...more recent posts
"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."Can you guess who said this? Click through to the comments for the answer to todays quiz. Brought to you by Ethel.
Daypop and blogdex are both trying to keep track of recent, highly linked stories in the weblog community. Daypop seems more comprehensive at the moment.
Bruce Schneier has a special September 30th issue of Cryptogram covering the Sept. 11 attacks (he had been publishing only once a month on the 15th - thanks to htp for the heads up.) He talks about airport security, intelligence failures, regulating cryptography, and steganography. Some things he said about intelligence failure started me thinking.
He makes the excellent distinction between data and information in the intelligence community. Data is just a bunch of unconnected, unverified bits of what might, with analysis, become information. They have a lot of data. And what we're seeing now is the reexamining of a lot of this data with the advantage of hindsight. The FBI and the CIA and the NSA are pouring over their mountains of old data looking for clues. And guess what? It looks like they should have known something was up. They had the data. But that doesn't necessarily mean there was a "massive intelligence failure" as some are suggesting. This is just a phenomenon that will always happen when your data set far outstrips your ability to analyse it.
Anyway, the interesting thing I thought (although he doesn't really take it this way) is that this should clearly point out that our intelligence community doesn't need more data! They have the data already. Expanding surveillence is not going to make any difference if it just adds to the mountain of data that then sits in a file cabinet or on a computer somewhere until after an attack happens. I don't have an answer (although more human intelligence and less electronic eavesdropping intelligence might be a start) but this might be an interesting line of defense for people in a position to try and put the breaks on police state happy reactionaries. They knew they should be watching Atta, and they still couldn't do it. How reasonable does it seem to add millions of more "potentially suspicious" people to that list? Won't that just make it all the more likely someone will slip through. What is needed is more information - and it might be the case that accumulating more data is counterproductive.
Scripting news thinks Robotwisdom is a a racist blog. Or at least he did on September 27th. I've been unable to come to any conclusion about this. Certainly Jorn Barger (the man behind robotwisdom) is a strong critic of Israel. But is he a racist? I guess I lean towards critic. In any case, he continues to have what I think are good links. Like this great article by Arundhati Roy. For some background on this fascinating woman (and a stunning picture - does that make me a sexist?) check out this Salon article.
This seems like a good change to be making. Dave Winer is updating the weblogs.com recently updated page so that instead of their spiders hitting every site every hour to look for changes, the sites themselves have to send a message requesting the indexing.
To participate a site must be able to send an XML-RPC or SOAP 1.1 message to weblogs.com, and that will schedule a poll event for sometime in the next hour. Our server will only read sites that claim to have updated. This change is necessary in order for Weblogs to scale to support the number of sites that it now works with.I'm not in the index, but dratfink is, and maybe some other people here want to be. I'll add this feature as soon as there are more instructions from Userland. It's expected, but still very cool, that they are making this open so smaller people like us can participate. Thanks!
Still trying to get my ideas together regarding the communications device I have been thinking about. The main thing is that it is portable, wireless, and can work in two different modes. One mode is the standard internet mode, where the device searches for a gateway within range and if one is found it can connect through it to the internet. (I'm ignoring the cost structures, although there would be some costs here for someone.) The other mode would be a peer to peer mode. Each device would be a client and a server. If you are in peer mode then your device searches for any other peers within range. You would see some sort of list of available servers from which you could choose. As you physically move around the list would change as different people would come in or go out of range. On your own device you can either have your server on or off. If it's on, then people within range can connect to you. This would be like having your own apache (or whatever) server on an intranet. Also, in peer mode, your device is a router whether you have your server on or not. So people can connect through you to others. But there would be some (small) limit on the number of hops to avoid gnutella like problems with scaling. The peer mode would be a very local thing.
Apparently the different flavors of 802.11 (like Apple's Airport, or Lucent's Wavelan) can be used for things like this, so there is really nothing new here. I guess it just boils down to realizing that connecting to the global internet is not always what you want. This is what I realized in the hours following the WTC collapse, when a lot of Manhattan's communication infrastructure was knocked out. I wanted to talk to people outside the city, but contacting people who were here seemed even more pressing. Obviously if the attack had been more nebulous (like a bio attack) communicating locally would have been even more important. Being able to switch to peer mode, thus bypassing any fixed infrastructure (because the portable devices themselves are the infrastructure) would have been very convenient.
The internet itself is decentralized, but only somewhat. From what I understand about routing, this is an efficient design. Complete decentralization seems to have problems scaling because each node gets flooded with too many routing requests. I can only imagine that the internet itself is going to become much more regulated and business like in the near future. But as this happens perhaps a new frontier will open up in the space usually referred to as "the last mile." This space could be filled with an ad hoc peer to peer local intranet. This would be a community space - probably interesting in NYC and other cities, while less interesting or even non existent in very rural locations. The peer network would be free (in both senses) while the internet itself does and will continue to cost money. I'm actually in favor of a charge per byte structure on the global internet. Maybe being a gateway between local peer nets and the internet could be a business. People would pay to use your gateway to jump onto the net if they happened to be inside your peer network. And conversely, people could drop into local peer nets from remote locations using these gateways in the opposite direction.
In times of crisis the peer networks would work even if local infrastructure was knocked out. And then the government could keep a stash of disposable wireless gateways (something like 802.11 basestations) and maybe just drop them (on tiny parachutes or something) over a disaster area. Like seeding a field from the air. This way the local net would work right away, and connections to the global net could be gotten up and working very easily.
Or something like that. It's boring to read about it this way. I'm actually working on a short near future sci-fi story to flesh out this idea. Not sure if that will work out, but I'll put it up as I go if I make any progress.
Whenever I get back to the BCCI affair I know it's time to stop reading and go outside for a walk. There is no reason for me to think I can put the big picture together, so when these large pieces insist on falling into place I get a little nervous. Maybe this is a good time to dive into some difficult (for me) coding. Something with a lot of strands I can put together and then actuallly test as to whether I am right or not. Something that will either work or break. Maybe that mail interface, or the downloadable weblog snapshot feature. It's not as important as 60 briefcases that may or may not be missing, but at least I can work on it and then at some point reach a conclusion. I don't wish to learn any more about the Caspian Basin right now.
I didn't mean to watch it, but we ended up in front of a TV last night having our emotions manipulated in that all too easy way. Still, it was worth it for the highlights. Of course Imagine is the song. I mean: The Song, given the moment, the context, and the particular city. When I heard the first few notes on the piano I just thought, skeptically, "who is playing this?" as if no mere man could be up to the task. Then the big cowboy hat tipped back revealing a rather serious looking Neil Young. "He's got clearance" I said out loud, stunned, and then Gandalf, er, I mean Neil cast the spell. Perfect.
"...You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one..."
Amen
And just to show I'm not always completely swallowed by such emotional orchestrations, I'll complain that if Simon can't get back with Garfunkle for one night, do we really stand a chance of all living together on this planet? I mean, come on - a solo Bridge Over Troubled Waters doesn't really cut it.
Here's a little something I wrote after using Mozilla 0.93 and 0.94 as my main browser for the last few weeks. Short version: It's usable, but you probably don't want to yet unless you have something against Microsoft.
If you use Microsoft Outlook Express for email, please read and follow these 4 simple steps. Very easy. This will help stop many of the worms that are plauging the internet. Please do this.