Quotulatiousness

September 2, 2012

The importance of encryption for private citizens

Filed under: History, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

Wendy McElroy relates one of the earliest examples of private encryption in the young American republic:

In America, the tug of war between privacy and forced access to encrypted data is as old as the nation’s formation. As always, forced access was executed by authorities against individuals.

In 1785, a resolution authorized the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs to open and inspect any mail that related to the safety and interests of the United States. The ensuing inspections caused prominent men, like George Washington, to complain of mail tampering. According to various historians, it also led James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to correspond in code. That is, they encrypted their letters to preserve the privacy of their political discussions.

The need for Founding Fathers to encrypt their correspondence is high irony. The intrusive post office against which they rebelled had been established specifically to provide a free flow of political opinion. In the 1770′s, Sam Adams urged the 13 colonies to create an independent postal system because the existing post office, established by the British, acted as a barrier to the spread of rebellious sentiment. Dorothy Ganfield Fowler in her book Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office observed, “He [Adams] claimed the colonial post office was made use of for the purpose of stopping the ‘Channels of publick Intelligence and so in Effect of aiding the measures of Tyranny.’”

Alas, the more government changes, the more oppression remains the same. Soon the Continental Congress itself wanted to declare some types of matter ‘unmailable’ because their content were deemed dangerous. Anti-Federalist letters and periodicals became one of the first types of information to become de facto unmailable. (Anti-federalists resisted centralized government and rejected a Constitution without a Bill of Rights.) During the ratification debates on the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were unable to circulate their material through the Federalist-controlled post office.

September 1, 2012

Digital “inheritance”: law has not caught up to our online lives

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

As I mentioned in a post the other day, our laws are still designed for a world where most things have a physical presence, and the problems we see in intellectual property and patent law are just the start of the turmoil our legal system will have to face:

What will happen to your Facebook account after you are gone?

Dealing with digital assets after someone dies is becoming a challenge for families and the legal system alike.

Lawmakers are trying to clarify rules governing the passage of social-media and email accounts, along with other online assets that might have financial value. Several states have enacted laws to deal with post-death access to digital assets, and several more are working on similar legislation, says Gene Hennig, a lawyer at Gray Plant Mooty in Minneapolis and a commissioner of the Uniform Law Commission.

That group, which recommends uniform state laws, plans to come up with a recommended statute that more states could adopt.

“Eventually people are going to start putting in their wills what they want, and we need to know what’s allowed,” Mr. Hennig says. “In the olden days, grandma had a chest in the attic full of photo albums. Now, your chest of photos is in your computer.”

Update, 3 September: Bruce Willis wants his kids to inherit the music library he’s built up, but the iTunes licensing won’t let him do that.

August 31, 2012

Colby Cosh on Neil Armstrong’s finest moment

Filed under: History, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

No, it’s not what you think at all:

On March 16, 1966, Armstrong and future Apollo 15 moonwalker David R. Scott became the first human beings to dock an orbiting spacecraft with an independently launched satellite, the Agena. (As proofs-of-concept go, this one has been more important to spaceflight than the moon landings.) The procedure proved surprisingly unchallenging; when the Gemini capsule nosed into place, Armstrong blurted out, “It’s really a smoothie!” The Gemini-Agena combo — mankind’s first “space station” — moved out of radio contact with mission control 28 minutes later. When it came back in range after another 15, Armstrong’s first words were, “We have serious problems here.” A wiring problem had left one of the attitude thrusters on Gemini stuck in the “on” position — firing continuously and causing an increasing left roll. Unsure what was causing the problem, Armstrong made the snap decision to separate from the Agena. But the problem was on their side, and without the Agena’s inertia, the Gemini craft began to spin even faster.

Press accounts said the pair were spinning at about one revolution per second. Senior mission controller Chris Kraft has since noted that their peak rotation was actually 550 degrees a second. Only a trained test pilot could make good decisions while whirling around in freefall 90 times a minute — and Armstrong justified the use of test pilots in space for all time by using Gemini’s re-entry thrusters to dampen the roll and save himself and Scott. By rule, the use of those thrusters meant the mission had to be aborted early. Armstrong and Scott suffered tense hours as they waited to see if they would splash down short of their Pacific landing zone, on the soil of Communist China.

