Quotulatiousness

October 31, 2013

A garage of historical significance

Filed under: History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:28

In The Register, a remarkably blasé report on the designation of the house where Jobs and Wozniak created the first Apple computers:

The house where Steve Jobs built his first computers has been added to a list of historic buildings in Los Altos.

The Los Altos Historical Commission voted unanimously to add the home at 2066 Crist Drive as a historic resources, since its hallowed garage was where Jobs made his first computers and co-founded Apple, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

The commission’s report said that it had been reviewing the property for potential designation for the past two years due to its “association with an event and an individual of historic significance”.

From other discussion on the topic, this will require the current owner of the property (Patricia Jobs, the sister of the late Steve Jobs) to get the commission’s advance permission to do any kind of work on the house … including ordinary maintenance. No funds from the municipality go along with this designation: once your house has been so designated, you no longer exercise full rights of ownership, but you still are required to pay for any work the commission deems necessary or desirable. Ms Jobs apparently still has a right to appeal, but I don’t know what her chances of success might be.

October 29, 2013

What happens when you challenge hackers to investigate you?

Filed under: Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Adam Penenberg had himself investigated in the late 1990s and wrote that up for Forbes. This time around, he asked Nick Percoco to do the same thing, and was quite weirded out by the experience:

It’s my first class of the semester at New York University. I’m discussing the evils of plagiarism and falsifying sources with 11 graduate journalism students when, without warning, my computer freezes. I fruitlessly tap on the keyboard as my laptop takes on a life of its own and reboots. Seconds later the screen flashes a message. To receive the four-digit code I need to unlock it I’ll have to dial a number with a 312 area code. Then my iPhone, set on vibrate and sitting idly on the table, beeps madly.

I’m being hacked — and only have myself to blame.

Two months earlier I challenged Nicholas Percoco, senior vice president of SpiderLabs, the advanced research and ethical hacking team at Trustwave, to perform a personal “pen-test,” industry-speak for “penetration test.” The idea grew out of a cover story I wrote for Forbes some 14 years earlier, when I retained a private detective to investigate me, starting with just my byline. In a week he pulled up an astonishing amount of information, everything from my social security number and mother’s maiden name to long distance phone records, including who I called and for how long, my rent, bank accounts, stock holdings, and utility bills.

[…]

A decade and a half later, and given the recent Edward Snowden-fueled brouhaha over the National Security Agency’s snooping on Americans, I wondered how much had changed. Today, about 250 million Americans are on the Internet, and spend an average of 23 hours a week online and texting, with 27 percent of that engaged in social media. Like most people, I’m on the Internet, in some fashion, most of my waking hours, if not through a computer then via a tablet or smart phone.

With so much of my life reduced to microscopic bits and bytes bouncing around in a netherworld of digital data, how much could Nick Percoco and a determined team of hackers find out about me? Worse, how much damage could they potentially cause?

What I learned is that virtually all of us are vulnerable to electronic eavesdropping and are easy hack targets. Most of us have adopted the credo “security by obscurity,” but all it takes is a person or persons with enough patience and know-how to pierce anyone’s privacy — and, if they choose, to wreak havoc on your finances and destroy your reputation.

H/T to Terry Teachout for the link.

October 11, 2013

Creating an “air gap” for computer security

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Bruce Schneier explains why you’d want to do this … and how much of a pain it can be to set up and work with:

Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using a number of tools to try to stay secure from the NSA. The advice I shared included using Tor, preferring certain cryptography over others, and using public-domain encryption wherever possible.

I also recommended using an air gap, which physically isolates a computer or local network of computers from the Internet. (The name comes from the literal gap of air between the computer and the Internet; the word predates wireless networks.)

But this is more complicated than it sounds, and requires explanation.

Since we know that computers connected to the Internet are vulnerable to outside hacking, an air gap should protect against those attacks. There are a lot of systems that use — or should use — air gaps: classified military networks, nuclear power plant controls, medical equipment, avionics, and so on.

Osama Bin Laden used one. I hope human rights organizations in repressive countries are doing the same.

Air gaps might be conceptually simple, but they’re hard to maintain in practice. The truth is that nobody wants a computer that never receives files from the Internet and never sends files out into the Internet. What they want is a computer that’s not directly connected to the Internet, albeit with some secure way of moving files on and off.

