The dotFuture Manifesto: Internet Crime, Web Services, Philosophy

Submitting Patents Online

2011-06-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's big project was submitting my patent application for the Delegate Key Exchange scheme I presented at RSA.

Working round the USPTO EFS system is still a real chore. One of the biggest problems being preparing the PDF to comply with their requirements. The Windows PDF generator is not listed as one of the ones that is acceptable so I first tried to install the distiller that the USPTO recommends. This turns out to not work at all on Windows 7.

Try number 2 was to try using Open Office. This was pretty much a disaster as OpenOffice couldn't parse the references in my Word document and lost all the reference numbers in the claims section and it didn't rotate the landscape diagrams to meet the PTO requirements.

To add insult to injury I remembered the reason that I uninstalled OpenOffice with prejudice last time I used it (on the provisional). It is one of those programs with an updater but the update invariably fails to retrieve the files it needs. Probably due to not having the right permissions. And unlike most other updaters it does not have a 'do not update' option. For the time being I have just disabled running the program on startup which is an obnoxious feature in itself. Why would I want to have over a Mb of code that always loads to support a program I am not running? If I get any more nag screens the whole Java system is going in the bin.

So anyway, after discovering that Word cannot rotate the diagrams I made I ended up having to recreate them using cut and paste into Powerpoint (which can handle rotation properly). First time round this was rejected by EFSWeb as well. Then I found an option to create standards compliant PDF.

I have the feeling I could have avoided the whole performance by just selecting that option in Word in the first place.

Salvador Dalek gets his exterminator gun.

2011-06-01T18:14:00.000-07:00

Salvador is complete and has moved into my office.

Netdulino

2011-06-01T06:01:00.000-07:00

I recently received my Netduino

Netdulino is a small computer designed for interfacing to hardware. It is very much like the Ardulino only with a faster processor (32 bit rather than 8) and supports the Microsoft .Net technology.

.Net is a really good match for this sort of board as the CLR is designed to allow for code to be compiled at deployment time for any processor with a CLR compiler. So in theory programs written in .NET could be moved from one Netdulino to another without the need to access the source code.

.Net also provides a full features programming environment (Visual Studio Express is free) and you can even choose between imperative (C# / Basic) or functional programming styles. These are full featured compilers with no compromises. You don't have to spend your time thinking about weird restrictions on integer sizes, register use or whatever. Any C# source will work fine without modification.

Getting started was pretty quick once the files were all installed. I had the LED blinking in about half an hour, most of which was spent downloading stuff.

The only drawback with this approach is that once you blink the LED there is not much more that can be done without getting some electronic components to interface to. I have ordered some LEDs, motors and a grab bag of other stuff from Jameco and Solarbotics.

Pakistan rejects complicity in bin Laden case - Central & South Asia - Al Jazeera English

2011-05-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

So 'Pakistan rejects complicity in bin Laden case'

Well they would, wouldn't they? But the US press account seems determined to make this a dispute between the US and Pakistani governments when in reality it is a dispute between the democratically elected politicians and anti-democratic factions in the military.

Neither Bin Laden nor the Taleban were ever popular in Pakistan. Musharraf, their main supporter in Pakistan was never popular either, he seized power in a coup and lost it the first time there was a democratic election.

The reason the Pakistani government needs to tread cautiously and appear to resist certain types of US pressure is not fear of domestic Taleban/Al Qaeda supporters. Even though they do exist, they never voted for Benhazir Bhutto's party anyway. The reason they have to be cautious is the risk of a military coup.

So it probably suits the Pakistani government to appear to be under pressure from the US to perform a purge of the military. It gives them a pretext to 'reluctantly' do what they would like to in any case. Just as Pakistan has to officially appear affronted at the invasion of its sovereignty in the killing of Bin Laden while being rather glad he is eliminated. The Taleban imposed a far more humiliating infringement on Pakistani sovereignty when they occupied and effectively rulled the Swatt valley for a period.

Pa. suit: Furniture rental co. spies on PC users | ajc.com

2011-05-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

Umm, what made someone think this would be legal?

Pa. suit: Furniture rental co. spies on PC users

The rental company appears to have a clueless lawyer who imagines attack is the best form of defense:

Aaron's, which bills itself as the nation's leader in the sales and lease ownership of residential furniture, consumer electronics and home appliances, said the lawsuit was meritless. It said it respects its customers' privacy and hasn't authorized any of its corporate stores to install the software described in the lawsuit.

It does not take a legal genius to see that the plaintif suffered an injury here. The only question is who is liable. Since the employee had knowledge of the spying software and the employee was acting for the store, it is very hard to see how Aaron's could not be liable.

Aaron's best chance to avoid class action status would be to persuade the court that this is an isolated incident and it is anxious to repair the damage. Describing the suit as meritless does not seem a good way to achieve that.

Authenticating Bin Laden's Body

2011-05-04T07:16:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall ponders the question of whether the US should release photos of Bin Laden's body.

That is a good question but one that at this stage probably has no good answer. Given the number of 'birthers' peddling a crackpot conspiracy theory about the President's place of birth I can well imagine members of Al Qaeda engaging in similar denial of the obvious. It is even possible, likely even that the same unscrupulous US politicians who saw advantage in pandering to birtherism will see benefit in claiming Bin Laden's death is a hoax.

So a better question would be how to provide proof beyond an unreasonable doubt that someone is dead.

One way to do this would be to use numbered, sealed tamper-evident bags. These are produced by several suppliers and were originally used for demonstrating that cash deposits have not been tampered with by couriers. A store keeper puts their takings in the bag notes the serial number and gives it to the courier. They then call the recipient and tell them the serial number of the bag. When the courier gives the bag to the recipient they check the serial number of the bag is correct and that it has not been tampered with.

The bags are made of a fairly durable but thin plastic and are self sealing with an incredibly strong glue that cannot be parted without leaving evidence. Some bags have a tamper evident strip in the glue so that the bag says 'void' if opened.

Tamper Evident Bag Provided by SecurityBag.com

These bags are used to establish the chain of custody for evidence in criminal trials.

So a basic protocol for establishing the death of BinLaden would be

Secure the area
Determine Bin Laden is dead
Cover most of body with sheet
Begin recording proceedings with video camera providing notarial authentication
Take tissue sample from body
Place tissue sample in evidence bag
Note serial number of bag
Seal bag
Stop recording
Place video camera in evidence bag
Transfer bags to laboratory
Begin recording of proceedings with video camera providing notarial authentication
Remove samples
Extract DNA
Print out DNA analysis
Stop recording
Publish all data

The serial numbers are unique but an unreasonable doubter could assert that the producer had been suborned into producing unnumbered bags and the number added later. So a way to provide additional proof that the evidence has not been tampered with would be to use two bags, one inside the other and put one or more bank notes, preferably from different countries inside the outer bag but not the inner. The serial numbers on the bank notes would then be used to provide additional proof that the evidence had not been tampered with.

It is my belief that the US government has already eliminated all reasonable doubt that Bin Laden has been killed. Does the protocol I propose eliminate unreasonable doubt as well? I would hope so but some people will dispute even the most indisputable facts.

Bin Laden in hiding

2011-05-03T08:22:00.000-07:00

So bin Laden wasn't hiding in a cave after all. Who would have thought that?

Well quite a few people actually because a cave is not a particularly good place for a person needing daily medical treatment to hide. Bin Laden's kidney failure meant that he needed dialysis. That is difficult to perform in a cave and would require a constant flow of medical supplies.

Hiding in plain sight was probably Bin Laden's best option.

Why choose a military town? Well where else could you construct a fortified building without attracting attention?

Bin Laden's security precautions would be quite unusual by US suburban standards. But not so much in a garrison town close to Afghanistan and Kashmir. A lot of the buildings in the area have high walls to stop eyes looking at the womenfolk. The builders would not have known that they were building screens to hide a man rather than a woman.

Bin Laden also appears to have been pretty disciplined in keeping a low profile. He kept his personal contact with the outside world to the absolute minimum compatible with still maintaining some influence in Al Qaeda.

While he was bricked up in his hideout, Bin Laden was relatively safe. But being bricked up also meant that he could not recruit, plan or train. Some are claiming that this means that eliminating Bin Laden will have minimal impact on the ability of Al Qaeda to act and that the 'war on terror' is therefore going to continue.

This is a complete misreading of the situation in my view. Bin Laden was irrelevant to Al Qaeda's operations because there haven't been any since 9/11. Terrorist movements splinter and fracture constantly. The original goal of 9/11 was to get other jihadists to unite around Bin Laden's banner. If Al Qaeda exists in any meaningful sense it has been run by someone else for the past five years. Most likely Al Zawahiri. But I suspect that it is more than likely that when Zawahiri is eliminated he will be found in similar circumstances.

The attacks attributed to 'Al Qaeda' since 9/11 have all been planned and executed without any contribution from Bin Laden's organization. Some of the participants have ties to people who run in the same circles, but thats all. That is not a 'franchise', thats not a 'subsidiary', thats another group co-opting a brand that has already gained recognition.

Eliminating Bin Laden is a major blow in the 'War on Terror' because the whole concept was absurd and counterproductive. Bin Laden wanted to be taken seriously as an enemy. He wanted to be treated as an equal. And Bush and his administration obliged. Now they are claiming the credit for the elimination of Bin Laden, the Arab awakening in North Africa and everything else that is positive that has occurred since Obama took office. Not surprisingly there is not one thing that occurred during their watch that they have accepted blame for.

Bush's claim to have inspired the Arab awakening are as absurd as Bin Laden's. His goal was to perpetuate and extend US control of the region at any cost. He was entirely indifferent to the interests of the people living there and to the number of deaths he caused to achieve his goal.

Bin Laden did at least recognize that the region is ruled by regimes that are unrepresentative, brutal and corrupt. But his ultimate objective was of course to replace those regimes with one that would have no representation, be even more brutal and make the corruption absolute. Very few of the protesters in Egypt were calling for Bin Laden's vision of the future. Bin Laden's position provided Bush with convenient cover for his own. Opposition to the corrupt dictatorships of the region was automatically equated with support for Bin Laden's caliphate.

The removal of Bin Laden alone might not have ended the 'War on Terror', but it does give Obama the credibility to address this issue on his own terms without constant interference from the Republican party.

The removal of Bin Laden in combination with the events of the Arab Awakening have the potential to transform the region completely. Without the bogeyman Bin Laden, the dictators and despots are going to find it much harder to resist change.

The Dalek!

2011-04-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

Salvador Dalek nears completion.

Now I have a Dalek, why not let him work in the workshop for me? He seems quite at home there.

Of course, that is how I made some of the parts. Printed by shapeways for $44.

Asking the wrong question

2011-02-26T12:55:00.000-08:00

The New York Times debates Why didn't the US foresee the Arab revolts?

Why would this fact be a surprise? Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gaddafi failed to foresee the same revolts despite committing far greater resources to the task.

How do we even know if the premise of the question is correct? I am not on the President's reading list for Top Secret intelligence and neither is the New York Times. If the intelligence services had been predicting the collapse of these miserable dictatorships I would hope that they would keep it to themselves.

All six of the 'experts' asked to comment on the question assume that its premise must be correct and that had the US predicted the revolts they should have somehow acted to prevent them.

That was certainly the old model of US foreign policy: Propping up dictators in the name of 'stability'.

As the past four weeks proved, it didn't work.

Ahmedinejad's view

2011-02-24T17:58:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post should really stop giving Ahmedinejad's shills space to write about the Middle East.

The Leverett's are a couple who used to do foreign policy for the neo-cons but for mysterious (ormore likely banal) reasons suddenly started spouting the Iranian government line in a series of tendentious opinion pieces.

According to the Leveretts, the Iranian elections were not stolen and Iran is poised to emerge more powerful as a regional player as Egypt defects from US control and thus submits to Iran's sphere of influence.

In European terms, this is like suggesting that Germany would be part of the sphere of influence of Ukraine. Egypt has a larger population than Iran, an economy that is diversified beyond oil and controls the Suez canal. In the highly unlikely event that Sunni Egypt would want to form an alliance with Shi'ia Iran under theocratic control, it is clear that Iran, not Egypt would be the junior partner.

While US influence in the region may have declined as a result of the changes of the past four weeks, the only point of having influence is to protect interests. And the interests of the US and the Western world in general are much better served by the spread of democracy than maintaining the rule of kelptocratic dictators.

As the largest remaining police state in the region, the sudden collapse of similar regimes in Egypt, Tunis and Libya must be a concern to the mullahs of Iran. And the process is far from complete. If Bahrain and Yemen fall, the regime in Saudi Arabia is going to come under further pressure. Should Saudi Arabia fall, Iran's system of government will become a glaring anomaly.

Shorter Gadhafi

2011-02-22T10:06:00.000-08:00

Shorter Gadhafi: Claims in the foreign press that I am murdering opponents of my rule are lies and anyone who believes them is to be murdered. [Talking Points Memo]

The New Generation of MacBooks...

2010-11-11T13:58:00.000-08:00

I was rather surprised by Apple's tagline for the new MacBook Air, 'The New Generation of MacBooks' (Apple - Mac).

As a means of selling MacBooks, fine. But what does it say about their other models?

I have the first generation MBA. It is a great design apart from the design fault on the hinges. But my original plan was to get the 17" model which is great unless you don't mind carting a large, heavy slab of aluminium round with you.

No doubt some of the people who go for the 15 and 17" models really do need the extra performance of a 2.5 GHz processor over 1.8. But some would surely find a smaller machine more than made up for a modest reduction in speed.

Stuxnet: After the hype

2010-11-08T09:50:00.000-08:00

By now most readers of this blog will be aware of the now infamous Stuxnet virus that allegedly targeted the Iranian nuclear program, was allegedly written by Israel, Russia, China, the US and Iran itself, had no fewer than 4 zero day attacks, cost over a million dollars to write, but was clearly an amateur job, which succeeded and failed. It has disabled security systems throughout the world and there are no confirmed reports of it breaking anything.

As with many media firestorms, the analysis has tended to run in advance of the facts. And when the facts didn't fit it was the facts that were ignored rather than the analysis.

I have not looked at the Stuxnet code directly, but I have spoken with several experts who have and they all tell me the same story: The code consists of a distribution mechanism and a payload. Both are targeted to a particular group of machines but the distribution mechanism is set to infect particular groups of windows machines while the payload appears to be set to target one very specific installation.

The code appears to have been written in a modular fashion with different attacks being written by different hands. The code is layered and we are not sure that all its secrets have been revealed even now.

