CNN + Technorati
Leave a reply
Monthly Archives: July 2004
Imperial Hubris
From John Robb’s weblog:
On Point.’ Anonymous (the CIA agent who wrote “Imperial Hubris”) speaks.’ Major points he made:
- Al Qaeda isn’t a terrorist organization.’ If it was, we would have destroyed it several times over by now (NOTE:’ this supports my term Global Guerrillas).
- Al Qaeda and its ilk represent a national security threat to the US.’ This is war and it is going to last a long time.
- The tempo of attacks and activity within al Qaeda and other’Islamic extremist organizations’is increasing.
- We are losing the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.’ Fallujah was an important defeat.
- Polls in the Islamic world indicate that our policies are opposed by 80-90% of the people (not our way of life).’ This is the basis of al Qaeda’s support.
- The policies opposed:’ Our military presence in Saudi Arabia.’ Our support for appostate regimes in the Islamic world (Egypt and Saudi Arabia).’ Our unqualified support for Israel.’ Pressure to maintain low oil prices.’ Support for regimes that surppress muslims (India and China).
- These’policies cannot be debated within the US political system.
- Democracy can’t be exported.
- The solution’is to revise our policies to meet the needs of the Islamic world because it is in our interest — or — if we can’t do that, we should be ruthless in our use of military power.
- Our military posture is defensive.’ It should be aggressive.’ Our generals have become bureaucrats.’ To win this militarily, it is going to require a high body count.
- No single official will be faulted in the 9/11 report (and therefore nobody will be fired), despite substantial failures.
- No basis for optimism.
npointradio.org/shows/2004/07/20040721_b_main.asp”>audio is very interesting. Two points additional points I found interesting.
- Our countries organizational blindness
- The sense of duty and professionalism of a civil servant.
- “We” are precieved of occupying the three top holly sites of Islam.
- Our policies that the Muslim world see as offensive are not under discussion here – at all.
- Totally lost the battle for hearts and minds.
But most disturbing is his general read of the situation. That given our deep structural inability to reframe the situation we will play the only card in our hand. Military power. Which is going to kill a hell of a lot more people on both sides. That, of course, will polarize things yet more.
Metric system, Tool Vendors, and Standards
There is a surprising syndrome in standards. At first blush standards exist to make help exchange between parties proceed more smoothly. If buyer and seller agree on weights and measures then transactions are simpler. It’s an efficiency argument. Surprisingly there is a countervailing force.
A common, but dangerous, blindness that arises from that simple view of standards. If you thinking about standards that way you become fixated on the efficiency benefits and in turn on the beneficiaries of the efficiencies. Example: why do we drive on the right (or the left)? Obviously because it’s so much more efficient and safe compared to not having a standard; it’s good for the drivers. This makes you blind to the other players in the game. What about the road builders what benefits to they capture?
We have two major sets of standards for weights and measures on the planet. The metric system and the anglo-american system. After the second world war the vast majority of the planet’s economic activity used the anglo-american system. Then and now the switching costs of moving from that standard to the more efficient metric system were huge. The efficiency improvements were minor compared to the huge advantages of having one system. This is a classic “standards war.”
I have come to consider a bit of a mystery why the minority standard – i.e. the metric system – survived and thrived. What what the source of the advocacy for that? I do not believe that parties to exchanges, i.e. those who use the standard, were creating a forceful demand for change. I do not believe that the benefits of switching were even close to the cost of switching. I just do not find it credible that the forces of good overcame the installed base by the virtue of their eloquent arguments. In large part because I find, upon closer examination, that the arguments are thin. They lack sufficient force to drive people over the switching costs.
What was the driving force? Who was driving this change?
Follow the money.
The beneficiaries where the tool vendors. The entire weights and measures industry benefited from the exercise. If they could get the anglo-american system to be changed over to the metric system they would get a share of the switching costs.
The entire boondoggle was driven by a desire to force upgrades in the installed base! Better yet the longer the switch over took (or takes) the longer they can sell two of everything. Two rulers, two scales, two sets of cups and measures. Sure the tool vendors had allies in the science community that were actually seeking efficiencies. They even allies in the education establishment who were looking for things to teach that weren’t controversial. But I can’t convince myself that the allies perceived sufficient near term benefit to be the real drivers.
The tool vendors sell efficiency, but they reap a benefit from volatility, complexity, transition, and change. The result is that almost without exception as standards setting unfolds the players at the table with the clearest understanding of why they will benefit is the vendors of tools (etc.) used to implement the standards. Their motives are not the same as the motives of those the users.
