Tag: technology

Mailvox: alternative credentials

ML’s experiences in computer programming have been similar to mine.

 Your posts regarding the college gender gap have been
fascinating.  I graduated in 2001 with a degree in computer science.  At
the time, our program had about ten women.  As it happens, two of them
happened to end up in a few of my upper division classes.  They were
both mediocre programmers at best.  From what I gathered they graduated
by hanging out in the lab and “collaborating” with the beta, gamma, and
omega males working on their own projects.

I went on to work at IBM for twelve years as a
software engineer.  By that time IBM had long been infected with the
diversity cancer and women in technology were vital to IBM’s success in
the global economy.  There were hundreds of women in my division and
while most of them were on the technical career track they worked mostly
as project managers or testers.  The women that started out in actual
software development positions did not last long.  They were frequently
promoted to management or moved to project management or test positions.

There were two notable exceptions.  In the mid to
late 80’s IBM experienced a shortage of software developers.  The
universities, typically lagging, had not yet created the programs to
educate programmers in sufficient numbers.  IBM decided it would offer
it’s semi-skilled workforce the opportunity to attend an in house
programming school.  Those that graduated were guaranteed promotions
from manufacturing and secretarial jobs to professional careers.  Since
IBM had a very large pool of candidates, it didn’t care about the
graduation rate.  The goal was to create functional programmers.  In
talking to the old timers I gather the program was very challenging.
 The only two competent female coders I came into contact with during my
time at IBM graduated from that program.  Both of these women were
exceptionally good, better than 90% of their male peers.  Even though
the program allowed women, graduating them was not mandatory.  In fact
women were not expected to graduate so those that did actually achieved
something meaningful.

You discuss alternative credentialing systems much
like IBMs old boot camp coming into existence.  How do you foresee these
systems withstanding the “need for diversity”.  Certainly no such
system would be successful at today’s diverse multicultural IBM.

There was one good female programmer at the small tech company of about 100 people where I worked for two years before starting my first game company. She was quite attractive too. But the other one spent years, literally years, finding creative ways to avoid doing anything at all. It was rather impressive in retrospect; I’m not even sure she knew how to program.

Diversity is a luxury item. The new credential systems spring up because there is a need for them, the old ones having been ruined by diversity, equality, and so forth. Whenever and wherever there is more need for actual performance than the pretense of it, people will find away to utilize them.

The history of the three-finger salute

Bill Gates appears to have not infrequently gotten things right by accident:

Speaking at a fundraising campaign at Harvard University, however, Gates
blamed IBM engineer David Bradley for the so-called “three-fingered
salute”, claiming that he had favoured a single button.

“We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard
design didn’t want to give us our single button,” he said.

Bradley originally designed Ctrl+Alt+Esc to trigger a reboot, but he found it
was too easy to bump the left side of the keyboard and reboot the computer
accidentally. He switched the key combination to Ctrl+Alt+Del – a
combination that was impossible to press with just one hand on the original
IBM PC keyboard.

One of the craziest things I ever saw was a programmer who designed a software program with a menu that you accessed by hitting Ctrl+Alt+F4+Del.  Intuitive and risk-free!

No, don’t go

Breaking up with Facebook is harder than breaking up with a real live individual:

According to journalist Sarah Kessler from FastCompany, leaving Facebook can be a long-winded and difficult process. After struggling to find the Delete Account option, which she eventually found by searching Google, she was met with photos of a selection of her Facebook friends with an automated message about how much they’d miss her if she left.

She was then asked to tell Facebook the reasons why she was leaving, which she said was due to privacy concerns, before Facebook tried to persuade her to stay by explaining more about how the site handles private data.

Facebook warned her that by deleting her account she’d lose all of her photos and posts, before trying to convince her to stay by telling her she could deactivate her account for as long as she liked, and then just login to reactivate.

By deactivating, everything on her profile would stay where it is but would become hidden in case she wanted to return to the site.

I wonder how long it will take before Facebook starts actively stalking people?  I never log into my account there and it was constantly pleading at me to pay it attention until I finally spammed its email.

Facebook, free speech, and the FBI

Yes, American, you are now officially living in a police state possessed of an all-seeing eye the likes of which even the Soviets and East Germans never managed to achieve:

A
man says that within hours of making an impassioned post on Facebook,
he was being interrogated by police and the FBI. Blaine Cooper, 33,
contacted policestateusa.com with a concerning story about how his
sentiments posted on Facebook had drawn the attention of the federal
government.  He showed me the comment and told me that within 24-hours
of posting it, he was being contacted by the police and FBI.

