Information Promiscuity: Addendum

When I talk about information promiscuity in the context of computer networks, I mean things like this

The ONLY reason viruses and worms persist is because of technological inertia in the installed base of software and hardware. If everyone switched to "dumb" browsers and email readers... one huge avenue of vulnerability would be eliminated. We don't do this because we like eye candy trinkets and shiny shit.

... the bottom line is any real or imagined threat from the machines exists only because we allow it to exist out of laziness, convenience and inertia.

Does anyone FORCE you to put mineable data on your cell phone? NO! A standard issue Mk 1 Mod 0 pencil and a little pocket notebook will create a "personal database" that's unminable by any remote software that could ever be created.

But we'd all rather have the cell phone.

Equal Opportunity for Ideas

Or, bringing balance to the Force

In an effort to give my readers (all two of them) a more balanced view of certain controversial topics, I've added two new blogs to my "blogroll".

To balance Climate Audit, The Blackboard, and Watts Up With That, I've added RealClimate and Open Mind.

I hope those interested in the subject will appreciate comparing the positions and arguments of the opposing factions.

Also, if anybody can find a suitable counterpoint to The Corner, please let me know. I'm looking for a blog--mostly boring, often insightful, occasionally funny--that combines social and pop culture commentary with articulation of core progressive principles in the same way The Corner does for conservative principles. If it were a group blog, with all the running debates that implies, that would be even better. I've been on the lookout for such a thing for years, now. But so far, no luck.

Information Promiscuity

Or, The Internet Changes Everything

This has been bugging me for a while, now. Years, actually. For some reason, I have a hard time putting it into words, though. So expect this post to be a little disjointed and incoherent. I hope to return to this idea repeatedly, and refine it over time. So consider this a kind of rough draft or first pass. I'll tune it up in future iterations.

Doctor Strangelove looks creepy. So does the Internet.

Privacy in the information age
This is a frequent topic of discussion on Slashdot. The general consensus of that community is that regardless of how the Internet makes it ever easier to share information, and regardless of how steady advances in computing technology make it easier to mine raw data for useful information, people are fundamentally entitled to absolute privacy. Any use of information technology--especially by the government or corporations--to learn things about people (even non-identifying things) is absolutely unacceptable.

I disagree.

The Internet changes everything
I don't really know how to say it better than this. Information is proliferating faster and faster all the time. Information that was previously hard to get and hard to analyze is now trivially easy to get, and trivially easy to exploit.

I think that earlier notions of privacy, based on the idea that even if you did let something slip, it wouldn't go very far, are completely obsolete. I think that the present generations of people, who were raised in the pre-information paradigm, are woefully inequipped to comprehend and adapt to the profound changes the Internet has wrought.

I think that their children, themselves raised by parents who don't understand this brave new world, are themselves little better off. It's not like their parents can teach them stable strategies for surviving in the information age: Their parents don't know any such strategies. Worse than that, their parents don't even realize that there's a new paradigm that requires new strategies.

I'm not just talking about Internet filtering software, or auditing a child's cell phone logs. There's a whole different mindset, a whole different philosophy, that must be worked out. And I think we're still several generations away from that.

The Neo-Luddites
One thing that frustrates me about the Slashdot community is that for all their enthusiasm for "information technology", its members seem totally unwilling to consider the long-term implications of these technological advances. No thought is given to the possibility that profound social changes are not only necessary, but inevitable. The focus of the community seems to be on how each individual can personally profit from an increasing level of information availability, without ever having to give up any control over their own information.

Even in situatiosn where the information is already out of their control, they object to any attempt by anybody else to mine that information and use it in ways they don't approve of. And yet, at the same time, they insist that it is their fundamental right to exploit other people's information however they see fit. Piracy for me, but not for thee, seems to be their motto.

I think of this mentality--that I should be free to exploit information technology however I like, but governments and corporations must continue to languish in the informational dark ages--as a kind of "neo-luddism": Civilization as a whole must not be changed by new information technology, and must not adapt to it. Even though the notion of privacy and information control as understood by previous generations is obsolete, society should still be bound by its outdated rules.

Cyberwarfare
The fact is, our civilization is increasingly a networked civilization. More and more of our infrastructure is part of an increasingly important, increasingly accessible information network. As this network grows in importance, it will grow in importance as a battlefield. This idea calls for careful consideration and thorough development.

Information Promiscuity
The thing that bugs me the most about all of this is the mismatch between our outdated notions of privacy and information security, and our eagerness to exploit more and more the growing information technology available to us. There seems to be a growing trend to "overshare" ourselves via social networking tools like MySpace and Facebook. We can't help networking our power grid management system, even though we can't effectively secure such networks against intrusion and exploitation. We get so excited about how new technology makes it easier for us to use information that we totally ignore how new technology makes it easier for others to use information against us.

In conclusion--for now
All of this bugs me. A lot. I wish people gave the implications of the information age more thought. I like my privacy. I get a little creeped out every time I see my picture at the top of this blog.

One reason I like the Ghost in the Shell stories so much is because information promiscuity and information security are a constant backdrop and a frequent theme. Masamune Shirow is one of the few people I can go to for the kind of thoughtful, far-reaching discussion of the implications of the information age.

One more thing
Did I mention I just created my own Facebook page?

