A Modest Construct » technology

Ghost in the Wires

Ben — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:02:34 +0000

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick: Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; Year: 2011; Pages: 432

Social Engineering was my hobby horse as an undergraduate IT major; I say this as though I’m an old veteran of the IT industry, but I’m not—I’m a fresh-faced, startup-mentality programmer. One of the reasons I always focused on social engineering in my various papers and projects, however, is I was exposed early to the idea of Kevin Mitnick. This isn’t to say I was particularly familiar with his exploits, or even well-versed in the technology of his area, but the notion that you could con your way into systems without necessarily programming or “hacking” was easy enough to understand.

At the time Kevin David Mitnick dominated the national news, there was no first-person narrative available for consumption. Prior to his conviction, of course, Mitnick would not publish a book of his exploits; after his conviction, one of the restrictions placed upon him was an inability to profit from books or films about his hacking for seven years. In the meantime, several books came out from journalists of varying proximity to Mitnick himself. One was Jonathan Littman’s The Fugitive Game, a narrative crafted in part from Littman’s conversations with Mitnick while he was on the run from the FBI. The other is Jonathan Markoff’s Takedown, which is a largely sensationalistic work with as much fiction as fact; Markoff, as it happens, was a New York Times reporter who was responsible for most of the hysteria and a lion’s share of the misinformation about Mitnick in those years. The idea that Mitnick had access to secret NSA databases, or that he’d hacked into NORAD, or that—as one prosecutor actually said in court—he could launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a phone, was largely the invention of Markoff the Fabulist and the long trail of phone company stooges that Mitnick left writhing and thrashing in his wake.

zomg hacker!

Ghost in the Wires is the first attempt by Mitnick to tell the story of those turbulent years in his old words. On the one hand, this means that we can avoid any speculation and hearsay; on the other hand, it’s a convicted felon writing about his years performing felonies. I’m not familiar with all of the laws in this regard, but it’s possible—hell, likely—there are arrestable offenses that Mitnick committed that nobody knows about. It’s unlikely that Ghost in the Wires contains any revelations, but at least we can expect it to be better than Takedown.

Our popular conception of hacker emphasizes their technical skills; we picture strange men in dark rooms interpreting binary code and issuing cryptic commands into a command-line prompt; coding malware in C and Assembler; sniffing TCP/IP packets and cracking encryption keys. Certainly, there’s an element to hacking which involves all of these things. There’s also an element, at least in Kevin Mitnick’s case, which involves fraud and impersonation and blustering into order to trick and manipulate one’s way into systems, rather than managing the entire feat via technological skills alone. Many modern writers tend to forget, when writing about Kevin Mitnick, that he was a very skilled technologist; because so many of his “hacks” involved simple impersonation, it’s easy to forgot that he was an adept at hacking computer systems programmatically, especially when it came to the de rigueur enterprise system of that time, DEC’s VMS. Ghost in the Wires reminds us that, though social engineering was often used to acquire information, or access to a system, technical expertise was needed to do anything with that access.

It’s been hypothesized (see Douglas Coupland’s JPod for mention of the subject within a fictional narrative) that the programming or technical community has a higher-than-average incidence of autism-spectrum disorders, simply because of the way disorders like Aspergers tend to emphasize concentration and technical ability. For a hacker like Kevin Mitnick however, such a diagnosis is impossible; as he himself mentions, his real skill as a hacker came from his ability to speak boldly with strangers while impersonating system users and to modify his story on the fly. Stutterers and bashful speakers need not apply when it comes to calling Nokia in Finland and pretending to be one of their U.S. engineers.

I see three main points to take away from Ghost in the Wires that are interesting and/or important:

It sucks to be one of the first well-known hackers in popular culture. Preceding Kevin Mitnick’s rise to infamy was Kevin Poulsen, perhaps the first “hacker” in the modern, pejorative sense of the term, to be arrested with national attention. But Mitnick captured the media attention in a way that, I think, has yet to replicated. His exploits came at a time when our culture was just young and naïve enough to believe just about anything told to them about technology, but invested enough in this whole “Internet” thing to be frightened by the possibilities. He was a scapegoat, at the right time; I would say “with the right crimes”, but of course most of the public panic about Mitnick’s abilities was based upon fairy tales.

Technical expertise or no, the ability to bullshit well is paramount. Technical brilliance will only get you so far in life; to achieve anything truly impressive requires bridging the gap between what can be accomplished with computer code and the real-life (personnel security, physical security, security through obscurity) obstacles in the way. This is also a frightening proposition for CIOs and network administrators, because it underscores what is still the case just about everywhere you go: people are the weak link in your security. Forget about that unpatched Apache flaw, or SQL injection, or overly-broad permissions—actually, don’t forget about them: they’re still important—because even a perfect technical system is meaningless when employees distribute credentials without performing the same sort of identification, authentication, and authorization steps that any decent information system implies.

Kevin Mitnick without an FBI manhunt might still be a minimum-wage worker. What happened to Kevin Mitnick was ridiculous. I don’t mean that Mitnick should necessarily have escaped punishment for hacking, as technically he did commit fraud and intrusion; however, the charges levied against him were farcical and largely fabricated; his five or so accumulated years spent in prison, including a long stint in solitary confinement, an injustice. The hysterical hue and cry in the media who latched onto the salable story of Mitnick-as-terrorist is an indictment of the journalists involved and the slavering readership who pay money for salacious sensationalism. All of that being said, one could argue that without an FBI manhunt, high-profile court case, and front-page coverage, Kevin Mitnick might still be a poor loser working Tier 1 tech support by day and hacking for fun at night. Instead, he’s now at the helm of a thriving security consultancy and manages a busy schedule of corporate speaking engagements. A worthwhile trade-off? Hard to say, and though Mitnick recognizes the irony, he doesn’t make any easy statements as to whether he’d do anything different; as readers, we end up not being sure what we think, either. It’s not satisfying in that regard, but at least Mitnick respects our intelligence.

Linux Command-Line Compressors Compared

Ben — Tue, 03 May 2011 13:22:31 +0000

A long time ago, I ran a comparison of various command-line compressors in Linux. Recently, intrigued by the rise of parallel computing and the emergence of multi-processor versions of old *nix favorites like gzip and bzip2, I thought I’d give the benchmark another go.

The Setup

My machine is an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 [2.4Ghz] on a Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6 (nVidia 680i), with 4GB of Corsair XMS2(PC2 6400). The tests were run on a vanilla installation of Ubuntu 10.10 x64, fully updated. The compressors themselves were compiled by me from source code, so I would have the latest and greatest at the time of testing.

I did not use a RAM disk, since I wanted all of my available RAM available for compression (some of the tests used aggressive settings). I did use a freshly-formatted SATA disk for the purpose, however. For further information, see the methodology and results.

Timing was done with the GNU time command.

