The Space shuttle is Concorde

CNN reports further cuts in the NASA science program. The elephant in the room here is the manned space program and the decision to continue making shuttle flights.

The shuttle was amazingly popular when it was first launched, after the first disaster everyone was asking 'when can they get it flying again'. After the second disaster people finaly seem to be asking the questions that should have been asked before the thing was built:

Does the reusable orbiter concept actually reduce per launch costs?

What is the scientific mission of the space station?

Why not shut down manned exploration entirely and use robots?

The shuttle has become the space equivalent of Concorde: for thirty years the acme of technological achievement. But despite being relaunched at great expense after a disaster things were never the same again.

After furious arm twisting NASA has agreed to 'consider' a shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. If the shuttle is unable to do that it should be shut down immediately, servicing the HST is the only contribution to science it can make at this point.

The rational policy at this point would be to fly one more mission to service the HST. The space station should be de-orbited, it is never going to achieve what it was meant to do. The Mars shot should be cancelled as premature. The money saved should be invested in cutting edge robotic exploration.

We may have the technology to send a person to Mars but we certainly don't have the technology to get them there alive. The radiation would kill them before they were half way there.

What we are close to having the technology to do is to set up a self-sustaining robot colony that can manufacture its own replacements. Establishing a colony of that kind would be an essential first step towards establishing any form of long term lunar presence. The colony does not need to be 100% self-sustaining. If the robot could fabricate the body parts of replacement robots the control systems could be supplied. The key thing is to start fabrication. Until it is possible to build essentials on site rather than ship every pound from earth the process is going to be hopelessly uneconomic.

Hacker Outsmarts Kinko's ExpressPay Cards

Ooops

Some companies have a real problem understanding that the technology to read and write mag stripe cards is commonplace these days. It would not take much to make the cards a lot harder to fake, a MAC code generated using a system wide shared secret would cost next to nothing but hold off a large proportion of attacks.

The terminals do have some controls in place. They can only be accessed from the kinkos locations. That means that a person using a fraudulent card is at personal risk. It would not take a great deal to detect fraud and arrest persistent perpetrators.

The bigger more worrying threat is the fact that it appears criminal gangs have been picking up on this type of network and using them as a means of money laundering. That means that their security controls are going to be subject to a much higher level of scrutiny than the designers likely expected.

Glass houses

What is amazing is not the fact that it took a hacker less than 30 minutes to get root in the Mac security competition.

What is amazing is the fact that the people who launch these competitions don't ask some security professionals how common rooted Mac or Linux boxes are first. Sure there are a heck of a lot of owned Windows boxes on the Internet. But there are also a heck of a lot of Unix machines.

A constant refrain at the IETF is 'bad security is worse than no security'. The point being that bad security leads people to rely on a machine thinking that they are safe and the consequences of doing so can be worse than having no security at all.

Judging an operating system by the frequency of security patches is the worst possible approach to security. All the operating systems we use today are hopelessly complex from a security perspective. None are really designed for use on an open international network. We do not even fully understand the requirements for security on such a network yet.

It only takes one security hole for a good computer to be turned bad.

Big screen vs little

The organizers of this year's Oscars clearly told the presenters to tout the value of the big screen over the little. Throughout the evening there were references to DVD.

I found this somewhat odd. First the message itself was muddied by the fact that the actors sent to deliver it could not read from the teleprompter with conviction. Perhaps they were afraid that on TV you don't get the chance for a second take. So instead we had a bunch of actors who are unused to using a telepromter delivering flat, lifeless lines and often misreading it.

This may have magnified the odder aspect, basic rules of marketing are to tout the benefits of your own product. If you must run down the opposition get someone else to do it. Running down the opposition makes you look afraid of them. Running down the opposition at your main annual event is simply crass.

There are so many ways that the same message could be got across without mentioning DVD. Talk up the 'big canvas' that the sound editors have to work with in the theatre. Talk up the social aspects, talk up the big picture. They tried to do this but each time they did they then had to ruin it by mentioning DVD, worse still they mentioned DVD last.

Even more peculiar: the event was being hosted on TV, in the living room. So the people they were reaching out to were the TV watchers.

Will DVD kill film? Yes and no.

DVD is certainly going to kill the current business model for the film industry. It might even kill the mega budge blockbuster but I doubt it. The theatres themselves will move away from 35mm celluloid and use digital projection from a high definition DVD or a network source. And regardless of attempts to stop it the same technology will turn up in people's homes.

But old business models are replaced by new ones. Once you get rid of the celluloid and the $5000 plus cost of striking each print a lot of things change. Every film will 'open big', initial runs will be shorter but reruns will be much easier to set up. When Harry Potter V opens I through IV will do a rerun in the same theatre.

The people who are threatened by a shift in the business model are not the people who make movies, its the middle men, the distributors, producers, facilitators who get squeezed. Middlemen have to add value to survive in the online economy.

