Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

It’s a tarp!

This Blog Goes to 11…

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Usually wrong but never in doubt.

What fresh hell is this?

Good luck with your asparagus.

I can see Russia from this blog!

Not all heroes wear capes.

A snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

Word salad with all caps

Yes we did.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

How has Obama failed you today?

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

Peak wingnut was a lie.

We still have time to mess this up!

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Today’s Wuhan Coronavirus Update: SNAKE FLU

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(Dr. Wang said he thought he was exposed because he was masked, but not goggled. Researchers are now wearing goggles.)

Pending further updates, of course… this seems like a positive development. Snakes, as I understand it, are a significant winter ‘health’ specialty meal, but banning commerce in snake meat would be much easier than — as has happened before — having to shut down live-poultry markets.

You don’t have to say the relevant authorities have gotten good at dealing with these crises, but you have to admit they’ve gotten more practiced.

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Late Night Open Thread: Butterflies!

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The color of the dress is a coincidence, but you can see why Warren supporters are liking this tweet!

That’s Billy Porter at the Critics Choice Awards, per Vogue:

Billy Porter knows how to make an entrance. Since his dramatic arrival at last year’s Met Gala, the Pose star has continued to dominate the red carpet in theatrical fashion—making his 2020 award season debut in a suit-gown hybrid with a white feathered train at the Golden Globes last week. Keeping up the momentum, the Tony Award-winning actor took the blue carpet at the Critics’ Choice Awards tonight in a seafoam green Hogan McLaughlin jumpsuit with a flurry of hand-painted butterflies adorning his chest and arms.

“Billy’s intention [was] to embrace freedom,” explained groomer and the artist behind the designs, Anna Bernabe. “Butterflies represent a personal metamorphosis. The multiple butterflies [all over his body symbolize] the numerous transformations and rebirths one goes through during a lifetime.” According to the pro, the application to Porter’s neck, chest, and back took over an hour…

And that reminded me about the most interesting toy I saw written up from this year’s CES, in the Washington Post:

Temporary tattoo printer: Prinker
Temporary tattoo technology hasn’t changed much in recent years. You can buy them, order custom designs online or print your own on special paper at home. But a new device called the Prinker makes temporary tattoos mobile for spontaneous people who don’t want to commit to forever ink. The handheld printer can apply cosmetic-grade ink to the skin in black or color just by quickly passing it once over the chosen body part. Images are selected from a companion app, or you can add your own. It can only print graphics up to an inch wide, so a full tattoo sleeve would take a while, but the only limit on the length of a tattoo is the length of your body. While the final product doesn’t smudge or fade much, it does wash off easily with soap and water.
Cost is $269, available in mid-2020.

At that price point, there’s gonna be a Prinker in every strip-mall nail salon by the 2020 holiday season. (And probably in a lot of middle schools / afterschool enrichment programs, too, as a ‘learn to code’ gimmick to keep kids interested.)

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Drones Over Colorado And Nebraska

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Commenter Jay Noble is wondering about those drone formations that are being seen over thinly-populated areas of Colorado and Nebraska. So am I. Jay did the research, and I did a little more, so here’s what we know and don’t know, mostly the latter.

Since about the middle of December, about 17 drones, with six-foot wingspans, have been operating in grid patterns from 7 to 10 at night in this area. The brightly lit drones fly at about 100 feet in the air. A little bit of video here, but lights in the night sky aren’t particularly interesting.

Whoever is operating the drones hasn’t spoken up, so there is much speculation as to their purpose. The FAA and FBI are investigating.

The grid-like flight patterns suggest a search or assessment mission. One hypothesis on a dicey website (not gonna link) and apparently spreading is that they are searching for a lost nuclear warhead from one of the missile silos in the area. I’ll bet money that’s not the case. The last time the Air Force lost a missile warhead, the preceding events were quite obvious. It was in 1980, in Damascus, Arkansas, and the warhead was lost because the missile underneath it blew up.

Speculations also include that one or more of the military bases in the area (Colorado Springs, Offutt Air base) is testing a drone operation. This seems unlikely, because the military has plenty of controlled air space in which to do such a thing. Also unlikely, but possible, is that one of the military units is working this without authorization. A Facebook friend of Jay’s speculates that it’s a classified technology; a “target item” is emplaced in a large search area during the day, and the search takes place in the night.

