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Reading List, December 2017

2018-01-01T02:10:00.000-05:00

Brian Merchant, How email open tracking quietly took over the world, in Wired, 11 December 2017. [Online]: https://www.wired.com/story/how-email-open-tracking-quietly-took-over-the-web/

It is no longer a secret that every website you visit silently tracks you in an effort to maximise ad revenue. What is less known is that emails also track you, through the use of tracking pixels and redirect links. These techniques were used by spammers and legitimate companies alike when creating newsletters or other mass email, in order to figure out their reach. What’s happening now is that private people are also using these techniques in order to create invisible and intrusive read receipts for email, which is incredibly frustrating from a privacy point of view.

My solution to the tracking woes? I only open the plain-text component of email, which gets rid of tracking pixels entirely. Redirect links are harder to beat, and I don’t have a good solution for this.
Dan Luu, Computer latency 1977–2017. December 2017. [Online]: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

I always used to joke that the layers of abstraction and indirection in modern computers means that they are slower than computers of the past. Every time we hardware people come up with faster machines, software people find ways to slow them down. In this post, Dan Luu presents quantitative data that shows that a modern computer has higher latencies than an Apple //e, released forty years ago. Luu also mentions a few reasons why this is the case, although the underlying factor here is that we have created increasing levels of abstraction and indirection that allow us to write better software and hardware that can be customised, but we lose in terms of performance. The Apple //e had a dedicated chip for processing keyboard inputs, a modern keyboard has a computer more powerful than the Apple //e just to process keyboard inputs. Luu also has some interesting discussions on why Android phones always seem to have higher latency with more powerful hardware than Apple phones, and why our computers are slower than a packet travelling around the world.
Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, Want to win a Nobel prize? Retract a paper, in Slate, 21 December 2017. [Online]: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/12/win_a_nobel_prize_by_retracting_a_paper.html

Once you go past the clickbaity headline, the article makes a point that a number of Nobel laureates have retracted their work when they lost confidence in the results. The primary argument in the article, according to me, is that honest science is rewarded.
Royal Society Te Apārangi, Selecting a quality publisher. [Online]: https://royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/research-practice/publishing-guidance/selecting-a-quality-publisher/

It is an open secret that the academic world is full of predatory publishers and bad science. Sometimes, legitimate researchers are tricked into publishing their work in these sub-par venues, and this is a loss, because such work is often lost as the journal folds up after charging the authors huge publishing fees. These guidelines from the Kiwis are useful in spotting and avoiding such predatory journals.
Matthew Greene, The strange story of “Extended Random”, in A few thoughts on cryptographic engineering*, 19 December 2017. [Online]: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/12/19/the-strange-story-of-extended-random/

A fascinating story of how a backdoor suspected to be the handiwork of the American NSA ended up inside certain Canon printers. I must confess, as someone with only a passing interest in cryptography, I don’t understand all the nuances mentioned in this article. Nevertheless, it makes an interesting reading.
Ian Parker, Killing animals at the zoo, in the New Yorker, 16 January 2017. [Online]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/16/killing-animals-at-the-zoo

I was unaware of the fact that animals are often euthanized at the zoo. This article is uncomfortable reading, but necessary as one of the many ethical issues that arise from keeping wild animals captive in a zoo. I’m still not sure how I feel about this issue, although I am inclined to believe that euthanasia is probably the most humane option of those presented.
Deborah Bright, How to let go at the end of the workday, in Harvard Business Review, 23 November 2017. [Online]: https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-to-let-go-at-the-end-of-the-workday

As a PhD student, I had trouble defining boundaries between my work and home lives. I often used to carry a stack of papers home to read after dinner, almost never read all that I intended to read, and this stressed me out, almost to my breaking point. It took me quite some time, and some effort to figure out that my problem was not letting go. This article is good reading for anyone else who may be in my position, as it has useful tips to help people snap out of work mode. Hopefully, this improves your lives this coming year.
Alex Knapp, How Garmin responded to a hate crime with humanity, in Forbes, 12 December 2017. [Online]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2017/12/12/how-garmin-responded-to-a-hate-crime-with-humanity/

Knapp chronicles the horrific shooting of two Garmin employees, and how the company chose to respond. I don’t want to present a watered down summary of this article, as it won’t do justice. Garmin’s response is one I would expect of all employers, to treat their employees and their loved ones as family, and to allow people space to grieve.
Eric S. Raymond, The blues killed rock and roll, in Armed and Dangerous, 28 December 2017. [Online]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7811

ESR tackles the question, why doesn’t modern rock music sound like the Beatles or Chuck Berry. His answer, British invasion blues bands like Led Zepplin, Rolling Stones, and The Who hijacked the genre.

Honestly, I like the new style of rock just as much as the old one, if not more. So I don’t quite like the tone of loss that ESR takes w.r.t. rock and roll.
Liliana Segura, Can the Supreme Court continue to live with our arbitrary and capricious death penalty?, in The Intercept, 24 December 2017. [Online]: https://theintercept.com/2017/12/24/arizona-death-penalty-supreme-court/

Hidalgo v. Arizona is a case that will be considered by the US Supreme Court. This case challenges the death penalty as being arbitrary. This is a fascinating story of how the Supreme Court once abolished the death penalty in Arizona, how it was brought back in a structured fashion, and how it regressed into arbitrariness. This is a case to watch, as lawyers argue that Hidalgo may be the ideal vehicle to abolish the death penalty across the United States, although its chances are slim at best.
Jeff Atwood, To serve man, with software, in Coding Horror, 31 December 2017. [Online]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-serve-man-with-software/

Atwood looks back at what makes software great, and his answer is that it makes our lives better.
Joanna Williams, Feminism is holding women back, in Spectator, 30 December 2017. [Online]: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/12/feminism-is-holding-women-back/

This article only partially addresses one of my pet peeves with social justice movements in the developed world. These movements tend to make mountains out of micro aggressions and create a culture of micro victimhood, at a time when real people elsewhere in the world have real issues. Just as Time magazine awarded person of the year to the #MeToo movement, there’s a movement going on in Iran where women are being arrested for not dressing according to an old, dogmatic dress code.

I’m not sharing this article to be critical, but because it ends with a message of hope. As we end this year, I think we should celebrate our successes. To that end:

The breakthroughs made by female scientists, engineers and academics in 2017 have been overlooked in favour of celebrating women as victims. But the truth is that women today are better qualified than men; they are working and earning more than ever before.
Francine Prose, The problem with problematic, in The New York Review of Books, 1 November 2017. [Online]: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/11/01/the-problem-with-problematic/

A critical look at the modern equivalent of book burning and censorship, i.e. the abusive takedown of authors and their works on social media. This article talks about the cottage industry of ‘sensitivity readings’, and of the illogical absurdity that authors have a ‘lived experience’ of what they write about, for this immediately disqualifies both historical and science fiction, as no one yet has the ability to travel to either the past or the future to gain the necessary ‘lived experience’. Prose also makes a passionate case for imagination, that we human beings are capable of imagining ourselves in different circumstances and writing about it, without necessarily having to live those circumstances.

What’s distressing is the frequency—and the unexamined authority—with which the words “experience” and “lived experience” define who is qualified to write or even to weigh in on a book.

Isn’t reading an experience that the writer allows us to “live”? Doesn’t fiction let the reader imagine what it might be like to be someone else? Or to enable us to consider what it means to be a human being—of another race, ethnicity, or gender?

The article also makes a passionate case for reading literature in a way that is not governed solely by sensitivity readings.

It’s painful to imagine someone reading Huckleberry Finn and having only one thought: fuck your white savior narrative.

This sort of criticism on social media is akin to bullying, finding easy targets in order to feel morally superior instead of tackling real, difficult issues. This manifests itself, not just in literature, but in almost all aspects of our lives, where people are fired because of outrage on social media, without any chance to defend themselves, or any chance to confront their million accusers. It is easy to jump onto a lynching bandwagon, harder to appreciate that everyone may have something useful to offer.

Reading List, November 2017

2017-12-01T11:21:00.000-05:00

Samuel Vee, I see trad people, in Status 451, 5 November 2017. [Online]: https://status451.com/2017/11/05/i-see-trad-people/

It seems that more and more, I’m sharing articles that would be frowned upon by the mainstream. I see this as a way to break some of the bubbles that are a part of life in a left-leaning college town. In this article, Samuel Vee cites theories by Haidt and Graham to understand why people who identify either as progessive or conservative do things that are decidedly un-progressive or un-conservative. In doing so, Vee argues that our political leanings come in through our moral foundations, and that these are innate, therefore identifying as part of the other political ideology is akin to being in the closet.

Vee makes another point right in the beginning of the article pointing out the social progress that we have already achieved, and mentions, rightly so, that we should view today’s moral and social issues through the lens of society fifty years ago. This reminded me of a fragment from a lecture by Haidt at Duke University, in which he raised the same point.
Kashmir Hill, How Facebook figures out everyone you’ve ever met, in Gizmodo, 7 November 2017.

A look inside the privacy nightmare known as Facebook. This article describes how Facebook generates a shadow profile on each person in the world, not just from information that you’ve shared, but from information that other people share about you. This is crazy, because anyone’s op-sec is now the minimum of the op-sec of the worst offender in their network. Ever shared your phone number or made a call to someone who decides to share this information from their smartphone to Facebook? Facebook knows that you’ve spoken. Ever written an email to a business contact who has a bad smartphone policy? Facebook will suggest that the two of you connect.

Simply deleting my Facebook account is not an option either, as this data collection will go on even if I don’t have a Facebook account.
Eric S. Raymond, The long goodbye to C, in Armed and Dangerous, 7 November 2017. [Online]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7711

The old fart thinks that it is time to let C go. ESR mentions that he hasn’t started a new project in C for quite a while now, and with contenders like Python, Go, and Rust, the need to write new code in C is largely irrelevant.

What I’d like to hear is why C++ is never considered as a serious contender. C++, especially the newer standards like C++11 and C++17 have evolved to be mature and modern standards that could easily give Go a run for its money. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how languages evolve in the next few years.
Alice Gregory, The sorrow and shame of the accidental killer, 18 September 2017. [Online]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-sorrow-and-the-shame-of-the-accidental-killer

Thanks to Nishant for sharing this article. This story talks about the horror, shame, and sorrow of accidentally causing injury or death to another human being. In the case of an accident, we are too quick to blame and find someone responsible, but we never see the person who walks away as a victim.

I went and listened to the ‘All Things Considered’ episode referenced in the article. In this episode, Maryann Gray reads a statement about causing the accidental death of an eight year old, and how she lives with that knowledge every day.
Esther Inglis-Arkell, How an unpaid UK researcher saved the Japanese seaweed industry, in Ars Technica, 19 November 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/how-an-unpaid-uk-researcher-saved-the-japanese-seaweed-industry/

A fascinating story of how a researcher, fired from her university due to a policy of not hiring married women, discovered the secret Clark Kent and Superman relationship between seaweed and a pink sludge, leading to the commercial farming of seaweed.
Arnab Ray, On Padmavati and selective outrage, in Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind, 20 November 2017. [Online]: https://greatbong.net/2017/11/20/on-padmavati-and-selective-outrage/

Arnab points out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed Indian liberals, and points out that the behaviour of liberals is actually pretty fundamentalist-adjacent. Sure, liberals don’t call for physical harm, but social shaming and ostracisation play the same role in shutting down inconvenient speech.
Kristina Panos, Joan Feynman found her place in the sun, in Hack A Day, 22 November 2017. [Online]: http://hackaday.com/2017/11/21/joan-feynman-found-her-place-in-the-sun/

A look at Richard Feynman’s little sister, herself a physicist researching coronal mass ejections at NASA’s JPL. I must confess, I hadn’t even heard of Joan Feynman until I read this article.
Brian Benchoff, Marguerite Perey: when the lab assistant gets the credit, in Hack A day, 28 November 2017. [Online]: https://hackaday.com/2017/11/28/marguerite-perey-when-the-lab-assistant-gets-the-credit/

A story of the discovery of francium by Marguerite Perey, lab assistant at the Curie Institute. After her discovery of francium, she went on to get a bachelor’s degree and then a PhD from the Sorbonne, and was the first woman elected to the French Academy of Sciences.
Ronald Minnich, Replace your exploit-ridden firmware with Linux, in The Linux Foundation’s Youtube channel, 27 October 2017. [Online]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iffTJ1vPCSo

Turns out that every Intel microprocessor has Minix3 running inside the management-engine, the stuff of security nightmares. In this talk, Minnich discusses how they managed to de-fang the management engine, remove all the old, legacy, and buggy firmware, and replace it with a Linux kernel with a userspace written in Go. This project, called NERF, or non-extensible reduced firmware, apparently also helps reduce the boot time by orders of magnitude, although I must say that I don’t necessarily understand why servers take eight minutes to boot up.
Andrew V. Suarez and Terry McGlynn, The fallacy of open-access publication, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 November 2017. [Online]: http://www.chronicle.com/article/the-fallacy-of-open-access/241786

Academic publishing is broken. Journals cost a lot of money, either to access or to publish, and sometimes for both. This is terrible news for the public, as they cannot access the results of scientific research paid for with their tax dollars. Open-access, or the philosophy that journals should be free to access is often touted as a solution, but has a downside that authors are now required to pay for publishing their work. In this article, the authors state that open-access does not solve the problems in the academic industry, and that open-access journals, motivated by a profit, could actually publish bad science. In my opinion, though, this article is written in a way that makes an open-access strawman, and reads like a propaganda piece for the old order, where colleges have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get access to journals. Sharing so that you may form your own opinions.

Reading List, October 2017

2017-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Jenny List, Accidental satellite hijacks can rebroadcast cell towers, in Hack A Day, 3 October 2017. [Online]: http://hackaday.com/2017/10/02/accidental-satellite-hijacks-can-rebroadcast-cell-towers/

Satellites are simple transponders placed in the sky, often with old but robust technology. It is no surprise then, that they could sometimes pick up and rebroadcast some unintended traffic, in this case, GSM traffic from Nigeria broadcast to large parts of Europe and Africa.
Steven Englehardt, Jeffrey Han, and Arvind Narayanan I never signed up for this! Privacy implications of email tracking, in Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS) 2018. [Online]: https://senglehardt.com/papers/pets18_email_tracking.pdf

It is no secret that information is the new oil. Today, everyone and everything is tracking you, including your email. This paper discusses the techniques for email tracking, and how tracking pixels and links in mass emails leak way more information than you could ever imagine, including setting cookies that track you across the web.

My solution, I use Thunderbird and view only plain-text emails. After reading this article, I set my privacy policy to reject cookies (amazing how many cookies were set in Thunderbird in the first place, even with my cautious approach), and installed Adblock Plus.
Jon Burt, Why does punching Sonic 3D trigger a secret level select?, in GameHut’s YouTube channel, 29 September 2017. [Online]: https://youtu.be/i9bkKw32dGw

Programmers back in the day took all sorts of shortcuts around management and red tape. If you’re a programmer, you’ll really enjoy this explanation of why Sonic 3D told you that you reached a secret level if you jiggled the ROM cartridge. I won’t spoil it for you, check out this video.
Harry McCracken, How IBM’s ThinkPad became a design icon, in FastCodeDesign, 5 October 2017. [Online]: https://www.fastcodesign.com/90145427/how-ibms-thinkpad-became-a-design-icon

I use a Lenovo ThinkPad and I love it. It is the most practical of all the laptops I’ve ever owned, and also the best built. Incidentally, the first IBM ThinkPad was released on the 5 October 1992, so the ThinkPad brand is exactly twenty-five years old now. This article talks about how the ThinkPad brand became an icon, and how it survived twenty-five years in the tech industry.

Richard Sapper designed the ThinkPad, and he was responsible for putting in the iconic touches such as the industrial black colour that meant business, and the bright red TrackPoint. Everything about the first ThinkPad seemed to be designed with the business traveller in mind, with a hard drive that could be swapped out from the front without disturbing your neighbour on a flight, to the TrackPoint which is absolutely the best pointing method when using a laptop on your lap or within the confines of an airline seat.

Other interesting titbits include the fact that Tim Cook, now Apple’s CEO, was responsible for the ThinkPad 701c, or the Butterfly, thus named because it had a butterfly keyboard that folded when the laptop was closed, but expanded to a comfortable size for use when the screen was opened.

Lenovo released a ThinkPad 25 version to commemorate this anniversary, and I must say that it is the most beautiful computer ever. I won’t be buying it, of course, because I already have a trusty ThinkPad.
Natalie Shure, Down with copay, in Jacobin Magazine, 6 October 2017. [Online]: https://jacobinmag.com/2017/10/sanders-single-payer-copays-medicare-for-all

A look at Universal Health Care, and why copays and deductibles have no place in the system. This is a damning indictment of one of the worst health-care systems in the world, that of the USA, where almost everyone gets priced out of health-care, a country that makes employees beholden to their employers for a chance to live a life where they can afford medical treatment.
Daniel Lemire, The Harvey-Weinstein scientific model, in Daniel Lemire’s blog, 14 October 2017. [Online]: https://lemire.me/blog/2017/10/14/the-harvey-weinstein-scientific-model/

It seems to me that talk of science has been broken by popular media. It also seems that this has occurred because some people treat science as “just another random theory, about as sound as my theory that 9/11 was an inside job”. Lemire, in this article, talks about how science should always be a healthy dose of scepticism, something that is now lacking when we talk about “scientific consensus”. In this article, he talks about how science should get away from the Harvey Weinstein model, where people shut up because of a fear of rejection rather than speak the truth.
Daniel Lemire, Bee-level intelligence, in Daniel Lemire’s blog, 13 October 2017. [Online]: https://lemire.me/blog/2017/10/13/bee-level-intelligence/

Everyone is talking about computers reaching human-level intelligence. In this article, Lemire argues that this is not the case. While we have indeed trained neural networks to perform as good or even better than humans at specific tasks, AI is nowhere close to reaching the intelligence of even a simple bee when it comes to working in the real world. Bees sense the environment and react to it, they can communicate with others, and work in swarms, all with a fairly low number of synapses in their nervous system. This is the difference between narrow AI – one that is good at only a specific task or a specific set of tasks – and general AI – which would be able to interact intelligently with situations it has never encountered.

