Google goes to warp speed, oddly fond of me

This morning I wrote a post about worrisome behavior associated with XPonlinescanner.com. At that time a search on the term led to the spammer's web site.

As of this evening a search on the same term leads to my blog post. This morning three people who ran into the same worrisome ad behavior left comments on my initial post -- they found it at the top of their searches within 15 minutes of the original posting.

This evening I posted about the frustrations of using iMovie '08 with a Flip Video camcorder. A few minutes after I posted it I decided to see if anyone else had discovered that Mike Ash's QTAmateur would translate the AVI files. I found exactly one post on the topic- mine.

Google indexed my blog post within 15 minutes of creation.

I then experimented with a post I made this evening to Apple's Discussion group. It too was indexed within 30 minutes of posting. That's nothing about me of course, Google is indexing that massive archive at an astounding speed.

This is unnerving on two levels. Personally it's unnerving that Google is so oddly fond of my blogs. They're not high readership blogs, though I do like to imagine my readership is unusually perceptive. Weird.

The personal focus is odd enough, but the indexing speed is even more uncanny. Google has quietly turned on a warp drive; how the heck are they able to index so quickly? What does this say about their bandwidth capacity -- that they're basically reading large portions of the net in almost real-time?

What oil price will radically change American life?

When does the price of oil change what Americans do?

I wrote in July of 2007 that a significant number of people would start to make different decisions at $5 a gallon. On the other hand I've read realtors claiming that the bubble popped when gas hit $3 a gallon, and people started worrying the cost of exurban commutes.

It's not just the absolute costs of course, it's the trend line. So if gas goes from $3 a gallon now to $5 a gallon in 2011, then people will react as much to the trend line as to the absolute value. If the price hits $5 a gallon in 2010 then the reaction will be even stronger.

On the other hand someone who does this sort of thing for a living things the price will have to hit $13 or so to force a "radical restructuring":

FuturePundit: Peak Oil By 2012?:

.... Energy analyst Charles T. Maxwell thinks gasoline prices in the US will need to more than triple to force Americans into a radical restructuring of how they live.

Maxwell said it will take $12 to $15 a gallon to get Americans to let go of what he called the “precious freedom of mobility.” As much as Maxwell laments the loss, he sees no other way for the U.S. to impose enough conservation to deal with the growing imbalance between oil demand and supply that he sees developing around 2010 and getting worse in 2012 or 2013, as the world hits a “peak” in conventional oil production...

I was thinking in terms of "start to change" when I picked $5 a gallon, radical change is a few steps beyond that.

Maxwell is elsewhere quoted as predicting "peak oil" in 2012-2013 resulting in a steady "rise starting in 2010, reaching $180 a barrel in 2015 and $300 a barrel in 2020". Since we're about $100 a barrel now, we wouldn't hit his "radical change" date until after 2025 or so.

I'd love to see an economist make some predictions here based on the historical record, though I have a hard time thinking of a precedent in an industrial economy outside of wartime.

As I've written previously our confusing situation may become clear within the next six months:

...If the price of oil is above $105 a barrel in August of 2008 then Peak Oil is on the sooner rather than later, and the world I grew up in is shuffling away -- sooner than I'd expected...

If we are at or above $105 in August I think we'll see a gradual and continuous change rather than a radical disruption. The price signals will be relatively clear with smooth trendlines.

This isn't, of course, good news for the survival of human civilization. Unless we put a very large carbon-tax-equivalent on coal, humanity will start burning massive amounts of coal to power our electric cars and to create various fuel products. Our carbon dioxide output will skyrocket -- even as our mobility and our gasoline consumption start to plateau. We'll push past the ancient maxima for CO2 and bake much of our habitat.

We need a technologic miracle, but in the meantime we need a carbon-tax-equivalent on coal.

Hacking encryption keys: quantum and otherwise

A non-specialist has written a review of quantum computer factoring that matches what I've been reading from my physics blogs. Quantum computing, alas, isn't as impressive as it used to be. Even if we can make it work, quantum computing is not necessarily a qualitative improvement over conventional computation -- though it will explore some (truly) mind-boggling quantum physics.

I wanted to call out one small part of the post though:

... I went over to a site that will tell you how long a key you need to use, http://www.keylength.com/. Keylength.com uses estimates made by serious cryptographers for the life of keys. They make some reasonable assumptions and perhaps one slightly-unreasonable assumption: that Moore's Law will continue indefinitely. If we check there for how long a 4096-bit key will be good for, the conservative estimate is (drum roll, please) — the year 2060...

