Flooding the personal information market

Glyn Moody on the benefits of enabling supersurveillance through radical openness:

Hm, a novel approach:

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market."

Not only effective, but fun, by the sounds of it!

Bob Blakley on Real ID

Writing in response to the DHS’ Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee report on the implementation of the REAL ID Act, Bob Blakley summarises its message in plain language:

The REAL ID act is a bad idea. The problems with the REAL ID act listed in the Committee’s report should not be fixed, because fixing them will not address the core issues the REAL ID act raises. Fixing the problems the Committee has identified will simply produce the best possible version of a very bad system. If the REAL ID act is implemented, there is no chance it will meet its stated goals; there is every reason to believe it will have many unforeseen adverse consquences; and there is every reason to believe its costs will be huge in proportion to its benefits.

I wonder if the US government will listen to its thoughtful critics here as the UK government really has not to date (although there are signs that that may be beginning to change...)?

Privacy, lost and found

photo by weaverluke

What are the chances of an identity nut like me stumbling upon this on an Islington pavement?!

With the exposure of their personal crib note into the public domain, I guess the author has lost a tiny fragment of their (arguable) human right. Ah well, nothing like the University of Life to bring dry academic lessons home! (Although did the note's author really care one jot about the loss, I wonder? Was the note even deliberately discarded after an exam? Perhaps that is the lesson—notions of privacy and the personal only matter to us personally when we feel we have something precious to shield from others?)

A privacy law shambles

Andrew at IMPACT blog points us to an "[i]nteresting article on The Independent website" From the article's introduction:

Legal Opinion: An over-complex privacy law may trigger new legislation

"There may never have been a simple answer to the question: what is the law of privacy? But a recent spate of cases has added to the dense jungle of rulings and legal principles through which even experienced judges are finding it difficult to navigate..."

This topic begs a very thorny question: precisely what constitutes "personal" information? Information is generated as we interact, in a rich, fuzzy and complex way, with one another and with the world around us. Ownership of that information is surely bound to be moot in very many cases...

Personal data mining: benefits and costs

Nic Brisbourne has written a thoughtful post called "Mining personal data - the next big frontier":

[Last] week Eric Schmidt of Google said he would help us answer questions like “What am I going to do tomorrow?”. I applaud the sentiment here, I really do, but I don’t think Eric is the right guy for the job, and he certainly isn’t going about it the right way.

A lot of people have a bad reaction when Google does things like this - Does Eric Schmidt want to sniff the armpits of my mind? is a very funny example, and indeed this post was in part inspired by some friends saying at dinner last night how much Schmidt’s arrogance pissed them off.

Underlying all this are some very real privacy concerns which I will come back to, but first I want to focus on how useful these sorts of services could be.

Nic goes on to discuss how some potential benefits to end users of allowing their behaviours and preferences to be tracked in exchange for cheap/free services and better ad personalisation could offset their privacy concerns.

I'm looking forward to chatting with Nic this week in preparation for a post I'm planning on "Identity for web startups—opportunities and threats": I'm sure his insights into the economic aspects of the topic (Nic is a Venture Capitalist at Esprit) will be extremely helpful.

Genomics, privacy and economics

Glyn Moody reports on disquiet around developments in personal genomics:

Good to see some others concerned by the imminent arrival of personal genomics:

In addition, many scientists fear cheap genome sequencing could have other, worrying consequences. Professor Steve Jones of University College London, said: 'If you make your genome public, you are not just revealing information about yourself and what diseases you might be susceptible to, you are also giving away crucial data about the kind of illnesses your children might be prone to. Each of your children gets half your genes, after all. They might not want the world to know about the risks they face and become very unhappy in later life that you went public. Your other relatives might equally be displeased.'

And by its implications for civil liberties:

However, there are other concerns, as Professor Ashburner points out. 'Anyone who commits relatively minor offences can have their DNA taken and analysed. At present, the main use of this process is to create a DNA fingerprint that can be used to identify that individual. But soon we will be able to create an entire genome sequence of that individual from a swab or blood sample. We will end up knowing everything about their genes. In the end, we could have millions of people on a database and know every single genetic secret of each person. That has to be a very worrying prospect.'

