Interesting report on how two different riots were handled by the Oakland, California police:

When Oakland police declared an unlawful assembly last year, mayhem ensued uncontrolled. People broke from the crowd into small groups, started fires and smashed dozens of windows near Oakland City Hall.

This time, when the order was given, it was clear the officers had a plan to execute and carried it out swiftly and effectively. The skirmish line pushed the crowd out of downtown and within an hour, it was virtually all over.

The BBC does an expose on a man they call Gaza’s smuggling-tunnel millionaire

For at least five years, this place has been a smugglers’ paradise. The soft desert sand on which the town sits is riddled with tunnels into Egypt. If you could take a slice of the ground under Rafah you would find it riddled with holes – like a Swiss cheese.

Like thousands of teenage boys in Rafah, Abu Nafez started off at 17 as a tunnel labourer. Dangerous, dirty and demanding work.

The number of goods made illegal surely helps these high-risk high-reward traders. It is not a short list.

He had over 100 employees and was smuggling millions of pounds worth of goods into Gaza. Crisps, coffee, cookers, cows, cars – yes, that’s right, whole brand-new cars.

It stands to reason that removing the ban could affect his business.

This lavish home is the fruit of Abu Nafez’s labours. But the tunnels business has almost disappeared in the wake of Israel’s decision to ease its blockade of Gaza.

Opportunity for growth, no? A business must adapt to changing markets. I see at least two risks in the conversion.

1. It would require a different skill-set. Illegal import and export probably takes a very different character and expertise than legal trade.
2. The move from low volume high price underground routes from Egypt is unlikely to translate directly to connections and routers for higher volume lower price goods from Israel.

This is a strange situation to read about.

On the one hand the BBC suggests Gazans have no money to purchase goods. Yet there is clear evidence of wealth accumulation and regular trade routes. On the other hand the smugglers are said to worry that legalization will crush their business by allowing low cost goods to enter the market as Gazans are eager and ready to purchase.

The flip-flop economics remind me of the current debate about legalization of marijuana in California.

The study said legalizing marijuana in California would drop the price of pot by more than 80 percent and increase consumption.

It also said California could generate annual tax revenues either far higher or much lower than the $1.4 billion tax estimate by the state Board of Equalization last year. It forecasts a possible surge of Amsterdam-style pot tourism or luring out-of-state drug traffickers wanting to buy cheap California weed to resell elsewhere.

Potential tax revenues may be lower if an illicit, secondary market develops from people trafficking cheaper, non-taxed marijuana.

Revenues could either be far higher or far lower. I see now.

Consumption is expected to increase (officially), prices are expected to plummet, advertising is expected to start, and a whole new market of non-compliance will be generated to escape taxation.

Aside from all the predictions, the problem that stands out to me most is the last item. Some groups try to go legitimate when given the opportunity. They thrive in underground and illegal markets because that is their best chance at a comfortable living given limited options (e.g. embargoes, racism). They are businessmen first, criminal only due to circumstances, and welcome a chance to shift their business above ground.

Consider the evolution of Las Vegas and how gambling became legalized and institutionalized. That was the result of a group transitioning away from wealth acquired through illegal methods and towards legal status. Legalization of gambling was achieved in 1931 by a vote in the state legislature, but it was only in the late 1940s that some in the mob used Las Vegas to build legitimacy and respectability.

If marijuana is legalized, will those in the industry today adapt and move into a larger market with greater capitalization potential? Hard to say, but the millionaire profiled by the BBC in Gaza jokes about the “skill” he has developed. It is not seen as importing or trading, only smuggling:

Some tunnellers have joked they could export their skills. Maybe go to the Mexico-US border and set up there, smuggling people or drugs into America. “You get me there, I’ll go,” quips Abu Nafez.

Wrong skills. Perhaps instead build a legitimate and respectable business for import-export to Israel?