The Compressors

gzip. Perhaps the most well-known compressor on Linux, gzip is a DEFLATE-based compressor which offers moderate compression at a very fast speed. Note: I made the mistake of retrieving the sources from www.gzip.org, which has links to v1.2.4, from 1999. The most recent stable version is 1.4, from GNU’s servers. The version reflected in the benchmark, therefore, is out of date.
bzip2. An old favorite, bzip2 is a basic block-level compressor which is more aggressive than its cousin, gzip, at the cost of speed.
xz. A relatively new compressor, xz arose from the ashes of LZMAUtils, an implementation of the LZMA compression spec from Igor Pavlov’s 7-zip project. xz is is the command-line equivalent, and similar in usage to gzip and bzip2; more to the point, it’s been accepted by the GNU toolchain and now has its own filter in tar (-J).
rzip. Originally written by Andrew Tridgell (of Samba fame, and who indirectly caused git, when you think about it) as a doctoral project. It functions similarly to gzip and bzip2, according to its author, but attempts to take advantage of “long-distance redundancies” in larger files; that is, where bzip2 may only process 900K chunks at a time, rzip will seek to look beyond that in order to eek out additional compression.
lzop. One of the Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) compressors, it focuses on decompression speed rather than pure compression.
compress. Though not really a contender in any real zip, I included the old compress program for comparative purposes. Compress is a fast LZW compressor which creates .Z files, and can be triggered as a filter in tar with -Z. The implementation used is ncompress.
zip. An old standby, zip creates, well, .zip files, using the DEFLATE algorithm. One difference between zip and gzip is that zip creates a structured archive (no tar necessary).
lzip. Another LZMA-based compressor, lzip is heavily-asynchronous, emphasizing small decompression times at the expensive of larger initial compression time.
p7zip. The *nix version of Igor Pavlov’s 7-Zip for Windows, p7zip has a slew of options (including different compressors, such as ppmd), but we’ll be focusing on lzma2.
pigz. A parallel implementation of gzip. Like most parallel implementations, pigz sacrifices a small amount of compression efficiency for large gains in speed.
lbzip2. A parallel implementation of bzip2.
pbzip2. Another parallel implementation of bzip2.
quicklz (qpress). A very fast implementation of LZO, the QuickLZ library was at version 1.5.0 at the time of the benchmark, but its companion compressor program, QPress, was linked against 1.4.1.
lxz. A parallel implementation of the xz compressor. By the same creator as lbzip2. It supports compression only, so the benchmark will not contain decompression numbers for this tool. The author considers it a stopgap until xz gets multithreading support.
lrzip. Long ago, a fork of rzip, Con Kolivas’ lrzip has become a full-fledged compressor with multiple possible algorithms to choose from; the only one tested was LZMA. Note that the version tested here (0.571) was replaced shortly after I ran my benchmarks by v0.600, which was a large rewrite ostensibly improving decompression speed.
plzip. A straightfoward parallelization of the lzip compressor.

A note on options.

Most of the compressors tested follow the same basic pattern for specifying compression strength, modeled after the options of gzip and bzip2. -# specifies compression strength, where # is a number. On some compressors, 0 is the lowest; on others, it’s 1. My approach was to test the lowest strength, the highest strength, and the default strength (either 5 or 6, depending).

On some multithreaded compressors, it was necessary to specify the number of threads or processors to use. Where this was required, I use a value of 4, the number of cores in my processor.

The Methodology

Corpus. I downloaded the 11/3/2009 pages-articles.xml.bz2 from Wikipedia’s mirror an uncompressed it. 23+ GB. Uh oh. Realizing that I didn’t have all the time in the world to spend compressing things, I truncated the file to its first 1’073’741’824 bytes (1GB) using the truncate command.

For each compressor/setting, the compression was run three times; the compressed size was recorded; then the decompression was run three times. Each run’s time was recorded, and the average and standard deviation was calculated for both compression and decompression.

Note that in some cases, operation speed was limited by the speed of the hard drive (I’ll cover this in detail in the next section); there isn’t much to be done about this, other than the note it. Multiple runs should tease out inconsistencies and show where there is a real discrepancy as opposed to a consistent bottleneck.

The Results

The data table itself is far too large to fit in this template, but you can see it as Google Spreadsheet here.

There’s no way to crown a clear winner, since all compressors mean tradeoffs. If I were as smart and capable as Werner Bergman, I could have a formula worked up for compressor efficiency, but I’m more curious to see the differences between single-threaded compressors and their multithreaded variants.

To get it out of the way: xz at maximum compression had the best compression ratio of all tested configurations. At 243’350’864 bytes, it shrank the test corpus to 22.7% of its original size. This came at a heavy cost, though, as compression at this level took an average of 27 minutes, give or take 200 seconds.

The fastest compression, by far, came from QuickLZ, whose lowest setting managed to process the entire 1GB file in an average of 6.3 seconds. Its maximum setting doubled the time to 12 seconds and shaved off an additional 75MB, but the price of such fantastic speed is much less compression: the maximum setting reduced our test corpus to only 44.4% of its original size.

Remember that there is no best compressor; there is only a compressor that is best for your needs. Compression is all about diminishing returns: it takes a mere 12 seconds to get from 100% to 44% with QuickLZ. It takes an additional 27 minutes to get from 44% to 22% with xz.

When looking at the decompression times, one might notice that the scores bottom out at between 12-15 seconds. My guess is this does not reflect the decompression speed at much as the write speed of the hard drive. In theory, one might see even lower numbers with a RAMdisk, but in practice, decompression speeds which outpace storage write speeds are unlikely to be taken advantage of outside a benchmark scenario.

The numbers for bzip2 vary wildly, for reasons I haven’t figured out. I ran a second iteration of three tests for each setting and got similar numbers, so I stuck with my initial measurements. Other compressors don’t have such high standard deviations relative to their runtimes, so I don’t think it was a problem with my setup.

Generally speaking, the parallel implementations of single-threaded compressors fare extremely well. Let’s look at the average times for some of the standard ones. Note that compression ratios are given as the percentage of the original filesize, not the percent reduction, so lower is better.

bzip2
Compressor	Compression Time (s)	Compression Ratio	Decompression Time (s)
bzip2 (min)	186.509	31.59%	63.342
lbzip2 (min)	38.852	31.63%	18.520
pbzip2 (min)	38.072	31.61%	13.533
bzip2 (default)	169.474	28.14%	64.432
lbzip2 (default)	42.085	28.15%	19.140
pbzip2 (default)	40.698	28.33%	14.630
bzip2 (max)	206.307	27.18%	66.460
lbzip2 (max)	52.091	27.19%	23.092
pbzip2 (max)	52.438	27.19%	20.617

gzip
Compressor	Compression Time (s)	Compression Ratio	Decompression Time (s)
gzip (min)	36.146	40.09%	19.195
pigz (min)	8.892	40.06%	12.199
gzip (default)	82.452	34.65%	16.912
pigz (default)	16.673	34.69%	12.852
gzip (max)	134.889	34.24%	16.513
pigz (max)	25.051	34.28%	12.129

xz
Compressor	Compression Time (s)	Compression Ratio	Decompression Time (s)
xz (min)	138.272	33.82%	50.916
lxz (min)	29.890	33.80%
xz (default)	1164.772	24.45%	34.114
lxz (default)	39.997	24.96%
xz (max)	1643.367	22.66%	31.968
lxz (max)	699.268	23.07%

As you can see, most parallel implementations decrease compression and decompression times by a factor of between 3 and 5, while taking, at most, a few tenths of a percent increase in final file size.

Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel

Ben — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:19:27 +0000

Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel by Julia Keller: Publisher: Viking Adult; Year: 2008; Pages: 304

My appetite for biographies is minimal: in general I find focus in single individuals results in a necessarily circumscribed and correspondingly dull book, and therefore avoid them except in certain cases (Christopher Hitchens’ recent memoir, while not strictly a biography, counts among their number). Inestimably more interesting—and invariably more important as well—are general histories, either of periods or concepts.

Occasionally, however, an individual or dynasty serves as a synecdoche for said historical period or concept, and this is the approach that Julia Keller takes toward Richard Jordan Gatling, the 19th-century inventor who lent his name to the famous machine gun. In fact, Keller’s book, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel, travels along two separate threads; the first is Gatling himself and the era of innovation of which he was emblematic, but the second is the rich irony of Gatling, most proud of his agricultural machinery, becoming famous for instruments of death.

For what is ostensibly a biography of Richard Gatling (or more accurately, biography of the “Gatling Gun”), Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel doesn’t dwell overly long on Gatling himself. There is an extensive introduction which serves to offer up the two major conflicts I mentioned above, and an initial section which overviews Gatling’s early life, but Keller’s narrative quickly swerves away from Gatling and into a more broad look at the era in which he lived. The time immediately preceding the Civil War saw a sudden flood of invention, pushed in part by changes in patent law and the U.S. patent office, and the period was marked by a surge in technological innovation unmatched until the turn of the century. This was both good and bad; in addition to the invention of the steam engine and the railroad, it also was an uptick in the invention and manufacture of military ordnance, and an explosion of “patent medicines” and other such medical quackery. The time period saw the United States suddenly transform from a weak young nation still getting its bearings after a bloody war for independence into an economic powerhouse: at the Great Exhibition in London, it was largely American inventions (including those of rival gunmaker Samuel Colt) which stole the show and suddenly made the Europeans nervous.

But while the United States was finally sloughing off the memory of the Revolutionary War, it was about to become embroiled in an even bloodier internecine conflict, and the importance of guns would come to the fore. What distinguished Gatling’s machine gun from the many other attempts by lesser inventors is that Gatling’s actually worked, not least because of his attention to manufacturing quality. Ironically, Gatling’s gun was never really used in the Civil War, at least in any real sense; the battle commanders were too distrustful of new technology. But in the period after the Civil War, when the gun’s sales finally skyrocketed as governments bought them for sanguinary conflicts against “primitives” in the American west and in Africa. It’s impossible to say just how many people were killed by Gatling Guns, but the stated hope of its inventor was that the gun would be so chilling and terrible in its effect that people would avoid armed conflict altogether—a notion not unlike the one which justified work on atomic weapons.

In this way Gatling is much like Robert Oppenheimer or Leó Szilárd, whose participation in invention was motivated by both an abstract desire for conquering scientific or engineering challenges, and partly by the somewhat naïve hope that the product would be ultimately beneficial; Kurt Vonnegut famously lampoons this naïveté in Cat’s Cradle. By the end of his life, Gatling had disassociated himself from his gun, directing his energies once again into agricultural machinery instead; but the genie was out of the bottle: mechanized warfare had become the new face of violence, a principle the world would finally see brought to its full expression in World War I—and taken to its most extreme degree at the end of World War II. Long after Gatling has died in Keller’s historical narrative, in fact, the death of War as a courageous, saber-flashing event was ongoing. There would be no more charging cavalry in the traditional sense, because horses offered no advantage against machine guns, artillery, or poison gas. Gatling’s legacy, or rather the deadly legacy of technological progress with which his name has become indelibly associated, is still seen today in smart bombs and tanks and mustard gas, and this knowledge would probably horrify him.

Keller’s sympathies clearly lie with Gatling; the motif throughout seems to be that of the misunderstood genius, and there seems to be plenty of evidence to suggest such a depiction is accurate, but there’s also a lingering sense that Gatling was as much an opportunist as an idealist—the image of him as an unctuous businessman is hard to shake when he attempts to peddle his gun—quality though it may be—to President Lincoln. But that may simply also be a characteristic of the era and not the man…. or perhaps both.

Ultimately, Keller’s biography-cum-history is melancholic, expressing a sort of fatalism about the progress of technology and its relationship to our nature, and eulogizing a man emblematic of the inherent schism of his age. Though it wanders a bit at parts, its focus blurred by the sheer scope of the narrative, it is a fine piece of scholarship, and I think properly deserves to become one of the most well-recognized book (the only recognized book?) about Richard Gatling.

Steven Pinker defends Twitter, but who’s attacking it?

Ben — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 04:38:22 +0000

Steven Pinker has a new op-ed in the New York Times where, ever the gallant hero of relativism in the way that most linguists and social scientists are, he defends new forms of mass and social media from their loudest detractors. His two salient examples are Powerpoint and Twitter. While the former has been a fixture of academic or professional communication for well over a decade, the latter is a relative newcomer and currently receives the same mix of pointed dislike and frenzied exuberance usually reserved for the novel.

Let it not be said that I am discomfited or alarmed by new forms of media; that I’m posting this to a blog after finding the article on Facebook, cross-posted from Twitter itself, may say something about my attitude toward the new and the popular. At the same time, I am extraordinarily distrustful of smiling cretins who like to whitewash the tendency of pop-culture to both reflect and encourage those things about ourselves which are ultimately damaging—the execrable Everything Bad is Good For You is a good example of just how facile such attempts can be.

A Rejection of Summaries

Pinker addresses the metonymized arguments that Powerpoint and Twitter (and media of that nature) stultify our discourse and represent an insidious verbal rot that (ostensibly) takes perfectly intellectual people and stupefies them into a torpid hulk. One gets the feeling that his implied opponents view humanity as a sort of real-life Flowers for Algernon, arising out of savagery by the power of the printed word and the reward of intellectual acumen; only to sink slowly and inexorably into monosyllables and dismayed puzzlement. Of course, these two forms of media merely represent the logical evolution of their predecessors—namely, notecards and text messages, respectively. In fact, though I have some sympathy for those linguistic and academic conservatives who are weeping and rending their garments over the Titanic (read: majestic, yet ill-fated) that is modern cultural intelligence, I am nonetheless inclined to agree with Pinker that panic is undue. But here’s his segue:

But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.

