Quotulatiousness

December 14, 2012

40 years ago today, man last walked on the moon

Filed under: History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:51

At sp!ked, Patrick West notes an under-observed anniversary:

It is a fine testament to NASA’s Apollo programme that of all the world-shaking events in living memory, men landing on the moon is the only one that doesn’t involve death. As Andrew Smith, author of Moon Dust (2006), notes, everyone remembers where they were when John F Kennedy was assassinated, Princess Diana died, or on 9/11. Most people, if they were alive at the time, also vividly recall when a man first walked on the moon on 20 July 1969.

Few, however, will remember what they were doing when the last man walked on the moon. That was 40 years ago today.

As he fired up the engines of Apollo 17‘s Lunar Module, Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon, delivered a final message to the world: ‘America’s challenge has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And as we leave the moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind.’ On this date, many of us lament that we haven’t gone back to the moon. Others won’t, citing the vast expense of this Cold War sideshow, equivalent to roughly $130 billion in today’s money.

We certainly aren’t likely to return to the moon in such cynical and pessimistic times, of Mayan prophecies, omens of economic stagnation and environmental catastrophe, Frankie Boyle misanthropy and books called Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?. In other words, everything the Apollo programme didn’t represent. America’s race to the moon may have been partly a means of getting one over the Soviets, but it also embodied the spirit of adventure and progress, as encapsulated by Neil Armstrong’s first words from the moon.

December 13, 2012

The ITU’s latest attempt to hijack the internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:09

David Gewirtz has the details:

According to The Weekly Standard, the chairman of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) decided to try an end-run around the U.S., Europe, and most freedom-loving nations by conducting a survey of nations and putting forth a resolution that gives governments control over Internet policy, which includes everything you and I send across the pipes.

Apparently, this wasn’t a binding policy, but it’s a political gambit designed to get the UN to continue the process of trying to wrest control of the Internet from those interested in freedom to those interested in control of freedoms.

I’m a strong believer in a global Internet, but I’m starting to think countries like China and Russia and Cuba and the various regressive Middle Eastern states are more trouble than they’re worth. Maybe it’s just time we pulled the Internet plug on them*.

December 11, 2012

This’ll take you back

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

The Verge on a 1960s interpretation of Google search:

Google didn’t exist during the 1960s, but if it did, it may have looked a lot like Google60. Described as “an art project to explore distances and heroism in user interfaces,” Google60 is the latest creation from designer and developer Norbert Landsteiner, who earlier this year released Google BBS — a project that allowed users to conduct Google searches from within a 1980s bulletin board-style interface. The idea behind Google60 is largely similar, except here, Landsteiner replaces the Google front end with a virtual IBM 360-like interface, replete with punch cards and a “Mad Men style,” 1960s aesthetic.

December 9, 2012

Verizon attempts to patent creepy targeted ad delivery technology

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:02

Verizon wants your TV to carefully observe you so it can deliver ads tailored for whatever activity you might be doing:

The U.S. Patent Office has delivered a “non-final” rejection of a Verizon patent application for a controversial technology that would have served targeted ads to TV viewers based on what they might be doing or saying in front of their sets.

[. . .]

The patent in question has been the subject of intense media scrutiny since FierceCable uncovered it last week. Verizon’s somewhat laboriously titled the patent application “Methods and Systems for Presenting an Advertisement Associated with an Ambient Action of a Use.”

The application says the technology would be capable of triggering different advertisements depending on whether a viewer or viewers might be eating, playing, cuddling, laughing, singing, fighting or gesturing in front of their sets. Specifically, the patent covers technology that can serve ads “…targeted to the user based on what the user is doing, who the user is, the user’s surroundings, and/or any other suitable information associated with the user.”

Privacy? You don’t need that, because we need to sell you shit.

December 5, 2012

Code used by Roger Williams in the 1600s is finally cracked

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:10

I first read about Roger Williams in Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty, but I didn’t know that Williams had left coded notes that had defied analysis until now:

The obscure book’s margins are virtually filled with clusters of curious foreign characters — a mysterious shorthand used by 17th century religious dissident Roger Williams.

