Google mocks the idiotic security question

Even as some Google engineers succumb to security question idiocy, others openly mock the madness.

At least, that what I assume is going on. My (113) Google Profile now asks me many of typical security questions (nickname, etc) -- so my answers can be indexed and added to Google's public knowledge base.

This is either crude commercialism (set up the victims, then sell the lockpicks) or cruel mockery.

I'm betting on the latter. Google shares are a bit down, but Chrome will boost them. Google's not that desperate for revenue. The Profile engineers are making fun of their colleagues.

(via Google Operating System)

Why Google Chrome?

Google has lots of good reasons to build Chrome. Certainly embedding Gears in the browser is a good reason, that ought to also make former Netscape Constellation engineers smile. Dissing Flash is a always a good reason.

But what's the best reason?

Well, Google is still primarily a search and discovery company. So maybe the best reason to build Chrome is to deeply embed Google search throughout the browser.

I'm 70% through the Chrome comic, and I'm excited. This is a big event, and it's a big event that will benefit the entire user community.

All open source, and they mean open. Any competitor can take anything, thank you not required.

Thanks Google!

PS. See Andy, Google's not done yet ...

Update 9/5/08: Nice story on how Chrome was created.

JavaScript slide show app from 1997 still works

Today I ran across a noteworthy example of technological continuity. I was surprised!

A recent transition in hosting and registrar services caused me to review ancient web pages largely created in the mid to late 90s -- during the heyday of the personal web site. Among the dusty collection were a set of Internet Tutorials for my fellow family physicians.

The tutorials used a home grown JavaScript slide show applet that let me draw ordered sets from a collection of (spartan) "slides" -- a feature that was killed off by PowerPoint's dull dominance. I wanted to have a dynamic cross-platform (IE 2/3 and Netscape 3) resource.

Today I tried the applet. I had to enable pop-ups but, incredibly, it still works in Firefox 3 (I didn't try Safari or IE 7, no need to push my luck).

There's more continuity on the net than we typically assume.

iPhone push pulled: was it the revenue hit?

Apple pulled a highly desirable feature from the September 2.1 iPhone update:

Apple Seeds 4th Beta of iPhone firmware 2.1; Pulls Out Push Notification Service - iPhone Hacks

Apple has seeded developers of its iPhone Developer program with the fourth beta version of iPhone firmware 2.1. The latest update again consists of more bug fixes.

However, Apple has strangely pulled out the Push Notification Service APIs in this release for "further development".

The Push Notification APIs is Apple's solution for one of the features that we have been asking for, ability for native iPhone apps to run in the background especially for applications like Instant Messenger, Facebook etc...

The most likely explanation is that there are a lot of major bug fixes being packed into 2.1, and it's entirely reasonable to push features out to 2.2.

On the other hand, Push Notification will also kill a lot of 40 cent SMS transactions. I've used Google Talk on my iPhone, and if were able to use push notification I'd use it all the time.

Those SMS transactions are a significant piece of AT&T and Apple's iPhone revenue. A $30/month tethering solution would make up for some of the loss, but not all.

So if I were Apple, all things being equal, I'd pull the Push and push the Tether.

Happy day: Palin

It could have been our Governor Pawlenty -- a smarter, smoother version of George Bush with an evil gift of copiously and covertly rewarding his base.

Instead McCain picks someone with a built-in scandal:

Talking Points Memo | Palin's the One

... So now we've learned that Sarah Palin is McCain's choice for vice presidential nominee. I have to say, it's a daring pick but I think a very weak one. I'm perfectly happy with it. Palin is in the midst of a reasonably serious scandal in her home state. Her brother-in-law is a state trooper who is in the midst of an ugly custody battle with her sister. And she's accused of getting the state police to fire him. Recently she was forced to admit that one of her aides had done this, though she insists she didn't know...

Maybe McCain decided Pawlenty couldn't deliver Minnesota? Was Alaska ever in play?

Standards for chargers: Thank you China

An innocent question about organizing chargers produces and surprisingly good Slashdot discussion of power adapter standards.

Did you know China mandated USB only charging for cell phones (so is that why iPhone 2.0 dumped firewire)? Did you know there are people representing the charger industry who actively campaign against an EU standard? (Ok, so that was predictable.)

