10/07/2008

I’ve landed a new client for Zing, and they’re asking me to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This isn’t anything new or unusual– it happens fairly often when I start projects. What makes this one a bit different is that the client is a law firm. And they take their NDA quite seriously.

My favorite part of it is the clause discussing confidential business information and how I’m not supposed to disclose it to others. But rather than saying I just can’t disclose it “electronically”, they specify all of the ways I might do so:

You will not otherwise permit such Confidential Information to be available, stored electronically or otherwise, published, distributed, transmitted or delivered in any form whatsoever, including without limitation the Internet, intranet, telnet, gopher, Archie, ftp (file transfer protocol), bft (binary file transfer), world wide web, news groups, BBS/bulletin boards, list servers, mail servers, archive sites, e‐mail, TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol, including TCP, IP, UDP, ARP, RARP, and ICMP), SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol), POP (post office protocol), CDF (Channel Definition Format), MCF (Meta Content Framework), push, NNTP (network news transfer protocol), MIME (multipurpose internet mail extensions), HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), HDTP (handheld device transfer protocol), radio, caches, search engines, spiders, bots, television, electronic, audio, CD ROM, PCS (personal communication services), and any other medium, regardless of language or program, including without limitation HTML (hypertext markup language), Dynamic HTML, XML (extensible markup language), VRML (virtual reality modeling language), SGML, Java, JavaBeans, JavaScript, scripting, Perl, CGI (common gateway interface), ActiveX, and HDML (handheld device markup language).

Wow, that’s pretty comprehensive. To think they’re worried I might post their information on a BBS, or perhaps on a Gopher site somewhere. Hah! Those technologies are so 1990.

10/05/2008

I’m on some kind of goofy retro computer game kick, where I’m figuring out how to install and play those silly computer games from my childhood. Back in the 80’s, when we had an Apple IIe, I was such a geek it was breathtaking to behold.

That’s me playing Brick Out, which was provided gratis with the Apple, probably to demonstrate its amazing low-resolution graphics capabilities. I later wrote my own version of the game, just to test my programming skills.

As time went on, I expanded my game library on the Apple. A perennial favorite was Night MIssion Pinball, which provided countless hours of entertainment for Dirk and me. So today I figured out how to get that classic game working on my Linux laptop.

Woo hoo! There’s nothing quite like four-color CGA graphics and 1-bit sound cards. But hey, that’s the kind of debris you’ll find on a trip down memory lane.

09/25/2008

It’s child’s play to mock Bush’s complete lack of public speaking skills– he’s made so many inane gaffes in his various off-the-cuff speeches it makes one think no one could be such a poor wordsmith.

One would be wrong. Sarah Palin may be more vacuous and a worse speaker even than Bush. Take this transcript as an example, from her recent appearance on CBS with Katie Couric:

Katie Couric: You’ve cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

Sarah Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundary that we have with Canada. It’s funny that a comment like that was kinda made to… I don’t know, you know… reporters.

Couric: Mocked?

Palin: Yeah, mocked, I guess that’s the word, yeah.

Couric: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.

Palin: Well, it certainly does, because our– our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there…

Couric: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

Palin: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It’s very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right next to, they are right next to our state.

Holy. Cow.

Look out! It’s Putin, rearing his head into the air space!

09/25/2008

It’s good to know that– at least at some level– Congress still listens to the people who elected them.

From a New York Times article today about the stalled bailout negotiations:

It has become abundantly clear that members of Congress are hearing from their constituents, many of whom are furious about the proposed rescue.

I was one of those constituents– I wrote to my Senators and told them the bailout was a lousy deal. I received a nice boilerplate e-mail response (“Thanks for your concern… I take all of these e-mail messages very seriously… yada yada”). Although I’m sure they didn’t actually read my message, I hope the sheer volume of people like me gave them a clue that they’re treading in dangerous territory.

09/24/2008

So Digg just raised $28 million in venture capital.

I’m not really sure what the heck they’re going to do with that… I mean, Digg is basically a web site with a database and a comment system where tens of thousands of people go to discuss interesting news items. The hosting and bandwidth bills are probably pretty steep, and of course you’d need a staff (half a dozen?) of server administrators, but beyond that it’s kind of nebulous what $28 million would do.

I guess I’ve been running on a shoestring budget far too long. I’m going to see if I can raise a few mil in venture capital to keep boomflag.com running.

09/23/2008

Tom and I spent four days backpacking in the Wind River Range, part of the Teton mountains in northwest Wyoming. What a spectacular trip.

We had some interesting adventures involving blowing out a tire and almost getting stuck fifty miles from civilization in the sagebrush, pouring rain and lightning above treeline, and of course a night in the tent while the rain lashed at the fly and thunder boomed overhead. And by our calculations we hiked around 27 miles, both carrying 50-pound packs up steep grades and across boulder fields where the rocks were the size of cars.

A good time all around.

09/23/2008

The Department of Homeland inSecurity has unveiled its shiny new terrorist screening system, which will scan people walking through the airport and identify those who appear to be suspicious. That’s right: it will analyze pulse rate, breathing, skin temperature, and even “fleeting facial gestures”. People who are flagged as suspicious will be pulled aside for “enhanced screening”. Hoo boy.

DHS is bragging about this system because in tests with 140 people, some of whom were told to “act suspicious”, it correctly identified 78% of them. 78%! And they act like it’s some kind of triumph that people who were intentionally acting suspicious were flagged as such. A trained police officer– or possibly even an untrained clown from the street– could probably have identified every one of them.

Leaving aside the horrendous implications of a system designed to basically analyze our thoughts and intents, the mind reels to consider how colossally ineffective this system will actually be. I think Cory Doctorow’s analysis of such a system (written prior to this announcement) sums it up quite nicely.

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here’s a math lesson you need to learn first. It’s called “the paradox of the false positive,” and it’s a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that’s 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result: true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a “false positive”– the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn’t. That’s what “99 percent accurate” means: one percent wrong.

What’s one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you’ll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won’t identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.

That’s the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test’s accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you’re looking for. If you’re trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer– a test– that’s one atom wide or less at the tip.

This is the paradox of the false positive, and here’s how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That’s pretty rare all right. Now, say you’ve got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren’t anywhere close to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all means is that the Department of Homeland Security has set itself up to fail badly. They are trying to spot incredibly rare events– a person is a terrorist– with inaccurate systems.

I can hardly wait to go to the airport this Friday to fly to St. Louis.