32C3

This year I participated in the Chaos Computer Club's annual congress for the first time, despite it being the 32nd such event being arranged, hence its name 32c3. This year's event has the subname of "Gated Communities" and follows last year in its location in Hamburg after having been in Berlin for a while. By this point I expect many have written the event off as a nerd gathering of hackers, which, well, in many ways it is, but it requires some modification. The number of visitors exceeds 12,000, so this is a large event, lasting over four days from 27th to 30th of December each year, and if you look deeper into it actually is a family event for many with own events for teaching children technology and a childspace that include games that use technology to represent position or sound in order to control ping-pong-games. Picture taking is of course prohibited throughout the conference unless getting explicit permission from all involved parties (as it should be in the rest of society).

Presentations this year were organized in four main tracks, starting at 11:30 and going as late as 2am. It is a somewhat interesting experience to attend a lecture on "A gentle introduction to post-quantum cryptography" by Dan Bernstein and Tanja Lange at 23:00 - 00:00 and having a full lecture hall. I wonder how many universities would have the same result.

Don't worry though, if missing a lecture the video streaming is one of the better you can encounter, separated into multiple sections, (i) a live stream (ii) a Re-Live, which is un-modified version of the stream that can be watched later and (iii) A released video of the talk that is properly mastered and in better quality. So if wanting to watch the aforementioned talk on PQC you can do so at any time.

As a disproporational amount of my acquaintances are focusing on the legal field instead of technology in itself, lets continue with a good talk by Max Schrems suing Facebook over Safe Harbor and data protection going all the way to the european court of justice. Or maybe you want to learn more about the legal ambiguities surrounding Sealand, and the precesses involved in creation your own country and the operational failures of data havens?

If wanting to mix in the more technological part, how about a wrap-up of the Crypto Wars part II and comparisons to the 1990's. For those not having spent too much time looking into the first one, some particularly bad ideas were the clipper chip for key escrow, but what is curious is the same amount of arguments being used then as now. FBI/NSA and other governmental agencies wants un-fethered access to encrypted email and blames cryptography for its failures, even though those involved in recent events in Paris and San Bernadino actually used un-encrypted communication and the security services never picked up anything. As such, they, along with politicians, use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) to make their case. Its typical of politicians to think that the problem is the rhethoric or the name rather than the underlying substance, and as a result we see discussions of a "secure golden key" or a "front door" instead of a "back door" to cryptography. The attempts of governments from the first crypto wars of couse influence us even today, in particular with the export restrictions imposed that until recently still exists compatibility for in various libraries allowing for downgrade attacks. A good talk by J. Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger on Logjam underlines why attempts of undermining encryption is a bad thing even decades later.

What people seems to forget is that encryption is required for the e-commerce that we use every day. Who would ever connect to an internet banking application if their neighbour could be monitoring all account information and traffic? And the right to privacy is even established under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 19, stating: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinion without interfearence and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers".

The United Kingdom (UK) is comming off this debate in a particularly bad way with Cameron's Snooper's Charter. In particular §189(4)(c): "Operators may be obliged to remove "electronic protection" if they provide ..." seems worrying. This is followed by Australia; where simply explaining an algorithm to someone can result in penalization. But none of these beats India; that require a copy of plain text to be retained for a minimum of 90 days if sending an encrypted message.

This level of tyranny from oppressive regimes of various governments nicely sets the stage for the presentation of North Korea's Red Star Operating System and the various ways the operating system, set to mimic Apple's Mac OS, in order to spy and keep the people down. Of particular interest is the watermarking technology and censoring application that forms part of the "anti-virus" (well, the red start icon of it could be a hint)

All in all, this is just a minimal representaiton of some of the interesting aspects of this conference. Not surprisingly the most used operating systems of the visitors (at least those connected to the network) was GNU/Linux (24.1%) and Android (17.6%), and if you want to see the talk about Windows 10 acting as a botnet you have that video as well.

Employment in a technological era

Lately I've been spending some time reading up on research into developments to the nature of employment given the increased computerization and automation in today's, and in particular, in tomorrow's world. These developments brings immense increases in productivity and opens up a new world of opportunities, but are employees keeping track and updating their skill sets to utilize it? My personal opinion is no, which was what initiated looking into the research on the matter.

Frey and Osborne's paper "The future of employment: how suspectible are jobs to computerisation" (2013) bring some interesting aspects, including a decent historical context to this issue; starting with referencing how John Maynard Keynes is frequently cited for his prediction of a widespread technological unemployment "due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labor outrunning the pace of which we can find new uses for labor" (Keynes, 1933). This was of course during a different technological advancement than we're experiencing now,  but it shows that the discussion is not new, in fact it is nicely illustrated by an example of William Lee, inventing the stocking frame knitting machine in 1589, hoping that it would relieve workers of hand-knitting, something which met opposition by Queen Elizabeth I that was more concerned with the employment impact and refused to grant him a patent, claiming that "Thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars" (cited in Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012).

