open internet declared closed

Some of the “kill switch” stuff sounds a bit overwrought, but it looks a like the Chinese view of the internet is on the point of prevailing. This from Rebecca MacKinnon's commentary on China's recent White Paper on internet governance: 

The White Paper is a clear articulation of the Chinese government's long-standing position that nation-states should have "sovereignty" over all aspects of the Internet - human or equipment or signal - that reside within or pass through Chinese sovereign territory. 

 And now here's Joe Lieberman: 

"Right now, China can disconnect parts of its Internet in times of war. We need to be able to do that too."

Of course, you can’t have the ability to disconnect the internet in time of war without having the ability to do it in time of peace as well: or indeed the ability to control access to it at any time at all.

Comments

[Nick L]

A thousand dreams of 90s net gurus just died. From tool of freedom to panopticon in two decades.

[Chris Williams]

Yeah, and Chris Sievey just died. Bummer. That, and I can't remember how I worked out he was in fact Frank.

[Richard J]

A mildly surreal touch to the whole sad news is that nobody in the press appears to have a photo of Chris Sievey out of costume.

[Phil]

I think we can say with some confidence that that's how he would have wanted it.

[Phil]

Back on-topic, I note that tens of thousands of Chinese Internet users are believed to use Twitter (despite it being blocked). Just think, if it grew to a full hundred thousand that would be all of 0.01% of the population! (For scale, according to the 2001 Census Jedi Knights make up 0.66% of the British population.)

[cian]

Because if hackers disabled facebook the US would just crumble right?

Or does Liebmerman think that nuclear reactors are connected to the internet just waiting for the wrong wiley hacker. He probably does.

[Phil]

Well, Gary McKinnon, I say to you. Enemy Gary McKinnons. Chinese Gary McKinnons. Thousands of Chinese Gary McKinnons! We'd better disconnect the Internet right now to be on the safe side.

It's weird - since IT has become ubiquitous it seems to have become more magical rather than less. On Casualty the other week the entire network went down when somebody kicked the photocopier. More specifically, there was a big powering-down whoomph sound, the lights flickered and all the screens went to NO SIGNAL. Not only that, but when the network finally came back up again all the displays were restored to how they had been - very much as if someone had flipped a strategically-located AV output switch & then flipped it back.

[Richard J]

since IT has become ubiquitous it seems to have become more magical rather than less.

Well, it has become more magical, hasn't it? Every boy in my primary class could write a quick BASIC programme of the 10 PRINT "Dave smells" 20 GOTO 10 variety, but I wouldn't honestly have a clue where to start even with Visual Basic these days.

[Alex]

Libertarians as an information source considered harmful.

[ajay]

since IT has become ubiquitous it seems to have become more magical rather than less. On Casualty the other week the entire network went down when somebody kicked the photocopier

Casualty is actually near-future SF, set in a universe where the NHS Connecting for Health project has been completed. Evidence: see above.

[cian]

Richard: Use Python rather than VB, assuming the later still exists. You might just be showing your age though. Today's kids can install a completely customisable OS (Linux), have access to hardcore computer languages/tools that simply weren't available back when I were a kid (80s) while accessing a huge community of pretty gregarious hackers. And the evidence seems to be that the ones who like that kind of thing do just that.

Meanwhile I imagine your kids of today who aren't that interested still know how to hack enough HTML/CSS to customise facebook, and may even know a little Javascript/Ruby/Python.

[dsquared]

but I wouldn't honestly have a clue where to start even with Visual Basic these days

They call it "Visual Basic" but it's actually the same thing as "macros". Like speaking prose, you're probably doing it every day without noticing.

[Richard J]

Macros are a bit beyond me. Convoluted nested =IFs are my style these days.

[Alex]

actually, when I introduced a colleague to pivots the other day, what kept going through my head was "this would be so much easier as a command line query..."

[Chris Williams]

It got all magic for me just then, when Alex wrote 'pivots'.

[Phil]

Macros are a bit beyond me.

Contra dsquared, I used to love macros. Macros used to consist of something immediately recognisable as a shorter form of "down 1, left 3, copy contents of cell, right 3, paste, and repeat". In fact macros generally used to begin "/E", because that was how you accessed the edit menu commands. I used to write yards of that stuff. Then it all went VB and I became 50% stupider overnight.

[ejh]

How do you turn it on?

[Richard J]

It's times like this you have to turn to the detathless wisdom of Insane Clown Posse - 'fucking magnets, how do they work?'

[dsquared]

My life has become incalculably better and my spreadsheets 90% more incomprehensible since I learned how to use VLOOKUP.

[john b]

I've just been given SPSS to play with. I'm looking forward to running some properly arcane and incomprehensible analyses as a result...

[cian]

My life has become incalculably better since I stopped being asked to fix spreadsheets. Its like playing whack a mole on a football field while blindfolded.

[Phil]

Although I can't write macros, I use VLOOKUP absolutely all the time (usually followed by my number 1 all-time favourite Excel command, Paste Values and Number Formats). I'm wondering now if at one time I would have written a "down one, look over there, copy the value and come back here, and repeat" script to get all those lookups done - and which way is actually quicker.