Immediately, Pinker makes what I feel is a completely unfair comparison. Comic books may be, in many cases, rather paltry intellectual fare if in no other regard than exercising verbal skills, but their real controversy was in their subject matter. As David Hadju notes in his excellent The Ten-Cent Plague, comics’ ostensible lack of intellectual depth paled in comparison to their subject matter, which included sex, violence, rebellion, drugs, more violence, and all the other neat things that developing kids like to consume. The glorification of these things, it was said, was corrosive to moral fibre, and would invariably lead to a generation of deviants, criminals, and probably Communists, too. A virtually identical argument is made against video games (notably modern ones such as the notorious Grand Theft Auto series), occasionally bolstered by studies which show some correlation between violent video games and aggressive behavior immediately after playing.

The argument against new forms of social media are not the hysterical bleatings—”Won’t somebody please think of the children?“—of moral decay, but rather the fear that the diminishing requirements for dialogue are lowering the intellectual bar. The latter, even if you don’t agree, is a rather more plaintive and reasonable argument; no, Twitter will not turn today’s children into slavering nitwits, but it does draw converts from other sorts of media that may have once asked its users to expound upon something, rather than simply abbreviate it. I started this blog in 2004, and though I make no particular case for the quality of its entries, one of the reasons I have continued to update it long after blogs passed their peak is that it forces me to explain, transcribe whole series of thought into words, and construct something potentially readable by others. When I started, the same sorts of people who now use Twitter all gamboled around Xanga and Blogspot and tried their hand—however unsuccessfully—at extended forms of communication.

A Confusion of Tongues

Of course, there’s the argument to be made that Twitter itself isn’t really even a form of dialogue so much as an electronic series of handshakes and nodding of heads; I mentioned that I first learned of Pinker’s article via Facebook, and ultimately Twitter, and in that sense these media acted as little more than conduits in order to reach the meatier medium of the website article—a medium not capped at 140 characters. As a filter or aggregation of information, Twitter and its ilk succeed as well as can be expected; I frequent the software-oriented DZone for much the same reason. Perhaps Pinker is aware of a collective sigh of woe regarding the use of social media as a way to share information external to these services, but the chorus of criticism of which I am aware has little to do with that and more to do with diminishing the faculties of communication by sheer atrophy.

It can’t be said that using social media is somehow poisonous to these faculties; I know of innumerable people who manage to participate in such terse or thin media and manage to retain their verbal skills without any apparent effort. But it would be sheer folly to assume that our preferred or popular modes of discourse have no peripheral effect on how we act otherwise. But Pinker seems to think so:

The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.

He seems to obliquely reference his prior examples of comics and video games, dismissing the common assumption that, e.g., watching violent media necessarily make one a violent person. The topical parallel suggests that similarly, reading 140-character tweets does not truncate one’s internal monologues at 140 characters as well. But might communicating in 140-character tweets have such an effect? I can’t say one way or the other, but I can say with relatively authority that the longer I go between writing entries on my blog, the more difficult it is to resume doing so. As with most tasks both physical and mental, practice is the key to ongoing success; the doomsday scenario implied by these media’s harshest critics is a motley group of teens whose communicative and contemplative faculties are entirely destroyed by the diminishing trend of online dialogue. At the same time Pinker denies this absorptive effect, he also stresses the need to remove oneself from said media—”develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life”—which would seem to indicate that he believes even the lovely and novel can ultimately be detrimental if they demand too much of our time and attention. A great many users of such media—one might even say the vast majority—manage a separation of concerns; what worries the worriers, of course, is the remaining portion for whom these media have the described deleterious effect: I have known classmates who, because they relied on Powerpoints, did not in four years of university develop even a passable acuity for speaking in front of groups.

A Disparity of Objects

Speaking of universities:

It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

With this single paragraph, it seems as though Pinker has not understood at all the very criticisms he has been deflecting. I would of course agree that institutions of higher education, along with the continued exercise of the intellect, are necessary for said “deep reflection”. Of course, the “analysis, criticism, and debate” to which he refers are the very items on the cultural chopping block—Twitter, for all its many merits, does not have the proper facilities for an organized or reasoned conversation, and while perhaps we’d like to think of each tweet as a doorway to something more interesting, we all know that a great many are the more sickly and pallid tabloid variety.

Perhaps the crux of my disagreement comes down to how Pinker sees the very nature of social media: “efficient access to information on the Internet” and “Facebook” or “Twitter” are synonymous only in the most crudely general of ways. No one expects that without glib and carefree media of this sort we’d all turn into lexicographers and physicists with tweed jackets, but neither is it fair to say that media which is a product of our own glib and voyeuristic tendencies, and which conducts itself as such, is equivalent to real collaborative effort or collected knowledge: in other words, Twitter may point you to a Wikipedia entry, but in that case only the Wikipedia entry itself constitutes any real form of information aside from (maybe) the tweeter’s succinct binary opinion. As a method of collating or evaluating full-text information, therefore, social media has some function, but at the cost of indulging those of our impulses which aren’t interested in the “constant upkeep” of our contemplative faculties.

In other words, I’m not sure what idealized technologies Pinker has been looking at, but those I’m aware of aren’t nearly so pure. The arguments he cites against Twitter and Powerpoint remain largely unanswered, neatly sidestepped in favor of defending some utopian vision of electronic media in general as a necessary filter which allows us to comfortably engage the widening gyre of global information—not to mention a glib, hapless shrug at the notion that radically changing primary means of communication will somehow have an effect on individuals and culture as a whole. It is oddly delinquent of Pinker, from whom I’ve come to expect so much better.

Information and the Digital Economy

Ben — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:59:56 +0000

Download the PDF.

Economic models of the traditional and well-known sense usually describe either manufactured physical goods or services performed, both of which are scarce resources: only so much grain can be grown, for instance—or widgets churned out of an industrial plant, or pipes plumbed by professionals. Short of espionage, even the market for Information was tied to the cost of materials and availability of produced goods such as printed books, pressed records, or spooled movies. In other words, though the Information was created once and itself remained unchanged, the marginal cost of creating copies of that Information was the sum of the materials, labor, and transportation costs used the produce, package, and ship the finished physical good to a store or warehouse.

Since the copyright on these forms of Information lasts for so long, it is more useful to look at the patent system as an economic model of the fixed costs of producing or selling Information. In the pharmaceutical industry, as has been the case for some time, companies can and routinely do spend a billion dollars on the research and development of a new drug (Moran, 2003, p. 25); the protection of a patent, however, is only good for 20 years from the filing date, so the company must attempt to recoup its expenses and produce a profit while it has a monopoly on the particular drug in question. The cost of manufacturing the drug is often vanishingly small, but the medication is priced well above marginal cost—it must be—because its fixed costs are so high, regardless of how many units of the drug it actually sells.