The ecology and economics of physical connector standards are fascinating; the irresistible force of consumer desire meets the immovable object of proprietary advantage and lock-in (the physical analogue of data lock). Consider the interesting examples of HP's printer cartridges, Apple's iPod connector, and the "authenticated" NEC battery.

Even though I wish the USB connector supported 12V instead of 5V, I am very grateful for its emergence as the de facto universal charger interface. I make USB charging support a very high priority -- which is why the RAZR's quasi-USB support drove me bats (yay BlackBerry, half-yay iPhone/Palm).

All very well, but what about China? This USB standardization is the kind of thing Singapore would do (smart, tyrannical), but when China does it they do it for the world -- much as California's emission standards become the North American rule.

Those anti-standard lobbyists will need bigger offices in Beijing.

Thanks China.

Leahy on McCain's dementia

I've always admired Senator Patrick Leahy.

Today he clearly states something that the GOP prefers to forget -- Reagan was severely cognitively impaired during his second term. During that term Baker governed the US; fortunately for us that was an improvement.

Leahy also draws a rather obvious comparison ...

Talking Points Memo | Leahy Goes There

...Leahy told Vogel yesterday the media has given McCain a free pass on flubs including mixing up Middle East geography, Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and referring to Russia's relationship Czechoslovakia -- a country that hasn't existed for 15 years.

'It was the same way with Ronald Reagan in the last few years he was president,' Leahy said, referring to the belief that Reagan experienced early signs of Alzheimer's disease late in his presidency....

McCain used to be cognitively stronger.

An artificial cat-level brain within 10 years?

I’ve long said that they day we create an artificial mind comparable to a hamster’s we’re toast. I have hoped this thesis wouldn’t be tested in my life-span …

It’s plenty devious, but we still can’t get it to follow orders worth a damn | Good Morning Silicon Valley

DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, is quietly creeping toward its goal of creating an artificial brain … HRL Laboratories, a joint venture of Boeing and General Motors … will spearhead the effort to build a chip with the “function, size, and power consumption” of a cat’s cortex within the next 10 years ..

… According to the news release, spotted by Wired’s Noah Shachtman before it was pulled, the goal is to build a chip with “neuroscience-inspired architecture that can address a wide range of cognitive abilities — perception, planning, decision making, and motor control.” “The first nine-month phase of the program will focus on designing, fabricating, and characterizing synaptic and neural elements and combining them into a high-density, interconnecting microelectronic ‘fabric,’ which will be incorporated into a more complex system-level fabric design,” according to the release. “In the following 15-month phase, HRL will combine the synaptic and neural elements to fabricate and demonstrate ‘cortical microcircuits’ that can model various lower-level brain functions and actually ‘learn’ by interacting with the environment…

Thank Google the partners are GM and Boeing. If they were, say, Google and Intel I’d be more concerned.

There’s a less than 1% chance they’ll succeed at this.

Still.

My first Wikipedia page: Data Lock

I've edited several pages, but this is the first I've created ...

Data lock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... Data lock is the planned or accidental strategy of retaining customers by holding data captive.

Data lock is a common outcome of proprietary file formats. It is a particularly common occurrence in cloud computing, but it is also commonplace in personal information managers and in commercial IT systems in every industry.

Customers rarely make data mobility a priority, so it can be difficult even for well intended developers to invest in data freedom. Google has shown recent moves away from data lock through the creation of APIs and new public export formats for blogs...

Update 8/27/08: Well, that was a short lived article! Wikipedia removed it, apparently because it was too much of a definition, and not enough of an encyclopedia article.

Cosmology and Complexity - almost understandable

This Aaronson lecture is surprisingly readable. Thank you scribe!

