To remember: the relative sizes of countries / continents on most maps is not representative of the true ratios, because most map projections were not meant for that. If you want to play around with different projections, here is a nice page from Wolfram (unfortunately you have to install a ~100MB plugin to get it to work). If you need the raw data, just go to Wikipedia.

Finally, here is a good essay from Asimov (from 1989) about the scientific process: The Relativity of Wrong – small nitpick: it would have been even better if it had used the metric system or at least it didn’t switch from miles to inches in he middle of the essay.

Very often media (and I’m using the word “media” here in its most comprehensive way – including things like blogs, Slashdot, etc) tells us the story of some uber-hyper-mega-cool new-unseen-until-now method of performing X. This leads many people to believe that progress is done in “quantum leaps” – ie. there are no intermediate steps between point A (where we are now) and point B (where we can get using this new discovery). As a side-effect, it also makes people think that all they have to do is to come up with a “big idea”.

This is utter nonsense and I would like to ask everybody to stop propagating this myth! (Of course I know that it is wishful thinking on my part to think that this blogpost would have a large impact on humanity, but hey, at least I’ve vented my frustration, and if just one person is convinced, I’m happy).

There are at least two factors which mislead people into this fallacy: first, the lack of knowledge of the reader in a particular field. So, there is no chance for the reader to evaluate what works the current one is based upon, unless this is explicitly mentioned by the author. And here is the second problem: our tendency to over-emphasize (either intentionally or unintentionally) our contribution.

Also, there are a lot of both empirical and scientific evidence for the fact that progress is not as simple as coming up with one great-idea. The quote from Thomas Edison (“Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”) illustrates this. A more scientific study comes from Malcolm Gladwell, who says that you need about 10 000 hours (about ten years) of deliberate practice to become great in a given field.

One example which comes to mind from the field of malware-research is the case of the Storm worm. When it “appeared”, there was a big media frenzy around it, fueled mainly by the AV companies. What nobody mentioned (because it would have broken the myth of “new, ultra-dangerous malware materializing from nowhere”) is that “Storm” is in fact the “normal” evolution of a much older malware family detected by many as “Tibs”. If one would to place the samples on a timeline and study them in the order as they appeared, one could clearly see how the different methods (like using a simple encryption layer over UPX, using different API calls to thwart emulators, using MMX/SSE instructions, using the return values of the API calls in the decoding process, etc) appeared and evolved. In fact “Tibs” and “Storm” are very clearly the work of the same group of people, and not something new as the reports would like you to believe.

No quantum leaps (except in theoretical physics :-))!

Picture taken from renrut’s photostream with permission.

Most recently the Metasploit site was attacked together with other security sites. They’ve seen a 15MBps traffic, which isn’t much by networking standards, but it can definitely bring a webserver to its knees. If you have a website, ask yourself this question: how likely is that your host will stand up to such traffic? The response probably is: very unlikely. Just a few big players can afford to take on these attacks, mostly because they have a high degree of distribution and redundancy (think Google, Akamai, Microsoft, etc).

The conclusion? There is no conclusion… We should start to put more effort into cleaning up computers and preventing their infection or accept that tens of thousands of people have the ability to take down sites at will in this new technocracy.

PS: The Computer Defense blog put up the analysis of a survey about DoS. Read part 1 and part 2.

Image taken from Idea-Listic’s photostream with permission.

• Soliciting Reviews on Mechanical Turk
• Time Out New York and Mechanical Turk
• Is it unethical to pay for reviews?
• Monitoring the Dynamics of Mechanical Turk
• Duration of Tasks on Mechanical Turk

Also a very cool chart about the MT activities created with the Google Chart APIs.

Of course I’m not fooling myself into thinking that this sort of system will ever be implemented. As a sidenote: on my articles I usually mark changes with the text “Update”, but there is no support in Blogger per-se to mark these changes. The cryptography behind the idea of signing sounds fairly simple (as it is described in the original post): when I write some text, I take the hash of it (preferably SHA-1 or something never) and send it to a third party service. This trusted service creates a signed statement which says “I’ve see this hash at this time”. Then later readers can use this statement to verify that your text has not changed. Of course there are several pitfalls:

• What if at a later date you want to change the look of the article? Since the HTML tags are part of the signed hash, you can’t do that. What you can do is to sign an intermediate version (like a Wiki-markup version) which is available for the user (important so that she can verify the signature) and use a transformation to create HTML. Of course this begs the question: can you trust the process which transforms the intermediate markup into HTML? (similar to the classic article Reflections on Trusting Trust which analyses the question: what if your compiler included some trojan code in each compiled program?)
• There is a second problem: there are a lot of elements not directly present in the page (like stylesheets or javascript files) which can be modified (so that the link to them stays the same, but their content changes). All of these can be used to dynamically change the content shown to the user. This is similar to the problem faced by search engines when they are trying to detect specially crafted “gateway pages”.

