Hello everyone!

Today I want to share a great book I’ve recently read, The Psychology of Software Teams by Dr. Cat Hicks. The book should be very interesting to anyone working on software and also other types of knowledge work as well. Dr. Hicks is a research psychologist, and although the book is written for a non-science audience, it’s still 30% bibliography by weight. Everything she’s written in here is grounded in research and rigorously footnoted.

There is so much that’s good in this book I was highlighting bits almost every other page.

It starts by demolishing the myth of the Lone Genius and “brilliance” beliefs more generally, which turn out to be part of a damaging set of beliefs she terms “Brains in Jars” beliefs around how software development is done, and by extension any knowledge work or teamwork in general.

A key quote in this case: “psychologists discovered that when we constantly monitor and worry about whether we’re being seen as high performers, we also begin to systematically avoid moments when we might fail, risking breaking others’ beliefs that we’re competent, that we belong, and that our work is a valuable contribution.”

In the research she presents, the “performance” mindset focuses on leveraging existing skills and can lead to avoidant patterns of behaviour and burn out, among other negative outcomes.

To continue quoting, “In the real world, individual performance is rarely the strongest predictor of group outcomes. In fact, the strongest predictors of developers’ self-reported productivity tend to be social and communal factors, like peer support and work structures that allow for more self-directed problem-solving. Focusing on improving the problem-solving environment around developers is the evidence-backed strategy.”

The “performance” mindset is contrasted with a “mastery” mindset: “For a person who’s internalized a mastery orientation, deep learning, intrinsic enjoyment, and taking on new work that expands their knowledge and exposes them to novel challenges can be key achievements, even when it opens them up to making more mistakes or looking worse than others.”

Hicks continues in applying group dynamics to software teams that need to collaborate across teams and other organisational boundaries. One of the things I was happiest about is her demolition of the concept of who is “technical” and who isn’t: “almost every single engineer admitted that they debated mightily over what that word meant and shared how much they felt uncomfortable with how exclusionary the term could be. This was striking because in my experience, both engineering organizations and our public conversations about software love to sort people with “technical” and “non-technical” labels.... People ... may often try to comfort others in ways that actually discourage cross-field collaboration and dampen engagement and collaboration by saying things like ‘oh that’s ok, not everyone is a technical person!’, which just reinforces the belief that you have low expectations for them and won’t support them if they try a new challenge.”

Central to the book is the idea that psychological safety is key to delivering high-quality work and long-term innovation. The term is used in this book not in the pop-culture ‘being nice’ or “warm-and-fuzzy sense but “a group-level belief that we’ll face less interpersonal risk with disclosure, particularly for sharing negative information.”

The last two chapters starts the reader on a journey towards building evidence-based spaces for intervention to shift their culture, and this is where things really kick off. Key to the approach is the discussion around creating an evidence strategy, something that would be recognisable to anyone engaged in operational research:

“I call this becoming an organization that wants to understand itself ... evidence literacy also builds you a great bullshit detector ... Evidence strategy focuses on what it takes to motivate creating evidence and validate our theories about what causes what. An evidence strategy will strengthen your decision-making and give you a structural foundation for evaluating the causal stories we tell about software teams. Just like maintaining software, maintaining a healthy evidence practice is a constant practice. The reward is seeing more about the world around you and a better map for creating change.” I was delighted that data literacy came up again as a fundamental skill.

In summary, I would strongly recommend the book to anyone who’s taken on team lead or management responsibilities in IT or is interested in how culture can enable positive outcomes and help people flourish in general. And although the book is written for technology companies and software development teams, an enormous amount of the lessons can be applied in general to any knowledge work and most especially work requiring creativity, problem-solving and cross-domain collaboration. Go check it out!

OpenAI model 'goes rogue', hacks HuggingFace

Hi everyone!

Today in "sci-fi things that have happened": an #AI #agent that was being tested without guardrails to find #security vulnerabilities, found a vulnerability in the closed sandbox it was running in, escaped it's environs, then hacked into another website looking for the solution to the challenge it had been set...

Guardian article here, OpenAI explanation here, Simon Willison's write-up with much more technical detail here.

From a #cybersecurity point of view what's concerning about this is that OpenAI appears to have serious gaps in their network awareness and firewall configurations. If software on any of our servers started trying to hack another server anywhere else, alarm bells would go off all over the place.

Another item to note is that the victim of the attack, a site called Hugging Face, tried to use AI to analyse the attack and was prevented by guardrails. As Simon writes above this re-ignites the debate about guardrails: who gets to decide what they are, are they helping or hurting, etc. Clearly we need some, given the appalling use of poorly safeguarded models like Grok to generate deepfakes and worse, but it's clear that people who have access to AI without them, and who have tokens to burn, are in a position of considerable power.

At this point anyone who's read Neuromancer, arguably the first cyberpunk novel, will start worrying when Tessier-Ashpool SA will turn up, if they haven't already. The future's already here, etc. :-)

What we don't have

Fatma is a nurse who's supporting a group of displaced people who are fleeing a militia that attacked them and burnt down their villages. Fatma has been travelling for days into the countryside in a Toyota Landcruiser to find this group and care for them.

Before she left the capital, she was given a handful of cheap mobile phones. The IT officer had paired them all, so they could network with each other without signal. The standard patient tracking app has been installed.

There is no electricity grid in the camp. There is no mobile signal or running water. The nearest well is two hours away.

When Fatma gets to the camp she hands one of her phones in ‘setup’ mode to each healthcare worker (HCW). They enter their names and register their fingerprints and PINs. From then on, each HCW can use any phone.

The HCWs walk through the massive camp, gathering survey data. New arrivals, how many families, how many children. Pregnant women, sick people. The workers take details of complaints from anyone who approaches them.

The HCWs cover one row of tents each, and the phones synchronise all the data between each other. Occasionally they lose sight of each other and lose signal too.

At mid-day they eat together and one of them, Rashid, returns to the mobile clinic that Fatma’s set up. Rashid plugs his phone into a solar panel to charge, picks up a replacement, and goes back to his colleagues.

When Rashid and his handset came in range of Fatma, all his data and his colleagues data from the other phones was synched with hers. After he leaves, she scrolls through the data and prioritises cases.

The syncing was so quick and automatic, they just assumed it was happening. Rashid spent less than 10 minutes in the clinic to get some water and supplies, and doesn't even glance at his new phone until he's walking back out again, to check the time.

Each night she takes one phone and puts it in the glove compartment of the jeep, turned off, and brings back the one she left the previous night. That is her off-site backup.

The next week an obstetrician and a midwife arrive in another truck. Among all their supplies they brought more handsets. Fatma adds them as caseworkers to the group database, where they can see only their patient's data. If an HCW had to borrow their phone and logged in with their PIN, of course they'd see only the camp survey data.

The week after, a doctor from another organisation visits the camp for a week. She doesn't have a device that's part of the cluster, but she connects to their phone's collective WiFi network, and from there she uses the login she was given on the webapp version of the patient tracking system. It looks identical to the normal app and one of the HCWs shows her how to use it.

A month later, someone else arrives with a satellite dish and a diesel generator. Now they have Internet access. Fatma's chats on Signal all come alive and update. One of the clinic phones is nominated by the cluster to upload an encrypted backup to a server in the capital. From now on it will try and do this every night. It also uploads anonymised and aggregate data to the main headquarters of Fatma's employer in a neighboring country.

