activities.\nLast week, Bruce Schneier appealed to the executives of Internet companies subject to — ahem — cooperation with the state security apparatus to resist. Well, I\u0026rsquo;m not an executive, and I don\u0026rsquo;t really know any: my relationship to communications networks is rather more hands-on. But I do know how government works, and I know that the politicians authorizing these programs generally lack even the barest ability to understand their details. Even the functionaries ordering them from within the state security establishment would find actual implementation a challenge. In order to execute these orders, they need scientists and practitioners with expertise in communications networks. In other words — and I know many of my readers are fellow network geeks — they need us.\nWe have a choice as to whether we will accept and perform work which is contrary to our moral obligations to society. We must not use our expertise to the disadvantage of the fundamental rights of our fellow citizens. In many of the jurisdictions in which we live and work, these fundamental rights are guaranteed by the most basic laws, laws which seem more and more to be ignored by our governments in the name of state security and permanent emergency.\nIn this case, we must start from our own first principles. Surveillance, when absolutely necessary, must be specifically and narrowly targeted, protected against abuse by technical and nontechnical means, and subject to legitimately independent oversight; surveillance systems which do not meet these criteria are not worthy of our support.\nTherefore, I pledge the following, and I invite you to join me:\nI will not participate in the design, development, deployment, maintenance, and/or operation of any communications system which, in my professional opinion, has as a design goal the indiscriminate collection, storage, and/or analysis of communications content and/or metadata for the purpose of mass surveillance of individuals or associations of individuals without their consent. I will work to ensure, to the extent technically feasible, that systems in which I participate in the design, development, deployment, maintenance, and/or operation have safeguards against misuse for the purpose of mass surveillance. I explicitly refuse to support any deployment of such a system misused for mass surveillance. I will work to raise awareness of the dangers to privacy posed by systems on which I work and with which I am familiar, both within my professional community as well as in the community at large. Of course, the last time I had operational responsibility for anything you could remotely call \u0026ldquo;production\u0026rdquo;, 911 was still just a telephone number, so perhaps my saying this doesn\u0026rsquo;t have that much impact. But I do build tools for network measurement, focusing these days on performance as opposed to security, and I\u0026rsquo;m actively working to make these as unattractive and cumbersome for mass surveillance purposes as is technically feasible. It might not be much. But it\u0026rsquo;s what I can do.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2013/08/the-freedom-panopticon/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis is the fourth post I\u0026rsquo;ve started on the pervasive, indiscriminate, uncontrolled surveillance of electronic communications by the ministries of state security of the North Atlantic world. I stopped writing each of the last three either because the rant got too paranoid, or further revelations showed that the rant was not yet too paranoid enough.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut the stream of new information seems to have dried up a bit, as the news cycle has distracted itself with something called a Miley Cyrus, whatever that is, so I\u0026rsquo;ve had a chance to catch up a bit. And as a researcher in network measurement who left a job funded by security-academic-industrial-complex money to move to Europe to work on a project seeking to apply technical privacy guarantees to network monitoring systems (which ironically was named \u003ca href=\"http://www.fp7-prism.eu\"\u003ePRISM\u003c/a\u003e, and which I must forevermore footnote on my CV as \u0026ldquo;no, not that \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)\"\u003ePRISM\u003c/a\u003e\u0026rdquo;), I feel I should make some statement on all of this. So here it is, predictable and unoriginal though it may be:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePervasive surveillance is anathema to a functioning democratic society, and nations which do not exercise effective civilian oversight of their state security apparati end up being controlled by them.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Freedom Panopticon"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/ecn-pam-2013/","summary":"","title":"On the state of ECN and TCP options in the Internet"},{"content":"Last Thursday, I sat on a panel with Swiss Telecommunications Association President Peter Grütter, Swisscom CEO Carsten Schloter, and Green National Councilor Balthasar Glättli, on the subject of network neutrality, and whether legal protection therefor is necessary in Switzerland. Not surprisingly, the panel was of different opinions on this matter. Swisscom and the telecom industry group support self-regulation, making the very good point that laws change too slowly with respect to Internet technology too quickly to be effective; and Glättli making the equally good point that as several obvious violations of neutrality can already be observed in Switzerland, trusting the industry to regulate itself has so far had dubious results.\nCoverage (in German) of the event can be found at computerworld.ch and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and if you\u0026rsquo;ve got 55 minutes to kill, video of the event itself (also in German) is available at the website of the Parliamentary Group on Digital Sustainability.\nEncouraging is that there seems to be agreement on what I\u0026rsquo;d consider the most important points: network neutrality, in the sense of fair and equal access for all to the Internet, is crucial to its survival, and regulation thereof at the level of technical detail is likely to be ineffective and is indeed dangerous. There seemed to be no desire on the point of the industry to split regulatory domains into wired and wireless (which, like the 1996 US telecommunications act which established last-mile competition, but only over copper, could have perverse effects). On the point of those existing violations of neutrality in Switzerland (largely blocking or limiting of competitive applications), Carsten Schloter remarked, \u0026ldquo;Whoever is [doing that], has already lost,\u0026rdquo; an encouraging sign for fair competition in the industry.\nAs to how to protect this, there is of course less agreement, with Mr. Grütter and Mr. Schloter arguing for self-regulation, and Mr. Glättli for legislation. I can see the former point; given the relative speeds of innovation in telecom and in legislation, the risk of getting legislation wrong and ending up either with an irrelevant regulation or, worse, a damaging one, is nonzero. On the other hand, if one takes self-regulation as the status quo, other operators in Switzerland apparently don\u0026rsquo;t agree with Mr. Schloter\u0026rsquo;s opinion, and would seem to have shown that it\u0026rsquo;s not working.\nTherefore, I personally tend to come down on the side of legal protection for network neutrality, but defined in such a way as to constrain anticompetitive behavior in the market, to protect access to the network for smaller players in the industry as well as for consumers, and to explicitly maximize the freedom of innovation (both technical and business) within those constraints.\nOne first step in this direction could be a legal obligation to transparency, for which there seems to be limited agreement. In this case operators offering unequal terms or selectively blocking traffic would be required to advertise this fact; the theory is that this provides an incentive in the market for them not to do so. This could work in a small market like Switzerland with last-mile competition both in the fixed and mobile space, but does nothing for mostly-monopolized markets like the United States, and does nothing to prevent future consolidation, either.\nIn any case, the conversation continues, and I look forward to taking part.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2013/03/an-afternoon-in-bern-network-neutrality-redux/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLast Thursday, I sat on a panel with Swiss Telecommunications Association President Peter Grütter, Swisscom CEO Carsten Schloter, and Green National Councilor Balthasar Glättli, on the subject of network neutrality, and whether legal protection therefor is necessary in Switzerland. Not surprisingly, the panel was of different opinions on this matter. Swisscom and the telecom industry group support self-regulation, making the very good point that laws change too slowly with respect to Internet technology too quickly to be effective; and Glättli making the equally good point that as several obvious violations of neutrality can already be observed in Switzerland, trusting the industry to regulate itself has so far had dubious results.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCoverage (in German) of the event can be found at \u003ca href=\"http://www.computerworld.ch/news/kommunikation/artikel/netzneutralitaet-auf-dem-pruefstand-62789/\"\u003ecomputerworld.ch\u003c/a\u003e and the \u003ca href=\"http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/schweiz/minimaler-konsens-ueber-netzneutralitaet-1.18043189\"\u003eNeue Zürcher Zeitung\u003c/a\u003e, and if you\u0026rsquo;ve got 55 minutes to kill, video of the event itself (also in German) is available at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.digitale-nachhaltigkeit.ch/2013/03/netzneutralitaet/\"\u003ewebsite\u003c/a\u003e of the Parliamentary Group on Digital Sustainability.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"An Afternoon In Bern: Network Neutrality Redux"},{"content":"The National Council of Switzerland1 is considering the addition of a guarantee of network neutrality into a forthcoming revision of Swiss telecommunications law. This is generally a Good Thing. We all like the Internet. This being Switzerland, we all like neutrality. So network neutrality must be great.\nMore seriously, the Internet has largely replaced the public switched telephone network and the postal system as the basic communications infrastructure of our society; just as with these systems, the \u0026ldquo;last mile\u0026rdquo; is a natural monopoly, so guaranteeing equal access to it is important. However, the results that legislation of network neutrality will lead to may vary widely based on how, precisely, it is defined.\nAt its most basic, \u0026ldquo;network neutrality\u0026rdquo; means the network infrastructure treats all traffic equally, and is essentially an aspect of the end-to-end principle, which moves more complex and application-specific functionality to the network edge, and is one of the keys to the success of the Internet architecture both as a communications network and a platform for innovation.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s where it gets complicated, though: what do we mean by \u0026ldquo;traffic\u0026rdquo;, and what do we mean by \u0026ldquo;equal\u0026rdquo;?\nAt the lowest level2, traffic consists of packets. One definition of network neutrality would focus on this lowest level, and demand equal treatment for all packets. Aside from small absurdities — of course the network has to treat packets differently by sending each packet to its appropriate (i.e. different) destination, otherwise the Internet would be analogous to a post office that was good for nothing but letters to Santa, and that would clearly be ridiculous — this seems to make sense until you get into the fine print.\nThe problem here is that traffic looks different at the packet level depending on the service it\u0026rsquo;s providing. Most video applications, for instance, send lots of packets at a more or less constant rate; packets that arrive more than a few fractions of a second late are useless, as they represent parts of video frames or audio signal that should already have been played. On the other hand, file sharing applications don\u0026rsquo;t really care when the packets arrive, as long as they arrive eventually. Interactive traffic like web browsing falls somewhere between these extremes: users don\u0026rsquo;t notice short delays on the order of milliseconds, but will perceive longer ones on the order of seconds.\nSo demanding that video packets get treated the same as file sharing packets is the worst of both worlds: file sharing gets meaningless guarantees about delay, while video traffic gets capacity it can\u0026rsquo;t use. A network that can fairly allocate appropriate service to each application would be desirable. This subtlety should be appreciated by any legal definition of network neutrality.\nIndeed, there is current work in network optimization, such as the IETF\u0026rsquo;s Congestion Exposure working group, which promises to increase network efficiency, performance, and fairness, that would be made impracticable by such low-level definitions of neutrality.\nWhen providing different network service to different applications, the question becomes: what do we mean by \u0026ldquo;application\u0026rdquo;, and here is where equal access becomes important. From a technical standpoint, there is very little difference between video from provider A and video from provider B. This is not true from a business standpoint. Running a network — the business of delivering bits from point A to point B — is a very low-margin business, and network operators have an incentive to bundle higher-margin services. This is the origin of the \u0026ldquo;triple play\u0026rdquo; offers ubiquitous throughout the developed world.\nObviously, the operators also have an incentive to make sure their high-margin services — video, telephony, etc. — run better than those from other service providers. There are two ways to do this, broadly: invest in service improvement, or reduce the performance of the services of their competitors by treating the packets delivering those services differently on their network.\nThis is the key of the open access argument, and why network neutrality is important. If incumbent operators use the tools and techniques of network management to stifle competition, the quality of service across the entire industry suffers, new applications don\u0026rsquo;t have room to emerge, and the Internet loses its power as an engine of innovation.\nIn legislating network neutrality, however, there are potential pitfalls to avoid:\nThe tools and techniques used to deny fair and open access by providing different levels of service are key to the day-to-day management of networks — the difference lies in whether an application is getting priority to increase overall network performance, or whether it is purely at the expense of a competing application. Legislation that restricts the usage of these tools and techniques can increase the cost of running the network while decreasing overall performance. This would be bad. Different classes of service at different price points can give an important signal to operators about which traffic is more important to its users. Consider the difference between personal videoconferencing traffic and videoconferencing for e.g. telesurgery3: it is much more important for the second to work, the cost of ensuring it works is higher, and that cost can certainly be passed on to the customer. So approaches that prohibit tiered service agreements at different price points are also likely to have undesirable side effects for future innovation. The speed of innovation even in a relatively unexciting field like network management is much higher than the speed of legislation, so legislation that names specific tools or technologies is not likely to be effective, as new techniques would simply be developed to work around the law. It will be interesting to see how the debate here develops.\n1: for American readers, the National Council is the rough equivalent of the House of Representatives, but elected by a party-plurality list system, and without any of the built-in misfeatures that lead to it being a wretched hive of extremism, corruption, and idiocy.\n2: the lowest level I\u0026rsquo;ll deal with in this article, anyway; my only experience on layer 1 is ripping fiber out of a convention center.\n3: there are of course other barriers to life-critical services such as telesurgery over the open Internet, but network neutrality legislation enacted today will probably be in effect for at least half a century; I am optimistic that these barriers can be surmounted over such timescales.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2013/02/on-network-neutrality/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe National Council of Switzerland\u003csup\u003e1\u003c/sup\u003e is considering the addition of a guarantee of network neutrality into a forthcoming revision of Swiss telecommunications law. This is generally a Good Thing. We all like the Internet. This being Switzerland, we all like neutrality. So network neutrality must be great.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMore seriously, the Internet has largely replaced the public switched telephone network and the postal system as the basic communications infrastructure of our society; just as with these systems, the \u0026ldquo;last mile\u0026rdquo; is a natural monopoly, so guaranteeing equal access to it is important. However, the results that legislation of network neutrality will lead to may vary widely based on how, precisely, it is defined.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On Network Neutrality"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve learned, after something happens in America, to wait a few days, first for the inaccuracies inherent in the twenty-four-hour news cycle to be spun out, then for the inaccuracies introduced by the inevitable political spin to cancel each other out, then for the inaccuracies introduced both by textual and cultural translation into the German-language media to at least settle down to a consistent-if-subtly-incorrect picture of what, exactly, it was that just happened, before I try to discuss it here in Switzerland. This is different in America, I explain, or that in the English-speaking world, we don\u0026rsquo;t have a word for whatever, Prohibition this, Puritans that, let\u0026rsquo;s not even talk about how the Second World War began in 1941, and so on.\nI can\u0026rsquo;t explain this.\nIn simple terms of cause and effect, the tragedy in Newtown was the inevitable result of a set of interactions among situations on the ground: firearms are ubiquitous in private ownership (why?), identification and treatment of mental illness is severely deficient (how?), to the point it\u0026rsquo;s far easier for the mentally ill to get their hands on a gun than into a bed in a mental health clinic or hospital (ähm, what?). Add to this the perverse incentive that the swarm of media coverage virtually guarantees you\u0026rsquo;ll be the most famous person in the country for a week, and mass murder starts to look like an attractive option, if the twisted logic of your disease puts you in the market for going down in a blaze of evil glory.\nThe natural human reaction to such events is to ensure it never happens again, or at least to try to. Here\u0026rsquo;s where my powers of explanation fail me.\n\u0026ldquo;Certainly this will lead to a gun ban.\u0026rdquo;\nNope.\n\u0026ldquo;But Britain and Australia banned guns after the same thing. Australians are basically Americans, right?\u0026rdquo;\nNot really, and doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter.\nPhilosophically, one of my core beliefs is that tools can\u0026rsquo;t be evil, only people can; therefore, the right to the manufacture or possession of any tool or technology should be guaranteed within reason unless there is a compelling social interest in restriction due to external dangers inherent to that tool or technology. This puts me pretty firmly in the independent-clause Second Amendment camp1: my problem with it is that it only applies to weapons and not to everything.\nOne of the only things I believe more firmly than this is that policies have consequences, and should be evaluated and enacted based upon the expected and/or measured results thereof. Here is where the rubber meets the road in the weapons control debate I hold a few shreds of hope that America might finally start having.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve been here before. After Columbine, America looked at the combination of ubiquitous weapons, untreated mental illness, and schools, and decided that schools were the problem: we continued locking down our schools, building fortresses out of them. I\u0026rsquo;m not sure how locked down Sandy Hook was, but I presume moreso than fifteen years ago, and whatever fortress-building they did do would not seem to have been particularly effective.\nI guess the response went a little in the direction of mental illness with the idiocy that was and is zero-tolerance, threatening serious time in a grown-up jail for kids who draw exactly the same pictures of stuff blowing up in the margins of their notebooks that I did back in school. This is would seem to be more about making sure you\u0026rsquo;re not liable when it turns out the angry kid in the back of the class is really, truly disturbed and in need of serious help — and not just fifteen and deeply awkward as fifteen-year-olds are wont to be — than it is about actual safety.\nThe math2 works like this: let p(w) be the probability that a given individual is in possession of massacre-capable weaponry, let p(x) be the probability that a given individual is sufficiently uninhibited (due most probably to a mental illness) to be capable of a massacre, and let p(z) be the probability that a given individual has access to a school. Ignoring dependencies, the probability of a Newtown is p(w) * p(x) * p(z).\nIf we take as given that preventing another Newtown is a policy aim, there is a trivial solution: set p(z) to zero. This is the post-Columbine fortress approach: \u0026ldquo;Close all the schools, there will be no more school shootings.\u0026rdquo; While this argument has actually been made by fringe advocates of homeschooling, I don\u0026rsquo;t think we can really take it seriously if we want to have a coherent society.\nIt would be great if we could put serious effort into reducing p(x), because untreated mental illness has social costs well above and beyond those of Newtown, Aurora, and Tucson. However, America is still a generation or two away at the least from comprehensive, means-independent, explicitly socially guaranteed medical care.\nThe preferred European solution, the one that everyone here seems to see as self-evident, is to set p(w) to zero or very close to it: if nobody has guns then there is no gun violence. Even Switzerland, which once bristled with army reserve assault rifles and to some extent still does, is taking guns out of reservists\u0026rsquo; homes following a 2007 incident wherein a recruit shot a sixteen year old girl at a Zürich bus stop.\nThat isn\u0026rsquo;t to say there\u0026rsquo;s no violence: people get beaten and knifed here not-infrequently. But the massive difference in scale between blades and guns is a question that is considered well-settled by military historians. Killing once with a knife is difficult. Killing twenty-six times with a knife is not unthinkable but requires significant skill and luck.\nGiven the political strength of the weapons and ammunition manufacturers and their proxy lobbying organizations, backed up by a\u0026hellip; I don\u0026rsquo;t even know what it is, a myth America has about its revolutionary self, a myth about its conquering of an unspoiled frontier, a red-blooded machismo that masks a deep-seated fear that someone will take everything you have if you cannot defend yourself, a history of pitched battles fought in our towns, from Stono to the Alamo, from Haymarket to Homestead, from Watts to Katrina\u0026hellip; well, let\u0026rsquo;s just say, I\u0026rsquo;m not optimistic that you can separate America from its guns without a few generations of change.\nIn a different political climate, one in which anything that looks like government wasn\u0026rsquo;t automatically suspect3, it might be possible to reduce p(w|x) enough to have an impact. This is roughly \u0026ldquo;guns for everyone except those disturbed enough to be likely to use them for evil\u0026rdquo;. On the other hand, given how many people get convicted of having guns they\u0026rsquo;re not supposed to — I saw so many of these on a grand jury stint in Pittsburgh that I still have the relevant section memorized: 18 USC 922(g)(1) — this is not likely to be effective without significantly reducing p(w) as well: if guns are everywhere, they\u0026rsquo;ll be easy to get even if they\u0026rsquo;re controlled.\nThere seems to me to be enormous practical room for the restriction of firearms ownership, and a drastic reduction of the number of firearms in circulation, without impacting the fundamental freedoms of responsible hunters, sportsmen, and yes, straight-up I-like-to-see-stuff-go-boom gun enthusiasts. Three possible practical control measures right off the top of my head: (1) security clearances for firearm owners, (2) periodic proficiency-based licensing for each firearm, (3) periodic per-firearm taxation, to reduce stockpiling of weapons that aren\u0026rsquo;t actively used for sport or practice. I doubt these are politically feasible.\nSo I don\u0026rsquo;t have any real ideas, I don\u0026rsquo;t have any real explanation. And then we come to the reaction. I know I should\u0026rsquo;t pay attention to anything I read in the American news, but I get questions.\n\u0026ldquo;Did some guy actually blame the massacre on not enough God in public?\u0026rdquo;\nYeah, and that guy was a semi-serious contender for President for a while this year. But didn\u0026rsquo;t Mörgeli just get caught comparing homosexuals to housepets? So I think this might just be yet another case of politicians saying stupid shit.\n\u0026ldquo;Did some other guy say the solution was more guns in schools?\u0026rdquo;\nAlmost certainly. There\u0026rsquo;s so many of those guys, though, that I don\u0026rsquo;t even know which one you\u0026rsquo;re talking about.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s hard to take the murder of twenty children as anything other than completely senseless. I feel for the families shattered by the massacre, and grieve for the lives barely lived. But I hope, yet, that something good could come from a conversation in the aftermath about what kind of society America really wants to be.\n1: I actually believe the dependent-clause interpretation was the intended one: we needed guns because we needed militias as we didn\u0026rsquo;t have the money for an army. However, I\u0026rsquo;m not a Supreme Court justice, so at this point my opinion on the matter is moot.\n2: With profuse apologies to my mathematician readers.\n3: Thank you, Grover Norquist.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2012/12/things-i-cant-explain-to-europeans/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve learned, after something happens in America, to wait a few days, first for the inaccuracies inherent in the twenty-four-hour news cycle to be spun out, then for the inaccuracies introduced by the inevitable political spin to cancel each other out, then for the inaccuracies introduced both by textual and cultural translation into the German-language media to at least settle down to a consistent-if-subtly-incorrect picture of what, exactly, it was that just happened, before I try to discuss it here in Switzerland. This is different in America, I explain, or that in the English-speaking world, we don\u0026rsquo;t have a word for whatever, Prohibition this, Puritans that, let\u0026rsquo;s not even talk about how the Second World War began in 1941, and so on.