Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2014

The NSA worked very hard to set themselves up for the Snowden leaks

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

A few days back, Charles Stross pointed out one of the most ironic points of interest in the NSA scandal … they did it to themselves, over the course of several years effort:

I don’t need to tell you about the global surveillance disclosures of 2013 to the present — it’s no exaggeration to call them the biggest secret intelligence leak in history, a monumental gaffe (from the perspective of the espionage-industrial complex) and a security officer’s worst nightmare.

But it occurs to me that it’s worth pointing out that the NSA set themselves up for it by preventing the early internet specifications from including transport layer encryption.

At every step in the development of the public internet the NSA systematically lobbied for weaker security, to enhance their own information-gathering capabilities. The trouble is, the success of the internet protocols created a networking monoculture that the NSA themselves came to rely on for their internal infrastructure. The same security holes that the NSA relied on to gain access to your (or Osama bin Laden’s) email allowed gangsters to steal passwords and login credentials and credit card numbers. And ultimately these same baked-in security holes allowed Edward Snowden — who, let us remember, is merely one guy: a talented system administrator and programmer, but no Clark Kent — to rampage through their internal information systems.

The moral of the story is clear: be very cautious about poisoning the banquet you serve your guests, lest you end up accidentally ingesting it yourself.

Market disruption and innovation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

Innovation often leads to challenges to established markets. Existing players in those established markets have three choices when faced with a disruptive new competitor or technological change: they can innovate themselves, they can retrench and avoid direct competition, or they can do what most incumbents do — get the government regulators to fight their battles for them.

Market incumbents do not like disruption. Uber, the ride-sharing service that has loosened the stranglehold of the taxi cartels, has been the object of government attacks and vigilante attacks both. Various regulatory agencies have tried with varying degrees of success to shut it down, London’s taxi drivers are even as we speak promising “chaos” in response to the firm’s success, French vigilantes have attacked its drivers, and in Seattle — blessed Seattle! — self-styled anarchists are targeting its cars and drivers. “Anarchists” for state-enforced cartel economics to increase private profit — somebody is unclear on the concept, it seems.

A great deal of the program of the old Left — from its full-on Marxist wing to its Proudhonian anarchist wing — is in the process of being accomplished by 21st-century capitalism. The means of production have been radically democratized, with multi-billion-dollar firms springing up out of garages and dorm rooms. The privileged position of dominant old-line financiers is being undermined rapidly by innovations such as Kickstarter, which blurs the line between the altruistic and the consumerist. The life expectancy of large corporations has collapsed, from about 75 years in the 1960s to 15 years and declining today. When Pierre-Joseph Proudhon called for “a war of labor against capital; a war of liberty against authority; a war of the producer against the non-producer; a war of equality against privilege,” he certainly did not have in mind Uber or Outbox; his most famous motto was, after all, “Property is theft.” (I think there is rather more to his idea of property than that simplistic formulation communicates, but this is not the place for that particular essay.) But the characteristics of those firms — relatively modest capital requirements, subverting various kinds of political authority in the form of licensure and regulation enacted in the interests of market incumbents, empowering efficient producers to compete with rent-seeking non-producers, and, above all, undermining the privileged place of state-sanctioned monopolies and cartels — looks a lot more like what the 19th-century revolutionaries had in mind than the USPS does. If what you mean by “capitalism” is the East India Company, then capitalism is not very attractive; if what you mean by “capitalism” is Kickstarter, then it is.

Not that a man transported from the 19th century to our own time would recognize that. If we could transport M. Proudhon or any of his contemporaries to the here and now, their eyes would not register any economic system with which they were familiar at the sight of the daily wonders we take for granted. They wouldn’t see capitalism; they’d see magic. But the DMV, the USPS, the housing project, and the prison would all be familiar to their 19th-century eyes. Our choice is not really between neat ideological verities with their roots in Adam Smith or Karl Marx, but between the DMV and the Apple store. Each model has its downsides, to be sure, but it does not seem like a terribly difficult choice to me.

Ontario politics: “Insular, petty and involves a cast of characters you wouldn’t want to meet wandering down a dark alley”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

It’s election season once again in Ontario, and Richard Anderson looks at the current state of play:

I know most of you can’t stand Ontario politics.

Especially those of us who live here…

It’s insular, petty and involves a cast of characters you wouldn’t want to meet wandering down a dark alley. Still it’s the largest province in Confederation so attention must be paid, however grudgingly.

The last decade of provincial politics has revolved around the astonishing acrobatics of the McGuinty-Wynne Liberals. They have lied, overspent and borrowed to an extent without precedent in English speaking Canada. Those of us who remember the Bob Rae years had assumed that they had seen the worst. Apparently it wasn’t. After a brief house cleaning under Harris-Eves we were returned to spendthrift form. The provincial debt has doubled in ten years. Nothing else in Ontario has grown anywhere near as fast.

A political party that was this incompetent, this obviously corrupt, would you think be headed for certain defeat at the polls. Transforming the engine of the Canadian economy into its busted leg took some doing. A treasure trove of natural resources, close proximity to the largest American markets and a highly skilled workforce. Ontario has, what seemed until recently, to be nearly indestructible advantages. A pack of Gibbonese monkeys could be running the show at Queen’s Park and the economy, somehow, would still keep moving along.

