Thursday, February 26, 2009

Watching the WORDS go by

This post is a mental mash-up of the content of two URL's.

  1. The Technium: Two Strands of Connectionism
  2. S.I.P. on GAE

So machines, especially the page ranking system of Google, are parsing our URL text based on statistical relationships. Humans, such as me, enjoy statistical non-narrative representation of URL text as seen on S.I.P. on GAE.

Why doesn't Google create Matrix-like vertical scroll ( MLVS ) of the stream of searches coming through? Or someone write an app that pipes Ettercap packet capturing into a MLVS? Or any other source that would make for an interesting scrolling screen?

I know some of the answers might be "well why don't you write it?". Yes, the Ettercap example is doable by a lone wolf hacker such as myself. But Ettercap is not going to have as rich content as a global Google stream of activity. This is more a business decision than technical. Someone with access to a critical mass of text stream needs to do this.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Sunday, February 22, 2009

My Crime and War Posting

Prelude

I've been saving up a lot of ideas on crime, war, justice, pragmatism and valuation of life; and in this blog posting will try to display all of them as coherently as possible. This blog posting will jump around from abstract theory, all the way over to technological or legal specifics. I will have lots of links that are sometimes a fundamental read to understand what I am saying.

Also note that all crime I am concerned with relates to murder, theft, assault, intimidation, and harassment. I do not care what someone does in the privacy of their own home as long as it is not harming another person.

The poor and female are at the greatest risk

A common perception of pro-Law & Order types are as Republican/Conservative, are above the poverty line, own property, and support Law & Order to protect their private interests. I think the stereotype is largely true. I also think the Republican/wealthy demographic should not be the only ones pro-Law & Order. I believe many on the political Left, especially including the inner-city poor and independent single females, should be pro-Law & Order. Why?

Because the easiest targets for violent crime are the poor and the independent, single female.

Compare the lives of the wealthier and the poor or more frugal in inner-cities. Those with more means can buy a car, pay for parking at their condo and at their job, while the poorer, or more frugal, must travel in less of a bubble on the sidewalk and by bus. The point of greatest threat in the inner-city is on the sidewalk, the most basic and austere of all transportation choices. Sure, all can potentially be on that sidewalk. But citing the Washington DC underground walking corridors exclusively for government workers as an archetypical example, plebians walk the most unsafe routes.

And we do not have to stay in the city, focused on dangers faced by plebians going to work or shopping for groceries. For the single female, life has gotten wrought with danger in the wealthiest suburbs. In the Seattle metro area, the "Eastside" is a synonym for wealth, suburbia, and a life removed from the troubles of the city. Arpana Jinaga, 24, was a young woman with great promise in the software industry, living her dream working at an Eastside company and living near Microsoft headquarters. Someone broke through her apartment door (shattered the door jam), and strangled her to death. The case is unsolved. See more info here. Look up the cases of Eve Carson, and Anne Pressly to see more of the same trend.

This is properly a feminist issue. Why aren't feminists inflamed and vocal about such an immediate, quantifiable and objective threat? Because capital F Feminism as an institution is configured to go after systemic abuses of power such as the professional "glass ceiling", dominance of white men in the pantheon of great thinkers, and too many phallic symbols on billboards. When it comes to immediate measurable violence against women, Feminism tends to only prosecute if the perpetrator is a white male, or white cultural unit.

Women are dying in part because of this cultural dialogue paralysis. We need Feminism, we need more independent females, and we need them in the war against their truest threats.

Great Depression/Transition of the 21st century

We may all become poor as the economic trends of late 2008 spin us away from a hyper consumer/production world economy to something still industrial but with a new austere overall lifestyle. This means less money for everything, including pay for cops to come and rescue you, or investigate the murder next door.

Americans have a lot of disinformation thrown at them via TV and movies. On TV, the detectives work what seems to be thousands of man hours on any and every murder case. On TV, viewers are conditioned into thinking the police are capable of infinite labor. Recently I was watching Jericho, and was disappointed the writers promoted the idea of infinite resource in saving people, especially in a series about the collapse of all basic services in our economy due to a terrorist nuclear attack. This was not a crime solving issue, but still my point is about the continued "principled" myth of infinite labor and resource even in a plot about the upheaval of all our basic needs.