As with many high profile attacks, various parties have taken the distribution vector and repackaged it to attack targets of their own choice. Those parties may or may not include the original authors.

The only firm geographic information we have is that the code has employed signed code components signed under two separate code signing certificates, both issued to Taiwanese companies. I think this is a particularly significant piece of evidence since there are not very many code signing certificates in circulation. It is not something a hacker is likely to come across unless they are looking for it. And whoever was looking for the code signing certs was almost certainly able to read Chinese.

That said, the modular nature of the code suggests that the virus was written by many hands. I suspect that the task of writing the code was outsourced to several independent contractors, none of whom would have needed to know the ultimate purpose. They may well have outsourced the task of obtaining code signing certificates to Chinese or Taiwanese hackers to throw investigators off the trail.

Anyone with sufficient money and criminal connections could have written the distribution code. The payload is rather different. It appears to be very closely focused on one single target. This was initially suggested to be the Iranian centrifuge enrichment plant but my sources suggest that the Iranian Bushehr nuclear power plant is a more likely target.

One of the reasons for thinking that the target was Iran was that the Iranians themselves complained about being subjected to a Western cyber attack. Then they suddenly stopped complaining and denied that there had been any impact whatsoever.

Whatever the target was, we are pretty sure that the code did not target any major installation that the operators were willing to admit was the target. It is possible that Stuxnet targeted a European or US plant, but I very much doubt that this could have been kept secret. We are also fairly certain that whoever wrote Stuxnet had a very good reason for wanting to disable the plant, even though this was unlikely to succeed for more than a few months.

This last aspect of the attack makes it very unlikely that Israel or any Western country would be responsible. Whatever the target, it is highly unlikely that any cyber-attack against a well designed control system can achieve more than a temporary denial of service. Whoever wrote the Stuxnet code was revealing that they knew a very great deal about the design of the target. It is not very likely that any intelligence agency would want to put such a valuable strategic asset at risk for the sake of some casual vandalism that would be repaired in a few months.

Even more compelling is the fact that the Bushehr plant is not yet operational. Disabling a running plant is one thing, disabling a plant that is not yet commissioned would require considerably greater and more detailed inside knowledge.

If the target was the Iranian centrifuges, the knowledge could only have come from inside Iran itself. That is not impossible, there is certainly a complex power struggle going on within the regime. But it seems very unlikely.

The Iranian Bushehr reactor seems a much more likely target than the centrifuges. At least two parties had access to detailed knowledge of the plant's design - the Iranians and the Russian's who designed it. It is also possible that there are plants in other countries built to the same design and that a third party could have learnt some of the details from them. I find this unlikely however since respect for Russian nuclear engineering was severely damaged after Chernobyl. Other than the Iranians, it is unlikely that the Russians have had many recent customers.

Why would Russia sabotage a plant they built themselves? Well it used to be standard operating procedure during the days of the Soviet Union. Countries would buy all manner of technology from Russia and then learn that it was not so much an outright purchase so much as a lease. Selling the Iranians a power plant and then sabotaging it to force the Iranians to pay for repairs is the way the Soviet Union did business and is the way that Russia does business today - as European countries buying Russian natural gas have found to their cost.

We certainly do not have conclusive proof, but the Russia theory is the only one that fits all the facts we know and is the best fit to those facts. Russia has built its cyber-warfare capability through an alliance with organized crime, commissioning the deployment code is certainly well within the type of favor that Kremlin-sponsored criminal groups such as the Russian Business Network have performed in the past. The payload was probably written separately and tested out on an actual Russian power plant with the identical control system - presumably with the plant shutdown or otherwise safe.

In conclusion, the Stuxnet attack appears to me to be a highly professional attack perpetrated by the Russian government on their ally to coerce Iran into agreeing to accept Russia's proposal to reprocess Iranian fuel. This would allow Russia to recoup the cost of the attack through revenues from the reprocessing and would ensure that Iran remained dependent on Russian technology in the future.

Iran agreed to the reprocessing deal in 2005 and then backed out. A few months ago Iran changed course again and agreed to honor their earlier agreement. The Bushehr Nuclear plant began to be loaded with fuel on 21st August and is scheduled to begin generating power in the near future.

Dalek Halloween

2010-10-31T18:11:00.000-07:00

My halloween costume this year. It is a full scale dalek hero prop replica made from fiberglass, aluminium and rubber.

I did not quite manage to finish it on time due to a disaster with the trundling mechanism. The eyepiece is dodgy and dalek aficionados will not the absence of plunger and gun. Given that fitting them requires careful measurement and is a one time thing, I did not want to rush it.

The voice is produced by an authentic Moogerfooger ring modulator as used by the BBC that I bought off EBay.

Red Cells

2010-08-30T07:19:00.000-07:00

What is it about terrorism that makes US Commentators talk nonsense (Washington Post)?

Wikileaks recently obtained a document which asked what should be the rather unsurprising question 'Does the US export terrorism'.

Of course the US exports terrorism, for the simple reason that the US is a rich county with a very large population of second and third generation immigrants who can afford to engage in the irredentist politics of what they imagine to be their homeland.

The UK has the same problem. The causal nexus of the strife in the Punjab that led to the 1984 siege of the Golden Temple in Amritsar was almost entirely located in Birmingham England.

Until September 11, Rudy Giuliani would never pass up an opportunity to attend an IRA fundraiser. But support from New York City flowed to both sides of the sectarian conflict in Ireland, just as they do to both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian issue.

Expatriate irredentists are often the biggest obstacle to a peace process. They fund the conflicts but experience none of the consequences. They collect the money to buy bullets and bombs to murder and maim, but they only every acknowledge the injuries caused against their side. So the expatriates are always the last holdouts.

This is of course known to anyone who specialized in counter-terrorism before 9-11. But since then everyone in the security world has declared themselves an expert in counter-terrorism, most basing their models on the experience of the cold war era when the most visible terrorist groups were state sponsored.

How an Israeli attack on Iran might proceed.

2010-08-22T11:31:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald is engaged in another argument with Jeffrey Goldberg over the latter's article in the Atlantic in which he is very clearly beating a drum for a US war on Iran.

Greenwald initially pointed out that Goldberg had something of a credibility problem given his earlier role in peddling some of the stories used to claim a casus belli for the US invasion of Iraq. Since then it appears that he has caught Goldberg in an outright lie. Even so, Goldberg appears to have been largely successful in framing the debate on war with Iran as to whether the US should attack first or let Israel start the war.

The argument from Goldberg et. al. appears to be that if Israel attacks Iran, Iran will retaliate and that this will force the US to come to Israel's defense following Iran's inevitable retaliation. I find this a rather unlikely scenario as it leaves out of consideration the reaction of China, Russia and US public opinion and the fact that any US response would be constrained by time and logistics.

Planning for wars takes a considerable amount of time. Even if the US was minded to immediately declare war on Iran, it could not do so immediately and the costs of doing so would be rather obvious. The US public would wake up to the possibility of being drawn into a third neo-con war in defense of the country that was unambiguously the aggressor. It is doubtful that a majority of Republicans would support that proposition, let alone Obama's base.

When Obama addressed the nation from the oval office, his only real option would be to call on all sides to accept a cease fire on the basis of a US-Russian-Chinese plan being voted on by the UN security council and look to take credit for saving Israel from its own foolish leaders.

Netanyahu is no fool, he knows that he can't launch an attack against Iran and then go run crying to the US's skirt after the inevitable retaliation. Those are the tactics of cowards and schoolyard bullies. Netanyahu would only launch an attack if he is certain he knows where the nuclear material is and he is certain that Israel would win the inevitable war that would follow. Since only a lunatic would be certain of either proposition the prospects of an Israeli attack on Iran are rather small.

BadB and anti-Americanism

2010-08-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

Its good to hear that Alleged Carder ‘BadB’ has been busted.

But take a look at his business card and remember that this is a Ukraine/Israeli citizen. Then ask yourself if the people who are doing Internet crime are purely in it for the money.

While the money is certainly a large part of their motivation, there is clearly a nationalist motivation as well. While the fall of the Soviet Empire was considered a very good think in the West, some people in the East were not so happy. And Horohorin, 27 was 8 when the communist system collapsed. He probably does not remember the secret police or the gulags.

It is strange but true that some people find the most bizarre, abominable things imaginable to idolize. When I was in college some students used to love to shock people by declaring their support for General Pinnochet, a man they knew to be responsible for several tens of thousands of murders.

How to bias a poll

2010-07-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

Selection bias free, I am sure.

Take Our Obama Socialism Survey And Receive Free "Impeach Obama" Sticker | The Conservative Caucus

Spies amongst us

2010-07-01T13:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I discovered I have been living near to a pair of Russian spies for the past ten years and never noticed. Today we start to discover just how lame those spies were. Shoddy tradecraft, falling for ridiculous ruses, what clowns!

I beg to differ.

Looking at the tradecraft described in the complaints it does not appear to be markedly different from the methods used by the KGB in the Soviet era. Some of the tools had changed, wireless laptops had replaced the old dead drops. But they were using the exact same methods that they had used in the Soviet era when the KGB successfully infiltrated both MI5 and the FBI.

And that for me is the real reason why the Russian spying antics were so pathetic: the times had changed, they had not. Which at root is the whole problem with the Putin crowd and its attempt to turn the clock back to the Breshniev era of 'Stalinism-Lite'.

First off, lets get the terminology right. The spies that were just caught were not agents, they were operatives. That is the field level spy masters. A real life James Bond does not go and steal the information himself, he recruits locals who have already have access to the information to act as agents. The division between operatives and agents is an important one in intelligence work: the agencies will generally do whatever they can to protect operatives, agents are generally considered expendable.

The Russian ten spies did not attempt to burrow into government agencies or perform classified work directly. Their covers were only designed to be good enough to fool immigration and would almost certainly have been exposed in a positive vetting process. To be effective as spies following the old KGB model the Russians would have to recruit agents with access to the information they wanted.

We yet don't know if the spies were successful in recruiting agents, though we may well find out if there are further arrests. While the tools of the operative are money, ideology and blackmail, it is only the last one that is practical with respect to cold-calling in a democratic society. Mercenaries such as Hanssen and Ames are typically walk-ins. They decide they are going to betray their country by themselves and then make contact. The same is typically true of ideologues.

Lets say you are an NSA employee and have been identified as a target by a Russian operative who approaches you with an offer of money in return for secrets. Even if the amount of money on offer is tempting (a million dollars say), the risks are enormous and the approach is very likely to be a trap. The competent traitor knows that they have to reject any unsolicited offers and be the party that makes contact themselves.

This leaves blackmail, which has always been the primary tool of the field operative. An offer of money is likely to be rejected and reported, an offer of money coupled with a threat is much less risky. Later this year the IETF will be holding a meeting in Beijing. As a somewhat senior information security professional I would consider it something of an insult if I was not targeted by a honey-trap operation. A few years back a police raid on an 'Asian massage parlor' in Silicon Valley uncovered hidden cameras in all the rooms. While it is possible that the owner was merely a pervert, many of the clients captured on the tapes would have access to technology that China would very much like to acquire.

In the Soviet era, the KGB could use a very powerful form of blackmail: reprisals against relatives still in their power. Co-operation might mean permission to live in Moscow for a parent or sibling, refusal might mean loss of a job, internal exile or being denied critical medical care.

Putin's modern day spies had much less to work with. The US is a far more open society than it was ten or twenty years ago. Exposure as an adulterer or homosexual might damage personal relationships but is not going to end a career or result in prison unless your job happens to be running an anti-gay bigotry association.

Its not just the tools that have changed, the objectives have as well. Twenty years ago an operative who obtained an internal telephone directory for a government agency would be a hero. Today the information is most likely up on a Web site (and more likely to be up to date). Want a background profile on the new assistant director for widget command? His kids are probably on Facebook, his classmates certainly are.

For the past couple of years I have been attending weekly seminars at MIT on cybernetic aspects of international relations. In a nutshell the Internet is having major effects on national security, diplomacy and the way that wars are fought in future. Russia, China and the US are each attempting to work out what military and foreign policy doctrine is going to be in the Internet age. The MIT/Harvard project funded by the Minerva Institute is looking into these issues.

Isn't this exactly the sort of stuff that Russia would want to send a spy to sit in on? Is it likely that any of them did? Well not if they were illegals unless they wanted to attract quite a bit of attention.

And here we get to the real incompetence of the whole affair. We do not know what the spies may have acquired but the fact that they were allowed to operate, observed for over a decade shows that they probably didn't acquire very much that was damaging. How much more could the Russians have acquired if they had spent the same amount of money on a room full of clerks searching Google?

The Chinese espionage activities leave me equally skeptical. I do not doubt that they exist, the documentation is conclusive. I just think that they are more likely harming the Chinese economy as helping it. As long as China focuses on stealing foreign innovation, development of their own technology base will suffer.

We do not yet know, we may never know the reason that the arrests happened now, but one possibility is that the spies were so incompetent that they were actually hurting US interests. This may sound odd to someone brought up with the notion that being spied on is a bad thing. But in international relations terms there is a real value in transparency. If I do not have anything to hide, I want my adversary to know that I do not have anything to hide. If I stop him from confirming that I have nothing to hide he is going to go off and invent an explanation for my refusal and plan against it. that is going to make his behavior more random (bad) and possibly more aggressive (very bad).

We may never know, but it does not look like the Russian ten were doing much to improve transparency. The Russians probably knew less as a result of their efforts than they would have without them.

Rand Paul: Worse than a racist.

2010-05-22T11:57:00.000-07:00

Rand Paul's tortured explanation of his opposition to parts of the civil rights act is being taken by some to indicate that he is either a covert racist or wishes to send a covert signal to racists that he is on their side.

Rand Paul's supporters are attempting to show that Paul's interest in positions that have traditionally been shout out to racists is in fact due to his deep and sincere belief in the rights of the individual and not a continuation of the covert-racism that many GOP figures such as Trent Lott and Jesse Helms engaged in for decades.

While there are many reasons to be skeptical of these claims, the counter-claim that Rand Paul is a rigid ideologue rather than merely a racist is actually a lot worse.

If Rand Paul is taken at his word, he is such a rigid ideologue that he would have opposed the real improvement in personal liberty provided by the civil rights act in favor of an abstract, theoretical definition of liberty. In Paul's world only the government can threaten liberty. No action by a private citizen can ever threaten liberty unless it involves coercion. In Paul's world, liberty matters above all else, but the term liberty has a fluid meaning that can be adapted to any purpose.