The accelerating migration from the analog storage of Information in the form of printed books or newspapers, pressed records or compacts discs, or boxed movies, to a form of digital storage and networked transmission which can operate independent of a central producer, has not only brought up ethical dilemmas with respect to copyright and media “piracy,” but also hauled into the spotlight the economic model wherein price is set so high above the marginal cost, since this now applies to virtually every good available for purchase (or, for that matter, available for pirating) on the Internet. Of particular concern is digital music, whose placed in the zeitgeist began with Napster in 1999 and remains today with the Apple iTunes Store. As well, “e-book” readers such as Amazon’s Kindle are now bringing the same controversy over marginal cost to the book market, heretofore largely untouched by the move to digital media, the same of which cannot be said for their counterparts in the periodical industry.

In a perfectly competitive economy, price falls toward marginal cost. Since digital goods have a marginal cost near to 0 (as distinct from the cost of the first unit), traditional economic wisdom would indicate that the price of such goods should fall dramatically, taking into account the additional cost of transmission and storage. In “Free!” Chris Anderson asserts that each piece of equipment “does more and more for less and less, bringing the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume closer to zero” (2008).

Apologists for software and other media piracy, along with more pragmatic technologists with an economic bent, often quote writer Stewart Brand, who once famously opined “Information wants to be free”. Less frequently mentioned is the entire quotation, which is “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other” (1985, p. 49). In other words, the economic cost of Information is not equal to its marginal cost, but this is not a revelation: no other industry in the world has enjoyed a configuration such as that. Anderson himself admits that attempting to offer a good at a price equal to its marginal cost cannot make (and will likely lose) money in a two-party market system. Only new synergies or “cross-subsidies” can generate an economic profit if these digital products are priced at their marginal cost (2008).

From Edison to Jobs

Though the indisputable leader in digital music sales is iTunes, having sold more than 2 billion songs since 2003, its smaller competitors number in the hundreds, and now include among their number such industry giants as Amazon.com (Feng, Guo, & Chiang, 2009, p. 243). Apple’s decision to charge a flat fee of $0.99 per downloaded song essentially set consumer expectation for price; Amazon, effectively a price-taker when it entered into the market, charges the same (though it offers a slight discount for purchasing whole albums as opposed to individual tracks), if only because attempting to charge any more would virtually guarantee the venture fails.

The low price charged doesn’t necessarily reflect the low marginal cost of producing the digital content in question. In all likelihood, the price point is set to attract those who would otherwise acquire the content illegally—that is, for a price of $0 (Smith, 2005). The ethical aspects of piracy and its causes and effects within the new economics of digital media are well beyond the purview of this paper, but it is clear that consumers who would never steal a physical good from a brick and mortar store are more than happy to acquire digital music without compensating the label or the artist. There exists the possibility that this phenomenon is a strange moral quirk, but more than likely it is a subversive economic reaction to the perceived low marginal cost of the goods. The consumer’s ease in acquiring the good, after all, is some reflection of the publisher’s ease in creating or duplicating the good. RIAA-funded reports to the contrary (which treat each illegal download as a lost sale), there is no good evidence that a consumer willing to “pirate” a song would also be willing to pay for it at any price point, be it $0.99 for a song from iTunes or $20 for an entire physical album. Paradoxically, however, there is evidence that people who illegally download music already spend more on legal music purchases than average (Shields, 2009), which would indicate that the rise of music piracy is simply what happens when the marginal utility of a track is less than the price set by its controlling firm. In the pre-digital era, this would have indicated a non-sale, but now demand for this kind of good can be independent of its price, since supply is effectively infinite.

From Gutenburg to Bezos

Though a relatively recent phenomenon, the rise of e-books is precipitous. Spencer Ante reports that Amazon sold more digital books than printed books last Christmas, which for Amazon entails a relatively small digital download to an electronic reading device that the customer already owns (2010, p. 50). At current prices, publishers net the same profit on both digital and printed books, but economic gravity is already dragging some prices down; in Amazon’s case, some new or best-selling e-books are $8, compared to as much as $35 for the hardback version of the very same Information. Though some of that price difference has to do with the larger marginal costs of the bound book, it’s long been common knowledge that publishers, like record labels and movie studies, exercise heavy price discrimination on new materials. Those willing to pay $35 for a new book do so because they are willing to pay that high amount either for the physical quality of the book or the privilege of reading it now instead of a year later, when the paperback edition is released. Libraries, too, will usually buy their initial stock of the books at an inflated price, quieting cries of alarm that the free use of books will ruin profits. For this reason, publishers such as Harper-Collins are delaying the publication of e-books for several months after a new hardcover’s release. Jeffrey Trachtenberg (2009, p. B2) notes that threat of competition from cheap digital media is a very real one for book publishers; however, this trend appears to be nothing more than market forces at work.

Amazon appears to pay publishers about half the cost of the new hardcover, regardless of which edition was solid: at first glance, this seems like a losing proposition in the case of digital downloads (Ante, 2010, p. 51). However, while the cost of Amazon’s “supply” of e-books may be close to the marginal revenue of selling them, the company also has little fixed costs associated with storing or shipping the data. As well, in Amazon’s case, the company is receiving revenue from the not-inexpensive Kindle e-book reader. This, then, might be an inverted instance of Chris Anderson’s Gillette-inspired bundling concept (2008). Rather than use cheap hardware and expensive data, Amazon sells expensive hardware and data as close to inexpensive as current economic models will allow.

Books and periodicals, like music, may benefit from an old but upward-trending concept known as bundling. Given a large product pool with a small but non-zero marginal cost of production, they can maximize profit as Hitt and Pei-yu describe in “Bundling with Customer Self-Selection” (2005, p 1481, 1491), citing the well-known marketing schemes of Colombia House as well as the newer pricing models of Netflix. In the case of technical book publisher O’Reilly, the bundling or subscription model has raised profits by about 20% (Ante, 2010, p. 51).

From Scarcity to Abundance

Traditional publishing models are predicated upon the idea that all of its aspects are essentially scarce resources: the physical media upon which Information is disseminated is itself scarce or at least costly, and the Information itself is a scarce resource which, because of its ostensible uniqueness, has no likely substitute good. Digital media not only reduces the marginal cost of goods to near zero, but it also raises the supply to near infinite. Whereas once record labels and publishing imprints decided who or what appeared on the scarce shelf space of stores, these same companies now essentially compete against independent artists or authors who have more power to self-publish, and for lower prices, than ever before. In fact, the lower prices apparent in the digital economy may to some degree reflect the new, more intense competition that has become its hallmark.

