globalsociety

First it was his Blackberry, then his social media campaign, now he is taking questions by text message before his Africa trip … gotta love it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8141870.stm

Are geeks interested in the economy? Do tech-heads pay attention to GDP? With 2009 widely predicted to be a year of economic slowdown in all of the major economies, things look bleak for technology enthusiasts.

Across a number of technology web sites that I regularly visit {osnews.com,  allaboutsymbian.com} it was only in late 2008 that I got  some sense that the looming economic downturn was having any significant on how geeks [sorry, I mean technology enthusiasts] talked about technology.

It is tempting to see the Geek as a one-dimensional figure. The stereotype of the geek is of someone narrowly focussed on his/her chosen technology, probably with little interest in broader issues, be these political, social or economic. As a geek since adolescence, I can say that this stereotype is far form the truth. Some of us geeks are one-dimensional, but by no means all of us.

I know geeks who span the political and social spectrum. Therefore I am not surprised that an awareness of the consequences of an economic  downturn on the world of information technology is seeping into the the geekosphere.

Economic slowdown may mean fewer high-end gadgets to play with; total meltdown may see us losing most of our toys altogether [argh!!!]. But where lies threat there lies opportunity; a chance to do more with less. The past decade has seen too narrow a focus on the features/specification arms race in computing and mobile technology. Now may be a good time s a good time to think of using  less energy, fewer toxic inputs, less sweated labour to build geek toys.

Hail the dawn of green geekonomics.

No, 2009 will not be the year of the Linux desktop. Nor will 2009 mark the much hoped for – among many Floss enthusiasts – beginning of the end of Microsoft, not even if Apple were to pull a giant irabbit out of a tiny ihat [sic].

I hate to have to break this to my hard-core Linux friends who promote their KDE/GNOME etc desktops, but the desktop is only part of the contemporary computing experience. The Cloud along with mobiles are as important.

Over the next few years we will see web, mobile and desktop applications converge AND remain distinct in predictable as all as unpredictable ways.  The economic downtown could have the positive effect a bringing concerns  about efficiency and cost effectiveness to greater prominence than spec boasting and feature bloat.

Witness the rise of the netbook – perfect for these straitened times. Note too the increasing capability and affordability of mobile phones. In this scenario the desktop is no longer the central  node of the consumer computing experience. It follows that the desktop operating system is of decreasing importance.

If we move more toward general information appliances that are always connected and which derive much of their functionality from server side applications, then it matters little what operating system runs on the appliance in our hands. In  the world of ubiquitous connectivity Alan Kay’s Dynabook  is indifferent to any actual operating system. In this scenario it is by no means obvious that Linux has a clear advantage over Redmond’s offerings. I go so far as to suggest that it would be a foolish person to bet against Microsoft being able to compete effectively in the web appliance space.

Does this mean I no longer care for Linux? Of course not! But insofar as everyday computing is concerned, Linux as a desktop operating system, along with all the other desktop operating systems, is in the endgame. 

OK, I can see that this looks a bit mad …

Consider: borders serve to selfishly preserve national wealth and power behind national boundaries of advanced capitalist states and to ensure the continuance of an unjust global order. The dominant neo-liberal ideology of globalisation glosses over the fact that large-scale economic migration was crucially important in Europe's history and European making of the so-called ‘new world’. We face a global economic crisis that calls for radical thinking, but narrow self-interest causes the increasingly right-wing governments and elites of western societies to refuse to engage with abstract ideas of global systemic democracy; instead they fall back on nationalistic and xenophobic politics: Brown’s ‘British jobs for British people’ etc. 

The global elite, like the pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy, have elaborated through their own organic intellectuals a fully thought through system which justifies the state of things.  Moreover, they have institutions, resources and ultimately power on their side, and are unlikely to yield up that power easily. Nonetheless, given the impracticality of completely fortifying the wealthy parts of the world, the demographic impact of birth rates in rich nations and the need for labour, as well as the injustice of a global system of apartheid, some way of more fairly sharing the world’s resources is called for. 

Instead of pulling up the drawbridge, how about a global Keynesian programme of public works?

2006

It was sometime in the late 1980s I believe, that I  had gone on a weekend retreat with a number of Roman Catholic school teachers from my old school, St. Mary’s College. Though having been raised an Anglican, I had attended a Roman Catholic grammar school and was for a time drawn toward what appeared to be the intellectual intricacy and therefore the challenge of RC theology. I was for a time considering a life in the priesthood. Anyway, this retreat was led by an elderly French Creole priest: Father Farfan.  He presided over the most congenial weekend, devoted to discussing morality, contemporary gender relations in the Catholic Church, educational reform, self-discipline and of course, contraception (he also managed to teach us how to dive safely into the sea from low rocks).