Armstrong was rueful about the abort, which cost Scott the chance to make a spacewalk and cut short the experiment with Agena. But NASA was impressed. One of the agency’s main concerns before the moon missions was that astronauts trying to set down the lunar module would refuse to abort the landing, even if they ran too short on fuel to leave the moon. Armstrong, alone among astronauts of the time, had established a record of outstanding sanity in the face of an emergency. He would probably like to be remembered for that — for making the right choice, a pilot’s choice — at least as much as for the trail he left in the dust of the moon.

Innovative ways to use huge surplus of beetle-blighted lumber

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

British Columbia has a problem with their trees: too many of them are dead due to a massive increase in the population of the mountain pine beetle. The province is searching for ways to cope with the lumber from all the beetle-killed trees:

When life hands you lemons, goes the old saw, make lemonade. But what if life should hand you 18m hectares (44m acres) of dead trees? That is the problem faced by the province of British Columbia in Canada, which could lose over half its pine trees to the depredations of the fearsome mountain pine beetle. The beetle, no bigger than a grain of rice, is native to the forests of Western North America, where it kills trees by releasing a blue stain fungus that prevents the flow of water and nutrients. While the insect was historically kept in check by spells of cold weather, years of mild winters have unleashed an outbreak whose spread and severity is unlike anything seen previously.

As a result, the province is peppered with billions of dead, grey trees. If they are simply left standing, they will eventually either decay or burn in forest fires. In either case, they will release the carbon dioxide they stored while growing, swelling Canada’s total carbon footprint from 2000 to 2020 by 2%.

[. . .]

Canadian researchers have discovered other uses for BKP. Sorin Pasca, a graduate student at the University of Northern British Columbia, found that rain and snow conveniently wash out sugars and other organic compounds from dead pine trees. By grinding up the dry BKP and adding it to normal cement, he created a hybrid material that is waterproof, fire-resistant and pourable like concrete but that can be worked, cut and nailed or drilled like wood. The material, dubbed Beetlecrete, has already been used to make countertops, benches and planters.

Even more esoteric uses for BKP are on the table. Nanocrystalline cellulose, made up of microscopic needle-like fibres, is a lightweight, ultra-rigid material that can be extracted from wood pulp. Currently used to improve the durability of paints and varnishes, nanocrystalline cellulose promises strong, iridescent films that may find uses in industries ranging from optical computing to cosmetics. And, as a last resort, dead and fallen pine trees can feed British Columbia’s 800MW of bio-mass power plants, which burn pellets of BKP and other waste wood to generate electricity.

August 30, 2012

21st century problems: who inherits your digital property?

Filed under: Books, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

Unless medical science has a solution up their collective sleeves, we’re all going to die (eventually). It may be an individual shock, but humans have been dying forever — it’s the unwelcome end of the trip. As a result, we’ve evolved ways to redistribute the property of deceased members of our families and communities. When the issues were as simple as who got Uncle Grog’s club and who got his loincloth, we came up with solutions.

Fast forward to our becoming-ever-more-digital age, and not all of our property is tangible: we’re becoming “owners” of digital property that may be as valuable as our physical possessions. What happens to our music libraries, e-book collections, social media accounts, and all the other non-physical things we’ve bought and used during our lives?

Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.

And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,” says Evan Carroll, co-author of “Your Digital Afterlife.” “Legally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult.”

Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn’t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files — but they don’t actually own them.

[. . .]

Most digital content exists in a legal black hole. “The law is light years away from catching up with the types of assets we have in the 21st Century,” says Wheatley-Liss. In recent years, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Indiana, Oklahoma and Idaho passed laws to allow executors and relatives access to email and social networking accounts of those who’ve died, but the regulations don’t cover digital files purchased.

Apple and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

August 27, 2012

Restarting the age of space

Filed under: Media, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

sp!ked reposted an older article by James Woudhuysen on the long-term importance of space exploration and the stay-at-home attitudes that oppose further development of the “final frontier”:

One thing unites the critics of lunar exploration. Forty years after man first landed on the moon — on 20 July 1969 — they share a disdain for the grandeur of extra-terrestrial endeavour; for the scale of human ambition involved; for the very idea that human beings should climb into space, as up a mountain, ‘because it is there’.

I have no special preference for size, thrust during lift-off, or the traverse across vast distances. The development of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s, so important to the Apollo programme, was a tribute to miniaturisation rather than to high energy or physical scale. No, my admiration for both Saturn boosters and tiny electronics grows from a respect for open-ended curiosity, for human achievement, and for taking risks. With space travel, a lot of bravery was also at stake. And with both space and the development of semiconductors, there is much teamwork to celebrate — teamwork that, in the case of Apollo, involved not just three astronauts, but the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people.

