Emergent Chaos

There’s a huge profusion of dating sites out there. From those focused on casual encounters to christian marriage, there’s a site for that.

So from a product management and privacy perspectives I found this article very thought provoking:

Bookioo does not give men any way to learn about or contact the female members of the site. Men can join for free, if they have been invited—and if a current Bookioo member can vouch for their information. They can then post a profile for the perusal of the female—and paying—members of the site. It’s those paying women, however, who get to call the shots.

As interesting as the approach is, what’s more interesting is how they came to it. They focused on a set of female customers, and asked what is it that they worry about, and what do they want? Co-founder David Olmos:

We think that women don’t feel comfortable with the current dating sites. The latter are too masculine: they were designed by men and they fundamentally address men’s needs. We know that many women prefer a different approach: they’re eager to socialize, to meet new people, and we propose to do that through activities. It may lead them to find a partner, of course, but they may as well enjoy an afternoon in a museum with a new girl friend whom they met Bookioo! So we propose to socialize through activities, common hobbies and common tastes.

As you can see, we actually want to revamp the “dating” concept, taking the perspective of women. The key issue for us is to make sure that women enjoy the level of privacy they wish and that the males’ profiles are fully validated. (“Bookioo: dating and social networking site gives women full control.”)

It’s also a very different approach to “creep management,” which we’ve covered in past posts like “Emerging dating paranoia,” “Dating and Background Checks in the UK” or “Dating & Background Checks in China”

The CBC Quirks and Quarks podcast on “The 10% Solar System Solution” is a really interesting 9 minutes with Scott Gaudi on how to find small planets far away:

We have to rely on nature to give us the microlensing events. That means we can’t actually pick and choose which stars to look at, and we can’t actually pick what times to look at. So the best suited telescopes are those telescopes we can use at anytime that are located throughout the globe so that it’s dark somewhere. And so we use a lot of amateurs, actually we don’t use, we work with a lot of amatuers who have their own telescopes, relatively small telescopes, .3 meters, .4 meters in their backyard which they can use anytime they want. We call them up when we see a microlensing event happening that we think might be interesting and we ask them to get data for us. In fact in many cases they’ve gotten crucial data for us which has helped to discover a micro-lensing event.

What’s most amazing to me is how useful it is to have small parts loosely coupled, each pursuing their own interests. What emerges is, quoting Gaudi again:

One of our amatuers, Jenny McCormick who works in New Zealand and has her own observatory which she calls Farm Cove Observatory has said “It just goes to show: you can go out there you can work full time, you can be a mother and you can still find planets.”

Photo: The ESO Telescopes, by Paul Browne

Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir have released a paper showing that they’ve broken KASUMI, the cipher used in encrypting 3G GSM communications. KASUMI is also known as A5/3, which is confusing because it’s only been a week since breaks on A5/1, a completely different cipher, were publicized. So if you’re wondering if this is last week’s news, it isn’t. It’s next week’s news.

The paper isn’t up on IACR’s Eprint archive yet, but copies of it are circulating around privately. I’m writing about it with Adi Shamir’s permission.

KASUMI is a modified version of the MISTY cipher. The KASUMI designers made MISTY faster and more hardware friendly by changing the key schedule and modifying some internal parameters. However, they also made it vulnerable to related key attacks.

Of all the weaknesses that a cipher can have, related key attacks are the ones to worry about least. Operationally, crypto engineers know that they should never reuse keys and when in doubt just pull another one off of the random number generator. Consequently, this doesn’t mean that the guys at Weizmann Institute of Science are listening to 3G calls.

Nonetheless, related key attacks are bad to have because implementers do screw up, and related key attacks indicate that the cipher designers didn’t have as tight a handle on things as they thought they did. It is no cause for panic, but it is no cause for either warmness or fuzziness (particularly since the DKS team point out that the KASUMI designers wrote that they’d taken care of related-key issues when they simplified MISTY into KASUMI).

Moreover, the attack here is completely practical. Here is a quote from the abstract:

In this paper we describe a new type of attack called a sandwich attack, and use it to construct a simple distinguisher for 7 of the 8 rounds of KASUMI with an amazingly high probability of 2^?14. By using this distinguisher and analyzing the single remaining round, we can derive the complete 128 bit key of the full KASUMI by using only 4 related keys, 2²⁶ data, 2³⁰ bytes of memory, and 2³² time. These complexities are so small that we have actually simulated the attack in less than two hours on a single PC, and experimentally verified its correctness and complexity. Interestingly, neither our technique nor any other published attack can break MISTY in less than the 2¹²⁸ complexity of exhaustive search, which indicates that the changes made by the GSM Association in moving from MISTY to KASUMI resulted in a much weaker cryptosystem.

