Unemployment is a majorly complained-about problem. Workers dislike the inherent poverty, and companies dislike having to search for, hire, and continue to motivate workers. So let's make it easier to get a job, which should benefit everybody. More people might quit, but they'll quit in favor of a job they prefer.
Various human traits are involved with successful employment. There are a number of models I could draw from, but I'm going to draw from Dungeon's and Dragons, which put together a simplistic model to enable people to pretend to be people very different from themselves. (If forced to play their own self, D&D groups would be radically unbalanced.) It produces six scales of traits, three physical, and three mental, which are randomly generated at the start of play. (You roll three dice to get the numbers. Everyone WANTS high numbers, but the dice effectively take it out of human control.) Over simplistic, perhaps, but if I make this system too complex, it'll collapse under its own weight.
Personality also makes a difference. A salesman and a computer programmer will need wildly different personalities to succeed in their respective fields. If you forced one to take the other's job, they would be miserable. Again, I have an oversimplified model of the Myers-Brigg's tests that boil personality down to four key traits. Introversion vs. Extroversion, Intuition vs. Sensing, Thoughts vs. Feelings, and Perception vs. Judgment.
I'll talk about D&D for a while, if you're familiar with the game, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs or so. I'll also talk about good ways to improve yourself in that field, so it may be good reading anyway.
The D&D traits are strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. The three-dice system generates numbers between 3 and 18, so 3 was arbitrarily decided to be the lowest-end of this trait found in humankind, and 18 the highest. A person with 3 strength breaks their arm while toweling off after a bath, while a person with 18 strength weight-lifts for fun and can easily ram through doors and rip handcuffs off their wrists.
Strength is, of course, having big muscles and a great ability to exert physical force. The best way to improve yourself, if you think you're deficient here, is to lift weights. Also, avoid watching television, as sitting still makes your body reabsorb the muscle.
Dexterity in D&D involves both the ability to move out of the way of obstacles, reflexes and so on, and also the ability to do fine work with your fingers. I'd split this for my model into body-dexterity (do gymnastics, dance), and finger dexterity (put this tiny gem into this ring and close the tiny wire around it). This is again improved by practice, so dancing and gymnastics will, if done daily, improve your body dexterity, and doing small-scale work like knitting or making miniatures is a great idea for finger dexterity.
Constitution is a general healthiness. A person with great constitution can both fight off disease and keep exerting themselves for hours. Constitution isn't technically a requirement for any job, but companies would prefer to hire workers with great constitution, as they will have fewer sick days, and put less strain on the health insurance. To improve yours, get regular aerobic exercise, eat a varied diet, but not too much or too little, and be sure to sleep consistently, enough, and at the same time every night. (Human bodies are odd about sleep!)
Intelligence is a general catchall of the ability to reason, learn, and remember. It is controversial, because it is ill defined and a major part of human identity. (D&D asserts that all animals have an INT score of 1 or 2, much much lower than any human. This seems...dubious.) Reading is great for this trait, if you think about what you've read. Education is also great exercise for it. This actually matters less than most people think it does.
Wisdom is an ill-defined trait that enables you to notice things. A person with high wisdom is observant, contemplative, and understanding. A person with poor wisdom is absent-minded, distracted, and impulsive. A high wisdom score is essential for any knowledge work, or unpredictable field. Improve yours with quiet reflection, meditative hobbies, and perhaps a trip to a museum. Avoid jangly, distracting mediums such as television.
Charisma is the ability to influence people using charm and force of personality. As a word, it derives from the Greek for "favor,' as they assumed that charismatic people were blessed by the gods. Anyone who wishes to have a public-facing job will need this. There are a lot of disagreements as to if you can influence your own or not. The closest one I can think of to a reliable improvement in charisma is acting classes. It also helps to be sociable, hygienic, and witty.
Okay, the D&D nerd-out is over. You may resume reading.
Now the Myers-Briggs. These two psychologists felt that all people had all eight of these traits, but balanced differently, with one more profoundly showing through, and one only meekly and privately. The one that is shown vs. the one that isn't reveals traits in personality. Let's go over the four dichotomies.