In the real world of course, the private individuals in the South could only discriminate by calling in the force of the state to remove blacks from whites-only lunch counters. As with Paul's assertion that 'tort law', not government regulation is the answer to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the gulf, libertopia is only achieved by ignoring state involvement in the favored case. Tort law is created by government legislation and (in common law jurisdictions at any rate) the decisions of government courts. Paul is not insisting on an absence of government regulation, he is insisting that the government is only allowed to regulate through retribution.

Libertarians are fond of the notion that the political spectrum is two dimensional, with a libertarian/authoritarian axis in addition to the left-right divide. The claim being that authoritarianism rather than any particular economic theory was the common factor in the totalitarian governments that came to power in the 20th century.

Rand Paul would clearly like to be placed on the libertarian end of the spectrum. But if we look at the consequences of his ideology rather than his purported principles he starts to appear distinctly authoritarian. Like Lenin he insists on placing a theoretical liberty defined by his rigid ideology above actual liberty.

Libertarians like to claim that they had no part in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. But this is only true if we ignore Latin America where a series of generals insisted on the need to defend liberty by replacing the democratically elected government through a military coup. And the fact that stalwart 'libertarians' such as Milton Friedman could support such murderers in the name of 'liberty' is certainly proof strongly suggests that it is a rigid commitment to ideology that is the defining enabler of totalitarianism above all others.

Stupid political arguments of our time

2010-04-15T05:21:00.000-07:00

John McCain says it is 'Time To 'Pull The Trigger' On Tougher Iran Sanctions' [TPM LiveWire].

There is just one teensy little problem. The US already has a full economic embargo on Iran. It is illegal for any US citizen to engage in any form of commerce with Iran including buying Iranian made goods and selling goods to Iran. So when McCain is saying that the US should pull the trigger, he is referring to a gun that has already been fired.

The only way that the US can bring any greater pressure to bear on Iran is by getting other countries to support the sanctions regime. And that in turn is made rather difficult by the fact that US credibility is rather poor after the lies told by Obama's predecessor to gain support for the US invasion of Iraq.

Waiting in line not for an iPad, but for a new shell - Local News Updates - MetroDesk - The Boston Globe

2010-04-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

Cool

Waiting in line not for an iPad, but for a new shell - Local News Updates - MetroDesk - The Boston Globe

Using field studies, lab experiments, and computer models, the biologists discovered that hermit crabs join together in what is known as a "synchronous vacancy chain" when they are looking for a new home.

Cry Anti-Semitism

2010-04-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

There are still a large number of people who ascribe to a wide variety of bigotries. But I think rather few people will agree that current criticism of the Pope's handling of priests who raped children is in any way motivated by sentiments comparable to anti-Semitism [BBC News].

At the root of the current crisis is the fact that the current Pope was determined to suppress criticism of the church by any means, even if doing so would inevitably lead to offenders being left to rape yet more victims. And now the claim of anti-Semitism is being made in the faint hope of bullying critics into silence.

The claim might be received a little more sympathetically if the Vatican had actually managed to apologize for its failure to condemn the holocaust as it was happening. Likewise it is rather hard to see an institution as being victimized by bigots when it spends so much time and effort promoting the cause of anti-gay bigotry.

Scholarship at the AEI

2010-03-29T12:27:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the firing of Frum, Charles Murray makes an unintentionally revealing post on the nature of the AEI and AEI scholarship.

Murray is also an AEI fellow, but he purports to be posting independently. In particular he states: I do not have any certain information to convey about David’s departure, except what Arthur Brooks has already said publicly: David resigned.

In other words the only "certain information" that Murray is stating is best described as a lie. While Murray's statement may be technically a true statement, it is intended to deceive and thus a lie. Murray is no doubt aware that the condition under which Frum could remain was to go from being paid what Murray describes as a 'handsome salary' to being unpaid. To insist of calling this a 'resignation' is dishonest.

Once we understand that this is the game Murray plays, we can see that the apparent denial of donor pressure influencing AEI policy in Murray's third paragraph is in fact nothing of the sort. Murray describes a very specific scenario in which donor pressure does not take place "The idea that AEI donors sit down to talk with AEI’s president...". The scenario is presented as being a 'fantasy', but nowhere is there actually a denial.

Murray is again being intentionally deceptive. As he must know, Frum alleged only that he was told not to write on Health Care Reform as it was likely to upset the donors. He did not allege that the donors made any complaint, which is the charge Murray decides to rebut.

After stating that he has no information, Murray theorizes that the reason for Frum's departure is his lack of work for the Institute. Murray himself admits to drawing a salary on the same basis, but gives no explanation for why Frum was forced to resign and he was not.

In making this complaint against Frum, Murray unintentionally admits one of the principal charges critics make against the AEI: it disburses patronage to Conservatives who toe the party line without expecting anything in return beyond use of their name on the letterhead. But for the pseudo-academic patina of his AEI 'fellowship', Charles Murray would be just another crank who wrote a covert racist screed.

But then look at how Murray finishes his piece:

I think that’s what happened. I also think that for David to have leveled the charge that Arthur Brooks caved in to donor pressure, knowing that the charge would be picked up and spread beyond recall, knowing that such a charge strikes at the core of the Institute’s integrity, and making such a sensational charge without a shred of evidence, is despicable.

Here Murray unintentionally demonstrates a complete lack of any capacity for self-examination. The next sentence after making a charge he admits he has no evidence for, Murray accuses Frum of having made a charge without a shred of evidence.

As Murray himself admits, he has no evidence other than what is in the public domain. While Frum has provided no evidence to support his assertion that members of the AEI were told not to write on health care, the AEI has made no attempt to refute the charge and no evidence has been presented to show the contrary. Since it is implied that Frum himself was one of the people told not to write on Health Care Reform, his own testimony is evidence. Now whether the word of Frum alone is persuasive (he was an AEI scholar after all), it is clearly not true to claim that there is no evidence.

If Charles Murray is representative of AEI 'scholarship', it is an institution whose integrity is not so much compromised as non-existent.

Police: Fired worker disabled cars via Web

2010-03-18T10:38:00.000-07:00

Hot on the Pensylvannia school webcam case, another case of what happens when companies only think 'what is the worst that could happen to me'.

An auto dealership fitted radio GPS systems with a function that enabled the engine to be remotely disabled. The company only worried about getting the car back if the customer didn't pay. They didn't consider the possibility that a fired employee might use the system to get back at the employeer.

The dealership is now facing demands for compensation from the owners who were denied use of the cars for several days. Some had their cars towed, all suffered unnecessary inconvenience. the dealer has suffered damage to its reputation and will almost certainly end up paying substantial compensation to the customers.

It does not look as if the dealer has learned its lesson either. Changing passwords won't help as the real cause of the problem was that the employee had too much authority. Since disabling a customer's car should be a last resort, the system should probably require authorization from more than one employee. Velocity controls to prevent one employee disabling hundreds of cars at the same time would be a sensible additional control.

Truth in Power Lunching

2010-03-13T19:53:00.000-08:00

I am particularly interested in two little mentioned new features of the new MacBook Pro. The features of interest are all on the back edge:

The first change is that Apple has finally seen sense and decided to support an SD card slot. the ability to transfer photos and video from camera to computer without additional dongles is a major hassle eliminator for professional and serious photographers.

But the more important change for me is that there is now an indicator of remaining battery power on the back edge where the user is unable to see it.

Why is this so important?

Well a very common situation in a conference room is that you have n available sockets on a power strip and n+1 (or more) people with laptops to plug in. This inevitably creates a situation where various people attempt to gain access to the plug by pleading imminent exhaustion of their battery.

The power strip meter is a dead giveaway. Now we will know whose machine is about to croak and who is merely bluffing.

What should the School District have done?

2010-02-19T07:08:00.000-08:00

The Pennsylvania school district being sued for allegedly spying on students now claims the feature was only used to recover stolen laptops.

Recovering a stolen laptop is an objective that most people would accept as valid. But at the very least the school district implementation has created a major legal liability. Even if they 'win' the lawsuit they could easily spend a million dollars in legal costs.

What should the school district have done instead?

Disclosure: Any security mechanism that you would not want to disclose to your users is likely to be a bad idea. A mechanism that is kept secret to avoid controversy is a very, very bad idea.

Dual controls: Banks require every important operation to involve at least two people. Its not just to reduce the risk of embezzlement, its to provide protection for the personnel. If one employee could open the safe by themselves they would be a target for kidnappers and if any money did go missing they would be a suspect.

Audit Trail: Every system that could be misused should generate a tamper proof audit trail.

Security people don't just ask 'what is the worst that can happen', they think 'what is the worst that someone could be accused of'.

Adding the necessary controls does not need to create excessive overheads. Simply generate a unique access code for each end point and seal the access codes in tamper-evident bags. Make the custodian of the bags a different person to the one that has the password for the recovery system. Alternatively use a software based mechanism to enforce dual controls.

This problem has been solved for a decade in key recovery systems. There really is no excuse for not applying that technology.

Clueless pundits

2010-02-16T05:59:00.000-08:00

What I find most depressing about the state of the Washington Post is the sheer political cluelessness of some of their pundits. Lane argues that Bayh's last minute withdrawal from the race has set himself up for a Presidential run against Obama.

There are many problems here, not least the fact that there really isn't a constituency in the Democratic party base that thinks Obama has failed to be sufficiently open to working with the Republicans.

I suspect that his timing was designed to prevent a big name GOP candidate from entering the race. But most party activists seem to have assumed that his real objective was to ensure that the party apparatus would install a blue dog candidate. That has pretty much made the Bayh brand toxic as far as national politics goes.

Bayh's departure appears to be driven by pique as the loss of the supermajority and the GOP tactics of total obstruction have transformed his role from cloture power-broker to a marginal player in the reconciliation-rules 51 vote game.

Human Error

2010-02-15T19:31:00.000-08:00

According to the Olympic committee it was 'Human Error' that caused the death of luger Kumaritashvili.

I beg to differ. Human error was merely the cause of the crash. The crash was fatal because the luger collided with an unprotected steel support.

Every corner on a Formula One track is protected with walls of rubber tires. The speeds are faster, but the drivers are riding in reinforced chassis designed to withstand high speed impacts. It might be that no amount of protection would have been sufficient, but failure to provide any would seem to be negligent.

But whatever the cause is ultimately determined to be, any judgment made at this point is premature.

Woods not a good Buic salesman

2010-02-12T12:56:00.000-08:00

One of the things I could never understand about GM was why they paid Tiger Woods to be the pitchman for Buick. It always seemed an odd fit, seems that I was right [USA Today].

My impression of Buick was that it was little more than an excuse to charge a slightly higher price for a range of uninspiring sedans made from standard GM parts. That is not an impression that you break by paying a celebrity to drive it when they would obviously be much happier in a Porsche or a Ferrari.

Seeing Woods step out of a Buick was never going to make people think 'hey I want to drive what he drives'. To the extent the brand of the car registered at all most people would think either 'rental' or 'being paid to drive it'.

People understand that Woods is also paid to tout the goods Nike makes in low wage sweatshops of course. But there the idea is that the spokesperson has at least some input into the goods on sale. It is unlikely he would stay with Nike clubs and balls unless they were amongst the best in the industry, there is the expectation that he at least sees the clothing range before it launches.

Arnold Palmer was a very successful spokesperson for Rolex for the simple reason that it was totally believable that a Rolex is what Palmer would choose to wear. It is hard to imagine many spokespersons that that would be true of for Buick, which is probably why the brand is best buried.

Everything you need to know about shooting the news…. « Photo Traveler

2010-02-09T11:12:00.000-08:00

All you need to know about news journalism [h/t Bob Krist]

No Flash on the iPad

2010-02-05T12:26:00.000-08:00

The New York Times joins the long list of journals who fail to mention the most likely reason that Apple refuses to implement Flash on the iPad.

Apple has made clear that it's intention is to control both the platform and the applications that run on the platform. Like the Video Game console makers, Apple wants to tax every application provider.

Support for Flash would provide another means of putting applications on the iPhone. And so Apple will refuse to support Flash whatever the status of the specification or the implementation until they abandon the 'application tax' model.

Is there any chance Apple will change? As with every other first generation Apple product, the iPad lacks rather a lot of features that appear essential. It is pretty obvious that the next version will have a camera for doing video conferencing. I think that they are going to find they are forced to support real USB and an SD card as well.

Apple does quite well spinning the fact that obviously essential features are missing. When the first iMac was launched it lacked a floppy drive because the box had originally been made as a 'Network PC' and repurposed as a home PC. Jobs argued that the lack of a floppy or a CDRom was because people would download programs from the Internet. This story has even been repeated this week as evidence for how 'prescient' Jobs has been in the past. Which is rather silly since there was an optical drive on the next iMac and every model since.

When the iPhone came out the big question was not whether it would make a good computer but whether it would be a usable phone. Experience of the HP iPaq range was that computer company phones were to be avoided. Rival phone makers have spent the three years since trying to catch up with the first iPhone. The fact that the iPhone is a vendor locked application platform was not a big deal to me as it was the first phone that you could run a useful application on without the thing crashing (yes, I mean you Palm).

The iPad is a computer and this time Apple is up against the rival computer makes. I don't much care how good Apple's eBook store is, I am going to buy my eBooks from Amazon which lets me read them on my Kindle, my PCs or in the very near future my Macs. The first generation iPad clones will probably be somewhat nasty. But if they have an SD slot and a proper USB port and let me write my own applications they are already looking like a better buy.

Apple is certainly going to try to roll their iPhone/iTouch application tax model onto the iPad but this time its going to fail. And when it does we will probably see the model starting to unwind on the iPhone as well. If Google Android based pad computers beat out the iPad they are going to establish a developer base to make them competitive with iPhone.

Word Stupidity

2010-02-03T08:35:00.000-08:00

For years, the defaults for making references to other parts of a document in Microsoft Word have been insane.

First off there is the stupid dialog box.

There are eight default objects that Word lets you link to but the drop down menu only shows the first six. For some reason the options for 'Table' and 'Figure' - i.e. the types of object people are most likely to be adding a cross reference to appear at the bottom so you have to scroll down to see them.

The other bizarre choice is that the default is to insert a reference to the Entire Caption. Does this ever make sense?

The net is that the user has to scroll through two drop down menus every single time they insert a reference. Word does not seem to have an option to add in a shortcut. And the default options are reset each and every time the dialog appears.