A hobbyist could be playing around, or a commercial operation could be mapping or conducting other types of reconnaissance.

Law enforcement met to coordinate Monday night, January 6, and told the public to be on the watch for the control vehicle, likely a large van or box trailer. They are advising people not to shoot the drones down, which may be illegal.

It looks like the civilian authorities genuinely do not know what the drones are up to or who is behind them. If it’s the military, this is unconscionable. They have other places to test such things. Or they could announce that they’re doing a test.

If it’s a private organization or hobbyist, they may be violating the law.

Stay tuned.

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Artificial Intelligence & You: Don’t Take My Word For It…

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This is part two of a series of posts on artificial intelligence.

A month ago, I wrote a post about our upcoming reckoning with AI-driven text generation. Today, computer security expert & cryptographer Bruce Schneier was kind enough to write a follow-up for the Atlantic, “The Future of Politics Is Robots Shouting at One Another“:

Presidential-campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it’s time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: Artificial personas are coming, and they’re poised to take over political debate. The risk arises from two separate threads coming together: artificial-intelligence-driven text generation and social-media chatbots. These computer-generated “people” will drown out actual human discussions on the internet.

[…]

Over the years, algorithmic bots have evolved to have personas. They have fake names, fake bios, and fake photos—sometimes generated by AI. Instead of endlessly spewing propaganda, they post only occasionally. Researchers can detect that these are bots and not people based on their patterns of posting, but the bot technology is getting better all the time, outpacing tracking attempts. Future groups won’t be so easily identified. They’ll embed themselves in human social groups better. Their propaganda will be subtle, and interwoven in tweets about topics relevant to those social groups.

Combine these two trends and you have the recipe for nonhuman chatter to overwhelm actual political speech.

It’s a short read, and I recommend clicking over.

Schneier provides many excellent links to AI-driven dis/misinformation campaigns that have already happened or are already underway.  One of his examples is the public comments on the FCC’s proposal to end net neutrality, which were flooded by pro-Trump content. Around half the signatories were fake. Over a million comments were written by a shoddy AI from an easy-to-detect template. The FCC (which like many government bodies is organized to be controlled by the president’s party) did not care.

Schneier touches on an important discussion point: what will the effect of all this be on society? Nobody knows, and the technologies are going to improve significantly faster than our ability to study their effects.

The best analyses indicate that they did not affect the 2016 U.S. presidential election. More likely, they distort people’s sense of public sentiment and their faith in reasoned political debate. We are all in the middle of a novel social experiment.

That data, of course, is four years old.

We’re already at the point where it’s easier to generate passable garbage than it is to detect and remove it. This will only get worse as we go from ‘passable garbage’ to simply ‘passable content’. Already, “it’s just a Russian bot” is used to dismiss any number of arguments we see online. What happens when the Russian (and Saudi, Chinese, North Korean, Republican, Hindu nationalist, etc., etc.) bots reach whatever the tipping-point level of sophistication is? When anything written by a non-verified source is instantly suspect?

Barring a dramatic shift in user authentication standards, we may soon find that the majority of political content (by volume) is written by computers. What happens then?

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What Took Them So Long?

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I predict that the decline and possible fall of Boeing won’t be arrested by this too little too late firing:

Aviation industry analysts said the sudden dismissal of Dennis Muilenburg, who had worked for Boeing for more than three decades, was a desperate attempt by the company to win back the trust of regulators and the public after crashes of its 737 Max aircraft led to the deaths of 346 people and accusations that Boeing had misled regulators and its customers.

This firing comes after news that recent testing of 737 pilots in MAX simulators showed that more than half of them responded to problems with the wrong procedures, even though they all got themselves out of trouble.

If you want to read a damning assessment of Boeing’s strategy around trying to make the 737 big enough to occupy the lower end of the market that the 757 used to occupy, Patrick Smith’s analysis is well worth a read. In short, Boeing missed the boat by not creating a 757 replacement (the never built 797), and the Airbus A321 is a better choice for the around 200 seat market for carriers that aren’t wedded to the 737 platform. The 50+ year-old 737 design is too loud, too uncomfortable, and doesn’t have the performance for the niche that Boeing is trying to satisfy with the MAX.

In addition to all the practical issues that dog the 737’s latest stretch, I think the real question is whether travelers in the US will even fly in the damn thing. My guess is that it will be actively avoided, and any incident, no matter how small, will be front page news. The 737 MAX is the Comet of US aviation.

