Intrinsic vulnerability of Linux?

Interesting paper by Dan O’Dowd arguing that objections to his assertion that Linux is unsafe for defense systems were based on (i) “dangerous misconceptions that it is equally easy for foreign intelligence agents or terrorists to infiltrate malicious code into any operating system” and (ii) “that the many eyes looking at the Linux source code will find any malicious code infiltrated into Linux”. In part, O’Dowd relies on the fact that UNIX co-author Ken Thompson showed many years ago that an open source process couldn’t find clever subversions, no matter how many people of whatever competence looked at the source code. O’Dowd is also claiming that the embedded Linux system sold by his company is not vulnerable in this way. He may be right (I hope he is), but embedded systems are of limited applicability.

Research and scholarship

Interesting conversation today with some academic colleagues. We were discussing the paradox that while it is an article of faith among academics that excellence in research is necessary if a university is to be excellent in teaching, the statistical evidence for this is thin (to put it mildly). So is this just an academic shibboleth (“a manner of speaking that is distinctive of a particular group of people” – www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn)?

In thinking about it, it seemed to me that Thomas Kuhn’s concept of a ‘paradigm’ might be useful. A paradigm, in TK’s sense, is an agreed theoretical framework which characterises a mature academic discipline. Research (‘normal science’ in TK’s terms) takes place on the edges of the paradigm and consists of exploring anomalies between the paradigm and the real world. Teaching, in contrast, consists of articulating the paradigm in such a way that new generations of students can understand and absorb it.

Teaching and research require quite different abilities and skills. Many people who are good at research are poor at articulating the paradigm. (Of course there are some spectacular refutations of this — Richard Feynman is the one who comes immediately to mind, but I believe it to be a reasonable generalisation.) Conversely, many people who are excellent teachers are poor at ‘research’ of the peer-reviewed, pushing-back-the-frontiers kind.

So what is necessary for good teaching, if not research? The answer, I conjecture, might be scholarship, which I define as study which has the effect of deepening one’s understanding of a paradigm. To be a good teacher, one needs (i) a broad and deep understanding of one’s subject (the product of scholarship), together with (ii) sophisticated skills at imparting knowledge, (iii) empathy with learners (something talented researchers often lack) and (iv) the ability and inclination for self-reflection. My conclusion: to have excellent teaching it is more important for an institution to have scholarship than ‘research’. My question: what’s wrong with this conjecture?

Apostrophe rage

Even the New York Times is succumbing to SAS (Surplus Apostrophe Syndrome). One of its headlines yesterday read: “Worm Brings Down PC’s and Networks”. Growl.

Contrasting IPO styles

There’s a nice piece in today’s NYT ruminating on the coincidence that just as Google plans an auction as a way of launching its shares on the market, Frank Quattrone — a leading practitioner of the old, corrupt way of doing IPOs — was convicted of obstructing the course of justice. “Once, Wall Street considered it embarrassing to have a stock soar right after it went public”, says the Times, “because the underwriters had obviously left a lot of money on the table and deprived the issuing company of the best price for the shares sold.

But in the late 1990’s it became a badge of honor to have a new offering double or even quadruple the first day of trading. That meant the potential for phenomenal profits to those who could buy at the offering – profits that could be realized within minutes after the stock began trading, long before it became clear whether the company would prosper or fail.

Mr. Quattrone put himself at the center of that process. Moreover, despite nominal rules separating investment banking from research, Mr. Quattrone had analysts reporting to him, allowing him to influence their recommendations to clients.” Google wants to play by different rules. It proposes to sell its shares in a version of a Dutch auction. That means any investor – whether the best friend of the lead underwriter or a small investor should have an equal chance of buying shares at the offering price. The auction will set the price.

At the height of the Internet boom, Mr Quattrone’s cronies — those who had been allocated shares prior to the market launch — could make obscene profits on the first day of trading. The Times mentiones one of his triumphs — VA Linux which Quattrone’s group took public in December 1999. “The shares were priced at $30 in the offering, but traded for $320 the first day, ending that day at $239.25, for a gain of nearly 700 percent. By the end of 1999, the shares were trading for less than the first-day close, but were still viewed as a great success. (They later fell as low as 54 cents in 2002, and now sell for about $2.)”

