Tag: technology

The need to restrict drone use

Those discussing the use of killer drones, both pro and con, at the New York Times somehow managed to completely fail to consider the two most problematic aspects of their use:

One point in favor of drone strikes is that they are weakening Al
Qaeda, the Taliban and affiliated groups, and hence protecting lives,
American and other.

Also, there don’t seem to be better means of doing
so.

Points against drone strikes are the cost in civilian lives, the
alienation of parts of the Islamic world, potential harm to the
authority of international law, and the possibility that drone use will
spread around the world, generating more conflict and harming long-term
U.S. interests.

These are all valid points, and I respect that reasonable people
could be convinced by either set. My own reasoning turns on four
arguments.

  1. First, states have a primary responsibility for the protection of
    their own citizens. If drone strikes are the best way to remove an
    all-too-real threat to American lives, then that is an especially
    weighty consideration.
  2. Second, I doubt that ending drone strikes would substantially reduce
    anti-Americanism in the Islamic world or put a dent in radical
    recruitment.
  3. Third, the U.S can do a lot to moderate some harms caused by its use
    of drones. By being clearer about what it’s doing and offering detailed
    legal justification, the U.S. could mitigate damage to international
    law and the threat of uncontrolled proliferation.
  4. Finally, there is evidence that drone strikes are less harmful to
    civilians than other means of reaching Al Qaeda and affiliates in
    remote, lawless regions (for example, large-scale military operations).

There are two serious problems with the use of drones overseas, both of which outweigh their potential benefits.  First, it has successfully established a precedent for using them domestically for routine law enforcement.  Second, and more problematic, the administration has foolishly granted a comprehensive justification for the use of drones by foreign forces against Americans on American soil.  When foreign militaries acquire access to drones, and they will, the US will find little sympathy from other nations when the equivalent of Hellfire missiles begin raining down on New York and California.

And the threat of disproportionate response won’t necessarily be a convincing deterrent, because clever attackers will be careful to disguise who is piloting the drone.  An Iranian drone might actually belong to China.  A Chinese drone might actually be utilized by American rebels… or by China making it look like American rebels.  The widespread use of drones is a very foolish move on the part of the U.S. Commander-in-Chief and can be safely expected to result in some serious blowback.

Bombs before GDP

Karl Denninger considers the problem of energy production in a world of increasingly expensive oil and coal:

We experimented with Thorium as a nuclear fuel in the 1950s
and 1960s.  Carried in a molten salt there are a number of significant
advantages to this fuel cycle.  Chief among them is that the reactors
operate at atmospheric pressure, have a strongly-negative temperature
coefficient (that is, reactivity drops as temperature increases) and
because they operate with their fuel dispersed in the coolant and rely
on a fixed moderator in the reaction vessel shutting them down is
simply a matter of draining the working fuel into a tank with sufficient
surface area to dissipate decay heat.  This can be accomplished
passively; active cooling of a freeze plug in the bottom of the reactor
vessel can be employed during normal operation and if for any reason
that cooling is lost the plug melts, the coolant and working fluid
drains to tanks and the reactor shuts down.  In addition thorium is about as abundant in the environment as is lead, making its supply effectively infinite.

Finally, these reactors operate at a much
higher temperature; the units we have run (yes, we’ve built them
experimentally in the 1950s – 1970s!) run in the neighborhood of 650C. 
This allows closed-cycle turbine systems that are more efficient than
the conventional turbines in existing designs, making practical the
location of reactors in places that don’t have large amounts of water
available.  That in turn means that the risk of geological and other
similar accidents (e.g. tsunamis!) is greatly reduced or eliminated. 
Finally, the fuel cycle is mostly-closed internally;
that is, rather than requiring both fast-breeder reactors and external
large-scale reprocessing plants to be practical, along with a way to
store a lot of high-level waste these units burn up most of their
high-level waste internally and produce their own fuel internally as
well as an inherent part of their operation.

So why didn’t we pursue this path for nuclear power?

That’s simple: It is entirely-unsuitable for production of nuclear bombs as it produces negligible amounts of plutonium.

A decision that might have made sense in the middle of the 1950s arms
race doesn’t make sense more than 60 years later.  So, why aren’t we
utilizing thorium-based nuclear power plants?

Apple’s high water mark

All declines have to begin from a high, and with regards to Apple, it would appear to be all downhill from here.  A few weeks ago, I ranted about the way Apple’s walled garden and forced upgrade approach was being adopted by foolish technology companies.  Two of our four Kobos ended up bricked, both due to the same buggy updated firmware; I could have avoided bricking the second one were I not inadvertently forced into an unwanted update by the computer software.

