Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Intrusion detection systems

One side of computer security is keeping people from getting unauthorized access: choosing good passwords, patching software to protect against known exploits, etc. But when you reach a more advanced level than that, intrusion detection systems (IDS) become an important way of detecting and mitigating attacks. These systems monitor the functioning of a computer system or account and produce some sort of alert if suspicious activity is ongoing.

For example, GMail includes a rudimentary IDS. It allows users to check whether anyone is logged into their account from another location. If you check the list and see only your home IP address and your phone, everything is probably fine. If some random IP address from Berlin or Mumbai or Tokyo is on there, someone has probably compromised your account.

IDS can be much more sophisticated than this. While GMail calls upon the user to keep an eye on things manually, automated systems can flag suspicious activity and produce warnings. A classic example would be a computer in a distant country accessing your GMail via POP3 and starting to download the entire contents of your archive. That is super suspicious and – if you are someone like Sarah Palin – potentially career-ending.

The same goes, naturally, for a situation where some random army private starts accessing and downloading thousands of diplomatic cables. Say what you will about the ethics of Wikileaks, but from a computer security perspective there should have been an IDS that spotted that aberrant pattern.

Attackers always get more sophisticated and their attacks always improve. As a consequence, those who want to defend computer systems must keep raising their own game by implementing sophisticated security strategies. Deploying IDS both on personal computers and within cloud services like GMail is one way in which people can become aware of breaches in time to stop them from becoming too severe. It’s never comfortable to learn that you are dealing with an intruder, but it is much better to have that awareness than to continue blindly forward while they persist in nefarious activities.

P.S. Does anyone know of a good IDS for Macs? Given how many people are on always-on internet connections these days, and given that all operating systems have security flaws that take time to fix, operating an IDS on one’s personal computer is probably a good security trade-off. Indeed, I am planning to set up a second system unconnected to the internet, next time I buy a new desktop machine. It is axiomatic that any computer connected to the internet is vulnerable.

Mini-review: Cheap Eats Ottawa

While blogs like Apt 613 are a great way to get information on Ottawa happenings, there is a case to be made for going out and buying a book once in a while. That is particularly true when it comes to a well-researched, informative, and up-to-date offering like Cheap Eats Ottawa. For anyone who feels like this town is a bit small, this book is a way of discovering some of the places between the places you’ve already visited a million times. There are options for just about every part of town and just about every cuisine, and useful lists like places that are open exceptionally late and places that are good for dates.

Cheap Eats Ottawa is on sale at Perfect Books (258A Elgin Street). The authors also run a blog.

The King’s Speech and unconventional teachers

The King’s Speech incorporates a trope that I think has been pretty well mined in Hollywood: the teacher who doesn’t follow ordinary rules of politeness. Think of Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society. The language teacher in The King’s Speech differs from his peers in that he insists on treating the king as an equal, without the excessive deference other teachers showed. It is suggested that this attitude at least partly explains how he has more success than other teachers.

This also reminds me of the psychiatrist played by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. The brilliant protagonist has no respect for the ordinary psychiatrists. Indeed, he treats them with contempt. By contrast, the psychiatrist who isn’t afraid to be abrupt and rude with him proves to be the one who he ends up respecting, and who ends up having some success with him. Another example is the brilliant but caustic Dr. Gregory House.

There is certainly some truth to the trope. Excessive deference and politeness can produce impotence, in that people hesitate to raise even rather important issues with people who they see as their clear superiors.

Mini-review: Pelikan Pelikano

If you like fountain pens, or are curious about them, consider picking up Pelikan’s inexpensive pen designed for European schoolchildren. It costs less than $30 and has a good writing and ink delivery mechanism. It is very bright and simple in its design (they come in primary colours), but there is nothing wrong with that. A lot of fountain pens are designed for people who want to pretend they are General Douglas MacArthur signing a peace treaty aboard a battleship. If you just want something that is fun to write with and a little bit unusual in this age of ubiquitous ballpoint and gel pens, this simple and inexpensive offering is one to consider.

Ottawans can find these pens on sale at Wallack’s (231 Bank Street).

(Note: Make sure to use these pens with cartridges or converters appropriately shaped for Pelikan pens. Cramming in the more commonly available refills available for other brands can lead to inconsistent ink flow and the risk of pen-splosions.)

