John LeCarre says...

"A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue."

His bio on his own website is crafted to this ideal.

I'm currently listening to "The Mission Song". Enjoying it, though it's a bit pedantic, and hard to follow some of the logic, given that I'm not as well acquainted with the politics of the Congo and Rwanda as I might be. Some of my difficulty might also have to do with the abridgment for audio -- I suspect they may have cut some critical details in the interest of recording time. However, the audio rendering is quite good...I really like the narrator.

Are they playing Pacman with your vote?

Alex Halderman's group managed to get hold of some old Sequoia AVC-Edge voting machines, and without needing to tamper with the tamper-evident seals reprogrammed them to play Pacman.

Sequoia AVC-Edge voting machines are DRE (that's Direct Recording Electronic -- not digital rectal examination, which is perhaps equally pleasant). This means that the only way they capture a vote is electronically: if something goes wrong with the machine, there is no independent evidence of how the voters wished to vote. (This is in contrast with optical scan voting technologies where the voter, for example, fills in a bubble sheet, which is scanned in for ease-of-counting, but which also provides an independent, auditable, debuggable record of the vote.)

Halderman writes,

"The original election software used the psOS+ embedded operating system. We reformatted the memory card to boot DOS instead. (Update: Yes, it can also run Linux.) Challenges included remembering how to write aconfig.sys file and getting software to run without logical block addressing or a math coprocessor. The entire process took three afternoons."

There are three significant points here:

1. It doesn't appear to be terribly technologically difficult to reprogram the machine. I'm sure that having worked out the process in 3 afternoons, it would take them about half an hour to run the same reprogramming process on the next machine.
2. It is possible to do this reprogramming in an undetectable way -- i.e. without messing with the tamper evident seals.
3. Given that the machine is DRE, vote tampering cannot be independently detected or recovered from.

Voting machines are often left on their own in unsecured locations. A motivated attacker in a district that uses these machines could prepare a vote-stealing program in advance, access the machine briefly, and load the program. Without leaving any noticeable evidence. A forensic analysis of the machine would probably detect the program, but without any obvious tampering, who'd bother? And by then, the damage might already have been done -- forensics after election day would detect the possibility of tampering but would not get back what the votes should have been.

I just explained this to Sidharta in about 5 minutes. He totally got it. How come most of our electorate doesn't?

Mary Anning, Revisited

I just got done listening to another great audiobook: Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. A friend recommended it, and I'm so glad he did. It combines two themes dear to my heart: A Jane Austen set-up and, if you can believe it, the problems of women in science.

This is the story of icthyosaur and plesiosaur discoverer Mary Anning (1799-1847), of whom I wrote a while back. It is more-or-less a novelization of her life. That is to say, most of the events and characters in the book are historical, but the narrative alternates between first person accounts provided by Mary, herself, and her friend Elizabeth Philpot, an expert fossil hunter in her own right.

Elizabeth is a typical Jane Austen heroine: born into the gentry, but with a very meager inheritance of her own. Mary is accustomed to living hand-to-mouth, the daughter of a cabinet maker, who dies highly in debt when she is about 11. The two women met soon after Elizabeth and two of her unmarried sisters moved to Lyme Regis to live cheaply, after the marriage of their brother who held the bulk of the family's wealth. Elizabeth had become interested in fossil hunting and Mary, who was only about 10 at the time, contributed to the family's income by supplying a fossil knick-knack ("curie", short for curiosity) stand that the family ran alongside the cabinet-making business. Elizabeth encouraged her to get an education, and to take a scientific, systematic approach to documenting her finds. Over time, the two became friends, and apparently spent significant time together collecting and studying the fossils. Along the way, they developed connections with, and taught or led a number of the well-known geologists and biologists of the time, including apparently, Cuvier (one of the acknowledged pioneers of paleontology).

Of course, scientific expertise is no excuse for gender, and though their contributions were first rate, neither Mary nor Elizabeth were recognized by any of the scientific establishment, on anything but a personal level. They were friends with the "great men", they sold fossils to the men, they corresponded with the men on scientific matters, they led the men on fossil hunts, but they could not publish papers or attend scientific meetings. And Mary had the double whammy of being of a different social class, as well, and living on the brink of starvation for much of her life.

The story reads like a pure novel. The narrative is wonderful, as are the voices of the two women. (I will say, too, that as audiobooks go, this was a lovely one, with two readers who provide excellent voices of their own.) The historical events are woven in nicely with the plot. And throughout you feel all of the pathos of the difficulties faced by two serious scientists in the context of their gender, poverty and class.

My informant tells me that The Lady and the Unicorn is good, too. It's on my queue.

Fortune cookie wisdom

OK...you may have guessed it by now...I like fortune cookies.

There were some good ones today.

I got one that read "Do it because you love it." All "between the sheets" jokes aside, I do try to live this. Or maybe I should say, I try to live a transposed version of it: "Because you love it, do it." It is important to make time for the stuff you love. Of course, this also means that my house isn't quite as clean as it would be if I loved cleaning.

