Category Archives: Web Article Review

DEFCON vs. voting machines

A hacker convention sets up voting machines each year and gives people a chance to try to hack them. The results are disturbing, although the article points out that the hackers are given full access to the machines for as long as they want which would never happen in the real world.

This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers find creative and alarming ways to break in. Last year, conference attendees found new vulnerabilities for all five voting machines and a single e-poll book of registered voters over the course of the weekend, catching the attention of both senators introducing legislation and the general public. This year’s Voting Village was bigger in every way, with equipment ranging from voting machines to tabulators to smart card readers, all currently in use in the US.

In a room set aside for kid hackers, an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida secretary of state’s website within 10 minutes — and changed the results.

alternatives to GDP

This article in The Conversation (which is a new publication to me) goes through some of the alternatives and potential augmentations for GDP.

One approach is to have a dashboard of indicators that are assessed on a regular basis. For instance, workers’ earnings, the share of the population with health insurance and life expectancy could be monitored closely, in addition to GDP…

Another approach is to use a composite index that combines data on a variety of aspects of progress into a single summary number. This single number could unfold into a detailed picture of the situation of a country if one zooms into each indicator, by demographic group or region.

One challenge is to select the dimensions that should be covered. Through an international consultative process, the commission led by Sen, Stiglitz and Fitoussi defined eight dimensions of individual well-being and social progress, including health; education; political voice and governance; social connections and relationships; and the environment.

They also mention the Better Life Index from the OECD and the Human Development Index from the UN.

new patent trading rules to boost productivity?

Here is one proposal to boost productivity growth from a professor at Columbia – basically tighter protections on patent use coupled with more flexible arrangements to share and lease them between parties. It sounds okay, but I have a couple questions.

First, the author sees this as an antidote to “forced technology transfer” from developed to developing companies. If I understand correctly, this is when a factory in a developing country (let’s say China) agrees to manufacture for a developed country firm, but insists they share the legal rights to the technology they are manufacturing, allowing them to possibly cut the inventor/designer out in the future. I get that this benefits the developing country, possibly at some expense to the incentive to come up with further inventions in the developed country. Maybe – but I’d like to see the evidence. Perhaps when the inventor is ready to trade his or her knowledge in exchange for cheap labor and lax regulation, he or she is ready to reap some rewards on the last invention and move on to the next one. I don’t know whether my theory or the author’s theory is more correct, but I have no evidence for either one right now so if I had any hand in policy making I would want to see the evidence for both.

Second, and this is related, the author equates technology with knowledge. That might make sense in certain industries, for example drugs and chemicals. In many other industries, as much or more knowledge exists in the minds of experienced human beings than exists in a written-down form. Many forms of engineering are an example, because engineering by definition is using existing knowledge and experience to solve new problems without completely obvious solutions. If it takes decades of education/training/experience to get an individual to this point, even with the available written-down knowledge, there is not a whole lot of risk if that written-down knowledge leaks out. There is probably also very little value in patenting or otherwise protecting it, and much to be gained by making it freely available.

cyber-attack – nothing to fear but fear itself?

Another thing Axios is worried about is a “crippling cyber-attack”.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said this week that the U.S. is in “crisis mode,” comparing the danger of a massive attack to a Category 5 hurricane looming on the horizon. Intelligence chiefs from the last three administrations agree, and told Axios there is no graver threat to the United States.

A well-executed cyberattack could knock out the electrical grid and shut off power to a huge swath of the country, or compromise vital government or financial data and leave us unsure what is real.

That last phrase is chilling to me. Even if a cyber-attack didn’t result in immediate loss of life, if it creates real fear that the systems of civilization are breaking down (such as transportation, communication, food and financial systems), it could lead to panic and severe consequences. Most of us do not have a stash of gold coins under our mattresses these days.

the most dangerous country in the world?

Axios says it could be Pakistan, if the extremist elements the military has cultivated as weapons against neighbors India and Afghanistan ever gain control at home.

Pakistan has the world’s 5th largest population, 5th largest military and 6th largest nuclear arsenal. The danger begins, Morell says, with a dysfunctional economy and a rapidly growing population of young people without education or job prospects. Add to that a military that continues to call the shots as though war could break out at any moment.

“The main reason the military has a grip on decision-making is because of a long-held and now mistaken belief in Pakistan that India is an existential threat to Pakistan and that Islamabad must do everything it can to protect itself from that threat,” he says.