The solved case and bad guys sent away forever, if it happens at all, will have to be done with less money. If we don't start planning now for how to do law enforcement with far less funds, we may not have law enforcement.

There are several theorists pointing out with details a near future social collapse due to a total end of global consumerist economics. John Robb and Dmitry Orlov have the most detailed view of this future, and I recommend reading their blogs and books. Robb predicts an America that is like swiss cheese -pockets of crime/anarchy/chaos/miserable poverty called Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ). He predicts a future in which some regions/cities figure out how to do the new lower wage economy well, and others that simply rot into misery.

My crime and war ideas are corollary with this swiss cheese America in which some places are safe to live in and others are some form of dangerous. I believe we are already well along this path, and the extremes are becoming more pronounced. Examples: Phoenix Arizona is the 2nd highest rate for kidnapping in the world as of 2008, with over 370 for the year. Across America their are formerly nice suburbs now ghost towns due to foreclosure evictions. Drug users and sellers are filling the vacant houses, and creating an unsafe environment for the few remaining homeowners. My own mother and father were held at gunpoint in their suburban home, threatened out of their neighborhood by blacks wanting no white homeowners.

Jurisprudence, Justice and Public Safety

Read a news article about a court case involving a murderer. Most I've seen weave a story around justice and rights. In this story the inner motivations of the killer are weighed, or we muse about the value of the killer's life and take its value into account while meting out justice. For the more vengeful, reasoning is presented about the killer's life needing to be spent behind bars or terminated altogether for justice to prevail, basically an eye for an eye religion/ideology. The story may weigh the killer's change in personal values, and ask if the killer regrets the act ( repentant ).

In a war, or in a place in which murder is so prevalent it might as well be war, communities may not have the resources to hold court and slowly, cautiously parse the incident in question. Equal valuation of life without regard to economics is ultimately religious, with Secular Humanism and Catholicism being the main religion examples ( I see the apparent error in categorizing something secular as religious. Most Secular Humanists I know have a mystical, non-empirical, non-pragmatic approach to their ideology) . One has to believe in an unquantifiable framework of psychology, spiritual motivations, and the like for a discussion of justice, repentance, and equal valuation of the killer's life to make sense. In a tough austere world in which murderers are prevalent, and the means to stop them rely on depleted funds/resources of the community, we will likely switch off the long nuanced story of justice or repentance. We may turn to a short dialogue of pragmatism and empiricism with immediate public safety as the only goal. We may turn to whatever is the quickest, cheapest means of eradicating the problem.

An overarching theme emerges, that I am going to tag as a meta quality of the Depression/Transition era: everything is tactical.

We can still have ideals, and aspire, but these will need to address needs and vulnerabilities in the now, in the corporeal world.

Paradigmic Blur

In the Post 9/11 world, especially with the advent of swarm terrorism and system disruption, acts of war no longer look like two official armies going at it. Acts of war look like crime.

The "actors" in war and crime are beginning to blur also. Al-Qaeda and Mexican Drug Cartels, are they both simply organized crime, with the trafficking of Allah ( with opium a complimentary export ) and cocaine as the main differences? Still, my main point is the open source nature of contemporary threats -in the national army paradigm the nation's military regulated who could become an actor of war, whereas religious fanaticism or drug trading are open to anyone to join the movement by merely copying the lifestyle and tactics, which are easily accessed in songs, media and internet sites.

"We are seeing Mexican hit men coming into the US doing hits for the drug gangs. One hit team took out three people at one time in (a middle American city). My team took out two small groups in (a middle American city), but they are here to stay. Very dangerous group. They cross over into the US then using Greyhound buses to travel up north. They are good at counter surveillance. They have been hiring private eyes to find cops, and informers to deal out death." -Undercover cop in middle American city. (source)

Solutions: Cheap and Technical

CPTED(wikipedia entry) is a direct, intelligent way to approach the problem of crime, by designing the manmade environment to naturally thwart crime. It usually requires lots of eyes and lots of social participation, the eyes and participation of the intended users of the environment (example: mall shoppers). CPTED is a viable component of crime prevention even in an era of austerity, but is a weakness for remote stretches of land, remote facilities such as oil or electrical lines, and single females living alone.

