Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
On 9/12/13 6:23 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote: Or do you also need [..] doping [..] Saw this on /. this morning. http://people.umass.edu/gbecker/BeckerChes13.pdf Yikes.. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] Hardware Trojans - was:] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
Marcus/Glen - On 9/12/13 6:23 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote: Or do you also need [..] doping [..] Saw this on /. this morning. http://people.umass.edu/gbecker/BeckerChes13.pdf Yikes.. Reading this article reminded me of the following: UNM/HPC did some Visualization work for Sandia regarding both MEMS and IC diffing back around 2000 that was impressive at the time. Part of the challenge was partial data from multilayered work. I was doing ad-hoc (e.g. free) consulting with them at the time and found it one of the more interesting problems... among other things, we looked at the equivalent of blink comparators and also dabbled with stereopsis as a method for looking for *significant* differences among the plenitude of noisy, *insignificant* differences. This level of mutation seems precedented in various parts of Molecular Biology and I'm reminded how intrinsically digital molecular biology is, despite living in an analog milieu, yielding idealized random numbers from the (brownian) environment. My limited understanding of (some) viral mechanisms seems to be a good analogy... the goal being to introduce differences which affect function of host cellular machinery without being detectable by simple inventory style means. Every time this arms race escalates to a new strata (in this case chemistry within the morphology), a new level of indirection or degree of freedom is added to the system... it seems as though (can't conjure a good example without going off on a tangential ramble) there is a structural or phase space imperative that stacking too many degrees of freedom will lead to a complexity collapse. It may be part of the story of punctuated equilibrium? - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] Raspberry Pi
I'm going to buy a Pi and need a little info. I've got Doug's posts: http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/07/delicious-raspberry-pi.html http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-second-helping-of-pi.html .. but wouldn't hurt to pick up on other's experiences too before building a system. - Where to buy? The two distributors on the website did not include USA. Be nice if they also had peripherals or kits .. see next. - What to buy? I'll get the upscale B model .. I think that's it for choices of the board. But other than a power adaptor, are there interesting addons, especially for more I/O .. i.e. goes-intas and goes-outtas sensors? Doug's system added a USB hub and memory card. - What Linux Distro? Although I use the terminal more than GUIs, I'm not as Linux savvy as I'd like. I'd prefer a fairly universal distro that I might encounter elsewhere such as on hosting services and laptops/home servers. Is Ubuntu still the favorite? One requirement if its possible is Node.js. - WiFi: any success stories? I can just use ether-over-power adaptors if needed but we're pretty wireless at home. I know some WiFi dongles get poor reviews, but my TiVo uses one nicely. - Enclosure: I've seen Doug's case choice, looks great .. are there any others out there? Or is naked OK too? TIA, -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Hardware Trojans - was:] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
Steve Smith wrote at 09/13/2013 08:09 AM: On 9/12/13 6:23 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote: Or do you also need [..] doping [..] Saw this on /. this morning. http://people.umass.edu/gbecker/BeckerChes13.pdf Yikes.. Reading this article reminded me of the following: [...] looking for *significant* differences among the plenitude of noisy, *insignificant* differences. That is a fantastic paper! But I still wonder at the practical utility of their chosen use cases. I can kinda grok the utility of reduced attack complexity because you can simply produce trojans en masse and hope they percolate into the critical sub-systems you will need/want. But I'm too ignorant to understand the utility of the side-channel use case. How would the black hat get the chip into the right place? The same way? By flooding the target with chips that all contain the hidden side channel? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions. -- Milton Friedman FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
On 9/13/13 2:57 PM, glen wrote: If we know this is/will-be the case, then why press for absolute transparency at all? Why not be anarcho-capitalist and allow for the opacity of some, strategically allowed, opacity? The anarcho-capitalist will try to extract every bit of value from any vocabulary they own or influence. It's fine for them to try to do that, but it is also fine to make them obsolete. For example, GPU vendors own their hardware designs and their driver stacks. If their driver stacks are open sourced, or reverse-engineered that gives a little more insight into how their hardware works. If people know how their hardware works, then some competitor can come along and create similar hardware at a lower price point. Provided an open source effort can come along and make a sort of similar VHDL design that puts them out of business, it's all good. Most anarcho-capitalists aren't that, of course, they are capitalists, and expect public investment to be there to protect their IP for them, through copyrights, patents, and so on. The GPU vendors want an interface like