For centuries the scribbles went undeciphered. But a team of Brown University students has finally cracked the code.

Historians call the now-readable writings the most significant addition to Williams scholarship in a generation or more. Williams is Rhode Island’s founder and best known as the first figure to argue for the principle of the separation of church and state that would later be enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

[. . .]

Fisher said the new material is important in part because it’s among Williams’ last work, believed to have been written after 1679 in the last four years of his life.

The new discovery is remarkable on several levels, Widmer said.

“Part of it was the excitement of a mystery being cracked, and part of it was Roger Williams is very famous in Rhode Island — no other state has a founder as tied up with the state’s identity as Rhode Island,” he said. “To have a major new source, a major new document, from Roger Williams is a big deal.”

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

December 4, 2012

ITU approves Deep Packet Inspection requirement to enable government snooping of internet traffic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

The UN’s International Telecommunications Union continues its in-camera campaign to wrest control of the internet from all other organizations with a new policy designed to please intrusive and authoritarian governments worldwide:

The telecommunications standards arm of the U.N. has quietly endorsed the standardization of technologies that could give governments and companies the ability to sift through all of an Internet user’s traffic – including emails, banking transactions, and voice calls – without adequate privacy safeguards. The move suggests that some governments hope for a world where even encrypted communications may not be safe from prying eyes.

At the core of this development is the adoption of a proposed international standard that outlines requirements for a technology known as “Deep Packet Inspection” (DPI). As we’ve noted several times before, depending on how it is used, DPI has the potential to be extremely privacy-invasive, to defy user expectations, and to facilitate wiretapping.

[. . .]

The ITU-T DPI standard holds very little in reserve when it comes to privacy invasion. For example, the document optionally requires DPI systems to support inspection of encrypted traffic “in case of a local availability of the used encryption key(s).” It’s not entirely clear under what circumstances ISPs might have access to such keys, but in any event the very notion of decrypting the users’ traffic (quite possibly against their will) is antithetical to most norms, policies, and laws concerning privacy of communications. In discussing IPSec, an end-to-end encryption technology that obscures all traffic content, the document notes that “aspects related to application identification are for further study” – as if some future work may be dedicated to somehow breaking or circumventing IPSec.

Several global standards bodies, including the IETF and W3C, have launched initiatives to incorporate privacy considerations into their work. In fact, the IETF has long had a policy of not considering technical requirements for wiretapping in its work, taking the seemingly opposite approach to the ITU-T DPI document, as Germany pointed out in voicing its opposition to the ITU-T standard earlier this year. The ITU-T standard barely acknowledges that DPI has privacy implications, let alone does it provide a thorough analysis of how the potential privacy threats associated with the technology might be mitigated.

These aspects of the ITU-T Recommendation are troubling in light of calls from Russia and a number of Middle Eastern countries to make ITU-T Recommendations mandatory for Internet technology companies and network operators to build into their products. Mandatory standards are a bad idea even when they are well designed. Forcing the world’s technology companies to adopt standards developed in a body that fails to conduct rigorous privacy analysis could have dire global consequences for online trust and users’ rights.

Tumblr gets trolled

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

The Register‘s John Leyden on the JavaScript troubles inflicted on Tumblr the other day:

A worm spread like wildfire across Tumblr on Monday, defacing pages on the blogging website with an abusive message penned by a notorious trolling crew.

The outbreak was triggered by the GNAA, a group of anonymous troublemakers who get their kicks from winding up bloggers with offensive posts.

Tumblr temporarily halted the publication of new journal posts to prevent the worm from spreading further before restoring the service to normal a few hours later.

[. . .]

“It appears that the worm took advantage of Tumblr’s reblogging feature, meaning that anyone who was logged into Tumblr would automatically reblog the infectious post if they visited one of the offending pages,” wrote Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

“It shouldn’t have been possible for someone to post such malicious JavaScript into a Tumblr post — our assumption is that the attackers managed to skirt around Tumblr’s defences by disguising their code through Base 64 encoding and embedding it in a data URI,” he added.

