Quotulatiousness

March 17, 2011

Industrial espionage, Chinese style

Filed under: China, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

Another good post at Strategy Page on the recent uptick in detection of Chinese industrial spies in the United States, and how this may not be a result of more successful anti-espionage efforts by the FBI or CIA — it may just be a by-product of stepped up efforts by China’s intelligence services:

For over two decades, China has been attempting to do what the Soviet Union never accomplished; steal Western technology, then use it to move ahead of the West. The Soviets lacked the many essential supporting industries found in the West (most founded and run by entrepreneurs), and was never able to get all the many pieces needed to match Western technical accomplishments. Soviet copies of American computers, for example, were crude, less reliable and less powerful. Same with their jet fighters, tanks and warships.

China gets around this by making it profitable for Western firms to set up factories in China, where Chinese managers and workers can be taught how to make things right. At the same time. China allows thousands of their best students to go to the United States to study. While most of these students will stay in America, where there are better jobs and more opportunities, some will come back to China, and bring American business and technical skills with them. Finally, China energetically uses the “thousand grains of sand” approach to espionage. This involves China trying to get all Chinese going overseas, and those of Chinese ancestry living outside the motherland, to spy for China, if only a tiny bit.

This approach to espionage is nothing new. Other nations have used similar systems for centuries. What is unusual is the scale of the Chinese effort. Backing it all up is a Chinese intelligence bureaucracy back home that is huge, with nearly 100,000 people working just to keep track of the many Chinese overseas, and what they could, or should, be to trying to grab for the motherland. It begins when Chinese intelligence officials examining who is going overseas, and for what purpose. Chinese citizens cannot leave the country, legally, without the state security organizations being notified. The intel people are not being asked to give permission. They are being alerted in case they want to have a talk with students, tourists or business people before they leave the country. Interviews are often held when these people come back as well.

Those who might be coming in contact with useful information are asked to remember what they saw, or bring back souvenirs. Over 100,000 Chinese students go off to foreign universities each year. Even more go abroad as tourists or on business. Most of these people were not asked to actually act as spies, but simply to share, with Chinese government officials (who are not always identified as intelligence personnel) whatever information was obtained. The more ambitious of these people are getting caught and prosecuted. But the majority, who are quite casual, and, individually, bring back relatively little, are almost impossible to catch.

Ever wonder how a sewing machine works?

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:16

H/T to Jeff Scarbrough for the link.

March 16, 2011

Guest post: Virginia Postrel and the “magic” iPad

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:16

This was written by Jon, my former virtual landlord, in an email to me earlier today. I’ve asked his permission to post it on the blog.

Did you see this Wall Street Journal post?

When Apple introduced the iPad last year, it added a new buzzword to technology marketing. The device, it declared, was not just “revolutionary,” a tech-hype cliché, but “magical.” Skeptics rolled their eyes, and one Apple fan even started an online petition against such superstitious language.

But the company stuck with the term. When Steve Jobs appeared on stage last week to unveil the iPad 2, which hit stores Friday, he said, “People laughed at us for using the word ‘magical,’ but, you know what, it’s turned out to be magical.”

I’m not sure what she’s on about when get gets to magic and dissing “makers” and hackers for their disdain of such. More on that later.

Sadly, I think love for the iPad is explained in much simpler terms: it is a shiny object, and people like shiny objects.

The thing is well proportioned (I’ve not looked at the specs, but I suspect that golden ratio proportions are present in its design), it has a polished surface, the display is bright and vivid — and people simply dig that sort of thing. I admit that I find the things attractive, but not attractive enough to overcome what are, for me, wallet-crushing limitations:

  • No ROI. I cannot be measurably productive on an iPad — I could not write or code or draw on the thing — so I’m never going to make back its cost. I’ve been able to pay for all of my computers by being productive on them, but that would not happen on the iPad. For that to happen, I would have to devote far more time than I have to, say, learning how to program for the thing — and that’s not likely to happen. Your mileage will, of course, vary on this: if you can measure and assign a dollar value to the time saved by having a portable internet access point around the office, plant, home, or on the road, then you’ll see more of a return here. At present, though, I don’t need that — at least not in a way that can be represented by income or cashflow.
  • Hyper-accelerated planned obsolescence. Apple is notorious for this — the next generation of device typically makes the earlier generation either less desirable or downright useless. My first — and only — Mac taught me this lesson, and I won’t fall for it again — at least not with an Apple product. The device becoming less desirable may not be an issue for most people, unless they are stylish hipsters who buy the device simply for its value as a fashion accessory. The reduced functionality, lack of updates, and lack of development support might be a real problem for people who bought the things for measurable productivity. So again, as ever and always, your mileage will vary.