Abdulmutallab speaks

2010-02-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

So, Abdulmutallab, the 'crotch bomber' has been co-operating with investigators 'despite' the use of standard FBI process [ NY Times].

This should hardly be a surprise. Police are trained to perform interrogations, they have years of experience. CIA agents are not.

Even so, the latest Republican Party talking point is the rather weird claim that reading Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights may have persuaded him to stop talking.

Let us recap the circumstances of Abdulmutallab's arrest. He was taken off the plane he had attempted to bomb. He had severely injured himself in the attempt to detonate the bomb. The passengers and crew had at a minimum removed his trousers and underwear. It seems quite likely that after discovering the bomb in his underpants, the passengers/crew had stripped him completely naked.

Given those circumstances, it seems rather unlikely that Abdulmutallab would have any expectation of a not-guilty verdict.

How could talking to the investigators possibly make Abdulmutallab's case any worse? He can't claim mistaken identity, he can't plausibly deny carrying the bomb, being aware of carrying it or attempting to detonate it.

Abdulmutallab is certain to receive a life sentence regardless of what he says. This is not a difficult case where a confession or an unintended slip is going to make the difference between conviction and acquittal. It is as close to being an open-and-shut case as they come.

The only chance Abdulmutallab has to improve his living conditions during his life sentence or to earn the possibility of parole in the distant future is to co-operate.

Incidentally, the man appears to have burnt away his penis in the attempt. How could torture do anything more than give him something else to think about? If he is being waterboarded he is going to blame his captors for his situation. If he is being being treated as an ordinary criminal he has plenty of time to build up resentment against the group who caused his injury.

At the time of his arrest Abdulmutallab was probably expecting to be taken to Gitmo and subjected to torture. The point at which his Miranda rights were read would be the first point at which the actions of the authorities significantly departed from his expectations.

iPad - missing the point

2010-01-27T20:24:00.000-08:00

All the reviews for the Apple iPad seem to be positioning it as a Kindle competitor.

This is rather silly as the point of kindling is that you use it to start the fire. It is the first fuel to be consumed.

To understand where Amazon is going with Kindle people should look to the fact that there is already a Kindle viewer for the iPhone which according to the Apple site should work on the iPad unless Apple is silly enough to attempt to block it. There is also a Kindle reader for the PC and a reader for Mac is promised.

The point of the Kindle was to allow Amazon to build an early lead in the eBook market and to prevent Apple from dislodging it in the way that Apple has managed to dismantle the power of the record labels. Kindle has clearly met that objective.

The iPad is simply a logical extension of the Kindle concept that is optimized for video, games and pictures rather than a dedicate book reader.

Rather too much is also being made of Amazon's recent 'change' in their pricing policy. Under the old pricing policy the publisher got 30% of the recommended retail price which Amazon routinely discounted by a third. So the publisher would recommend a price of $15 which Amazon would discount to $10 and receive $4.50 per copy. Under the new scheme the publisher gets 70% of the sales price provided they agree to a recommended price of $2.99 to $9.99 that is at least 20% lower than the hardcover price and agrees to enable text-to-speech. So the royalty rates are actually rising from 45% to 70% and only if the publisher is also willing to take a considerable price cut. The net result is that it makes little sense for a publisher to charge more than $9.99 for a Kindle book unless they are going to charge a minimum of $23.33.

Amazon is still making a nice profit from Kindle sales, but their cost of sales is no longer negligible. Associate fees are 10% of Kindle sales and the costs associated with payment processing and running the Amazon site and brand are likely to take up another 10%. Kindle royalties might rise a little further in the future, but any rise is going to significantly cut into Amazon's profit.

Why charging illegal entry?

2010-01-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

Someone asked me why O'Keefe has been charged with illegal entry rather than wiretapping.

The answer is that this is likely a holding charge. The prosecutors have all the evidence they need to win a conviction for attempting to gain entry to Federal property for the purpose of committing a crime. That alone carries a sentence of ten years. Burglary is the act of breaking and entering for a criminal purpose. The actual taking of property a separate offense: theft.

But the FBI and the prosecutors will almost certainly be adding additional charges before taking the case to a grand jury. They will also be looking to see if the group have attempted any other breakins and in particular the possibility that they might have succeeded.

What charges are likely? Well the Pellicano case is a fairly close comparison. Pellicano was eventually sentenced in December 2008 to 15 additional years in prison, and ordered (with two other defendants) to forfeit $2 million [Wikipedia].

Pellicano was engaged in his activities for several years and so he was charged with RICO Conspiracy. He also attempted to cover up his activities and so he was charged with witness tampering, false statements and destruction of evidence.

Of the Pellicano charges, the charge of Interception of Wire Communications does not apply on the basis of the facts set out in the indictment. It would apply if the conspirators had been allowed to actually place the wiretap and it was used to intercept a communication. But had that happened I would expect it to have been reported in the affidavit and charged as per the indictment. It may turn out that the conspirators intercepted other communications in which case they would be liable for either a one year or a five year sentence depending on the circumstances.

A count of Posession of an Electronic Communication Interception Device (18 USC 2512) seems likely, but that only has a sentence of five years.

According to the facts as we currently understand them, the activities of O'Kefee and his conspirators were nowhere near as extensive as those of Pellicano, nor did they succeed. But against that there is the fact that they attempted to bug the telephone of a United States Senator.

Another third rate burglary

2010-01-27T07:25:00.000-08:00

The FBI Affidavit provides some very interesting information on what Democrats are now referring to as the 'Louisiana Watergate'. Conservative propagandist James O'Keefe and three accomplices were caught allegedly attempting to tap the phones of Senator Landrieu.

As the Senator's office is on Federal property, the holding charge of attempting to gain entry to Federal property for the purpose of committing a crime carries a maximum ten year jail sentence.

The affidavit itself reads like a bad script for an episode of the A-Team. Two members of the group dressed up as telephone repairmen and attempted to gain access to the telephone closet. They headed for the Senator's office, attempted pretexting and were directed to the GSA office down the hall where the plot was uncovered when the pair were asked for identification and claimed to have left it in their van.

Now it is quite possible that a GSA employee would have been trained to recognize a telephone company ID badge, but I don't know what one looks like and the typical security guard at a non-government facility wouldn't either. For a few hundred bucks the conspirators could have bought a second hand badge printer on EBay to create their own badges and greatly reduced the chance of getting caught.

Using fake ID reduces the risk of being caught but increases the penalties if caught. Possession of a fraudulent access device is a federal crime, as is possession of means to create fraudulent access devices. Using real identification greatly increases the risk of being caught, but some do so anyway.

So how does a facility protect itself against this type of attack?

At this point we do not know where the conspirators first aroused suspicion, it is quite likely that they were considered suspect from the minute they walked in the door. A well designed security process has multiple layers and multiple checks:

Check Government ID
Confirm Corporate ID
Check contact name
Confirm with contact
Escort visitor
Defined process

The first line of defense is to ask for government issued ID. With fifty states, there is considerable variation in driving licenses, but they are at least a closed set and a telephone repairman handing over a New York drivers license in Louisiana should be asked for an explanation. Most state driving licenses have anti-counterfeiting measures built in and are printed on distinctive stock.

Corporate ID provides an additional check but is not a substitute for government issued ID. Corporate ID should of course match the government ID.

My experience of government buildings is that government issued ID is required to enter the building. This alone would make the conspirator's claim that they left their ID in their van very suspicious.

Another thing that is required to enter a government building is a contact person. It is quite likely that the conspirators bypassed this requirement by giving the Senator's Office as the contact. 'Walk-ins' are a common occurrence at politician's offices of course, but a tradesman coming to perform work without a specific contact name should be a red flag.

In most government buildings, visitors require an escort unless they are visiting a separate area that is specifically designated as public access. Most of the newer corporate offices in Silicon Valley now have meeting rooms that connect directly to the lobby. This allows employees to meet visitors without bringing them into the part of the building where company confidential material might be on display.

Security procedures of this sort have become standard practice in most US companies in the wake of 9/11, at least with regard to the form which is easily copied. What is not easily copied are the less visible parts of the system such as what should happen when work needs to be done on the telephone system.

The most important security control is to have a defined procedure so that the person responsible for implementing it knows what to do. In the case of a GSA facility, there will be a written policy describing precisely which individuals should have access to the telephone system and under what circumstances. That process will anticipate the possibility that a bogus telephone repairman would turn up attempting to place a wiretap, not least because the process will have been extensively reviewed and quite possibly red-teamed by CIA teams responsible for attempting similar operations against foreign powers.

Crotchbomber changed return flight

2010-01-12T05:02:00.000-08:00

Much is being made of the failure of the authorities to catch Farouk AbulMutalab aka the 'crotchbomber' despite suspicious activity such as flying on a one-way ticket.

Only according to the Nigerian press, Farouk's ticket
was a return and he even went so far as to change the routing on the return leg.

The Twitter DNS attack

2009-12-20T09:44:00.000-08:00

Praetorian Prefect has a comprehensive rundown.

RealID farce continues

2009-12-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post report that states will get more time to comply with Real ID.

This is nonsense, what is actually going on here is that RealID is dead and the administration has put off recognizing the fact for another 15 months. The 46 states that are non compliant know full well that the next deadline will be extended as well.

This was all totally predictable when RealID was passed as a rider to the 2005 Iraq war appropriations. The Senate never got a chance to debate RealID at all, it was added to the bill in conference without any Democrats present.

At present 25 States have passed laws that prevent compliance with RealID. Even if the number of states was smaller it was never very likely that any administration would have made good on the threat to refuse use of those state's driving licenses to board planes.

Belgian coma man

2009-12-13T08:32:00.000-08:00

Hearing the story of a Belgian coma victim who has 'woken' after 23 years on the radio made me wonder if we are not going to have another re-run of the Terri Schiavo circus.

According to James Randi's JREF, there is nothing there. The alleged awakening is hardly of Lazarus proportions. The patient is still immobile and the communication consists of 'facilitated communication' with an assistant doing the actual typing.

As always, once the credulous media have publicized a false claim it will be impossible to persuade wishful thinkers otherwise. The story of the Belgian man who awoke from a coma after 23 years will be transmuted into fact.

But, but, but....

2009-12-09T14:46:00.000-08:00

How can the GOP defend this?

I guess it must mean that he never got a blow-job.

What passes for news

2009-12-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

At one time what started in the tabloids stayed in the tabloid, since the OJ Simpson trial everything is a soap opera and everyone is always the injured party.

So Tiger's mistress is upset that he was 'unfaithful' to her? On what grounds?

It would be really nice if just one little part of the mainstream media could occasionally try to serve a more useful purpose than providing Jon Stewart with material. Can it really be that hard? If you know you are going out with a cheater then you should pretty much expect him to cheat on you as well and have no grounds for a complaint at all if you are also cheating on them.

Or in other words: It is no sin for a cheating cheater to cheat on their cheatee.

The fifth man

2009-12-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

Oh dear, Tiger's mistress count reaches four.

One wonders what the US press would have made of the fact that it took the UK media two decades to uncover the identity of the fifth man.

Don't go to Moe's speakeasy on 4th street.

2009-12-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

The Climate Summit in Copenhagen has created an interesting clash between the City council and the local prostitutes.

The clash began when the city council decided to send notices to city hotels asking guests not to patronize the local prostitutes during the conference. In response the prostitutes are offering free sex to anyone who shows both a warning notice and their conference ID badge. Prostitution is legal in Copenhagen and the sex workers are objecting to the city council interfering with their trade.

But what was the Mayor thinking? The warnings sound like the newspaper editorials that some of the craftier bootleggers would run in their newspapers loudly protesting the evils of the demon drink. Prohibitionists would read the article and agree with it, the rest would think about going to Moe's for a drink, the location of which would be clearly stated in the article.

More Faux News Reporting

2009-11-20T12:04:00.000-08:00

S. Robert Lichter writes an article titled Fox News: Fair And Balanced? in Forbes.com

As you might guess from the title, S. Robert Lichter's conclusion is 'yes'.

So who is S. Robert Lichter?

First hit on Google

"S. Robert Lichter is president of the Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs and a paid consultant to the Fox News Channel" [1]

So the only guy they can find to describe them as 'fair and balanced' is the same guy who they were paying as a consultant only last year? Surely a relevant disclosure to make in the circumstances?

Filibuster tactics

2009-11-20T08:06:00.000-08:00

I was rather interested to read the latest tactical maneuvering on the health care bill.

It is now clear that the initial GOP threat to force a reading of the whole bill has been neutralized. The best possible outcome for the Democrats at this point would be for Coburn to go through with his threat. The Democrats would then bring in a team of speedreaders to complete the reading over the thanksgiving recess while Coburn and some Democrat presiding miss their dinner, thus providing a highly visible proof of GOP obstruction.

But the more interesting feature is a consequence of the possibility of multiple filibuster threats. In theory any Senate motion is subject to filibuster. But in practice use of the filibuster tends to be limited to final passage rather than the intermediate stages. There is a reason for that, it is really bad tactics for the minority to attempt to filibuster early in the process.

As we saw earlier with discussion of the 'nuclear option', there are ways and means to get round Senate rules. A cloture motion sets out a time limit for debate on a motion. But there is no reason that the Democrats could not introduce a motion to change the rules of the Senate to introduce a time limit for debate on all future procedural motions for a bill. Such a motion would be subject to filibuster, but that is a one time event and a filibuster is not without benefit for those participating in breaking it. Whatever hardship the majority endures will be highly visible via local TV news and newspapers. Most would much rather spend a week sleeping in my office than on the campaign trail.

Under such circumstances the dynamics of the health care debate become very different. All the concessions that the majority made to the minority earlier are lost and then some.

And once there is one bill on the floor that is filibuster proof, it can be used as a vehicle for any purpose that garners a 50 Senate votes.

The dillema of intelligence

2009-11-05T07:24:00.000-08:00

The seizure of a consignment of Iranian arms destined for Hezbollah demonstrates a particularly difficult problem of intelligence: it may not make any difference at all.

While any action that reduces the amount of arms available to either the Iranian regime or their Hezbollah franchisees is good, this is clearly only a tactical victory at best. The arms factories will continue to churn out more weapons in Iran and some means will be found of delivering significant quantities to Hezbollah.

Clearly Israel was acting on intelligence sources. So it is equally clear that Iran and Hezbollah will be moving to close the breach. Not knowing is bad, but even if you know you are unable to act on it without a significant risk of not knowing in future.

Which makes me wonder quite why this particular interdiction took place. One possibility is that the Israelis knew that they would be loosing their source in any case, the source might be a defector.