PHYS771 Lecture 20: Cosmology and Complexity

...But that's only one thing that's wrong with the simple "spherical/flat/hyperbolic" trichotomy. Another thing wrong with it is that the geometry of the universe and its topology are two separate questions. Just assuming the universe is flat doesn't imply that it's infinite. If the universe had a constant positive curvature, that would imply it was finite. Picture the Earth; on learning that it has a constant positive curvature, you would conclude it's round. I mean, yes, it could curve off to infinity where you can't see it, but assuming it's homogenous in curvature, mathematically it has to curve around in either a sphere or some other more complicated finite shape. If space is flat, however, that doesn't tell you whether it's is finite or infinite. It could be like one of the video games where when you go off one end of the screen, you reappear on the other end. That's perfectly compatible with geometric flatness, but would correspond to a closed topology. The answer, then, to whether the universe is finite or infinite, is unfortunately that we don't know....

Very fun topic. I finally have a personal story for the limits of information -- when bits become a black hole.

Curious relationship between computation and the cosmological constant.

Microsoft’s love for Firefox is limited – the Windows Live Writer plug-in example

I was surprised that Microsoft management let the superb Windows Live Writer team create a plug-in that supported Firefox.

WLW is unequalled as a blogging tool. Why not use it to drive geeks towards IE?

Well, reality has set in.

The WLW plug-in has never been updated for FF 3.

There’s a way to make it work: Make Firefox 3 beta accept the Windows Live Writer Blog This extension, but FF users expected an update in June.

Microsoft’s FF love has its limits. It’s reassuring to see economics still works!

Update 9/15/08: News comes via comments that an update is in the works - from one of my favorite Microsoft development teams. See the comment from Joe C. I understand corporate bureaucracy all too well. I suspect Microsoft customers would be happier today if Bush hand lost and the DOJ had split the company into more agile components.

Yes, you do want a mongrel

Humanity should be brought up before the Canine High Tribunal ..

Pedigree dogs plagued by disease

... Scientists at Imperial College, London, recently found that pugs in the UK are so inbred that although there are 10,000 of them, it is the equivalent of just 50 distinct individuals...

We should treat our symbiotes with more respect. I don't expect breeders to reform themselves, so we really ought to be adopting mongrels.

Problem is, in Dog City USA mongrels are darned hard to find. There just aren't that many fertile females available these days, and the boys don't get to wander free.

The demand for mongrel pups here is so great that two years ago we had to register for notification across 10,000 square miles -- and to call within hours of a birth notice.

Maybe it's time for breeders to start breeding long lifespan mongrel dogs ...

Biological warfare attracts some troubled scientists

Perhaps Bruce Ivins was responsible for the anthrax attacks.

On the one hand, the Bush FBI's credibility is negative. That is, if the FBI told me the sun was shining I'd get an umbrella. In that vein it's noteworthy that they keep tweaking their leaks...

Doubts over the anthrax case intensify -- except among much of the media - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

... What did the FBI do in response to that rather devastating hole in its theory being pointed out? It just leaked a completely different story to the Post about when and how Ivins mailed ...

On the other hand there are supposed technical developments ...

The Anthrax Case: From Spores to a Suspect -- Enserink 2008 (812): 1 -- ScienceNOW
By Martin Enserink

The scientific evidence against Bruce Ivins, the 62-year-old Army scientist who killed himself while about to be indicted for the anthrax murders, is finally emerging. Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) laid some of its cards on the table. One key document, scientists say, now enables a reconstruction of the trail that led the FBI from the deadly letters back to Ivins's lab at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland...

... The key to understanding the investigation is that the anthrax used in the attacks didn't have a single, uniform genetic makeup, a source close to the investigation says. Each of the envelopes likely contained many billions of spores; within such a population, there are always subpopulations of cells bearing mutations that set them apart from the majority. The same minorities would presumably have been present in the "mother stock” of anthrax from which the spores were prepared.

However, standard sequencing--which would require the DNA from thousands of spores--would have resulted in a "consensus sequence" for the spores, in which such rare mutations were simply drowned out. To find them, researchers used a different technique: They grew spores from the envelopes on petri dishes, generating hundreds or even thousands of colonies per dish, each the progeny of a single spore. They then searched for colonies that looked different from the majority; the affidavit mentions variations in "shape, color, texture."... Next, they set out to find the mutations that made those colonies different.

To do that, the FBI used a brute-force approach: It had the entire genomes of the bacteria in the minority sequenced. TIGR--which merged into the J. Craig Venter Institute in 2006--sequenced "probably somewhere between 10 and 20" such genomes in the years after the attacks, Salzberg says. TIGR could not handle live anthrax cells itself; the FBI gave the lab purified DNA ...