A separate phone downloads the latest security patches and an update to the patient tracking app. The updates spread throughout the cluster of devices and they reboot themselves in phases overnight.

A week later a rumour reaches the camp that the militia has moved closer to them. Within a few days, a third of the camp has fled. Fatma promotes Rashid to cluster administrator, gives him a small box full of phones and a solar panel, and he leaves the camp in a truck to follow them.

A week later, the camp is empty and the militia are two days away. Fatma left as well and has met up with Rashid in the new camp. Their databases merge and Rashid’s cluster now has missing patient data from people who had examinations after he left, but who then fled to the camp he now works at.

After three months, Fatma's tour is done and she's due some R&R. She leaves in another truck to start the journey back to the capital for a debrief before she flies home, with a phone in her pocket. Once it gets in range of a mobile signal, she calls her partner and leaves a message on their voicemail to say she's coming home.

***

TECHNOLOGY that you can't see directly see in this short story:

* WiFi mesh networks and VPNS

* Encrypted, sharded & multi-master replicated databases, built on CRDTs or similar things.

* Stock Linux, capable of hosting a multi-tiered application, using all the capabilities of a normal mobile handset incl. SMS & voice calls

* Load-balanced application - level adaptive clustering.

* P2P package/app distribution and rolling updates with boot assessment.

Written in response to this question on HN.

(Some of the) things you can't do on stock Androids that block this story from happening:

* Hosting servers (incl. HTTPS, <port 1024) on Android phones

* Mesh networking, multi-hop routing is not allowed, WiFi-Aware doesn't count because of this. batman-adv on a handset would count.

How it works in real life:

Paper. Whiteboards. Excel if you're lucky. There's more likely to be mobile signal. Long nights transcribing stuff into slow webapps via a VSAT connection.

Bigger facilities will have better tech.

What's also not shown is Fatma's team: logisticians, watsans, health promotion/community outreach.

Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zack Wienersmith

 

The debate over immigration is often presented as being between people who want to let in 'some' immigrants, and people who want to let in as few as possible.

This is an artificial framing that includes only a small spectrum of possible arguments. The book "Open Borders" by Zack Wienersmith and Bryan Caplan makes a 'radical' case in a comic book format. An introduction to the book is here.

I found it an interesting angle and I think people who want to restrict immigration need to consider how they'd respond to the arguments in the book. Bryan Caplan is a libertarian, which adds an interesting twist.

At present, in the UK, the conservatives are trying to partially offshore their asylum processing to Rwanda, a move condemned by the UN, many former conservative ministers, Archbishop Justin of the Church of England, Doctors Without Borders, and many more. Given that they've united such a disparate group, quite an accomplishment, I'd take it as a good sign, were one needed, that they're barking up the wrong tree.

From an 'open borders' policy that is nowadays seen as radical, to on the other hand a more medieval approach, where people from the other village smell different and aren't to be trusted - if you're an outsider, you're a citizen of nowhere and probably fleeing the law - it's clear what direction the UK is heading in, and this is lamentable.

Brute racism and unthinking jingoism are sadly easy to understand if not condone. The opposite takes a bit more effort, but is well worth considering.

Ride-hailing, electrification & self-driving cars are not sufficient to reduce congestion & emissions

In this article, I'm going to explain why I think that ride-sharing & self-driving cars without 100% electrification and car-to-car coordination & fleet orchestration may be a recipe for gridlock and an impact in the wrong direction on climate change.

First, what is the impact of ubiquitous ride-sharing on traffic in inner cities? Some research shows that as the cost of a car ride decreases, more people ride in cars who would otherwise have taken public transport or cycled.

The largest cost of a trip using a ride-sharing service is paying the driver. If self-driving cars are available, it seems obvious that a self-driving taxi or car hire service will be cheaper than one driven by a human. The effect will probably be more pronounced but of a similar nature to ride-sharing: taking traffic from public transport & cycling, but not reducing the number of cars on the road.

In addition to this I believe that Jevon's paradox may come into play here, as it has with storage space & compute capacity in the cloud. To quote Wikipedia, this 'occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.'

If rides become cheaper, then there is also the possibility that this will unlock demand by making previously uneconomical uses of ride-sharing viable, much like the falling price of coal which triggered the original paradox.

Parallel to this, each provider of ride-sharing has an incentive to provide as many cars, or potential rides, as possible. This is something we can see clearly in dockless bike-sharing, where competitors flood cities with their bikes in an effort to grab market share.

Ride-share bikes in China - Mashable

For bike-sharing, surplus bikes can result in some very unusual scenes, such as the one shown here. For ride-sharing services, surplus cars would take up parking spaces, and increase congestion as they travel between rides.

The result is a 'tragedy of the commons' -type situation. The commons in this case is the common right of way (roads), and public parking spaces. The tragedy is that congestion could become so bad that the travel times become longer, and the impact on the environment is increased through the extra fuel consumption of what is for now overwhelmingly an ICE-based fleet of cars.

Would electrifying a ride-share fleet solve both these problems? Petrochemical fuel consumption would obviously diminish, as would particulate pollution, due to regenerative braking. But if a Jevons/tragedy situation occurs, there would still be more cars on the road than necessary, using more fuel than necessary, electrified or not.

A famous advert for public transport, courtesy BoredPanda.

That is why I believe that two more components are necessary: car-to-car coordination and fleet orchestration. These would enable several energy-saving & congestion-reducing features.

Car-to-car coordination would, for example, enable fleet driving, where the driving of all cars in a fleet are slaved to the first, and drafting is used to reduce fuel consumption.

Fleet orchestration would enable many new ways of using cars, such as pre-placement of vehicles for surge periods, but the most important one for the environment would be optimising the distribution and direction of cars for maximum occupancy. This would be a super-charged version of UberPOOL.

Most congestion is caused by hundreds of cars with one person sitting inside each of them, something that in my opinion is the most insane sight that the average person will see, and ignore, on any given day. The problem is that this is a very hard problem to solve. Both these components would require extremely broad roll-out in order to be effective. However, they would also benefit from network effects: once a large provider has a version working well, it makes sense for additional cars to join their network if possible.

So to conclude: in my opinion, ride-sharing apps or self-driving cars cannot have a positive impact on the environment without full electrification and a major ramp-up in the intelligence with which fleets are deployed. Low-cost or autonomous car transport will lead to gridlock without coordinating intelligence, and worse pollution without full electrification.

One Christian response to the Snowden disclosures

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”

- John 3 verses 19-21 (NIV)

This quote from John may be taken as a straightforward condemnation of the “Intelligence Community” of any nation, or as the baseline from which we judge the openness of any government. However, it’s vulnerable to the practicality argument: after all, the Gospel is “...so radical that it's doubtful that [the U.S.] Defense Department would survive its application”, to quote a certain Mr. Obama, specifically in this case talking about the Sermon on the Mount in 2006.

But what else does the Bible have to offer us to guide our thinking on the Snowden disclosures?  Some other people have thought about this, for example Stephen Mattson at “Red Letter Christians” looks at it from the angle of facing up to the truth, while the Christian Post looks at the privacy implications, and Reform magazine has some partly Christian-centred responses to the question of Big Brother in general. For the sake of completeness, and without endorsing these points of view, I’ll note that I also found Christians calling for Snowden to be shot, and for Obama to be impeached for attempting to install himself as a dictator.

