Covid Warnings

Posted on 2021-09-06 by jcs

Another datum for those of you following the origins of COVID-19 debate. Josh Rogin, writing over at Politco notes that US diplomats were warning about problems in the Wuhan labs as early as 2017, a good two years before the first cases of COVID-19 appeared. The diplomats were concerned that, according to its own accounting, the Wuhan labs lacked enough trained staff to operate the BSL-4 laboratory safely. They sent cables to the state department warning of their concerns about another possible SARS outbreak.

Of course the chuckleheads in the State Department ignored the warning—probably for geopolitical reasons—and there was an outbreak much, much worse than the previous SARS episode. In the US, the question took on a political flavor when Trump suggested the virus may have been manmade causing his political opponents to feel duty bound to deny the possibility. As a result, a year went by with partisans furiously denying the “conspiracy theory” of a lab leak and no investigation into the wisdom of gain-of-function research being done.

As a final, sad note, Rogin writes that

just months into the pandemic, a large swath of the government already believed the virus had escaped from the WIV lab, rather than having leaped from an animal to a human at the Wuhan seafood market or some other random natural setting, as the Chinese government had claimed.

It’s telling that we still can get them to admit this.

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Some Prerequisite Reading

Posted on 2021-09-05 by jcs

As I said in my last post, I’m planning to write a bit about some of the technical aspects of Apple’s CSAM scanning project. Happily, Apple listened to the avalanche of criticism and put their plans on hold. I hope this hiatus will be permanent but it probably won’t be. Irreal will never accept any surveillance system that runs on individual phones. Apple can, of course, do what they like on their own servers but they better stay out of my phone because it’s, you know, mine not theirs.

After their initial announcement and the furious reaction it provoked, Apple got busy assuring everyone that their system was perfectly safe and respected privacy. The second assertion is, of course, false on its face but the first is almost certainly false too. My upcoming post will address some of the reasons why the system isn’t as secure as apple claims but if you’re completely unfamiliar with how the system is supposed to operate, Josip Rezić has a useful post that gives an overview of Apple’s system. The best resource is, of course, Apple’s own technical summary, which is longer and has more technical details. It’s definitely accessible so is also worth reading for an understanding of how the proposed system would operate.

If you own an iPhone or are just concerned with Corporate/Government surveillance, you have a stake in this controversy and should familiarize yourself with what’s going on. Every single proposal like this needs to be resisted and beaten back.

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Apple and Backdoors

Posted on 2021-09-04 by jcs

In the ongoing Apple CSAM saga, Irreal has mostly been concerned with Apple’s betrayal of their promise to protect their users’ privacy but there’s also the issue the long term security consequences of Apple’s decision. We’ll take a look at the security of Apple’s plan in a later post. This is a sort of meta-post on the dangers of introducing backdoors.

Before we begin, it’s worth noting that Apple has delayed the rollout of their clientside CSAM scanning. The optimistic reading of their words is that, “Yes we know we screwed up and this is our way of abandoning the program without admitting we were wrong.” If they’re still not convinced, here are some reasons why it’s a really bad idea.

In the early 2000’s, the NSA had a clever plan. They devised a random number generator (DUAL_EC) that would allow them access to encrypted messages and pressured industry to adopt it. Almost immediately, security researchers pointed out the RNG had serious vulnerabilities but the NSA and its apologists pressed on. They claimed that even if that was true, only the NSA had the key to exploit the vulnerability so all was well. Unfortunately, the NSA had been too clever by half because hackers—unidentified to this day—managed to rekey Juniper Networks implementation and gained access to sensitive government communications for three years. Irreal has written about DUAL_EC before [1, 2]. Matt Green has an excellent Twitter thread (unrolled here) that recounts a brief history of the disaster.

This is the NSA, whose raison d’être is devising secure communication protocols, trying to introduce a secure backdoor and failing. What reason is there to believe that Apple would do any better? Indeed, security researchers have already pointed out problems. Apple insists that there’s no backdoor and, trust us, everything is under control. If Apple persists, they and the rest of us will find out just how naive that view is.

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Yet Another Win For Open Access

Posted on 2021-09-03 by jcs

For those of you, like me, interested in open access, there’s more good news. There’s good evidence that the scales are finally tipping to the side of open access. If things continue, we could soon see open access considered the default choice and paywalls considered an anachronism.

The proximate event is the decision by the American Astronomical Society to open source all of its journals. One could argue, of course, that it’s easier for a professional society such as AAS to open source its journals than it is for commercial publishers such as Elsevier to do so because their business models depend on people paying to read the material they publish.

