Category Archives: Security

History, Security

Want to learn more about the fight for Internet freedom?

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Read all about it here:

Save the Net Now

and here:

Net Losses by James Surowiecki

Check out what the music group R.E.M. has to say:

Net Neutrality levels the internet playing field, insuring that small blogs and independent sites open just as easily as the sites of large media corporations. It allows every voice to be heard by thousands, even millions of people. This freedom is currently under threat because the nation’s largest phone and cable companies have pressured Congress to give them more control over which Web sites work for users based on which corporation pays them the most! If Congress caves, consumer choice will be limited, the free flow of information will be choked off, and the free and open Internet will become a private toll road managed by these large companies.

My memory could be playing tricks on me, but if I’m not mistaken this is an old battle that comes from the early days of the Internet. Seems to me that sometime in the early 1980s MCI was promoting the X.25 protocol along with a “Mail service”. IBM and AT&T also endorsed X.25 and had all sorts of negative things to say about the lack of structure and reliability of TCP/IP. Can’t find a reference today, but the articles are still somewhat vivid in my mind. Vint Cerf however, who just happened to help develop the TCP/IP protocol, was head of the Digital Information Services at MCI and decided to connect MCI’s Mail service to it, thus establishing the direct foundation for today’s Internet. MCI was actively working with the National Science Foundation by the late 1980s to help public organizations run TCP/IP communications over a “high speed” (for the day) network. Meanwhile AT&T and IBM were stewing in their juices, apparently mad as hell that the public was not required to purchase their expensive network hardware and proprietary services in order to communicate over the network. IBM was determined to develop other protocols but finally was forced to admit TCP/IP as the default by the mid 1990s. Now, behold AT&T and the other carriers saying they should be allowed to buy out the public interest and own the network. No surprise, really, but if they are successful then will we really have returned to 1984?

This reminds me of when General Motors, Mack Truck, oil and tire companies (known as National City Lines and led by E. Roy Fitzgerald) managed to buy out all the public transportation providers in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Soon no public transportation was left — the wealthy shareholders had bought a lock on the market. One the competition was gone, and federal anti-trust charges were avoided, Los Angeles residents were increasingly forced to rely on cars, trucks, oil and tires. Some say this group of companies made their money back in the first ten years after they purchased and disassembled the public system.

Poetry, Security

Eggs, cubicals, and safety

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An article in the San Jose Mercury News caught my eye in a cafeteria the other day:

Google employs roughly 6,000 workers, consumes about 300,000 eggs a year and uses 7,000 pounds of liquid egg products in its baking and cooking. By year end, the company will have 12 cafes on its Mountain View campus.

Gee, that’s fifty eggs per worker per year, or roughly one egg per worker per week. Strange statistic, no, especially since Google eggs are free?

Anyway, when I read a bit further, I came to the somewhat predictable reason that egg consumption and Internet companies are in the same story:

Google officials plan to announce their employee cafeterias will no longer serve eggs that come from hens crammed into small cages.

I have to be honest. My first reaction when reading a sentence like this is to think of happy little feathered hens, clucking around in freedom instead of cooped-up in cubical-like cages. Sunny warm afternoons, green fields, blue skies…it’s all so ideal. But then my senses come back to me and I wonder if the hens are healthier and the eggs are safer without the control of a cage. For what it’s worth, on a micro level my friend forgot to put his hens back in the cage recently. He found one hiding in the compost bin a week later. A foot was all that was left of the other one — racoons, he thinks. So the cage or coop is certainly useful on a local level, what about the big guys?

At least 95 percent of the 300 million laying hens in the United States live in wire cages known as “battery cages,” because they are stacked in batteries, or arrays.

Not to be confused with the Google offices, which have employees stacked in batteries, or arrays, of cubicals. They apparently choose to work in those confined spaces. In fact, things were so tight during the boom years that inflatable tents inside the buildings were sometimes used for meetings. Some say the free food keeps them happy in these confined spaces, but I digress.

The cages allow farmers to reduce disease, and death rates are lower for birds living in cages than for birds that roam outside or on henhouse floors, Gregory [senior vice president for United Egg Producers in Atlanta, the leading trade association for egg farmers] said.

“We don’t believe it is cruel,” he said. “I grew up on a farm when everything was free roaming. But the cages provide so many more benefits for the health and welfare of the birds.”

In a 2003 study of egg farms in the United Kingdom, hens in cages had a 5 percent mortality rate compared with 8 percent for both barn-raised and free-range chickens.

Strange that the study is from the UK while all the other numbers are from the US market. Nonetheless, the cages obviously reduce costs since they introduce a number of controls and efficiencies. The question, therefore, is whether a definition of “cruelty” or “welfare” has been agreed upon between the industry and animal rights activists, and whether this has been honored. And perhaps more importantly is the efficiency and safety of the animals even worth it if the consumers are willing to pay more money for eggs of chickens that survive a free range? I mean, what cost does that extra 3 percent mortality rate really add to each egg, and what about the difference in taste or desireability? The entire article doesn’t mention anything about the actual quality of one egg versus the other, or the impact of free range chickens on the range (the ecosystem and environmental changes).

