Funny. Cruel. Apple and the Zune.

Daring Fireball: Conjectural Transcript of the Upcoming Negotiations Between Apple and Universal Music.

In which Jobs smiles.

MySpace debacle: virtual weapon or virtual parasite?

This is why evolved (vs. designed, ie bioweapons) organisms don't kill their hosts immediately:

MySpace worm uses QuickTime for exploit:

... The social networking site MySpace.com is under what one computer security analyst called an 'amazingly virulent' attack caused by a worm that steals log-in credentials and spreads spam that promotes adware sites.

The worm is infecting MySpace profiles with such efficiency that an informal scan of 150 found that close to a third were infected, said Christopher Boyd, security research manager at FaceTime Communications Inc.

MySpace, owned by News Corp., is estimated to have at least 73 million registered users.

The worm works by using a cross-scripting weakness found about two weeks ago in MySpace and a feature within Apple Computer Inc.'s QuickTime multimedia player....

....MySpace's "seemingly random tendency" to expire user sessions or log out users makes it less noticeable to victims that an attack is under way, according to a Nov. 16 advisory by the Computer Academic Underground....

...spam messages contain a file that appears to be a movie but instead is a link to a pornographic site that also hosts adware from Zango Inc., Boyd said. Zango, formerly 180 Solutions Inc., settled last month with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for $3 million over complaints that it didn't properly ask the consent of users before its adware was installed...

So, is this a (virtual) bioweapon aimed at Zango, with MySpace as a incidental casualty, a weapon aimed at MySpace with Zango as a red herring, or a very, very badly designed Zango-funded phishing scam?

If the latter, it's a great way to teach biology. Evolved parasites don't kill their hosts outright -- what's the point?

BTW, this is also technically interesting. The bug appears to be in MySpace, but there's a more subtle problem as well. QuickTime has a lot of embedded scripting power -- which can be used for good or ill. Flash does the same sort of thing. There's a tricky problem here with functional boundaries; features required for market success may become a part of emergent exploits. There must be biological equivalents; we should learn from how evolution manages compartmentalization. In the meantime, the advantages of adding functionality to software should be increasingly balanced against the likelihood of creating new exploits. One of the 2-3 buzzwords for the next 20 years will be 'complexity management'.

Neandertal: not gently into the night

Our primary ancestors, the skinnies, arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago. There they found the remnants of the Neandertal (var: Neanderthal), one of many variants (species? subspecies? "breeds"? races?) of human. Cold adapted they'd survived for what we'd call a "long time", seemingly changing little. Thousands of years before the coming of the skinnies, however, the Neandertal were already suffering greatly....

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Hungry ancients 'turned cannibal'

.... Starvation and cannibalism were part of everyday life for a population of Neanderthals living in northern Spain 43,000 years ago, a study suggests.

Bones and teeth from the underground cave system of El Sidron in Asturias bear the hallmarks of a tough struggle for survival, researchers say.

Analysis of teeth showed signs of starvation or malnutrition in childhood and human bones have cut marks on them.

Details appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some bones appeared to have been dismembered and broken open, possibly to allow access to marrow and brains.

"Given the high level of developmental stress in the sample, some level of survival cannibalism would be reasonable," the scientists wrote in their research paper.

The team, led by Dr Antonio Rosas from the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, also found that the bones shared physical features with other European Neanderthals from the same period.

Dr Rosas and colleagues found a north-south variation in Neanderthal jaw bones, suggesting that populations from southern parts of Europe had wider, flatter faces.

The findings may help shed light on the life and death of the Neanderthals, which became extinct about 10,000 years after the arrival of modern humans in Europe around 40,000 years ago.

Many experts believe they were not able to compete with the moderns for food and shelter.

The Neandertal did not go gently, or slowly. For 13,000 years, about four times the length of our recorded history, they declined as the earth warmed and the techies flourished -- taking caves and food with adaptive technologies and techniques. The skinnies liked the warmer weather. The Neandertal probably did too ... until they realized it came with a price.

Thirteen thousands years is a lot of hardship, though there must have been centuries of better times ...

