Rogue Unit, Rogue Nation

It would be interesting to know the date that Bush and the GOP stopped talking about a "single rogue unit" and "a few bad apples":

Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees - New York Times

... The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

More like a rogue nation.

The rational right betrayed: Bush wasn't in on the con

A recent Brad DeLong post deserves to be read. Don't miss the "great" (as in terrible) Andrew Sullivan quote in Peggy Noonan Realizes She Has Conned Herself.

There are small government rationalists in the historic Republican camp. They play a key role in democracy; they are the respected opposition. They helped forge some of the best results of the blessed Clinton years.

They thought Bush was one of them, and that his apparent inability to add was just an act to con the proles. When the bills came due our 100% GOP government would, with immense and solemn reluctance, eliminate medicare, social security, medicaid and a vast array of Roosevelt's legacy. Now they've come to understand that Bush is a KGB agent designed to destroy America. Or maybe he's a space alien in disguise. Or maybe Bush is a mildly demented con artist and the GOP is corrupt. Whatever the truth, their horror is genuine.

They thought they were conning the dimwitted, but they've discovered their own wits were dim.

Tough on them, terrible for America.

The worldmind in action: finding impact craters

A scientist (amateur?), viewing a newly discovered asteroid impact crater using Google Earth, impulsively decides to look for more. He quickly finds two candidates (Astroseti.org), but hours of additional work don't turn up any more.

It's a truism of the history of science that new instruments create a flurry of new discoveries. The new instrument in this case is not satellite imagery (old), or even Google Earth (though it's cool), it's the distributed worldmind. Lots of minds doing a vast amount of analysis.

After 9/11 I, among many others, proposed using a large collection of minds to process visual data from Afghanistan (obviously the security risks require some thought). I don't think that happened, but this story again shows us the potential of the new instrument.

Incidentally, the story of the early find and then nothing seems odd, but consider how many must have looked this way. The same idea probably occurred to tens of thousands of enthusiasts. The vast majority would look for a few hours then give up. If it takes 10,000 hours to find a crater, and the average search is one hour, then roughly 1 in 10,000 persons will make a discovery like this.

My Homeland security interview: via MoneyGram

Recenly I had to send some money to my sister in Canada. A quick Google search suggested MoneyGram or Western Union were my best choices, and MoneyGram works with Canadian Post Offices. It was the better option.

I ran into some technical glitches (password problem) and experienced a mixture of both insecure (they use password hints!) and stupidly secure practices (they wanted my sister to know my home phone number), but it did work. They most interesting part, however, was the automated interview with "homeland security". Three of the four questions were about finding out which "John Faughnan" I was:

4. Based on your background, in what county is 'xxxxxxx'? ( The
address listed may be partial, misspelled or contain minor numbering
variations from your actual address )

One question, however, wanted to know who I knew:

1. With which of the following people are you most closely associated? (
Names may be listed as last-name first-name, include maiden names or contain
slight misspellings.) [I've removed names]

A... A...
G... B...
H... H...
L... F...
S... N...

The names were a bit odd. They sounded vaguely Arabic, but mostly they seemed computer generated. I googled on them (that should boost my watchlist ranking!) but came up with no matches at all. Odd.

It was an interesting example of how Homeland Security is implementing its watch lists, and seeking to match a name to a profile.

I do wonder if everyone gets the automated interview...

Bad Google, bad: Blogger misbehaving

Blogger/Google hit me with a real one-two.

First they temporarily locked down my tech blog because their brain-dead algorithms mis-identified it as a spam blog, then, the moment they "whitelisted" it, they had a major hardware outage. It took them about 16 hours to recover, and they were awfully slow to admit on status.blogger.com that they had a problem (times below are PT, outage was early evening on 3/16):

Thursday, March 16, 2006

The filer that we have been having trouble with in the last few days failed again. Those blogs that are stored on the bad filer are temporarily not available for publishing and viewing. We are working on replacing the filer and restoring access to the blogs affected.

Update (10:40 am, March 17): The filer has been restored. All affected blogs are available for publishing and reading.

More Google/Blogger incompetence

Today Google locked down my tech blog because their alorithms miscategorized it as a spam blog. They reviewed and cleared the block, but now the site is wiped and I can't republish from the Blogger archives.

I would not be inclined to trust my personal files to Google.

Google has locked my tech blog!

#$#$!$!#$ Google.

Google's bots decided my tech blog, Gordon's Tech was a splog (spam blog). Wow, that's nasty. It's locked until they review it. I'll post here what happens next. Note the threat to delete the entire blog within 10 days.

I'm going to have to reconsider my enthusiasm for Google. I think it just dropped about zero.

Your blog is locked

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

You won't be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than a business day.