He also provides a list of ten rules (or recommendations, I guess) you should follow if you want to set up an air-gapped machine of your own.

October 7, 2013

CSEC’s sudden media prominence … in Brazil

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

If you haven’t heard of CSEC before, you’re certainly not alone. The signals intelligence service known as Communications Security Establishment Canada has been eager not to be in the public eye, but allegations are being made that CSEC has been spying on the Brazilian government’s mining and energy ministry:

The impact for Canada of these revelations could be equally grave: they come at a time when Brazil has become a top destination for Canadian exports, when a stream of delegations from the oil and gas industries are making pilgrimages to Rio de Janeiro to try to get a piece of the booming offshore oil industry, and when the Canadian government is eager to burnish ties with Brasilia. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird visited Brazil in August, and spoke repeatedly about the country as a critical partner for Canadian business.

[…]

While CSEC’s role in conducting economic espionage has been alluded to before, how it does this job has not. The significance of the documents obtained by Globo in Brazil is that they speak to how “metadata” analysis by CSEC can be used to exploit a rival country’s computer systems.

The CSEC-labeled slides about the “Olympia” program describe the “Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy” as a “new target to develop” despite “limited access/target knowledge.”

The presentation goes on to map out how an individual’s smartphone — “target’s handset” — can be discerned by analysis, including by cross-referencing the smartphone’s Sim card with the network telephone number assigned to it and also to the handset’s unique number (IMEI).

The “top secret” presentation also refers to attacks on email servers.

“I have identified MX [email] servers which have been targeted to passive collection by the Intel analysts,” one slide says, without explaining who the speaker is.

September 29, 2013

Unplugging your laptop to give your battery a longer working life

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:53

In Wired, Roberto Baldwin says you shouldn’t leave your laptop plugged in all the time:

In order to squeeze as much life out of your lithium-polymer battery, once your laptop hits 100 percent, unplug it. In fact, you should unplug it before that.

Cadex Electronics CEO Isidor Buchmann told WIRED that ideally everyone would charge their batteries to 80 percent then let them drain to about 40 percent. This will prolong the life of your battery — in some cases by as much as four times. The reason is that each cell in a lithium-polymer battery is charged to a voltage level. The higher the charge percentage, the higher the voltage level. The more voltage a cell has to store, the more stress it’s put under. That stress leads to fewer discharge cycles. For example, Battery University states that a battery charged to 100 percent will have only 300-500 discharge cycles, while a battery charged to 70 percent will get 1,200-2,000 discharge cycles.

Buchmann would know. His company Cadex sponsers Battery University. The site is the go-to destination for anyone interested in battery technology. And it’s not just constant power that shortens your battery’s life. While batteries degrade naturally, heat also accelerates the degradation. Extreme heat can cause the cells to expand and bubble. Kyle Wiens of iFixit told WIRED: “Too much heat to the battery over time, and the battery isn’t going to last as long.”

You can battle this degradation by keeping the lid open and your laptop out of your actual lap while using it.

September 27, 2013

The day World War III didn’t happen

Filed under: History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

In The Register, Iain Thomson takes us back to the depth of the Cold War, when it nearly turned very hot indeed:

Computer problems are an annoyance for us all, but thirty years ago a fault in the Soviet Union’s ballistic missile early warning system very nearly caused nuclear war, if not for the actions of Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces.

[…]

in the early hours of the morning on the September 26, there was panic when the Soviet early warning system Oko, a monitoring system of geostationary satellites and ground stations designed to spot ballistic missile launches, reported that the US had fired off a missile against the Soviet Union. Then four more launches were reported by the system in quick succession.

“An alarm at the command and control post went off with red lights blinking on the terminal. It was a nasty shock,” Petrov told Moscow News in 2004. “Everyone jumped from their seats, looking at me. What could I do? There was an operations procedure that I had written myself. We did what we had to do. We checked the operation of all systems — on 30 levels, one after another. Reports kept coming in: All is correct.”

Petrov, then the officer in command of the Oko system at a bunker near Moscow, had the responsibility of informing the Soviet high command in the event of a US missile launch. Although he didn’t have launch control of the USSR’s huge nuclear arsenal, he was the first responder, and given the scant minutes available in the event of a surprise attack, his word would most likely have been accepted by the Soviet leadership.