Oppenheimer and the falling cost of havoc

I've blogged tediously about the falling cost of havoc. I didn't know, though I might have guessed, that Oppenheimer was far ahead of me (genius does that)...

How to Get a Nuclear Bomb (The Atlantic, December 2006)

... In 1946 Robert Oppenheimer sketched the problem clearly. In an essay titled “The New Weapon,” he wrote: “Atomic explosives vastly increase the power of destruction per dollar spent, per man-hour invested; they profoundly upset the precarious balance between the effort necessary to destroy and the extent of the destruction.” Elaborating, he wrote,

None of these uncertainties can becloud the fact that it will cost enormously less to destroy a square mile with atomic weapons than with any weapons hitherto known to warfare. My own estimate is that the advent of such weapons will reduce the cost, certainly by more than a factor of ten, more probably by a factor of a hundred. In this respect only biological warfare would seem to offer competition for the evil that a dollar can do.

I suspct Oppenheimer would have been surprised by our continued survival. I think of that when I contemplate how much the cost of havoc has fallen since his day. Whether by angels, aliens, or some emergent property of humankind, we seem to have cheated the odds. I hope the angels aren't tiring ...

Life with Microsoft OneCare - why Vista is doomed

I decide to upgrade my Microsoft OneCare test subscription to a full subscription. This is what happens:

1. Click on link. Opens Firefox. Microsoft tells me I have to use IE. Interesting. I thought they weren't allowed to do that any more.
2. Start up IE 7. Cut and paste link from #1.
3. Enter credit card information.
4. Get to the page that's supposed to update OneCare. Click. Wait. Wait. Wait.
5. After a few minutes click 'retry' link.
6. Get message one can't retry. (The link, you see, was a test. I failed.)
7. Go to support.
8. Try their automated support path. It fails.
9. Follow link to chat.
10. Chat requires ActiveX install. I click to allow, using the latest version of Microsoft's fabled browser on the latest version of XP. Installation process terminates the chat session.
11. Restart chat using back button. Get error message that I need to wait 30 seconds.
12. Wait. Try back button again. Screen is blank. Refresh screen. Now it works.
13. Chat rep says I need to call Tech support.
14. Tech support answers (quickly!). Says I need to call the registration desk. 9am-6pm PT on Monday.
15. On a whim, I try hitting one of the pages from my history file. Now it says 'congratulations. Indeed OneCare now works. Visit their OneCare service page. Experience several major usability errors in a few mouse clicks.

Vista is going to be such a disaster. Thank you Apple. I'm so glad I have only one XP machine to maintain ... and if Parallels works out, one day there will be none.

The quiet demise of the CD

A little bit of Future Shock, or perhaps I should say Future Bite. I've used some nice archival quality Verbatim CDs for years and I wanted a refill. I couldn't find them; the only CD spindles for sale on Amazon seem to be lower quality.

I finally figured out why. The price of 'archival' DVDs has fallen below the current price of CDs, so low that packaging and shipping is probably a significant part of product cost. I ended up buying a spindle of DVDs instead.

CDs are quietly disappearing. Alas, I should upgraded my mother's new Mac Mini to a DVD burner! Blank CDs will become increasingly unreliable and costly.

I remember reading the book written by Bill Gate's father (yes, his father) called 'The New Papyrus'. It was all about the how the data CD would revolutionize the world. This was before the net became public. I was amazed by the CD back then, and I wrote a letter to a Canadian development organization on how it could dramatically change the delivery of knowledge to what was then called the 'third world'.

Good-bye CD. We barely knew you ...

Update 9/25/09: See also - UK University lectures and iTunes U.

Stay the course, the iron fist, and game theory

One of the reasons I was able to let go of The Economist as its quality deteriorated was that I could turn to the many excellent blogs I read. Crooked Timber is among the very best, and here they trash the "we must not show we can be turned" by reference to game theoretic models (emphasis mine):

Crooked Timber: Reputations are made of …

....The point being that since game theory in general provides the analyst with so many opportunities to twist himself repeatedly up his own arse like a berserk Klein bottle, if a given real-world course of action appears to have nothing going for it other than a game-theoretic or strategic justification, it’s almost certainly a bad idea. Thus it is with that bastard child of deterrence, “credibility”.

