Month: January 2014

Here’s a survey across 7 muslim-majority countries, asking what form of dress is most appropriate for women in public:

More here. The ultimate source is apparently the Middle Eastern Values Study at the University of Michegan, but I’ve not been able to track down fuller details. I’d love to see breakdowns by gender and age, and changes over time.

Somebody had fun writing this news report about Cormac McCarthy’s ex-wife:

A domestic dispute over space aliens escalated Saturday morning when a lingerie-clad New Mexico woman allegedly pointed a silver handgun at her boyfriend, a weapon she retrieved from her vagina, where it had been placed while the accused was performing a sex act, police allege.

…

While using the gat as a sex toy, McCarthy reportedly asked her boyfriend, “Who is crazy, you or me?” The probable cause statement, drafted by Deputy Chris Zook, does not indicate whether McCarthy’s boyfriend dared to answer that query.

If nothing else, the story makes this customs report from Jordan more understandable:

Jordan Customs Department (JCD) staff in Aqaba on Wednesday foiled an attempt to smuggle 69,000 pills of Viagra sexual enhancement, as well as 18,984 toy pistols.

My friend Sam is a remarkable hacker-activist, and one of the most

aware

people I have encountered. He listens deeply to the people around him, and opens himself to the spirit as well as the practicalities of what they are creating. Schooled first by electrical engineering and then by the occupy movement, he has now entwined those threads by developing into a nomadic technical contributer to all kinds of projects.

Thus I’m watching with interest his growing interest in permaculture, Open Source Ecology and related ideas.

Until now, I hadn’t paid much attention to these ideas. I’m temperamentally unsuited to living in a farming commune. Most discussion of permaculture seemed to come from people with a very different makeup to me: enraptured by the natural world, seeking a life of quiet stability in a small community.

So Sam’s approach caught my attention, if only for the superficial reason that he makes farming into slightly less of an impossible lifestyle choice:

You…start to tend the land by using natural processes to get the land to become ‘regenerated’ and then a productive living system gradually over your lifetime and transformed from dead soil or useless land into living soil and a forest garden in which you have planted trees that take 15 or 20 years to grow and can then sustain / feed you

All the while you continue on with your normal life elsewhere in the city or travelling or whatever… but through well timed purposeful, organised planting, sowing, watching and community building it can yield food and fuel. Then your land has more value over time and you then kind of inherit it later in your own life as a living system that will support you and others with fuel and food….

The way I would see it, I would attend the site at various points during my life to gently shape and guide the process but, for the most part, nature would take its course and the land and the system that would be developing there would be largely auto-catalytic and autonomous.

The full post is well worth reading. It steps much further back, linking agriculture to design and to some of the ideas of Buckminster Fuller:

I started to think about how I could use design to change the environment around me in such a way that would extend my internal functions and reorganise my environment so that it would work for me… so that it would, in the fullness of time, support me… as I think of my own future, I would like to eventually create a living system, by which I probably mean a forest garden, which I had designed after much studying and having made the tools to make the tools to make the tools.

Cory Doctorow is as pessimistic as can be about the web in 2014. He thinks a netflix-driven drive from DRM is going to turn most HTML5 interfaces unseeable and unmodifiable:

Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them (because reporting a security flaw in DRM exposes you to risk of prosecution for making a circumvention device), so they will be riddled with holes that creeps, RATters, spooks, authoritarians and crooks will be able to use to take over your computer and fuck you in every possible way.

As near as I can work out, there’s no one poised to do anything about this. Google, Apple and Microsoft have all built proprietary DRM silos that backed the WC3 into accepting standardization work on DRM

Molly Crabapple has a great interview with Art Spiegelman. Some favourite bits:

style is the residue of trying to do it right

By their nature, [comics] are not respectful. As a result, a lot of wild shit comes through. Even when people are trying to do pro-Assad cartoons, there’s all this stuff that leaks out. Because his version of the public narrative of what he’s about is too dissonant with the actual narrative.

I find it very hard to submit work because of [fear that editors won’t like it]. Like I would rather set up a system where I have enablers.

Enablers?


Instead of editors. It’s like, “OK, you want to do something? Here’s some space. Do it.” Now it’s not practical. I’ve been an editor. You can’t run a railroad that way.

I get it but I have a very hard time fulfilling my part of it, which is submission. “Here! Take me! I’m yours!” I can’t do it.

I’ve been working lately with Tolga Tanış of

Hurriyet

, to document weapons reaching Syria through Turkey — and to back the Turkish government into admitting their tolerance of it.

Turkish officials had furiously denied allowing weapons into Syria. That is, until Tolga’s column forced them to backtrack. At this point the defence minister finally accepted that Turkey had exported “non-military weapons” to Syria.

Tolga’s article was based on Turkish customs records collected in Turkstat, and then incorporated into Comtrade, the UN’s global trade database. From June, Turkish customs started recording exports under international category 9303, which covers hunting and sporting guns. By September the total was 47 tonnes of weapons, costing $1 million:

Commodity	Month	Weight (kg)	Value ($USD)
Other firearms, sporting, etc, signal pistols, etc	June 2013	3,568	$91,811
Other firearms, sporting, etc, signal pistols, etc	July 2013	4,430	$83,462
Other firearms, sporting, etc, signal pistols, etc	August 2013	10,220	$271,018
Other firearms, sporting, etc, signal pistols, etc	September 2013	28,805	$619,035
	TOTAL	47023	1065326

This kind of data can be pretty flaky — items easily get miscategorised through bureaucratic mistakes, attempts to minimize taxes, or a thousand other reasons. But the Turkish government accepted the truth of the data, and merely quibbled that Tolga’s reporting on it was misleading:

Ungrooved hunting rifle suitable for use for sports purposes and blank firing guns are not war weapons as suggested by the said report. This commodity’s exportation to Syria is not held subject to any limitation in line with the current international rules and regulations.

