Jeber’s

Not going postal

Last week I had several pieces of mail that I wanted to be picked up by the mailman. I did what I’ve done thousands of times before, what I’m sure many of you would have done. I put it in the mailbox in front of my house and put up the little red flag that indicates there’s mail in the box.

The next day my mail was still in the box and the flag was still up.

Since this was the third time this year that my outgoing mail was ignored by my postal carrier, I tried to call the local post office to complain. It seems they don’t answer their phone, and for obvious reasons they don’t have an email address. So I called the office of the San Diego postmaster and filed a complaint with him.

Today I had a message on my phone from the office of the postmaster. Finally I’d have an explanation, justice would be served. Well, maybe not.

I was told that mail pickup is a courtesy. All the mail carrier is required to do is deliver mail. The postmaster informed me that if I wanted to be sure my mail was indeed mailed, I needed to deposit it in an official USPS mailbox.

The United States Postal Service “Residential Mailbox Standards” state;

You need to contact your local Post Office before moving your mailbox or mailbox support, because your mailbox needs to be approved by the Postal Service. Your postmaster will approve custom-made mailboxes on a one-time basis as long as they generally meet USPS standards.

Image via Wikipedia

This is because legally your mailbox, the minute you plant it in the ground, belongs to the USPS. Doesn’t that make your mailbox an official USPS mailbox? As such, shouldn’t it have the same standing as the cookie-monster shaped boxes disappearing from neighborhoods all over America?

This is the same USPS that seems to need an increase in rates almost every year, the same USPS that wants to eliminate Saturday delivery, the same USPS that cries over the fact that email is killing its business.

Well, my dear USPS, email is killing your business because it works and you don’t.

I can send email for free. I can send an email instantly any time of day or night and any day of the week, weekends, too. I can send an email from anywhere I have an internet connection. I can send a card via email. I don’t have to buy stamps or find a mailbox. I don’t even have to own a computer to send email, I can use the computers at the library. I can send email from my computer without you being able to suddenly appropriate my computer as your property. I can move my computer anywhere I want without your approval. What I can’t send by email I can send via UPS or FED-EX far more easily than I can send it through the USPS.

The USPS is to the advent of email what the buggy industry was to the advent of the auto industry.  Its methods are outdated and its benefits overshadowed by modern technology. The long history of bailouts of the USPS by the government puts the GM bailout to shame. The days of hand-carried mail by a postal worker are over. It’s a service that has died but remains unaware of its own decaying corpse. It’s no more necessary today than the Pony Express.

Let’s bury this outdated and inefficient service now before its financial difficulties and poor service cause it to become even more irrelevant than it already is.

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Does Daemon offer humanity Freedom?

My fascination with hard science fiction, especially books in which plausible technology is employed, started when I was a teen in the 60s. I was fortunate enough to be assigned to the National Security Agency as a cryptographic analyst when I enlisted in the Army Security Agency in the 70s. I like to joke that my first computer was a Cray, and it was. NSA prides itself on being 10-20 years ahead of the “outside” world when it comes to technology. That experience cemented my interest in technological science and science fiction. That interest is just as strong today as it ever was.

Daemon was the first novel of its kind that I’ve read. I’ve plowed through the Clancy Net Force novels, even those written by other authors, and found the premise of each to be a bit too fantastic and unrealistic though they were entertaining. I enjoyed Jack Williamson’s The Silicon Dagger though the technology was never explained and came across as nonsensical. The social issues he raised are worth considering. But nothing I found impressed me as much as Daemon. The use of plausible and contemporary technology in ways that could potentially alter human society challenged my mind and excited my imagination.

I wrote a glowing review of Daemon when it was first self-published and recommended to me by a friend on Friendfeed, appropriately enough. I’ve re-read the novel 3 or 4 times now, and am eager to read the follow-up to Daemon called Freedom.

Daniel Suarez ended Daemon in a way that suggested a sequel. And very soon this sequel will be available in bookstores.

If you’d like to read a few sample chapters of Freedom you can do that here. As soon as I’ve read it I’ll have a lot more to say on the subject.

(On the Daemon’s website you’ll find many interesting links to how and where the technology Suarez incorporates into his novels is being used and explored. It’s well worth reading if you have an interest in the potential misuse of technology or internet security. You may also want to view this video in which Suarez talks about botnets.)

(Disclosure: I bought my first copy of Daemon, then Daniel kindly provided me with autographed copies of Daemon and Freedom. I assure you, having been provided with free copies of these books is in no way responsible for my enthusiasm for them. I was not asked to review them; it was solely my decision to do so. My recommendations are authentically my own.)

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War, what is it good for?

Historically, wars were fought to increase the empire, conquor enemies, gain wealth and impose one society’s beliefs and customs on the rest of their (known) world. Two domestic benefits of warfare were employment for many of the young men and work for those who stayed home, manufacturing arms and munitions. 

