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An encounter with Google’s security rules

I attended a Google NYC Tech Talk yesterday evening, entitled “Doubleclick Ad Exchange: Connecting the World of Online Advertising“. It was the most interesting of the several I have been to (the sole exception is one highly technical presentation by Victor Miller a year ago on hashing functions). There was a reasonable amount of detail on some of Google’s strategies for ultra low-latency auctioning of internet advertising, and I was able to enjoy the special pleasure that you get from listening to smart people explaining something they know a lot about. If I was not completely won over by three references to the market’s “invisible hand” in various names, that is the result of my own failure to believe, and Google is not to blame for it.

A sideshow to the talk was a closer look than usual at some of Google’s security rules. Nothing extraordinary, and I don’t think I’m putting the company at risk in what follows, but the cumulative effect left me in a state of mellow reflection (possibly not my normal state).

In the large presentation theater, we were told we could take photographs of things within the theater itself but not of anything in the rest of the space, all of which was completely visible from the open-walled theater. Okay, I understand the “I shall avert my eyes” rule and am even able to observe it. But with something over two hundred strangers in the room, I wonder to what extent the company expects such a rule to be honored. Making a rule without enforcing it can weaken one’s authority if someone decides to test it, and that is a risk when the rule isn’t easy to enforce, surely a temptation to some of the contrary among us.

More interesting was the security downstairs. There were a number of people on line at the desk, waiting as a security officer tried to find someone on the phone to authorize a certain person to enter the building. We all had our IDs ready to show him. But a moment came when the officer let through someone who said he was going to be late to the Tech Talk, and then suddenly all of us who said we were going to the same place were waved through — without anyone looking at IDs, printed Meetup “tickets”, official name lists, or anything else. I was glad to get in without further delay, but I think the security officer must have felt the kind of pressure to which a weak functionary is most susceptible — fear that he might get in trouble for holding up something important. I hope the company asks itself what it says to the outside world when a security officer feels weak and is vulnerable to silly time pressure of this kind. For security to be respected, doesn’t it have to appear confident, patient, and utterly unruffled?

Inside security, I faced the familiar little desk with name badges on it, printed from Meetup’s name list. Google is now using a higher quality name badge than it used to. That gave a more professional feeling to the visit than used to be the case, certainly. What made me smile to myself is that, in the lobby of what must be the most technically innovative company now active in the US, these badges were still being sorted by hand, as they have been ever since I started attending the Tech Talks. And this time, the people who were passing them out actually gave me someone else’s badge, without looking at any of my credentials or even trying to pronounce the last name on the badge to me (I spelled mine out for them clearly). I didn’t realize I had gotten the wrong badge until I got home later in the evening and took it off. Only the first letter is the same as in mine.

I guess I should be glad whoever got my badge didn’t get me in trouble — he could have photographed the opulent buffet (in the off-camera section of the meeting space), or stayed behind past the no-peeing hour in the men’s room, or sneaked out of the building through an unauthorized exit stairway (these were accessible but we were warned away from them in tremulous gentleness by a junior employee).

I suppose it’s something to be grateful for when security, so frightening in our society in the past decade, is handled softly — rather than with the ill-concealed hostility that has become common elsewhere.

On the whole, though I’ve been irked with some of Google’s practices in the past weeks, I came away with a better overall impression of the company than I had when I went in, and that surprises me a little, and pleases me, too.

Call-screening in Google Voice has a problem

According to the current version of its call-screening help page , Google stores callers’ spoken names the first time they leave them, and then reuses those names when a call arrives later from the same number.

But that assumes it is the always same person calling from a given number. That is not a safe assumption by any means, and in effect, it disables the call-screening function because you can’t rely on it.

If many different people call from a single phone number — from an organization, say, or a shared phone — you have no way of screening by caller, only by number. That’s not really call-screening — it’s essentially just the same thing as caller ID. Call-screening is when I decide whether I want to take the call depending on who is actually calling, not what number they’re using.

Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) on the damage done by immaturity in politics

Flinders Petrie has counted nine attempts at civilization made by people exactly like us; and every one of them failed just as ours is failing. They failed because the citizens and statesmen died of old age or over-eating before they had grown out of schoolboy games and savage sports and cigars and champagne. … If you cannot organize Socialism you cannot organize civilised life, and you will relapse into barbarism accordingly.