Noam Chomsky’s take on Trump and Russia

Noam Chomsky’s take on Trump and Russia is interesting. He is contrarian, as usual. To summarize, he is worried that climate change and nuclear weapons are existential threats to our civilization, and he thinks our political system is failing to deal with these threats regardless of who is nominally in charge.

So, of all Trump’s policies, the one that is the most dangerous and destructive, in fact poses an existential threat, is his policies on climate change, on global warming. That’s really destructive. And we’re facing an imminent threat, not far removed, of enormous damage. The effects are already visible but nothing like what’s going to come. A sea level rise of a couple of feet will be massively destructive. It will make today’s immigration issues look like trivialities. And it’s not that the administration is unaware of this. So, Donald Trump, for example, is perfectly aware of the dangerous effects, in the short term, of global warming. So, for example, recently he applied to the government of Ireland for permission to build a wall to protect his golf course in Ireland from rising sea levels. And Rex Tillerson, who was supposed to be the adult in the room before he was thrown out, as CEO of ExxonMobil, was devoting enormous resources to climate change denial, although he had, sitting on his desk, the reports of ExxonMobil scientists, who, since the ’70s, in fact, were on the forefront of warning of the dire effects of this accelerating phenomenon. I don’t know what word in the language — I can’t find one — that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal — the existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word “evil” doesn’t begin to approach it. These are the kinds of issues that should be under discussion. Instead, what’s being — there is a focus on what I believe are marginalia…

And I think we find this on issue after issue, also on issues on which what Trump says, for whatever reason, is not unreasonable. So, he’s perfectly right when he says we should have better relations with Russia. Being dragged through the mud for that is outlandish, makes — Russia shouldn’t refuse to deal with the United States because the US carried out the worst crime of the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia has done. But they shouldn’t refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we shouldn’t refuse to deal with them for whatever infractions they may have carried out, which certainly exist. This is just absurd. We have to move towards better — right at the Russian border, there are very extreme tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war, terminal for the species and life on Earth. We’re very close to that. Now, we could ask why. First of all, we should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it’s because NATO expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama. The US has offered to bring Ukraine into NATO. That’s the kind of a heartland of Russian geostrategic concerns. So, yes, there’s tensions at the Russian border — and not, notice, at the Mexican border. Well, those are all issues that should be of primary concern. The fate of — the fate of organized human society, even of the survival of the species, depends on this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you know, whether Trump lied about something? I think those seem to me the fundamental criticisms of the media.

high tech camp stoves

I’m intrigued by these high-tech camp stoves from Biolite (note there may be other, similar products/companies out there, and I am not selling anything on this site.) They use fans and electronics to burn wood or other types of biomass very efficiently for cooking, supposedly produce minimal smoke, and can charge electronic devices. Some of them can charge their own batteries and/or hook up to solar panels to charge them.

using less straws would be good, but obviously not enough

It should be obvious that you can’t just stop using plastic straws and pat yourself on the back for saving the earth. The much bigger problem is packaging, and this article in Scientific American has some ideas for how it could be tackled, and how it has been in a few countries not called the United States.

Legislators could make laws that incentivize and facilitate recycling, like the national bottle deposit and bag tax bills that were proposed in 2009. These bills would have created a nationwide five-cent deposit on plastic bottles and other containers, and a nonrefundable five-cent charge on plastic bags at checkout. The U.K. launched a similar charge on all single-use grocery bags in 2015 and announced a nationwide bottle deposit requirement in March of this year. Within six months of the plastic bag charge being in place, usage dropped over 80 percent. Similarly, in Germany, where a nationwide bottle bill was put in place in 2003, recycling rates have exceeded 98 percent. In the U.S. these actions would go a long way toward recovering the estimated $8 billion yearly economic opportunity cost of plastic waste.

Other actions could include a ban or “opt-in” policy on single-use items like plastic straws. That is, single-use plastic items would not be available or only upon request. A small tweak like this can lead to huge changes in consumer behavior, by making wastefulness an active choice rather than the status quo. Such measures were recently adopted by several U.S. cities, and are under consideration in California and the U.K.

Another, somewhat obvious, idea would be to tax packaging. This would raise some revenue while also nudging companies toward solutions that reduce, reuse, or recycle the packaging to avoid the tax. Some other tax could be reduced to offset this new one, if that seems critically important.

passive house

This article describes how an old home was retrofit into an extraordinarily energy efficient “passive house“.

I’m guessing the owners are not poverty-stricken. Then again, there must be some payback period and I wonder if it is measured in years or decades. If it pays back reasonably, there should be some kind of financial arrangement that would allow ordinary people to do this.