Posts in the topic "Technology"
Fielding Armor on the Cheap
Posted 07 Apr 10
While the Pentagon spends hundreds of billions on gold-plated aircraft and vast ranks of specialized armor, poorer adversaries are doing just fine with Toyotas.
Asymmetric warfare is uneven not just because a small, light insurgent force can tie up huge armies more or less forever, but because they can do it at much, much less cost. William Owens’ article is a little dry, but it makes the point that anyone can field an effective counterforce with very little money. And not just trucks (though what budget-conscious insurgent wouldn’t prefer an off-the-lot Toyota Hilux to a $150,000 Humvee?) You want, say, tactical missles? No problem:
Even the two most sophisticated weapons systems specified, the ATGMs and MANPADs, are cheap and readily available to almost any state or state supported entity. A number of the older and more conventional weapons systems can be made substantially more effective by simple applications of new technology. For example the 73mm SPG-9 can employ a simple laser range finder, greatly aiding its long-range effectiveness. GPS equipment and surveying can make MRL and mortar attacks much more effective. Relatively simple night sights and equally simple voice communications using low levels of encryption at the tactical level are commonly available from a large number of sources. Longer range digital HF or commercial satellite phones using high-grade laptop based encryption systems are not hard to obtain, given even a relatively small military budget.
When one dollar spent by an opponent can stymie $100 of your expenditures, the war just isn’t going to be won – not easily.
This post indexed as: Military, Technology
Why do we have to throw everything away?
Posted 30 Mar 10
Today’s off-topic rant:
Some of the lights in our kitchen stopped working. Not the bulbs, the sockets. When I took them back to the (expensive) lighting store that sold them to us, 4-1/2 years ago, the clerk actually laughed when I wondered whether they’d replace them. In fact, he was impressed the fixtures had lasted even that long — far past their one-year warranty.
And it’s not just one corner-cutting manufacturer. He said they’re all like that.
The irony, of course, is that the failing component probably cost less than a dollar, somewhere in China. For just pennies (okay, maybe a few hundred pennies, but even so) they could build something to last.
I know, I know — planned obsolescence, all that, companies have been shaving costs since the dawn of time. Still.
I’ve been looking for a used table saw lately. Like most machine shop tools, if you can find one made a few decades ago, for similar cost it’s probably better and more serviceable than anything more recent (after minor maintenance, granted).
And don’t get me started on, say, current house-construction methods.
We used to build things to last. Now we buy them to throw away.
This post indexed as: Personal, Technology
Photography Lessons
Posted 30 Mar 10
That is, lessons for writers from the collapse of photography as a profession.
The NYT has a bleak article today on the vanishing — not to say vanished — future of professional photographers. Three factors have converged: the disappearance of buyers as magazine pages are cut; cheap, easy-to-use digital cameras; and the willingness of amateurs to sell their photos dirt cheap.
Today a creative director, rather than hiring a pro for hundreds of dollars, can buy an adequate stock photo for a fraction of that. And increasingly, those stock photos come from hobbyists who’ve placed their snaps on, say, Flickr, and who are happy to be paid anything at all.
“People that don’t have to make a living from photography and do it as a hobby don’t feel the need to charge a reasonable rate,†Mr. Eich said.
Now consider the market for short stories. In the old days, getting published meant sending out your manuscript to New York in a big brown envelope. Each response could take weeks, and you had to pay return postage, too. After a few rejections you’d have to retype the damn thing, what with the dogears and coffee stains. The process was expensive in time, effort and money.
Today? It’s as easy as hitting SEND a dozen times.
But the more important parallel with stock photography: most current story markets pay next to nothing — and writers are still happy to take it.
Decades ago it was difficult to publish, but once you did, you could actually make money. A fair number of authors even supported themselves, as late as the 1960′s or even 70′s.
Now we find the reverse: easier to write and (relatively) easier to get published, but impossible to be paid a living wage.
People still read. They still look at glossy, printed photographs, too. But that sure doesn’t make it easy on the folks who actually produce words and pictures.
This post indexed as: Technology, Writing
The Infantryman’s Burden
Posted 01 Mar 10
It’s no secret that US soldiers go into combat with a LOT more personal equipment than they used to. Consider two photos, forty years apart:
It’s mostly armor, of course. And in Iraq, water. Still, even as some items have become lighter — consider the Vietnam field radios, carried by a dedicated radioman, vs. modern electronics — there seem to be more of them.
DefenseTech has an interesting article on this point today. In Afghanistan, where firefights take place across wide ground and at high elevations, the infantryman’s load has become a tactical problem. Moreover, the Taliban figured this out, and have adapted their tactics accordingly: firing at a distance, and moving more rapidly and easily than western forces.
After a description of the Soviets’ response to this same problem in the 80′s, the author makes another point: the US military has been focused on a “platform” response. That means rather than providing soldiers with a lighter, more effective grenade launcher — the Soviets’ solution — we’ve concentrated on big expensive machinery like the Bradley fighting vehicle, or various mounted weapon systems.
