Thursday 16 December 2010
P vs. NP goes on
So if you remember, I wrote about a proof to the P vs. NP problem proposed by Vinay Deolalikar. Well, it turns out there are "fatal flaws" in his proof, thus rendering it invalid. So, unfortunately he can no longer get the Millennium Prize or the Fields Medal for this proof. However, he has provided a brand new way of looking at the problem and has no doubt inspired many researchers to follow his methodology or indeed even improve on it. Until then, we wait. It's been over a century, a couple more years can't really hurt.
Sunday 12 December 2010
Gates of Hell
OK Internet, it's time we had a talk. Not every controversy has to end in the word "gate". Seriously, it's getting so annoying.
Firstly, not every little piece of news that is a tad controversial (which is practically all of them) deserves its own name. Learn to tone it down.
Secondly, the only scandal that ends in "gate" is The Watergate Scandal. Everything else can be and should be named after something else. It is named thus as the scandal revolved around a robbery of the Democratic Party Headquarters in the Watergate Complex.
Everything else that doesn't have a "gate" ending object central to it, should be named something else. Bigotgate, Chicanegate, Digggate, Cablegate, Whitewatergate, etc need to stop now.
Firstly, not every little piece of news that is a tad controversial (which is practically all of them) deserves its own name. Learn to tone it down.
Secondly, the only scandal that ends in "gate" is The Watergate Scandal. Everything else can be and should be named after something else. It is named thus as the scandal revolved around a robbery of the Democratic Party Headquarters in the Watergate Complex.
Everything else that doesn't have a "gate" ending object central to it, should be named something else. Bigotgate, Chicanegate, Digggate, Cablegate, Whitewatergate, etc need to stop now.
Wikileaks
So, I've been away for a while. Between having minimal to no Internet and having no electricity, I have been less than connected to the Internet. That and I am fairly lazy, but still TIA. Now on to business.
I'm sure you have all heard of Wikileaks, the purported whistle blower website. It provides people with an anonymous "drop boxes", where they can submit documents detailing any wrongdoing. The site then goes on to state "our accredited journalists assess the submission. If it meets the criteria, our journalists then write or produce a news piece based on the document." It goes on further to describe ways of ensuring your anonymity when sending it via post and so forth. In theory this has provided whistle blowers with a way to expose wrongdoings. In theory.
I say purported as I do not believe it is a whistle blower site. Firstly, let us examine the concept of whistle blowing. It derives from the practice of policemen blowing a whistle to alert people around of the commission of a crime. It refers to a person who highlights something wrong that is happening, most in an organisation. Now, when I say wrong I mean illegal, but some people consider it includes immoral wrongdoings. So the site first came to prominence when it published Iraq/Afghanistan War Diaries. These gave details of operations and on the ground realities of the wars. They did bring to light some, for lack of a better term, disconcerting revelations. These could be considered whistle blowing, but there are many grey areas, which we overlook for the sake of argument and say this is valid whistle blowing. That, my friends, is where it all ends.
The next major publication was swiftly dubbed Cablegate (hate that name, cf.this post for the explanation). This was the leak of several secret diplomatic cables between Washington DC and diplomatic missions in several countries. Here's where we go from the legally ambiguous to outright illegal and the legitimacy of these leaks as whistle blowing is a little more than questionable.
To explain, let us detail the job of a diplomatic mission to another country. Most of us are familiar with the consular services, that is issuing visas, passports, etc, but that is only their public facing role. Diplomatic envoys are representatives of their sovereign government in a, presumably, friendly nation. It is their duty to not only represent their country, but also provide their country with information about the people, mainly politicians, of that country. As part of this duty, they send back profiles, if you will, on politicians to their government. These are sent in cables, which are private communications.
Notice the emphasis on private. Not only are these communiques private, but some of them are even classified. Granted, they may not be highly classified, but classified all the same. Only a limited number of people have access to these cables and presumably such access comes with a "do not tell anybody about this" clause. This is where the illegality comes in.
Whomsoever gave these cables to Wikileaks is guilty of a few crimes, depending which way you spin it. These range from the banal mail fraud to my personal favourite espionage. It's not even debatable if what these people did is wrong, it just is. Most of these cables do not expose any sort of wrongdoing at all.
As stated before diplomatic envoys report on local politicians. Although I would like to believe that these people are trained for and/or good at judging people, most of what they report is still personal opinion and conjecture. It is just inherent in this type of data. This is essentially office gossip at an international level. I'm pretty sure that someone somewhere has called their new Head of PR an "mistake-prone control freak" (my personal favourite quote out of all of the cables) and that is considered to be normal. Hence, no wrongdoing and thus no whistle blowing.