The first is introversion vs. extroversion. An introvert is more concerned with his or her own internal self and ideas, is worn out by social contact (whether they seek it or not), and tends to have a few close friends. An extrovert, in contrast, is more interested in other people, feels built up and excited by other people, and feels "faded away" when alone. They have many friends, most of them more casually than the introvert.
The second is Intuition vs. Sensing. The Intuitive types seek abstraction and big systematic understanding, and the Sensing types prefer the concrete, direct, and small details.
The third is Thinking vs. Feeling. Thinkers put weight into logic, Feelers demand emotional positions. A Feeler will find a Thinker cold and inhuman, a Thinker will find a Feeler irrational and silly. (But both have important roles to play in a civilization.)
The last is Perception vs. Judgment. Perceivers want to keep the options open until they have enough evidence to make a decision, whereas Judgers want to have a plan ahead of time.
Myers and Briggs both assert that only the person themselves has true knowledge about where they would fall, but a number of tests on the internet can offer their advice.
Next up, how to use these traits to find a job you'll be happy with.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Artificial Diet
A current interest at the moment that I constantly see promoted is "all natural diet." People worry that preservatives and processed foods are ruining their health, and so wish to replace processed food with naturally grown fruits and vegetables. Everywhere I go I see food vendors brag about how natural and unprocessed their food is.
I can see why they would claim that, since food processing tends to leech micronutrients from the food, and people show a marked preference for anything natural over anything artificial. The processed food tries to make it up with an "enrichment" process, but they don't add much back. One writer compared it to being "robbed of $25, and refunded 99 cents."
However, the contrarian in me notes that "natural" doesn't mean "good for your health" necessarily. Arsenic and cyanide are natural, while the vitamin C capsules I occasionally take are utterly artificial. So I'd like to try, as an experiment, an all artificial diet. Everything I would consume for the week would be synthesized in a laboratory. No plants, no animals, just tablets and powders.
Part of what I would learn is the state of understanding of human diet. When proteins were isolated from carbohydrates and fats, it was noted that proteins helped people survive. So "protein" means literally "essential to life." At this time, it was assumed that protein was enough to survive on. Which it wasn't, really. Sailors often developed deficiency diseases like scurvy, because all they had to eat was hardtack. Scurvy was assumed to just be some kind of seaborne disease.
Then vitamins were discovered. These are trace nutrients that you need to survive. A proof was developed that giving a scurvy sufferer citrus fruit, (all of which is rich in vitamin C), cured their scurvy. The idea of vitamins made such an impact on the public that to this day there is a pseudomedicine that revolves around the idea of megadoses of vitamins curing all disease. (Suppliments may help your immune system, but this is otherwise wrong.)
Then it was discovered that traces of certain minerals were also necessary. In the 19th century, anemia was a disease of young, unmarried women, and for sociological reasons, cured by marriage. This was because her father likely skimped on providing her with certain foods, (especially expensive red meat), whereas her new husband had every reason to feed her properly. Iron, magnesium, copper, calcium, phosphorus, zinc, chromium, sodium, and potassium are all needed by the body in trace amounts. Too much also creates problems.
If there are any additional dietary needs, they are not known. By performing this experiment, I hope to discover them. At the end of the week, I would have a physical exam and resume my existing diet. I am also hoping that synthesized food proves cheaper than natural, but probably not unless produced in bulk.
I can see why they would claim that, since food processing tends to leech micronutrients from the food, and people show a marked preference for anything natural over anything artificial. The processed food tries to make it up with an "enrichment" process, but they don't add much back. One writer compared it to being "robbed of $25, and refunded 99 cents."
However, the contrarian in me notes that "natural" doesn't mean "good for your health" necessarily. Arsenic and cyanide are natural, while the vitamin C capsules I occasionally take are utterly artificial. So I'd like to try, as an experiment, an all artificial diet. Everything I would consume for the week would be synthesized in a laboratory. No plants, no animals, just tablets and powders.
