Articles, Page 1 of 169

“Healthcare” is big these day. Government, insurance companies, individual choices, personal lifestyles, money – all of them are players in what has been a complicated and controversial issue for a long, long time. (And somehow I doubt the upcoming vote will change that, no matter how it turns out.) People have strong feelings/opinions on the matter, and there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.

Some want to change everything, to be sure everyone is “covered.” They feel for those who get lesser treatment because they don’t have money, and they can see the gross inefficiency of using emergency rooms as the nation’s Primary Care Physician. “We’re the worst,” they say. “We’re so rich and we can’t/don’t even take care of our own!”

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Some behavioral researchers recently made some interesting conclusions regarding human behavior for survival. They looked at survival statistics for two ill-fated ships, the Titanic and the Lusitania. Each ship sank within three years of each other carrying approximately the same number of passengers and with a nearly identical survival rate of 67%. The difference between the two was how long it took the vessel to sink; the Titanic went down in just under three hours while the Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes. The researchers were curious if there would be a commonality between the two with regards to who survived and based their analysis on a multitude of factors like passenger class, age, marital status, children, etc. They expected to find that a propensity for women and children to be granted lifeboat access with the greatest casualties in the middle-aged, single men down in steerage. Instead, they found nearly the exact opposite on the Lusitania and came to the conclusion that in a short span of time, self-preservation nearly trumps all notions of chivalry whereas with a long enough timespan to “calm down,” people begin behaving by social norms again regardless of circumstance.

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RSA is pretty much the de facto name in public key encryption. They’ve long held open challenges to programmers to crack their keys going back to 1977 as a means of keeping track of what size key was necessary to maintain security. Currently, it’s been a common recommendation that 1024bit keys were still secure and many professional organizations have been brute-force attacking them for years. Some researchers at the University of Michigan have upended previous estimates on the security of a 1024bit key by recovering private keys from encryption hardware in a mere 104 hours. Their method involved a cluster of 81 Pentium 4s working an algorithm designed to detect error fluctuations (PDF) in calculations induced from chip faults. The process was helped along by inducing more faults within the chips by cutting the supplied voltage at key times.

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We conduct observations under the assumption that the universe is uniform. Indeed, many theists point to apparent exceptions to this assumption as evidence of God. Meanwhile, atheists insist that such irregularities simply mean we have incomplete knowledge.

This, for me this is the real meaning of what it is to believe in the metaphysical. Is the universe knowable? Those who accept the metaphysical are saying that, at some fundamental level, it is not. Even if they are correct I refuse to accept it; even if we cannot know the world, we most assuredly cannot know beforehand what our limits of knowledge are.

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You don’t often hear about the Exorcists of the Vatican, but recently Father Gabriel Amorth began pointing his finger. He’s been the chief Exorcist of the church for the past 25 years with more than 70,000 cases of possession under his belt. He insinuates the Devil having infiltrated into the Vatican with evidence being internal violence, pedophilia and other cover-ups. Amorth further goes on to describe the film The Exorcist as exaggerated, but an otherwise exact representation of the possessions he has encountered where he says all sorts of things spew forth from the victims, “Anything can come out of their mouths – finger-length pieces of iron, but also rose petals.” Naturally, his comments have not sat well with the Vatican.

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Lately I have been playing around with extensions on Firefox (on Linux) and Chrome (on Windows). Chrome has a few really interesting plug-ins that I have played around with. One is an “IE Render” button, that will open a new Chrome tab and render it as if it were IE8. This may sound ridiculous, but some sites (like USAA until a few months ago) do not render correctly in Chrome, but do in IE. It totally works, so I convinced my wife to stop using IE8 completely. I consider that a big win.

That was my first experience with a Chrome plug-in so I started browsing through all those available and found Ad-Block+. I had it on Firefox already, but due to my wife being strongly against my Linux aspirations for our laptop (a battle still being fought), I do not really use Firefox as much as Chrome. I installed it and it worked fairly well. Now sites I visit load faster, and some (ABC) do not disrupt online video watching with super loud commercials. Fantastic, right?

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We have been giving the Mormons a hammering over the last few days. Although I find their beliefs highly improbable, it is hard not to admire their loyalty to them and their willingness to defend them. They say adversity makes us stronger, and this sect has had enough of that to become very strong.

For me, what is far more concerning are the pseudo religious cults that abuse their members and challenge us all through their defiance of our laws and societal values. Prime amongst these must be the fast-growing Scientologists whose depravity is becoming increasingly better understood.

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The 2010 Oscars have come and gone and the outcomes were interesting. Many people were surprised when The Hurt Locker destroyed Avatar. It was viewed as a breakthrough for women as director Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director as her film went on to more awards like Best Picture. Therein lies the question.