But Petrov didn’t make the call. He knew that the Oko system, which had only gone live the year before, was buggy. He also later described how logically such a move made no sense. While a first strike by the US wasn’t out of the question, if the capitalists were to do so they’d launch everything they had, not a few missiles at a time, he reasoned.

September 24, 2013

The horrors of Greek Austerity strike!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Greece — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Those poor Greek civil servants … this is so hard on them:

In a sign of just how hard the austere financial climate is hitting, it has been reported that the Greek government has been forced to put an end to one of its civil servants’ most treasured privileges. We speak, of course, of the Hellenic Sir Humphreys’ entitlement to an extra six days a year paid holiday if they are compelled to work with that frightful engine of misery, the computer.

Reuters reports that the long-standing regulation, in which all Greek government workers compelled to use a computer for more than 5 hours a day get an extra day’s leave every two months, was axed in an official announcement on Friday.

September 19, 2013

After smartphones, genius machines?

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

In the Daily Beast, Robert Herritt reviews the latest book by Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.

Cowen’s main background assumption is that in the not-too-distant future various kinds of “genius machines” will be everywhere. In the workplace, business negotiations and client introductions “will be recorded, processed, and analyzed [and] … [e]ach party to the communications might receive a real-time report on when the other people are likely lying …” At the supermarket, “[y]our shopping cart will use GPS to track your moves through the store, including which aisles you visit most often.” As for our personal lives, “[a] woman might consult a pocket device in the ladies’ room during a date that tells her how much she really likes the guy. The machine could register her pulse, breathing, tone of voice … or whichever biological features prove to have predictive power.”

Even a few years ago, this forecast would have sounded silly, but that was before many of us trusted Match.com algorithms to suggest potential spouses and smartphones came with fingerprint scanners. Cowen’s not talking about flying cars (that futurist mainstay that always seems both just out of reach and comically unnecessary), but rather slightly more sophisticated versions of the technologies that many of us already use.

The bad news, he tells us, is that the rise of the machines will only worsen the wage polarization we are seeing today. Cowen predicts a situation where 10 percent to 15 percent of Americans are “extremely wealthy” with “fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.” Most of the rest will see stagnant or falling wages but will benefit from plenty of “cheap fun and also cheap education.” For those wondering, this vanishing middle ground is where the book gets its catch-phrase title.

What will determine whether you end up a high earner or a low-wage left-behind will be, in large part, your answer to some variation on the following questions: “Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you?”

September 8, 2013

Sometimes the worst possible thing for you is to dominate your market

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Charles Hugh Smith on the dangers of being too big in your own market:

Microsoft is a case study in dominance leading to incompetence and catastrophe. Within the moat of near-monopoly/dominance, competence dwindles to the ability to keep doing what worked spectacularly well in the past, and keeping bureaucratic infighting and divisional rivalries down to a dull background erosion of initiative and talent.

Doing more of what succeeded spectacularly in the past works until it doesn’t, at which point doggedly pressing on with the old formula of success leads to catastrophic failures.

Nokia and Blackberry are recent case studies, but the rise of Google Chrome and smart-phone/tablet computing is beginning to threaten Microsoft’s core business of being the utility monopoly in the PC space.

Dominance means leaders and employees alike lose the ability to experience risk. The customer will take what is delivered, regardless, for the simple reason that alternatives are either unavailable or cumbersome.

[…]

Dominance in any space breeds complacency and enables the luxuries of political squabbling, sclerosis and loss of focus. Competence becomes incompetence, and the infrastructure that fosters creativity and flexibility — that is, a keen appreciation of risk and spontaneity — is slowly dismantled.

That applies not just to corporations but to governments, nations and empires.

H/T to Zero Hedge for the link.

September 1, 2013

The military tablet – appearing now in combat zones around the world

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Strategy Page talks about the US Air Force use of Windows tablet computers for aircraft pilots and the wider adoption of tablets in the rest of the military:

Air forces all over the world are catching up when it comes to iPads. These devices were soon being adopted by officers and troops after they first appeared in 2010, without waiting for official permission. The iPad mini showed up in 2012. While using PDF files to replace maps and manuals was one of the first military uses, this was quickly followed by military-specific smart phone apps.

