Brief Oxford Union exploration

Antonia Mansel-Long in the Oxford Union

I made a first foray into the Oxford Union tonight. I really expected the whole place to resemble the smoky room where I imagine the Suez Canal seizure plan of 1956 to have been formulated. While the ground floor library had approximately the right feel, it was not, in fact, quite so ostentatious.

That said, it is probable that we of no political influence simply cannot access the parts of the building where future prime ministers are selected over cigars and snifters of brandy. I doubt that President Musharraf spent the time after his recent presentation in any of the rooms we ducked into.

Overall, the visit made me feel vindicated about choosing not to pay their ridiculous membership price.

Notes on a Scandal

Flower in the Oxford Botanical Gardens

To call Notes on a Scandal a ‘thriller,’ as many have done, is to strike close to the reasons for which I found it largely unsatisfying as a piece of cinematic work. While decently acted, the story just couldn’t justify the drama that the producers tried to spin around the story. It turned out more like an example of amplified tabloidism, rendered a bit surreal through the inappropriate Philip Glass soundtrack (though my sense that the music made the plot seem trivial may derive from how I associate Glass inescapably with the bombing scenes in The Fog of War).

While the film was not without interesting elements – how a narrator can both be exceptionally aware of the workings of the world around her and profoundly ignorant of how others perceive her – they are ultimately not enough to redeem it as a piece of storytelling. If you’re going to make a film about people violating societal taboos, they ought not be so wishy-washy about it. Nobody wants an uncommitted, neurotic villain, nor one with no particular artfulness through which to be redeemed.

Keyboard clacking away

Oranges in the Oxford Botanical Gardens

By Monday, I am meant to have a draft copy of my thesis introduction ready for discussion. The paradoxical thing about the task is that it will almost certainly be necessary to revamp the introduction a great deal, once the three core chapters have been finished. Of course, it is essential to get the direction right. Tidying up the introduction and conclusion is something that can be done during the period between when my supervisor leaves Oxford and when my thesis is due (April 1-22).

Hopefully, a generous soul or two will volunteer to read a few chapters (or even the whole thesis) to check for general comprehensibility and strength of argumentation.

PS. Lots more information, both about the thesis and other coursework, is appearing on the wiki.

More amateur cryptography

One of the oldest problems in cryptography is key management. The simplest kind of cryptographic arrangement is based on a single key used by however many parties both for encryption and decryption. This carries two big risks, however. In the first place, you need a secure mechanism for key distribution. Secondly, it is generally impossible to revoke a key, either for one individual or for everyone. Because of these limitations, public key cryptography (which utilizes key pairs) has proved a more appropriate mechanism in many applications.

Once in a while, now, you read about ‘unbreakable’ cryptography based on quantum mechanics. The quantum phenomena employed are actually used for key generation, not for the actual business of encrypting and decrypting messages. Like the use of a one-time pad, the symmetric keys produced by this system hold out the promise of powerful encryption. Of course, such systems remain vulnerable both to other kinds of cryptographic attacks, particularly the ‘side channel’ attacks that have so often been the basis for successful code-breaking. Recent examples include the cracking of the encryption on DVDs, as well as Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs.

An example of a side-channel attack is trawling through RAM and virtual memory to try and find the password to some encrypted system. When you login to a website using secure socket layering (SSL), the data sent over the network is encrypted. That said, the program with which you access the site may well take the string of text that constitutes your password and then dump it into RAM and/or the swap space on your hard disk somewhere. Skimming through memory for password-like strings is much less resource intensive than simply trying every possible password. Programs like Forensic Toolkit by AccessData make this process easy. People who use the same string in multiple applications (any of which could storing passwords insecurely) are even more vulnerable.

As in a large number of other security related areas, people using Apple computers have a slight advantage. While not on by default. if you go into the security menu in the system preferences, you can turn on “Use secure virtual memory.” This encrypts the contents of your swap space, to help protect against the kind of attack described above.

The real lesson of all of this is that total information security can never be achieved. One just needs to strike a balance between the sensitivity of the data, the probability of it coming under examination, and the level of effort that would be required to overcome whatever security is in place.

PS. My PGP public key is available online, for anyone who wants to send me coded messages. Free copies of the encryption software Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) can also be easily downloaded.

