a convenient truth

Remember kids, sp00fball is a really, really bad password.

This will make sense to some of you.

Take your top 20 artists. For each of these artists, collect the top 5 similar artists. The resulting number of unique artists is your eclectic score. If the score is small (extreme = 5) your musical preferences are very limited, and if it is large (larger than 80, extreme = 100), then you have an eclectic musical preference. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/eclectic.php

My eclectic score is currently 85/100

The 85 related artists for my profile are AFX, Afterlife, Aim, Akotcha, Amiina, Amorphous Androgynous, Aphex Twin (2), Arovane & Phonem, Augustus Clarke, Autechre (2), B12, Baby Mammoth, Balil (2), Beaumont Hannant, Biosphere & Deathprod, Black Dog Productions, Blue States, Boards of Canada, Bola (2), Bonobo, Boozoo Bajou (2), Brothomstates, Bullitnuts (2), Caribou, Caustic Window, Centry, Christ., Christian Kleine, Count Basic, Da Lata, Days, FFWD, Fireflies, Fridge, GAK, Geir Jenssen, Gescom, Heights of Abraham (2), Hunch, Indian Vibes, Joe Gibbs and the Professionals, Jónsi & Alex, Kenny Dope, Kid Loco, Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid, Kinobe, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Leftfield, Leggo Beast (2), Lemongrass, Manitoba, Mike & Rich, Paul Hartnoll, Peace Orchestra (2), Pete Namlook & Geir Jenssen, Phonem, Plaid (2), Polygon Window, Proem, Richard Devine, Sigur Rós & Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Solid Doctor (2), Squarepusher, Stars In Coma, Sun Electric, System 7, The 13th Sign, The Black Dog, The Charade, The Electric Pop Group, The Future Sound of London (2), The Higher Intelligence Agency, The Higher Intelligence Agency & Biosphere, The Orb, Thievery Corporation (2), Thunderball, Tosca (2), Tycho, Underworld, Yabby U Meets Sly And Robbie, Zion Blood, dZihan & Kamien (2), múm, µ-Ziq, Ólafur Arnalds

So i am mostly twittering rather than blogging these days, partly due to laziness and partly due to business and partly because twitter is just great.

So, You should follow me on twitter.

rating: 2 of 5 stars

I approached this book with an open mind, I think. In fact, for all that I have been persuaded of global warming over the last ten years or so, I’d love to be wrong; I have kids, I have a general hope for a techno-utopia, and that’s going to be an awful lot harder in a world with global warming.

The central thesis of the book is that there is a conspiracy amongst politicians, scientists and the media to present climate change as fact, when the science is very complex and in many parts undecided and in fact we should all be much more suspicious of claims of climate change.

Of course, the conspiracy does not extend to the various eminent scientists he quotes in this book, some of whom has suffered mysterious losses of funding, and other incidents that might be attributed to said conspiracy.

The book is structured with one eminent scientist per chapter, each one of who disagrees with something associated with the climate change argument. The author says in the introduction:

The question of credibility brings me to another rule I imposed on myself: I would not play the numbers game. I would not rely on claims that 14,000 scientists signed one petition saying the planet is toast or that 14,001 signed another saying that global warming is a hoax. There are a lot of scientists in the world. By definition most of them are mediocre. Getting thousands of mediocrities to sign a petition is an impressive work of political organizing; it is not science. No, I was looking for a relative handful of scientists of great eminence, whose credibility (unlike their equations) would be transparent to the lay reader.

First, clearly, the author isn’t seeking to play “the numbers game” because he’d lose. The vast majority of scientists, if asked, will say they think that the climate is changing due to the effect of humans.

Second, If you’ve been around science much, one of the things that becomes apparent is that the more eminent a scientist the less actual science they do. If you want a really good view of what’s actually going on, you need to speak to some “mediocrities”.

Especially, of course, if there is a world-spanning conspiracy that you are courageously battling against - it’s those eminent scientists who are always in on the conspiracy, not the brave researchers out on the arctic snows, right? See, I do pay attention to TV.