Most of us make do with AES 128 bit (Tiger disk image encryption) and AES 256 bit (Leopard disk image encryption) keys. I checked out the NIST 2007 recommendations on keylength.com and found:

• AES 128: > 2030
• AES 256: >> 2030

Another table (ENCRYPT) described 256 symmetric key (ie. AES) as "good protection against quantum cryptography". So most of us don't need to worry about 4096 bit keys unless we're protecting information that will be very valuable in 2040.

I'll be 80 then -- if I'm alive. I'm not too worried.

Of course Schneier et all are usually reminding us that the key length is generally the least of our worries. Weak passwords, dictionary attacks, attacks on keys in memory, etc are all bigger threats. The biggest threat of all, though, is security that either destroys our data (that's really secure!) or that is too onerous to easily implement.

PS. I was in the "quantum will get us" crowd, so I'm a bit humbled by the new wave of "quantum reality".

XPonlinescanner.com: Malware infection on Star Tribune and other news sites

Preface: 3/24/2008.

I've retitled this post and added this preface due to a comment I received today:

I've seen several versions of the install file over the past week which is an indication that someone is up to no good. The source was: hxxp://xponlinescanner.com/2008/download
XPantivirus2008_v77011816.exe
XPantivirus2008_v880136.exe
XPantivirus2008_v77024205.exe
XPantivirus2008_v880181.exe
I submitted these files to TrendMicro and they all came back as malware containing a Trojan downloader.

So it looks like this was part of an attack of some sort. The Minneapolis Star Tribune site may have been compromised or it may be an unwitting attack vector. I couldn't find a good email address to notify them yesterday, but I did find a "feedback" form that looked like it might work. They really need to have a link to notify them of website issues in general and malware attacks in particular.
--
I click on the StarTribune National News link and my Firefox page vanishes. Instead I see:

I have to kill Firefox from the XP application list to get free. Talk about "erratic PC behavior, PC freezes and creahes".

There actually is a vendor selling this product. So this might not be a simple phishing attack; maybe the bot virus is embedded in a supposed commercial product instead. Maybe my XP box isn't really infected and this really was something the Strib's ad supplier tossed up.

Or not. [jf: see comments. Looks like a malware attack.]

I just can't tell. McAfee SiteAdvisor connects the vendor to spam, so I'm leaning towards my machine NOT being infected and XPonlinescanner.com being a shady enterprise with a good probability of a nasty "backdoor" in their "antiviral" "security" product.

I really do need to get rid of my last XP box. Using XP on the net is like waving a wad of bills in a port bar of old Bangkok.

Update 9/14/09: A similar attack hit the New York Times

Deliberations of the Zorgonian Commission on the Terran Problem

100011010101010: This human was exceedingly wrong about war #2545134 but publicly renounced his errors.

100101011010110: A cognitively disabled human was tortured for weeks by her housemates and her caretaker then murdered.

100011010101010: I see your point.

100101011010110: Then the deliberations may end?

100011010101010: It has been a long time, hasn't it?

010101010101010: Too long.

001101010101010: But who will take care of the dogs?...

Everything you need to understand about the neo-banking crisis of 2008

Everything you need to know, in 3 paragraphs (emphases mine)

What Created This Monster? - New York Times

...A milestone in the deregulation effort came in the fall of 2000, when a lame-duck session of Congress passed a little-noticed piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The bill effectively kept much of the market for derivatives and other exotic instruments off-limits to agencies that regulate more conventional assets like stocks, bonds and futures contracts.

Supported by Phil Gramm, then a Republican senator from Texas and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, the legislation was a 262-page amendment to a far larger appropriations bill. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton that December.

Mr. Gramm, now the vice chairman of UBS, the Swiss investment banking giant, was unavailable for comment. (UBS has recently seen its fortunes hammered by ill-considered derivative investments.)...

And now, to save the greater economy, we will all donate to save Mr. Gramm and his ilk.

Because, you see, we can't let the those companies go under. And they can't be run, you see, without the the people who led them into their current peril. So we need to save the companies, which means saving their leadership, which means they get to keep the money of old that makes them rich, plus extra money from us now, because they really don't need to work because of the money they got before when they made the bests that ...

Yeah, you get the picture.

I'm acquiring an unsavory fondness for the Japanese tradition of Seppuku. In those days a dishonored leader didn't demand a new set of fresh stock options ...

Mall of America security expells PZ Myers from creationist movie

PZ Myers, was expelled from AMC theater's pre-screening of EXPELLED! by Mall of America security staff.