This is fun:

This page is an online two dimensional code generator which is written in PHP. It can generate QR Code, Data Matrix, Aztec Code and Micro QR Code

Guess what this does:

The author recommends a blog dedicated to QR code, which has an odd story about Stone Age Meat marketing. Apparently these QR Codes “break all the rules”:

I remember well in the mid 1990s how a professor of physics demanded that a university save money purchasing computers. His theory was that one or maybe even two extra PCs would be available in a lab with money saved.

The problem with his theory was that the less-expensive computers experienced a high rate of malfunction and failure. The computers were purchased specifically to perform lab work using devices connected to a serial port. The serial port depended on a 16550 Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) chip.

At that time Gateway 2000 was saving money by using the least expensive parts available. An order of fifteen PCs could end up with fifteen different UART brands and/or versions, many of which would fail under load. More specifically we suspected that a single character would get left in a shift register and one in the holding register; the character then would not transmit and give no interrupt or alert. System failure.

It was not possible to determine through software the revision of the chip installed so drivers could not compensate and adapt to this problem. The solution, at that time after meetings and evaluation of PC vendors, was to dump the Gateway investment and purchase Dell “business-line” computers — the OptiPlex. Dell offered the university a guarantee of chip quality control and consistency, which actually turned out to be the case for the UART.

The bottom line was that more money was saved by high availability in just one semester than by the lower initial capital investment.

Apparently the same could not be said for capacitors.

Engadget does not mince words in a recent report regarding the OptiPlex:

Dell asked customer service reps to deny there was any problem with their motherboards, telling them to pretend they’d never heard about the issue and to “emphasize uncertainty.”

Uncertainly is exactly what consumers should be trying to avoid.

An earlier post on Engadget suggests a 97% failure rate!

According to recently released documents stemming from a three year-old lawsuit, Dell not only knew about the bogus components but some of its employees were actively told to play dumb, one memo sent to customer service reps telling them to “avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had issues.” Meanwhile, sales teams were still selling funky OptiPlex machines, which during that period had a 97 percent failure rate according to Dell’s own study.

To be fair that still leaves a 3% chance of success — uncertainty isn’t gone yet.

Imagine 3% of an office working, or 3% of a student body getting their work done…

This is not just a problem with Dell or Gateway, of course. All manufacturers of technology equipment face the question of quality when building their products.

I noticed the D-Link DWL-3200AP, for example, was using low-ESR capacitor rated for only 1000 hours. This seems far below the normal use one might expect from a wireless bridge. Anyone could go buy a 7000-hour high-temp capacitor for less than a quarter.

Likewise, I found that the Motorola 2210-02 ADSL2+ broadband modem has a capacitor that fails due to load. It overheats and then shuts down the broadband link (perhaps you were wondering why this site went down for a day or two last month — thank you for the hits, and for exposing a hardware failure in my infrastructure). This is only marginally better than complete failure. It masks the cause by being intermittent, which is worse. Once I found the problem I was able to keep the link up by removing heat, which is why it is better.

Oh, and do not get me started on Apple hardware failures. I am on my third (and last) iPhone in only six months. The most recent failure was caused by a bad cable. Who puts six ribbon cables in a phone? This is a device that is totally sealed to consumers and constantly moved around. Ribbon cables are known to come loose. Put the two risk factors together…my phone was unsuable for two days (screen had limited functionality) and I spent two hours at an Apple store just to get the cable re-seated.

I would gladly have paid an extra dollar or two to avoid the multi-day outage. Two antenna cables, three data cables, and a screen cable; in other words, six too many:

The lesson seems to be that hardware quality continues to plague network devices with serious security (availability) consequences.

Product companies make decisions that might not reflect your requirements, but they also do not give much transparency prior to the purchase or readily accept fault afterwards. Buyer beware.

Here are a few suggestions for how to reduce hardware risks:

1. Test – We would have found the UART failure quickly if we had just ordered one or two systems and run them through the paces
2. Contract – Make certain that a failure of hardware is covered with warranty and perhaps even compensation
3. Virtualize – Isolate hardware to a single highly-redundant device and then put the other devices into a virtual environment were you have more control and better logging options