Israeli hackers use trojan software to spy on rival companies: Neuromancer lives

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli firms 'ran vast spy ring'

Neuromancer was not the first science fiction novel to describe a world of corporate hackers spying upon one another's software -- but it was the best of this genre. I hope someone interviews William Gibson for his commentary on this historic story. Historic because the events described will soon be so commonplace...

Police in Israel say they have uncovered a huge industrial spying ring which used computer viruses to probe the systems of many major companies.

At least 15 Israeli firms have been implicated in the espionage plot, with 18 people arrested in Israel and two more held by British police.

Among those under suspicion are major Israeli telecoms and media companies.

Police say the companies used a "Trojan horse" computer virus written by an Israeli to hack into rivals' systems.

Interpol and the authorities in Britain, Germany and the US are already involved in investigating the espionage, which Israeli police fear may involve major international companies.

Imagine the situation in Russia and China.

The last remaining shards of the media squeak up.

Washington Post: Assault On the Media

The barbarians have leveled the house and set fire to the fields. They advance on a loan scribe deep in the rubble. It gradually dawns on him that there's a war on, and maybe he should "fight back".

...I resisted writing about this subject precisely because I do not want anyone to confuse my own views with Newsweek's or The Post's.

I write about it now because of the new reports and because I fear that too many people in traditional journalism are becoming dangerously defensive in the face of a brilliantly conceived conservative attack on the independent media.

Conservative academics have long attacked "postmodernist" philosophies for questioning whether "truth" exists at all and claiming that what we take as "truths" are merely "narratives" woven around some ideological predisposition. Today's conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations -- and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward. Just a modest number of failures can be used to discredit an entire enterprise.

Logic, rationality, empiricism. That's so Enlightenment. Bush is either pre-Enlightenment or post-modernist or both. BTW, I don't think he would have much of a problem with that assertion. Bush famously remarked that the "jury is still out on natural selection". He's no rationalist.

The ultimate iMac accessory: an air conditioner

Faughnan's Tech: iMac essential: a thermal monitoring program

Let's assume Apple has fixed the power supply and the fans in the new (last month's) 2nd generation G5 iMac. They still have one huge problem -- IBM's CPU. In contrast to Intel, who invested wisely and heavily to destroy power-efficient competitive CPUs with their own excellent solution, IBM and AMD have followed the hot road.

So I don't think Apple has solved the G5 iMac's heat dissipation problem.

So if you want a G5 iMac, what else do you need? A well air conditioned room with an external fan pushing cool room air into the iMac's air intake. This kind of defeats the purpose of a quiet machine, but at least the room will be comfortable. One could compromise by running the iMac in its low speed setting and allowing the room temperature to rise a bit. A high quality large low speed external fan could even be fairly quiet.

My guess is that the combination of an internal thermal monitoring system, judicious use of external drives to reduce internal drive heating, lower performance settings, room air conditioning and a quiet external fan, all taken together, will allow one to use a 2nd generation G5 iMac for at least 2-3 years. When you need power for video editing, crank the external cooling and let the machine rip.

Yes, Apple has a problem.

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History to screen the Discovery Institute's anti-evolution propaganda

Smithsonian to Screen a Movie That Makes a Case Against Evolution - New York Times

Reading the article one is left with two possible conclusions:

1. There's been significant incompetence at the museum.
2. This was an informed decision. That implies either non-scientific leadership or profound political cynicism.

This is another substantial victory for the Discovery Institute (largely funded, btw, but far right proponents of christian government) and a significant defeat for american science. We are continuing to lose ground. It may yet be reversed, by Monday morning the office of the museum's director will be getting some interesting phone calls.

Happiness is a selective memory - manipulating memory for good and for profit

EconLog, Framing Effects and Memory, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty

A central assumption of much of my research is that people can choose their own beliefs. There are many possible mechanisms, but Vrij's discussion suggests yet another. If you want to believe something, just describe the relevant event to yourself using appropriately loaded language. Your memory does the rest.