His crime was being PZ Myers, a prosletizer for atheism. Ironically, Richard Dawkins did get in to the pre-screening, and confronted the producer.

I'll be over at the MOA Monday, I wonder if anything will mark the spot.

Economist obituary: the last French foot solder of World War I

I'd wondered if any were yet living.

Lazare Ponticelli | Economist.com:

... On March 17th he had his wish, or most of it: a state funeral for all the poilus at Les Invalides, and then a simple family burial. The government badly wanted this last foot-soldier to be memorialised; but he preferred to be uncelebrated and ordinary, even in some sense forgotten, and thus the more symbolic of all the rest.

There may be others, for a year or so, in Germany or England or elsewhere.

It's a good obituary.

I am grateful I've never been in a war. I hope my children avoid them.

Phorm - another eye in the sky

More of the same old stuff ...

A Company Promises the Deepest Data Mining Yet - New York Times:

...Amid debate over how much data companies like Google and Yahoo should gather about people who surf the Web, one new company is drawing attention — and controversy — by boasting that it will collect the most complete information of all.

The company, called Phorm, has created a tool that can track every single online action of a given consumer, based on data from that person’s Internet service provider. The trick for Phorm is to gain access to that data, and it is trying to negotiate deals with telephone and cable companies, like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, that provide broadband service to millions...

...Phorm puts a cookie, a small bit of computer code, on a person’s computer to tie his or her Web-surfing to the random number and then saves only that number in advertising categories like types of cars or clothing...

In China the government tracks people's activities. In the US it's business. Funny.

Phorm assigns each computer-user-account-browser a unique ID and tracks the relatonship between unique ID and web page requests. I assume a Firefox extension would allow a browser to defeat Phorm. I assume they need ISP collaboration to track the web pages. A private VPN service would eliminate that possibility.

I've been using Witopia PPTP VPN when accessing public wifi, I wonder if it's time to start tunneling all my traffic through a trusted VPN.

Mea culpas of rationalists who supported the conquest of Iraq

Slate has a series of essays on the mistakes rationalists made in supporting the American invasion of Iraq.

Personally I was initially persuaded by Saddam's posturing (turned out to be a mixture of mostly bluffing Iran and genuinely not knowing what weapons he didn't have), our apparent inability to sustain the embargo, the harmful effects of the embargo on Iraqis (sigh), and the fake smallpox immunization program. I reversed course when Cheney/Bush completely alienated Turkey and left us with zero allies - prior to the actual invasion.

Of all the commentaries, Richard Cohen most resembles my own recollections -- but he focuses on the Anthrax mystery rather than my smallpox memories ...

I was miserably wrong in my judgment and somewhat emotional. - By Richard Cohen - Slate Magazine

Anthrax. Remember anthrax? It seems no one does anymore—at least it's never mentioned. But right after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, letters laced with anthrax were received at the New York Post and Tom Brokaw's office at NBC. In the following days, more anthrax-contaminated letters were received by other news organizations—CBS News and, presumably, ABC, where traces of anthrax were found in the newsroom. Weirdly, even the Sun, a supermarket tabloid, also got a letter, and a photo editor, Bob Stevens, was fatally infected. Other letters were sent to Sen. Tom Daschle's Capitol Hill office, and in Washington, D.C., a postal worker, Thomas L. Morris Jr., died. There was ample reason to be afraid.

The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.

For this and other reasons, the anthrax letters appeared linked to the awful events of Sept. 11. It all seemed one and the same....

Kaplan's story also runs parallel to my own. I would add that while I had some respect for Colin Powell, I was moved much more by Tony Blair's support for war. He had been a Clinton ally, at the time he had a terrific international reputation, and I didn't imagine he'd be a lackey of the Bush administration.

Nobody in the series mentioned Tony Blair. He's getting off far too easily.

The HIV genocide delusion

I think journalists do need to specifically ask Barack Obama about his perspective on the HIV genocide conspiracy theories. He didn't address this directly in his speech, in retrospect that's a noteworthy omission.

AIDS conspiracy theories: a field guide. - By Juliet Lapidos - Slate Magazine

... Barack Obama rebuked his former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Tuesday for giving sermons in which he blamed the government for creating a racist state and "inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color." Wright isn't the first to say that AIDS originated in the White House. Others have attributed the epidemic to a laboratory accident, malnutrition, or even God's divine will...

...According to a study released in 2005 by the Rand Corp., more than one-quarter of African-Americans believe the disease was engineered in a government lab, and 16 percent think it was created to control the black population...

