Chaos Program

Tonight I watched the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica “prequel” (what language sadist invented that word?) Caprica. It seemed to start a little slow but eventually got going and had some interesting features. In no particular order, here are my thoughts (note: there are spoilers)

The terrorists are teenagers. Historically, it takes a little longer to become radicalized to the point of blowing yourself up. In the real world terrorists are more likely to be college age or older.  However, just as we’ve seen the average age of violent gang members decrease (and the sex of violent offenders widen to include a greater portion of females than used to be the case) in an advanced society where young people have access to sex and death clubs (albeit only as virtual reality) this is certainly possible. It is still different from reality at the current time.

The hedonistic virtual club shown a couple times in there, where bored teenagers (and presumably a lot of older people) went is not possible with current technology. In real life, clubs are not (to the best of my knowledge) this depraved. Close on the sex end maybe, but rarely if ever are there human sacrifices. But when technology makes this sort of thing possible, can anyone doubt they will come into existence? What kind of world will we have when teenager’s avatars lose their virginity before their physical selves do? This may not be more than a decade or two off.
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I learned an interesting lesson at my job today.

Our team recently gained a member who is trained in user experience stuff, actual testing and measuring it, not just eyeballing it like me. During a couple meetings lately, we’ve discussed the language used on the web site. We’ve changed the terminology a couple times during the course of development as we thought of new implications and also as we struggled to describe the technology in ways that people who are new to it can understand. When you’ve been working on a project for a couple years, learning how to talk about it to people who are brand new to it can be a challenge.

What do you mean you don’t understand what a child node is? It’s a node directly linked by a default or alternate path from a parent! (Note: Never end this type of sentence with words like “dummy,” “idiot,” “moron” or anything similar. For some reason it doesn’t go over well.) (See here for a partial explanation of child node)

One result of the changes in terminology is that the web site is inconsistent. Sometimes it uses one term, sometimes an older one that is no longer approved. This might be because we forgot to change it or it might be because someone was writing stuff and forgot that we had changed the term. An attentive reader might be thinking, “Ah! So you learned you should thoroughly edit everything when you make changes, maybe even have copy written by a professional who will be focused on the words and not think of them as a distraction from the real job of hacking code!” This would be wrong. Nice try though.
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If there is meaning in life, then there must also be poetry. Whether you like it or not.

Some of us like it more than others. Many of us were brought up to think of poetry as an inaccessible creature, something belonging to smug self-involved intellectuals who dressed badly and had even poorer social skills than the average computer geek. (Completely unrelated question: Do computer security geeks – like me – count as being more or less geeky than regular computer geeks?)

High school has a way of making people think that way. It turns out that a large part of this may be the result of the way poetry is taught, rather than the poetry itself. It’s just a fact of life that many of us, particularly males (and, according to a survey I read once, political conservatives) are more likely to enjoy Rudyard Kipling than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet English teachers are far more likely to use the second as examples of great poetry than the first. Such is life.

So we learn that poetry is for the elite. Those of us who don’t belong to the elite probably won’t understand the stuff anyway, so why bother?

That sort of disconnect from literary poetry was the subject of a terrific blog post I found the other day at the Poetry and Culture blog about Dashiell Hammett and poetry (here). Since I’m a poet (these days) and Hammett is one of my favorite authors, I had to read it. The post gave several examples of Hammett’s main character expressing less than positive feelings about not just written poetry but the entire idea that there is anything poetic in life.

Well, a hard boiled detective might find life’s poetry to be a bit rough around the edges, wouldn’t he?

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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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If I had a bigger brain, how many more languages would I be able to say, “The check is in the mail” in? Wouldn’t it be nice to be smart enough to answer the important questions (some of them may even be more important than that one)?

The nature of people with big brains has been a favorite science fiction theme for many years. I’ve seen it done in an old episode of Outer Limits and a much newer episode of Farscape, for example. In an excerpt from their book Big Brain, published online in Discover magazine’s December offerings (here) Gary Lynch and Richard Granger come up with some interesting thoughts on this question. I’ll say up front, this was interesting enough reading that I bought the book and really hope it’s not completely obsolete by the time I have a chance to read it (Do you think there might be a flaw in my reading strategy?).

According to a blurb about the book on Discover’s website (here) Lynch is a psychiatrist and Granger a cognitive scientist, which seems to mean they are doing a little more than speculating about the subject. The hook they use to get into it is the skulls of a pre-human species of hominid called Boskop (named for the place the skulls were found). Measurements of the skulls indicate that the brains of the Boskop people were roughly 25% larger than those of modern humans. From this, Lynch and Granger calculate an average IQ for Boskop of 150 which is 50% higher than the human average. But according to the excerpt they’re gone, now. Boskop became extinct maybe 10,000 years ago. We did not.

Were Boskop not as smart as the brain size calculation seems to indicate? Or was intelligence not an important thing 10,000 years ago? Hmmm. 10,000 years ago. Isn’t that about the time the last ice age ended? Maybe their brains overheated as the temperature went up. No, that sounds a little far fetched

Anyway, there are serious flaws in calculating intelligence based on brain size alone. The biggest one is that brain size is only one parameter in intelligence. Whales have bigger brains than humans but are not necessarily smarter. The convolutions in the cerebral cortex make a big difference. Roughly speaking, the more complicated the folding of the cortex, the smarter a species will be. This is why humans are (mostly) smarter than whales. [For a decent discussion of brain size see this article at HowStuffWorks.com]

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My boss and I have an ongoing disagreement that sometimes flares up (loudly), about who was the better detective: Hercule Poirot, or Sherlock Holmes? The boss takes the point of view that Holmes relied on “parlor tricks” while Poirot used pure intelligence to reason out the solutions.