I would like to take one aspect of the Snowden disclosures specifically, and that is the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence agencies’ bulk collection of Internet traffic, and their subversion of the fabric of the Internet as a whole by manipulating and undermining the security standards used worldwide to enable trust, privacy, financial transactions, and so on. The “Five Eyes” are traditionally the intelligence agencies of the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, who refer to the arrangement simply as FVEY, which is an acronym I’ll be reusing here.

One of the earliest stories about the uses and abuses of technology in the Bible is the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 v1-9. As you can read on the right, the story is at root a story of pride and hubris; enabled by a new technology – the fired brick, which decoupled the expansion rates of cities from the limits of local quarry production – man thinks himself equal with God, and suffers for it. In the mapping of this story onto the actions of the FVEY alliance, the pride and hubris is easy to see: the philosophies of “Collect It All” , “Mastering the Internet” and “NOBUS” (NObody But US should be able to hack into or control systems) are straightforward attempts to gain a ‘God-like perspective’ of what happens on the Internet and elsewhere. To cast a different light on this, this is no different to secretly transforming what was supposed to be an unprecedented enabler of freedom, democracy, trade and dialogue within a ‘Global village’ into a Panopticon, a brightly-lit cage in which we are all trapped and in which nothing that is done can be hidden.  This is in stark contrast to the professed aim of the US Govt. in particular, extolling the Internet for what it could be, when convenient to their foreign policy. In the Babel story, the hubris of the Babylonians is punished by God by ‘confusing their language’ and preventing their collaboration. The motives of God in doing that aren’t important in this context, and we can never know them fully anyway. But without invoking a divine intervention, or Nemesis, it is for me possible to see how the hubris of the FVEY countries could lead to the end of the fragile unity of the Internet in the form we now know; a splintering into national networks, different or competing numbering and naming schemes, leading to conflicts between IP addresses and domain names. This may seem like hyperbole, so I will relate to you some of the events surrounding the 2005 World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), a UN-sponsored global summit held in Tunisia by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), at which the EU proposed that control of the Internet be passed from the U.S. Dept. Of Commerce to an international organisation such as the ITU. What happened: the U.S. refused, and furthermore went back on its previous promise to transfer control of the root zone file, the central registry of the master lists of computer names on the Internet, to an international organisation by Sept. 2006. Other countries, predictably including Russia and Iran, reacted frostily. You might imagine the position of the Americans explained succinctly as follows:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

“a) We built it, so we get to keep charge of it. Trust us, we’re defending freedom and democracy.
  b) Also, have you seen the list of people asking to take control of the Internet? Saudi Arabia, SRSLY?
  c) And anyway, what are you going to do, build your own Internet?”

Post-Snowden, the reasoning behind (a) is now unfortunately suspect, while the list in (b) is growing and has countries like Germany on it, who are considering the feasibility of (c) with increased scrutiny. Indeed, countries such as Brazil have already proposed installing new undersea fibre-optic cables that don’t make landfall in the UK, a major Internet hub for Europe, or traverse UK or US territories en route to other parts of the world, the goal being to lessen the impact of the of the taps on these cables that we now know exist.

Hopefully the story of the Internet Governance episode at WSIS goes to show that the current, more-or-less unified state of the Internet is not something we can take for granted. Certainly the organisations currently tasked with Internet governance and administration do not – as the short and blunt Montevideo statement makes extremely clear.

Why are we here? In the wake of 9/11 the FVEY agencies were told: “make sure this never happens again”. We now know that they responded by accelerating their work to try and gain the capability of monitoring everything, anywhere, on the worlds telecommunications systems. At no point was the question asked of our leaders, let alone the electorate, “should we turn the Internet into a tool for pervasive surveillance?”, and yet this is what has been done. As a result, the risk of ruining the potential of the Internet, by splitting it up, or turning it into a weapon, is higher than ever.

It is crucial to understand that the Internet is nothing more than a set of agreements – contractual, political and cultural – joined together to create a network of networks. Once the agreements break down, so does the Internet.

Now, it might be seen as bitterly ironic, even hypocritical, to try and make a Christian case for unity in the face of disagreement, given how riven with division the global Church is itself. But nevertheless, a global communion and solidarity is a central part of Christian faith, no matter how sorely used.

I believe that similarly, the truly global communication offered by the Internet is far more important than the problems arising from its existence, inasmuch as it can, in turn, enable truly global community. Personally, I’m thankful for being able to hear from members of my family spread all over the world across three continents and spanning the globe, and I hope that we never lose the huge possibility of being brought together on such a scale, difficult to imagine as that may be.

"More perfect union?" by Alan Wilson

This book is billed as being for people who want to align their heads with the directions their hearts have already taken on the issue of same-sex marriage and the acceptance of non-straight people in general. Specifically, if you’re a committed Christian and believe in marriage equality, but can’t square this theologically with what you have read in the Bible or heard in Church, and are minded to do so, then this book is for you.

This book was also written for two other audiences; one of them is very clearly the other bishops of the Church of England, i.e. Alan Wilson’s colleagues; the other, according to the blurbs on the inside of the cover, is people who disagree with the position of the author on same-sex marriage. This last group may understandably be harder to convince than the primary audience mentioned above, and I doubt that the book contains arguments they haven’t heard before, and have already thought hard about; I invite them to skim a book report in order to confirm this :-)

If you’re not a Christian then you may well be wondering what all the fuss is about and why it matters to you. Two short answers: (a) it probably doesn’t if you’re straight, and (b) a lot of bigotry and homophobia in Europe and abroad is regrettably buttressed by, given moral cover from, or couched in the terms of, religious or pseudo-religious reasoning. If this troubles you, then you might agree that the sooner churches pulls the rug out from under that kind of thing, the better.

The book starts with a brief history of the Church’s attitude to non-straight sexuality & gender from after WW2. This chapter alone is a shameful indictment of recent church history. I choose my words carefully when I say that reading how the Church enabled, collaborated with, and supplied moral justifications for a system that enabled so much pain, anguish and humiliation, leaving broken families and suicides in its wake – it left me feeling fucking angry. After I calmed down a bit, I was left merely deeply upset, that an institution supposedly dedicated to a God of love could get things so completely, terribly, heartbreakingly wrong.

It’s this chapter that, for me, makes it hardest to tolerate discrimination against gay people in Church, or consider as just their exclusion from Christian marriage. With the best will in the world and no matter the intentions behind it, for gay people wanting to marry in church, their exclusion must seem like just the latest blot on a long and dense time-line of prejudice and discrimination. In my opinion, if the established church wants to honestly adopt exclusion as a policy without condoning its terrible conduct in recent history, then the first order of business should be a major exercise in corporate repentance. Of course, I don’t see how any repentance could be sincere and leave such a policy in place.

Back to the book, we’re taken on a brief tour of the domains in which the arguments for and against tolerance, and more controversially, full acceptance of homosexuality is conducted. Briefly looking at the scientific, sociological and societal facts as he sees them, he then turns to scripture and shows how - surprise surprise - it's all in the interpretation. Modern interpretation tries to take into account the frame of reference of the culture in which the text was written, explaining why nobody thinks Christians should follow the holiness codes from Leviticus, or live according to rules meant for people living in the Roman empire.

It's in his interpretations that he’ll probably part ways with any readers not agreeing with his central point. One quote I thought humorous enough was “[you may] notice the complete absence in the N.T. of any of the extensive standard assortment of Greek words that would have been used naturally to describe the enormous amount of same-sex activity that went on in ancient cities”, although generally his arguments are of a weightier quality, familiar though they may be to anyone who’s been following the debate. However, given the size of the volume and the speed at which he covers ground, his arguments are made in broad enough terms that I'm sure objections can be found by people unmotivated by the framing logic.

