Anomaly UK – Page 67 – Anomalous Opinions

Phones

This kind of thing is what really drives me nuts.

“Mobiles are believed to have been used by the 7/7 bombers as timers in their rucksack bombs” – well, if you want to use them as timers you can buy them second hand from a car boot sale, you don’t need a network.

I would like to know what is being done about shoes. All the London terrorists wore shoes, and without shoes they would probably not have been anything like as effective. Yet one can walk into a shop in any town in Britain, and buy a pair of shoes, cash down; no ID, no questions. Don’t these people realise we’re AT WAR???

In the same way that stuff which appears in the newspapers a lot is stuff which is newsworthy, and therefore rare, human rights which get a lot of publicity are those which are argued about, and therefore marginal. The really really basic human rights, like the right to buy a pair of shoes or a telephone without being required by the government to register yourself as the owner, are so obvious that we don’t even think about them as human rights, which is a shame, because we let government get away with taking them away far more readily than we do the marginal cases.

The other element here is a kind of “aquis communitaire” of police powers. As an implementation detail of the telecoms industry, there used to be a practical necessity to provide a name and address to get use of a telephone. With the technological innovation of call rating on the switch, pay as you go became possible and therefore anonymous access to telephones. (I recall with embarrassment that when I went to a meeting with Ericsson sales-people pushing this new technology, I didn’t see what the big deal was). The police, having got used to the convenience of access to telephone records, feel that some obvious, essential police tool (which in fact would never have been given to them in the first place except by accident) has been taken away from them, and that the law must be changed to give it back. Again, because people are used to the idea that police can find out who made a phone call, they are more sympathetic to it than they would be out of the blue.

There is an obvious parallel to the attitude of copyright owners.

Kidnapped

I don’t have much patience with those who spend a lot of time whining about the trains. I don’t see obvious signs of gross stupidity or incompetence, and the regular problems – delays due to mechanical failures, weather, staff shortages, whatever, can only obviously be fixed by spending more money, which would have to come from me or from taxpayers.
So in the normal way of things, the fact that I was delayed by 40 minutes coming home on Friday would not be anything to make a fuss of.
On this occasion, the train reached Luton in good time. However, the door didn’t open. Pointing this out to a nearby member of the catering staff, we were told there was a problem with the door but it would open in a minute. After a couple of minutes, an announcement came that passengers in the rear four coaches should move up to the first class area to exit the train. Five or six of us did so, but on reaching the first class area we were informed that we were too late, that the doors were closed and could not be re-opened.
The train at this point was still stationary at the platform.
Again, if it were true that it was impossible (or unsafe) to open the doors at that point, then the whole thing would have been a badly handled technical problem – basically business as usual. But I seriously doubt that. I suspect that, at the cost of some delay and inconvenience, the train could have been held and we could have been allowed to leave the train. The staff involved chose to avoid that inconvenience by taking several passengers ten miles out of their way.
I don’t like whining – what am I going to do about this that is productive? First, advice. If you are on a Midland Mainline train and the doors don’t open, immediately raise hell. Ignore what you are told, charge up and down the train looking for a working door, and make a lot of noise. If there is any suggestion that you will not be allowed to leave, pull the emergency alarm without hesitation.
This is the opposite of what I would previously have advised. For the sake of safety and smooth running, one should stay calm, follow instructions, and trust that you will be treated reasonably. My bitterness is due to that trust to have been proved to be misplaced.
The second step I am considering is going to the police. If a taxi driver, say, refused to let a passenger out at the destination, and abandoned them ten miles away, I’m sure criminal charges could be brought. Since, in this case, I believe that a deliberate decision was made not to let us off where they had agreed to do, the situation appears to be equivalent. I can’t be bothered asking for compensation for what is, in effect, a fairly ordinary delay, but the member of the train staff that decided to keep us on a train against our will and against the prior agreement ought to be fined or imprisoned.

Microsoft Bugs

A question at the end of an article on how the Microsoft X-Box security (designed to prevent unauthorised code being run) was broken:

512 bytes is a very small amount of code (it fits on a single sheet of paper!), compared to the megabytes of code contained in software like Windows, Internet Explorer or Internet Information Server. Three bugs within these 512 bytes compromised the security completely – a bunch of hackers found them within days after first looking at the code. Why hasn’t Microsoft Corp. been able to do the same? Why?