We had better think carefully about these issues, for genetic information is, ultimately, just another kind of information, and information wants to be free. Google's investment in a genetics startup is also worth noting. However, given the high value of our personal genetic information, it seems likely to me that we will try to guard and control it much like we do the money in our bank accounts.

One of the biggest strategic uncertainties facing any business, government or organisation these days is that of privacy and its associated economic ramifications:

• how will attitudes towards privacy evolve across society and its constituent demographics?;
• where will each demographic seek to draw lines between high-value, private information and low-value public information?
• what technological, legal, business and social factors could undermine the ability of people to maintain such segmentation between public and private information?
• to what extent will re-aggregation of lots of pieces of low-value information enhance its aggregate value?

No-one knows the answers to these questions yet, but they are among the ones we will need to keep asking ourselves and each other if we are to work together to create a future society we want to live in.

Googlephobia growing

Ivan Pope reports on growing Googlephobia (and that in advance of their launch of a mobile phone network that will know where you are and what your voice sounds like):

You know something is hitting the popular imagination when it makes front page news. Today the Independent, with a hint of sensationalism, has put Google on the front page. So what’s brought it to this? The Independent story starts with Eric Schmidt’s somewhat daft comment that “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’.” However, there is a lot more to it than that, as anyone who follows online news will be realising. The Techmeme news service is flooded day after day with Google stories as they make the tech weather. Here are seven recent Google stories that go into the Googleophobia mix:

1. Google want’s to tell you what to do tomorrow (see above)


2. Google buys Feedburner and knows what RSS feeds we are reading


3. Google invests in human genetics firm


4. Google buys Doubleclick to control the human sum of banner advertising


5. Google wants us to report ‘paid links‘ so they can police them


6. Google launch their ‘Web History‘ product and reveal just how much they know about you


7. Google installs ‘virtual spyware‘ on Dell computers

That personal and personalised information Google is tracking is all adding up...

The Emperor's New Identity Web

Piers Fawkes imagines:

...a possible future where we'd have to manage our identity in a way similar to the way we manage our image today. In the same way we dress and style ourselves to say something (or nothing) about ourselves, we will dress our personal information to do the same thing. Some of will don red coats to show off, some will don black coats to hide.

The basic premise behind this vision is that our privacy is dead. Our data is already out there.

I don't suggest that 2007 will see us trying to don our red coats just yet - for one thing the tools are not built to do this just yet - but I do think that the general public will have a privacy epiphany as they become aware of their lack of privacy and flow of personal data.

I engaged with Piers in the comments section of his post:

Interesting piece, Piers.

I completely agree with you that privacy, in its traditionally-understood form, is dying. [weaverluke readers will know that I have written as much on this blog.]

However, what you seem to be getting at with your (admittedly evocative) "red coat, black coat" analogy, but don't spell out, is that, as more and more information about us is available online, coats of either colour will increasingly become as invisible as the Emperor's New Clothes to those observers who choose to look through them to the "naked identity" of the wearer.

Even that metaphor breaks down when you examine it, because all we can ever see online are assertions, which we ascribe to certain people, about other things and people (or about themselves). (Of course, we cannot see people or things themselves, because they exist in the physical world!) But how do we really know who such assertions are from, and if we can trust them?

We can never really be sure what's what or who's who in the slippery world of the Identity Web (as the Kathy Sierra debacle illustrated all too well). All we can do is establish relatively strong hypotheses—and, until the sophistication of identity-mediating technologies approaches the incredible efficacy of our human cognitive perceptual mechanisms, those hypotheses will very often remain moderately confident at best.

Posted by: weaverluke | May 20, 2007 1:48:14 PM

Thanks for your great comment, Luke. In response:

We can never really be sure what's what or who's who in the slippery world of real life. Think of a time you interviewed someone for a job - you never know whether their CV was 100% true or 100% false. And I'd bet that despite your cognitive mechanisms, you'll only know slightly better by the end of the interview too.