This strikes me as an excellent example of why the military-industrial iron triangle is such a problem. Defense companies sell ruinously expensive, overbuilt, wastefully ineffective equipment to an overfunded Pentagon so inefficient it has lost a trillion dollars. At the same time, soldiers on the ground don’t have the cheap, simple tools they need to do their jobs.
This post indexed as: Military, Technology
Tech Devolution
Posted 28 Feb 10
One aspect of the continuing, astonishing pace of technological development is how quickly sophisticated capabilities become available to everyday joes. The military-industrial complex is losing control of cutting-edge technology faster than ever. Just this week, three examples hit the news:
It is now cheap and easy to jam GPS navigation systems. One small device can knock out receivers for a radius of several kilometers. Even better: for a few thousand dollars extra, you can actually spoof locations! I expect this to start showing up in techno-thrillers and caper movies no later than next year.
Second, high-speed license plate scanning is now available to auto-repo companies. For the cost of the camera and a $600/mo. subscription fee, you can drive around (at up to 80 mph) checking parking lots, highways, etc for cars under a repossession order. That’s nice enough, at least for bottom-feeding collection agencies, but the larger question is: what happens to the collected data? This technology won’t stay in the, um, responsible hands of bounty hunters and repo men forever, and once large numbers of entities are using it, one could imagine all sorts of uses for vehicle tracking. Stalking, for example.
Finally, widespread commercial use of video surveillance, and effective conscription of cellphone call data, allowed authorities to rapidly discover a complete record of the Dubai assassination team. Even ten years ago this would have been impossible; now it’s everyday. (What’s most surprising is that the team, widely believed to be from Mossad, didn’t realize how easily they’d be found.)
Human ingenuity ensures a proliferation of unexpected uses for new inventions. It’s a brave surprising new world.
This post indexed as: Crime, Intelligence, Technology
The Panopticlick – You Are Being Tracked
Posted 28 Jan 10
Via Brian Krebs: it turns out that with all but the highest levels of browser security enabled, any website that wants to can uniquely identify your computer.
Cookies, history, visited sites, behavior — none of that matters. Simply assembling all the configuration information your browser shares is enough. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has assembled a demonstration here. Go ahead, try it!
Scary, huh? My own results depended on the browser. Using Opera, with Javascript and cookies disabled, isn’t bad. But of course that setup makes it difficult to actually read many websites, so my fallback is Firefox, with scripting enabled. And on that platform, my config is unique among all 140,000 sites the Panopticlick has tested so far.
The metaphor they’re using is “digital fingerprint,” but it’s more like a DNA sample.
They know who you are. And they’re watching.
Well, there’s always Tor. But that makes your online experience slow and crippled indeed. I use it anyway for certain research — you know, nuclear terrorism and so forth — but it’s not practical for day-to-day browsing.
Happy Data Privacy Day!
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Technology
CIA Enlists Private Tech to Spy on Interweb
Posted 15 Jan 10
The CIA just increased their investment in a private company whose mission is to eavesdrop on social-networking flow everywhere.
Visible Technologies, which trawls “media, video, images, blogs, Twitter, and any RSS feed in 12 languages” for corporate and government clients, just announced a $22m C round. The CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is both an original investor and a current participant.
Should this bother you? The company’s position is that public statements are, well, public — no expectation of privacy exists. It’s no different than taking a photograph of someone on the street. Or secretly recording the behavior of people inside a supermarket. Or pointing a video camera at an political demonstration …
Legal, sure, until the collected information is used for political purposes. Like compiling dossiers on elderly peace activists: the police would never do that, would they? Oh, yeah, they would.
But that’s not the point of this post. More interesting to me are the quasi-public VC “firms” the government has set up. Besides In-Q-Tel, the Army has its own, OnPoint Technologies (not to be confused with NPR’s talk radio show), and the DOD has a larger initiative they call DeVenCi — Defense Venture Catalyst Initiative. The latter doesn’t invest directly, but facilitates “communications and mutual understanding between innovators and the DoD.” (The difference between funding, vs. guaranteeing large contract purchases in a way that supports the company, may matter less than results, which are likely to be similar.)
Set aside the politics for a moment. Even if the goals of these programs are worthwhile, we should ask, are they a good way to go about it? Remember: taxpayer dollars at work.
For one thing, the employees are well compensated. Furthermore, at In-Q-Tel a significant portion of their pay depends on the financial success of the investments — not the strategic objectives. Conflict-of-interest problems appear inevitable, as fiduciary responsibilities collide with national security concerns. Suppose Visible Technologies became an acquisition target for a Chinese internet company (which is not unheard of). Should In-Q-Tel partners oppose the sale, against their own (and the taxpayer’s) financial interest?
That’s not a hypothetical. Christopher Byron detailed stock shenanigans by In-Q-Tel a few years ago. In somewhat hyperbolic language,
This week there’s more to report on this fishy, six-year-old firm, which has been pouring a reported $35 million annually of taxpayer money into deals running the gamut from the shrewd to the idiotic. The one common feature of them all: if an investment proves profitable, much of the money flows into the pockets of In-Q-Tel’s own employees; if a deal proves a loser, the nation’s taxpayers get stuck with 100 percent of the loss.