If we don't hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within 10 days.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

Update: They've unlocked it, but now when I try to publish I get "001 java.io.IOException". Enthusiasm heading for sub-zero levels.

The meaning of the decline of America

Books on the decline of a nation are like the proverbial stuck clock. They are wrong almost all of the time. Almost.

The same week that Salon made its bid for a Pulitzer Prize, they feature a review of a book predicting the decline and fall of America:

Salon.com Books | Decline and fall

... In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, it was clear to everyone that the United States had suffered a hideous blow, but few had any idea just how bad it was. It didn't occur to most people to wonder whether the country's very core had been seriously damaged; if anything, America had never seemed so united and resolute. Almost five years later, with Bush still in the White House, a whole cavalcade of catastrophes bearing down on us and a lack of political will to address any of them, the scope of Osama bin Laden's triumph is coming sickeningly into focus. He didn't start the country on its march of folly, but he spurred America toward bombastic nationalism, military quagmire and escalating debt, all of which have made its access to the oil controlled by the seething countries of the Middle East ever more precarious. Now the United States is careening down a well-worn road faster than anyone could have imagined.

It's easy to mock books about disaster and decline. After all, we who are relatively prosperous in America have, by definition, lived tolerably through several such books. On the other hand, it's hard to deny that America has "jumped the shark". Reelecting George Bush II. Delivering both the house and the senate to the 21st century GOP. The rise of theocracy. We're not in great shape now, and ahead lies the promise of far more dramatic acts of terrorism, of the post-oil world, geopolitical transitions, technological risks, climate change, the hoary ghost of Malthus (in the form of various plagues), etc, etc.

In any case, it was always very unlikely that America would remain ascendant forever. Like Spain, China (several times), England, the Netherlands, Turkey and so many other empires, we'll transition to some other role. We may have a faster rise and fall than most, but these are fast times. Centuries have become decades.

The more interesting question than the relative (and perhaps absolute) decline of America, is what it means. Will the world follow, or will human prosperity continue to grow overall? Certainly many of the challenges America faces are truly global; China's challenges are immense, for example. Will America's fall be relatively peaceful (Soviet Union style? - even better, the Netherlands) or a typically American meltdown? Will we keep some semblance of democracy, or will we re-elect some version of GWB? How should we, as individuals, adjust to the world ahead.

Those are the interesting questions. To me it's not about decline (highly probable and we're likely in the thick of it now), but about what happens to the world and how we manage the transition.

Amazon backup service: That was quick

The Singularity makes it hard to keep speculation in the future. Recently I was bemoaning the pitiful decline of Dantz Retrospect (my SOHO backup solution) and the dearth of alternative backup software. I noted that the looming prospect of Google offering free online backup was probably depressing the marketplace.

The surprise today was Amazon announced their storage solution first:

Amazon S3 Functionality

Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set.

• Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
• Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
• Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
• Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
• Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent (TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

Pricing

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

S3 is not a backup service of course, it's a data service. Someone has to lease/sell the software that would do the backup work, storing the encrypted files on S3. It's not cheap though. I figure at least a $130 a year fee for a meager 50GB of backup. The economics may be wrong for use as a pure backup solution.

One wonders how S3 will survive Google's pending storage service. It would be surprising if Google were to cost more than 5 cents/GB/month.

What about the wisdom of storing one's files on an online server like Google's? Online backup is now commonly used by corporations, so it may simply be inevitable. In theory one could put sensitive files into encrypted disk images (but ANY change would likely mean a new full backup of the entire image); but I recently wrote about the limitations of that approach. Even the best of today's encryption might be no defense against a quantum computing code cracker of 2030. So encrypting an image would buy one at most a few years of protection. Maybe that's all we'll get. (Of course if the image file were subpoenaed one would be obliged to provide the key to break the encryption. Such a key might be hard to remember however ...)

Entitled opinions: Another podcast for the living mind

Recently I raved about the BBC's In Our Times podcast. Today, on browsing the iTunes home page for IOT (click on the small arrow next to the title of the podcast) I came across reviews. I didn't know the iTunes store had begun featuring reviews. Of course all the reviews were perfect fives, each vying to be more excessive in their praise.

One of them, however, suggested a look at an amateur (in the good sense of the word) rival from Stanford:

Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

... hosted by Professor Robert Harrison - is a weekly literary talk show that ranges broadly on issues related to literature, ideas, and lived experience. The show is typically a one-on-one conversation with a special guest about select topics or authors about which he or she is especially entitled to an opinion...

Robert Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University and is Chair of the Department of French and Italian, where he has been since 1985.. He was trained as a Dantista at Cornell University where he received his Ph.D. in Romance Studies in 1984. Among his publications are the books The Body of Beatrice, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, and The Dominion of the Dead...

The titles look great, but I've only just added this to my collection. A nice touch is that one can download the back catalogue, I think they've done over 10 shows.