Posted by: Piers Fawkes | May 20, 2007 8:30:52 PM

Piers,

Very true! However, if you then met and talked with that person again, your ability to verify their facial appearance, voice print and body language would allow you to be almost certain that they were the same person as you met before. This is not really the case on the web, where the cues may be hugely diverse, but the identification methods available to us are far less integrated than our biologically-evolved ones.

Conversely, it is easier to build a rich picture of *someone* (even if you are less than certain of the persistence of their underlying identity across all the constituent pieces of information than you would be having grilled them face to face!) online than offline.

Then again, if we consider our extended offline social networks as analogies for the links of the (social) web, it becomes clear that—as you say—we rely on pretty fuzzy cues for identifying the deeper characteristics of people offline too: we ask friends' opinions of other friends and so on.

My takeaway from all this—we must learn deeply about the "Human Web"—how we interact with one another and our world via our intricate and sophisticated, biologically-evolved organism—if we are to understand how to build an effective Identity Web. And privacy is a concept, of relatively recent provenance, which may prove to have relatively shallow roots in that organism.

Garlik DataPatrol report

So my first Garlik DataPatrol full report has arrived, some three weeks after I registered (this follows an initial credit report which arrived just a couple of days after registration).

The report is beautifully presented (online), and contains some really useful information—such as a view of how the credit agencies see you and a demographic analysis of your residential area. I also learned where to go to stop junk mail—the Mail Preference Service—and that I could opt out of the Electoral Roll ("just put a cross in the box on your annual Electoral Roll renewal form") and restrict access to Companies House information on me (also with the MPS), all in order to reduce my risk of suffering Identity Theft.

However, I am apparently doing a Bad Thing in putting a link to my CV on my blog, and using my real name on my blog. This is a tricky one, because the professional benefits to me of having this information openly discoverable are considerable. But it does bring home to me why many bloggers blog pseudonymously...

One aspect of DataPatrol that doesn't work well yet is the Connections section, where your supposed personal and company connections are listed. Perhaps this is partly because us bloggers put ourselves virtually around somewhat, but the results here really don't give a good picture of my important connections. I haven't even met many of the individuals listed—they simply work for a company that employs someone I do know.

The other thing that was a bit creepy was having many of the people who live on my street listed by name and address! That just brings home the perils of being on the Electoral Roll, I guess. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I want to snoop on my neighbours. Perhaps Garlik should consider omitting this category of information from their reports?

These niggles aside, I would certainly recommend my UK readers give Garlik a try—it doesn't take more than ten minutes or so to register, and you will surely gain some useful and thought-provoking insights into how your identity is represented in the public sphere.

C21st living: act locally, be surveilled globally?

Bill Thompson writes:

Those of us living in the west, with cheap easy access to computers and the internet and a sophisticated technological infrastructure surrounding us, are increasingly living our lives online.

This is no more frightening than any other vast social change, but it will be resisted by many who see in the loss of privacy something threatening, who believe it is dangerous or dehumanising or somehow against nature.

But we should never forget that we make human nature, it is not given to us, and we can therefore remake it.

Our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing, so it should not surprise us that we are finding new ways of constructing an identity online.

As I spread myself around over the network, updating my Facebook profile, commenting on MySpace, flying through Second Life, blogging, twittering, updating my calendar and posting photos and videos and audio I am finding a new way to be Bill Thompson.

While it's a nice sentiment, I think we need to consider the broad sense of Bill's notion of "remaking human nature" in the context of the insights of evolutionary psychology: our psychological experience is founded on our evolutionary heritage, which has, for example, seemingly optimised us for social interaction within relatively small groups.

However, at the same time, I wholeheartedly agree with the previous clause of the same sentence: that "our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing." I have myself argued that, in a world where information flows ever more freely and pervasively, we have no choice but to completely re-conceive the role of privacy in our lives. Given the relatively recent provenance (as Bill points out) of the Western concepts of privacy and individual identity, it seems likely that their roots only penetrate the topsoil of our culture rather than the deep clay of our evolutionarily selected traits (such as our predeliction for interacting within small groups), so it may be that we can reinvent this aspect of our experience.

Perhaps we will continue to seek out small groups to engage with proactively while at the same time coming to tolerate, accept or even enjoy the fact that our audience for that engagement may be unknowably diverse and global.

