Wikileaks

Now I may have some opinions about whether or not it was a good idea to leak those documents from SIPRNet. But that's not what I want to talk about. No, I want to talk about information security.

Simon Jenkins makes a very nice point on the Huffington Post: The documents taken from SIPRNet were available to "some 2-3 million authorized accessors to the State Department intranet worldwide."

In a pool of 2-3 million accessors, there is guaranteed to be a good sized pool of spies and other individuals who would be...umm...susceptible to assorted temptations and coercions. It boggles the mind that the State Department/Department of Defense would leave the kinds of documents included in the leak out there for just any of those 2-3 million people to read.

Basic IT security includes providing access to information on a Need to Know basis. Did all of those 2-3 million people (or for that matter a Pfc, such as Bradley Manning, putative source of the leaks) really need access to all of that data? In addition, thumb drives and writeable media are a known source of data loss. There is a whole branch of IT security known as Data Loss Prevention (aka Data Leak Prevention) which attempts to address the problem of leaks. In general it's a tough problem, but on the other hand, it's really not rocket science to turn off USB ports and CD writers on computers that can access sensitive data.

I would be willing to bet pretty good money (like a bank account much larger than my own) that many, many of those 250,000 documents to be leaked by Wikileaks were out there long, long ago in the hands of people who weren't intended to see them.

I'm with Jenkins: "Blame the State Department, Not the World's Media" (or Wikileaks).

On friendship

I am reading The History of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding. It's a lot of fun, in an 18th Century sort of way. Full of witty quotes. I just ran across this one, though, which I really like.

I hope my friends will pardon me when I declare, I know none of them without a fault; and I should be sorry if I could imagine I had any friend who could not see mine. Forgiveness of this kind we give and demand in turn. It is an exercise of friendship, and perhaps none of the least pleasant.

Yes, indeed.

Some words from the Tropic of Capricorn

Ok...yes...I know...it's weird...Dawn is listening to Tropic of Capricorn...when did that ever stop me? Lovely prose...bit too male-existential-crisis/stream of consciousness for my taste, though he expresses many thoughts that I can relate to. Likewise Babbitt (minus the stream of consciousness) which I listened to immediately before this. What can I say? I'm having an accidental run of early 20th century men's midlife crisis books...I didn't know what I was getting into. But that's not what I want to talk about.

No...I bring this up because I was struck by some cultural aspects of these two books. Namely, that though they both describe events that took place nearly 100 years ago (1920s), they nevertheless describe lifestyles and technologies that are remarkably recognizable in modern terms. I get the sense that if you dropped me in the middle of those novels, I'd be able to function pretty well (except for the internet part). Unlike, for example, dropping me into a Jane Austen book, where I suspect that I wouldn't know how to use the bathroom. (Sorry...couldn't resist...too much Tropic of Capricorn, I guess.)

These novels also used a number of terms that I would have expected to be more modern, such as in Babbitt "boneheaded", and in Tropic of Capricorn "bimbo" and "daffy". According to the Word Detective, bimbo (derived from Italian bambino) first showed up in English around the 1920s, and didn't come to mean a ditzy female until somewhat later than that, so that this reference in Tropic of Capricorn (published 1938) would have been one of the relatively early uses, I guess. "Daffy", on the other hand, from "daff" (meaning fool) apparently showed up around 1400. Word Detective has references to "bonehead", but does not actually comment on it, so I don't know when it arose, but it would never have occurred to me that it was as old as 1920s.

Curioser and curioser...

Now here's a colorful character: evolutionary/genetic biologist and general purpose radical JBS Haldane.

While trying to attribute a different quote that turned out to be his, I ran across the following, which I thought was quite in line with my previous posting:

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Turns out he's got quite a few other zingers. The one I was looking for was the one quoted often by Sapolsky (who, though not quite so zinger-prone, himself, nevertheless provides some incredibly entertaining science writing): I'd lay down my life to save two brothers or eight cousins.

I'll have to pick up a real biography.

Wonder what they're cooking up nowadays

Lauren Weinstein has apparently been converting his old videotapes to digital, and is posting some curiosities. Here's one about the 1970's predictions for the waves of the future. It's funny to hear the oooh-aaah tone in which they discuss the distant possibility of things we take for granted today, but it's also surprising how much of the impact of our technology they were able to anticipate.