Early on combat pilots in Afghanistan, like many businesses, discovered how useful the iPad could be on board. U.S. Marine Corps helicopter pilots found the iPad a useful way to carry hundreds of military maps, rather than the hassle of using paper versions. Marine commanders quickly realized this “field expedient” (a military “hack” that adopts something for unofficial use while in the combat zone) worked, and made it official. That meant buying iPads for this and getting to work coming up with more uses. Meanwhile, support troops that have to handle a lot of data, quickly found ways to get it done on iPads. This was pretty simple for technical troops who rely on lots of manuals. They are often already available in PDF format, and can easily be put on an iPad. But the iPads are basically hand-held computers, and can do so much more. The troops quickly began making that happen themselves.

About the same time iPad appeared the U.S. Army decided to establish an app store (the Army Marketplace) for military smart phone users. This quickly included the iPad, which soldiers were instant big fans of. The army app store included an “App Wanted” section where users could post descriptions of an app they need. If a developer (in uniform, or an army approved civilian with access to the Army Marketplace) was interested, a discussion could be started on an attached message board. The army found that many needed apps were quickly created and made available at the Army Marketplace. Developers could charge for their apps, although the army is also would pay developers to create needed apps that have been described by military smart phone users. The other services quickly adopted a similar attitude towards app development and many of the U.S. Army apps have shown on smart phones outside the country.

August 4, 2013

Bruce Schneier talks about security and trust

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Published on 19 Jun 2013

Human society runs on trust. We all trust millions of people, organizations, and systems every day — and we do it so easily that we barely notice. But in any system of trust, there is an alternative, parasitic, strategy that involves abusing that trust. Making sure those defectors don’t destroy the cooperative systems they’re abusing is an age-old problem, one that we’ve solved through morals and ethics, laws, and all sort of security technologies. Understanding how these all work — and fail — is essential to understanding the problems we face in today’s increasingly technological and interconnected world.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a “security guru,” he is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.

H/T to AVC for the link.

July 17, 2013

QotD: The war on general-purpose computing

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

As we wait for dessert, I ask him about his recent speeches at technology conferences discussing the “war on general purpose computing”. He runs through the argument with practised fluency. Computers are by nature general-purpose machines. It’s impossible to make a computer that does all the kinds of things we want computers to do yet is somehow disabled from making copies of copyrighted material, or viewing child pornography, or sending instructions to a 3D printer to produce a gun.

“Oh my God, that’s good,” says Doctorow after his first mouthful of crumble. My peanut butter shortbread is fantastic too, if absurdly calorific. We are interrupted only by another waiter dropping a tray of glasses.

He continues with the argument. The impossibility of making limited-purpose computers won’t stop governments or corporations trying to put on the locks, or changing laws to try to make those locks effective. But the only way these limits can possibly work is subterfuge: computers therefore tend to contain concealed software that spies on what their users are trying to do. Such software is inevitably open to abuse and has often been abused in the past.

Digital rights management systems intended to prevent copying have been hijacked by virus-writers. In one notorious case, the Federal Trade Commission acted against seven computer rental companies and the software company that supplied them, alleging that the rental companies could activate hidden software to grab passwords, bank account details and even switch on the webcam to take photos of what the FTC coyly calls “intimate activities at home”. As computers surround us — in our cars, our homes, our pacemakers — Doctorow is determined to make people realise what’s at stake.

Tim Harford, “Cory Doctorow has Lunch with the FT“, TimHarford.com (originally published at the Financial Times), 2013-07-15

July 7, 2013

Trying to prevent another “flash crash”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Tim Harford discusses high speed trading and its potential problems:

“High-frequency trading” is a rich environment of algorithms, of predators and prey, all trying to make money by trading financial products at tremendous speed. But the basic proposition is simple to state. When the price of a share rises in New York, the price of related contracts will rise in Chicago just as soon as the news arrives. But if everyone else gets the news on the regular cable, and you’re renting space on the faster cable, you can see into everyone else’s future by (say) 0.7 milliseconds, plenty of time to buy soon-to-rise assets and then, less than a thousandth of a second later, to sell them again.

You don’t have to be a socialist to find this kind of thing discomfiting. There are three concerns. The first is that scarce resources are being spent on high-speed connections that have no social value in what is at best a zero-sum game. The second is that high-frequency traders may be making money at the expense of fundamental investors. The third problem is that such trading appears to introduce systemic risks. The “flash crash” of May 2010 is still poorly understood, which should ring alarm bells — especially since the need for speed means most high-frequency algorithms are simple and therefore stupid.

