Old School Hacker

Magic Forum

As you may know, I have recently taken a significant interest in prestidigitation.  It has taken a fair bit of hunting to find good resources.  There are many forums that are broken, and many resources that are dead.  I have managed to find one good forum, however.

It's the Magic Cafe forum.  It's very active and has a large number of members.  I've been able to get some very interesting advice from it.

Barbie and Public Key Cryptography

The Threat Level blog has just posted an interesting thing.  It's a new toy from Mattel.  A security key fob in barbie form.  They have apparently created two 'chat' systems.  The one is open for anyone to chat with anyone - however, one may only communicate via pre-written phrases.  How this is supposed to work I have no idea.  I can only imagine a board-room of middle-aged marketroids attempting to adequately encapsulate pre-teen english.  It would optimistic to say that I expect conversations held via this system to be stilted.  Bizarre and unintelligable would perhaps be more appropriate.  There is a second system, that offers greater freedom and flexibility.  This system only permits one to speak with individuals one has met in person.  The 'token', in the form of an MP3 player, is placed in a friend's dock, it authenticates, and you may then use the second system to chat with each other.

This does pose some interesting ideas.  Cryptographically secure chat, using (real) two factor authentication.  The anonymity of the internet can at once be extremely valuable, and dangerous.  Both are important.  The second system does have it's own caveats, however.  It relies on a whitelist of words.  One may only use the words that have been whitelisted.  This in itself should provide for peculiarly stilted conversations.  They are quick to reassure the users of this system, saying "But don't worry --  we're always adding cool new words!"  I have to admit, I find that quote to be hysterical. 

Move

Wanted to let everyone know I have just moved from Edmonton to Sarnia, and I'm finally getting the shop geared up.  There's a lot of cleanup to be done and organizing.

Computer Repair

This video is via the Consumerist blog.  It exposes what any tech worth his salt already knows, the vast majority of people working to repair computers are incompetent.  I'm not talking about marginal incompetence, being good enough.  I mean gross incompetence.  Bordering on stupidity.  The reality is that repairing computers can be extremely hard, and requires a great deal of skill.  The problem is that you won't get paid for it.  While you have to be very knowledgeable to do the work, the pay is very poor.  Most of those who are good enough to do it properly work elsewhere in the field and get much better pay. 

Dangerous Logic

"I think Mengele’s case highlights how the idealised image of the objective Academic, struggling only to further knowledge, can be a road straight to hell."

A quote from this post on the Phineas Gage Fan Club blog.  It's a grand post, I highly recommend reading it.  The author considers Mengele as model of villainy and evil.  There is an interesting thought here.  Mengele wasn't one-dimensional.  He was not pure evil, although he did some terribly evil things.  Many speak of him having a playful side.  Hitler, I have read, was very cordial in person and had a great sense of humour.  The holocaust is an example in many ways of pronounced faults in human psychology that we must all be personally aware of and careful about.  The author in the aforementioned post mentions the danger of logic without controls.  Logic is a tool.  It is an extremely valuable tool, but if it is not regulated by morality and ethics it can lead in bad directions.

We can see this when we consider the behaviour of individuals in the Enron scandal, or even spammers.  The behaviour they took part in is to a person in their position completely logical and reasonable.  This is evaluating the situation without the benefit of ethics.  Pure logic can be very destructive without an ethical framework within which it can be contained.

Missing the Point

Nota bene: This is substantially a rant about people being stupid.

The results are in from the Radiohead 'experiment'.  In spite of it being available online for people to pay what they wished, it was still distributed significantly on filesharing networks.  Here's the thing that gets me.  After all this time, they still don't get it.  One pundit says:

"If the community rejects even forward-thinking experiments like this one, real harm is done to the next generation of experimentation and change,"