I would pair this article with Steven Pinker’s book ‘How the mind works’, as Pinker has some interesting things to say about the same debate, albeit over twenty years ago (when the book was first published). Pinker argues that humans and computers perform different tasks efficiently, so who is to say which task is easy and which is difficult? Humans find it easy to read and produce a gist of ‘Alice in wonderland’ but hard to remember a twenty digit number. Computers find it easy to remember the twenty digit number, but hard to read and produce a gist of ‘Alice in wonderland’
Rodney Brooks, The seven deadly sins of predicting the future of AI, in Rodney Brooks – Essays, 7 September 2017. [Online]: https://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/

Yet another piece on AI and the hype around it. Rodney Brooks was the director of MIT’s Computer systems and artificial intelligence lab (CSAIL), so hopefully, he knows what he’s talking about. :) I won’t bother summarising the article here, go read the whole thing.
Daniel Golden, How the CIA staged sham academic conferences to thwart Iran’s nuclear program, in ProPublica, 10 October 2017. [Online]: https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-schools-how-the-cia-staged-sham-academic-conferences-to-thwart-iran-nuclear-program

A fascinating tale into the cloak and dagger world of espionage, how spooks attend conferences and recruit scientists to defect. The best part – apparently, one of the defectors got a PhD from MIT even though this person was spirited out of Iran without diplomas or transcripts. Allegedly, the CIA pressured MIT to grant this person admissions to its PhD program. While MIT denies this, two professors have apparently corroborated this story.
Al Williams, Retrotechtacular: Tom Carter revolutionized your phone, in Hack A Day, 16 August 2016. [Online]: https://hackaday.com/2016/08/16/retrotechtacular-tom-carter-revolutionized-your-phone/

A fascinating David v. Golaith tale of how a Texan named Tom Carter took the massive monopoly known as the phone company to court and allowed us to connect any device to our phone lines, opening the way to answering machines, cordless phones, and yes, modems, that connected us all to the internet.
I did not know that the first 9600 baud modems were released in
1. I can’t even imagine the level of innovation that would have been required to develop these devices before the age of transistors and LSI chips.
Sarah Jeong, The judge’s code, in The Verge, 19 October 2017. [Online]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-google-judge-william-alsup-interview-waymo-uber

A fascinating sketch of the judge who presided over Oracle v. Google. It is refreshing to read about a judge who actually understands the technical details of the case he is presented, and can make intelligent decisions. It also reminds me of the nostalgia of the old school of programming (the one I used back when I was in high school and just learning C++) which involves reading up books and documentation and does not involve googling for the answer or looking it up on StackOverflow. (As an aside, check out StackOverflow Importer)
Alex Campolo, Madelyn Sanfilippo, Meredith Whittaker, and Kate Crawford, AI Now 2017 report, ed. Andrew Selbst and Solon Barocas. [Online]: https://assets.contentful.com/8wprhhvnpfc0/1A9c3ZTCZa2KEYM64Wsc2a/8636557c5fb14f2b74b2be64c3ce0c78/_AI_Now_Institute_2017_Report_.pdf

A look beyond the scaremongering by people like Elon Musk, this is a practical look at AI systems in use today and how they need to be regulated in a way that affects society in a positive manner. Important recommendations include not using “black-box” AI systems in core public agencies, ensuring that AI systems are trained on data and produce outputs that do not reflect or amplify systemic biases, intellectual and societal diversity in AI researchers, and ethical codes in the AI community.
Ernie Smith, The incredibly technical history of digital rights management, in Vice Motherboard, 19 October 2017. [Online]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evbgkn/the-incredibly-technical-history-of-digital-rights-management

Anyone who knows me knows that I hate DRMs. This is a technical history of DRMs, traced back to the 1960s when IBM decided against encrypting its software and relying on the inherent honesty of its customers, to the modern era, when music labels had almost dropped DRMs, until Spotify revived the idea. Also interesting, Steve Jobs’ essay, “Thoughts on music” which is linked in the article, in which Jobs argues that DRMs are essentially useless, but necessary to get the licensing permissions from the music labels.
Alex Parker, Writing a bootloader, in Alex Parker’s Website, 13 October 2017. [Online]: http://3zanders.co.uk/2017/10/13/writing-a-bootloader/

Computers are increasingly complex. They are so complex that I can no longer write even a simple “Hello World” program any more without using a gazillion libraries, an operating system, a compiler that I don’t understand, and much more. In this series of posts, Parker walks us through writing a simple bootloader for an x86 processor, yes, the same one running my laptop right now, that can print Hello World using only BIOS calls. Pretty neat, and reminds me that computers are not all that complicated.
Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni, How a genius thinks, works, and lives, in The Mission, 20 July 2017. [Online]: https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shannon-12-lessons-on-life-and-learning-from-a-genius-e8b9297bee8f

An inspiring article on a legend. This article talks about ten lessons (yes, I know, clickbait cliché) the authors of Shannon’s biography learnt when researching the man.

Reading List, September 2017

2017-10-01T15:54:00.000-04:00

Joel Kotkin, Trump damaged democracy, Silicon Valley will finish it off, in The Daily Beast, 27 August 2017. [Online]: http://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-damaged-democracy-silicon-valley-will-finish-it-off

Kotkin writes about the lack of competition in Silicon Valley, a problem that has led to a lack of technical innovation along with decreasing the economic mobility in America. While I think that it is easy to blame Silicon Valley for all the problems in the world today (hacking the election, gentrification, exploiting workers in the gig economy, & c.), I think that this falls into the American trap of thinking of the world in terms of a ‘single actor’.
Kashmir Hill, Yes, Google uses its power to quash ideas it doesn’t like – I know because it happened to me, in Gizmodo, 31 August 2017. [Online]: https://gizmodo.com/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas-it-doesn-t-li-1798646437

Something we knew already, that Big Business will crush any criticism of itself. In this case, the Big Business in question has a motto, ‘Don’t be evil’.
Scott Alexander, My IRB nightmare, in Slate Star Codex, 29 August 2017. [Online]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/

A Kafkaesque walk down the nightmare that is getting approval from the bureaucracy in the institutional review board. Read it, it is funny in an incredibly dark way. Within this, you may find some insights into why medical research sucks.
Arnab Ray, RaGa and leaked transcript of AI speech, 5 September 2017. [Online]: http://greatbong.net/2017/09/05/raga-and-ai-leaked-transcript/

Making fun of Rahul Gandhi at this point feels like punching down.
Tanya Gupta, The great saucer invasion: The day six ‘spaceships’ landed in England, in BBC News, 3 September 2017. [Online]: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-41110193

A trip down memory lane when pranking people was fun, and wouldn’t land you in jail for wasting the time of the police force.
Ron Barry, How to decode the images on the Voyager Golden Record, in BoingBoing, 5 September 2017. [Online]: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/05/how-to-decode-the-images-on-th.html

The Voyager space probes have been in space for forty years as of this month (September 2017). Barry walks us through how to decode the golden records that the probes carry with them as the sum total of all information that humanity would want aliens to experience, probably long after we’re all dead and gone. The thought of a lonely probe travelling through the universe carrying all of our experiences, hopes, and thoughts on a single gold disk makes me feel a mix of sadness and wonder.
Oliver Roeder, How to win a nuclear standoff, in Five Thirty Eight, 6 September 2017. [Online]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-win-a-nuclear-standoff/

A game-theoretic view of the nuclear brinkmanship going on between the USA and North Korea. Spoiler alert, Trump’s actually playing the game right.
John Lanchester, You are the product, in London Review of Books, 17 August 2017. [Online]: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product

A look at Facebook and how it has fucked up the world. You’ll walk away from this article feeling dirty for just being online, at the amount of data you’ve leaked about yourself, and how much online companies know about you.
Daniel Lemire, On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator, in Daniel Lemire’s blog, 15 August 2017. [Online]: https://lemire.me/blog/2017/08/15/on-melissa-oneills-pcg-random-number-generator/

Melissa O’Neill wrote a better random number generator that was quickly adopted by engineers all over the world. She tried to get this work published, but failed multiple times. What’s ridiculous is that this makes her work less reliable in the eyes of academics. Which makes me wonder – is the academic model broken? I would love to write a blog post about this in more details, maybe once I graduate and leave the world of academia for good. Until then, I play my roles, stay quiet below the radar, and try to not rock the boat too much.
Greg Kumparak, Tesla flips a switch to increase the range of some cars in Florida to help people evacuate, in TechCrunch, 9 September 2017. [Online]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/09/tesla-flips-a-switch-to-increase-the-range-of-some-cars-in-florida-to-help-people-evacuate/

Tesla makes cars with two battery ‘capacities’, except that they are the same car, with one car crippled using software. This is protected by software that is illegal to crack because of laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). So, what does Tesla do when a hurricane strikes Florida? It sends an over-the-air update so that people don’t remain stuck in hurricane land waiting for their electric cars to charge. While I like the fact that Tesla did not screw over their customers, I still think that it is a shade of evil to create a good product, then intentionally cripple it. Clearly, the car costs only as much as the cheaper model, otherwise Tesla would not turn a profit. Why then charge more to remove a stupid software lock?
Ariel Levy, The perfect wife, How Edith Windsor fell in love, got married, and won a landmark case for gay marriage, in The New Yorker, 30 September 2013. [Online]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/the-perfect-wife

Edith Windsor passed away earlier this month. This article talks about the case she brought against the federal government of the USA in the landmark case that brought recognition for same-sex marriages.
Eric S. Raymond, Unlearning history, in Armed and Dangerous, 22 September 2017. [Online]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7660

I don’t agree with parts of ESR’s analysis, nevertheless it makes it to my list for providing an illuminating alternative perspective. In fact, as an Indian, I rarely understand American politics, much less the complicated and charged relationship between the north and the south. ESR’s premise here is that statues of confederate soldiers were built as a part of the reconciliation between the north and the south after the civil war, as a form of soft, romanticised airbrushing of the Lost Cause. Therefore, ESR concludes, smashing the statues re-opens wounds that have not yet healed. This is funny (and wrong), because the statues in question were installed, not during or after the civil war, but much later as a Fuck You to the people who said that the colour of a person’s skin should not decide their position in society.
Scott Manley, The computer hack that saved Apollo 14, on YouTube, 31 August 2017. [Online]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSSmNUl9Snw

The story of how an engineer had astronauts reprogram some data on their control computer to ignore a malfunctioning abort switch.
Alex White, Bad timing, in The Cooper Square Review of Science, Medicine and Technology, 22 September 2017. [Online]: http://coopersquarereview.org/post/bad-timing/

Alex talks about the time when he discovered a bug in his code after running experiments and getting a good set of data. This is something that could easily happen to any PhD student, and is the stuff of our nightmares. Alex’s initial reactions on discovering the bug explain how some forms of scientific misconduct could occur through bad choices after discovering an honest mistake. He, of course, went back and fixed his error without any significant harm, so there’s a happy ending to this story.

Reading List, August 2017

2017-08-31T22:27:00.000-04:00

Simon Penner, Another point of view, in Status 451, 3 August 2017. [Online]: https://status451.com/2017/08/04/another-point-of-view/

This is not a post for people who have already made up their minds. If, however, you are the type who can wrestle with an alternate point of view, or even acknowledge that privilege is not necessarily universal and is fluid within social and political contexts, do read this post about the challenges faced by a Canadian Midwesterner in Politically Correct Liberal California Bay Area.

The reality is that software engineering jobs are not magical privileges, not lifetime keys to the lands of luxury and riches. They are hard, important work taking smart, skilled, and highly practiced people a lifetime to master. Most people here will have struggles, because hard things make you struggle. Focusing on a very small subset of those struggles is a very curious definition of “fairness”. Respectfully: Check your goddamn privilege.
Alex Mayyasi, The invention of Pad Thai, in Priceonomics, 28 October 2015. [Online]: https://priceonomics.com/the-invention-of-pad-thai/

Answering the question, how long does it take to create a cuisine.

Not long: less than fifty years, judging by past experience.

This is a fascinating tale of how the Pad Thai was created by executive decree, in an effort to make Thailand more ‘cultured’ and to prevent colonisation.
Rachel Kolb and Dakota McCoy, Gene-editing tool raises questions about what is ‘disease’, in San Francisco Chronicle, 3 August 2017. [Online]: http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Gene-editing-tool-raises-questions-about-what-is-11732894.php

What are the ethics of gene manipulation. Where do we draw the line between preventing disease and interfering with the natural course of life? In this op-ed, the authors point out that while most people would consider being deaf as something that should be cured if possible, there is a rich culture that exists between deaf people, such as sophisticated sign languages. Curing deafness at the embryonic stage could easily destroy this culture.

This article makes the list just as a reminder that we engineers and scientists need to consider social, cultural and ethical implications of our decisions, not just the scientific impact.
Ken White, Lawsplainer: How federal grand juries work, part one, in Popehat, 7 August 2017. [Online]: https://www.popehat.com/2017/08/07/lawsplainer-how-federal-grand-juries-work-part-one/

Ken White’s a former federal prosecutor who has now moved to private practice. He’s also very funny, and as evidence, here’s an article explaining how grand juries work, in all their detail. Recommended for sounding more intelligent during your next conversation.
Simon Penner, Judging things by their side-effects, in Status 451, 6 August 2017. [Online]: https://status451.com/2017/08/06/judging-things-by-their-side-effects/

Again, I would not recommend this article if you’ve already made up your mind. Simon talks about the infamous Google memo. His point, which is something to be considered is that the criticism around the memo wasn’t that the memo was just plain wrong, instead it focussed on the effect – that it created a hostile work environment. In this article, Simon argues that by focussing on the effect, Google and others are implicitly acknowledging the contents of the memo as true, otherwise they could simply say, ‘That’s wrong’, and move on.

If we adopt a social norm that the side effects of speech are more important than its truth value, another problem arises: we can no longer trust the truth value of anything by default, ever.

In 2003, the Bush administration knew damn well that there were no WMDs in Iraq. However, they really truly sincerely believed, according to whatever weird messed up metric they were using, that not bringing war to Iraq would cause massive harm and danger to many people, so that nevertheless we should lie about there being WMDs in Iraq.

Simon also points out that the reaction to the memo – dropping a banhammer – is harmful because it implicitly assumes that there is a single actor, and that firing one engineer will prevent such memos from being written and circulated in the future.

Or, to use an analogy the left might like: “If we blow up terrorists, there will be no terrorists to blow us up” is an insane and ridiculous statement because, among other things, it assumes that blowing up terrorists will not radicalize any new terrorists.
Scott Aaronson, The Kolmogorov option, in Shtetl-Optimized, 8 August 2017. [Online]: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376

Talks about the Soviet mathematician Kolmogorov, who founded a significant portion of probability theory as we know it today, and his choices to not pick fights that he could not win against the Soviet Union.

In fact it’s often because they fear you might be right that the authorities see no choice but to make an example of you, lest the heresy spread more widely. One corollary is that the more reasonably and cogently you make your case, the more you force the authorities’ hand.

To an Inquisitor, “good heretic” doesn’t parse any better than “round square,” and the very utterance of such a phrase is an invitation to mockery. If the Inquisition had had Twitter, its favorite sentence would be “I can’t even.”

Does this mean that, like Winston Smith, the iconoclast simply must accept that 2+2=5, and that a boot will stamp on a human face forever? No, not at all. Instead the iconoclast can choose what I think of as the Kolmogorov option. This is where you build up fortresses of truth in places the ideological authorities don’t particularly understand or care about, like pure math, or butterfly taxonomy, or irregular verbs. You avoid a direct assault on any beliefs your culture considers necessary for it to operate.
Scott Aaronson, What I believe II (ft. Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffery), in Shtetl-Optimized, 15 August 2017. [Online]: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3389

A follow-up to ‘The Kolmogorov Option’ that addresses the elephant in the room.
Scott Alexander, Contra-Grant on exaggerated differences, in Slate Star Codex, 7 August 2017. [Online]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/

Alexander takes on a LinkedIn post by Adam Grant. Do read till the very end, including the comments section in which Alexander and Grant continue the debate.

Why am I sharing this? Because it is refreshing to see in today’s day and age, two people having a debate based purely on facts and their interpretations of data without resorting to ad-homenim attacks.
Fredrik deBoer, Why selection bias is the most powerful force in education, in the ANOVA, 29 March 2017. [Online]: https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-powerful-force-in-education/

Fredrick points out that the outcomes of most schools are decided simply by the students they accept. So, schools that select bright, motivated students end up with students that perform better. The most amazing data in this comes from Fredrik’s thesis, where the performance of students post college goes up by a fixed amount (essentially changing mostly the intercept of the graph, not the slope). This is a fascinating reading on how we need to be careful about selection bias whenever discussing education and student performance.
Al Williams, You know you can do that with a 555, in HackADay, 10 August 2017. [Online]: http://hackaday.com/2017/08/10/you-know-you-can-do-that-with-a-555/

I had a conversation with a friend recently, in which I pointed out that the task he wanted to accomplish could be done with a 555. This hack goes even further, making logic gates and op-amps with a 555. Fascinating reading.
Steven Dufresne, Decoding Enigma using a neural network, in HackADay, 11 August 2017. [Online]: http://hackaday.com/2017/08/11/decoding-enigma-using-a-neural-network/

Using an LSTM neural network for encoding and decoding the Enigma, which leaves me asking, Why?

What next, neural networks for LQR? Neural networks for displaying text on a screen? Neural networks for encoding and decoding key-presses on a keyboard? Neural networks functioning as an adder?
Eric Berger, SpaceX is launching a supercomputer to the International Space Station, in Ars Technica, 11 August 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/spacex-is-launching-a-supercomputer-to-the-international-space-station/

The headline’s quite a misdirection. Basically, HP-Enterprise will be installing a 1 TFLOP/s computer in the international space station. Not a supercomputer by any modern standards, but it is the most powerful computer sent to space.

The trouble with space is with all the high-energy radiation. This radiation can get inside electronics and flip bits in all sorts of crazy ways, which is why the space shuttle used core memory, a technology from the 1960s. This study is meant to see how ordinary computers fare in the radiation-rich environment of space.
Lee Rowland, Controversy is curriculum, in Inside Sources, 25 April 2017. [Online]: https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/we-all-need-defend-speech-we-hate

Lee Rowland is a senior staff attorney at the ACLU. In this post, she argues that free speech, and the ability to confront and counter opinions that we disagree with is a skill that colleges are failing to teach their students. She rightly points out that hate speech, and speech that affects vulnerable students should be stopped, but that recent events show that colleges are failing students, be it the use of violence, outrage, or threats to shut down speech that is protected by the first amendment, but with which students disagree.

These incidents have not shut down a single bad idea. To the contrary, they’ve given their opponents’ ideas credence by adding the power of martyrdom. When you choose censorship as your substantive argument, you lose the debate. Because none of us are the wiser about the better world those protesting students want to see instead of telling us, they silenced others. In curricular terms: They didn’t do the assignment.

When students leave the nest of higher education, they will immediately be thrust into a rough-and-tumble world filled with things many of us don’t want to see: racism, sexism, ableism, cruelty. But we all know these things won’t go away if we close our eyes. We need a next generation of students trained to take the deep breath, open their eyes, and change that world with their words and ideas.
Jonathan Haidt, Why so many Americans don’t want social justice and don’t trust science, in Boyarsky Lecture in Law, Medicine and Ethics, Duke University, 3 July 2013. [Online]: https://youtu.be/b86dzTFJbkc

Technically, not a book or an article, but useful nevertheless. Given the sheer divergence of political discourse in the USA and the massive echo chambers that people live in, this, in my opinion, is a useful starting point to understand the other side.

To push further, this video also gives me some insights into why we Indians love talking about politics and listening to the other side, and why and how this has changed recently. (Spoiler alert: I blame the American import of ‘us-vs-them’ ideology that is discussed in this video.)
Dan Lyons, New tech start-up bubble, in Open Source Leadership Summit, February 2017. Published by Coding Tech, 27 July 2017. [Online]: https://youtu.be/G7vrCpWbmDw

Again, a video, but this one is totally hilarious, and short, at just 20 minutes. The story of a 50+ year old tech reporter inside a startup dominated by millenials.

Also made me realise that I’m essentially a 50 year old man at heart.
Denise Cummins, Why the STEM gender gap is overblown, in Making Sen$e, 17 April 2015. [Online]: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/truth-women-stem-careers/

The short answer, the gender gap varies across fields, with some fields having more men (notably computer science and engineering) and some fields having more women (social sciences and psychology). Maths, physical sciences, and biosciences have a near 50% gender ratio.