Apple was able to get away with this very risky strategy due to it being run by a perfectionist, detail-oriented, technofascist.  It didn’t matter if the updates were forced, because anyone working for Steve Jobs was going to be triple-damn certain that the updates would work properly… or at least not contain any fatal bugs.  Now that Jobs is gone, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that Apple is running into the same kind of bugs that plague most of the other companies that stupidly tried to imitate it.  I received this email from a friend of mine who was so bold as to update his iPhone to iOS 6:

I updated my iphone to IOS6 last night. New
app appeared called ‘passbook’ which apparently is ‘the simplest way to
get all your passes in one place’ … except it doesn’t connect to the
itunes store. Also I found I had lost
all my playlists from my music … this also happened to a friend but his
have since automagically reappeared … mine haven’t so far!

It’s now been two days and he is still missing his playlists.  Not a big deal, hardly a fatal bug, and yet likely indicative of more serious problems to come in the future.  Meanwhile, Karl Denninger notes that Apple has forced its users to give up Google Maps in favor of its own lower-quality map software.  It’s far too soon to pronounce final judgment, but these recent events tend to bolster my expectation that the second post-Jobs era at Apple is not going to go any better than the first one did.

What could go wrong?

One of the minor problems with being forced into a centralized data system is that you have to assume that the centralizer is as careful with your data as you are. Which, of course, is seldom the case:

Apple faced a major embarrassment on the eve of the launch of its new iPhone when hackers published a trove of sensitive information about 1m Apple devices online. The hacker group AntiSec, an offshoot of the Anonymous and Lulzsec collectives which last year targeted Sony, News International and others in a high-profile wave of attacks, said it had obtained the database of Apple device-identifiers from an FBI agent’s laptop.

The hackers claim this is just a sample from 12m records, which they say include the full names, street addresses and mobile phone numbers of owners of Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. Several security researchers verified the published data are genuine, but said they present little risk to the people involved as long as the other details are not released.

Antisec should go ahead and release the whole kit and kaboodle. Perhaps the fanbois will finally learn a salient lesson concerning the wisdom of trusting Apple, Facebook, Google, or any other company attempting to utilize the walled garden model.

If you’re an Apple user who wants to find out if your device was compromised, The Next Web has created an online tool that lets you do so if you know your UDID.

Blogger and the Apple Vay

You vill have it our vay. You vill not have it your vay no more, hein? Your vay is old and schlecht. Our vay ist neu and gut and you must to use it so zat alles ist in ordnung!

The old Blogger interface will be removed in the coming days.

We’ve made many improvements to the new Blogger interface.

You can upgrade to the new interface at any time.

The thing is, I don’t want to upgrade to the new Blogger interface. I tried it. And I disliked it. So I went back to the old one, only now they are taking that option away from me. And for what? So Blogger’s engineers can feel as if they have something to do? How does forcing all their bloggers to use the new interface benefit Blogger in any way?

Now, the new interface isn’t absolutely awful, so I’m not going to drop Blogger over it, but it adds absolutely nothing as far as I’m concerned. It’s not as if I’m a Luddite, as I use the new Blogger template at Alpha Game and even tried twice – and failed twice – to use it to recreate the functionality of this blog. But I truly do not understand why so many technology companies insist on not only fixing things that are not broken, but forcing their users to adopt the “New and Improved” versions.

This is especially problematic when the forced upgrade actually breaks the product and there is no way to go back to the previous version. The last Kobo upgrade actually bricked two out of the three eReaders. Apple can get away with this sort of thing because it was run by an insane perfectionist. But I suspect disaster eventually looms for any company that forces upgrades, because it is an excellent way of creating the possibility of losing all of your customers simultaneously.

The Apple-Samsung debacle

It would appear fairly obvious that Apple’s patent infringement award will not only be appealed, but reversed and thrown out.

Apple v. Samsung juror Manuel Ilagan said the nine-person jury that heard the patent infringement case between the companies knew after the first day that it believed Samsung had wronged Apple…. The decision was very one-sided, but Ilagan said it wasn’t clear the jurors were largely in agreement until after the first day of deliberations.

“It didn’t dawn on us [that we agreed that Samsung had infringed] on the first day,” Ilagan said. “We were debating heavily, especially about the patents on bounce back and pinch-to-zoom. Apple said they owned patents, but we were debating about the prior art [about the same technology that Samsung said existed before the iPhone debuted]. [Velvin Hogan] was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself. In the beginning the debate was heated, but it was still civil. Hogan holds patents, so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent — what was prior art –because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn’t something out there before Apple.

“In fact we skipped that one,” Ilagan continued, “so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down.” …

“Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents,” Ilagan said, “it’s easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel…then you go down the products to see if it had a bezel. But we took our time. We didn’t rush. We had a debate before we made a decision. Sometimes it was getting heated.”

Regardless of what you think of patents or Apple, the fact that the jury didn’t even look at all the prior art should be sufficient to get a judge to look at this again. And the jury foreman sounds like an Apple plant, or at least fanboi.

