Chaos Program

I had a slightly weird encounter yesterday with Google Social Search. This is a beta product (which in Google-land doesn’t really mean anything) that shows you results from your search that are found via your “social circle.” I ran a search and noticed this new and unusual thing at the bottom of the first page of results.

At first, I thought it was amusing. Then I thought it was creepy. Then I decided it was just annoying. Let’s examine the meaning of this service by going through each of these points in turn.

Amusing: My search was a catch all for material on an academic subject. It doesn’t matter which one. School’s out but I’ve been gong to school so long, sometimes my brain just gets in that mode. I had already tried searching Google Scholar and found some interesting stuff, and a lot of other stuff that I could not afford to buy. The ridiculous price of so many scholarly and scientific publications is a pet peeve of mine (I don’t mind them making a buck. I just mind that they jack up the prices so high that published research is effectively hidden from most of the world, especially me). So since I didn’t have hundreds of dollars to shell out for a very few articles that might or might not be relevant, I decided to broaden the search and see what regular Google would bring up.

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The big tech story of the week is the one about Google making people mad with it’s new “Buzz” service. The most interesting aspect of this story is that everyone seems to have gotten it wrong.

Here’s the short version of the story: Google has some new social media application that makes all your email contacts into “friends” in the social networking sense and a lot of people objected to that, claiming that email contacts should be kept private, not advertised to the world as a friends list. This is stupid on so many levels – Google, their users, all the “analysts” – it’s hard to know where to start. So I’ll start at the beginning as far as I knew it.

The other morning, as I do most mornings, I brought up my gmail account and glanced to see if there was anything new. There was some kind of banner or thing about something called “Buzz.” I immediately thought “Hmm. Could this be a whack at Yahoo’s boring Buzz bookmarking service?” But no. I saw that my boss had already been there and made a comment. I also saw that to reply to his comment I had to create a “profile” that would make all of my email contacts into friends who I could then get Buzzy with, or some such thing.

I decided not to create the profile because I don’t use my gmail account for general email purposes. I have a yahoo account for that. My gmail account is mostly for poetry and other writing. I use it to communicate with the members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, a lot of editors and a few close friends and family. It’s the kind of account – intentionally – receives the kind of joke emails that people forward all the time. In other words, while it’s a public address, I tend to use it for more private purposes.

Weirdly, Buzz shows that I have 6 followers, including 4 who do not have public profiles – which I also do not have. How do you follow someone who does not have a profile to follow? And if you don’t have a profile, how is it possible to follow someone else without a profile? What the hell is going on here? read more »

Two unrelated things clicked in my head today as actually being related on a theoretical level. Thing one I spent some time the other day looking over the websites of some potential vendors. I’ve done this sort of thing lots of times before. As per usual, I was unimpressed by the websites themselves (which may or may not say much about the company itself). Thing two: Someone cracked the algorithm for cell phone signal encryption (really a sort of hiding) to the internet. Both these things show the conflict between the old industrial era way of doing things (let’s call it web 0.5) and the newer Twitter-ified way of doing things (web X.0). It tells us a lot about the changing generations and the growing struggles of the information age.

After that slightly pompous lead in, it’s tempting to just stop but I’ll add some detail, starting with the cell phone encryption code, which is a pretty big deal news-wise. The biggest weakness of cell phone security – and it’s a very big weakness – is that, in order to work, cells broadcast their signal in all directions at once. It’s not like the old fashioned landline phones that send their signal down a wire. In order to intercept the signal of one of those old phones, you have to tap the physical wire. In order to intercept a broadcast signal, on the other hand, you just need to be within range with the right equipment.