I shall not say any more even to merely summarise the article. It is impossible to say more without the appearance of making a political statement these days. Even two years ago, this article came with a disclaimer from the editors just for people who choose to get angry about headlines without reading the entire article.
Nick Srnicek, We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s why, in The Guardian, 30 August 2017. [Online]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/30/nationalise-google-facebook-amazon-data-monopoly-platform-public-interest

Google, Facebook, and Amazon are almost monopolies that are increasingly seeking to inject themselves into all aspects of our lives. Srnicek argues that these companies should be treated the same way as utilities or railways and nationalised to serve the public interest.

This article makes it to the list simply as an acknowledgement of a problem. There’s no way this can actually happen, there’s a huge counter-argument for government censorship and big-brother, along with the all-important question of which government gets to control the internet. No, we’re stuck with the status quo for now.
Matthew Prince, Why we terminated Daily Stormer, in Cloudflare blog, 16 August 2017. [Online]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

This is an excellent article to read because it expresses the tension between the first amendment and the right of private citizens to have an opinion or a stance, especially if the citizen in question owns a company that handles about a tenth of the web traffic in the world.

Here’s the story. After the Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Google and GoDaddy decided to veto the Daily Stormer, an alt-right website that was ostensibly the brains behind the demonstration. The website went off to a Russian domain, then the dark web, apparently shit-talked how Cloudflare supported them. This made the founder of Cloudflare angry, and he pulled the plug on the website, opening it up to a DDoS attack that would eventually take it down.

The tension here is that a few companies control almost all of the internet, effectively making it an oligopoly. I know that I’m simplifying the debate here, but the details are irrelevant to the point being made. The point is that these companies can engage in censorship, such censorship is legally justified because they are not a government but private entities. This, however, is dangerous territory filled with slippery slopes. Prince acknowledges all of these issues and the fact that his decision probably sets a very bad precedent.

Reading List, July 2017

2017-07-31T23:59:00.000-04:00

Cyrus Farivar, WinAMP woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself, in Ars Technica, 3 July 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/07/winamp-how-greatest-mp3-player-undid-itself/

A fascinating tale of WinAMP, my favourite music player in the early 2000s, and how it was run into the ground by AOL.
Mike Masnick, State dept. enlists Hollywood and its friends to start a fake Twitter fight over intellectual property, in Techdirt, 5 July 2017. [Online]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170705/10241437723/state-dept-enlists-hollywood-friends-to-start-fake-twitter-fight-over-intellectual-property.shtml

This article is just so crazy that I find it very hard to believe. If it indeed turns out to be a fake, I may actually delete it from this list. Apparently, the State department wants to start a fake Twitter feud to advance MPAA and RIAA propaganda, and they thought that reaching out to Stanford Law School professors and students was a good idea.

Well, turns out it is true. Ars Technica has also confirmed this story.
Joris Giovannangeli, Skylake bug: A detective story, in Ahrefs, 28 June 2017. [Online]: https://tech.ahrefs.com/skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd

This is a fascinating read on how developers discovered a bug hiding deep in Intel’s microcode on Skylake processors. The bug has now been patched, but this story remains extremely important as a cautionary tale when dealing with levels of abstraction that are now prevalent in computer systems.

Processors could have bugs hiding deep in their systems, and these hardware or microcode bugs could seriously affect the software running on the processors. While most bugs would be in the software layers, sometimes hardware bugs could affect perfectly correct software. Or sometimes a compiler bug could affect perfectly correct high-level code. Bugs affecting correctness could be hiding in the operating system, in the virtualisation environment, in shared libraries, anywhere. Writing software is an exercise in trusting the layers upon layers of abstraction that we now deal with.
Clara Turnage, Most Republicans think colleges are bad for the country. Why?, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 July 2017. [Online]: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Most-Republicans-Think/240587

Sadly, this is not The Onion. According to this article, 58% of Republicans and right-leaning independents do not trust colleges and universities. These statistics are crazy. The article talks about how colleges and universities are considered “liberal” and on how most people take their cues from leaders and media pundits on their side of the aisle.
John Timmer, New ‘bribery game’ shows that sometimes, transparency makes things worse, in Ars Technica, 15 July 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/researchers-look-at-roots-of-bribery-using-game-theory/

Summary of a research paper published in Nature Human Behaviour (DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0138). The takeaway here is that in any society, corruption will occur, and the stronger the central government, the more the corruption, especially when bribery is an option and leads to a wealthy leader. Secondly, transparency in government does not help matters, what is needed is transparency about bribery, but that’s unlikely to happen. It seems like the thing that would really lower corruption is a strong economy.

This is research based on a very specific game played by a small-ish group of people, so the results may not be representative of real life. Nevertheless, interesting research.
David Kravets, Animal rights? Monkey selfie case may undo evolution of the internet, in Ars Technica, 15 July 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/animal-rights-monkey-selfie-case-may-undo-evolution-of-the-internet/

This article points out the legal battle that PETA is engaged in to grant copyright to a monkey who snapped a selfie. The author of the article points out that PETA is suing the organisation that supplied software to publish a book for copyright infringement, as that software was used to publish a book that PETA alleges caused copyright infringement. This is crazy, because it is the equivalent of suing Microsoft because someone used MS Word to type a bootlegged copy of Harry Potter.

My opinion is that PETA is just being the obnoxious, holier than thou, stupid idiots that they have always been, and are a danger to animal rights everywhere because they are the strawmen that people will point to and group all the reasonable activists with. This is fun times for PETA, trying to stay relevant by suing a photographer to the point that he is now broke. The fact that they are now trying to sue the organisation that provided software to the photographer just shows that they are being vexatious litigants who are clamming up the system with frivolous lawsuits.

Make no mistake, the American copyright system is broken. However, PETA’s suit is a testament to the brokenness of the American judicial system, not because of the content of their claims, but because these claims have been allowed to proceed so far up the judicial system, steamrollering people who may not have as deep pockets as an organisation that accepts donations from all over the world.
Eric S. Raymond, The slow birth of distributed software collaboration, in Armed and Dangerous, 19 July 2017. [Online]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7628

ESR talks about the birth of something that all of us developers take for granted – distributed version control. This is a fascinating tale of how people went from sharing entire files, to using patch, to CVS, then to SVN, and finally to Git. (Of course, I’m oversimplifying, there are other version control systems, but who really cares about them? ☺)

As an aside, someone once remarked about GitHub, ‘It’s amazing how we’ve taken a distributed version control system and made it centralised.’ I thought that it was a funny statement, but I was made aware of the painful truth of this maxim when a friend mentioned that he did not know that pull-requests could be merged in git, he assumed that they were just a GitHub feature. Linus Torvalds would have some words.
Steve Mitchell, How I became a mathematician, September 2002. [Online]: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~mitchell/Misc/bio.pdf

A fascinating tale from a professor at the University of Washington who dropped out of college three times, spent time rock climbing, hitch-hiking, riding the rails, and joining graduate school without a college degree. This makes it to my list just because of the sheer impossibility of the story.

As an aside, why do mathematicians have such poor websites? Check out Mitchell’s home page, it is just four links. In fact, searching for most of the people in the list turns up almost no information about them at all. So, I find it interesting when Mitchell writes:

My heroes then included John Milnor, Michael Atiyah, Jean-Pierre Serre, Raoul Bott, Dennis Sullivan, Frank Adams and Dan Quillen; no one outside of mathematics will have heard of them, even though by rights they should be household names.

Reading List, June 2017

2017-06-30T13:19:00.001-04:00

Eric Diaz, The oral history of Star Trek: TNG’s best episode: “The Inner Light”, in Nerdist, 31 May 2017. [Online]: http://nerdist.com/the-oral-history-of-star-trek-tngs-best-episode-the-inner-light/

‘The Inner Light’ is probably the best Star Trek: TNG episode, and this is a very interesting history on how the episode was conceived and how it made it to its final form. I did not know that we could have had a sequel to this episode. I must say that it was strange that ‘The Inner Light’ was never referenced again except for one small passing reference.
Robert Graham, How The Intercept outed Reality Winner, in Errata Security, 5 June 2017. [Online]: https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reality-winner.html

All printers insert invisible dots in files that are printed that can identify the model and serial number of the printer as well as the time a document was printed. Just putting this out there, governments mandate printer companies to insert code that tracks the documents we print. Next time you buy a printer, verify that it does not print tracking dots by visiting this link by the EFF.
the grugq, Real talk on reality, in Medium, 9 June 2017. [Online]: https://medium.com/@thegrugq/real-talk-on-reality-cf07cbb78530

Perhaps invisible dots had nothing to do with the case. A list of opsec failures that led the DOJ to arrest a leaker.
Chris Lee, Wibbly-wobbly magnetic fusion stuff: The return of the stellarator, in Ars Technica, 9 June 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/06/wibbly-wobbly-magnetic-fusion-stuff-the-return-of-the-stellarator/

Possibly the future of devices to contain plasma for nuclear fusion. Reading this article tells me just how far we’ve come, and how much further we have to go.
Peter Bright, According to statistics, programming with spaces instead of tabs makes you richer, in Ars Technica, 15 June 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/according-to-statistics-programming-with-spaces-instead-of-tabs-makes-you-rich/

I usually don’t have opinions about programming style, but I do have a very special hatred in my heart for people who indent C/C++ code using spaces. If you’re one of those evil people, from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

This article is short and funny. You could read it in thirty seconds, but spend the next hour laughing.
Arnab Ray, When did we lose the game?, in Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind, 18 June 2017. [Online]: https://greatbong.net/2017/06/18/when-did-we-lose-the-game/

Arnab makes a point here about why we should not care about the outcome of a cricket match.

Because they know, or should, that their pride as a people is not defined or determined by the outcome of a game.
Sidin Vadukut, How to consume news, in Livemint, 26 June 2017. [Online]: http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/6vLjwbrZYZUwMOpy9XO8uN/How-to-consume-news.html

This is a great article that I would strongly recommend you read. It’s a how-to on maintaining sanity through the twenty-four hour news cycle where non-news becomes news, and the amount of information is overwhelming and designed to engage emotionally rather than logically.

I used to recommend political podcasts such as “Pod Save America” to my friends. I don’t any longer, mainly because I cannot stand the intense negativity of the reactions to the news. The world hasn’t ended, and probably won’t for the next few years. Until then, our priorities should be to more immediate tasks rather than get outraged about every latest tweet or headline.

Perhaps the best thing that has happened over the last few weeks is that I’ve found myself getting inured to the news.
Nick Heath, Hacking the Nazis: The secret story of the women who broke Hitler’s codes, in TechRepublic, 26 March 2015. [Online]: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-women-who-helped-crack-nazi-codes-at-bletchley-park

Something cheerful to end the list. This is a fascinating read on how codebreakers cracked the Enigma code, on the utter secrecy they lived in, and about Tommy Flowers, the unacknowledged British Postal Worker who developed a key piece of hardware – the shift register – that enabled the first electromechanical computers to run. What’s fascinating is that the women who worked on the very first computer and helped the Allied forces win the war went on to their very ordinary lives, sometimes not touching another computer until the present decade.

This is a longish read, but worth your time.

An Introduction to CTest

2017-06-22T12:28:00.000-04:00

I've seen a lot of people (I'm looking at you Daniel Lemire) praise newer languages like Go, which makes me sad as a C++ programmer. Well, that's until I realise that most of the features touted could be easily incorporated in C++ with just a bit of elbow grease. In this post, I'll show how to add an automated testing system using CTest.

I love CMake, it allows me to write cross-platform code and be confident that the build system would work across a choice of compilers, IDEs, and operating systems. When writing large projects, however, it is imperative to have a series of tests that could indicate regression bugs whenever new features are added. While I love the testing support built into languages such as Java, writing tests is not all that hard in C++ either. For example, I could simply write a function that mimics a unit test and prints out either "Test passed" or "Test failed" depending on the result of the test. All I now need is a way to automatically run these tests.

This is where CTest comes into the picture. I'm assuming here that you are using CMake as your build system. If you are not, then you are clearly wrong, a terrible person, and the type who would probably not write tests anyway. So stop reading this post. 😄

Okay, back from that little digression.

My setup for testing is thus: I am building a library that defines all the required functions. Each class/function/API must be tested, so I write tests for each of these. The tests are written so that they would indicate success using the keyword "Test passed" or failure using the keyword "Test failed". I put all the tests in a separate tests folder. Within the tests folder, I write my CMakeLists.txt thus.

set(EXECUTABLE_OUTPUT_PATH ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/tests)
set(CTEST_BINARY_DIRECTORY ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/tests)

file(GLOB files "test_*.cc")

foreach(file ${files})
    string(REGEX REPLACE "(^.*/|\\.[^.]*$)" "" file_without_ext ${file})
    add_executable(${file_without_ext} ${file})
    target_link_libraries(${file_without_ext} ${PROJECT_LIBS})
    add_test(${file_without_ext} ${file_without_ext})
    set_tests_properties(${file_without_ext}
        PROPERTIES
        PASS_REGULAR_EXPRESSION "Test passed")
    set_tests_properties(${file_without_ext}
        PROPERTIES
        FAIL_REGULAR_EXPRESSION "(Exception|Test failed)")
    set_tests_properties(${file_without_ext}
        PROPERTIES
        TIMEOUT 120)
endforeach()

This is a really simple script. It loops over all files in the tests folder that match the pattern test_*.cc, i.e. C++ files that start with the test_ prefix. It generates the executable name by stripping out all the leading directories until the path, while also stripping out the extension for the file. It compiles the file and links it against the project libraries. Finally, it tells CMake/CTest that the compiled binary is a test which on passing would have in its output the text "Test passed", and on failure could have the text "Test failed" or "Exception". Finally, I add a timeout of 120 seconds, or two minutes. If the test runs longer than this time, it will be automatically terminated and marked as a failure. This is not ideal -- some of my tests run for just seconds, while the longest test could run for just under a minute. However, the purpose of the timeout here is not to detect performance bugs, rather to prevent the machine running the tests from fritzing out because of a bug that results in the tests doing something really crazy.

Oh, and in order to enable testing, I simply change the CMakeLists.txt on the very top level of the project (the one that defines project name, version, etc.) to include this one extra line.

include(CTest)

Simple, isn't it? Now why would you go running to Go (see what I did there? 😄), when C++ with CMake offers cross platform builds, testing infrastructure, and parallel execution with memory consistency models?

In the next posts on the series, I might just describe how to test for memory leaks using Valgrind/MemCheck or how to test test-coverage (alliteration FTW) using gcov. Stay tuned.

An introduction to Vim macros

2017-06-08T10:51:00.001-04:00

Vim is my favourite text editor, because it is minimalist while also being insanely configurable. While I may describe my ideal Vim setup sometime in the future, I do want to share some tips and tricks that make Vim so damn efficient for certain tasks. Today, I shall focus on macros.

Here’s the key idea to keep in mind when discussing about Vim. Vim is not just an editor, it is a text manipulation program. Inserting text is just one of the many tasks that Vim can accomplish. A macro is a small Vim program that the user can record in order to make text editing more efficient.

Consider a simple use case. Let’s say that I have a CSV file that looks like this

New York,NY,USA
Seattle,WA,USA
Mumbai,MH,India

Let’s say that I want to add another column at the beginning of each line that is sequentially numbered, like so

1,New York,NY,USA
2,Seattle,WA,USA
3,Mumbai,MH,India

I could go down each line and manually add each column, but there’s a better way. The solution is to program a Vim macro that does the following tasks in order.

Assuming that the first column of a certain line is the required number for this line (row), we copy the first column to the next line.
Increment the line number by one so that it is one more than the previous line (row).

So, I edit the first line, in order to manually add the new column to the first line.

1,New York,NY,USA
Seattle,WA,USA
Mumbai,MH,India

Next, I ensure that I’m not executing any Vim command. I can verify this by pressing ESC a couple of times. Then I press q followed by a letter to identify this macro, e.g.: a. The macro then consists of the following keystrokes

0: Move to the beginning of the line.
v: Visual mode.
/,: Find the first , to match.
y: Yank (copy) the highlighted text.
j0: Go to the beginning of the next line.
P: Paste the copied text. At this point, the cursor should be on the ,.
h: Move the cursor one position to the left so that it is on the last digit of the number.
Ctrla: Increment the number.
q: Stop recording the macro.

Now, pressing @a would perform the nine steps outlined with just two key-presses. Let’s say the file had 50 more lines to be edited. In this case, I could use another powerful trick that Vim offers – the ability to repeat a command multiple times. So, ensure that I’m out of executing any command, I could type in a number followed by a command that would execute the specified command a certain number of times. So, pressing 50@a would execute the macro a fifty times, which is an insanely powerful technique for modifying multiple lines with a single command.

That’s all for Vim macros for today. I hope you found this post useful. Macros were one of the things I learnt relatively late as a Vim user, but now that I do know about this trick, I use it all the time, and it has saved me countless hours and a lot of headache when modifying code or text. Until the next time, when I take some time to write some more about cool Vim tricks and tips.

Reading List, May 2017

2017-05-31T09:52:00.000-04:00

Sam Machkovech, Facebook helped advertisers target teens who feel ‘worthless’, in Ars Technica, 30 April 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/05/facebook-helped-advertisers-target-teens-who-feel-worthless/

No surprises here, a quick discriminative filter could show who was depressed vs not, perhaps using something as simple as Naïve Bayes would probably work.

Then I read that Facebook sells this data to advertisers instead of getting depressed teens some help. Eff you Facebook!

Just last month, I wrote ‘STOP USING FACEBOOK SERVICES’. That advice still holds.
Matt Inman, You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you, in The Oatmeal, 2 May 2017. [Online]: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

An interesting read about the backfire effect.
Mike Masnick, Don’t get fooled: The plan is to kill net neutrality while pretending that it’s being saved, in Techdirt, 3 May 2017. [Online]: https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/20170502/17212137292/dont-get-fooled-plan-is-to-kill-net-neutrality-while-pretending-being-protected.shtml

This article lays bare the plan by the self-serving ‘lawmakers’ in Congress and the broadband providers. The plan outlined here consists of three steps:
1. Force outrage by arbitrarily pretending to change rules around net neutrality. This will be struck down by courts, but will cause public outrage and enable congressmen to make money off broadband companies.
2. Congressmen pretend to write a law that would tick many of the boxes, such as no zero rated traffic and the like that are from yesterday’s net neutrality debate. These bills will actually be written by broadband companies and will outlaw things that the broadband companies have already circumvented. In other words, the law, if passed, won’t accomplish anything.
3. Leverage the controversy to push for a congressional rescue.
The Onion, Nation’s back alleys working to expand available services in anticipation of Trumpcare bill becoming law, in The Onion, 4 May 2017. [Online]: http://www.theonion.com/article/nations-back-alleys-working-expand-available-servi-55928

Net neutrality is not the only thing Republicans want to gut. They also probably want to make it impossible for people to live, which is why they want no restrictions on guns, and all sorts of restrictions on people getting healthcare. In times like these, satire can strike a chord, which is why this article makes it to my list.
Dan Goodin, More Android phones than ever are covertly listening for inaudible sounds in ads, in Ars Technica, 5 May 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/05/theres-a-spike-in-android-apps-that-covertly-listen-for-inaudible-sounds-in-ads/

If there’s any doubt that 2017 is the new 1984, read this article. As if not content with using accelerometer, GPS, gyroscope, magnetometer data, along with an always-logged-in account system that exists on mobile phones, advertisers and app developers are now finding ways of tracking people using covertly hidden sounds beyond the human auditory spectrum in TV advertisements and using microphones on mobile phones to detect these hidden audio to further infiltrate user privacy.