Another thing that keeps me from buying one of these is that I can see that they are not going to age well. A portable device is going to get beat up, and the iPad will lose much of its Jobs-gizz-polished luster as the screen gets greasy and smudged, the case gets dinged and pitted, and then, finally — horror of horrors — the screen gets a deep corner-to-corner gouge after you read about the next generation device, drop the thing face down in shock, accidentally kick it into the next stall, and the hobo there picks it up and does who knows what with it before passing it back to you under the cubicle wall. Something as precious as the iPad just will not weather that sort of abuse. And even if it did, would you really want it back after that?

Postrel dibbles:

Even the “maker ethic” of do-it-yourself hobbyists depends on having the right ingredients and tools, from computers, lasers and video cameras to plywood, snaps and glue. Extraordinarily rare even among the most accomplished seamstresses, chefs and carpenters are those who spin their own fibers, thresh their own wheat or trim their own lumber — all once common skills. Rarer still is the Linux hacker who makes his own chips. Who among us can reproduce from scratch every component of a pencil or a pencil skirt? We don’t notice their magic — or the wonder of electricity or eyeglasses, anesthesia or aspirin — only because we’re used to them.

I’m not sure what to make of that. It sounds like she’s saying that hackers should revere the iPad simply because they could not make one themselves from scratch. By that logic, I should revere a shipping pallet because I could not make one from scratch — and I’m thinking beyond my lack of woodworking skills here. To Postrel, the shipping pallet should be seen as magic because I did not plant the acorn that grew into the oak that I cut down with the axe that I forged myself from ore that . . . oh, screw it, you know where I’m going with this and have better things to do with your time than to follow me there).

Postrel is missing the fact that clever people have commoditized magic: they’ve found methods to manufacture tedious or complicated things in ways that make them commonplace and disposable. It’s true that your average hacker could not build an iPad from scratch, starting from raw silicon and copper and gold and dead plankton transmogrified into petrochemicals. I mean, really, who has the time to farm plankton, wait for them to die, settle to the bottom of the ocean, be covered by sediment, be compressed through the build-up of rock strata over geological epochs — sorry, I’m doing it again. While your average hacker is not going to build an iPad from raw materials, your average hacker could probably build a world-changing application for a popular platform if that platform were open.

The article throws out the old groan about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. To those who don’t think too much about how that technology works, it certainly must seem like magic. What’s truly magical, though, is when such magic is commoditized and becomes commonplace. It goes from being a flashy-bangy trick to something that’s actually useful. Sadly, Apple is not building magic — they are building a captive audience.

Damnit. I’ve been letting this stew for a couple of days, and I can see that it’s just going to boil down to some lame bromide about how free markets and free access to products that one actually owns after paying for them are what is truly magical, but I’m just not going to go there. So I’m going to consider this done and send it off.

Ontario’s nuclear power industry

Filed under: Cancon, Japan, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:32

I live near two nuclear power plants, and have done for more than a decade, but even with those two hints, I didn’t realize that Ontario gets 55% of its electricity from nuclear sources. For some reason, I thought we were somewhere in the 20-25% range — higher than the Canadian average of 15%, but not over half.

The Canadian Nuclear Association has posted a statement on their website (including the above nugget of information):

“Our thoughts are with the people of Japan and their relatives in Canada during this terrible time, as well as with the workers at the Fukushima station for their tireless efforts to protect the people offsite.

Over the coming days and weeks you can expect to hear many varying opinions on the events in Japan and even on Canadian nuclear facilities. Some will be based on fact and will contribute to a worthwhile discussion. Unfortunately, some of what you will hear may not be based on fact.

It’s important to remember the Fukushima plant was damaged, not as a result of any flaw in the reactor design, but from the largest ever earthquake in Japan’s history followed by a devastating tsunami. The nuclear industry — in Canada and around the world — has a history of working closely together to share technical expertise. We also have a history of examining operations and activities to ensure continuous improvements.