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI can\u0026rsquo;t explain this.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Things I can’t explain to Europeans"},{"content":"The Internet Society Switzerland Chapter\u0026rsquo;s inaugural national event was last night at the Käfigturm in Bern; in my talk, \u0026ldquo;The Open Internet under Threat\u0026rdquo; (which, as it turns out, was unwittingly inspired in part by a much earlier post on this blog; slides are here), I accomplished what I set out to do, I think — start a conversation about the present state of the Internet, and threats to its openness, to figure out where we ISOC people as politically-interested network geeks can make a difference. Balthasar Glättli\u0026rsquo;s talk on Internet politics in Switzerland, and the conversations that followed both talks, were eye-opening, ranging from the education of politicians on even the most basic technical realities of the Internet through framing Internet freedom issues for random people off the street to exactly how much regulation is necessary or desirable to guarantee the fundamental rights behind network neutrality. Thanks to ISOC, the sponsors, the organizers, and all who attended, for an interesting evening in Bern!\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2012/11/an-evening-in-bern/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"http://www.isoc.ch/\"\u003eInternet Society Switzerland Chapter\u0026rsquo;s\u003c/a\u003e inaugural national event was last night at the \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4figturm\"\u003eKäfigturm\u003c/a\u003e in Bern; in my talk, \u003ca href=\"http://www.trammell.ch/2012/10/talk-the-open-internet-under-threat/\"\u003e\u0026ldquo;The Open Internet under Threat\u0026rdquo;\u003c/a\u003e (which, as it turns out, was unwittingly inspired in part by a \u003ca href=\"http://www.trammell.ch/2011/02/sixty-eight-eighty-nine-eleven-or-why-protocol-design-matters/\"\u003emuch earlier post\u003c/a\u003e on this blog; slides are \u003ca href=\"/wp/2012/11/open-internet-print.pdf\"\u003ehere\u003c/a\u003e), I accomplished what I set out to do, I think — start a conversation about the present state of the Internet, and threats to its openness, to figure out where we ISOC people as politically-interested network geeks can make a difference. Balthasar Glättli\u0026rsquo;s talk on Internet politics in Switzerland, and the conversations that followed both talks, were eye-opening, ranging from the education of politicians on even the most basic technical realities of the Internet through framing Internet freedom issues for random people off the street to exactly how much regulation is necessary or desirable to guarantee the fundamental rights behind network neutrality. Thanks to ISOC, the sponsors, the organizers, and all who attended, for an interesting evening in Bern!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"An evening in Bern"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ll be giving a talk to the Internet Society (ISOC) Switzerland Chapter at a meeting in Bern, at 18:30 on Tuesday 27 November, entitled \u0026ldquo;The Open Internet under Threat\u0026rdquo;. After my talk, Green National Councillor Balthasar Glättli will speak on Internet-related topics in Swiss national politics, so it promises to be a really interesting evening for Internet geeks and policy wonks alike! The Internet has been marked by its openness since its earliest days. Expanding the end-to-end principle into a philosophy of operation led to the construction of a network that was open, neutral, and stateless, allowing a boom in innovation that has allowed the Internet to largely replace the public switched telephone network as “The Network”.\nToday, this openness is under threat on economic, sociopolitical, and technical fronts. Closed platforms can be more easily monetized than open ones. As the Internet becomes a public utility, governments demand more control over it. Network address exhaustion, translation, and transition challenge the end-to-end nature of the network. This talk discusses these threats, as posed by current applications and services as well as situations beyond the network. It\u0026rsquo;s intended as the starting point for a discussion about what ISOC local chapters can do to ameliorate this situation, but should be interesting for anyone concerned about the intersection between the technical side of the Internet and the realities of policy and economics.\nThe location is to be determined, but will be near the main railway station in Bern. Details here. The talk will be open to non-members, but since membership in the Switzerland chapter is open to any member of the Internet Society with some connection to Switzerland, and ISOC Global Membership is free, if you\u0026rsquo;re interested in the open development of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world, please sign up.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2012/10/talk-the-open-internet-under-threat/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ll be giving a talk to the \u003ca href=\"http://www.isoc.org\"\u003eInternet Society\u003c/a\u003e (ISOC) \u003ca href=\"http://www.isoc.ch\"\u003eSwitzerland Chapter\u003c/a\u003e at a meeting in Bern, at 18:30 on Tuesday 27 November, entitled \u0026ldquo;The Open Internet under Threat\u0026rdquo;. After my talk, Green National Councillor \u003ca href=\"http://www.balthasar-glaettli.ch\"\u003eBalthasar Glättli\u003c/a\u003e will speak on Internet-related topics in Swiss national politics, so it promises to be a really interesting evening for Internet geeks and policy wonks alike! \u003c/p\u003e","title":"Talk: The Open Internet Under Threat"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m not voting in the 2012 Presidential election. From a pure-fandom point of view I suppose you could say I\u0026rsquo;m for Obama, and I\u0026rsquo;ll probably raise a glass to his victory should it come, but in the end that wasn\u0026rsquo;t compelling enough to jump though all the various hoops necessary to get an absentee ballot as an emigrant American. And the only thing I\u0026rsquo;m sure I want four more years of is life in Switzerland.\nYes, I was once so proud of being part of Obama\u0026rsquo;s election in \u0026lsquo;08 that my Facebook profile picture had me throwing my absentee ballot into a mailbox in New York for about a year afterward. In retrospect I suppose it was naïve of me to hope he\u0026rsquo;d roll back the Bush-era extensions of executive power in the service of state security, to hope that any of the war criminals of 2003 or the straight-up Wall Street criminal-criminals of 2008 would see the inside of a prison, to hope that a vote for Obama was really a vote for a less divisive America, for an America built on cooperation and compromise instead of football-hooligan politics.\nI would have been uneasy voting for Obama knowing that the state security apparatus is larger now than in 2008; a free society cannot exist in the face of ubiquitous surveillance, no matter how benign we may think the watchers to be today. And while I agree in principle that the most effective way to deal with the extremely low-density threat presented by international terrorism is through targeted attacks against individuals and organizations with proven ability and intent to carry out terrorist actions, I can\u0026rsquo;t reconcile the drone war as presently prosecuted with my respect for the rule of law.\nIt was this unease that made it possible for such a small thing to decide he wasn\u0026rsquo;t getting my vote, when I was publicly insulted by the Obama campaign\u0026rsquo;s press secretary spokesman Ben La Bolt*, who accused me, as part of yet another cheap hit in the endless round of slap-fighting between Team Red and Team Blue, of being either a tax fraudster or — even worse — a forex guy, because I have a Swiss bank account. Okay, I\u0026rsquo;m not quite enough of a solipsist to believe this insult was personal, and let\u0026rsquo;s face it, so few Americans emigrate that I don\u0026rsquo;t even think it crossed the man\u0026rsquo;s mind that someone might have a Swiss bank account because they live in Switzerland1. Americans abroad are safe to score cheap political points off of because, to a first approximation, we don\u0026rsquo;t even exist2. But the Obama campaign did in this moment make it clear it didn\u0026rsquo;t want my vote, so do without it it will.\nOn the other hand, I couldn\u0026rsquo;t vote for Mitt Romney because he\u0026rsquo;s willing to be affiliated with the Republican Party in public, which shows, in my opinion, an astounding lack of judgement. One can certainly have a debate about whether \u0026ldquo;more government\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;less government\u0026rdquo; is a reasonable starting point from which to develop policy, and one can certainly discuss to what extent behavior not condoned by a particular interpretation of a particular religious text should be tolerated in a society. Having lived in a relatively socially conservative but deeply tolerant country with a generous social safety net for the past four years, and seen how well this works, I tend to find most Republican policies long on contempt and short on practicality, and the party\u0026rsquo;s platform3, with its praise for wealth inequality and sooty air4 and its open hatred of homosexuals, reads to me more like a paean to life in Victorian London than anything else. But I can see how people with different beliefs and priorities might see this differently.\nHowever, a party that condones a contempt for the basic tenets of the Enlightenment among its members and within its policies is impossible to take seriously. It\u0026rsquo;s one thing to stick your fingers in your ears and go la la la la at any mention of carbon pricing5: you can make a lot of money burning coal, and it\u0026rsquo;s probably too late to avert a global climate disaster. It\u0026rsquo;s another thing entirely to hold that science \u0026ldquo;is lies from the pit of hell.\u0026rdquo;\nThe past three and a half centuries of scientific, technological, economic, and cultural progress in Western civilization are based on a philosophical foundation that knowledge is based on the empirical, the measurable, the observable. Rejection of this philosophy by an individual places them at a disadvantage; rejection of this philosophy by a society is potentially fatal. In short, science works, and it shall continue working whether you believe in it or not, whether you understand it or not, whether you find it politically expedient to ignore it in order to shore up your support among religious fundamentalists or not.\nI won\u0026rsquo;t vote for Obama because of what he has, or has not, done. But I can\u0026rsquo;t vote for Romney because of what I believe.\n1: I will, however, celebrate one happy side effect of America\u0026rsquo;s late-spring Switzerland hate-on: we don\u0026rsquo;t have to deal with the embarrassment of Michele Bachmann having a red book.\n2: A vitriolic rant against the unmitigated evil that is FATCA is the subject of a future post.\n3: Extra irony points to the Republicans for quoting Benjamin Franklin on the first page of the platform. Franklin was a Deist, a scientist, and a noted lover of women, in at least the euphemistic sense. The esteemed Mr. Franklin would want even less to do with today\u0026rsquo;s Republicans than they with him, if they actually knew who he was.\n4: Its first page on environmental policy contains just one word of body text in boldface: Coal. I really, really wish I were making this up. I\u0026rsquo;m not. (Hey, look! The GOP uses WordPress, too!)\n5: The only mention of climate change in the Republican platform is to deride the Obama administration for saying the national security implications of climate change are on par with those of international terrorism. I agree that this is a laughable comparison: disruptions due to climate change in the coming century are far more important to national security than those due to international terrorism.\n*: Corrected source of Obama campaign quote, added link to tweet. Thanks, Tony!\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2012/10/four-more-years-in-switzerland/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m not voting in the 2012 Presidential election. From a pure-fandom point of view I suppose you could say I\u0026rsquo;m for Obama, and I\u0026rsquo;ll probably raise a glass to his victory should it come, but in the end that wasn\u0026rsquo;t compelling enough to jump though all the various hoops necessary to get an absentee ballot as an emigrant American.  And the only thing I\u0026rsquo;m sure I want four more years of is life in Switzerland.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Four more years… in Switzerland"},{"content":"The apparent secret to getting bagels that look like bagels: broil them slightly before boiling them, and add way more salt and a little sugar to the boiling water. Bonus: these actually taste like bagels, too\u0026hellip;\nBagels, Wallisellen, 4 December 2011\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/12/bagels-redux/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe apparent secret to getting bagels that look like bagels: broil them slightly before boiling them, and add way more salt and a little sugar to the boiling water. Bonus: these actually taste like bagels, too\u0026hellip;\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_410\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/wp/2011/12/IMG_8379.jpg\"\u003e\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-410 \" title=\"IMG_8379\" src=\"/wp/2011/12/IMG_8379-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"/wp/2011/12/IMG_8379-300x300.jpg 300w, /wp/2011/12/IMG_8379-150x150.jpg 150w, /wp/2011/12/IMG_8379.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"\u003eBagels, Wallisellen, 4 December 2011\u003c/figcaption\u003e\u003c/figure\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Bagels, redux"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s bad form to draw generalizations about a place and a people from a tiny little sample of experience. And my sample last week in Taipei, Taiwan, was particularly tiny: first, I was there for an IETF meeting which kept me inside the convention center for most of the week, which resembled nothing so much as every convention center I\u0026rsquo;ve ever been in. And the times I wasn\u0026rsquo;t kept in the convention center by work, I was kept inside otherwise by a persistent rain that wasn\u0026rsquo;t so much rain as simply dampness-as-atmosphere: I literally saw the sun for only fifteen minutes the entire week, and that while it was between the horizon and the cloud deck one morning. I stayed in bed.\nThat said, here are a few notes on observations that came to mind while I was there.\n\u0026ldquo;The Taiwanese are Friendly.\u0026rdquo; Read this in the Lonely Planet. Agree. Okay, I didn\u0026rsquo;t meet that many Taiwanese that I wasn\u0026rsquo;t trying to buy something from or to convince to drive me somewhere, but those I did met the description. It\u0026rsquo;s actually the only place I can remember being as a tourist that random people coming up to me on the street or the subway never tripped my \u0026ldquo;this guy\u0026rsquo;s working an angle\u0026rdquo; detector.\nThe reality of nationhood defines a nation. Seriously. Cross-strait relations are complex enough that I feel like I\u0026rsquo;d have to do diploma work in international affairs on the subject before I could speak intelligently on them, but this point seems pretty straightforward. Following my belief in results, not ideology, it is very hard to stand in Beijing, then to stand in Taipei, and to take anyone who insists that Taiwan is part of China at all seriously. The Republic of China has effective control of its borders and appears to provide all the services of a government. The civil society and economy also seem distinctly Taiwanese. If it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has webbed feet like a duck, it might be a duck. China\u0026rsquo;s claim to Taiwan is exactly as silly as Taiwan\u0026rsquo;s (longstanding official but practically forgotten) claim to China.\nTaiwan insists on its existence. Taiwan is understandably a bit defensive and twitchy about this, given that it\u0026rsquo;s officially an almost-unrecognized state (due to diplomatic coercion by the PRC) and lives under an openly-advertised military threat that seems even more pointless for having spent a week on each side of the divide. Taiwan is proud of its history, and perceived status as successor state to imperial China under the Qing – dates in Taiwan are even given as years of the \u0026ldquo;Republican dynasty\u0026rdquo;, if you will, founded in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen. Much of the National Palace Museum1 seems devoted to or at least deeply influenced by this viewpoint: there\u0026rsquo;s a treaty room containing the ROC\u0026rsquo;s diplomatic archive, going back to Unequal Treaties signed by the Qing emperors. This room also contains a wall listing the 120 or so countries that de-facto recognize citizens of the ROC by issuing visas or landing permit waivers to them.\nGlobalization cuts both ways. This is probably colored by the fact that I spent a lot of time in Xinyi, which seems to be the finance-district-and-upscale-malls part of town. But the malls — and there were a lot of malls, basically nothing but malls — seemed to be largely full of Western imports: Swiss watches, Belgian chocolates, Italian suits, American-designed iPhones. Taiwanese with money seem to want to spend it on the same junk we do.\nTaipei borrows my favorite bit of urban design from Bern. Bern? Well, the sidewalks in much of the city are covered by the first (American: second) story of the buildings, which is both useful in a rainy place and reminiscent of the Berner Altstadt (also a rainy place).\nChina minus central planning looks a bit like Los Angeles2 with scooters. Facetious, maybe, but a hard impression to shake. Again probably colored by my stay in Xinyi. I\u0026rsquo;ve already mentioned the malls full of pricey European crap. Add the wide streets, the tall buildings, the hills and mountains in the near distance, the endlessly-under-construction metro, the ocean-moderated climate, and the fact that almost everyone seems to get around in something personal and motorized, be it car or scooter, and the LA impression holds more true.\nDid I mention the scooters? Scooters themselves aren\u0026rsquo;t that loud, but multiplied by several hundred and I was woken up every morning by the drag-strip sound of rush hour out my 12th3 floor window.\nAll in all, enlightening. Next time I\u0026rsquo;ll have to see more than the square mile around Taipei 101.\n1The museum\u0026rsquo;s history itself is interesting – founded in 1925 in Beijing, it evacuated its collection in 1933 ahead of a the advancing Japanese army, and moved eventually to Taiwan in 1948 as the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists intensified. It\u0026rsquo;s got the largest collection of Chinese art in the world, in large part because it escaped the Cultural Revolution. But that\u0026rsquo;s another story.\n2I\u0026rsquo;ve actually spent very little time in Los Angeles. Glendale and Burbank, sure. So when I talk about Los Angeles, I\u0026rsquo;m talking about my impression of Los Angeles, which may or may not reflect its reality. I can however say with all honesty that in my experience, the air\u0026rsquo;s much, much better in Taipei, and the metro quite a bit more useful.\n3My room was on a floor labeled the 15th, but the building lacked a 4th, 13th, or 14th floor for reasons of good luck.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/11/taipei-for-distracted-beginners/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/wp/2011/11/IMG_8131.jpg\"\u003e\u003cimg class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-394\" title=\"IMG_8131\" src=\"/wp/2011/11/IMG_8131-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"/wp/2011/11/IMG_8131-200x300.jpg 200w, /wp/2011/11/IMG_8131.jpg 427w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s bad form to draw generalizations about a place and a people from a tiny little sample of experience. And my sample last week in Taipei, Taiwan, was particularly tiny: first, I was there for an IETF meeting which kept me inside the convention center for most of the week, which resembled nothing so much as every convention center I\u0026rsquo;ve ever been in. And the times I wasn\u0026rsquo;t kept in the convention center by work, I was kept inside otherwise by a persistent rain that wasn\u0026rsquo;t so much rain as simply dampness-as-atmosphere: I literally saw the sun for only fifteen minutes the entire week, and that while it was between the horizon and the cloud deck one morning. I stayed in bed.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat said, here are a few notes on observations that came to mind while I was there.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Taipei for Distracted Beginners"},{"content":"[][1]Bagels boiling, Wallisellen, 7 November 2011 The problem with taking a week in New York and coming back to Zürich is that you miss the bagels. Bagels, however, are made by humans, and we are humans, so how hard can it be?\nTurns out, quite. Basing our recipe on one we found on an American cookbook written in German (the author\u0026rsquo;s blurb assurs us that her husband is a real, actual American from Bedford, Pennsylvania, of all places), the results of our first attempt are shown here. Ariane gets most of the credit for these, she made the dough while I was still reading the Economist on the 751. I just did the photography, and formed a couple of rings.\nBagels finished, Wallisellen, 7 November 2011\nWhat we got were a little too soft on the inside, a little too hard on the outside, and, while they were certainly among the best-tasting bread to come out of this kitchen, they weren\u0026rsquo;t really bagels. Things to try next time:\ntweak the recipe (the Internet has a lot of opinions on how to make bagels, because the Internet has a lot of opinions on everything; sadly, most of these are wrong.) boil longer (two minutes a side seems a bit short) with saltier water let them rise a bit less (because they fell quite a lot in the oven) buy bagels in New York like everyone else (the flight\u0026rsquo;s not free, but hey, the dollar\u0026rsquo;s cheap\u0026hellip;) ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/11/bagels/","summary":"\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_377\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"\u003e[\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-377\" title=\"IMG_7920\" src=\"/wp/2011/11/IMG_7920-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"/wp/2011/11/IMG_7920-300x200.jpg 300w, /wp/2011/11/IMG_7920.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" /\u003e][1]\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"\u003eBagels boiling, Wallisellen, 7 November 2011\u003c/figcaption\u003e\u003c/figure\u003e \n\u003cp\u003eThe problem with taking a week in New York and coming back to Zürich is that you miss the bagels. Bagels, however, are made by humans, and we are humans, so how hard can it be?\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Bagels"},{"content":"[Dupont Circle, Washington DC, 6 October 2011\nPerhaps it is hasty to simply dismiss the swamps of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers as blighted by the pernicious lies spewing forth from the numerous bullshit factories lining their banks. There is beauty to be found there after all.\nI first went to Washington in the summer of 1991, with my late mother, and my now-stepfather and his daughter. We rented a van in Knoxville for reasons lost to the ages and took the interstate route up along the Blue Ridge. The goal, I suppose, was the standard civics lesson for an eighth- (me) and ninth-grader (her): walk around, take pictures of the big marble buildings where things were presumed to happen according to the Schoolhouse Rock version of American representative democracy, see an actual copy of the documents the first few lines of which we\u0026rsquo;d just had to memorize, have a look at the Apollo 11 Columbia capsule. Mom was an old hippie who\u0026rsquo;d been here in \u0026lsquo;69 marching against the war (in Vietnam), so we spent more time at the minimalist Wall searching for the name of Mom\u0026rsquo;s fallen pen-pal in the Army than we did at any of the more grandiose neoclassical temples of the American pantheon.\nOff the Mall, though, DC in \u0026lsquo;91 was an example of the conditions that led to the American political obsession with law and order, ever-longer sentences, and ever-bigger prisons. We stayed in an apartment a bit off Dupont Circle we loaned out from a friend of Mom\u0026rsquo;s; the friend warned us to stay on our side of 14th NW after dark. We parked the van north of Logan Circle one afternoon and came back the next morning to find its windows smashed, the radio stolen, and a parking ticket for a hundred bucks under the windshield wiper.\nI remember these things, but that\u0026rsquo;s not what\u0026rsquo;s memorable to me about this trip. Washington was the second actual city I\u0026rsquo;d been to, but the first I\u0026rsquo;d ever walked in1. For a thirteen year old kid from the suburbs, the hint of freedom promised by going from point A to point B without a car was so weird that I didn\u0026rsquo;t realize what it was until after we\u0026rsquo;d wrapped the van doors in plastic, vacuumed up the sawdust from the shattered wood paneling, and headed back to Knoxville. Washington had places you could walk to. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t a huge fan of the actual walking, mind you. As a fat kid with ill-fitting khaki shorts and the cardiovascular system of an eighty year old alcoholic smoker, the walking part sucked, so I didn\u0026rsquo;t notice how brilliant the theory of walking was until I was stuck back home in Memphis2.\nDupont Circle, Washington DC, 6 October 2011\nWhat\u0026rsquo;s more, Washington had a subway. The Dupont Circle station was our home station on this trip, and decending the perfectly circular hole in the ground pierced by the longest escalator I\u0026rsquo;d ever even conceived of to stand on the platforms in the gridded, arched tunnels that generated their own wind was, for me, living science fiction. Sure, it was useful for all the other stuff we wanted to do, but it was a destination in its own right. I had to beg my mom to ride the red line with me out to Maryland and back, just because we could. My love of the machinery of public transport began there at the end of the Dupont Circle escalator, and that led to an irrational enthusiasm for public transport itself3.\nThe magic of that Washington is long gone now. Years of experience and rapid-onset cynicism have morphed the city into its symbology in my mind. Washington is the corruption of K Street, the willful idiocy of Congress, the five-to-four election, the permanent campaign, the national security state. Washington isn\u0026rsquo;t killing America, per se, but the power concentrated there is a magnet for those who are.\nBut it was nice, for one day last week, to go visit the place where I started my journey to the 12 Stettbach-Flughafen and the S14 Hinwil-Zürich via Wallisellen.