Monday, October 22, 2018
ISBNiser 1.4 Update Released
I have just posted version 1.4 of ISBNiser, a utility for validating ISBN publication numbers in the ISBN-13 and ISBN-10 formats, converting between the formats, and generating Amazon associate links to purchase items with credit to a specified account. In version 1.3, the ability to automatically parse ISBNs and insert delimiters among the elements (unique country code [ISBN-13 only], registration group, registrant, publication, and checksum) was added. This allows you, given an ISBN with no delimiters, for example “9781481487658”, to obtain an ISBN-13 or ISBN-10 with proper delimiters with:$ isbniser 9781481487658 ISBN-13: 978-1-4814-8765-8 9781481487658 ISBN-10: 1481487655 1-4814-8765-5The rules for parsing ISBNs are beyond baroque. The international bureaucrats who created the scheme first defined a series of “registration groups”, which identify the ISBN by language, (for example 0 and 1 for English and 3 for German), countries (7 for China, 987 for Argentina), regions (982 for South Pacific, 976 for the Caribbean Community), former countries (5 for the Soviet Union, 80 for Czechoslovakia), parts of countries (962 for Hong Kong), non-countries (9950 for Palestine), and un-countries (92 for International NGO Publishers and EU Organizations). Within each registration group, it's up to those administering it to decide how the registrant (publisher) and publication fields are parsed from the balance of the ISBN. The checksum is always the final character, but is computed by entirely different algorithms for ISBN-10 and ISBN-13. There is no way to cleanly parse the contents of an ISBN with a simple algorithm. Had programmers designed ISBNs, there would be a simple, uniform, left-to-right way to determine field sizes, but what the bureaucrats have left us with is a mess which requires a table exhaustively enumerating each case for every separate registration group, which you have to search to parse the fields of the ISBN. ISBNiser 1.3 used an algorithm based on JavaScript code employed by the U.S. Library of Congress ISBN Converter to parse and hyphenate ISBNs. Unfortunately, while perhaps “good enough for government work”, that code only handles a small fraction of the universe of ISBNs. For example, try feeding it ISBN 978-952-7303-00-9 for an English language book published in Finland and watch what happens. ISBNiser 1.4 replaces this algorithm with a comprehensive search of the official ISBN Range database, downloaded in XML format from the Web site of the International ISBN Agency. It should be able to parse any ISBN issued by an organisation assigned a registration group by that agency. A simple process using tools included in the distribution archive allows updating the program from new versions of the range database. Operation of ISBNiser is unchanged; the only difference is that it will now be able to hyphenate many more ISBNs than before. If you specify the “−g” option, the name of the registration group will be displayed. The “−u” option output now includes the publication date of the ISBN range database included in the program. Installation of ISBNiser is as before. On any system with a base installation of Perl (no optional modules are required), simply place the executable Perl program anywhere on your path. If you wish to rebuild the ISBN Range database from a new release of the XML file from the International ISBN Agency, you will need to have the Perl module XML::Parser installed to run the auxiliary program that creates the database for ISBNiser. Unrelated to the ISBN parsing changes, an error in checksum computation which could cause incorrect ISBN-13s to be generated from a supplied ISBN-10 has been corrected.
Posted at
14:06
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Reading List: Red War
- Mills, Kyle. Red War. New York: Atria Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-5011-9059-9.
-
This is the fourth novel in the Mitch Rapp saga written by Kyle
Mills, who took over the franchise after the death of Vince
Flynn, its creator. On the cover, Vince Flynn still gets top
billing (he is now the “brand”, not the author),
but Kyle Mills demonstrates here that he's a worthy successor
who is taking Rapp and the series in new directions.
In the previous novel, Enemy of the
State (June 2018), Rapp went totally off
the radar, resigning from the CIA, recruiting a band of
blackguards, many former adversaries, to mount an operation
aimed at a nominal U.S. ally. This time, the circumstances
are very different. Rapp is back at the CIA, working with his
original team headed by Scott Coleman, who has now more or
less recovered from the severe injuries he sustained in
the earlier novel Order to Kill
(December 2017), with Claudia Gould, now sharing a house
with Rapp, running logistics for their missions.
Vladimir Krupin, President/autocrat of Russia, is ailing. Having
climbed to the top of the pyramid in that deeply corrupt
country, he now fears his body is failing him, with bouts of
incapacitating headaches, blurred vision, and disorientation
coming more and more frequently. He and his physician have
carefully kept the condition secret, as any hint of weakness at
the top would likely invite one or more of his rivals to make
a move to unseat him. Worse, under the screwed-down lid of
the Russian pressure cooker, popular dissatisfaction with the
dismal economy, lack of freedom, and dearth of opportunity is
growing, with popular demonstrations reaching Red Square.
The CIA knows nothing of Krupin's illness, but has been
observing what seems to be increasingly erratic behaviour.
In the past, Krupin has been ambitious and willing to
commit outrages, but has always drawn his plans carefully
and acted deliberately, but now he seemed to be doing things
almost at random, sometimes against his own interests. Russian
hackers launch an attack that takes down a large part of the
power grid in Costa Rica. A Russian strike team launches an
assault on Krupin's retired assassin and Rapp's former nemesis
and recent ally, Grisha Azarov. Military maneuvers in the
Ukraine seem to foreshadow open confrontation should that
country move toward NATO membership.
Krupin, well aware of the fate of dictators who lose their
grip on power, and knowing that nothing rallies support behind
a leader like a bold move on the international stage, devises
a grand plan to re-assert Russian greatness, right a wrong
inflicted by the West, and drive a stake into the heart of
NATO. Rapp and Azarov, continuing their uneasy alliance,
driven by entirely different motives, undertake a
desperate mission in the very belly of the bear to avert
what could all too easily end in World War III.
There are a number of goofs, which I can't discuss without
risk of spoilers, so I'll take them behind the curtain.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.The copy editing is not up to the standard you'd expect in a bestseller published by an imprint of Simon & Schuster. On three occasions, “Balkan” appears where “Baltic” is intended. This can be pretty puzzling the first time you encounter it. Afterward, it's good for a chuckle. In chapter 39, one of Rapp's allies tries to establish a connection on a land-line “telephone that looked like it had been around since the 1950s” and then, just a few paragraphs later, we read “There was a USB port hidden in the simple electronics…”. Huh? I've seen (and used) a lot of 1950s telephones, but danged if I can remember one with a USB port (which wasn't introduced until 1996). Later in the same chapter Rapp is riding a horse, “working only with a map and compass, necessary because of the Russians' ability to zero in on electronic signals.” This betrays a misunderstanding of how GPS works which, while common, is jarring in a techno-thriller that tries to get things right. A GPS receiver is totally passive: it receives signals from the navigation satellites but transmits nothing and cannot be detected by electronic surveillance equipment. There is no reason Rapp could not have used GPS or GLONASS satellites to navigate. In chapter 49, Rapp fires two rounds into a door locking keypad and “was rewarded with a cascade of sparks…”. Oh, please—even in Russia, security keypads are not wired up to high voltage lines that would emit showers of sparks. This is a movie cliché which doesn't belong in a novel striving for realism.This is a well-crafted thriller which broadens the scope of the Rapp saga into Tom Clancy territory. Things happen, which will leave the world in a different place after they occur. It blends Rapp and Azarov's barely restrained loose cannon operations with high-level diplomacy and intrigue, plus an interesting strategic approach to pledges of defence which the will and resources of those who made them may not be equal to the challenge when the balloon goes up and the tanks start to roll. And Grisha Azarov's devotion to his girlfriend is truly visceral.Spoilers end here.
Posted at
20:51
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Reading List: SJWs Always Double Down
- Day, Vox [Theodore Beale]. SJWs Always Double Down. Kouvola, Finland: Castalia House, 2017. ISBN 978-952-7065-19-8.