Part of what I would learn is the state of understanding of human diet. When proteins were isolated from carbohydrates and fats, it was noted that proteins helped people survive. So "protein" means literally "essential to life." At this time, it was assumed that protein was enough to survive on. Which it wasn't, really. Sailors often developed deficiency diseases like scurvy, because all they had to eat was hardtack. Scurvy was assumed to just be some kind of seaborne disease.
Then vitamins were discovered. These are trace nutrients that you need to survive. A proof was developed that giving a scurvy sufferer citrus fruit, (all of which is rich in vitamin C), cured their scurvy. The idea of vitamins made such an impact on the public that to this day there is a pseudomedicine that revolves around the idea of megadoses of vitamins curing all disease. (Suppliments may help your immune system, but this is otherwise wrong.)
Then it was discovered that traces of certain minerals were also necessary. In the 19th century, anemia was a disease of young, unmarried women, and for sociological reasons, cured by marriage. This was because her father likely skimped on providing her with certain foods, (especially expensive red meat), whereas her new husband had every reason to feed her properly. Iron, magnesium, copper, calcium, phosphorus, zinc, chromium, sodium, and potassium are all needed by the body in trace amounts. Too much also creates problems.
If there are any additional dietary needs, they are not known. By performing this experiment, I hope to discover them. At the end of the week, I would have a physical exam and resume my existing diet. I am also hoping that synthesized food proves cheaper than natural, but probably not unless produced in bulk.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Light Up Purse
At I Heart Switch, women talk about using electronic engineering to improve their lives. A recent project of theirs was about purses. Almost all purse carrying in the US is done by women, as a replacement for pockets that women's clothing often doesn't have and men's clothes almost always does. A common problem with purses is that they are dark inside, forcing the user to fumble around until she feels the tool she was looking for. This is even worse in unlit places like raves, movie theaters, and bars, where overhead illumination is insufficient to see even the top layer of the purse's contents.
So I Heart Switch's solution was an internally lit purse that activated a small light when the purse was open, and turning this light off when the purse was closed. A magnet determines the open/closed state of the purse, and a 9V battery provides the power. For aesthetic reasons, the battery, electronics, and back of the light can be sewn into fabric strips, which would then be sewn to the sides of the purse. The fabric strips conceal the electronics, which shouldn't be removed anyway.
The creator of this ingenious invention, Ms. Lewis, made a short video about its production.
So I Heart Switch's solution was an internally lit purse that activated a small light when the purse was open, and turning this light off when the purse was closed. A magnet determines the open/closed state of the purse, and a 9V battery provides the power. For aesthetic reasons, the battery, electronics, and back of the light can be sewn into fabric strips, which would then be sewn to the sides of the purse. The fabric strips conceal the electronics, which shouldn't be removed anyway.
The creator of this ingenious invention, Ms. Lewis, made a short video about its production.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
More On Water
Scott Adams, the former engineer cartoonist who writes Dilbert, predicts that the next crisis will be a water shortage. I can believe this, with more and more regions worried about not having enough clean and potable water to get by. For all my life, my birth region of southern California has imported all its drinking water from northern California, which in turn has been importing it from northwestern California. All regions that I know of are straining their dwindling resources on this matter.
Only a tiny amount of this is due to direct human consumption. I personally drink about 1 gallon per day, but bathe (~60 gallons), wash (~20 gallons), and water (~50 gallons?) far more. The thirstiest work of all being agriculture, since all plants are quite thirsty, and animals often even moreso. A cow can drink it's own weight in water every week, in addition to needing to water its food, wash the cow, and so on.
This seems deeply ironic, because the earth is some 75% covered in water. However, much of this is the salt water of the ocean, useful for neither drinking nor washing. We humans are animals that must remain isotonic, that is, having the "same" volume of salt inside and outside our cells, to survive. Drinking salt water would only serve to strain your kidneys and make you thirstier still. Washing with salt water would render your cleaning agents useless, as well as leave a corrosive salty deposit covering the surface of whatever you washed.
Some of what remains is too polluted to drink. Many bodies of water in the US are contaminated with various chemicals, such as PCBs, mine tailings, and pesticides, and no longer fit for human consumption. Many others have an excess population of bacteria, amoebas, and other microorganisms that render drinking them unsafe.
