I thought I'd just write a few thoughts down and see where it goes. I'm having trouble writing down my thoughts. Apologies if I go too fast. I'm not in the mood to be patient.
First things first. I write a lot. My mother is a bibliophile. I am a scriptophile, I love to write. But I don't publish most of what I write. My graphic novel Javantea's Fate ground to a halt not long after it started, so I started a blog called "Making of JF" hoping to gain readership by writing keywords and drawing interesting things a few days per week. Years later very few pages of Javantea's Fate were finished, but 378 pages of Making of JF were done. That's a huge amount of writing. It was a very tough part of my life, so I'm glad that I have that corpus of writing to show what my mind was thinking. But I didn't post everything I wrote. The House MD episode "Private Lives" discussed a person who wrote down everything she was going through. I didn't do that back in 2001, but I was spending a few hours three days a week on it. I can't do that now because I signed a confidentiality contract with my previous employer and one of our clients. They went to bat for me and I owe them my current happy status but I also think that the past four years of not quite radio silence (comparatively) has warped my mind. Of course my mind was warped before I went to work in infosec, but the secrets I've kept have gnawed at me. It's the whole issue of doublethink straight from 1984. I am holding two contradicting truths to be true at the same time. Operational security is incredibly important, information should be made free. But information is power and with great power comes great responsibility. I am an irresponsible person. I don't believe in control.
Let's talk about control. There are more than a few theories on the human mind that talk about control and I'm not going to do them any justice explaining them right now. Let's say that my friend, let's call him Descartes for now says that human beings are incapable of moving. He's wrong, but let's say I'm so furious that I want to prove to him that human beings are capable of moving. So I tell him, if I am able to walk from my current position to one foot in front of you, then I can move and your statement is false. He replies, but how do you know you're moving and not changing my mind about what's going on? Occam's razor? Nope. Descartes isn't having it. So I think again. I am unable to reach out and touch you right now. If I am able to reach out and touch you, I must be able to move therefore your theory is wrong. Descartes is too smart for that. You can change my mind, so how do I know if you're actually touching me?
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This is a quick message to those who communicate with me over PGP or who verify my signatures, I am now using a new key and I am retiring (but not yet revoking) the old 1954fed2 key. Many things I have written are still signed with the old key and many software packages I wrote are signed by that key so it will remain secret hopefully for a year or two. The reason I'm changing keys is because the 1954fed2 key is 1024-bit El-Gamal and is 9 years old. How many keys are 9 years old? The longevity of my key probably has to do with my trust in El-Gamal and my distrust of RSA. Over the past few months I have factored a handful of weak RSA keys and I have done a little bit of cryptanalysis. There are many weaknesses in cryptographic keys and many weaknesses in the computer systems that protect them. We hope that we will avoid these and that our random number generators are strong enough to keep the NSA from reading our personal and business conversations that we choose to encrypt with PGP. We also hope that the NSA isn't able to sign malicious software with our keys or the keys of people we rely upon to provide us with software. But in all, we can only do so much and if RSA is broken or SHA-2 is broken, then we just have to deal with the consequences. Until we know better, we have to use the best judgement we have.
So now for the key. It's been signed by 1954fed2. The key id is CBA783EF. As always, only trust fingerprints or keys signed by keys you have checked the fingerprints for.
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For those who are interested in the OpenPGP format. Here is a parsing of the above public key:
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Jan 12, 2013
I've been blogging more than usual since I released AI3 on Christmas Eve. You should check it out. In comparison to all websites I have released, AI3 has the most potential and should get the most respect. I purchased a super-fast server (SSD especially for fast database lookups), leased a super-fast colo space for it, and am going to add to it regularly. As a feature of AI3, I will attempt to keep a regular blog here with insight into what I think about each feature of the website is and then I will make a page with that data on ai3 using a simple slug. I've already done a few if you want to look at the past few blog posts.
The feature that I'm going to discuss today is single-minded research of a single difficult topic. Searching for a common word in Google can be one of the most frustrating things in the world. What you really want is for someone to answer the question you are asking, not learn every way to misunderstand what you are asking. Sometimes AI3 will fail, there's no doubt that Google is more in depth than anything I can create even if I had all of Wikipedia. So let's get in depth on a very simple question. It's not one of the easy questions I've been dealing with. Let's ask: "Is the word 'We' used more positively or negatively?" By that, I mean "Is the sentence 'We plan to solve poverty by 2017,' more common than 'We can not solve poverty by 2017'?" But not just that sentence, but every sentence which is in the positive "We *verb*" vs "We *verb* not". This is a deviously difficult problem. Even with a huge corpus, definitive answers require statistical analysis of a ton of stuff. Let's attempt it though. Start with We and we. All words in AI3 are case-sensitive, which is why there are links to all variants of we on the We word page. 1276 pages is too many unless we have a script. Let's try collocation of We. It's a slow process because We is such a common word. You can look below if you're impatient. While you're waiting, maybe try looking at a few sentences. The second sentence is:
`` We didn't want town work '', Jones said.Eureka already? Yup. All we need to do is find similar words on We and every word that is in the negative. That's pretty easy, right? There are only four pages of words that contain n't and most of them are pretty uncommon. Note that there's a bug where dashes assume that two words are one. That's a problem with my parser which should be more intelligent about whitespace. So manually or automatically, we can start searching for sentences that contain We didn't and so on. Since the related page doesn't have a count (due to slowness), we are stuck just trying a high page number and using a binary search from there. If you don't know what a binary search is, let me explain. Let's say that there could be upwards of 100 pages of sentences or more. Simply skip to page 100. If it gives you an error, then there aren't that many pages. Go to half that number, page 50. Half the number again and again until you come up a valid page. Then pick a number half way between the valid page and the invalid page. After a few hits, you will find that page 6 is the end of We didn't. In total, it should only take 7 tries to find any number between 1 and 100 because 2^7 is 128. If you don't understand the math, hopefully you'll understand the process. Anyway, now we have a way of counting all the negative sentences. Then we simply need to count all the sentences that contain We. That can be found on the We word page. But let's say that you thought this algorithm through and have some skill with a database. How long would it take you to come up with the solution? Read more »
It's been a month since I went to Brasil. I am planning on going back, learning as quickly as I can. It's likely that I won't be able to make it back until next winter, but I will plan on it. I need to stay in touch with the friends I made over there. There are many conferences that I can attend to make my stay work-related, but the plane ticket is my main expense. I'm planning on keeping my Brasilian telephone number and giving it to my friends so that they can call me for cheap or free. Of course they can call me on Skype for free as well. We're lucky that we live in such a well-connected society, it's just up to us to stay in touch.
A video I watched today said that Vila Prudente is a favela. I actually visited that neighborhood while I was there and didn't think it was a favela. If that is the definition of a favela, then my eyes deceive me. Certainly the neighborhood may be much poorer than some of the neighborhoods I visited, but it looks quite beautiful (see the street view if you want to know what I mean). Maybe that is the definition of the favela, poverty in a beautiful place. It didn't connect with me that there would be any crime in that neighborhood. The video is about how the residents are getting people involved with documentary films.
What's new with me? Well, since I'm back in Seattle, I may start up yet another blog at blog.altsci.com (not started yet) which will keep a little more info on my day to day and will collect all the other blogs. One problem I have is that I have too many blogs. In one way it's good to separate topics but on the other hand most people who visit my blog are looking for me rather than my topic. I would love to attract more people interested in my subject matter but maybe I should post more subject matter. I can do that.
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