You have to crawl before you can walk

So I got to thinking the other day about how Uber and other businesses depend on manual labor to make them selves work...   At least in the initial stages.  So I present the original networked company - Bell Telephone.   Many moons ago Bell's model for switching was this lady --

Yes that's right.  She and an army of others just like her, (a bit less nosey though) made the connections that got your call through to Dr Welby. Sam the butcher, or Mr. Drucker...   I guess I'm showing my age here. 

So compare the role of the manual labor in the early stages of these startups.  Uber is leveraging the same model.  Manual labor drives the cars.  The business makes the application to accept the order I" need a ride from Point x to point y" and dispatch the car.  The manual labor fulfills it.   But understand how much manual labor is used in all kinds of industries. Face book is using it to support their new AI. http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/.   You can even get manual labor as a service..  I give you Mechanical Turk. https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

So obviously the phone company has removed the manual component and automated their switching. Uber will have to automate their drivers at some point.  With the valuations they have they should be researching this right now.  Don't wait for a Google or and Apple car to replace your driver.   Google and Apple can build a order taking interface and have a fleet competition for Uber very quickly.  It does not work the same way for Uber.  Uber has done the easy task of writing and order taking and dispatch app.  What they do not have is the self driving car.  This is a hard problem for them.  Current Uber drivers beware! You will be replaced.

Hotels, Airlines should get in sync

So a thought struck me the other day as I was discussing wifi access on planes with a co-worker.  Airline wifi should be same model as hotel wifi.  Business Class passengers get to pay $14.99 a day, and us freight class passengers should get it for free.  We have to have something for putting up with the cramped seats,  right?

Trojan Horses?

I had a wonderful Christmas.  I hope you did too.  One of the things I received from my Father-In-Law was a cheap mouse made to look like a sports car.  It even has head lights that glow.  Zoom zoom!  Anyway,  I was about to put a battery in it an plug it up when I noticed the familar CE symbol on the packaging.  Made in China. hmmm...   Do I really want to attach this to my laptop or my work PC?   Not unless I want the APT capturing my key strokes.  Paranoid?  Maybe..  but after finding out that the NSA is doing a shipping man in the middle with routers and laptops,  maybe less so.

Unfortunately or fortunately, the NSA is driving us all to a more secure Internet.  Encryption will be de rigueur.  Really all that leaves is the hacked hardware peripheral as an option.  Perhaps the safest thing is to build my own computer with a CPU that I purchase at a physical store completely at random. 

I'm just saying that's all...

Target: I'm calling bullshit!

Target got hacked.  Many times companies perform a triage as fast as they can when they are penetrated in such a manner.  I thought Target was pretty forthcoming in that they seemed to make public the incident fairy quickly.  That being said, I'm calling bullshit on the PINs not being exposed.

Their press release seems to not understand that there are different types of encryption that apply for different uses. 

http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/27/technology/target-pin/

Target wants the public to believe that the pins were not exposed.  They claim that the encryption renders the PIN safe.  The PINs were protected with 3DES.  3DES is a symmetric algorithm.  One key performs both encryption and decryption.  The PIN gets encrypted at the POS terminal, and remains encrypted through Targets internal systems until it is presented to the processor.  Then the processor decrypts it.  Original indications were that the breach was at the POS terminal, instead of the a central system that stores the card transactions.  Since we know the 3DES key is present on the POS term and the POS term is where the breach occurs, I would submit that the PINs are far from safe.  Potentially this key could be encrypted on the terminal, however, in memory it would have to be unencrypted to perform the encryption of the pin. 

I am not a designer of these POS systems, so I am not privy to all the safe guards employed at the POS Terminal.  All I'm pointing out is the type of encryption they are claiming to use seems inconsistent with the amount of security that a symmetric algorithm provides.

What the NSA / Snowden fiasco tells us

So the NSA is uptight that their super secret spying system has been exposed.  I always wondered how much they listened in but was very shocked at the volume. Now, two encrypted email services have shut down rather than have to provide access to emails.  When we think about this what does this tell us?  There is no backdoor in encryption that the NSA has fostered...

For many years people have surmised that the NSA had built in secret backdoors into the NSA approved encryption algorithms.  When the US government decided to no longer classify these as munitions, many thought it was because the NSA had a backdoor key.   However, if there was a backdoor then the NSA would not have to resort to demanding access to the emails from lavabit.  They could just soak them in as they passed through the ISP and decrypt at their leisure.

Another effect of this is now much of the IT infrastructure in the rest of the world has started looking for non US based cloud solutions.  They are not interested in exposing their data or their customer's data to the NSA. That's lots of corporate money and potential tax dollars that just went bye bye.

I predict that NSA's pursuit of Edward Snowden will contribute to more encryption being used in the world.  This will nullify the NSA's desire effect of being able to read all the communications in the clear.


We will see what the future brings.

Think of the possibilities.

With all the uproar of the NSA PRISIM database, I have to contribute my 2 cents.  What would Joe McCarthy been able to do with this type of data?  McCarthy put the nation on edge by applying conjecture, circumstances, and association. 

Just think about this for awhile...  Let it sink in, and then call your congressman.

A Patriot is concerned for the country he loves.

Update: Java Unicode Regex

So in a past insert on Java Unicode Regex support, I gushed about how Java's support for Unicode was full of awesome coding goodness.  Sigh.  I must inform you that Java's Unicode regex is really very lacking.  For the full understanding take a look at this thread http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4304928/unicode-equivalents-for-w-and-b-in-java-regular-expressions

Just remember...  not everything on the internet is true ;-)

The era of cyborg dominion has dawned

Well that's it. We are beaten...   We might as well give up. Hail to the new robot overlords!




Here's a link to the details http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/robot-hand-beats-you-at-rock-paper-scissors-100-of-the-time