In Better Together the authors believe in non-technical, offline social solutions. I believe the physical, non-technical, offline lifestyle will be more prevalent in an austere era, but anticipate it will be the source of weakness in some and the source of strength in others.

Absolute anti-technical communities will be candidates for the worst kind of TAZ, a vulnerable off-grid community with little means to import good open source solutions (example: capturing rainwater on rooftops) posted on the internet, and little means to combat crime other than the way of the Old West. The criminals or terrorists, if organized, will likely have electronic communications of some sort, giving them crucial tactical advantage.

The point I'm trying to make is a subtle one. This Depression/Transition era will be a shift to more austere living, and less consumerist culture. But it will not mean an absolute negation of industrial/technological culture. Luddite anti-industrialist, all-localism types may see the Depression/Transition as a carte blanche affirmation of their desired world coming into existence. I think something more dialectical will emerge, best described as an end to easy money and rampant consumerism, but with industrialism moved to a distributed in-home topology. Less trips to Best Buy, and more welding/fabrication at home. Also, recall the industrial age existed long before the Consumerist Age born after WW2. To turn off the Consumerist Age does not turn on a primitive hunter-gatherer society.

Solutions: Surveillance and Citizen Involvement

In the here and now of the early Depression/Transition era, we have the tools to combat crime more effectively. At the top of the list is an Open Democratic Surveillance System (ODSS). Recently a discussion on Slashdot generated what I consider a fairly robust and near complete description of an ODSS. I saved the salient points in another blog entry, here: slashdot discussion: open democratic surveillance system, it is recommended reading.

I have been obsessed with the ODSS concept, and began writing a web app for citizen reporting of crime here ( tip: does not work with Internet Explorer, use Firefox). Since beginning this programming project I've found somewhat better examples already on the web.

  1. Texas Border Patrol (live cams with citizen monitoring enlisted)
  2. YouNews (archived footage)
  3. Anchorage Crime Map

Changing focus now to sociology more than specific technical, to examine why ODSS may be better than CPTED and offline "get-out-in-the-community" crime prevention. Walking around a neighborhood, hoping to view and subsequently report a crime is tactically dangerous. Viewing it on a surveillance camera and clicking on a submit button ( see Texas Border Patrol example) to report an incident in progress is much more tactically sound, by being both safer and quicker in getting the info to the right people faster. Once the reporting of the incident is sent to the most appropriate actors ( police, US Army, citizen vigilantes, etc) the information can still remain in public view at something like this. Of course information that would be an extreme tactical advantage for the criminals may need shielding, the answer might be an email list to confirmed residents/stakeholders rather than general WWW publishing. But the surveillance footage should always be fully public.

An ODSS and online reporting tools have another tactical advantage that is sociological, not technical. Racial and class solidarity is often a support system for crime, and the anonymity of web based civic action could help break this kind of solidarity. As an example of the no-snitch code within some communities, I give the example of the murder of Tyrone Love and the silence maintained in that community. The best people in that community, people like Tyrone, need a means of defense that does not put them at risk for doing so. Online channels of reporting help with that.

Solutions: The old American melting pot

Panning to a much broader view of fighting crime, with Tyrone Love in mind, I want to close with message that may sound odd, and may not fit well with typical Conservative nor Liberal talking points. Fighting crime in the Depression/Transition era will work better with the most honest and intelligent dialogue we can muster. For liberals, it is time to admit that certain neighborhoods or regions have crime coming mostly from blacks or Mexican immigrants. These fail my Acid Test of Legitimacy. It is an automated Liberal reaction to claim such racial statements as heinous, and that is unfortunate hypocrisy. The same people who play the language/rhetorical game of never stating the danger of a neighborhood, but make absolutely sure never to place themselves in that neighborhood. This Liberal game helps kill black men like Tyrone Love. This Liberal game prevents society from the natural hygiene critical dialogue provides. It is the most complete and utter fool who thinks by stating "these particular blacks or Mexicans are a threat" we will denigrate all in that race or class. We are able to effectively point to the meth dealing Aryan Nation membership whites living in trailer parks from Florida to Oregon as people deserving prison or worse, without confusing ourselves into thinking all whites fit that profile.

