Snapped on our walk this afternoon near where we live. The lake was laid out by Capability Brown and a few years ago was restored to its original shape.
Flickr version here.
Many happy returns of the kernel
Today is Linus Torvalds’s birthday. In celebration, Glyn Moody has a lovely account of the first stirrings of Linux.
Nipples, lies and digital images
There’s a wonderful analysis by Secure Computing of the way an image in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue was tastefully PhotoShopped, probably by a graphic artist as a routine job. There’s nothing really sinister in the story (a missing handbag, eyes and teeth enhanced, a nipple removed). It’s really just a fascinating forensic analysis of how you can detect PhotoShopped alterations if you know how.
There’s good news and bad news here. On the one hand, the case study provides a cautionary tale about how untrustworthy digital images have become; on the other, it shows how someone with the right tools and forensic skills can detect alterations.
Update: To be fair to Victoria’s Secret, they responded well to the critique (unlike Ralph Lauren, which in a similar case resorted to the DMCA takedown tactic).
The Noughties
Conclusion of this morning’s Observer column.
What all this suggests is that the noughties were the years when the internet went from being exotic to mainstream – indeed, to being a utility. No child under the age of 11 knows there was once a world without Google. Most teenagers cannot imagine a world without Facebook or YouTube. And even the proportion of adults who can remember travel agents is declining fast. Almost without noticing, we have become dependent on the network. Our task in the next decade will be to make sure it remains free and open, rather than the captive of the corporations and governments who would love to control it. Happy New Year!
The coming Chinese century
There’s an astonishing piece by Mark ‘Six Degrees’ Lynas in the Guardian.
The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.
China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world’s poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. The failure was “the inevitable result of rich countries refusing adequately and fairly to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility”, said Christian Aid. “Rich countries have bullied developing nations,” fumed Friends of the Earth International.
All very predictable, but the complete opposite of the truth.
Astonishing, if true. So what’s China’s game?
Why did China, in the words of a UK-based analyst who also spent hours in heads of state meetings, “not only reject targets for itself, but also refuse to allow any other country to take on binding targets?” The analyst, who has attended climate conferences for more than 15 years, concludes that China wants to weaken the climate regulation regime now “in order to avoid the risk that it might be called on to be more ambitious in a few years’ time”.
This does not mean China is not serious about global warming. It is strong in both the wind and solar industries. But China’s growth, and growing global political and economic dominance, is based largely on cheap coal. China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to.
What’s funny about this is that China is beginning to throw its weight about in a thoroughly American fashion. Looks like we all have some adjusting to do.
Surreal estate
Tiger Woods’s unbelievably naff other place in Florida. Described by one observer as “a cross between a discount motel and a beachside nursing home”.
Tiger’s crash: the Top Gear angle
Phil Greenspun has decided not to order the Cadillac Escalade after all.
Imagine a group of engineers so gifted that U.S. taxpayers were willing to spend more than $50 billion to keep them together. These folks designed a vehicle that weighs 6000 lbs. empty and is advertised as having safety advantages over cars designed by companies that operate without continuous government assistance. Tiger Woods, a man whose physique is presumably far more durable than average, drives this vehicle across a lawn and into a tree at a pretty low speed. Did he bound out of his Cadillac Escalade without a scratch? According to the New York Times, “Woods was slipping in and out of consciousness. [the police] said Woods suffered lacerations to his upper and lower lips and blood in his mouth, and that he was treated on scene for 10 minutes before being transported to a nearby hospital.”
Yep. I’ve cancelled my order too.
Philip Greenspun’s Christmas Present to Barack Obama
One of those offers one cannot refuse.
I would like to make an offer of a Christmas present: unlimited helicopter transportation for him and his family, at no cost to him or the U.S. taxpayer, through the end of his reign.
