Busy week. Flew to Montr'eal, which seems to be a very nice city. Rather like Melbourne in some ways, but colder, older, and in French with English subtitles. My poor French was at least enough to buy a pair of boots (c'est trop long / trop petite / tres bien!). At present in Sunir's house in Ottawa.

Feeling distinctly seedy from long days, change in timezone and weather, etc. A break from code is probably good decompression anyhow. It turns out that I'm going to San Francisco for a couple of weeks, and I'm quite sure I'll be busy enough there to make up for it.

this will go down on your permanent record

It snowed at the Ch^ateau Montebello, and all in all was just a perfect Canadian postcard: a big log cabin in the woods. Attendees and speakers were a melange of government/business/law/tech, so I feel like I understand the balance much better. People seemed to like my talks.

I used to believe the cypherpunk libertarian position that technology alone is not enough and law should just get out of the way. I now think that's too simplistic.

The prospects for the Total Surveillance Society are fairly spooky, but there seems to be technical and social movement towards something more reasonable.

There was a distinct difference between Canadian, European, and USA-ians at the conference. The US is (and I say this in the nicest possible way) such a police state -- much more conservative in their approach to human rights, or rather much more trusting in the action of the invisible hand.

The ZeroKnowledge technology and people are very cool indeed. I can see that free software is a conundrum for them: they have people who understand the political, technical and security reasons to use it, but at the same time they have an honest lead over the rest of the field as far as I can see, and it's asking a lot for them to give it up. Hm.