Kind of makes me wonder what wild and impossible thing someone's working on today that we'll be absolutely dependent on in 30 years. My prediction track record is not good. I remember the first time I heard someone talking about protein secondary structure prediction from amino-acid sequence. My reaction was, "Nah...it's much more complicated than that. They'll never get it to work." And when Ellen bought her first PC, she whined "I know it will be obsolete as soon as I get it out of the store." I was just starting grad school at the time, and thought I knew plenty about computers. Chortled I: "Obsolete??? With 20 meg of hard drive??? You couldn't fill that much memory if you sat down to write from now through the rest of your life."

Where do rhyming poems come from?

From French, it seems.

I have been listening to a series of lectures on poetry (I am horribly ignorant about it). At any rate, one of the things the instructor mentioned struck me as very interesting.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying here, but...

Apparently Anglo Saxon poetry (i.e. pre-William the Conqueror British poetry) favored alliteration and rhythm and did not use rhyme extensively. One of the innovations brought to England by the Norman conquest was a French predilection for rhyming poetry. According to Prof. Drout, French and Latin are more amenable to or better facilitate the use of rhyme (i.e. same sound at the end of a word, after a stressed syllable) than English, because they tend to have a lot of common word suffixes that all sound the same. (I am reminded of my high school French class exercise of enumerating all the ways you can make the "A" sound: e, ee, ees, ai, ais, ait, aient, aie, er, est, es, et,...am I forgetting some?)

Again, according to Drout, cosmopolitan, continentally traveled Chaucer was instrumental in adopting rhyme into English and treating alliteration as a cheesy device.

Macy's "Magic Mirror"

Wow...I just had to ask myself if this wasn't April Fool's Day. I've just seen about the worst idea I've come across in a long time.

"Macy's shoppers can now check their look in a "magic mirror" in a fitting room, thanks to touchscreen computing. A large mirror, linked up to a touchscreen tablet computer, lets visitors to the iconic department store chain's flagship New York location scroll through their options, then digitally "try on" clothes in the mirror. Then they can get quick feedback from friends by posting their image to Facebook or sending it in an e-mail or text.

How long until

1. Someone figures out how to hack the system and turn on the magic mirror remotely, capturing unwitting customers in the fitting room in various stages of undress?
2. (Variant of 1) Someone in the Macy's IT Department figures out a way to run the system in "test mode" to turn on the camera on unwitting customers in the fitting room in various stages of undress...and starts collecting the images?
3. Macy's starts capturing that Facebook or email address you enter, and starts sending you messages like "If you liked that DKNY dress, you'll just love this Ann Taylor"?

Thank goodness it's only scheduled to be available until November.

Edited to add: It all makes sense to me now. It seems that the company that's making this capability available to Macy's is UK-based RetailCam...that would be UK as in the country that brought you Big Brother and 21st century quality surveillance.

Interview with John Le Carre

I accidentally tuned in to Democracy Now yesterday and was surprised to hear someone talking about Bukavu, which I was reading about last week in The Mission Song. Surprise, surprise...who should be speaking but John le Carre, himself?

It turned out to be a very nice hour-long interview by Amy Goodman. It covered all sorts of stuff, from his experiences visiting Africa (he says he is a follower of "Graham Greene's dictum" that "if you're reporting on human misery, you do well to share it") to politics to his writing process. Having read a number of his books with interest (I really enjoyed "A Most Wanted Man" last year), I found this interview put the books into a nice context.

I will add that le Carre has a lovely voice. He sounds like a man half his age.

I'm adding him to the list of people I'd like to make friends with.

Another one: "bites the dust"

Yes, I am a fan of Queen.

However, what this is really about is the origin of the phrase "bite the dust". I ran into what may have been one of the fairly early uses of this phrase, reading Samuel Butler's comparatively painless prose translation of The Odyssey.

According to The Phrase Finder, the phrase "bite the dust" was used in 1750 by Tobias Smollet. However, they also note that Butler uses it in his 1898 translation of the Iliad, and I myself found it in his 1900 translation of the Odyssey (book XXII). Lang, et. al. translate the same phrase as "bite the earth" in the Iliad.

So as I figure it, the image of "bite the dust" to refer to a violent death goes back as far as Homer.

Who knew?

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.