\n1San Francisco wins chronologically, but as I was always accompanied by my grandfather, who didn\u0026rsquo;t walk so well, and my grandmother, who didn\u0026rsquo;t breathe so well, San Francisco was a car town as far as I was concerned until I walked across it fifteen years later.\n2Actually, it took much longer than that. I started driving less than a year later, and didn\u0026rsquo;t look back. I first put the theory of walking into practice two years after that, after I had two wrecks in the span of a week and had to trudge the 1200m to my job stocking shelves and serving yogurt at a strip-mall drug store, because we were out of cars. At that point it just seemed unpleasant, as Memphis was in no way meant to be walked. But I did remember what DC had been like, and idly wished for a subway to whisk me home from the strip mall. The fact that I even noticed a 1200m walk is somewhat alien to me today.\n3As evidence of the irrationality of this enthusiasm, I submit that I once regularly rode MARTA from Briarcliff and North Druid Hills to Georgia Tech via bus to Lindbergh Center and from Arts Center stations. Ask an Atlantan to explain how pointless that is.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/10/the-light-at-the-end/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e[\u003cfigure style=\"width: 400px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/bht/6227298848/\" title=\"Dupont Circle (I) by bht, on Flickr\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"/img/archive/6227298848_5d17eeaec0.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"\u003eDupont Circle, Washington DC, 6 October 2011\u003c/figcaption\u003e\u003c/figure\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePerhaps it is hasty to simply dismiss the swamps of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers as blighted by the pernicious lies spewing forth from the numerous bullshit factories lining their banks. There is beauty to be found there after all.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Light at the End"},{"content":"On December 7, 1951, the New York Times – then as now as close to a paper of record as you\u0026rsquo;ll find in America – devoted a relatively limited amount of space to the tenth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy, which drew the United States into the Second World War: an editorial noting the occasion, and an article noting that a ceremony would be held in Pearl Harbor to note the occasion.\nNow, one could argue that Hawaii is not \u0026ldquo;as American\u0026rdquo; as lower Manhattan – indeed, it would have to wait until a Cold War reinforcement of America\u0026rsquo;s sovereignty on its Pacific flank in 1959 to become a state, while Manhattan has been firmly in American hands since shortly after Yorktown. But this, I think, is not enough to explain the relative silence of the commemoration of the day that will live in infamy, as compared to the unremitting assault of noise about All Things Nine Eleven, which I am happy I can blunt a bit by living several thousand miles away.\nThis will not be a rant about the screaming dysfunction that has replaced the once proud tradition of journalism in America, a noise machine that cranked out thousands of hours of \u0026ldquo;content\u0026rdquo; this week for a public seemingly eager to Never Forget. It will not be a screed about the utter idiocy of throwing essential liberties in front of the temporary security bus, nor even a lament for what, in time, will come to be known as the first of America\u0026rsquo;s lost decades. No, there will plenty of time to write those, should I feel I have anything to say that hasn\u0026rsquo;t already been said louder and better elsewhere. In any case, they have very little if anything to do with the anniversary at hand.\nI would like, instead, to write about fear.\nTen years ago today, my mother dropped my wife of one week and me off at Memphis International Airport for a flight to Pittsburgh. When the US Airways desk agent told me we couldn\u0026rsquo;t fly that day due to a terrorist attack, I insisted that he take our bags anyway, refusing even to acknowledge his unfunny and frankly rather tasteless joke. Then I noticed the people clogging the terminal, people who\u0026rsquo;d been on their way from Louisville to Cancun or Houston to Cleveland when the airspace was closed and the pilots of their airplanes had been ordered to Land. Right. Now.\nConfusion and fear passed over the terminal in waves, as each new piece of information from radios, televisions, or telephone calls got distorted in the telling and retelling. The Pentagon had been attacked. No, it was just on fire. Pittsburgh was attacked too, no, wait, it was a field outside Pittsburgh. I heard something about Dallas. Pittsburgh again. They were evacuating buildings in downtown Memphis. They were evacuating buildings in downtown everywhere.\nIt took us a half hour on line to get a payphone to call my mother to come pick us up at the airport, which she\u0026rsquo;d already decided to do anyway when she got to the office and heard the news. We bought a new car in Jonesboro – in large part because the new car dealerships were the only people who could handle financing in a world without FedEx – and drove home. Somewhere around Cincinnati, we saw our first airplane back in the sky. My original fear that things were going to get Very Bad on the domestic front more or less immediately – I\u0026rsquo;d been pessimistic about the thuggish, authoritarian bent of the administration ever since it had been \u0026ldquo;elected\u0026rdquo; five to four, and was pleasantly surprised to be able to cross the Ohio River without submitting to a military police inspection– turned out to be more than a bit overblown, and life got back to normal.\nOkay, back to a new normal. Pretending that Nine Eleven Changed Nothing would be a little disingenuous. I got laid off from my third dot-com in a row a month later, more or less as a direct result of the disappearance of anything that even smelled like venture capital in Pittsburgh in the weeks after the attacks. My grandmother passed away. The family was, I think, successful in keeping the images of the towers off the television in her hospital room. A little over a year later, I participated in my first and last anti-war rally, a disappointingly muddled affair on Pittsburgh\u0026rsquo;s Northside that seemed to be more about Mumia Abu-Jamal and Mexican avocado pickers than the invasion of Iraq for dubious and inconsistent reasons. Relief that life went on became disbelief, disappointment, and disillusionment at the utter irrelevance and malicious incompetence of most of the American response.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s one thing when Rudolph Giuliani leverages a few moments of relative not-losing-it one morning in September to run for President of the United States of Nine Eleven. It\u0026rsquo;s another thing when these same few moments are repeated for a decade as the singular justification for the dismantling of a society.\nThis frightened me far more than the specter of scary men with giant kerosene-fueled suicide-cruise-missiles who prayed fervently to a slightly different and angrier god. I wrote in September 2001 that \u0026ldquo;[i]f we [do not resist the temptation to authoritarianism], terror wins, America becomes a third world tinpot totalitarian state, and you can reach me at my new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe.\u0026rdquo; I didn\u0026rsquo;t really mean it at the time, at least not the bit about moving, though reading it ten years later from my flat in Switzerland, I suppose I mean it now.\nSo. Disbelief. Disappointment. Disillusionment. Exasperation, once we started taking off our shoes and throwing away our water bottles. But not fear. I suspect I couldn\u0026rsquo;t be afraid of terrorism if I tried. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s overly rationalist, maybe it\u0026rsquo;s a little reckless, and I\u0026rsquo;m certain some of you will call it disrespectful to the 0.1 victims of terrorism in America per 100,000 per year, but I can\u0026rsquo;t be bothered to waste any real effort worrying about or preparing for something that, from a risk-evaluation point of view, never happens.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s more than that, though, and this is the part that makes me sad: Things happen, and you can\u0026rsquo;t change that they\u0026rsquo;ve happened; we call this \u0026ldquo;time\u0026rdquo;. But you can choose how you react, whether you will accept and adapt, or whether you will cower and twitch. In the last ten years, at the level of (American) society, I see very little acceptance, no adaptation, and a particularly violent attack of cowering twitchiness. We can, and should, remember the fallen, and grieve them, but we should not allow their deaths to be our own. Not playing along with this fear was the point at which I became an exile in my own land. Physically leaving a few years later was merely a technicality.\nYou can do a lot of living in ten years. You\u0026rsquo;d have to try hard not to. The wife of one week as of September 11, 2001, is now an ex-wife of three or four years, depending on how you count it. We don\u0026rsquo;t talk. The car we rode in that morning was totaled in an accident with a semi at I-240 and Perkins Road in 2004, which my mother thankfully walked away from, only to pass away last year after a short, sudden battle with leukemia. I have no idea what happened to the desk agent; I hope he\u0026rsquo;s well. I\u0026rsquo;ve had six homes, four jobs, two kayaks. I speak a little German now. I\u0026rsquo;m getting on with life; as I look back across the ocean at the Month Of All Nine Eleven All The Time, I am sad that I can\u0026rsquo;t say the same about my country.\nTo the families of the 2,523 men and women who lost their lives in the attack on Pearl Harbor Naval Station, Hawaii Territory, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, I honor your loss, and their sacrifice on that day. May the decades of peace in the Pacific following the conclusion of the Second World War be a testament that their lives were not lost in vain.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/09/ten-years-on/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOn December 7, 1951, the New York Times – then as now as close to a paper of record as you\u0026rsquo;ll find in America – devoted a relatively limited amount of space to the tenth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy, which drew the United States into the Second World War: an editorial noting the occasion, and an article noting that a ceremony would be held in Pearl Harbor to note the occasion.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Ten years on"},{"content":"I opened the NZZ am Sonntag (the Sunday edition of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the paper of record for German-speaking Switzerland) today to read of yet another threat from Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s current favorite comic-book supervillain: Starker Franken.\nThis week, its was \u0026ldquo;Starker Franken gefährdet eintausend Hotels\u0026rdquo; (\u0026quot;\u0026hellip;endangers a thousand hotels\u0026quot;). Last week, \u0026ldquo;Starker Franken droht die Löhne\u0026rdquo; (\u0026quot;\u0026hellip;threatens wages\u0026quot;). I\u0026rsquo;m half expecting next week to read \u0026ldquo;Starker Franken ermordet zwei Landsmänner in einer Messerstecherei in Langstrasse\u0026rdquo; (\u0026quot;\u0026hellip;kills two compatriots in a knife fight in Langstrasse [Zürich\u0026rsquo;s red light district]\u0026quot;) or, even worse, \u0026ldquo;Starker Franken ist mit 225 km/h auf der A1 bei Kölliken von der aargauischen Kantonspolizei kontrolliert geworden\u0026rdquo; (\u0026quot;\u0026hellip;got caught speeding.\u0026quot;)\nStarker Franken means, of course, \u0026ldquo;strong Franc (currency)\u0026rdquo;, and I\u0026rsquo;m not making light of the difficulty. On the one hand, I\u0026rsquo;ve gotten a 30% raise in dollar terms over the last three years, just sitting here. On the other, the relative strength of the franc to the euro is crushing export-related sectors of the economy, which in a country roughly the size of Maryland, Delaware, and DC, is \u0026ldquo;most of them\u0026rdquo;. The Swiss national bank ran out of money a couple of years ago trying to keep the Euro exchange rate manageable, and got stuck with a big fat paper loss denominated in Euros in doing so. Deflation is not inevitable, but it\u0026rsquo;s less unthinkable than it should be in an economy that\u0026rsquo;s basically stable and not in debt up to its ears. So, yeah, villainy.\nBut it\u0026rsquo;s kind of hard to take the angst seriously when it\u0026rsquo;s reported with tabloid breathlessness week after week above the fold on the front page of a supposedly august newspaper.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/07/comic-book-supervillainy/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI opened the NZZ am Sonntag (the Sunday edition of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.nzz.ch/\"\u003eNeue Zürcher Zeitung\u003c/a\u003e, the paper of record for German-speaking Switzerland) today to read of yet another threat from Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s current favorite comic-book supervillain: Starker Franken.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Comic-Book Supervillainy"},{"content":"The New York Times ran a story last week, essentially detailing the Zürich Model: increase the usage of non-automotive transportation by simultaneously making public transit more attractive (through increased frequency and punctuality though e.g. transit-priority usage of shared corridors) and automotive usage less attractive (via lowering the capacity of throughways via street and lane closure, the \u0026ldquo;red wave\u0026rdquo; of worst-case traffic-light timing, traffic calming, lowered speed limits, and so on).\nIt turns out that this latter activity also makes life nicer for bicyclists: some of the reduced lane capacity can be reassigned to bike lanes, and narrow, low-speed throughways are more comfortable and less threatening for cyclists, such as the \u0026ldquo;Velobahnen\u0026rdquo; along Ackersteinstrasse and Scheuzerstrasse.\nThe article focuses on the open hostility to motor vehicles evident in Zürich\u0026rsquo;s urban design, and the chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, was refreshingly honest about his job being the movement of people, not automobiles: \u0026ldquo;Driving is a stop-and-go experience. That’s what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy for drivers.\u0026rdquo; Another official, Pio Marzolini, summed up what Zürich is like on foot, by comparison with the rest of the world: \u0026ldquo;When I’m in other cities, I feel like I’m always waiting to cross a street. I can’t get used to the idea that I am worth less than a car.\u0026rdquo;\nNot all Zürchers, especially those who drive, more especially those who drive in from the Grossraum and spend an American amount of their lives stuck in traffic on the wrong side of Gubrist, are not quite as thrilled about the success of the Zürich model, largely because it works, and in working it makes driving in Zürich suck. And Mr. Fellmann apparently forgot that Swiss people read the Grey Lady. In the week since the article appeared, his words have led to a story in the Tages-Anzieger, in which he clarified that the \u0026ldquo;we don\u0026rsquo;t hate cars, we search for a balance (between driving and other modes of transportation), for the environment and quality of life.\u0026rdquo;\nOffered as balance? The onetime-hellscape of Pfingstweidstrasse, a tangled mess of cars\u0026hellip; that for the past several years has been torn apart in order to add Tram Zürich-West. Even when it puts on the best L.A.-face it can muster, there\u0026rsquo;s still a tram running through it every seven minutes.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s why I like it here.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/07/the-zurich-model-and-the-domestic-audience/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe New York Times ran a \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/science/earth/27traffic.htm\"\u003estory\u003c/a\u003e last week, essentially detailing the \u003ca href=\"http://voony.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/thezurichmodel/\"\u003eZürich Model\u003c/a\u003e: increase the usage of non-automotive transportation by simultaneously making public transit more attractive (through increased frequency and punctuality though e.g. transit-priority usage of shared corridors) and automotive usage less attractive (via lowering the capacity of throughways via street and lane closure, the \u0026ldquo;red wave\u0026rdquo; of worst-case traffic-light timing, traffic calming, lowered speed limits, and so on).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Zürich Model and the Domestic Audience"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/snack-trac-2011/","summary":"","title":"A tale of two outages - a study of the Skype network in distress"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;ve finally given up arguing politics. The way the game seems to be played is indistinguishable from arguing whose football team is better. If I were slightly more cynical, I\u0026rsquo;d develop a market for jerseys with elephants and donkeys on them and make a killing. It\u0026rsquo;s even better here in Europe, where most political parties have nice, bright colors, so much the better for mascotry.\nBut, alas, the colors are irrelevant. What matters are your policies, and the results these policies lead to. If your policies have desirable results, they are good policies, whether your reasons behind them are clothed in the right color or not. If your policies have bad results, the fact that Messiah revealed them to you in a grilled cheese sandwich or that they will serve to glorify the memory of the Great Revolutionaries of the Proletariat won\u0026rsquo;t make them any better, will they? No? Okay.\nIdeology gives you idiot jihadists who don\u0026rsquo;t want to use AES to encrypt their messages to each other because they couldn\u0026rsquo;t possibly believe that a system built by nonbelievers could be trusted. Does AES work? Yes, if you do it right. Does it care who you pray to? While the algorithm itself is complicated in ways I don\u0026rsquo;t really understand, I feel pretty safe in saying: No. Most of the bloodier wars in human history have an ideological basis, as well, as it allows the dehumanization of one\u0026rsquo;s opponents: the guys in the next village don\u0026rsquo;t believe in the same invisible superhero that we do (may Its name be ever whispered in trembling fear), so it\u0026rsquo;s totally cool to march in and take their stuff and do what you like to them. There is of course a great body of work on the results produced by ideological revolutions: the Renaissance, the Reformation, post-mercantalism, and so on. This is sort of my point, though: let\u0026rsquo;s set aside ideology for its own sake (realizing of course that such positions as \u0026ldquo;war is bad\u0026rdquo; may themselves be seen as ideological) and evaluate it based upon its results.\nAlas, in the great tradition of solutions leading to larger problems, this answer to the argument gives us two other points to argue: what is the difference between a desirable result and an undesirable result, and how can you predict the results that will emerge from a given policy?\nI spent more time in the 1990s than I\u0026rsquo;d like to admit trying to come up with a rational answer to the first question, and I eventually convinced myself of this: there is no logically self-consistent hierarchy of desirability, so the desirability of a result is an essentially arbitrary function of human universals, cultural norms, and personal taste, which leaves us with a Potter Stewart situation: I know what\u0026rsquo;s desirable when I see it. But at least this gets us from \u0026ldquo;X is bad because Y is AWESOME GO TEAM!\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;X is bad because it will lead to a bad result (as determined by Y which is AWESOME GO TEAM!)\u0026rdquo; Which would at least be one step in the right direction, which is better than nothing.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s not, for the most part, what we have right now. I\u0026rsquo;m referring to American politics here, and by American politics I refer to a style, not to a place (cf. [I\u0026rsquo;ve finally given up arguing politics. The way the game seems to be played is indistinguishable from arguing whose football team is better. If I were slightly more cynical, I\u0026rsquo;d develop a market for jerseys with elephants and donkeys on them and make a killing. It\u0026rsquo;s even better here in Europe, where most political parties have nice, bright colors, so much the better for mascotry.\nBut, alas, the colors are irrelevant. What matters are your policies, and the results these policies lead to. If your policies have desirable results, they are good policies, whether your reasons behind them are clothed in the right color or not. If your policies have bad results, the fact that Messiah revealed them to you in a grilled cheese sandwich or that they will serve to glorify the memory of the Great Revolutionaries of the Proletariat won\u0026rsquo;t make them any better, will they? No? Okay.\nIdeology gives you idiot jihadists who don\u0026rsquo;t want to use AES to encrypt their messages to each other because they couldn\u0026rsquo;t possibly believe that a system built by nonbelievers could be trusted. Does AES work? Yes, if you do it right. Does it care who you pray to? While the algorithm itself is complicated in ways I don\u0026rsquo;t really understand, I feel pretty safe in saying: No. Most of the bloodier wars in human history have an ideological basis, as well, as it allows the dehumanization of one\u0026rsquo;s opponents: the guys in the next village don\u0026rsquo;t believe in the same invisible superhero that we do (may Its name be ever whispered in trembling fear), so it\u0026rsquo;s totally cool to march in and take their stuff and do what you like to them. There is of course a great body of work on the results produced by ideological revolutions: the Renaissance, the Reformation, post-mercantalism, and so on. This is sort of my point, though: let\u0026rsquo;s set aside ideology for its own sake (realizing of course that such positions as \u0026ldquo;war is bad\u0026rdquo; may themselves be seen as ideological) and evaluate it based upon its results.\nAlas, in the great tradition of solutions leading to larger problems, this answer to the argument gives us two other points to argue: what is the difference between a desirable result and an undesirable result, and how can you predict the results that will emerge from a given policy?\nI spent more time in the 1990s than I\u0026rsquo;d like to admit trying to come up with a rational answer to the first question, and I eventually convinced myself of this: there is no logically self-consistent hierarchy of desirability, so the desirability of a result is an essentially arbitrary function of human universals, cultural norms, and personal taste, which leaves us with a Potter Stewart situation: I know what\u0026rsquo;s desirable when I see it. But at least this gets us from \u0026ldquo;X is bad because Y is AWESOME GO TEAM!\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;X is bad because it will lead to a bad result (as determined by Y which is AWESOME GO TEAM!)\u0026rdquo; Which would at least be one step in the right direction, which is better than nothing.\nBut that\u0026rsquo;s not, for the most part, what we have right now. I\u0026rsquo;m referring to American politics here, and by American politics I refer to a style, not to a place (cf.]2 rants against the looming tone in Switzerland)\u0026hellip; To the extent that results are discussed at all, they show up as negative outcomes from opposing viewpoints: \u0026ldquo;Do X, because Y is the opposite of X, and Y will lead to bad thing Z.\u0026rdquo; (More troubling is the common subtext of this: \u0026ldquo;Incidentally, X is brought to you by Team W, while Y is a nefarious idea cooked up by Team V, who according to unconfirmed reports wouldn\u0026rsquo;t mind if a whole bunch of A marched across the B and C\u0026rsquo;d your D, just saying.\u0026rdquo; To date this sort of thing seems primarily to be the province of Rupert Murdoch media properties, and those media organizations trying to compete with him on his terms.)\nIn most such scenarios, the link between Y and bad thing Z is generally tenuous at best, as is the degree of actual opposition between X and Y: since the choice is an ideological one, the desirability of the results and the evaluation of the policies in terms of the results are necessarily skewed, often ridiculously so. Bad thing Z often doesn\u0026rsquo;t even really happen apart from a few anecdotes. Results come into the picture not to evaluate a policy, or even to justify it after it has been chosen, but to motivate support for it through fear of the alternative. This is good politics, maybe, especially with an uneducated electorate, but it leads to terrible policy: if you\u0026rsquo;re always trying to govern yourself away from the looming (but probably nonexistent) disaster, you\u0026rsquo;re going to make bad decisions in the medium term about the management of (actual) mundane problems. (Incidentally, watch this space for a long-winded article on energy policy.)\nBetter, then, not to dignify the argument with participation. (If any of you want to go halfsies on selling party jerseys, though, let me know.)\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/06/post-ideology-or-why-your-favorite-team-sucks/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve finally given up arguing politics. The way the game \u003cem\u003eseems\u003c/em\u003e to be played is indistinguishable from arguing whose football team is better. If I were slightly more cynical, I\u0026rsquo;d develop a market for jerseys with elephants and donkeys on them and make a killing. It\u0026rsquo;s even better here in Europe, where most political parties have nice, bright colors, so much the better for mascotry.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Post-ideology, or why your favorite team sucks"},{"content":" Basically every Swiss city, town, village, train station, or particularly wide spot in the road has one: the hauptwegweiser (roughly \u0026ldquo;central trail sign\u0026rdquo;), which tells you where you can go from here on foot, and approximately how long it will take you if you\u0026rsquo;re in decent shape and not taking too many photos along the way.\nHiking is a big deal in Switzerland. The federal government holds the cantons responsible to maintain the hiking trail network, which measures 62'000 km. (By contrast, there are only 71'000 km of roads, and 5'100 km of rail.) Of course, the Swiss have been walking across the country since before they were Swiss. Trails began to be developed at the start of last century, as cars and trucks started making walking on the main roads uncomfortable or dangerous. The density of the trail network is impressive from an American point of view. Much of it crosses private property, which significantly reduces the difficulty of land acquisition for building out such a network. This approach is helped by Swiss law on rights of way on private property: there is an implicit right to use a path unless so signed, and the right to restrict usage is regulated by the local authorities. The density of the rail and bus network means that many of the hiking trails run from one stop to another, so there\u0026rsquo;s generally no need to plan for a loop. And the whole network is impeccably and beautifully mapped by the Swiss Federal Office of Topography, which publishes 247 sheets in 1:25k scale of the entire country with a design so elegant that Edward Tufte would be proud. The whole national map is available online.