It’s a good question. There are a few plausible explanations:

The design team were aware that the task of making it secure was an impossible one, and put just enough effort in to show willing, or to qualify as an “access control system” for legal purposes.
The design was done in an insane rush, due to last-minute architectural compromises or general managerial incompetence.
One or more of the designers secretly felt that the more the customer could do with the device, the better it would be, and in effect sabotaged a feature which had the purpose of limiting what the customer could do with it.

But my favourite theory is quality control. The biggest obstacle I face as a programmer to producing high quality software is the system of controls intended to make sure the software I produce is of high quality.

The major mechanism is obtaining approvals from people who have a vague idea of what the software is supposed to do, no idea at all of how it is supposed to do it, and little interest in the whole process. Other mechanisms involve using, or avoiding, particular tools or techniques.

What they all have in common is that they require me to subordinate my own engineering choice for some one else’s, quite likely someone who not only has less knowledge of the specific question, but of the relevant general principles. This extends even to questions of who else to involve: if the bureaucracy says I have to get sign-off from person A, then person A gets to check the product ahead of person B, even if, left to myself, I would choose to ask person B to check it in preference, due to person B’s greater expertise or interest.

The bureaucrats would say it is a question of trust – the checks are in place so that management can take direct responsibility for the quality of the product, rather than just taking my word for it. I do not find this at all offensive; it is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to want. The problem is that it doesn’t work. It is always possible to “go through the motions” of doing the procedures, but there is almost no value in it. Getting it right always takes a mental effort, a positive commitment. I don’t blame them for not trusting me to do it, but they don’t have any choice.

The general ineffectiveness of quality control policy is masked by the usefulness of systematic testing. It is possible for a less-involved person to ask for, and check, tests – particularly regression tests on a new version of a product – and achieve significant quality benefits from doing so. As testing of this kind is generally part of the general battery of ceremonial procedures, the uselessness of all the others is less obvious than it would otherwise be. But there are many failures that this kind of testing doesn’t catch (and, therefore, which over-emphasis on this kind of testing will increase the occurence of), and practically all security issues are in this category.

I have no knowledge of the quality-control regime at Microsoft: I’m just speculating based on my observation that a ceremony-heavy process can produce bad code of a kind that would be almost inexplicable otherwise. In this case, there are other reasonably plausible explanations, which I already listed.

(via Bruce Schneier)

(See also LowCeremonyMethods)

Perspective

Yasin Omar will be forgotten. Al-Zawahiri will be a footnote. The July bombings will be a detail of history, but people will still talk about the 2005 Edgbaston Ashes Test.

When my children are grown up, the names of Flintoff and Warne will trip off the tongues of commentators like those of Laker or Sobers. The last-wicket heroics of Simon Jones, Lee and Kasprowicz will be flashed up as benchmarks when unlikely batsmen struggle on. Warne’s unbelievable leg-break to Strauss, Flintoff’s first-ball perfect yorker to Kasprovicz, and Harmison’s ingenious disposal of Clarke deserve to be held up as exemplars of bowling’s arts, while Flintoff’s nine sixes will inspire a generation. And the two-run margin of victory, after twenty hours of unique cricket, will be remembered by all of us that sat through those nail-biting final minutes (I actually threw up) for the rest of our lives.

All that, and there are still three matches to go in the series.

The War on Housing

Today sees the 50th anniversary of Britain’s biggest problem – the Green Belt.

Almost everything that is deeply wrong with Britain – the low birth rate, transport, even the poor Test performance – can be traced at least in part back to this piece of authoritarian stupidity. Whereas for centuries the bulk of the population suffered in inadequate housing because of the cost of building, now technology has made building cheaper than ever, and the cost of housing is higher than ever because an alliance of the powerful and the environmental primitivists cannot tolerate the thought of the plebs having comfortable and spacious accomodation. Remember
the report that showed that more than two-thirds of those Americans officialy in poverty had more than two rooms per person?

To rehash an earlier posting, the great illusion that the Green Belt policy was based on is that a large proportion of Britain is already built up. If you examine the land use statistics, something like 90-95% of the land area is undeveloped. While countries like the USA or Australia have, on paper, much lower average population density, that in practice includes vast useless deserts or grazing land – the presence or absence of such are not really relevant to the urban or suburban masses.

