Posts by Ponytailed Opinionator

Chinese cyber chief plays down censorship concerns

Re: "Freedom is our goal. Order is our means."

One billion people. Probably the biggest gap between haves and have nots on the planet. The fastest developing economy around - at least until recently. An industrialised, educated, 'Westernised' (whatever the hell that means... is it shorthand for hypocrisy?) working and industrial class in the cities, with a rural class in the country that still works the fields by hand and remembers being part of the Red army. A land area, with one state, covering one continent. The oldest bureaucracy in the world (and the corruption that goes it with it). A national history that stretches back at least a couple of thousand years, most of them comfortably spent as the absolute, unchallengeable world power...

Imagine waking up in the morning, and it being your job to make sure that that doesn't fall apart into civil war. Can you imagine the ulcers you'd have?

I may not agree with everything the Chinese government is doing. Some of it, I find utterly appalling. But I'm sure as hell glad that I don't have their job.

Obama calls out encryption in terror strategy speech

I kind of disagree. It's ridiculous to have laws that everyone breaks - all it does is undermine the authority of the system. If you mean a section of road to have a 20mph speed limit: enforce it. If you don't, don't put the sign up. It just makes you look foolish and weak.

That's not really the concern about mass surveillance. The concern, firstly, is whether we're willing to discard the concept of privacy, and secondly, victimisation. It's not about forcing everyone to comply with stupid laws - as you point out, that's simply not achievable in a democracy. It's about using the threat of enforcement to silence dissent: taking the individuals who openly and legitimately challenge the system, and using information gathered from surveillance to threaten them (with legal action, disclosure or embarrassing secrets, whatever).

Societies need dissent to stay healthy: any control system that inhibits legitimate dissent is bad for all of us.

On terrorism, the scary truth is that the terrorists will always win. Once you make the mental step to being willing to hit soft targets - innocent men, women and children - what's to stop you? What's the plan, put microphones into every home and public space so no-one can ever talk without being heard? Ban knives? Ban paper so no-one can write anything down? Eliminate mud, so no-one can scribble in it? What kills more people, Terrorists or cars?

This isn't about protecting people. This is about control. Terrorism is the government's friend: the more we are scared, the more we turn to the government to protect us. And the more we turn to the government for protection, the more it can use those same tools to silence dissent, reinforce its own power, and act without thought of the consequences.

There's only one answer to this: Courage. Be willing to be hurt. Better to run the relatively minimal risk of being shot in the street by an extremist gunman, than give up our power to challenge the system when it is wrong. After all, why was the gunman so angry in the first place?

IETF's older white men urged to tone it down

Re: Who is John Galt?

I have read Atlas Shrugged, at least. And the question is WHERE is John Galt, not WHO.

I think Rand's analysis is stunning and brilliant. She's about the only writer that actually celebrates intelligence, rather than building subtle (or unsubtle) morality plays about how it is to be feared. However, her conclusions are appalling. Any answer to the problems she poses that leaves Eddie Villers to die in the desert is monstrous. Anyone willing to leave Eddie Villers to die is a monster.

She's also rather naive, and wildly optimistic. Assuming that a Rearden could ever end up as CEO of his own business is just laughable: firstly there's a set of skills needed in that domain that are not engineering skills, but are valuable (and hence offer value). Secondly, that's where the looters live. People who create value typically never get that far in the first place. The principle of building everything on value for value exchange is fair and rather hard to argue with: defining value is a touch trickier.

However, far more pertinently to this thread, I'll just point out that Dagny was a brilliant technologist and a woman, and Rand was (if you're objectivist, certainly) a brilliant writer and a woman. So attempting to use any kind of objectivism as an argument to work against female submissions to the IETF is all kinds of messed up. Where are the looters? Half the world's population is female, roughly. If women are not roughly equally represented in the IETF, doesn't that rather suggest that there are non-rational processes keeping them out? And isn't that the hallmark of the looters?

Wouldn't posting an RFC to fix the mechanisms the looters are using to maintain their monopoly be a good, logical, objectivist answer to the problem?

Why are we objecting to this again?

How cyber insurance actually works

Norton and 'everyone wins'...

Let's say a hypothetical competitor to Norton, then, who has actually grasped the concept offering value for value, rather than just looting the system for all it's worth.

Anyway, the only reason why an Insurance company should offer to take on liabilities for covering zero-days is because they think there's money to be made in doing so. And the more bug-ridden and full of security holes and the longer it takes to patch them, the higher the premiums they offer are going to be.

Which encourages users to switch to a platform that is more secure*. Which encourages the OS vendors to do a better job, and support their products better. Everybody wins.

* Or, if they don't have that option, at least potentially allows the insurance company to settle out of court for lost revenue or something? I'm not sure how this would work - if 1% of Fnord cars have accidents because of a manufacturing or design fault, do the insurance providers for all those vehicles get to reclaim some of their losses from Fnord?

A combination of DirectLine and Norton Antivirus as a consumer proposition might be interesting, though?

The problem consumer antivirus has is justifying any kind of recurring cost: adding anti-fraud insurance, or something similar, gives the consumer a more tangible benefit. The insurance company can probably reclaim some of their losses, when a payout is required, from banks or third parties that have taken insufficient care with customer data (or via their existing corporate insurance), and get benefit of scale in doing so - while the consumer gets to avoid a complex and time-consuming problem.

And the antivirus company is incentivised to do a good job, rather than being incentivised to build fear and uncertainty in the consumer base, as is currently the case.

Everyone wins.

Behold, the fantasy of infinite cloud compute elasticity

Time to get Worstall back

This is a scaling question.

If your hotel has 1,000,000 rooms, booking out 1000 of them at short notice is not a problem.