[. . .]

(more…)

August 26, 2012

Google investigates their own in-house Gender Gap

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Tim Worstall in Forbes on Google’s unique approach to narrowing the Gender Gap:

As we all know, because we’re reminded about it often enough in rather shrill voices, the gender gap is one of the more pernicious unfairnesses in our society. This idea that women only earn 77 cents to a $1 for men, don’t get the same promotions, are in fact discriminated against by society.

The thing is, the more people study this question the less and less it’s possible to see that there is in fact a gender gap. Or rather, a gender gap driven by discrimination. Do note that economists discriminate (sorry) between taste discrimination and rational discrimination. Taste discrimination would be where women were treated worse than men just because they are women. Akin to say the dreadful racism of the past: and we would all admit that there was indeed discrimination against women in the workplace in the past.

What is a great deal less certain is whether this taste discrimination still exists: of course, we’ll always be able to find examples of it, but does it exist in a general sense, across the economy? Many researchers think not: for when you add up the effects of rational discrimination then look at the gender gap there doesn’t seem to be much if any room left for that taste discrimination. Rational discrimination is things like, well, women and men do tend to self-segregate into different occupations. Some of which are higher paid than others. Men tend to be willing to take riskier jobs and thus earn a danger premium to their wages. Women tend to negotiate less hard for their wages or a promotion. And of course women do tend to be those who take career breaks to have and to raise children. Perhaps this shouldn’t be so but it is and it’s most certainly true that the largest contributor to the gender pay gap is not gender itself but the effects of motherhood.

This is all pretty well known in the academic literature. What Google has done is most unfair. It has entirely ignored the academic work, ignored the partisans of both sides, and actually gone and asked its own staff what’s going on.

August 23, 2012

Crisis malware is particularly capable of damage

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

John Leyden in The Register:

Security watchers have discovered a virus strain that compromises VMware virtual machines as well as infecting Mac OS X and Windows computers and Windows Mobile devices. It demonstrates previously unseen capabilities in the process.

The Crisis malware typically arrives in a Java archive file (.jar) and is typically installed by posing as a Flash Player Java applet to trick a victim into opening it.

The archive contains executable files targeting Apple and Microsoft operating systems; the malware is able to detect which platform it is running on and serve up the correct variant.

Once launched, the worm puts in place a rootkit to hide itself from view; installs spyware to record the user’s every move on the computer; and opens a backdoor to the IP address 176.58.100.37, allowing miscreants to gain further access to the machine, according to a write-up of the threat by Kaspersky Lab. The malicious code also, unsurprisingly, survives across reboots.

The Windows variant can kill off antivirus programs, log keypresses, download and upload files, take screengrabs, lift the contents of the user’s clipboard, record from the computer’s webcam and mic, and snoop on these applications: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Microsoft Messenger, Skype, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger.

August 22, 2012

Kicking the Baby Boomers while they’re down

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

P.J. O’Rourke laments the America that was, before the Baby Boomers came along and ruined everything:

The United States has set itself on a course of willful self-diminishment. Seventy-four years ago the perfect American was Superman, who happened to have been, like many of our forefathers, an undocumented alien. If Superman arrived today — assuming he could get past the INS and Homeland Security — he would be faster than the postal service, more powerful than a New York Times blogger, and able to ascend tall buildings in a single elevator.

[. . .]

America has had plenty of reasons to abdicate the crown of accomplishment and marry the Wallis Simpson of homely domestic concerns. Received wisdom tells us that, in the matter of great works and vast mechanisms, all is vanity. The Nurek Dam probably endangers some species of Nurek newt and will one day come crashing down in a manner that will make the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima tsunami look like an overwatered lawn. And we have better things to spend our country’s money on, like putting a Starbucks on every city block. But I suspect there’s a sadder reason for America’s post-eminence in things tremendous, overwhelming, and awesome.

My sad generation of baby boomers can be blamed. We were born into an America where material needs were fulfilled to a degree unprecedented in history. We were a demographic benison, cherished and taught to be self-cherishing. We were cosseted by a lush economy and spoiled by a society grown permissive in its fatigue with the strictures of depression and war. The child being father to the man, and necessity being the mother of invention, we wound up as the orphans of effort and ingenuity. And pleased to be so. Sixty-six years of us would be enough to take the starch out of any nation.