[dsquared]

btw:

Convoluted nested =IFs are my style these days.

in other words, computer programming.

[Richard J]

Come to think of it, one very boring job I had a few years back, I wrote a QBasic programme to figure out how someone could have come up with a particular sub-total out of a larger pool of numbers. As this is, IIRC, an NP problem, it became very slow indeed when the larger set got to more than 16 or so numbers.

The rather embarrassing things were that:- a) I spent about two days writing this instead of the time I could have spent just fudging the question, and b) that I then plotted the running time against the number of elements in the dataset to confirm my prediction, and then worked out that, ISTR, a dataset of just 60-odd numbers would take longer than the age of the universe to run.

[Richard J]

d2> Copied and pasted without comment:-

=IF(OR(AND(B5="",D5=""),OR(ISNUMBER(MATCH(B5,'entertaining analysis'!A$1:A$18,0)),ISNUMBER(MATCH(D5,'entertaining analysis'!A$1:A$18,0)))),0,CELL("row",A5))

[Alex]

What a horrible language VBScript is.

if:
b5 == d5 == None
elif:
for x in range(a1, a18):
if (x('entertaining analysis')).isnum or x==b5 or x==d5:
a5 = 'row'
else:
#do something different
#if I catch your meaning?

[Alex]

...aargh. your comments box strips whitespace, rendering it impossible to comment in Python!

[Richard J]

It's not even VBScript. It's all a cell-formula...

(And all because our sodding accounts system can't, AFAICT, export its data in CSV, XLS, or anything other than plain text with all the formatting left in.)

[Chris Williams]

Yup, magic all right. Premise: ordinary, everyday technology reached Clarke levels of 'sufficiently advanced' some time in the 1980s. Until then, a putative smart person with time on their hands could conceivably understand the operation of everything in the median developed nation household. Since then, not so much.

[Alex]

(And all because our sodding accounts system can't, AFAICT, export its data in CSV, XLS, or anything other than plain text with all the formatting left in.)

What kind of formatting? If it's just csv you need, it might be surprisingly easy to write a python script to reprocess the gunk.

CW: I dunno, I think I have a good handle on everything here, but that may just mean that my material standard of living hasn't measurably advanced since the 80s.

[cian]

Richard: A colleague of mine was once asked by somebody on the business side to do something vaguely like that. It would have required a fair bit of work and was generally a pain. However the guy was technically his bosses boss, and was a pain, so he couldn't really get out of it without causing political problems. He asked around, learnt the guy was a bit of a bullshitter and he wanted the data to impress his boss, who hadn't actually asked for it. Reasoning that nothing would actually be done with this data, he decided just to make up some plausible results, wait half a day and give them to him. Nothing more was heard of the matter.

Six months later he's snoozing through a presentation waiting to do his three slides, when he looks up and notices a summary of his data being used as the crux of the previous guy's presentation...

[cian]

Chris: I suppose if you choose a sufficiently fine level of granularity that's true, but other than the sofa (it doesn't stain. Seriously, how does it do that) I think I'm good.

I couldn't repair most of it.

[Chris Williams]

Alex is not in the set 'putative smart person', but in the set 'rare genius person' so for the purposes of this premise I am ruling him out of order.

I mean, in every town there used to be people who could understand what every part of their TV did, and given enough time, make one from bits they got from RS. A lot more people (some even overlapping with the first lot) could strip a car down to bits, replace the correct worn bits, and put it back together again.

Now, who can make a computer, and install an operating system and know what all the code does . . . then go on to understand each bit of necessary code in their _car_. I've got about sixteen electronic things two feet from me, each of which would require a shelf-full of volumes to specify from scratch.

So we use interlocutionary tools. But that simplifies, and makes it easy to confuse the interface with the thing itself. Magic creeps in. Time, I think, to go off and read "In the beginning was the command line" again.

[Alex]

Hey, loads of people do bizarre things to cars. Including re-flashing (or whatever) the electronic engine controller code to make it go faster. That's not even recent; it's been in petrol-head culture for 20 years. And people still build their own PCs.

As far as mobile devices go, I'm about to make the point professionally that it's no longer a big challenge to make a phone - the hardware is all available in commerce, you can pick one of several open-source operating systems. Making a good one is hard. Generally, however, doing a phone is easy.

OpenMoko didn't get too far, although they did make a gadget, because they had a lot of purist hangups about the UMTS codecs. The software works, though.

It's probably beyond the resources of the B&T community to do our own smartphone - unless D^2 was to sell some shares. Eurotrib could probably do it. DailyKos certainly. What's more fun is setting up your own MVNO...

[cian]

So we use interlocutionary tools. But that simplifies, and makes it easy to confuse the interface with the thing itself. Magic creeps in.

Sorry, but I don't buy this. If you have a reasonable working knowledge of the principals, then that gives you a framework to think about it. Understanding can be quite sufficient operating at the macro level to keep "magic" away.

And as Alex says, we seem to be moving back to an era where amateurs can do everything.