I've read that this belief is also widely held in South Africa. Even if the US government were ten times as evil as Cheney/Bush, we don't have the technology to create a virus like HIV. We also don't have the power or technology to create a massive evolutionary and cross-species profile of the evolution and dissemination of HIV and its cousins.

One of my questions about Obama is how grounded is he in the world of logic and science. We already know McCain is arational, I'd like to know where Obama fits on the spectrum between Al Gore (reason) and George Bush (delusion).

The Slate article is quite well done; it's worth a full read.

Fake graduation rates and other predictable outcomes of no child left behind

Bush's educational program was said to be based on good outcomes in Texas. Of course it wasn't so. Turns out schools in Texas were cooking the books to get better numbers. Strong incentives, like "improve or die" reliably produce this kind of result.

The easiest way to cook the books for a particular school is to get the low performing students to move elsewhere. Then to make the overall district look better, don't invest in tracking where they "move" to. They did that in Texas too.

I'm picking on Texas, but the same thing will happen everywhere that these kinds of incentives are applied. It works for physicians too. If you pay us less for patients who don't keep their blood sugars tuned up, you'll find that those patients will "leave". There must be fifty ways to help a patient leave ...

Today the NYT tells the story for Mississippi, but I'm betting Minnesota and Vermont are playing the same game, albeit with more subtlety ...

States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School - New York Times
March 20, 2008l
By SAM DILLON

JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent...

...“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”

... federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site.

... New Mexico defined its rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who received a diploma. That method grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave before the 12th grade.

The law also allowed states to establish their own goals for improving graduation rates. Many set them low. Nevada, for instance, pledged to get just 50 percent of its students to graduate on time. And since the law required no annual measures of progress, California proposed that even a one-tenth of 1 percent annual improvement in its graduation rate should suffice.

.. Most troublesome to some experts was the way the No Child law’s mandate to bring students to proficiency on tests, coupled with its lack of a requirement that they graduate, created a perverse incentive to push students to drop out. If low-achieving students leave school early, a school’s performance can rise...

... In Mississippi, the official formula put the graduation rate for the state’s largest district, Jackson Public Schools, at 81 percent. Mr. Bounds, the state schools superintendent, said the true rate was 56 percent.

At Murrah High School, one of eight here, the official graduation rate is 99 percent, even though yearbooks show that half of Murrah’s freshmen disappear before becoming seniors...

The obvious story here is that you get what you pay for. There will always be a way to game the system though, which is why you can't replace professional culture with incentives, just as you can't create a civil society through police action. Obviously both incentives and policing can be pretty important, but they can't replace professional pride and culture or a basic culture of civil behavior.

The less obvious story is that about 30% of Americans don't complete High School.

So I'd like to know why so many don't finish High School, but I'd first like to know what the "optimal" graduation rate should be. That's the question that leads to the most interesting and important discussions.

Toxic heparin: fraud is looking likely

Two weeks ago I wrote: Gordon's Notes: Toxic heparin was fraud, not accident. A comment rightly corrected me -- I'd jumped the gun.

Today, however, it's looking like fraud. Chondroitin sulfate was manufactured in place of heparin, contaminating up to 10% of the nation's supply of a heavily used medication. The Chinese government is denying investigators access to the suspected source of the counterfeited medications...

Heparin Discovery May Point to Chinese Counterfeiting

Federal drug regulators, in announcing Wednesday that the mystery contaminant in heparin was an inexpensive, unapproved ingredient altered to mimic the real thing, moved closer to concluding that Americans might be the latest victims of lethal Chinese drug counterfeiting...

...The contaminant, the regulators said, is a chemically altered form of chondroitin sulfate, a dietary supplement made from animal cartilage that is widely used to treat joint pain...

Federal officials stopped short of saying that the contaminant — constituting as much as 50 percent of the active ingredient in heparin — was counterfeit...

... the authorities left little doubt that they believed that the contaminant was not an unintended byproduct of some manufacturing process.

In its natural state, chondroitin sulfate does not have anticlotting properties. But it mimics heparin when altered to form what is called oversulfated chondroitin sulfate. That is what made it difficult for Baxter International, the manufacturer of the heparin associated with the allergic reactions, to detect the impurity...

...“The base compound, chondroitin sulfate, is very abundant and an inexpensive compound,” said Moheb Nasr, director of the agency’s office of new drug quality and assessment. Chemically modifying it, Mr. Nasr added, “will not be that expensive either.”