Aeon Flux

I saw the film version of Aeon Flux today. The physics and biology were bad; the architecture and lighting were good. Overall, it makes me want to go to Berlin. It also makes me want to watch Gattaca again: a film with similar logical flaws, but a comparable commitment to aesthetics.

As virus-haunted-future films go, 12 Monkeys is much better. As lethal heroine films go, Ghost in the Shell remains the standard. The philosophical issues raised are less superficial, and the combat is infinitely more credible. There is a lesser extent to which Force = [ Mass * Acceleration / Physical attractiveness of person in question ]. Also, no matter how many Hollywood dollars they seem capable of bringing in, elaborate flips and cartwheels are simply not tactically effective.

The purpose of ‘international relations’

Water plants in the Oxford Botanical Gardens

What can international relations contribute to the understanding of science and policymaking? This is a section that needs to get written, for my introduction, and its one that involves a bit of fundamental contemplation of the discipline.

Last night, I got into a discussion with the warden of Wadham College and a trio of fellows about my lack of faith in the concept of ‘social science.’ In essence, this is a lack of faith in the possibility of approaching truth, in the study of politics and related fields. One can become convincing and powerful, but one can never be authoritatively ‘right’ when speaking about morality in warfare, the consequences of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, or the economic effects of NAFTA. Importantly, one also cannot be qualitatively as ‘right’ when answering such questions as one can when dealing with properly scientific ones.

I don’t know if it is a reflection of the kind of people the discipline attracts, or whether there is some other explanation, but it seems to me that IR is more concerned with action than with understanding. Interaction with knowledge is certainly important, but that is largely because such interaction is a necessary part of empowerment. Perhaps the reason for which we are given such impossibly long reading lists to skim is because we are just picking out those bits that will sharpen our ability to do whatever it is we wish to do in the world.

[Update: 1:30am] Perhaps I should be clear: this is one of those “use of the blog as a place for speculative thinking that might generate interesting responses” kind of post. Purposive, rather than simply analytic in itself, that is.

Lives and concerns of coursemates

On the occasions when I do see members of the program (fairly rare now that it has completely broken down into small groups working on the optional papers), it seems that everyone is caught up in the double effort of finishing the thesis and finding something worthwhile to do when this all ends. With the last day for possible viva exams now six months off, minds are getting focused. With the more stressful elements of research degrees making themselves known, the general enthusiasm for the D.Phil has been waning. Many people who seemed gung-ho about carrying on to convert their M.Phil to a doctorate in two additional years are now leaning towards other uses for their time.

This is a bit contradictory, really, given that it is precisely the people who want to carry on the for the D.Phil who need to worry most about their theses. The chances of anyone at a different school giving it such a careful looking over (or even any examination at all) are a lot lower than those of Oxford taking it strongly into account, when considering you as a doctoral candidate.

In any case, I am off to work on my potted history of the Kyoto Protocol.

Infernal machines

Proving the adage that technology is actually driven by evil spirits who let it fail just when it is most inconvenient: the MySQL database that serves as the back-end to my wiki has chosen this morning – an hour before I need to give a presentation stored in the wiki – to go kaput. SQL failures have been an irksome occasional occurrence with GoDaddy hosting. Good thing I printed off a PDF version of the presentation before going to sleep.

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Perspectives on international environmental law

New College Cloisters, Oxford

It cannot be taken as a good sign to have a presentation in twelve hours and still not really be sure about the main thrust of what you are going to say. I feel like I have a lot of structural elements, but only a semi-rough conception of what I am going to build out of them. The feeling is somewhat akin to that which I have towards the thesis and, indeed, life in general once this program ends.

The immediate requirement is to decide how skeptical I ought to be about international environmental law. The fact that Canada, for instance, doesn’t seem to feel particularly obligated to meet its Kyoto targets makes one wonder whether there’s conviction out there to match rhetoric. One temptation is to fall back, and say that environmental law is just one more mechanism through which governments can be lobbied – both internally and externally. Another possibility is to say that law isn’t what’s in the books and filed with the Secretary General, but rather what states actually get up to. The latter view would probably be more favoured by my international law instructors, but it makes the whole corpus of international environmental law even more nebulous than it previously appeared to be.

I suppose I will write a draft, read for a few hours, then decide exactly what to say in the morning (when my cognitive faculties are at their lowest ebb).