Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog
Archive for January, 2008
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
In this farming community where nightfall usually brings clear, starry skies, residents are abuzz over reported sightings of what many believe is a UFO.
Several dozen people — including a pilot, county constable and business owners — insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.
“People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it’s the end of times,” said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he saw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. “It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts.” ^
I remember, as a kid, going to the back of the library where, apart from the shelves, they had a turning wireframe shelf where they put all the weird and whacked out books. The conspiracy theories about Mayans inventing television, exposes of Replicants and Liquefactionists among us, theories about Egypt and magnetic mind control, and finally, reams of UFO information. When summer wore boring, I’d even check out some of these books and see what they were about.
In all honesty I have to say that most were paranoid, religiously desperate interpretations of inconclusive data, but not all of the UFO ones were fully whacked. The problem with the UFO books was that at some point each book had to cite or otherwise reference someone who was a whackjob, even if the authors were on the level. Maybe three-quarters of the UFO books were charlatanism, sensationalism or amateur con-jobs, but that remaining quarter seemed to come from sincere people.
To use William Gibson’s word, I’m agnostic on UFOs. I haven’t seen one. However, I also can’t think of a single conclusive reason why other species with advanced technology cannot exist, especially in a universe that’s huge and billions of years old. To think that there is some scientific datum that proves that UFOs cannot exist or other species cannot exist is to me the same kind of religious delusion as some of those books about Mayan magnetic Liquefactionism.
But because I like to think I’m objective, I have to ask myself: why do we humans (including myself) resist the idea of UFOs existing? Even in this blog, I’m not exactly jumping to go out and find the truth. It’s like I’m so inured to its possibility, yet not really looking forward to a positive answer, that I’ve filtered it out in the same way suburbanites filter out crime, traffic, nuclear war and aging as they settle down in front of their TVs at night.
Luckily, one of my favorite authors gave me a hint:
Even before I left graduate school I had come to the conclusion that virtually all people live by what I think of as a “fiction-absolute.” Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world–so ordained by some almighty force–would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles. Politicians, the rich, the celebrated, become mere types. Does this apply to “the intellectuals” also? Oh, yes. . . perfectly, all too perfectly. ^
The fiction absolute is a convincing theory. As long as we are alone in a society, we can accept our role in it and reason that others with more power or money deserve it, according to some theory of what that society values. If another society appears on the horizon however and they appear to be having a better time of it, our contentment is shattered, and we want to murder them or submit to them so we can have the better life.
It’s kind of like the dickhead in traffic this morning who was perfectly content to bobble along at five below the speed limit in the left lane, until I started to pass his fat cell-phone-yammering ass, at which point he floored it so I couldn’t get ahead (note to interested readers: he lost out to a left turner because I could from the right lane see ahead of the SUV that was blocking his vision). He was happy at a slow speed, until he saw someone moving quickly. Relativity in action?
UFOs present the same kind of challenge. We can’t see their home planets, so if they’re here, their technology is superior to ours. Since we explain ourselves as being smart and progressive on the basis of our technology, that means they’re smarter and better organized than us. Basically, if UFOs are real, humanity just got massively one-upped and we can’t be content with what we have anymore. We have to start striving toward something.
Instability comes with our foreign visitors. What if their ways are better? What if we aren’t the pre-eminent force in the universe? What if the universe is like a wild west, and no Cosmic Arbitrator is going to prevent a more advanced species from doing to us what we do to cows, and using us to produce milk or meat? If a UFO landed in Washington, D.C., tomorrow and an alien got out and was verified as an alien, existential panic would shatter humanity.
At least for a few days. After that, it could end up being beneficial, since we no longer could rest in fat lazy contentment that makes us hate ourselves. We’d have a new quest. That can’t be all bad. I still don’t know if UFOs exist, but sometimes I wish for more of these highly credible sightings.
Posted in Culture, Literature | 2 Comments »
Monday, January 14th, 2008
In the fall, John Muir Laws published “The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada.”
There is also something sweet and obsessive, and marvelously 19th century about the whole enterprise, the idea of a lone amateur, now 41 years old (living in a rented $600 apartment in San Francisco), spending season after season tramping around the mountains, painting mushrooms and moles.
“I’m a beauty junkie,” Laws adds. “And this book was done by somebody who is stunned by the beauty of the world.”^
The world, too much with us, afflicts us with this desire to be functional all the time. We justify vacations and TV because they relax us. It’s refreshing to see someone who just leapt ahead into something he found amazing in nature, and succeeded at it, to boot.
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
Monday, January 14th, 2008
A new spin on social networking from a Slashdot user:
I’ve now been meta-social networking on Slashdot for six months, and my meta-friends list runneth over with people who have distinguished themselves with their brains and personalities and knowledge. I’m proud of this list, because when I go through it, I see people who are using their brains to make technology and humanity better. These aren’t the couchbound slackers that make our lives miserable by failing to fix obvious deficiencies. These people represent the kind of people whose company I’d want to seek, the kind of people who bring a sense of hope for humanity.