But no one saw Dalton McGuinty coming. How could they? With the personality of a mediocre non-entity and the political cunning of a dishonest child, he won two majority governments and narrowly missed a third. How has been something of a mystery. The Dalt had certain inborn advantages. His sheer nebbishness made him seem unthreatening. Yet here we stand at the bottom of a deep hole he himself dug. There were, of course, his weak and bungling rivals. Ernie Eves looked and sounded like an unenthusiatic version of Gordon Gekko. John Tory’s ability to self-destruct is near legend. Tim Hudak isn’t a real boy at all.

Yet the greatest advantage that Dalton McGuinty had, and which Kathleen Wynne retains, is the electorate. There is no greater advantage to a scheming and incompetent politician than a disengaged and misinformed electorate. That describes the voters of Ontario almost perfectly. This might seem a tad puzzling to some. Generations of Canadian voters have been been able to hold their governments to rough account. Semi-literate frontier farmers were able to follow the twists and turns of the Pacific Scandal and send John A, temporarily, packing. Today the ordinary voter sees greater crimes and follies with nary a batted eye.

Vikings day 3 draft picks

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

“Trader” Rick Spielman was in full wheel-and-deal mode on Saturday, as the Vikings traded back a few times to stockpile extra picks. Despite some moaning on the part of the fan base, this is something he’s been remarkably consistent about — he likes to have about ten picks in a given draft. He’ll move up to get a particular player (like Harrison Smith in 2012, Cordarrelle Patterson in 2013, and Teddy Bridgewater this year), but in general he prefers to trade down to get more opportunities to draft players for the long term. There was a particularly persuasive article about this at Vox.com a few days back, arguing that teams should always try to maximize the number of players they draft, to increase their chance of getting players who will be around for a long time in the league:

Draft picks can be traded, and the success of any one player picked is highly uncertain. Because of that, their data says that in the current trade market, teams are always better off trading down — that is, trading one high pick for multiple lower ones — but many teams become overconfident in their evaluation of one particular player and do the exact opposite: package several low picks for the right to take one player very early.

“There are one or two teams out there that philosophically follow this idea,” says Massey, who serves as a draft consultant with several NFL teams that he can’t disclose. “But in my experience, teams always say they’re on board with it in January. Then when April rolls around, and they’ve been preparing for the draft for a long time, they fall in love with players, get more and more confident in their analysis, and fall back into the same patterns.”

My only disagreement with this argument is that due to the current Collective Bargaining Agreement, there’s a discontinuity in the data at the bottom of the first round: teams get an optional fifth year on contracts with first round players. For this reason, I think Minnesota was right to trade up to get Bridgewater at the bottom of the first round, to get that option instead of waiting until they were next on the clock (which would have been eight picks later in the second round).

At the Daily Norseman, KJ Segall looks at the draft philosophy being employed by Rick Spielman and Mike Zimmer:

As we agonized through the pre-draft build up, I contemplated the basic two directions the Vikings could go — solving the offense with relatively few moves, or focusing on a defense that had holes everywhere. On one hand, we needed three things to have an offense worthy of contending in the NFC North: a good quarterback, a good offensive guard, and a reliable backup running back. (Not bad when one of the things you need is a backup position.) If we fixed that, then our solid WR corps, strong Oline, and superstar RB would be giving opposing DCs nightmares… but, that would also mean that our defense would have missed out on some upgrades, and many a team might simply outscore us no matter what we could do with the ball. On the other hand, letting the offense be with the adequate Matt Cassel, Charlie Johnson, and (fill-in-the-blank backup running back), all while attempting to plug as many holes on the leaky longship that was our defense could create a relatively well-balanced team that might not scare a lot of people but could still sneak out some surprises.

So it came down to this — be mediocre across the board, or be great at one thing and weak at another. Ultimately, through FA and what has been a shockingly good draft (shockingly because when you get the hands-down best QB available at freakin’ pick 32… well, the mind, it gets blown), they basically have gone with the latter. Yes, we solved our quarterback situation beyond our wildest expectations, and our offense will in fact be much, much better this year (and it wasn’t even all that terrible last year, either). And yes, by drafting Daddy David Yankey and Jerick McKinnon, we did technically solve those other two holes- although McKinnon is most definitely a project at first, and Yankey’s ability to unseat Charlie Johnson yet remains to be seen. (Although he should hopefully do so at some point in the season.) In reality, we focused pretty heavily on defense throughout the draft, starting off with the selection of Anthony Barr. The Bridgewater awesomeness aside, it would appear that the Vikings were determined to work on the defensive upgrades made in free agency as their primary focus.

On to the actual day three picks below the fold.

(more…)

QotD: Longevity

Filed under: Health, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

It is not, naturally and generally, the happy who are most anxious either for prolongation of the present life or for a life hereafter; it is those who never have been happy. Those who have had their happiness can bear to part with existence, but it is hard to die without ever having lived.

John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion, 1874

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