This is a scary thing, because the only fool-proof solution is to stop using smartphones altogether, and I’m not sure that I’ll be comfortable with that tradeoff. While there are solutions that mitigate these issues somewhat, for example, fine-grained app permissions on Android Marshmallow and higher, we must always be careful to only give apps enough permissions that they need, no more. At the same time, an app like Blackberry DTEK can show if apps access sensitive parts of your phone, such as your camera, microphone, or GPS. Detect an app accessing something when it is not active? It goes right into the trash.
Dong Huk Park, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Zeynep Akata, Bernt Schiele, Trevor Darrell, Marcus Rohrbach, Attentive explanations: Justifying decisions and pointing to the evidence, in ArXiv, 14 December 2016. [Online]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.04757

As much as we rely on deep neural networks for everything, we don’t really understand how they work in that we do not have a mathematical model or guarantee on their performance. Essentially, we just throw in a lot of labelled data at these networks and pray to the neurotic gods that the network learns the correct data, and does not label gorillas.

This work attempts to provide some justifications that would explain how the neural network reached a decision. However, this works only for images, and does not give an insight into what the learned parameters represent, so that’s still a relatively open question. I still need to analyse this properly so that I can tell how this work differs from this other ArXiv paper by Google that uses neural networks to create image captions.
Maria Wirth, Are Christian and Muslim nations OK and Hindu nations not?, in Maria Wirth’s Blog, 21 April 2017. [Online]: https://mariawirthblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/are-christian-and-muslim-nations-ok-and-hindu-nations-not/

I have often shared articles about the Indian media’s bias against the BJP and what I think are their really dangerous tendencies to rake up communal hatred where none should exist. I came across this article through Shashi Tharoor’s twitter feed. Otherwise, I would have probably skipped right past this article.

This article is written as a devil’s advocate. I don’t think for a moment that Maria Wirth is actually advocating for a Hindu Rashtra. As a devil’s advocate, Wirth makes a very interesting argument – the media, both Indian and international, is willing to vilify the concept of a Hindu Rashtra while at the same time, holding the duplicitous position of implicitly accepting the existence of Christian and Muslim states.

Wirth lays out the differences between being a ‘Hindu’ compared against other organised religions. She correctly points out that the term ‘Hindu’ itself means a person living in the geographic expanse that is mostly India. She lists out the better qualities of our Dharma, things that I learnt only too late in my life because all I heard as a child were negative things about religion. Correctly, she says that there is nothing wrong about children learning these aspects of Dharma.

However, this is where I stop agreeing with her. Beyond this point, her article reads like propaganda, which will simply not do. Dharma based on open debate and introspection does not have to be defended by dogma. In fact, by believing in the infallibility of the teachings of Dharma so far, we would be doing a disservice to the very idea, the very essence of what makes Dharma different from religion. It is one thing to study the Vedas for their philosophy or to gain a historical perspective, it is quite another to stretch the Vedas to be scientific texts to be taken literally after thousands of years of new discoveries. It is one thing to be proud of our Dharma and our heritage, it is another to be arrogant and believe that the attack by the media is a giant conspiracy because they are afraid of what we could achieve if we only embraced our identity. It is one thing to claim that children should learn aspects of Dharma, another to claim that they be taught this at schools. (While we are on the subject, why does the media not raise any objections to Christian missionary schools where students pray every day to ‘Jesus Christ our Lord’? I know, I was educated for most of my school life at a school affiliated with a Church.) Such thoughts are better suited to a dogmatic religion, not to one which is founded on debate, by acknowledging the position of your peers and by proposing your own position and letting people think for themselves which they believe.

I have only recently (for less than half my life) learnt enough about my Dharma to accept my heritage instead of hiding behind the ‘atheist’ branding, realising that I could be both, a Hindu who follows the path of Dharma and an atheist. I still have a lot to learn and my thoughts on this subject will probably change.
Eric Umansky, How we’re learning to do journalism differently in the age of Trump, in ProPublica, 8 May 2017. [Online]: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-were-learning-to-do-journalism-differently-in-the-age-of-trump

It is no secret that journalism is facing a monumental challenge in the form of an administration that denies objective reality. In such times, a few good men are trying to figure out a new strategy for journalists that would work in the face of misinformation, in the face of propaganda, all while retaining their credibility while they are being vilified by the administration.

In this article, ProPublica shares how they’ve changed, worrying less about working on different stories than other publications and focussing more on collaborations with these same publications. About doing journalism in the open so that readers can verify facts for themselves, and maybe even contribute insights that a small team of reporters could not possibly uncover in the fast paced fact-checking world. Finally, being okay with the uncertainty of where a particular story may lead.

In my opinion, these are just good practices of any investigative field, with or without Trump. In fact, the same principles would apply even if we were to consider academic research. Collaborate with other researchers, verify their results, put your own data out in the open, and don’t be afraid of publishing negative results.
Peter Eckersley and Erika Portnoy, Intel’s Management Engine is a security hazard, and users need a way to disable it, in Electronic Frontier Foundation, 8 May 2017. [Online]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/intels-management-engine-security-hazard-and-users-need-way-disable-it

Since 2008, all Intel processors have a super secret and off-limits component called the Management Engine (ME), which is always on and has ‘root’ access to every computer component. The ME can totally override what a user wants to do, including powering on a computer upon receiving a packet over ethernet.

The problem with the ME is that it provides security through obscurity. No one outside of Intel knows the code running on this tiny computer, but it will take only one hacker to breach this secrecy and publish their findings before all computers running these processors are broken. Already, some vulnerabilities have been discovered in one module of the ME, the Active Management (AMT). In any case, all computer software may have bugs and vulnerabilities, so I don’t feel comfortable knowing that my laptop may be a ticking time bomb until the next vulnerability has been found.

This article does list a set of suggestions for Intel to fix this mess, but I can guarantee that Intel will do exactly none of them.
Russ Cox, Zip files all the way down, in research!rsc, 18 March 2010. [Online]: https://research.swtch.com/zip

This is an interesting read on how to write self-reproducing programs, and takes this concept a step further by producing zipped files that contain themselves. The ultimate in recursion, or just send this file to a ‘friend’ and have fun watching them trying to unzip the file.
Brad Smith, The need for urgent collective action to keep people safe online: Lessons from last week’s cyberattack, in Microsoft On the Issues, 14 May 2017. [Online]: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/05/14/need-urgent-collective-action-keep-people-safe-online-lessons-last-weeks-cyberattack/

Microsoft finally buckles after the latest WannaCrypt attack and calls out the NSA and the US government for stockpiling vulnerabilities that eventually make it to the public domain where they are weaponised.

Finally, this attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem. This is an emerging pattern in 2017. We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world. Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage. An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen. And this most recent attack represents a completely unintended but disconcerting link between the two most serious forms of cybersecurity threats in the world today nation-state action and organized criminal action.

I disagree somewhat with this analogy. Tomahawk missiles stolen still have a finite number. It is as if the criminals have stolen the replicator recipes for the Tomahawk missiles that allows them to create new Tomahawks for zero cost to replenish the ones they used up. Essentially, there is no physical world counterpart to code yet. Code can be replicated for zero cost, whereas it always takes resources to make something in the physical world. This is another reason why it gets so hard for laypeople to understand code and the implications associated with it.
Catalin Cimpanu, Keylogger found in audio driver of HP laptops, in Bleeping Computer, 11 May 2017. [Online]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/keylogger-found-in-audio-driver-of-hp-laptops/

This is a weird story. Apparently, HP laptops ship with a default driver that starts a program upon startup to log all keystrokes to a file. Ostensibly, this is to detect the user pressing volume buttons, if so, this is a terribly shitty scheme. The system logs all keystrokes to C:\Users\Public\MicTray.log which could be read by any other application, so if you have an HP laptop, all your passwords may already be compromised.
Richard Brody, The earthquake that will destroy the Pacific Northwest, in The New Yorker, 20 July 2015. [Online]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

The Pacific Northwest, including the states of Oregon and Washington sit on top of a subduction zone, i.e. a zone where an oceanic plate is being pushed under a continental plate. In this subduction zone, however, the continental plate is being compressed and pushed inland and upwards like a spring, and it is only a matter of time before it gives way and causes what would be the most devastating earthquake in modern times. The resulting tsunami and other disasters will only compound the problem, as most of the region is not prepared to handle such a disaster, given that it was unknown until the late nineteen-eighties.

This article is a fascinating read, as it shows us the cost of our arrogance and ignorance, that our lives are insignificantly tiny compared to the life of our planet, and is an important warning to reconsider how we handle scenarios that could result many lifetimes from now from decisions made today.

Thanks to KK Yu for recommending this article.
Wired Staff, The Pope’s memo on climate change is a mind-blower, in Wired, 18 June 2015. [Online]: https://www.wired.com/2015/06/popes-memo-climate-change-mind-blower/

The “best” bits out of the Pope’s encyclical on climate change.
Anonymous Academic, Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books that nobody can buy, in The Guardian, 4 September 2015. [Online]: https://theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/sep/04/academics-are-being-hoodwinked-into-writing-books-nobody-can-buy

There is an issue with science right now, and no, it is not that some scientists disagree on whether climate change is real. This has to to with the fact that academics now have to chase publications, either papers or books in order to show a successful career and get grants to do more research. This article lays out one such problem. Academics are being asked to write books because it appears good on their CV. These books are never circulated, except to around 300 or so libraries, where they are almost never read, only in expensive hardback format. The only person making a profit here is the publishing house, to the tune of $1–2 million a year from each editor, who may be assigned around 75 such books. I get sick just thinking of the time wasted writing a book that no one will ever read when it could have been spent doing something better, like reading articles on The Guardian.
Sara Lautman, The world is running out of sand, in The New Yorker, 29 May 2017. [Online]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-world-is-running-out-of-sand

An interesting read about something we take for granted. This article is a super-geeky explanation of what sand is, and why it is so hard to get good quality sand.
Karl Bode, Congress busted using cable lobbyist talking points in attacks on net neutrality, in Techdirt, 26 May 2017. [Online]: https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/20170524/06502737444/congress-busted-using-cable-lobbyist-talking-points-attacks-net-neutrality.shtml

I always felt that the USA has legalised corruption by calling it “lobbying”. This article simply serves to further the point. Lobbyists from the cable companies that are responsible for the atrociously shitty internet that we all “enjoy” have written a set of talking points that the tech-illiterate congressmen simply repeat like ex-parrots. What’s also mindblowing is the doublethink that allowing cable companies to exploit consumers is somehow good for consumers.

Anyway, this article describes how the metadata in the PDF of talking points circulated to all GOP congressmen clearly shows that the memo was written by a lobbyist.
Megan Rose, Kafka in Vegas, in ProPublica, 26 May 2017. [Online]: https://www.propublica.org/article/alford-pleas-fred-steese-conviction-without-admitting-guilt

This is yet another article on the corruption within the US government. This article covers the story of a person who was wrongly convicted for a murder based on behaviour that may be considered as prosecutorial misconduct as prosecutors hid evidence from the defence attorneys that may have exonerated this innocent man. Twenty years later, after many appeals, the person was finally found innocent. Yet the messed up criminal justice system in the USA would still keep this person behind bars until he pled “guilty” for a crime for which the court had already declared that he was innocent!

This is the problem with a system that puts in too much power in prosecutors, and the problem with a jury based system in general. You’re a person who has been called for jury duty against your will. Would you really pay attention to the trial and poke holes in the government’s arguments, or would you just believe the government? Would you sentence a person to death just because the government told you that he was a “bad dude”?

Oh, and the prosecutor with a history of shady practices who initially put this innocent man in prison for two life terms? He is now a judge, no consequences. In fact, his “tough-on-crime” rhetoric may have been instrumental in his “success”.
Corey Alexander, I’m 17 and I deleted all my social media. Here’s what happened, in Medium, 29 April 2017. [Online]: https://medium.com/@coreyalex/what-ive-learnt-as-a-17-year-old-who-deleted-all-social-media-d282274d4edd

I’m almost off Facebook, but this teenager has done what I have been unable to do. Get completely off social media. This is an interesting article, so do spend some time reading it.

Reading List, April 2017

2017-04-30T15:57:00.000-04:00

Adam Carroll, When money isn’t real: The $10,000 experiment, in TEDxLondonBusinessSchool, 9 July 2015. [Online]: https://youtu.be/_VB39Jo8mAQ

Adam Carroll presents an interesting point – we have abstracted away money through the use of a number of instruments, such as credit and debit cards, NFC payment systems on our phones, and in-app purchases, when we don’t realise how much we are actually spending. Carroll spends some time showing how his kids, aged 7–11 played monopoly differently when they were playing with real money. He goes on to lay his premise, that financial literacy must be taught to children at a young age, when they should be allowed to fail and learn from their failures at a small scale, not at the hundreds of thousands of dollars when they are in student loan debt and just out of college.

Carroll’s talk hit a lot of notes with my own experiences with money, and I’m sure that it would resonate with your experiences as well.
Brett Scott, If plastic replaces cash, much that is good will be lost, in Aeon Essays, 01 March 2017. [Online]: https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is-good-will-be-lost

Found this gem through Nishant’s monthly log. I think it ties in nicely with the above video. In this article, the author argues that cash is good because it is free of control of the banks, that the people who use cash most are the poor, those who don’t necessarily have access to bank accounts. The author also lays out the conglomerates that push for a cashless society, and rightly points out that these are the banks and the payment processing firms such as Visa and Mastercard. The author, therefore, notes that cash transactions should, by corollary, be called bankless transactions.

In terms of the recent demonetisation fiasco in India, I think that this article deserves a place on my list of share-worthy articles.
Chantal Panozzo, 7 ways living in Switzerland ruined America for me, in Vox.com, 21 July 2015. [Online]: http://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/8974435/switzerland-work-life-balance

Now that I’m nearly done with student life (I hope), I am also starting to care about real life. This article makes an excellent case for working in Europe, where people are more productive, work less hours, and have a life outside work.
David Kravets, Uber said to use “sophisticated” software to defraud drivers, passengers, in Ars Technica, 6 April 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/uber-said-to-use-sophisticated-software-to-defraud-drivers-passengers/

The skeletons keep coming out of the closet for Uber, and it feels as though this is one hell of an unethical company. According to the claims in this suit, Uber presents the passenger with a higher upfront fare, the driver with a lower fare, and Uber keeps the difference. After software to prevent regulators from hailing Ubers, after gazillions of sexual harrassment allegations, and a video where the CEO refuses to acknowledge that he screwed his drivers over when confronted, this.
JP Mangalindan, Facebook Messenger now analyzes your chats to give you recommendations, in Yahoo Finance, 6 April 2017. [Online]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-messenger-now-analyzes-chats-give-recommendations-165930240.html

Seriously, STOP USING FACEBOOK SERVICES! Switch to something that offers real encryption with a zero-knowledge algorithm. Use Signal, an application developed by Moxie Marlinspike’s Open Whisper Systems. Signal uses OTR encryption, which offers forward secrecy and deniable authentication. Open Whisper Systems does not keep any logs, except your phone number, which is also your user identification on the system. Signal supports text, voice, and video calling, so it should be the only app that you use.

WhatsApp uses encryption code from signal, which is why WhatsApp also supports encrypted text, voice, and video conversations. However, one must remember that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, so I hesitate to recommend it on a matter of principle.
Jack Laidlaw, IOT startup bricks customer’s garage door intentionally, in HackADay, 6 April 2017. [Online]: http://hackaday.com/2017/04/05/iot-startup-bricks-customers-garage-door-intentionally/

IOT is a mess, even when companies play nice. IOT devices are security black holes, often using insecure passwords across all devices. The scariest part about these devices is that they interact with the real world where they can cause real harm. Morphine pumps used in hospitals can be hacked over WiFi to deliver lethal doses of morphine, IOT thermostats can be hacked to freeze the occupants of a house to death, smart meters can be hacked to short circuit and blow up.

Of course, there’s the other part of the story, where companies play dirty. If the company that sold you your dumb, mercury switch thermostat shut down, then you can continue using your thermostat until it physically fails, which, knowing how simple mercury switch thermostats are, will probably be never. On the other hand, your fancy IOT thermostat company could shut down tomorrow, taking down all its servers and leaving you with a non-functioning thermostat that would probably freeze you to death. Or a company could play really dirty, and lock you out of your device simply for being critical in an Amazon review.

While you’re here, enjoy this little joke that I read on the internet.

Good morning sir, do you own a refrigerator? Yes? Well, you’re under arrest, your refrigerator is attacking Germany.
D. Victoria Baranetsky, Encryption and the Press Clause, in NYU Journal of intellectual property and entertainment law (JIPEL), Vol. 6, No. 2, 3 April 2017. [Online]: http://jipel.law.nyu.edu/vol-6-no-2-1-baranetsky/

In this article, the author argues that while the Crypto Wars of the ’90s focussed on the free speech aspect of the first amendment, now, there’s a case to be made for encryption as being essential to the freedom of the press, or the Press Clause of the first amendment. Under ubiquitous surveillance, the author argues that encryption is essential for people to be able to communicate their ideas freely, and ties it in with Justice Scalia’s interpretation of the clause in Citizens United, wherein the Justice interpreted freedom of the press as a right of all citizens to communicate with one another.

The encryption wars will take place with the usual amount of FUD on the part of the government. I just want to point out: encryption is maths, and banning encryption won’t do any good, because anyone is free to do maths on their own. It’s not a genie out of the bottle game either, it’s not as if we would be better off had the government won the first crypto wars. Without encryption, we would not have been able to successfully conduct online transactions, we would not even be able to trust that our emails are not read, or be able to communicate in any way over the internet without fear of our information being compromised, not by the government, but by malicious entities.
Lena Groeger, When the designer shows up in the design, in ProPublica, 4 April 2017. [Online]: https://www.propublica.org/article/when-the-designer-shows-up-in-the-design

This is an interesting article on the visualisation of data and how it affects our perceptions. It shows interesting examples on how the right data visualisation may have far-reaching effects in the real world in terms of displaying an actual problem, or, on the other hand, as importantly, not showing a problem where one does not exist.
Holly B. Shakya and Nicholas A. Christakis, Association of Facebook Use With Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study, in American Journal of Epidemiology, 01 February 2017. [Online]: https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kww189

In this paper, the authors point out a correlation between mental health and Facebook use. I must point out that I do not really understand all the statistics presented in the paper. However, what is interesting is that a 1 standard deviation increase in Facebook activity was linked to a 5%–8% standard deviation decrease in mental health. Now, it is important to note that this study uses self-reported statistics, so it could mean many things. It could mean that depressed people seek company on Facebook, just as they would seek their friends in real life, or it could mean that using Facebook causes depression. It could also mean that using Facebook makes people lower their own estimation of their mental health, or it could mean that people who perceive their mental health to be lower spend more time on Facebook.

