Tech

Predicting Technology

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In an excellent report from Iraq, Michael J. Totten reports that:

“To get paid by AQI for killing Americans,” Lieutenant Hightower said, “the attack must be videotaped. They often used tracer rounds so they could prove it was real. We found whole piles of these tapes when we cleaned the city out. We found and killed a sniper just northeast of the city. He had all kinds of video tapes of himself shooting and killing American soldiers.”

Do you think that anyone who worked on developing compact, inexpensive video cameras ever imagined they would play a pivotal role in a major military conflict? Do you think they ever imagined that villains would use their creations to manage a small but powerful ad hoc army of mercenaries?

People who think they can predict the course and effects of technology, like advocates of anthrogenic global warming, delude themselves.

Quote of the Day

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We’ve been assured again and again that RFID passports are secure. When researcher Lukas Grunwald successfully cloned one last year at DefCon, industry experts told us there was little risk. This year, Grunwald revealed that he could use a cloned passport chip to sabotage passport readers. Government officials are again downplaying the significance of this result, although Grunwald speculates that this or another similar vulnerability could be used to take over passport readers and force them to accept fraudulent passports. Anyone care to guess who’s more likely to be right?
 
It’s all backward. Insecurity is the norm. If any system — whether a voting machine, operating system, database, badge-entry system, RFID passport system, etc. — is ever built completely vulnerability-free, it’ll be the first time in the history of mankind. It’s not a good bet.
 
Once you stop thinking about security backward, you immediately understand why the current software security paradigm of patching doesn’t make us any more secure. If vulnerabilities are so common, finding a few doesn’t materially reduce the quantity remaining. A system with 100 patched vulnerabilities isn’t more secure than a system with 10, nor is it less secure. A patched buffer overflow doesn’t mean that there’s one less way attackers can get into your system; it means that your design process was so lousy that it permitted buffer overflows, and there are probably thousands more lurking in your code.
 
Diebold Election Systems has patched a certain vulnerability in its voting-machine software twice, and each patch contained another vulnerability. Don’t tell me it’s my job to find another vulnerability in the third patch; it’s Diebold’s job to convince me it has finally learned how to patch vulnerabilities properly.

–Bruce Schneier

The Spirits Were Right!

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In my previous post, The Amazing Psychic Shannon, I channeled the great ethereal spirits and asked them what we would eventually determine about the causes of the Minneapolis bridge disaster.

The spirits said:

The engineering investigation will reveal the bridge collapsed due primarily to design or construction flaws dating from the time of the bridge’s construction in 1968.

Today, I read:

The I-35W bridge was entirely supported by two main trusses, composed of many small pieces of steel bolted or welded together like a child’s Erector Set. Though it is possible to design a steel truss bridge with redundancy, the I-35W bridge was supported only by those main trusses.

 

“A truss arch bridge is like a chain — if you try to take out one link, you lose the whole system,” said Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a UC Berkeley professor who is an expert in such bridges. “They are very vulnerable to instability.”

 

Astaneh compared a steel truss system to a house of cards, which will quickly collapse if one card is pulled out.

Spooky.

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Excellent Blogging on Power, Infrastructure and Financial Issues

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I highly recommend Carl from Chicago’s posts on these issues at the Life in the Great Midwest blog. Carl’s posts are easily accessible via the category list on his blog’s left sidebar (click on Economics, Electricity, Social Security or Taxes to start).

Carl’s latest post, on the economics and politics of electric-power infrastructure in Illinois, is here.

Comment on Foster’s Post

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Just wanted to link: first help desk.

I’ve got to admit that I identify with the clueless monk and am always amazed at the steady patience of the it guys.  Clearly the tone is universal if the language isn’t.

(This was going around a few months ago; sorry if I’m repeating it but can’t find it through googling Chicagoboyz.)   And I suspect there was some of that in the 1930’s; inertia and fear of change are probably at least as motivating as turf battles & definition of status in terms of how many people wait on us.  The break with all those notions was described by Franklin – but I think it is human nature to fear change and want larger acreage.