In the 21st century we no longer occupy those lands we conquor, indeed we no longer even conquor our enemies to the same extent our ancestors did. We don’t kill every adult male or manchild, we don’t rape the women or take possession of all the livestock of our foe. We don’t even attempt to become benign overlords any more.

We do still send our young males, and now females, into harm’s way. We are on our way to making warfare more antiseptic and sterile, but we’re not there yet. We no longer reap the benefit of increased employment or manufacturing capabilities, since we can now use robotics to construct our instruments of war, requiring fewer humans and manufacturing plants. The battlefield will soon be overrun with robots. The new “frontlines” will be occupied by a person in the rear with a joystick and monitor. Our enemy’s tactics are changing, too. Our greatest enemies are foreign belief systems and computer viruses. Our nation’s freedoms have turned out to be a Trojan Horse.

War seems to be morphing into an activity that offers none of the rewards it traditionally has, none of the benefits. Soon it will become a completely senseless behavior. Yet humans are confrontational animals. Because we posses a sense of personal property we have also evolved attitudes and behaviors to provide for the defense of that property. When we perceive our nation as personal property (us vs. them) we extend that desire to defend our property to the national level. So it seems inevitable that mankind will continue to argue, assault and take up arms against neighbor and foreigner.

If conventional warfare no longer exists, how horrific is the future of human antagonism?

When social networks are one-way streets

Social networks are the latest rage on the internet among the technorati. I’ve joined several; Plurk, identi.ca, Popego, nearly all in beta or early development. The two I enjoy and use the most are Friendfeed and Twitter. These services are used by the people I follow the most, technology insiders like Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, Dave Winer and Leo Laporte, to name just a few. Every day they post comments I like and comment on. But this is primarily a one-way street. The posts I make are rarely liked or commented on by them, even though most of them subscribe to me.

The reason for this is that we inhabit two fundamentally different worlds of interest.

Most of these people are in their 20s and 30s and are employed in technology or closely related fields. As I said, they are techo-insiders; they either work for companies heavily invested in cutting-edge technology or they own a brand identified with that world.

My world is a bit different.

My introduction to bits and bytes was in the 1970s, when I enlisted in the Army and was privileged to be assigned to the National Security Agency as a member of the Army Security Agency. There are two primary types of people employed by the Agency, cryptographers and analysts. Cryptographers write and break codes. They are mathematical wizards, comparable to programmers in the software industry. I was an analyst. We took the decrypted intelligence and studied it for patterns and created estimates based on the data we collected. We didn’t break the codes. We tried to make the intelligence useful to our customers. I used a Cray supercomputer for my work and was trained in Fortran and Cobol even though neither was necessary for analysis.

Shortly after I left the Army I moved to Idaho and was uninvolved with technology for the next 13 years. Those years saw the birth of the internet and the development of the personal computer. I was only vaguely aware of all this. I still loved technology but I was totally out of the loop.

It was around 1997 that I once again found myself in San Diego and around those who were fascinated by this fairly new World Wide Web. I was quickly hooked and it wasn’t long before I bought a shiny new Gateway computer with a massive 500Mhz processor and a membership in AOL. I learned as much as I could about computers and in a couple of years I felt I knew enough to want to share what I’d picked up. I found Chris Pirillo’s newsletter and shortly after that his forum. At the same time I joined Scot Finnie’s forum, also based on technology. There I met people whose interests mirrored mine. They were building their own computers and sharing websites they found interesting and informative. While I had accumulated a reasonable amount of knowledge about hardware and computer security that I could pass along to those in the forum, I realized at heart I was still an analyst. My primary interest was in making sense of the various opinions I encountered. I would read and listen to those with more knowledge than I possessed then try to distill that wisdom into something comprehensible to those just getting started. I truly enjoyed being able to pass along esoteric knowledge to those in need, in a form they could easily grasp. In a way I was performing the same function in the world of technology that a priest plays in the world of theology. I was taking obscure wisdom and attempting to make it intelligible to the common man. But where a priest is deeply involved in the world of theology, in the world of technology I was still an outsider. I had an opportunity to listen to those on the inside, but I was not a member of the club.

Primarily through my association with Chris and Scot I’ve been allowed to eavesdrop on conversations I might otherwise have never been privy to. I’ve learned who the influential are. They are those who have worked at Microsoft since the early days, they own start-ups, they write software, they often determine what will become popular among the rest of us users and what will fail to attract attention. They write for industry magazines or have websites that constantly rank in the top 100 of influential sites.

I’m not one of them.

I’m an analyst, a writer. I enjoy writing humorous commentary. My primary focus is social, not technological. I want to make technology understandable to others less out of a love of technology than a deep concern for people. Where once I had wanted to become a priest to bring god to the masses, now I’m a priest of the internet. I want others to get as much out of this medium as I have. My websites are concerned with the social issues I believe are important to humanity. I espouse social reform and technology plays a major role in that.