\nThe end result is a system so well put together than you can literally go to a train station, hop on a random train or bus, get out, find the wegweiser to the next train station or bus stop, and start walking without much of a plan.\nThis is the first in a very occasional series that on the old blog was called \u0026ldquo;Royale mit Käse\u0026rdquo;, sort of a set of short articles on \u0026ldquo;Switzerland for Americans\u0026rdquo;, that I figured I should start writing while I still remember what America is like. I\u0026rsquo;m taking requests, just drop me a line.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/05/the-hauptwegweiser/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/bht/5681438326/\" title=\"Hauptwegweiser by bht, on Flickr\"\u003e\u003cimg class=\"alignleft\" src=\"/img/archive/5681438326_041f54e819.jpg\" alt=\"Hauptwegweiser\" width=\"333\" height=\"500\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003e Basically every Swiss city, town, village, train station, or particularly wide spot in the road has one: the \u003cem\u003ehauptwegweiser\u003c/em\u003e (roughly \u0026ldquo;central trail sign\u0026rdquo;), which tells you where you can go from here on foot, and approximately how long it will take you if you\u0026rsquo;re in decent shape and not taking too many photos along the way.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Hauptwegweiser"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc6235/","summary":"","title":"IP Flow Anonymization Support"},{"content":" Zürich scares winter off by packing a snowman with explosives, lighting it on fire, and measuring the time until its head blows off. I am not making this up.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s a dedicated square in the city for this (Sechseläutenplatz), and many people get a half day off work to watch the parade of the Zünfte (guilds), watch the Böögg explode, and grill Cervelat on the smoldering bones of winter. The tradition is slightly feudal, and dates to the age when the city was ruled by the guilds. Sechseläuten (literally \u0026ldquo;the six o\u0026rsquo;clock (p.m.) ringing of the bells) marked the day after which work ended at six (as opposed to \u0026ldquo;at dark\u0026rdquo;). Many of the same guilds exist today (the oldest date to 1336), primarily as old-money social clubs, and this is their biggest party of the year.\nBeing freshly minted suburbanites, we decided to check out the lower-key affair up the road in Bassersdorf. Downsides: it\u0026rsquo;s smaller, poor public transit connections. Upsides: you can actually get close enough to watch the Böögg go boom without showing up at nine in the morning, and having been founded in the 21st century as a deliberate satire of the parade down the road, it takes itself even less seriously than the real thing.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/04/sachsiluute/","summary":"\u003cdiv style=\"margin: 0 0 10px 0; padding: 0; font-size: 0.8em; line-height: 1.6em;\"\u003e\n  \u003ca title=\"Böögg (Bassersdorf)\" href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/bht/5611129756/\"\u003e\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"/img/archive/5611129756_df8dbd1232.jpg\" alt=\"Böögg (Bassersdorf) by bht\" width=\"500\" height=\"333\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eZürich scares winter off by packing a snowman with explosives, lighting it on fire, and measuring the time until its head blows off. I am not making this up.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Sächsilüüte"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/ipfix-ieee-2011/","summary":"","title":"An Introduction to IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX)"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/snack-tma11/","summary":"","title":"Identifying Skype traffic in a large-scale flow data repository"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/netflow-pam-2011/","summary":"","title":"Peeling Away Timing Error in NetFlow Data"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m packing for a trip to Memphis, for what will probably be the last time in the foreseeable future. I can\u0026rsquo;t really say that I\u0026rsquo;ll miss it. It\u0026rsquo;s a great place to be from, I guess, and the instant Elvis-and-Jack-Daniels association it has in the eyes of Europeans has started many an interesting train conversation. But most everyone I know, save a couple of friends and a pile of Facebook acquaintances, has moved on. My mother was a compelling reason to book a flight, but she\u0026rsquo;s gone now, too, and my stepfather moved shortly thereafter to San Diego. Even the Last Cat Standing in the ten year battle over the house has found a new home. All that\u0026rsquo;s left is the house itself, full of stuff. Most of this stuff is future garbage, if it isn\u0026rsquo;t already present garbage, which I\u0026rsquo;m off to dig through in order to find the small bits that aren\u0026rsquo;t.\nThis is doubly weird, as Memphis is basically the capital of my past, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty much impossible to travel there without also traveling in time.\nI haven\u0026rsquo;t lived there for sixteen years, but up until I left the States it was always \u0026ldquo;back home\u0026rdquo;. It\u0026rsquo;s said you can never go back, but this sentiment, I think, might be reserved for people who haven\u0026rsquo;t moved across an ocean. Everything here — the sights, the sounds, the smells — is still basically new, so the old senses tie stronger to the old memories. My America clock is stuck in 2008. I can\u0026rsquo;t even see Germantown Parkway without being thrown back into a shopping trip for turkey for some Thanksgiving past, and the unremitting ugliness of Germantown Parkway is not one of those things that people get misty about.\nOn a more practical note, for those of you who are actually reading this, I\u0026rsquo;ll be disappearing for a while. No Internet out at the house, bouncing back and forth between Memphis and Atlanta, then going to Prague for a week and a half, where it\u0026rsquo;ll be busy. See y\u0026rsquo;all in April.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/03/die-hauptstadt-der-vergangenheit/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m packing for a trip to Memphis, for what will probably be the last time in the foreseeable future. I can\u0026rsquo;t really say that I\u0026rsquo;ll miss it. It\u0026rsquo;s a great place to be \u003cem\u003efrom\u003c/em\u003e, I guess, and the instant Elvis-and-Jack-Daniels association it has in the eyes of Europeans has started many an interesting train conversation. But most everyone I know, save a couple of friends and a pile of Facebook acquaintances, has moved on. My mother was a compelling reason to book a flight, but she\u0026rsquo;s gone now, too, and my stepfather moved shortly thereafter to San Diego. Even the Last Cat Standing in the ten year battle over the house has found a new home. All that\u0026rsquo;s left is the house itself, full of stuff. Most of this stuff is future garbage, if it isn\u0026rsquo;t already present garbage, which I\u0026rsquo;m off to dig through in order to find the small bits that aren\u0026rsquo;t.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is doubly weird, as Memphis is basically the capital of my past, and it\u0026rsquo;s pretty much impossible to travel there without also traveling in time.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Die Hauptstadt der Vergangenheit"},{"content":"Got yet another SVP (Swiss People\u0026rsquo;s Party) flyer stuffed in the mailbox yesterday, outlining what passes for their platform for the April cantonal elections, which is a straight cognitively-dissonant mix between xenophobic nationalism and classical liberalism. Schweizer wählen SVP, it says: Swiss people vote SVP, the implication being that all the other parties are for people who are somehow less than Swiss. The party somewhat disappointingly leaves the question of the impact of the rather stark protectionism implied by disengagement from Europe on the freedom of markets and Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s competitiveness unanswered. I get the impression this is because actually attempting to answer such a question would require nuance, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t fit onto a triple-folded A4 flyer in 36-point type underneath the picture of the scary foreigner. (You\u0026rsquo;d hope they\u0026rsquo;d be smart enough to realize, at least from the mailboxes, that they were advertising to a building full of binational couples. But alas.)\nI\u0026rsquo;ve been grappling with my concept of the SVP for a while. I would associate the level of rhetoric (which, as I\u0026rsquo;ve noted before, leads me to sympathy with gangsters, which I\u0026rsquo;m guessing is not the intent) with nascent political violence by paranoid schizophrenics (cf. Jared Loughner and the Tucson shooting). I bring this up with Swiss people and they look at me like I\u0026rsquo;m mad. The problem is I assume that all right-wing loons are Americans — slightly unhinged, heavily armed — while they\u0026rsquo;re assuming the SVP right-wing loons are Swiss — basically reasonable, still armed, but with cause: they\u0026rsquo;re in the army reserve (just like everyone else), they\u0026rsquo;ve got better firearms training, and they\u0026rsquo;re not following a dogmatic independent-clause interpretation of the Second Amendment, which, of course, isn\u0026rsquo;t in effect here anyway.\nAssuming they\u0026rsquo;re reasonable makes them a lot less scary. Let\u0026rsquo;s face it, the one thing they\u0026rsquo;ve managed to actually change of late is banning minarets a year and a half ago, a meaningless little piece of symbolic islamophobia that\u0026rsquo;s been largely forgotten. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t planning on building one anyway. Yeah, their Ausschafungsinitiative makes it indeterminably easier to deport \u0026ldquo;criminal foreigners\u0026rdquo;, which in SVPlerisch means \u0026ldquo;all foreigners\u0026rdquo;, but you still have to actually do something to get thrown out, and the initiative itself was so poorly written that it\u0026rsquo;ll take five years to figure out how to implement the damn thing. Okay, it might get me deported if I decide to drive 210 km/h, drunk, down the A1, but this is also not putting a huge crimp in my plans for the weekend. The Smart\u0026rsquo;s rev-limited to 135 in any case.\nNo, the problem isn\u0026rsquo;t that the SVP is preaching xenophobia to the Swiss. Switzerland was basically founded (in legend anyway) on a 13th-century pact to keep the outsiders from overrunning them, and is one of the few places in Europe which still uses dialect in the open as a way of separating Swiss from non-Swiss (and indeed, Bündner from Berner from Zürcher from Walliser). An inward-facing viewpoint is built into the culture.\nThe problem, ironically, is that the SVP is importing the worst features of American politics into Switzerland: twenty-second soundbites, casting of nuance as weakness, nationalist exceptionalism, and above all a culture of reaction to fear. Christoph Blocher, the man behind the haircut, who sets the party\u0026rsquo;s agenda, has been called Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s Karl Rove, and reported to be a great admirer of the Turd Blossom\u0026rsquo;s work. Which is sad. One of the things I was happy to be leaving behind was the screaming dysfunction that passes for political engagement in America, and I hope it doesn\u0026rsquo;t rot Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s uniquely participative democracy, especially before I get a chance to take part.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/03/amerikanische-qualitat/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eGot yet another SVP (Swiss People\u0026rsquo;s Party) flyer stuffed in the mailbox yesterday, outlining what passes for their platform for the April cantonal elections, which is a straight cognitively-dissonant mix between xenophobic nationalism and classical liberalism. \u003cem\u003eSchweizer wählen SVP\u003c/em\u003e, it says: Swiss people vote SVP, the implication being that all the other parties are for people who are somehow \u003cem\u003eless than Swiss\u003c/em\u003e. The party somewhat disappointingly leaves the question of the impact of the rather stark protectionism implied by disengagement from Europe on the freedom of markets and Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s competitiveness unanswered. I get the impression this is because actually attempting to answer such a question would require nuance, which doesn\u0026rsquo;t fit onto a triple-folded A4 flyer in 36-point type underneath the picture of the scary foreigner. (You\u0026rsquo;d hope they\u0026rsquo;d be smart enough to realize, at least from the mailboxes, that they were advertising to a building full of binational couples. But alas.)\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Amerikanische Qualität"},{"content":"It is not yet completely clear the extent to which the Revolutions of 2011 were run on Facebook and Twitter, but to say they have not been instrumental would, I think, be disingenuous. Like Matthew Brady\u0026rsquo;s Civil War photographs, the body counts in Vietnam, or CNN in Kuwait, from the American standpoint the social networking protocols have removed one more layer of separation between the reality of these revolutions, and those watching them. The key here is that they are also used as a primary communications medium for those taking part.\nNow is perhaps not the time to point out that they\u0026rsquo;re doing it wrong.\nOne of the key differences between \u0026ldquo;Web 1.0\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Web 2.0\u0026rdquo; has been monetization. It is basically impossible to monetize a commodity based upon an open standard, and as soon as the world figured this out in late 1999 or early 2000, the first web bubble exploded. In making sure not to make the same mistake again, a key feature of 2.0 businesses was closing these protocols off, and charging in some way for access to them. For the most part, what they charge you for access is ownership of the things you contribute to them.\nThe core of both the Twitter and Facebook \u0026ldquo;protocols\u0026rdquo; is a giant proprietary database (running on presumably bog-standard relational database software). In the case of Twitter, if the incidence of the Fail Whale is any indication, it is not even a particularly well-designed or -provisioned one. Sure, each of them has an \u0026ldquo;API\u0026rdquo; that allows third-party developers some small degree of freedom of interfacing to this database, but you can\u0026rsquo;t send a Twitter message (tweet) or Facebook message (post/like) without sticking a row in that database.\nThis non-protocolness of the protocols is a single point of epic failure. It has the following consequence for revolutionaries: they cannot be used for any activity which is not at least implicitly approved and accepted as legal by the powers in control of the jurisdictions in which those databases operate. For Facebook and Twitter, this is the United States. From this, we can at least infer that the United States is in support of the revolutions against Arab dictatorships, even against those it has supported in the past.\nBut before we go congratulating ourselves for inventing a machine that makes freedom, let us acknowledge its limitations, so that we are not surprised when we reach for it in the future and it\u0026rsquo;s not there, because its many masters don\u0026rsquo;t approve of the particular type of freedom we happen to be trying to make: ask Birgitta Jonsdottir how it\u0026rsquo;s working out for her. Open protocols may not be monetizable, but you pretty much have to resort to disconnecting the internet to bring them down.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/02/sixty-eight-eighty-nine-eleven-or-why-protocol-design-matters/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt is not yet completely clear the extent to which the Revolutions of 2011 were run on Facebook and Twitter, but to say they have not been instrumental would, I think, be disingenuous. Like Matthew Brady\u0026rsquo;s Civil War photographs, the body counts in Vietnam, or CNN in Kuwait, from the American standpoint the social networking protocols have removed one more layer of separation between the reality of these revolutions, and those watching them. The key here is that they are also used as a primary communications medium for those taking part.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow is perhaps not the time to point out that they\u0026rsquo;re doing it wrong.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Sixty-eight, eighty-nine, eleven, or: Why Protocol Design Matters"},{"content":"Stuck at home this weekend: doctor said stay off a rather badly twisted ankle, not from snowboarding in Arosa, but from falling down the damn stairs in Bahnhof Chur after snowboarding. The upside is I\u0026rsquo;ve got a nice new lens to play with, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been shuffling and lurching around the flat taking photos of anything that doesn\u0026rsquo;t move.\nHave also finally made some progress on re-sorting my backlog of photos that goes back to Pittsburgh, so look for new stuff to show up on Flickr over the next weeks.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/02/portrait-of-a-coffee-machine/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/bht/5461189241/\" title=\"Portrait of a Coffee Machine by bht, on Flickr\"\u003e\u003cimg class=\"alignleft\" src=\"/img/archive/5461189241_a38178de06.jpg\" alt=\"Portrait of a Coffee Machine\" width=\"254\" height=\"500\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003eStuck at home this weekend: doctor said stay off a rather badly twisted ankle, not from snowboarding in Arosa, but from falling down the damn stairs in Bahnhof Chur \u003cem\u003eafter\u003c/em\u003e snowboarding. The upside is I\u0026rsquo;ve got a nice new \u003ca href=\"http://www.the-digital-picture.com/reviews/canon-ef-100mm-f-2.8-l-is-usm-macro-lens-review.aspx\"\u003elens\u003c/a\u003e to play with, so I\u0026rsquo;ve been shuffling and lurching around the flat taking photos of anything that doesn\u0026rsquo;t move.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Portrait of a Coffee Machine"},{"content":"This is Ivan S. (name der Redaktion bekannt). Ivan lives with his wife and young son in a dingy little apartment in an old building in a small town outside a small city in Switzerland, an Ausländerghetto filled with asylum-seekers and semi-skilled foreign workers. Ivan has held the occasional odd job, but most of his time these days is spent on low level criminal activity for the Swiss arm of one or another criminal organization with ties to the Balkan peninsula: petty thievery, drug dealing, armed lookout and intimidation, transport. If it involves breaking the law with only marginal autonomy, Ivan\u0026rsquo;s probably got his fingers in it.\nIn his copious free time, Ivan races his black BMW 318i. Anywhere and everywhere. Autobahn, city streets, school zones, doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter. Come to think of it, it\u0026rsquo;s probably the racing that will eventually get Ivan deported to live with his grandmother, who lives back in Serbia, collecting checks from the Swiss disability scheme, due to some dodgy paperwork on file with the authorities here.\nI have basically nothing in common with Ivan. First off, he doesn\u0026rsquo;t actually exist, and I\u0026rsquo;m reasonably certain I do. He seems like kind of an asshole, and I try hard to be nice. (Okay, I\u0026rsquo;ve run from the cops once, but that\u0026rsquo;s another story, and I\u0026rsquo;m not the guy who was firing Roman candles at unmarked police cars, I\u0026rsquo;m just the guy who drove across the bridge to buy them.)\nBut we are both, according to the xenophobic right in Switzerland, Ausländer (for the Americans in the room, imagine this as \u0026ldquo;Furr\u0026rsquo;ner\u0026rdquo; with the worst Deep South, don\u0026rsquo;t-let-the-sun-set-on-you-here-boy accent you can muster). Now, now, it will be quickly clarified, don\u0026rsquo;t worry, you\u0026rsquo;re an American, which makes you good Ausländer. Ivan is bad Ausländer. We like good Ausländer.\nThe problem is, when it comes to the tone it sets, to how I feel as part of Swiss society, the distinction doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter. Xenophobia is xenophobia. People who are from here are better than people who are not. Exceptions come after that. By taking the nationalist tack — a common tactic for a party without actual ideas, it should be noted — the Swiss right wing, exemplified by the Swiss People\u0026rsquo;s Party (SVP), unwittingly aligns the interests of good and bad Ausländer. It brings us to feel something like sympathy for Ivan. There\u0026rsquo;s a great distance between us, but we get the same sneer from the Migrationsamt, and we are painted the same color by the broad brush of the noisiest part of the Swiss political landscape. We — basically all the nurses, half the doctors, and a big chunk of the finance and tech sectors, as well as the occasional Balkan gangster or Nigerian dealer — are not welcome here.\nThe SVP would do well to consider the impact of the xenophobic noise they use to keep the hinterlands voting for them in fear. It brings the people to the urn, sure, but it tends to undermine the perception Switzerland\u0026rsquo;s own residents — Bürger and Ausländer — have of their home as a modern, inclusive, cosmopolitan country — a perception which underlies, in part, our continued mutual prosperity. And it brings us to common cause with Ivan, which we most certainly should not have.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/02/the-problem-with-the-peoples-party/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/wp/2011/02/waffenmonopol_fuer_verbrecher.jpg\"\u003e\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-162 alignleft\" title=\"waffenmonopol_fuer_verbrecher\" src=\"/wp/2011/02/waffenmonopol_fuer_verbrecher-300x233.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"233\" srcset=\"/wp/2011/02/waffenmonopol_fuer_verbrecher-300x233.jpg 300w, /wp/2011/02/waffenmonopol_fuer_verbrecher.jpg 450w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003eThis is Ivan S. (name der Redaktion bekannt). Ivan lives with his wife and young son in a dingy little apartment in an old building in a small town outside a small city in Switzerland, an Ausländerghetto filled with asylum-seekers and semi-skilled foreign workers. Ivan has held the occasional odd job, but most of his time these days is spent on low level criminal activity for the Swiss arm of one or another criminal organization with ties to the Balkan peninsula: petty thievery, drug dealing, armed lookout and intimidation, transport. If it involves breaking the law with only marginal autonomy, Ivan\u0026rsquo;s probably got his fingers in it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Problem with the People’s Party"},{"content":"When the Glattalbahn Line 12 opened in December, it turned the VBZ/VBG tram network into a big circle with a few branches, which made this (admittedly somewhat abstract) representation possible.\nSee if you can figure out where you live.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/02/transit-art/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen the Glattalbahn \u003ca href=\"http://www.vbg.ch/index.php?option=com_content\u0026amp;view=article\u0026amp;id=331\u0026amp;Itemid=239\"\u003eLine 12\u003c/a\u003e opened in December, it turned the \u003ca href=\"http://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/vbz/en/index.html\"\u003eVBZ\u003c/a\u003e/\u003ca href=\"http://www.vbg.ch/index.php\"\u003eVBG\u003c/a\u003e tram network into a big circle with a few branches, which made this (admittedly somewhat abstract) representation possible.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/wp/2011/02/tram-circle-2.png\"\u003e\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-129\" title=\"tram-circle-2\" src=\"/wp/2011/02/tram-circle-2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"652\" height=\"529\" srcset=\"/wp/2011/02/tram-circle-2.png 652w, /wp/2011/02/tram-circle-2-300x243.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 652px) 100vw, 652px\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSee if you can figure out where you live.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Transit Art"},{"content":"I started this blog, ostensibly, to write more, especially fiction. I\u0026rsquo;ve written quite a bit over the past five years, but most of it just falls apart on the page before I can finish editing it together, so very few people have seen any of it. There\u0026rsquo;s a story about a train, a story about a house, a story about a sniper and a waitress in a coffee shop in the north end of Chicago. Maybe, one of these days, I\u0026rsquo;ll finish one of these. But in the meantime, there\u0026rsquo;s this.\nWe just moved into a new flat near the train station in an old industrial area of Wallisellen, Switzerland. On the edge of town, wedged between a bunch of old warehouses and Autobahn 1, is a little wood. It\u0026rsquo;s the type of thing that long since would have been torn down in America to make room for a Waffle House across the interstate from the Waffle House, but here, where space is at a premium, there seems to be more consideration of open space. So you find woods, or fields, or pastures, in the weirdest places. There are cows in this country who have a better tram connection downtown than most Americans.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll often walk the fifteen minutes or so through this wood to the tram, listening to music on the iPhone. The wood is rather loud: when I say it\u0026rsquo;s wedged against the autobahn, I mean wedged. Come to think of it, maybe that\u0026rsquo;s why they left it wooded. Nobody wants this view.\nRunning through the wood is a stream, a minor branch of the Glatt (\u0026ldquo;Flat\u0026rdquo;) River, which having grown up on the Mississippi I\u0026rsquo;d barely even call a ditch. At a bend in the stream there\u0026rsquo;s a spot wide enough to be called a pond, around which the city has put a few benches so people can enjoy the quiet of nature amid the roar of cars speeding by on their way to Urdorf or Dättwil or Niederbipp or wherever. In this pond live a bunch of ducks.\nLast Tuesday, I was on the way to the office, running a little late, jamming out to Zakopower on the iPhone, and one of the ducks landed on the trail in front of me. I stopped, immediately — ducks don\u0026rsquo;t usually do this, and I wanted to get a picture of it. I took my earphones out, and — quietly and fluidly, so as not to scare off the duck — raised the phone to take a picture. Before I could even get the camera app loaded, the duck spoke.\n\u0026ldquo;Can you do me a favor?\u0026rdquo; said the duck. Okay, he didn\u0026rsquo;t say exactly that. What he said was, \u0026ldquo;Chönne Sie mir a Gfalle mache?\u0026rdquo; because, of course, the duck was from Wallisellen and therefore spoke Swiss German, to which I said, \u0026ldquo;Hä? Entschuldung, ich habe nicht verstanden.\u0026rdquo; (\u0026ldquo;Huh? I\u0026rsquo;m sorry, I don\u0026rsquo;t understand.\u0026rdquo;), because, well, I hadn\u0026rsquo;t understood. Swiss German is hard, especially over traffic noise.\n\u0026ldquo;I said, can you do me a favor?