Another is that the timing is determined by Israeli politics. Netanyahu is in a pretty weak diplomatic position, Israel has only one major ally and under Obama the US is not prepared to underwrite the Likud line. I doubt that this is the case, while Netanyahu is certainly capable of that type of calculation, the Mossad people know this and would be expected to control access to information accordingly.

Another possibility is that Israel would prefer to cause the Iranian regime to occupy itself with a mole hunt at the moment. Hunts for traitors can do an immense amount of damage in themselves. They can even cause defections of those previously loyal. If so, this would be rather interesting as Mossad is one of the few intelligence services that appears to have any useful internal knowledge of the Iranian regime. If they are prepared to risk losing sources it is likely because they consider the regime to be particularly vulnerable at this point in time.

NBC Universal to be floated?

2009-10-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

Probably the most under-reported politics storyline is the news that Vivendi may IPO its stake in NBC Universal. This is been seen as part of a larger move that is expected to see NBC spin out of GE which currently has majority control.

The political impact of this is likely to be significant. At the moment MSNBC has a bizarre status as a tabloid that changes political complexion from Conservative in the morning to Liberal at night. From a business standpoint this makes no sense, the audience for Joe Scarborough is not going to watch Rachel Maddow in the evening or vice versa.

MSNBC would surely have addressed this incongruity years ago if it had been an independent company or owned by a media combine (Comcast may acquire the majority stake). The reason it has not is that GE is an industrial combine whose management is clearly more comfortable with conservative commentators. In the wake of 9/11 the channel attempted to refashion itself as 'Fox News Lite'. The spectrum of political debate was deemed to run from John McCain on the left through Dick Cheney in the center and off into the far right. The Democratic Party, the party that had captured more votes in the 2000 Presidential election and only a few percent less in the 2004 election was to be considered an irrelevance, a party of perpetual opposition whose opinions were now irrelevant and were not worth air time.

Things look rather different now. The Democrats hold the White House, Senate and House and appear to have every chance of keeping them for the indefinite future. MSNBC has recognized this trend and has switched their programming so that they are now backing left and right approximately the same amount of time. This is what passes for 'balance', favoring the GOP when it is the dominant party and switching to 'balance' when it is not.

I expect that MSNBC will jettison its Conservative hosts soon after it changes ownership and afterward attempt to establish itself as the unabashed liberal equivalent to 'Faux' News.

That is really not good for liberals. The reason that the GOP is in the electoral hole that it is today is that it has been marinading itself in the ideological foment of Fox 24 hours a day. That is really unhealthy to say the least.

Instead of coming to terms with the fact that the Bush administration approach of executive policy made through gut level instinct was a total failure, Fox keeps telling the GOP to double down on the gut.

Historically the progressive party is the party of ideology and the conservative party the party of pragmatism. The idea being that most people will be better off with a pragmatic conservative than well intentioned liberal following some ideological program designed before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Thanks to Fox News in particular, and the Murdoch press ion general, the conservative and liberal parties throughout the English speaking world have switched roles. The liberal parties are now the party of pragmatism and the conservatives are the ones peddling the ideological drivel written by charlatans and frauds channeling pre-industrial economic sages.

Liberals have been well served by not having a Faux News of their own. Hopefully MSNBC will not become one.

What happens if we automate everything

2009-10-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

According to legend, if you can boil a frog if you put it in cold water and raise the temperature to boiling slowly enough.

Strangely enough, there is even empirical evidence for the claim. One physiologist, a Freidrich Goltz noted that if you remove the brain from a frog, it will no longer hop out of the water. Small detail that, the brain had been removed. In another source which I was unable to track down immediately, a researcher noted that frogs with intact brains will tolerate higher temperatures if the water temperature is raised slowly. In several hundred observations, every frog jumped out except for the one which became the 'proof' of the anecdote.

The reason I raise the question is that I have been thinking about the question of what happens if computers and robots start working so well that they effectively replace most forms of human labor? The idea is not so far fetched as it was even a decade ago. Twenty years ago practically all leisure time was spent either sleeping or watching television. Today people while away the hours on the Internet.

As one of the instigators of this brave new world we have inflicted on you all, one of the most frequent objections made against proposals I make is that they will 'kill jobs'. To which I answer that eliminating unnecessary jobs is a good thing. One of the biggest challenges we face in the industrialized world is the fact of an aging population. People are living longer and spending a lot more time in retirement. So the people in work are having to work for the people who are retired. To date we have answered this issue by importing labor from the rest of the world. But those countries are also starting to face the same trends and those sources will dry up, if not reverse the emigration trend as ex-patriots start returning.

But what if every job turns out to be replaceable?

Economists are not much help on questions of this type. The best they can provide is an explanation of the circumstances that caused the last event. At worst they attempt to bully 'unqualified' commentators into silence with specious claims of expertise.

Only about 15% of the wholesale price of a book is paid as royalties to the author. If we add together all the costs associated with producing the content of a book they represent less than 10% of the retail price paid by the end customer. The other 90% represents the cost of paper, printing, distribution and retailing. Costs and jobs that will be eliminated entirely as the industry moves from paper to digital.

The story is not new, the introduction of industrial robots has led to a similar transformation in manufacturing industry. Employment in agriculture, already negligible, continues a steady decline. What is different this time is that the job losses are affecting the part of the economy that grew under the previous transformation. The 'knowledge workers' whose skills were meant to guarantee employment turn out to be as replaceable as the Victorian farm workers were.

Perhaps the biggest shock of the current recession was the realization that the feckless idiots funding extravagant lifestyles by borrowing against their house were previously the foundation of our apparent prosperity. Sales dry up when there is nobody with money to buy.

In retrospect, it appears that the introduction of containerized shipping transport is a much more likely cause of the recession in the mid 1970s than the oil price shocks on which it is usually blamed. The patient was already sick, the oil price shock was simply the trigger that sent him to the hospital. If the Wall Street crash had been the sole cause of the great depression it should have ended with the recovery that followed FDR's initial recovery act. Instead the country faced a second dip that I suspect was more likely caused by the displacement of agricultural workers displaced by rural electrification.

It is perhaps the worst legacy of Keynes that economists insist on ignoring the impact of technology on the economy in favor of mathematical and fiscal explanations for economic trends. It is not surprising why they prefer this, you can't plot a smooth curve through the invention of the shipping container, the barcode or the World Wide Web. More importantly, predicting economic trends from technology trends would require intellectual skills that modern economists have largely abandoned in favor of abstract algebra.

So we are caught in something of a trap. The aging population will cause our living standards to collapse if we do not eliminate jobs fast enough. But if we eliminate too many jobs we risk a depression or a slump. There may not even be a 'Goldilocks solution', merely eliminating the unnecessary jobs means that the economy has the additional capacity to meet the increased needs, it does not guarantee that the resources can be moved from one place to another.

We are caught in a trap, but here is where the frog comes in. If the water gets too hot, we can jump out.

As technologists, our only responsibility is to make sure that the economy has sufficient capacity to meet necessary needs. We cannot and should not worry about doing that job too well. If there is a temporary shortage of demand then it is the responsibility of government to address the issue. If we reach the automation limit then society is going to have to invent a new basis for allocating resources.

Cloud Coockoo Land Computing

2009-10-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

According to Slashdot, Booz-Allen has analyzed the cost of cloud computing for the federal government in a new report

So what does the report actually say?

As with many articles written by consultants, this one spends a great deal of time introducing Spurious Three Letter Acronyms (STLAs) and almost none explaining or justifying its underlying assumptions.

The short answer is that the government can best realize the cost savings of cloud computing by moving as fast as possible. It is thus regrettable that "there are currently no security standards for cloud computing".

In other words, we have an analysis of the cost/benefits of cloud computing that is forced to admit that the brave new world of cloud computing suffers from at least one significant technical deficiency.

Once this is understood, we can view the reams of jargon in a somewhat more skeptical light. The article is heavy on conclusions but the assumptions leading to those conclusions are hidden in the proprietary Booz-Allen "detailed cost model".

Forgive me for being a skeptic on this, but hasn't every development in computing infrastructure offered lower costs? When was the last time one actually did? Despite predictions, paper consumption increased rather than decreased as a result of the paperless office. It is only recently that electronic displays have become good enough and ubiquitous enough to rival paper. And the largest factor in the current decline in the demand for wood pulp is the displacement of newspaper by the Web.

Cloud computing certainly offers major cost savings in certain specific types of computing environment. But talk of 'the switch to cloud computing' suggests that cloud computing guarantees significant cost savings in every type of computing environment.

At no point in the Booz-Allen article do we learn where these cost savings are to come from. It is implied that some of the savings will come from lower expenditure on hardware and power as a result of better utilization of the underlying resources. There is also what should be a very clear red flag in the assumptions:

"Existing application software will migrate with the infrastructure to the cloud. Application software support costs remain out of scope. "

While some applications will migrate to a cloud environment without issue, those of us who have experienced government computing environments know that even minor changes can require considerable time and days of expensive consulting effort. In a government environment the costs of failure are high. The processes that control change to critical computing resources are designed to mitigate the risk of failure. Computing resources are comparatively cheap compared to consulting manpower. It is by no means obvious that cloud computing will be a break even prospect for the typical government data system, let alone a source of savings.

It is certainly rather difficult to understand how a $3 million investment in cloud computing infrastructure would result in a reduction of 'O&S' expenses from $77.3 million to $22.5. No explanation is given for these figures except for the admitted omission of the costs of migrating applications. While hypothetical cost savings of $50 million for a single data center might appear to be impressive, it represents only a hundred man years of consultant time, an amount that can easily be consumed several times over when an agency is required to make substantial configuration changes to every application running in the data center.

The key oversight of the article is the fact that no distinction is made between adopting the cloud computing model for new infrastructure deployments as opposed to 'switching' existing deployments to the cloud model. This distinction is critical when we look at the costs that the model is focused on:

4.Our model focuses on the costs that a cloud migration will most likely directly affect; i.e., costs for server hardware (and associated support hardware, such as internal routers and switches, rack hardware, cabling, etc.), basic server software (OS software, standard backup management, and security software), associated contractor labor for engineering and planning support during the transition phase, hardware and software maintenance, IT operations labor, and IT power/cooling costs.

These are of course costs that are typically incurred early in the deployment of a specific application. Once a system is deployed these are sunk costs that will not be recovered through a 'switch' to the cloud. While a switch to the cloud may allow a reduction in the cost of power and cooling, this benefit must be set against the real costs of making a significant change in the configuration of a deployed system, costs which are omitted from the Booz-Allen model.

The only scenario in which it is likely that cost savings of the magnitude anticipated in the study might be realized is if the cloud computing model is adopted before the expenditures are made on hardware infrastructure when a new application is deployed or a major revision made to an existing application.

While the savings in such circumstances may well be significant, it is important to describe them as a development choice and not the 'switch' described in the article. Since only a small percentage of government information technology applications are newly deployed or substantially revised in any given year, it follows that the expected savings from cloud computing will also be modest in any given year, if indeed it is possible to reliably measure them at all.

Since the savings from cloud computing are likely to be considerably more modest than those promised, the urgency for action is likewise reduced. Rather than committing to 'switch' to the cloud computing model as quickly as possible, government agencies should only proceed at the rate justified by actual cost savings from actual trials.

Cloud computing certainly offers significant advantages to certain enterprises for certain types of computing services. In particular it is likely to be most relevant for the small enterprises that have no computing staff whatsoever, let alone dedicated 'data centers'. The more often cloud computing is presented as a panacea, a magic wand that automatically delivers dramatic cost savings with little effort, the more practitioners are going to dismiss it as yet another passing fad that promises much and fails to deliver anything.

James Arthur Ray | Create wealth in all areas of your life: Financial, Relational, Mental, Physical and Spiritual.

2009-10-18T05:43:00.000-07:00

Take a look at the Web site of 'motivational speaker' James Arthur Ray.

No cliche left unturned, note the use of words like 'harmonic' and 'spiritual'. There is even a little pyramid thrown in there.

This is the guy who ran the 'Spiritual Warrior' sweat lodge ceremony at which three people died.

50 people at $9695 each, makes close to half a million dollars, not bad for a week's work.

Insider dealing 2.0

2009-07-06T19:08:00.000-07:00

Bloomberg reports that a Goldman Sachs employee was arrested for the alleged theft of trading code. The suspect is a dual Russian-US national and was arrested after transferring the code to a machine in Germany.

While we do not yet have the details of this particular incident, it is the type of theft that would require significant resources to exploit. Without the necessary capital to front-run the Goldman-Sachs trades, the trading software is not worth too much.

Traditional businesses strategy is to use capital from a cash cow to develop new forms of enterprise. MBAs are told to 'work up the value chain' to find larger rewards. It has always been a matter of when and not if the Russian cyber-mob would decide to take the profits they have made from cheating bank customers and go after the banks themselves.

In this case the suspect is a dual national, most likely he has family living in Russia. It might well turn out that blackmail was involved. This has occurred in corporate espionage cases. If an employee has a relative living in a police state, they can be pressured in subtle ways. A parent gets sick but the normal hospital treatment is unavailable, unavailable that is 'unless' the child can perform a 'patriotic service' for the state.

Understanding the risk is one thing, working out how to apply effective controls is quite another. Attempts to compartmentalize information are expensive to design and maintain. Trying to compartmentalized code is more challenging still.

Matthew Yglesias

2009-07-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias makes a good point about Posner's proposed link ban. People want their sites to be linked.

Actually there are people who do not want to be linked, but they can do so pretty easily using technical means, no need to change copyright law. In fact the New York Times used to use links that automatically broke after a few weeks.

But even if they did not, who would if linking to the New York Times was prohibited? Adding links takes effort. I am happy to do so as a courtesy to the authors I reference, but that is really all it is. I am quite happy leaving the links out or linking to another news source.

Traditional news is now a commodity. I can link to hundreds of news articles on the coup in Honduras. The only newspaper content that is not commodified by the Web is opinion - which is the one type of content that the Web model supports effectively.

We need to work out a way for funding primary news gathering, but changing the copyright laws to affect linking is not it.

George W. Bush appointees buck Barack Obama on terror policies - Josh Gerstein - POLITICO.com

2009-06-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

Gee who would have thought that Bush appointees would turn out to be political hacks?

Krugman on Global Warming

2009-06-29T08:49:00.000-07:00

Krugman makes a good point, the whole country came together in the fight against terrorism, why not for global warming?