... The idea is that the war is costing huge amounts of money and lives with no real prospect of success and a distinct danger that it is making things much worse. However, to do the logical thing would send the signal to our enemies that we will give up if fought to a pointless bloody standstill.Therefore, for strategic reasons, we must redouble our efforts, in order to send the signal to our enemies that we will fight implacably and mindlessly in any battle we happen to get into, forever, in order to dissuade them from attacking us in the first place.... What’s it like as a piece of game-theoretic reasoning?

Lousy. It is certainly true that one of the benefits of doing something stupid is that it saves you from having to spend money on maintaining your reputation as an idiot. However, is the reputation of an idiot really worth having?

It turns out that it can be proved by theorem that the answer is no. If the game of being a belligerent idiot with no sensible regard for one’s own welfare was worth the candle, in the sense of conferring benefits which outweighed the cost of gaining it, then everyone would want to get that reputation, whether they were genuinely an idiot or not. But if everyone wanted that reputation,then everyone would know that simply acting like an idiot didn’t mean that you were one, in which case it would be impossible to establish a reputation as an idiot in the first place. The point here is that it’s one of the more important things in game theory that a signal has to be a costly signal to be credible; like membership of the Modern Languages Association, a reputation in deterrence theory is something that is worth having, but not worth getting. People who use the word “signal” in this context (usually on the basis of a poorly understood or second-hand reading of Schelling) don’t always seem to realise that they are explicitly admitting that the costs of being in Iraq are greater than the benefits...

Friedman, another entity with a lost reputation, calls for a strategy of the persistent iron fist. That's a slightly different tactic. It's worth considering how that would turn out. Let us assume America used the "iron fist" approach. It's worked for many nations in the past. So ten years from now Iraq is "pacified". What does the world look like then? Well, we'd have Putin's Russia to the east - brutal and powerful. In the west we'd have ... well ... the same thing more or less. You don't get to the use the "iron fist" selectively. If it is used in Iraq, it is used at home, it is used with allies, it is used everywhere. Wouldn't that just be grand?

Friedman deflated

Tom Friedman, a pompous windbag who's also a billionaire by marriage, is taken down style.

Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque - Hideous Kinky: The Genocidal Fury of Thomas Friedman

.... Nowadays, of course, we hollow men, headpieces filled with straw, obviously lack the will to power. And so even while Tom adjures his great hero, the Commander-in-Chief, to unleash the re-invasion force (where Tom proposes to get 150,000 more fighting troops from remains a mystery; maybe China will loan us some), thereby "crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq's institutions and political culture from scratch," it's clear that he believes that the sissy-mary American public lacks the proper martial spirit to carry through the necessary 10 years of fisting that the Iraqis so clearly deserve. And so, more in anger than in sorrow, he proposes the only other possible alternative to a brand-new blitzkrieg: bugging out in 10 months time and forgetting the whole shebang ever happened. Otherwise, "it will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces...

Friedman is not the only person to lose his reputation and his credibility in the past few years, but few have been so public about it.

How long can you live in a vacuum?

Unconcsious in about 30 seconds, but no irreversible damage if rescued within 2 minutes. Considering one has only about 6-9 minutes in water, this isn't as bad as one might guess. Excellent essay.

iPod. Lame. iPhone. Laughable.

Daring Fireball has a funny and insightful essay on the reaction of Palm CEO Ed Colligan to the Apple iPhone rumors. I go with the theory that Colligan is a savvy CEO; he's really very worried about Apple but is spinning a good story.

The part that made me laugh, though, was the footnote referencing an infamous Slashdot posting on the iPod's launch. It's well worth a read, and, no, you can't add comments.

I'm holding on to my decrepit Samsung PalmOS phone until I see Apple's iPhone or it dies completely -- whichever comes first.

Spindle neurons: 30 million years in Cetaceans, 15 in primates

It's not often that a research results gives me goosebumps. This one did, since I'd completely missed that spindle neurons had previously been identified in the toothed whales (how the heck did I miss that?!). Emphases mine.