There are ways to clean this water, but all of them are expensive, impractical, and require considerable energy input. So anytime we pollute water, we're really shooting ourselves in the foot. Other techniques are politically unfeasable, like water reprocessing. Australia is a very thirsty desert continent, but it can't reprocess the used water because that disgusts people. Any government that tried would see itself promptly losing the next election.
We should invest in water-processing technology, that we might all have non-vile water for our uses. We should also refill the various resource's we've been tapping, lest they all run dry. Perhaps we can refill lakes with reprocessed water, as the lake's native life does not know or care where it's water has been, whereas the human population definitely does.
Only a tiny amount of this is due to direct human consumption. I personally drink about 1 gallon per day, but bathe (~60 gallons), wash (~20 gallons), and water (~50 gallons?) far more. The thirstiest work of all being agriculture, since all plants are quite thirsty, and animals often even moreso. A cow can drink it's own weight in water every week, in addition to needing to water its food, wash the cow, and so on.
This seems deeply ironic, because the earth is some 75% covered in water. However, much of this is the salt water of the ocean, useful for neither drinking nor washing. We humans are animals that must remain isotonic, that is, having the "same" volume of salt inside and outside our cells, to survive. Drinking salt water would only serve to strain your kidneys and make you thirstier still. Washing with salt water would render your cleaning agents useless, as well as leave a corrosive salty deposit covering the surface of whatever you washed.
Some of what remains is too polluted to drink. Many bodies of water in the US are contaminated with various chemicals, such as PCBs, mine tailings, and pesticides, and no longer fit for human consumption. Many others have an excess population of bacteria, amoebas, and other microorganisms that render drinking them unsafe.
There are ways to clean this water, but all of them are expensive, impractical, and require considerable energy input. So anytime we pollute water, we're really shooting ourselves in the foot. Other techniques are politically unfeasable, like water reprocessing. Australia is a very thirsty desert continent, but it can't reprocess the used water because that disgusts people. Any government that tried would see itself promptly losing the next election.
We should invest in water-processing technology, that we might all have non-vile water for our uses. We should also refill the various resource's we've been tapping, lest they all run dry. Perhaps we can refill lakes with reprocessed water, as the lake's native life does not know or care where it's water has been, whereas the human population definitely does.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Human Flesh Search -- Banned!
On the Chinese Internet, outraged posters have had a technique for a while that is loosely translated as "Human Flesh Search Engine." Basically, they harness the six-degrees-of-separation effect, and ask their friends about things, who ask their friends, who eventually know the information they seek. The information they seek is usually the identity of a person who has made a particularly obnoxious posting.
Eventually, they get the person's information and some extra photos and possibly his address. This is enough to physically find him and lay his comeuppance upon him. Or if not physical revenge, an interview with his mother, where she talks about how he used to wet the bed or some other humiliating tidbit.
Since one popular target of Human Flesh Searches are corrupt government officials (who get their private addresses revealed for harassment's sake), the city of Xuzhou has passed a regulation, to come into force on June 1st of this year, forbidding the human flesh search. It prohibits posting anything deemed to be private, and penalties range from a 1000 yuan fine (~$250?) to prohibition from using a computer at all for six months. The use of the term "human flesh search" is also forbidden
Public reaction has been so far to threaten to human flesh search the city officials, thus revealing their private addresses, to declare human flesh searching to be a human right, and threats to move to elsewhere where it remains legal. As far as New Jersey. (read: America)
This capability has long been noted in Chinese society. Pamphlets in World War II advised American soldiers that extensive social contacts in the country made asking around random people you hired the best means of gathering information. (Although these same pamphlets also suggested avoiding racism and other things that are quite obvious today but weren't in 1941.) However, it's only recently that the Internet has also been available in China, and appreciable results produced from this.