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Artificial Intelligence & You: Automated Fake News and Trolling

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As evidence continues to mount that we are living in a cyberpunk dystopia, I’ve decided to do a series of posts on artificial intelligence. This one is about text generation.

I’m something of an AI skeptic. While they’ve proven to be very effective in some areas, these are mostly tasks with a narrow scope and well-defined set of rules, such as playing chess and go, or determining whether something is a picture of a cat. More complex tasks like driving have proven to be a lot harder. Driving in particular has very ambiguous inputs that are highly context-dependent, two things that AIs have trouble with.

(Let’s please continue reading and not get hung up on the political and ethical roadblocks to self-driving cars.)

AIs have also historically had trouble generating text and images. Not because these are magical tasks that only humans can perform; it’s simply been difficult to make computers good at them. Well, much to my surprise, this may be coming to an end in the next few years. And I don’t mean that in the “self-driving cars are always five years away” sense.

In the last couple of years, computerized content generation has made some remarkable advances. Deepfakes–videos that believably replace one person with somebody else–are proliferating, and fairly easy to make. AIs are frighteningly good at generating faces now, too.

But what about text? Google Translate has gotten much more sophisticated lately as Alphabet has perfected the neural networks that power it. But is that more like writing, or more like playing go? I’d say it’s in between.

Which brings us to writing. Earlier this year, the nonprofit group OpenAI built a text-generation neural network that was, in their opinion, too frightening to release. I called malarkey, but now that they’ve been gradually releasing more sophisticated versions of their model, I call… less malarkey. What this means for you, and some examples, below the fold.

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Open Thread: Trading SPACE FARCE! for Paid Parental Leave

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But seriously… I doubt it will happen, because the Repubs don’t want a bunch of ‘low-level bureaucrats’ (federal employees) to get ‘freebies paid from our taxes’, especially right before Christmas (because they can’t enjoy their holiday unless they know other people are suffering). But I would happily trade an expansion of paid family leave in return for, let’s be honest, years of scheduling Very Serious Hearings about a sixth branch of the military. The Washington Post is a good guide here, IMO, because they’re reporting on what they consider a local pocketbook issue:

… The deal is part of a defense authorization bill that is slated to pass this month. If consummated, the agreement could mark one of the biggest deals President Trump has cut with Congress. It would secure a massive expansion of benefits for federal workers, something Democrats have long sought, in exchange for a realignment of the U.S. military that Trump has sought to secure as part of his legacy…

One Democratic congressional aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the parties are “nearing agreement on a final deal.” The package could be voted on as early as next week, the aide said.

If it is approved, the extension of paid family leave to federal workers would represent a major benefit to more than 2 million federal civilian workers, who are only eligible for unpaid leave under federal law.

It would mark a reversal of sorts for the White House, which has sought to strip pay and benefits from federal workers since Trump took office in 2017. Instead, it would mark one of the biggest extensions of a new work benefit for the federal workforce in recent history…

Trump has become increasingly fixated on Space Force as his administration faces the House impeachment inquiry, according to one senior administration official. But it has not been clear if House Democrats would approve of his request.

The Pentagon has already reestablished a Space Command that will be headed by a four-star general. But the Space Force, if approved, would stand up an organization to train and equip specialized forces whose mission would be to accelerate the country’s response to the militarization of space…

A senior defense official with knowledge of Space Force discussions said Thursday that the Air Force convened a planning task force months ago and is weighing “myriad” issues, including how service members would be transferred from the Air Force to the Space Force, what Space Force uniforms would look like, and what rank structure would be used…

Still, there are a variety of more complicated issues that will take the Pentagon time to hammer out, the official said. They include logistical issues, such as where Space Force headquarters will be housed in the Pentagon, and practical ones, such as whether the Space Force will have its own security forces on the ground or rely on other branches of service.

For federal employees, the deal represents not just a rare new benefit, but a victory in a three-year war with the Trump administration that from the start was suspicious of the career bureaucracy of 2.1 million employees.

The White House has gone to war with unions that represent federal workers and won. In recent months it has gotten reprieves from the courts over a union challenge to a series of White House executive orders designed to weaken labor’s hand in collective bargaining.

The administration has slashed long-established benefits such as telework in many agencies and taken steps to more aggressively fire workers it deems poor performers. And while Trump has proposed a raise for the workforce for next year, he did not want an increase this year until Congress intervened, demanding it under the terms of a budget agreement that ended the partial government shutdown…

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Late Night Open Thread: Vroom!