My question remains:

How can we find sustenance and protection for our intricate and bounded, biologically-evolved, deeper, softer selves in the always-on "surface" world we are creating?

"Global privacy invaders" awards

Kim Cameron points us to this story:

Privacy International announces global privacy invaders

02/05/2007

In an event in Montreal, Canada, Privacy International ran the first International Big Brothers Awards ceremony. At the 'Computers, Freedom and Privacy' (off-site) conference, with over 200 attendees, PI outed the most invasive companies, projects, officials, and governments. A special award for the 'Lifetime Menace' was also announced.

Background

PI's 'Big Brother Awards' have been running for nearly ten years, with events run in eighteen countries around the world. Government institutions and companies have been named and shamed as privacy invaders in a variety of countries and contexts.

This year was the first time that Privacy International ran an international event to identify the greatest invaders around the world. The event was hosted by 'the pope', as presented by Simon Davies in full regalia [my emphasis!]. Previous hosts include 'Dr. Evil' and 'The Queen of England'.

Nominees and Winners

After reviewing the variety of nominations received from around the world, Privacy International and leading international privacy experts selected the following nominees and winners in the following categories:

Most invasive company

Nominees

• Google, for their retention practices and their purchase of Doubleclick, an on-line marketing and profiling firm
• Choicepoint, for their vast databases of personal data, sold to nearly anyone who wishes to pay
• SWIFT, the international banking co-operative for sharing personal financial transactions with the U.S. government
• Booz Allen Hamilton, the international consultancy, for taking the knowledge and contacts of their senior executives, mostly from U.S. intelligence agencies, to sell and share their experiences with firms and governments around the world

Winner: Choicepoint

Worst Public Official

Nominees

• Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain, for his relentless work over ten years to expand the UK into the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations
• Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, for returning the surveillance policies of his nation to the age of the Cold War
• Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency and now undersecretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, behind and at the forefront of most disastrous U.S. surveillance policies, most recently the EU-U.S. agreement on Passenger Name Records transfers
• Alberto Gonzales, current Attorney General for the U.S., for pushing expansive interpretations of the U.S. Constitution in order to create new powers for the Bush Administration without Congressional authorisation and judicial oversight

Winner: Stewart Baker

Most Heinous Government

Nominees

• China, for implementing even greater surveillance policies and continues its oppression of various groups, and moves towards the international stage with the Beijing Olympics with additional surveillance schemes
• The U.S., for leading the world down the path of greater surveillance and its disastrous influence on policy and technology
• The United Kingdom, for being the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations, rivaling only Malaysia, China and Russia as it also leads other countries across the EU down its same path
• Tunisia, for being stupid enough to have invasive and despotic practices even while hosting a UN summit on the information society, and then oppressing guests and groups from around the world while in the public eye
• The European Union, for pretending to be founded upon a bedrock of civil liberties and fundamental rights but then spending decades establishing invasive policies without any democratic oversight

Winner: The United Kingdom (for more information please see Taking Liberties documentary (off-site))

Most Appalling Project or Technology

Nominees

• U.S. Border Policy, and most recently the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, for fingerprinting visitors from around the world while hoisting fingerprinting and ID card programmes upon citizens around the world, including Americans
• International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN agency, for implementing a variety of invasive policies behind closed doors, including the 'biometric passport' and passenger data transfer-deals
• India's Ministry for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions for requiring government employees to disclose their menstrual cycles on job appraisal forms
• the CCTV industry, for promoting a technologically 'effective' policy around the world despite all the evidence to the contrary

Winner: The International Civil Aviation Organization

Lifetime Menace Award

Nominees

• The Biometrics Industry, for selling a limited technology to governments and public institutions around the world, promising much while delivering very little except for minimisation of personal privacy
• The Military Industrial Complex, for being behind almost every invasive surveillance policy around the world, where we showed the example of General Dynamics, contractor to a variety of governments, who own companies such as Anteon (UK) who in turn own 'Vericool' (UK) who is responsible for selling surveillance technologies to schools that want to fingerprint their students to verify class registries, library privileges, and cafeteria purchases
• The Intellectual Property Industry, for promoting and pushing invasive policies around the world in order to keep track of the habits of on-line users to pursue their agenda of 'protecting' content
• Communitarianism and the proponents of the 'Common Good', because every bad policy around the world is justified based on the philosophy that is good for society and the individual must sacrifice his or her selfish rights in favour of the needs of the many

Winner: The 'Common Good'

Winners were given the classic BBA award, a golden statue of a boot stamping upon a human head, as promised by George Orwell in 1984 on a vision for the future.