His
colorful comment was in reference to what he believes is an “American
Police State,” in which the power of the federal government is growing
in a direction which may one day lead people to fight back.

Cooper,
who is training to be a wild land fire fighter, said that on August 23,
he was contacted by Officer Jason Kuafman of the Prescott Valley Police
Department and was told that he needed to come to the police station
for an interview with the FBI.

He complied with the
request for an interview, which lasted 45 minutes with federal agents
present.  He was released after apparently being determined to not be a
threat.

“They had every Facebook post I had ever made
in a huge file, along with all my wife’s information, and parent’s
information,” Cooper told policestateusa.com.

I
sometimes feel as if I should take requests from the federal agents
charged with monitoring this blog.  I mean, if I knew the usual guy was a
Jets fan or particularly into Asian women, I’d feel obliged to
occasionally surf through a few Jets sites or hit up Hot Asian Babes
every now and then. While I’m obviously opposed to the universal spying
system and I think it is the very definition of the sort of fragile
system that predictably ends in chaos and tears, the actual individuals
are basically the Internet equivalent of the late-night security guard.

What
is there to do?  Either go entirely dark or flood them with
information.  Those are your two options.  Nothing else is even remotely
viable.

Mailvox: The Bank of Internet

If Amazon can’t make money as a retailer, perhaps it can do so as the Central Bank of Internet:

Two of my overseas contributors have asked to be
paid not via PayPal in their local currencies *or* in U.S. dollars.
Instead, they prefer to receive payment in the form of Amazon gift card
credits.

And a new global medium of exchange emerges…

Given the problems that Amazon is having which Karl Denninger has chronicled, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them introduce some sort of rival to PayPal before the end of the year.  Because they make no profit margin on most of their non-media sales, and because international media growth was actually negative last quarter, they’re going to have to do something different.

And as one banker I knew once told me, nothing makes money like money. Jeff Bezos is a smart guy, so if it so obvious that even we can see it, he’s probably already got it in the works.

How Steve Jobs sank Apple’s case

Beldar sums up the Apple price-fixing case and quotes the judge’s decision:

“On January 27, Jobs launched the iPad. As part of a beautifully
orchestrated presentation, he also introduced the iPad’s e-reader
capability and the iBookstore. He proudly displayed the names and logos
of each Publisher Defendant whose books would populate the iBookstore.
To show the ease with which an iTunes customer could buy a book,
standing in front of a giant screen displaying his own iPad’s screen,
Jobs browsed through his iBooks “bookshelf,” clicked on the “store”
button in the upper corner of his e-book shelf display, watched the
shelf seamlessly flip to the iBookstore, and purchased one of Hachette’s
NYT Bestsellers, Edward M. Kennedy’s memoir, True Compass, for $14.99. With one tap, the e-book was downloaded, and its cover appeared on Jobs’s bookshelf, ready to be opened and read.

“When asked by a reporter later that day why people would pay $14.99
in the iBookstore to purchase an e-book that was selling at Amazon for
$9.99, Jobs told a reporter, “Well, that won’t be the case.” When the
reporter sought to clarify, “You mean you won’t be 14.99 or they won’t
be 9.99?” Jobs paused, and with a knowing nod responded, “The price will
be the same,” and explained that “Publishers are actually withholding
their books from Amazon because they are not happy.” With that
statement, Jobs acknowledged his understanding that the Publisher
Defendants would now wrest control of pricing from Amazon and raise
e-book prices, and that Apple would not have to face any competition
from Amazon on price.

“The import of Jobs’s statement was obvious. On January 29, the
General Counsel of [Simon & Schuster] wrote to [the CEO of S&S,
Carolyn] Reidy that she “cannot believe that Jobs made the statement”
and considered it “[i]ncredibly stupid.””

Beldar sums up the decision: “This is just a methodical thrashing. In every appeal, the first thing
the appellate judges (and their law clerks) read is the district judge’s
opinion. After reading this one, I think almost any appellate judge is
going to be favorably impressed with its comprehensiveness and clarity.
It’s the kind of opinion after which you exhale and say, “Whew! That’s
going to be hard to fault in any significant way.””