Now, evidence is emerging that In-Q-Tel’s brand of “Heads I win, tails you lose” deal-making may go even further than that. A source familiar with In-Q-Tel’s inner workings claims that once an equity deal with a company is worked out, In-Q-Tel officials routinely begin talking the company up on Capitol Hill to help the new partner land lucrative government contracts. A Newsweek story in March of last year suggested much the same thing, reporting that In-Q-Tel helped one of its investment partners — a Nevada-based software firm called Systems Research and Development — obtain government business.
As usual, the fundamental problem is oversight. If the public, or even just a few competent senators and members of congress, were allowed to keep an eye on what In-Q-Tel and its brethren are up to, Byron would have to find other subjects.
By the way, I should mention that my novel Exit Strategy dealt with a government-intelligence VC operation gone rogue. But that was fiction.
This post indexed as: Crime, Finance, Intelligence, Military, Technology
Speed Racer on the Virtual Trading Floor
Posted 08 Jan 10
Some doomsday reporting last fall on “high velocity trading,” where massively powered computers running PhD-designed algorithms buy and sell stocks in fractions of a second. Technology Review has a great article on the topic this month (if you don’t subcribe, or aren’t an MIT alum, another copy may be found here).
The technology is amazing; one hedge fund is quoted saying they have computing power equivalent to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s. High-velocity quant funds, as they’re known, will trade millions of shares every hour, with notional values of hundreds of millions of dollars — in and out in seconds, arbitraging the tiniest differences in prices across markets.
Critics claim these guys threaten to crater the market again, like 1987′s Black Monday, only on vastly larger scale and over in micro-seconds. The funds argue they’re merely providing liquidity, and their positions are net market-neutral, but they would say that, right? They’re making money faster than the mint can print it.
I don’t know who’s right. But it is obvious that the incredible ingenuity, effort and investment spent on devising these systems could have gone elsewhere: curing malaria? developing better solar cells? eliminating E.coli from children’s school lunches? NOT canceling the manned space-flight program?
Still, the technology is fascinating — and surely provides framework for someone’s next financial thriller.
This post indexed as: Finance, Technology
Online banking, like it or not
Posted 07 Jan 10
Via Ezra Klein, from Felix Salmon, the brave golden new world of online banking.
Call me paranoid (many have) but the takeaway line is this one:
[Yodlee] built up an enormous dataset over the years — $3 trillion of transactions from 23 million users have been cleaned up and put into a huge database by 500 employees — and it’s now going to open up that database to software developers around the world.
Um, that would seem to raise a few questions about privacy. Like, who owns that data? Given the constant drizzle of data breach reports, basic security appears to remain a huge issue. And more broadly, do you really WANT profit-seeking private firms knowing so much about you and your financial life?
As it happens, I encountered Yodlee more than ten years ago, when they were just starting out as a personal-financial-information aggregator. The idea was, you’d register and then give them all your logins and passwords — banks, credit cards, investment accounts, frequent flyer miles, whatever — and they’d compile it all into a simple, consolidated view. From there you could do all your transactions, and see your total balance sheet, on one platform.
Neat, huh? I thought so, and I wanted to introduce them to the large financial firm I was working for. So I went to sign up, just to try it out. I got through the initial registration screens, up to the point where they asked for my bank account number . . .
and I stopped. Just couldn’t do it. Sure, they had the most bulletproof firewalls and encryption and privacy policies in the world — or so they claimed — but that wasn’t enough. Not for me.
Now, it has to be said: I’m old. Older than the teens and 20-somethings who are likely to use these services in the future, cheerfully and without fear. And Yodlee has never experienced a data breach (that we know of).
That’s not good enough for the FBI, as it turns out, which last week recommended using only sterile computers for online banking. Is it good enough for you?
This post indexed as: Finance, Technology
TMI: Tradecraft
Posted 06 Jan 10
One reason I enjoyed reading thrillers and spy novels, when I was younger, is the tradecraft you could learn. Detailed instructions for evading a tail, planting a bug in an embassy, exchanging coded microdots in dead drops — it’s all there, in between the gunfire and betrayals by venal politicians. A fascinating window into the secret world, unavailable anywhere else …
until now. This once-mysterious arcana is now laid out in dozens of neat, lesson-planned how-to books, aimed at all ages. The gift shop at the International Spy Museum includes (among many, many more) the following titles:
Handbook of Practical Spying
The Real Spy’s Guide To Becoming a Spy
Ultimate Spy
Other tricks and techniques are detailed in books like The Worst-Case Scenario Survival series. Wannabe MacGyvers have Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things (or, for that matter, The Unofficial MacGyver How-To Handbook).
From an author’s standpoint, it’s sort of like forensics. In the old days, half the fun of a police procedural was, well, the procedure: how to take a fingerprint, run a DNA scan, or spray a hotel room with Luminol. Thanks to CSI: Everywhere and a cultural fascination with this stuff, readers now know far more about it than I ever will. Even autopsies — for a mystery to be publishable, apparently a pathologist has to saw open a braincase by Chapter 3.
I can’t possibly keep up, but now that the information is out there, maybe it doesn’t matter so much. I guess there’s always character, plot, setting and voice to fall back on.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Technology, Writing