Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Climate change game

The BBC has made a free online game, in which you try to manage European policies during the next century so as to deal with climate change, all while maintaining political popularity. It is quite difficult, and perhaps not overly realistic. Dealing with energy is extremely easy (I could never even come close to selling my surplus), whereas food and water require constant management. In reality, I would expect markets to deal with food and water problems fairly easily (especially if the latter were priced intelligently), whereas large scale energy issues require government leadership. More information about the game is here.

Perhaps the greatest flaw of the game is how it deals with the popularity of initiatives. The way in which public opinion is modeled seems badly off-kilter. One would not expect to be able to get a screen at the end that says all of the following:

  • Well done!
  • Europe emitted a very low level of carbon emissions, which is likely to result in global temperatures increasing by 1.4-2.5 degrees Celsius.
  • You left the economy in ruins. Hyper-inflation and joblessness are endemic across Europe. People are starving and crime and lawlessness have taken hold.
  • You were generally liked and seemed to consider public opinion on almost all the decisions you took.

I am not sure what this ‘victory’ screen says about the BBC’s opinion on European voters, but the combination strikes me as supremely implausible. The willingness of the other world leaders to accept binding targets is also rather greater than one would expect.

Who art thou?

While more than 100 people a day consistently visit this site, less than a dozen leave comments regularly. A lot of the remainder seem to be people who search for something specific, either find it here or do not, and then depart. One recent query of the first sort: “how many chapters mphil thesis?” And one of the latter: “photo of two turkeys.” Discounting such visits, there still seem to be some silent readers out there.

I would be really curious to know a bit about those who read consistently. You don’t need to say who you are, but I would love to know where you are from and why you read this blog. Knowing that would give me a greater ability to write on subjects people care about (say, sandwich economics) and less on topics of lesser interest. I have never sought a mass audience, but I would like to please the audience I have.

People who have been silent thus far are especially encouraged to leave a note.

Blogging less of a priority

Graveyard in Oxford

Today was really busy, as most days in the immediate future seem likely to be. As such, expect me to retreat a bit from writing excessively much here. This is a somewhat anxious time, and anxiety is best dealt with in less public places.

PS. This site and Papa Fly Productions have now been upgraded to WordPress 2.0.7. Here’s hoping that more than ten days pass before they need to issue another security fix. Thankfully, the installation seems to have been painless.

Web 2.0 wandering

Muddy river near The Trout

A post on Metafilter led me to a long-winded essay about why blogging is a fundamentally cynical activity. Then, a comment on the MeFi post led me to a page that randomly generates text that sounds like a piece of postmodern criticism. It was amusing and memorable enough to add to del.icio.us. From the blog run by the person who wrote the script, I found the video to Pink Floyd‘s “High Hopes,” which looks like the recollections of someone who did far too many drugs while they were at Oxford. I recognize the type of places, but not the places themselves. It must be Cambridge.

The above is some kind of amazingly self-referential romp around some of the cleverer sites out there driven by user-submitted content. These people are the “You” that Time Magazine saluted. Collectively, the contemplation of all this technology and effort gives one a sense of trivial empowerment. It’s interesting, and it takes up time, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. At least, no more so than sitting around and listening to music. At least, in its curious way, it is a social activity.

MacWorld 2007 keynote

Peacock near The Trout

Sure Apple gets millions worth of free advertising by releasing its products in their glitzy, spectacular way. At the same time, it is hard for a geeky Mac fan not to comment.

Everyone expected Apple to announce the iPhone at Macworld, though there does seem to be more to this device than most people expected. Everyone expected it to be an iPod and a phone, in this case it has 8GB of storage, and most expected it to be widescreen. The two megapixel camera is probably pretty poor – as telephone cameras universally are – but it could be useful regardless. The biggest surprise is that the thing runs OS X, rather than the proprietary and limited systems generally associated with smartphone and Blackberry type devices. Combined with the embedded sensors (proximity, ambient light, and an accelerometer), I imagine people are going to come up with some pretty amazing hacks for these devices.

The iPhone is a quad-band GSM + EDGE phone with WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0. A lot of people probably expected it to be 3G, but this is a better move for Apple. 3G has pretty much been a disaster for everyone who bet on it. The fact that it seems capable of talking to WiFi networks is also a big plus, especially if it can be used to do VoIP in an elegant way. The fact that it does not is unsurprising, but also a letdown. I am personally looking forward to the days when mobile phones automatically form mesh networks to pass traffic between themselves. That would circumvent the need for network infrastructure for calls within densely populated places and really change the business circumstances in which cellular service providers found themselves.

The mundane issues are more what concerns me: it looks like the starting price is US$499 for a 4GB model and US$599 for the 8GB and they will start shipping in June. Those prices are based on signing up for a two year phone contract, also. There’s no way it makes sense to buy the release version, as there are usually a couple of serious flaws that get sorted out in the next version. (Not that I will be spending $600 on such a device any time in the foreseeable future.) The battery life is supposedly sufficient for five hours of talk time and sixteen hours of audio listening. If true, that is better than my iPod Shuffle, and enormously better than my old 20GB 4th generation iPod.

Like a lot of people, I am curious about whether this device will stand up to everyday abrasion better than the iPod Nanos do. There’s also no way I would even consider buying this platform before Skype or something similar can be run on it.

