Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. Between 2005 and 2007 I completed an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. I worked for five years for the Canadian federal government, including completing the Accelerated Economist Training Program, and then completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2023.

Newly insulated

Milan Ilnyckyj looking scary

Through a trek to the Ottawa Mountain Equipment Co-Op and the application of three days’ pay, my respectable collection of wet weather gear has had quite a few degrees of cold capability added into it.

I got some good insulated Gore-Tex gloves (they make me feel less like a mutant than mitts do); I also got a merino wool base layer, a windproof toque to supplement the more attractive one Sarah made me, a fleece neck warmer thing that makes me look like a goon when worn with the toque, a little thermometer, and a couple of miscellaneous knick-knacks, shoe de-stinking agent, and a travel towel (for future trips to nearby cities).

Naturally, the only response to getting new gear is to go experiment with it. One’s first inclination with new gear is to discover its capacities and limits. In its way, the new stuff is like the bicycle was: an enabler of motion, and a gateway to increased capability within the city as it stands.

P.S. I hate plural possessives.

Canada’s science-savvy fifteen-year-olds

Canada’s educators should be proud of the recently released results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The test examines the performance of 15-year-olds in science and placed Canada third in the world, after Finland and Hong Kong. Following after are Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, and South Korea. Britain is 14th, France 25th, and the United States is 29th.

This is especially welcome news given the ever-increasing importance of basic scientific understanding in contemporary society. In everything from making decisions about one’s own health to voting, having an understanding of at least physics, chemistry, and biology is increasingly necessary. Hopefully, the results of this assessment demonstrate that young Canadians are being well prepared.

More information is available through their website.

Problems with government databases

LeBreton Flats in winter

By now, everyone has probably heard about the data loss debacle in the United Kingdom. The British government lost the child benefit records for 25 million people. These records include addresses, dates of birth, bank account information, and national insurance numbers. In total, 40% of the British population has been exposed to the risk of identity theft.

Obviously, this should never have happened. One government agency requested some anonymized data for statistical purposes. Instead, a different department sent them the whole dataset in an unencrypted format. Encrypting the discs would have made it nearly impossible for thieves to access the data; anonymizing the data would have made such theft unprofitable. The failure to do either is the height of idiocy, but it is probably what we need to expect from the civilian parts of government when it comes to data security. Security is hard; it requires clever people with good training, and it requires oversight to ensure that insiders are competent and not cheating. People who are naive and naturally helpful can always be exploited by attackers.

In response to this situation, two sets of things need to be done. The first is to correct the specific failures that cause this kind of problem: require encryption of sensitive documents in transit, limit who has access to such sensitive databases, and tighten the procedures surrounding their use. The second is to limit the amount of such data that is available to steal in the first place. That could involve using paper records instead of digital ones – making mass theft dramatically harder to accomplish. It may also involve not creating these kinds of huge databases, as useful as they may seem when working properly.

It is fair to say that there will always be people out there able to break into any information that a large number of civil servants have access to. This would be true even if all civil servants were capable and virtuous people, because a lot of the best computer talent is applied to breaking flawed security systems. Given that bureaucrats are human, and thus subject to greed and manipulation, the prospects for keeping a lid on government data are even worse. Acknowledging the realities of the world, as well as the principle of defence in depth, suggests that limiting the volume of data collected and held by all governments is an appropriate response to the general security risks highlighted by this specific incident.

Bali talks beginning

Starting tomorrow morning, there will be twelve days of talks in Bali, Indonesia intended to begin the process of drafting a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, when the period it covers ends in 2012. This particular meeting is mostly about choosing the structure for the real negotiations. Three possibilities are likely:

  1. The parties agree to extend the Kyoto Protocol, keeping in place many of its institutional structures
  2. The parties decide to create a whole new instrument
  3. The talks collapse in acrimony, with no agreement

Which of these takes place will largely depend on the stances adopted by the great powers and major emitters, especially the United States, Russia, China, Japan, Brazil, and the European Union.

Some questions of succession hang over the proceedings. The new Rudd government in Australia has only been in power for a week, and may not have a well developed negotiating position. More importantly, everyone knows the Bush administration will soon be out of power. Leading Congressional Democrats are attending the summit themselves. It remains to be seen what effect that will have.

Cell phone eavesdropping

People at Ashley’s Chrismukkah party

Analog cellular phones are absurdly vulnerable to eavesdropping. Anyone with a radio that can be tuned to the frequency used by a particular phone can listen to all calls being made, and anyone with a transmitter that would operate on that frequency can make calls that will be billed to the subscriber’s account. At a church sale while I was in elementary school, a friend of mine picked up a radio scanner capable of monitoring nearby cell calls for $20. Things improved with digital cell technology, notably the GSM standard common in Europe and the CDMA standard used in North America. As well as allowing more efficient usage of radio spectrum, the digital technologies made it such that someone with nothing more than a radio could no longer make or overhear calls.