Global emission pathway, made manifest

Over lunch yesterday, I had an idea for a climate change art installation that would represent the task that needs to be completed and, crucially, the kind of raw work that needs to go into it.

The central feature would be a steel bar extending up diagonally to the right, shaped like historical and projected future global greenhouse gas emissions, expressed in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. It would be anchored at the point of the present, but flexible and free-standing beyond that.

Toward the far end of the bar would be some physical mechanism for bending the whole thing downward. People who saw the installation would contribute physically to the process, which would take weeks or months. Some ideas for mechanisms:

  • A pulley system with a large array of blocks and tackle, allowing people to slowly wrench the bar downward
  • Platforms attached to the bar onto which weights could be progressively moved, lowering it
  • A chain attached near the end of the bar, connected to a large wheel that can slowly be turned

Whatever the mechanism, there would need to be a ratchet system in place to make sure the bar would not swing violently upward if something went wrong.

At the beginning, the whole setup would look like a business-as-usual projection, with annual emissions rising right out to 2100 as humanity continues to exploit coal and unconventional oil and gas (the conventional stuff plausibly being already exhausted by then). At the end, it would look like the curves from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, bent down to carbon neutrality.

An important part of the installation is that the process of moving the bar should be physically hard work for the people viewing the exhibit. It should be uncomfortable in formal clothes, and leave people feeling the strain of it for a couple of minutes afterward. With weights, it could be calibrated to the different strength levels of visitors. Some could move 1kg, some 10kg, some 20kg.

The installation would illustrate how a task that is impossible individually becomes possible when two things happen: when lots of people make an appropriate contribution, and where someone sets up a mechanism that directs and coordinates those actions.

I don’t think you could do this in North America. Some tourist would drop a weight on their foot and sue you and the gallery for millions of dollars. Maybe it could be done in England. If the city of Oxford was willing to take on the liability risks involved in Luminox, maybe there would be some English venue willing to tolerate those associated with a big steel bar under increasing tension.

Feynman and the Trinity test

This post have been revamped in response to a perceptive comment. The old version is available here.

In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, American physicist Richard Feynman speculates that he may have been the only person who watched the Trinity Test relatively directly, using a windshield to exclude ultraviolet light. Everyone else, he claims, was looking through something akin to welding goggles.

This claim is contradicted in chapter 18 of Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, in which Rhodes claims that Ernest Lawrence considered watching the test through a windshield, but decided to step out of the car and watch it directly, and that Robert Serber also watched with unprotected eyes.

Feynman does come up a few times in Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book. He is quoted on the limitations of human understanding (p.32-33 paperback), the boundaries of science (35), and the status of Seth Neddermeyer‘s plutonium implosion setup in 1943 (479). The book also describes Feynman coining of the term ‘tickling the dragon’s tail’ to describe Otto Robert Frisch‘s dangerous criticality experiment (611), and fixing a shortwave radio being used during the Trinity test itself (668). In one of his books, Feynman describes how he began fixing neighbourhood radios as a small boy.

Quite possibly, people other than Feynman did watch the test without welding goggles and he never found out about it, or at least learned of it after the wrote the speculative comment in his book.

The social and political importance of sustained Chinese growth

Some socio-economic questions are so complex that they are probably impossible to definitively answer, since we only have one planet to work with and one human history unfolding. We can’t run a bunch of trials and work out the probabilities involved (sweet, sweet Monte Carlo method). At the moment, one such question is: “What would happen geopolitically if economic growth in China really slowed down for a while?”

The question relates to how quickly China should deploy renewable energy, to help respond to climate change.

One can imagine a benign scenario where growth slows a bit while China focuses on greenery, the air in Beijing gets cleaner for a span longer than the Olympics, and China’s importance within the global system continues to increase smoothly (though how benign that increase is is another question).

One can also imagine a less benign scenario where the Chinese economy isn’t producing enough jobs to employ the generation entering the workforce. Without jobs, they could focus in large numbers on more destabilizing things, like overthrowing the Communist Party and establishing a more credible democracy (though what the many considerations involved in any such matter would be is another question, as well).