Some of the statistics are interesting. For instance, the mean interaction with Facebook is much lower than the standard deviation, which seems to indicate a highly skewed distribution, i.e. a small number of people probably over-use Facebook. At the same time, a 1 SD increase in Facebook activity would indicate updating your status 12 times more a month, or clicking on 50 more links in a month. This study correlates that with indicating your own mental health at 0.05 less on a scale of 1–4, so I really wonder if the results are significant?

Anyway, this article corroborates my own views on Facebook, so I shall treat this article as Gospel truth, the best kind of truth.
Jeffrey P. Bezos, 2016 letter to shareholders, 12 April 2016. [Online]: https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t

I think Amazon is one of the most innovative tech companies right now, more than Google, Facebook, Tesla, or SpaceX. There’s a reason for this. Amazon works like a very large number of startups – each team is a startup working within the organisation. This letter simply lays this out in much nicer language. Bezos says that there is no ‘Day 2’ in Amazon, only ‘Day 1’, that no one should get comfortable with what they are doing.

There are other interesting parts in the letter as well, such as an obsessive consumer focus that goes beyond statistics and surveys, beyond processes and protocols. A number of people are pointing to this part especially after the United Airlines fiasco. But that’s a short term thingy. I’m sure that a year from now, the takeaway from this letter would be the ‘there is no Day 2’ philosophy. Something I try to remind myself of every day – stay uncomfortable, stay innovative, keep learning.
Joost Mollen, Pirate Bay founder: ‘I have given up’, in Motherboard, Vice, 11 December 2015. [Online]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pirate-bay-founder-peter-sunde-i-have-given-up

This is an interesting interview with Peter Sunde, the founder of Pirate Bay, talking about the sorry state of the internet. Relevant now that we have simply shrugged off the recent incorporation of DRMs in the W3C standards.

Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It’s terrible, but people are happy and go like “it could be worse.” That is absolutely not the right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to Africa and poor countries, but they’re only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. And getting government grants to do that, because they do PR well.

Finland actually made internet access a human right a while back. That was a clever thing of Finland. But that’s like the only positive thing I have seen in any country anywhere in the world regarding the internet

We have become somehow the Black Knight from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. We have maybe half of our head left and we are still fighting, we still think we have a chance of winning this battle.
Aditi Roy, Nasir Memon, and Arun Ross, MasterPrint: Exploiting the vulnerability of partial fingerprint-based authentication systems, in IEEE Transactions on Forensics and Security, Issue 99, 6 April 2017. [Online]: https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2017.2691658

Fingerprint recognition systems on our devices are incredibly insecure, and all biometrics should be seen as convenience that reduces security. Biometrics are publicly known and non-revokable, so they make terrible passwords. In this paper, the authors exploit yet another vulnerability in how fingerprint recognition systems are implemented – most systems are perfectly happy with partial matches. Therefore, the authors propose a set of partial fingerprints that are generic enough to unlock a large number of devices that use partial fingerprints for matching. Of course, this work has not yet been tested on real devices, rather has been done by matching already captured fingerprint images using software on a standalone computer. It is conceivable that such an attack may not yet be feasible on real devices due to some additional properties of their sensors or software. It is only a matter of time, however, that further vulnerabilities can be exploited to break fingerprint locks.
Dan Goodin, Smart TV hack embeds attack code into broadcast signal–no access needed, in Ars Technica, 31 March 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/smart-tv-hack-embeds-attack-code-into-broadcast-signal-no-access-required/

This is an impressive hack. It embeds command signals that exploit vulnerabilities in a web browser running on fully-patched Samsung Smart TVs to launch an escalation-of-privilege attack on the TV and get root. What’s scary about this attack is that it can be done without any access to the TV, all it takes is a rogue TV transmitter which could probably be made with less than a thousand dollars in parts (computer + software defined radio). By including rogue commands that can target a number of vulnerabilities, not just one, the attacker could conceivably take control of all IoT TVs.

Yet another example of why I’m terrified of the IoT revolution.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA image shows Earth between the rings of Saturn, 20 April 2017. [Online]: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6822

This is an impressive image taken as Cassini starts its decaying orbits towards its grave on Saturn. This photograph of our world as a tiny dot within the rings of Saturn reminds me of the “pale blue dot” and Carl Sagan’s commentary.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there…
Finn Cohen, The day Prince’s guitar wept the loudest, in The New York Times, 28 April 2016. [Online]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/arts/music/prince-guitar-rock-hall-of-fame.html

You must listen to this performance of Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lyne and others playing ‘While my guitar gently weeps’ to celebrate George Harrison’s posthumous induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Then read the article about how the performance came together, and learn about the history of Prince’s epic guitar solo.

What strikes me most in these interviews is how much Prince was a ‘nice guy’, just enjoying the moment and the music.

And then that whole thing with the guitar going up in the air. I didn’t even see who caught it. I just saw it go up, and I was astonished that it didn’t come back down again. Everybody wonders where that guitar went, and I gotta tell you, I was on the stage, and I wonder where it went, too.

And when he tossed his instrument into the air at the very end of the song, it never appeared to land; it was almost as if Mr. Harrison had grabbed it himself in midair to signal, “That’s enough of that.”
Cathleen O’Grady, “Mindless eating”, or how to send an entire life of research into question, in Ars Technica, 24 April 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/the-peer-reviewed-saga-of-mindless-eating-mindless-research-is-bad-too/

The saga of Dr. Brian Wansink continues. I’m interested in this saga and following it because it relates to Cornell University. Dr. Wansink has been a pop nutrition researcher, with many quotable ‘results’ that have been adapted into policy. The fact that over twenty years of research has been brought into question is disturbing.
Mike Issac, Uber’s C.E.O. plays with fire, in The New York Times, 23 April 2017. [Online]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html

Yet another Uber related post. And to think that earlier in the month, I wrote, ‘The skeletons keep coming out of the closet for Uber’, when talking about how the company Greyballed law enforcement. This talks about a number of unethical practices at Uber, including tracking people even when they had deleted the app from their phones, and using data from Unroll.me to collect people’s anonymised Lyft receipts to figure out Lyft’s financial status. There’s a lot to unpack in this article, I’ll attempt to summarise the above two points only.

Uber used a technique for fingerprinting iPhones. This could be done though using some data unique to the phone. Simple statistics include details such as the IMEI number and serial number, although one could go into more complicated statistics that would result from process variations within devices at the time of manufacture. I do not know the exact details of Uber’s operation, but it is conceivable that the system could use a combination of either of these details. Uber used these fingerprints to identify used or stolen phones that were being used to inflate rides in countries like China. The only thing that would prevent them from doing something like this was Apple’s policy towards apps on the App Store. In order to prevent Apple’s engineers from discovering this code, Uber installed a geofence around Apple headquarters, just like Volkswagen had installed cheat software to reduce emissions on an EPA test.

The second bit of news is even more disturbing. Unroll.me is a service that is supposed to enhance one’s privacy by unsubscribing from emails. The fact that their privacy policy allows them to sell data from our inboxes simply indicates that we must read the fine print. What’s also equally disturbing is that in these contracts, we don’t have any room to negotiate – it’s a take-it-or-leave-it contract. This is true of all the software we use, and may soon start affecting physical devices we buy as well, depending on how Impression Products v. Lexmark International is decided. Anyway, the bottom line is that we really should not trust online services to protect our data.
Xuodong Zheng, Phishing with unicode domains, 14 April 2017. [Online]: https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/

This is a scary as hell attack. It exploits Punycode, which is a way to generate unicode domains. The attack directs you to a unicode-encoded domain name that would look a lot like a regular domain, for example, аррӏе.com vs apple.com. The first one uses a Cyrillic ‘а’ while the second uses the ASCII ‘a’. The good thing is, most Firefox users can turn this off by setting network.IDN_show_punycode to true in about:config. This has also been patched in Google Chrome 58.
Lucasz Olejnik, Stealing sensitive browser data with W3C ambient light sensor API, 19 April 2017. [Online]: https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com/stealing-sensitive-browser-data-with-the-w3c-ambient-light-sensor-api/

Proof-of-concept attack that changes screen brightness and reads the resulting light levels from the ambient light sensor on a mobile phone in order to figure out stuff like whether or not a particular link was visited by the user, or to figure out how another website may appear to a user. Not overly scary at the moment, as extracting a string of a handful of characters takes 20+ seconds, so unless the user is a total doofus, should figure something is wrong and shut down the malicious website. On the other hand, this does show how exposing some API will almost certainly lead to that API being misused in a way that would harm our privacy or security.

Reading List, March 2017

2017-03-31T20:14:00.000-04:00

Richard Baguley, Origin of wireless security: The Marconi radio hack of 1903, in HackADay, 2 March 2017. [Online]: https://hackaday.com/2017/03/02/great-hacks-of-history-the-marconi-radio-hack-1903/

This is an interesting read that shows how the first “secure” radio transmission was hacked by a prankster. A fascinating story, but a relatively simple hack by today’s standard – a small transmitter very close to the receiver can hide the legitimate signal from a transmitter further away. The article does not touch upon how this is still an open challenge today, as most radio systems we use do not use any form of security. For instance, GPS signals can be spoofed using a pocket transmitter to perhaps move an aircraft off trajectory. ADS-B transmissions from aircraft are not encrypted, so one could easily use a transmitter to spoof actual air traffic control. Also see this DefCon20 talk for an interesting video on hacking ADS-B.
Bruce Schneier, Uber uses ubiquitous surveillance to identify and block regulators, in Schneier on Security, 6 March 2017. [Online]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/uber_uses_ubiqu.html

If this does not convince you that corporations have enough data to draw conclusions about your life, you are living with your head in the sand. This discusses a story that Uber “greyballed” regulators so as to prevent them from hailing Ubers and possibly issuing citations to drivers. Uber used a number of parameters to make an intelligent guess, based on how many times people opened up the app, whether or not they used cheaper phones, where they hailed Ubers, and credit card information.

When Edward Snowden exposed the fact that the NSA does this sort of thing, I commented that the technologies will eventually become cheap enough for corporations to do it. Now, it has.
Sebastian Anthony, IBM will sell 50-qubit universal quantum computer “in the next few years”, in Ars Technica, 6 March 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/03/ibm-q-50-qubit-quantum-computer/

It seems that quantum computing may finally be here. Seems like this may be a really bad time to be a conventional computer architect. :)
Daniel Lemire, College and inequality, in Daniel Lemire’s blog, 7 March 2017. [Online]: http://lemire.me/blog/2017/03/07/college-and-inequality/

I strongly believe that education, especially a college education is key to helping the workforce navigate the changing opportunities. The global market means that lesser skilled jobs will move to countries with lower wages and a greater supply of low-skill labour. In such a situation, the only way for the population in higher-income countries is to move to higher-skilled jobs. In this article, Lemire challenges my basic assumptions, that college is a level playing field for people from all strata. Lemire argues that college effectively favours the better off, in fact, perpetuates class differences. Facebook has a page chronicling the class struggles within Cornell. It is heartbreaking to realise how many students here struggle with food insecurity. To top it off, if they don’t complete school due to financial difficulties, they still have crushing college debt that would probably leave them worse off than if they had never joined Cornell.

That aside done, do read Lemire’s thoughts on the subject. Also, follow his blog, it is well worth the read.
Arnab Ray, Unbelievably believer, in Random thoughts of a demented mind, 8 March 2017. [Online]: https://greatbong.net/2017/03/08/unbelievably-believer/

I had no idea that Reza Aslan had his own show on CNN where he took a characteristically shallow look at “Hinduism” for his first episode. I know that Reza Aslan is fairly popular amongst the liberals, but I think that he is a pretentious git. It is nice to see Arnab give a fitting reply to what appears to be a poorly executed show.
Rachel Herrmann, Impostor Syndrome Is Definitely a Thing, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 November 2016. [Online]: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Impostor-Syndrome-Is/238418

I almost had a mental breakdown at least once during my graduate school experience to date. It’s hard to figure what qualifies as a breakdown and what doesn’t. This is one of the articles that tackles exactly one issue, and that is the feeling of not belonging to a place. In my opinion, however, the author really misses on making some substantial suggestions beyond the usual “go attend talks” and “work-life balance”. I could write a much longer post on why I think “work-life balance” is a bunch of baloney, but that’s for later. My reason for sharing this article is to provide anecdotal evidence towards my claim that “no one tells you that depression is part of the package when you apply to grad school”.
Christopher Hitchens, The Fanatic, Fraudulent Mother Teresa, in Slate, 20 October 2003. [Online]: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html

I remember when Mother Teresa passed away. I was only seven years old, and I remember flags at half-mast, and a day of mourning in India. That memory slipped off my radar soon afterwards, only to be questioned when the foundation left running in her legacy perpetrated a fraudulent story on how the reforms of the Indian government would hurt children and how they faked outrage and claimed the moral high ground because of reforms aimed at curbing corruption, favouritism, and child trafficking. The moral outrage prompted me to try and inform some of my friends, which led to long conversations on Facebook posts. Recently, this article popped up on my radar, which brings me back to the subject of Mother Teresa. It seems that she fits very well into standard category of a confidence person. In fact, she could have been an excellent politician to be reviled, but for the backing of the church. This article in Slate describes her in almost an Orwellian manner, just as described in “The Book”. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions from this article.
Samuel Vee, The new confessional is the porcelein throne, in Status 451, 8 March 2017. [Online]: https://status451.com/2017/03/08/the-new-confessional-is-the-porcelain-throne/

Samuel, in this article, lays out his premise that the new religion is one of moral outrage. Even as the world moves to a post-religious, secular order, the things that characterise organised religion – moral pulpits, public shaming, witch hunts – still remain. The article is explosive, and will almost certainly have you questioning your own beliefs.

It’s supremely bizarre when you think about it though. Muslims may pray to Mecca five times a day in devotion, but the committed progressive enters the confessional booth of Twitter and Facebook with every bathroom break, unaware, in search of penance and absolution.
Mark Wilson, Microsoft is disgustingly sneaky: Windows 10 isn’t an operating system, it’s an advertising platform, in betanews, 12 March 2017. [Online]: https://betanews.com/2017/03/12/disgustingly-sneaky-windows-10-ads/

Thanks to the Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL), I have now moved almost full time to Windows 10. I love OneNote, and WSL lets me do my programming tasks with minimum interruptions, which seems like a win-win. However, the ads in Windows are just unacceptable. There are ads in the lock screen, in the start menu, and now in the file explorer, which is annoying as hell. This article describes these issues, but really does not offer any solutions. Is there a solution? A boycott of Windows? Will I get OneNote like functionality on Linux?
Mike Masnick, Move Over, Series Of Tubes, The Internet Is Now A Bridge Over A Creek For A Dozen People?, in Techdirt, 13 March 2017. [Online]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170311/00533736893/move-over-series-tubes-internet-is-now-bridge-over-creek-dozen-people.shtml

This article takes on the “internet is a series of tubes” trope and talks about the equally bad “bridge over creek” analogy provided by Senator Ron Johnson. It then effectively takes apart this analogy replacing it with a more accurate analogy that argues for net neutrality.

But getting back to the net neutrality argument, Johnson’s statements are ludicrous. The “bridges” he’s discussing aren’t being built among neighbors. What’s happening is that the giant companies (AR&R from above) have already built the bridges, and are telling the neighbors that FedEx won’t be able to deliver to them any more in a convenient, timely or cost effective way… unless FedEx agrees to pay up (meaning that the community will have to pay more since the costs will be passed on). And, again, his claim that investment would go down under his analogy that has nothing to do with net neutrality is just… factually wrong because all of the big broadband providers are public companies where their capital expenditure data is public. And it shows that they’ve increased spending on their networks with the open internet rules, rather than the opposite.

The new administration in the United States is determined to take away civil liberties one at a time, death through a thousand paper cuts, as it were. At a time when fast internet access is a fundamental right in certain countries, it is extremely disheartening to see the country that virtually gave the world the network of connected computers that would one day become the internet as we know it, now trying to kill that very thing it spawned. In continuing our bad analogies, it would be like a parent nurturing their child until the child became someone big and important, and then one day unceremoniously killing that same child.
Robert J. Sawyer, WordStar: A writer’s word processor, 1990, reprinted in Ars Technica on 16 March 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/wordstar-a-writers-word-processor/

I almost exclusively use Vim for all of my typing. I find that it is really useful to have a minimal text-editor that focuses on the job at hand. This is a useful essay on similar lines reminding us of the simpler days when typing a document was about focussing on the actual typing itself, and not on anything else.

I’ve never used a DOS-based word processor. My first experiences with a word processor were with MS Word ’97, I believe. Over the years, I have come to eschew everything about word processors, instead going for a simple text-editor and a formatting/markup language such as Markdown or LaTeX.
Richard Cooke, Shooting the Red Arrows blind – Ep 3, in Richard Cooke Photography (YouTube channel), 27 February 2017. [Online]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZGwQv1FQOU

Technically, this is a video, not an article. However, I think it warrants inclusion in this list because it is cool, and this is my list – I make up the rules. I like this article because it shows the resourcefulness of photographers and pilots back in the days of film. Richard Cooke shoots the Red Arrows with a film camera mounted on the belly of a plane. The framing for the photographs was planned ahead of time, and the lead pilot in the formation had to ensure that his aeroplane was in the right position, as the photographer couldn’t see out of his viewfinder. The framing was done using white tape over a black lens. Thirty-six photographs, then the team had to land and change film. Makes me think that digital photography has really spoilt all of us. But I think that what makes this video great – the resourcefulness and perseverance of those involved – is still an inspiring message today.
Arnab Ray, The five stages of grief once again, in Random thoughts of a demented mind, 18 March 2017. [Online]: https://greatbong.net/2017/03/18/the-five-stages-of-grief-once-again/

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Indian media has a problem with Narendra Modi and the BJP.

However well known the electoral successes of the BJP, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the Indian liberal that the BJP is considered a rightful loser in any election.

Okay, I’m done plagiarising Jane Austen. However, the observations on the Indian media being hostile to Narendra Modi have been established over the past fifteen years. Arnab Ray in this wonderfully-written article describes the Indian media going through the five stages of grief.

In 2014, Modi’s victory was sought to be de-legitimized by calling into question the very nature of the Indian democratic “first-past-the-post” system, which these same people had been perfectly fine all these years. And now, Modi’s victory is being de-legitimized by providing a platform for and amplifying the fantastic theory of tampering of EVM machines, the same EVM machines that led to embarrassing losses for BJP in politically important states like Delhi and Bihar not so long ago.

Arnab’s closing remarks are wonderful, and the Indian media would do well to heed them. Perhaps the US media could also learn something here.

Trying to trivialize the enemy, or to blame the system of democracy or the people who inhabit it, is just not a winning strategy … They can, of course, keep trying to create media martyr heroes, from Kejriwal to Nitish Kumar to Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid, hoping that one of them will stick, and provide them platforms on their channels, their conclaves and thinkfests, and run campaigns like “intolerance” and “awaardwapsi”. The danger starts when they start to believe in their own messaging, or to quote Scarface “get high on your own supply”, because then they react to election results as a fan does when their team loses, as opposed to supposedly neutral arbiters and interpreters of facts.

Till the time they come to accept this, large sections of the media will continue to appear as they do nowangry, petulant, and partisan.

And what they should realize is that this only makes their dreaded and hated Modi look even stronger.