Good grief!  There are 13 year old teeny boppers on myspace who get it.  There are people who don't know what an operating system is, who get it.  I am going to point out something that, in spite of it being blaringly obvious to many of us online, still seems to have eluded the minds of the few.  The internet is for moving and processing information.  Music is information.  What will the internet do with it?  Move it and process it.  People participate in this because they are using the internet for what it's best at.  Seriously, there are little kids who understand this.  But the music industry doesn't.  Musicians: Your music will always be on filesharing networks.  You won't get it off.  You can't get it off.  I know this can be frustrating, people are doing things you don't want them to do with your creation.  All I can offer as solace is the reality that if it's on the network, that means people like it.  They enjoy it.  Filesharing networks are systems built on popularity.  What this means for you is that your name is out there and you can actually sell your music.  It is far worse to not be on the network at all, than to be all over it.  My advice is to accept it, find ways to use it to your advantage.  At the very least, you have created something that has brought a great deal of joy into peoples lives.

The Dangerous Precedent

Madonna is leaving her label.  After NIN and Radiohead deciding to leave their respective labels, is it possible that this counts as a genuine precedent?  The RIAA member companies have remained entrenched in their position, suing their own customers and insisting on DRM that punishes only those who have not pirated their music.  This is an interesting change in tide.  We know that the internet makes transfer of information easier than ever before in human history.  Music is information.  All the labels have provided was marketing and distribution.  If a band can perform it's own marketing and distribution online, then the labels become an anachronism.  They are utterly superfluous to the transaction.  It's an interesting thought, their ongoing struggle against digital music distribution may have just demonstrated to the world that they are no longer necessary at all.

They are superfluous and redundant in the grand scheme of the network.  Of course, personally I doubt this will mean the death of the RIAA.  My opinion is that this is the beginning of music distribution evolving into a new form, and the companies who cannot manage to evolve along with the industry are the ones that will wither and die.  The present situation though, reminds me of an old rhyme that appeared in the masthead of the newsletter of a telegraph operator's union:

Is it not a feat sublime?

Information hath outrun time.

That quote is more than a hundred years old now.

Lolcats

A thought on why lolcats are as funny as they are.  I grew up with cats, my parents still have them.  Every cat has a very different personality and is unique in it's own way.  They do become friends over time.  The simple reality is that if cats could talk, these are things they would really say.  The content of many lolcats images really does reflect the sort of personality that cats have.  As for spelling and grammar, do you really expect cats to be that good at spelling? :)

The Art of Management

Important Management Skills #1:  The ability to flick a screwdriver into a man's sternum at five yards.

Important Management Skills #2:  Blame subordinates for a minty fresh sensation in the morning.

Important Management Skills #3:  Maintain duplicate sets of memos for and against all initiatives.  Do not distribute, but file them.  After initiative is completed, retrieve appropriate memo to assert personal genius.

Important Management Skills #4:  In times of uncertainty, mouse cables make a convenient garrote.

Important Management Skills #5:  Delegate to maintain deniability in case of catastrophe.

The True Nature of a Computer

This has been an interesting week.  I have been finding more and more people who are reluctant to write scripts to accomplish repetitive tasks on the mainframe and elsewhere.  It's weird, if you have to do the same thing a hundred times, why not make the computer do it?  That's what they do best.  Why apply the incredible computational capacity of the human mind to such a mundane problem?  This I cannot fathom.  I find such things interminable.  I script as much as I can at every turn.  I don't want boredom and repetition in my life.  I want it to be interesting and fun! 

I've been thinking about this point lately.  Why not script it?  There seems to be this... fear.  This distrust for the computer.  It's as though they expect the computer to behave randomly at times.  I suppose I can understand how they have harbored this view.  There is a certain operating system which does behave randomly.  That's because of bugs:)  If you have only been exposed to computers through this operating system, however, I can imagine you would attribute this entropy to the hardware and not the software.  You might infer that this is the nature of the system.  This inference is profoundly wrong.  If you feed a computer the same instructions, it will do the same thing.  Consider this code from PIC assembler:

        movlw 0x04

It's only one line. But what do you think will be in W after it's executed? Hint: 0x04. What will be in W after I execute it a second time? I imagine you can figure it out. I can have the processor execute this instruction over and over again for a hundred years and still have the same outcome. Barring a hardware failure, it will always do the same thing. This is the nature of computers. They aren't random, capricious entities. They are predictable machines. Let us use them for what they're good at.