Conversely, if you want to prevent your desires from affecting your beliefs, use measured language to describe it to yourself. Otherwise, you're burying a time capsule of deception for yourself to dig up at a later date.

The more we understand our minds, the more ephemeral and contextual we appear to be. Belief is particularly fluid. This adds new dimensions to classic books describing mass movements.

My approach to creating a selectively-false and happy set of memories is a large collection of family photos that cycle across our array of computer displays. These leverage the principle of selective reinforcement of memory -- given two proximate events, unbalanced reinforcement of one will decrease retrieval of the second. It as though as one memory grows it usurps the foundation of its "neighbor" memories. In this experiment the happy photos selectively blur away all other events.

Truth is fundamentally overrated in our current universe.

PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) may work the other way. By constantly reinforcing very negative memories all good memories seem to be subsumed. This is why some therapies for PTSD have been hypothesized to be potentially counter-productive. I think that PTSD research is now focusing on "selective destruction" of memory and reinforcement or implanting of more positive memories.

Memory therapy, involving the selective implantation of false memories for the the benefit of the patient, will be an increasingly interesting subject over the next twenty years. Particulary if it is done without the informed consent of the patient. Of course, some would say advertisers have done this for years.

Speaking of memory, I thought I wrote on this topic some time ago, but my searches aren't turning anything up. Maybe I did that in an alternate time slice :-).

Gender imbalance in China: the contribution of Hepatitis B infection

The Search for 100 Million Missing Women - An economics detective story. By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt

Fascinating. There are two fascinating claims here that seem reasonably persuasive:

1. Hepatitis B infection biases live births to male infants. (Hep B infection is very common in some areas of China and used to be very common in Taiwan -- until they began immunizing newborns to prevent perinatal infection.)
2. This phenomena accounts for a significant portion of China's gender bias (too few women -- the other explanations are selective neglect of liveborn girls and selective abortion, the old explanation of 'stopping after the first boy' doesn't work).

Economics and public health are meeting in increasingly interesting ways.

Signs of the end times? Or just new times ...

First - Crooked Timber: I think I’m going to be sick: The Economist’s new venture is:

...an inspirational lifestyle magazine which instead of helping readers make decisions in their professional life, helps them do the same in their personal life”...

... Take white-collar boxing – the latest stress reliever for Wall Street and City elite. Tired of punching a bag at the gym, they have now moved on to punching each other in front of a paying audience. ...

... If smacking around your colleagues doesn’t sound appealing, how about brushing up on your space travel tips so you can be first in line to book your space flight?

... Other articles include the latest on gadgets, health innovations, luxury items and how to order your own bespoke car.

and ...

The April 22, 2005 business section of a "local" paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, printed the compensation rankings for the CEOs of publicly traded Minnesota companies (the numbers are in millions of dollars, they don't distinguish between CEO-founders and CEO's hired into a mature company):

1. William McGuire, UnitedHealth Group: 125
2. Robert Ulrich, Target: 40
3. Jerry Grundhofer, US Bancorp: 39
4. Steve Sanger, General Mills: 18
5. Randall Hogan, Pentair: 10
6. Joel Ronning, Digital River: 8.6
7. James McNerney, 3M: 8.5
8. Kendrick Melrose, Toro: 8.1
9. Richard Rompala, Valspar: 7.8
10. Arthur Collins, Medtronic: 6.7

and

• the Wall Street Journal has a front page essay on America's rigid class structures
• the New York Times runs an entire series on the same topic
• Cohen and DeLong write in The Atlantic about globalization and class upheaval in near-future America. The primary thesis? There will be vastly more money and wealth going to multinational companies, but it will not go to workers exposed to the income pressures of globalization. Where it will end up settling (deflation, shareholders, senior management) is unclear and may depend on social factors such as corruption.
  