The conclusion? Be afraid, be very afraid. Don’t trust anyone. And donate to the Internet Archive :-).

Image taken from surfstyle’s photostream with permission.

Update: a good example for historical data is the new feature in Goolge Earth which allows you to view historical imagery. However, it also highlights the fact that you can’t trust a single entity to keep its history straight.

It is worth watching, and it went in a totally different direction than I anticipated after the first seconds.

In his opinion, although we think that claims made by spam is very “out there” and wonder why people keep falling for it, in fact it is no worse that what we see in other media (like TV commercials). On some level I agree, although there certainly seems to be more regulation on TV commercials. For one, almost all of them display a disclaimer of some sorts (the fact that it is unreadable is an other question :-)). Also, in my personal experience, they are more of a “don’t talk about the negative aspects” than an outright lie type (for example omitting the fact that the super-duper vacuum cleaner makes such an infernal noise that you can’t use it).

In the end, people need to learn to keep their expectations in check. If it is too good to be true, it probably isn’t. Technology and legislation can only do so much…

If you don’t know English, you’re not a programmer

However I think that a language and culture shared by many people would be a big step towards reducing the feeling of animosity we have between different groups of people. You see, people are selfish mostly. To get someone to think kindly of you, she needs to consider that you have some things in common. And there is no easier way to create hate, than being different than the given person (talk a different language, dress differently, look differently).

It is always the differences we see first. You can convince yourself with this very simple experiment: try to recognize people who have a different skin color than you see every day (blacks, asians, whites, etc). At first you will see no difference between them, because the fact that they are different from what you are used to seeing is so striking that you don’t observe the more subtle details usually used to identify individuals!

How would us all speaking a common language and share some common cultural values help? It would eliminate some of the differences. It would help us better relate to each other. It would make it possible to directly communicate with one another, without an intermediary who may distort the ideas.

Is English the only option? No, but its current position in many fields makes it a very good candidate for the job.

Won’t this “drown” other cultures? Not at all, there will always be some local aspect of people’s knowledge and behavior (“culture”). Take a look at Canada, the USA and Australia for example. Even though they have English as (one of) their official language, nobody would say that they are the same. It may some small effect, but it is worth it to reduce the global xenophobia which seems to be ever growing…

All in all, it was an interesting book to read, it contains many fun anecdotes and quotes which entertain the reader and illustrate the point. Many of the suggestions should be fairly obvious to us, cynical consumers who are bombarded daily by advertisements. However, the most important question that I have, after reading the book, is: do I really want to do this?

One example which exemplifies my dilemma perfectly: the book recommends that, when trying to convince somebody, always use your credentials to establish credibility. However this flies in the face of my theory that “arguments should stand on their own, regardless of who presents them”.

An other example: the book ends by describing seven methods for what it calls “mindless persuasion”. In contrast my goal always is to have an intelligent discussion about topics focused around rational arguments.

I liked the tips about presentation methods, but the line is blurry there too. Should a presentation “win” just because it was more entertaining/fun? In the same time I believe in what I present (or what I’m arguing for), so isn’t is my duty to use the best possible methods to convince people?

In the end, the positive thing that I’ve got from this book is that in the future I will recognize easier when someone tries to apply these methods to me, and maybe, but just maybe, I will use some of the things described there.

you just have to look. For example, we live in an overcrowded, noisy city and still, I was able to find these flowers on my way home from work. I’ve always said that I don’t need a camera phone, but this time it came in handy (and even the psychedelic effect it added to the image looks nice). Also, it is all a matter of perspective (from multiple points of view). From the picture you can’t tell how big the garden is. In fact, it is fairly small, but looking from the right angle you can still make it so that it fills you entire visual field.

PS. With some investigative work you can find out my phone model from this post