After the science, sociology and theology lessons comes a history of marriage, ancient (in the Bible) and modern (how did Christian marriage became the norm in Britain?) In the Bible, marriage is mostly depicted as barbarically as you might expect in the Old Testament and as of little concern at first in the New Testament letters given that Jesus is coming back real soon now, so why bother? Once the New Testament writers and early Church fathers realised that the second coming might take a while, they looked again at the gospels, and it's from the gospels and later writings that Wilson draws his major points, which he then uses to shed light and not a little heat on the history of the Church of England.

Several of his major points: marriage is an institution of its time and culture, and has never had a fixed representation handed down by God; marriage is ideally centred around a spiritual relationship of self-giving love and partnership, not reproduction or sex; and that the institution of marriage, like the Sabbath, was made for people, not the people for the institution.

The history of marriage from the dark ages on, as told here, is quite engaging. Marriage has gradually been seen as less of a dynastic arrangement or question of property transfer, and more and more as an idealised ‘love’-based relationship, a consenting partnership of equals. These developments are something that Wilson claims have their roots in Christianity. The church is portrayed as constantly trying to batton down a stable definition in the midst of changing cultural mores and prejudices.

Looking at post-war developments, Wilson states that marriage is no longer seen as the gateway to adulthood and sexual activity, but is more the “gold standard”-certification of mature relationships. On this second point I beg to differ; I see it as a cultural choice. I am quite sure that it's normal these days to know stable, loyal, non-married and married couples, just as it is sadly normal to know relationships that have gone wrong inside and outside of marriages.

Wilson gives a little space to considering global church unity before moving on to CofE minutiae, which considering that the CofE is, for historical reasons, bureaucratically central to the Anglican Communion, is probably not enough. I also think this small consideration is the reason that he's quite harsh with Rowan Williams and his efforts on this topic. As he states several times in the book; it’s worth remembering that world-wide, the trend is not liberalisation but polarisation – with many countries, notably Uganda, moving to a more hard-line stance, again with highly unfortunate religion-based justifications.

At 164 pages this book covers a lot of ground in a short space. It’s well-written and not at all formal or academic in its approach, remaining accessible while managing not to blunt the force of its arguments by dint of presenting them in a popular format. I don’t expect it to change anyone’s mind but I do hope it will encourage more people to stand up for marriage equality as Christians. And I strongly encourage any bishops reading this to buy themselves a copy, if they haven't already had one dropped gratis into their pigeon-hole at Lambeth Palace.

God, Gender and the Bible by Deborah F. Sawyer

I just finished reading God, Gender and the Bible by Deborah F. Sawyer, which I gave Bethan a few birthdays ago. It's a short but weighty look at how God and gender roles interact in the Bible. It's academic in its approach and uses, among other things, Judith Butler's theories of gender performativity and Luce Irigaray's ideas of memesis to dissect gender roles in several contexts - most notably, Genesis, Judges, Jeremiah and the New Testament.

Now if by chance you're thinking "Feminist theologian! I can see where this is going," you'd be wrong, because Sawyer makes no attempt to either excuse or condemn the patriarchal nature of most scripture, and cheerfully takes an axe to some of the best "yes, but"s of Christianity's attempts to be more friendly to womankind. For example, women are frequently well-portrayed and commended for exemplary behaviour in the gospels, but Sawyer mostly categorises this as a literary device designed to show up the men, with whom it was assumed the readers would identify - not, sadly, as early examples of proto-feminism.

Neither is this an attempt to prop up current forms of patriarchy using biblical authority. Sawyer looks unflinchingly at the worst of it - exposure of infants, Jephthah's murder of his daughter in front of a mute God, and even more horrific things in Judges. Yet these things are the backdrop for several stories that are examined in more detail - those of Eve, Abraham's wife Sarah, Tamar, Ruth & Naomi, Judith, and the Samaritan woman at the well, among others.

Using these stories, the book illustrates is that once gender roles are recast as human constructs, rooted in a particular time & place, we can readily see how assigned roles are bent, twisted and broken as necessary to fulfil God's divine plan. To list a few examples, Tamar and Ruth both subvert the ancient Jewish laws of levirate marriage. Judith, a widow, not only refuses remarriage, she acts as both seductress and then assassin, accomplishing what the men of Israel could not.


Moving onto the New Testament, Sawyer uses early Roman Christianity to show how the paterfamilias was usurped by a manner of deusfamilias that was extremely threatening to the Roman empire in its form at the time, due in part God taking the place of the Emperor in religious life (Romans of the time referring to Christians as atheists, funnily enough [for us, that is - the arena wasn't really funny for them.]), and due also to converting women believing themselves free from the obligation to bear Roman children.

Throughout the book there are two themes running in parallel; firstly that patriarchy itself is emasculated in the presence of a divine God, and that ultimately all power relations are flattened into insignificance before God in the Kingdom of Heaven. This is succinctly summarised in (surprise!) Galatians 3 v. 28, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

The second theme is the running conflict or paradox between manifest human autonomy and God's demand on his believers for absolute dependence on him, referred to most often as being modelled on a parent-child relationship. As I understand it, Sawyer sees post-Enlightenment humanity as having "come of age". Growing children constantly renegotiate the terms of their relationship with their parents, and this is as it should be, stressful though it may be for all concerned. But how can a mortal, limited humanity renegotiate with an infinite, divine & eternal God? Near the end of the final chapter, Sawyer proposes (I think) Eve's original sin as being part of the divine plan as a way of resolving this, and I confess at this point I have no idea what to think about that, being already stuffed to the gunnels with the rest of the book.

Anyway! Modern gender theory is deployed here as a very capable tool to highlight God's divinity, which is not something I expected. If you are of a theological bent and have an opinion on gender roles and the Bible, I would highly recommend it as being very thought-provoking.

Mrs Tittlemouse is a short-sighted bourgeois reactionary

Reading a story aloud every evening for months on end does strange things to your brain. Thus, after the third or fourth month of reading 'The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse' by Beatrix Potter to my little daughter, something clicked, or maybe snapped, and I suddenly realised that the story is actually about Communism and the secret police, and has a surprising moral that is relevant to these post-Snowden times.

You may think this is deeply silly, and you're probably right. But since Mrs Tittlemouse is both quite short and now in the public domain, I can offer you a scene-by-scene interpretation right here.