OpenCL so that they can keep people away from the actual design. That's annoying, and misrepresents the concept of `open' for their own selfish purposes. Anyway, my point here is that working at the interface level carries more benefit than cost for the same reasons that test-driven development has taken over (at least in hype) the s/w development world. I tend to view it as a constraint based approach to the world. Forcing absolute transparency (even if only in the ideal) seems like a low RoI commitment. Some users can't afford to trust, and will have a very sensitive cost function. Other users have a more risk/reward structure. Lastly, it's also important to realize that your egalitarian concept of of the diverse overlapping communities _might_ turn out to be naive or overly simple. If we think in terms of gaming, there should arise some seriously competent gamers who pool resources into a very small (and controllable) cabal that has a better understanding of the entire stack than anyone else. And, not only will the transparency _not_ assist the rest of us schlubs in keeping that cabal honest, it will _prevent_ that because the cabal can hide behind the illusion of transparency. But it is ok if there are schlubs, if provided one chooses to be one. Membership in the cabal comes from cognitive investment, not capital. They can always say things like It's all on the up and up! The source code's out there. Check it yourself. ... all the while _knowing_ that without their billions of dollars in assets we normal people cannot check it ourselves. Hence, perhaps similar to green washing, the good gamers will use our own ideology against us. I've worked on a variety of types of code, and I don't find I need to appeal to individuals controlling teams of people and domain experts to understand the parts I'm interested in.There's a scale free property to good codes that makes it possible to understand them. Understand the goals, inputs, the outputs, and starting building out an understanding.. If there is no source code it is much more difficult (but not impossible). Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Raspberry Pi
On 9/13/13 10:32 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: I'm going to buy a Pi and need a little info. I've got Doug's posts: http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/07/delicious-raspberry-pi.html http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-second-helping-of-pi.html .. but wouldn't hurt to pick up on other's experiences too before building a system. - Where to buy? The two distributors on the website did not include USA. Be nice if they also had peripherals or kits .. see next. I bought mine from CanaKit about 6 weeks ago. It is a B.2.0 model (latest I think). Be sure to double check the circuitry *and* the doping on all the transistors to make sure it isn't those Canadians http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxPRHXgYVlk trying to sneak something past us! ARMs and Atmels' seem like a particularly good way to infiltrate the universe... Mobile devices, TVs, SetTops, etc. The *lower* processor count might make it easier to verify but the ubiquity of chip design/manufacturers and the *high capability* and *diversity* of the devices they tend to go into seem like they would be the ideal candidates for a hardware trojan. Have hardware trojans been found in the wild yet? (meaning have they been discovered in other than an obvious, targeted venue?). /end threadkink - What to buy? I'll get the upscale B model .. I think that's it for choices of the board. But other than a power adaptor, are there interesting addons, especially for more I/O .. i.e. goes-intas and goes-outtas sensors? Doug's system added a USB hub and memory card. There is the I/O pins (gazintaGazoutas) inspired (I suppose) by the Arduino. I haven't checked but I assume they don't mirror them position for position (otherwise allowing an Arduino Shield to be used?). I bought mine to upgrade from the Arduino Emma used to drive the Vacuum advance/shutter system for our Multiplex Holo Recorder, unfortunately it hasn't left the box. - What Linux Distro? Although I use the terminal more than GUIs, I'm not as Linux savvy as I'd like. I'd prefer a fairly universal distro that I might encounter elsewhere such as on hosting services and laptops/home servers. Is Ubuntu still the favorite? One requirement if its possible is Node.js. You must have seen the NOOBs on an SD http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4536 already? Seems like learning/using Raspbian makes a lot of sense... I'm guessing Node.js is everywhere? - WiFi: any success stories? I can just use ether-over-power adaptors if needed but we're pretty wireless at home. I know some WiFi dongles get poor reviews, but my TiVo uses one nicely. One of my colleagues doing camera http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/camera-board testing with me uses one. I think I bought mine (Edimax EW-7811 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003MTTJOY/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i05?ie=UTF8psc=1) by his recommendation. - Enclosure: I've seen Doug's case choice, looks great .. are there any others out there? Or is naked OK too? Knowing your proclivities, I suggest clear. TIA, On that note, you would be welcome to break in mine for me. It is in a box along with the USB WiFi thingy and a power supply, just waiting to be warmed up. Then you could maybe wait for model C or revision B? I'm interested in the RPi as an extended alternative to the Arduino... so if you were to wring out the gazInOutUz for me, I'd consider it a good deal! - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?
