Month: October 2008

Contemplating netbooks

Having played around a bit with Tristan’s EEE PC, I am considering getting a netbook computer myself. My old iBook is not very portable and, while the big screen and keyboard it offers have advantages, there is considerable appeal in a machine that could be a default content of my backpack.

Do any readers have experience with particular netbooks? I would be looking for something that is tolerable for writing emails and blog posts on, and good for surfing the web. Long battery life would be an advantage, as would an operating system that does the most common tasks well.

I won’t be buying anything for a couple of months, at least, due to a bit of a financial crunch, so machines that look promising and have not yet been released are also worth mentioning.

Massive anti-terror database contemplated in the UK

British Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon has been saying some worrisome things about terrorism, security, and civil liberties. He is backing a plan to create a massive database of mobile and internet communications, for purposes of fighting terrorism. One worrisome aspect is the suggestion that it would be used to deal with “terrorists or criminals.” Technologies initially justified as an extreme measure necessary to fight terrorism will always spread to more banal uses, with a greater scope for abuses.

Indeed, that is the biggest issue that needs to be weighed against the possible terror-fighting capacity of such databases. They will inevitably be abused. Furthermore, governments are far more dangerous than terrorists, both when they are acting in malicious ways and when they are trying to be benign. Modern history certainly demonstrates that, while the power of terrorists to inflict harm is considerable, the ability of states to do so is extreme.

Previously:

Oxford graduation

As of today, I am officially a graduate of the University of Oxford. My name was read in absentia at the ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre today. As such, I am now a member of the Convocation.

Admittedly, it is somewhat anticlimactic to finish my degree in this way. It was, however, the sensible choice. The things I miss most about the place are the conversations, the engaging seminars and lectures, the overlapping social spheres, and places including the botanic gardens, Natural History Museum, and various canals.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

This collection of Richard Feynman‘s autobiographical anecdotes is both charming and amusing. More than anything else, it conveys what a remarkable character he is, and what an astonishing variety of things he managed to do. Few Nobel Prize winning physicists can claim to have had a one man art show, learned to pick locks and crack military safes, played the drums for a percussion-only ballet, wrangled cryptographically with the mail censors at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, spent the summer after finishing his undergraduate degree as ‘chief research chemist of the Metaplast Corporation,’ juggled, deciphered Mayan hieroglyphs, defended a topless bar in court, and fixed radios while he was still a small child. One can never tell if Feynman is being entirely honest and accurate – largely because the character he draws for himself is so uncomplicated and appealing – but one is certainly grateful for the stories.

Indeed, the book provides a nice counterargument to the division of labour. While economics and societal organization have revealed specialization in knowledge and production to be highly efficient overall, Feynman demonstrates the degree to which variety is remarkable and wonderful for the individual. The question the reader is left with is whether they can experience anything comparable without Feynman’s own extensive genius and peculiar character.

Stern on the opportunities in recession

Nicholas Stern – most notably the author of an eponymous report on the economics of climate change for the British government – has a piece in The Guardian arguing that the financial turmoil ongoing around the world provides an opportunity to refocus investment on low-carbon options:

The International Energy Agency estimates that world energy infrastructure investments are likely to average about $1 trillion a year over the next 20 years. If the majority of this is low-carbon, and some of it is brought forward, it will be an outstanding source of investment demand. So too will be the investments for energy efficiency, many of which can be labour-intensive and are available immediately.

It makes sense to highlight how the current pause in headlong, high-carbon growth can help us to reorient the global economy. Stabilizing climate requires a constant commitment to reducing emissions: not one that wavers when growth seems to strong to resist or too weak to threaten.

Martin Hellman on the risk of nuclear war

Despite the end of the Cold War, there remains some possibility of a major nuclear exchange between some combination of those world powers with more than a couple of hundred nuclear weapons. Such an outcome could arise through accident or miscalculation, unauthorized launch, or simply through the progressive stressing of the situation, in a manner akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, of the Able Archer exercise in 1983.

Martin Hellman – one of the three civilian inventors of public key cryptography – has written a piece describing some statistical ways through which we could contemplate the risk of global nuclear war, as well as evaluate it relative to other threats. As a near-term nightmare scenario, the massive use of nuclear weapons surely exceeds the threat posed by climate change: climatic change across a decade is highly abrupt, whereas the time between the decision to use nuclear weapons and the generation of mass casualties would likely be only minutes.

Based on the frequency with which near misses have taken place, Hellman argues that the perpetuation of the current global nuclear situation carries a 1% per year risk of mass nuclear exchange. He estimates that this exceeds the risk of living beside a nuclear power plant by 1000 to 1 and has a clever rhetorical device for making that concrete:

Equivalently, imagine two nuclear power plants being built on each side of your home. That’s all we can fit next to you, so now imagine a ring of four plants built around the first two, then another larger ring around that, and another and another until there are thousands of nuclear reactors surrounding you. That is the level of risk that my preliminary analysis indicates each of us faces from a failure of nuclear deterrence.

Surely, if his estimate is anywhere near correct, all the ongoing concern about new nuclear power plants should be superseded more than one thousandfold by concern about the state of security in the face of nuclear war. After all, everybody lives with the risk associated with global thermonuclear war and nuclear winter. Only those living fairly close to nuclear power plants bear acute risks associated with meltdowns.

Hellman’s warning is akin to the one repeatedly sounded by former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who himself revised the American nuclear warplan for the Kennedy administration in 1963. In both cases, the suggestions are similar: work to reduce the number of weapons, increase the time required for anybody to use them, and avoid the complacent belief that the lack of explosive accidents or attacks since the Second World War proves them to be impossible.