March 15, 2011

DC residents get stiffed on their solar power subsidies

Filed under: Environment, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

David Nakamura reports on some Washington, DC folks who are feeling ripped off by their local government over solar panel reimbursements that were promised but never delivered:

It isn’t easy going green, and it may also prove costly.

Dozens of District residents who installed solar panels on their homes under a government grant program promoting renewable energy have been told they will not be reimbursed thousands of dollars as promised because the funds were diverted to help close a citywide budget gap.

In all, the city has reneged on a commitment of about $700,000 to 51 residents, according to the D.C. Department of the Environment. The agency has pledged to try to find money in next year’s budget, its director, Christophe Tulou, said.

“It just doesn’t seem fair to go through a process with them and have them make investments in solar panels under the assumption they would be reimbursed,” Tulou acknowledged. “It’s really sad we are having these economic woes when we are.”

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

Update on the Fukushima situation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Japan, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Colby Cosh complained yesterday about the low quality of information being provided by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and that has not really improved since yesterday. At The Register, Lewis Page updates the situation as best he can:

The story of the three quake- and tsunami-hit reactors at Japan’s Fukushima plant continues, with indications that one of the three worst-hit reactors has sustained further damage. A fire also broke out at another reactor, shut down at the time of the quake and not previously thought to be a problem, but this has now been put out. None of this suggests that the reactors’ crucial containment vessels could be breached, however.

World Nuclear News reported in the early hours (UK time) that a “loud noise” had been heard at the site of the No 2 reactor at Fukushima and pressure readings had fallen in the doughnut-shaped “suppression chamber” situated beneath the core. The suppression chamber holds a large quantity of water and steam from the core, released into it to be condensed, so reducing pressure in the core without the need to vent to atmosphere in some situations: though reactors 1, 2 and 3 have all been repeatedly vented to atmosphere since the quake nevertheless.

Following the apparent release from inside the suppression chamber, radiation levels at the site briefly rose to 8217 microsieverts per hour — such that an unprotected person outside would receive several years’ normal background radiation dose in a single hour. Radiation then dropped to less than 2,500 microsievert/hr. (UPDATED TO ADD: The IAEA reports that as of 6am UK time this had fallen to 600 microsievert/hr). WNN reports that a statement from TEPCO, the plant operators, stated that there had been “no significant change” to the status of the vital containment vessel surrounding the reactor core.

A new way of looking at wood flooring

Filed under: Europe, Technology, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:39

To state the obvious, trees don’t grow in nice straight lines. As natural creatures, they bend and sway in their environment — if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to withstand the extremes of weather. While this is great for the tree, once the tree has been cut down, the amount of useful wood that can be harvested is limited by many factors, including just how far from “straight” the trunk of the tree grew. Much of the wood that can’t be economically used for solid wood products ends up as chips, flakes, or fibres for manufactured “wood” products.

Bolefloors may increase the amount of solid wood that can be used for flooring:

Bolefloor technology combines wood scanning systems, tailor-made CAD/CAM developments and innovative optimization algorithms for placement software developed by a Finnish engineering automation company and three software companies in cooperation with the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology.

Bolefloor scanners’ natural-edge visual identification technology evaluates “imperfections” such as knots and sapwood near the edges or ends so that floors are both beautiful and durable.

H/T to BoingBoing for the link.

March 14, 2011

The iBoob saga

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:57

Jesse Brown recounts the story of the iBoob app:

Idiots worldwide rejoiced when news came that the iBoobs app, censored by Apple, had found a home in the Android Marketplace.

For those tragically unfamiliar with iBoobs — how can I describe it? It’s boobs. They jiggle. A settings screen lets you adjust things like “boob weight,” “stifness,” and “gravity factor.” If any of this turns you on, I’d like to introduce you to a killer app called porn.

iBoobs is a Freemium product. If you upgrade from the free ”iBoobs light” app to the $2.10 paid app, you can toss the boobs around with the tip of your finger. Or at least, you could last week. It seems that Google has since followed Apple’s lead (at least partially) and banned the paid version of the app.