It goes without saying that Hollywood needs to add flair and story in order to entertain the masses, that’s understood. But often times, accurate or not, the common man’s understanding of history becomes the portrayal from Hollywood. Such classics as Platoon or Saving Private Ryan come to mind as becoming the de facto image people associate in their minds to the war experience. The IAVA (Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America) was mentioned by Newsweek for its take on the accuracy of The Hurt Locker’s portrayal of EOD and service in Iraq. By and large, the movie was well received as one of the best movies showing the Iraq experience, but there are always quirks that create a small snub. IAVA mentions the inattention to minor details like not using appropriate ranks as something simple enough that its research oversight is rather inexcusable for what the movie intended to be. And while its understood that flair was added to the role of EOD, the movie’s usage of them for purposes beyond EOD and the portrayal of other military elements such as FOB guards was simply wrong. For the many OmniNerds that have been deployed to the Middle East, what do you think about Hollywood’s versions of Iraq on celluloid?

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So the other day, I came out of the movie theater and checked my iPhone to see what I missed while being entertained by Alice in Wonderland. In my AKO mail was a curious looking message about North Korea having tested a missile with a nuclear detonation in Okinawa, Japan. The message indicated alerts being made for pending mobilization of military units. WTF?

Office of the Director of National Intelligence
INTELLIGENCE BULLETIN
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

(U//FOUO) DPRK has carried out nuclear missile attack on Japan

06 March 2010

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The intent to defend America’s IT infrastructure is quite old, but often even new initiatives are so mired in secrecy that nothing ends up happening. Recently, the Obama administration declassified pieces of the Bush era Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative which was an effort to make sweeping changes to America’s security posture. A subsequent congressional review of the declassified portion concluded that while the plan had areas of significant merit, the declassified pieces presented various characteristics that were at odds with itself and along with hindrances to the development of solutions. For instance, the findings state the program was too secret for its own good (essentially nobody could work on it since nobody knew about it) and that R&D should be centrally managed by a specialized agency such as DARPA rather than parceled out piecemeal to competing academic environments.

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While making a rare drive to deposit a check, I realized something: It’s possible the Internet will do more to reduce global warming and conserve energy than 2007’s Nobel Peace Prize winners: Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — combined. (Well, unless you count Al Gore as the inventor of the Internet, but I’m not going to go there.) It’s difficult, of course, to put a number on how much the latter two have done or will do to help reduce the amount of Carbon in the air – but in the end, I don’t think it makes much of a difference.

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Music I purchased in February 2010:

• Spoon – Transference – I can’t help but be a little extra happy to see Spoon continue to chug out new and interesting indie rock. Gotta root for the home team!
• Motion City Soundtrack – My Dinosaur Life – These guys finally put together a really good album. Unlike their previous work, the songs don’t all sound the same. Hooray!
• Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix – Another solid indie rock album, although not quite as catchy initially.
• Set Your Goals – This Will Be the Death of Us – Clear step up on their sophomore album. Really good punk/pop.
• Them Crooked Vultures – Them Crooked Vultures – Josh Homme, Dave Grohl, and John Paul Jones? What the what?! As disenchanted as I’ve become about Homme’s projects and “supergroups,” this one actually seems to work.

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I remember when cheating was easy to identify. Hidden answers for a test? Cheating. Copying another’s work (without citing)? Cheating. Working beyond time constraints? Cheating. So what is it these days that seems to make so many people justify the act? Perhaps its just the “I’m Special” generation not wanting to have anything negative associated with their persona. Maybe the Internet has made the concept of share and share alike just part of culture. Or it could be status quo and this is simply the modern evolution of yesterday’s cheater.

There was a blog about cheating in computer science at Stanford that I found somewhat applicable. The students described their motivation to cheat was that with code, it’s easy to copy and paste plus they felt the liberal arts had an unfair GPA advantage with their subjective grading. As an added twist, the students knew their professor, Eric Roberts, ran their assignments through a lexical analysis tool devised to detect plagiarism between current code and past code. These students clearly had to make the decision not only to cheat but to cheat and beat the system.

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So in recent news, the United States was ‘p0wned’ by itself during a virtual cyber-attack exercise. The outcome more or less showed we have quite a journey ahead of us to properly prepare politically … and technically. The latter is mentioned not so much in that our CNO (Computer Network Operations) is in question but rather the vulnerabilities to require us to have a CNO response in the first place. Mitre and SANS together have assembled the 2010 enumeration of common weaknesses in programming, a list that seems to change very little over the years showing how systemic many of the problems really are. For example, the list is still peppered with buffer overruns, improper bounding and type overflows amongst a slew of web vulnerabilities.

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A Washington DC area non-profit organization known as the Bipartisan Policy Center recently hosted an exercise called Cyber ShockWave. Developed by Michael Hayden (former director of the NSA and CIA), it intended to allow participants to experience a simulated, nation-wide cyber attack to role-play how the US might respond. Notable folks such as Michael Chertoff, John Negroponte, Fran Townsend and Joe Lockhart participated, indicative that the role players were experienced in the positions and not amateur think-tank employees speculating. As was likely predicted whenever political talking heads put their minds together, the US failed. In a nutshell, the attack began with malware on the cellular network through widespread phishing followed by the loss of some pipelines and eventually the east coast power grid. While the exercise showed a failure of America’s public capabilities, it was successful in opening eyes regarding how an adherence to existing authorities, jurisdictions and policies were the equivalent of American stepping all over its poncho while running at full speed, a glorious Washington DC faceplant. Amongst the questions raised were:

• whether private communications companies would even comply with government requests to use their infrastructure in defensive and offensive ways

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