The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse		...and what it means
Once upon a time there was a wood-mouse, and her name was Mrs. Tittlemouse. She lived in a bank under a hedge. Such a funny house! There were yards and yards of sandy passages, leading to storerooms and nut-cellars and seed-cellars, all amongst the roots of the hedge. There was a kitchen, a parlour, a pantry, and a larder. Also, there was Mrs. Tittlemouse's bedroom, where she slept in a little box bed! Mrs. Tittlemouse was a most terribly tidy particular little mouse, always sweeping and dusting the soft sandy floors.		This introduction serves to establish Mrs. Tittlemouse as a landowner obsessed with order.
Sometimes a beetle lost its way in the passages. "Shuh! shuh! little dirty feet!" said Mrs. Tittlemouse, clattering her dust-pan. And one day a little old woman ran up and down in a red spotty cloak.		The truth is that, Mrs. Tittlemouse's claim to 'ownership' of what appears to be a common right of way is only given weight through the use of intimidation,
"Your house is on fire, Mother Ladybird! Fly away home to your children!"		scaremongering,
Another day, a big fat spider came in to shelter from the rain. "Beg pardon, is this not Miss Muffet's?" "Go away, you bold bad spider! Leaving ends of cobweb all over my nice clean house!"
She bundled the spider out at a window. He let himself down the hedge with a long thin bit of string.		and unwarranted physical coercion.
Mrs. Tittlemouse went on her way to a distant storeroom, to fetch cherry-stones and thistle-down seed for dinner. All along the passage she sniffed, and looked at the floor. "I smell a smell of honey; is it the cowslips outside, in the hedge? I am sure I can see the marks of little dirty feet." Suddenly round a corner, she met Babbitty Bumble—"Zizz, Bizz, Bizzz!" said the bumble bee.
Mrs. Tittlemouse looked at her severely. She wished that she had a broom.		Babbity Bumble can't be intimidated however. She's a bee!
"Good-day, Babbitty Bumble; I should be glad to buy some beeswax. But what are you doing down here? Why do you always come in at a window, and say Zizz, Bizz, Bizzz?" Mrs. Tittlemouse began to get cross.		Mrs. Tittlemouse is experiencing cognitive dissonance caused by Babbity refusing to conform to the classical worker-capitalist paradigm.
"Zizz, Wizz, Wizzz!" replied Babbitty Bumble in a peevish squeak. She sidled down a passage, and disappeared into a storeroom which had been used for acorns.
Mrs. Tittlemouse had eaten the acorns before Christmas; the storeroom ought to have been empty.		In other words, Mrs. Tittlemouse would rather the storeroom go unused than have the space be productively filled.
But it was full of untidy dry moss.
Mrs. Tittlemouse began to pull out the moss. Three or four other bees put their heads out, and buzzed fiercely. "I am not in the habit of letting lodgings; this is an intrusion!" said Mrs. Tittlemouse. "I will have them turned out—" "Buzz! Buzz! Buzzz!"—"I wonder who would help me?" "Bizz, Wizz, Wizzz!"		The bees, lead by Babbity Bumble, have formed a workers collective and—worse!—reclaimed the heretofore-unused real-estate as socially useful living space. No doubt the bees consider the unallocated resources the byproduct of a wasteful economy that hasn't been properly planned.
—"I will not have Mr. Jackson; he never wipes his feet." Mrs. Tittlemouse decided to leave the bees till after dinner.		Tittlemouse is essentially driven back by the collective resistance of the bees, but is still reluctant to call upon Mr. Jackson, and for good reason as we shall see...
When she got back to the parlour, she heard some one coughing in a fat voice; and there sat Mr. Jackson himself!		...but Mr. Jackson has eyes, ears and noses everywhere, and he already knows that something's up.
He was sitting all over a small rocking-chair, twiddling his thumbs and smiling, with his feet on the fender.
He lived in a drain below the hedge, in a very dirty wet ditch.		Mr. Jackson is not good company. This is because Mr. Jackson is, in fact, an agent of the secret police. Dirty work is his speciality.
"How do you do, Mr. Jackson? Deary me, you have got very wet!"
"Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mrs. Tittlemouse! I'll sit awhile and dry myself," said Mr. Jackson.		Mr. Jackson begins to toy with Mrs. Tittlemouse. Like all government officials, he speaks in triplicate...
He sat and smiled, and the water dripped off his coat tails. Mrs. Tittlemouse went round with a mop. He sat such a while that he had to be asked if he would take some dinner? First she offered him cherry-stones. "Thank you, thank you, Mrs. Tittlemouse! No teeth, no teeth, no teeth!" said Mr. Jackson. He opened his mouth most unnecessarily wide; he certainly had not a tooth in his head. Then she offered him thistle-down seed—"Tiddly, widdly, widdly! Pouff, pouff, puff!" said Mr. Jackson. He blew the thistle-down all over the room.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mrs. Tittlemouse! Now what I really—really should like—would be a little dish of honey!"		...until he finally reveals the true purpose of his call.
"I am afraid I have not got any, Mr. Jackson," said Mrs. Tittlemouse.
"Tiddly, widdly, widdly, Mrs. Tittlemouse!" said the smiling Mr. Jackson, "I can smell it; that is why I came to call."		Protestations of innocence are useless...
Mr. Jackson rose ponderously from the table, and began to look into the cupboards. Mrs. Tittlemouse followed him with a dish-cloth, to wipe his large wet footmarks off the parlour floor. When he had convinced himself that there was no honey in the cupboards, he began to walk down the passage.		...Mrs. Tittlemouses' right to privacy and her protection from unreasonable search and seizure are ignored. The truth is that, like the modern-day 'war on terror', the fight against communism considered civil liberties as mere obstacles, to be ridden over rough-shod.
"Indeed, indeed, you will stick fast, Mr. Jackson!" "Tiddly, widdly, widdly, Mrs. Tittlemouse!"
First he squeezed into the pantry. "Tiddly, widdly, widdly? no honey? no honey, Mrs. Tittlemouse?"		Again, this symbolises the creeping abrogation of Mrs. Tittlemouses rights. Furthermore, although Mr. Jackson is searching for honey, other innocents are caught up in his search of her private property...
There were three creepy-crawly people hiding in the plate-rack. Two of them got away; but the littlest one he caught.		...and suffer the consequences of his paranoia.
Then he squeezed into the larder. Miss Butterfly was tasting the sugar; but she flew away out of the window.		Miss Butterfly probably represents the socialite elite. She's happy to flit through the window and fashionably play with the boundaries that Babbity and her comrades are trying to erase, but she didn't stay to fight.
"Tiddly, widdly, widdly, Mrs. Tittlemouse; you seem to have plenty of visitors!" "And without any invitation!" said Mrs. Thomasina Tittlemouse.		Note that Mrs. Tittlemouse, despite her obsession with hygiene and dislike of (non-mouse) visitors, was less comfortable still with Mr. Jackson. Beatrix Potter is showing that the bourgeois are unhappy with the methods used by the state against revolutionaries, even when the state believes itself to be acting in their interests...
They went along the sandy passage— "Tiddly widdly—" "Buzz! Wizz! Wizz!" He met Babbitty round a corner, and snapped her up, and put her down again. "I do not like bumble bees. They are all over bristles," said Mr. Jackson, wiping his mouth with his coat-sleeve. "Get out, you nasty old toad!" shrieked Babbitty Bumble. "I shall go distracted!" scolded Mrs. Tittlemouse.
She shut herself up in the nut-cellar while Mr. Jackson pulled out the bees-nest. He seemed to have no objection to stings. When Mrs. Tittlemouse ventured to come out—everybody had gone away.		...and while the real fight takes place she hides...
But the untidiness was something dreadful—"Never did I see such a mess—smears of honey; and moss, and thistledown—and marks of big and little dirty feet—all over my nice clean house!"		...and the riot is over, the state has destroyed the temporary autonomous zone, and left Mrs. Tittlemouse to clean up the mess.
She gathered up the moss and the remains of the beeswax. Then she went out and fetched some twigs, to partly close up the front door. "I will make it too small for Mr. Jackson!" She fetched soft soap, and flannel, and a new scrubbing brush from the storeroom. But she was too tired to do any more. First she fell asleep in her chair, and then she went to bed.		Note that Tittlemouse shows no concern for the bee pupae that were gestating in their nest; no concern for where Babbity Bumble will live now that storeroom is empty and useless again. She's concerned merely with order for the sake of a quiet life and the maintenence of the status quo, oh and look—free beeswax! In making the front door smaller, has Mrs. Tittlemouse let her love of order override the proper concerns of national security? Or has her initial distaste for Mr. Jackson solidified into rejection and disgust over his disproportionate, jack-booted response to the radicalised bees? Has she herself been radicalised?
"Will it ever be tidy again?" said poor Mrs. Tittlemouse. Next morning she got up very early and began a spring cleaning which lasted a fortnight. She swept, and scrubbed, and dusted; and she rubbed up the furniture with beeswax, and polished her little tin spoons.
When it was all beautifully neat and clean, she gave a party to five other little mice, without Mr. Jackson. He smelt the party and came up the bank, but he could not squeeze in at the door.		The answer is no; The truth is that Mrs. Tittlemouse cares only for other mice and their opinions, as part of her social elite; her racist prejudices prevent her from obtaining class consciousness through empathy with her fellow woodland animals.
So they handed him out acorn-cupfuls of honey-dew through the window, and he was not at all offended.		She's quite willing to accommodate Mr. Jackson and even continues to pay her taxes. She has seen the violence inherent in the system, but continues to conform.
He sat outside in the sun, and said—"Tiddly, widdly, widdly! Your very good health, Mrs. Tittlemouse!"