For Conservatives, to win the war on crime, do like the US military -try to recruit all the good people. Remember, everything is tactical. Creating an all-white, all-Protestant, all-heterosexual club would be fine, except you create more criminals, and you tell them to target your club. An all-white, all-Protestant, all-heterosexual club is tactically weak. Recruit every homosexual that wants to own a home, be a professional, and contribute to the community. Recruit every black that doesn't identify with gang culture or solely with black culture. Recruit every Chinese immigrant that wants to run their business in peace. Recruit every Mexican immigrant that is afraid of, or opposes, the Mexican Drug Cartels.

That is a community army that could kick crime right in its head.

Open democratic surveillance system

Open democratic surveillance system
thread on Slashdot:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/21/0425218

by macraig (621737) mark.a.craig@gmail.xxx on Saturday February 21, @07:46AM (#26941049)

The correct use of those cameras is to wire them up to the Internet, and make it so that ANY concerned citizen can monitor the cameras in a Web browser, or perhaps a dedicated app. Leave it up to concerned citizens watching a camera to call the police and report what they have observed. Best of all, give them a tool - Firefox extension? - that lets them record what they're viewing, so they have some form of evidence to give police, not just hearsay.

In the United States we have Neighborhood Watch groups, many of which would no doubt find cameras on every street invaluable: they could sit home warm in their jammies and still help keep their neighborhood safe, instead of being out roaming the streets in the harsh cold with the crooks, risking being shot-at.

That approach would incur no additional municipal cost for monitoring, and any misuse of the cameras would be the responsibility of individual citizens, not Big Brother. Would citizens actually do it? I think they would, in high-crime areas or areas where crime is rising. That approach would be democratic, rather than autocratic.

by RyoShin (610051) tukaro@gmail.xxx on Saturday February 21, @09:33AM (#26941873)

"so they have some form of evidence to give police, not just hearsay."

So the police set up a system, the people record the system, then give the police their own feed? Instead, set the system up so that it records the previous five minutes. If someone is watching and sees a crime, they can hit a button on the website (which would use either AJAX or Java) that would start extra recording for that particular camera. After it's all gone down, they hit the stop button (or it stops after X minutes automatically) and they are given a video ID and a little form to fill out to explain what they just saw.

When they submit the form, the information is sent to a rookie/veteran stuck in the office whose job it is to watch the feeds and read/respond to citizen alerts. (If it doesn't work out to have the same person behind the desk 24/7, just make it a rotating shift where each cop takes 6 hours a week at it.) If a lot of citizens suddenly flag a camera, an alert is sent to both the cop on duty, the police chief, and an SMS is sent to any cop in the immediate area of that camera. Cops hopefully have access in their vehicles to the cameras, so they have to check the feed before speeding off (to stop /b/-style raids or some gang using social engineering to move cops from another area).

But getting the citizens interested might be a bit hard... so, instead of Neighborhood Watch, make it Neighborhood Survivor, or Neighborhood Real World, or Neighborhood Big Brother. Glitz the page up, and let people create accounts that can be tied to their successful report rate. (Make sure it has the ability to automatically downgrade reports from an abusive account or IP.) Have a weekly show on local cable about various incidents and those who reported them, along with the ability for people to "vote" on which camera area should get a make-over (regular city stuff, like re-paving a road, fixing fences/house sides, etc.) which will help to boost morale in an area.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

If "Information is Power" is filtering/banning information for your soldiers a case of friendly fire?

It's one thing to unplug the networks because of an active and known threat. It's another when the network is disconnected from a failure to comply with computer policies created by folks who don't have the slightest understanding of information or computer security (pilots).