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I want one of these cycles, and I’m not even chairbound (yet)…

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Andrew Yang’s Dangerous Idea

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Andrew Yang has released a plan for Internet regulation. Some of it is good, some of it is anodyne, and some of it is terrible. You may wonder why I’ve chosen to write about this, since he’s not going to be the nominee. Two reasons: one, we should all be talking about this stuff more. Two, his plan is a great example of how Americans go astray when thinking about regulating tech companies.

From his website, we can start with the good:

Regulate the use of data and privacy by establishing data as a property right. The associated rights will enable individuals to retain ownership and share in the economic value generated by their data.

Wonderful! Big fan. I used to work at a startup that sought to enable customers to do this. Alas, it failed because investors thought that our user base would only be the Very Online™, and the sorts of people who want to hide things. Without widespread adoption (or government regulation), this doesn’t work.

Then we have the “sure, alright, I could see that working out”:

Minimize health impacts of modern tech on our people, particularly our children. I will create a Department of the Attention Economy that focuses on smartphones, social media, gaming, and apps, and how to responsibly design and use them, including age restrictions and guidelines.

He proposes things like “removing autoplay video for children under 16,” though personally I’d like to see that apply to children under 116. This one also contains stupider bullet points like “removing the queues that allow infinite scrolling,” which would be laughably easy to work around, if anybody can even figure out what it means.

And then we reach his dangerous ideas, which many politicians across the spectrum like, and which represent a particular failure mode in American regulatory thought.

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Thought Exercise On Renewable Energy

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Sorry about this morning’s OTR post, restoring my laptop’s hard drive after repair went long after I gave up and went to bed last night. I’ll post it Monday.

I’ve been pondering this renewable energy question off and on recently and figured I’d open it up to discussion to broaden my thinking.

The question is: if you pay a surcharge for renewable energy from your electricity provider, is it better to then be wasteful or at least a “big consumer” of that clean electricity in order to increase demand for clean electricity and thus spurring more investment in renewables, or should you try to be as energy-conscious as possible and not leave lights on, keep the thermostat down/up, etc.?

In this scenario, the electricity that comes in your house is technically a mix of renewable and dirty, but you pay a surcharge to have clean energy equal to your usage added to your provider’s feed. If every customer chose this option, all the electricity provided to your home would be from renewable sources.

My thinking is that, since demand increases investment/supply, it’s desirable to consume more electricity once you’re setup to pay the premium as described above. More investment in renewable energy is a good and a larger supply/higher percentage renewable in the renewable/dirty mix that my provider supplies is also a good. So except for wasting some money, it seems to me like wasting electricity is actually a good here.

If your supply is already 100% renewable (from a provider, not your own solar/wind/etc.), I’m undecided if it makes sense to be a “big consumer” or not.  Again, increasing demand means more investment in supply in your locality and region, and provides the market/investors evidence that such demand might exist in other under-served areas. Since a major goal of us who pay the surcharge for renewable or are willing to pay higher rates or invest in infrastructure like solar is to make a better, carbon-free world, there, perversely, seems to be a clear incentive to be wasteful here too. But I’m not sure.

 

What think you?

 

 

Consider this a non-political open thread.

 

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Explosion At Novosibirsk

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An explosion, said to be of a gas cylinder, caused a fire at the Vektor research institute in Novosibirsk. The explosion took place on the fifth floor of a six-floor building, where a laboratory was being refurbished. This is a plausible explanation.

How worried should you be? If you live outside Novosibirsk, not very.

There are reports that all the glass in the building was broken, but I am beginning to doubt those reports, because I don’t see them in all the news articles. BBC has one of the more complete reports.

Vektor houses a collection of nasty viruses, including one of the two official samples of smallpox virus. I say “official” because every now and then overlooked samples show up. It’s also possible that as the Arctic warms up, the bodies of people who died from smallpox will become more accessible. But otherwise, smallpox is extinct in the wild.

The smallpox virus is probably stored in a cold room in the basement of the building. We’ve come to the time when the official samples should be destroyed. The other is at the CDC in Atlanta.