Something to consider next time you encounter a complex standard.
Going Backward
I have an acquaintance who has a little life-cycle model of firms he enjoys:
- Knowledge: Ideas
- Action: Realization
- Relationships: Market Tuning, Discovery, Creation
- Process: Efficiency, Tuning, Scaling-up
One of his little jokes: During the bubble it became possible to sell companies in the first phase. To be make them fungible. Start a company, have a bundle of clever ideas, and then sell that bag of goods.
Bitching over at Joel on Software brought this up. Microsoft has killed a product he uses. They acquired it’s maker. He quotes all this marketing propaganda:
The existing Lookout product will no longer be available, but its technology will be part of an exciting vision that MSN has for delivering new and innovative search services
I love that idea. You take a real product and you shift it backward into “exciting vision.” Of course there are times that is the best move for a company. Probably even times when it increases your overall valuation. Lose the customers, raise the value – weird huh?
I love the idea because I have so often seen idea lovers, people like me, advocate just that move inside an existing firm.
I wonder, did Microsoft say to the guys at the company they were acquiring. “We want to buy you and turn you into our vision.” “Turn into” we do with the compost pile at my house.
Anonymous Reputation
I’m finding it very interesting to look at the challenges of creating a reputation system that allows it’s participants to remain anonymous. I think this is key. The right solution to the Internet identity design problem must support keeping the users identity compartmentalized. Only that can maintain privacy. If on the one hand we want to have communications that are more usefully tied to an actor’s reputation while on the other hand we to keep that actor’s total identity fragmented then we must find a way for him to maintain a number of persona in the net. The basic persona he adopts should be quite private, quite anonymous.
Consider as a benchmark the spam problem. This is the problem of guarding open systems from bad actions and bad actors. This problem arises in both open comment systems (i.e. blog comments), open web site editing systems (i.e. wiki’s), open messaging systems (i.e. internet email), and of course open source, and open science.
All the solutions focus on sorting. Sorting actions into good ones and bad ones. Sorting actors into good ones and bad ones.
Lots of tricks exist for sorting the actions. For example filtering out postings with bad words; or links to bad sites. For example training statistical recognizers to let good things thru and shuttle bad looking things off for further analysis or disposal. Having a moderator or editor that passes judgment on the individual actions.
The bad actor mechanisms work by building a model of various actors. Then when sorting actions we inform that by the reputation of the actors involved. “Oh look it’s the 10th posting from the same IP address in 30 seconds.” You might glance at the sender of an email message and say “Oh, Bob. He’s a good egg.” or “Ah email from apache.org, they’re cool.”
By design, for privacy reasons, most internet protocols make mapping from actions back to actors is very sloppy. It wouldn’t be hard, technically, to fix this. For example sender could sign every message using a private key. Then recipients could, with the help of some directory services, map that back to the sender and from there to any number of services that could vouch for his reputation.
This hasn’t happened both because shifting the installed base to some standard solution would be hard; but more so because the this would assure the total collapse of any privacy for senders. It would make every message they send part of their record. That this record is highly distributed today is small comfort. It would enable big brother.
Any system that is going to be popular with real people for casual usage needs to allow for anonymous senders. And it’s not just the senders who desire this. If I’m running any one of the many kinds of open systems enumerated at the head of this message I don’t wish to demand full disclosure by my contributors. I only want two things: I want lots of contributions and I want a way to temper the damage done to my systems from bad actors. If I’m running a retail store I don’t want to demand that my visitors reveal their entire persona just to browse my offerings!
Is it possible to have useful actor reputation systems without demanding that the actors give up their privacy? This is a key design problem.
It appears that the answer is yes. Consider as an example. Let’s say I have an excellent reputation in some community. I request that community write me a letter of introduction to the anonymous community. This letter says nothing more than the bearer of this letter is a good guy. I take the note to the anonymous community and they provide me with an reputation/identity that I can use to on anonymous actions. Recipients of those actions can then check that anonymous reputation. If I act badly in that persona then they place bad marks on the anonymous reputation; but it these do not go back to my original reputation – there is no back pointer. The only back pointer available is the link to the original community. I have damaged the reputation of my home community, and only that.
It’s an interesting cryptographic design problem. Could we design a system where sufficiently bad actions on the part of the anonymous actor can be feed back to his original persona but that does not require that we trust the anonymous reputation communities to guard his privacy otherwise.