For a couple decades now, most cell phones have attempted to evade broadcast interception by (somewhat) randomly changing frequency multiple times during every transmission. That way it’s very hard to intercept more than a single tiny portion of the signal, hopefully too tiny a portion to make sense out of the message. The flaw in this scheme is that for the message to be received, the other end (the cell tower) must be able to follow all the frequency hops and put the complete transmission back together. So both ends need to be synchronized. True randomness is impossible.
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Arguably the biggest buzzword in computing today is “cloud computing.” Other candidates include “real time web,” “social computing” and (my favorite) “monetization.” Briefly, cloud computing means deploying internet based applications and services in a way that abstracts hardware needs out so that dependence on any particular server is limited and adding more servers (or virtual servers) makes scaling relatively easy. The example of cloud computing I am personally most familiar with is Amazon Electronic Compute Cloud which hosts the web site I have been developing at my job (Trailmeme). There are numerous others.

A recent study reported at Dark Reading claims that adoption of cloud computing is being hampered by concerns about security. I think this at least somewhat misleading.

The article gives two numbers related to this. First, almost exactly half of companies are not using the cloud and do not plan to at this time. The second number is that half of those mention security as one of their reasons for not rushing to adopt cloud computing. The conclusion of the article is that security is a major concern in cloud computing. I wish this were true but I don’t believe it.

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At the beginning of the movie The Longest Day, the Germans have broken an important code the Allies use to communicate with the French Resistance. At least they think they have. They believe that when a line from a particular poem is read on the radio, it will be the signal that the invasion of France (D-Day) is imminent. They don’t know what the French resistance fighters are supposed to do about it, where it will happen or much of anything else, but they will at least know the time with possibly as much as several hours of warning.

It’s possible that the message carries information about specific assignments or even where to find further instructions. The movie (one of those rare masterpieces, by the way, that may be more interesting just to listen to, than to watch) does not go into detail about the communications network that put these codes in place, or the people who were imprisoned, tortured or murdered by the Gestapo to find ways to weld the scattered cells into a guerilla army that could be set in motion so well at the required time.

That brief scene, though, and others, such as the one where resistance members hear the coded signal, should help teach us something that’s been missing from the commentary about the really interesting role of Twitter in the protests in Iran this week. That lesson is that spontaneous revolutions are not just uncommon, they are almost impossible in a modern police state.
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I read a few articles this week about the 60th anniversary of the George Orwell novel 1984 (including this interesting one at National Review Online) and one thing that struck me is that very few literary works get reviewed 60 years after their publication. Even fewer good ones get reviewed/taught/discussed 60 years later. Everybody knows at least a little about 1984, even those of us who have not yet read it (In school, I was in the class that was assigned Animal Farm instead. Interesting book. Hated the pigs).

But this is not a review of 1984. That would be silly since I just admitted I haven’t read it! But it seems I should. Traditionally, reading has been seen as a way of passing on culture – not the kind of culture that causes people to donate money to the opera or spend time at museums but the kind that shapes the way people think. That’s why an old fashioned Classical Education valued Socrates and Thomas Aquinas among others. Agree with them or not, these were smart people and excellent teachers.

Well, that’s the official story, anyway.
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A doctoral candidate in Virginia developed a highly accurate (as far as we can tell) and probably one of a kind map of North Korea (Wall Street Journal article here). This may become important in light of other developments, including North Korea’s announcement of having done a second, successful underground test of an atomic bomb (see AP story here).

Earlier this year, researchers for the Open Security Foundation used seemingly unrelated newspaper articles to learn details of the Heartland Systems data breach, one of the biggest data hacking incidents yet known (Wired story here), before the breach was made public.

Both of these items reminded me of an old story about one of the first people to study serial murder. This was a detective (whose name I should be able to remember but can’t just now. Sorry!) who began studying newspapers from all over California in order to find similar murders that were not thought to be linked, as likely as not because they were in different jurisdictions so that the investigators involved did not even know about them. He discovered quite a few links no one else had noticed this way.

This sort of research to link up scattered, seemingly unrelated information is called open source intelligence gathering and we may not be far from the time when you can get a degree in it and (hopefully) lots of high-paying jobs. The term should not be confused with open source software or artificial intelligence. This intelligence is the kind that concerns intelligence agencies like the CIA. And the open just means not hidden. read more »

So there’s a story going around that Time Warner Roadrunner is proposing instituting tiered service in Rochester, NY. The levels would start at $29.95/month for up to 5 GB of data transfer and go up to $54.90/month for 40GB of data. There would also be fees for going over your monthly allotment. More details here and here.