Annapurna read her fortune, and immediately groaned, "oh, that's bad!" Then she cracked up. It read "Be broke, be wealthy, but don't accept mediocity". And, no, that's not my typo.

Face Police

Facebook has apparently implemented a "Panic Button" in the UK that "allows youngsters to report suspicious behaviour to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) and Facebook."

I can't help thinking this is a bad idea.

Don't get me wrong. I really don't like the idea of kids being cyberbullied or stalked or in any way endangered in any online forum. And yes, I see lots of potential for all of these via Facebook and other online forums.

But I don't think this Panic Button will ever be terribly useful, and I do think it will cause more harm than good.

Think about it. Do we really want a bunch of 13-18 year olds hitting that button unsupervised, possibly at whim? CEOP, as far as I can tell, is a branch of UK law enforcement. Would you really want law enforcement getting involved with every report a teenager cared to dream up? And can you imagine how much work it would be for law enforcement to sort out all those reports? And who gets blamed when law enforcement can't keep up with it all, and some teenager gets killed anyway? And what happens to the kid who gets reported by some other kid as a prank? Sure it will get sorted out, but how long will it take for that kid to get his life back?

I don't have the answer to handling cyberstalking, but I'm pretty sure this isn't it.

A little taste of the future

Lauren Weinstein called out a proposal last Friday by the White House called National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. I haven't read through it yet, but it's certain to be interesting. I'll post some impressions when I have gone through it. I'm eagerly awaiting commentary by Bruce Schneier and Ed Felten.

This could turn out to be a defining moment for the internet.

What's at issue here is how you are defined as an individual on the internet. How does anybody know you are you? Do they know you're a dog? Sometimes it doesn't matter. Sometimes it does. If you're trying to purchase something online, it seems reasonable for the other party to want to be certain that you are not a mugger who stole your credit card (and for you to want to be certain that you are communicating with a legitimate merchant and not a fake web site). If you're a whistleblower, it seems reasonable for you to wish to hide your identity. If you are a stalker, it seems reasonable for law enforcement to have the capacity to identify you despite pains you may have taken to hide your identity. The ability of the merchant and law enforcement to identify you unambiguously may be in direct opposition to the whistleblower's need for anonymity.

At this point, as I understand it, the proposal claims to be voluntary for "the public". Of course, once the infrastructure is in place, the foot is in the door and it becomes easier to turn it into a legal matter to mandate it for all internet access.

Which is why we should pay attention now.

Good Omens

Just got done listening to a fantastic audiobook, Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. And because the narration is so awesome, I'll mention it was narrated by Martin Jarvis.

I was first introduced to Terry Pratchett's work reading The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents to Annapurna a few years ago. It is one of my favorite kid books.

Pratchett's sense of humor and lovely, light voice are a pleasure to read. It has a distinctly Wodehouse/Douglas Adams feel. But he has more to say, a deeper philosophical message than either Wodehouse or Adams. (I say "Pratchett" though it is co-authored with Gaiman...I haven't read Gaiman, but there is a strong Pratchett feel, and I've read that he did most of the actual writing.)

Good Omens is, if you can believe it, a farcical rendering of the days leading up to Armageddon. There are two things you need to know about this story. First, Pratchett is a fairly vocal humanist. Second, the story was published in 1990, which is around the time that the Soviet Union was breaking up, and no one knew which way it was going to go. Though the story does not directly refer to the unfolding world drama, the parallels are obvious in the interaction between the two main earth-based agents of Armageddon: angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley. Through their scheming conversations, Gaiman and Pratchett manage to pose many deep philosophical questions about entrenched mindless animosities, good vs. evil, theodicy (God's goodness in the face of evil), the intentions of creation, innateness vs. acquisition of evil, determinism vs. free will, etc.

In this story, it seems that the "Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness" is mistakenly placed at birth in a stuffy middle class British family (think of a dad somewhat like Hyacinth Bucket), instead of with a US ambassador, where he could have gotten up to a lot of good mischief. Neither side realizes the mistake until it becomes apparent that none of the expected harbingers of the apocalypse are appearing in the vicinity of the putative Spawn. It then becomes a race between Aziraphale and Crowley on one side, trying to save the Earth they have come to enjoy, versus the assembled hosts of heaven and hell who are determined to have it out.

And meandering through the text we have the "nice and accurate predictions of Agnes Nutter", a book full of correct but cryptic (and ultimately pointless) predictions from the seventeenth century, including the actual location of the actual Spawn.

The book mainly pokes fun at the concept of "our side vs. their side" and the myriad ways in which people have found to misunderstand and abuse it. There is a theme of tolerance that seems to pervade Pratchett's work, at least as much as I've read. Which is another reason I like it so much.

And finally, I will say this is one of the best audio renditions I've listened to lately. Jarvis is brilliant at creating distinct (and funny) voices and accents for each of the characters. The only one that I found a little off was that of the young Spawn, but I suspect there was a deliberate decision to make him sound like his stuffy adoptive father, rather than the 11 year old boy leader he is supposed to be. And interestingly, he puts on an American accent for the characters War and Pollution (two horsemen of the apocalypse), though as far as I could tell there is nothing in the text that calls for this.