Even the theatre owners are likely to survive. People want a social experience as well as entertainment. Cinema may loose out to DVD but theatre owners will look for new forms of social entertainment. In the 1930s theatres were turned into cinemas. In the 1970s UK cinemas were being turned into bingo halls. In the 1980s the bingo halls were turned back into cinemas.

There is no shortage of demand, no shortage of technology. What we do lack is the paradigm. It took 20 years after the invention of the cinema camera for cinema to discover drama as its principle model.

What is so shocking about cinema in the digital age is the total lack of interactivity. The best audience is the one that makes least noise and disturbance to others. So what is the point of being in a group?

We have massively multiplayer games, why not have a massively multiplayer game that is genuinely cooperative and played in situ? A game designed to stimulate discussion and cooperation amongst the players?

How not to chase bots

EWeek describes a hunt for bot command and control.

I don't think this is going to do much more than force the bot-herders to develop a peer to peer control mechanism. In principle every member of a botnet could be a controller. The only thing the bot controller needs is an up to date list of IP addresses of the bots under control, that is easy enough to maintain as the bots are established. The only 'central control' you need is a public key pair for authenticating the bot control channel commands.

Of course this is not necessarily what is really going on. Journalists don't always ask the right questions (Larry is usually good here) and people don't necessarily answer entirely accuractely.

Botnets may look like armies but that does not mean that military style decapitation techniques are going to work. They work in the military because armies have to work within chain of command principles that are constrained by the limits of human communication and interaction. Every order has to flow through the officers. Take out the NCOs of the other side and the engagement is usually won. Take out the mid ranking officers and the battle is usually won. Take out the high command and the campaign is usually won. It takes a long time for an army to replace officers but it only takes a few seconds to replace a botcontroller unless you can arrest the human perpetrator. I would follow the money trail rather than the easier to confuse bit trail.

The way to go after the bots is to go after the human operators at the top and to restrict the value of the worker bots to the bare minimum. I have written about reverse firewalls in the past. I still think that is part of the necessary approach. The other part is to have a reaction system so that when a bot starts banging with a DDoS attack we can identify it and shut it down pronto.

The Feds have been effective against botherders recently. I would like to know how.

An easy choice

"You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca, or you give up astronomy. You can't do both."

I suspect the voters will find this an easier choice than Prof Gilmore thinks.

Just don't look

Bundled or a la carte

Apparently Conservatives want pay-by-channel cable — except the TV preachers

This is not so surprising, most people don't want to see home shopping or pseudo-religious broadcasts but these are crammed into the basic cable package because they don't cost the cable company anything.

The problem with the a la carte model is that 1) people don't evaluate the price of a commodity in a rational fashion no matter what idiot economists think, 2) the costs of distribution are fixed regardless of the number of channels 3) existing technology does not support attractive pricing models.

If cable went a la carte most people would cancel the home shopping and religious shows immediately. Only a few hardened news junkies would want more than one 24 hour news channel, only a few hardened music fans would want MTV and all the clones, only people with kids would want the children's shows.

Offered a choice between the 120 channels I allegedly get on satelite TV at $60 and a la carte at $1 per channel I would chose the a la carte option and cut down to about 25 channels. I certainly would not be paying for Fox News, home shopping, ESPN, MTV, VH1, ABC Familly. Court TV is lame, the SciFi Network inept, I don't speak spanish.

Where the a la carte logic falls down of course is that the provider's costs are fixed. If the number of subscribers declines the price has to go up. My guess is that the price would be at least $2 per channel, I would be no better off at best.

This would in turn hit the finances of the channels, their revenue would decline, program quality would fall. Faced with higher prices for worse content most people would further reduce the number of channels they subscribe to and the cycle would repeat.

This particular market ends up with a result that is worse for every participant. The reason is that the goods being sold are not really as fungible as the market theology demands. There is finite bandwidth on the satelite or on the cable distribution drop. Content is not a rival good, my watching a program does not deprive another. Attempting to allocate costs for bits as if they were atoms fails.

Enigma codes

The project to crack the remaining three enigma codes has completed

A while ago Whit Diffie gave a talk on the Vennona decrypts to Ron Rivest's reading group at MIT and tried to get me and others interested in analyzing the problem from the point of view of the complexity of the effort.

The Vennona codes demonstrate the problem of using a one time pad in practice. Used correctly one time pads provide perfect confidentiality. There is not even a theoretical possibility of breaking the code. Used incorrectly they reduce to one of the simplest forms of cryptographic problem: an alphabetic substitution cipher where one text is used as the 'key' to encrypt another.

Breaking the Vennona codes led to the discovery of the Cambridge spy ring, the exposure of Fusch and the execution of the Rosenbergs. The M4 group might be interested in taking on this challenge as a followup.

Atrios

Atrios takes a brave stand

For the record: I agree.