I have to admit to only reading the first half of this book in detail, and skimming the rest, since it became quite repetitive. Each chapter has something of the form:

1. Show some claim from the media that is overblown and poorly presented.
2. Claim the media’s interpretation is what “science” thinks.
3. Find a scientist who disagrees, often for very good reasons.
4. Imply that this undermines the entire basis for global warming.
5. Imply that the fact this is never talked about in the media is because of a conspiracy, perhaps led by the UN.
6. Rinse and repeat.

The UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) comes in for specific criticism throughout the book. According to the author, and some of his scientists, it is rabidly pro-climate change, ignoring dissenting voices and treating them as enemies of the system.

This is so at odds to my own understanding of the IPCC that I don’t really know what to think about this claim. My own understanding (admittedly rather superficial) is that the IPCC tries to extract some sort of consensus from a huge number of scientists. Since the only way you get consensus from a group of experts is to say the least controversial things, backed up by the most evidence, that the IPCCs reports are amazingly conservative. The idea of the IPCC as some hot-headed climate warrior is just weird.

The basic points that the author makes are self-evidently true. Climate change is an evolving subject, involving large amounts of questionable science. Questionable does not mean it is not true - it just means it hasn’t had a few centuries to bed in. Unfortunately we cannot wait a few hundred years to make sure our science works well, we must use questionable science. This means there is little consensus amongst scientists (getting scientists to agree is like herding cats anyway).

But the “consensus” argument is one not made by science itself - it is something claimed in the media. And the author is absolutely correct here - the media is incapable of presenting science in a way that truly reflects it’s complexity. News at 11. This is no conspiracy - if journalists were capable of understanding the nuances of climate change, they wouldn’t be journalists would they?

None of the results in the book really dispute that humans are responsible for climate, change, and the author makes no actual direct claim that they do. He even admits that many of his subjects object to his efforts:

I naively imagined that all reputable scientists would be delighted to have their stories told. Some were. Some weren’t, and spoke to me grudgingly. Many simply ignored me, perhaps hoping I would go away. And a few absolutely hated it and have never forgiven me for “outing” them.

How powerful must an orthodoxy be if men who are praised for questioning it try furiously to deny they have done such a thing?

I have a different explanation for their hatred, and it’s not because of the prevailing “orthodoxy” - it’s because their words have been spun with such innuendo that it completely misrepresents them.

If I were to use the same technique, I could claim that the Mr Solomon is a prominent anti-nuclear activist, and that nuclear power is likely to be one of the greatest beneficiaries of the attempt to reduce CO₂ production. Ergo, Mr Solomon is part of a world-spanning anti-nuclear conspiracy attempting to rubbish global warming, to ensure no more plants get built. But to make this claim would be a pretty poor show, wouldn’t it.

View all my reviews.

After the ringing endorsement for more “talking rubbish” from Tom in the comments to my last post, I feel newly inspired to spout off.

So, a couple of news items in recent weeks about our government’s incompetent attempts to turn our generally-mostly-well-behaved-as-long-as-you-are-white police force into some kind of robo-stasi.  The ethics of these things are pretty obvious, but what perplexes me is how some of these powers are supposed to be used.

First, the Computer Misuse Act (1995) allows the police to hack into “compromised” systems without a warrant.  Who knew?  Not me. Anyway, apparently they plan to “step up this activity”.

Now as it happens I have briefly met some of the chaps from SOCA, who presumably would be executing this brief.  I am sure they are fine upstanding members of the constabulary, but leet haxors they are not.  Frankly I think it’s unlikely they could drive a pivot table in Excel, let alone devise a 0-day.  The drafters of this act perhaps envisaged the police employing uber hackers from the underground, which superficially sounds quite exciting, but it’s an ITV plot I’m afraid.  If the Old Bill know of uber hackers in the UK they’re most likely to feel their collars.

Alternatively of course they could employ russian hackers, but the amazingly bad idea of involving anyone associated with the FSB with sensitive police business may be apparent even to the clouded minds of our senior officers.