UAVs move closer to the front rank of US Navy assets

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

Strategy Page on the progress of the X-47B UAV:

The U.S. Navy X-47B UCAV (unmanned combat air vehicle) made its first catapult launch on November 29th, 22 months after its first flight. This launch was not from a carrier, but an airfield built to the same size as a carrier deck and equipped with a catapult. This first launch was to confirm that the X-47B could handle the stress of a catapult launch. Another X-47B has been loaded onto the deck of a carrier, to check out the ability of the UCAV to move around the deck. If all goes well, the first carrier launch of an X-47B will take place next year, along with carrier landings. Last year the navy tested its UCAV landing software, using a manned F-18 for the test, landing it on a carrier completely under software control.

It was four years ago that the navy rolled out the first X-47B, its first combat UAV. This compact aircraft has a wingspan of 20 meters (62 feet, and the outer 25 percent folds up to save space on the carrier). It carries a two ton payload and will be able to stay in the air for twelve hours. The U.S. is far ahead of other nations in UCAV development, and this is energizing activity in Russia, Europe and China to develop similar aircraft. It’s generally recognized that robotic combat aircraft are the future, even though many of the aviation commanders (all of them pilots) wish it were otherwise. Whoever gets there first (a UCAV that really works) will force everyone else to catch up, or end up the loser in their next war with someone equipped with UCAVs.

The U.S. Navy has done the math and realized that they need UCAVS on their carriers as soon as possible. The current plan is to get these aircraft into service six years from now. But there is an effort to get the unmanned carrier aircraft into service sooner than that. The math problem that triggered all this is the realization that American carriers had to get within 800 kilometers of their target before launching bomber aircraft. Potential enemies increasingly have aircraft and missiles with range greater than 800 kilometers. The navy already has a solution in development; the X-47B UCAS has a range of 2,500 kilometers

December 3, 2012

The feudal technopeasant internet

Filed under: History, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:20

Bruce Schneier on the less-than-appealing state of user security in today’s internet:

It’s a feudal world out there.

Some of us have pledged our allegiance to Google: We have Gmail accounts, we use Google Calendar and Google Docs, and we have Android phones. Others have pledged allegiance to Apple: We have Macintosh laptops, iPhones, and iPads; and we let iCloud automatically synchronize and back up everything. Still others of us let Microsoft do it all. Or we buy our music and e-books from Amazon, which keeps records of what we own and allows downloading to a Kindle, computer, or phone. Some of us have pretty much abandoned e-mail altogether … for Facebook.

These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals. We might refuse to pledge allegiance to all of them — or to a particular one we don’t like. Or we can spread our allegiance around. But either way, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to not pledge allegiance to at least one of them.

Feudalism provides security. Classical medieval feudalism depended on overlapping, complex, hierarchical relationships. There were oaths and obligations: a series of rights and privileges. A critical aspect of this system was protection: vassals would pledge their allegiance to a lord, and in return, that lord would protect them from harm.

Of course, I’m romanticizing here; European history was never this simple, and the description is based on stories of that time, but that’s the general model.

And it’s this model that’s starting to permeate computer security today.

We’re from the ITU and we’re here to “fix” your internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

At Techdirt, Nick Masnick recounts some of the wonderful things the International Telecommunications Union would like to “help” regarding that pesky “internet” thing:

We’ve been talking about the ITU’s upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) for a while now, and it’s no longer “upcoming.” Earlier today, the week and a half session kicked off in Dubai with plenty of expected controversy. The US, the EU and now Australia have all come out strongly against the ITU’s efforts to undermine the existing internet setup to favor authoritarian countries or state-controlled (or formerly state-controlled) telcos who want money for internet things they had nothing to do with. The BBC article above has a pretty good rundown of some of the scarier proposals being pitched behind closed doors at WCIT. Having the US, EU and Australia against these things is good, but the ITU works on a one-vote-per-country system, and plenty of other countries see this as a way to exert more control over the internet, in part to divert funds from elsewhere into their own coffers.

Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the ITU, keeps trying to claim that this is all about increasing internet access, but that’s difficult to square with reality:

    “The brutal truth is that the internet remains largely [the] rich world’s privilege, ” said Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, ahead of the meeting.

    “ITU wants to change that.”

Of course, internet access has already been spreading to the far corners of the planet without any “help” from the ITU. Over two billion people are already online, representing about a third of the planet. And, yes, spreading that access further is a good goal, but the ITU is not the player to do it. The reason that the internet has been so successful and has already spread as far as it has, as fast as it has, is that it hasn’t been controlled by a bureaucratic government body in which only other governments could vote. Instead, it was built as an open interoperable system that anyone could help build out. It was built in a bottom up manner, mainly by engineers, not bureaucrats. Changing that now makes very little sense.

Canada is also on the record as being against the expansion of the ITU’s role.

Canada will look to prevent governments from taking more power over the Internet when governments sit down for 12 days of negotiations on the future of the Internet next week, but the government didn’t say Thursday where it stands on a contentious proposal that could see users pay more for online content.

Canada’s position going into the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) mirrors a number of Western allies in opposing having governments control how the Internet functions, leaving it to the current mix of public and private sector actors, according to documents released to Postmedia News under access to information laws. That stance is in contrast to proposals from some of the 193 members of the International Telecommunications Union, such as Russia, that want greater control over the Internet — more so than they already have in some cases — including more powers to track user identities online.

The meeting in Dubai will determine whether the ITU, an arm of the United Nations, will receive broad regulatory powers to set rules of road in cyberspace. The potential to centralize control over the Internet into the hands of governments has some users and hacktivists concerned that freedoms online would be crushed should a new binding international treaty change the status quo for how telecommunications companies interact across borders.

December 1, 2012

Tyler Cowen and Andrew Coyne on The Great Stagnation

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

Tyler Cowen discusses his book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. Andrew Coyne (National Post) presents a rebuttal and the pair discuss Cowen’s thesis focusing on issues of productivity, innovation and government policy (moderated by Wendy Dobson).

November 30, 2012

Can we bury iTunes yet?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

In Slate, Farhad Manjoo calls for the abolition of the worst carbuncle on Apple’s escutcheon:

iTunes 11 did not arrive on time. Apple originally promised to deliver the next version of its ubiquitous music-management program in October. Last month, though, the company announced that the release would slip to November, because the company needed “a little extra time to get it right.” This week the Wall Street Journal, citing “people who have seen it,” reported that the real cause was “engineering issues that required parts to be rebuilt.”

I suspect both those explanations are euphemisms for what’s really happening in Cupertino. I picture frazzled engineers growing increasingly alarmed as they discover that the iTunes codebase has been overrun by some kind of self-replicating virus that keeps adding random features and redesigns. The coders can’t figure out what’s going on — why iTunes, alone among Apple products, keeps growing more ungainly. At the head of the team is a grizzled old engineer who’s been at Apple forever. He’s surly and crude, always making vulgar jokes about iPads. But the company can’t afford to get rid of him — he’s the only one who understands how to operate the furnaces in the iTunes boiler room.

Then one morning the crew hears a strange clanging from iTunes’ starboard side. Scouts report that an ancient piston — something added for compatibility with the U2 iPod and then refashioned dozens of times — has been damaged while craftsmen removed the last remnants of a feature named Ping whose purpose has been lost to history. The old engineer dons his grease-covered overalls and heads down to check it out. Many anxious minutes pass. Then the crew is shaken by a huge blast. A minute later, they hear a lone, muffled wail. They send a medic, but it’s too late. The engineer has been battered by shrapnel from the iOS app management system, which is always on the fritz. His last words haunt the team forever: She can’t take much more of this. Too. Many. Features.

I use iTunes, but only because I need to back up my iPhone data … and nearly half the time, iTunes craps out on me and I have to go looking for fixes or work-arounds from Apple. Since I updated my iPhone to the most recent iOS version, I haven’t been able to sync with iTunes at all. Here’s hoping that the new version will fix that — and maybe, if we’re lucky, some other issues, too.