Still, professional societies tend to publish some of the most prestigious journals in their respective fields so if most of the societies adopt open access, researchers will still be able to find top notch open access homes for their papers. Once a majority of researchers stop publishing in the commercial journals with paywalls, those publishers will have to fall in line and offer the same type of deal that AAS is.

That deal boils down granting unlimited access to the papers in exchange for the researchers—or really their institutions—paying a publishing charge. That’s what’s known as a page charge in today’s system. It turns out that publishing a commercial journal can be outrageously profitable—Elsevier, alone, makes billions every year—so in a sense the party will be over for them but there’s no reason they can’t make a reasonable profit while still doing the right thing.

Whether it’s government and the funding agencies insisting on open access or competition from the already free journals, it seems like the days of the academic paywall are coming to an end.

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Melpa Reaches a Milestone

Posted on 2021-09-02 by jcs

As regular readers know, I’m a big fan of Melpa and its proprietor Steve Purcell. It’s an extraordinary resource run strictly as a public service. The site is not monetized and yet Purcell devotes huge amounts of time to running it. Melpa is an unofficial repository so some GNU purists may spurn it but as a practical matter it’s the most important and useful repository and it’s hard to imagine configuring Emacs without it.

Recently, Melpa passed 5,000 packages, everyone of which is curated and kept up to date. It’s a pretty significant achievement so I say again: if we can coax Purcell out of New Zealand and you’re lucky enough to meet him, be sure to buy him a beer. Until then, I can only say, Thanks and well done.

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Go

Posted on 2021-09-01 by jcs

A funny thing about human beings is that once they’re out of their young adult years they tend to like things the way they’ve always been. In the tech world, that often takes the form of preferring the text editor and languages you’ve always used. Even those of us who take the plunge and, say, switch between Vim, Emacs, or VS Code don’t want to give up our programming languages.

I’ve been a C user for most of my career and although these new-fangled languages, like Rust or Julia, are intellectually interesting, most of us have no urge to change. The languages that do have a chance of seducing us away from our go-to languages are those that represent a limited extension to the one we’re attached to. For C, until recently, that would have been C++ but many C programmers found C++ too baroque and full of bad ideas to be a real successor to the crown.

Fredrik Holmqvist has a different candidate for the successor to C: Go. C++ grew out of Bell Labs so it seems a natural choice but as I said, many of us don’t like the language. As I’ve written before, C++ does away what’s good about C and introduces things that are demonstrably worse. Go, on the other hand, comes out of Google so its provenance is already suspect. The thing is, though, it was designed by folks with the same sensibilities and taste that gave us C. Dennis Ritchie is no longer with us but Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, who were early C users, influenced its development, and shared those sensibilities, are and, more to the point, are principal developers of Go.

Holmqvist makes a strong case for giving Go a chance. If you’re a programmer who grew up with C, you might want to give it a try.

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Who Needs a Smart Phone?

Posted on 2021-08-31 by jcs

As long as I’m obsessing about smart phones and the choice between Android and iPhone, we might as well consider the New Luddite option: no cell phones. Over at diaspora*, Doc Edward Morbius has a post that argues that smart phones are foolish and not nearly as useful as the old way. The “old way” is a land line, a Rolodex, a paper journal/appointment book, a calculator, and, of course, scratch paper.

The old way was better, Morbius says, because those devices weren’t integrated and you could use more than one of them at the same time. If you wanted to look up an address in your Rolodex while on the phone, it was no trouble because they were separate devices. Even putting aside for a moment that I can still do that with my iPhone, the argument is beyond silly. Yes, a smart phone implies a slightly different workflow but it’s generally a better workflow and anyone who denies that is just being willfully obtuse.

People who make these arguments always do the same thing: they ignore that you have all the world’s information and all your personal data instantly available—not to mention a phone that’s associated uniquely with you—and concentrate instead on some minor detail like “yes, but I can’t use my calculator as easily while I’m on the phone.” It is, really, an 8-year-old’s argument.

Going off the grid by ditching your phone is more than an inconvenience. It’s simply not feasible for anyone who wants to remain a part of society. It’s true you probably don’t need one down on the commune, though.

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Gain-Of-Function Research

Posted on 2021-08-30 by jcs

It’s been over a year and we still don’t know the origins of COVID-19. Barring the leaking or release of Chinese records, we likely never will. Consensus has converged on one thing, though. Just about everybody now admits—despite earlier, strenuous, and probably disingenuous denials of the possibility—that it’s at least as likely that the pandemic resulted from a lab leak as it is that it resulted from the virus jumping between species naturally. Many believe that Occam’s Razor points strongly at the lab leak as being more likely but it’s hard for those of us who aren’t virologists to make a scientifically informed judgment.