Security firms, on the whole, will also try their best to keep the police off your network, since they won’t be able to tell if it’s the police or not.  For all the fretting about these powers, in practice it’s only those who take no care at all who need to worry, and their machines are probably infested with viruses already.

Second is the rather more disturbing intention of the Government’s to require ISPs to log every email sent. Again, the ethical problems with this are pretty obvious but the practical implications are bizarre.

When you send an email from your workplace to someone else, it’s very likely that your emails never directly touch one of your ISPs mail servers - your mail goes to your corporate mailserver, then over the internet to your receipient’s mailserver.  That mail does traverse your ISPs network, but not their mailservers.

So to log this activity, your ISP would need to run a filter on all TCP traffic for port 25, decode this traffic and extract the headers.  Although this is onerous for ISPs, it’s possible.  It will inevitably make email less reliable, and slower, but hey who cares, right.

But, and this is a but you could drive a truck through, a whole load of people use opportunistic strong encryption for email. It’s enabled out of the box on all decent mail systems these days, and from watching our own logs I guess well more than half of email is encrypted for transport now.

Cracking this is not only difficult-to-impossible, but illegal in many cases. It certainly is more than onerous.

So, may  I just ask, WTF?  Are they really proposing on making laws to legislate for the impossible just to irritate everyone?

Private firm may track all email and calls, reports The Guardian.  It’s a pretty remarkable story, and on the face of it it’s enough to get lots of people very upset already.

I think it’s a lot more insidious than it seems too.  The trick is in the term “Communications Traffic Data”, and what this really means in practice.

As with phone calls now, the government claims it will only record “Communications Traffic Data” and not the content of internet traffic. It’s still quite Big Brother, of course:

By building up a database about our movements - our morning rituals of
checking emails, visiting web sites, buying online - this will build up
a pattern. This in itself is “content”. This will create a pattern of
recognition about our movements. Plus how long would it be before they
start to argue that they need to see the content as well? Curiously,
because so few people in China - relatively speaking - are online
and/or using credit cards, China will look pretty free compared to our
electronically driven society.

It’s a lot worse than this I’m afraid. 

How do we decide what Communications Traffic Data is?  All traffic over the internet is transmitted in packets (called Datagrams) according to the Internet Protocol (IP).  These datagrams have a header, and a body.  The header contains the IP Communications Traffic Data, and the body contains the content.  The IP header contains, amongst other things, the source IP address and destination IP address of the datagram.

So is this what the government counts as Communications Traffic Data?  Well, not quite.  the IP addresses are part of what they want to record, but not everything.  How do we know what type of traffic this is?  Surely whether this is part of an email or part of a web page is Communications Traffic Data too?  Also, who initiated this conversation?  This could be a web request, or a page in response, and which way the traffic is going is important too isn’t it?

Well, that information isn’t in the IP header.  It’s inside the content of the IP packet.  For Web and Email, it’ll be inside a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) packet, carried within IP.

So, we look at the IP packet, see it’s a TCP packet, unpack the content and look at the TCP header.  The TCP header is the Communications Traffic Data for TCP, and the body is the data.  In the header for the TCP packet we have the information we need to see what port numbers this communication is between, and we know that port 80 is normally web traffic, so now we know it’s a web page.

We also know who started the conversation, so we can keep track of who is asking whom for what.

But, well, what URL is being requested?  Is this Communications Traffic Data? It’s not as far as TCP is concerned, but it is for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).  And surely anyone reasonable would say it’s Communications Data as far as the government is concerned?

So, we unpack the tcp packet, find the HTTP request and look at that.  Now then, there’s not much left of this packet now is there?  For an HTTP request in fact, we can reasonably claim that the entire packet is Communications Traffic Data.

As I understand both existing and planned legislation, there’s no strict definition of what “Commmunications Traffic Data” really is, and the possible database could well end up storing all of these data.