Humpback whale found to have 'human' brain cell - World - Times Online

Researchers in the US have discovered that humpback whales have a type of brain cell seen only in humans, the great apes, and other cetaceans such as dolphins.

Studying the brains of humpbacks, Patrick Hof and Estel Van der Gucht of the Department of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York discovered a type of cell known as a spindle neuron in the cortex, in areas comparable to where they are seen in humans and great apes.

Although the function of spindle neurons is not well understood, they may be involved in processes of cognition - learning, remembering and recognising the world around oneself. The cells are also thought by some to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease and other debilitating brain disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

The findings may help to explain some of the distinctive traits exhibited by whales, such as sophisticated communication skills, the ability to form alliances and co-operate, the researchers report in The Anatomical Record.

They say their study may subsequently indicate that such whales are more intelligent than they have been given credit for, and suggests that spindle neurons – the likely basis for complex brains - either evolved more than once, or have gone unused by most species of animals, kept only in those with the largest brains.

.... the spindle neurons found in humpback whales were discovered in the same location as toothed whales, suggesting that the cells may be related to brain size, reported Reuters.

Toothed whales, such as orcas, are generally considered more intelligent than baleen whales such as humpbacks and blue whales, which filter water for their food.

The humpback whales also had structures resembling 'islands' in the cerebral cortex, also seen in some other mammals and which may have evolved in order to promote fast and efficient communication between neurons.

Spindle neurons are thought to have first appeared in the common ancestor of hominids, humans and great apes about 15 million years ago, the researchers added. In cetaceans they would have evolved earlier, possibly as early as 30 million years ago."

So many questions. What the heck could convergent evolution produce the same neuronal structure in both cetaceans and primates? Is there only one high-probability path to [whatever] from our ancient common ancestor? What does it mean to have 30 million years of evolution working on these structures rather than a mere 15 million? How the heck did I miss the discovery of spindle neurons in toothed whales in 2000?

One prediction. If we retain a liberal civilization (vs., say, Putin's Russia), creatures with these neural structures will have "human" rights within seventy years.

PS. My guess on why I missed this? The original discoveries of spindle neurons in dolphins may have predated theories of their unique role in human cognition -- so it didn't get much media coverage.

Update 11/27/06: More memories filtering in. I think dolphins pass the "mirror test". That is, they recognize that the image in a mirror is connected with them. I believe it was recently discovered that elephants also pass this test. I think cetaceans and hippos are related, more distant to elephants. I also dimly think there's some connection between the "mirror test" and "spindle neurons". So will we find elephants have spindle neurons?

Lead poisoning from Christmas Lights: California, China, and the GOP

A small inquiry leads, as usual, to a bigger story. Our outdoor christmas tree lights (Bethlehem Lighting commercial grade tangle-free lights) carry a warning label: "Handling the coated electrical wires of this product exposes you to lead, a chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm". Incidentally, to also cause brain damage in children -- with no known safe exposure level. (Prop 65, which mandates the law, only addresses birth defects, so if lead only caused severe brain damage in children, but not birth defects or cancer, no warning would appear. A political compromise, no doubt.)

Google helped track this down. This was a california story in 2003, but we missed it. The best summary is:

CHEC Articles: Holiday Lights and Christmas Trees May Contain Lead

If you've been shopping for holiday lights this season, you may have noticed a warning label on some of them stating that they may contain lead.

... Wire coating and cords are usually made of PVC plastic that may contain lead. Lead is used in PVC for several reasons. For wires and cords, lead makes the plastic more flexible and reduces the risk of fire. Lead is also used in many PVC products to stabilize the color. Lead in PVC products can disintegrate into lead-laced dust.

The labels began appearing on holiday lights, as well as on electronic equipment and cords on other consumer products such as hairdryers, after a number of lawsuits were filed by an environmental advocacy organization in California.

The amount of lead in the lights and other consumer products with warning labels may vary considerably. It is not clear if the amount of lead that is released poses a risk to human health. Some tests show that lead could come off in the hands. Note that nearly all appliance cords are covered with PVC that contains lead.