I do think it’s reasonable, though, for the man-on-the-street to have an opinion on a related question: Should we doing gain-of-function research in the first place? It’s a matter of considerable controvery even in the scientific community. There are three salient facts:

  1. The cost of a lab accident in human lives could be huge or even existential.
  2. Lab accidents are frighteningly common.
  3. As far as I can see, no one can point at any concrete advantages that have accrued from the research.

To the extent that those three statements reasonably reflect reality, it’s hard to reach any conclusion other than that such research should be ended immediately. To be sure, that would be asking those who do such research to give up their research programs and maybe even their life’s work but if the choice is between that and another pandemic like COVID-19, it’s an easy choice.

Sadly, far from suspending or even slowing down such research while we examine the risks and benefits, the US federal government under the leadership of Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins has removed some of the safeguards previously put in place and are proceeding apace. When Collins was asked why he removed safeguards he replied that he was “not able to fully reconstruct” the details. That sounds like political speak to me.

On a question like this, I’m not willing to accept “trust the experts.” If you can’t spell out why this research isn’t an existential threat then you should stop doing it. Full stop.

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The Index

Posted on 2021-08-29 by jcs

What do you think about book indices? Do you think about book indices? If you’re like most people, the first question doesn’t make much sense and the answer to the second is something like “Hardly ever.” The book index is so ubiquitous that we hardly notice it even if we occasionally use one.

It wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, the notion of a book index was so controversial that people wrote diatribes against them, and like the New Luddites of today, predicted that people would stop reading books altogether preferring to just scan the index to see what the book was about.

Having prepared the index for two books, I can tell you that making it is one of the hardest parts of getting a book ready for publication. No one likes doing it but if you’re writing a non-fiction book, you pretty much have to. You would think that you could just mark a word as an index item as you write the manuscript and you can but no one does, probably because it forces your mind away from the content.

Over at Prospect Magazine, Michael Delgado has an interesting article on the history of the index and the controversies surrounding it. The article is sort of a review of Dennis Duncan’s new book, Index, A History of the. I haven’t read the book but the title alone makes it enticing.

Most of us probably don’t have sufficient interest in things like book indices to read a whole book about them but Delgado’s article is interesting and short enough to make it a worthwhile read.

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Why Are People Apple Users?

Posted on 2021-08-28 by jcs

This whole contretemps with Apple has me pondering my computing future. I’m not ready to man the lifeboats yet but it does seem prudent to check them for seaworthiness. My ruminations got me to wondering why Apple has such a loyal user base. What is it about it that makes the Apple product line so sticky? I’m one of those loyal customers and have been since 2008. This post is me thinking out loud—as it were—about why I am such a loyal customer.

One of the things I always say I like about the Apple ecosystem is the integration. My iPhone, iPad, and Macs all talk to each other and often something I’ve started on one device can be continued on another. All my emails and iMessages are always available on all the devices and I can even share the clipboards between them. If I take a photo with one device, it’s instantly available on the others.

That kind of integration is harder in the Linux world because the same vendor doesn’t control the whole stack. Even so, there is integration in the Linux ecosystem. I’m sure there’s integration comparable to Apple’s in the Microsoft world but that’s a nonstarter for me.

Then there’s the hardware. The iPhone and the Macs are top-of-the-line but devices from other venders are, cum devices, comparable. The situation with tablets is a bit different. No fair analysis, I think, can conclude anything other than that the iPad blows its competitors away. If you’re going to have a tablet, you probably want it to be an iPad. Of course, there’s no reason you can’t have an Android phone and Linux PC and still use an iPad. I use my iPad mostly for reading Amazon ebooks, reading email, and doing crossword puzzles so my use doesn’t depend on my using other Apple devices. And, of course, I could just as well read those books on a Kindle reader and find some other application for crosswords if I wanted to rid myself of all things Apple.

So far we have Apple’s superior integration and the iPad but is that enough to account for their stickiness? I don’t think so. The real discriminator, I believe, is privacy. I would hate to give up my iPhone for an Android but the reason for that is privacy. Android users are having their every action surveilled while, until now, iPhone users could be pretty sure that wasn’t happening to them.

Every time I think about moving back to Linux and an Android phone, it’s privacy that gives me pause. What if there are a lot of other folks out there with similar views? If Apple decides that, “You know what? We don’t really care about our users’ privacy after all” what reason would all those people have to stick with Apple? Apple, of course, insists that’s not the case but their demurrals seem weak and disingenuous. If fighting CSAM on the backs of their users ends up costing them their premier position they’ll have no one to blame but themselves. But at least they can tell all their fellow cocktail partiers that they were virtuous.

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