HasturCom: The Madness Out of Space

Or, The Thing That Should Not Be

Here at HasturCom, different teams do the same thing in different contexts. So there's my team, which specializes in supporting websites for external HasturCom business. There's also another team, identical to mine, which specializes in supporting websites for internal HasturCom.

Now, this arrangement actually makes lots of sense to me, as far as it goes. The problem arises because it goes a lot farther than that, and not in any kind of good or wholesome direction.

Both these teams are organized under the same department head. All of this department's "customers"--HasturCom employees who are responsible for taking care of HasturCom's business--submit their website support requests to this department.

Ideally, they'd submit their request to the appropriate team within the department: To the External team for external business, and to the Internal team for internal business. But in fact our department does not communicate these kinds of fine distinctions to our customers. So our customers just submit their requests to both teams.

The next step, then, is for whichever team is responsible for fulfilling the request to proactively respond to the customer, take ownership of the request, and carry out the appropriate fulfilment tasks. But this never happens. Internal requests will sit in the joint team queue until somebody from the Internal team gets around to responding to it.

Or until my supervisor decides that it's a perfect opportunity for the External team to go "above and beyond", and volunteers us for the work. This sucks.

A dude whose supervisor is worse than mine

What sucks even more, though, is that my teammates get antsy when they see these Internal requests in the queue, because they know that if the Internal team doesn't get on them soon, our supervisor will assign them to us. And we don't want this.

So when my teammates get antsy, the often tag me, as the New Guy, to make sure that the Internal team takes charge of the request. This also sucks. Imagine you're at your place of work, large and in charge, maxing and relaxing. All of a sudden, some other dude, who is totally not the boss of you, gets all up in your email inbox, all like "dude, you're responsible for this, get on it", and "somebody other than me needs to do some work around here". That dude, the one all up in your email inbox? He's kind of a jerk. I don't want to be that dude.

I mean, I'm really polite and business-formal about it and all. But still. Running around telling other people to do their jobs, however politely, is not my idea of Fun Times. It'd be different if I was the boss of them. Then I'd totally revel in my power, and rule with an iron fist over my loyal subjects. But the Internal team is not my loyal subjects, and I have no power over them. I just end up having to be a jerk to them anyway.

And it gets worse. The real madness here is that even within our own department, it's not always clear which team is responsible for what request. There is no consistent nomenclature. Even my teammates, who have been here twice as long as me or longer, don't always know if "shoggoth01" is an Internal or External server, or if "Shambling Horror" refers to an Internal or External project.

The madness reaches epic levels when our customer actually does know to which team he should forward his request:

CUSTOMER: Internal Team, please modify the webserver on shoggoth01, to support the Shambling Horror project.

INTERNAL TEAM: External Team, we think "Shambling Horror" might be your area of responsibility. Can you take this on?

Note here that the Internal Team apparently has no qualms about being jerks all up in my email inbox.

MY TEAMMATE: Container, please find out who is responsible for this request.

ME: Well, if shoggoth01 is an Internal server, and Shambling Horror is an internal project, it should be the Internal Team's responsibility, right? I'll ask them.

MY TEAMMATE: In fact, it is the Internal Team's responsibility. I've told them to take care of it.

ME: . . .

And then I lose 12 SAN.

Flawless Victory

Or, I Love it When a Plan Comes Together

Today I had an opportunity to test a script I'd written a few months ago. There was a major server failure here at Hasturcom, and we needed to shut down all of the applications that communicate with the failed server.

Before I wrote this script, shutting down these apps was a tedious, error-prone manual process. Thus the script: the concept was, a few quick keystrokes, and Pow! A robot does the grunt work.

Anyway, today was the first opportunity to actually test the script, on a large scale, against a live production environment. And I'm pleased to report that it worked flawlessly.

It's the most complicated script I've written in my (admittedly brief) scripting career, so I'm pretty proud of it--especially because it works.

Eco-Tourism

Or, Irrational Exuberance

Apparently the state of Florida is considering opening up some offshore oil and natural gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico. Historically, exploitation of these fields has been prohibited, for fear that an oil spill would mar Floridian beaches and harm Florida's valuable tourism industry.

Whatever. But it did get me thinking: Disasters require relief, right? I mean, this news article about Florida oil vs. Florida beaches? It made a big deal about the size and duration of the cleanup efforts after the last big oil spill on the Florida coast.

So I'm thinking, a big oil spill like that, you're gonna need a lot of volunteers. Sure, you're gonna need some trained professionals, too. But sooner or later, you're gonna need to bus in a couple hundred enthusiastic amateurs, give them a half-day seminar on entry-level oil cleanup operations, and put them to work.

So why not make it a tourist attraction? There's gotta be plenty of people out there who wouldn't mind paying a little money to Save the Planet. You set up a trailer park campsite, cater three hot meals a day, and charge a reasonable fee to house eco-tourists for the duration of the cleanup efforts.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "two weeks cleaning up an oil spill doesn't sound like much of a vacation to me". But I'm telling you, that's where you're wrong.

In other news
While I'm on such an awsome roll of awsome ideas, how about this? Instead of canceling Civilization every time it endangers some species or other (Sacramento Delta Smelt, I'm looking at you), why not just make a genetic record and move on?

Then, in a hundred years or so, when it turns out we really did need that species after all, we can clone it from our genetic library, and restore it in all its original humanity-serving glory. What do you think?