In Back to Methuselah, Part II, (orig. pub. 1921; New York: Penguin Books, 1977): 129–30.

HTTPS being rejected at Yahoo hosting

Someone mentioned that an HTTPS link to a website of mine would not open, while the same request sent as plain HTTP worked normally. That would be something quite new — HTTPS requests to my site were working as recently as last night; I know because I made many of them while writing a webpage.

So I looked up some other sites hosted by Yahoo — choosing some that Yahoo uses to advertise its hosting service (at http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting), sites I could be sure are indeed currently resident at Yahoo. I confirmed independently that they are hosted there: whois lists yahoo.com name servers for all of them. Among the sites are:

  • https://chefaimee.com
  • https://papayadayspa.com
  • https://graceharborindustries.com
  • https://ju-jitsu-center.com

etc. Indeed, all open only with HTTP, not HTTPS.

It may, of course, be an anomalous outage of some sort; none of the sites I checked actually supports secure connections for payment. But my untowardly suspicious mind imagines the problem to be connected to today’s various blackouts in protest against SOPA. The URLs I use to work on my site, as well as one of Yahoo’s secure sites for its own business (https://order.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/order/choosedomain?), have no trouble being accessed by HTTPS, which suggests that this is not a Yahoo-wide problem.

Propagation of a meme and a metameme

I received a humorous circular from a friend, arguing that one of the large-scale design features of the space shuttle derives from the gauge of the Roman wheel-rut, designed to accommodate the width of two chariot-horses. The punchline is “so horses’ arses control everything.”

A few minutes’ Internet search traces the core of this message back to a 1994 posting: http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1994/1994ADL.html (appended below for the record, lest it vanish; accessed 20120102).

I doubt very much that was the first year it appeared. But it’s interesting to see how long these things propagate for. February of 1994 was just about the time I started using the Internet again, after a hiatus of 14 or 15 years. I have a vague recollection of having seen it around that time, and of remembering then that I had heard a school-buddy recounting something similar in the 1970s.

Version of 19940209:

Date: Wed, 9 Feb 94 16:37:01 PST
To: Fun_People
Subject: UBPIOTD (Useless But Possibly Interesting Information Of The Day, natch)

From: Nat Howard
From: Bill Innanen

US Standard Railroad Gauge
or
How MilSpecs Live Forever
————————–

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 ft 8 1/2
in (1.44 m). That’s an exceedingly odd number.

Why is that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England,
and the US railroads were built by English ex patriots.

Why did the English build ‘em like that? Because the first rail lines were
built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s
the gauge they used.

Why did *they* use that gauge then? Because the people who built the
tramways used the same jigs and tools as they used for building wagons,
which used that wheel spacing.

OK! Why did the wagons use that wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use
any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance
roads, because that’s the spacing of the ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in
Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The
roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear
of breaking their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the
chariots were made by or for Imperial Rome they were all alike in the
matter of wheel spacing (ruts again).

Thus we have the answer to the original question.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 ft 8 1/2 in derives from the
original military specification (MilSpec) for an Imperial Roman army war
chariot. MisSpecs [dpb: sic] (and bureaucracies) live forever!

[end]

Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) urging Americans to resist Chinese telephantasmia (1921)

Y. R. Chao attended Cornell on a Boxer Indemnity scholarship, and wrote a number of playful letters to his American friends after returning to China. This appears appended to the first of his circular “Green Letters”, dated Peking, 1921:

Frisco for 3rd time, no emotion for it. Took sight-seeing tour of Chinatown at night. I believe that most Americans in Frisco who are interested in what they think, or purposely represent, to be things Chinese ought to be executed, or at least no-longer-by-me-tabooed-worded. Of course you of Calif, who know me or my like are OK.

Appended to an oral history interview with Rosemary Levenson, 1974. Now posted at http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb8779p27v&chunk.id=div00023&brand=calisphere&doc.view=entire_text. Accessed 20111129.

On telephantasmia, see this post.

Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on doing good work (1978)

Vaclav Havel:

“Every piece of good work is an indirect criticism of bad politics.”