The situation now resembles or is coming to resemble a case of monopolistic competition, albeit one in a state of extreme transformation. The number of producers in the market is now effectively infinite (taking traditional firms and self-publishing individuals together, and implying that individuals can act as multiple producing and consuming agents both alone and as organizations), and though some firms are currently exercising their market dominance (such as Apple setting a standard $0.99-per-track price), the ever-present threat of piracy ensures that prices will tend to be set low. A low marginal cost of production and surplus of human creativity insures that market entry and exit are easy. Finally, though it is true that specific songs by specific artists are technically unique, they are ultimately unique in brand, but substitute goods in genre. A consumer looking to purchase ten rock songs may have his or her need met by any ten in a thousand songs available. The result is that consumers discount more heavily when substitute goods are available but not when purchasing unfamiliar products, according to Clemons (2008, p. 13).

Yet another character of monopolistic competition that was impossible ten years ago is now rapidly becoming more realistic: perfect information, wherein consumers know all goods being sold, their differences, their prices, and even what profit a firm makes from them, could not have existed for such a wide array of goods in the years before the Internet generally and powerful search engines specifically. While traditional firms have relied on the popular 20% of products sold (market “fat spots”) to subsidize the less profitable 80%, this latter “long tail” is now the focus of considerable economic and marketing attention, and is the center of Anderson’s argument regard low-margin economies. More to the point, it is also the focus of more consumer attention, now that better information availability has improved access to the long tail.

Clemons (2008) speaks to the changes being wrought by increased access to information. Citing online price-comparison engines, he argues that these services essentially “discover” the correct market price for a good (as opposed to a producer setting it), much like the NYSE (p. 15). The kind and quality of product offerings will also change to reflect the more perfect consumer information. His summary of pricing changes is clear:

[C]onsumers’ willingness to pay is a function of the competition discount, the compromise discount, and the uncertainty discount, all of which have changed because of change in consumers’ informedness. Margins on most commodity offerings have collapsed[.] Pricing strategy has been transformed, and consumer behavior in the presence of informedness has been the principal driver (p. 33).

The implications are large for both consumers and producers alike. In the long term, technology of this sort will change how firms do business; just as the Industrial Revolution radically transformed the developed world from an agrarian economy to an industrial one in a minimal span of years, so too will the move to a digital economy of Information both fast and transformative. Regardless of high fixed costs, lower marginal costs due to improved technological will lower price, especially when products now compete against a growing niche market of goods that are given away for free. Anderson (2008) suggests that pricing in the digital economy will dip drastically low for Information and increase the cost of physical goods. A summer blockbuster movie, for example, may cost pennies, but popcorn will cost as much as ever—until that science-fictionalized day comes when technology gives us an unlimited supply of physical resources, as well. The net effect will be two separate but cross-synergizing economies, one for traditional physical goods with non-negligible marginal cost, and one for digital Information which, once expressed, automatically creates an effectively infinite supply of itself.

References

Anderson, C. (2008). Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Wired, 16, 3. Retrieved March 5, 2010, from http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
Ante, S. E. (2010, January 11). Trying to Avert a Digital Horror Story. BusinessWeek, 50-52. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from Business Source Elite (47279438).
Brand, S. (1985, May). Keep Designing. Whole Earth Review, 44-57.
Clemons, E. K. (2008). How Information Changes Consumer Behavior and How Consumer Behavior Determines Corporate Strategy. Journal of Management Information Systems, 25, 2, 13-40. Retrieved April 3, 2010, from Business Source Elite (34879420).
Feng, Y., Guo, Z., & Chiang, W. K. (2009). Optimal Digital Content Distribution Strategy in the Presence of the Consumer-to-Consumer Channel. Journal of Management Information Systems, 25(4), 241-270. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from Business Source Elite (38419436).
Hitt, L. M., & Pei-yu, C. (2005). Bundling with Customer Self-Selection: A Simple Approach to Bundling Low-Marginal-Cost Goods. Management Science, 51(10), 1481-1493. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from Business Source Elite (18676603).
Moran, M. (2003). Cost of Bringing New Drugs To Market Rising Rapidly. Psychiatric News, 38(15), 25. Retrieved April 2, 2010
Shields, R. (2009, November 1). Illegal downloaders ‘spend the most on music’, says poll. The Independent. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/illegal-downloaders-spend-the-most-on-music-says-poll-1812776.html
Smith, T. (2005, September 20). Apple CEO blasts ‘greedy’ music labels. The Register. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/20/apple_jobs_piracy_pricing/
Trachtenberg, J. A. (2009). Harper-Collins Delays E-Books. Wall Street Journal, 254(137), B2. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from Business Source Elite (47053417).

File Compressors in 64-bit

Ben — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:22:20 +0000

Though I’m not the sort of person who believes that native 64-bit compilations of programs will automagically make them perform faster or better, I do like to keep an eye on the state of the art, since I was an early adopter of native 64-bit OSes (I’ve been using 64-bit Linux since about Fedora Core 2 or 3, and beta versions of Windows XP x64) when AMD launched their K8 platform.

Previously, I’ve casually benchmarked the Javascript speeds of 64-bit browsers v. their 32-bit counterparts (here); more recently, I benchmarked a 64-bit compile of FLAC against several other 32-bit compiles of the same version (here).

This time, I decided to test various and sundry file compression utilities—more specifically, those which offer both 32- and 64-bit versions of themselves. This benchmark did not exhaustively test all potential combinations of compression options (if you’re interested in that, see Werner Bergman’s excellent Maximum Compression and Matt Mahoney’s Data Compression Programs), nor will it compare various compressors to each other; neither will it even list how well the programs actually compressed, since that’s not really a consideration here. The sole purpose of the benchmark was to compare the execution time of a 32-bit program with its 64-bit version.

The corpus in this case was enwiki9, compressed to a RAM disk to minimize the potential effects of write latency. I wanted the corpus to be sufficiently large to better tease out significant differences in these compressors over a large dataset.

The results for each compressor are listed on their own page, as well as an explanation of the compressor, its origin, and any additional notes. One notable exception to this list is WinRK, which is available in a 64-bit version but contains no command-line interface.

Snow Crash

Ben — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:24:40 +0000

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: Publisher: Spectra; Year: 1992/1993; Pages: 480

My familiarity with Neal Stephenson began with Cryptonomicon, which at the time came much more highly recommended to me than Snow Crash. The former doesn’t quite count as “science fiction”; it was more like a techno-thriller consumed by comp.sci and technological masturbation, with a bit of historical intrigue thrown in for good measure.

Snow Crash, which is really what launched Stephenson’s career (it achieved both critical and commercial success), falls more solidly in the realm of science fiction, but it is a novel which operates on a number of levels. A great deal of verbiage has been produced on behalf of its various subtexts, meanings, influences, and reactions, so I won’t linger too long on any one aspect: further information is there for the taking.