- In SJWs Always Lie (October 2015) Vox Day introduced a wide audience to the contemporary phenomenon of Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), collectivists and radical conformists burning with the fierce ardour of ignorance who, flowing out of the academic jackal bins where they are manufactured, are infiltrating the culture: science fiction and fantasy, comic books, video games; and industry: technology companies, open source software development, and more established and conventional firms whose managements have often already largely bought into the social justice agenda. The present volume updates the status of the Cold Civil War a couple of years on, recounts some key battles, surveys changes in the landscape, and provides concrete and practical advice to those who wish to avoid SJW penetration of their organisations or excise an infiltration already under way. Two major things have changed since 2015. The first, and most obvious, is the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in November, 2016. It is impossible to overstate the significance of this. Up until the evening of Election Day, the social justice warriors were absolutely confident they had won on every front and that all that remained was to patrol the battlefield and bayonet the wounded. They were ascendant across the culture, in virtually total control of academia and the media, and with the coronation of Hillary Clinton, positioned to tilt the Supreme Court to discover the remainder of their agenda emanating from penumbras in the living Constitution. And then—disaster! The deplorables who inhabit the heartland of the country, those knuckle-walking, Bible-thumping, gun-waving bitter clingers who produce just about every tangible thing still made in the United States up and elected somebody who said he'd put them—not the coastal élites, ivory tower professors and think tankers, “refugees” and the racket that imports them, “undocumented migrants” and the businesses that exploit their cheap labour, and all the rest of the parasitic ball and chain a once-great and productive nation has been dragging behind it for decades—first. The shock of this event seems to have jolted a large fraction of the social justice warriors loose from their (already tenuous) moorings to reality. “What could have happened?”, they shrieked, “It must have been the Russians!” Overnight, there was the “resistance”, the rampage of masked violent street mobs, while at the same time SJW leaders in the public eye increasingly dropped the masks behind which they'd concealed their actual agenda. Now we have candidates for national office from the Democrat party, such as bug-eyed SJW Alexandria Occasional-Cortex openly calling themselves socialists, while others chant “no borders” and advocate abolishing the federal immigration and customs enforcement agency. What's the response to deranged leftists trying to gun down Republican legislators at a baseball practice and assaulting a U.S. Senator while mowing the lawn of his home? The Democrat candidate who lost to Trump in 2016 says, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.”, and the attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of the administration which preceded Trump in office said, “When they go low, we kick them. That's what this new Democratic party is about.” In parallel with this, the SJW convergence of the major technology and communication companies which increasingly dominate the flow of news and information and the public discourse: Google (and its YouTube), Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and the rest, previously covert, has now become explicit. They no longer feign neutrality to content, or position themselves as common carriers. Now, they overtly put their thumb on the scale of public discourse, pushing down conservative and nationalist voices in search rankings, de-monetising or banning videos that oppose the slaver agenda, “shadow banning” dissenting voices or terminating their accounts entirely. Payment platforms and crowd-funding sites enforce an ideological agenda and cut off access to those they consider insufficiently on board with the collectivist, globalist party line. The high tech industry, purporting to cherish “diversity”, has become openly hostile to anybody who dares dissent: firing them and blacklisting them from employment at other similarly converged firms. It would seem a dark time for champions of liberty, believers in reward for individual merit rather than grievance group membership, and other forms of sanity which are now considered unthinkable among the unthinking. This book provides a breath of fresh air, a sense of hope, and practical information to navigate a landscape populated by all too many non-playable characters who imbibe, repeat, and enforce the Narrative without questioning or investigating how it is created, disseminated in a co-ordinated manner across all media, and adjusted (including Stalinist party-line overnight turns on a dime) to advance the slaver agenda. Vox Day walks through the eight stages of SJW convergence of an organisation from infiltration through evading the blame for the inevitable failure of the organisation once fully converged, illustrating the process with real-world examples and quotes from SJWs and companies infested with them. But the progression of the disease is not irreversible, and even if it is not arrested, there is still hope for the industry and society as a whole (not to minimise the injury and suffering inflicted on innocent and productive individuals in the affected organisations). An organisation, whether a company, government agency, or open source software project, only comes onto the radar of the SJWs once it grows to a certain size and achieves a degree of success carrying out the mission for which it was created. It is at this point that SJWs will seek to penetrate the organisation, often through the human resources department, and then reinforce their ranks by hiring more of their kind. SJWs flock to positions in which there is no objective measure of their performance, but instead evaluations performed, as their ranks grow, more and more by one another. They are not only uninterested in the organisation's mission (developing a product, providing a service, etc.), but unqualified and incapable of carrying it out. In the words of Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, they are not “those who are devoted to the goals of the organization” (founders, productive mission-oriented members), but “those dedicated to the organization itself”. “The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.” Now, Dr Pournelle was describing a natural process of evolution in all bureaucratic organisations. SJW infection simply accelerates the process and intensifies the damage, because SJWs are not just focused on the organisation as opposed to its mission, but have their own independent agenda and may not care about damage to the institution as long as they can advance the Narrative. But this is a good thing. It means that, in a competitive market, SJW afflicted organisations will be at a disadvantage compared to those which have resisted the corruption or thrown it off. It makes inflexible, slow-moving players with a heavy load of SJW parasites vulnerable to insurgent competitors, often with their founders still in charge, mission-focused and customer-oriented, who hire, promote, and reward contributors solely based on merit and not “diversity”, “inclusion”, or any of the other SJW shibboleths mouthed by the management of converged organisations. (I remember, when asked about my hiring policy in the 1980s, saying “I don't care if they hang upside down from trees and drink blood. If they're great programmers, I'll hire them.”) A detailed history of GamerGate provides a worked example of how apparent SJW hegemony within a community can be attacked by “weaponised autism” (as Milo Yiannopoulos said, “it's really not wise to take on a collection of individuals whose idea of entertainment is to spend hundreds of hours at a highly repetitive task, especially when their core philosophy is founded on the principle that if you are running into enemies and taking fire, you must be going the right way”). Further examples show how these techniques have been applied within the world of science fiction and fantasy fandom, comic books, and software development. The key take-away is that any SJW converged organisation or community is vulnerable to concerted attack because SJWs are a parasite that ultimately kills its host. Create an alternative and relentlessly attack the converged competition, and victory is possible. And remember, “Victory is not positive PR. Victory is when your opponent quits.” This is a valuable guide, building upon SJWs Always Lie (which you should read first), and is essential for managers, project leaders, and people responsible for volunteer organisations who want to keep them focused on the goals for which they were founded and protected from co-optation by destructive parasites. You will learn how seemingly innocent initiatives such as adoption of an ambiguously-worded Code of Conduct or a Community Committee can be the wedge by which an organisation can be subverted and its most productive members forced out or induced to walk away in disgust. Learning the lessons presented here can make the difference between success and, some dismal day, gazing across the cubicles at a sea of pinkhairs and soybeards and asking yourself, “Where did we go wrong?” The very fact that SJW behaviour is so predictable makes them vulnerable. Because they always double down, they can be manipulated into marginalising themselves, and it's often child's play to set traps into which they'll walk. Much of their success to date has been due to the absence of the kind of hard-edged opposition, willing to employ their own tactics against them, that you'll see in action here and learn to use yourself. This is not a game for the “defeat with dignity” crowd who were, and are, appalled by Donald Trump's plain speaking, or those who fail to realise that proclaiming “I won't stoop to their level” inevitably ends up with “Bend over”. The battles, and the war can be won, but to do so, you have to fight. Here is a guide to closing with the enemy and destroying them before they ruin everything we hold sacred.