The cost of reducing carbon consumption is trivial to the cost of a single war. Yet for some reason the militarists never seem to have the slightest hesitation about spending a trillion dollars or so on a war.

Since supplies of carbon fuels are finite it is a question of when, not if, we change consumption patterns. And carbon addiction was and is the root cause of all the issues in the Middle East.

Tweets on Sanford

2009-06-24T18:08:00.000-07:00

Now we know what Twitter is good for - piling on to the latest public embarrassment Twitter / Search - Argentina

Me: The simplest explanation for Sanford's behavior is that someone zapped him with some kind of mind control ray.

@Jonny5172 Gov Sanford told staff he would be "spiking some Argentina tail" & they HEARD "hiking the Appalachian Trail." Honest mistake

@kboreilly Now we know why Mark Sanford rejected that stimulus money: He already had more stimulation than he could handle.

Somebody on Facebook: "where in the world is gov sanford?" "apparently w/ carmen sandiego!"

Stewart On Sanford: Just Another Politician With A Conservative Mind And A Liberal Penis

The Revolution might not be tweeted

2009-06-22T19:28:00.000-07:00

The London Times has an excellent rundown on events in Iran.

Westerners, in particular Twitterers, need to take a deep breath. This is not about us, its all about the Iranian people and the type of government they decide to accept or reject.

In particular, the Times notes that far from being the central organizing force of the protests, almost no Iranians appear to have heard of Twitter. None of the 20 people they surveyed at an opposition rally had heard of Twitter. The revolution may not be tweeted after all, or if it is, the tweets may be playing a supporting rather than a leading role.

While the role of Twitter may be exaggerated, many of those attending the rallies had seen the death of Neda Agha-Soltan on television. Since we can be sure that this was not on Iranian state TV, it is clear that attempts to ban satellite TV have failed.

With this information, we can sketch out the likely path that news takes from the street via camera-phone, to the outside world via the Internet and back to Iran via the satellite TV stations. The flow of information out of Iran is being driven by email and the Web, not in 140 character tweets.

But even if Twitter is not the conduit through which information flows out of Iran, it may play an important role in establishing and connecting the support infrastructure for this process. Almost anyone who receives information from inside the regime, knows that they can bring it to wider attention through 'Twitter'. And even if the recipient of that information has no idea what Twitter is or how to use it, they can quickly find someone who can. And once out on the Twitter flux, any information that has news value will be re-tweeted repeatedly until it comes to the notice of the mainstream news.

Every revolution has an external support infrastructure, usually these are pretty small and limited to exiles and second generation ex-patriots. Twitter has enabled the Iranian opposition to build a support infrastructure of hundreds of thousands, if not millions in less than a week.

Ten days ago, the Iranian theocracy appeared to be set to last for decades, today most observers think is a question of when, not if the regime falls. The injustice, and hence the illegitimacy of the regime have already been established, through the election fraud and the martyrdom of Neda Agha-Soltan. All the regime has left is fear.

A regime that rules through fear is weakened by every scrap of information that demonstrates it has lost control. The inability of the authorities to control Twitter is one such demonstration.

Why I don't watch MSNBC

2009-06-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

I turned on the TV for the latest news from Iran this morning. CNN was doing its usual ad-laden drivel so I thought, why not try MSNBC?

Joe Scarborough, that's why.

Scarborough was originally hired when MSNBC was attempting to compete with Fox News, providing a non-stop GOP tabloid. Hiring an extreme-right former GOP Congressman fit right in with that bizarre plan.

After discovering for themselves that GE could not possibly outdo Rupert Murdoch in right wing tabloid TV, the channel has lurched to the left. This is at least a rational strategy. With Murdoch occupying the right wing tabloid space and CNN attempting to occupy the 'objective' space, the only place that is not being contested is the tabloid left space.

Hiring smart progressives like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman for prime time has turned MSNBC's fortunes round. But they still have a big problem, viewers still autopilot to CNN when they want news. Conservatives can flip to Fox and see programming that isn't going to challenge their prejudices with unfortunate facts. But Liberals can only find agreeable programing at MSNBC half the time. If they flip in the morning they will hear Joe Scarborough airing his rather simplistic and uninformed opinions.

Iran 'telephone poll' bogus

2009-06-17T21:50:00.000-07:00

Every so often a smart alec pops up on CNN touting his 'telephone poll' of the Iranian electorate which indicated that Ahmedinejad was in the lead running up to the poll.

Tehran Bureau takes the telephone poll apart. They point out that the last poll was taken over a week before the election and that over half the people called refused to give a response.

Given the absurd and undemocratic conditions in which the election was held, only a simpleton or a government shill would claim that people called at random would give their honest opinion to an unknown stranger. While 'undecideds' typically break fairly predictably in US elections, the people called up by Gallup and co do not face retribution by Baiji thugs if they give the 'wrong' answer.

The 'results' of the 'survey' were that 34% of respondents said they would vote for Ahmedinejad, 14% for Mousavi and 27% refusing to answer. The survey was taken May 11th through 20th, immediately after the four candidates to be allowed to contest the election were announced and before Ahmedinejad was exposed as a clown in a series of television debates.

The US election takes place over a period of 18 months, the candidates are well known to the electorate at least a year in advance. Late shifts in opinion are rare. The Iranian election takes place in a three week period, outside of which the opposition candidates are non-persons as far as state media are concerned. Presenting the results of this survey as anything other than a description of the state of play at the start of the campaign is deceptive and dishonest.

While the 'survey' predicts an Ahmedinejad win, it certainly does not predict a blow-out 66-30 win. No observer of Ahmedinejad's performance in the debates was of the opinion that he had increased his standing, quite the opposite.

Given the fact that every telephone call into and out of Iran is monitored, respondents had reason to believe that they would face reprisals for giving the 'wrong' answer. But in fact this was probably a misplaced fear as once the authorities became aware that a poll was being taken they would quickly redirect calls so that they would be answered by trusted government supporters.

Clear proof the Iranian election was rigged

2009-06-16T19:22:00.000-07:00

This sequence of TV screen captures shows the election returns as reported on Iranian TV

Over the course of the night Rezaee went from having 633,048 votes at 9:47 to 587,913 at 13:53. A loss of 45,135 votes in the space of four hours.

Does Iran already have nuclear weapons?

2009-06-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

If Iran had already built a nuclear weapon, would it admit the fact?

Britain and France both managed to build a bomb with economies and manufacturing infrastructure shattered by World War II. Iran has seventy million people, a vastly larger economy and access to the past fifty years of technology. If the political leadership had given the order to build a bomb in response to the Bush 'Axis of Evil' speech in 2002, they could easily have completed it by now.

Having a bomb is one thing, admitting that you have it, quite another. India and Pakistan were both believed to have built bombs in the mid to late 1980s. Pakistan acquired enough fissile material to build a bomb in 1987 but did not perform tests until 1998. Immediately afterward, India performed its own nuclear tests and the India-Pakistan conflict became a nuclear standoff.

Iran would undoubtedly face serious consequences if it was to conduct a nuclear test of its own in violation of an international treaty. Israel would become a declared nuclear power, Saudi Arabia and possibly Turkey would start their own nuclear programs. Neither China nor Russia could be guaranteed to block US attempts to impose sanctions.

So if Iran did have a nuclear weapon it almost certainly would not announce the fact. Which is a problem for an aspiring demagogue with regional superpower aspirations such as President Ahmedinejad since not revealing the existence of a nuclear weapon means the entire point of having it is lost.

An equally plausible scenario is that Iran has begun but not completed its nuclear project. For decades India and Pakistan were described as being 'a screw turn away' from having a bomb. The Ayatollah Kohmeini, is reported to have halted Iran's first nuclear program (a joint project with Israel), describing nuclear weapons as the weapons of the devil. According to a 2007 US intelligence estimate, Iran halted an active weapons program in 2003 and has not restarted it since.

The two most likely situations are that Iran has already built an undeclared bomb, or that the nuclear program was suspended just short of having completed a bomb. In either case, the optimum stratagem for Ahemedinejad to employ to become a declared nuclear power is to provoke an attack by Israel or the US and use it as a pretext for withdrawal from the non-proliferation and test ban treaties.

As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, bombing is not going to stop or even slow any Iranian weapons program. Iran is a vast country and neither the US nor Israel has much of an idea of the location of any nuclear facilities. And even if the locations of the sites were known, an attack would hardly come as a surprise. Any Iranian nuclear facilities will be built deep, deep underground. This has not been lost on the Israeli and US nationalist-militarist factions who have been discussing the possible use of nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive strike to prevent another country obtaining nuclear weapons.

The Israeli attack on the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981 was almost certainly a phyric victory. According to Iraqi scientists interviewed on CNN crossfire, the Iraqi nuclear weapons program expanded from 400 people and a budget of $400 million to 7000 people and a budget of $10 billion. Who would have imagined any other result?

Ahmedinejad and the neo-cons baying for a 'pre-emptive' attack on Iran are all militarists. They believe in the violence as a first resort, they have a tendency to overestimate their own strength and to dismiss their opponents as cowards. The only difference is that the Iranian militarists appear to be quite smart: in the aftermath of 9/11 they have finessed a fairly weak military position to emerge as the regional superpower. The US neo-cons and their Israeli allies have achieved the exact opposite: they have reduced the US from unchallenged supremacy as the one remaining superpower to parity with Russia and China.

Kotogianis charged in mortgage fraud

2009-06-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

Reuters reports Nine accused of $92 million U.S. mortgage fraud scheme

The ringleader is allegedly Thomas Kontogiannis, whose name may be familiar to readers of Taling Points Memo as 'Conspirator #3' in the Duke Cunningham case. He is also apparently a part time arms dealer.

It is unclear whether this fraud is related to the Cunningham indictment or another scheme. Either way it is quite astonishing that a bank would lend $92 million for property that did not exist without apparently bothering to check.

Trying to fix the Jag

2009-06-01T15:11:00.000-07:00

Spent today trying to fix the hydraulics on the Jaguar. The hose going to the convertible top latch had gone causing hydraulic fluid to leak from the roof onto the gearshift.

While I was getting the hoses to fix that the handbrake cable snapped. Another job that requires me to take out the driver's seat and lift the carpet on that side.

It was the first time I had taken the Jag apart. That is partly because I have not wanted to risk it but mostly because very little has gone wrong except for the air conditioner, the rear quarterlight (after a thief broke it) and two coils dying on the engine. While the hose and the coils are very typical of an XK8, they are the only issues that have occurred on what is now a ten year old car.

So when the quote from the dealer was $1500 for labour and $340 for parts I decided to have a go myself. Turned out that the job was not as bad as I feared albeit I have not managed to complete it yet!

I took the drivers seat out and the rear seats and various bits of trim to run the hoses all the way from the top latch to the hole through the rear bulkhead into the trunk where the hydraulic motor is. That is where things have got stuck. There must be a retaining clip or something that is stopping the hoses from going through. So near and yet so far. Fortunately managed to park it under cover next door.

Did not get any dalek building done today because of the Jag. Will be cleaning the seats with leather restorer before putting them back.

SERE was exposure to brainwashing, not interrogation techniques

2009-05-20T19:46:00.000-07:00

Over the past week it has become ever clearer that the Bush administration torture program took place during the time that Cheney was searching for 'evidence' of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

Now consider what a friend who works as a defense analyst just pointed out to me: The principle objective of SERE was to expose troops to the techniques used for brainwashing, not defense against interrogation.

The military has long understood that the best way to protect military secrets is not to reveal any information that is not strictly necessary to any personnel who might be captured. Torture is not an effective means of interrogating POWs, any information is almost certainly worthless by the time the victim is finally broken.

The Vietnamese objective was to break the US airmen to extract 'confessions' and 'denunciations' for propaganda. The Pentagon began the SERE program in an attempt to avoid or at least mitigate similar embarrassments in future conflicts.

It is not just the timing of the torture that is suspicious therefore, the techniques themselves are suspicious. At a time when Cheney is known to be looking for any evidence that might be used to support a claim of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link the Pentagon stops using the techniques known to be most effective for interrogation on their prime Al Qaeda prisoners and instead begins to use techniques known to be most effective for brainwashing.

The timing and the techniques provide two pieces of the puzzle. The destruction of the torture tapes provide a third. The fact that the administration had employed torture was already known at the time that the tapes were destroyed. The surviving records will almost certainly reveal the names of the staff involved. Destruction of the tapes clearly served no intelligence purpose and was clearly not going to be sufficient to derail the investigation into the use of torture during interrogations that had already begun. The only reason to destroy the tapes would be if it demonstrated that the purpose of the torture was for something other than interrogation, such as brainwashing the prisoner into confessing to the existence of a fictious Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship.

If the purpose of the torture is in fact proved to have been brainwashing rather than interrogation it changes the game entirely. The infamous Yoo and Bybee memos do not provide immunity for the use of torture in a brainwashing program, nor does the immunity provided by Congress.

All of which makes the current GOP attacks on Pelosi more understandable. The GOP can probably survive a truth commission into the use of torture for interrogations, but it knows that even its bedrock support in the heartlands is not going to forgive it if the scope of the commission expands to considering the fabrication of evidence used to make the case for a disastrous war.

(also posted to Talking Points Memo Cafe)

Howard Kurtz - Specter Skates - washingtonpost.com

2009-05-04T05:21:00.000-07:00

Howard Kurtz writes: "There was, of course, no way to predict that Bush's second term would be sunk by Katrina, bloody chaos in Iraq and a financial meltdown that would require a massive bank bailout."

Oh really? I admit that back in 2000 there was no way that anyone could have predicted that Bush's second term would have been sunk by bloody chaos in Iraq. But the failure of the war was already apparent by the 2004 election. That is why Howard Dean was a serious contender for the nomination. If anything the situation in Iraq improved after 2004. What folk reacted against was the fact that their original support for the war had been obtained through lies.

Katrina, being a natural disaster was genuinely unpredictable. But the indifference, incompetence and cronyism it exposed were visible to anyone who bothered to look from day one of the Bush administration.

The extent of the financial meltdown was mostly a surprise, but plenty of bloggers had been warning of the CDO issue for years and Warren Buffet had dubbed them 'Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction'.

What Kurtz really means is that nobody Howard Kurtz knows and talks to predicted any of this stuff and he cannot imagine a world in which his circle of beltway cronies might not know what is really going on.

QoS #6 - iTunes

2009-04-27T18:25:00.000-07:00

RSA Cryptographer's Panel Predictions

2009-04-21T08:26:00.001-07:00

Journalist jailed in Iran

2009-04-18T07:44:00.000-07:00

Iran has jailed a US journalist as a spy.