I wonder if/when small radio stations will start simply broadcasting podcasts ...

Where are my keys?

Via GMSV, a plausible visit to the near future: Slibe.com: google in 20 years

Nasal decongestant addiction: I don't buy it

I don't buy the conventional explanation for nasal decongestant addiction:

Nasal Sprays Can Bring on Vicious Cycle - New York Times:

... It works so well that you tend to keep using it,' says Dr. David Vernick, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. 'You're used to breathing well with the spray, and when you stop it, you get congested. So you use it a little more frequently, yet the congestion doesn't clear up for long.'

That's because after three or four days of continuous use, the sprays can cause the nasal linings to swell up again, even when the cold or attack of sinusitis or allergy that originally caused the problem has passed. If this pattern continues, a patient has a good chance of becoming trapped in a vicious cycle of overuse and dependence that can last for months or years.

Nyah. It's not that I don't believe in the rebound effect, it's rather that it seems insufficient to explain the range of behaviors seen. I suspect that a small portion of the population develops a true cocaine-like addiction to the decongestant. Anyone who's taken oral sudafed at bedtime knows this class of drugs has stimulant activity. My bet is that a few people metabolize these drugs in a peculiar way, and the result is a truly addictive substance.

Pure speculation. No data.

Latest GOP Bill would send me to prison for 15 years ...

Fifteen years. Hmm. That might dissuade me from blogging or speculating about Bush's monitoring programs:

Reporters Exempt From Eavesdropping Bill

Reporters who write about government surveillance could be prosecuted under proposed legislation that would solidify the administration's eavesdropping authority, according to some legal analysts who are concerned about dramatic changes in U.S. law.

But an aide to the bill's chief author, Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, said that is not the intention of the legislation.

"It in no way applies to reporters _ in any way, shape or form," said Mike Dawson, a senior policy adviser to DeWine, responding to an inquiry Friday afternoon. "If a technical fix is necessary, it will be made."

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the draft of the legislation, which could be introduced as soon as next week.

The draft would add to the criminal penalties for anyone who "intentionally discloses information identifying or describing" the Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program or any other eavesdropping program conducted under a 1978 surveillance law.

Under the boosted penalties, those found guilty could face fines of up to $1 million, 15 years in jail or both.

The WaPo article's headline actually contradicts the article's text. It's a bad headline, but what's clear is that non-journalists would probably be guilty if they promulgated or discussed the GOP's surveillance programs. I wonder if what I've written or speculated would qualify for jail time under such a law.

Were such a law to come to pass, I most certainly would not be talking about such programs on this blog, or in any other forum. I wonder what a council of the wise would say? Is "it" "happening here"? Perhaps the ACLU ought to launch an alternative form of 'doomsday clock' that would measure how close we are the 'tipping point'.

note: I fixed up a few links and revised wording after the initial publication.

Same genes, different outcome - why?

Chimps and humans have 99% overlap in genes. It turns out, of course, that not all genes are created equal. The impact of changes in transcription factors can be enormous, and that's what's different between us and chimps ...

TIME.com: Eye on Science - Science Blog Archives - Why We're Humans, Not Chimps

... a comparative analysis of rhesus macaques, chimps, orangutans and humans shows that the specific genes for so-called transcription factors, which act as on-off switches for other genes, have changed dramatically over the past 5 million years.

All humans have very similar genes (almost clonal), but we vary greatly in capabilities. Presumably the transcription factors will turn out to be important in that too. That's where we'll intervene to ensure that, thirty years from now, wealthy children will have average IQs of 200. Speciation by wealth?

Gwynn Dyer: Interpreting America to Iran

Gwynne Dyer, the iconoclastic Canadian journalist and military historian has added another five articles to his web site. (Please email him and ask him to start a blog with a simple posting when articles are added).

17 February 2006 Iran, Oil and Euros
19 February 2006 The Leg Drain
23 February 2006 Iraq: Civil War
27 February 2006 America's Indian Ally
3 March 2006 Montenegro

The list doesn't include his recent fascinating article for the Tehran Times, in which he explains that Bush and his minions are indeed crackers and are willing, if not eager, to attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons. In the article on the bourse he explains that while Iran's creation of a Euro-based oil pricing system could cause the US economy to crater this is not why the US may attack Iran -- Bush doesn't care about economics.

The de facto role with Iran is fascinating. Other than his income from the Tehran Times I don't know if he's being paid for this or if it's simply an emergent phenomena, but Iran could do far worse than employ Gwynn Dyer.

Saddam's downfall was apparently not understanding Bush II. Dyer's record suggests he understands Bush and the US, and he also understands Iraq and the middle east. We're all better off if Iran understands the nature of the US under Bush, and doesn't assume we won't do something perverse and, arguably, crazy.