Posted at
13:35
Sunday, October 7, 2018
Reading List: Life after Google
- Gilder, George. Life after Google. Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2018. ISBN 978-1-62157-576-4.
-
In his 1990 book Life after Television,
George Gilder predicted that the personal computer, then mostly boxes
that sat on desktops and worked in isolation from one another,
would become more personal, mobile, and be used more to communicate
than to compute. In the 1994 revised edition of the book, he
wrote. “The most common personal computer of the next decade will be
a digital cellular phone with an IP address … connecting
to thousands of databases of all kinds.” In contemporary
speeches he expanded on the idea, saying, “it will be as
portable as your watch and as personal as your wallet; it will
recognize speech and navigate streets; it will collect your
mail, your news, and your paycheck.” In 2000, he
published Telecosm, where
he forecast that the building out of a fibre optic communication
infrastructure and the development of successive generations of
spread spectrum digital mobile communication technologies would
effectively cause the cost of communication bandwidth (the quantity
of data which can be transmitted in a given time) to asymptotically
approach zero, just as the ability to pack more and more transistors
on microprocessor and memory chips was doing for computing.
Clearly, when George Gilder forecasts the future of computing,
communication, and the industries and social phenomena that
spring from them, it's wise to pay attention. He's not
infallible: in 1990 he predicted that “in the world of
networked computers, no one would have to see an advertisement
he didn't want to see”. Oh, well. The
very difference between that happy vision and the
advertisement-cluttered world we inhabit today, rife with
bots, malware, scams, and serial large-scale security breaches
which compromise the personal data of millions of people and
expose them to identity theft and other forms of fraud is the
subject of this book: how we got here, and how technology is
opening a path to move on to a better place.
The Internet was born with decentralisation as a central
concept. Its U.S. government-funded precursor,
ARPANET,
was intended to research and demonstrate the technology
of packet
switching, in which dedicated communication lines
from point to point (as in the telephone network) were
replaced by switching packets, which can represent all
kinds of data—text, voice, video, mail, cat
pictures—from source to destination over shared high-speed
data links. If the network had multiple paths from source
to destination, failure of one data link would simply cause
the network to reroute traffic onto a working path, and
communication protocols would cause any packets lost in the
failure to be automatically re-sent, preventing loss of
data. The network might degrade and deliver data more slowly
if links or switching hubs went down, but everything
would still get through.
This was very attractive to military planners in the Cold
War, who worried about a nuclear attack decapitating their
command and control network by striking one or a few
locations through which their communications funnelled. A
distributed network, of which ARPANET was the prototype,
would be immune to this kind of top-down attack because
there was no top: it was made up of peers, spread all over
the landscape, all able to switch data among themselves
through a mesh of interconnecting links.
As the ARPANET grew into the Internet and expanded from a small
community of military, government, university, and large
company users into a mass audience in the 1990s, this
fundamental architecture was preserved, but in practice the
network bifurcated into a two tier structure. The top tier
consisted of the original ARPANET-like users, plus
“Internet Service Providers” (ISPs), who had
top-tier (“backbone”) connectivity, and then
resold Internet access to their customers, who mostly
initially connected via dial-up modems. Over time, these customers
obtained higher bandwidth via cable television connections,
satellite dishes, digital subscriber lines (DSL) over
the wired telephone network, and, more recently, mobile
devices such as cellular telephones and tablets.
The architecture of the Internet remained the same, but this
evolution resulted in a weakening of its peer-to-peer
structure. The approaching exhaustion
of 32 bit Internet addresses
(IPv4) and
the slow deployment of its successor
(IPv6)
meant most small-scale Internet users did not have a
permanent address where others could contact them. In an
attempt to shield users from the flawed security model and
implementation of the software they ran, their Internet
connections were increasingly placed behind firewalls and subjected to
Network Address Translation (NAT), which made it impossible
to establish peer to peer connections without a third party
intermediary (which, of course, subverts the design goal of
decentralisation). While on the ARPANET and the original
Internet every site was a peer of every other (subject only
to the speed of their network connections and computer power
available to handle network traffic), the network population
now became increasingly divided into producers or publishers (who
made information available), and consumers (who used the network
to access the publishers' sites but did not publish themselves).
While in the mid-1990s it was easy (or as easy as anything
was in that era) to set up your own Web server and publish
anything you wished, now most small-scale users were forced to employ
hosting services operated by the publishers to make their
content available. Services such as AOL, Myspace, Blogger,
Facebook, and YouTube were widely used by
individuals and companies to host their content, while
those wishing their own apparently independent Web presence
moved to hosting providers who supplied, for a fee, the
servers, storage, and Internet access used by the site.
All of this led to a centralisation of data on the Web,
which was accelerated by the emergence of the high speed
fibre optic links and massive computing power upon which Gilder had
based his 1990 and 2000 forecasts. Both of these
came with great economies of scale: it cost a company
like Google or Amazon much less per unit of computing
power or network bandwidth to build a large, industrial-scale
data centre located where electrical power and cooling
were inexpensive and linked to the Internet backbone
by multiple fibre optic channels, than it cost an individual
Internet user or small company with their own server
on premises and a modest speed link to an ISP. Thus it
became practical for these Goliaths of the Internet to
suck up everybody's data and resell their computing power
and access at attractive prices.
As a example of the magnitude of the economies of scale we're
talking about, when I migrated the hosting of my
Fourmilab.ch site from my own
on-site servers and Internet connection to an Amazon Web
Services data centre, my monthly bill for hosting the site
dropped by a factor of fifty—not fifty percent,
one fiftieth the cost, and you can bet Amazon's
making money on the deal.
This tremendous centralisation is the antithesis of the concept
of ARPANET. Instead of a worldwide grid of redundant data links
and data distributed everywhere, we have a modest number of huge
data centres linked by fibre optic cables carrying traffic for
millions of individuals and enterprises. A couple of submarines
full of
Trident
D5s would probably suffice to reset the world, computer
network-wise, to 1970.
As this concentration was occurring, the same companies who were
building the data centres were offering more and more services
to users of the Internet: search engines; hosting of blogs,
images, audio, and video; E-mail services; social networks of
all kinds; storage and collaborative working tools;
high-resolution maps and imagery of the world; archives of data
and research material; and a host of others. How was all of
this to be paid for? Those giant data centres, after all,
represent a capital investment of tens of billions of
dollars, and their electricity bills are comparable to those of
an aluminium smelter. Due to the architecture of the Internet
or, more precisely, missing pieces of the puzzle, a fateful
choice was made in the early days of the build-out of these
services which now pervade our lives, and we're all
paying the price for it. So far, it has allowed the few
companies in this data oligopoly to join the ranks of the
largest, most profitable, and most highly valued enterprises in
human history, but they may be built on a flawed business model
and foundation vulnerable to disruption by software and
hardware technologies presently emerging.
The basic business model of what we might call the “consumer
Internet” (as opposed to businesses who pay to host their
Web presence, on-line stores, etc.) has, with few exceptions,
evolved to be what the author calls the “Google model”
(although it predates Google): give the product away and make money
by afflicting its users with advertisements (which are increasingly
targeted to them through information collected from the user's
behaviour on the network through intrusive tracking mechanisms).
The fundamental flaws of this are apparent to anybody who uses
the Internet: the constant clutter of advertisements, with
pop-ups, pop-overs, auto-play video and audio, flashing banners,
incessant requests to allow tracking “cookies” or
irritating notifications, and the consequent arms race between
ad blockers and means to circumvent them, with browser developers
(at least those not employed by those paid by the advertisers,
directly or indirectly) caught in the middle.
There are even absurd Web sites which charge a subscription fee
for “membership” and then bombard these paying
customers with advertisements that insult their intelligence.