The nice thing is that Google is not confining its innovation to technology.

Heavenly light

The weather was horrible yesterday — wet and miserable for much of the day. And yet when I was driving home the light was magical — sunlight filtered through clouds — the perfect photographic lighting. I grew up in this kind of light: it rains a lot in Ireland, but the weather is also very changeable, so one gets a lot of filtered sunlight.

As I took the picture I was reminded of the moment when I first discovered that photography could be a serious and absorbing passion. It was sometime in the 1950s, and I was walking with my parents in the grounds of Muckross House, a beautiful Victorian mansion in Killarney. We came on a solitary English lady, aged somewhere between 35 and 45 and my parents fell into conversation with her.

Was she a visitor? Yes. Was she enjoying herself? Very much. What did she like about Ireland (expecting a reply about the friendliness of the inhabitants, the hospitality, etc.). “Oh”, she said, “the light”. My parents looked puzzled. “I’m a photographer”, she said, as if that explained everything.

At this point, I became intrigued.

“Why do you have yellow glass on your lens?” I asked.
“That’s a yellow filter”, she said, “it makes the blue of the sky deeper and makes the clouds stand out better”.
“Why do you have two cameras?”
“One for colour film, and one for black and white”.
“Where do your cameras come from?”
“From Germany. They’re made by a company called Ernst Leitz”.

And then she handed me a Leica. I nearly dropped it — it was so astonishingly, unexpectedly heavy. I had never handled such a thing before. It was a beautifully engineered precision instrument — quite different from the Box Brownies which were the only cameras I had handled up to then. I was instantly hooked. I vowed to take up photography. And hoped that one day I might have such a beautiful camera. I did — and I have.

Great art matters — and that’s Official!

Tessa Jowell, the UK Secretary of State (i.e. Cabinet Minister) for Culture has published an extraordinary personal essay arguing that great art is important, not because it brings in tourists or leads to economic gain, but because it enriches lives. Here’s a quote:

“(a) Complex cultural activity is not just a pleasurable hinterland for the public, a fall back after the important things — work and paying tax –are done. It is at the heart of what it means to be a fully developed human being. Government should be concerned that so few aspire to it, and has a responsibility to do what it reasonably can to raise the quantity and quality of that aspiration. (b) Markets have their place, but theatres, galleries or concert halls also need intelligent public subsidy if complex culture is to take its place at the heart of national life. (c) Developing a much greater audience for the complex arts will only happen as the result of determined policy initiatives — like this Government’s realisation of free entry to national museums and galleries. “

There’s more. For example:

“A wider definition, associated with Ruskin, sees a nation’s wealth as including personal happiness and fulfilment. It’s an obviously broader view, into which culture fits more readily. It’s a definition of wealth which better describes what matters to people, and I believe better gives us a key to real transformation in society. Culture lies at the heart of this definition — its impact is more central, but difficult to measure in mechanistic terms. I think we need to find a way to express this as politicians and as leaders. As a Culture Department we still have to deliver the utilitarian agenda, and the measures of instrumentality that this implies, but we must acknowledge that in supporting culture we are doing more than that, and in doing more than that must find ways of expressing it.”

This is an amazing development. I never thought I would live to hear a New Labour politician say things like this. In fact, it’s a long time since I heard a British politician of any stripe betray any interest in, or love of, art for art’s sake. I’d hitherto thought of Ms. Jowell as worthy but rather dull. I’ve obviously misjudged her.

So how big is the Google cluster?

Harmless (but fascinating) puzzle for geeks. Here’s a lovely piece of detective work, which works backwards from the numbers in the IPO prospectus to reach some estimates. The answer: somewhere between 31,000 and 80,000 machines. Nice work! Thanks to Slashdot for the link.

Jack Valenti doesn’t get it — after all these years

I always thought the MPAA stance on IP protection was shortsighted, but even I assumed that at least they knew what the problems were. Here’s an excerpt from an astonishing interview between Keith Winstein of MIT and Jack Valenti which demonstrates the true state of affairs.

KW: But today, you still cannot on the market actually buy a licensed DVD player for Linux.

JV: I didn’t know that.

KW: So the question is, do you think people who go to Blockbuster, they rent a movie, they bring it home, and they play it on Linux by circumventing the access control, are those people committing a moral transgression?