If your imagination isn’t enough, there’s a YouTube video of the application here.

Analysis of the Fukushima reactor situation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Lewis Page sees the triple-whammy disaster that hit the Fukushima nuclear plant as proof of the design:

Let’s recap on what’s happened so far. The earthquake which hit on Friday was terrifically powerful, shaking the entire planet on its axis and jolting the whole of Japan several feet sideways. At 8.9 on the Richter scale, it was some five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been designed to cope with.

If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued — probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive.

In fact, though the quake was far beyond design limits, all the reactors went into automatic shutdown perfectly: triumph number one. Control rods slammed into the cores, absorbing the neutrons spitting from the fuel rods and pinching off the uranium-fission chain reactions powering the plant.

[. . .]

For a few hours all was well. Then the tsunami — again, bigger than the plant had been built to cope with — struck, knocking out the diesel backups and the backup diesel backups.

Needless to say, this being a nuclear powerplant, there was another backup and this one worked despite having been through a beyond-spec quake and the tsunami. Battery power cut in and the cores continued to be cooled, giving the plant operators some hours of leeway to bring in mobile generators: triumph number three.

Unfortunately it appears that the devastation from the quake and tsunami was sufficient that mobile power wasn’t online at all the sites before the temperatures inside the cores began to climb seriously.

On the flip side, Colby Cosh finds the information sharing from the Japanese authorities to be less than helpful:

It’s a frustrating sequence of events to behold, and it has been made more so by the poor crisis management of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) and the Japanese government. A serious nuclear incident is the whole world’s concern, and TEPCO and Japan have an obligation to explain to the world just what has happened. But English-language reports from the state broadcaster, NHK, have been shockingly feeble and confused. TEPCO’s press releases, meanwhile, are masterpieces of indecipherable technical and even legal jargon. (“As the reactor pressure suppression function was lost, at 5:22am, Mar 12th, it was determined that a specific incident stipulated in article 15, clause 1 has occurred.”)

The global public has been left to figure out for itself what to make of hazy videos of nuclear power facilities exploding. What little context we can assemble, as we try to interpret such a mortifying sight, arrives mostly in shreds provided by Western oracles — ones who, in their turn, seem to mostly be working from supposition and indirect evidence, and who may not be particularly independent from the nuclear industry.

No one should forget, while trying to make sense of what’s happening in Japan, that something like 300 people died in major coal mining accidents around the world in 2010 alone. None of those accidents involved natural disasters, and probably not all of them even involved culpable human error. We just accept a certain quantum of mortality as the cost of keeping the lights on — when it comes to every means of power generation, that is, except nukes. A death toll in the single digits from the Fukushima troubles would represent an amazing triumph of design robustness. (Especially if we judge the quality of Japanese engineers and regulators by their competence at communications.)

March 11, 2011

Reason.TV: Should governments subsidize alternative energy?

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:48

Nothing to see here, citizen iPhone 3G user, move along

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

An impertinent Apple iPhone 3G user risks becoming a non-person by asking why Apple’s latest security fixes exclude customers using earlier iPhones:

A Reg reader who brought up Apple’s decision to exclude the iPhone 3G and other older devices from its latest security update on an official forum has received a firm rebuke for his effort.

Apparently the post, which was quickly deleted, failed three separate rules of the Apple Discussions soviet, as a curt notice to our source explained (extract below):

Apple removed your post on Apple Discussions, titled “Please Apple, you cannot leave a major share of your customers vulnerable,” because it contained the following:

Speculation or Rumors Discussion of Apple Policies, Procedures or Decisions Petitions

Damn straight. Frankly our man can consider himself fortunate not to have his account deleted for suggesting Apple (at minimum) ought to release patches for Safari for the iPhone 3G. An iOS 4.3 update, released on Wednesday, which includes a number of critical security fixes, is incompatible with both the iPhone 3G and older versions of the iPod Touch. You need the iPhone 3GS, or later, or iPod Touch third generation to take advantage of the update, which includes a number of critical security fixes as well as performance and functionality improvements.

You don’t question us, Apple customer. We question you.

March 10, 2011

Very early railway film

Filed under: History, Media, Railways, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:12

H/T to “JtMc” for the link.