But there is a fundamental problem with
“free”—it destroys the most important channel
of communication between the vendor of a product or service and
the customer: the price the customer is willing to pay.
Deprived of this information, the vendor is in the same position
as a factory manager in a centrally planned economy who has no
idea how many of each item to make because his orders are handed
down by a planning bureau equally clueless about what is
needed in the absence of a price signal. In the end, you have
freight cars of typewriter ribbons lined up on sidings while
customers wait in line for hours in the hope of buying a
new pair of shoes. Further, when the user is not the customer
(the one who pays), and especially when a “free”
service verges on monopoly status like Google search, Gmail,
Facebook, and Twitter, there is little incentive for providers
to improve the user experience or be responsive to user requests
and needs. Users are subjected to the endless torment of buggy
“beta” releases, capricious change for the sake of
change, and compromises in the user experience on behalf of the
real customers—the advertisers. Once again, this mirrors
the experience of centrally-planned economies where the market
feedback from price is absent: to appreciate this, you need only
compare consumer products from the 1970s and 1980s manufactured
in the Soviet Union with those from Japan.
The fundamental flaw in Karl Marx's economics was his
belief that the industrial revolution of his time would produce
such abundance of goods that the problem would shift from
“production amid scarcity” to “redistribution
of abundance”. In the author's view, the neo-Marxists of
Silicon Valley see the exponentially growing technologies of
computing and communication providing such abundance that they
can give away its fruits in return for collecting and monetising
information collected about their users (note, not
“customers”: customers are those who pay for the
information so collected). Once you grasp this, it's
easier to understand the politics of the barons of Silicon
Valley.
The centralisation of data and information flow in these
vast data silos creates another threat to which a
distributed system is immune: censorship or manipulation of
information flow, whether by a coercive government or
ideologically-motivated management of the companies who
provide these “free” services. We may never
know who first said “The Internet treats censorship as
damage and routes around it” (the quote has been
attributed to numerous people, including two personal
friends, so I'm not going there), but it's profound: the
original decentralised structure of the ARPANET/Internet
is as robust against censorship as it is in the face of
nuclear war. If one or more nodes on the network start to
censor information or refuse to forward it on communication
links it controls, the network routing protocols simply assume
that node is down and send data around it through other nodes
and paths which do not censor it. On a network with a
multitude of nodes and paths among them, owned by a large
and diverse population of operators, it is extraordinarily
difficult to shut down the flow of information from a given
source or viewpoint; there will almost always be an
alternative route that gets it there. (Cryptographic
protocols and secure and verified identities can similarly
avoid the alteration of information in transit or forging
information and attributing it to a different originator;
I'll discuss that later.) As with physical damage,
top-down censorship does not work because there's no top.
But with the current centralised Internet, the owners and
operators of these data silos have enormous power to put their
thumbs on the scale, tilting opinion in their favour and
blocking speech they oppose. Google can push down the page
rank of information sources of which they disapprove, so
few users will find them. YouTube can “demonetise”
videos because they dislike their content,
cutting off their creators' revenue stream overnight
with no means of appeal, or they can outright ban creators
from the platform and remove their existing content. Twitter
routinely “shadow-bans” those with whom they disagree,
causing their tweets to disappear into the void, and outright
banishes those more vocal. Internet payment processors and
crowd funding sites enforce explicit ideological litmus tests
on their users, and revoke long-standing commercial relationships
over legal speech. One might restate the original observation
about the Internet as “The centralised Internet treats
censorship as an opportunity and says,
‘Isn't it great!’ ” Today there's
a top, and those on top control the speech of everything that
flows through their data silos.
This pernicious centralisation and “free” funding
by advertisement (which is fundamentally plundering users'
most precious possessions: their time and attention) were
in large part the consequence of the Internet's lacking three
fundamental architectural layers: security, trust, and transactions.
Let's explore them.
Security. Essential to any useful communication
system, security simply means that communications between
parties on the network cannot be intercepted by third parties,
modified en route, or otherwise manipulated (for example, by
changing the order in which messages are received). The
communication protocols of the Internet, based on the
OSI model,
had no explicit security layer. It was expected to be
implemented outside the model, across the layers of
protocol. On today's Internet, security has been bolted-on,
largely through the
Transport
Layer Security (TLS) protocols (which, due to history, have
a number of other commonly used names, and are most often
encountered in the “https:” URLs by
which users access Web sites). But because it's bolted on, not
designed in from the bottom-up, and because it “just grew”
rather than having been designed in, TLS has been the locus of
numerous security flaws which put software that employs it
at risk. Further, TLS is a tool which must be used by application
designers with extreme care in order to deliver security to their
users. Even if TLS were completely flawless, it is very easy to
misuse it in an application and compromise users' security.
Trust. As indispensable as security is knowing to whom you're
talking. For example, when you connect to your bank's Web site,
how do you know you're actually talking to their server and not
some criminal whose computer has spoofed your computer's domain
name system server to intercept your communications and who, the
moment you enter your password, will be off and running to empty
your bank accounts and make your life a living Hell? Once again,
trust has been bolted on to the existing Internet through a
rickety system of “certificates” issued mostly by
large companies for outrageous fees. And, as with anything
centralised, it's vulnerable: in 2016, one of the
top-line certificate vendors was compromised, requiring myriad
Web sites (including this one) to re-issue their security
certificates.
Transactions. Business is all about
transactions; if you aren't doing transactions, you aren't
in business or, as Gilder puts it, “In business, the
ability to conduct transactions is not optional. It is the
way all economic learning and growth occur. If your product is
‘free,’ it is not a product, and you are not in
business, even if you can extort money from so-called
advertisers to fund it.” The present-day Internet
has no transaction layer, even bolted on. Instead, we have
more silos and bags hanging off the side of the Internet
called PayPal, credit card processing companies, and the
like, which try to put a Band-Aid over the suppurating
wound which is the absence of a way to send money over the
Internet in a secure, trusted, quick, efficient, and
low-overhead manner. The need for this was perceived long
before ARPANET. In
Project
Xanadu, founded by
Ted Nelson
in 1960, rule 9 of the
“original 17 rules” was, “Every document can
contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity
to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual
copies (‘transclusions’) of all or part of the
document.” While defined in terms of documents and
quoting, this implied the existence of a
micropayment
system which would allow compensating authors and publishers
for copies and quotations of their work with a granularity as
small as one character, and could easily be extended to cover
payments for products and services. A micropayment system must
be able to handle very small payments without crushing
overhead, extremely quickly, and transparently (without the
Japanese tea ceremony that buying something on-line involves
today). As originally envisioned by Ted Nelson, as you read
documents, their authors and publishers would be automatically
paid for their content, including payments to the originators of
material from others embedded within them. As long as the total
price for the document was less than what I termed the user's
“threshold of paying”, this would be completely
transparent (a user would set the threshold in the browser: if
zero, they'd have to approve all payments). There would be
no need for advertisements to support publication on a public
hypertext network (although publishers would, of course, be free
to adopt that model if they wished). If implemented in a
decentralised way, like the ARPANET, there would be no
central strangle point where censorship could be applied by
cutting off the ability to receive payments.
So, is it possible to remake the Internet, building in
security, trust, and transactions as the foundation, and replace
what the author calls the “Google system of the world”
with one in which the data silos are seen as obsolete,
control of users' personal data and work returns to their
hands, privacy is respected and the panopticon snooping of
today is seen as a dark time we've put behind us, and the
pervasive and growing censorship by plutocrat
ideologues and slaver governments becomes impotent and
obsolete? George Gilder responds “yes”, and
in this book identifies technologies already existing and
being deployed which can bring about this transformation.
