Emergent Chaos

Twenty years ago today, Nelson Mandela was released from prison on Robben Island, where he was imprisoned for 27 years for considering violence after his rights to free speech and free association were revoked by the government.

I learned a lot about the stories when I visited South Africa, and then more when my mom sent me “The World that was Ours” by Hilda Bernstein. She was an activist and the wife of one of the “Rivonia Trial.” Her book is a highly readable account of what life was like, and how people who started out as reformers were radicalized by increasingly bizarre and ineffectual attempts by the government to exert control.

It also gives a good sense of how absurd the actions of the apartheid system became as time went on. I could make snarky comparisons to the TSA, and believe me, I’m tempted. But the simple truth is that as bad as things have gotten in the US, they generally don’t even approach the dysfunction which existed in South Africa.

Looking at South Africa today, it’s easy to forget that twenty years ago, the country was engaged in an active race war with government forces shooting into funeral crowds every weekend. The work that Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and F.W. De Klerk and others did to stop the violence and build the society which exists in South Africa today is one of the success stories of our time. Yes, it has deep imperfections, but so does the world.

Photo from the Apartheid Museum. On the left is a ballot box.

On January 30th, 1649, Charles I was beheaded for treason. He refused to enter a defense, asserting that as monarch, he was the law, and no court could try him. That same defense is raised today by Milošević, Hussien and other tyrants.

The story of how John Cooke built his arguments against that claim is told in entertaining and accessible depth in “The Tyrannicide Brief” by Geoffrey Robertson.

As his website says, “Geoffrey Robertson QC has been counsel in many landmark cases in constitutional, criminal and media law in the courts of Britain and the commonwealth and he makes frequent appearances in the Privy Council and the European Court of Human Rights.” So he knows what he’s talking about, and he knows how to tell an engaging story.

The principle that no one is above the law is an important one. So today raise a glass and remember John Cooke.

Asked about the timing, the unbriefed propaganda minister mumbled: “As far as I know, effective immediately.” When that was reported on television, the Berliners were off. Baffled border guards who would have shot their “comrades” a week earlier let the crowd through—and a barrier that had divided the world was soon being gleefully dismantled. West Germany’s chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was so unready for history that he was out of the country.

The destruction of the Iron Curtain on November 9th 1989 is still the most remarkable political event of most people’s lifetimes: it set free millions of individuals and it brought to an end a global conflict that threatened nuclear annihilation. For liberals in the West, it still stands as a reminder both of what has been won since and what is still worth fighting for.

The Economist has two excellent articles about the wall. “So much gained, so much to lose” and “Walls in the mind.” They do a great job of capturing both the ups and downs of the chaos that has replaced the Politburo and its puppets.

It’s also worth remembering that it’s the 61st 71st anniversary of Kristalnacht.

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.

That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States [including the military and naval authority thereof] will, during the continuance in office of the present incumbents, recognize [and maintain the freedom of] such persons, as being free, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has a good article on the Emancipation Proclamation.

[Quick update: Bryan Carter has a great photo he mentioned in the comments.]

South African runner Caster Semenya won the womens 800-meter, and the attention raised questions about her gender. Most of us tend to think of gender as pretty simple. You’re male or you’re female, and that’s all there is to it. The issue is black and white, if you’ll excuse the irony.

There are reports that:

Two Australian newspapers reported Friday that gender tests show the world champion athlete has no ovaries or uterus and internal testes that produce large amounts of testosterone. … Semenya is hardly alone. Estimates vary, but about 1 percent of people are born with abnormal sex organs, experts say. These people may have the physical characteristics of both genders or a chromosomal disorder or simply ambiguous features. (“When someone is raised female and the genes say XY,” AP)

For more on the medical end of this, see for example the “Consensus statement on management of intersex disorders” in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The athletics associations rules don’t cover all of these situations well. The real world is far messier and more complex than most people have cause to address. There are a great many apparently simple things that are really complicated as you dig in.

What the sports associations and news media are doing to Semenya is reprehensible. (There are over 10,000 stories listed on Google News, versus 13,000 for Derek Jeter, who just broke a Yankees record.) She didn’t come into running knowing that she had no ovaries. Having to deal with the identity issues that her testing brings up under the harsh light of the entire world (including me) is simply unfair.

It’s unfair in almost the same way as the British government’s treatment of Alan Turing, the mathematician who Time named one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century for his fundamental work on computers and cryptanalysis. Turing was also a convicted homosexual who committed suicide because of his “treatment” with estrogen, which caused him to become impotent and to develop breasts.

This week, Gordon Brown issued an apology entitled “Treatment of Alan Turing was ‘appalling’:”

While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

Sports officialdom and state governments are different. Sports are voluntary associations, although athletes have little influence on the choices of international sports functionaries. Either way, watching the chaotic world crash onto the inflexible bureaucracies is tremendously frustrating to me.