March 9, 2011

Charles Stross on the future of gaming (from 2007)

Filed under: Books, Gaming, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:35

Charles Stross is the author of many fine books, but it was Halting State that many gamers would know him from. At the time the book was published, he wrote an article for GuildCafe on the future from a gamers viewpoint. The original article disappeared, so he’s reposted it on his blog:

I’ve been asked by our hosts to take a stab at identifying how online games will affect our culture over the next couple of decades. That’s an interesting target because it covers a bunch of time scales. So I’m going to look at where we stand today, and where we might go at various stages along that 25 year time-line.

That’s a tall order; technology doesn’t stand still, and it’s no good trying to guess where the gaming field is going without knowing where the tech base is taking us. So we need to look at where we are and where we’ve come from in order to plot a course ahead.

[. . .]

The first symptom is that Reuters pay Warren Ellis or some other cutting-edge cyber-celebrity to move into SL. (And, whaddaya know, if they did the job right, they picked someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.) Warren drinks their retainer or injects it into his eyeball or something, then dashes off some febrile prose which gets syndicated. Heads turn at AP and UPI: “why don’t *we* have someone covering this Whizzumajig? We’re falling behind! Hire Hunter Thompson!”

At the same time, some random gamers in places like the Swedish Foreign Ministry or the French Nazi Party decide they can get some free publicity by staking out some territory and figuratively mooning the straights. Exploding pigs, flying lutefisk, and other whackiness ensues.

And then the tidal wave of mass media awareness arrives, complete with the usual foaming mess of sewage, uprooted trees, and general crap turned out by the tabloid press and cheap news channels as they try to spew one lurid scenario after another through the playground. “It encourages pedophiles! Or terrorists! Kids get into Whizzumajig and fail their college exams! Users get hair in their palms and go blind! Ban Whizzumajigs now, before it steals our precious bodily fluid!”

“It’s the libertarians who push this crap”

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:22

Dave Weigel tries to find the answer to the burning question “Why do conservatives hate trains so much?”:

But it could hardly make less sense to liberals. What, exactly, do Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians have against trains? Seriously, what? Why did President George W. Bush try to zero out Amtrak funding in 2005? Why is the conservative Republican Study Committee suggesting that we do so now? Why does George Will think “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”?

“You need to distinguish between Republicans and conservatives and libertarians when you look at this,” says William Lind, the director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation. “It’s the libertarians who push this crap.”

Libertarians, of course, have no problem with trains (see, e.g., Atlas Shrugged). They do have a problem with federal spending on transportation, as do many Republicans. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957; Amtrak took over the rails in 1971. Since then, conservatives will sing the praises of private rail projects but criticize federally funded projects that don’t meet the ideal. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., for example, pushed a high-speed rail initiative through Congress in 2008. By 2010, he was denouncing “the Soviet-style Amtrak operation” that had “trumped true high-speed service” in Florida. In 2011, as the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, he is interested in saving the Orlando-Tampa project by building 21 miles between the airport and Disney World. This is about 21 miles farther than local Republicans want to go.

March 8, 2011

Lastest boon to spammers? The move to IPv6, apparently

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

John Leyden reports that with all the good things about moving to the vastly larger address space of IPv6, we can expect at least one negative:

The migration towards IPv6, which has been made necessary by the expansion of the internet, will make it harder to filter spam messages, service providers warn.

The current internet protocol, IPv4, has a limited address space which is reaching exhaustion thanks to the fast uptake of internet technology in populous countries such as India and China and the more widespread use of smartphones. IPv6 promises 3.4 x 1038 addresses compared to the paltry 4.3 billion (4.3 x 109) addresses offered by IPv4.

While this expansion allows far more devices to have a unique internet address, it creates a host of problems for security service providers, who have long used databases of known bad IP addresses to maintain blacklists of junk mail cesspools. Spam-filtering technology typically uses these blacklists as one (key component) in a multi-stage junk mail filtering process that also involves examining message contents.

“The primary method for stopping the majority of spam used by email providers is to track bad IP addresses sending email and block them — a process known as IP blacklisting,” explained Stuart Paton, a senior solutions architect at spam-filtering outfit Cloudmark. “With IPv6 this technique will no longer be possible and could mean that email systems would quickly become overloaded if new approaches are not developed to address this.”

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