Category Archives: soft-core

Letter to a Young Turk

I’ve been arguing for the last few weeks that what’s needed most for Vanuatu is to invest significant time and effort into the creation of a new crop of technically savvy individuals who can help Vanuatu bridge the growing gap between life in the information age and life as we’ve always known it in the islands.

There’s a pressing need for people to assist with this transition. The barriers have begun to fall that once allowed life in the village to remain consistent, with change seeping in slowly and in tiny doses. Very soon, most everyone in Vanuatu will have access to mobile telephony. We’re already hearing stories about Tannese in Middle Bush bringing their mobile to the garden with them, just in case someone wants to reach them.

Only weeks ago, nobody really got fussed about waiting days or even weeks to hear a bit of news. But now that we can actually get it, we want information immediately. It’s a universal human trait to want to keep caught up on the latest. In the past people here have been content to let information and gossip arrive at its own pace, confident at least that nobody was getting the jump on anyone else. But now, someone who owns a mobile phone holds a distinct advantage over those without. In this culture – and most others – knowledge is power, and in Vanuatu, a new arms race has begun.

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No Borders

I made a mistake this week, or rather a misjudgement. I wrote about a new threat called Goolag, in which a malicious person could use Google to find servers on the Internet that are vulnerable to attack. The servers are infected with malicious code that causes anyone who visits them to be exposed to compromise. This is how many an innocent person’s computer becomes a spam-bot, remotely controlled by hackers and used to send spam, and sometimes to infect its neighbours as well.

I wrote, “Making simple mistakes is the easiest way to expose yourself to attack…. You won’t be targeted so much as stumbled across.”

Within two days of writing about the issue, an online security blog reported a wave of attacks affecting approximately 200,000 web servers. The single most important part of comedy, as they say, is timing.

This latest wave of attacks is important to us for a couple of reasons: It demonstrates that the democratising effect of information on the Web respects no single set of ethics or morality. The very same information-sharing tools that have so empowered people everywhere are being used by vandals and criminals for their own selfish ends as well.

It also means that there are no safe havens online.

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Splash and Ripple

Drop a stone in the middle of the pool. Watch its ripples spread wider and wider across the surface. Inevitably – sometimes sooner than later – the ripples mingle and apparently disappear among the others. Cause and effect: A simple action creates immeasurable, unpredictable and unforeseeable results.

Among development professionals, this provokes roughly equal amounts of fascination and frustration. Fascination, because anyone with a mote of interest and natural curiousity is quickly engrossed by the flow of events as human cultures mingle and change. Frustration, because at some point it will be necessary to say to a donor, ‘Your money will have exactly this effect.’

And that will be a lie, of sorts.

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#@)(!*^ing Encryption

A few words about the title: The first seven letters are written using a very simple code, or cypher. Each of the letters in the original word is replaced by the non-alphabetical character to which it is closest on a US keyboard. The process of hiding a message by substituting other letters, numbers or symbols is known as encryption. When the code is reversed, the title reads ‘Explaining Encryption’.

But it also looks like swearing, doesn’t it? In fact, the use of characters like this to denote swearing is a simple (dare we say crude?) kind of encryption. A child too innocent to know such words derives no meaning from the random collection of characters. Someone well versed in the ways of the world, though, can add up the number of characters and quickly deduce what was intended.

On and off over the last two months, we’ve been looking at various aspects of online security. This week, we’re going to consider what steps we can take to make the information we send over the Internet secure from prying eyes.

We’ll also consider why it is that no one uses these measures, and why most of us won’t any time soon.

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On Being Right

A number of recent events have given me occasion to consider what it means to be right.

Viewed through a rationalist filter, humanity can manage itself well (if not easily), provided its curiousity remains strong and its faculties of discernment are not tarnished. This assumes, of course, that humanity as a whole is curious. I am learning, to my dismay, that it is indeed curious, but not at all in the way I thought it was.

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MEME: Bitsharks

I’m going to start blaming random network- and computer-related problems on Bitsharks. Get everyone believing in the idea of predatory bots cruising the network, dining on people’s digital transmissions.