1958 climate change video

Boing Boing came up with quite a find today: a video from 1958 that is both amusing and full of relatively accurate information about climate change. Entitled “The Unchained Goddess,” it was produced as an episode of the Bell Telephone Hour.

As I have described before, the idea that climate change only entered the realm of scientific knowledge within the last few years is quite mistaken. Notice also how the announcer in the video is concerned about emissions of “six billion tonnes per year of carbon dioxide.” The figure today is closer to forty billion.

The Code-Breakers

For those with a serious interest in the history and practice of cryptography, David Khan’s The Code-Breakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet provides an enormous mass of knowledge. The scope of the 1200 page book is vast: covering everything from the earliest ciphers to the origins of public key cryptography in detail. It is probably fair to say that the period best covered is that between the Middle Ages and the Second World War, though the sections covering the decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Linear B are also detailed and skilfully written. Those interested primarily in the contemporary practice of cryptography – or those seeking a more concise text – would be well advised to consider the books by Simon Singh and Bruce Schneier on the topic.

Khan’s book excels in actually describing how various cryptographic systems work, as well as how they were broken. For the most part, his analysis is factual and dispassionate. The sole exception is in the period covering the Cold War, in which his ire against the Soviet Union and those Americans who turned into traitors for it are acute. At times, the book gets into an excessive amount of detail about the bureaucratic organization of different cipher bureaus: including lengthy sections about how various wartime bodies were reorganized. In most cases, the book does not provide much biography on the men and women involved, though exceptions exist in the case of some of the most eminent or interesting cryptographers. The book does provide an interesting discussion of the history of writing on cryptography, including the impact that major publications had on the development of the field and its comprehension within society at large. Kahn also does a good job of debunking some of the many spurious claims that have been made about ‘revolutionary’ and ‘unbreakable’ cryptosystems that people have invented: stressing how the making of cryptographic systems is a realm of abstract mathematics, while the breaking of such systems is a gritty and practical exercise.

In addition to covering the techniques of cryptography and cryptanalysis themselves, the book covers many related security issues: including physical security, invisible inks, elements of spycraft, decisions about how to use information gleaned through cryptanalysis, and the use of broken cryptographic systems to transmit fake or confusing information. The book also covers the relationships between cryptographic work and the activities it is supporting. An especially intriguing section details the efforts of the American navy to combat rum smuggling during the prohibition era. Ships with floating cryptoanalytical laboratories provided vital intelligence to interception vessels, just as other cryptanalysis had helped re-direct U-boats away from German submarines during the Second World War. The book covers an enormous variety of code systems, ranging in use and sophistication. These include diplomatic and commercial systems, high level military systems used between major installations, systems for vehicles, trench codes for those on the front lines, and more. The most abstract section of the book contemplates communication between human beings and extraterrestrials, covering questions about how we could recognize alien communication, as well as mathematical steps through which a comprehensible discourse could potentially be established.

For those interested in actually breaking codes and ciphers themselves, the book provides detailed information on techniques including frequency analysis, factorization attacks of the kind used against polyalphabetic substitution ciphers, and the index of coincidence. It also provides a lot of information on the weak ways in which cryptography is often used and the kinds of errors that have allowed for key breaks into previously unreadable cryptosystems. While it would not be especially useful for attacking modern computerized cryptographic systems, it would provide some guidance for those seeking to break into amateur or puzzle-type cryptographic challenges.

The Code-Breakers may well be the most comprehensive cryptographic history available, though it is far less detailed in its description of post-Cold War cryptosystems than some of its more concise recent contemporaries. For those wishing to gain an appreciation for how cryptography emerged, the role it played for most of human history, and the techniques that have been employed to guard and attack messages, this is an ideal place to turn.

The calm before the storm

Some research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States examined the behaviour of the climate in the period immediately before eight abrupt shifts. In all cases, there was a reduction in the level of climatic fluctuation immediately before the tipping point was reached. The authors argue that “the mechanism causing slowing down is fundamentally inherent to tipping points” and could thus be used to predict when such a shift is imminent.

While interesting, this probably isn’t enormously useful. If we want to mitigate to avoid abrupt shifts, the emissions cuts will need to occur long before the point when a critical threshold is being approached. A warning might provide an opportunity for more targeted adaptation, however, which might in turn reduce the amount of suffering that occurs as a result of crossing any particular climatic threshold. Certainly, learning more about the causes and consequences of abrupt climatic shifts ought to be a priority for the world’s scientific community.

The GAO on carbon capture and storage

The American Government Accountability Office has released a report (PDF) on carbon capture and storage (CCS). Some key points:

  • To make a significant contribution to fighting climate change, the International Energy Agency estimates that 6,000 CCS facilities would be required, each storing one million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
  • Integrating CCS into existing coal plants is very expensive and difficult.
  • It is easier with integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants, but they are very expensive before you even take CCS into account.
  • Commercial scale IGCC plants (not necessarily with CCS) can’t be expected before 2020 – 5 years after global CO2 emissions need to peak.
  • Coal plants with CCS will produce 35% – 77% less electricity than those without.
  • There are questions about the long-term viability of storing carbon underground.
  • Leaks could contaminate water and suffocate people.
  • CCS will only be deployed if companies are forced to use it.

In short, people who are counting on CCS to make a big contribution to fighting climate change have a lot to prove, and cannot be reasonably permitted to assume the near-term emergence of the technology as a viable, low-cost option. Until CCS is shown to be safe and feasible on a commercial scale, we simply cannot allow new coal power plants in countries that are serious about dealing with climate change.

I found out about it via Gristmill.