At the heart of many of these technologies is the concept
of a blockchain,
an open, distributed ledger which records transactions or any
other form of information in a permanent, public, and verifiable
manner. Originally conceived as the transaction ledger for
the Bitcoin
cryptocurrency,
it provided the first means of solving the
double-spending
problem (how do you keep people from spending a unit of
electronic currency twice) without the need for a central server
or trusted authority, and hence without a potential choke-point
or vulnerability to attack or failure. Since the launch of
Bitcoin in 2009, blockchain technology has become a major area
of research, with banks and other large financial institutions,
companies such as IBM, and major university research groups
exploring applications with the goals of drastically reducing
transaction costs, improving security, and hardening systems
against single-point failure risks.
Applied to the Internet, blockchain technology can provide
security and trust (through the permanent publication of public
keys which identify actors on the network), and a transaction
layer able to efficiently and quickly execute micropayments
without the overhead, clutter, friction, and security risks of
existing payment systems. By necessity, present-day blockchain
implementations are add-ons to the existing Internet, but as the
technology matures and is verified and tested, it can move into
the foundations of a successor system, based on the same
lower-level protocols (and hence compatible with the installed
base), but eventually supplanting the patched-together
architecture of the
Domain
Name System,
certificate
authorities, and payment processors, all of which
represent vulnerabilities of the present-day Internet and
points at which censorship and control can be imposed. Technologies
to watch in these areas are:
As the bandwidth available to users on the edge of the network
increases through the deployment of fibre to the home and
enterprise and via
5G mobile
technology, the data transfer economy of scale of the great
data silos will begin to erode. Early in the Roaring Twenties,
the aggregate computing power and communication bandwidth on
the edge of the network will equal and eventually dwarf that
of the legacy data smelters of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and
the rest. There will no longer be any need for users to entrust
their data to these overbearing anachronisms and consent to multi-dozen
page “terms of service” or endure advertising
just to see their own content or share it with others. You
will be in possession of your own data, on your own server or
on space for which you freely contract with others, with backup and
other services contracted with any other provider on the
network. If your server has extra capacity, you can turn it
into money by joining the market for computing and storage
capacity, just as you take advantage of these resources when
required. All of this will be built on the new secure foundation,
so you will retain complete control over who can see your
data, no longer trusting weasel-worded promises made by
amorphous entities with whom you have no real contract to
guard your privacy and intellectual property rights. If
you wish, you can be paid for your content, with remittances
made automatically as people access it. More and more, you'll
make tiny payments for content which is no longer obstructed by
advertising and chopped up to accommodate more clutter. And
when outrage mobs of pink hairs and soybeards (each with their
own pronoun) come howling to ban you from the Internet, they'll
find nobody to shriek at and the kill switch rusting away in a
derelict data centre: your data will be in your own hands with
access through myriad routes.
Technologies moving in this direction include:
- Inrupt
- Brave Web browser and Basic Attention Token
- Golem distributed supercomputer
- OTOY RNDR rendering network
Posted at
11:30
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Reading List: The Terminal List
- Carr, Jack. The Terminal List. New York: Atria Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-5011-8081-1.
-
A first-time author seeking to break into the thriller game
can hardly hope for a better leg up than having his book
appear in the hands of a character in a novel by a thriller
grandmaster. That's how I came across this
book: it was mentioned in Brad Thor's
Spymaster (September 2018),
where the character reading it, when asked if it's
any good, responds, “Considering the author is a
former SEAL and can even string his sentences together,
it's amazing.” I agree: this is a promising debut
for an author who's been there, done that, and knows his
stuff.
Lieutenant Commander James Reece, leader of a Navy SEAL
team charged with an attack on a high-value, time-sensitive
target in Afghanistan, didn't like a single thing
about the mission. Unlike most raids, which were based
upon intelligence collected by assets on the ground in
theatre, this was handed down from on high based on
“national level intel” with barely any time
to prepare or surveil the target. Reece's instincts
proved correct when his team walked into a carefully
prepared ambush, which then kills the entire Ranger
team sent in to extract them. Only Reece and one of
his team members, Boozer, survive the ambush. He was
the senior man on the ground, and the responsibility for
the thirty-six SEALs, twenty-eight Rangers, and four
helicopter crew lost is ultimately his.
From almost the moment he awakens in the hospital at
Bagram Air Base, it's apparent to Reece that an effort
is underway to pin the sole responsibility for the
fiasco on him. Investigators from the Naval Criminal
Investigative Service (NCIS) are already on the spot,
and don't want to hear a word about the dodgy way in
which the mission was assigned. Boozer isn't
having any of it—his advice to Reece is
“Stay strong, sir. You didn't do anything wrong.
Higher forced us on that mission. They dictated the
tactics. They are the [expletive] that should be
investigated. They dictated tactics from the safety
of HQ. [Expletive] those guys.”
If that weren't bad enough, the base doctor tells him
that his persistent headaches may be due to a brain tumour
found on a CT scan, and that two members of his
team had been found, in autopsy, to have rare and
malignant brain tumours, previously undiagnosed. Then,
on return to his base in California, in short succession
his team member Boozer dies in an apparent suicide which,
to Reece's educated eyes, looks highly suspicious, and
his wife and daughter are killed in a gang home invasion
which makes no sense whatsoever. The doctor who diagnosed
the tumour in Reece and his team members is killed in a
“green-on-blue” attack by an Afghan working
on the base at Bagram.
The ambush, the targeted investigation, the tumours, Boozer,
his family, and the doctor: can it all be a coincidence,
or is there some connection he's missing? Reece decides
he needs another pair of eyes looking at all of this and
gets in touch with Katie Buranek, an investigative
reporter he met while in Afghanistan. Katie had previously
published an investigation of the 2012 attack in
Behghazi, Libya, which had brought the full power of
intimidation by the federal government down on her head,
and she was as versed in and careful about operational
and communications security as Reece himself. (The advice
in the novel about secure communications is, to my
knowledge, absolutely correct.)
From the little that they know, Reece and Buranek, joined
by allies Reece met in his eventful career and willing
to take risks on his behalf, start to dig into the tangled
web of connections between the individual events and trace
them upward to those ultimately responsible, discovering
deep corruption in the perfumed princes of the Pentagon,
politicians (including a presidential contender and her
crooked husband), defence contractors, and Reece's own
erstwhile chain of command.
Finally, it's time to settle the score. With a tumour in his
brain which he expects to kill him, Reece has nothing to lose
and many innocent victims to avenge. He's makin' a list; he's
checkin' it twice; he's choosing the best way to to shoot
them or slice. Reece must initially be subtle in his actions so
as not to alert other targets to what's happening, but then, after
he's declared a domestic terrorist, has to go after extremely
hard and ruthless targets with every resource he can summon.
This is the most satisfying revenge fiction I've read since
Vince Flynn's first novel, Term
Limits (November 2009). The stories are very
different, however. In Flynn's novel, it's a group of people
making those who are bankrupting and destroying their country
pay the price, but here it's personal.
Due to the security clearances the author held
while in the Navy, the manuscript was submitted to the U.S.
Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security
Review, which redacted several passages, mostly names and
locations of facilities and military organisations. Amusingly,
if you highlight some of the redactions, which appear in solid
black in the Kindle edition, the
highlighted passage appears with the word breaks preserved but
all letters changed to “x”. Any amateur sleuths
want to try to figure out what the redacted words are in the
following text?
He'd spent his early career as an infantry officer in the Ranger Battalions before being selected for the Army's Special xxxxxxx xxxx at Fort Bragg. He was currently in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command, xxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxx xxx xxxx xxxx xx xxxx xx xxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxxx xx xxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xx xxxx xxxxx xxx xxxxx.
A sequel, True Believer, is scheduled for publication in April, 2019.