Here’s that meta-social networking list again. Check ‘em out. I’m proud of them, even if I only know a few of them. ^
An interesting take on an old dilemma of online “avatars” and how well they translate into the real world. I’ve got my shingle out at LinkedIn, FaceBook, Slashdot, MySpace, Amazon and Technorati. Drop me a line sometime!
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
Monday, January 7th, 2008
Litchfield took a look at just over 1 million randomly generated Internet Protocol [IP] addresses, checking them to see if he could access them on the IP ports reserved for Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle’s database.
He found 157 SQL servers and 53 Oracle servers. Litchfield then relied on known estimates of the number of systems on the Internet to arrive at his conclusion: “There are approximately 368,000 Microsoft SQl Servers… and about 124,000 Oracle database servers directly accessible on the Internet,” he wrote in his report, due to be made public next week. ^
 In Hollywood, hackers are people motivated by profit to ensnare others through ninja kung-fu style computer trickery that involves lots of fast and furious typing, as if it were military hardware in use through a virtual space that resembles the organic symbolic chaos of a dream more than the related structures of a machine. The machine may appear as chaos to us, but what defines a hacker is being able to decipher that chaos and so manipulate mechanisms behind the scene where others cannot see. It is as if life is a giant stage-piece, and the rest of us are crawling around on the painted skin, but a hacker can get inside and twist the wicker skeleton to create “magic” the rest of us can barely understand.
The movie vision as often differs from what you’ll find in your life. Real hacking will probably never sell books or movies, because it’s much more studious and also more boring than that view. Hacking is understanding the machine, and how it functions, entirely independent from what it looks like it is doing. Magicians are visual illusion hackers. Cooks are kitchen chemistry hackers. Psychologists are brain structure hackers. Martial artists are kinetic simian motion hackers. Artists are emotional symbolism hackers.
When the media says hackers, they mean black hat hackers with financial motivation, which usually means other roving digital criminals or no questions asked code warriors for hire.
Moore said what made the hacking job so easy was that 70% of all the companies he scanned were insecure, and 45% to 50% of VoIP providers were insecure. The biggest insecurity? Default passwords.
“I’d say 85% of them were misconfigured routers. They had the default passwords on them,” said Moore. “You would not believe the number of routers that had ‘admin’ or ‘Cisco0′ as passwords on them.^
After having seen computer crime up close, and investigated instances of it that came out of the blue as far as the users were concerned, I have a different view of this situation than most. I don’t believe black hat hackers are illegal. Like spammers, they are people who choose to live outside of normal life, and they are looking for easy opportunities in almost all cases.
The exceptions are the rare hacks where a specific target is the reason for hire, and the hacker isn’t a free agent as much as a black economy contractor, sort of a digital Blackwater.
Spammers make their money by mailing ten million people with penis enlargement scams so that ten guys in Los Angeles write back with stubby sweaty fingers and get their oblong placebos. Hackers make money by prowlin for information people want, which is either monetary information or information that can be monetized like corporate and government secrets.
This means that as long as targets are plentiful, you can harden your business enough to make it a second-tier target, and escape the worst of the mess. This is one fundamental rule of security I have always tried to impart. There is a pyramid of opportunism, with the guys at top having the fewest hacks because they’ve made it the hardest, and the guys at bottom getting hacked frequently because they do what everyone else does, which is mediocre.
Seventy-five per cent of companies listed human error as the leading cause of security failures such as breakdowns and systems outages. Forty-eight per cent also cited operations and technology lapses as key causes of security failures. Problems resulting from third parties such as contractors and business partners, meanwhile, received 28 per cent of the votes as a root cause of security failures.
Misbehaving employees also figure prominently in IT fears: Ninety-one percent of respondents say the risk of employee misconduct related to information systems worries them. ^
While there are security experts who will tell you to always update your patches and run a firewall, I think security advice is like dieting: you can’t escape the basics. These are:
Reduce. Remove extra services, sequester networks into subnets, remove machines and dead accounts, give out few real privileges because the user doesn’t need them.
Obscure. You don’t want to publish any information that can help an attacker, so be purposefully vague about your facilities and procedures in public information.
Verify. Verify people, not roles. Make sure your employees know who is on the other end of the phone, and that it’s always OK to take a few minutes to figure out who it is and whether they really should have this information.
Harden. Make your systems overkill to prevent brute-forcing, ensure that your software can handle sudden loads, and put in steel doors of virtual and physical types.
Refresh. If passwords haven’t changed in a while, now is a good time. If you haven’t prowled the network looking for little changes that could have a big impact, start now. Consider regular fuzz testing of your software, unleashing nmap and other tools on your network, just to see how inviting you look to a hacker looking for the easy score.
Interface. Most hacks happen with the help of the “human layer.” Educate your employees. Design your security procedures so they don’t encourage manic writing of passwords on sticky notes in publically viewable areas. Give your users a break, simplify their procedures, and they’ll follow them more, even if they’re not as secure as possible.