As more and more of the world is processed by Turing Machines, assumptions that seem obvious to the programmer are exposed harshly at the edges. A friend with a Juris Doctorate recently applied for a job online. The form had a field “year you graduated from high school” that had to be filled out before she went on. Trouble is, she never did quite finish high school. She had the really relevant qualification-a J.D. from a good school. But she had an emotionally wrenching choice of lying on the form or not applying for the job. She eventually chose to lie, and sent a note to the HR people saying she’d done so and explaining why. I doubt the fellow who wrote that code ever heard about it.

I have a challenge to anyone involved in creating an online identity management system: How well does your system handle Semenya?

The typical answer is either that “that’s configurable, although we don’t know if anyone’s done exactly that” or “she’s an edge case, and we deal with the 95% case really well.” If you have a better answer, I’d really like to know about it. And as a product guy, those are likely the decisions I’d make to ship.

I’ll close by echoing Brown’s words: We’re sorry, you deserve so much better.

Once apon a time, I was uunet!harvard!bwnmr4!adam. Oh, harvard was probably enough, it was a pretty well known host in the uucp network which carried our email before snmp. I was also harvard!bwnmr4!postmaster which meant that at the end of an era, I moved the lab from copied hosts files to dns, when I became adam@bwnmr4.harvard…wow, there’s still cname for that host. But I digress.

Really, I wanted to talk about a report, passed on by Steven Johnson and Gunnar Peterson, that Vint Cerf said that if he were re-designing the internet, he’d add more authentication.

And really, while I respect Vint a tremendous amount, I’m forced to wonder: Whatchyou talkin’ about Vint?

I hate going off based on a report on Twitter, but I don’t know what the heck a guy that smart could have meant. I mean, he knows that back in the day, people like me could and did give internet accounts to (1) anyone our boss said to and (2) anyone else who wanted them some of this internet stuff and wouldn’t get us in too much trouble. (Hi S! Hi C!) So when he says “more authentication” does that mean inserting “uunet!harvard!bwnmr4!adam” in an IP header? Ensuring your fingerd was patched after Mr. Morris played his little stunt?

But more to the point, authentication is a cost. Setting up and managing authentication information isn’t easy, and even if it were, it certainly isn’t free. Even more expensive than managing the authentication information would be figuring out how to do it. The packet interconnect paper (“A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn) was published in 1974, and says “These associations need not involve the transmission of data prior to their formation and indeed two associates need not be able to determine that they are associates until they attempt to communicate.” That was before DES (1975), before Diffie-Hellman (1976), Needham-Schroeder (1978) or RSA. I can’t see how to maintain that principle with the technology available at the time.

When setting up a new technology, low cost of entry was a competitive advantage. Doing authentication well is tremendously expensive. I might go so far as to argue that we don’t know how fantastically expensive it is, because we so rarely do it well.

Not getting hung up in easy problems like prioritization or hard ones like authentication, but simply moving packets was what made the internet work. Allowing new associations to be formed, ad-hoc, made for cheap interconnections.

So I remain confused by what he could have meant.

[Update: Vint was kind enough to respond in the comments that he meant the internet of today.]

Demonstrating that no one’s data is safe, the names, pay records, and other personal information of 90,000 English soldiers was placed on the Internet. These soldiers, who served with king Henry V at Agincourt now have their information listed at www.medievalsoldier.org, exposing them to the chance of identity theft after nearly 500 years. They soldiers served from the years 1369-1453. There is no word as to whether they will get credit card protection yet.

It’s hard not to like a holiday which celebrates the storming of a prison and the end of a monarchy.

Photo: Vytenis Benetis .

My usual celebration of Independence day is to post, in its entirety, the Declaration of Independence. It’s very much worth reading, but this year, there’s a little twist, from a delightful story starring Lawren Smithline and Robert Patterson, with a cameo by Thomas Jefferson. Patterson sent Jefferson a letter which read, in part:

“I shall conclude this paper with a specimen of such writing,” he boasted, “which I may safely defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race to decypher to the end of time….”

Well, perhaps it didn’t last until the end of time, but the cipher apparently lasted until now, which is pretty darn good.
There’s an article in
Harvard Magazine, and one in American Scientist, but it’s behind a paywall. Finally, the Wall St Journal has an article, which mentions, both without linking to either.

I think what I really like about this story is how a mathematician bothered to send his new ciphertext to the author of Virginia’s statue on religious liberty (as our third President preferred to be remembered). Having just finished Steven Johnson’s very enjoyable “The Invention of Air,” I’m struck by how broadly engaged with science and the useful arts the founders were. I think that sending an encrypted letter to President Obama would get you … well, I don’t really want to think about it, having just read the Declaration.