Is the Russian government telling the truth? Giving us the whole story? In 1979, the city of Sverdlovsk had a sudden epidemic of anthrax from a leak in a bioweapons production plant. The Soviet government pretended that this was from bad meat and kept it quiet, just as they did seven years later with the Chernobyl disaster. Putin seems to prefer handling accidents that way, having turned off international radiation monitors that might have told us something about the explosion at Nyonoksa in August.

If this is a coverup and viruses were released, people in Novosibirsk are the most at risk. Disease will show up fairly quickly, and people can be isolated and vaccinated. Russia does not want epidemics in its population. There is the small possibility that someone infected from Novosibirsk might travel internationally, but we know how to deal with these viruses, even Ebola now.

As to the question of whether all Russia’s explosions this summer are related, the answer is probably not, except for one possible connection. The Achinsk armory explosions are of a not uncommon type in Russia. Too many armories, too little safety, bored and uncaring security forces. The Nyonoksa and Novosibirsk explosions could be connected by pressure from above to get new weapons fielded rapidly. Pressure and haste in science tend to make things go wrong.

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The Most Terrifying Technology

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One of the problems with the Trump administration is that they are doing so many retrograde, horrible, awful things, that you can’t even keep up with chronicling them, let alone fighting them all. You have to pick your battles, and even then, the deck is so stacked against you that victories are few and far between and often pyrrhic. Because of this, you can’t even begin to think about dealing with the numerous future crises that are rolling down the road at an alarming rate. For example:

Now I have no idea how well thought out his policy is, or how practical, but one of the things that scares the hell out of me is the future of automation. In particular, automated trucking. I feel like I have mentioned this before, but I can’t remember when, but it is important to realize that trucking employs several million people, and there are an equal number of people whose livelihoods come from supporting the trucking industry. This data is from 2014, but that is pretty recent when it comes to data sets of this size:

Because I live in an area that is considered both the Ohio Valley and Appalachia, I am acutely aware of how the loss of a couple thousand mining and steel mill jobs every year has perverted our politics for the last two-three decades. Take that upheaval, and make it several orders of magnitude worse, and you get the idea how bad this is going to be. And we’re not even getting into the fact that trucking is a tough business as it is, with owner operators getting hosed every single day (the trucking industry as a whole did really well the past few years, but the drivers- not so much. Sound familiar?).

Again, this is the sort of thing that if we were a serious nation, we would be planning in advance how to deal with it, whether it be regulation, legislation banning and limiting it, etc. It’s going to be a major deal. The only serious conversations I have even seen about it are coming from the left, with discussions about a universal basic income (Give People Money by Annie Lowrey was a good read), and to his credit, Andrew Yang has talked about this (and also written a book).

Of course, half the people in the Democratic primary would probably scoff at this idea, but it really is not just backwards thinking socialism. It’s more forward thinking than people realize, because this stuff is really right around the corner.

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Panopticon Creep: UK Edition

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Once upon a time, London was the world’s most-surveilled city. This position has since been usurped by Chongqing, a city in the Sichuan province which boasts one hundred sixty-eight cameras per one thousand people. Perhaps upset over the loss of their title, Boris Johnson has decided it’s high time that the UK began compiling records of its citizens’ web traffic.

tl;dr: Here’s an executive summary based on my reading of the linked article.

  • Currently, the various parts of the government collect analytics on how people use their websites.
  • BoJo would like to combine all of this data, creating profiles of how each individual uses the whole government’s online offerings.
  • This is to be done ASAP and in secret. The rationale for this is mumble mumble Brexit.
  • This data will be “anonymized”, which is not particularly meaningful at this level of specificity. While an analyst armed with this database would not be able to find a person’s usage by searching for their name, the same analyst could easily derive a person’s name from their usage.

Drilling into some detail now:

Boris Johnson has secretly ordered the Cabinet Office to turn the government’s public internet service into a platform for “targeted and personalised information” to be gathered in the run-up to Brexit, BuzzFeed News has learned.

In a move that has alarmed Whitehall officials, the prime minister has instructed departments to share data they collect about usage of the GOV.UK portal so that it can feed into preparations for leaving the European Union at the end of next month.

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Today’s Security FAIL

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Iran had a missile blow up on the launch pad a couple of days ago, and the folks who do open-source intelligence (OSINT) have been looking at open-source overhead photos, trying to figure out what happened. I put in a guess or two.

This afternoon, a really great photo showed up in our Twitter streams. All those guesses and questions were answered. Caution for those holding clearances: The image may be classified.

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