On one hand, I do approve of fighting corruption. On the other hand, this can so easily be abused. People are human-flesh searched for disagreeing with group-think, for being attractive and female, for "embarrassing" China in any fashion (including things that are not controversial in any other country), for general insufferable-ness, or for posting something stupid. And being searched could ruin your life if you are found. Targets have been threatened with vandalism, murder, and torture. (Admittedly, the worse one's internet "crime," the worse the results of being found. The murder and torture threats were mostly against criminal and evil government officials.)
Is the benefit from woman being able to be on the Internet without a thousand skeeves knowing where she lives worth the loss of an important way to encourage honesty in government? For that matter, will the ban do anything other than encourage a new euphemism for the same practices? (Some commenters seemed nonplussed by the threatened penalties.) Can the human flesh search be wielded for the use of good without succumbing to the temptations of evil?
Eventually, they get the person's information and some extra photos and possibly his address. This is enough to physically find him and lay his comeuppance upon him. Or if not physical revenge, an interview with his mother, where she talks about how he used to wet the bed or some other humiliating tidbit.
Since one popular target of Human Flesh Searches are corrupt government officials (who get their private addresses revealed for harassment's sake), the city of Xuzhou has passed a regulation, to come into force on June 1st of this year, forbidding the human flesh search. It prohibits posting anything deemed to be private, and penalties range from a 1000 yuan fine (~$250?) to prohibition from using a computer at all for six months. The use of the term "human flesh search" is also forbidden
Public reaction has been so far to threaten to human flesh search the city officials, thus revealing their private addresses, to declare human flesh searching to be a human right, and threats to move to elsewhere where it remains legal. As far as New Jersey. (read: America)
This capability has long been noted in Chinese society. Pamphlets in World War II advised American soldiers that extensive social contacts in the country made asking around random people you hired the best means of gathering information. (Although these same pamphlets also suggested avoiding racism and other things that are quite obvious today but weren't in 1941.) However, it's only recently that the Internet has also been available in China, and appreciable results produced from this.
On one hand, I do approve of fighting corruption. On the other hand, this can so easily be abused. People are human-flesh searched for disagreeing with group-think, for being attractive and female, for "embarrassing" China in any fashion (including things that are not controversial in any other country), for general insufferable-ness, or for posting something stupid. And being searched could ruin your life if you are found. Targets have been threatened with vandalism, murder, and torture. (Admittedly, the worse one's internet "crime," the worse the results of being found. The murder and torture threats were mostly against criminal and evil government officials.)
Is the benefit from woman being able to be on the Internet without a thousand skeeves knowing where she lives worth the loss of an important way to encourage honesty in government? For that matter, will the ban do anything other than encourage a new euphemism for the same practices? (Some commenters seemed nonplussed by the threatened penalties.) Can the human flesh search be wielded for the use of good without succumbing to the temptations of evil?
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Holy Wars
If there's one thing I've thought weird about my particular field of expertise, it is the tendency of experts in computer science to engage in "holy wars," in which a particular practice is irrationally touted as "the one true way," and all opposing tendencies are denounced as evil.
Holy wars emerge on all kinds of matters. Long ago there were editor wars, in which people argued about the one-true-way(tm) to edit text. There were two competing programs in mainframes, vi and emacs. Vi was super-minimalistic, designed for low-bandwidth connections. Every byte counted, so it avoided sending extraneous information. Emacs was a highly detailed editor that allowed you to do all kinds of tasks to the text while you edited it. This was helpful because much of the text being edited was program-code, and emacs could compile it for you, show you the results, and bring you back to the code. With a keystroke. Emacs could also debug, spell check, and if you were feeling depressed about your code not working, it had "ELIZA," an imitation psychologist based on a school of psychology that rephrased your questions to give you a new perspective.
In the editor wars, the opposite tendencies of each side were routinely mocked. Vi fanatics ridiculed emacs's complexity ("Escape-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift," because emacs editing often involved hitting chords of keys to trigger particular tasks), the code size, ("Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". Eight megabytes was a lot of memory back then.) and the tendency to do everything within the editor. ("It's not an editor, it's an OPERATING SYSTEM.") Emacs fans found Vi oversimplified, and therefore stupid. But rather than see it as a matter of preference (which it was), the other faction was "evil" for not accepting your assumptions as true.