Listen to the book.

Lovers' Vows

Warning: it's not as interesting as the title might suggest. And that's true on several levels.

In the only Jane Austen novel that I actually dislike (and I'm not the only one who feels this way about it), Mansfield Park, one of the plot drivers is a performance to be staged by some of the characters. The characters go through contorted farcical relationships that mirror or ironically contrast with the contorted farcical relationships in the play they choose to stage. That play?

Lovers' Vows by one Elizabeth Inchbald, published 1798.

I've thought, for some time that I ought to read it. The characters make such a fuss about the play and so much is made about how risque it is to stage it for the neighbors that I thought it surely must be juicy.

Wrong!

It wants to be Gilbert and Sullivan and Pope John Paul, but has all of the Gilbert and Sullivan implausibility with none of the Gilbert and Sullivan wit and all of the good morals of John Paul but none of his charisma. You get the idea: preachy, implausible and failing to be funny with great effort.

The story revolves around Frederick, the illegitimate son of Agatha Friburg, who was seduced in her youth by Baron Wildenhaim, who abandoned her and went off and married an unnamed Baroness, and produced a lovely daughter, who fell in love with her poor but virtuous tutor. Through an implausible series of events, Frederick meets the Baron, attempts to kill him, reveals himself to the Baron, is instantly accepted as his son, and refuses to be accepted as said son unless the Baron also agrees to marry Agatha. Which the Baron does, on the advice of the virtuous tutor. And as a bonus, throws in permission for said tutor to marry his daughter. Because she loves him.

Lots of internal conflict, yes?

Other literature that I've read because it was referenced by Jane Austen I've enjoyed a lot: Cecilia, The Mysteries of Udolpho. You safely can skip this one. At this point I'm no longer sure what she was trying to convey when she chose it to base her plot on, except possibly forcing the device. She had some characters express moral concern over the content of the play, but it was so preachy I can't see what there was to object to, unless it was considered too titillating to mention illegitimacy at all.

As I warned you, neither the play nor this post is as exciting as its title.

Watching New York

Here's some real news: New York City is planning to waste a whole bunch of money. Building a large surveillance network in midtown Manhattan. To stop terrorism.

Let's get one thing clear. Surveillance cannot prevent terrorism. At best it can (maybe) help track down whodunit. Which is rarely a question in true terrorism. The whole point of terrorism is publicity. The only thing that mass surveillance achieves is a chilling effect on the populace. Surveillance is best left to very well-defined, limited applications (say, the Mona Lisa).

An Enemy of the People

Last week I read An Enemy of the People (Ibsen, 1882). I must say, I'm taking a liking to Ibsen. (I read A Doll's House last year, and loved it, though it went right by me in high school.)

This one concerns a politically naive, but conscientious doctor who discovers that the Baths he was instrumental in having brought to his small town are actually so polluted as to endanger human life. The town, it seems, has invested significant resources into building the baths, but is poised, at the moment of his discovery, to reap significant economic benefits from them. I think you can guess the rest. I'll just say that it involves an orchestrated villification of the good doctor.

The players are Dr. Stockmann, innocent but honest; his brother the mayor, the quintessential politician; Hovstad, the editor of a supposedly progressive periodical, in reality more interested in the economic stability of his paper, whether it be from muckraking or preserving the status quo; Aslaksen, the printer, representing small business interests; and Morton Kiil, the wealthy father-in-law of Stockmann, whose property is responsible for the pollution. Room for conflict? I think so. Sound like the kind of interests at play today? You bet. Though it was written in 1882, it felt like you could replace "poisoned water" with any one of half a dozen modern issues (health care crisis, financial crisis, for starters), and it would be perfectly relevant today.

I was completely with Dr. Stockmann until the middle of the 4th act. At that point, he veered off into what seemed like an elitist blast against the common man. Basically, he is very pissed off with the masses who had elected such a bonehead as his brother and allowed themselves to be swayed by such rabble rousers as Hovstad. He concludes

"The majority never has right on its side. Never, I say! That is one of these social lies against which an independent, intelligent men must wage war. Who is it that constitute the majority of the population in a country? Is it the clever folk, or the stupid? I don't imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over. But, good Lord!--you can never pretend that it is right that the stupid folk should govern the clever ones I (Uproar and cries.) Oh, yes--you can shout me down, I know! But you cannot answer me. The majority has might on its side--unfortunately; but right it has not. I am in the right--I and a few other scattered individuals. The minority is always in the right."

This seems to me the wrong conclusion, and blaming the victim. But I suppose I can't totally blame him, either. Look at our tea parties. And I was slightly relieved, by the end, where he decides to set up a school for poor children. He says,

"I am going to experiment with curs, just for once; there may be some exceptional heads among them."

I've read that Ibsen was very bitter at the time he wrote this one, at the reception of an earlier work which may have contributed to the cynical feel.

The play is very powerful in its conciseness. The personalities and interests of the characters are made clear within just a few lines. It is extremely painful to watch Stockmann's wonderful ideals stripped from him by the cynical self-interests who have no qualms at twisting or ignoring truth.