Hackers advocate the free pursuit and sharing of knowledge without restriction, even as they acknowledge that applying it is something else.

I wrote an article in this month's issue of Communications of the ACM. Its a typical Decius rant about freedom to tinker; really a hacker's perspective on the Bill Joy/Fukuyama argument that science needs to be centrally controlled and partially abandoned. The issue is a special issue on Computer Hackers with submissions from Greg Conti, FX, Kaminsky, Bruce Potter, Joe Grand, Stephen Bono, Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and Matt Green. Many folks on this site might enjoy reading the whole thing if you can get your hands on it. The articles mesh together well and there is some neat stuff in here.

Hackers advocate the free pursuit and sharing of knowledge without restriction, even as they acknowledge that applying it is something else.

Tom has been published in the current issue of CACM. His article is currently number one of only 7 references to Francis Fukuyama in the ACM Digital Library. There is a report about Internet voting, two about trust in electronic commerce, an excerpt from The Social Life of Information, and an article by Grady Booch where the title is a take-off on Fukuyama's classic, The End of History. Tom's article is the only one to reference Fukuyama in the context of science/technology policy and academic freedom.

In crafting policy, is it useful to distinguish between basic knowledge and specific vulnerabilities in a finished product?

Tom's opening line refers to "the free pursuit of knowledge." The implication in Joy's argument, and in Tom's response to it, suggests that it is possible, through policy, to wall off certain areas of knowledge in a selective manner, based on some balanced assessment of risk and reward. Set aside the wisdom of the policy issue; it's not clear to me this is even possible.

So much of what turns out to be disruptive knowledge arrives unexpectedly. This much should be obvious by definition. Yet frequently it seems to be brushed aside. Joy focuses on big, deliberate endeavors; he refers to "efforts" like the Manhattan Project.

Although the history of the Internet is deeply intertwined with defense, it is worth noting that the World Wide Web was not the product of a grand-vision project. Well, actually, it was, but that big project was about physics, not information management. The Web arose from an off-the-books "effort" to organize some documentation.

Recall the recent Freeman Dyson articles that I recommended. The next supervirus is as likely to arrive courtesy of a five year old, playing in the backyard, as from a diabolical terrorist with genocidal tendencies.

Inherent in Tom's premise is the idea that one has the ability to distinguish between knowing and doing. At the bleeding edge, on zero budget, with only the vaguest ideas of the applications or impact of what you're exploring, this may not be a reasonable assumption. There is a subtlety between "doing" and "applying"; you might "do" in the lab but "apply" in the wild. But as Tom asks, what if you have no lab? When the wild is your lab, either for lack of resources, or because the wild is your object of study, "doing" and "applying" are often one in the same.

Update: Greg Conti has made the CACM issue available as a ZIP archive.

Hackers advocate the free pursuit and sharing of knowledge without restriction, even as they acknowledge that applying it is something else.

Decius has been published in this month's issue of Communications of the ACM. Its a typical Decius rant about freedom to tinker; really a hacker's perspective on the Bill Joy/Fukuyama argument that science needs to be centrally controlled and partially abandoned. The issue is a special issue on Computer Hackers with submissions from Greg Conti, FX, Kaminsky, Bruce Potter, Joe Grand, Stephen Bono, Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and Matt Green. Many folks on this site might enjoy reading the whole thing if you can get your hands on it. The articles mesh together well and there is some neat stuff in here.