Celebrities in the field also promote holy wars. Let us take the case of Edsger Dijkstra. Mr. Dijkstra is a brilliant programmer who invented the shuttling yard algorithm, taught at Texas A&M, and seriously caused a revolution in networking. He also has an utter hatred of unconditional jumps as a programming technique. Most languages use the keyword "goto" to do unconditional jump, and Mr. Dijkstra wrote an essay denouncing it as "Goto considered harmful." He also despises COBOL, although to be fair, so do most people who have used it.
These little quibbles are called "Holy wars" after their resemblance to "religious" fights in the past -- the stakes are small, the fighting is vicious, and after all is said and done, little is gained. The practitioners are convinced of the superiority of their own way of doing things and offended by the very existence of alternatives.
Currently running holy wars in computer science include Windows vs. Macs, GPL vs. BSD, proper tabbing for programming (in which tabs often suggest which loops belong where, but how many spaces per tab is hotly contested), GUI vs CLI, KDE vs. Gnome, and scripting vs. compiling.
The strange thing is, I really don't see much of this in other fields. I don't see Jungian psychologists having a slap-fight against the Freudians. I don't see vicious, insult-riddled debates between architects, even among the many schools of design with conflicting ideas. I've yet to hear of the Cubist painters swearing that Pointillism was eviler than eating babies. Is this because I talk to more Computer Scientists than other majors, or does CS just inherently attract mostly insufferably picky people?
Holy wars emerge on all kinds of matters. Long ago there were editor wars, in which people argued about the one-true-way(tm) to edit text. There were two competing programs in mainframes, vi and emacs. Vi was super-minimalistic, designed for low-bandwidth connections. Every byte counted, so it avoided sending extraneous information. Emacs was a highly detailed editor that allowed you to do all kinds of tasks to the text while you edited it. This was helpful because much of the text being edited was program-code, and emacs could compile it for you, show you the results, and bring you back to the code. With a keystroke. Emacs could also debug, spell check, and if you were feeling depressed about your code not working, it had "ELIZA," an imitation psychologist based on a school of psychology that rephrased your questions to give you a new perspective.
In the editor wars, the opposite tendencies of each side were routinely mocked. Vi fanatics ridiculed emacs's complexity ("Escape-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift," because emacs editing often involved hitting chords of keys to trigger particular tasks), the code size, ("Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". Eight megabytes was a lot of memory back then.) and the tendency to do everything within the editor. ("It's not an editor, it's an OPERATING SYSTEM.") Emacs fans found Vi oversimplified, and therefore stupid. But rather than see it as a matter of preference (which it was), the other faction was "evil" for not accepting your assumptions as true.
Celebrities in the field also promote holy wars. Let us take the case of Edsger Dijkstra. Mr. Dijkstra is a brilliant programmer who invented the shuttling yard algorithm, taught at Texas A&M, and seriously caused a revolution in networking. He also has an utter hatred of unconditional jumps as a programming technique. Most languages use the keyword "goto" to do unconditional jump, and Mr. Dijkstra wrote an essay denouncing it as "Goto considered harmful." He also despises COBOL, although to be fair, so do most people who have used it.
These little quibbles are called "Holy wars" after their resemblance to "religious" fights in the past -- the stakes are small, the fighting is vicious, and after all is said and done, little is gained. The practitioners are convinced of the superiority of their own way of doing things and offended by the very existence of alternatives.
Currently running holy wars in computer science include Windows vs. Macs, GPL vs. BSD, proper tabbing for programming (in which tabs often suggest which loops belong where, but how many spaces per tab is hotly contested), GUI vs CLI, KDE vs. Gnome, and scripting vs. compiling.
The strange thing is, I really don't see much of this in other fields. I don't see Jungian psychologists having a slap-fight against the Freudians. I don't see vicious, insult-riddled debates between architects, even among the many schools of design with conflicting ideas. I've yet to hear of the Cubist painters swearing that Pointillism was eviler than eating babies. Is this because I talk to more Computer Scientists than other majors, or does CS just inherently attract mostly insufferably picky people?