The parallels with the recent US election are obvious. A key difference is that Narendra Modi is a skilled politician with a proven track record of effective government and development while he was Chief Minister of Gujarat. His accomplishments as Prime Minister have been lacklustre, even from my fanboy perspective. Yet, the media has been terrible at providing any sort of balanced, truthful narrative that is so essential when the person is power is a borderline egomaniac with a fan following that would rather believe what he writes on twitter than objective reality.
Emily Dreyfuss, Silicon Valley would rather cure death than make life worth living, in Wired, 23 March 2017. [Online]: https://www.wired.com/2017/03/silicon-valley-rather-cure-death-make-life-worth-living/

This article touches upon one of the many things that Silicon Valley engineers get wrong, and emphasises, in my mind, the importance of an education not just in science and technology, but also how science and technology interact with society including the ethics of such interactions. While Silicon Valley is busy ‘disrupting’ various industries, including the one responsible for the circle of life, the author argues that what matters isn’t living forever, rather, living a meaningful life.
Eric S. Raymond, How to act like you’re bright, in Armed and Dangerous, 28 March 2017. [Online]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7451

ESR starts of with an episode of the Big Bang Theory, which used to be a funny show. He, however, takes issue with the acting, which has never been a strong point with the show. The characters portrayed are one-dimensional stereotypes of nerds, which is always funny for a general audience, but makes us nerds cringe. In this post, ESR lays out some tips on how actors should approach acting like bright people. While I don’t necessarily say that this is a comprehensive list, it does have some good tips.
Daniel Lemire, Never reason from averages, in Daniel Lemire’s Blog, 28 March 2017. [Online]: http://lemire.me/blog/2017/03/28/never-reason-from-averages/

In this blog, Lemire lays out the trouble with statistics, when averages don’t tell the whole story. He has an excellent example explaining why running after the shiniest new language is not a good idea for programmers, but I think this analysis should also extend in other fields. For instance, Elon Musk claims that the Tesla Autopilot is safer than a human driver because the Autopilot has driven more miles to a crash than the average human driver. Here’s the problem with the analysis. There has been only one Tesla crash, which makes the mean a useless statistic. What if the next accident happens at the very next mile? Moreover, statistics often do not account for other parameters that may need to be controlled. Takeaway, treat statistics with caution.

Cornell Graduate Students United: At What Cost?

2017-03-25T12:17:00.000-04:00

On Monday and Tuesday, we graduate students at Cornell will be voting on whether or not we want to unionise. Actually, scratch that, only graduate students who hold a TA, RA, or GRA appointment can unionise.

This is a shitty arrangement, and I will be voting against it.

For those of you who are not aware of how graduate school works at Cornell, you could be on one of many appointments.

Fellowship: A graduate student on a fellowship gets a stipend and tuition paid without associated teaching or research opportunities. Graduate students on a fellowship typically work towards their own theses, but will be excluded from the union
Graduate research assistantships: A GRA gives a graduate student stipend and tuition without teaching responsibilities. However, this money comes out of a specific project grant, and the students typically work on their own theses. Students on GRAs magically qualify to join the union, whereas there is virtually no difference between a GRA and a fellowship for the most part.
Research assistantships: An RA appointment provides stipend and tuition without teaching responsibilities, but with research responsibilities. Students on an RA appointment must work on projects that may not be their own theses. RAs qualify to form a union
Teaching assistantships: A TA appointment provides stipend and tuition with teaching responsibilities. TA appointments qualify to form a union.

This breakdown shows that the union organisation is already on tenuous ground, as students could move in and out of these various appointments on a semester-by-semester basis. Receiving and losing union protection every four months is like not receiving any protection at all. If the union truly believes that students are exploited by professors (which I must categorically state, I am not. I love my job, I love my lab, and I love my advisor), then they are leaving a gaping loophole wherein a professor could simply move a student out of one of the protected appointments to an unprotected appointment, then crap all over them.

But that’s not the primary reason I am opposed to the union. At every stage in campaigning for our votes, the union has been shifty and deceitful, sometimes resorting to outright lies that could be easily disproved. For instance, the union always brought up a case of a student in the department of chemical engineering who lost his appointment at a lab following an accident that allegedly left him unable to control his right hand for a couple of years. The union’s position was, well, if only there were a union to fight for workers’ compensation, that student would still be at Cornell. Here’s the lie – students on a GRA, RA, or TA are already protected by workers’ compensation. That particular student was on a fellowship, and this underscores my point about the shittiness of students receiving different protections for the same work based on an arbitrary status. In this student’s case, the union would have simply walked away with a ‘Not my problem’ statement.

Now, I am a fan of collective bargaining. I believe that we students may still get a lot done through collective bargaining, but the union in its current form is not the way to do so. For starters, the union will not cover all graduate students, and I abhor the idea of leaving some fellow students in virtually the same position as myself without the protections of collective bargaining simply based on a technicality. But this is ignoring the fact that Cornell has an organisation that could achieve collective bargaining for graduate students, the Graduate and Professional Students Assembly (GPSA), which has successfully managed to achieve many things in Cornell, such as negotiating our wages to be raised at 2% a year, above the current inflation rate of 1%. The last president, Elizabeth Garrett also increased graduate student salaries across the board, making RA and GRA salaries the same as TA salaries. Now, asking us to put $500–1000 towards union dues is stupid, considering that we make $30,000 a year before state and federal income taxes. What’s also crazy is that the union apparently will have a two-tiered structure, wherein we may be expected to pay more in order to have a vote (a voice) in the union. This is taxation without representation, and I will always vote against such an arrangement on a matter of principle.

Additionally, the union seems like a power grab by a bunch of sloppy students. The entire process was undemocratic to say the least, and seemed just like a page out of Catch-22. Sign the union authorisation card. Well, what am I signing up for? Come to our meetings and find out. Cool, how do I do that? You must sign the card to come to our meetings. The process was secret, with no voice from graduate students who may have been on the fence, and with further amendments to artificially inflate the voices of some students. Take, for instance, this amendment, which grants equal voice on the negotiating committee to students from the six jurisdictions, whereas the number of students in these jurisdictions are by no means the same.

Further, some of the provisions on the Cornell GSU constitution defy logic, and show that they were probably written by monkeys on typewriters. See, for instance, Section IV.A.A2, which states that any grievance against any member of the union will be shared across all members of the union. I do not see this as helpful. While transparency is good, it should be balanced with privacy. Publishing a list of grievances without verification of the claims is irresponsible, and promotes a lynch-mob mentality which will make the environment at Cornell a lot more hostile and toxic. I realise that I am not providing evidence to support this claim – the fact is that I am basing this off an existing incident which I do not wish to publicise, firstly, because I heard this account second-hand, and in order to protect the privacy of the persons that may have been involved.

Lastly, the process of getting rid of a dysfunctional union will be much, much harder than the process of voting one in. So, to my friends who say that they want to ‘try it out’, let me remind them that this is the equivalent of ‘trying out’ arson. You will probably get burned, and you’ll be leaving a whole future generation of graduate students with a mess that they’ll have to deal with for the entirety of their graduate student life.

To conclude, the union in its current form is a juvenile power grab without a stated objective, a mission, or a plan to achieve its objectives. Voting for the union is the equivalent of voting for Donald Trump, and I hope that my friends can now see how that’s working out for the USA. Do not, do not vote for the union. Vote against it, let them come up with something better instead of an empty promise for something better. We can always vote for a better union next year. But we cannot vote out a shitty union once it’s formed.

Reading List, February 2017

2017-02-28T20:49:00.000-05:00

Robert B. K. Dewar and Edmond Schonberg, Computer science education: Where are the software engineers of tomorrow, in CrossTalk, The Journal of Defense Software Engineering, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January 2008), pp. 28–30. [Online]: http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/702523/9242013/1288741087497/200801-Dewar.pdf?token=wupN4Gjh8%2F%2BKtRk%2FoDFv4ToxHDA%3D
For pitfalls of Java as a programming language.

Also, talks about how students today don’t know how to program, but rather put together pieces in order to get them to work. Can be linked to StackOverflow programming, or node.js programming.

It [Texas A&M] did [teach Java as the first language]. Then I started teaching C++ to the electrical engineers and when the EE students started to out-program the CS students, the CS department switched to C++.
Eric S. Raymond, Why python? [Online]: https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

For these quotes:

One course I did not consider was going back to C as a default language. The days when it made sense to do your own memory management in a new program are long over… For most other situations, accepting the debugging overhead of buffer overruns, pointer-aliasing problems, malloc/free memory leaks and all the other associated ills is just crazy on today’s machines. Far better to trade a few cycles and a few kilobytes of memory for the overhead of a scripting language’s memory manager and economize on far more valuable human time
Eric S. Raymond, Things every hacker once knew. [Online]: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/

A trip down nostalgia lane. There are some things here that I did not know, for instance, that ^L generates the ASCII code for FF and that it why it clears the screen; also the AT prefix in modems.
Eric S. Raymond, The lost art of C structure packing. [Online]: http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/

Aligning structs to save memory? Sure, I knew about this in the back of my mind, but I never would have thought to use this optimisation.

From when it was written at the beginning of 2014 until late 2016 this section ended with the last paragraph. During that period I’ve learned something rather reassuring from working with the source code for the reference implementation of NTP. It does packet analysis by reading packets off the wire directly into memory that the rest of the code sees as a struct, relying on the assumption of minimal self-aligned padding.

The interesting news is that NTP has apparently being getting away with this for decades across a very wide span of hardware, operating systems, and compilers, including not just Unixes but under Windows variants as well. This suggests that platforms with padding rules other than self-alignment are either nonexistent or confined to such specialized niches that they’re never either NTP servers or clients.
John Timmer, Making a different case for guns as a public health issue, in Ars Technica, 20 February 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/making-a-different-case-for-guns-as-a-public-health-issue/

This presents an important argument for the study of guns in relation to public health, with a focus on the risk of suicide. Interesting to note that the number of gun related suicides exceeds the number of all homicides put together. Other interesting information includes the correlation between gun laws and suicide rates across states.
Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, The internet of hackable things you don’t own, in Motherboard, 21 February 2017. [Online]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-internet-of-hackable-things-you-dont-own

Talks about the IoT revolution of devices that people do not own, and the implications. It covers most of the cases I already knew about, such as Keurig, Nest, John Deere, pacemakers, etc.
Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, Why are license “agreements” so uniformly terrible? in BoingBoing, 1 November 2016. [Online]: https://boingboing.net/2016/11/01/why-are-license-agreements.html

Talks about licence agreements and how they are broken.

Let’s start with their length. The current iTunes Terms and Conditions are over 19,000 words, translating into fifty-six pages of fine print, longer than Macbeth. Not to be outdone, PayPal’s terms weigh in at 36,000 words, besting Hamlet by a wide margin.

Assume the average user can read the 3,500-word Flash license in ten minutes—a generous assumption given the dense legalese in which it is written. If everyone who installed Flash in a single day read the license, it would require collectively over 1,500 years of human attention.

So when retailers and record labels tell you that the song you purchased is licensed, not sold, they mean two things—you don’t own the copyright in the song and you don’t own the file you downloaded.
Eric Berger, NASA’s longshot bet on a revolutionary rocket may be about to pay off, in Ars Technica, 22 February 2017. [Online]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/nasas-longshot-bet-on-a-revolutionary-rocket-may-be-about-to-pay-off/

A plasma based impulse engine that could reach Mars in less than forty days. This sounds really impressive, although there are some serious shortcomings in the reporting here. For starters, the reporter seems to suggest that the engine will not require any fuel because it runs on electricity. While this may technically be true, the engine actually uses up propellant which is not self-replenishing. Moreover, the propellant in question is a noble gas, which itself would be extremely hard to extract, compared to hydrogen which could be obtained by simple electrolysis of water.

I’m including this article on the list because it comes close to my dream of a Star Trek future.
David Epstein, When evidence says no, but doctors say yes, in ProPublica, 22 February 2017. [Online]: https://www.propublica.org/article/when-evidence-says-no-but-doctors-say-yes

Talks about the broken medical system in the US (no surprises here), wherein doctors prescribe unnecessary treatment that in most cases has no ill effects other than increasing medical bills, but in some cases could actually increase risk to the patient through complications, or by making them incompatible with a life-saving procedure that may be necessary in the future.

I guess the bottom line is this – do your own medical research before trusting your doctor if you are in the US. The political climate here tends to take control away from patients while providing the illusion of control.
Jonathan Stray, Defense against the dark arts: Networked propaganda and counter-propaganda, 24 February 2017. [Online]: http://jonathanstray.com/networked-propaganda-and-counter-propaganda

This is a rather well-written article on propaganda and how to counter it. A key insight here is that fact-checking rarely works in countering propaganda. Rather, the right way to counter propaganda is to come out first with a counter. Although not explicit, the article almost perfectly describes the present strategy of the White House.

The key tactic of alternative or provocative figures is to leverage the size and platform of their “not-audience” (i.e. their haters in the mainstream) to attract attention and build an actual audience. Let’s say 9 out of 10 people who hear something Milo says will find it repulsive and juvenile. Because of that response rate, it’s going to be hard for someone like Milo to market himself through traditional channels. His potential audience is too spread out, and doesn’t have that much in common. He can’t advertise, he can’t find them one by one. It’s just not going to scale.

But let’s say he can acquire massive amounts of negative publicity by pissing off people in the media? Well now all of a sudden someone is absorbing the cost of this inefficient form of marketing for him.
Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, Calling bullshit. [Online]: http://callingbullshit.org/

Apparently, this is a legit UW course (I checked the course roster in case this was some sort of trap) on providing students the necessary tools to detect bullshit. I haven’t read all the assigned readings, but the ones that I did read are most interesting. Do read the case studies as well. Trying to detect flaws in the logic there is a very interesting mental exercise.

This should tie in well with the previous link on propaganda.
John Graham-Cumming, Incident report on memory leak caused by Cloudflare parser bug, in Cloudflare blog, 23 February 2017. [Online]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-caused-by-cloudflare-parser-bug/

This is really scary stuff. Cloudflare is used by many many websites and ISPs for security reasons. Their HTML parser had a bug that would fail to detect buffer overflows, the oldest kind of bug in the world. As a result, an unknown amount of sensitive data got exposed to the world, which may have been cached by search engines and other web crawlers.

This is bad for many reasons. However, on reading the blog, it appears that authentication tokens, HTTP data, cookies got exposed. As a result, most websites have revoked authentication tokens. There’s a discrepancy in accounts of what got leaked. For instance, some people claim that full HTTPS session data is available, which includes passwords and the like. On the other hand, Cloudflare claims that private SSL keys weren’t compromised. I would welcome a primer on SSL that explains how the two statements are consistent.

The reporting on Cloudbleed has been so hazy, even amongst the “tech” websites, that I’m really embarrassed. As always, it indicates that much of computer security is fragile and could be easily broken with disastrous consequences. Even companies specialising in security are not immune.

Binge Watching 109 Hours of The West Wing

2017-01-29T16:57:00.000-05:00

The past week has seemed so unreal. For those of you reading this in the future when all history has been destroyed, let me fill you in. The United States of America elected into the office of the President an orangutan troll, and a bunch of truth-denying spineless gits into their Congress.

So the only thing that seems sane right now is to binge watch ‘The West Wing’, the amazing, uplifting Sorkin drama filled with good men, hope, and optimistic dialogue. ‘The West Wing’ ran from 1999–2006 on NBC, in the time when people were tired of Bill Clinton and elected into office George W. Bush, a president so wildly mocked that everyone thought that the US had hit rock bottom with its choice of president. Yet, like a battered woman who only can ever date abusive boyfriends, the US broke off its last healthy relationship and chose to get into a four year relationship with a bully.

The West Wing was a great show because it made politics – a field reviled so much that the US Congress now has a lower approval rating than gonorrhoea – look cool and fun. It achieved this by showing a small group of thoughtful, commited people changing the world, in a nod to Margaret Meade. This meant that people routinely went beyond party affiliations, beyond their own petty egos in an attempt to make the world better. For instance, when Sam and Toby offer a Republican congressman a number of standard Republican demands in exchange for his vote to sustain the President’s veto on repeal of the estate tax, he refuses the perks, yet votes to sustain the veto because the repeal of the estate tax made him ashamed to be a Republican. When a young Republican lawyer made Sam look like a fool on national TV, the President hired her because he admired her viewpoint. The same person, Ainsley Hayes, then turned Sam around on a policy in order to help small businesses, and Sam listened to what she had to say because she made a point.

The same theme also flows through in ‘Mr. Willis of Ohio’, an episode which throws the Constitution of the US out the window in terms of how members are elected to Congress, but still makes for great drama because Mr. Willis of Ohio enters into a room with no preconceived notions, listens to an argument, and votes his conscience at the end of the episode.

When the President’s daughter is kidnapped, the President invokes the 25^th amendment and transfers power to the Republican speaker of the house. While I must say that the Speaker did end up bombing a lot of countries in a nod to G. W. Bush, he did get the President’s daughter back, and walked away from the office with no regrets. ‘The nation’s best served by seeing only one President at a time.’ A Republican politician walked away from his seat in Congress to help a Democrat President. I don’t ever see this happening in the real world today.

When Senator Stackhouse filibusters a bill for improving healthcare benefit, it isn’t because he just wants to obstruct the President, but because he genuinely believes that the government should add another 47 million dollars to autism research. The President, instead of trying to push the bill, decides to help Sen. Stackhouse with his filibuster, reopen the bill, and add the additional funding. ‘Screw the print deadline.’

When the Ayatollah of Iran arranges to fly his son to the US for a life-saving surgery, the President refuses to use this as leverage for diplomacy against the Ayatollah. ‘Imagine a big red cross on the plane.’ When the only doctor available for the surgery is one whose parents had been tortured by the Ayatollah, the President convinces him to go ahead with the surgery, without threats, but by appealing to the doctor’s humanity.

Even the Presidential debates were substantive. I especially loved how President Bartlett shut down Gov. Ritchie, who was quite the caricature of a Republican back in the day, but appears almost reasonable by today’s standards. I loved how he explained that ‘unfunded mandate’ were two words, not one long word. I loved how this was the thing that sealed his re-election. I see the presidential debates today, and I see a smart, articulate woman with a history of service being voted out in favour of a person who cannot use words with more than three syllables, someone who has no idea of what he is talking, and delivers empty promises. The West Wing harks back to a time when people realised that they had to choose the smartest kid in class to be president, not one they could share a beer with. Seriously, what’s the craze Americans have with sharing a beer with someone? It appears that no one can be elected president in the US without putting disgusting things in his mouth, which makes me wonder how long until the US elects an adult-film actor for the role?

An extra-judicial killing by the President troubles him so much that he needs to see a psychiatrist for the resulting sleeping disorder. I may be an Obama fanboy, but I still never saw him lose sleep, or even blink as his administration green lit multiple extra-judicial executions of people using drones, so much so that children in Pakistan are now afraid of clear blue skies.

I could go on and on about The West Wing, and how it has become relevant today. That would require that I go over each episode, one by one. Luckily, Joshua Malina and Hrishikesh Hirway are doing just that. I would strongly recommend their podcast The West Wing Weekly, where they go through an episode each week, with lots of #TrumpAiYiYi over the past few weeks.

PS: Even though the title of this post suggests that I’m binge-watching, I would like to clarify to people, especially my parents and my boss, that I am not binge-watching anything right now; that simply makes for a better title.