Rotten to the core

In case you are wondering, not only is Apple an intrinsically evil, technofascist company, but the Apple Geniuses are even bigger tools that you likely imagined:

It was bad, and it wasn’t just a bunch of young punks working the system; the corruption rained down from above and pooled deep at the bottom.

Jake and Ronald both spoke with smiles and contempt about their former boss-of-bosses, a regional manager from Apple corporate who they allege ran the store like it was her own personal playground. Jake says the rest of the gang wasn’t much better. “It bends my brain to know that, statistically speaking, it’s harder to get a job at the Apple Store than it is to get into some Ivy League schools,” he says. “Yet somehow they’re staffed by some of the most inept people this side of mastering the ability to speak.”

I liked Apple a lot better back in the //e days.

Anklebiters will bite

Requiring real names does not reduce unwanted comments:

YouTube has joined a growing list of social media companies who think that forcing users to use their real names will make comment sections less of a trolling wasteland, but there’s surprisingly good evidence from South Korea that real name policies fail at cleaning up comments. In 2007, South Korea temporarily mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names, but scrapped it after it was found to be ineffective at cleaning up abusive and malicious comments (the policy reduced unwanted comments by an estimated .09%).

I think some people fail to understand why I delete anonymous comments. There are two reasons. The first is that it is difficult to keep track of who is saying what when there are multiple anonymous commenters. The second is that if you can’t be bothered to take the three steps required to click Name/URL, enter a name, and click okay, the chances that you are going to say anything that requires notice are nil.

I’m not saying that it is necessary to register with anyone or provide your real name, the point is to maintain a consistent identity so that people can connect one comment with another. But that identity need not be linked to your actual identity. The ineffectivness of requiring real identities in nominal pursuit of civility is useful information, however, because it demonstrates that the real object of the campaign against Internet anonymity is something other than civility.

Women ruin everything: DEFCON edition

From atheist conferences to hacker conferences, women are complaining about them:

[E]veryone at DEFCON benefits from more women attending. Women “hackers” – in the creative technologist sense – are everywhere, and many of them are brilliant, interesting, and just plain good company (think Limor Fried, Jeri Ellsworth, and Angela Byron). Companies recruiting for talent get access to the full range of qualified applicants, not just the ones who can put up with a brogrammer atmosphere. We get more and better talks on a wider range of subjects. Conversations are more fun. Conferences and everyone at them loses when amazing women don’t attend.

When you say, “Women shouldn’t go to DEFCON if they don’t like it,” you are saying that women shouldn’t have all of the opportunities that come with attending DEFCON: jobs, education, networking, book contracts, speaking opportunities – or else should be willing to undergo sexual harassment and assault to get access to them. Is that really what you believe?

Yes. Absolutely. The conference should do everything it legally can to dissuade “amazing women” from attending. Because what this foolish woman, in her obvious ignorance of cause-and-effect, is asserting that the absolute highest priority of the conference should be that women feel comfortable. The problem is that once that principle is established, the seeds of the conference’s destruction will have been planted, because women will always find a reason to claim they are uncomfortable. No one at DEFCON would benefit in the long term from more women attending, at least not under that principle, because it only creates more opportunities for women to feel uncomfortable. Therefore, more female attendees would eventually eviscerate DEFCON as the small core of male attendees who actually make the conference valuable would stop attending as their activities increasingly infringed upon female comfort. History is very clear on the way women degrade every male institution they successfully invade that they do not succeed in destroying entirely.

Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the policy statement recommended by one of her commenters: “This conference is for everybody and everybody visiting this conference should feel comfortable, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion.” That’s not a hacker conference policy, that’s one establishing a comfort conference. The priority defines the purpose.

And lest you think I exaggerate concerning what might be erroneously dismissed as a slippery slope argument: “These guys can rationalize until they’re blue in the face but IT IS NEVER OKAY TO GIVE A LADY THE HEEBIE JEEBIES!”

We’re not even 100 years into the great equalitarian experiment and Western civilization is already on the verge of economic and demographic collapse. This is not a coincidence. Consider that it only took 79 years for the United Kingdom to go from granting all women over the age of 21 the franchise to voluntarily surrendering its national sovereignty in the Lisbon Treaty. When the Sports Guy said “the lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything”, he spoke nothing but the bitter truth.

Sheep for the shearing

There’s gold in them thar fools:

Orbitz Worldwide Inc. has found that people who use Apple Inc.’s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see. The Orbitz effort, which is in its early stages, demonstrates how tracking people’s online activities can use even seemingly innocuous information—in this case, the fact that customers are visiting Orbitz.com from a Mac—to start predicting their tastes and spending habits.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Mac users also have more debt than Windows or Linux users. Of course, one thing that Orbitz may not have learned in their research is that Mac users spend infinitely more than Linux users on hotels, since Linux users build their own shelters whenever they travel.

True science fact: there are no homeless people in America. Did you really think it was a coincidence that the standard “homeless” look is a strung-out, bearded, middle-aged white man?