JV: I do not believe that you have the right to override an encryption. Because if you have the right to do it, everybody can do it. For whatever benign reason you have, somebody else has got one even more benign. But once you let one person deal in a digital copy — and I don’t have to tell you; you know far better than I that, unlike in analog, the ten thousandth copy is as pure as the original — it is a big problem. So once you let the barriers down for your perfectly sensible reason, you gotta let it down for everybody.

I don’t want to get into the definition of morality. I never said anything was immoral in what I was saying. I said it is wrong to take something that belongs to somebody else.

KW: Indeed, but are you doing that when you rent a movie from Blockbuster and you watch it at home? … I run Linux on my computer. There’s no product I can buy that’s licensed to watch [DVDs]. If I go to Blockbuster and rent a movie and watch it, am I a bad person? Is that bad?

JV: No, you’re not a bad person. But you don’t have any right.

KW: But I rented the movie. Why should it be illegal?

JV: Well then, you have to get a machine that’s licensed to show it.

KW: Here’s one of these machines; it’s just not licensed.

[Winstein shows Valenti his six-line “qrpff” DVD descrambler.]

KW: If you type that in, it’ll let you watch movies.

JV: You designed this?

KW: Yes.

JV: Un-fucking-believable.

KW: So the question is, if I just want to watch a movie–I rent it from Blockbuster–is that bad?

JV: No, that’s not bad.

KW: Then why should it be illegal?

Afterwards, I wondered how old Jack Valenti is. A search of Google images brought up pics like this one from CNN…

… which suggests that, in addition to knowing nothing about Linux, he has terrible taste in shirts. His bio reveals that he was born in 1921, and worked for Lyndon Johnson until he became head of the MPAA in 1966. So he’s been a lobbyist for nearly 40 years. What a guy!

John Paczkowski on Google

“We’re not evil; we’re also not stupid: Much has been made of Google’s forthcoming auction-style IPO, and the promises of a system that attempts to put individual investors on a level playing field with large mutual funds and institutional investors. Should the auction function as intended, it will wrest virtually all control away from the IPO’s underwriters, and make it difficult for speculators to sell out early for a quick profit. Small-time investors are hoping that Google’s unorthodox methods will prove successful, and perhaps even effect some change in the conventional “wisdom” that has long governed initial public offerings. But that may be wishful thinking. In the coming weeks, big institutional investors will likely demand that Google and its underwriters hand them a piece of the IPO at a price lower than the one that will be set at auction. And Google may well cede to those demands. It’s certainly left itself room to do so. In its S1, the company said its offering price may reflect ‘the prices bid by professional investors.’ What does this mean? That powerful institutional investors, as they often do, will end up having a say in how Google’s IPO plays out, and that they could end up profiting from it more than anyone else.” [From Good Morning Silicon Valley]

More thoughts about Blogging

I’ve been brooding some more about George Packer’s piece about blogging. Some further thoughts:

1. I realised that I’ve been keeping an online diary for a long time — since 1997, it turns out. (I went back through my archive to find out.) Reading those early entries (which were — and remain — on a private website) has made me realise why I started doing it. I was overwhelmed by what was coming at me from the Web and realised that I had to invent a method of keeping track of things that was better than a list of bookmarks. So I began keeping an online diary as a kind of lab notebook. It was good for a while but then it too threatened to overwhelm me. But I put a search engine on the site and then it was transformed into the most incredibly useful resource. At that point I realised that I had finally found a solution to the conundrum of how to combine insatiable and wide-ranging curiosity with a hopeless memory. From then on, I knew that if I’d written about something in my diary, I could always find it — and the links associated with it. (This was all pre-Google, of course).

2. We are building Blogging into all the courses on the Open University Relevant Knowledge programme that I run. What we’re finding is that many students find it difficult to get started. Why? It’s not because it’s technically difficult, but because they are thrown by the idea of publishing their thoughts to the world. For most people, that smacks of terrible arrogance — it involves assuming that other people would be interested in reading what they have to say. I’ve never had any difficulty in that respect, possibly because I have the requisite arrogance, but probably also because I’ve been a newspaper columnist for as long as I can remember. (I’ve written a weekly column continuously since 1982).