Marcus/Glen/et alii - I just listened to Amy Goodman's interview with Robert Riech http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/13/inequality_for_all_robert_reich_warns on his new film, Inequality for All. I was caught enough by the following statement he made to look it up and consider it further (cut and pasted from the DN! website transcript): /This economy is not working for everyone. And one of the points we make in the film, which I have been writing about, but the wonderful thing about the film is that you can dramatize something, is that the economy is not something out there, it is not kind of a state of nature, the economy is a set of rules. It is based upon, basically, rules that are decided upon by our democracy. And if our rules are generating outcomes that are unfair, that don't work very well, that don't spread enough of the gains of economic growth to enough people, we change the rules./ Responding to your well bent (kinked?) thread on Skype Vulnerability which segued into discussions of Anarcho-Capitalism and Open Source: If we know this is/will-be the case, then why press for absolute transparency at all? Why not be anarcho-capitalist and allow for the opacity of some, strategically allowed, opacity? The anarcho-capitalist will try to extract every bit of value from any vocabulary they own or influence. It's fine for them to try to do that, but it is also fine to make them obsolete. ... Most anarcho-capitalists aren't that, of course, they are capitalists, and expect public investment to be there to protect their IP for them, through copyrights, patents, and so on. The GPU vendors want an interface like OpenCL so that they can keep people away from the actual design. That's annoying, and misrepresents the concept of `open' for their own selfish purposes. Lastly, it's also important to realize that your egalitarian concept of of the diverse overlapping communities _might_ turn out to be naive or overly simple. If we think in terms of gaming, there should arise some seriously competent gamers who pool resources into a very small (and controllable) cabal that has a better understanding of the entire stack than anyone else. And, not only will the transparency _not_ assist the rest of us schlubs in keeping that cabal honest, it will _prevent_ that because the cabal can hide behind the illusion of transparency. But it is ok if there are schlubs, if provided one chooses to be one. Membership in the cabal comes from cognitive investment, not capital. They can always say things like It's all on the up and up! The source code's out there. Check it yourself. ... all the while _knowing_ that without their billions of dollars in assets we normal people cannot check it ourselves. Hence, perhaps similar to green washing, the good gamers will use our own ideology against us. I've worked on a variety of types of code, and I don't find I need to appeal to individuals controlling teams of people and domain experts to understand the parts I'm interested in.There's a scale free property to good codes that makes it possible to understand them. Understand the goals, inputs, the outputs, and starting building out an understanding.. If there is no source code it is much more difficult (but not impossible). Marcus I was left wondering if Marcus' arguements about Open Source don't apply well to Governance and Economics. The Stick and the Carrot of any society seems to be it's Legislation and Policy and it's Economic System. Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting code development? And isn't Economics the primary execution environment for that code? It seems like much of our discussion about transparency in government and accountability is not unlike demanding that we be able to read the code that is being executed. Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?) IS there a large enough contingent of aspiring technocrats such as ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a phase change? Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our technosphere, but Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become incredibly powerful just as the *very ideas* of Democracy and then Free Markets once were themselves. Just a thought... - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 09/13/2013 02:59 PM: If people know how their hardware works, then some competitor can come along and create similar hardware at a lower price point. Provided an open source effort can come along and make a sort of similar VHDL design that puts them out of business, it's all good. Right. So, it would work fairly well without a requirement for absolute transparency. Most anarcho-capitalists aren't that, of course, they are capitalists, and expect public investment to be there to protect their IP for them, through copyrights, patents, and so on. The GPU vendors want an interface like OpenCL so that they can keep people away from the actual design. That's annoying, and misrepresents the concept of `open' for their own selfish purposes. Well, to be fair, copyrights and patents have to be defended by their owners using the public infrastructure as a lever. If you're too poor to defend your own property, that public infrastructure is worthless to you. Some of the larger organizations often argue that _they_ are the primary source of the public infrastructure in the first place. So, it's not quite as cut and dried. But you're right, these capitalists are not anarcho-capitalists by any stretch. They want state-corp integration ... preferably asymmetric integration. Membership in the cabal comes from cognitive investment, not capital. I disagree. Membership in the set of cabal _tools_ ... the technically competent person, comes from cognitive investment. Ownership/control of those tools comes from capital, usually in the form of golden handcuffs. What percentage of geeks do you know that wouldn't opt for a 6 figure salary in exchange for their indentured servitude? ... at least for a little while? Membership in the actual cabal requires you to be able to own/control the tools, which means you need money to pay them some sort of competitive salary (or perhaps lavish them with avant technology). In some rare cases, you can exert control through charisma or machiavellian manipulation. But that's the exception, not the rule. I've worked on a variety of types of code, and I don't find I need to appeal to individuals controlling teams of people and domain experts to understand the parts I'm interested in.There's a scale free property to good codes that makes it possible to understand them. Understand the goals, inputs, the outputs, and starting building out an understanding.. If there is no source code it is much more difficult (but not impossible). Again, for the most part, I agree. But you have to remember two things 1) you're not the average and 2) the _types_ matter. For example, it's one thing to be curious about, say, operating systems. But it's another thing, entirely, to be curious about cryptographic systems. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella Among the metal ones a messenger will soon arrive. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?
Proprietary Code (PC :-) has a place if people are willing to put up with it, but then most people don't realize there are alternatives. That old Freedom vs. Security thing seems apropos here. Many people are quite willing to put up with a little less freedom for a little more security. I'm not sure where I come down on the issue of whether or not those who are so disposed deserve neither. Sometime I empathize a lot with the libertarians, but given our millions of years of evolution, largely as a communal species, I suspect that libertarian thinking is mostly an adolescent point of view. Gary Sent from my PC email client (Mail.app) running on a PC OS (Mac OS) running PC hardware (MacBook Pro) - geez, what a hypocrite I am :-) On Sep 13, 2013, at 7:11 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Marcus/Glen/et alii - I just listened to Amy Goodman's interview with Robert Riech on his new film, Inequality for All. I was caught enough by the following statement he made to look it up and consider it further (cut and pasted from the DN! website transcript): This economy is not working for everyone. And one of the points we make in the film, which I have been writing about, but the wonderful thing about the film is that you can dramatize something, is that the economy is not something out there, it is not kind of a state of nature, the economy is a set of rules. It is based upon, basically, rules that are decided upon by our democracy. And if our rules are generating outcomes that are unfair, that don’t work very well, that don’t spread enough of the gains of economic growth to enough people, we change the rules. [...] Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting code development? And isn't Economics the primary execution environment for that code? It seems like much of our discussion about transparency in government and accountability is not unlike demanding that we be able to read the code that is being executed. Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?) IS there a large enough contingent of aspiring technocrats such as ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a phase change? Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our technosphere, but Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become incredibly powerful just as the *very ideas* of Democracy and then Free Markets once were themselves. Just a thought... - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Hardware Trojans - was:] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
On 9/13/13 10:02 AM, glen e. p. ropella wrote: But I'm too ignorant to understand the utility of the side-channel use case. How would the black hat get the chip into the right place? The same way? By flooding the target with chips that all contain the hidden side channel? Install staff at foundries that provide chips to infrastructure/software as a service companies, and then use those same companies to listen-in on the side channels to collect keys..? I've found the instrumentation underlying IPMI monitoring for monitoring cluster health to be pretty high variance, but perhaps as voltage regulators get integrated into the chip (and mobile use-cases make people very sensitive about power usage), it would be possible to observe a physical compute node's power draw from one virtual machine vs. a target's virtual machine? Spend some money signing up for all the popular cloud computing companies and go fishing for signature power variations.. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Raspberry Pi
On 9/13/13 12:29 PM, Steve Smith wrote: Have hardware trojans been found in the wild yet? (meaning have they been discovered in other than an obvious, targeted venue?). The paper mentions VisionTech, but it sounds like that was mainly just a counterfeiting operation. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1266976 Those in the know, if there are any here, probably can't talk about it. Maybe if there are `interesting stories' they will show up on the Washington Post or the Guardian one of these days. :-) Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
On 9/13/13 6:40 PM, glen wrote: Membership in the cabal comes from cognitive investment, not capital. I disagree. Membership in the set of cabal _tools_ ... the technically competent person, comes from cognitive investment. Ownership/control of those tools comes from capital, usually in the form of golden handcuffs. What percentage of geeks do you know that wouldn't opt for a 6 figure salary in exchange for their indentured servitude? ... at least for a little while? What kind group would contain an instance of such a cabal? An open source development team at Intel or Google? A big university software team? I can't think of a lot of examples of open source development done for its own sake. I agree about this distinction between a cabal purposes vs. the human tools that achieve it. Usually the technological tools are closed too (with open as the exception), serve the human resource tools, which then serve the cabal (e.g. the company's deciders). I'm talking about a different sort of cabal, like the folks that develop and direct a large package like LLVM, Postgres, GHC, or R. These projects involve developers that span universities and corporations. The software serves as a research vehicle, and/or the basis for another specialized product. The people that work on these packages may even work for competing companies that provide the golden handcuffs (and jump between the companies to the extent their aren't legally restricted from doing so). Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