Sitting one evening on a large veranda, swatting away mosquitoes, our little group comprised teachers of science and mathematics at my old school, and myself, who was then a computer programmer; the session was led by Fr Farfan, who decided to touch on questions of the existence of God. When my turn came around to make a contribution I thought I could demonstrate that I had been doing a bit of reading in philosophy and theology: I proudly presented a summary of St. Anslem’s ontological proof for the existence of God, which may be summed up as follows: “God is that  than which nothing greater can be conceived”.

This did not have as profound an effect as I had hoped it would (I had been quite impressed by what appeared to be an impregnable argument; Fr Farfan appeared rather less so). The good Father interjected with, ” Well Brian, consider this: If God were all powerful then perhaps he could create  a stone  that was so heavy he would be unable to lift it”. He was articulating a variation on an established philosophical response to Anslems’s proof. Conundrum, or clearly nonsensical argument? Nonetheless, one which caused me to stay up that night and think about it. Now what does this have to do with code breaking? you ask. Well, I think a great deal, actually.

Coded communication has always fascinated humans. From Ancient times up to the present, for all kinds of reasons, people have felt a need to send messages which, if intercepted by a third party, would make no sense. Spies, diplomats and soldiers are the obvious users of such coded messages. Simon Singh’s The Code Book: The Secret History of  Codes and Code-Breaking (Fourth Estate, 2000),  is a gripping account, a romp through the history of the battle between those who make codes and those who attempt to break them.

The earliest form of code-making involved word substitution: this was used by the Romans and probably others before them. Roman code-making sparked a cold war in that some of the best minds of the Ancient world set to work to find efficient means of cracking the early codes. Especially interesting is Singh’s account of tenth-century Arab cryptanalysis, which sought out patters in enciphered text using frequency analysis. Early code-making involved two branches: hiding of messages - steganography; and scrambling of messages, cryptography. Even today, as we are on the verge of new breakthroughs using supercomputer-driven codes, these two branches still shape how we work with codes.

Charles Babbage’s prototype computer pointed the way to using the speed of electromechanical devices that employed a brute force method to overwhelm codemakers’ ciphers. Prior to this, code-breaking relied on human wit, diligence, patience, and insight. The ideas of von Neuman and Turing  combined with developments in electromechanical technoclogy opened up a new phase of development, one which reached its peak in the Second World War with the Nazi development of the Enigma cipher, and Turing’s leadership of the successful attempt to crack it.

Today, with wide access to powerful personal commputers, we use encoding keys which are 128 (randomly generated) binary digits long, which would in principle require many millions of human-hours to crack– i.e. break by brute force. There is a weakness, though, in our current cryptographic schemes, as you might have learnt if you use PGP to encrypt your email. While your generated key is 128 bits long and virtually impossible to crack (except perhaps by US or Russian secret services), you access that key to decode messages by first entering a password (yes, your cipher key has itself to be ciphered). And therein is one weakness of contemporary digital security: the humble password. If we are to remember a password then this implies that passwords are themselves limited by human memory, which, unlike computing, remains pretty much as it was in the time of the Ancients.

Even if some care were taken to choose a password  that would be hard to guess it is no proof against a determined code breaker: take for example, a sequence of alphanumeric characters comprised of your favourite colour (blue)  plus the year (70) and month (12) of  your birth, plus your height in cm (165); this would give a password of ‘blue7012165’. This password, while it would be quite difficult to guess, could be cracked by a sufficiently powerful ‘brute force’ attack – in which the cracker (these are hackers who specialise in breaking into systems) uses a computer program that tries each word in a dictionary followed by sequences of numbers. This crack would be computationally intensive, but you could write the algorithm to implement it in a couple of hours.

So, in the age of the digital computer we now have the technology of making codes which would require massive amounts of computing power to crack,  but that can in theory be cracked by relatively simple brute force techniques.

Singh’s work ends with a challenging but rewarding discussion of quantum cryptography and quantum cryptanalysis. You should read Singh to find out what this is about, but it suffices to say here that with  quantum computing – where all possible solutions to a cipher are evaluated at once in  a massively parallel system - there is the possibility for either the end of code-making or the perfect code (or perhaps both simultaneously), though given quantum indeterminacy, it is not clear which outcome would carry the day.

To segue back to St Anslem then (God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived): can a quantum computer make a code so strong that no quantum computer  would be able to crack it? Hmm ...

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My 30 day experiment to work mainly in Linux hit a snag. I tried several Linux distros on aDell XPS m1330 laptop: I installed Ubuntu 7.10 but I don't like the Gnome look and feel; Kubuntu also ran well , but Mandriva offer the best KDE desktop in my experience. So Mandriva it was to be.

I have been using Linux off and since 2002 moving between USE/OpenSUSE, Mandrake/Mandriva and Xandros.I decided to go all the way and run only Linux on a laptop for 30 days, so I took out the VIsta dual boot hard disc and stuck that in an external drive enclosure, then installed Mandriva 2008 on a separate hard disc and stuck that into the laptop. No going back without getting the screwdriver out, I thought. Except I did. I could not get sound to work nor could I get the built in web cam going. I was getting no joy from any Linux games save Darwinia; and no games at all worked in cedega.