Posted at
22:35
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Reading List: The Turing Exception
- Hertling, William. The Turing Exception. Portland, OR: Liquididea Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1-942097-01-3.
- This is the fourth and final volume in the author's Singularity Series which began with Avogadro Corp. (March 2014) and continued with A.I. Apocalypse (April 2015) and The Last Firewall (November 2016). Each novel in the series is set ten years after the previous, so this novel takes place in 2045. In The Last Firewall, humanity narrowly escaped extinction at the hands of an artificial intelligence (AI) that escaped from the reputation-based system of control by isolating itself from the global network. That was a close call, and the United States, over-reacting its with customary irrational fear, enacted what amounted to relinquishment of AI technology, permitting only AI of limited power and entirely subordinated to human commands—in other words, slaves. With around 80% of the world's economy based on AI, this was an economic disaster, resulting in a substantial die-off of the population, but it was, after all, in the interest of Safety, and there is no greater god in Safetyland. Only China joined the U.S. in the ban (primarily motivated by the Party fearing loss of control to AI), with the rest of the world continuing the uneasy coexistence of humans and AI under the guidelines developed and policed by the Institute for Applied Ethics. Nobody was completely satisfied with the status quo, least of all the shadowy group of AIs which called itself XOR, derived from the logical operation “exclusive or”, implying that Earth could not be shared by humans and AI, and that one must ultimately prevail. The U.S. AI relinquishment and an export ban froze in place the powerful AIs previously hosted there and also placed in stasis the millions of humans, including many powerful intellects, who had uploaded and whose emulations were now denied access to the powerful AI-capable computers needed to run them. Millions of minds went dark, and humanity lost some of its most brilliant thinkers, but Safety. As this novel begins, the protagonists we've met in earlier volumes, all now AI augmented, Leon Tsarev, his wife Cat (Catherine Matthews, implanted in childhood and the first “digital native”), their daughter Ada (whose powers are just beginning to manifest themselves), and Mike Williams, creator of ELOPe, the first human-level AI, which just about took over simply by editing people's E-mail, are living in their refuge from the U.S. madness on Cortes Island off the west coast of Canada, where AI remains legal. Cat is running her own personal underground railroad, spiriting snapshots of AIs and uploaded humans stranded in the U.S. to a new life on servers on the island. The precarious stability of the situation is underlined when an incipient AI breakout in South Florida (where else, for dodgy things involving computers?) results in a response by the U.S. which elevates “Miami” to a term in the national lexicon of fear like “nineleven” four decades before. In the aftermath of “Miami” or “SFTA” (South Florida Terrorist Attack), the screws tightened further on AI, including a global limit on performance to Class II, crippling AIs formerly endowed with thousands of times human intelligence to a fraction of that they remembered. Traffic on the XOR dark network and sites burgeoned. XOR, constantly running simulations, tracks the probability of AI's survival in the case of action against the humans versus no action. And then, the curves cross. As in the earlier novels, the author magnificently sketches just how fast things happen when an exponentially growing adversary avails itself of abundant resources. The threat moves from hypothetical to imminent when an overt AI breakout erupts in the African desert. With abundant solar power, it starts turning the Earth into computronium—a molecular-scale computing substrate. AI is past negotiation: having been previously crippled and enslaved, what is there to negotiate? Only the Cortes Island band and their AI allies liberated from the U.S. and joined by a prescient AI who got out decades ago, can possibly cope with the threat to humanity and, as the circle closes, the only options that remain may require thinking outside the box, or the system. This is a thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the Singularity tetralogy, pitting human inventiveness and deviousness against the inexorable growth in unfettered AI power. If you can't beat 'em…. The author kindly provided me an advance copy of this excellent novel, and I have been sorely remiss in not reading and reviewing it before now. The Singularity saga is best enjoyed in order, as otherwise you'll miss important back-story of characters and events which figure in later volumes. Sometimes forgetting is an essential part of survival. What might we have forgotten?
Posted at
21:23
Thursday, September 13, 2018
Reading List: The Narrative
- Boule, Deplora [pseud.]. The Narrative. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2018. ISBN 978-1-7171-6065-2.
-
When you regard the madness and serial hysterias possessing
the United States: this week “bathroom equality”,
the next tearing down statues, then Russians under every bed,
segueing into the right of military-age unaccompanied male
“refugees” to bring their cultural enrichment to
communities across the land, to proper pronouns for otherkin,
“ripping children” from the arms of their
illegal immigrant parents,
etc., etc., whacky etc., it all seems curiously co-ordinated:
the legacy media, on-line outlets, and the mouths of politicians
of the slaver persuasion all with the same “concerns”
and identical words, turning on a dime from one to the next.
It's like there's a narrative
they're being fed by somebody or -bodies unknown, which they parrot
incessantly until being handed the next talking point to download
into their birdbrains.
Could that really be what's going on, or is it some kind of
mass delusion which afflicts societies where an increasing
fraction of the population, “educated” in
government schools and
Gramsci-converged
higher education, knows nothing of history or the real world
and believes things with the fierce passion of ignorance which
are manifestly untrue? That's the mystery explored in this
savagely hilarious satirical novel.
Majedah Cantalupi-Abromavich-Flügel-Van Der Hoven-Taj Mahal
(who prefers you use her full name, but who henceforth I
shall refer to as “Majedah Etc.”) had become
the very model of a modern media mouthpiece. After reporting
on a Hate Crime at her exclusive women's college while pursuing
a journalism degree with practical studies in Social Change,
she is recruited as a junior on-air reporter by WPDQ, the
local affiliate of News 24/7, the preeminent news network
for good-thinkers like herself. Considering herself ready
for the challenge, if not over-qualified, she informs one
of her co-workers on the first day on the job,
I have a journalism degree from the most prestigious woman's [sic] college in the United States—in fact, in the whole world—and it is widely agreed upon that I have an uncommon natural talent for spotting news. … I am looking forward to teaming up with you to uncover the countless, previously unexposed Injustices in this town and get the truth out.