What, then, should be done? Rather than trying to slow down the algorithms, why not slow down the market? Most financial exchange markets run continuously, effectively assuming that traders can react instantaneously, withdrawing out-of-date offers and replacing them with up-to-the-picosecond prices. It’s this flawed premise — that all trades could be instantaneous — that means that no matter how fast the computers get, there will always be an incentive to go faster still.

A simple way for an exchange to improve matters would be to run an auction once a second, batching together all the offers to buy and sell that have been submitted during that second. Unsuccessful bids and asks would be published and would remain on the books for the next auction, unless withdrawn. One auction a second ought to be enough for anyone; it would deliver a stream of well-behaved data to regulators — currently unable to figure out what is going on — and it is plenty of time for a computer to weigh its options.

July 4, 2013

Virtual reality hardware coming to your local big box electronics store

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

In The New Yorker, Joel Johnson talks about the Oculus Rift, which may be available in retail stores by the end of the year:

Luckey’s garage creation, which soon was named the “Oculus Rift,” is not far from a smartphone with a headband. An L.C.D. screen spans across a plastic mask, sitting about an inch away from a user’s eyes; a barrier divides the display in two, effectively creating one screen for each eye. Motion sensors track the position of the wearer’s head, then feed this data across an umbilical cord to a computer, typically a gaming P.C. Instead of rendering one 3-D world to a single monitor, as in a typical first-person video game, such as Call of Duty, the computer renders the same 3-D world twice, from slightly different angles. It sends those two perspectives, side by side, to the Rift, creating the illusion of depth. Motion is controlled by the direction in which the wearer is looking; instead of using a mouse or a controller to direct your gaze in the 3-D world, a person simply needs to turn his head.

The Oculus Rift uses optical tricks to create the realistic sensation, like slightly warping the edges of the view in the computer, which is corrected by plastic lenses in the goggles. The pixels are more tightly packed directly in front of the eye, giving the perspective a roundness that feels more like human vision. It works. The Oculus Rift rivals — and will possibly exceed, when it hits the shelves sometime in late 2013 or mid-2014 — the best virtual-reality hardware available, military-grade or otherwise.

[. . .]

I’ve been testing the Oculus Rift for a month, and in it, virtual reality feels a lot like scuba diving. First, there is the mask. Then there is the strange disconnect between where your body actually is and where your mind, confused by the mask, is telling you that your body is located. This sensation of discombobulation is doubled in virtual reality, since the current version of the Oculus Rift doesn’t track your body or hands, only your head.

Still, more than any of its antecedents, the Oculus Rift is convincingly engrossing. Most of the several dozen people who have tried my Rift put the goggles on as skeptics, but removed them as believers that virtual reality, as a practical phenomenon, now exists.

On YouTube, WoodenPotatoes recently posted a video where he tried out his new Oculus Rift unit with the original Guild Wars Prophecies by ArenaNet. As he points out in the video, the game is in no way optimized for use with the Rift, but is still an interesting experiment:

May 3, 2013

What could kill Google Glass? Terminal dorkiness.

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

In Wired, Marcus Wohlsen theorizes that the inherent dork factor will be the biggest hurdle for Google Glass:

The Segway. The Bluetooth headset. The pocket protector.

What do these three technologies have in common? They all pretty much work as promised. They all seem like good ideas on paper. And they’re all too dorky to live.

Now, far be it from me to claim that nerdiness equals lack of popularity potential. But I contend that dorkiness and nerdiness are two different qualities. While nerdiness implies a certain social awkwardness that’s ultimately endearing, dorkiness connotes social obliviousness that opens you to deserved ridicule.

Guess which category Google Glass will fall under when it goes “mainstream?”

Forget about the privacy concerns for a second. I don’t think you have to get that serious to recognize the inherent antisocialness of Google Glass. All you have to do is look at the guy in the picture at the top of this post. Or any of the rest of the guys on White Men Wearing Google Glass, a new Tumblr that serves up the data needed to transform the hypothesis “Google Glass is too dorky to succeed” into a proven scientific theory.

Disagree? The floor is open for falsification. Start your own Tumblr: People Who Look Cool While Wearing Google Glass.

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