On 9/13/13 6:40 PM, glen wrote: So, it would work fairly well without a requirement for absolute transparency. If the goal is to develop versatile technical language, and someone effectively owns a bunch of the useful words (interfaces , ...) that is an impediment to giving everyone a fair shake at doing technical work. Those that can afford to license the useful interfaces at least aren't at a deficit compared to those that cannot. The worse part is that certain interfaces become less mutable than others. If the licensed interfaces aren't the perfect ones, then the sellers and customers of those words will try to keep them around even if they lack deep merit. If, on the other hand, the useful parts of the interfaces can be recast in another way, and understood in isolated bits then better interfaces can be built around them. The frozen language (interfaces, ..), I think, tends to limit the imagination of the users. The split between users and implementers or vendors and customers, is artificial. The ethic of absolute transparency says that if you want something, you don't need to bitch to someone to get it, you can just go make it. This was the original appeal of computers to me: Imagination - Reality Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?
*Some Incomplete and Scattered Thoughts* I missed some of the discussion and will have to catch up once I get the number of unread emails I have at least less than the current year :P but I don't see why true transparency wouldn't affect people becoming dominant through a better understanding of the system - would not that understanding be public knowledge if indeed all parts of the system were transparent? Unless we are talking about gut instinct / intuition, in which case inequality is probably unavoidable. Proprietary Code (PC :-) has a place if people are willing to put up with it, but then most people don't realize there are alternatives. That old Freedom vs. Security thing seems apropos here. Many people are quite willing to put up with a little less freedom for a little more security. I'm not sure where I come down on the issue of whether or not those who are so disposed deserve neither. I think Mr. Franklin's point was that you get what you deserve (which is true only in narrow contexts) and they will certainly get neither. In other words, if you want something done right, do it yourself :P Sometime I empathize a lot with the libertarians, but given our millions of years of evolution, largely as a communal species, I suspect that libertarian thinking is mostly an adolescent point of view. Many people would agree with you, but I also think the whole point of community is that we keep each other in check, that is, on the path towards some goal. We can't do that if we don't have the freedom to be different from one another, which requires some degree of autonomy. It's like balancing an ecosystem. At the risk of mixing metaphors, there have to be enough wolves to keep the sheep in check but also few enough to keep them from hunting the sheep to extinction (of both populations). No, I think that definitely mixed the metaphors / crossed the streams. Oh well. Anyway, my point was that adolescence is often claimed to be one of the most formative parts of people's lives, along with maturity, if/when that comes along. Sent from my PC email client (Mail.app) running on a PC OS (Mac OS) running PC hardware (MacBook Pro) - geez, what a hypocrite I am As I think you were heading towards with your previous comments, one shouldn't be faulted for the shortcomings of the system wherein one resides, in this case the consumer computer market that makes a couple sub-prime setups most convenient. I just listened to Amy Goodman's interview with Robert Riechhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/13/inequality_for_all_robert_reich_warnson his new film, Inequality for All. Still puzzling over that title, but then I was in and out of the room while my parents were watching the show. Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting code development? And isn't Economics the primary execution environment for that code? It seems like much of our discussion about transparency in government and accountability is not unlike demanding that we be able to read the code that is being executed. Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?) I find it interesting and maybe (or maybe not) significant that criminal justice seems to have a less clear role in this analogy. Perhaps this relates to how varied the number of opinions one can find regarding it's purpose are? Is there a large enough contingent of aspiring technocrats such as ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a phase change? Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our technosphere, but Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become incredibly powerful just as the *very ideas* of Democracy and then Free Markets once were themselves. I think several related projects have been discussed on this list (FOSS Estonian voting software, Citizens Elect [right name?]), but I think none of them get at what you are saying. I think the problem is that (like microchips and the computers that play a major role in designing / building them) society is a lower-level construct which produces the higher-level construct of technology, and (unlike microchips, perhaps) we want / expect society to work even when tech does not, rather than the other way around (with some exceptions, I suppose. Zombie http://www.kabar.com kniveshttp://zombietools.net/tools/? I can't really think of any non-trivial examples. I guess some more realistic survival gear like water filters). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?