Outward flowing data

Every time I run iTunes, gigabyte after gigabyte starts flowing out from my computer. In the last two hours, I have send 4.11GB worth of data, and I don’t use any kind of file sharing service. The hard drive gets hot. It clicks, when I am not even using the computer. The only plausible explanation is that people are using software, such as OurTunes, to download my music library. Normally, I would be flattered that they want my music. Unfortunately, two factors complicate things. Firstly, if all the drive activity makes my HD go kaput, I am left with no working computer at a time when having one is critical. Secondly, as a non-St. Antony’s student, I am on their network on a fairly provisional basis.

As such, you now need a password to access my shared music. If you’ve gone to the trouble to find this message and read it, send me an email.

Citable citation

Tree and blue sky

My congratulations go out to my friend Lindi Cassel: the first person who I know personally (as in ‘used to make stick figures out of kneadable eraser while in biology class with’) to get cited on Google Scholar:

Cassel, Lindi and Peter Suedfeld. “Salutogenesis and autobiographical disclosure among Holocaust survivors.” The Journal of Positive Psychology. Volume 1, Number 4 / October 2006. p.212-225.

While the subject matter is certainly sobering, the publication is extremely impressive, like so much else about Lindi. Bravo.

GMail security hole

Path to Marston

As people who read techie news pages like Engadget and Slashdot already know, a somewhat serious security flaw in GMail has recently been uncovered. Specifically, when you are logged into GMail in one browser window or tab, any other site you visit can grab your entire contact list. Whether that is a serious leak or not is a matter of perspective. Certainly, it exposes all of your friends of even more spam than they already receive.

Read the following carefully before you click anything. If you want to see the script that grabs contact lists at work, follow this link. Engadget says it’s “non-malicious,” but the risk is yours. The bug arises from the way in which GMail stores your contacts as a JavaScript file that can be requested by other websites. Google claims they have fixed the bug but, as the link above will prove, they have not.

Plausible attacks

A site that wanted to be really sneaky could exploit this information in many ways. At the very least, it could be used to very easily identify many of the people who are visiting. Knowing someone’s contact list might help in the launching of phishing attacks. It could, for example, make it easier to work out what company someone works for. You could then find out who does their information technology and send spoofed emails that seem to come from the IT department, asking for passwords or other sensitive information.

If it is a site that contains content that many people would not want others to know that they view, it could grab the email addresses for people with the same last name as you and threaten to send them information on your surfing history. A less complicated ploy would be to use emails that seem to come from people who you know to get through spam filters. Because of email spoofing, it is very easy to make messages seem to be coming from someone else.

Implications

As someone with 1037 MB of data in my main GMail account – including 14,410 emails and more than 1500 instant message conversations – I am naturally very concerned about GMail security. There is tons of stuff in there that I would be profoundly opposed to seeing on a public search engine, as has already happened in at least one case with private GMail data.

Contrary to their own assertions, Google had analysed and indexed all e-mails processed through their mail service. Due to a mistake made by an administrator, a database of the highly secret project was mirrored onto the external index servers, and as a result, the private mails of thousands of GMail users could be accessed via the search front-end for at least one hour.

Source

Clearly, it would be preferable if GMail started using durable encryption on their archived messages. This would both protect the messages from hostile outsiders and keep Google from doing anything undesirable with them. Even a passphrase based symmetric-key encryption system (perhaps based on AES) would be an improvement. I bet all the students at Arizona State University, which had turned to GMail to provide all their email services would feel likewise, if they knew.

[Update: 8:30pm] This article by Brad Templeton, the Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, makes some good general points about GMail and privacy.

[Update: 11:00pm] According to Engadget, this hole has been fixed. It’s good that it was dealt with so quickly, but there are still reasons to be concerned about GMail security in general.

[Update: 2 January 2007] The mainstream media has caught up with the story. CBC News: Teen exposes Google security flaw.

[Update: 18 July 2008] GMail just added a very useful ‘Activity on this account’ feature. It tells you (a) whether any other computers are logged into account and (b) when and where the last five logins took place from. This is excellent.

Foggy day

Fog on Parks Road, Oxford

Along with thunder and lighting, fog is among my favourite atmospheric phenomena. The best thing about it is the way in which it reveals the characteristics of light: the diffusion around omnidirectional sources and the elegant linearity generated by point sources and sharp edges. The fact that it makes trees look atmospheric and intriguing is of considerable benefit.

The fog today is apparently so bad that they are canceling flights out of Heathrow. I find that a bit surprising, as I thought commercial jets had RADAR guidance systems for takeoff and landing, to use under such conditions. They are justified in being concerned about takeoffs and landings. Along with Controlled Flight Into Terrain, approach-and-landing accidents have accounted for 80 percent of fatalities in commercial transport-aircraft accidents from 1979 through 1991. Given how crowded the airspace around London must be, extra caution is probably warranted; I imagine they would not be taking huge financial knocks for canceling flights without good cause.

One unhappy matter photographic is that my Photo.net subscription expires in just over a week. Not to drive anyone too brazenly towards the donation page, but consider yourself gently nudged.

[Update: 22 December 2006] Many thanks to Tristan Laing for setting me up with another year of Photo.net hosting.