Sounds like it was quite an evening!

Google as "the Internet"

Seamus McCauley muses on "Google" as synonym for "the Internet" (click the link for a nice bonus photo illustration!):

I've been wondering for a while how it came to pass that "Google" became visual shorthand for "the Internet" amongst advertisers.

The current campaign for Thomson holidays exhorts holidaymakers to use "our Google Maps" (which turns out to be a slightly customised version of what is very clearly Google's Google Maps). Mobile phone companies in particular, when they started wanting us to know that we could access the web on our phones, showed us phones with Google on them. Here's another one.

So I'm intrigued by the sudden cultural shift implied by Nokia's latest online ad for the N800 (left), a phone with Internet access, majoring on the BBC website and Flickr and MySpace and Wikipedia without a mention of Google. "Take the Internet to new places", it says. Or, in other words - not just Google search.

Google has an incredibly powerful brand (BBC) that for the last couple of years has been semiotically synonymous with the Internet. Assuming, not unreasonably, that advertisers are on the cutting edge of understanding cultural significance, that psychological dominance of what people mean by the Internet may be coming to an end as consumers are considered able to accept more nuanced symbols of the web.

When millions of people identify your brand with the Internet itself, you know you have a decent business. Whether or not Google can continue to convince the masses that they are "the Internet" will play a huge part in determining their future fortunes.

However, it's also intriguing to note that the growing privacy concerns around Google provide them with the inverse challenge of convincing people that they are not too omniscient for their users' comfort—when striving for omniscience kind of goes with the territory of trying to be "the Internet". This would seem to pose Google with something of a strategic and branding conundrum.

There's money in that there identity—we just don't quite know where yet.

[also left as a comment on Seamus's post]

Stefan Brands podcast

Dave Birch recently interviewed leading cryptographer Stefan Brands, whose company Credentica has developed a set of technologies that enable "multi-party security": for instance, allowing the government to vouch securely for my age, but also for me to "spend" that assertion with the local pub (via a smart card) without either the government knowing I have done so or the pub knowing any more than that I am over 18.

If adopted in schemes such as our national ID Card here in the UK, Credentica's U-Prove technology could transform our ability as citizens to negotiate control over information (rather than that control being hard-wired into the technology, as the current government scheme would entail). It's a really important issue for people to understand, so I heartily encourage you to listen to the podcast:

• listen now (mp3)
  
• subscribe in iTunes

Reflections on Identity Mashup

I enjoyed being on the panel at the Identity Mashup event at the BT Centre, London the other night. Pursuant is a summary of some of the key points that arose and my further thoughts (mostly towards the end).

Tom Ilube spoke about his company Garlik, which aims to help people track information others hold about them. I find this interesting in that it chimes nicely with my musings on supersurveillance (watching what the watchers are watching about us).

Richard Baker talked about the enterprise in general and BT in particular, and the challenge of providing identity-enabled services to a relatively non tech-savvy mass market. He touched on the strategic model of risk, value and convenience that my friend and white paper co-author John Madelin has developed at BT.

Simon Willison told us about OpenID, a technology protocol that obviates the need to remember lots of passwords (or risk using just one) for all the different web services you use by allowing you to authenticate ("sign in") in one place, then have other web services recognise that you have already signed in, rather than you having to sign in separately for each one. (Wow, that concept is really hard to communicate succinctly without visual examples!)

Edgar Whitley of the London School of Economics' Information Systems Group was sceptical about OpenID's accessibility to the masses, expressing concern that technology like the UK government's ID Card will have to be simpler to use than OpenID is if it is to be used at all (there was some disagreement amongst the panel over OpenID's relative ease of use or otherwise—personally, I suspect ongoing innovation will make it progressively even more approachable by non-geeks).