In a moment of intense frustration, as so many times in the past,  I felt I did not have the time to troubleshoot all of these issues; so I swapped hard discs and went back to the comforting environment of Vista: web cam working great sound, bluetooth synch with my mobile phone, all the familiar windows software, all of my games ... As I have often thought over the years: life is too fucking short for Linux.

But no.  Hang on I thought. Calm down. I gritted my teeth and decided to have another go at switching to Linux. If I needed to use Windows urgently I had my desktop. I reminded myself – again - that trying to move my work to Linux would give me first-hand insight into a range of issues involved in switching to Free Software. So I swapped hard discs again and went back to a full Linux environment on the laptop [17 December 2007 and already a wobble].

As I will be working on an application prototype that must run cross platform, I set up a WinXP VM running under VMplayer for for software testing. Not quite a pure Linux set-up, but as I have no Office productivity software loaded in the Windows VM, and no easy option to dual boot back to Windows I am forced to investigate the nuances of getting the laptop to work on Linux, while getting on with my normal work of writing and developing an e-learning application.

What do I like so far? Multimedia on Mandriva is great: I have flash, win32 and QuickTime codecs, and a full DVD player. I prefer the ease of a Linux installation with proprietary plugins, and have no interest in an-all Free Software purist solution.

What really swung it for me is that I now have the built-in Novatel 3G HSPDA wireless broadband card working out of the box. This is key as I don't like being tethered to Wifi hotspots.


What do I not like:

Sound is still not all there and I can't use the webcam on the XPS 1330.

Integrated media buttons do not work (they did in Ubuntu); the integrated remote control has limited functionality, and bluetooth remains a no-go area for me. 


All of these I will tackle over the next week or two. Cedega has n sound, but I may have found the problem, I think (Gaming is not central to this experiment ... but is fun).

Battery usage is about 10 - 15 % down compared to Vista: 4:40 hrs as against 5:30 hours on an extended battery, but I will investigate optimizations.

Open Office offers most of what I would do in Microsoft Office, but Impress seems a poor substitute for PowerPoint 2007; maybe I just need to source some good templates, or create my own.

The DIY aspect to Linux is fun, but it does require time. This could be a barrier to adoption by busy people. It certainly has been for me in the past.

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Second part of my Zotero rant. Still not able to get the program to communicate with openoffice writer, which means no work on Linux. What is especially irritating is that the problem has been widely reported on the zotero forums, and while a number of users have reported successful workarounds, as far as I can tell none of the zotero technical people have indicated that that they: a) are aware of; and b) are working on the problem. So, it is back to Endnote for me.

This is what happens when I launch OOwriter 2.3:

Have to click OK twice for this error dialogue to go away.

Here is a screen grab of what the OO extension looks like after installation:

I can’t enable the highlighted ‘ZoteroRPC.py’ item (made certain that python is installed and configured on my machine). 

Nothing happens when I try to insert a citation from OO writer.

I’m sure that I could grok this, but really haven’t got the time right now.

Here’s hoping that this gets resolved fairly quickly, as I’m on the verge of recommending this as a great tool for students.

So, channel 4 have done it again: two-part drama, Britz, about a British muslim brother and sister – Sohail and Nasima – and how the London bombings affected them. Destined to be controversial, I found it a deeply moving and disturbing drama.

Within hours of the screening of the second and final episode, the linked discussion forum had hundreds of messages, ranging, predictably, from the sympathetic to the hostile.

There is no easy, or indeed, gentle way to represent the making of a suicide bomber. And given the current political climate in the UK, you have to commend the producers for tackling this topic. It was hard to watch, but whatever your views on the ‘war against terror’, I can’t see how any thinking person can dismiss this drama as ‘making murder beautiful’. The taking of human life will always be morally complex, and for that very reason, we get nowhere by simplification.

I didn’t entirely agree with the way in which the writer developed the characters (but so what?). In particular I found Sohail’s justification for joining the secret service – that he ‘owed everything to Britain, for taking in his family’ and he ‘wanted to give something back’ – to be historically naive in the extreme. After all, it was Britain's colonial expansion that shaped the Indian sub-continental space from which Sohail’s parents migrated to the UK. The notion that black and brown migrants should be grateful for the chance to live in Britain is patently absurd when viewed in isolation from the fact of millions of British people having bettered their life chances by moving to other places. I thought Sohail was far too intelligent to mouth this right-wing platitude. He was otherwise complex and fascinating.

And Nasima. Well, her story was almost too painful to watch. To the question, what could lead a sensible, caring, human being to become a suicide bomber, Britz posed an answer. And what a complex answer it was. Who could deny that Nasima’s life was beautiful, though her death was ugly. We watch her life, up to it’s final moments, as a process of becoming, but becoming what?

That is one of the most urgent questions of our time.