Pizza
Boy this pizza store is very well connected! Lots of nice little details, worth watching twice.
thanks Brian!
Master of the Senate
“Master of the Senate” is about LBJ’s rise to power in the Senate
during the 1950s. It is an amazing story. Johnson was a methodical
and calculating ass licker and sadist. It’s is difficult to
understate that story. He would enter a community, figure out who were
the powerful old men, particularly the lonely ones, in that community and then proceed to suck up to them until they gave him power. Then he would turn around and use that power to demand that those below he brown their noses.
Johnson wasn’t a man of high principle; but he was one of strong low principles. He was enthusiastic about to using the weaknesses and principles
of others to manipulate them. The 1950s were an excellent time to do just that.
The old racists were looking for somebody to hand off the flag to. The young liberals were looking for somebody in the south they could talk to.
There have always been two powerful dialectics in American politics:
race and commercial regulatory power. While Master of the Senate
would be a better book if it had something to say about the second
dynamic the issue of race is the interesting story of that period.
The single most significant shift in American politics of the last
50 years was the realignment of the race card. Entering this period
the Republicans were on the side of large economic entities and against
the smaller economic entities; in particular labor. Meanwhile the
Democrats drew much of their power from the south and the southern
democrats were racists. Exiting this period the flag of anti-civil;
the fear that “others” would destroy one’s sacred culture had passed
to the Republicans and the Democrats had lost the South. Johnson rode
on the power released by that realignment.
If you don’t want to believe that the Republicans now carry the racist flag
then you should suffer thru this TV Ad from a
Republican cantidate for congress in today’s election. It is a
horrible classic example of how leaders use hate speech to sharpen the
boundries around their group. The kind of speech that leads over time
to violence.
Johnson played the power inherent in that dialectic to a T. First he
convinced the old racist democratic senate chairs that they were to him
“like a daddy.” They handed him the power to run the Senate. Meanwhile
he convinced the northern liberal senators that he was one of them, that
he was their best hope to get something, anything, that would finally bring the vote to southern blacks.
When it became clear that no Southerner would ever be president
without making progress on civil rights Johnson turned on his patrons.
Over the next decade the power of the federal goverment was used to
deliver a modicum of civil rights to the southern blacks and the
Democrats lost the South. No wonder Walmart came out of Arkansas. No wonder “For black men in their mid-thirties at the end of the 1990s, prison records were nearly twice as common as bachelor
privacy stories
This morning I read an article about the resignation of a VP at a discount airline Let’s call it airline B. I loved the story as a marvelous example of secrecy and privacy in the modern world.
Three airlines. Guy once worked for airline C; which was later acquired by airline A. So this guy was allowed a nice discount for flights on airline A. Favored folks, like this guy, were allowed to fly cheap on seats that would be otherwise empty. How was he to know what seats were empty? He could log into a special website.
So this guy goes to work for airline B; which competes with airline A. Time passes and the folks at airline B write some software to log into the special website and using that info they know which routes are highly booked and which aren’t. Presumably they use that in their own route planning.
Airline A finds out about Airline B’s clever scheme. What do they do? They hire some guys to pick up the trash at the home of some VP at Airline B. Curious about his eating habits? Nope, they are looking for paper.
Oh no! The Trash has been thru a shredder! No problem. They hire a company to digitally reconstruct his trash. (Don’t you just love that phrase: “digitally reconstructed his trash”?”
Of course this is all hearsay since but I read it in the New York Times.
Where’s the crime? Is it a crime to use data you glean from a web site? Is it a crime to collect somebody’s trash? Are there limits to what you can do with that trash? Well?
nroff, pic, and the mac
Maybe all that esoteric stuff I learned back in the 1970s isn’t entirely obsolete!
.PS
box "joe"
box "joe's" "bank" at last box + (1.2 , 1.2)
arrow from 1st box.ne to last box.sw "banking"
box "credit" "firm" at last box + (1.2 , -1.2)
arrow from 2nd box.se to last box.nw "reporting"
box "mortgage" "company" at last box + (-1.2 , -1.2)
arrow from 3rd box.sw to last box.ne "credit check"
arrow from 4th box.nw to 1st box.se "rejection"
.PE
Then on my Mac I invoke something along these lines:
groff -e -p -ms foo.ms > foo.ps && open foo.ps
Man is that nostalgic! A manual for pic is here.
Now, where can I get a copy of ‘ideal’? It was a precursor to pic that used constraints and rendered it’s drawing onto the complex number plane.