There's more, but the above provides a decent overview. We are an aging society, so we may respond to these circumstances with less social upheaval than we would have 80 years ago. All the same, I do expect a green/socialist party to emerge in America in 2012, rather to the shock of pundits everywhere. (I'm a middle-of-the-road Clinton Democrat myself btw, but I'm old too :-).

Search engines I use now

At the pretty wired (ok, it was in Minnesota) .com startup I worked for in the 90s I was the first to discover and use Google. Alta Vista, my old favorite, had been in decline and Yahoo was still pretty much a directory/indexing company (for manual indices, I then preferred the Encyclopedia Britannica's site!).

Google was the clear winner from the start. It's been a Google world ever since.

There are rumblings, though, of rebellion. Googe's indexing engines are slow to hit many pages, especially Gooogle's own blogs. Yahoo seems to hit the pages Google misses. And, as Phil Bradley notes, there are many special purpose alternatives.

Here are a few I've lately found useful - or at least interesting:

Mindset (Yahoo): Yahoo search biased to commercial or non-commercial
http://mindset.research.yahoo.com

Grokker: visual results
http://www.grokker.com

Brainboost: just facts
http://www.brainbost.com

Google Scholar: academia
http://scholar.google.com

Google Portal: Google + Gmail + Google History search
http://www.google.com/ig

Froogle and Pricescan: Shopping, also Amazon for the best overall user reviews.

Google Print: search full text of books
(added 5/28, thanks to a reference from Phil Bradley's blog)
http://print.google.com/

Water boarding and other American recreational activities

The Torture Feature: Taxonomy of Torture

Form Direct Questioning to Sleep deprivation to Isolation to Water boarding to old-fashined beatings-to-death. All unremarkable everyday routines in modern America and our outsourced torture sites.

Intelligent design: the game of Spore

BBC NEWS | Technology | Sims creator takes on evolution

In the game, players start off as an amoeba in a 2D world, reminiscent of some early video games.

The aim is to grow and evolve generations of creatures, with players able to choose the physical attributes of their creation.

"You get to play every generation of the creature," said Mr Wright. "I want something boys can make scary things or casual gamers can make cute things."

He said the computer would analyse a creature's design and work out how it should behave.

In the demonstration, Mr Wright created a three-legged creature and said the software would work out how it should walk.

"This is the hardest piece of technology I have ever had to solve," he said.

The creatures are supposed to evolve through natural selection, and intelligent design. As I've noted in the context of another game, SkyNet comes not from the integrated missile defense system, but rather from the first generation of networked games that includes rat neural tissue in the networked game consoles ...

Security costs money, it's cheaper for banks to pay the crooks.

PBS | I, Cringely . May 26, 2005 - Phish or Phisher?

Cringely tackles phishing scams, and he's sufficiently impolitic to point out why credit card companies and banks don't fuss about this fraud:

Another problem is that a large group of phishing victims -- banks and credit card companies -- don't want to publicize their losses, which might lead to a loss of business as customers start to worry about being victimized. But it goes even further, because the financial institutions are only on the hook for reported thefts. So by not making a big deal of it, maybe you won't notice that extra $30 charge and won't demand that your credit card company cover the loss. Being upfront about phishing could easily double corporate losses because of it by forcing these outfits to actually assume the risk that they say they'll assume.

So nobody talks about it, and the costs of phishing are generally hidden in the average eight percent that credit card companies figure they'll lose through theft, bankruptcies, etc. In a business with interest charges often going above 20 percent, phishing is tolerable...

This has been true forever. When credit cards started being used outside of brick-and-mortar settings fraud and identity theft exploded -- but the costs of fraud are still much less than the costs of preventing fraud. Especially if the victims don't notice their losses.

It's no different with checks. Check fraud is a very common crime, but in general the banks and police don't bother to bring these cases to court. It's just not worth the hassle -- for them.

Of course we bear the costs, but that's another story. Happily there are plausible solutions:

... Thinking there must be a better solution I contacted Max Levchin, who used to chase phishers for a living as co-founder and CTO of PayPal, a company he left a few months after it was bought by eBay back in 2002.