The F.D.A. said it had found the contaminated heparin at Changzhou SPL, the Chinese plant that supplies the active ingredient to Baxter...

... Erin Gardiner, a spokeswoman for Baxter, said Wednesday that tests found the supplies were contaminated before they arrived at the Changzhou plant. “The consolidators and workshops handle the crude material, so that is where our focus is turning,” Ms. Gardiner said.

So far, Ms. Gardiner said Baxter’s investigators had been denied access to the consolidators and workshops. “We will continue to seek access.”

Last week, the F.D.A. said it had not yet visited the workshops.

Some heparin producers in China also sell chondroitin sulfate, which can be derived from pig cartilage. Traders and producers say it is far cheaper than heparin, as little as one-twentieth the cost. That could be an enticement for counterfeiters, especially in the wake of a virulent pig virus that swept across China last year, substantially reducing the availability of the starting materials needed to make the active ingredient in heparin.

Contaminated heparin sourced from China has also turned up recently in Germany, where about 80 allergic reactions have been reported. But investigators there have yet to identify the contaminant. F.D.A. officials said their discovery of chemically modified chondroitin sulfate came exactly one year after the discovery that a pet food ingredient shipped from China contained toxic levels of melamine, which was added to make it appear higher in protein. Many pets became ill, and some died.

Around the same time, The Times reported that an unlicensed Chinese chemical plant sold a cheap counterfeit ingredient, diethylene glycol, that was mixed into cold medicine in Panama, killing nearly 120 people and disabling hundreds more.

Diethylene glycol mimics its more expensive chemical cousin, glycerine, a safe ingredient used in medicine, food and toothpaste.

The F.D.A. said its search for answers in the heparin case had been made easier because of the cooperation it had received from China’s State Food and Drug Administration. That was not the case when United States officials inquired last year about the melamine and diethylene glycol.

The agency cited an accord signed in December by the governments of China and the United States as one reason for the cooperation they had received recently, which they said allowed American investigators to quickly begin their investigation of the additive...

So, does anyone really think that we happened to catch the very first instance of massive counterfeit in the American medication supply chain? If so, please contact me about a new financial instrument I've created just for you ...

People I love very much take medications every day. I suspect many of them are sourced from nations that have very weak regulatory and enforcement agencies, and a feeble justice system.*

Reading this article closely, I feel the journalists are quietly building a good case for panic. They are probably wondering what they need to do -- wander the streets banging drums?

Pithed.

PS. Bill Gates gets his medications from the same places we do. So does Warren Buffett. Maybe some people who own Senators will decide the turn up the heat a bit?

* The US now has weak regulation and enforcement, so we should all be very, very nice to our lawyers.

Memories of how badly Bush began ...

Krugman has linked back to an article he wrote five years ago. It reads as well today as it did then.

The part I'm quoting here reminds us how very badly Bush and company began:

Things to Come - New York Times:

...Victory in Iraq won't end the world's distrust of the United States because the Bush administration has made it clear, over and over again, that it doesn't play by the rules. Remember: this administration told Europe to take a hike on global warming, told Russia to take a hike on missile defense, told developing countries to take a hike on trade in lifesaving pharmaceuticals, told Mexico to take a hike on immigration, mortally insulted the Turks and pulled out of the International Criminal Court -- all in just two years...

They were so, so full of themselves. The crew that remains now is less obviously inept, mostly because they seem to be largely invisible. Fundamentally, however, I fear Bush and Cheney have are no more "ept" than when they started out.

The Twin Cities is a great place to live: bike trail plans

I really hope we get one or more of these plans:

River bike trail gains traction in Bloomington:

...Imagine being able to hop on a bike at Fort Snelling and pedal for hours on a quiet trail along the Minnesota River, winding all the way to Le Sueur, 72 miles upriver...

I thought Le Sueur was downriver, but I only live by the Mississippi, I wasn't born here.

This trail would have to get through a really big obstacle -- the old Air Force land south of the MSP airport. That few hundred meters of land has been the bane of bicyclists for eons.

There are several great projects listed in the article. As noted in a local paper:

Minneapolis—the nation’s No. 2 cycling city after Portland, Ore., according to the U.S. Census Bureau—Olson is among as many as 3,000 people who commute through the cold months, according to the City of Minneapolis Bicycle Program, a division of the Public Works Department.

When choosing great places to live, I'm a firm advocate of ignoring everything except the bicycle trail network. Trust me on this -- if you just look for great bike trails you won't go wrong.