GSM phones, the more common sort globally, employ a number of cryptographic features. The first is the use of a SIM card and a challenge-response protocol to authenticate the phone to the network. This ‘proves’ that calls are being made by the legitimate account holder and not by someone impersonating them. GSM can also utilize encryption between the phone and base station as a form of protection against interception.

Unfortunately, a design flaw in the GSM standards somewhat undermines the value of the latter. While the phone must prove to the network that it is authentic, no such thing is required in the other direction. As such, anyone with the resources and skill can build a machine that looks like a cell phone tower, from the perspective of a phone. The phone will then dutifully begin encrypting the conversation, though with the malicious man in the middle monitoring. The device impersonating a cell tower to the phone impersonates a phone to a real cell tower, allowing the person using the phone to make calls normally, ignorant of the fact that their communications are being monitored.

Of course, anyone who has access to the phone company’s network can do all this and more. This includes law enforcement personnel conducting legal surveillance with warrants. Unfortunately, it also includes potentially unscrupulous people working for the cell phone company and anyone with the capability to break into their networks.

Major climate change issues

After many years of writing on whatever came to mind, I am now trying to be more systematic in some areas. In particular, I am trying to come up with a comprehensive collection of blog posts covering all important aspects of climate change. This serves a number of purposes: it helps me to synthesize information, it should be informative to others, and it should foster discussion that helps increase the sophistication of positions and arguments. The posts are organized here:

Climate change posts

The index page isn’t the most gorgeous looking thing on the web, but it is resilient and can be updated easily. Do people see this as a useful undertaking? What would make it more helpful or worthwhile? This initiative was mentioned before, but received little attention.

Here is the code for the link above:

<a href="http://www.sindark.com/wiki/index.php?title=Major_climate_change_issues"><img src="http://www.sindark.com/photo/CCmedium.png" alt="Climate change posts" /></a>

Feel free to link it on other sites, if desired.

Hydrogen and helium as sources of lift

Here is a random counter-intuitive fact about chemistry: while the atomic weight of hydrogen is 1.00794 grams per mole and that of helium is 4.002602 grams per mole, the helium nonetheless has 92.64% of the buoyancy of the hydrogen. This is because air weighs about 1.3 grams per litre, while hydrogen and helium gasses weigh 0.08988 and 0.1786 respectively. It is the difference between the density of air and the lift gas that is important and, in absolute terms, hydrogen and helium are not that different.

Ultimately, both hydrogen and helium are capable of providing about 1kg worth of lift per cubic metre of gas at room temperature and pressure. The major reason for which helium is popular as a lifting agent for balloons and zeppelins is because it is not flammable (it is actually a remarkable unreactive element). Unfortunately, helium is a lot more costly, has other uses (such as cooling superconductors), and is in the midst of significant shortage.

McKinsey climate change study

Chrismukkah decorations

McKinsey – a major consultancy – has released a report (PDF) on the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The general conclusion is a familiar one: that existing technologies and emerging technologies with a high probability of success can collectively reduce emissions by a very considerable degree at modest cost. Specifically, the study argues that 3.0 to 4.5 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent can be averted by 2030, at marginal costs of under US$50 per tonne. Business as usual would see present emissions of 7.2 gigatonnes grow to 9.7 gigatonnes by 2030: almost twice what the whole planet can handle.

The executive summary linked above is well worth reading, as it is rich with detail. It stresses how abatement will not happen through a few big changes: many thousands of emitting activities must be incrementally reformed. That said, 40% of the abatement they describe would actually save money in the long term (for instance, by replacing existing systems with more energy efficient varieties).

Perhaps the most interesting element in the whole report is the abatement curve on the fifth page of the executive summary. It ranks a collection of mitigation activities from those that produce the highest level of economic benefit per tonne to those that are most costly. For instance, increasing the efficiency of commercial electronics could save $90 per tonne of CO2 equivalent. Other win-win options include residential electronics, building lighting, fuel economy standards for cars and trucks, and improvements to residential and commercial buildings. Cellulosic biofuels are net winners, though of a lesser magnitude, as is changes to soil tillage to boost the strength of carbon sinks. The most expensive abatement options include carbon capture and storage, the use of solar electric power, and the use of hybrid cars (the single most expensive option listed).

This is quite an encouraging view. Achieving substantial reductions within a developed economy for under $50 a tonne is promising in itself. It also suggests that international abatement prices could be even lower, given how insane things like tropical deforestation are from an economic perspective, once climate change is taken into account.

Ottawa is a frozen wasteland

As much as I enjoyed Ashley’s party tonight, the walk home afterwards has left me convinced that humans should not live in this place. After about forty minutes out there, well insulated, my whole body is in pain. My breath is frozen to my face in painful sheets of ice, and I have had an agonizing cold-induced headache since getting halfway home.

I want to live somewhere saner.