All told, the state of the global economy now seems pretty worrying. The immediate financial crisis was staved away with giant amounts of public money. But not much actual reform seems to have taken place in the financial system. At the same time, the European Union is dealing with a crisis and Japan continues to stagnate. If you believe that growth is generally good (though greenhouse gas pollution must fall), you have good reason to worry about the state of the world economy today. Alternatively, the same is true if you think growth is generally good for global stability, and global stability is important (World Wars are nasty things).

Oversight over institutions of armed power

On Yes, Prime Minister, a character describing a situation in which a document was leaked discusses the difference between what you do when you really want to find the source of a leak and what you do when it is all just for show. When it is for show, he says, you conduct a leak inquiry. If it is for a serious investigation, you call in ‘Special Branch’.

Reading through the Wikipedia entry on ‘Special Branch’ gave me a bit of pause. It seems like the term is used to refer to two different types of sub-organizations, within broader security structures like national police forces and armies.

Outward intelligence gathering

One sort of Special Branch is the macho Jack Bauer sort that wears flak jackets and drops in on terrorists from helicopters. They are also the ones with the machines for listening to private phone calls and reading private emails, back doors into supposedly confidential databases, and other such legally dubious trickery.

Having some kind of organization of this sort is important – especially for keeping genuinely dangerous things like biological and nuclear weapons away from terrorists. At the same time, giving such an organization an increasingly broad mandate just increases the risk that the organization itself will become abusive, or that the intelligence it collects will be used for inappropriate purposes.

There has to be some kind of meaningful, outside, civilian scrutiny of such organizations. If they are allowed to sit up at the top of the chain deciding who can trust who, we cannot allow them to be a secretive band of unknown people. It may render them less effective as an intelligence organization, to be subject to civilian oversight, but it is ultimately important for the security of society that this be so.

Quite possibly, governments shouldn’t have any organizations that they are not prepared to appear before a fairly elected legislature (in secret, perhaps) and answer detailed questions about.

Internal oversight

The other sort of Special Branch answers the question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? They are a response to the reality that organizations like armies and police forces attract bullies – people who are themselves attracted to power. At times, such people will abuse that power. That danger is increased enormously when the people are put within structures that will protect them, regardless of what they do. If the police force protects officers who use excessive force, their violent tendencies are likely to get worse.

Having a Special Branch to check for this kind of corruption in the rest of the service makes a lot of sense, and is an important check on police power. After all, a bad police officer is a scary thing. They are armed with weapons and power, and the judge will almost always take their word for how a situation went (unless there are photos or a video).

Changing balance

On Yes, Prime Minister, I think they were talking about the internal sort of Special Branch, looking for wrongdoing within powerful organizations. These days, I fear the outward-looking type of Special Branch has grown more powerful by comparison, partly by capitalizing on the fear people have of terrorism (despite the tiny chance of being a victim).

When people are fearful of non-governmental forces, they can easily err and make the government overly mighty. People also need to maintain in their minds the corresponding fear of abuse by government itself. The government is so powerful that it can do considerable harm by accident, and its control over information is such that we may never really know what accidents or abuse have taken place.

Terrorists can kill some innocent civilians – maybe a lot if they get hold of something dangerous. But the police can create a police state. They can seize the government with one of their own by force, if the other institutions of the state become weak enough. We need independent people watching over them more than we need them to be looking into the local radical cell.

iTunes 10.1.1 (4) bug

One really annoying bug exists in iTunes 10.1.1 (4). When you buy a track from the iTunes Store, it doesn’t go into Apple’s default ‘Recently Added’ smart playlist. This makes it so you have basically two different ‘inboxes’ for new songs, podcasts, etc. You need to remember whether you bought a song on iTunes, ripped it from a CD, or downloaded it as a free podcast, etc.

It would be better if songs you purchased appeared in ‘Recently Added’ along with everything else. It would be especially useful when traveling and listening to previously-downloaded podcasts.

The CBC is growing on me

I wasn’t always the biggest fan of the CBC. I found the argument that we have plenty of diversity in commercial stations relatively convincing. More recently, I have found myself more appreciative of public broadcasters including the CBC and – for international news – the BBC. They do cover politics well.

In addition to providing good content with no advertising, they both run very useful websites.