This seems like a somewhat odd move for a country hoping to improve relations with the US. And it might well be an attempt on the part of some faction to prevent that happening.

Or it might just be that the US is still holding the Iranian diplomats that were arrested and imprisoned back in 2006 and that the Iranians have arrested Saberi to provide some bargaining leverage.

Hopefully it is the second as the first would make it very difficult to get her released. Unless of course she really is a spy in which case the US would have cause to bargain.

YouTube - QoS#3 Proof the Home Depot do return damaged goods to the shelves

2009-04-14T05:57:00.000-07:00

YouTube - Deployment Deadlock in SSL Hash Algorithms

2009-04-13T04:40:00.000-07:00

Sometimes having the right technology is not enough.

Launching: The Quantum of Stupid

2009-04-06T22:08:00.001-07:00

I have started a new series of podcasts, The Quantum of Stupid Part 1 is now online.

Coincidence? I think not

2009-03-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

At his pow-wow with the major bankers, President Obama reportedly said "excess is out of fashion". Unlike most incoming Presidents, Obama has not renovated the White House and is reusing the furniture from the previous occupant. There are even stains on the carpet, as he pointed out.

Which brings us to the second piece of news, that ShamWow pitchman Vince Shlomi was arrested for punching a prostitute.

Coincidence? I think not. Shlomi may be peddling super-absorbent cloths these days, but I will bet that there isn't anything he doesn't know about removing stains from carpets. Time to send the miscreant up to Washington D.C. for a spot of community service at the White House.

YouTube - The New mac Mini! The Mactini

2009-03-20T17:19:00.000-07:00

Brother toner cartridge low toner override - fixyourownprinter.com

2009-03-14T13:34:00.000-07:00

So the Brother color printer started pleading for a new set of colour toner carts ($270). All three carts ran out at the same time, hmm. Time for a Google, which unearthed the following on a blog.

Re: Brother toner cartridge low toner override by Brett In SoCal (6/29/08 4:57 PM) reply + / -
Brother MFC 9440CN Toner Life End Message... The Final Solution!!!

1. With power on, open the toner access main door (You will get a "door open" message in the LCD.)
2. Hit the "Clear/Back" button and... ta-dah!!! you go right to the Toner Reset Menu' (cue Vienna Boy's choir sounds here).
3. Using the up ^ Down > "Search" arrow buttons, you can then scroll through reset options for each of the printer's [4] toner cartridges!
Code: B. = black; C. = cyan; M. = magenta and Y. = yellow
4. For each for these cartridges is the option to reset for low yield = S (small?) or High Yield = H
5. Using the number keypad, select option #1 (to reset each to the size you have installed.
6. Hit the "Clear/Back" button to get out of the menu, close door ad the problem is FINALLY solved.

Just tried it, works great!

Not a surprise...

2009-03-04T07:48:00.000-08:00

So Apple iPhone controls over 66% of all mobile web use.

This does not surprise me at all as the difference between iPhone and other mobile web browsers is that iPhone works and they do not.

Palm ships the treo with an attrocious browser called blaser that seems to have been designed to use as much data service as possible. On the Palm you ask to download a page, wait two minutes, click a link, wait another two minutes, go back to your first page to go to the next link, wait two minutes for it to reload and so on.

It really does not take a great browser to eat into Apple's share. All it really takes is a browser that is not shitty.

And don't get me started on the Wap phone lunacy that had idiots thinking people would queue up to surf the web on a device with a display the size of a postage stamp and a browser that costs $1 to download the front page of CNN.

The mobile Web is about two things, one is access to relevant information, the other is the ability to perform relevant transactions. The key here being relevant. I might buy a book from Amazon on the iPhone, I am not going to do extensive comparison shopping. I might look up flight times, delays and so on, I am less likely to do online banking unless it is critical to do it right then and there.

The mobile web is not a replacement for the armchair web which is why ideas like walled gardens and such make no sense at all.

2012 the re-run

2009-03-01T07:04:00.000-08:00

The Bush administration frequently appeared as an attempt to repeat every tragedy of US history as farce: 1876, Vietnam, McCarthyism and most recently the Great Depression. So its no surprise that the 2012 GOP Presidential field is shaping up to be a re-run of previous farces.

Palin, currently the front-runner is the Dan Quayle of the pack. Lets see whether she makes it to the starting gate. Quayle dropped out of the 1996 race before he was fully in it.

Last week it appeared that Bobby Jindal might well be the Bill Clinton of the 2012 race, a different type of Republican, at least insofar as being apparently competent and not visibly corrupt. Like Biden in 1988, Jindal threw away his entire campaign in a single speech. Given the opportunity to address the nation in the response to Obama's address, Jindal pitched the core Republican base and gave a Reaganesque personal account that turns out to be a total fiction.

If Jindal runs his opponents will run endless attack ads of the part of the speech where Jindal is prevaricating. If Jindal does not run it will likely be because there has been a major eruption of a volcano that makes the attack on volcano monitoring look Katrinaesque GOP myopia. If Jindal is nominated, Obama will spend the week of the Republican convention taking a quiet family holiday in his birth state of Hawaii, an island created by a highly photogenic, continuously erupting volcano.

It is hard to see how the 2012 campaigns of Romney or Huckabee can turn out any better than their efforts in 2008, they can certainly do worse. Huckabee cannot beat Sarah in the primaries if she runs. If Palin does not run it will prove that an evangelical nut-jb can't win.

Romney's principal strength in 2008 was the willingness of the LDS church to organize and fund raise for him. Always looking for mainstream respectability, the LDS church saw having a Mormon at the top of a major party Presidential ticket as a way to achieve legitimacy. From that perspective, LDS political activities were a clear failure in 2008, drawing attention to the weirder aspects of the church and in particular the racist and anti-Semitic aspects of its control-freak philosophy. After its controversial involvement in California's Prop-8, the church knows that its political involvement will be closely scrutinized. Romney will still take the LDS vote in 2012, but may well find that the church is less interested in playing a political role and fails to deliver the money and the organization that made Romney viable.

One somewhat tidier basement later...

2009-02-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

I spent much of the weekend throwing stuff out. Some pieces went on craigslist, others can be kept for a yard sale but most of the stuff is simply low grade junk that had been kept on the off-chance it might come in handy. Like pieces of scrap wood six inches long.

50 Days to D-Day

Look at my works ye mighty and despair

2009-01-29T06:21:00.000-08:00

What I found most interesting about this CNN piece is that the author is not making it up. There really is a National Republican Victory Monument.

And if you become a Platinum donor, your name can be inscribed on it!

The triumphal arch is more generally associated with the military victories of dictatorships and kings than electoral success in a democracy.

iPod Touch mounted on M110 Sniper Rifle | The Firearm Blog

2009-01-22T08:57:00.000-08:00

The Firearm Blog shows an interesting twist on the development of the iPod. It is no longer an autonomous mobile device, it is a component in other devices.

The iPod touch is actually a pretty cheap package for a battery, computer and display.

Better DRM = cheaper software?

2009-01-12T07:40:00.000-08:00

I have been interested in 3D-Modelling, 3D Design and most recently small scale CNC for some time. But as anyone who has tried to work in that area knows, professional software costs a huge sum - thousands, cheaper commercial products tend to cost in the region of $500 and lack necessary features and open source software tends to be works in progress.

Looking at the features of IronCAD it is exactly what I need. It allows 3D objects to be built from acfurately dimensioned 3D models. But even the lite version still costs thousands.

What I need is really a limited time usage license. Instead of buing a seat I want a fraction of a seat, a few hours a month at most.

If we had decent DRM technology it would be possible to support this type of use. Software vendors could expand their market and avoid competition from below.

Gratuitous use of technology part 1.

2009-01-10T18:52:00.000-08:00

Leap second - Just say no.

2009-01-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

Over the course of a year solar noon varies by as much as quarter of an hour. From 12:00 (by definition) on midsummer's day and 12:15 around beltane at Greenwich.

'The astronomers' are apparently worried that solar noon must exactly accord with noon according to our clocks everyone else uses because it appears that they don't know how to correct for such things without changing the time table for everyone else. The rotation of the earth is not exact and not exactly predictable.

So what they do instead is they install a leap second once a year or so, giving only six months notice. This messes up no end of computer programs as it means a vast amount of rarely tested code has to be written to deal with the edge cases.

And so there is a US proposal to stop the idiocy and abolish the leap seconds. There is simply no reason to introduce regular corrections of the order of a second to a quantity that varies of its own accord by fifteen minutes over the course of a year. That is three orders of magnitude more than the corrections being made by the astronomers.

Unless you are an astronomer there is no particular reason to care which particular day of the year 12:00 corresponds to solar noon.

So the response of the astronomers to the proposed change is classic agenda denial. 'There is no publicly available documentation that adequately or consistently justifies the proposed re-definition of UTC' In other words we are going to keep meddling with the clocks because we don't know what might happen if we stop doing it.

This is really about power. The astronomers get a feeling of importance from being responsible for proposing their little corrections. They should be told firmly that this is going to stop.

The US should stop piddling around negotiating a change to UTC. Just define a time scale without corrections and announce that that is now official. Job done.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

2009-01-08T13:10:00.000-08:00

Bringing up Dalek

2008-12-29T04:24:00.000-08:00

Did Blu-Ray kill Playstation?

2008-12-13T10:46:00.000-08:00

What is notable about this report on video game console sales is the fact that the once dominant PlayStation brand is no longer worth a mention.

Other reports state that sales of PlayStation consoles are down 19% year on year, XBox and the mighty Wii are both growing.

It is not hard to see the reason, Sony's decision to use the PlayStation franchise as a launchpad for their Blu-Ray format is going to be seen as one of the biggest and costliest blunders in the history of technology marketing. Even though Blu-Ray has defeated HD-DVD, the cost of the battle is is already greater than the potential patent revenue before the value of the PlayStation franchise is considered.

Comcast wants to charge me $5 for not violating my privacy

2008-12-04T05:22:00.000-08:00

I just got a letter from Comcast telling me that they want me to pay $4.95 a month for not having my telephone number listed in their directory. Something that takes absolutely zero effort on their part should not cost $60 a year. Companies should not reveal or sell the names and addresses of their customers without their permission.

Yes, I know that this is standard practice in POTS world. But this is VOIP service and until recently my Vonage alternative was working just fine. Now it is cutting out repeatedly and the cause appears to be Comcast dropping packets. In other words it does not seem to be a coincidence that the extortion demand came right after they shut out the competition.

I don't believe Net Neutrality is the solution. That is an attempt to regulate Comcast's behavior and will only work so long as there is an administration willing to regulate. As we have seen in the finance world, from time to time we get a government that would rather not bother with regulating and then pretend that nobody could have foreseen the entirely predictable consequences of not doing so.

The answer here is competition: Force the telcos to open up the local loop as has been required in Europe.

Oh and if anyone else wants to complain about this to Comcast here are their internal numbers.

So does anyone know a good residential DSL provider in the Boston area?

Limits of digital photography

2008-11-30T14:33:00.000-08:00

Reading the constant complaints about the need for fast ISO speed on the camera forums, it is time to ask, what is the maximum useful ISO level anyway?

Well one way to decide would be to look at the light levels for the most extreme photographic condition, moonlight is 0.27 Lux.

The other two factors in the equation are film speed and lens speed. We might in theory want to take pictures at 1/8000th but this is not very likely. A more sensible limit would be 1/50th, the longest exposure for which we might take a hand held shot with a 200mm focal length lens with optical vibration reduction.

Lens speed is also somewhat arbitrary. Lets pick f/2.8.

So what ISO speed allows us to take pictures at 1/50th and f/2.8 in 0.27 lux?

Well doing the math from Wikipedia suggests that this would take ISO 174,000, or three stops higher than the top, pushed ISO speed on a Nikon D3.

In other words it should be just about possible today with a D3 at the absolute maximum ISO setting if you have an f/1.4 lens and are willing to accept a bit of noise and do some post processing.

More Nikon speculation - Global Electronic Shutter time?

2008-11-29T12:48:00.000-08:00

Even before their new toy is launched specualtion begins on what is next.

I don't think we are going to see quite the same pace of new product launches that we have been used to in the past. What changes we do see are likely to be directed at cost and weight reduction rather than more meaningless megapixels.

But one change we could see is the replacement of the legacy mechanical shutter system with an electronic version. This has many advantages in budget models:

Cost - the shutter is the last major mechanical component in the camera. Dispense with the shutter and the camera can be made cheaper.
Video performance - the DSLR wobble is due to the way that the imaging chip is being read out. A global electronic shutter eliminates that problem.
Weight - Although the shutter itself is very light, the mechanical support required adds weight and requires space which constrains other components.
Cleaning - remove the shutter and you can seal the imaging chip completely with an easy to clean transparent shield.

The downside of an electronic shutter is that it takes up some pixel imaging space that is going to effectively reduce ISO performance somewhat. I am not sure we will see it on the pro-end cameras at first, but there are a few advantages there

Space - the space saved means it would be possible to fit a full frame viewfinder and electronic cleaning at the same time.
Electronic flash sync at all every shutter speed.
Even higher shutter speeds.
Noise - turn on live view and the camera becomes totally silent.
Make infrared photography possible with a stock body by simply changing the sensor filter.

The last would be fun. There are already several folk who will modify a camera for infrared use. But it is somewhat involved and cannot be reversed easily. Making the filter user swappable would make this area much more accessible.

I doubt we will see it on a budget model. But we might see it on a pro-model.

Security experts reveal details of WPA hack - News - heise Security UK

2008-11-26T15:32:00.000-08:00

Security experts reveal details of WPA hack - News - heise Security UK

Using the CRA to roll back executive orders

2008-11-25T17:26:00.000-08:00

As a matter of political tactics, I think the Christian Science monitor is wrong when they opine:

And even the CRA has a downside. It must be used wisely or it may do more harm than good. For one thing, once the CRA has been used to repeal a rule, the agency cannot reintroduce a modified rule on that issue, potentially leaving legislative and enforcement gaps, de Rugy notes.

Newt Gingrich wrote the CRA and he knew what he was doing. He wanted the effect of using the CRA to be to permanently bar future reversal through future executive orders by default. If this was not the intended outcome it can be reversed through a followup bill.

So lets say that Clinton had issued an executive order protecting Yellowstone from logging, if Dole had won the GOP could then have used the CRA to reverse the order and permanently prevent a President from issuing a new one.