De-addicting

2017-01-01T21:07:00.000-05:00

I’m on a process to break away from the distractions of social media, primarily Facebook, and spend the time to pursue other interests. This is an interesting experiment, and it has required significant dedication and effort on my part. At the end, though, I’m not certain if I’ll be successful.

I realised that I had a problem when Facebook became the most visited sites in my browser. I should have been working, not scrolling through Facebook like a, well, you know what Jerry Seinfeld has to say. I further noticed that I would tend to log on to Facebook every time I was stuck at work, so that my capacity to tackle problems was reduced to only those that involved cracking a walnut shell. Anything more complex, and I would procrastinate and end up on Facebook.

What I needed was a swift kick in the arse to get off Facebook and into the real world. It came through the means of my latest project which required all my attention. At this time, I logged out of Facebook from my work computer and focussed entirely on my work. The feeling was amazing, as I finally got stuff done. Then I noticed that the very sneaky bastards at Facebook end up sending emails targeted at triggering my fear of missing out (FoMO). These include the following patterns

X posted something new
Y responded to something X did
X commented on his/her own post

The emails become more desperate in their volume as time goes along without someone logging in to Facebook. The peak I saw was three emails a day, all about people Facebook thought I cared about or stalked. Imagine if Facebook were a person!

I responsibly trashed these emails, and took this as a challenge to not access Facebook at all. Eventually, I realised that I couldn’t just shut myself out, so decided upon a once-a-week access policy. I decided that I would access Facebook every weekend, then nothing for the week, and so forth.

As you can probably guess, this experiment also failed. It failed because my friends have almost unanimously decided to use Facebook to coordinate events and activities. In this case, my fear of missing out isn’t unjustified, not accessing Facebook resulted in me missing out on invitations and appearing anti-social. The next week, I had to organise an event of my own, and I used Facebook to do it. During this time, I had to regularly send and receive messages, all on Facebook, and I broke my resolution to only access Facebook every weekend.

Obviously, the biggest setback to my grand plans to get off Facebook is that all my friends are there, and actively use it to converse. This includes friends I meet in real life as well, not just those far away. I could share an office with one of them for a week, and they wouldn’t tell me half the things I would know about them or what they’re thinking from Facebook. This leads me to wonder, how did we ever become this way? When I was a child, all we ever had was a landline. We did not even have cable TV because we lived on the outskirts of the city for a long period. Computers and internet were out of the question. When we finally got a computer, we had to connect through a very slow and very expensive dial-up connection that shared the same phone line. Today, our phones have changed, and travel with us wherever we go. They have all these apps that seem to constantly require our interactions with them. We have this need to be loved, to be constantly appreciated by others, and hitting a simple like button is easy enough for our friends. The analysis is clear, Facebook and other social media is not too different from cocaine or heroin – just as a drug user continues his habit even to his own destruction, we too seek the endorphins released by our body through the trap of interacting with others on social media.

Facebook seems to be like a parasite that seeks to suck out all the information from me while temporarily pumping me full of chemicals that make me feel better. At the same time, I’m struggling with tasks that once felt easy. I used to write much better, and with more ease than I do right now. This post has seemed arduous, winded, and I’m not happy with the outcome. It seems to me that the only real fix is not with a weekend-only Facebook policy, but to invest my efforts in something meaningful to the point that I no longer care about Facebook, or the lives of a thousand odd people who have connected with me there. I had this brief moment of clarity, and it lasted me for a month when I had laser-sharp focus on my research and nothing else. Let’s see if I can keep that up for the year to come.

Progressive Snapshot: Is it worth it?

2016-07-30T20:39:00.000-04:00

I turned 25 last year, which in the highly mathematical and calculating eyes of the US insurance industry meant that I had suddenly matured into a much more responsible driver than I was at 24 years and 364 days of age. As a result, I expected my insurance rates to go down. Imagine my surprise when my insurance renewal notice from GEICO actually quoted a $50 increase in my insurance rates. To me, this was a clear signal that it was time to switch companies.

Typically, I score really high on brand loyalty. I tend to stick with a brand for as long as possible, unless they really mess up. This qualified as a major mess up. As a result, I started shopping for insurance quotes.

Two companies that quoted me significantly lower rates (30%–40% lower) were Progressive and Allstate. Both had an optional programme that could give me further discounts based on my consenting to the companies tracking my driving habits. Now, I am a careful driver – I hardly ever accelerate hard. I hate using the brakes at all – I prefer to control my speed mostly using my engine and careful planning except in the case of an emergency. As a result, the prospect of an additional 30% discount seemed like a sweet deal. Of course, I have my concerns with companies tracking my habits, of the security practices (or lack thereof) at these companies. Allstate required persistent tracking, Progressive kind of stops tracking after six months or so. Therefore, Progressive it was.

The Snapshot device is a simple OBD2 adapter that plugs in to the OBD2 port in my car. It is small and unobtrusive. The only thing that alerts me to its presence is the three beeps when I start my car. Unfortunately, that is where the praise stops and the annoyances begin.

The very premise of these tracking systems is that bad drivers will tend to follow practices that will result in them braking hard. Therefore, these devices penalize hard braking above everything else, and let you know through a very annoying beep. Having spoken to a friend who was enrolled in Snapshot, I had the impression that the device requires a rather gentle touch on the brakes, so that meant really careful driving. However, I soon found out that my normal driving was well within the device parameters and never triggered the device; this reinforces my notion that Americans don’t know to drive. The proliferation of the automatic transmission has resulted in a generation of people who don’t listen to or feel their cars, and people who jackrabbit on a regular basis.

However, the premise of penalizing hard brakes is fundamentally broken. As a careful driver, I would never brake hard unless I had to avoid an emergency, such as a child running out on the street in front of me, or a drunk man making a sudden dash, or the traffic light changing from green to yellow when I’m less than 30 m from the light. Having a device beep and inform me that money is going out of my pocket while I’m still trying to avoid an emergency situation is a very bad idea. The device further compounds this foolish UX with a very bad engineering decision to somehow not account for a noisy input. Case in point, a woman walks onto the street, resulting in my braking. Not very hard, but harder than I usually would. This triggers those annoying money out of pocket beeps, but when I get home and check, the single braking event has been counted as two separate events and has resulted in $12 out of my pocket.

For a moment, think of the implications of such a bad design. Now, whenever I have a situation that may not necessarily be an emergency, my instinct is to not brake because the stupid device takes money away for doing the right thing. Light changes to yellow, try to go through it because braking before the stop light will cost me money. Pedestrian at the crossing, be aggressive and they won’t actually be dumb enough to step out in front of the car.

For the past four months, this device has been making driving hell

Obviously, I don’t indulge in such behaviour, but my point is that I’m inclined to. Just a few days ago, the traffic light changed from green to yellow, and I braked from 45 mph to a stop in around 50 m. Not unsafe by any stretch of the imagination, but a hard brake, and essential, because the light had turned red before I reached it. That one event counted as three trips of the idiotic non-hysteresis measuring algorithm employed by the retarded coders at Progressive or their subcontractors; that is serious coin out of my pocket. What should I do the next time the light turns yellow and I’m travelling at 45 mph? Should I stop and definitely have money out of my pocket, or should I barrel right through if there is no police officer at the scene? I know the answer, but I’m not sure if the average motorist will stop.

The Snapshot device has made driving hell. Instead of concentrating on being a safe driver and shooting for fuel economy second, I feel my focus shifting to avoiding braking first. That is a dangerous thing for a driver.

So, should you enrol in the Snapshot programme? Well, it depends. If you are the kind of driver that drives for long distances, and brakes hard, don’t go for it. If you are a careful driver, and like me you drive really low miles, you may want to consider the potential of a 30% discount in your insurance rates against the potential headaches of having a nagging device in your car, that like most other naggers, tends to nag right when it is most inconvenient. You may also want to consider the privacy and security risks of having an internet connected device connected without a firewall to the CAN bus – a network that was designed without any security considerations whatsoever.

In my case, I had an initial discount of 27% which dropped to 24% after the red light incident. If this discount holds, I’d say, ‘not a bad deal.’

On Being Bored

2016-07-02T15:48:00.000-04:00

I’m bored.

Now, Neil Gaiman would probably claim that I should be at my peak creativity because boredom, according to him, causes the mind to think in ways it would not ordinarily think. This, however, is not the case.

I think I’m getting stupider as time goes by and I blame the internet and the always-connected nature of our life for this. Now, I no longer am just bored – I’m bored and stupid.

Just ten years ago, I did not have even a mobile phone, let alone a “smart” phone. Ten years ago, I had to carry around every single fact, figure, and detail in my head if I had to carry on a conversation. Now, I just tend to look things up on my phone or on the internet, so I don’t have to remember anything any more. Some may say that it is a great thing, that this frees up my mind to perform other more important tasks. This is a lie – my mind has simply become conditioned to not remember things; any cognitively challenging task is simply brushed aside.

Ten years ago I could effortlessly stay involved in a conversation. Now, with facebook and twitter, and everything else, I have the attention span of what most people would consider to be the memory of a goldfish (which is a myth – goldfishes have memories considerably longer than seven seconds; the seven second myth is something someone made up so as to get over the guilt of keeping a fish in a tiny bowl; I’m sure your goldfish suffers from some sort of PTSD thanks to all the solitary confinement, you monster). Just because I can scroll, like a gay French king, through everything that my friends post on facebook, my mind has lost its training to pay attention, even if the conversation is not interesting. My mind has forgotten that it cannot press Ctrl+W in real life if something fails to entertain me.

Ten years ago, if I got bored, I had to read a book, practice music, write some code – do something. Now, I go to facebook, twitter, youtube and shout “Entertain me!”

Now, I have been comparing ten years ago with the present. This is not to say that the changes that I have described have happened over a span of ten years. To twist Hemingway, this intellectual bankruptcy has come about gradually, then suddenly. If you take a look at the history of my blog, you’ll see that just four years ago, I was writing multiple posts every month. Now, I write once every few months. Four years ago, my posts were (I think) witty, intelligent, and addressed a diverse range of issues. Now, my writing has experienced a steady decline in quality, such as this post, written hurriedly in the course of an hour spent between two tasks.

Writing is an arduous task. In order to write, I need to first select a topic that I think is interesting enough. Then (this is an optional step) I need to research the topic and find out as much as I can. Finally, I need to write. Each of these topics is difficult. Scrolling through my facebook feed like a gay French king is easy.

So what do I plan to do going forward? The obvious step would be to deactivate my facebook account, which is actually very hard to do given the number of services dependent on it, including Messenger, which is how all my friends communicate. However, if I do take this step, I think it will free up time to do the following

Write code for fun, i.e. outside of what I would write for work. This includes completing some of the projects I started earlier, including Free2FA and SmartWeather
Pursue photography as a hobby. I have not written any new content for my other blog The FOSS Photographer in a long time, over three years. I need to revive that blog, starting with designing a better logo
Get back into shape. I have not stepped outside or done any physical activity in over a year. Recently, I have started a routine of 5k runs every other day, and I would like to continue this schedule as long as the weather permits.
Read books. Every so often, I end up buying books because I (used to be) a bibliophile. I have a box set of “A Song of Fire and Ice” waiting to be read for over a year and a half. I have bought a number of books by Neil Gaiman in a HumbleBundle ebook sale. And as with every HumbleBundle, there are a tonne of cheap pulp fiction garbage that was added on, I should probably read that as well in case I find a diamond in the coal mine.
Increase my meaningful social interaction. This means calling up friends instead of sending them IMs, having in-person chats, being involved in meaningful conversations.

Basically, I need to stay away from the internet, and go back to doing things I did ten years ago in order to entertain myself. I hope I can achieve these goals.

Go Set a Watchman

2016-03-12T17:48:00.001-05:00

I’ve been reading Harper Lee’s book ‘Go Set a Watchman’, and I’ve only recently put it down. I’ve been really conflicted about this book, and even as I write this post, I’m not sure if I like it or not.

The trouble with Watchman is that it uses the same characters as Lee’s earlier work, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, and while the characters are more-or-less the same, the narrator has changed, from the child Scout to the adult Jean-Louise. This issue is further exacerbated by people wanting to look at Watchman as a sequel to Mockingbird. However, looking at Watchman as a sequel introduces some retcon issues.

Watchman has a total of four paragraphs that narrate approximately the story in Mockingbird. However, in Watchman, the accused is a relation to Calpurnia, and Atticus successfully acquits him; which is very different from the Mockingbird version of Tom, who ends up being convicted, and ultimately killed.

Because of this retcon, I decided to treat Watchman as a separate book by its own right, and not as a sequel to Mockingbird. Therefore, for the entirety of the book, I had the very hard task of shutting out everything I knew about Scout, Jem, Atticus, Calpurnia, Dill, and everyone else, and re-learn these characters from scratch. I had read a tonne out outrage on the interwebs about Atticus being a racist, and I really did not want my knowledge of Atticus as the perfect person, or Gregory Peck portraying the character into the way, and ruining what could be a perfect story.

In the end, I’m convinced that the characters are the same, although the writing is decidedly not. Mockingbird had a rhythm, it had a flow through it that was effortless for the reader. It felt authentic, and resonated with most of us in a way that Watchman really does not. Watchman feels clunky, amateurish, and really subpar. For instance, Jem’s death is just sprung on us. Now, I would totally accept this, as Jem really is a character that is just present as a memory in Watchman; however, I did expect something more on how his death affected Jean-Louise. To me, a simple ‘Jem died’ sounds something more like what Rushdie may do with a minor character, and then introduce a ridiculous story of how the character died, and never talk about the character again. On the other hand, to do this with a character that does have some significance in the story feels rather flat.

The sloppiness in writing does not end there. Until we end up with Atticus and Henry (Hank) in the Maycomb Citizens’ Council next to a racist, we haven’t been invested enough in the characters to feel the full force of Jean-Louise’s disgust at Atticus behaving in such a way. Then, a flashback tells the four paragraphs that would go on to become Mockingbird. Are we really expected to love the character of Atticus through a flashback?

Frankly, I think the trouble with Watchman is that it does not tell a story. On the other hand, characters monologue their own political convictions, which I’m sure are proxy for how Harper Lee herself felt. There’s a lot of exposition on why the South went to war, and that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but on the Federal government trampling on states’ rights. There’s talk on the Supreme Court decision, and how that decision tramples on the Tenth Amendment. These could very well be in a collection of speeches, and not very great ones at that. Will I feel moved in any way, after hearing someone just talk their views and walking off the stage? After a reference to “Childe Roland” when Jean-Louise asks her uncle why Maycomb has become so intolerant? Harper Lee sticks to the Childe Roland reference, by never really telling us how Jean-Louise finds peace with the Maycomb people, with Atticus, and Hank; she just magically does after being slapped by her uncle.

There is a coming of age story in Watchman, and that is Jean-Louise finally breaking her conscience from that of Atticus, and becoming her own lady, but that part is also botched up so much that we don’t see it coming along, but it’s not a surprise either like the final reveal of Boo Radley in Mockingbird.

This is not to say that Watchman does not have its moments. It was deeply amusing for me to find that Harper Lee, through Jean-Louise, thinks that ‘The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower’. However, such moments are few and far between.

Perhaps I really need to be invested in the story of the South, to understand American racism before I can truly appreciate the book. However, I don’t get the racism. It just sounds wrong, and I don’t know what I want to think of a book that relies on the reader understanding racism as something more than just a horrible bigoted idea. Upon re-reading the book, I see a whole lot of prejudice and hatred, right from the first part when Hank tells Jean-Louise that while black people have cars, they aren’t responsible, and drive without a licence or insurance. This thread is resumed when Zeebo’s boy runs over Mr. Healy and kills him. Atticus, on learning this, wants to plead him guilty so that the case does not fall in the ‘wrong hands’ of lawyers who actually want to defend the accused.

The most disappointing part of the book for me was that it felt like reading a cheap paperback. Good books have a flow to them, when words come one after another in a rhythm to tell a story that is stretched out from beginning to end. The writing here feels like an amateur writer, it sounds simple (in a bad way), haphazard, and misses a story to it. The story exists if we factor in the character arcs from Mockingbird – even so, there are differences that would make for a very jarring read.

On the whole, Watchman leaves me deeply unsatisfied. The book raises questions about the South and the culture, but does not provide answers at any point. Neither does the story account for much; a lot of it is exposition and flashbacks that don’t really contribute much by way of telling a story or establishing a character. Finally, I find it really hard to figure out Atticus as well, a person who joins the Klan just to find out who is behind the masks, and joins the Citizens’ Council just to fight against the Supreme Court trampling on the Tenth Amendment, or arguing that the black race doesn’t deserve full civil rights yet. I must congratulate the person who told Harper Lee to go write this again building a story from the point of view of the child Scout, and expanding the four paragraphs into ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.

I would have loved to love another book written by Harper Lee. ‘Go Set a Watchman’ just isn’t it.

Thanks to Dr. Sudha Shastri and Harshit Sahay for their comments and feedback, and for enabling me to better sort my thoughts based on our thoughtful discussions. This is an updated version of the original post published 12^th March 2016. While no content has been deleted, I’ve added a few paragraphs to better express my opinion.

Thoughts on Apple vs the FBI

2016-02-17T14:47:00.000-05:00

According to this article on the Verge, the FBI basically wants Apple to create a system that allows them to make an unlimited number of guesses, at speeds of 80 ms per guess. On a 4-digit passcode, this means that the pass-code is cracked in just under 14 minutes. With a 6-digit pass-code, it will be cracked in just about 22 hours.

However, if Apple allowed creation of pass-codes of unlimited length, and someone chose a 10-digit pass-code (if you think that is hard to remember, keep in mind that most people memorise multiple 10-digit phone numbers), then the time required to crack it is around 25 years. However, the FBI or anyone cracking the pass-code also needs to know the length, so they will have to try all the way from 1-digit pass-codes to 10-digit pass-codes. 9-digit pass-codes will take around two and a half years, while 8-digit pass-codes will take 3 months.

So while I do appreciate and support Apple's resistance to the FBI, I think that they will be much better off asking people to set up 10-digit or longer pass-codes in the future.

Where did we start with 4-digit pass-codes? From ATM machines, where people had to enter these numbers by hand? Really, we ought to move towards longer pass-codes and pass-phrases.

This xkcd comic shows how to create secure pass-phrases. Just choose 4–6 words at random and join them together to create a rather secure pass-phrase. Or just use diceware.

How do we respond?

2015-11-18T11:52:00.000-05:00

This is a question that is on almost everyone’s mind following the horrific attacks on Paris last weekend. It’s a question that most people can’t answer, and neither can I. I will, however, try to make the best sense of what happened.

Some gunmen attacked Paris, and left over 150 dead and over 300 wounded. I remember the sense of horror and confusion that I felt at the time of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Yet, during the time of the attacks, I was over two hundred kilometres away from Mumbai, safe in the city of Nashik.

With any terrorist attack, there is always the spectacle, the theatrics that are the scariest. Ten people with guns caught an entire country off-guard for three days. Three days of not knowing how many people were responsible, or why we were attacked. And so, I can empathise with the people in Paris.

I may be speaking from a position of privilege here, and I really don’t know how it feels to be a person who has lost a loved one to a senseless attack, but I’ve become increasingly convinced that the only way to fight terror is through our response to terror. A number of people have already said in words better than I can explain that the only way to fight terror is not to be terrorised. To the victims of attacks, this may sound hollow and meaningless, but these people do raise a valid point.