Has anything changed since the 16th century, or are we facing the same kind of social opposition to changing the status quo? How many, today, are willing to learn a programming language in order to interface with and utilize the tools of today? As pointed out by Makyr (1998): "Unless all individuals accept the "verdict" of the market outcome, the decision whether to adopt an innovation is likely to be resisted by losers through non-market mechanisms and political activism". This was followed up by the luddite riots between 1811 and 1816 as a manifestation of a fear of technological change among workers as Parliament revoked a 1551 law prohibiting the use of gig mills in the wool-finishing trade.

Today's challenges to labor markets are different in form, yet resemble the historical aspects to a great extent. These days the ability to communicate with a computer is, in my humble opinion, as vital as learning human languages, yet there are barely a few pushes towards learning programming languages alongside human spoken languages. My hypothesis is that a reason for this is a lack of knowledge in the adult population for the same, and quite frankly mathematics and logic in general, which naturally makes people uncomfortable requiring children to learn these subjects. Initiatives such as the UK's attempt to get kids coding, with changes to the national curriculum. ICT – Information and Communications Technology introducing a new “computing” curriculum including coding lessons for children as young as five (September 2013) is therefore very welcome, but as referenced in an article in The Guardian: "it seems many parents will be surprised when their children come home from school talking about algorithms, debugging and Boolean logic" and "It's about giving the next generation a chance to shape their world, not just be consumers in it".

The ability to shape my own day is one of the reasons why I'm personally interested in the world of open source. If I'm experiencing an issue while running an application, or if I want to extend it with new functionality, it is possible to do something about it when the source is available. Even more so, in a world that is increasingly complex and interconnected, basing this communication on open standards enables participation from multiple participants across different operating systems and user interfaces.

At the same time, increasingly so in the aftermath of Edward Snowden, I want to have the ability to see what happens with my data. Reading through the End User License Agreements (EULA) of services being offered to consumers I sometimes get truly scared. The last explicit example was the music playing service Spotify that introduced new terms stating that in order to continue using the service I would have to accept to having gained permission from all contacts to share their personal information. Safe to say I terminated that subscription.

There is an increasing gap in the knowledge required to understand the ramifications of the services being developed, the value of private information, and people's ability to recognize what is happening in an ever connected world. As pointed out in two earlier posts, "Your Weakest Security Link? Your Children, or is it?" and "Some worries about mobile appliances and the Internet of Things" this can actually be quite difficult, with the end result of individuals just drifting along.

So what do you think? Why not pick up an online tutorial on learning SQL, the structured query language used to talk with most database systems the next time you're feeling bored and is inclined to put on a TV program or just lie back on the couch, or maybe pick up a little bit of python, C, or for that matter C# if you're in a windows-centric world. Or as a general plea; make read a book once in a while.

 

2012 Outlook

The year 2011 has been marked with extreme volatility, much to do indecisive politicians that have not only shown a lack of decision making and slow response to changing environments, but that have actively worked their way towards the wrong direction and into a corner. As such, when I received the following quote from an acquaintance, I could do nothing but concur.

As Year end draws nearer, the worry is the main positive for 2011 is it's looking likely to be a whole lot better than 2012...

There is nothing that would indicate the volatility to decrease in 2012. What has changed, however, is the psychology of it all. It is amazing what people, and then in particular market participants, can get used to. An equity index move of 3-5 per cent points is now nearly to consider normal, and at least don't prompt too much attention. The investors are also a different breed, and trying to learn to take advantage of the volatility to increase earnings, and act counter-cyclically to take advantages of dips in the market.

For the Fixed Income space, the phrases regulatory risk, execution risk and event risk has truly been experienced, and players are adapting to expect to wait for windows for proper transactions depending on the surroundings.

All of this is likely to continue, and the world is bracing for outcome of a break-up of the European monetary union. This coming week the International Swaps and Derivatives Association will hold a webcast with its members next week to discuss what would happen to euro-denominated derivatives contracts in the event of one or more countries leaving the euro zone.

Personally I'm not expecting a full-fledged break-up of the union within 2012 where the Euro completely cease to exist, resulting in a dependence on Lex Monetae for interpretations of contracts, but I do consider it likely to have one or several countries seceding the euro-zone and getting a New National Currency (NNC), which can result in interesting contractual effects and monetary flow control (prohibition of exporting hard cash from a country can result in a foreign governed contract not being enforceable still)

If nothing else 2012 looks to become a very interesting year - but not a year for the weak minded.