The baby boom was skeptical about America’s inventive triumphalism. We took a lot of it for granted: light bulb, telephone, television, telegraph, phonograph, photographic film, skyscraper, airplane, air conditioning, movies. Many of our country’s creations seemed boring and square: cotton gin, combine harvester, cash register, electric stove, dishwasher, can opener, clothes hanger, paper bag, toilet paper roll, ear muffs, mass-produced automobiles. Some we regarded as sinister: revolver, repeating rifle, machine gun, atomic bomb, electric chair, assembly line. And, ouch, those Salk vaccine polio shots hurt.

The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik caused a blip in chauvinistic tech enthusiasm among those of us who were in grade school at the time. But then we learned that the math and science excellence being urged upon us meant more long division and multiplying fractions.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

August 21, 2012

Royal Navy faces shortage of trained submariners

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Thomas Harding in the Telegraph:

Internal documents warn that a lack of recruits for the Submarine Service may leave attack submarines and boats carrying the Trident nuclear missile stranded in port.

A separate threat comes from a predicted 15 per cent shortfall in engineers by 2015.

One in seven posts for weapons officers at the rank of lieutenant will also be vacant, raising operational questions over the boats equipped with nuclear and cruise missiles.

Many submariners are being poached by the civilian nuclear sector and those who remain are being forced to go to sea for longer and more frequently.

Adml Lord West, the former First Sea Lord, said the situation was “very worrying” and he hoped the Navy had mechanisms in place to make up for the shortfall.

[. . .]

The Navy has a fleet of six attack submarines and four Vanguard boats that carry the Trident nuclear missile, but the personnel issues could mean they cannot be deployed.

The report found that the recruiting and retention of submariners was also threatening operations. “Inability to recruit, retain and develop sufficient nuclear and submarine design qualified personnel will result in an inability to support the Defence Nuclear Programme,” the document said.

Verity Stob learns to love IPv6

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:45

A love story, of sorts:

Somewhere in the near future…

There were more than 50 people in the room, so it was hot and airless, and it smelled of stale sweat. Government-sponsored crisis posters, tatty and torn, were sticky-taped to the yellowish walls. One urged its readers: ‘Don’t let your selfishness come between little Johnny and his Wikipedia’, another enquired: ‘Do you NATter with your Neighbours? Don’t squander the nation’s resource!’

(The latter effort was illustrated with a carefully posed photo of a beaming, bosomy Minister for IT Conservation encouraging a weedy-looking Everybloke to plug his laptop into her generously exposed router socket. The photo had recently acquired a pleasing piquancy. This same Minister had been caught selling a bunch of government-owned IP addresses, supposedly earmarked for use in schools for the next generation of Olympic heroes, to the International Bank of Fatcat and Taxhavenia.)

Under the flickering fluorescent lighting, a shuffling, miserable queue of the desperate and the hopeless zigzagged towards the bullet- sound- and Windolene-proof glass of the counter. At the front of the queue was me.

The official behind the glass pursed his lips, flicked my carefully filled-in paperwork to one side with disdain, and leaned forward to speak into his goose-neck microphone…

August 20, 2012

Royal Navy announces design of new “Type 26 Global Combat Ship”

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Britain’s Royal Navy revealed the design of the Type 26 today:

The announcement on the Type 26 Global Combat Ship has been described by officials as a “significant milestone” in a programme which will support “thousands of UK shipbuilding jobs”.

Basic specification images show sleek stealth features, familiar to modern warships, making them harder to detect.

The ship will be 148 metres long with a displacement of 5,400 tonnes.

The MoD has been working with BAE Systems since 2010 to determine the basic design for the ship. Detailed specifications of the vessel will now be examined.

Vertical missile silos for a range of weapons, such as cruise missiles, will be housed on board along with a medium calibre gun.

The hangar on board will house a Merlin or Wildcat helicopter and there will be extra space for unmanned drones, underwater vehicles or other specialist equipment.

[. . .]

The current plan is to build 13 of the ships, which are due to start coming into service after 2020.

The Type 26 will replace the 13 Type 23 frigates but the MoD is not giving a precise commitment on numbers until they know the unit cost.

The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, says the ship will be used “across the full spectrum of warfare”.

He added: “The T26 GCS will be a multi-mission warship designed for joint and multinational operations… including complex combat operations, maritime security operations such as counter piracy, as well as humanitarian and disaster relief work around the world.”