"The way to nail phishing," says Max, "is for the companies being impersonated to offer cash bounties -- to the first person to report the incident, the first person to call the free host and take down the site, the first person who figures out the identity of the perp. This would mean admitting that the matter is much more serious than most people realize, but that's going to have to happen, sooner than later, if columns like yours continue to give coverage to the matter. On the other hand, it's peanuts, financially, for the companies involved. There is the adverse selection problem -- why not set up phishing sites, report them, and collect the bounties? -- but it's easy to mitigate this by making the pay-outs contingent on all kinds of personal information from the good samaritan, and making the bounties really significant financially only when criminal charges are brought against the perpetrators. In fact, about a year ago, I was thinking of starting a site that would be an independent agency, holding the bounty money in escrow, ensuring the actual payments, and providing the war-room-style up-to-the-second information about what the latest phishing scams were. In the end, I decided this was a project not too different from my PayPal work, and I could do more fun things with my personal time, but still think the idea is sound."

Race as a collection of genes that travel together

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: A Family Tree in Every Gene

The thesis of the article is that genes tend to travel together and that it's possible to assign a human being to a geographically isolated population in which that the gene set was very common. That assignment group can be called a "race" (actually, from the article, it might even be a "tribe" or "extended family") and this theory is a statistical (rather than cultural) model of "race".

This makes sense to me. I've been skeptical of passionate statements that "race does not exist" -- they reminded me of the earnest statements that "intelligence is not genetically determined". Well intentioned, but unpersuasive.

The New York Times
March 14, 2005
A Family Tree in Every Gene
By ARMAND MARIE LEROI

Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of "Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body."

... The dominance of the social construct theory [jf: of race, vs. the genetic theory] can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an "indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge." Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.

Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.

The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.

But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from - and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many - a few hundred - variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology...

...Yet there is nothing very fundamental about the concept of the major continental races; they're just the easiest way to divide things up. Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups, each located somewhere on the map. This has not yet been done with any precision, but it will be. Soon it may be possible to identify your ancestors not merely as African or European, but Ibo or Yoruba, perhaps even Celt or Castilian, or all of the above.

... The billion or so of the world's people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well. Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences...

A statistical model of "race" implies a (pardon the language) sort of n-dimensional "bell curve". Imagine a 'gene-space' consisting of (say) 100 or so marker gene values. If we treat this a 100-dimension space then an individual human should appear as a point in this space. If we add a dimension for frequency then we may "see" (humans aren't good at visualizing 100 dimensions -- pending our upgrades) "mountains" in the space. Those are "races". Most of us are somewhere on the flank of a mountain, but there ought to be (how can one resist the word) "pure" folk at the peaks.

Yahoo Search drops the big one: non-commercial search

Yahoo! Mindset

Ooookkkaaaay. This is actually interesting. Yahoo's new "Mindset" search allows you to weight search results based on how "commercial" they are. I tested this by searching on product with the slider set to "non-commercial". Instead of Google's 50 pages of ads I got a very useful review in the 3rd hit.

Of all the search experiments I've seen in the past year this one has impressed me the most. In the search wars, filtering out 'commercial' sites is a dramatic and risky move.

Stanford Center for Clinical Informatics: Seminar series

2004-05 Seminars - Stanford Center for Clinical Informatics (SCCI) - Stanford University School of Medicine

This is a remarkable resource for medical computing/health informatics folks. Admittedly it's a small audience, but the collection of resources and speakers is remarkable. Kudos to Stanford for putting it online.

Our first interstellar probe - leaving the solar system

NASA - Voyager Enters Solar System's Final Frontier

Heading for the stars.

The consensus of the team now is that Voyager 1, at 8.7 billion miles from the Sun, has at last entered the heliosheath, the region beyond the termination shock," said Dr. John Richardson from MIT, Principal Investigator of the Voyager plasma science investigation.