FIVE LITTLE CHICKENS

Five little chickens by the old barn door,
One saw a beetle, and then there were four.
Four little chickens under a tree;
One saw a cricket, and then there were three.
Three little chickens looked for something new:
One saw a grasshopper; then there were two.
Two little chickens said, “Oh, what fun!”
One saw a ladybug; then there was one.
One little chicken began to run,
For he saw a katydid, then there were none!

Energy, Security

Disease clusters, radiation and cell towers

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Many years ago I worked in a research building that was located above a giant plasma generator. Everyone who had worked there for more than five years and who sat fairly near the thing (the floor above, the office next door) were said to be suffering from cancer or other illness. One woman passed away suddenly in her 50s. The generator drew so much energy that on hot days the central organization would ask the operator to turn it off so they could run the air conditioners. Who knows how much the thing emitted. Don’t think it was ever measured. Some employees were smokers, most did not exercize regularly, and so forth, but a correllation seemed too strong to be coincidence.

There aren’t many plasma generators around but what if the same effects can be documented in people who work or live near cell-towers? And what if those people happen to be important enough that a sudden deterioration of their health could cause serious financial impact to a big organization? The latest news from Australia is rather shocking:

Australian Medical Association president Mukesh Haikerwal said there was no proof of a connection but “if you get clusters of disease it’s sensible to investigate.”

Dr John Gall, from private health company Southern Medical Services, which has been called in to assess the sick, said last night three of those affected had tumours showing symptoms consistent with radiation.

But he said there was no causal link with the building based on preliminary observations.

A spokesman for state Health Minister Bronwyn Pike said WorkCover would investigate the matter and the Department of Human Services would provide any expertise needed.

RMIT chief operating officer Steve Somogyi said testing was carried out on the building after the first two of the seven tumours were reported in 1999 and 2001. It found radiation and air quality levels within recommended guidelines.

Hmmm, who set those guidelines again and based on what evidence? Funny how experts can sometimes use a lack of data as proof of something that doesn’t exist, rather than proof of uncertainty. In network security, it can often be worse to have false negatives than false positives. And if you ever run a honeypot system you have to be careful to never assume that a lack of bears in the honeypot (it sounds better than attackers who like honey, if you know what i mean) proves that there is not threat of bears, let alone a bear already sleeping in your bed. And from that perspective, maybe it wasn’t radiation from the towers, but something in the food, furniture or decorations…

History, Security

Google succumbs

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I think the Google Co-op concept is a novel idea. It allows individuals to rank information on the web “by creating ‘subscribed links’ for your services and labeling webpages around the topics you know best”. Wait, did I just read that correctly? Has something failed at Google? What happened to their pigeon algorithm revolution? Wasn’t the original concept of their search technology based upon figuring out a clever way to interpret page ranking through links? (Incidentally, I didn’t see a way to label webpages as safe/trusted, which would be the most interesting feature from a security perspective and also useful in the traditional sense of PGP.)

I must be missing something, because the announcement seems to suggest to me that so many attackers have been able to riddle the Google page-ranking system with holes, that the search giant has maxed-out their pigeon power and is essentially trying to ask everyone to help by sticking their own thumb into the cracks…

Don’t get me wrong, I agree that the power of the internet is in the people who have localized and specialized knowledge. But this is so completely counter to the origins of this “our algorithm is smarter than you are” company, one has to wonder if Google will next start trying to actually work within (or to help build) social fabric/structure rather than just pop out intellectually challenging tools. A better plow is great, since people can make better use of available land, but what’s your role when the plows turn into swords? Do you keep making swords and fan the discord among people fighting for resources or do you look for a way to establish localized rights and try to preserve the real value of plows?

More insight available courtesy of the Reg:

The problem is, Google has created a commons that is designed to be exploited beyond its capacity. Each user of a commons has an incentive to defect from the common good, to seek individual advantage. But in the Google commons, SEOs have an incentive to DESTROY the common good, to try to prevent anyone else from having any individual advantage. How the hell do you create a sustainable business model when everyone is intent on fucking up yours?

Many people have waxed lyrical about how Google was “God’s Brain” and contained some sort of magical Gestalt of all of mankind’s knowledge. But now it’s like an autistic brain that can’t say anything except advertising jingles.

— Charles Eicher

The Reg also had another take on the problem here:

creating junk web pages is so cheap and easy to do, Google is engaged in an arms race with search engine optimizers. Each innovation designed to bring clarity to the web, such as tagging, is rapidly exploited by spammers or site owners wishing to harvest some classified advertising revenue.

Recently, we featured a software tool that can create 100 Blogger weblogs in 24 minutes, called Blog Mass Installer. A subterranean industry of sites providing “private label articles,” or PLAs exists to flesh out “content” for these freshly minted sites. And as a result, legitimate sites are often caught in the cross fire.