I know this list isn’t what you get from other sources. They will tell you technological ways to make your company 100% safe, but those ways rely on software and hardware to have no active exploits, which is never the case. Expect parts of your security to fail. If you have a generally healthy policy, and people who are aware of the importance of security, you’ll be better off than trying to build a bulletproof fortress.
Posted in Computer Security | No Comments »
Monday, January 7th, 2008
Telecommuting is a win-win for employees and employers, resulting in higher morale and job satisfaction and lower employee stress and turnover. These were among the conclusions of psychologists who examined 20 years of research on flexible work arrangements.^
I was glad to see this article. It’s easier to get a lot of things done outside the office, in a pleasant home surrounding, which is often more natural and less encumbered. Even just taking off a tie seems to raise IQ by seven points.
 My only question here is how telecommuting is arranged. Most businesses allocate days of the week for telecommuting, but it makes more sense to do it by project. You figure out the project, meet the people, get the information, and then go home to get some real work done.
Whenever I get nostalgic for consulting, it’s this. I tend to live in places where I’m surrounded by living plants and animals, and sitting at a desk typing away with some good music going can make even the most mundane task a little better.
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
Monday, January 7th, 2008
Let’s talk about hype and Windows Vista. No, I’m not talking about Microsoft hype. I’m talking about the people who hate it.
If you listen to the chatter on the Internet, Ron Paul won the presidency, Windows Vista has failed, everyone’s going to buy a Macintosh and it’s really important what happened last night on Lost. That’s only if you listen.
[D]uring my speech to the Association of PC User Groups, I asked how many of the 180 in attendance were using Windows Vista.
At least half of those in attendance raised their hands, probably more. Frankly, I was fairly surprised.
APCUG is a national affiliation of user groups around the country — organizations such as HAL-PC and the Houston Area Apple Users Group. Their members generally are older, many are retirees, and while they are enthusiastic about tech, they’re often cautious about adopting the latest and greatest. ^
 Writers spend a good deal of their lives trying to get to the real story. That means what’s actually happening, as opposed to some third-party rendering of it, whether in the form of media attention or anecdotes or rumors. When you get past all the chatter and misinformation (and, where corporations are concerned, outright disinformation) you’ll find the truth. You have to keep looking for it, foraging for it, digging for it. That’s why we like detective stories. The lone thinker rides into town, digs and gets laughed at for it, then solves the case and everyone else looks fat and stupid.
The blogosphere always puts a spin on things because it’s self-referential. You have all these bloggers writing about what the others have written. It’s a natural amplification effect like that of the media itself. If CNN writes an article about artichoke marmalade, you can bet that Fox news will as well. And journalists are far from impartial, since many of them have spouses and family members working at these companies. They form a natural amplification channel that will talk something to death once it becomes trendy in the media.
This is why blogs and media form an important future, and it’s not clear who is assimilating whom. Blogs usually take stories from the media and put them into the indie spin for which blogs are famous, but the large media outfits watch blogs for trends. Together, this is probably 2% of the population of North America and England dictating what the rest of us think is trendy.
While I am certainly not endorsing a candidate, going by traditional measuring, Ron Paul has about as much luck as an armadillo in a freeway during rush hour: i.e. No chance. However, when you go on the Internet, he’s been hailed as the man who can lead us all to the Promised Land.
I don’t begrudge his supporters one bit, I just don’t get the online/off-line disconnect. ^
It’s important to remember when marketing your products that this is the case, and it’s one powerful reason that branding and brand identity are of paramount importance. You want to get people to have a vision of your brand, and to start repeating that in the small closed circles of bloggers, Hollywood, media workers and fashion designers. What these people speak others repeat, and so your brand identity becomes a meme of its own.
Another example of the hype working well is the Asus Eee minilaptop. As a recent article states, Asus and Intel are getting close because this new machine cuts out all the BS people don’t need with a laptop. They want to check email, surf the web, type documents and play minesweeper, and that’s it for 95% of laptop use.
The Eee is not only threatening hardware manufacturers by introducing a 95% solution at 35% of the going price, but is also redefining what people expect from a mobile operating system. A stripped down Linux as offered on the Eee by default lets you do all the tasks you need to for that 95% solution, but also gives you the ability to extend your operating system as you need with low-impact software. True, a lot of the open source offerings, like Open Office, really are inferior to the closed source software they are cloning. People will get around that given time.
Windows Vista is not yet the 95% solution. It requires too much hardware, and it’s a work in progress, but it’s moving slowly toward acceptance the same way Windows XP did (and I actually remember people saying they’d never give up Windows 98 because it was “the best so far”). Over time, Vista will get better and more people accept it.
In the meantime, I know more than a few people who are happily using it. Most of them aren’t technical gurus, but a few are. If you read the blogosphere, or the media, you wouldn’t know that to be true but it is. Between the hype and reality there’s opportunity for those who want to build brands and make ideas reach their audience.
Posted in Branding, Information Technology | 5 Comments »
Bolg – The Chris Blanc Weblog is proudly powered by WordPress
© 2010 Chris Blanc
|