It’s funny what the absence of viewfinders does to people. Observed in St John’s Street, Cambridge yesterday.
The p/w problem
This morning’s Observer column.
Here’s my problem. My password has expired and I need to set a new one. So I think of something and type it in. The system rejects it as being insecure. That’s funny – it’s about the same level of complexity as its expired predecessor. Then I remember – the organisation has recently acquired a new chief information officer and he’s embarked on a root-and-branch overhaul of the system, which presumably includes upgrading security rules.
So I think of a really secure, incomprehensible password and type it in. The system rejects it as laughably inadequate. So I try another and another and another. Same result each time. At this point, I’m getting irritated. Since it’s a Microsoft network, I decide to see what advice Microsoft can give me. I go to the company’s “Safety and Security Center” where’s there’s a helpful page on how to create strong passwords in four easy steps.
Walking away from responsibility
I took this picture on April 6, 2009, when it seemed appropriate in the light of bankers’ attitudes to the catastrophe their industry had created for the world.
Seems doubly ironic now in the light of news that the bank’s CEO has resigned as a result of the $2.3 billion loss incurred by a rogue trader.
Stained glass
Shot in the bar of the Arts Picturehouse cinema in Cambridge on September 21, while waiting for the screening of Page One.
danah boyd at the Oii10 conference
danah and her Microsoft Research colleague Alice Marwick gave two stunningly insightful talks about how (American) teenagers use social networking. Their talks alone would have justified the trip to Oxford.
Links to the article behind this available from here.
Vint Cerf, me, Joi Ito and Andrew Graham
Vint Cerf, me, Joi Ito (new Director of MIT Media Lab) and Andrew Graham (Master of Balliol), originally uploaded by jjn1.
At the reception which preceded the Gala Dinner in Balliol. Thanks to Christopher Michel, who grabbed my Leica and got the shot. Christopher and Joi are both accomplished photographers. And Leica users.
Hmmmm…
“The second time as farce…”
From Paul Krugman’s blog.
I was recently asked to give a talk on “capitalism and democracy”; that’s bigger-think than I usually do, but I gave it a try. I took as my starting point the famous Fukuyama thesis that liberal democracy — meaning basically a market economy plus democratic institutions — was an end state, a final resting point for state organization.
I always had my doubts about that, largely thanks to the 1930s: what we saw there was that a severe economic crisis could put liberal democracy very much at risk. And it was a close-run thing: slightly better strategic decisions by the bad guys could have made totalitarianism, not democracy, the end state.
It seemed to me even when Fukuyama first wrote that this could and probably would happen again, that there would be future crises that would put our system — which I agree is a very good system — at risk.
But one thing I was sure of was that the next great crisis would be different. It would be environmental, or about resource shortages, or about runaway technologies, or something; it wouldn’t be about a banking crisis and a collapse of aggregate demand, aggravated by bad monetary and fiscal policy. We’d learned to much to repeat that performance — right?
Wrong. The amazing thing now is not that we’re having a crisis, it’s the fact that we’re having the same crisis, and making the same mistakes.
The cost of IP madness
From ArsTechnica.
Three Boston University researchers have produced a rigorous empirical estimate of the cost of patent trolling. And the number is breath-taking: patent trolls ("non-practicing entity" is the clinical term) have cost publicly traded defendants $500 billion since 1990. And the problem has become most severe in recent years. In the last four years, the costs have averaged $83 billion per year. The study says this is more than a quarter of US industrial research and development spending during those years.
Two of the study's authors, James Bessen and Mike Meurer, wrote Patent Failure, an empirical study of the patent system that has been widely read and cited since its publication in 2008.
Roger’s way
The late, great Roger Needham was one of the wisest men it’s ever been my privilege to know. He was one of the world’s great computer scientists, utterly incorruptible, unimpressed by power and status, and always said what he thought, no matter what the social context. He and his wife Karen Sparck-Jones (who had many of the same qualities) built their first house in the village of Coton with their own hands and lived in it for the best part of four decades. He was a Labour County Councillor for years, owned about two sports jackets and two ties, and made a point of always wearing a red tie whenever a Tory came in to dine at his (and my) Cambridge college. In all the time I knew him he never once sat down at a meeting. Instead he would pace up and down while talking.
He also had a lovely, pithy way of summarising awkward truths. When my OU colleague, Martin Weller, and I launched You, your computer and the Net — the Open University’s first major online course — it attracted 12,000 students in its first presentation and nearly broke the university because our regional colleagues suddenly had to recruit, interview, train and mentor enough part-time tutors to meet the university’s 20-to-one tutorial ratio. When I told Roger about this he said: “Ah, I see. What you’ve created is a success disaster”.
He had a phrase to describe projects or products that were near completion and kind-of worked: “Good enough for government work”, he would say.
I’ve just been reading a terrific paper by Frank Stajano on his proposed solution to the growing problems of password-based authentication in which he quotes another of Roger’s famous aphorisms. “Optimisation”, he said, “is the process of taking something that works and replacing it with something that almost works, but costs less.”
LATER: This post prompted a nice email from a friend who also knew (and admired) Roger. It reminded him, he wrote,
“of a talk Roger gave (by video, because he wasn’t well) at a conference I was organising for the Cambridge Society in Lancaster on the Cambridge Phenomenon. There were all kinds of big-wigs there from Lancaster, and from Cambridge. Roger’s talk was on what made the Phenomenon work. It was a brilliant performance – greatly enhanced by his dry comment (speaking as a pro-Vice-Chancellor) that one of the things that made it work was the the University was friendly to it. He added: ‘It wasn’t friendly as a matter of policy; it was far too inefficient for that’ There aren’t many pro-V-Cs of any institution who would risk making a comment like that!”