In “The Power of the Powerless” (XIV), Paul Wilson tr. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). On-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-power-of-the-powerless_be62e5917d.pdf, accessed 20111218. See also http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/index.php?sec=2&id=5&setln=2

Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on the “dictatorship of technology” (1978)

Vaclav Havel:

Technology — that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modern metaphysics — is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction. And humanity can find no way out: we have no idea and no faith, and even less do we have a political conception to help us bring things back under human control. We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations (for instance, from our habitat in the widest sense of that word, including our habitat in the biosphere) just as it removes us from the experience of Being and casts us into the world of “existences.” This situation has already been described from many different angles and many individuals and social groups have sought, often painfully, to find ways out of it (for instance, through oriental thought or by forming communes). The only social, or rather political, attempt to do something about it that contains the necessary element of universality (responsibility to and for the whole) is the desperate and, given the turmoil the world is in, fading voice of the ecological movement, and even there the attempt is limited to a particular notion of how to use technology to oppose the dictatorship of technology.

“The Power of the Powerless,” XX, Paul Wilson tr. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). On-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-power-of-the-powerless_be62e5917d.pdf, accessed 20111218. See also http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/index.php?sec=2&id=5&setln=2

Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on ideological enslavement (1978)

Vaclav Havel:

The power structure is enslaved by its own ideology and its ideological prestige.

“The Power of the Powerless,” XVII, Paul Wilson tr. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). On-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-power-of-the-powerless_be62e5917d.pdf, accessed 20111218. See also http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/index.php?sec=2&id=5&setln=2

Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on law (1978)

Vaclav Havel:

Like ideology, the legal code is an essential instrument of ritual communication outside the power structure. It is the legal code that gives the exercise of power a form, a framework, a set of rules. It is the legal code that enables all components of the system to communicate, to put themselves in a good light, to establish their own legitimacy. It provides their whole game with its rules and engineers with their technology. Can the exercise of post-totalitarian power be imagined at all without this universal ritual making it all possible, serving as a common language to bind the relevant sectors of the power structure together? The more important the position occupied by the repressive apparatus in the power structure, the more important that it function according to some kind of formal code.

…

It is possible to imagine a society with good laws that are fully respected but in which it is impossible to live. Conversely, one can imagine life being quite bearable even where the laws are imperfect and imperfectly applied. The most important thing is always the quality of that life and whether or not the laws enhance life or repress it, not merely whether they are upheld or not. (Often strict observance of the law could have a disastrous impact on human dignity.) The key to a humane, dignified, rich, and happy life does not lie either in the constitution or in the Criminal Code. These merely establish what may or may not be done and, thus, they can make life easier or more difficult. They limit or permit, they punish, tolerate, or defend, but they can never give life substance or meaning. The struggle for what is called “legality” must constantly keep this legality in perspective against the background of life as it really is. Without keeping one’s eyes open to the real dimensions of life’s beauty and misery, and without a moral relationship to life, this struggle will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of some self-justifying system of scholastics. Without really wanting to, one would thus become more and more like the observer who comes to conclusions about our system only on the basis of trial documents and is satisfied if all the appropriate regulations have been observed.

“The Power of the Powerless,” XVII, Paul Wilson tr. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). On-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-power-of-the-powerless_be62e5917d.pdf, accessed 20111218. See also http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/index.php?sec=2&id=5&setln=2

Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on ideology (1978)

Vaclav Havel:

In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, … ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’ s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of … ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. (II)

…

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. (III)

…

Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality. (IV)

…

[Ideology] is one of the pillars of [the "post-totalitarian"] system’s external stability. This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie. (V)

…

Individuals can be alienated from themselves only because there is something in them to alienate. The terrain of this violation is their authentic existence. Living the truth is thus woven directly into the texture of living a lie. It is the repressed alternative, the authentic aim to which living a lie is an inauthentic response. Only against this background does living a lie make any sense: it exists because of that background. In its excusatory, chimerical rootedness in the human order, it is a response to nothing other than the human predisposition to truth. Under the orderly surface of the life of lies, therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth. (VIII)

“The Power of the Powerless,” Paul Wilson tr. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). On-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-power-of-the-powerless_be62e5917d.pdf, accessed 20111218. See also http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/index.php?sec=2&id=5&setln=2 where, however, the text appears to have been OCRed but not to have undergone sufficient proofreading.

