Meltdown and Spectre summarised

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Lovely economical summary by the UK ICO’s Head of Technology Policy of the two vulnerabilities currently obsessing the CPU-design industry:

In essence, the vulnerabilities provide ways that an attacker could extract information from privileged memory locations that should be inaccessible and secure. The potential attacks are only limited by what is being stored in the privileged memory locations – depending on the specific circumstances an attacker could gain access to encryption keys, passwords for any service being run on the machine, or session cookies for active sessions within a browser. One variant of the attacks could allow for an administrative user in a guest virtual machine to read the host server’s kernel memory. This could include the memory assigned to other guest virtual machines.

Quote of the day

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“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.”

Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm1, (2015)

So what is Twitter really for?

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This morning’s Observer column:

In a way, it’s no surprise that Trump should have taken to Twitter because it has the right bandwidth for his thought processes. Technically, bandwidth is the range of frequencies that a particular communications channel can transmit. The wider the bandwidth, the more information the channel can handle, which is why analog phone lines were OK for voice communication but hopeless for relaying music. Smoke signals are one of the oldest communication channels devised by humans and they were very good for communicating danger or summoning people to gatherings. But as the cultural critic Neil Postman once observed, they were lousy for philosophical discussions. The bandwidth is too low.

Same goes for Twitter. It’s great for transmitting news tersely, which is why an increasing amount of breaking news comes via it (and not just warnings from Trump about supposedly imminent nuclear exchanges, either)…

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Drumbeats

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Lest we get too optimistic about 2018, this from Eliot Cohen, Director of the Strategic Studies program at Johns Hopkins:

There are sounds, for those who can hear them, of the preliminary and muffled drumbeats of war. The Chinese are reported to be preparing refugee camps along the North Korean border. Resources are being shifted to observe and analyze the North Korean military. Mundane logistical processes of moving, stockpiling, and updating crucial items and preparing military personnel are under way. Only the biggest indicator—the evacuation of American dependents from South Korea—has yet to flash red, but, in the interest of surprise, that may not happen. America’s circumspect and statesmanlike secretary of defense, James Mattis, talks ominously of storm clouds gathering over Korea, while the commandant of the Marine Corps simply says, “I hope I’m wrong, but there’s a war coming.”

Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe Donald Trump, he of the five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, will flinch from launching a war as commander in chief, in which case the United States will merely suffer an epic humiliation as it retreats from as big a red line as a president has ever drawn. Still, lots of people have an interest in war. For Russia, the opportunity to set the United States and China against each other over Korea is a dream come true. For narrow-minded American strategists, it is the only way of cutting the North Korean nuclear Gordian knot. For Kim Jong Un peeking over the edge of the precipice may cause South Korea to break with the Americans, or the Chinese to fight them. For Donald Trump it may be a moment of glory, a dramatic vindication of campaign promises, and an opportunity to distract American minds from Robert Mueller’s investigation of his campaign’s ties to the Russians. And so threats and bluster may turn into violent realities. And if they do, not tomorrow or the next day, but some time in 2018, a Second Korean War could very well make it one of those years in which history swings on its hinge.

Catch-up time

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This morning’s Observer column:

For me, the tech stories of 2017 turned out not to be really tech stories at all. Mostly they were about politics, as the non-tech world woke up to the fact that this digital stuff really affected them. As, for example, when they realised that for a mere $30,000 the Russians could beam subtle political messages to as many as 126 million US voters in an election year without anyone (including Facebook) apparently noticing. Or when big consumer brands suddenly realised that it wasn’t a good idea to have their ads running on YouTube alongside beheading or white supremacist videos. Or when parents woke up to the fact that not everything running on the YouTube Kids channel was wholesome or harmless.

That people were so surprised by these discoveries suggests that the perceptual time lag between technological change and public awareness is longer than we had supposed…

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When the falcon no longer hears the falconer

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From a really thoughtful assessment by Andrew Gelman and Julia Azari of lessons from the 2016 election:

In 2016, Trump was opposed vigorously as dangerous, incompetent, xenophobic, tyrannical, and unhinged, by almost everybody in elite circles: most of his Republican primary opponents at one time or another, a large number of conservative intellectuals, former Republican candidates Romney and McCain, the various Bushes, the media, almost all newspaper editorialists including those that were reliable Republican supporters, all Democrats, about 10 Republican senators, and even some pundits on Fox News. Further, Trump’s breaking of all the standard niceties of politics was there for all to see for themselves. But half the voters said, we go with this guy anyway. “The falcon no longer hears the falconer,” as W. B. Yeats put it.

To put it another way, the elites in the Republican party had a coordination problem, which allowed one of the most disliked choices to win the nomination in a multi-candidate primary campaign. At this point, one might well ask whether elites are now following public opinion: are elected officials who would like to challenge Trump afraid to alienate their voters? These sorts of questions demonstrate the connections between public opinion and legislative politics: Congressional Republicans are reliant on Trump’s support within their party but fearful of his unpopularity among Democrats and independence; meanwhile, Trump relies on the forbearance of a Republican-led Congress to avoid being engulfed by investigations of scandals.

Their Lesson 13 is also interesting:

13. There is an Authoritarian Dimension of Politics

Political scientists used to worry about authoritarianism within the electorate. Mainstream politicians, ranging from Republicans on the far right to lefties such as Sanders, tend not to go there. Trump did. In doing so he broke the rules of politics with extreme comments about his opponents, etc., that are hard to forget. But a significant segment of the electorate, maybe 20%, have always been waiting for its authoritarian champion on what we now call the alt-right dimension. There had not been one in the modern era. Trump’s absolute dominance of the political news for over a year signifies this uniqueness. There had been others with this sort of appeal, notably Joe McCarthy or George Wallace, but they never came close to becoming our national leader.

The dark underbelly of online ‘safety’

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This morning’s Observer column:

Alarmed by this, the companies have been bragging about the number of extra staff they are recruiting to deal with the [‘inappropriate content’] problem. Facebook, for example, is hiring 10,000 extra people to work on “safety and security generally” – which means that by the end of 2018 it will have 20,000 people working in this area. And YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, announced her goal of “bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018”.

What these impressive-sounding commitments do not specify is how many of the new hires will be actual employees and how many will be merely contractors. My hunch is the latter. A more important question – and one we have all shamefully ignored until now – is what kind of work will they be required to do, and under what conditions?

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Brexit wasn’t just because of social media

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This morning’s Observer column:

It seems obvious now that the weaponisation of social media played some role in both the Brexit referendum and the US election. What’s much less clear, however, is whether it was critical in determining the outcome. Personally, I’m sceptical. Our current obsession with digital technology as the trigger for these political earthquakes may actually be a kind of displacement activity. What we’re overlooking is that none of this would have happened if our ruling elites had noticed what four decades of globalisation and neoliberal economics had done to the life chances of many of our fellow citizens.

Nearly four million people in the UK voted for Ukip in 2015, for example, and got just one MP for their trouble. So when David Cameron presented them with a chance to give the neoliberal order a good kicking, they hardly needed their Facebook feeds to tell them what to do. I hope the information commissioner does succeed in unearthing the role of data analytics in Brexit. But even if she does, she’ll only have retrieved one piece of the jigsaw.

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That Alabama ‘victory’

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I agree with Dave Pell’s assessment:

“Before anyone gets too excited, I think it’s worth keeping this particularly unusual race in perspective. Roy Moore; an ill-informed, racist, misogynist, anti-gay, child molesting criminal who was shunned by many in his own party lost an election — and that was still considered an upset.”

Yep.