So there you have it. Mrs. Tittlemouse represents the landed bourgeois, the bees the workers collective, and Mr. Jackson the secret police. Truly a tale with a 'nightmarish quality' as Daphne Kutzer apparently wrote in her no-doubt less addled take on the story.

But a spectre is haunting Mrs. Tittlemouse - the spectre of what happens next time the bees come back through the window! How will Mr. Jackson destroy their nest, now that he can't get in through the front door?

Are we supposed to ask ourselves this question? Is Potter suggesting Tittlemouse's reluctance to call upon Mr. Jackson is misplaced, or is she secretly rooting for the return of the bees?

OK, but what does this have to do with the NSA?

The relevance of the fable to today is surprising. Imagine that instead of physically invading Mrs. Tittlemouses cupboards, Mr. Jackson has instead harvested her email, Facebook status updates and Yahoo webcam chat sessions. In response, Mrs. Tittlemouse didn't resize her front door; she audited all her crypto software, and ensured that all her Internet traffic was encrypted. But once the Internet is safe from surveillance, does that also make it safe for malfeasance?

This story illustrates a dilemma confronted by many throughout history. To what extent are we willing to compromise our core sense of identity in order to ensure collective security, and to whom does it fall to set these limits? In this story, Mr. Jackson unilaterally evicted the bees. As a consequence, Mrs. Tittlemouse accepts the risks of more bees taking up lodging in future, in order to maintain the tidiness (and access to beeswax) that is so important to her.

Today, the security establishment in the shape of the NSA, GCHQ and the other signatories of the 'Five Eyes' treaty have unilaterally decided where our rights to privacy begin and end. They've made an end-run around democratic limits by arranging for the NSA to spy in Europe, for GCHQ to spy on American companies such as Google, etcetera.

In response, Google now encrypts their datacenter links, journalists are more likely to use encryption, and any website that professes to value your data uses encryption by default. We are slowly realising that Mr. Jackson is not our friend, and, like Mrs. Tittlemouse, that we need to make our front door smaller.

Heartbleed and the NSA: put your hand up if you've ever credited a responsible-disclosure vulnerability report to the NSA. Anybody? Anybody?

Heartbleed is no doubt the worst security bug to hit the Internet in a very, very long time, and this comes hot on the heels of serious SSL certificate checking bugs in iOS and OpenSSL.

Bloomberg says the NSA knew of Heartbleed and said nothing. The ODNI forcefully denies this. Unfortunately the denial is difficult to accept, and here is why. Vendors often credit the people or organisations who find vulnerabilities. As the ODNI themselves pointed out, the Federal government uses OpenSSL and, no doubt, many other open source security products.

It would make sense for the 'defensive' wing of the NSA to to audit these products and, following the logic the ODNI themselves laid out in the link above, responsibly disclose any vulnerabilities to the product owners.

Furthermore, it is an obvious PR win for the NSA to ask for credit, and they know how open source works, having done work on SELinux etc. People would say, "Hey, my tax dollars at work, making us all safer! Truly the NSA is a force for good in the world."

(On the other hand, it is an obvious counterintelligence win not to ask for credit, because then the Chinese, Russians etc. (and Germans, the MSF, and UNICEF to judge by their target list) would say 'The NSA can find that type of vulnerability? Better scan our software!' and Coverity would add a check for that class of problem, making future bug hunting harder.)

But here is the problem: does anyone recall any serious security vulnerabilities that were found and disclosed by the NSA? I don't. We know they search for vulnerabilities; the ODNI admits this themselves. Thanks to Snowden we know that programs such as FoxAcid can query a library of exploits in real time using complex criteria such as value, risk of disclosure etc.

If the ODNI's assertions regarding disclosure of vulnerabilities such as heartbleed are true, where are the corporations and open source projects that can stand up and credit the NSA with finding the problems for which they have issued patches? Why is their blog post above a context-free assertion of fact, instead of a litany of examples of past actions?

This is my conclusion. Anyone who works on OpenSSL or any other open source project such as BIND or Apache, and who has received a vulnerability disclosure from the NSA, needs to stand up and say so. Their continuing absence proves Bloomberg right and the ODNI wrong, and we need to know.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

So I was given this book as a present by my brother – thanks! – which presented a good opportunity to read a book I’d normally never pick up; due to (a) what I know about Objectivism, and (b) what people who like Rand seem to get up to: see Paul Ryan, the Koch brothers, etc.

But! I will say this: to its credit, and taken as a book, considered apart from its philosophical, moral and political stances, then it is actually quite good. Why: the dialog crackles. The plot is constructed well enough that it kept tugging me on in the manner of a good thriller, and the people are well-drawn enough that I wanted to find out what happened to them. It was good enough that I didn't read any other books at the same time. As a minor weak point, in some places the descriptive prose is hideously clunky.

That said, everything else about the book stands as a good example of why artistic merit is often divorced from other value systems, and since the author and the book itself specifically demand not to be judged in isolation from reality, as art for the sake of art, I’m happy to unload on the book as follows.

Firstly, Rand has used to the fullest extent her liberty as author to construct a reality in which her argument is presented in the best possible light. There’s nothing wrong with this as a rhetorical device; otherwise what would be the point of a political novel? But it’s interesting to note what had to be left out in order to make her promotion of egoism and self-interest-as-Prime-Directive stick.

There is one mother and one father in this book, that of Keating and Dominique respectively, and both parent-child relationships are severely dysfunctional. They are both relations between grown children and their parents. Parent-child relationships where the child is younger, i.e. dependent, clearly don’t figure in a world where self-interest is all, and indeed how can it? Parents sacrifice a lot when they have children – free time, mobility, sleep, income – and all sacrifice is antithetical to Rand’s philosophy. She would call it selfish, saying that the parent is somehow trying to live through their child, second-hand. I don’t deny that some parents do try this, but certainly not all; and all good parents sacrifice.