Furthermore, some of the "data" sent in the cables in nothing more than well crafted misinformation (this is completely ignoring the false cables that were released). Governments are aware that diplomats report back to their capital, as they have their own diplomats doing the same. So they may choose to feed a diplomat false information in the hope that their parent country will believe it and thus be manipulated into behaving a certain way. I will swiftly avoid any ethical or political debate by saying that all of that falls outside my purview.
Yes, I agree that there may be some cables whose leaking may have proved beneficial, but they are a minority. There is a saying in the security industry: "Even f you secure 99% of the system, you have still failed." The cables that potentially have a detrimental effect, though small in number, will have the greatest impact. Barring these, most of the cables' leakage and then release lead to nothing more than embarrassment for the governments involved.
And thus we see that the recent Cablegate (*shudder*) was basically neither legal nor legitimate whistle blowing. Effectively, Wikileaks are just fences for stolen digital data. Now this leaves us with the question of where the blame/responsibility lies. For that, I will put up another post, as it is quite a lengthy matter. That and you are probably really bored of reading this by now.
***SIDENOTE***
Just found this. No real relevance, but it's funny!
I'm sure you have all heard of Wikileaks, the purported whistle blower website. It provides people with an anonymous "drop boxes", where they can submit documents detailing any wrongdoing. The site then goes on to state "our accredited journalists assess the submission. If it meets the criteria, our journalists then write or produce a news piece based on the document." It goes on further to describe ways of ensuring your anonymity when sending it via post and so forth. In theory this has provided whistle blowers with a way to expose wrongdoings. In theory.
I say purported as I do not believe it is a whistle blower site. Firstly, let us examine the concept of whistle blowing. It derives from the practice of policemen blowing a whistle to alert people around of the commission of a crime. It refers to a person who highlights something wrong that is happening, most in an organisation. Now, when I say wrong I mean illegal, but some people consider it includes immoral wrongdoings. So the site first came to prominence when it published Iraq/Afghanistan War Diaries. These gave details of operations and on the ground realities of the wars. They did bring to light some, for lack of a better term, disconcerting revelations. These could be considered whistle blowing, but there are many grey areas, which we overlook for the sake of argument and say this is valid whistle blowing. That, my friends, is where it all ends.
The next major publication was swiftly dubbed Cablegate (hate that name, cf.this post for the explanation). This was the leak of several secret diplomatic cables between Washington DC and diplomatic missions in several countries. Here's where we go from the legally ambiguous to outright illegal and the legitimacy of these leaks as whistle blowing is a little more than questionable.
To explain, let us detail the job of a diplomatic mission to another country. Most of us are familiar with the consular services, that is issuing visas, passports, etc, but that is only their public facing role. Diplomatic envoys are representatives of their sovereign government in a, presumably, friendly nation. It is their duty to not only represent their country, but also provide their country with information about the people, mainly politicians, of that country. As part of this duty, they send back profiles, if you will, on politicians to their government. These are sent in cables, which are private communications.
Notice the emphasis on private. Not only are these communiques private, but some of them are even classified. Granted, they may not be highly classified, but classified all the same. Only a limited number of people have access to these cables and presumably such access comes with a "do not tell anybody about this" clause. This is where the illegality comes in.
Whomsoever gave these cables to Wikileaks is guilty of a few crimes, depending which way you spin it. These range from the banal mail fraud to my personal favourite espionage. It's not even debatable if what these people did is wrong, it just is. Most of these cables do not expose any sort of wrongdoing at all.
As stated before diplomatic envoys report on local politicians. Although I would like to believe that these people are trained for and/or good at judging people, most of what they report is still personal opinion and conjecture. It is just inherent in this type of data. This is essentially office gossip at an international level. I'm pretty sure that someone somewhere has called their new Head of PR an "mistake-prone control freak" (my personal favourite quote out of all of the cables) and that is considered to be normal. Hence, no wrongdoing and thus no whistle blowing.
Furthermore, some of the "data" sent in the cables in nothing more than well crafted misinformation (this is completely ignoring the false cables that were released). Governments are aware that diplomats report back to their capital, as they have their own diplomats doing the same. So they may choose to feed a diplomat false information in the hope that their parent country will believe it and thus be manipulated into behaving a certain way. I will swiftly avoid any ethical or political debate by saying that all of that falls outside my purview.
Yes, I agree that there may be some cables whose leaking may have proved beneficial, but they are a minority. There is a saying in the security industry: "Even f you secure 99% of the system, you have still failed." The cables that potentially have a detrimental effect, though small in number, will have the greatest impact. Barring these, most of the cables' leakage and then release lead to nothing more than embarrassment for the governments involved.
And thus we see that the recent Cablegate (*shudder*) was basically neither legal nor legitimate whistle blowing. Effectively, Wikileaks are just fences for stolen digital data. Now this leaves us with the question of where the blame/responsibility lies. For that, I will put up another post, as it is quite a lengthy matter. That and you are probably really bored of reading this by now.
***SIDENOTE***
Just found this. No real relevance, but it's funny!
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