Comparing the sequence of the variant colonies to an original B. anthracis strain called Ames, widely used in research, identified a number of mutations, says Salzberg; they included single-nucleotide polymorphisms, a change of a single base pair, and tandem repeats, in which a short piece of DNA is repeated a variable number of times.

The FBI then had scientists at other labs develop tests that allowed them to screen any anthrax sample for four of these mutations....

... with the four tests, the FBI examined more than 1000 anthrax isolates, collected from 16 labs that had the Ames strain in the United States and several more in Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In only eight of those samples, they found all four mutations seen in the envelope samples; and each of these eight, the affidavit says, was "directly related" to a "large flask" of spores, identified as RMR-1029, which Ivins had created in 1997 and of which he was the "sole custodian."

... It's also unclear how many of the 1000 samples had fewer than four, but more than zero, of the mutations. "If a whole bunch of them had two or three," that would increase the odds that the perfect match at USAMRIID was just a false positive...

... Science aside, the affidavit relies heavily on circumstantial evidence...

One of the weak points in the affidavit is Ivins's motive, says Gregory Koblentz, a biodefense specialist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia... A glaring omission, meanwhile, is any evidence placing Ivins in Princeton, New Jersey, on any of the days the envelopes could have been mailed from there...

I'll take the skeptical side of things. The FBI has shown a nasty combination of incompetence and aggressiveness over the past decade. There's no evidence that they've reformed.

On the other hand, there's some reason to suspect that biological warfare attracts troubled scientists. The innocent Steven Hatfill was a convenient FBI fall-guy because of a murky past and questionable judgment. Bruce Ivins probably suffered from lifelong mental illness, perhaps a variant of paranoid schizophrenia.

Maybe we ought to be doing a better job of evaluating people who want to work with bioweapons?

Just saying.

Reason without science - the music of the spheres

Fifteen hundred years of fascinating nonsense. That's what I think as I listen to In Our Time's "The Music of the Spheres".

It's all rather like Freudianism - but he only lasted about 70 years.

What drives these examples of unreal reason?

I think of the underlying memes as attractive antigens that bind to our cultural and biological "memetic receptors" (it's hard to escape those immunology lectures). They're hypnotically interesting, and in age of scholarship without science they flourish like metastatic weeds.

The greatest cultural invention of the 2nd millennium, science, pulled the weeds. The Music of the Spheres became astronomy, mathematics, physics, neuropsychology, literature and art.

Science deserves more gratitude.

Microsoft's auto-lobotomy

In a longish article that seems designed to put Cringely on the witness stand, he outlines Microsoft's more recent alleged crimes.

It's an impressive list. Reading it I again wonder about the deal Gates made with Rove to drop the justice department suit against Microsoft. I wonder if we'll ever hear the details.

The part that really caught my attention though, was a small bit about Microsoft's policy on archived email:

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . What Goes Around Comes Around | PBS

... Months after the Microsoft/Burst settlement I received e-mail from a former Microsoft contractor:

“Now that Burst v. MS has moved out of the courts, I thought that I might add a little to what you know about this case. Back about two years ago when the judge told MS to cough up the rest of the emails that was supposed to have floated around between MS execs that discussed the Burst relationship, the team that I was on (Corporate tape backups) was asked to gather all together all of the tapes that were used during that time. Even though there was a corporate policy in place that any *.pst was to be excluded from backup capture, the effort failed. Not only did the Backup Exec software fail to filter out those pst files, but some of the involved blue badges (Microsoft employees) intentionally disguised their mail files so that they would not be recognized and included in the nightly backups. This last effort was even prohibited by policy from the VP level. As I was the one tasked to gather the tapes together from Arcus/Iron Mountain, I know exactly how many tapes were recalled for the involved servers. They filled several 240 tape trunks and were stored in the Building 11 tape vault....

I recently did an internal lecture on using Windows Search to enhance the value of email archives, to make them a part of working memory. Microsoft, as a part of a guilt-induced policy, excludes these files from backup.

The price of crime is an auto-lobotomy.