USER: “Why didn’t my email go through?”
ME: “Did you receive a failure message?”
USER: “No.”
ME: “Uhhh, you didn’t send it alone, did you?”
USER: “What do you mean?”
ME: “Well… how big was the message?”
USER: “Just a paragraph or so. Why?”
ME: [Dismayed] “And you sent it onto the Internet alone?”
USER: “What, why?”
ME: “Don’t you know what can happen?”
USER: “What? What are you talking about?”
ME: [sighs] “Poor little thing. Probably never had a chance. Hang on a sec….” [Types random commands into console.]
USER: [alarmed] “What’s going on?”
ME: “It’s what I thought. Bitsharks.”
USER: “What did you call me?”
ME: “Nonono. Bit. Shark. A Bitshark got your email.”
USER: “A Bitshark?”
ME: “Yeah. Predatory bots cruising the shallow parts of the Internet. They single out the smaller, more vulnerable bits of data, then consume them.”
USER: “Oh my God.”
ME: [Pained, patient] “Look, just do me a favour. Next time, send your email out in groups. Sometimes the numbers confuse the Bitsharks and the little guys manage to make it through.”
USER: “Oh, the poor thi- I, I… of course.”
ME: “You won’t forget?”
USER: “Heavens, no.”
ME: “Good. Tell your friends.”

Network Neutrality: Not Negotiable

Someone asked:

I’m curious what the[…] community thinks… what if a company such as Comcast were to offer two plans:

1. $30/mo – The internet as we know it today without any preference to content providers, advertising, etc
2. $15/mo – An internet where some content providers get preference, subsidizing the lower monthly bill.

If companies offered a choice would we still care?

Effectively, it would be no choice at all. It would, in fact, be disastrous.

The effects described in George Akerlof’s 1970 paper, The Market for ‘Lemons’ come into play in such a scenario. In a nutshell, the paper states that certain markets (like used cars) favour the sale of ‘lemons’ over quality. The reason is that it’s easier to simply wax and buff a lemon (and rely on the buyer’s ignorance) than it is to do the right thing and service it properly before re-selling.

The reason this approach works is because buyers can’t see what’s under the hood and, generally speaking, wouldn’t know what to look for even if they could. So instead of paying well for quality, they tend to buy the cheapest item, regardless of its condition. The same is true of Internet service. People just don’t know what’s possible. Worse still, they don’t have the ability to recognise whether they’re getting what they’re supposed to or not.

So if the telcos were to foist a divided offering on their customers, they could rely on ignorance to invoke a market for ‘lemons’. People see no extra value in buying the better service, so they flock en masse to the cheaper one. Telco then discontinues the more expensive one, citing lack of consumer interest.

Minimum operating standards such as Network Neutrality were put into place to protect consumers and the market itself. Absent Net Neutrality, the potential for abuse of control over traffic by carriers is far too great. No compromise is possible in this regard, because degradation of Net Neutrality is a degradation of the market itself.

Policing Piracy

The Australian government recently announced that it was taking the issue of Internet piracy very seriously. They were, according to reports, considering their own version of a British proposal to require Internet Service Providers to cut off so-called ‘repeat offenders’. People who were suspected of deliberately and repeatedly downloading unauthorised music and video files would have their Internet accounts suspended.

This is a commendable goal. Respect for the creative works of others is at a low ebb these days. We need to alter our cavalier approach to copyright and to properly reward those who spend their time and effort in creating the music, movies, software and other creations we so enjoy.
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Oranges and Lemons

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at various aspects of online security. It’s a big topic, and it’s often difficult to be clear about what’s happening, and what’s at stake. This week we’ll try to provide a few basic ideas about how to judge what makes us safer and what doesn’t.

We rely exclusively on our senses to assess the presence or absence of threats in the world around us. When we get up in the morning, we check the bread we eat for mould, sniff the milk before adding it to the tea, and touch the edge of the mug with our lips before drinking, to make sure it’s not too hot. We look both ways before crossing the road and we listen for oncoming traffic. We hesitate to get into a bus that doesn’t look safe. We cover our mouth and nose if there’s too much dust or smoke.

We employ our senses in a multitude of ways without any conscious thought. All the while, in the background, the brain is taking everything in and deciding from one moment to the next how to react to each new situation. For most of us, a typical computer gives us exactly nothing to react to. All we see is a pretty background, a few flashing icons or blinking lights and the Solitaire game in front of us.

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