Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Macs are also vulnerable

If you think your computer is secure because it is a Mac, you are dead wrong. The latest patch for OS X – 10.6.8 – contains 29 patches for security holes that allow arbitrary code execution. Any of those holes could be used to totally own your computer, circumventing any antivirus or encryption software you may be running. These 29 have been patched, but you can be sure there are others in the OS and in popular software like Flash and Adobe’s PDF reader.

If you want to keep a system safe, keep it physically disconnected from the internet.

Control time is a cost

In real-time strategy games – like the Starcraft, Warcraft, and Homeworld series’ – the player needs to collect resources of some kind, which are then invested in additional resource gathering capabilities as well as combat units. The ‘macro’ game consists of building up an economy that can support the military forces you wish to assemble. In many games, it is necessary to collect resources of different kinds, with different units requiring various combinations for purchase. For instance, Warcraft II required players to collect gold, wood, and oil. Starcraft and Starcraft II feature the collection of minerals and ‘vespene gas’.

Combat units also vary substantially in how much attention they require from the player. Some units can just be ordered to march in the general direction of the enemy, and then allowed to attack automatically. Other units require constant personal attention, for instance because their capabilities are centred around spells or special abilities that the unit will not use automatically. A unit like a Roach in Starcraft II falls into the first category – it doesn’t require much personal attention. By contrast, units like High Templar and Infestors can only be effective if the player’s attention is focused on them quite a bit.

I think it is sensible to think of the time spent controlling a unit as a cost closely equivalent to the resources invested in it. Indeed, the player’s time is probably the most fundamental resource in such games. Every second spend developing an economy is a second that cannot be spent on scouting the enemy, harassing their resource collection operations, or performing tactical strikes with combat units.

Something a bit similar may arise in turn-based games like chess, especially when a timer is involved. When a player is under pressure to make moves quickly and accurately, the time they need to spend working out the implications for each of their pieces is a real cost. For instance, it might put useful pressure on your opponent to have a bishop well ahead of your other forces, supported from behind. But for every move from that point on, you need to think about the implications of your moves and countermoves for that bishop, and the chances of making a mistake increase.

What Google knows

I wrote before about how Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan is really the minimum requirement for such a powerful organization.

Jacob Mchangama, a Danish human rights lawyer, has put this in a nice way: “The dream of all dictators is to know as much about you as Google does”.

Incidentally, that is all the more reason for companies like Google to refuse to comply with illegal search requests from governments.

Photos and asides

Sorry for the thin content here lately. I have been intensely busy with other things.

For instance, last night I took photos at a Young Canadians in Finance sponsored fundraiser for the United Way. The keynote speaker was Wayne Wouters – Clerk of the Privy Council and Canada’s top bureaucrat. The United Way has a press release up about the event, which includes one of my photos.

P.S. If you are planning to mail anything in Canada – or have anything mailed to you – it may be wise to do it soon.

P.P.S. You can solve chess endgames for free online, using the Nalimov Endgame Tablebases. Once you are down to six or fewer pieces (including kings), the number of possible chess positions falls off sharply. In fact, they can all be stored in just over 7 gigabytes of space.

Firefox avoiding duplicate tabs

Firefox 4.0.1 seems to have a new behaviour. If you try to enter an exact URL that you already have open in another tab, it jumps to the first instance rather than opening a new one.

That seems rather sensible, though the jump seems a bit abrupt. Still, it’s better than having piles of redundant and confusing content in your many Firefox windows. It’s especially confusing for me, since I am usually running Chrome and Safari for testing purposes at the same time.

Disaggregated data

About a week ago, I attended a discussion session and social event on ‘data journalism’. To a large degree, it was about converting datasets, many of them collected from governments, into news stories of interest to the general public. You can take crime data, for instance, and process it into a form with a lot of general appeal. The same goes for education, transport, and other topics.

One general point that the discussion reminded me of is the importance of aggregated versus disaggregated data. For example, saying that the average income in Happytown is $75,000 is quite different from providing the individual data points for every person in the town. If you give someone the first piece of data, all they can really do is report it and compare it with similar statistics. If you give them the disaggregated data, they can do all sorts of their own analysis. What do the top and bottom 10% of the population earn? Are there any high or low outsiders?

If the data is embedded in a database with other types of information, you can do even more fancy stuff. Which are the richest neighbourhoods in town? What level of education does the average person earning more than $100,000 possess? If you can link databases together, you can do even more. What kinds of crime are committed in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods? How about in the richest?

All this creates privacy risks, particularly given how data from different databases can be meshed together and used to identify individuals. There is also the risk of errors, if data from different sources is incorrectly integrated, or if the methodology of analysis is not sound. All the more reason why basic statistical literacy is an increasingly important piece of education to possess, for those trying to make sense of the world. Otherwise, you may fall victim to deeply faulty claims. The average income of a Happytown resident who owns a monocle may be $500,000, but that doesn’t mean that buying a monocle will make you rich.

Diaspora – a less evil Facebook?

I am increasingly wary of Facebook. I don’t trust them with my photos, phone number, or full name. I worry about all the information they can extrapolate from my web of friends.

My hope is that Disapora will emerge as a less evil social network – one that supplies the considerable benefits of social networking, but with real respect for the privacy and interests of users.

Thanks to my friend Alison, I have an account on the alpha version of Diaspora. I have some invitations, so if anyone is especially keen to give it a try, they should let me know.

Use a wiki to make a family tree

Yesterday it occurred to me that a wiki would be an ideal way to assemble a family tree.

People could be added in, with open fields where information about them can be added. There could be basic things – like dates of birth, marriage, and death – and more personal ones, like schools attended and so on.

By making it a wiki, the project wouldn’t put a huge burden on a single person, and everyone could easily contribute what they knew.

Custom software specifically intended for making family tree wikis would probably be better than using generic wiki software like MediaWiki. It could be tweaked to suit the purpose more intuitively and be easier to use.

Smartphones and location data

There have been some worrisome revelations recently about Apple and Google tracking people by the location of their cell phones. In Google’s case, the tracking may be part of an advertising strategy.

It seems like online privacy is really a losing battle these days. Perhaps consumer anger about these latest tracking allegations will encourage regulators to keep a closer eye on what sort of monitoring technologies are being deployed without the full understanding of consumers.