For what has our response been to terrorist attacks in the past? Digvijay Singh used it to stir up communal hatred in a time when the country needed to come together. The United States used this as an excuse to spy on everyone in the world. Politicians use it as an excuse to do whatever they want.

And so it has been after the Paris attacks as well. Already, we see a push to blame refugees, who are fleeing the same horror that Paris experienced. People want to score brownie points by criticising Facebook for enabling its ‘security check’ feature. And politicians, yet again, have decided to use this as an opportunity to push for pervasive, Orwellian surveillance.

The only thing I’m sure of right now is that we must not lose our minds because of a few demented people. In a sense, the Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’ had it right all along.

I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm? You know… You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan.” But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!

I know that dry statistics do nothing to ease those who have lost loved ones. But think about this: just yesterday, an estimated 3,000 people died in car accidents in the world. I don’t have numbers for people who died due to gun violence or killed themselves. And yet, a staged barbaric act causes us to act in such an irrational manner that we play right into the hands of the perpetrators. Let’s not do that any more.

This post has been a rather incoherent dump of the number of thoughts that are going through my head right now, but only one sentiment is important: My thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Paris.

Why I Support Digital India on Facebook

2015-10-02T10:23:00.000-04:00

Supporting a cause on Facebook is the way to go, unless of course, the cause is endorsed by the Prime Minister of India, in which case, either you are an angel or a devil, depending on your political leanings.

Recently, the Prime Minister met Mark Zuckerberg, and asked people to change their profile pictures to be overlaid with a tricolour and a network representing digital connectivity. As you can probably tell from my Facebook profile page, I changed my picture.

Then stuff hit the fan. Apparently, buried in the code was a reference to , a contentious business venture by Facebook to provide ‘free’ internet to poor people in India. Apparently, what Facebook wants to do is provide Facebook for free, which allows Facebook to tap into a demographic that has since eluded it, and which will also prevent competitors from opening up shop in India – we won't have our own Renren.

Now, I support net neutrality, but I don't think that internet.org is about net neutrality. A big company wants to provide a service for free, do these commies want the big bad capitalists to provide everyone internet for free?

Of course, Facebook has clarified that the internet.org reference was a programming error.

The most recent criticism levelled at us who support the Digital India campaign is that we have no idea about how this idea will be implemented. To such criticism, my response is this – I support the cause of Digital India. The implementation details will be messy, with no right answer. The first step is realising that we need to make India connected and digital, just as we realised at some point that we wanted to be free from British oppression. Would the same people have criticised the Indian National Congress or other champions of our freedom movement for not having an idea about how the freedom would be achieved?

I believe that computers and software have a great potential to make our lives better, but we need to use them the right way. Some steps are already underway. I filed my taxes this year entirely on my computer. I can see the government at work in real time, online. These are good steps in the right direction, hence my support. I don't want to hook up with someone by swiping right. That is a digital India I won't rush to support.

What is 'Orwellian'?

2015-09-07T16:13:00.000-04:00

Ever since the Snowden leaks – and even before them – we've been hearing the word ‘Orwellian’ to describe the state of surveillance we're living under. But what exactly does the word ‘Orwellian’ mean? What was George Orwell so afraid of and that he cautioned us against?

Reading two of his definitive books – ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’ and ‘Animal Farm’ – I cannot believe that Orwell was afraid of increasing surveillance. I believe that Orwell was afraid of something more. In the world described in ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’, constant, never-ending surveillance is only tiny part – a means to an end. The end what is scarier.

Moreover, I refuse to believe that the word ‘Orwellian’ should be used to describe just one tiny component of one novel written. No, I believe that the description should apply to a broader concept.

I believe that to understand the term ‘Orwellian’, one must look to the earlier story – ‘Animal Farm’. Indeed, I think that ‘Animal Farm’ really sets the stage for the ideas that Orwell wanted to convey – a totalitarian state where people lost their identity and individualism, and the exploitation and perpetuation of the class system.

In ‘Animal Farm’, Orwell distances the human metaphor by describing animals that overthrow their human overlords (owners), and run the farm themselves. In no time, the smarter pigs emerge as a ruling class, ruling over the other animals with lesser intelligence, actively pursuing a propaganda, changing history, and relying on the non-existent memories of the foolish animals. The allegorical tale shown as animals enacting the animal-like instincts present in humans serves to distance the reader from any human emotion, pointing out the ridiculousness of the totalitarian state – something Orwell was afraid would happen to the UK after World War II.

A number of people much smarter than me have pointed out the parallels between Orwell's books and the Soviet revolution. I'm not going to repeat the parallels. I am, however going to point out the parallels between ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’; to show that Orwell was battling a common foe in both the books, thereby that the word ‘Orwellian’ should refer to something more than a state of surveillance.

In ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’, Orwell shows the human condition set in a state of total surveillance, lack of individualism and memory, and official propaganda. By putting a human face to the nameless animals in ‘Animal Farm’, Orwell seeks to show the world in ‘Animal Farm’ from the perspective of someone stuck inside the system. Winston Smith is that face, and he is guilty of CRIMETHINK by falling in love.

In all aspects, the world described in ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’ is similar to the world in ‘Animal Farm’. Big Brother stands in for Napoleon, Goldstein for Snowball. In a similar way, Napoleon's spies become the THINKPOL; the same way history is changed in ‘Animal Farm’, it is done in MINITRUE. Finally, as the old animals of the revolution die, any remaining memories of life before the revolution are lost except in stories, which are heavily falsified to be in favour of the government. Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past. Winston cannot recollect anything about life before the revolution, except in sporadic memories. Julia, born after the revolution cannot even think of a world without the Party, instead finding satisfaction in smaller digressions from the Party narrative; not in the grand ideas of overthrowing the Party like Winston does.

In a sense, Orwell is critical of not only the totalitarian state that exists, but also of the people living in the state. He accuses them of being guilty of DOUBLETHINK, and the Party (or the pigs, remember Julia refers to them as ‘swine’) forcing them to live that way.

How does the Party ensure that the people remain subservient to its interests? By enforcing a policy of persistent surveillance, by ensuring that it can provide the illusion of not tolerating any independent thought, so that anyone with any independent thought will no longer be able to share his or her thoughts with anyone else without fear of being persecuted. Why do I say ‘illusion’? Because the Party can only do this on the Outer Party members, the proles are human, whereas the Party workers are not. However, the proles are too dumb to realise their true power, and do not pose a threat to the Party. It is clear that surveillance is a means to and end, but not the end itself.

Orwell's dystopia is closer to real life than other depictions of dystopia in fiction. It has been pointed out that his stories are thinly veiled allegories of the Soviet Union, and that the political reason for writing these stories down was a warning based on his fear that socialism would take over the United Kingdom. So, do the dangers of which he warned still exist?

The answer to such a loaded question must necessarily be complex, but I lean towards a ‘Yes’. More and more, we've become less and less. We get distracted by shiny objects. We cannot digest nuanced argument, or indeed any argument more than a few words long. Twitter, with its 140 character limit must certainly be to blame. Our politicians rely on us forgetting every one of their mistakes, twisting the truth, and relying on our DOUBLETHINK and lack of memory to serve their interests. We prop up enemies like Goldstein, and direct our hate towards them. We have a fairly rigid class hierarchy although it isn't forced upon us, but just a product of capitalism. And of course, we have never-ending surveillance, just that we have accepted it ourselves for little rewards.

What truly scares me is that our narrative is becoming increasingly Orwellian, that we want our politicians to engage in THINKPOL as long as it it against perceived enemies, that we like DUCKSPEAK in our news and our narratives, and that anything else is boring. We are more than willing to give up our freedom for tiny rewards, not directly to the government, but to our corporate overlords, who then promptly hand it over to the government. Reading ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’, I could not help but think that such a book could easily be written in contemporary time, on in any other time, and still hold as a cautionary tale. Therein I think lies its appeal.

On a lighter note, I would have loved to see Winston respond to O'Brien like Picard resisted Madred…

A Loss of Wonder

2015-07-04T23:41:00.002-04:00

At some point, we stopped telling the stories we used to tell.

We used to tell stories that evoked a sense of wonder, a sense of the infinite possibilities out there, both for us as persons and for mankind. Now, we tell stories of mundane people involved in everyday tasks.

I've been watching a lot of ‘Star Trek’ recently. I started watching the original series two years ago, then switched to ‘The Next Generation’, and now back to the original series. The contrast is stark.

While the original series really spoke of the endless possibilities once we reached space, and interstellar travel; TNG really dealt with socio-political issues of the day. In a sense, TNG was really the story of the world in the 1990s, set in the twenty-fourth century.

Maybe my wistful longing for the 60s can be attributed to the allure of nostalgia so poignantly described in ‘Midnight in Paris’; however I think this is unlikely.

To my mind, the 60s were the epitome of an optimistic thinking that hasn't been seen since. Of course, we had Kennedy's promise; who wouldn't be fascinated by a president who threw his cap over the wall, promising us that a country would send a man to the moon and return him safely before the end of the decade. Star Trek showed the possibilities that would be available three centuries later. Not if, not what if, but will. ‘The Jetsons’ showed us how life would be a century later, that we would all live in Space-needle like buildings, drive flying cars, work an hour a day two days a week. The 60s also had the Googie style of architecture, bonnet-rockets on cars, everything that to me today evokes a child-like sense of wonder and hints to the vision of the future with which the baby-boomers grew up.

Perhaps spurred on by the spectre of nuclear annihilation, science and technology grew at an unprecedented rate. I'm not referring to just the growth brought on by Moore's law or its equivalent in other fields, but the overarching theme of bigger, better, faster that seemed to prevail. The SR-71 blackbird, the Concorde, the space programme, the twin towers at the World Trade Center, the Space Needle, everything seemed to open up more and more possibilities. We sent rovers on Mars, surely it is only a matter of time before we send people there. Of course we'll live forever (which is why the boomers never planned for retirement). The general atmosphere was one of optimism in spite of ‘duck and cover’.

Today, innovation just means following Moore's law. A bigger battery, a bigger screen, a bigger phone, a faster processor, a newer app. My favourite jibe is that our smart-phones now have more computing power than the Apollo missions, and yet we just fling birds into pigs. NASA sent men to the moon with less than we now have in our pockets. Casio had an incredible history of innovation with digital watches from the 1970s–90s. Most of them flopped really badly, but isn't that the point of innovation? Today, Apple announces its watch, which is the same as Android wear, which in turn was based off the Pebble, which did not even aspire to the same level of gall as Casio. Casio thought it would be a cool idea to put in a GPS in a watch back in 1999. Or their watches with big ‘Data Bank’ logos stamped on them, which could hold a phonebook, a planner, and a notepad. This was back in the early 1990s. Today's smart-watches barely measure up to Casio's models from over two decades ago. On the other hand, today, we are happy to throw money at Kickstarters that will sell you a printout of your Whatsapp conversations.

This lack of optimism is a dangerous meme not just restricted to American culture, but has coloured every part of the world. In some sense, we had a brief glimpse of this in the late 1990s in India when I was 10, although everything in the world looks rosy in the pre-teen years of one's life. But then it was snuffed away and replaced with the cynicism inherent in the satellite TV waves projected by American satellites on my country. We had a nation to build when the baby-boomers were dreaming overseas. By the time we reached our age to dream, the world was a colder, darker place. The cold war was over, the threat of global annihilation through a nuclear war was over, but then we had our own local threat in south Asia. The political mood was grim, with daily news of terrorist attacks; and the cold, harsh reality of how divided a country India still was after fifty years of growing together. Today, that sense of optimism and wonder is dead, even when we launch missions to the moon, and beyond to Mars. ‘India Mars mission to launch amidst overwhelming poverty’, The Guardian reported, and the Indian media echoed. For what business does this country have dreaming, when we haven't been able to solve any of our problems by the day. What right do the people in my country have to dreaming, or to any sense of wonder?

And that's the problem. We haven't been able to solve anything, or make any progress without dreaming. People who wish to scale and cross a wall throw their caps over the other side, and then follow their caps. It means that their caps won't be left behind if they fall off on the wall. It also gives them a reason to scale the wall. If we give a hundred groups of smart, young students resources, and ask them to build something; 10 build a messaging app, 10 build a hookup app, 30 build video games; we have a problem. The world is good enough. It could be better, but that would take work; that would make the present a little less good, but the future brighter. And we don't care about the future. The future is for others to worry about.

Neal Stephenson proposed that a reason for this stagnation today is that science fiction writers haven't done enough to encourage the world to inspire people. Jules Verne inspired us to travel around the world in less than eighty days, to build submarines and spaceships. Ray Bradbury inspired us with tales of terraforming and colonising Mars, but today, people who propose that we realise this idea are looked upon as from the loony-bin. Stephenson goes on to theorise two ways in which science fiction has played a role in inspiring change:

Inspiring people by showing us the possibilities that exist, and by inspiring youngsters to participate in science and technology.
By providing people with hieroglyphs, a hieroglyph being defined as something that ‘…supplies a plausible…picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place…Such items serve as hieroglyphs – simple, recognisable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.’

This theory underscores the problem today. We no longer have science fiction producing effective hieroglyphs. Does science fiction still inspire people to consider careers in science and technology? Maybe, maybe not. I really am not the right person to make such a judgement. In India, almost everyone goes into science and technology, if only because science and technology pays more than say, the liberal arts. All around me, I've only seen people who're in science and technology, and I don't think they were inspired there by science fiction.

Does contemporary science fiction still produce hieroglyphs? No, I don't think so. The hieroglyphs today are produced by scientists, and they aren't catchy enough to grab anyone's attention. After all, who wants hieroglyphs of vibrating patterns of energy, of ten of twenty-six dimensions, of lineland and flatland, or even cats in a box, or god playing dice. We don't talk about ray guns and warp engines any more. We talk about AI as if it is Skynet, and cringe or laugh when it classifies some persons as a particular species of ape. We want better AI, but we want it to drive our cars, to organise our enormous photographic collections, to solve our maths assignments, or to enable us to remember less. Basically, we want our lives to improve while remaining unchanged in essence.

The lack of good stories to tell, the loss of wonder and amazement and the sense of possibilities, the cynicism and pessimism in today's culture has seeped into the political establishment, which has decided to position itself at the opposite corner from science, technology, and development. Funding for the sciences is down, and dropping. People are no longer interested in development. No one wishes to take any risk any more. Fifteen years ago, Cornell University – where I now work – decided that it was too much of a liability to work on nuclear research and the promise it offered, so they shut down the research reactor here. Today, we computer architects are taking over the building that housed the forgotten reactor. There are some gremlins working on self-driving cars in the basement below. Yeah, we're the ones who will make it possible for you to throw higher-resolution birds into higher-resolution pigs, but that's all you'll be doing. Send a man to Mars? Probably not in our lifetime. I doubt that we'll even have the International Space Station up any longer, given the abject failure of the space programme in the wake of funding cuts to NASA, the agency that famously has given us the super-soaker, freeze-dried food, memory foam, ‘space blankets’, or advanced robotics. Hey, they made a car that could work on the moon. Version two of the lunar buggy sits here on earth, never to see flight, much less the surface for which it was made.

Perhaps it does take a spectre of war to be innovative. Or we could go the way the Chinese have, and invite the best science fiction writers to talk and inspire people at science fiction conventions.

Excellent Sheep: A Review

2015-01-29T10:45:00.000-05:00

Ever since William Deresiewicz appeared on The Colbert Report, I've wanted to read his book "Excellent Sheep: The miseducation of America's elite and the path to a meaningful life". I finally managed to get my hands on the book (thanks to Cornell's excellent library system, which includes BorrowDirect). Having got my hands on the book, I had to read it, and found myself agreeing with everything Deresiewicz said in the first 10 pages or so. After that, my reaction was rather of the WTF type.

Deresiewicz does a good job explaining how the Ivy leagues got to this current level of snobbery that they stand at right now. He explains how the admissions procedure was constantly tweaked to make them an old boys' club. How the SATs were implemented as a method to bring some sanity to the admissions procedure. How admissions committees mercilessly demand higher and higher (and frankly unrealistic) levels of excellence from students, and how the rich boys' club has been reinstated just because of the expensive process to get in. The book did a great job helping me understand the students I was teaching during the semester, on how students have been conditioned to always be the best in everything they do. In fact, before reading the book, before teaching, I had assumed that Ivy league students would be like us back at IIT-B. I was wrong. Back in IIT-B, I don't think we every whined for every mark on a homework worth 0.5% of the final grade. I don't think we even cared about grades. (Well, I did, but as any of my batch mates would point out, I was the exception to the rule.) The folks with five and six point averages never let on that they were depressed or sad with their grades, they were rather content. Not so in the Ivys.

Beyond this premise, however, Deresiewicz goes off the rails in an all-out attack on the Ivy leagues. Everything is based on the premise that the Ivy league is broken; that students should stay away from the Ivy leagues and all top colleges, and stick with second-tier colleges. Everything in the book is based on you accepting Deresiewicz' premise that the Ivy leagues are indeed broken. No proof is given, except anecdotal evidence and testimony from a handful of folks.

Let me first attack the premise that anecdotal evidence and testimony from 200 folks does not tell a story. Let's assume that an Ivy league school accepts around 5,000 undergraduate students every year. There are eight Ivy league schools. This means that around 40,000 students pass through the Ivy league system every year. Over 50 years, that's 2,000,000 students. At this number, testimony from 200 people literally amounts to a sample that can be measured in parts per million, hardly sufficient to establish a premise. Further, this sample is from people who agree with Deresiewicz' essay "Disadvantages of an Elite Education", and will necessarily suffer from confirmation bias.

At the same time, Deresiewicz himself is a product of an Ivy league education. He has been educated at Yale and then Columbia, taught at Columbia for ten years before he was denied tenure in 2008. And that's when "Disadvantages of an Elite Education" was published. That date represents the exact time when Deresiewicz decided to burn the earth and boil the seas for the Ivy leagues. This hatred seeps through his book, which gets increasingly ridiculous towards the end. For instance, he wants every student to pursue an education in the liberal arts, not engineering or science, cause, you know, science and engineering have given the world absolutely nothing in the past century, whereas a liberal arts education opens the mind et cetera. Specifically, Deresiewicz wants everyone to study English (guess what he taught at Columbia?), because he asserts that English is the best of the liberal arts. Now, I don't have any objections to the liberal arts, in fact, some of my favourite courses back at IIT-B have been from the humanities and social sciences department, specifically English literature. However, I have strong objections to them being the only stuff I should learn.

Next, Deresiewicz asserts that the Ivy leagues aren't interested in teaching, only in research, and that means they hire lecturers instead of professors, that the deny tenure aggressively, and (this is where his assertions go so wild that they make him almost certifiable) that a professor who gets a "best teacher" award almost always ends up being denied tenure, because colleges view good teachers with a sharp suspicion and utter hatred. "How dare you spend time teaching when we pay you to do research?"

Overall, Deresiewicz' book is nothing but his assertions, with no facts or figures to back them up. Of course, Deresiewicz will blame my engineering education for detecting and pointing out that his book is utter BS, after all, if I had majored in English, I would appreciate his book for the genius it contains. So, if you're a person who is grounded in logic, please do yourself a favour, and don't read the book. You'll be glad to have saved a few hours of your life. If you're the type who studies English for a living, go ahead and read the book. What are you going to do with the extra time anyway?