The US Navy’s still-experimental Littoral Combat Ship

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:29

New ship designs are highly complex and often take years to debug. The US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program surprised most observers by settling on two different designs and splitting the intended order quantity between the two design firms. One of each design is in service now, the more traditional USS Freedom (LCS-1), and the trimaran-hull USS Independence (LCS-2). Each has had its own set of teething problems:

The LCS has long been a good source of bad news and potentially explosive revelations. In the last year the LCS design has been found to have structural and other flaws. The first LCS, the monohull USS Freedom, has suffered four major problems since it entered service four years ago. The latest one is a leak in a propeller shaft seal, which caused some minor flooding. Despite this Freedom was able to get back to port under its own power. Last year cracks in the hull as long as 17 cm (6.5 inches) were discovered, and the water-jet propulsion system broke down as well. Two years ago one of the gas turbine engines broke down.

The most serious problem is in the USS Independence, a radical trimaran design. It seems that a “dissimilar metals” situation arose when salt water, the aluminum hull, and some other metals got into close proximity with each other and extensive corrosion resulted. Aluminum hulls tend to corrode more than steel, but the problem became so bad with the USS Independence that, 18 months after entering service, it was sent into dry dock for corrosion repairs and design changes to eliminate the problem.

Cracks, corrosion, and equipment breakdowns are common in new warship designs especially designs that are radically different (like the broad trimaran shape of the USS Independence). Usually, these problems can be fixed but there’s always the risk that the new design will be seriously flawed, requiring extensive rework and a halt in building more ships of that class. So far, the U.S. Navy has not wavered in the face of potential design and construction flaws.

This is all part of the expected years of uncertainty and experimentation as this radical new combat ship design seeks to find out what works, to what degree, and what doesn’t. There is some nervousness about all this. The U.S. Navy has not introduced a radical new design for nearly a century. The last such new design was the aircraft carrier, which required two decades of experimentation and a major war to nail down what worked. Even the nuclear submarines of the late 1950s and early 60s were evolutionary compared to what the LCS is trying to do.


USS Freedom at sea. Click for full-sized image at Wikipedia


USS Independence at pier side. Click for full-sized image at Wikipedia.

August 19, 2012

ESR on the limits of “lawfare” for Apple

Filed under: Business, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:56

To put it mildly, ESR isn’t a fan of Apple’s lawfare approach to competition:

It’s beginning to look like Apple’s legal offensive against Android might backfire on it big-time. Comes the news that Judge Koh has declined to suppress evidence that Apple may have copied crucial elements of the iPad design from prototypes developed by Knight-Ridder and the University of Missouri in the mid-1990s.

Those of us aware enough of computing history to be aware of early work by XEROX PARC and others have always been aware that Apple’s claims of originality were highly dubious. Apple’s history is one of adroit marketing and a facility for stealing adapting ideas from others, wrapping them in admittedly excellent industrial design, and then pretending that all of it originated de novo from the Cupertino campus.

The pretense has always galled a little, especially when Apple’s marketing created a myth that, footling technical details aside, the whole package somehow sprang like Athena from Steve Jobs’s forehead. But it didn’t become intolerable until Apple began using lawfare to suppress its competition.

The trouble with this is that there’s actually a lot of prior art out there. I myself saw and handled a Sharp tablet anticipating important iPhone/iPad design tropes two years before the uPhone launch, back in 2005; the Danger hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick) anticipated the iPhone’s leveraging of what we’d now call “cloud services” in 2002-2003; and of course there’s the the Sony design study from 2006, described by one of Apple’s own designers as an important influence.

If only Apple were honest about what it owed others…but that cannot be, because the company’s strategy has come to depend on using junk patents in attempts to lock competitors out of its markets.

August 13, 2012

English law in the age of Twitter

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

At The Register, OUT-LAW.COM outlines the things to avoid saying on Twitter:

Debates in Parliament, home visits from the police and distressed celebrities have all left tweeters a little unsure as to what is and what is not acceptable by law on Twitter.

The list of those offending and those offended keeps growing with recent high profile reports referring to Louise Mensch, Tom Daley, Guy Adams, Steve Dorkland, Helen Skelton and Kevin Pietersen. This guide discusses 10 legal risks which apply, or potentially apply, to Twitter, in the context of recent media attention given to the lawfulness of tweets.

This is not just of intellectual interest to those of us living outside England: American, Canadian, Australian, Dutch, Indian, or Zimbabwean Twitter users can be sued in English courts (your country may or may not have laws shielding you from this kind of legal action, but most currently do not: the law lags well behind the technology).

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