The CRA only requires a simple majority and cannot be filibustered. If Congress decides to use a single vote to reverse multiple rules the courts are barred from reviewing the procedure employed. There is no forum where the procedure can be disputed, ergo one vote to disqualify all the rules in one go is fully possible.

So the Republicans have no ability to oppose rule reversals under the CRA and questionable incentive to filibuster a subsequent bill to restore executive rulemaking power. On the contrary, they are more likely to be in favor than the Democrats.

If Bush issues an executive order to gut the clean air act, the Democrats use the CRA to reverse it and the clean air act is safe from future Republican presidents. If the reversal limits Obama's scope to use the clean air act proactively they use their 58+ seats to push through a new bill.

But in practice the Democrats won't use the CRA because they don't need to. Having established that the Democrats have the upper hand tactically, there is no incentive for the GOP to attempt a filibuster as the Democrats can inflict an even worse outcome from their point of view with no need for cloture.

Stupid advertising copy

2008-11-24T05:05:00.000-08:00

Its small size will fit on top of even the most crowded desk, and it offers wireless access when connected to a Wi-Fi router (via the Gigabit Ethernet port).

Why waste desk space on a device whose entire point is that it has no user interface, no display, no keyboard? The Home Serer lives in the basement, stores data and makes no fuss. That is the point.

I bought the 500Gb version and added a couple of 1Tb drives. These days the 1Tb model is priced better and might be a better bet. Whichever one you get you need to buy at least one extra drive so that you can use the data mirroring function.

There are still some rough edges on WHS. For a start there should be a method of backing it up to an offsite location.

Dept of not supposed to say that

2008-11-23T08:06:00.000-08:00

If you believe that the main reason for opposing universal health care is the narrow party interest of the US Republican party, it probably isn't very wise to tell people that.

Much better to keep up the agenda denial nonsense of claiming that universal health care is an important goal that would be much better achieved by waiting a year, or two, or until after re-election in 2012. Because there is nothing that voters like better than a politician who makes campaign pledges that they then abandon once in office, despite wining effective, filibuster-proof control of both houses of Congress.

The only reason to delay on health care would be if there was a division in the Democratic caucus that left them without a simple majority. Senate Democrats opposed to universal health care are not going to join a GOP filibuster. And it would not have any effect if they did. Just as the Republicans have demonstrated repeatedly, the Senate filibuster power is simply not sufficient to block a bill when the opposing party has the White House.

But what I find rather more interesting is the fact that the advice these GOP 'experts' give their own side is as bad and as misinformed as the opinion that they give the Democrats (and for that matter relied on to run the country, Michael Cannon from Cato quoting Norman Markowitz:

A “single payer” national health system – known as “socialized medicine” in the rest of the developed world – should be an essential part of the change that the core constituencies which elected Obama desperately need. Britain serves as an important political lesson for strategists. After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party…

The shear ignorance of this statement is difficult to fathom. Now admittedly Markowitz is a Marxist, but the fact that so many right wing bloggers are repeating it as sage advice is instructive. In the first place, the term 'socialized medicine' is unique to US political discourse. The rest of the developed world does not use the term at all. Before Blair's 'New Labour', the British Labour party would have proudly described the NHS as a triumph of socialism and the Tories would have tried to change the subject. But they would not use the term 'socialized medicine' any more than they would use the terms 'pro-life' or 'pro-choice' as euphemisms for pro- and anti- positions in the abortion debate.

As for the idea that religious voters abandoned the Tory party because of the NHS, that is wrong on so many levels. The British Labour party was as much a product of the non-conformist churches as the union movement. The Church of England is sometimes referred to as the Tory party at prayer but it is not a political movement like the Southern evangelical churches are, indeed it is difficult to apply the word 'movement' to the established church.

British clergy do not issue the type of political screed that has become common in some US pulpits. Issues of conscience such as abortion, the death penalty and gay rights are decided on non-party votes. To the extent that the clergy has been involved in politics it has favored the left rather than the right.

The reason for the rise of the Labour party was the decline of the Liberal party. The reason for the decline of the right in the Tory party was their discredited support for Hitler prior to the war.

The closing factual blunder in the statement is that the UK Conservative party did not go into decline after the launch of the NHS. On the contrary, it made up ground in the election following the historic 1945 Labour landslide and won the next three elections. Labour did not win two successive full terms of office for the remainder of the century. Some decline!

While it is true that the Tory party did not try very hard to roll back the NHS along with the rest of 'socialism', that was because the NHS was and is popular. It is almost universally considered to be superior to the US model. The popular demand is for more services from the NHS, not less.

When a political movement is reduced to opposing policies in case they might be successful it is time to call it finished. The Tory party recovered after the 1945 landslide because they agreed not to challenge Labour's reforms. The Tory party continued to respect the post-war consensus right up until the Thatcher government came to power in 1979.

Earth to election scanning machine cos

2008-11-18T08:15:00.000-08:00

Why not build a scanner that registers a cross rather than a filled in oval as a vote?

What an end to partisanship is and is not

2008-11-15T17:48:00.000-08:00

Since the election the Washington Post editorial page has been filled with op-eds of the form 'Obama was elected on a pledge to do X, but he must be cautious, avoid the mistake Clinton made in moving too fast, now is not the time, better to delay, more debate is needed' and so on.

These are typical agenda denial tactics. The opponents of stem cell research, gays in the military, universal health care and so on, know that they have just lost the debate on the merits. It was called an election. So now they are trying to continue their rearguard action by arguing that it is politically expedient for a President elected by convincing popular and electoral majorities to delay policies that enjoy the support of 60% or more of the population.

When it is pointed out that these policies would all have been passed in the last Congress if not for the fact that the Democrats lacked the votes to override the veto that was certain to be used, the agenda deniers argue that Obama's pledge to end partisanship in Washington obliges him to give the Republican party an effective veto on every policy proposal.

That is not what an end to partisanship means. An end to partisanship means not attacking your opponents as traitors, being anti-American, 'pallin' around with terrorists and the like. An end to partisanship means a return to civility in public discourse and a willingness to listen to policy arguments that are made on the merits.

An end to partisanship does not require election promises to be abandoned because the other side opposes them. That was the reason for putting them in the platform in the first place: so that Obama could claim a mandate for those policies in office.

Every government faces a range of issues. Since Gingrich's 'Republican revolution' the GOP has adopted an approach where the entire party agreed to act in lockstep, deciding issues within their own caucus and then voting as a bloc on the outcome. Obama has signaled that this will not be the model for his administration. He is willing to build a working coalition from members of either party who share his goals.

George Will's confused mind

2008-11-14T05:16:00.000-08:00

Following an interview with Mitch McConnell, George F. Will argues that the result of 2008 is not irreversible:

Ninety percent of John McCain's vote was white, and the white percentage of the turnout has fallen from 90 percent in 1976 to 77 percent in 2004 and 74 percent in 2008. Still, McConnell believes that although Hispanics, the nation's largest minority, gave Obama two-thirds of their votes, they are entrepreneurial and culturally conservative, and therefore are not beyond the reach of Republicans.

So all the GOP needs to do is to engineer a situation where white voters are 90% of the electorate!

Well actually not, because the decline of the 'white' share of the vote is the result of non-white voters voting in greater numbers. By 'white', Wills seems to mean 'people like me' a rather narrower definition than 'caucasian'. That was achieved in large measure through deliberate disenfranchisement of minority voters in the US South.

A charitable interpretation of McConnell's plan is that he is suggesting that the GOP can attract minority voters to its cause. The thought that does not appear to occur to either is that the reason that only 10% of GOP support is coming from minorities might be the fact that a large portion of the party is quite happy to play the race card.

'Center-Right'

2008-11-13T16:53:00.000-08:00

Following up on my post that no country is center right by definition, I have been thinking further about the claim.

One counter argument made by a friend over lunch is that US institutions are center-right. There is no universal health care, welfare is considerably less generous than in other advanced industrial nations, militarism is tolerated in the political discourse. But using the fact that the US government has adopted policies that are distinctly to the right of the people as an argument to continue to pursue policies to the right of the people makes no sense either.

From 1994 through to 2006 the Republican party has managed to scrape together narrow electoral majorities by fusing Nixon's 'Southern' strategy of pandering to racial hatred, supply side economics and militarism. But throughout this period the GOP has only once managed to win the popular vote in the past five Presidential elections and have only won a majority of the house vote twice.

The GOP really consists of four separate factions, three of which only really care about one single issue and the fourth which only cares about power and is willing to agree to any demands from the other three, to the extent that they are not incompatible.

If the US had a direct democracy rather than a representative democracy, this strategy would simply not work.

Let us accept for the sake of argument that there might have been a national consensus in favor of the supply-side, market fundamentalism that has had the GOP in its grip. In the wake of the sub-prime meltdown that consensus is 100% inoperative. McCain was forced to campaign on 'social issues' and 'national security' as the country simply cannot be convinced that the GOP is credible on economic issues.

The National Security issue was used successfully by the GOP in 2002 and 2004. In 2006 the electorate rejected the Iraq war and the National Security was framed in the 2008 campaign as which candidate could best clean up the mess created by the Republican party.

That leaves 'social issues'. Here the religious right has for years been led on with the promise of a ban on abortion and the overturning of Roe vs Wade. At this point there is very clearly a strong national consensus in favor of abortion rights.

That leaves only same-sex marriage as an issue on which the GOP could credibly claim their party view represents a national consensus. But even there it is a distinctly fragile one. The issue only reached national attention for the first time in 1997 and first legal same sex marriage only took place in 2002.

The first plebiscite to ban gay marriage passed by 67 to 33 in Hawaii in 1998. Ten years later, prop 8 only managed to pass by 52.5% to 47.5% in California, a state with a considerably larger conservative population. During the campaign both sides recognized the fact that should the proposition fail in California, same sex marriage would inevitably be legalized across the whole country.

None of the three wings of the GOP commands a majority of popular support and probably never did. The only reason the coalition worked is that each wing of the party only cared about their particular issue and were willing to sacrifice everything else to get it. The activities of the neo-cons certainly offended the civil libertarian sensibilities of the likes of Grover Norquist but they were prepared to accept a national security state as the necessary price to get lower taxes.

Now that the party has completely lost two branches of government and must expect the third to be put out of reach for a generation, there is little reason for the factions to stick together. Apart from the social conservatives, they can all achieve far more by working with Obama than they can achieve within the GOP.

Paying for the Energy Plan

2008-11-13T06:39:00.000-08:00

One of the questions asked at the debates was what promises the candidates might be willing to give up in order to deal with the credit crisis.

While the question was economically illiterate and anyone who knows mainstream economic theory knows that the standard response to a recession is spend, spend, spend, saying this in a debate was not an option. Obama's answer was that it might be necessary to address the energy plan more slowly.

This might actually be necessary. Even though Obama's economic team will be 100% neo-Keynsians who will attempt to spend their way out of recession, doing so will increase the national debt. And if thy are successful the recession will be over right around the time that the build-out of the national renewable energy infrastructure should be ramping up.

One way to pay for the infrastructure build-out is to reduce spending on the military. One of the lessons that should be learned from the Bush administration is that an all-powerful military is simply too dangerous for the country. The real root cause of the Iraq war was not faulty intelligence, or provocation by Iraq, it was George W. Bush's belief that the US military was invincible. Rebuilding the military creates the risk that the next militarist President will make the same mistake and launch another failed war.

Another way to pay for the build-out is to divert resources from NASA. Putting a man on Mars can wait a decade or four, reducing use of carbon fuels cannot. Even if the money was available to pursue both programs, the skilled resources are not. The energy plan is going to need a large number of first rate engineers and scientists. We can't wait to train them, NASA is the obvious place to look.

The US version of British Leyland

2008-11-13T05:18:00.000-08:00

US policy makers would be well advised to take a look at the history of British Leyland before deciding on a bailout plan for General Motors.

The problems with GM are remarkably similar to the problems with British Leyland: workforce paid more than its productivity merits, obsolete plant, defective designs.

After a series of government bailouts in which the company shrunk at each stage, Britain's only native volume car manufacturer went out of business completely and the plant was shipped off to China.

The only way to save the company is going to be to shut down a large percentage of the plants. Gas may be back to $2 a gallon, but there is no sign that the SUV fad is ever coming back which means that much of GM's model line, including almost all the profitable models are simply obsolete.

It could have been different of course. Detroit could have invested in fuel efficient vehicles instead of lobbying Congress to prevent fuel efficiency standards being raised. Luxury car makers in Europe have been building high end cars out of aluminum for a decade now. They are lighter and do not rust. The Japanese have been building hybrids. The US makers have been turning 1960s truck designs into cars.

No country is center right by definition

2008-11-12T06:39:00.000-08:00

More concern from liberal pundits about the push by Conservatives and the establishment punidtocracy to declare the US a 'center-right' nation.

The problem I have here is definitional. By international standards, Obama and 90% of the elected Democrats in Congress are a pretty conservative bunch. But the argument being made here is that Obama and other 'liberals' need to be cautious because they are to the left of the country and the country as a whole is 'center-right' relative to itself.

In other words, the country is to the right of the country.

Clearly this is a contradiction in terms which is a fairly clear sign that what is presented as conventional wisdom conceals an ulterior motive.

What is even more suspicious here is the fact that the pundits give Obama some advice that any political adviser knows is bad.

Any politician knows that Obama has to deliver change if he is going to hope to be re-elected in 2012. This was very clearly understood in the campaign which is the reason why there is only one big ticket commitment, universal healthcare. Obama has to start on healthcare on day one and deliver before the distractions of the mid-sessional elections. Obama's mandate will never be stronger than the day he takes office.

The idea that waiting until 2013 would be a good idea is so ridiculous that it is hard to understand how any expert observer could suggest it in good faith. The fact that the country is currently in a recession induced by the policies of market fundamentalism is simply irrelevant. The earliest legislation can be expected to pass is fall 2009. It will take at least a year to get the program up and running meaning that 2011 is the earliest date that the program is likely to be costing money, 2012 is more likely. And that is yet another reason to start work immediately.

Either the recession will be over by 2012 or we will be calling it a depression in which case there will be far more voters worried about the risk of losing their employment based healthcare than the national debt.

It is really hard to see how the pundits could give worse advice from a political perspective.

But the bigger failure of the punditocracy is that they consider the issues of politics to be who gets elected to what, not what is achieved. They do not consider for a moment the possibility that Obama might prefer to be the single term President that established universal healthcare rather than the two term President who competently managed the rebuilding after eight years of the incompetent Bush administration.