History’s contradictions

Lovely Observer piece by Will Hutton:

Sometimes dealing with the past is easy. A few months ago, the college where I am principal (Hertford, Oxford) handed back a precious 16th-century atlas to its rightful owners – the Humboldt University library in Berlin. A British soldier had been offered it in exchange for a packet of cigarettes in the devastated streets of Berlin in May 1945. His father was an Oxford professor and for most of the last 70 years the Ortelius atlas had been first buried in his room and then locked in the college safe.

The 70th anniversary of the end of the war seemed as good a moment as any to return it. But what struck everyone at the small ceremony was how affected the German delegation, including representatives from the embassy and Humboldt University, were by what we were doing. It was a symbol of Germany’s relationship with Britain within a peaceful EU, an act of friendship all the more valuable because it had been freely offered and a recognition that history had moved on.

But more often than not history’s legacies are more unforgiving – a minefield in which yesterday’s and today’s realities seem irreconcilable…

Academic bitchiness

Isaiah Berlin was a past-master of the genre. Here he is writing1 to Marion and Felix Frankfurter in December 1934 about Richard Crossman, who was then a Fellow of New College, Oxford (where Berlin had been briefly a Fellow), and whom I think Berlin detested.

“Crossman is trying to sell his soul again & finding no buyers even among those who think he had one.”

I worked for Crossman briefly, when he was Editor of the New Statesman. He was an interesting man, but not a nice one.


  1. from Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946, edited by Henry Hardy, Chatto & Windus, 2004. 

Tyrannised by email? Here’s how to fight back

Lovely advice from Hannah Jane Parkinson

Here’s what I suggest. Taking a cue from my boss, I’m going to be turning on my out-of-office reply when I actually leave the office in the evening. On time. For homeworkers, or flexiworkers, that means when your shift is over. Because an automated out-of-office email that reads:

“Hi. Thanks for your email. I’ve finished work for the day and I have left the office. I’m now bathing my son and about to watch that new drama – the one with Ben Whishaw – and have a couple of glasses of pinot, but if anyone asks I’ll say it’s one. Might even order a takeaway. I’ll be able to answer your email in the morning, when I’m being paid to, at around 9am. Have a lovely evening too.”

Martian takeaways

We went to see The Martian on Saturday. Interesting and enjoyable, but not as good as Apollo 13. We saw it in 2D, but a friend who saw it in 3D described it as “unmissable”. In structure, it’s a bit formulaic — if you’ve ever read one of those ‘how to write a screenplay that sells’ books you’ll be able to predict how it evolves. But the big difference with Apollo 13 is that The Martian is pure fiction, whereas the earlier film told a version of something that actually happened, and so was significantly more gripping.

Still, the takeaways from The Martian are useful. They include:

  • Never underestimate the significance of potatoes
  • The importance of ‘maker’ and DIY skills — the very skills that are atrophying because of our addiction to black-box technologies with “no user-modifiable parts”.
  • The usefulness of engineers and geeks, especially those who are good with mathematics.

How to find out how long your runway is

The one big thing I’ve learned from being involved in tech start-ups is that the first person you should hire is a financial controller. You don’t have to have him or her as a full-time employee — usually a day a week is enough at the beginning. But what you need is someone who understands money, because most techies don’t understand it. The best financial controller we ever had maintained a constantly-updated spreadsheet which could tell us — to the day — when we would become insolvent if things continued on their present course.

In principle, insolvency is a simple idea: it’s when your liabilities exceed your assets. But what most engineers and company founders forget is that — if you’re behaving ethically — your liabilities include the cost of shutting down the company, ensuring that laid-off staff get whatever redundancy pay that’s due to them, and that your customers are not left in the lurch. In the UK context, that probably means you need at least £50k over and above the cash you’re counting on to give you the runway provided by your investors.

In one of the companies I was involved in, it took us much longer to get sales revenues than we expected — not because people didn’t like our product (they did), but because when you’re a new company sales take much longer to close, and therefore it takes much longer to get the resulting revenues flowing in. And if you’re doing hardware as well as software (and we were) then you have to remember that in order to make the hardware you have to put money up front — often three to six months ahead of delivery.

Which is why some fledgling companies are destroyed by a sudden big order. The large revenues that will in due course arise from those sales arrive long after you’ve had to put up the cash in to make the kit. And in the interval you can become insolvent — and then it becomes illegal to continue to trade unless you have been able to find ways of increasing your assets, either from investors, a bank overdraft or some other wheeze. So little companies sometimes go under because they’ve suffered what my old friend Roger Needham used to call a “success disaster”.

So it’s nice to discover that Trevor Blackwell has created an elegant interactive calculator which will tell you exactly how much runway you’ve got left. All start-up founders should consult it regularly.

Backdoors won’t work. Just ask the TSA. (Or the NSC)

skeleton_key

Very nice openDemocracy piece by my colleague Julian Huppert on why putting backdoors in encryption systems is a very bad idea:

This was demonstrated recently with a security disaster involving the US Transport Security Administration. They want to be able to search through people’s luggage, if they think there is contraband inside. But sometimes people quite reasonably want to lock their luggage, so that people cannot just take things from it. So a system was created with TSA approved locks, so that TSA officials can unlock them using a master key. In theory, no one else can, so your luggage is safe.

You might ask: what if someone got hold of these master keys? But the TSA had an even bigger disaster to come. In a piece in the Washington Post praising their work, someone foolishly posed with a set of master keys. The photo was of a high enough resolution that people can now 3D print copies, and use them to open any TSA approved lock. The backdoor is wide open, and security breached.

This fate can happen to any backdoor system, and probably will. That is why the US National Security Council has been quite clear in their draft options paper.

The relevant excerpt from the NSC ‘Options’ paper reads: “the Administration will not seek legislation that compels providers to design their products to enable government access to encrypted information”.

Two things are interesting about this. The first is how useful it is to have a mundane, everyday illustration of an important idea. We have been telling people for ages that backdoors in encryption software is a bad idea, but this gets nowhere with non-geeks because they have no personal experience to which that proposition can be related. But they know about suitcase locks.

This reminds me of all the years I wasted trying to persuade lay audiences about the importance of open source software. My argument was that software that affects our lives should never be impenetrable or unalterable ‘black boxes’ — the the “freedom to tinker” was vital. This argument got precisely nowhere.

And then, one day, I suddenly understood why: my audiences had never written a line of software. It was an entirely alien concept to them. So the next time I gave the talk I brought a copy of my favourite recipe book with me. Before starting, I asked who in the audience cooked or baked? Every hand went up. So then I turned to a particular recipe that had 300ml of double cream as one ingredient. “Now”, I said, “double cream if not good for a guy like me, so I’d like to replace it with creme fraiche. But imagine that we lived in a world where, if I wanted to do that, I would have to write to the authoress to seek her permission, and perhaps to pay a fee. What would you think of that?” And of course they all said that it would be nuts. “Well then”, was the payoff line, “now you understand why open source software is important.”

The second thought raised by Julian’s post is that while the UK government is unlikely to pay much attention to the geek view of the absurdity of backdoors in encryption systems, it’s much more likely to pay attention to the considered view of the US National Security Agency.