Snow Crash qualifies as a “cyberpunk” novel in the vein of William Gibson’s Neuromancer; it has all the prerequisites: post-collapse society with a weak or nonexistent central government, majority control by large and powerful corporations, an advanced computer network which features neural interfaces, a badass hacker protagonist, and either a general lawlessness or stringent, Big Brother-style control from one or more entities.

When the novel opens, we meet the main character: a tall, half-Asian/half-Black named Hiro Protagonist—a freelance hacker who carries samurai swords. When we first meet him, Hiro is not hacking (with code or with swords), but instead delivering pizzas for the Mob, which is now a large—essentially legitimate—corporation. These corporations, the Mafia included, comprise much of the “order” in this world, by which I mean they are able to enforce security by way of leveraged economic power (and a good deal of fear). In fact, most corporations comprise their own “nations,” and so a single neighborhood/suburb owned and operated by a housing conglomerate is in fact sovereign territory, requiring a visa just to enter. The United States government has taken a similar path; the CIA is now the Central Intelligent Corporation, the Library of Congress is basically a digitized Apple Store of information, and government property consists of a restricted zone where the CIC headquarters resides.

In Stephenson’s dystopian future, the Internet as we know it is called the “Metaverse”, and it more closely resembles an advanced version of Second Life than anything we know today: Hiro (and others) experience the Internet as a 3D explorable universe, with an incredible density of people and advertisements and audiovisual phenomena. Data transfer is done via “hypercards,” which are virtual objects that download data locally when touched. Hiro was, at one point, instrumental in creating the Metaverse, and we assume that he originally did so in “Flatland”; that is, with a keyboard an a regular two-dimension monitor. Stephenson never really says how programming is done three-dimensionally: the virtual reality of the Metaverse doesn’t really map to actions we might normally associate with computer. You can swordfight, sure, and “download” data in the sense of getting a hypercard. But do you simply sit down at a virtual terminal and program a virtual computer inside the Metaverse? Or is programming somehow abstracted into a physical activity like taking apart an engine? In some ways, Stephenson’s vision of the Internet was remarkably shortsighted.

More interesting is the neat semantic twist that forms the book’s major plot point: it is a virus, in a fuzzy biological/technological sense; more accurately, it’s a very ancient “brain” virus that affects humans in the deep structures of their grammatical brain. When the appropriate information is transmitted either visually or audibly, and the receiver contains the appropriate deep grammatical structures for it (i.e. that person is a “hacker”) it can overwhelm and destroy that person’s brain. Stephenson, by way of a multipart dialogue between Hiro and the well-spoken avatar of a librarian program, spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the origins of this virus, which dates back to ancient Sumer. The idea is entirely fictional, of course, but the explanation is so thorough that one can’t help but be impressed, as though it were a plausible phenomenon. It’s the sort of thing Dan Brown tries to accomplish and fails because he’s a terrible writer and a gullible idiot.

There is one significant criticism I must level against the book, of course, and it’s the same problem that plagues Cryptonomicon (and, I might plausibly guess, the rest of his works): Stephenson’s books are heavy on gadgets, technology, history, and explanations, but they are decidedly light on narrative arcs, plots, and character development. So much time is spent explaining the vagaries of the Metaverse and the Sumerian virus and the corporate franchises qua nation-states that it wasn’t until the book ended, abruptly, that I realize just how little had actually occurred within the narrative’s timeframe, and just how little the characters had changed or even particularly grown on me. Nothing of any real note happens to the “villains” and even less happens to the heroes, and nothing much at all is resolved. It would be infuriating if I hadn’t had such a good time geeking out with Stephenson when he wanted to do virtual samurai battles and rail gun fights instead of building any narrative tension worth noting.

JPod

Ben — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:58:59 +0000

JPod by Douglas Coupland: Publisher: Bloomsbury; Year: 2007; Pages: 567

JPod is considered the spiritual successor to Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, a boom-era tech novel about the joys and perils of working at Microsoft in its heyday. As you can read in my review of the book, I was not particularly fond of it; perhaps I simply can’t appreciate Coupland’s treatment of that era. I personally found Show Stopper! to be a more interesting and engaging book; it dealt with the same subject matter, but it was a historical treatment and not a romp through absurdist humor only vaguely related to its purported subject.

In order to understand what JPod is like, first imagine a generic office comedy involving people doing vaguely computer-y things. Then, instead of deriving most of the plot or humor from the Dilbert-like foibles of such an environment, imagine its characters doing random and entirely unpredictable things for implausible reasons. The main character, Ethan, helps his mother bury the body of a biker named Tim whom she killed in a fracas over her marijuana plants; he does this very early in the book, with a sort of irritated insouciance that tells you the rest of the book is going to occur within a sort of fantasy realm wherein the depiction of reality, and the ramifications of actions, are nonsensical, inconsistent, and therefore not particularly interesting.

The fatal flaw of JPod is, I believe, its ambiguity. If it was a stream of schtick, I could enjoy it on the same level I enjoy, say, a Monty Python sketch; likewise, if it were a serious novel about the travails and tribulations of a darksome corporate environment, I could also enjoy it in the same way I enjoyed Joshua Ferris’s And Then We Came to the End. But Coupland makes all these overtures at postmodern solemnity: he uses typography extensively—in Microserfs, too—bookending the amorphous “chapters” of the novel with nutritional facts, random phrases, and occasionally whole pages of binary code or prime numbers. It doesn’t have any real meaning; it’s cleverness for the sake of cleverness, which I suppose is forgivable if the book is commanding enough, but I just don’t see it. Insofar as this book may be considered an epistolary novel, these snippets gain some narrative weight: they serve as context for a story told via the stream of information that we encounter every day, in which discourse between two individuals (a form of information) occurs alongside the nutrition facts for Doritos or spam email from Nigeria (also a form of information). This is clever in a non-shallow way, but it’s also not done consistently and so falls by the wayside.

Then, too, JPod was published in 1997, long after the boom that Microserfs described; the latter, regardless of its quality, was at least the product of its era, and reflected it to the point where it’s become part of the geek canon. JPod describes the same scenario, but it’s no longer believable or relevant; oh, he’s updated the heady Silicon Valley startup atmosphere with a game company, but mostly it serves as an exit vector for a lot of divergent half-plots, and an incubator for plot points that should have been plots, but were not (Ethan’s romance with the new girl, Kaitlin, is one such example). The resulting story, at least so far as I read it, is an extended illustration of the mild autism that often affects those in technical fields. Us geeks are aware of this—some of us are proud of it, since it makes us feel better about our dearth of social graces—and I think that more than anything sums up JPod: it’s a disjointed collection of Slashdot jokes compiled in the form of a narrative. Everything, from the easter egg than Ethan builds into his video game, to the techno-babble typography, is a creature born from the technophilic decade. So is, you might argue, the characters’ inability to react with shock, horror, or disgust to any of the terrible or strange things that happen every other page.