And so the expected post-Jobs descent of Apple begins.

Datagate goes international

I was catching up on the Italian news this morning and saw that Datagate is what the Italian press is calling the explosive new revelations that the NSA has secret agreements with European countries to spy on European citizens as well. The news is not quite so readily available in English, although Prachi Gupta’s article at Salon is still accessible:

The
NSA has been working with at least seven European other countries to
collect personal communications data, according to Wayne Madsen, a
former NSA contractor who has come forward because he does not think the
public should not be “kept in the dark.” According to Madsen, Denmark,
the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy all have formed secret
agreements with the US to submit sensitive data.

The Guardian reports:

Under
international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified
documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust
level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third
party relationships.

In an interview published last night on the PrivacySurgeon.org blog,
Madsen, who has been attacked for holding controversial views on
espionage issues, said he had decided to speak out after becoming
concerned about the “half story” told by EU politicians regarding the
extent of the NSA’s activities in Europe.

He said that under the
agreements, which were drawn up after the second world war, the “NSA
gets the lion’s share” of the sigint “take”. In return, the third
parties to the NSA agreements received “highly sanitised intelligence”.

The
news could be potentially damaging to countries, particularly Germany,
whose chancellor Angela Merkel has vocally condemned the NSA program
that recently came to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

This sounds like Echelon on steroids, dwarfing anything Orwell imagined in Big Brother. Moreover, as La Repubblica reports, the Observer article has already been removed from the web “pending an investigation: 

“Datagate, anche l’Italia collabora” 
Poi il Guardian rimuove la pagina web
Il Telegraph: quella fonte è inaffidabile
Foto Ma l’articolo è comunque finito in edicola

“Datagate, Italy also collaborates”
Afterwards the Guardian removes the web page
The Telegraph[sic]: that source is not found
Photo But the article is nevertheless still on the newspaper stand

Note that La Repubblica mistakenly refers to The Telegraph when the link actually refers to The Guardian.  These revelations should give a massive boost to the growing anti-Merkel forces in Germany, as it reveals her to be a shameless and bald-faced liar.

Snowdon and the secret cyber army

Although, given its functions and capabilities, secret cyber Praetorian Guard would appear to be a more historically relevant description:

With his revelations exposing the extent of potential, and actual, pervasive NSA surveillance over the American population, Edward Snowden has done a great service for the public by finally forcing it to answer the question: is having Big Brother peek at every private communication and electronic information, a fair exchange for the alleged benefit of the state’s security. Alas, without further action form a population that appears largely numb and apathetic to disclosures that until recently would have sparked mass protests and toppled presidents, the best we can hope for within a political regime that has hijacked the democratic process, is some intense introspection as to what the concept of “America” truly means.

However, and more importantly, what Snowden’s revelations have confirmed, is that behind the scenes, America is now actively engaged in a new kind of war: an unprecedented cyber war, where collecting, deciphering, intercepting, and abusing information is the only thing that matters and leads to unprecedented power, and where enemies both foreign and domestic may be targeted without due process based on a lowly analyst’s “whim.”

It has also put spotlight on the man, who until recently deep in the shadows, has been responsible for building America’s secret, absolutely massive cyber army, and which according to a just released Wired profile is “capable of launching devastating cyberattacks. Now it’s ready to unleash hell.”

Meet General Keith Alexander, “a man few even in Washington would likely recognize”, which is troubling because Alexander is now quite possibly the most powerful person in the world, that nobody talks about. 

I have little doubt that General Alexander is, within the constraints imposed upon him by the nature of his job and career path, a decent man who operates within the limits that have been set for him by his superiors, though obviously not the legal ones imposed by the U.S. Constitution.  However, it doesn’t take a superintelligence or a Roman historian to figure out where this arrangement is likely to end up as soon as a sufficiently ambitious or ideologically driven individual manages to take control of the cyberwar apparatus.

Meanwhile, Edward Snowden has safely landed in Moscow and a ship bound for Syria, rumored to be carrying American weapons for the Syrian rebels, has mysteriously cracked in two on the high seas and has been abandoned.

Curiouser and curiouser….

UPDATE: It appears Mr. Snowden is heading for Ecuador:

“The government of Ecuador has received an asylum request from Edward J.
Snowden,” Patino said. WikiLeaks said in a statement that Mr Snowden is “bound for the Republic
of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being
escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.”