Tony Fish, the discussion moderator, wanted to know where the beef was: where is the value in identity, and who can leverage it? I opined that advertisers found value in being able to build the richest possible picture of a person in order to target adverts at them optimally—which is why Google is making so much money. Conversely, Tom pointed to identity phraudsters who can extract several thousand pounds of value from a target individual (mostly by getting credit) by obtaining just a handful of key data about them.

There were many other interesting points and observations that came up, but there was also a familiar sense in the room of "how the heck does all this fit together in a single, intelligible picture?" I suggested that looking at identity in terms of value could be a way of pulling the many threads together: corporations, government and individuals alike want to realise for themselves the tangible value of identity, and individual people value—to varying degrees according to person and context—privacy, convenience, service personalisation, transparency and pretty much any other attribute of identity-enabled information services you care to name. In other words, we each place particular values on information and the ways it flows or does not flow.

In the summing up, I lobbed a provocative thought into the room: "privacy is dead; long live privacy". Things would be so simple if we didn't try so desperately to hang on to our little sense of bounded self and melted quietly into the identity soup of this webbed world. That is a scary, scary process—but surely an inevitable one, carried as we little people are on the rip tide of C21st cultural evolution?

That said, money is only a particular kind of information, so the massive imbalances of wealth could not be sustained should we collectively allow information to truly flow freely (as in, in an extreme example, the information that allows me to log into my bank account, although of course I am talking about a far broader spectrum of information value here, most of it only indirectly related to cash!).

It's hard to see the rich letting the poor at their lucre willingly (scary!), and indeed the current trend is massively in the other direction, with megabrands (Tesco, Google, Virgin and so on) increasingly acting as massive re-aggregators of value created by others. So we're left with a huge conundrum—information needs to flow freely to create value, but collectively we're not willing to let it do so beyond specific, highly circumscribed contexts. Indeed, if we did so all at once, our whole ecopolitical system would surely collapse.

This all raises many more questions than it provides answers. One thing's for sure: the dual imperatives of information fluidity and information control look set for some spectacular showdowns over the coming years!

After the main session, I got to chat with a number of interesting people. I felt right at home immersed in a crowd of identity nuts! ; )

For another angle on the Identity Mashup event, check out this thoughtful post by Graham Sadd.

Legal ruling on information transparency

BBC News reports:

A new ruling, which said a college had breached a woman's privacy by secretly monitoring her emails, means employers cannot spy on staff, say legal experts.

Lynette Copland, who works at Carmarthenshire College in west Wales, successfully sued her employer for breaching the Human Rights convention.

She was awarded more than £6,000 by the European Court of Human Rights.

Employment law solicitor Alison Love said if employers were going to monitor emails they must tell their employees.

It's interesting to note that the ruling doesn't outlaw the spying altogether, but rather obligates employers to do it transparently. More a victory for the inexorable tide of information freeflow than for "privacy", then?

Privacy is dead. Long live privacy!

Sam Sethi muses about using OpenID and XFN (XHTML Friends Network) for a distributed "trustlist" (aka whitelist) network.

In this respect and many others, OpenID looks set to empower us to distribute and re-aggregate our presence in ways barely imaginable in a siloed authentication world. This seems like a wonderful prospect to me.

But traditional privacy buffs beware: the single identifier of your OpenID may well make collusion between service providers to share your personal info far easier than it is in our current identity-fragmented web!

Is this really a problem? I used to believe that it definitely is, but seems to me that maybe it doesn't have to be: if we can devise effective distributed reputation systems, then people will be incentivised to disclose and re-contextualise information about others in a respectful way. And it will be the big organisations with the best opportunity and the most to gain from illicit information-sharing collusion with one another—corporations and government—who also have the most to lose in the "reputation web". After all, corporate identities are not disposable, by definition.

In this light, perhaps we could just after all be entering a new era of mutually-respectful information transparency, where each individual's integrity is honoured above all else? Well, it's nice to dream. : )