We recommend the following:

* Do not allow children to handle holiday lights!
* Adults should wash hands thoroughly after handling the lights.
* [jf: I don't think there are ANY lights made anywhere but China] Avoid lights made in China and other foreign countries, where there are no restrictions against the use of lead in consumer products. Lights made in the U.S. are likely to contain smaller amounts of lead, especially in the coating....
* Do not assume that holiday lights that do not bear the warning label are lead-free. It is possible that the lights are not sold in California. California is the only state that requires the warning label.
* Older lights that have not been labeled may also contain lead.

How much lead?

At the University of North Carolina at Asheville, researchers had a group of students put up lights then tested the lead levels on their hands. They found the lead levels were at least 10 times greater than what is considered safe.

That's a lot of lead. So much for assuming the GOP-eviscerated EPA is able to protect us.

So, to summarize, many electrical cords contain lead within the PVC covering. Chrismas lights from China (all of them) can contain quite a bit more lead since there's no effective regulation of lead in China; now that all lights come from China there's no other option for US consumers.

The GOP, including our rotten Senator Norm Coleman, has been trying to limit the ability of California to create local environmental rules that are stronger than federal mandates. The GOP is not going to support regulation of lead contamination in electrical cords; they're more likely to block this kind of warning label from appearing outside California.

Thank you California environmental pressure groups and thank you rabid attornies. In the meantime don't let children hand christmas lights, wash hands, and don't vote GOP.

Polonium and the bombing that launched the second Chechen war

I often update old posts with new information for future reference, but I don't usually call attention to them.

In this case I added enough to my post on the Litivenko polonium poisoning that I'll all attention to it. Litivenko was connected the unusually well founded conspiracy theory that the KGB (FSB now) was behind the Russian apartment bombing that launched the second Chechen war.

Vista in trouble. Already.

Joel Spolsky is a former Microsoftie with fond memories of the old company, certified very smart guy, and CEO of a boostrapped software company (Fog Creek). He's not a lifelong Microsoft despiser/disliker like me. So his verdict on Vista is a warning to respect:

Joel on Software

...Every piece of evidence I've heard from developers inside Microsoft supports my theory that the company has become completely tangled up in bureaucracy, layers of management, meetings ad infinitum, and overstaffing. The only way Microsoft has managed to hire so many people has been by lowering their hiring standards significantly. In the early nineties Microsoft looked at IBM, especially the bloated OS/2 team, as a case study of what not to do; somehow in the fifteen year period from 1991 - 2006 they became the bloated monster that takes five years to ship an incoherent upgrade to their flagship product.

Microsoft has been sliding downhill for a long time. The last good version of Word came out @ 1995, Windows 2000 was the last quality OS (XP is a Win2K derivative and a step backwards in some ways), Excel has been frozen in time (mercifully it's not deteriorating). Sure they mint money, but that's merely billions (and billions).

Lately the long decline seems to have accelerated. Microsoft "Live" is a chaotic mess (try installing Onfolio on the Live new toolbar in IE 6). IE 7 has delivered yawns and groans. Their vaunted webcam shipped with software that blue-screened many laptops. Vista is likely to be a bloated heap of trouble for years to come.

Microsoft is too powerful to be displaced by OS X or Linux, so we'll all suffer their failures for years to come. Fortunately, even if it won't displace Microsoft significantly, OS X is available for use ...

Why would Putin poison by Polonium?

A former KGB agent and enemy of Putin has apparently died of Polonium poisoning. The KGB and Putin are the obvious suspects. Why would they use Polonium?

A Rare Material and a Surprising Weapon - New York Times

... If substantial amounts of polonium 210 were used to poison Alexander V. Litvinenko, whoever did it presumably had access to a high-level nuclear laboratory and put himself at some risk carrying out the assassination, experts said yesterday.

Polonium 210 is highly radioactive and very toxic. By weight, it is about 250 million times as toxic as cyanide, so a particle smaller than a dust mote could be fatal. It would also, presumably, be too small to taste.