Richard Feynman on practical applications of the theory of gravitation (1964)

Richard Feynman:

Atypically, among all the other laws of physics, gravitation has relatively few practical applications — I mean the new knowledge of the law; it has a lot of practical applications: it keeps people in their seats, and so on. But the new knowledge of the law has few practical applications relatively speaking, compared to the other laws. … The only applications I could think of were, first, in some geophysical prospecting; in predicting the tides; nowadays, more modernly, in working out the motions of the satellites and planet probes and so on that we send up; and also, modernly, to calculate the predictions of the planets’s position[s], which have great utility for astrologers to publish their predictions and horoscopes in the magazines. That’s the strange world we live in: that all the advances in understanding are used only to continue the nonsense which has existed for two thousand years.

— “The Character of Physical Law, Part 1.” Lecture at Cornell University, 1964. Online at http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/richard-feynman-the-character-of-physical-law/ (accessed 20111203), time: 36:59–38:11.

Y. R. Chao on his dissertation (1974)

Yuen Ren Chao 趙元任, the historical and descriptive linguist of Chinese, wrote his doctoral dissertation on logic in Harvard’s Department of Philosophy (1918). He later recalled:

Professor [Henry M. Sheffer] was really very meticulous; he was in charge of my thesis on “Continuity: A Study in Methodology,” concerned with the question of the difference between a difference of degree and difference of kind, and when it’s a difference of kind, is it also a difference of degree.

I remember at the defense of the thesis, at which Professor William Ernest Hocking was chairman, after they announced that I had passed the examination, Professor Hocking asked me, “Do you feel that writing on such a subject has had any effect on your life?” I said, “Certainly it didn’t help me in my habits of indecision.”

…

[from First "Green Letter", Peking, 1921:] [My dissertation] prov[ed] that it was impossible to prove anything and conclud[ed] that no universal proposition was true.

Quoted from an oral history interview with Rosemary Levenson, 1974. Now posted at http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb8779p27v&chunk.id=div00023&brand=calisphere&doc.view=entire_text . Accessed 20111129.

Edsger Dijkstra on anthropomorphizing computers (2001)

Edsger Dijkstra, from an oral history interview with Philip Frana in 2001:

One of the most devious things we do is existing in time and the use of anthropomorphic terminology forces you linguistically to adopt an operational view. And it makes it practically impossible, at least very difficult to argue about programs independently of their possibility of being executed.

Edsger W. Dijkstra, OH 330. Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 2 August 2001, Austin, Texas. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. http://purl.umn.edu/107247. P. 16 of PDF.

The abbreviation UTC as an acronym

In “Daylight Saving Time is a huge mess”, posted to blog “The Endeavor” on 20111106, John D. Cook writes:

The abbreviation UTC [dpb: the non-Anglocentric successor to "Greenwich Mean Time"] is an odd compromise. The French wanted to use the abbreviation TUC (temps universel coordonné) and the English wanted to use CUT (coordinated universal time). The compromise was UTC, which doesn’t actually abbreviate anything.

Actually, it abbreviates the squabbling between the English and the French over whose language is to be dominant. Perhaps it is a good model for other such cases.

View of the Mariana Trench

The BBC Natural History Unit documentary Deep Blue (2003) contains only a little information delivered verbally and is noteworthy mostly for its beautiful photography, drawn from the Blue Planet series.

It contains a couple of really stunning views into the Mariana Trench from above — worth renting the whole movie just to see, if you ask me.

Tinker Tailor remake

A friend has sent me this review (http://www.economist.com/node/21529004) of the new film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a favorite book of mine.

I have misgivings. I have misgivings about seeing any film made of any book I really enjoyed — I’m afraid my own involved visualization will be supplanted by the film’s. I turned off the Alec Guinness version six minutes in — all, all wrong, wrong. Louis Mazzini, Henry St. James, Col. Nicholson, yes; George Smiley, no.

Rarely does any movie come near reproducing sensations as complex as I have when I read a good book. Explicitness washes out subtlety; images wash out words.

The one temptation is the review’s hint that there might be a new angle on the character of Mr. Smiley: “…there’s a sadistic side that Mr Oldman has brought carefully to the surface.” Hm.

Clearly, if I had expected to avoid torment in this life my expectations were impossibly unrealistic.

Break-in?

To my surprise, when checking in to the security-setting page of one of my less-used Google accounts, I found that “jyte.rpxnow.com”, an entity unknown to me, had been “granted access” to the account.

I am considerably more cautious about my email than most people I know – I never access it on any but my own computers, and I use 2-step verification, SSL and other secure protocols, and various other security features.

I’m aware of having visited Jyte.com only once, in 2009, and for various reasons I’m sure this unauthorized access was set up only in the last month or so.