\u0026rdquo; this time in High German, which I can actually speak. I was already running a little late, but I probably see this duck every day without realizing it. It seemed a little impolite to say no. And the time to pretend I hadn\u0026rsquo;t seen him was well in the past.\n\u0026ldquo;Um. Sure. Depends on what, though.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s no big deal. I see you\u0026rsquo;re listening to your iPod. So you\u0026rsquo;ve noticed, it\u0026rsquo;s a little loud here.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah. Actually, I wondered why there\u0026rsquo;s a bunch of ducks living here.\u0026rdquo;\nThe duck pulled his wings forward a bit; a shrug. \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s the neighborhood, really. The ducks here are a bit nicer than the ducks down by the lake. And who wants to have to put up with swans all day?\u0026rdquo; I nodded in sympathy. Swans can be annoying. \u0026ldquo;Anyway,\u0026rdquo; the duck continued, \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s loud. We\u0026rsquo;d like them to build a sound wall along the road here, to make it a nicer, quieter pond. Good for people, good for ducks. Can I get your signature?\u0026rdquo;\nThe duck didn\u0026rsquo;t appear to be holding a petition. \u0026ldquo;Um, on what?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Over there, hanging on the nail behind the garbage can next to the bench.\u0026rdquo;\nI went over to look, the duck waddling behind me, and sure enough, there was a clipboard hanging on a nail, with a cheap ballpoint taped to a string. \u0026ldquo;Volksinitiative Lärmschutz Grindel\u0026rdquo; (Popular Initiative for Noise Protection) it said, and about thirty signatures. It was an actual Swiss initiative, like the one that banned minarets a couple of years back. A rough specification of the wall was there, the costs broken down\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;Wait, this is a real thing,\u0026rdquo; I said.\n\u0026ldquo;Of course it is,\u0026rdquo; scoffed the duck.\n\u0026ldquo;But I can\u0026rsquo;t sign this,\u0026rdquo; I said.\n\u0026ldquo;Why not?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m an American. Can\u0026rsquo;t vote, can\u0026rsquo;t sign initiatives.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Oh,\u0026rdquo; said the duck, disappointed. \u0026ldquo;That does explain your accent, at least.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Sorry. It\u0026rsquo;s a good idea,\u0026rdquo; I offered.\n\u0026ldquo;Ah, well. You come through here a lot, don\u0026rsquo;t you?\u0026rdquo; the duck changed the subject abruptly.\n\u0026ldquo;Yep. I live over by the station, and I take the tram into the university every day.\u0026rdquo;\nThe duck pauses. \u0026ldquo;Wait, the 9?\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Yeah.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;What the hell are you doing taking the 9? The 12 leaves right from the station, and if that\u0026rsquo;s not fast enough for you, you\u0026rsquo;ve got four trains an hour direct to the center of the city! Anyone who can read a timetable knows this!\u0026rdquo;\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s why I can\u0026rsquo;t write fiction: if even a noise-distracted talking duck can point out the holes in my plot, how can I believe it myself?\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/02/volksinitiative-larmschutz-grindel-or-why-i-cant-write-fiction/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI started this blog, ostensibly, to write more, especially fiction. I\u0026rsquo;ve written quite a bit over the past five years, but most of it just \u003cem\u003efalls apart\u003c/em\u003e on the page before I can finish editing it together, so very few people have seen any of it. There\u0026rsquo;s a story about a train, a story about a house, a story about a sniper and a waitress in a coffee shop in the north end of Chicago. Maybe, one of these days, I\u0026rsquo;ll finish one of these. But in the meantime, there\u0026rsquo;s this.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Volksinitiative Lärmschutz Grindel (or, Why I Can’t Write Fiction)"},{"content":"ICANN will hold a press conference in Miami on Thursday, presumably announcing the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool. This is when 102/8, 103/8, 104/8, 179/8, and 185/8 — each a block of 16 million addresses — will be handed out to the regional registries (RIRs), thereby ending the allocation of IPv4 address space at the first level of delegation.\nI\u0026rsquo;m going to go ahead and predict right now that almost every journalist covering this event will get something subtle but essential wrong, and that the result will be fifteen minutes of panic followed by business as usual for everyone except those who understand the minutia of IP address allocation policy until we start seeing pressure at the lower levels of delegation.\nAs a disclaimer, I\u0026rsquo;m not actually one of those people who understands the minutia of IP address allocation policy, but you\u0026rsquo;re reading this on the Internet, so you\u0026rsquo;ve already proven yourself willing to believe things you read from random people who have no credibility whatsoever, and you certainly can\u0026rsquo;t do any worse with me than with the thirty-second blurb you might hear about this on your favorite cable news noisebox. So with that in mind, here\u0026rsquo;s what this actually means:\nIP addresses are used to identify computers on a network, and are needed to route packets from one machine to another through the Internet. IP address space is allocated from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) in blocks. For IPv4, these are /8s, which correspond to the first number in an IPv4 address and cover about 16 million addresses. (We say, for example, that 82.1.2.3 is in 82/8.) There are five RIRs organized (roughly) on continental boundaries. ARIN covers North America, RIPE covers Europe and the Middle East, APNIC the Asia-Pacific region and Australia, LACNIC Latin America, and AfriNIC Africa. This allocation is the first level of delegation, and is the level at which we\u0026rsquo;ll run out of IPv4 addresses this week.\nEach of these RIRs maintains a pool of unassigned space within the /8s it has been allocated, and assigns smaller blocks out of this space on valid request from one of its members. These are generally either large ISPs or national-level registries. This assignment is the second level of delegation.\nIf you get your Internet access (and therefore, your IPv4 address) from a giant ISP (say, Comcast in the US, Swisscom here) with a direct assignment, you are at the third level of delegation: your ISP either hands you a static address, which is registered (long-term) to your account, or a address out of an active pool of dynamically allocatable addresses. The latter are usually cheaper, because they allow the ISP to serve more customers with fewer addresses — you don\u0026rsquo;t need an address when your connection isn\u0026rsquo;t up.\nIf you get your Internet access from a smaller ISP, you are at the fourth or fifth level of delegation. Your ISP gets its addresses from a bigger ISP, which might in turn get it from a national registry, and then gives one of them to you. In any case, the exhaustion of the free pool will almost certainly not mean your ISP will take your current address away.\nUntil Thursday, the way things have worked is when an RIR had a sufficiently small portion of its current free /8 available for assignment, it would go to IANA to get a new one. The process was driven, bottom up, by the demand from the members, which was in turn driven by demand from their customers.\nWhy isn\u0026rsquo;t the sky falling?\nThe internet is not \u0026ldquo;out of space\u0026rdquo; because after the assignment Thursday, each of the RIRs will still have a fair amount of space to hand out, as will, presumably, their customers. Only the first level of delegation is completed. APNIC, for example, foresees business as usual for another six months. The RIRs will continue to make assignments out of their free pools until these get close to exhaustion, while in one way or another preferring IPv6 for new assignments.\nHow do we fix the problem?\nMove to IPv6, which was specified more than a decade ago to address precisely the situation we\u0026rsquo;re in today. Chances are good your computer supports IPv6. You may even be running IPv6 right now without even knowing it (many of the things that \u0026ldquo;just work\u0026rdquo; on local networks of Macs over Rendezvous use IPv6, for example).\nUnfortunately, the transition increases provider costs, while only serious geeks to date have been interested in paying for IPv6 connectivity, so rollout at the network level has fallen way behind. There are lots of little IPv6 networks out there, but relatively few of them are connected to the IPv6 Internet. There are also still genuine open questions as to the best method for transitioning all the various applications that make up what most non-engineers think of as The Internet (that is, the bit with the cat videos and pornography) from an all IPv4-world to an IPv6 world with a long period of coexistence. This is the part I know nothing about, so I\u0026rsquo;ll stay quiet on this point. Y\u0026rsquo;all know where Wikipedia is.\nMore unfortunately, unless you\u0026rsquo;re a network operator or a big customer, you\u0026rsquo;re pretty much just along for the ride. Astute readers will note that, in the link above, there\u0026rsquo;s basically no advice for J. Random Cablecom Customer.\nFurthermore, it should be noted that IPv4 address exhaustion affects new providers of address space disproportionately. Holders of existing address assignments can continue implementing various tricks (NAT, dynamic addressing, virtualization and consolidation of applications, and so on) to stretch their existing assignments, while receivers of new addresses will get relatively few IPv4 addresses, or even only IPv6 addresses, and will have to put up with transition technologies to reach sites on the Internet that are only IPv4-reachable. This sets up an perverse incentive for large existing operators to delay IPv6 rollout, as their existing IPv4 allocations will increasingly represent a competitive advantage over new entrants.\nIt would be really nice if Thursday\u0026rsquo;s press conference was an announcement of something we don\u0026rsquo;t already know, say, that a bunch of legacy space holders (take a look toward the top of the list here; these are mainly big companies and military networks who got Internet addresses before anyone outside the American academic-military-industrial complex knew what the Internet was) had decided to hand back piles of IPv4 space to help address scarcity during the IPv6 transition, or, more realistically, that IANA had found some sort of magical IPv6-transition unicorn in while it was on a walk in the forest. Failing that, it\u0026rsquo;s interesting times for network operations geeks. But, as yet, the internet is not \u0026ldquo;full\u0026rdquo;.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/02/the-end-of-the-free-pool/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eICANN will hold a \u003ca href=\"http://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/leading-global-internet-groups-make-significant-announcement-about-the-status-of-the-ipv4-address-pool\"\u003epress conference\u003c/a\u003e in Miami on Thursday, presumably announcing the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 \u003ca href=\"http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml\"\u003eaddress pool\u003c/a\u003e. This is when 102/8, 103/8, 104/8, 179/8, and 185/8 — each a block of 16 million addresses — will be handed out to the regional registries (RIRs), thereby ending the allocation of IPv4 address space at the first level of delegation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m going to go ahead and predict right now that almost every journalist covering this event will get something subtle but essential wrong, and that the result will be fifteen minutes of panic followed by business as usual for everyone except those who understand the minutia of IP address allocation policy until we start seeing pressure at the lower levels of delegation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs a disclaimer, I\u0026rsquo;m not actually one of those people who understands the minutia of IP address allocation policy, but you\u0026rsquo;re reading this on the Internet, so you\u0026rsquo;ve already proven yourself willing to believe things you read from random people who have no credibility whatsoever, and you certainly can\u0026rsquo;t do any worse with me than with the thirty-second blurb you might hear about this on your favorite cable news noisebox. So with that in mind, here\u0026rsquo;s what this actually means:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The End of the Free Pool"},{"content":"Nope, this isn\u0026rsquo;t about web privacy.\nMy old blog had a tag called \u0026ldquo;Royale mit Käse\u0026rdquo;, on the little differences between Switzerland and America. One of the bigger little differences is the sweetness of dessert.\nMy mom once sent me a care package full of Mrs. Fields cookies (\u0026ldquo;trans-fats are proof that there is a God, he loves us, and he wants us to be insanely fat\u0026rdquo;) with the approximate energy density of a neutron star; these would induce a temporary diabetic coma in the average Swiss person.\nOn the other hand, for dessert one night this weekend, we had something more traditional, which as near as I can tell was basically grits with extra gluten and a pinch of sugar. Two scoops of ice cream on top of that and I could barely taste it, which made it just about tolerable.\nAfter a couple of years here, my palate\u0026rsquo;s definitely leaning somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Start-with-a-quarter-pound-of-butter recipes just don\u0026rsquo;t work any more. So without further ado I present my adjusted-for-Switzerland portable cookie recipe. This basically started as the average of a few American sugar-cookies-from-scratch recipes I found on the web, with the sugar and butter scaled way back.\nFirst, cream together:\n70g butter 140g sugar 15g vanilla sugar 1 egg pinch salt At this point, you can layer a flavor on top of the sugar base. If you want chocolate chunk cookies, smash a bar of Cailler Dark with a hammer after eating a couple of squares for yourself, and cream the powder and chunks in. For lime cookies, grate the peel of one lime, then squeeze in the juice for good measure. I\u0026rsquo;ve made cinnamon sugar cookies with this base once, but they weren\u0026rsquo;t very good so I\u0026rsquo;ll leave the proportions as an exercise for the reader.\nNow mix the following together:\n250g flour 8g baking powder and add that to the sugar-butter-egg-hammered-chocolate a little bit at a time. You probably won\u0026rsquo;t use all of it. But you might need a little more flour. You know you\u0026rsquo;re done when you can form the dough into a ball without too much sticking to your hands. Stick this ball in a bowl into the fridge for a while. Might want to cover it unless you want cookies that taste like your fridge.\nPreheat the oven to 200°C, place ~2 cm diameter balls of dough on a piece of baking paper on a baking sheet. Bake ~8-10 min, until they\u0026rsquo;re done enough for you. This makes more than a dozen, less than two. Just multiply or divide the numbers as appropriate for more, or fewer, though keep in mind non-integer numbers of eggs can be tricky. Hm, I suppose this makes these scalable portable cookies, as well, doesn\u0026rsquo;t it?\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/01/portable-cookies/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eNope, this isn\u0026rsquo;t about web privacy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy old blog had a tag called \u0026ldquo;Royale mit Käse\u0026rdquo;, on the little differences between Switzerland and America. One of the bigger little differences is the sweetness of dessert.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMy mom once sent me a care package full of Mrs. Fields cookies (\u0026ldquo;trans-fats are proof that there is a God, he loves us, and he wants us to be insanely fat\u0026rdquo;) with the approximate energy density of a neutron star; these would induce a temporary diabetic coma in the average Swiss person.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn the other hand, for dessert one night this weekend, we had something more traditional, which as near as I can tell was basically grits with extra gluten and a pinch of sugar. Two scoops of ice cream on top of that and I could barely taste it, which made it just about tolerable.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter a couple of years here, my palate\u0026rsquo;s definitely leaning somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Start-with-a-quarter-pound-of-butter recipes just don\u0026rsquo;t work any more. So without further ado I present my adjusted-for-Switzerland portable cookie recipe. This basically started as the average of a few American sugar-cookies-from-scratch recipes I found on the web, with the sugar and butter scaled way back.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Portable Cookies"},{"content":"Welcome to trammell.ch, yet another in a long line of periodically updated versions of my web presence. This is all somewhat under construction, as is everything, always.\nThe old weblog, My Ridiculously Circuitious Plan, has been incorporated into the archives here (as of December 2013).\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2011/01/gruezi-yall/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWelcome to trammell.ch, yet another in a long line of periodically updated versions of my web presence. This is all somewhat under construction, as is everything, always.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe old weblog, \u003ca href=\"https://ridiculouslycircuitous.blogspot.ch\"\u003eMy Ridiculously Circuitious Plan\u003c/a\u003e, has been incorporated into the archives here (as of December 2013).\u003c/p\u003e","title":"grüezi, y’all"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/yaf-lisa-2010/","summary":"","title":"YAF, Yet Another Flowmeter"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/anon-ccr-2010/","summary":"","title":"The Role of Network Trace Anonymization Under Attack"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc5655/","summary":"","title":"Specification of the IPFIX File Format"},{"content":"The tenor of the health-care slapfight (I\u0026rsquo;ll not dignify it with the word debate) in the United States of late is\u0026hellip; well, frankly, embarrassing. Y\u0026rsquo;all are really making yourselves look bad. Death panels? Really? When a walking vapidity whose prime qualification for the job is that she can see Russia from her house gets up on the tee-vee and starts improvising science fiction so terrible that even L. Ron Hubbard wouldn\u0026rsquo;t stick his name on it, you do what the rest of us do, and you ignore it.\n[People](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html) who have a bigger audience than I do (but who, alas, don't know that the Swiss don't wear lederhosen, or that most of the cheese here is relatively hole-poor) have already drawn the parallel between the American system and the Swiss one, and wondered why you can't reap the benefits of moving to a more Swiss-style system. Well, let's have a look. The main differences I've noticed between the Swiss health-care system and the American trainwreck are: Health insurance is mandatory; when you register your residence (which you must do within 8 days of moving to a new city or district), they give you 45 days to select a carrier, sign up, and send proof of insurance to the district. If you can't pay, the government subsidizes you. Consequently, you can buy insurance retroactively. I purchased coverage from 1 June 2008 on about 20 June; had I had any claims during that time, they would have been paid. Health insurance carriers must accept any patient, cannot deny coverage for \"pre-existing conditions\", and have a relatively limited set of variables on which they can set rates. Health insurance is paid directly by the patient, who pays 100% of the premium. The company doesn't have anything to do with it. For me, here, this works out that I pay about twice as much out of pocket every month, but that the total cost is about half what it was, compared to UPMC in Pittsburgh. The particulars of my coverage here are about equivalent. Health insurance covers those things insurance generally does, not purely elective (e.g. cosmetic surgery) or routine (e.g. dental cleaning) things. I'm told health insurance usually operates on a reimbursement basis: you pay the doctor, the insurance pays you. However, all my experience with my carrier so far has the doctor or hospital billing the insurance company, and the insurance company billing me for anything under the deductible. In any case, I see the bills, and the bills are the same regardless of who you have coverage through. Medical expenses incurred as a result of an accident are handled by a separate accident insurance system, paid by the employer. This accident insurance covers you whether or not you were at work or doing something work-related at the time. Accident insurance premiums are \"pre-tax\", and are shown on your pay stub. I'm not sure who covers accident insurance for the unemployed; I'm guessing it's the city's or district's responsibility. Testing and treatment seem to work differently. At least in my experience, they're much slower than American doctors to prescribe antibiotics or advanced diagnostics, and somewhat more willing to let you heal, under supervision. I attribute this to relatively less angst over malpractice lawsuits, which comes from a less litigious culture in general. Billing and care are handled completely separately; this allows the medical people to focus on caring for the patient, not shaking them upside down waiting for a wallet to fall out. I walked out of the emergency room after a bicycle accident in July (resulting in a thankfully not-broken-but-badly-sprained left hand), without having to convince anyone I would pay them. It felt odd. I'm not sure you could run this system with American patients. First, Americans like suing their doctors when things go wrong much more than Swiss do. It's [not clear](http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/08/06/reduce-the-high-cost-of-medical-malpractice/) whether this makes things significantly more costly in the first order; most of the effects (diagnostic and ultimately-unnecessary treatment costs) are second order, and these are probably much more significant. Of course, one of the reasons Americans like suing their doctors is that when something goes wrong, it usually goes wrong in some expensive way, and the insurance company sure as hell won't help you out; the Swiss are more calm in part because they know the system will do a reasonable job of taking care of them if something does happen. But litigation is a part of American culture in a way that it isn't part of Swiss culture. Second, Americans and Swiss have rather different ideas on end-of-life care. Contrast Terri Schaivo, who was basically kept alive by executive order, with [Dignitas](http://www.dignitas.ch/), where people from all over Europe who might die painfully someday in the future fly for legally assisted suicide. (Okay, it's more complicated than that; I've not talked to an actual Swiss person who's completely comfortable with what Dignitas does, but they do what they do without the Federal Council sending the Swiss Army to force feeding tubes into people, which is my point.) A Swiss person who is likely to live out the last few days of a terminal illness in a morphine haze would be kept alive for a few expensive and excruciatingly painful weeks in an American hospital. Third, Swiss are healthier. They eat somewhat less (but not necessarily healthier — this place is serious about its sausage and ice cream, though, ah, not at the same time) and exercise a lot more, both in the order of the day and for fun. Zürich, at least, can be crossed on foot in a little over an hour, is excellent for bicycling as long as you pay proper attention to the tram tracks, has ridiculously usable public transit, and is absolute murder to drive in. Transport alone knocks five kilos off the average. And there are lots of lakes to swim in and mountains to climb and ski down. Additional costs in airlifts and broken bones (which you see a lot of; the trams are packed with crutches in April and May) are more than offset by the savings of an entire generation not sitting out the three-month heart-disease endgame in a hospital. The real problem, of course, is that the United States is saddled with a giant health-finance industry that eats kittens, shits evil, owns your senator, and employs your neighbors. Monoliths with money, power, no sense of ethics, and a bunch of normal people who you kind of like on the payroll are tedious to get rid of. But let's sidestep that for a moment, and pretend we can fix things, shall we? Now, those of you who know me know I'm not a free market fundamentalist by any means. But I have to say that from the ground here, it appears that the core advantage of the Swiss system is alignment, in the form of choice. This element is missing from the American public health insurance system (i.e., Medicare), the American private health-finance industry (i.e., the aforementioned evil-shitting kitten-eaters), and everything I've read about what's going to come out of this particular partisan health care reform sausage-factory. In Switzerland, I pay for my insurance. I am free to change my insurance carrier if my insurance carrier does not please me, without changing doctors (or worse, jobs); consequently, they're actually quite pleasant to deal with. I pay my doctor, and am free to change my doctor as well, without changing insurance carriers. So doctors' offices are pretty pleasant to deal with, too (of course, this may have something to do with the fact that the front office's main job isn't yelling at insurance-company back-office people all day). In Switzerland, the patient (me) and the payer (me) have aligned interests (at least, assuming I don't have multiple personality disorder): in this case, getting well without getting broke. Add in good access to information to make informed decisions (I see the bills) and this is one of those depressingly rare situations in which the free market actually does what it says on the tin. In the dystopian death-panel future that has the American right whipping its minions into showing up at health care rallies [packing heat](http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/cnn-assault-rifles-spied-openly-phoenix-ra), of course, interests are misaligned: you (the patient) want to get well, and some GS-3 in a giant nameless government agency (the payer) just wants to go home. (Actually, in the dystopian death-panel future, that GS-3 is actively trying to kill you, because you're the only person who realizes the [truth](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories), that the President is a Kenyan-built, Indonesian-programmed cyborg sent from an even more dystopian future to enslave the American people in Teh Soshalizum, but in the dystopian death-panel future, you need to adjust your tinfoil hat.) This misalignment is the core of the problem with the current system, too: the patient, who wants to get well without getting broke, has no information and no mechanism by which to use that information to make an informed choice. The payers all have different interests. Medicare: GS-3 indifference, your employer: cost control, your insurance company: making enough sweet, sweet cash to fuel the [private jet](http://djmrswhite.livejournal.com/415594.html) for a weekend of kitten-eating in the Caymans. Sadly, though, it's all about a bunch of Reaganists who believe Government Is Evil using the noise machine to win the slapfight versus the indignance of what's left of the Left at the injustice of leaving ten percent of people uninsured and more liable to fall into medical bankruptcy. Alignment isn't even part of the discussion, probably because it's too simple and not profitable enough. Without proper alignment, reform won't work. Personally, I've given up hope for this time around; maybe when it hits the agenda again in 2025, you'll have figured this out. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2009/08/misaligned/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe tenor of the health-care slapfight \u003cspan\u003e(I\u0026rsquo;ll not dignify it with the word debate)\u003c/span\u003e in the United States of late is\u0026hellip; well, frankly, embarrassing. Y\u0026rsquo;all are really making yourselves look bad. Death panels? Really? When a walking vapidity whose prime qualification for the job is that she can see Russia from her house gets up on the tee-vee and starts improvising science fiction so terrible that even \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu\"\u003eL. Ron Hubbard\u003c/a\u003e wouldn\u0026rsquo;t stick his name on it, you do what the rest of us do, and you \u003cem\u003eignore it\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Misaligned"},{"content":"U+1DE7 COMBINING STACK OF DIAERESIS FALLING RIGHT, used primarily for native English speakers trying to pronounce Swiss German.\n(Yes, I know it's been forever. Stand by.) ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2009/07/unicode-jokes/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/wp/2009/07/ha2.png\"\u003e\u003cimg class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1176\" src=\"/wp/2009/07/ha2.png\" alt=\"ha2\" width=\"155\" height=\"169\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003eU+1DE7 COMBINING STACK OF DIAERESIS FALLING RIGHT, used primarily for native English speakers trying to pronounce Swiss German.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  (Yes, I know it's been forever. Stand by.)\n\u003c/div\u003e","title":"Unicode jokes"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc5610/","summary":"","title":"Exporting Type Information for IPFIX Information Elements"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/weis-2010/","summary":"","title":"Modelling the Security Ecosystem - The Dynamics of (In)Security"},{"content":"Happy New Year, all! 2009\u0026rsquo;s turning out to be a good one. So far, I\u0026rsquo;ve learned how not to play the digiridoo and how not to ski. At this rate, I\u0026rsquo;ll have learned how not to do about 240 new things by the time the year\u0026rsquo;s out.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2009/01/welcome-to-2009/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHappy New Year, all! 2009\u0026rsquo;s turning out to be a good one. So far, I\u0026rsquo;ve learned how not to play the digiridoo and how not to ski. At this rate, I\u0026rsquo;ll have learned how not to do about 240 new things by the time the year\u0026rsquo;s out.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Welcome to 2009"},{"content":"So, I apparently now how to speak German now, at least a bit. Finished the first course this week, passed the final, did quite well aside from the fact I thought that \u0026ldquo;frühstücken\u0026rdquo; (to breakfast) was separable (\u0026ldquo;Ich stücke heute nicht früh.\u0026rdquo;) which it isn\u0026rsquo;t (\u0026ldquo;Ich frühstücke heute nicht.\u0026rdquo;) This means \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t eat breakfast today,\u0026rdquo; which, depending on your definition of \u0026ldquo;breakfast\u0026rdquo; and what time of day it is right now, may or may not actually be true. I wasn't the only person to make this mistake, as the general rule is verb prefixes are separable if they are themselves German words, which \"früh\" (\"early\") clearly is. After some discussion we've decided either 1. that we're going to avoid \"frühstücken\" as a verb entirely (\"Heute habe ich das Frühstück nicht gegessen\") or 2. be cocky beginning-German students and take back \"wir stücken früh\". Languages, after all, are changed only by single coinages by single innovators, and if the English loanverb \"downloaden\" (\"ich loade etwas down\") is separable, then dammit, so is frühstücken. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/12/wir-stucken-fruh/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSo, I apparently now how to speak German now, at least a bit. Finished the first course this week, passed the final, did quite well aside from the fact I thought that \u0026ldquo;frühstücken\u0026rdquo; (to breakfast) was separable (\u0026ldquo;Ich stücke heute nicht früh.\u0026rdquo;) which it isn\u0026rsquo;t (\u0026ldquo;Ich frühstücke heute nicht.\u0026rdquo;) This means \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t eat breakfast today,\u0026rdquo; which, depending on your definition of \u0026ldquo;breakfast\u0026rdquo; and what time of day it is right now, may or may not actually be true. \u003c/p\u003e","title":"Wir stücken früh"},{"content":"One advantage of the fact the sun doesn\u0026rsquo;t rise \u0026rsquo;til eight in the morning here these days is you can drag out of bed at the usual time and see something like this without any effort.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/12/an-alpine-sunrise/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOne advantage of the fact the sun doesn\u0026rsquo;t rise \u0026rsquo;til eight in the morning here these days is you can drag out of bed at the usual time and see something like this without any effort.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"An Alpine Sunrise"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s two on a Sunday morning, and I\u0026rsquo;m coming up on the last twenty-four hours of my first six months in Switzerland. I\u0026rsquo;ve just rotated the flat (i.e. moved nearly all the furniture a hundred eighty degrees along the outside wall of the living room) on the suggestion of a friend about a month ago and I have to say she was right, it\u0026rsquo;s much better this way.\nHalf a year ago I stepped off an airplane and looking back I marvel at how clueless I was, which feels good until I realize I'll most probably be able to say the same thing about myself now in another half a year. Indeed this is probably a sign I'm not wasting my time. In the world outside, not that much has changed it seems. The global economy collapsed, sure, but the real damage had already been done so I can't really count that as a change. And of course, speaking of Change, Barack Obama has become President-Elect of the United States; indeed this would have been the subject of a deeper post on this very blog entitled \"Four Eleven Changed Everything\" had I been able to come up with anything more to say than the title. And in the world inside, I've learned a few important things. First and foremost would have to be that life is in essence unpredictable, or at least it is unpredictable by me. Maybe the rest of you are really good at filling in the blanks ahead of time, but almost every detail of the last half of 2008 has come to me as a complete and total surprise. Trying to fill in a deeper picture than that may be fun and certainly passes the time, but should be labeled for entertainment purposes only. Despite the downs of the roller-coaster ride it's been, the ups have been immeasurably more than worth it, and I still look out the window occasionally and can't quite believe I've made it here. This should finally clear shortly, I hope, as I need to get the dazed look out of my eyes at some point so I can continue on with the business of living here and choosing what, precisely, that means for me. There's more I'm sure, but I can't express it in any but the most impossibly trite greeting card language at the moment (what do you want, it's two in the morning?) and I have a train to catch soon. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/11/more-ridiculously-circuitous-is-no-plan-at-all/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s two on a Sunday morning, and I\u0026rsquo;m coming up on the last twenty-four hours of my first six months in Switzerland. I\u0026rsquo;ve just rotated the flat (i.e. moved nearly all the furniture a hundred eighty degrees along the outside wall of the living room) on the suggestion of a friend about a month ago and I have to say she was right, it\u0026rsquo;s much better this way.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"More Ridiculously Circuitous is No Plan at All"},{"content":"The last month or so has been a bit of a whirlwind. There\u0026rsquo;s the travel: I finally used the Halbtax card I bought to escape the rain in June and hopped a train to Neuchâtel, then back for a day before business in Valbonne (via Nice, dinner in Cannes), after which I was back in town for a long weekend before flying back out to Vienna, then back here for a week and a bit before flying next Tuesday to San Diego for my stepsister\u0026rsquo;s wedding. There\u0026rsquo;s the work: a document I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on since I started here went out Friday, and I spent the weekend mostly clearing the Things I Said I\u0026rsquo;d Do Before Going To San Diego deck. There\u0026rsquo;s the sport: Mel showed me a nice short loop around the lake easily doable in two and a half hours with a relaxing three-franc boat ride in the middle, and I\u0026rsquo;m a wall climber again, this time for real because I\u0026rsquo;m in better shape and frankly, it\u0026rsquo;s a better wall. There\u0026rsquo;s the learning: classes started Thursday, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been meeting with a couple of native Swiss Germans relatively frequently to speak German poorly. (By which I mean I speak German poorly. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure they know what they\u0026rsquo;re doing. I can\u0026rsquo;t tell, of course, because I speak German poorly.) There\u0026rsquo;s the furniture shopping: three trips to Dietlikon in the past month, with at least one coming up next, and the apartment\u0026rsquo;s about 50% done (next up: art). And there\u0026rsquo;s the fun: the month-long I Live Here Now and Finally party which is just now starting to slow down, exploring Zurich with friends new and old, finding cheap(ish) good Indian food, good Swiss food, good South African food (mmmm that\u0026rsquo;s good gnu), freaky good vegetarian everything, bars with good live Swiss rock, bars with tweaky DJs, and the old favorite biweekly expat drink-a-thon at the Talacker (always highly recommended before a 6am flight to a 9am meeting). This will probably be the only post for this month; stay tuned for rambling posts in October on the nature of safety in Switzerland, the nature of winter in Switzerland, probably some random whining about Sarah Palin and Ben Bernanke, and what it was like coming back to the United States for a week after four months away. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/09/in-which-your-correspondent-suddenly-remembers-he-has-a-blog/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe last month or so has been a bit of a whirlwind. There\u0026rsquo;s the travel: I finally used the \u003ca href=\"http://mct.sbb.ch/mct/en/reisemarkt/abonnemente/halbtax.htm\"\u003eHalbtax\u003c/a\u003e card I bought to escape the rain in June and hopped a train to Neuchâtel, then back for a day before business in Valbonne (via Nice, dinner in Cannes), after which I was back in town for a long weekend before flying back out to Vienna, then back here for a week and a bit before flying next Tuesday to San Diego for my stepsister\u0026rsquo;s wedding. There\u0026rsquo;s the work: a document I\u0026rsquo;ve been working on since I started here went out Friday, and I spent the weekend mostly clearing the Things I Said I\u0026rsquo;d Do Before Going To San Diego deck. There\u0026rsquo;s the sport: Mel showed me a nice short loop around the lake easily doable in two and a half hours with a relaxing \u003ca href=\"http://www.faehre.ch/\"\u003ethree-franc boat ride\u003c/a\u003e in the middle, and I\u0026rsquo;m a wall climber again, this time for real because I\u0026rsquo;m in better shape and frankly, it\u0026rsquo;s a \u003ca href=\"http://gaswerk.kletterzentrum.com/home.php\"\u003ebetter wall\u003c/a\u003e. There\u0026rsquo;s the learning: classes started Thursday, and I\u0026rsquo;ve been meeting with a couple of native Swiss Germans relatively frequently to speak German poorly. \u003cspan\u003e(By which I mean I speak German poorly. I\u0026rsquo;m pretty sure they know what they\u0026rsquo;re doing. I can\u0026rsquo;t tell, of course, because I speak German poorly.)\u003c/span\u003e There\u0026rsquo;s the furniture shopping: three trips to Dietlikon in the past month, with at least one coming up next, and the apartment\u0026rsquo;s about 50% done (next up: art). And there\u0026rsquo;s the fun: the month-long I Live Here Now and Finally party which is just now starting to slow down, exploring Zurich with friends new and old, finding cheap(ish) good Indian food, good Swiss food, good South African food (mmmm that\u0026rsquo;s good gnu), freaky good vegetarian everything, bars with good live \u003ca href=\"http://www.admiraljamest.com/home.html\"\u003eSwiss rock\u003c/a\u003e, bars with tweaky DJs, and the old favorite biweekly expat drink-a-thon at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.talacker41.ch/\"\u003eTalacker\u003c/a\u003e (always highly recommended before a 6am flight to a 9am meeting). \u003c/p\u003e","title":"In Which Your Correspondent Suddenly Remembers He Has a Blog"},{"content":"The east-southeast view from the balcony, 10 August 2008, showing (bottom to top) the Hardturmbrücke railway bridge over the Limmat, most of Züri-West, the old city (clustered mainly behind the big smokestack), the Zürichberg (green hill on the left), the Albis and the southwestern shore of the lake (that\u0026rsquo;s Horgen or Thalwil in the right-center distance, I think), and the Alps.\n","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/08/as-promised/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe east-southeast view from the balcony, 10 August 2008, showing (bottom to top) the Hardturmbrücke railway bridge over the Limmat, most of Züri-West, the old city (clustered mainly behind the big smokestack), the Zürichberg (green hill on the left), the Albis and the  southwestern shore of the lake (that\u0026rsquo;s Horgen or Thalwil in the right-center distance, I think), and the Alps.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"As Promised"},{"content":"I had about half an hour to kill this afternoon in the neighborhood of the university, so I decided to take this week\u0026rsquo;s Economist out to the Polyterrasse, a giant balcony behind the main building of ETH with a great, close-up view of the center of the city. I went out to one of the benches toward the corner (the better for the view though perhaps not for the glare of the sun). These benches are large wooden constructions, about four meters long and a meter and a half wide, with a rounded wooden back sticking up out of one side of the seat for two meters. This has the effect of dividing each bench into three sections: a couple of seats facing one direction, a couple of seats facing the opposite direction, back-to-back, and to the side a large flat space for laying down and reading, indeed, even sunning oneself if the weather is cooperative.\nThat's when it hit me. This city is full of benches. At the tram stops. Along the lakefront. Along the Limmat. On the Polyterrasse. And they are all flat. No spurious armrests. No ingenious uncomfortability. I mean, I'd gotten used to the fact that there are virtually no homeless people here, or at least, no people sleeping on the streets, except the drunks holding up the trees after a Euro match or Street Parade. But it had never occurred to me that when you have a place for everyone to sleep, you can build the benches with something other than discouraging sleeping in mind. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/08/its-the-little-differences-really-part-two/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI had about half an hour to kill this afternoon in the neighborhood of the university, so I decided to take this week\u0026rsquo;s Economist out to the Polyterrasse, a giant balcony behind the main building of ETH with a great, close-up view of the center of the city. I went out to one of the benches toward the corner (the better for the view though perhaps not for the glare of the sun). These benches are large wooden constructions, about four meters long and a meter and a half wide, with a rounded wooden back sticking up out of one side of the seat for two meters. This has the effect of dividing each bench into three sections: a couple of seats facing one direction, a couple of seats facing the opposite direction, back-to-back, and to the side a large flat space for laying down and reading, indeed, even sunning oneself if the weather is cooperative.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"It’s The Little Differences, Really, Part Two"},{"content":"The apartment is coming together, slowly. While shedding the cloud of stuff that had orbited me in Pittsburgh was an almost religiously therapeutic experience which I would recommend wholeheartedly to all, it turns out that clothes irons, cooking pots, and mops are all kind of useful. So I\u0026rsquo;m picking up needful things one tramload and Saturday afternoon shopping trip at a time. Next up: Sihlcity. Again.\nThe first thing I did on moving in though, and I think by far the most productive in terms of return on effort, was applying faux wood grain shelf paper to the shelves in my built-in bedroom closets. The maniacal application of shelf paper – Schrankpapier should you need to buy any in Zürich without resorting to interpretive dance, in which the concept of shelf paper is difficult to express; I speak from experience – to each and every horizontal surface is one of those thankfully lost arts practiced only by our grandmothers, so there could be only one reason beyond some sort of misguided transgenerational cultural exchange for me to instruct myself in its dark secrets: that whatever the shelf paper was pressed into service to cover was far, far worse. So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I give you the former appearance of my bedroom shelves, a pattern which can only accurately be described as the Color of Hell. (And now, in the interests of maintaining some sort of universal balance between good and evil, here is a cute picture of a duck) ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/08/the-color-of-hell/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe apartment is coming together, slowly. While shedding the cloud of stuff that had orbited me in Pittsburgh was an almost religiously therapeutic experience which I would recommend wholeheartedly to all, it turns out that clothes irons, cooking pots, and mops are all kind of useful. So I\u0026rsquo;m picking up needful things one tramload and Saturday afternoon shopping trip at a time. Next up: \u003ca href=\"http://www.sihlcity.ch/\"\u003eSihlcity\u003c/a\u003e. Again.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Color of Hell"},{"content":"I was sitting on the balcony last night, my ears recovering from the quite loud, somewhat interesting, yet ultimately disappointingly clubby beats of my brief Bellerive-to-Mythenquai flirtation with Streetparade, registering to vote in the November U.S. presidential election, when I noticed a spider scurrying along my right leg, building a web over the folds in the fabric of my still-slightly-too-baggy jeans.\nI came out this morning, to have a blood orange juice – and only a blood orange juice as I still need to purchase a coffee machine – and a look at the Alps. My balcony table and chairs – until next Monday the only chairs I own; I spend a lot of time on the balcony – were completely covered in spiderwebs, an elaborate construction winding from the door to the near chair, connecting the table to the wall to the window frame via the balcony wall, then across the far chair and around the side of the building to the opposite window frame. It was so impressive that I admired it for about three whole seconds before clearing it with more than a few waves of the hand and having a seat. There are a lot of spiders here. This is probably a consequence of simple economics, because there is a lot of spider food here as well. Perhaps owing to the fact that the Limmat is less than a hundred meters downhill, there are quite a few moths. So many so that walking home along the Klosterfahrweg along the north shore of the river at dusk, the streetlights seem almost to mere metallic stalks frantically orbited by miniscule points of luminosity. So many so that I've learned to keep the lights off when opening the windows after dark to cool the flat down. Otherwise spontaneous generation of moths buzzing around inside the paper lanterns results. In other news, it turns out that I am indeed a legal resident of Pennsylvania for electoral purposes, and will be as long as I live abroad without moving back to the United States. So my vote will be worth something in the presidential election, or at the very least, it will be an Allegheny County election official disregarding, disqualifying, or misplacing my absentee ballot rather than a Shelby County one. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/08/the-hills-are-alive-with-the-sound-of-spiders/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI was sitting on the balcony last night, my ears recovering from the quite loud, somewhat interesting, yet ultimately disappointingly clubby beats of my brief Bellerive-to-Mythenquai flirtation with \u003ca href=\"http://www.streetparade.ch/\"\u003eStreetparade\u003c/a\u003e, registering to vote in the November U.S. presidential election, when I noticed a spider scurrying along my right leg, building a web over the folds in the fabric of my still-slightly-too-baggy jeans.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Spiders"},{"content":"From the twenty-third of March, two thousand five to the fifth of August, two thousand eight: my one thousand, two hundred thirty-one day tenure as a homeowner ended yesterday with a wire transfer, a HUD-1 form via fax, and a closing in Erie, Pennsylvania. The new owners got an amazing deal, as they should in the current market. I\u0026rsquo;m happy with my end of it as I\u0026rsquo;m no longer holding onto a debt denominated in a currency I want nothing to do with for a while yet secured by an asset in a city I have no particular desire to ever return to. So it\u0026rsquo;s what we call a win-win, then.\nAn interesting footnote here is that the whole experience was bracketed by meetings of the IETF. I spent a fair amount of time during the 62nd meeting in Minneapolis working out the details of the purchase, and of course it was at the 72nd in Dublin last week that I signed the bulk of my half of the paperwork for the sale. Although, to be fair, this is probably simply indicative of the fact that I do so much travel for work that such trips make a convenient set of reasonably evenly spaced signposts by which to remember what happened when. In other news I'm settling in a bit more. I have Internet access at the flat now, which should not be worth mentioning, but is, because I am a geek. I'm a long way from my sysadmin days, three lifetimes ago in Atlanta. Me-as-a-sysadmin would not have taken thirty minutes of screwing around with the cable modems to realize that the reason Cablecom had shipped me two was that one was for the phone and one was for the Internet, and that no amount of coaxing would get the phone one (alas, the first one I unpacked) to give me an IP address. Although me-as-a-standards-geek would point out that they probably also SHOULD have clearly labeled each, or at least a little note in the box explaining the situation. Ah well. We'll call it another universal: the standard of cable company customer service is invariant with respect to culture. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/08/my-ridiculously-circuitous-plan-is-three-fifths-complete/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFrom the twenty-third of March, two thousand five to the fifth of August, two thousand eight: my one thousand, two hundred thirty-one day tenure as a homeowner ended yesterday with a wire transfer, a HUD-1 form via fax, and a closing in Erie, Pennsylvania. The new owners got an amazing deal, as they should in the current market. I\u0026rsquo;m happy with my end of it as I\u0026rsquo;m no longer holding onto a debt denominated in a currency I want nothing to do with for a while yet secured by an asset in a city I have no particular desire to ever return to. So it\u0026rsquo;s what we call a win-win, then.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"My Ridiculously Circuitous Plan is Three-Fifths Complete"},{"content":"Have just returned from Ireland. I had a chance to see a little of the city of Dublin, wandering about a bit through the Temple Bar – Trinity College – Grafton Street triangle last Sunday afternoon, and again on Tuesday; the weather, I take it from every cabbie who drove me around here that we really, really lucked out on the weather. Summers there are generally\u0026hellip; wet.\nArrival was a bit of a shock. After two months in Zurich, the differences between Ireland (or rather, I should say the area around Dublin) and the United States seemed so minimal as to be disorienting. Okay, so all of the signs are in English as are far more of the overheard conversations, but it's more than that. The architecture and design, and the feel, of the city seem quite reminiscent of the Northeast. I told a friend a last week that \"they were trying to build this, and they built America instead\" which is probably true but doesn't capture the feel exactly either. It might simply be that we (English speakers or Westerners) all tend to build cities the same way nowadays (sprawling and automotive) and Dublin outside its core is as new as a lot of second-ring suburbs in the States. Second-ring suburbs where everyone drives on the wrong side of the road. I didn't have a chance to get out of the city (well, out of the city beyond Rathcoole) before leaving, but fully intend to take advantage of the fact that Ireland's a two hour flight away in the indeterminate future. Last Tuesday was spent shuttling around Dublin taking care of documentation for the closing of the house in Pittsburgh. All my signatures were notarized by the Vice Consul of the United States for the Republic of Ireland. Last Tuesday night was spent drinking numerous toasts to her health over a Guinness or five. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/08/to-the-health-of-the-vice-consul-of-the-united-states-for-the-republic-of-ireland/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHave just returned from Ireland. I had a chance to see a little of the city of Dublin, wandering about a bit through the Temple Bar – Trinity College – Grafton Street triangle last Sunday afternoon, and again on Tuesday; the weather, I take it from every cabbie who drove me around here that we really, really lucked out on the weather. Summers there are generally\u0026hellip; wet.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"To the Health of the Vice Consul of the United States for the Republic of Ireland"},{"content":"I moved into the flat yesterday. By \u0026ldquo;moved in\u0026rdquo;, I mean most of my stuff is there, I have a motley and assorted collection of furniture, much of which is still boxed and flatpacked in the hallway, and I slept in the new bed last night. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m really tired, maybe I\u0026rsquo;m finally home, or maybe [redacted] francs just buys you a damn good bed, but last night marked the first time I\u0026rsquo;ve ever slept through my first night in a new place.\nThen I woke up and sat out on the balcony for a few minutes, to look over the city and the mountains before starting my day. I think I'm going to like it here. Pictures are still to follow. I took a few yesterday morning. However, the cable I need to connect the camera to the computer so I can actually get the photos edited and online is packed. Somewhere. Ah, well. It's an amazing view. Trust me on this one. Yesterday marked the first time I've driven in Zürich, to go get a bunch of must-have stuff at Ikea and to pick up a free sofa bed out in Niederhasli. My impressions: 1. it's a pretty reasonable place to drive around, although parking is incredibly scarce in the city, as it should be; 2. Zurich's suburbs look very nearly American from behind the wheel of a van; 3. it takes a frighteningly short drive from the center of the city to get you out in the cornfields stuck behind a tractor; and 4. I understand now why most of the people I know who drive here do so via GPS. I've driven through one particular intersection in Milchbuck from every conceivable angle. I've seen more of Oerlikon than I'd like to have. And it's quicker to walk from the Hauptbahnhof to the ETH Hauptgebaude than the way I drove it, although to be fair I often do not take quite so many wrong turns when walking it. Next up: assembling Ikea furniture. Again. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/07/home-sweet-home/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI moved into the flat yesterday. By \u0026ldquo;moved in\u0026rdquo;, I mean most of my stuff is there, I have a motley and assorted collection of furniture, much of which is still boxed and flatpacked in the hallway, and I slept in the new bed last night. Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m really tired, maybe I\u0026rsquo;m finally home, or maybe \u003cspan\u003e[redacted]\u003c/span\u003e francs just buys you a damn good bed, but last night marked the first time I\u0026rsquo;ve ever slept through my first night in a new place.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Home Sweet Home"},{"content":"I went by my new flat Monday morning to pick up the keys and do the walkthrough. It was a good Bastille Day. First off, it was much bigger than I\u0026rsquo;d remembered, and in somewhat nicer shape. The kitchen will need less work than I\u0026rsquo;d remembered. There is no counter space, but a giant, very 1950\u0026rsquo;s cabinet on the wall opposite the refrigerator so I don\u0026rsquo;t need any under-counter storage, and I\u0026rsquo;ll probably just get a table or butcher\u0026rsquo;s block to stick in the 120cm between the refrigerator and the oven to act as a counter. No need to bother with trying to have a breakfast nook in there, though I have the space, because while the kitchen has a balcony (which I\u0026rsquo;d not noticed before) and a very nice view of the street, it\u0026rsquo;s not nearly the view I have out the living (and dining) room windows. Pictures still to follow. I took a camera yesterday, but the fog was in.\nThe landlord's nice, which is always a plus, especially when he lives in the building. I'm still staying at the flatshare in Hirslanden, because I have no furniture, and the hardwood floor, while beautiful, is hard, and wooden. Furniture here, it turns out, is like furniture in the United States: it is either used, it is expensive, or it is crap. Actually, that's not quite the case. The bedding is completely different. There do not seem to be any such thing as box springs (there are a needlessly wide variety of somewhat springy slat-like suspension systems) and the mattresses seem to be primarily made of different types of plastic foam glued and slotted together in various terribly complex arrangements. All except the cheap ones. The cheap ones are essentially 12 cm polyurethane foam blocks with 2cm cotton pads on top, and still cost 400 francs a go. Taking the day off tomorrow to go buy furniture. Wish me luck coming in on time and under budget. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/07/we-have-keys/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI went by my new flat Monday morning to pick up the keys and do the walkthrough. It was a good Bastille Day. First off, it was much bigger than I\u0026rsquo;d remembered, and in somewhat nicer shape. The kitchen will need less work than I\u0026rsquo;d remembered. There is no counter space, but a giant, very 1950\u0026rsquo;s cabinet on the wall opposite the refrigerator so I don\u0026rsquo;t need any under-counter storage, and I\u0026rsquo;ll probably just get a table or butcher\u0026rsquo;s block to stick in the 120cm between the refrigerator and the oven to act as a counter. No need to bother with trying to have a breakfast nook in there, though I have the space, because while the kitchen has a balcony (which I\u0026rsquo;d not noticed before) and a very nice view of the street, it\u0026rsquo;s not nearly the view I have out the living (and dining) room windows. Pictures still to follow. I took a camera yesterday, but the fog was in.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"We Have Keys"},{"content":"Every reasonably-sized city in the Western world is basically similar. One can understand life in Zürich quite easily by thin metaphor and direct reference to New York or San Francisco or Berlin. Of course, the language is different, and the local history is unique, but local history is unique everywhere, and the difference between an accent, a dialect, and a language is simply a matter of degree along a continuum of mutual intelligibility. The emergence of global capitalism over the past century or so has served to further bind the set of cultures already based upon the common classics of the Enlightenment, medieval Christendom, and the Roman Empire before them.\nI'm not saying at all that I'm disappointed with the relative lack of difference; indeed, this is precisely what made moving here possible. But it does mean that it's largely the little differences that grab the attention. Today's little difference: Swiss expiration dates. Most perishable items here seem to have two dates printed on the top, labeled A and B. A is the sell by date, after which I presume the item is taken off the shelf; B is the consume-by date. I have to say I like this way better; I've always been rather strict about expiration dates (for some reason, milk never smells quite right to me sniffing the carton) and here I actually understand what the expiration date means. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/07/its-the-little-differences-really-part-one/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eEvery reasonably-sized city in the Western world is basically similar. One can understand life in Zürich quite easily by thin metaphor and direct reference to New York or San Francisco or Berlin. Of course, the language is different, and the local history is unique, but local history is unique everywhere, and the difference between an accent, a dialect, and a language is simply a matter of degree along a continuum of mutual intelligibility. The emergence of global capitalism over the past century or so has served to further bind the set of cultures already based upon the common classics of the Enlightenment, medieval Christendom, and the Roman Empire before them.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"It’s The Little Differences, Really, Part One"},{"content":"I have now joined the ranks of adoptive Zürchers who can (and seemingly invariably do) say, in the language of their choosing, \u0026ldquo;with luck, and patience, you will find a flat.\u0026rdquo; Compared to many of the stories I\u0026rsquo;ve heard, I have been lucky, without having to have been particularly patient.\nThe search was not without compromise. My new flat is not in the middle of where I want to be, but it's quite close to two separate tram lines. Like my flatshare, it's probably 25 minutes on foot or by tram, take your pick, to my office; I've seen places that were closer. It's not all that close to the lake, though I can walk down to the Limmat in a couple of minutes if I really need to see the water. And it's not been renovated in a while, though it's in excellent repair for not having been. The kitchen could use a little work. But it's big (two rooms and a wide corridor, with a kitchen big enough to work with; it feels larger even than my first apartment in Shadyside). It's quiet (enough). It's got more closet and shelf space than I know what to do with although this could be hazardous in my quest not to acquire yet more stuff after having just successfully ditched all the old stuff I didn't need not six weeks ago. And it has a stunning view of the city and the mountains from the living room and balcony. Pictures to follow.\nBut most of all, I don't have to count apartment hunting as a hobby anymore. In lieu of a giant post on the entire saga, as I'm going now to climb the Uetliberg in celebration of the fact that I'm not trudging around the back alleys of Albisrieden today, here are my pieces of advice to those who would follow me here: Believe people when they tell you it is not easy here. At any given time, three in one thousand housing units are available to let. Flats here are nearly thrice as scarce in those in Manhattan, and Zürich does not have a developed rental brokerage market to compensate. Plan accordingly. The open market is an excellent way to explore the city, to spend time reading on the tram, and to discover where you do and do not want to live, but it does not appear to be particularly effective in actually getting you a flat. Marginally desirable places advertised on homegate will have twenty to thirty visitors, probably five to ten of whom will apply. Good places will have a line all the way down the stairwell from the fourth floor (counting from zero, as the Swiss do) out the front door ten minutes before the besichtigung begins. Great places are not available on the open market at all. The semi-open market (i.e., associated with a university, a company, or some other organization with limited membership) is much better. The quality of the apartments listed isn't necessarily much better, but at least there's less competition. I found both my flatshare and my apartment from the Universität Zürich / ETH housing office (if you're affiliated, it's the best eight francs you'll ever spend). Of course, the apartments listed tend to appeal to the organization they're listed with. ETH lists a lot of unacceptably (for me) studenty places, just as I'm sure most of the housing bulletin board at UBS is way outside my price range. The informal market (\"I know a guy who knows a guy who has a place he's got to leave\"), however, seems the way to go, but this involves 1. having lots of friends 2. who have lots of friends 3. who have flats 4. that they don't want anymore 5. that you do. Building this network takes time, and is probably not realistic to get plugged into in a month or two. I've had three potential leads this way, all in the last week or so, only one of which was a real possibility. It took me an hour to reply to the email. By then, the place was gone. Pride is your enemy. Be prepared to beg. So is understatedness. I was reluctant to bother my future landlord during the week I'd heard nothing, as my usual policy in dealing with people I don't know all that well is I'm busy, I presume you're busy too, and you don't need to deal with me bugging you to tell you things you already know (\"I want the apartment\") and to ask you questions you probably don't know the answer to yet (\"so can I have it already?\"). I was advised on several occasions that this was a Bad Idea, and I got over my impulse to quiet patience yesterday afternoon to send a quick \"hi, have you made a decision? I am humbly at your service should you need any more documentation.\" I don't know that it made the difference, but I had a call back and an acceptance within half an hour. \u0026lt;p\u0026gt; So. Cheers to all! Party at my place! \u0026lt;/p\u0026gt; \u0026lt;/div\u0026gt; \u0026lt;/div\u0026gt; ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/07/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-beginning/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI have now joined the ranks of adoptive Zürchers who can (and seemingly invariably do) say, in the language of their choosing, \u0026ldquo;with luck, and patience, you will find a flat.\u0026rdquo; Compared to many of the stories I\u0026rsquo;ve heard, I have been lucky, without having to have been particularly patient.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Beginning of the End of the Beginning"},{"content":"On the door of my office, there are two of those little car-window flags hanging off the nameplate. One of them is Swiss, one is Italian, one for each of my officemates. They\u0026rsquo;re there for the European football championships, which appears to be the one context in which Europe allows itself to embrace nationalism anymore. This is probably a good thing, as Europe\u0026rsquo;s embrace of nationalism up to about sixty or so years ago tended to end up in the embrace of large amounts of territory gained and then invariably lost, always at terrible cost.\nWhat's left of that impulse led to thousands of people draping flags and wearing jerseys stretched along the lakefront and the Limmatquai from the Zurichhorn to Central, and a minor fistfight or two at the end of a disappointing match but none of the rioting associated with the Ultras in the American idea of European hooliganism. Theus, who put the flags on our office doors, sincerely apologized for leaving me out, for not being able to find an American car-window flag in Zurich. First, this is unsurprising although my Confederate Battle Flags in Inappropriate Contexts counter hit two this morning with an older Swiss man wearing a T-shirt from Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga, Tennessee but what I did find surprising was my reaction to the offer. I really, really didn't want an American flag on my office door. What is surprising about this, you may ask? After all, I've voted with my feet, and I'm not particularly inclined to come back in the foreseeable future. But I'll always be American, identified at least by my accent in English now and most probably in German later, by the experience of my first formative thirty years, by my culture and my worldview. And while I'm ashamed of things done by my government in my name, and concerned by the continued fallout from a litany of poor policy choices stretching back beyond the beginning of this century to the middle of the last, I'm proud of my country, and of the promise of its history. But I have no flag. I've never been one to wave the stars and stripes, especially since its defamation after Nine Eleven Changed Everything. But I realized, seeing the tricolors of Germany, France, and Italy, Switzerland's white cross, even Turkey's crescent and star, proudly worn by the kilometers-long crowd, that its defamation is complete. The flag defined by 4 U.S.C. 1 is not my flag. It is the flag of a small coterie of smaller men of a single party, driven by the will to power to maintain their position by fear, men I will not assent to supporting by waving their banner. It does not represent the promise of my history. It's become a symbol of the threat of its end. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/07/on-nationalism/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eOn the door of my office, there are two of those little car-window flags hanging off the nameplate. One of them is Swiss, one is Italian, one for each of my officemates. They\u0026rsquo;re there for the European football championships, which appears to be the one context in which Europe allows itself to embrace nationalism anymore. This is probably a good thing, as Europe\u0026rsquo;s embrace of nationalism up to about sixty or so years ago tended to end up in the embrace of large amounts of territory gained and then invariably lost, always at terrible cost.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On Nationalism"},{"content":"In software development, we have a saying: \u0026ldquo;Good, fast, cheap: pick any two.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m sure many other technical fields have a similar saying. Essentially, it expresses if you want something done right, it\u0026rsquo;s either going to take a while or be expensive. I am finding that this applies to searching for an apartment in Zürich. The only word that comes up consistently in speaking with people here who actually have a place to live here is \"luck.\" \"I was lucky.\" \"You need some luck.\" \"With a lot of patience, and a little luck, you'll find a place you like.\" So. Good. Fast. Cheap. Lucky. \"Good\" here means a reasonably sized place in a reasonable location. \"Fast\" here means getting a place in a reasonable amount of time, as I have a sublet now, and an excellent roommate, but it's short term and would like to be out by the first of August if at all possible. \"Cheap\" here means under 1500 CHF/mo, which I cannot go over until I dispose of the house in Pittsburgh. So, that leaves Lucky. So far, I've seen quite a few variations on Fast and Cheap; in other words, not Good. I have decided that I do not want an apartment that is actually a Renault dealership (I've seen two of these actually). I do not want an apartment that is actually Bahnhof Wipkingen (one of the city's most abused, least useful stations, which means it's still serviced about as well as, say, much of the LIRR or SEPTA). And though it means I could have a view of the lake and two large, recently renovated rooms for under 1500, I'm reasonably certain I don't want to live in Horgen; while Swiss suburbs are not quite the affront to the senses as, say, Dulles, or Alpharetta, they are still suburbs, and I'm not particularly inclined to have to ride the train in for half an hour every morning, and to worry about the Last Train each night. Yes, I know. It's immeasurably better than the Port Authority. But I'm here now. I want to do way immeasurably better than the Port Authority. The places that I do want to live: small and kind of close to the lake, small and expensive and close to the lake, tiny and expensive but renovated yesterday and with an incredible view of the lake and the city (there's a lake theme here isn't there?) I are gone usually before I have a chance to see or apply for them. And that's basically the problem. The open market here is a sucker's game. The only apartments that actually have to be advertised are pretty much those which by definition have something wrong with them, be it price, or location, or the giant pile of used cans of heating oil out front. And so, I wait for Luck. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/06/on-luck-or-the-apartment-search-volume-one/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIn software development, we have a saying: \u0026ldquo;Good, fast, cheap: pick any two.\u0026rdquo; I\u0026rsquo;m sure many other technical fields have a similar saying. Essentially, it expresses if you want something done right, it\u0026rsquo;s either going to take a while or be expensive. I am finding that this applies to searching for an apartment in Zürich. \u003c/p\u003e","title":"On Luck (or, The Apartment Search, Volume One)"},{"content":"Too much going on here to write about any of it. I\u0026rsquo;m still collecting my notes for The Post On The Apartment Search, which if it goes on much longer might make a reasonably good Russian novella.\nIt's overcast, again, today, and threatening to rain, as it has been every day I have been here in Zürich except yesterday. My original plan if it was raining today was to take advantage of the insanely great train system here to go to Ticino, across the Alps, where the weather is usually better. But it turns out that not only is it raining in Ticino, it's raining in Switzerland in general; Zürich, at least, seems to be the least rainy place in the whole country. So. Think I'll wander about for a while and try not imagine not being able to afford living in each building I pass by. But I did want to share this one little story in the meantime. Now, I've been continually amazed at fairly regular appearance of Confederate battle flags on pickup trucks bearing West Virginia plates. Okay, maybe I'm not amazed, but I do wryly appreciate the irony. However, wandering around in Unterstrass (or was it Fluntern? it's all starting to run together) the other day looking at apartments (what else, really?), I happened to see a little battle flag sticker right above the Kanton Zürich plates on an otherwise unadorned black Toyota Corolla. Er, what? Apologies to all for not having a camera on me. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/06/youre-doing-it-wrong/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eToo much going on here to write about any of it. I\u0026rsquo;m still collecting my notes for The Post On The Apartment Search, which if it goes on much longer might make a reasonably good Russian novella.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  It's overcast, again, today, and threatening to rain, as it has been every day I have been here in Zürich except yesterday. My original plan if it was raining today was to take advantage of the insanely great train system here to go to Ticino, across the Alps, where the weather is usually better. But it turns out that not only is it raining in Ticino, it's raining in Switzerland in general; Zürich, at least, seems to be the least rainy place in the whole country. So. Think I'll wander about for a while and try not imagine not being able to afford living in each building I pass by.\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  But I did want to share this one little story in the meantime.\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  Now, I've been continually amazed at fairly regular appearance of Confederate battle flags on pickup trucks bearing West Virginia plates. Okay, maybe I'm not amazed, but I do wryly appreciate the irony. However, wandering around in Unterstrass (or was it Fluntern? it's all starting to run together) the other day looking at apartments (what else, really?), I happened to see a little battle flag sticker right above the Kanton Zürich plates on an otherwise unadorned black Toyota Corolla. Er, what? \u003cspan\u003eApologies to all for not having a camera on me.\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e","title":"You’re Doing It Wrong"},{"content":"Found in Blick am Abend, on the seat next to me on the tram ride home yesterday:\nAs for Game Six, Let's Go Pens!! ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/06/das-funfte-nhl-playoff-finalspiel/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eFound in Blick am Abend, on the seat next to me on the tram ride home yesterday:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003c/p\u003e \n  \u003cdiv\u003e\n    \u003cimg src=\"/img/archive/IMG_0192.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" /\u003e\n  \u003c/div\u003e\n  \u003cdiv\u003e\n    As for Game Six, Let's Go Pens!!\n  \u003c/div\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e","title":"das fünfte NHL-Playoff-Finalspiel"},{"content":"I arrived in Zürich at ten on Sunday morning, having spent eight hours on a plane from Newark, two hours on the runway at Newark waiting for the storm to clear out of the way of the transatlantic routes from New York, four hours in the Continental first class lounge (advantage: first class) waiting out my layover, two hours flying from Atlanta with a crowing rooster in the cargo hold right below me (me: \u0026ldquo;Is that a\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;, guy beside me: \u0026ldquo;Yeah.\u0026rdquo;), two hours at the Houlihan\u0026rsquo;s in the atrium of Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson having breakfast with my cousin on my last way through Atlanta for a while, an hour on a plane from Memphis, two days repacking and reviewing what I\u0026rsquo;m having shipped to myself while finalizing a customs manifest the customs guys here declined to even bother looking at after they saw how detailed it was, and two days on a truck driving what was left of my stuff from Pittsburgh, country music blaring. Yes, I know I don\u0026rsquo;t like country music, but what could be more appropriate for driving the stuff you just cleaned out of your house across Kentucky in a rented truck on your way out of the country after a divorce in which your ex-wife ended up with your car and your cat? Replace the cat with a dog, the car with a truck, and Switzerland with, er, Texas or Alabama or something, and you\u0026rsquo;ve got a country song right there! Even so the pleasantly efficient and helpful Swiss woman behind the counter at Kreisbüro 7 who registered me as a resident of Zürich yesterday said \u0026ldquo;Ah, Elvis!\u0026rdquo; when seeing I was born in Memphis, so who am I to say what\u0026rsquo;s country and what\u0026rsquo;s not?\nI arrived in Zürich to find a great little apartment right off the 11 tram line which I have to myself until my flatmate gets back from New York in two and a half weeks, on all of which more later (indeed, it may be a bit before blogtime catches up to realtime here), although my room does lack a bit for non-floor horizontal space. A friend of mine, over for lunch Sunday, noticed this and offered me an old table she wasn't using, which given that I'd noticed the same and had even gone so far as set up two bookends on the floor, I accepted sight unseen. So. Those of you who have been to my house in Pittsburgh, you remember the little Ikea coffee table in the living room, with all the magazines and stuff on the shelf below? Yeah. Well, it's that table. Exactly. Down to the birch finish. Apparently, I'm still meant to have one of those for a while yet. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/06/everything-old-is-new-again/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI arrived in Zürich at ten on Sunday morning, having spent eight hours on a plane from Newark, two hours on the runway at Newark waiting for the storm to clear out of the way of the transatlantic routes from New York, four hours in the Continental first class lounge (advantage: first class) waiting out my layover, two hours flying from Atlanta with a crowing rooster in the cargo hold right below me (me: \u0026ldquo;Is that a\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;, guy beside me: \u0026ldquo;Yeah.\u0026rdquo;), two hours at the Houlihan\u0026rsquo;s in the atrium of Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson having breakfast with my cousin on my last way through Atlanta for a while, an hour on a plane from Memphis, two days repacking and reviewing what I\u0026rsquo;m having shipped to myself while finalizing a customs manifest the customs guys here declined to even bother looking at after they saw how detailed it was, and two days on a truck driving what was left of my stuff from Pittsburgh, country music blaring. Yes, I know I don\u0026rsquo;t like country music, but what could be more appropriate for driving the stuff you just cleaned out of your house across Kentucky in a rented truck on your way out of the country after a divorce in which your ex-wife ended up with your car and your cat? Replace the cat with a dog, the car with a truck, and Switzerland with, er, Texas or Alabama or something, and you\u0026rsquo;ve got a country song right there! \u003cspan\u003eEven so the pleasantly efficient and helpful Swiss woman behind the counter at Kreisbüro 7 who registered me as a resident of Zürich yesterday said \u0026ldquo;Ah, Elvis!