It will be interesting to see the response from the GSM Association. They have the opportunity to show leadership. If they recognize that this is a real problem, reassure us that it’s not a catastrophe, and show that they’re taking it seriously, then this can be an all-around good thing for them and us.

We’re all adults (well, okay, most of us are adults and act like adults some of the time), and if we know that there will be an upgrade in a few years, then that’s great. We lived through the WEP issues. We are living through the SSL evil proxy issues. This is less acute than either of those. But we need to have some assurance that in a few years, we’ll just get wireless devices with a safety net. Their challenge is to have a response before this news metastasizes into a common perception that 3G crypto is worthless.

Photo “bag_contents” courtesy of openfly. Selected because it looked good and it was the only photo that came back on a search of “3g crypto.”

Street with a View is an art project in Google Street View, with a variety of scenes enacted for the camera, either to be discovered in Street View, or discovered via the project web site.

via David Fraser.

We’ve been flooded with comment spam. I’ve added one of those annoying captcha things that don’t work, and a mandatory comment confirmation page. Please let me know if you have trouble. Blogname @ gmail.com, or adam @ blogname.com

I think comments are working, but most won’t show up immediately. I’m digging into more effective solutions.

I expect that there will be senseless acts of violence, planes destroyed and perhaps a city attacked with effective biological weapons. There will be crazy people with more power than we want to comprehend. There will be a billion malnourished, undereducated folks whose lives don’t improve. The first world will continue to be saddled with debt, the third world with mis-management and kleptocracies. Global climate change will continue to threaten us all.

There will also be heroic responses to that craziness. More effective aid will help hundreds of millions to help themselves. This may be the decade where we get a handle on malaria and hunger. Genetically modified food will improve nutrition for many of those on the edge. The best education in the world will be a free click away and watched on a cell phone. The Persians and Chinese may well end the decade with more freedoms.

There’s also going to be vaccines created within months of a new disease discovery, a global network that lets you talk to anyone, anytime, robots on mars, computers in our pockets. I’m also given to understand that we’ll be able to watch movies with plots in vivid 3d, and print 3d objects at home.

And there’s going to be things we can’t predict, which will emerge out of nowhere and blow all our minds. Maybe this will even be the decade that brings us flying cars and peace on Earth.

Whatever it brings, I’m looking forward to it.

Happy new year, and a happy new decade!

@Stepto has asked to make #tsaslogans a trending topic. I know you won’t let me down.

For some time, I’ve watched the War on Bottled Water with amusement. I don’t disagree with figuring out how to reduce waste, and so on and so forth, but the railing against bottled water per se struck me as not thought out very well.

The major reason for my thinking is that I never heard any of the venomous railing against water extending to any other drinks that come in bottles. To my mind, it seemed that a Coke, hey, that’s okay, but if you start with one and take out the sugar, the caffeine, the artificial flavors, and CO₂ you end up with water. Coke okay, water evil.

Me, sometimes all I want is a cool drink of water. More often, I want something a little more. I’m very fond of those fizzy waters with a bit of essential oils in them, as well as iced tea. But I don’t want the sugar. I want an artificial sweetener even less, and often when faced with decisions, water is what’s available. When I’m traveling nearly anywhere, I think I’d rather have it in a bottle, thanks.

The prejudice against water comes from thinking that it’s just water. Rarely is there such a thing as just water. The only just water there is is distilled (or in a pinch deionized) water, and that is itself special because it is unusual for something to be just water.

And now, I can’t help but think, “Uh huh” as I read, “Millions in U.S. Drink Dirty Water, Records Show.”

The summary is that more than 20% of US water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years. The violations include sewage bacteria, known poisons and carcinogens, parasites, and so on. Mid-level EPA investigators say that the government has been interested in other things and just not enforcing things, and they don’t think change will happen.

Security isn’t just going after terrorists, it’s basic thing. Like water.

From BoingBoing:

Somali nautical pirates have established a stock-market where guns and cash are invested in upcoming hijackings, with shares of the proceeds returned to investors

Emergent Chaos strikes again…

Bruce Schneier points in his blog to an article in The Telegraph in which Steve Ballmer blames the failure of Vista on security. Every security person around should clear their throat loudly. Security is not what made Vista unpalatable.