This would directly affect me, so I’m not exactly an unbiased observer. But in an unbiased way, my first thought on seeing this structure was, “Between YouTube, Facebook and online Mah Jong or what have you, who on Earth actually uses a lousy 5 gig?” It may sound like a lot to people who don’t know any better but take it from an old – professional – Computer geek. That one is a red herring. They don’t even mean it seriously.  Ignore it (except possibly to be offended by the mendacity of a company that pretends to be offering a low price option that, in effect, no one can use).

My second thought was that there is no need for tiered service. The infrastructure is there, in place. When a particular user downloads some huge file, there is no one in a control center yelling, “Scotty! We need more power! Hurry or she’s gonna blow!” There is no danger that the pipes are going to burst because there are too many electrons going through them. The system works just as well at a user’s first gigabyte downloaded as their hundredth. Tiered usage is a bookkeeping device, completely unrelated to the stresses and strains on the system.

As I said, this will directly affect me and I’m not happy about it. I work from home more often than not. And I take online classes. I can use a half gig (500 mb, 0.5 gb) in a day without even trying. I can do that without downloading any Linux ISOs or software, or using Internet phone (skype – I’ve thought about it but haven’t tried it yet) or viewing YouTube videos or other streaming media, believe it or not. I know this because I have a bandwidth meter installed on my main computer. I’m just that kind of guy. People who use streaming media are likely to use much more.  And pay more. This is starting to sound like a bad thing, especially in a recession.

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Thanks to my job at Xerox, I had the fun and interesting experience the other day of answering some questions emailed to me by Amanda Morin, half of the Ruby team at About.com. This is new stuff to me. Some of the questions made me feel like I was doing a midterm in grad school! But the end result is not too bad, though she (probably wisely) cut my comment about scaling Java in comparison to Ruby (anyone who knows me, knows I’m other than a fan of Java).

The basic questions were about Ruby and about Cloud Computing. What do you know but 2 days after answering all those questions, I run across an article that states the obvious but little thought of idea that cloud computing may be a new thing for business but it’s old news for cyber criminals. What do you think a botnet is but a resource cloud? Wish I had seen it before! Oh well, check out the article Botnets and illicit file swapping: the original “cloud computing” and an older take at Cloud Computing: Invented By Criminals, Secured By ???

In addition to interviewing me, Amanda interviewed Hampton Catlin, who (unlike me) really knows what he’s talking about. There’s a series of articles on the subject. Go see the articles. Learn something and make it look like someone out there has an interest in what I have to say (It’s okay to pretend).

Interviews with me

• Cloud Computing and Ruby: Interviewing Dave Vandervort
• What is Cloud Computing? Interviewing Dave Vandervort of Xerox Innovation Group

Other bits of the series (also interesting, though not as much):

• What is Cloud Computing
• Cloud Computing and Ruby: Interviewing Hampton Catlin

updates

3/25/2009: Fixed bad link on “What is Cloud Computing” That was mistakenly pointing to the Hampton Catlin interview.

We commonly refer to computer programs that spread and cause trouble in terms of diseases; we call them viruses and we say that a computer that has one is infected. Lots of things spread, though. Butter. Ideas. Economic downturns. Clouds of nerve gas. But there are a more limited number of things that spread between people.

Twitter had a problem today. Not just today but that’s when it seemed to come to a head. (If you don’t know Twitter, all you need to know is that

Twitter without Don't Click

people send very short messages that will be seen by their friends who “follow” their posts, or by anyone who looks at the stream of all posts. More on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter). This was both hilarious and disturbing. Hopefully that’s not a comment on life, the Internet, or Twitter itself.

What happened was that Twitter was hit by a piece of program code that used a simple social engineering trick to fool people into activating it, so it could reproduce. It showed a link that said “Don’t click this link.” Of course people did click the link, allowing the code to insert itself into their feed, where all their followers would see it – and passive-aggressively do what they knew they shouldn’t and replicate the link still farther.
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