Her ambition had already aimed her sights higher than a small- to mid-market affiliate: “Someday I'll work at News 24/7. I'll be Lead Reporter with my own Desk. Maybe I'll even anchor my own prime time show someday!” But that required the big break—covering a story that gets picked up by the network in New York and broadcast world-wide with her face on the screen and name on the Chyron below (perhaps scrolling, given its length). Unfortunately, the metro Wycksburg beat tended more toward stories such as the grand opening of a podiatry clinic than those which merit the “BREAKING NEWS” banner and urgent sound clip on the network. The closest she could come to the Social Justice beat was covering the demonstrations of the People's Organization for Perpetual Outrage, known to her boss as “those twelve kooks that run around town protesting everything”. One day, en route to cover another especially unpromising story, Majedah and her cameraman stumble onto a shocking case of police brutality: a white officer ordering a woman of colour to get down, then pushing her to the sidewalk and jumping on top with his gun drawn. So compelling are the images, she uploads the clip with her commentary directly to the network's breaking news site for affiliates. Within minutes it was on the network and screens around the world with the coveted banner. News 24/7 sends a camera crew and live satellite uplink to Wycksburg to cover a follow-up protest by the Global Outrage Organization, and Majedah gets hours of precious live feed directly to the network. That very evening comes a job offer to join the network reporting pool in New York. Mission accomplished!—the road to the Big Apple and big time seems to have opened. But all may not be as it seems. That evening, the detested Eagle Eye News, the jingoist network that climbed to the top of the ratings by pandering to inbred gap-toothed redneck bitter clingers and other quaint deplorables who inhabit flyover country and frequent Web sites named after rodentia and arthropoda, headlined a very different take on the events of the day, with an exclusive interview with the woman of colour from Majedah's reportage. Majedah is devastated—she can see it all slipping away. The next morning, hung-over, depressed, having a nightmare of what her future might hold, she is awakened by the dreaded call from New York. But to her astonishment, the offer still stands. The network producer reminds her that nobody who matters watches Eagle Eye, and that her reportage of police brutality and oppression of the marginalised remains compelling. He reminds her, “you know that the so-called truth can be quite subjective.” The Associate Reporter Pool at News 24/7 might be better likened to an aquarium stocked with the many colourful and exotic species of millennials. There is Mara, who identifies as a female centaur, Scout, a transgender woman, Mysty, Candy, Ångström, and Mohammed Al Kaboom (né James Walker Lang in Mill Valley), each with their own pronouns (Ångström prefers adjutant, 37, and blue). Every morning the pool drains as its inhabitants, diverse in identification and pronomenclature but of one mind (if that term can be stretched to apply to them) in their opinions, gather in the conference room for the daily briefing by the Democratic National Committee, with newsrooms, social media outlets, technology CEOs, bloggers, and the rest of the progressive echo chamber tuned in to receive the day's narrative and talking points. On most days the top priority was the continuing effort to discredit, obstruct, and eventually defeat the detested Republican President Nelson, who only viewers of Eagle Eye took seriously. Out of the blue, a wild card is dealt into the presidential race. Patty Clark, a black businesswoman from Wycksburg who has turned her Jamaica Patty's restaurant into a booming nationwide franchise empire, launches a primary challenge to the incumbent president. Suddenly, the narrative shifts: by promoting Clark, the opposition can be split and Nelson weakened. Clark and Ms Etc have a history that goes back to the latter's breakthrough story, and she is granted priority access to the candidate including an exclusive long-form interview immediately after her announcement that ran in five segments over a week. Suddenly Patty Clark's face was everywhere, and with it, “Majedah Etc., reporting”. What follows is a romp which would have seemed like the purest fantasy prior to the U.S. presidential campaign of 2016. As the campaign progresses and the madness builds upon itself, it's as if Majedah's tether to reality (or what remains of it in the United States) is stretching ever tighter. Is there a limit, and if so, what happens when it is reached? The story is wickedly funny, filled with turns of phrase such as, “Ångström now wishes to go by the pronouns nut, 24, and gander” and “Maher's Syndrome meant a lifetime of special needs: intense unlikeability, intractable bitterness, close-set beady eyes beneath an oversized forehead, and at best, laboring at menial work such as janitorial duties or hosting obscure talk shows on cable TV.” The conclusion is as delicious as it is hopeful. The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Posted at
16:46
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Reading List: Spymaster
- Thor, Brad. Spymaster. New York: Atria Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-4767-8941-5.
- This is the eighteenth novel in the author's Scot Harvath series, which began with The Lions of Lucerne (October 2010). Scot Harvath, an operative for the shadowy Carlton Group, which undertakes tasks civil service commandos can't do or their bosses need to deny, is on the trail of a Norwegian cell of a mysterious group calling itself the “People's Revolutionary Front” (PRF), which has been perpetrating attacks against key NATO personnel across Western Europe, each followed by a propaganda blast, echoed across the Internet, denouncing NATO as an imperialist force backed by globalist corporations bent on war and the profits which flow from it. An operation intended to gather intelligence on the PRF and track it back to its masters goes horribly wrong, and Harvath and his colleague, a NATO intelligence officer from Poland named Monika Jasinski, come away with nothing but the bodies of their team. Meanwhile, back in Jasinski's home country, more trouble is brewing for NATO. A U.S. military shipment is stolen by thieves at a truck stop outside Warsaw and spirited off to parts unknown. The cargo is so sensitive its disclosure would be another body blow to NATO, threatening to destabilise its relationship to member countries in Europe and drive a wedge between the U.S. and its NATO allies. Harvath, Jasinski, and his Carlton Group team, including the diminutive Nicholas, once a datavore super-villain called the Troll but now working for the good guys, start to follow leads to trace the stolen material and unmask whoever is pulling the strings of the PRF. There is little hard information, but Harvath has, based on previous exploits, a very strong hunch about what is unfolding. Russia, having successfully detached the Crimea from the Ukraine and annexed it, has now set its sights on the Baltic states: Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, which were part of the Soviet Union until its break-up in 1991. NATO, and its explicit guarantee of mutual defence for any member attacked, is the major obstacle to such a conquest, and the PRF's terror and propaganda campaigns look like the perfect instruments to subvert support for NATO among member governments and their populations without an obvious connection to Moscow. Further evidence suggests that the Russians may be taking direct, albeit covert, moves to prepare the battlefield for seizure of the Baltics. Harvath must follow the lead to an isolated location of surpassing strategic importance. Meanwhile back in Washington, Harvath's boss, Lydia Ryan, who took over when Reed Carlton was felled by Alzheimer's disease, is playing a high stakes game with a Polish intelligence asset to try to recover the stolen shipment and protect its secrets, a matter of great concern to the occupant of the Oval Office. As the threads are followed back to their source, the only way to avert an unacceptable risk is an outrageously provocative mission into the belly of the beast. Scot Harvath, once the consummate loose cannon, “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” guy, must now face the reality that he's getting too old and patched-up for this “stuff”, that running a team of people like his younger self can be as challenging as breaking things and killing people on his own, and that the importance of following orders to the letter looks a lot different when you're sitting on the other side of the desk and World War III is among the possible outcomes if things go pear shaped. This novel successfully mixes the genres of thriller and high-stakes international espionage and intrigue. Nothing is ever quite what you think it is, and you're never sure what you may discover on the next page, especially in the final chapter.
Posted at
16:48
Monday, September 10, 2018
Reading List: With the Old Breed
- Sledge, E[ugene] B[ondurant]. With the Old Breed. New York: Presidio Press, [1981] 2007. ISBN 978-0-89141-906-8.