I contend (very reasonably and with only enough shrillness in my voice to convince people to listen) that this shows a lack of understanding of Holmes’s true skills as a detective. The famous parlor tricks – where he figured out people’s life stories by observing tiny clues he noticed in a glance at them – are NOT how he solved cases at all. Unlike the indolent Poirot who seemed to get most of his information by eavesdropping, Holmes investigated cases. He used disguises to infiltrate locations and spy on suspects. He had a network of informants (The Baker Street Irregulars). He studied shipping and train schedules and knew the map of London intimately, in order to understand the movements of people and things related to his cases. He did experiments in order to improve his understanding of potential evidence. He worked at the business of investigating.

To be honest, it’s been decades since I absorbed the complete Sherlock Holmes novels and stories and I never did get into the Poirot stuff because I find Agatha Christie’s writing style to be dull. Really really really dull. Maybe it’s a British thing. Odd, really, since my mother has everything Christie ever wrote. Most of what I know about the brilliant Belgian detective I got from watching the series with David Suchet on TV. I enjoyed them and often found the solutions to be quite clever. But to compare Poirot’s skill at thinking to the monomaniacal investigative prowess of the great Sherlock Holmes is silly.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, up until recently the United States Air Force was too stupid to encrypt the video feed from attack drones such as the predators used in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I know that sounds harsh. Maybe it’s even too harsh. Let’s look at the story (original report here) and see how it develops. The short version is that sometime “late last year” (apparently December 2008) the computer of a captured Shiite fighter in Iraq was found to contain video from U.S. aerial drones. In July, more of these intercepted videos were found. The WSJ report claims that the interception was done with (or with something like – the writing is unclear) Skygrabber, software advertised as intercepting satellite transmissions of various file types. The price on the website is $45.95 (apparently was $26.95 a few days ago. Did they raise the price to capitalize on increased demand due to the publicity?).

According to the WSJ report, the Air Force has understood that these feeds were vulnerable to interception since the 1990s but did not do anything to encrypt them because a) It costs a lot of money and b) This kind of interception is too hard for the primitives we fight against anyway. (Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but the gist seems accurate.)

In their defense, Skygrabber probably did not exist in the 1990s. The Internet was less developed in those days too. According to Defense Tech the Global Information Grid used by the U.S. military to transfer data is 25 years old. One consequence of this is that security measures that are considered basic today are completely lacking. Defense Tech estimates that upgrades needed could run to $65 billion over the next three years.

Hackers work faster than that.

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Cyberwar and related issues have been in the news lately. Since the cyber attacks on Estonia during the Russian invasion of 2007 (see here and here) the topic is popular. Maybe even almost sexy.

Since there are lots of news articles lately (mostly without much substance, but there are a few links at the bottom of this post if anyone’s interested) I’ve been giving the subject some thought. The first thing I think about it is that fears are somewhat overblown. To date, I am not aware of even one confirmed case of a cyber attack actually killing anyone. That’s what war is about, remember. Even in Estonia, the cyber attacks were much less of an issue than the Russian tanks.

This doesn’t mean cyberwar can’t cause problems, including problems for the military. Cyber attacks can be used to target communications, to block (or alter) global positioning systems (see this report) and possibly change the behavior of critical infrastructure items like dams and nuclear power plants. In the near future it may be able to cause traffic jams or accidents, make hospital systems go haywire, redirect ships and planes and many other potentially devastating things. At least those are some of the potentials. Fortunately, none of that potential has yet been reached.

Yet.
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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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So someone thought it would be a good idea to remake Patrick McGoohan’s 1960s classic The Prisoner. Why? My current favorite candidate for a reason is that Hollywood hates creativity. They also remade V, after all and that was a show that was crying out to be forgotten (while the remake – which I’ve stopped watching – performed the amazing and unforgivable feat of making Morena Baccarin boring).

I could criticize the casting of The Prisoner but what would be the point? Jim Caviezel seems to be a competent enough actor but no where near Patrick McGoohan’s caliber. But then, who is there alive today who is of that caliber? But my problem with the show isn’t with the acting. It’s with the entire show.

Did I mention they’ve also canceled Dollhouse? (See here and here) This was a somewhat creative show that had all the interesting stuff leached out of most of the first season and all of the second season that had aired before its cancellation. The rumor is that the creator of the show, the brilliant and always interesting Joss Whedon, was not allowed by the network to do the show the way he wanted except for a few (brilliant) episodes in the first season. Whether this is true of not, the resulting show was dull. It’s a shame to lose a show with such an interesting premise (programmable people) but the execution was so poor, I guess it’s no great loss.

The Prisoner didn’t have the advantages of a brilliantly creative creator or an interesting new premise. It’s had a lot of hype, though, and of course Ian McKellen. And it has lots of feelings.
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