I believe I understand what Coupland was trying to do; I just don’t think he did it very well. Neither, I think, did Microserfs need to be updated for the 2000s (nor could it be in any meaningful sense). Though I’m not particularly a fan of either, I would recommend Microserfs long before I ever recommend JPod.

Halting State

Ben — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:58:49 +0000

Halting State by Charles Stross: Publisher: Ace; Year: 2007; Pages: 368

I read Accelerando earlier this year; it was my first experience with Charles Stross, and it was a bit of a mindjob. While Stross is known for “hard” scifi, Accelerando quickly vaulted into a plausible-but-fantastic realm that probably wasn’t very indicative of the Stross that was recommended to me when I read Daemon.

It’s far easier now to see what my commenter was referring to now; Daemon and Halting State have very similar plots, but the latter is intelligent, interesting, accurate, and engaging, while the former is none of these things. But I don’t want this review to draw Halting State merely as the antithesis of Daemon; needless to say that Stross doesn’t make the same mistake that Suarez does, which is to try far too hard to prove his technological mettle, and therefore make the entire book about his weary attempt to sound impressive. With Stross, technology is woven so closely to the fabric of the story that it becomes invisible, and serves to support the story rather than become the story.

Halting State is, at first glance, about computer gaming; more specifically, it theorizes the eventual expansion of massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) into an even greater economic force than they are currently. Technology has advanced just enough to allow such games to exist as a sort of augmented reality—and this same kind of technology suffuses the working world as well: CopSpace, for instance, is a virtual overlay which transplants a visual representation of police data into real life, at least as viewed through specs. With the rise of online gaming, however, comes its economic importance, and this is where the story begins: a company which acts as a sort of bank for one of the more popular MMORPGs is virtually robbed, which brings three main characters into the mix. The first is Sue, a ball-busting cop; the second is Elaine, a forensic accountant for an elite firm; the last is Jack, a brilliant programmer who, when we first meet him, is handcuffed to a lightpost in Amsterdam, inebriated and high.

Stross’ characterizations are not necessarily his strong suit; these aren’t stock characters, necessarily, but they do fit some of the moulds. Sue is about as much of a Luddite as one can be in the context of this near-future world; the sort of action hero who would kick down a door while the less-muscled nerd was trying to pick the lock, and much hay is made of her abject confusion when it comes to the internal rules and nomenclature of gaming. Elaine and Jack, who are gamers themselves, are much more adept at navigating the narrative. Even still, it seems as though Jack is still having to backtrack, sitcom-like, and explain himself whenever he comments about a technological topic; one may argue for its realism, though it strikes me as merely pedantic and tiresome.

As I mentioned earlier, Stross writes what is known as “hard” scifi, and as such it is focused on technical accuracy and realism; there are no space aliens injected in order to spice things up, or Michael Bay caricatures, or deuses ex machina literally from machines, or cure-all Science™ or other cheap tricks from lazy fabulists. You could argue that the whole purpose of science fiction is escapism, but I would posit that the best science fiction is usually less like Star Wars and more like Starship Troopers. It’s usually one of two tracks:

Use the futuristic setting in order to exaggerate or accelerate a time-agnostic point; e.g. Accelerando featured a legal system wherein patents could be granted literally in the blink of an eye, and the book’s sidelong treatment of this problem is an indictment not only of our current patent process, but such information systems in general.
Speculate how technology with solve or create problems; in Halting State‘s case, the problem is (a) pervasive gaming culture and (b) an acquired reliance on imperfect information systems. Add to this mixture a dose of human greed, incompetence, and violence, and you’ve got a book.

Halting State doesn’t necessarily think the big thoughts in the way that Accelerando does; it is, after all, a techno-thriller and not a space opera. But it does say something about the risks of technology (and state actors) and how, given the rate at which technology in general and gaming in particular is becoming not only a part of a culture, but a part of our economy, such matters can quickly escalate out of the province of soda-drinking teenagers and into a matter of national security.

Accelerando

Ben — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 02:32:27 +0000

Accelerando by Charles Stross: Publisher: Ace; Year: 2006; Pages: 432

I was recommended Charlie Stross after my less-than-exemplary experience with Daniel Suarez’s Daemon. The commenter in question figured that Stross had better bona fides and wrote a better technical piece of fiction. I’m quite pleased to say that he was right.

Accelerando is actually free: you can download it in a variety of formats here. Because I stare at a computer screen long enough as it is, I opted for the paperback after about 15 pages of the PDF. The book is unlike anything I’ve read before; I see ghosts of other writers, but the end result is unique to me. Mostly, it’s like a bullet train barreling past; you reach tentatively out and get yanked out of your shoes and carried, screaming, for several hundred miles.

It’s difficult to give even a shallow summary of the book’s whirlwind events, but we start with a man named Manfred Macx, at some point in a near-future. Brain power is augmented by technology, and pretty much everything is connected via the Internet and persistent wi-fi. I say it’s a near future, but of course it’s still science fiction insofar the the technology described has very effectively bridged the brain-computer gap in a way that we’re only beginning to understand now.

Manfred has very little money, but he’s a mover and a shaker, always coming up with new ideas and patenting them; then he assigns the patent to foundations modeled after Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, except they deal with hardware, infrastructure, &c. Essentially, it’s describing a future where IP has very much moved into the shared domain, and the entire economic model is in flux.

Despite the advance, the beginning of Accelerando is very coherent (if verbose and fast-paced); it’s also beautifully written. Consider this excerpt:

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.

One can see the comparisons to Neal Stephenson forming already.

But much like its name would suggest, this brisk pace is a slow start, and soon Stross has taken us decades into the future, where “Economics 2.0″ has completely eliminated human necessity in controlling markets, mankind has mined the solar system, the distinction between human consciousness, AI, and computer-corporate entities is blurred, and it’s all enough to given an ethicist nightmares. It’s both a thrilling and terrifying view of the future, exquisitely sci-fi but surprisingly realistic in its execution.

I mentioned Neal Stephenson, but I see hints of other authors as well (limited though my sci-fi reading is): the latter half of the book reminds me very much of Dafydd ab Hugh’s Endgame; as well, it’s heavy on Heinlein, with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress coming immediately to mind. I’d nod (grudgingly) to William Gibson and the cyberpunk genre, from which this book appears to borrow, but it doesn’t have quite the same dinginess that most cyberpunk does; Accelerando is all steel and glass, whereas most cyberpunk that I’ve read tends toward gritty dystopias.

By the end, Accelerando has taken four very confusing left turns—which, if you’re keeping track, brings you back to where you started—and some rather gallingly convenient plot devices. Still, once the bullet train comes to a stop and you can stand up, dizzily brush yourself off, and pick the insects out of your teeth, you realize that it was quite the amazing story. It’s a demonstration not just of Stross’ writing abilities, but of his keen grasp of technology (real and imagined). It’s definitely enough to make me read more by him.