There is no antidote, and handling it in a laboratory requires special equipment. But to be fatal it must be swallowed, breathed in or injected; the alpha particles it produces cannot penetrate the skin. So it could theoretically be carried safely in a glass vial or paper envelope and sprinkled into food or drink by a killer willing to take the chance that he did not accidentally breathe it in or swallow it...

Putin, a nasty piece of work, must have a thousand ways to kill his enemies. Why use a method that points directly to him? Did the KGB think the poison couldn't be identified? Did they want their murder to be publicly known, while still preserving some shred of deniability? Did someone else do it to implicate the KGB? Was it an accident of some other scheme?

Every intelligence service in the west is working overtime now. This is bad news on many more levels than what appears to have been the murder of one of Putin's many enemies.

Will this be seen one day as the first shot in Cold War II?

Update 11/25/06: See the comment from Technologist. Polonium is not as hard to find as we've been told. I'm going to start reading Technologist's blog ...

Update 11/26/06: The NYT responds inside a column to the use of Polonium in antistatic devices:

A British counterterrorism official said polonium 210 was a byproduct of the nuclear industry and is used in the production of antistatic materials. But in the form believed to have been used in the suspected poisoning, it would have required high-grade technical skills and a sophisticated scientific process to produce, probably within a nuclear lab.

The same article suggested one reason why someone would really want to kill Mr. Litvinenko:

In 2003, he wrote a book accusing the Russian secret service of orchestrating apartment house bombings in Russia in 1999 that led to the second Chechen war.

The idea that rogue KGB agents, or even non-rogue agents were behind the bombings that led to a terrible war, received serious consideration in an Economist book review. That surprised me then, I figured it was just another conspiracy theory.

Gwynne Dyer wrote about the bombing allegations last year (emphases mine). I wonder if anyone has tried to interview Alyona Morozova recently ....

The Russian-American relationship is not thriving, and the proof of it is the fact that the United States granted political asylum a month ago to Alyona Morozova, a Russian citizen who claims that her life is in danger because of her role in investigating a series of "terrorist" bombing attacks that killed 246 Russians in September 1999. The chief suspect in the bombings, according to her, is Vladimir Putin.

Three apartment blocks in Russian cities were destroyed by huge bombs that month, including one that left Alyona Morozova's mother and boyfriend dead under the rubble...

Boris Yeltsin was in the last year of his presidency then, and he was seeking a way to retire without facing prosecution for the fortunes he and his cronies had amassed in their years of power. Vladimir Putin, former head of the FSB secret police, had recently been appointed prime minister by Yeltsin but was still largely unknown to the Russian public.

The deal was that Yeltsin would pass the presidency to Putin at the end of the year, and Putin would then grant Yeltsin an amnesty for all crimes committed while he was in office. But there was still the tedious business of an election to get through, and Russians who scarcely knew Putin's name had to be persuaded to vote for him on short notice. How to boost his profile as Saviour of the Nation? Well, a war, obviously.

Alyona Morozova (and many others) claim that Putin's old friends at the FSB carried out the apartment bombings themselves, in order to give their man a pretext to declare war on Chechnya and make himself a national hero in time for the presidential elections. It would be just one more unfounded conspiracy theory -- except that only days after the big Moscow bomb, a resident at a similar apartment building in the city of Ryazan spotted three people acting suspiciously and called the local police.

The police founds sacks in the cellar that they initially said contained hexogen, the explosive used in the other bombings, together with a timer set for 5.30 am. They also discovered that the three people who had planted the explosives were actually FSB agents. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, insisted that the sacks contained only sugar and that the whole thing was a training exercise, and the local police fell silent, but there was no proper investigation.

Alyona Morozova fears the Russian government's wrath because a number of other people who have tried to investigate the incident have been murdered or jailed on trumped-up charges of "espionage". So she asked for political asylum in the United States: nothing surprising in that. It's much more surprising that the US government actually granted her asylum, because it is implicitly acknowledging the possibility that President Vladimir Putin, in addition to being a mass murderer of Chechens, may also be a mass murderer of Russians.

Was Mr. Litvinenko close to learning something new about the bombing?