This lack of basic relationality goes further; there is one uncle (Toohey) and one niece (Katy), no brothers or sisters, no cousins, no grandparents or grandchildren. Roark and Dominique, the heroes, are introduced to us almost from nowhere. Roark’s parents are hardly discussed, yet where was his absolute self-centeredness inculcated? Dominique’s mother is dead, so where did she pick up her psychological sadomasochism? How did she grow up, since Guy Francon clearly wasn't involved? Gail Wynand, for his part, is effectively an orphan.

The only person whose parents are introduced at all are Toohey’s, whom we learn he manipulated into subservience at an early age. Nothing else about them seems significant.

This lack of familial relations, and the sparse friendships represented, allow Rand to promote self-interest to the hilt. She obviates the need for vulnerability in true relationships, she elides material links except when they illustrate weakness of character as in Keating. Wynand and Roarck came from a poor background, but neither have ill or poor parents, grandparents or other family members to support. Roarck doesn't need to think about paying the medical bills of his father; and if he did, then in what light would this cast his decision to refuse work, or to get himself expelled from school?

Enough about what is missing. What is present is objectionable enough, and we can start with the rape of Dominique Francon. Limply described as a 'rough sexual encounter' in the plot summary in the Wikipedia article, the section dedicated to the rape scene itself devotes half its verbiage to pathetic attempts to defend it. But I ask you: in what kind of rough sex would one attempt to smash one's lover over the head with a crystal lamp-stand? Miles away from anywhere, in the middle of the night, where your lover could die of blood-loss, from the nasty head wound a successful blow would inflict?

It's not hard to object even though the author clearly doesn't. As written, Dominique didn't enjoy it; she fought like a demon, she felt herself defiled. She suffered terrible pain. She went into shock immediately afterwards on the bathroom floor. Rand can deny this is rape; that matters not in the slightest. It was rape as written; in the book Dominique refers to it as rape.

It makes things worse to try and offer the slight smidgen of justification available: that in the book, Dominique is a sadist, she enjoys suffering, she was in love and secretly wanted it. Worse because in the real world, tragically, women are raped, all the time, by men who falsely and wrongly believe all these things of their victims. And this scene in a book that offers Roarck as a model, a super-man worthy of emulation, and Dominique in her tormenting and submission to him following this as an ideal woman. When you consider that the book is often read and admired by young men, it gets worse still.

I'm far from the first and surely not the last to make these points. But what of the ideology? After all the book is explicit in its agenda, what of that?

This is where I get more mixed and less forthright, because Rand herself is highly mixed up. She movingly describes the designs of Roarck, and the scathing indictment of all others shows a real love of building and architecture. Yet it's when Toohey is insincerely promoting collectivism that we hear of sacrifice, charity, and love. Greatness, Rand is saying, rejects all these things in the furtherance of itself.

How wrong this is. And ironically the book itself is full of sacrifice, charity and love; without which Roarck could not succeed. Austen Heller sacrifices a good portion of his reputation in first hiring Roarck for his debut project, then defending him; the worker Mike sacrifices time and income to move with Roarck in order to work with him; Heller and later Wynand host Roarck as he relaxes; And Wynand very clearly grows to love Roarck, even in preference over his then-wife, in all ways except romantically.

It's Toohey, in the book, who does nothing out of love or charity. All his actions are self-serving, but they are dressed up in the language of collectivism. His deceit, however, is also self-serving. And it's when Toohey is insincerely extolling collectivism that the book expresses the distorted shadow of what love, charity and sacrifice are all about.

But again, the book constructs a reality to support it's argument, why should it not be distorted? However, to see clearly the nature of distortion I think it's most helpful to compare the book to a real-world scenario.

"Buildings and their manufacture are inseparable. You understand a building if you understand how it’s made. I want to know what buildings are for, how they work, what they can or should be made of, before I even begin to think what they should look like."

A quote from Roarck? No. Imagine that Rand was writing The Fountainhead today, and not about architecture, but about technology. Roarck and his purist sensibilities, and his refusal to compromise, are mirrored nowhere better than in one company: Apple.

Steve Jobs was famously self-centered, and the gadgets that Apple produced under him and his successors are the product of a laser-like focus on greatness, a word that Rand and Jobs both loved to use.

Jonathan Ive is the chief designer at Apple and deserves a lot of credit of the iMac, iPhone, and iPad. He worked closely with Jobs, and recently gave a (very) rare interview to Time magazine. The above quote is from him, except that I replaced the words "object" or "thing" with "building".

Watch me put some of his quotes into two buckets, named after characters you might recognise:

ROARCK		TOOHEY
"We did it because we cared, because when you realize how well you can make something, falling short, whether seen or not, feels like failure."		"I don’t like being singled out for attention. Designing, engineering and making these products requires large teams,"
"We’re surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects. ... our success is a victory for purity, integrity — for giving a damn."		[The team] "is really much smaller than you’d think — about 15. Most of us have worked together for 15 to 20 years. ... We can be bitterly critical of our work. The personal issues of ego have long since faded."
"What people are responding to is much bigger than the object. They are responding to something rare — a group of people who do more than simply make something work, they make the very best products they possibly can. It’s a demonstration against thoughtlessness and carelessness,"		"Apple is imperfect, like every large collection of people."

See what I did there? Apple, surprise surprise, in the real world, values both greatness, collective effort, ego and egoless team work. Nowhere is this clearer than in Ive's description of Jobs himself:

"His ideas were bold and magnificent. They could suck the air from the room. And when the ideas didn’t come, he decided to believe we would eventually make something great. And, oh, the joy of getting there!"

And this is why for me the ideology of the book fails. Taken as a hymn to human achievement, greatness, and struggle in the face of adversity, the book works well. But the struggle in the book is cast as one against some of the key ingredients needed for humans to achieve greatness and to overcome adversity. The book takes human nature, puts it through a centrifuge to extract one single ingredient, and then extolls this above all others, to the detriment of the whole. How annoying.

Affine transform for rotating in place an A4 ratio (A3, A5, etc.) image for e.g. converting landscape to portrait

I'm sure there's a better way of doing this with only one scale operation, but I don't know the maths. This took hours to find, and so hopefully it will save someone else the time. The Java code I'm sure can be translated to other languages relatively easily.

AffineTransform r = new AffineTransform();
               
r.rotate(Math.toRadians(90), width/2, height/2);
r.scale(width, height);
               
/*
 * -(Math.sqrt(2d)-1d)/2d
 * = half the distance as % left between
 * the ratios of Ax paper;
 *
 */
r.translate(-(Math.sqrt(2d)-1d)/2d, (Math.sqrt(2d)-1d)/2d * (1/Math.sqrt(2d)));
               
r.scale(Math.sqrt(2d), Math.sqrt(2d)/2d);

The Armistice Centenary, War, and who we are.

I recently read that David Cameron said that he wanted to see a 100th Armistice commemoration "that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, says something about who we are as a people".

Armistice was signed on Nov 11 1918, but the British blockade of German ports was only lifted in March 1919. The blockade killed some 800,000 Germans, mostly in the end phase, and the majority civilians. The blockade was used to impose the 'war guilt' reparations of the Versailles treaty which arguably led to WW2.

"The hundreds of thousands of noncombatants who have perished since November 11 because of the blockade were destroyed coolly and deliberately, after our opponents had won a certain and assured victory. Think of that, when you speak of guilt and atonement."

 - a senior German delegate at Versailles.