Update, 1 December: The update went well enough, but it still couldn’t contact the iTunes store or detect my iPhone. After a few minutes of looking through the Apple troubleshooting help pages, I reset the DNS cache and re-enabled iTunes to run in Administrator mode. That was enough to let it detect the iPhone and run a backup and re-synch.

November 28, 2012

Chinese aviators start carrier landing practice

Filed under: China, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:52

Strategy Page updates us on the development of China’s aircraft carrier capabilities:

A Chinese aviator, flying a Chinese made J-15 fighter, made the first landing and takeoff from a Chinese aircraft carrier just two months after the ship was commissioned (on September 25th). The first Chinese aircraft carrier, the Liaoning is a 65,000 ton, 305 meter (999 feet) long ship that had spent over a year on sea trials. During that time Liaoning was at sea for about four months. This was all in preparation for flight operations. Last year China confirmed that the Liaoning will primarily be a training carrier. The Chinese apparently plan to station up to 24 jet fighters and 26 helicopters on the Liaoning and use the ship to train pilots and other specialists for four or more additional carriers.

Five years ago the Chinese Navy Air Force began training carrier fighter pilots (or “aviators” as they are known in the navy). In the past Chinese navy fighter pilots went to Chinese Air Force fighter training schools, and then transferred to navy flight training schools to learn how to perform their specialized (over open water) missions. Now, operating from carriers, and performing landings and take-offs at sea, has been added to the navy fighter pilot curriculum. The first class of carrier aviators has finished a four year training course at the Dalian Naval Academy. This included learning how to operate off a carrier, using a carrier deck mock-up on land. Landing on a moving ship at sea is another matter. The Russians warned China that it may take them a decade or more to develop the knowledge and skills needed to efficiently run an aircraft carrier. The Chinese are game and are slogging forward. The first landing and takeoff was apparently carried out in calm seas. It is a lot more difficult in rough weather (when the carrier is moving up and down and sideways a lot) and at night. The latter, called “night traps” is considered the most difficult task any aviator can carry out, especially in rough weather.

They also point out that the US Navy’s experiments with naval UAVs continue and are putting technological pressure on both Russia and China to do the same:

Over the last few years, the U.S. Department of Defense decided that the air force and navy be allowed to develop combat UAVs to suit their particular needs. The X-45 was meant mainly for those really dangerous bombing and SEAD missions. But the Pentagon finally got hip to the fact that the UCAV developers were coming up with an aircraft that could replace all current fighter-bombers. This was partly because of the success of the X-45 in rapidly reaching its development goals, and the real-world success of the Predator (in finding, and attacking, targets) and Global Hawk (in finding stuff after flying half way around the world by itself.)

The U.S. Navy expects UAVs to replace most manned aircraft on carriers and the Chinese are aware of that. So the age of manned aircraft operating from Chinese carriers may be a short one. Chinese engineers are well aware of automatic pilot software and how it works. Now they will have feedback from Chinese carrier pilots and be able to do what the Americans have done.

The usual caveats about UAVs in combat should be noted.

November 26, 2012

End software patents

Filed under: Business, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

Marginal Revolution writer and George Mason economics professor Alex Tabarrok argues for an end to software patents.

November 25, 2012

Anthropology and hacker culture

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:56

Cory Doctorow on a new book by Biella Coleman called Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking:

[Coleman’s dissertation has been], edited and streamlined, under the title of Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, which comes out today from Princeton University Press (Quinn Norton, also well known for her Wired reporting on Anonymous and Occupy, had a hand in the editing). Coding Freedom walks the fine line between popular accessibility and scholarly rigor, and does a very good job of expressing complex ideas without (too much) academic jargon.

Coding Freedom is insightful and fascinating, a superbly observed picture of the motives, divisions and history of the free software and software freedom world. As someone embedded in both those worlds, I found myself surprised by connections I’d never made on my own, but which seemed perfectly right and obvious in hindsight. Coleman’s work pulls together a million IRC conversations and mailing list threads and wikiwars and gets to their foundations, the deep discussion evolving through the world of free/open source software.

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