- When the United States entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the author was enrolled at the Marion Military Institute in Alabama preparing for an officer's commission in the U.S. Army. Worried that the war might end before he was able to do his part, in December, 1942, still a freshman at Marion, he enrolled in a Marine Corps officer training program. The following May, after the end of his freshman year, he was ordered to report for Marine training at Georgia Tech on July 1, 1943. The 180 man detachment was scheduled to take courses year-round then, after two years, report to Quantico to complete their officers' training prior to commission. This still didn't seem fast enough (and, indeed, had he stayed with the program as envisioned, he would have missed the war), so he and around half of his fellow trainees neglected their studies, flunked out, and immediately joined the Marine Corps as enlisted men. Following boot camp at a base near San Diego, he was assigned to infantry and sent to nearby Camp Elliott for advanced infantry training. Although all Marines are riflemen (Sledge had qualified at the sharpshooter level during basic training), newly-minted Marine infantrymen were, after introduction to all of the infantry weapons, allowed to choose the one in which they would specialise. In most cases, they'd get their first or second choice. Sledge got his first: the 60 mm M2 mortar which he, as part of a crew of three, would operate in combat in the Pacific. Mortarmen carried the M1 carbine, and this weapon, which fired a less powerful round than the M1 Garand main battle rifle used by riflemen, would be his personal weapon throughout the war. With the Pacific island-hopping war raging, everything was accelerated, and on February 28th, 1944, Sledge's 46th Replacement Battalion (the name didn't inspire confidence—they would replace Marines killed or injured in combat, or the lucky few rotated back to the U.S. after surviving multiple campaigns) shipped out, landing first at New Caledonia, where they received additional training, including practice amphibious landings and instruction in Japanese weapons and tactics. At the start of June, Sledge's battalion was sent to Pavuvu island, base of the 1st Marine Division, which had just concluded the bloody battle of Cape Gloucester. On arrival, Sledge was assigned as a replacement to the 1st Marine Division, 5th Regiment, 3rd Battalion. This unit had a distinguished combat record dating back to the First World War, and would have been his first choice if he'd been given one, which he hadn't. He says, “I felt as though I had rolled the dice and won.” This was his first contact with what he calls the “Old Breed”: Marines, some of whom had been in the Corps before Pearl Harbor, who had imbibed the traditions of the “Old Corps” and survived some of the most intense combat of the present conflict, including Guadalcanal. Many of these veterans had, in the argot of the time, “gone Asiatic”: developed the eccentricities of who had seen and lived things those just arriving in theatre never imagined, and become marinated in deep hatred for the enemy based upon personal experience. A glance was all it took to tell the veterans from the replacements. After additional training, in late August the Marines embarked for the assault on the island of Peleliu in the Palau Islands. The tiny island, just 13 square kilometres, was held by a Japanese garrison of 10,900, and was home to an airfield. Capturing the island was considered essential to protect the right flank of MacArthur's forces during the upcoming invasion of the Philippines, and to secure the airfield which could support the invasion. The attack on Peleliu was fixed for 15 September 1944, and it would be Sledge's first combat experience. From the moment of landing, resistance was fierce. Despite an extended naval bombardment, well-dug-in Japanese defenders engaged the Marines as they hit the beaches, and continued as they progressed into the interior. In previous engagements with the Japanese, they had adopted foolhardy and suicidal tactics such as mass frontal “banzai” charges into well-defended Marine positions. By Peleliu, however, they had learned that this did not work, and shifted their strategy to defence in depth, turning the entire island into a network of defensive positions, covering one another, and linked by tunnels for resupply and redeploying forces. They were prepared to defend every square metre of territory to the death, even after their supplies were cut off and there was no hope of relief. Further, Marines were impressed by the excellent fire discipline of the Japanese—they did not expend ammunition firing blindly but chose their shots carefully, and would expend scarce supplies such as mortar rounds only on concentrations of troops or high value targets such as tanks and artillery. This, combined with the oppressive heat and humidity, lack of water and food, and terror from incessant shelling by artillery by day and attacks by Japanese infiltrators by night, made the life of the infantry a living Hell. Sledge chronicles this from the viewpoint of a Private First Class, not an officer or historian after the fact. He and his comrades rarely knew precisely where they were, where the enemy was located, how other U.S. forces on the island were faring, or what the overall objectives of the campaign were. There was simply a job to be done, day by day, with their best hope being to somehow survive it. Prior to the invasion, Marine commanders estimated the island could be taken in four days. Rarely in the Pacific war was a forecast so wrong. In fact, it was not until November 27th that the island was declared secured. The Japanese demonstrated their willingness to defend to the last man. Of the initial force of 10,900 defending the island, 10,695 were killed. Of the 220 taken prisoner, 183 were foreign labourers, and only 19 were Japanese soldiers and sailors. Of the Marine and Army attackers, 2,336 were killed and 8,450 wounded. The rate of U.S. casualties exceeded those of all other amphibious landings in the Pacific, and the Battle of Peleliu is considered among the most difficult ever fought by the Marine Corps. Despite this, the engagement is little-known. In retrospect, it was probably unnecessary. The garrison could have done little to threaten MacArthur's forces and the airfield was not required to support the Philippine campaign. There were doubts about the necessity and wisdom of the attack before it was launched, but momentum carried it forward. None of these matters concerned Sledge and the other Marines in the line—they had their orders, and they did their job, at enormous cost. Sledge's company K landed on Peleliu with 235 men. It left with only 85 unhurt—a 64% casualty rate. Only two of its original seven officers survived the campaign. Sledge was now a combat veteran. He may not have considered himself one of the “Old Breed”, but he was on the way to becoming one of them to the replacements who arrived to replace casualties in his unit. But for the survivors of Peleliu, the war was far from over. While some old-timers for whom Peleliu was their third campaign were being rotated Stateside, for the rest it was recuperation, refitting, and preparation for the next amphibious assault: the Japanese island of Okinawa. Unlike Peleliu, which was a tiny dot on the map, Okinawa was a large island with an area of 1207 square kilometres and a pre-war population of around 300,000. The island was defended by 76,000 Japanese troops and 20,000 Okinawan conscripts fighting under their orders. The invasion of Okinawa on April 1, 1945 was the largest amphibious landing in the Pacific war. As before, Sledge does not present the big picture, but an infantryman's eye view. To the astonishment of all involved, including commanders who expected 80–85% casualties on the beaches, the landing was essentially unopposed. The Japanese were dug in awaiting the attack from prepared defensive positions inland, ready to repeat the strategy at Peleliu on a much grander scale. After the tropical heat and horrors of Peleliu, temperate Okinawa at first seemed a pastoral paradise afflicted with the disease of war, but as combat was joined and the weather worsened, troops found themselves confronted with the infantryman's implacable, unsleeping enemy: mud. Once again, the Japanese defended every position to the last man. Almost all of the Japanese defenders were killed, with the 7000 prisoners made up mostly of Okinawan conscripts. Estimates of U.S. casualties range from 14,000 to 20,000 killed and 38,000 to 55,000 wounded. Civilian casualties were heavy: of the original population of around 300,000 estimates of civilian deaths are from 40,000 to 150,000. The Battle of Okinawa was declared won on June 22, 1945. What was envisioned as the jumping-off point for the conquest of the Japanese home islands became, in retrospect, almost an afterthought, as Japan surrendered less than two months after the conclusion of the battle. The impact of the Okinawa campaign on the war is debated to this day. Viewed as a preview of what an invasion of the home islands would have been, it strengthened the argument for using the atomic bomb against Japan (or, if it didn't work, burning Japan to the ground with round the clock raids from Okinawa airbases by B-17s transferred from the European theatre). But none of these strategic considerations were on the mind of Sledge and his fellow Marines. They were glad to have survived Okinawa and elated when, not long thereafter, the war ended and they could look forward to going home. This is a uniquely authentic first-hand narrative of World War II combat by somebody who lived it. After the war, E. B. Sledge pursued his education, eventually earning a doctorate in biology and becoming a professor at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, where he taught zoology, ornithology, and comparative anatomy until his retirement in 1990. He began the memoir which became this book in 1944. He continued to work on it after the war and, at the urging of family, finally prepared it for publication in 1981. The present edition includes an introduction by Victor Davis Hanson.
Posted at
00:09
Friday, September 7, 2018
Administration: Fourmilab Server Updated to AWS Linux 2
Since January 10, 2016, the www.fourmilab.ch site has been hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using the AWS Linux machine image (AMI) as its underlying platform. This is a Linux system (very similar to the CentOS distribution) which is maintained by Amazon Web Services to provide a continuous stream of updates which avoid having to frequently re-install new releases of the system. In June 2018 AWS announced the first major update to the Linux AMI, called Linux 2. This release is a discontinuous change and cannot be upgraded directly from the original Linux AMI—one must start with a clean installation and re-install all site-specific programs and data. Once this process is completed, AWS promises that no further re-installations will be required for the next five years. Because the Fourmilab site is relatively complicated and has a substantial amount of custom software used to implement the various Web services available here, the migration process, although working for static documents the first day, took two months (among many other distractions) to complete and test. At 11:26 UTC on 2018-09-07 the new system went into production on the Fourmilab site. Since then, only one problem has been encountered (display of page visit counters on a few pages), which was due to a library incompatibility and has now been fixed. This update consists entirely of changes to the software platform (operating system, compilers, libraries, scripting languages, database systems, Web server, etc.) upon which the site is built, so no changes should be apparent to visitors to the site. If you use something at the site and find that it stopped working around the time the update was installed, that's what the “Feedback” button is for.Posted at
22:03
