September 2007
Security + Privacy = Liberty. And the CheapID / State In A Box - Identity Services Architecture **DEMO** is now online
CheapID demo now online.
You can go, you know, generate yourself a dodgy ID card, and get a real solid idea of what on earth all this Identity Services Architecture stuff is about.
Note well, the code is flakey, your IDs will break every time I tweak the code, and this is a junky alpha. Of, well, a biometrics system that actually believes, in every detail, that Security + Privacy == Liberty, for small enough values of all those terms.
Russians in Iraq
“{foo airbase} we are landing.”
“{Russian airplane} you don’t have authorization to land.”
“{foo airbase}, sorry, my English is not precise. We are informing you that we are landing. we have no fuel. In five minutes, we will be on ground, with your permission or not. We think it would be easier for everyone if we land on your runway instead of your ammo dump, yes?”
Biometrics for Godly men
Part of what makes my job tolerable is using images of 14 century Hindu saints as my test data.
Holy shit that’s a lot of money
Graph of US govt. spending on energy vs. spending on Iraq.
You know it’s bad.
But you don’t really know how bad.
It’s like fifteen pages of War and half an inch of power. Gaaaahhhhh.
Obscenities, obscenities.
Understanding the nature of the problem
[On the National Response Plan]
“Where’s the beef?” asked Baughman, who is Alabama’s emergency management chief. “I don’t have any problems with a framework . . . but it’s not a plan . . . and it’s not national. Who are we fooling here?”
…
“Coordination between state and local governments and the feds . . . seems to be getting worse rather than better,” said Timothy Manning, head of emergency management in New Mexico and a member of a DHS-appointed steering committee that initially worked on the emergency plan before being shut out of the deliberations in May.Testifying before a House panel last week, Ashwood and colleagues openly questioned why the draft was revised behind closed doors. The final document was to be released June 1, at the start of this year’s hurricane season.
Federal officials, Ashwood said, appear to be trying to create a legalistic document to shield themselves from responsibility for future disasters and to shift blame to states. “It seems that the Katrina federal legacy is one of minimizing exposure for the next event and ensuring future focus is centered on state and local preparedness,” he said.
The simple truth of this is it is not ok, and it will not be ok unless something is done. The piece I did over on Treehugger about disaster response is one piece of the puzzle, and the study that Lugon pointed me at is another.
It’s time for the people to accept responsibility for disaster response. It’s not reasonable to expect the government to get out of this snarl in time to provide effective cover. We just need to accept that it’s broken right now, that they’re trying to fix it, and until that outage resolves, we’d better find a new way.
Redefining Readiness
The ever-helpful Lugon of the Flu Wiki, a site focussing on pandemic flu preparedness, pointed me at Redefining Readiness, which is a study about disaster response that actually, you know, asked members of the public what they would actually do in a disaster, and why.
Needless to say, the results pose some interesting questions for disaster response planners, like “will any of the stuff you are suggesting work, at all, given how little public consultation was done?”
Part of the reason that our work on Networked Domestic Disaster Response (aka disastr.org) is so pointed at the public right now is to see what people think of it. Is this cool? Is this useful? Is this what people need or want?
People don’t always know what’s good for them, but usually they do, and it’s usually safest to assume that they do unless proven otherwise. I’m not sure that’s at all how central planners normally think about these things.
STAR-TIDES
Project STAR-TIDES is the new form of EITP, which is the .gov, .mil, big .org etc. autonomous building / distributed infrastructure / disaster response effort.
They’re also up on Appropedia.
I’m currently kind of the jack of all trades / focus manager for this project - keep the thing pointed at the problems, organize the purchasing of systems to test, generally make sure the ground gets covered and the goals get met in terms of working on the technology. It’s an interesting environment.
Hobbits. I wonder if they’ve found the fat one yet.
Remember those “hobbit” skeletons?
Yup, it was a human subspecies
Here’s my question. If birds who’ve never seen an eagle’s shadow still know to panic, that suggests that some kinds of threat identification stuff can be genetically hardwired.
What if that extends to things other than threats? Like, say, food sources…
Or, you know, just weird stuff that was around at the time. It’s unlikely that we these guys ever had enough evolutionary impact on us to get wired into our DNA as either friend or foe, but it’s an amusing thought that, if they *had* seriously interacted with us over a long period, we might have been “remembering” them at a genetic level, in the same way that we “remember” snakes…
Wow.
I checked out Viridari’s Blog in response to a comment here, and found this gem:
Now, on so many levels, you can see how close we are to a total collapse of the current value system. Hippies marching under the pledge of allegiance buffaloing confused small town cops with by the sound of the tape, extremely solid discipline and no shortage, whatsoever, of bravery.
Would that the Democratic party had such a spine.
What needs to happen is that the left and the right supporters of the Constitution need to come together. The left needs to give up it’s futile and anti-rights stance on the Second Amendment and allow, at the very least, for rifle ownership across the board, casting out unconstitutional restrictions like those that apply in big cities like New York and Chicago. On the other hand, the Right needs to accept that victimless soft drug crimes (pot) are matters for community service, not incarceration, and that abortion rights etc. are facts of life.
The choice is clear: unite in mutual respect and support for the Constitution, or lose everything.
The hippies in the clip above showed the way. Follow.
Bitching about parallel computation
I Want A New Platform - at Union Square Adventures - can’t handle a new platform!
The core of this issue is that we’re in a **PARALLEL COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT**
That’s really the issue. You’re planning on using multiple CPUs to do the work, and the architecture bottlenecks at your ability to get the centralized components of the architecture to behave.
Gee… didn’t the supercomputer guys have this problem about 30 years ago?
A single system, serving hundreds or tens of thousands of concurrent users is going to have these problems. The more interactive it becomes, the more **LIKE SOFTWARE** your web site is, the worse the problem will be.
You think you have problems? Check out:
http://disastr.org
and imagine this problem in the context of sixty million people hitting your system in a three hour window to try and figure out how to save themselves from a disaster.
Can it be done? Sure. But the STORM botnet is a your model, not your current web applications framework.
Start thinking of swarms of disposable entities serving your web sites. It’s not about taking a single webserver app and scaling it no no no. It’s about writing parallel supercomputer cluster software that happens to be user-interactive rather than number crunching.
Nodes that carry data. Migration over the network to spare compute resources. Local session data that’s spooled to disk replicated on the fly rather than databases.
SQL *on the node* if you need it (think SQLite) rather than an Oracle install.
It’s not easy: people in the supercomputer world have been worrying about this since the 1980s, maybe earlier. But that’s what you’re up against here: supercomputer sized computations with irregular datasets and complex interdependencies.
If you haven’t thought about this stuff, you need to go back to the Transputer papers and the Occam programming language. Occam is really the best single source for clear thinking about parallel computation as a fundamental part of software design that I am aware of, and the Transputer is an idea who’s time is not yet come - first we need parallel programmers, *then* parallel computers.
Once you’ve got your head around that - and things like the “Crazy Postman” algorithm and why they worked in a transputer environment - then you’re ready to get down to writing code for these massive new generation applications.