One of the reasons that the blockade took so long to stop was that the British civil service thought it was an elegant system:

"The Blockade had become by that time a very perfect instrument. It had taken four years to create and was Whitehall's finest achievement; it had evoked the qualities of the English at their subtlest. Its authors had grown to love it for its own sake; it included some recent improvements, which would be wasted if it came to and end; it was very complicated, and a vast organisation had established a vested interest."

 - John M. Keynes, "Two Memoirs"

"I have watched fighters in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Sudan, the Punjab, Iraq, Bosnia and Kosova enter villages, tense, exhausted, wary of ambushes, with the fear and tension that comes from combat, and begin to shoot at random. Flames soon lick up from the houses. Discipline, if there was any, disintegrates. Items are looted, civilians are battered with rifle butts, units fall apart, and the violence directed at unarmed men, women and children grows as it feeds upon itself. The eyes if the soldiers who carry this orgy of death are crazed...

"As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence. And we will court our own extermination. By accepting the facile cliché that the battle underway against terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to acknowledge our own culpability. We ignore real injustices that have led many of those arrayed  against us to their rage and despair."

 - "War is a force that gives us meaning" by Chris Hedges

"Aim ... to defend the Enlightenment hope of a world that is more peaceful and more human, the hope that by understanding more about ourselves we can do something to create a world with less misery. I have qualified optimism that this hope is well founded. There are more things, darker things to understand about ourselves ... We need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us. But this is part of the project of caging and taming them."

 - "Humanity" by Jonathan Glover (also the source of the blockade info)

If the 100th anniversary of Armistice next year is to mean anything, it should be this. Say something about who we are as a people, by all means, but please, be honest.

Bitcoin as a law enforcement/natsec honeypot: what is the evidence?

Paranoia appears to be the order of the day, given what we know about the NSA and GCHQ thanks to Edward Snowden. Absent from the stories so far is any mention of Bitcoin. I find this odd - Bitcoin is the most cypherpunky of all crypto technologies, after all.

I want to make the case, without necessarily endorsing it, that we should be much more suspicious of Bitcoin than we are at present.

1) Bitcoin was almost certainly a team effort. The design has been peer-reviewed and is found to be remarkably secure, complete and well-rounded[1]. I argue that this suggests that a peer-review or quality control process has already been applied. If one individual cryptographer had written Bitcoin, it would contain far more idiosyncracies than it does, not just in the cryptosystem design but also in the C++ code itself. The core protocol itself, which uses a Turing-incomplete programming language, has had only one major vulnerability found in its design and execution.

For comparison, the Amazon AWS API is also a huge team effort that was also (I assume) designed with the help of competent Internet protocol and cryptography experts, and also has suffered from only one major vulnerability, which was found by a certified genius, Colin Percival. Likewise Colin's own one-person-product, the highly secure backup facility Tarsnap has also had only one serious vulnerability to date.

Bitcoin is at least one order of magnitude more complex than Tarsnap, or the crypto used in v1 of the Amazon AWS API. We should have seen far more bugs of varying severities if it was a one man band.

2) The author(s) created, maintained and then apparently retired a pseudonym (Satoshi Nakamoto) while staying completely anonymous on the Internet.

As an achievement this is almost as impressive as Bitcoin itself, albeit of a different nature.

Using the Internet anonymously is much harder than one would think. Things like Tor are vital of course, but beyond that there is the practice of operational security to a very high standard. One slip-up is enough to junk the whole identity, e.g. logging on to a pseudononymous account from an insecure location, or even sending a cookie obtained via Tor 'in the clear', is enough.

As a real-world example, the assassination of Rafic Hariri in Lebanon was pinned on Hezbollah because one of their agents made a single phone call to his girlfriend with his dedicated operational phone instead of his personal mobile.

3) Bitcoin is, by design, highly vulnerable to network analysis. Network analysis can be used to comb through large graphs looking for patterns or suspicious behaviour. Because the entire transaction graph of Bitcoin is public, anyone can perform network analysis on the whole Bitcoin network. This is not so significant by itself, but becomes vitally important when combined with the next point.

4) In the absence of good network analysis, the Bitcoin network is not legally attackable at the point where hard currency is converted. Network analysis backed up with law enforcement or hacking, however, could be extremely effective, and this fits the MO for some large three letter agencies: as we have seen with the recent disclosures of NSA attacks against SSL and Tor, the most successful attacks are multi-pronged: they combine, for example, legal strong-arming with technical know-how and hacking.

Obtaining the transaction logs of a currency exchange would give a starting points from which the rest of the transaction graph can be de-anonymised.

5) One single party controls more than 25% of all BTCs in circulation.[2] Someone, somewhere has the ability to destabilise the BTC currency exchange market at will. If you think of BTCs as a commodity instead of a currency, it is obvious that anyone holding large reserves can wreak havoc by dumping their holdings on the market. They could also bankrupt or bleed the exchanges dry of working capital by converting large sums of BTC over a period of time.

6) Whoever wrote Bitcoin must have known that it would attract criminals and wingnuts like flies to a honeypot. After all, look at the history of cyptocash and you can't help but notice Jim Bell's 'assassination politics', or realise the potential for mischief within the combination of hidden servers and cryptocash. Once Bitcoin was established and hidden servers were possible via Tor, Silk Road was inevitable. Even with the demise of Silk Road, Bitcoin is still used for money laundering, paying for skimmed credit card numbers and for 0-day exploits - in this last case, maybe even by the NSA itself.

7) 'Satoshi Nakamoto' is an anagram of 'Ma, I took NSA oath!' :-) But seriously:


To summarise, Bitcoin was apparently designed by good cryptographers and peer-reviewed before it was released. It was almost certainly written by a team of good coders.[1] The entity that did this practiced impeccable operational security. Bitcoin was designed to be difficult to attack by non-state actors, but was also designed to be inherently vulnerable to network analysis, especially so when combined with legal and covert access techniques. A single entity retains the ability to severely disrupt the BTC market through its control of large reserves, and only the most unaware or blinkered recluse could have failed to realise its potential target market mainly consisted of rogues and blackguards.

Whether or not this points to a law enforcement or national security agency as I've suggested, I think it's evident that we cannot assume that the creation of Bitcoin was motivated by altruism, or even by the strain of libertarian cypherpunk ideology that gave Bitcoin such fertile soil in which to grow.

Dan Kaminsky was quoted by Matthew Green as saying "authorship is a better predictor of quality than openness", and likewise, motive is a better predictor of the true purpose of a tool than its quality. The motive of the creators of Bitcoin remains completely unknown.

***

Corrections and footnotes

[1] As per the HN discussion, apparently the first BitCoin client was quite buggy in the beginning. Only one exploit was used on the network, but see the Bitcoin CVE list here for a more realistic list of the software bugs encountered in Bitcoin. Worth noting is that this is a separate issue to bugs in the design of the cryptosystem. Thanks to nwh on HN for the pointer.

[2] I previously stated that "...and has tried to hide that fact" but this is based on a misreading of the paper. Thanks to mcphilip on HN for pointing that out.

There's an interesting discussion over at Hacker News where some good counterpoints are made.

Spring 3.1+ Environment properties not being resolved when using dollar-notation placeholders in bean properties? Read this :-)

So after spelunking through the Spring source, I found out that it was my fault, of course. Why:

1. I needed a in my spring XML, even with nothing else, just to tell Spring to look for ${...}.
2. My spring schema version was on 2.5, which of course doesn't have the global Environment stuff and assumes you don't want it.

This lesson brought to you by many tram rides and a sleeping toddler.