Background: the U.S. military has spent the last 10 years or so trying to buy some replacement helicopters for presidential transport. They settled on a huge $30 million Eurocopter with three screaming jet engines that put out a big welcome mat for a cheap heat-seeking missile, such as the Stingers that U.S. tax dollars purchased for the Taliban during the 1980s. By the time our military and Lockheed Martin added some anti-missile defenses and some U.S. manufacturing, the cost of each 14-passenger helicopter went up to about $400 million, far in excess of what airlines pay for the 853-passenger Airbus A-380. The program was shut down, in theory, but recently Congress authorized a $100 million gift to Lockheed Martin to keep the program alive (source). Does the U.S. really need to spend $15 billion on a handful of helicopters that will be used mostly for 10-minute hops? And should we buy helicopters that are so heavy that it will require several C-5 cargo planes to get them to foreign destinations (the president of the U.S. always travels with his own helicopters rather than borrowing local ones)?
Running the existing helicopter fleet is not cheap. There are literally 800 pilots, mechanics, and administrators, all paid federal salaries and pensions that are more than double their private-sector counterparts (source). Jet fuel is purchased in prodigious quantities.
I happen to own two nearly brand-new four-seat Robinson R44 helicopters. Powered by efficient Lycoming piston engines, these burn less fuel in a 130 mph cruise than each Eurocopter engine would burn at idle. Currently we use these for flight training at East Coast Aero Club, but in the interest of sparing the taxpayer from further ruin, I would be willing to move them down to Washington, D.C. I will also move myself down and one or two additional instructor-pilots from East Coast Aero Club. All of us have more than 1000 hours of helicopter experience. All are U.S. citizens and one of us is an Army veteran (given the recent tragedy in Texas involving a continuously promoted and decorated Army officer, it may be necessary to clarify that, to the best of our knowledge, he was not simultaneously serving in the U.S. Army and waging jihad on behalf of Al-Qaeda).
Footnote: Phil Greenspun founded ArsDigita and teaches web application programming at MIT. He writes an entertaining blog.
The Apple Catch 22
My son needed to book an appointment with a ‘genius’ at the local Apple Store to find out what’s wrong with his MacBook. So he went online to www.apple.com/uk/retail/ to book an appointment. The reservation system took him through the various steps and accepts a reservation for 09.20 tomorrow. But then the Apple system pops up an “Oops, there was an error” window. So we phone the phone number listed for the store (01223 253600) to check that the reservation actually got made and get the usual “For [this] press 1, for [that] press 2…” rigmarole. It then helpfully tells us that Apple “regrets” that it unable to discuss reservations on the phone. To do that we are advised to log into www.apple.com/uk/retail. Bah!
LATER: In the interests of fairness, I should report that (1) the system had registered the appointment, and (2) that the ‘genius’ was admirably efficient, courteous and helpful. The hard drive had scrambled itself and the machine was repaired under warranty within the hour.
STILL LATER: Kevin Cryan pointed me at this nice essay by Clive James on dealing with computer systems and automated call services.
How secure is the cloud?
Not as secure as the vendors might like to think — at least according to this useful and informative piece by David Talbot.
Computer security researchers had previously shown that when two programs are running simultaneously on the same operating system, an attacker can steal data by using an eavesdropping program to analyze the way those programs share memory space. They posited that the same kinds of attacks might also work in clouds when different virtual machines run on the same server.
In the immensity of a cloud setting, the possibility that a hacker could even find the intended prey on a specific server seemed remote. This year, however, three computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and one at MIT went ahead and did it. They hired some virtual machines to serve as targets and others to serve as attackers–and tried to get both groups hosted on the same servers at Amazon’s data centers. In the end, they succeeded in placing malicious virtual machines on the same servers as targets 40 percent of the time, all for a few dollars. While they didn’t actually steal data, the researchers said that such theft was theoretically possible. And they demonstrated how the very advantages of cloud computing–ease of access, affordability, centralization, and flexibility–could give rise to new kinds of insecurity. Amazon stressed that nobody has successfully attacked EC2 in this manner and that the company has now prevented that specific kind of assault (though, understandably, it wouldn’t specify how). But what Amazon hasn’t solved–what nobody has yet solved–is the security problem inherent in the size and structure of clouds.
Good article, worth reading in full. Also includes an interesting animation of how the exploit was carried out.