On 9/13/13 6:11 PM, Steve Smith wrote: Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?) Ok, criminal Justice is more like crude block-device virus scanning for `bad' signatures. It doesn't prevent problems (stop the malware from entering in the first place), it tries to mop up afterward. To me, the debate about the FISA court government overreach, is analogous to what devices are allowed to be scanned what what signatures constitute badness, and _who_ defines that. The NSA, not even metaphorically, is concerned getting access to the space of physical memory to get lookahead on badness, and our democracy says there there should be protection rules on those pages. Law is about laying out how privilege escalation in the operating system works, when exceptions can be issued in user space (longjmp, signal handlers), and when they are issued to processes or the kernel (NMIs, termination). And national security is about keeping the machine room a reasonable temperature and ensuring their is power! But I don't agree that democracy is the act of writing code, in reality it's more like `core war', a process of finding the best (or just dominant) programs through competition. Everyone with influence wants less competition, whether they are governing or not. That's the biggest risk to finding the best programs IMO. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?
Markus... Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?) Ok, criminal Justice is more like crude block-device virus scanning for `bad' signatures. No... I still think it is like an exception detection/handling process... enforcement is roughly detection and handling is roughly courts and penal? Intelligence is more like virus-scanning... It doesn't prevent problems (stop the malware from entering in the first place), it tries to mop up afterward. To me, the debate about the FISA court government overreach, is analogous to what devices are allowed to be scanned what what signatures constitute badness, and _who_ defines that. The NSA, not even metaphorically, is concerned getting access to the space of physical memory to get lookahead on badness, and our democracy says there there should be protection rules on those pages. Law is about laying out how privilege escalation in the operating system works, when exceptions can be issued in user space (longjmp, signal handlers), and when they are issued to processes or the kernel (NMIs, termination). And national security is about keeping the machine room a reasonable temperature and ensuring their is power! Yes, national (foreign and domestic) security is like malware scanning... But I don't agree that democracy is the act of writing code, in reality it's more like `core war', a process of finding the best (or just dominant) programs through competition. Well, politics is like core-wars but democracy itself (writing your own rules, including rules about how to write rules whether directly or by proxy-representatives) still seems a lot like writing code to me. The interpreters/compiler/system drivers may be a lot buggier than what we are used to... but ... ? Everyone with influence wants less competition, whether they are governing or not. That's the biggest risk to finding the best programs IMO. So I guess I agree that psuedo-democracy-as-we-practice-it is very much like self-modifying code, etc. - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?
On 9/13/13 10:14 PM, Steve Smith wrote: No... I still think it is like an exception detection/handling process... enforcement is roughly detection and handling is roughly courts and penal? Intelligence is more like virus-scanning... Crimes are punished and criminals contained -- security theater for an audience that needs to see `something is being done'. But the deed is already done. In the analogy, the bits have already been written to disk. Then you have to hunt evidence and then the bad actor from the evidence (which is to find the signature in the pool of storage). More modern virus scanners intercept the bad bits before they hit disk (as they are coming on the network) and don't torture users of the system as the cops run around looking the same suspects (disk blocks) over and over and over. Disk heads flying all over the place, I/O bandwidth saturated and CPUs wasting cycles looking for known-bad patterns. Like our apparent insatiable need for security, this is a huge distraction from actually getting work done. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