HTTP requests aren’t such a contrived example either.  But try some more on for size.  Imagine an MSN chat conversation.  The IP packets just record that your computer talks to an MSN server somewhere, and that’s it.  That’s a lot less than telephone communications data, which at least records the virtual circuit endpoints (i.e. phone numbers).  So, is it reasonable to unpack all these packets to find the usernames for who is communicating?  Probably.  Again, very little of the actual data is considered to be “content”, and almost all of it is “Communication Data”.

Imagine you are playing an MMO such as World of Warcraft, and you start a private chat with someone else.  Is this Communications Traffic Data?  How about your emotes to someone? 

What about email attachments?  Their size, filenames and types are part of the MIME protocol, within an email, and these could be “Communications Data”.  The actual contents of the attachment would be hard to justify as “Communications Data”, but that’s about it.

As should be clear by now, the Internet is built as layers within layers within layers.  Every layer considers it’s containing stuff to be “just data”.  It’s the most powerful abstraction we have, and without it we would never have been able to build the Internet.

But the Internet was never designed to facilitate state monitoring and control of all communications, and it doesn’t have the ready control knobs that an authoritarian government would have required.  It’s also not easily possible to retrofit them, which is what this government really requires.  They use loose language in statute to allow them to adapt to a technology that they don’t really appreciate.  Because the media don’t appreciate the technology either, we’re likely to find a government with strongly authoritarian instincts being granted vast powers entirely by accident.

That would be tragic.

Bah.  It looks like Delicious is failing to post my new links to my blog, which is irritating since it was lots of my content!  So, some manual links:

• Dangerous Economic Fallacies - via the splendiforous Polymeme, some interesting economic “fallacies”.
• Red Light Cameras Don’t Work - something we don’t have in the UK (yet) to my knowledge (update: apparently there are loads in London), but that is very popular in the US.  The problem is that they don’t reduce accidents, they increase them - but hey, at least they increase revenue from fines, so that’s ok.
• Creative Climate Change Containment - this is the kind of solution that might actually save the planet, not the Daily Mail waging war on plastic bags.

Hello again, it’s been a while I know.

There seem to have been a flood of decent debut novels recently.  Well ok, flood is probably an exaggeration.  I seem to have noticed some very good debuts, that are much better than you’d expect.  Try some of these on for size.  Something they all have in common is something of the Gormenghast, I think - occupying the more fabulous end of fantasy (no heroes here) but with a kind of mix of compassion and cynicism that I suspect is very hard to pull off as an author.

Scar Night, by Alan Cambell is a case in point.  This is an excellently dark and rather trippy novel with some appropriate perverse and scary characters, beautifully rendered on a grotesque city.

The sequel I found initially disappointing, but I think I was expecting too much from it in some ways.  It continues the weirdness of the original world, and is in much the same vein.

Anyway, highly enjoyable.

This one, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susannah Clarke, is even better.  It has a unique tone to it - Lewis Caroll does Gormenghast, perhaps.  It’s very English, and very very well written.

This novel is going to be classified as ‘fantasy’, which seems to be the end of a novel for some critics, which is unfortunate.  Some of the finest writing in the language is in this genre, and the best (as with the best of all genres) transcends it’s genre.

I’d recommend this book to anyone.

I’ve not read this one yet (is this cheating?).  It’s sat there waiting for me to finish the Dark Tower novels by Steven King.  Those are great too, but hardly Debuts.

Anyway, The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch, looks like a real winner.

I’m cheating a bit here - this isn’t exactly a debut, it’s China Mieville’s second novel.  However, Perdido Street Station is superb, as is pretty much everything else China Mieville has written.

If anything I think the sequel, The Scar is even better.

The .st NIC messed up my domain renewal

All sorted now though.

James Clark, who may be known of to some of you, has posted some fascinating stuff about Thai names.  When you are designing an application and you need to store data about people, you’d normal start with either something called, maybe, fullname or perhaps firstName, lastName or maybe givenName, familyName.

It seems Thai names are nothing like this at all.  Just how many different sorts of names are there out there, and how would you support all of them in an application?