It’s a slightly garbled statement — “ungrooved rifle” is a contradiction in terms, and Tolga’s article accurately described the nature of the weapons.

But let’s accept the gist — recreational guns aren’t designed for war, so it’s OK to send them into an embargoed warzone.

I don’t know any other country that makes such a distinction between ‘fun guns’ and ‘gun guns’. Turkey certainly didn’t in the past. They have proudly trumpeted seizures of weapons destined for Syria, many of which would be classified as recreational:

Officers found 120 air rifles, 50 blank firing guns, 60,000 fireworks,

14,300 shotgun shells, 4,500 blank firing guns bullets, 107 rifle binoculars and 280 kilograms of bird’s eye [Source]

Some 110 air guns, 51 shotguns, 86 rifle scopes, 86 rifle clips, 104

gun clips and 50,375 bullets were seized in five operations conducted in

the last week of January, Yazıcı told daily Hürriyet. [Source]

Besides which, you have to consider how creative — or desperate — the Syrian rebels have been in making use of ostensibly weak weapons.

Brown Moses

has an entire playlist dedicated to DIY grenade launchers, many of them made from sporting shotguns. The image on the right, from The Atlantic, shows one such converted shotgun, albeit from before these particular export records.

Finally, remember: this portion of the arms flow into Syria became public, more-or-less by accident. But 47 tonnes of small arms is, well, small, in comparison to the needs of a full-blown war. We only catch small glimpses of the overall traffic, and can easily get a skewed picture of what is going on. It’s great to have

something

on record, but what is unrecorded is far greater.

Belgiums constitutional court has ruled that arms export licenses should be subject to Freedom of Information laws, despite a government attempt to exclude them:

La Cour constitutionnelle en annule la partie relative à la confidentialité.

La Cour constitutionnelle a rendu un arrêt ce jeudi annulant certaines dispositions du décret de la Région wallonne réglementant l’exportation d’armes. La décision est un nouveau camouflet pour un décret qui a vu le jour dans le sillon du conflit libyen et dont l’avant-projet avait déjà été durement attaqué par le Conseil d’Etat.

I have very few memories from early childhood, to the perpetual surprise and occasional exasperation of those around me. I’m an extreme case of what is usual: a 5-year-old will have good memories of what they did at age 3, but a 9-year-old will have mostly forgotten. This study tries to pin down the time and nature of “childhood amnesia”, and suggests it happens around age 7:

at ages 5 to 7, the children remembered over 60 per cent of the events they’d chatted about at age 3. However, their recall for these events was immature in the sense of containing few evaluative comments and few mentions of time and place. In contrast, children aged 8 and 9 recalled fewer than 40 per cent of the events they’d discussed at age 3, but those memories they did recall were more adult-like in their content. Bauer and Larkina said this suggests that adult-like remembering and forgetting develops at around age 7 or soon after. They also speculated that the immature form of recall seen at ages 5 to 7 could actually contribute to the forgetting of autobiographical memories – a process known as “retrieval-induced forgetting”.

Who says the Britain doesn’t have global influence? In the 80s we managed to hobble cellphone encryption so that our spies could listen in on calls. That’s according to Norway’s Aftenposten newsletter, which talked to 4 people involved in developing mobile communications systems in the 1980s.

A European working group designed the encryption system. They had to choose how long to make the keys — the more bits, the more secure it would be. The experts proposed a reasonably-strong 128 bits, but encountered unexpected opposition:

The British were not very interested in having a strong encryption. And after a few years, they protested against the high security level that was proposed. They wanted a key length of 48 bit. We were very surprised.

Why would Britain want a

less

secure system? To spy on Asia, it seems. According to two sources, “

the British secret services wanted to weaken the security so they could eavesdrop more easily

“:

The British argued that the key length had to be reduced. Among other things they wanted to make sure that a specified Asian country should not have the opportunity to escape surveillance.

This fits with the understanding which has been put together by security experts, often baffled by the weakness of GSM encryption. Cambridge academic Ross Anderson wrote in 1994:

Indeed, my spies inform me that there was a terrific row between the NATO signals agencies in the mid 1980’s over whether GSM encryption should be strong or not. The Germans said it should be, as they shared a long border with the Evil Empire; but the other countries didn’t feel this way. and the algorithm as now fielded is a French design.

Incidentally, Anderson also gets in the kind of anti-Murdoch swipe which was as relevant then as now, suggesting that somebody might “

break the Royal Family’s keys for sale to News International

“

Tim Bray attempts a high-level survey of the development landscape in 2014. Server-side development is solid and improving. But the client-side is a mess — a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of different tools appearing, mutating and vanishing month by month. We’re dealing with the weaknesses of JS and CSS, the annoyances of the DOM, and the need to develop in triplicate for Android, iOS and the web. Eventually we’ll converge on some streamlined solution(s) for client-side development, but it’s anybody’s guess what that will be:

Historical periods featuring rococo engineering outbursts of colorful duplicative complexity usually end up converging on something simpler that hits the right 80/20 points. But if that’s what’s coming, it’s not coming from any direction I’m looking, so color me baffled. Maybe we’re stuck with clients-in-triplicate for the long haul.