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Security
XKCD is an online comic about math, science, and nerd issues in general, that, this previous monday, made an interesting commentary on security in general.
In the strip, he compares what most cryptology fans assume would happen with strong encryption, that their secrets are safe because it is mathematically difficult to retrieve the information, verses the actual ugly truth.
Anyone willing to spend a million dollars to decode the contents of your hard drive by force is also willing to savagely beat you with a rubber hose, (or in Mr. Monroe's strip, a $5 wrench) until you reveal the password needed to access the information. For you see, all security has some point of failure. By installing this extensive cryptography system, the point of failure has been moved from the seizing of the hard drive, to the unfortunate sensitive flesh of the owner.
Let us say that I have an irrational (or even justified) fear of home invasion, so I spend a million dollars hardening my door. My front door is now able to endure blasts of dynamite without structural damage, is essentially impossible to pick, and repels abrupt force. Let us also say that you wish to break in and steal something of mine. Maybe my stereo happens to be more awesome than yours and you want it. Maybe I have state secrets that you wish to give to a rival state. Maybe you want to arrest me because I've committed a crime. It doesn't matter why you want in, how will you do it?
Probably, you'll either bust down a side or back door, or break one of my windows and hop through it. I didn't think to reinforce those, so you make it in easily. And then my awesome stereo / state secrets / stack of money / body/ whatever it is that you wanted is yours to grab.
Perhaps you think that it is pessimistic to assert that perfect security is impossible. It doesn't need to be, though. I don't need to make my front door impossible to pick if my neighbors tend to call the police if they see someone strange fiddling at my door for more than five minutes. The safe I keep my money in need only hold off any safe cracker until I can show up with a weapon to threaten him for trying to steal from me. And if I ever need a bulletproof car, it need not resist an infinite barrage, merely keep me un-shot enough to get to the airport and get the hell out of that city.
Security is about making your point of failure impractical, not impossible. A burglar will prefer to rob that other house up the street, the one that the door never closes properly and the neighbors all hate him for blaring music at 4am. Don't be that guy and your things are reasonably safe.
In the strip, he compares what most cryptology fans assume would happen with strong encryption, that their secrets are safe because it is mathematically difficult to retrieve the information, verses the actual ugly truth.
Anyone willing to spend a million dollars to decode the contents of your hard drive by force is also willing to savagely beat you with a rubber hose, (or in Mr. Monroe's strip, a $5 wrench) until you reveal the password needed to access the information. For you see, all security has some point of failure. By installing this extensive cryptography system, the point of failure has been moved from the seizing of the hard drive, to the unfortunate sensitive flesh of the owner.
Let us say that I have an irrational (or even justified) fear of home invasion, so I spend a million dollars hardening my door. My front door is now able to endure blasts of dynamite without structural damage, is essentially impossible to pick, and repels abrupt force. Let us also say that you wish to break in and steal something of mine. Maybe my stereo happens to be more awesome than yours and you want it. Maybe I have state secrets that you wish to give to a rival state. Maybe you want to arrest me because I've committed a crime. It doesn't matter why you want in, how will you do it?
Probably, you'll either bust down a side or back door, or break one of my windows and hop through it. I didn't think to reinforce those, so you make it in easily. And then my awesome stereo / state secrets / stack of money / body/ whatever it is that you wanted is yours to grab.
Perhaps you think that it is pessimistic to assert that perfect security is impossible. It doesn't need to be, though. I don't need to make my front door impossible to pick if my neighbors tend to call the police if they see someone strange fiddling at my door for more than five minutes. The safe I keep my money in need only hold off any safe cracker until I can show up with a weapon to threaten him for trying to steal from me. And if I ever need a bulletproof car, it need not resist an infinite barrage, merely keep me un-shot enough to get to the airport and get the hell out of that city.
Security is about making your point of failure impractical, not impossible. A burglar will prefer to rob that other house up the street, the one that the door never closes properly and the neighbors all hate him for blaring music at 4am. Don't be that guy and your things are reasonably safe.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