The AF is bass-ackward when it comes to all things network. As pointed out in the article, much of the internet is blocked for arbitrary reasons based on words in the website such as blogs, forums, flash sites, social networking. I have even been blocked from accessing websites with the word "weapon" and "flight simulation". I wonder how many websites Al Qaeda blocks from their people? ...obviously not flight sims.

An average terrorist with a internet connection is better wired than an Air Force officer. The word to our enemies is, "Don't try to bomb our communications, we will gladly disable them for you the first time you email an Air Force Base a .zip file."

Posted by: Sauce | Feb 18, 2009 9:54:23 PM

See what happens when you standardize your network on the most insecure operating system on the planet - then implement half-ass DoD 8570 measures. Maybe those boys should get some real training for a change. Perhaps buy one less F-22 and you could actually fund that.

Posted by: Solaris10 | Feb 18, 2009 8:52:58 PM

WIRED:DANGER ROOM: Air Force Unplugs Bases' Internet Connections

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

How to make NASCAR rednecks accept Obama

I'm on several Conservative email lists. No wait, I am on one, but its so busy and diverse its like being on a thousand. It is Human Events magazine. Through it Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, Ted Nugent, Sarah Palin, Pat Buchanan and Chuck Norris weave their unique style of right wing ism. I read it so I know what true right wingers are talking about. Not being all snob here; Coulter has a stinging wit that is great and Pat Buchanan comes off as very principled and intelligent.

Since January almost every writing is a call to jihad against President Obama. The President's economic rescue plans are simply seen as ruination via all out socialism.

Here is my recommendation to the Obama administration to counter this growing tide of discontent.

Make sure the stimulus money employs men that drive concrete trucks and work laying down concrete. Make sure this concrete is being laid down far from the big liberal cities. Out in suburban Ohio, Nebraska, California's redneck valley region, Wyoming, and Moses Lake Washington. Whether the projects are repairing our aging Interstates, or building something for the next paradigm - such as wind farms; get lots of Republican men and women out there doing real shovel work and bringing home $800 a week.

Do not direct stimulus money to the standard old friends-of-Democrats such as inner-city lesbians working towards rewilding the landscape and revering native peoples. Hire hard drinking lesbian truck-drivers instead. Hyperbole aside: do not divert tax money to pet projects of the far left social justice set. Not one dollar of the stimulus money.

So back to the prejudiced white Nascar fans bringing home $800 a week (who's neighbors are unemployed due to the closed Home Depot store). They will become deaf to the Republican scream-machine, and become not so much believers in socialism, but at least vocal advocates of the type of government Obama promised in his inauguration speech. One that works.

Monday, February 16, 2009

The most IMPORTANT reading material for an American in 2009

Social Collapse Best Practices by Dmitry Orlov. He is predicting the full collapse of the USA economy. I quote him in the remaining paragraphs of this post.


So that’s what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting “Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!” Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won’t be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don’t recommend passively standing around and watching the show – unless you happen to have a death wish.

Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but in reality they are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next.

So, what is there for them to do? Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Micro/local/residential industrialism: home power management

I spotted on a friend's Facebook Wall discussion about emerging power management for the home with desktop software. Here are the two "products" they were discussing:

  1. Google PowerMeter
  2. Edison by Verdiem

Anti-crime technology: Device knows when it is stolen

Sun Microsystems is promoting a world in which devices are networked. Add to that RFID, and we have a world of objects managed digitally.

Here is an idea I would love see implemented: objects know when they are stolen, and do the right thing ( such as contact owner and proper authorities ) to get back to their proper owner. Bruce Sterling has described a world of these types of things, and calls them Spimes.

For all who would opt out of this, fine. In a depression era economy, I also offer as an idea for police departments: Provide little or no assistance for those who make law enforcement and investigations expensive. By "make law enforcement expensive" I mean people and their objects are not on the grid, not watched, not trackable, and anonymous.

Math formula to discover bad faith Republicans

( Republicans against drain on treasury for market intervention since Obama is in office)
MINUS
(Republicans against drain on treasury for market intervention while GW Bush was in office[ Ron Paul type platform ])
EQUALS
Amount of insincere, unprincipled Republicans