Many people liked Vista. My tech reporter friends not only adored it, but flat couldn’t understand why people didn’t adore it. I have a number of other friends who adored it. In assessing Vista, this is important to keep in mind. Despite its bad rep, many people liked it. So why did many people not like it?

First, there were the gamers. Before Vista came out, Microsoft did a lot of marketing Vista to gamers. There were kiosks at gaming conventions and other places touting Vista as a gaming platform.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Reliable tests at the time said that Vista ran games about 20% slower than XP. Compounding this was that among the drivers that were dodgy when it first came out were video drivers. Many gamers felt that they had been sold a pig in the poke, and there was merit to this claim. Hardcore gamers are people who will spend money on bleeding-edge kit, and it was precisely this bleeding-edge kit that didn’t work well at first. And whatever it was that made games run slower (even if it was security features), that’s not the point. Microsoft’s statements to the gamers was that their gaming experience would be better on Vista, and it was worse. Once the 4chan crowd starts making memes about suckage, you’re behind the eight-ball.

Second, there were the cheapies. Many machines were marked as Vista-capable that either weren’t, or could only run the basics of Vista and not the fancy new stuff. There is an aphorism that Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away. The problem is that most of the PC makers will try to sell you the cheapest possible computer, and these cheapest possible computers just didn’t have enough oomph to do Aero and the cool features in Vista. Microsoft took more than Intel gave and the customers felt they’d been sold a pig the poke. There were even lawsuits over this, and it added to Vista’s bad rep.

Third, there were the people on laptops. For whatever reasons, when Vista first came out, it was slow on laptops. One of my co-workers bought a ThinkPad to run Vista on for testing alongside her existing XP laptop, and it was much slower than the XP laptop running side-by-side.

I will add another personal anecdote. My brother-in-law bought my sister a brand-new Vista laptop. It ran slower than his older XP laptop. It was so bad that he would turn the screen of his XP laptop away so that she wouldn’t see him running XP and mentally compare it to her new laptop.

On the other hand, to repeat, the people who had high-end machines but not bleeding-edge machines adored Vista. If you had lots of memory, a not-quite-bleeding-edge video card, and a fast processor, Vista was great from the getgo.

However, this was not the buying trend of most PC makers. Their trend was to push people to ever-cheaper machines. Sadly, at the time Vista came out as well, all but the most expensive laptops were dodgy for Vista in all its glory.

This is a matter of zigging when you should have zagged, for the most part. But there were two other trends that caught Microsoft by surprise.

The first trend was virtualization. Vista was virtualization-surly. One of its cool features that’s great if you’re on a high-end computer is that it did a lot of pre-caching and pre-loading. Most people with lots of memory on a computer just don’t use that memory, and Vista had ways to use it to make the experience snappier. If you’re on a VM, this is precisely what you don’t want. In an ironically saving grace, though, Vista had a virtualization-surly license, as well. Only the most expensive Vista package was licensed for VMs, which was just as well given that it was optimized for big tower computers in a way that it was pessimized for VMs.

The second trend was netbooks. Intel gave not in the form of faster CPUs, but lighter, smaller, cheaper, less power-hungry CPUs in the Atom. The Atom, however, didn’t have the oomph for Vista, and this meant it had to run XP, which further tarnished Vista’s rep.

All of this together — bad performance among gamers, bad performance on cheap computers and laptops, combined with the trends towards virtualization and netbooks were what gave Vista a bad rep. The people who bought a computer that was a high-end desktop but not a gaming machine loved Vista (and love it to this day). Unfortunately, this demographic is precisely the demographic that also tends to buy Macs. Vista’s problems were all from zigging when you should have zagged.

Some of Vista’s problems can be laid at the feet of “security” (which I intentionally put in scare quotes. UAC was rightly ridiculed for excessive dialogs, but is that a security failure or a UI failure? Yes, kernel improvements delayed getting drivers out (which is one of the things that made the gaming experience suboptimal) and some other bumps. But those were compounded by marketing that went opposite of reality. If the Vista marketing had said, “Hey, it’s going to be a bit slow, and there will be some rough edges. But you’ll really like how we’re sticking it to virus writers” then there may have been a different perception. It is also not fair to blame counter-factual marketing on security.

The bottom line is this. Vista was great for some people. It was bad for others. But the marketing said it was going to be great for everyone. Good marketing that took Vista’s plusses and minuses as facts could have made things better. It was bad timing that Vista came out when the prevailing trend of every-faster computers everywhere started to change. Facing that could have made the difference.

None of that has anything to do with security.