\u0026rdquo; when seeing I was born in Memphis, so who am I to say what\u0026rsquo;s country and what\u0026rsquo;s not?\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Everything Old is New Again"},{"content":"Eight years, nineteen days ago, I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a convoy from Atlanta consisting of a ten-foot cargo truck and a slightly battered green \u0026lsquo;95 Honda Civic with about ninety thousand miles on it, and moved into a seven hundred square foot third-floor walk-up with central air one block off Walnut in Shadyside with my fiancée.\nMost of the contents of that truck are gone now, and the Civic was totaled in a relatively minor accident last spring. My fiancée became my wife became my ex. And I'm back in Shadyside, staying at a hotel built where a car dealership's stock overflow lot stood on my arrival. Tomorrow, I drive back to Memphis, in a fifteen-foot cargo truck carrying somewhat less, by volume, than what I came in with. There I'll store the stuff I couldn't bring myself to sell, or throw away, before flying off to Zürich via Atlanta and, er, Newark. From a purely material point of view, these eight years have netted me as near to zero as is measurable, until you count the outstanding house debt, that is. From a material point of view, it's weird the things I'm taking away from here. It's especially weird when I see it all listed out nice and neat, which it turns out I have to do if I want to enter Switzerland with my stuff without paying 7.6% MwSt as import duty. From the manifest of box A101: \"...1 box Staedtler colored pencils. 1 HP 48G calculator. 1 glass coin dish. 1 bicycle tire inner tube...\" This is as much an organized projection of my inner lack of organization as it is anything else. But it's not the material point of view that's the important one. Pittsburgh's taught me a lot of things, some of which I even bothered to learn. It's introduced me to people I'm glad to know, or to have known. Thank you, to those of you who made my time here more interesting. And thank you especially to those of you who, over the past few weeks, have helped me to leave. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/05/a-farewell-to-pittsburgh/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eEight years, nineteen days ago, I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a convoy from Atlanta consisting of a ten-foot cargo truck and a slightly battered green \u0026lsquo;95 Honda Civic with about ninety thousand miles on it, and moved into a seven hundred square foot third-floor walk-up with central air one block off Walnut in Shadyside with my fiancée.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Farewell to Pittsburgh"},{"content":"I think it\u0026rsquo;s safe to say it\u0026rsquo;s crunch time now. I\u0026rsquo;ve got a little more than a hundred hours left here in Pittsburgh, the final details of my arrival in Zürich are very nearly sorted out, and now it\u0026rsquo;s down to the disposition of individual boxes and the things in them.\nThings. It strikes me that if I only owned the things I actually used, the whole act of moving across the ocean would be, aside from the unavoidable bureaucracy, not all that difficult. There's the cliché, of course, that you don't own your things, your things own you, but I'd always sort of taken that as a warning about your more advanced stages of materialism, that if you find yourself rubbing down your Murciélago with a diaper each Sunday morning, you've taken things too far. One of the many things the move to Zürich has taught me so far before it's even happened is that this is not the case. Indeed, your things begin to own you as soon as you assign value to them, regardless of the value they actually hold. I shall pledge now (and hope not to break said pledge immediately) that I'll remember this feeling every time I'm about to acquire yet more stuff. And yet... there's still the little whining voice in the back of my head pointing out all the additional photographs I could take more easily by shifting a few hundred dollars of the money I've made selling all my stuff into bringing yet a third camera with me. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/05/in-a-moving-state-of-mind/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI think it\u0026rsquo;s safe to say it\u0026rsquo;s crunch time now. I\u0026rsquo;ve got a little more than a hundred hours left here in Pittsburgh, the final details of my arrival in Zürich are very nearly sorted out, and now it\u0026rsquo;s down to the disposition of individual boxes and the things in them.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"In A Moving State Of Mind"},{"content":"Every so often, I run a 5k. By \u0026ldquo;every so often,\u0026rdquo; I mean \u0026ldquo;about once a year.\u0026rdquo; This one 5k is pretty much all the running I do, outside, of course, of the occasional Four Concourse Dash at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International. The rest of my exercise has been decidedly lower impact -walking, cycling, kayaking, wall-climbing, and the ever-so-important Biannual Headboard Toss (see below). So pretty much every time I do run, I\u0026rsquo;m a stiff, aching mess for quite some time afterward.\nI ran in the Race for the Cure in Schenley Park on Sunday morning. My gun time was a respectable thirty-six minutes even, which worked out to 32:40 line to line. I did have to slow down to a walk to rest a bit after the second mile, which is better than usual; I tend to sprint off the line and gasp my way through the middle of the race; in last year's Great Race I ran a 7:45 first mile on the way to a 31:09 finish. (In other words, a winter of indulging the Inner Fat Kid that started with quite excellent New Mexican food in Albuquerque last October and has not really let up since has added a minute thirty-one to my 5k time.) And am I paying for it today. My hamstrings and calves have tightened up to the point I'm lucky I can touch my knees, much less my toes, and if my quads could talk, they'd be saying \"take the elevator.\" ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/05/flexibility-ive-heard-of-it/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eEvery so often, I run a 5k. By \u0026ldquo;every so often,\u0026rdquo; I mean \u0026ldquo;about once a year.\u0026rdquo; This one 5k is pretty much all the running I do, outside, of course, of the occasional Four Concourse Dash at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International. The rest of my exercise has been decidedly lower impact -walking, cycling, kayaking, wall-climbing, and the ever-so-important Biannual Headboard Toss (see below). So pretty much every time I do run, I\u0026rsquo;m a stiff, aching mess for quite some time afterward.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Flexibility, I’ve Heard of It"},{"content":"Another day, another set of tourists through the house. This group stayed two full minutes, which is I think a new record. I can barely get from the basement to the top floor via each room in two minutes, and I live here.\nOf course, I didn't actually get to see this batch of tourists, because I was up on the roof of my front porch at the time, working with Phil to throw my headboard over the edge. Gently, but still. Hm. Maybe that had something to do with it. (Many thanks to Phil, John, Tony, and Paul for helping me move all the heavy crap down to the first floor, where it will be carted away by its respective new owner(s) next weekend.) ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/05/on-tourists/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/img/archive/Moving-The-Headboard-One.jpg\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"/img/archive/Moving-The-Headboard-One.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" /\u003e\u003c/a\u003eAnother day, another set of tourists through the house. This group stayed two full minutes, which is I think a new record. I can barely get from the basement to the top floor via each room in two minutes, and I live here.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On Tourists"},{"content":"Time, it feels, is running out.\nMy standard policy with respect to moving is basically not to move, which given that I've moved once every two years or so pretty reliably since 1995, is probably not a good standard policy. What this means is that I generally leave the actual mechanics of moving off to the last minute, madly throwing things into boxes when the truck pulls up downstairs, and utterly failing to sort out the mess after the fact. (This should perhaps be an indication that I have no real use for most of my stuff, but that's another issue entirely.) So it is this time. Twenty-one days is not at all last-minute given my history, but given the somewhat different logistics of crossing the ocean, feels it. I've tried tricking myself into moving by pulling the art off the walls (always the last to go in the past) and I think it seems to be working. Indeed, I probably would have gotten some packing done last night had it not been for Game 1 of the Yuengling Conference Finals, absolutely worth it in every way, especially considering the result. (Speaking of, Malkin's shortie last night, I must say, was not only poetic payback for the mugging he took on his short-handed attempt of a few seconds before, but also made up nicely for his penalty \"shot\" against the Rangers last series, and beyond that, was one of the prettiest goals I've seen this year in its simplicity. But reviewing individual goals in pretentious art-critic style isn't getting any furniture down my stairs, so I digress...) ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/05/twenty-one-fourteen-forty-two-and-counting/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eTime, it feels, is running out.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003eMy standard policy with respect to moving is basically not to move, which given that I've moved once every two years or so pretty reliably since 1995, is probably not a good standard policy. What this means is that I generally leave the actual mechanics of moving off to the last minute, madly throwing things into boxes when the truck pulls up downstairs, and utterly failing to sort out the mess after the fact. \u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003e(This should perhaps be an indication that I have no real use for most of my stuff, but that's another issue entirely.)\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003eSo it is this time. Twenty-one days is not at all last-minute given my history, but given the somewhat different logistics of crossing the ocean, feels it. I've tried tricking myself into moving by pulling the art off the walls (always the last to go in the past) and I think it seems to be working. Indeed, I probably would have gotten some packing done last night had it not been for Game 1 of the Yuengling Conference Finals, absolutely worth it in every way, especially considering the result.\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003e(Speaking of, Malkin's shortie last night, I must say, was not only poetic payback for the mugging he took on his short-handed attempt of a few seconds before, but also made up nicely for his penalty \"shot\" against the Rangers last series, and beyond that, was one of the prettiest goals I've seen this year in its simplicity. But reviewing individual goals in pretentious art-critic style isn't getting any furniture down my stairs, so I digress...)\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e","title":"Twenty-one Fourteen Forty-two and Counting"},{"content":"At the corner of Murray and Bartlett in Squirrel Hill lies the 61C Cafe, named after the bus route that stops at its front door; it has come to be my standard weekend morning hangout these last days in Pittsburgh. This is largely because, invariably, someone wants to come by at some insane hour of the morning to see the house. I\u0026rsquo;ve actually been woken up one Sunday morning by the sound of people in my living room due to a terrible misunderstanding between the realtors involved. And if I have to hide away from my house for half an hour on a Sunday morning, there might as well be some damn good coffee involved.\nI suppose I should be happy that my house is still showing at such a healthy clip eight months in, especially in a market we're all told is bad, bad, bad, but I'd be much happier if some of the people stopping by had giant piles of cash (francs preferred, dollars accepted... for now); instead, I have the distinct impression that I'm running a relatively low-volume, somewhat disappointing tourist attraction free of charge. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/05/another-sunday-morning-at-the-six-one-charlie/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAt the corner of Murray and Bartlett in Squirrel Hill lies the 61C Cafe, named after the bus route that stops at its front door; it has come to be my standard weekend morning hangout these last days in Pittsburgh. This is largely because, invariably, someone wants to come by at some insane hour of the morning to see the house. I\u0026rsquo;ve actually been woken up one Sunday morning by the sound of people in my living room due to a terrible misunderstanding between the realtors involved. And if I have to hide away from my house for half an hour on a Sunday morning, there might as well be some \u003ca href=\"http://61ccafe.com/\"\u003edamn good coffee\u003c/a\u003e involved.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Another Sunday morning at the Six One Charlie"},{"content":"On my return from Tucson tonight, I walked, as usual, straight from the gate to the taxi stand, because while the 28X (see all previous grumbling about the Port Authority) is perfectly serviceable for a ride from my office (which it stops right in front of) to the airport (which it stops right in front of), it\u0026rsquo;s certainly not worth waiting for at midnight for the privilege of spending an hour on the bus and forty minutes walking home.\n(I shall do my best to ensure this doesn't become an \"I Hate The Port Authority\" blog, because that sounds way more boring even than \"An American in Switzerland.\" Maybe once my bike's out of the shop.) Now, I've had some interesting taxi rides before. I once caught a ride from the airport to my old apartment in the Northside from the taxi driver who lived on my street. This time, I rode in with a former geek from one of Pittsburgh's myriad boom-era-gone-bust IT startups. He'd run in exactly the same circles I had; I'd been vaguely aware of his company, he'd been aware of one or two of mine. He looked a little familiar, and said I did too. He even claimed to have heard of Leapfrog Research and Development, though given how tiny we were and our absolutely nonexistent marketing budget, I do suspect a bit that he was angling for a tip. On second thought, given how tiny Pittsburgh's geek-entrepreneurs-who-didn't-move-to-Boston-or-the-Valley community is, maybe not. Near as I could figure out, the bust led to a divorce that went nasty (a number was mentioned with respect to his ex-wife's lawyer's bill that I would take in a minute as an offer on my house) led for unclear but probably easily guessed reasons to midnight runs to the airport in a Yellow Cab. Given \"the two guns [he's] had pulled on [him] and the one junkie who nearly plunged a heroin needle into [his] neck,\" though, he's about done with the cabbie's life, and is hard at work in his copious free time on the next big thing for the next big mobile platform. So that's one thing I'll both miss and not miss about Pittsburgh: how unbelievably small it is. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/04/a-damn-small-town/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOn my return from Tucson tonight, I walked, as usual, straight from the gate to the taxi stand, because while the 28X (see all previous grumbling about the Port Authority) is perfectly serviceable for a ride from my office (which it stops right in front of) to the airport (which it stops right in front of), it\u0026rsquo;s certainly not worth \u003cspan\u003ewaiting\u003c/span\u003e for at midnight for the privilege of spending an hour on the bus and forty minutes walking home.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"A Damn Small Town"},{"content":"It\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that Pittsburgh\u0026rsquo;s hockey team is better than its public transit system, because otherwise I\u0026rsquo;d be in a mood.\nThings I won't miss about the Port Authority: Bus trunking. I don't know if this is what this is actually called, but if you have, say, three different routes to the suburbs that share the same route through the city, each with a thirty-minute frequency, you can schedule them in a couple of different ways. The smart way would be to stagger arrivals, thereby providing a ten-minute service frequency through the common routing area (i.e., the city, which is the bit of the route that actually has the density required to support public transit). The not-smart way would be to have three buses come along one minute after each other (or, better yet, following each other), thereby providing a thirty-minute service. Ten-minute service is almost frequent enough to be dependable even without precise timing. Thirty-minute service is not. Guess which one the Port Authority uses? Bus packing. Yeah, thirty minute service. I suspect they do this because, at least on the 61 routes through the southern bit of the East End, they don't have enough space on the buses for all the people (largely students and staff at the Oakland universities; people like me) who want to ride them, so frequently a full bus will pass you. Then another full bus will pass you. Hopefully a third full bus won't pass you, because then you're waiting thirty minutes for another full bus. You are, anyway. I'm not. I'm walking. That one driver on the 67H who doesn't know where the Schenley Pool stop is and for some reason wants to fight me about it. I should not have a blogworthy feud with a bus driver. And yet I do. Anyway, a lot of this is not really the Port Authority's fault. They don't have any money, because they are an American public transit authority, and we pretty much decided public transit was for other people half a century ago. Mind you, this not having any money doesn't keep them from digging a half-billion dollar tunnel under the Allegheny River to carry the seventeenth-largest light rail system in the United States the distance of a fifteen minute walk. But it does serve Heinz Field, and this town loses its senses when it comes to da Stillers, so this is two rants for a later date, and one argument I'll lose by fiat. Moving on.","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/04/bus-error/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt\u0026rsquo;s a good thing that Pittsburgh\u0026rsquo;s hockey team is better than its public transit system, because otherwise I\u0026rsquo;d be in a mood.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003eThings I won't miss about the \u003ca href=\"http://www.portauthority.org/paac/\"\u003ePort Authority\u003c/a\u003e:\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cul\u003e\n    \u003cli\u003e\n      \u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBus trunking\u003c/span\u003e. I don't know if this is what this is actually called, but if you have, say, three different routes to the suburbs that share the same route through the city, each with a thirty-minute frequency, you can schedule them in a couple of different ways. The smart way would be to stagger arrivals, thereby providing a ten-minute service frequency through the common routing area (i.e., the city, which is the bit of the route that actually has the density required to support public transit). The not-smart way would be to have three buses come along one minute after each other (or, better yet, following each other), thereby providing a thirty-minute service. Ten-minute service is almost frequent enough to be dependable even without precise timing. Thirty-minute service is not. Guess which one the Port Authority uses?\u003c/span\u003e\n    \u003c/li\u003e\n    \u003cli\u003e\n      \u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBus packing\u003c/span\u003e. Yeah, thirty minute service. I suspect they do this because, at least on the 61 routes through the southern bit of the East End, they don't have enough space on the buses for all the people (largely students and staff at the Oakland universities; people like me) who want to ride them, so frequently a full bus will pass you. Then another full bus will pass you. Hopefully a third full bus won't pass you, because then you're waiting thirty minutes for another full bus. You are, anyway. I'm not. I'm walking.\u003c/span\u003e\n    \u003c/li\u003e\n    \u003cli\u003e\n      \u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThat one driver on the 67H who doesn't know where the Schenley Pool stop is and for some reason wants to fight me about it.\u003c/span\u003e I should not have a blogworthy feud with a bus driver. And yet I do.\u003c/span\u003e\n    \u003c/li\u003e\n  \u003c/ul\u003e\n  \u003cp\u003e\n    \u003cspan\u003eAnyway, a lot of this is not really the Port Authority's fault. They don't have any money, because they are an American public transit authority, and we pretty much decided public transit was for \u003ca href=\"http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38644\"\u003eother people\u003c/a\u003e half a century ago. Mind you, this not having any money doesn't keep them from digging a \u003ca href=\"http://www.theboretotheshore.com/\"\u003ehalf-billion dollar tunnel\u003c/a\u003e under the Allegheny River to carry the \u003ca href=\"http://www.portauthority.org/PAAC/CustomerInfo/BuswaysandT/LightRailTransitSystem/TQuickFacts/tabid/187/Default.aspx\"\u003eseventeenth-largest\u003c/a\u003e light rail system in the United States the distance of a fifteen minute walk. But it does serve Heinz Field, and this town loses its senses when it comes to da Stillers, so this is two rants for a later date, and one argument I'll lose by fiat. Moving on.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/div\u003e","title":"Bus Error"},{"content":"All right. Let\u0026rsquo;s try this a fourth time then, shall we?\nI've had a long and incredibly sparse career as a blogger. I was a bit late to the game, starting my first one, Elmer and Bellefonte, on the twenty-third of August, two thousand one, largely for the purpose of hearing myself rant about various topics of high geekdom. It's no longer online, which is no great loss as the only real post of any note on it was a long one, entitled Ramblings on the American Response, dated the twentieth of September of that year, in which among other things I expressed concern that \"[a]s the shock of seeing New York burn wears off, authoritarian interests within our nation are scrambling to make things safer for us (because, of course, they know better) at the expense of civil liberties,\" and vowing without any real conviction that \"[i]f we [do not resist the temptation to authoritarianism], terror wins, America becomes a third world tinpot totalitarian state, and you can reach me at my new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe.\" Well. A little under seven years later, through a much more, well, ridiculously circuitous course of events in which angst about eroding civil liberties does, I must admit, play a minor supporting role, I'll have a new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe soon enough. In forty six days, five hours, my one-way flight to Zurich lands. (As an aside for the record, there was a second blog, completely lost to the sands of time; and a third, Tales from the Centerline, which was largely concerned with the summer-long renovation of my Depression-era house atop Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill in 2005. You're not missing anything by my never mentioning either of these again.) So, welcome to my fourth blog. I'm starting this one to keep in touch with the people I'm leaving behind here, and to have a public record of what it was like to pick up at thirty and start over (not quite from scratch, mind you) an ocean and a few mountains away. I promise I'll try to keep it from going all \"an American in Switzerland\" on you. ","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/2008/04/once-more-onto-the-blog/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAll right. Let\u0026rsquo;s try this a fourth time then, shall we?\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003eI've had a long and incredibly sparse career as a blogger. I was a bit late to the game, starting my first one, \u003cspan\u003e\u003ca href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q\u0026#038;hl=en\u0026#038;geocode=\u0026#038;q=Elmer+and+Bellefonte+Streets,+Pittsburgh,+Pennsylvania,+15232\u0026#038;jsv=107\u0026#038;sll=40.45242,-79.9346\u0026#038;sspn=0.006548,0.008529\u0026#038;ie=UTF8\u0026#038;z=17\u0026#038;iwloc=addr\"\u003eElmer and Bellefonte\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/span\u003e, on the twenty-third of August, two thousand one, largely for the purpose of hearing myself rant about various topics of high geekdom. It's no longer online, which is no great loss as the only real post of any note on it was a long one, entitled \u003cspan\u003eRamblings on the American Response\u003c/span\u003e, dated the twentieth of September of that year, in which among other things I expressed concern that \"[a]s the shock of seeing New York burn wears off, authoritarian interests within our nation are scrambling to make things safer for us (because, of course, they know better) at the expense of civil liberties,\" and vowing without any real conviction that \"[i]f we [do not resist the temptation to authoritarianism], terror wins, America becomes a third world tinpot totalitarian state, and you can reach me at my new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe.\"\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003eWell. A little under seven years later, through a much more, well, ridiculously circuitous course of events in which angst about eroding civil liberties does, I must admit, play a minor supporting role, I'll have a new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe soon enough. In forty six days, five hours, my one-way flight to Zurich lands.\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003e(As an aside for the record, there was a second blog, completely lost to the sands of time; and a third, \u003cspan\u003eTales from the Centerline\u003c/span\u003e, which was largely concerned with the summer-long renovation of my Depression-era house atop Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill in 2005. You're not missing anything by my never mentioning either of these again.)\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\n  \u003cspan\u003eSo, welcome to my fourth blog. I'm starting this one to keep in touch with the people I'm leaving behind here, and to have a public record of what it was like to pick up at thirty and start over (not quite from scratch, mind you) an ocean and a few mountains away. I promise I'll try to keep it from going all \"an American in Switzerland\" on you.\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e","title":"Once More Onto the Blog"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/rfc5103/","summary":"","title":"Bidirectional Flow Export using IPFIX"},{"content":"","permalink":"https://trammell.ch/publication/naf-lisa-2006/","summary":"","title":"The NetSA Aggregated Flow Tool Suite"}]