There are obvious reasons why the War on Housing has been so much more successful than, say, the War on Some Drugs, but the contrast is striking. Articles about record low street prices for recreational drugs are almost as common as articles about record high prices for houses. Meanwhile, Prescott struts around, appointing one spot or another as the site for a few new houses – mostly, the vast tracts of land being industrially and unprofitably farmed to produce unwanted food being too valuable, unvalued sites such as school playing fields or inner-city “brownfield” meadows which are the only bits of greenery some inner-city children ever see.

War on Squirrels

Two views from my blogroll: Eric Raymond says

The choice between “support the war” and “allow the pressure off of enemies who want to kill us all” is not a difficult one. As a libertarian, I’m deeply sorry we live in a world where governments are doing the fighting for us, and I fear the consequences of the power they will amass while doing so. But I don’t see an alternative.

While Nick Seddon says

… it is wrong to treat this as a war. Or rather, it is possible to prevent this becoming a war. Much as evangelicals (the kind who read the metaphor of the armour of God at the end of Ephesians in literal terms) and neocons (Mark Steyn’s article in The Spectator this week concludes, “If it’s a war, you can win it. Anything less is unlikely to end in victory.”) are keen on their gung-ho adrenaline, it will only make things worse to react as if this is a war of simple opposites, a clash of civilisations …

I set out to agree with Nick Seddon. But whenever I tried to form an argument of the form, “it’s wrong to say this is a war, because if it was a war then ….” I had nothing to complete the sentence with. Not “nothing that supported my argument”, nothing at all. To me, deciding whether the situation is or is not a war leads to no policy conclusions at all. No measure I can think of would automatically be appropriate “because we are in a war”. Wars come in all shapes and sizes, even leaving aside questionable entrants like the “War on Drugs” or the “Cold War”.

It’s like the the old story of the squirrel, the hunter and the tree.

Now here’s an odd thing. Having written the above, I thought I’d show off my erudition, or “ability to use google”, by giving a better reference to the squirrel. In fact it’s from William James. But check out the page that came up when I looked it up. Maybe one day I’ll come up with something original.

Filesharing cases

The BPI (British Phonographic Institute) is suing five users of filesharing software for unauthorised distribution of copyrighted music. (The Register)

I support them in this action. A case can be made for abolishing or severely curtailing traditional copyright protections, and I am sympathetic to some of the arguments, but I do not see the issue as nearly clear-cut enough to justify ignoring or defying the law as it stands.

The copyright industries have made a lot of enemies by seeking (with considerable success) to vastly expand the scope and power of copyright law (and, in the case of software patent law). I am proud to count myself among those enemies. I strongly oppose:

Legal restriction on the production, distribution or use of tools or techniques that can be used to infringe copyrights.
Special police powers for investigating copyright infringements, over and above those that apply to other kinds of civil-law actions.
Expansion of the scope of intellectual property, for example extension of terms or application of patent law to computer software.
Ignoring or brushing aside the moral, legal and practical differences between “Intellectual Property” and actual property.

The suits under discussion involve of none of those – they are an entirely legitimate application of traditional copyright principles. It is by no means certain that traditional copyright law will be sufficient to preserve the plaintiffs’ business model in the face of technological and economic change, but that is their problem, and they are fully entitled to try.

Humanitarian Intervention

Chrenkoff asks, since there are 250,000 Iraqis living in Britain, how come none of them are doing suicide bombings?

Separately, Judith Klinghoffer points out that two of the suspects are from Somalia, where the invasion by Westerners was carried out at the urging of the U.N., but was abandoned in the face of strong resistance.

At the same time, the anti-war Neil Craig reminds us of some of the uncomfortable facts about Western intervention in Yugoslavia.

Now my gut feeling has always been against sending armies overseas. It may come as a surprise to my (literally several) readers, and I tend to forget it myself, but if asked outright whether it was the right policy to invade Iraq in 2003, I would say I think it was probably wrong.

There are several reasons why, believing this, I still am generally much closer to the “Pro-war” side than the “Anti-war” side.

I think the policy, mistaken as it may have been, was nevertheless an improvement on the policy it replaced, as I discussed here.

I felt that the previous attack on Yugoslavia was so outrageous and unjustifiable, that to make a big fuss about the much more finely balanced question of Iraq was to show a lack of sense of proportion.
I had expected the operation in Afghanistan to be a failure, and, seeing it now as largely a success, I entertain the possibility that George Bush knows something I don’t.
Whatever the right answer to the difficult question in 2003, I am convinced that to cut and run from Iraq now would be a catastrophe. It would reinforce the most damaging belief held by Islamist terrorists — the illusion that they can beat us.
And at least there was a plausible national interest proposed for intervening in Iraq, unlike Yugoslavia or Somalia, and Bush was clear and explicit about it. I didn’t agree with Bush’s conclusions, but I liked his style.