As a result, my contributions to social networking sites are seldom noticed and rarely commented on. The movers and shakers are focused on technology, I’m focused on humanity. We live in two different worlds that occasionally overlap. Social networks, for me, are one-way streets. I try to make my voice heard above the chatter about the latest service, the newest shiny gadget. But my input is of little value. They know I’m not one of them. I’m an interested voyeur, a watcher, a listener. I’m a simple techno-priest among the internet gods. My understanding is far below theirs.

Still, I love the networks I inhabit. I enjoy my role, even when I post an insight that’s overlooked but widely commented on when repeated by one of the insiders. I’ve learned to accept my position as a guest in the technorati society. I hope others who often feel left out of the conversational flow in their favorite network take my tale as encouragement to stay involved, keep connected. What you learn is as important as what others might learn from you if they would only listen. We can all drive on this one-way street. Some of us just have to accept that this particular road isn’t leading toward our destination. It’s still a fun ride, though.

GayTech

I’ve been seeing questions raised within the tech crowd regarding the absence of women in high tech.  One such conversation mentioned a tech conference that was scheduled to have 20 some odd speakers, only one of whom was a woman.

I’m not questioning the validity of that observation.  I agree that there are too few women in prominent positions within the community.  That’s not to say there aren’t women in the tech field.  They just aren’t often given as many opportunities as their fellow male counterparts to be highly visible and influential.

But it did get me thinking; is technology neutral on sexuality?  There’s certainly tech gadgets and applications geared toward men, women, children, tweens, just about every demographic one can imagine but one.  Gays.

Why are there no prominent gay voices within the tech field?  Is there any application or program that especially appeals to gays?  I know there are gay themed websites, but where are the gay entrepreneurs, the gay VCs, the proudly gay developers?  Is being gay of no consequence to technology?

Further erosions of British liberty

Is the only way to effectively combat terrorism the creation of a police state?

MI5 seeks powers to trawl records in new terror hunt

Millions of commuters could have their private movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.

Records of journeys made by people using smart cards that allow 17 million Britons to travel by underground, bus and train with a single swipe at the ticket barrier are among a welter of private information held by the state to which MI5 and police counter-terrorism officers want access in order to help identify patterns of suspicious behaviour.

The request by the security services, described by shadow Home Secretary David Davis last night as ‘extraordinary’, forms part of a fierce Whitehall debate over how much access the state should have to people’s private lives in its efforts to combat terrorism.

It comes as the Cabinet Office finalises Gordon Brown’s new national security strategy, expected to identify a string of new threats to Britain – ranging from future ‘water wars’ between countries left drought-ridden by climate change to cyber-attacks using computer hacking technology to disrupt vital elements of national infrastructure.

The fear of cyber-warfare has climbed Whitehall’s agenda since last year’s attack on the Baltic nation of Estonia, in which Russian hackers swamped state servers with millions of electronic messages until they collapsed. The Estonian defence and foreign ministries and major banks were paralysed, while even its emergency services call system was temporarily knocked out: the attack was seen as a warning that battles once fought by invading armies or aerial bombardment could soon be replaced by virtual, but equally deadly, wars in cyberspace.

While such new threats may grab headlines, the critical question for the new security agenda is how far Britain is prepared to go in tackling them. What are the limits of what we want our security services to know? And could they do more to identify suspects before they strike?

One solution being debated in Whitehall is an unprecedented unlocking of data held by public bodies, such as the Oyster card records maintained by Transport for London and smart cards soon to be introduced in other cities in the UK, for use in the war against terror. The Office of the Information Commissioner, the watchdog governing data privacy, confirmed last night that it had discussed the issue with government but declined to give details, citing issues of national security.

Currently the security services can demand the Oyster records of specific individuals under investigation to establish where they have been, but cannot trawl the whole database. But supporters of calls for more sharing of data argue that apparently trivial snippets – like the journeys an individual makes around the capital – could become important pieces of the jigsaw when fitted into a pattern of other publicly held information on an individual’s movements, habits, education and other personal details. That could lead, they argue, to the unmasking of otherwise undetected suspects.

Individuals wrongly identified as suspicious might lose high-security jobs, or have their immigration status brought into doubt, he said. Ministers are also understood to share concerns over civil liberties, following public opposition to ID cards, and the debate is so sensitive that it may not even form part of Brown’s published strategy.

But if there is no consensus yet on the defence, there is an emerging agreement on the mode of attack. The security strategy will argue that in the coming decades Britain faces threats of a new and different order. And its critics argue the government is far from ready.

(Source)

What they need are some technologically intelligent people who can conceive of ways to protect their citizens without violating all their liberties.