Why are “humanitarian” military interventions so much worse in their effects than self-interested ones? I think partly it is related to the tragedy of plentiful raw materials.

It has often been observed that some of the richest countries are the ones with the least raw materials — Japan, the Netherlands, etc. At the same time some of the countries with the richest raw materials — much of Africa, Russia, South America, are among the poorest countries.

The most likely explanation is that, where things of value are easily available, either diamonds in Sierra Leone, or plentiful wild food crops, power will all go to those that can most easily dominate the available resources – bandits and warlords. Where survival requires actually making things, banditry will still exist, but there must be a structure in society that leaves some power to the people who make or grow stuff. It is that societal structure that enables further development.

Likewise, when a “humanitarian” force gets involved in a conflict the incentives for the factions change. It becomes most important to influence the “humanitarians” I remember a British officer on U.N. duty in Sarajevo, in a press conference, saying that he had proof that both sides had deliberately shelled their own civilians, in an attempt to win sympathy from the other end of the TV cameras. I thought this was one of the most astonishing and major pieces of newsof the whole conflict, but I have never heard any mention of it again from that day to this.

Influencing the humanitarians is, in general, easy, because those who sent them are mainly concerned with “doing something to help”, and not with the nasty details of the situation. One of the reasons that I find Neil Craig‘s conspiracy theories about Yugoslavia far more believable than, for instance those of about the London bombs, is that fundamentally, nobody here really cared what was actually happening in Yugoslavia. We heard some sob stories, we said “something must be done”, we did something, the details of context and consequence are of only idle or passing interest. Conversely, we care deeply about what happens on the Piccadilly Line and why, and it will be very difficult to pull the wool over our eyes for more than a very short time. (Another consequence of the “fire-and-forget” nature of humanitarian interventions is the opportunity of private exploitation of the situation by the personnel involved, as I discussed here.)

Freedom and Photography

Further to my earlier piece, I’d like to point out what the “opposite” of having cameras everywhere is:

It’s having people follow you around to make sure you don’t take photographs.

That sounds silly, but it’s not hypothetical, it’s real, now.

Where’s the principle here? Am I more free if I can take a photograph in a public place, or if I can’t. And if I can, why can’t a shop-owner or a bus company or the police? And if I can’t, how intrusive to privacy is it going to be to stop me?

I admit that just because it is legal for someone to do something, that doesn’t make it good public policy for the Government to do it, too – that has to be argued separately.

But I do think the freedom to take photographs in public is more fundamental than any right not to be photographed in public.

Related: Kinds of Privacy

Crime and Terrorism

From time to time we hear criticism of the “crime-fighting” approach to counter-terrorism: the line is that the terrorists aren’t restrained by law, and we cannot afford to disadvantage ourselves against them.

As I mentioned previously, the flaw is that I as a civilian am at least as concerned not to be wrongly convicted of terrorism as of crime – removing the protection of the law for any action removes my certainty of not being punished without a chance to defend myself in court.

In any case, criminals aren’t restrained by law either, so what’s the difference?

Well, terrorism is a much bigger problem than crime, isn’t it? Um, isn’t it?

No, it isn’t. Check this out:

Violent death rate in Baghdad, from March 2003 to March 2005, from Iraq Body Count: 20.1 per 10,000 population. That’s 100 per 100,000 per year, and it includes the invasion itself. I can’t get accurate figures for the period after the invasion, but from the feel of the report, I would knock about a third off for “peacetime” Baghdad: say 70 per 100,000 per year

Murder rate in Washington, D.C. 69.3 per 100,000 per year.

That’s it – the capital of Iraq, the epicentre of world terrorist activity, has, as close as I can measure it, the same violent death rate as the capital of the USA with no terrorists.

OK, admittedly, Washington D.C has by far the worst murder rate of any “peaceful” city in the entire world, but compare any other city in the world to Baghdad, and terrorism is negligible.

Maybe, since car drivers kill more people than terrorists, we should suspend basic freedoms for drivers, as well.

Oh yeah, we did that.

Update: Apparently Scrivener discovered this back in January