Why USA.NET Feels So Lonely

From Radicati's newly published report on hosted email services:

Nice work, guys!

Physical Encryption: The Ultimate ID Theft Defense

When my father recently retired his old laptop, he realized that many years of financial records and other private data have proliferated all the dark nooks and crannies of his hard drive. So this weekend he charged my son with the task of physically encrypting his drive using the Sledgehammer Algorithm, an asymmetrical encryption protocol.

Multi-core Processors are Key to Security

MIT Professor and Turing Award Winner Ron Rivest knows a thing or two about security. He invented the RC2, RC4, and RC5 symmetric key encryption algorithms (RC=Rivest Cipher), as well as the MD2, MD4 and MD5 hashing algorithms. He's also the R in RSA, so I got to know him when Jim Bidzos and I were getting VeriSign off the ground (not to mention a few friendly poker games we shared).

Anyway, the community of security researchers continuously strengthen their algorithms to withstand the steady onslaught of attack from cryptographers with increasingly powerful computers. So Rivest has been developing his newest MD6 algorithm on Tilera multi-core processors. Tilera is a Bessemer company that has integrated 64 processors with independent memory, caches and network ports on a single chip known as Tile64.

According to this article from a recent MIT campus paper, NIST won't adopt MD6 as a standard because it's just too slow to run without the Tile64. The inescapable conclusion is that as long as we continue to buy computers built on stale platforms, our security algorithms will be vulnerable to hackers with newer toys.

A Field Trip to 1906

About an hour ago Captain Watts discharged my son Avery and me from our duties aboard the Balclutha, a sailing ship docked in the Bay. Together with Avery’s class (the regular crewmen), his teacher (Guest of the Captain), four other parents (the Tall Sailors), and the staff of the Age of Sail program (the Officers), we set sail to Portland in the year 1906 to fetch much needed timber for rebuilding San Francisco. Avery worked in Galley Crew, and I in the Rigger Crew. The simulated voyage—a 20 hour adventure –was arduous but ultimately successful.

The Balclutha—a glorious three-masted steel hull square rigged sailing ship built in Scotland and now docked in the San Francisco Maritime Museum—has sailed many times around the world since its commission in January 1887, and did actually sail up the West Coast through Frisco In 1906. Today, as our nation’s only floating national park, she’s open to visitors by day but open only to the Age of Sail program off hours.

Dockmaster Clyde allowed us to board with but one duffel bag for our pillow, blanket and toothbrush. He relieved me and the other Tall Sailors of any anachronistic distractions like cameras and phones, so for 20 hours we were completely off-grid. First Mate Phoenix was not pleased when Second Mate Bonk presented the new crew. “I dispatched you to recruit 10 older experienced sailors, not 10-year-old sailors, you ninny!” But Captain Watts -- determined to be the first to market with Oregon lumber -- resolved to train the greenhands.

The Galley, Boat, Boson, Rigger and Deck Crews were each manned by four regular crewmen plus one Tall Sailor (grownup). But the Tall Sailors were NOT in charge. In fact, the contract we signed specifically prohibited us from doing or saying anything (except in the case of emergency, which never came up), since this experience was for the kids’ benefit, not ours. After years of

helicopter parenting, we had to somehow be there without ever saying a single word to any of the children, including our own. As they fumbled to put their coats on upside down, or provoked the captain by forgetting to remove their hats on deck, or over-salted the stew, or didn’t think to use the Head Call when they had the chance, or spoke too softly to be heard, or wondered where to stow a dirty tissue, or groped for the right word, or bickered, or encountered any of the little struggles that we normally help them overcome, the Tall Sailors had to suck it up and let it be. We simply followed our crews around and watched (though at night the Tall Sailors slept in a separate bunk galley so regular crewmen were on their own to make bunk).

In fact a regular seaman from each crew had already been designated to lead that crew as their mate, and to give the orders that the rest of us had to follow to the word. When it came to ship discipline, there was no impunity for Tall Sailors—I had to haul firewood for the Galley stove more than once just for putting hands in my pockets as the frigid Bay winds whipped around us.

It took some harsh training, but the crews learned how to appropriately respond to their captain, first mate, other officers and crew mate. (Say ‘Aye, Sir’ to anyone other than the captain and you’ll haul water buckets during Galley call.) The crew mates themselves were mostly uncomfortable at first when it came to issuing commands (our Rigger Mate was a sweet, shy 10 year old girl), but with the First Mate and Captain breathing down their necks they quickly learned to bark out orders clearly and properly.

For the past week the regular crewmen had been preparing by learning all kinds of stuff (that I still don’t know) such as how to identify parts of the ship, tie all kinds of strange knots, and sing authentic sailor shanties. So they were ready right away for the officers to teach them more complex team skills, such as working in unison to lower and raise the lifeboats, coil the hawser (a thick 120 foot mooring line), raise their school's flag up the main mast, and swab the decks. Rather than teach the crews directly, officers trained the mates to teach the crews.

The deck crew kept the bells ringing on time, and the galley crew kept all the hands fed. Through the cold night each crew kept a silent 90 minute watch, punctually and quietly relieving their deckmates. Turns out we had no pirate attacks (or sleepwalkers) and so it was a time for the deckhands to reflect on what they accomplished yesterday, and to enjoy the sounds and smells of the Bay, barely illuminated through the mist by the Ghirardelli factory sign. One boy, weepy and homesick, made it through the night with the help of his mate, but in the morning he had the biggest smile of all.

At 0430 this morning the Galley Crew began preparing breakfast and by 0600 all the crews were dressed, everyone had a Head Call, and the seaman returned the hawser to port. After galley call, it was time for some sailor fun—the Rigger Crew had hoisted a block and tackle and new lines up the aft mast to hold an expertly knotted boson’s chair, and now their mate was coordinating their Heaves and the Hos as the Riggers hauled their chair up the mast with their own crew members in it. At the captain’s suggestion, they recruited other crews to man the stern line, helping them hoist the Guest of the Captain (their teacher), whom they brought back to deck only after negotiating a week’s relief from homework.

At the final assembly of all deckhands, Captain Watts led us in a shantey.

The work wuz hard an' the voyage wuz long,
Leave her, Johnny, Leave her!
The sea was high an' the gales wuz strong.
An it's time for us to leave her!

It was as if these were different kids than yesterday morning. What they learned on the Balclutha went beyond a nautical lesson. They were confident, in charge, and even respectful of the officers who had been so firm with them. They learned that they can accomplish way more than they thought, that with elbow grease, teamwork and their own wits they can solve their own problems.

And that’s when it occurred to me that maybe in fact the Tall Sailors had as much to benefit from the experience as the kids. The 20 hours of just watching taught me that letting Avery solve his own problems is not only possible, but far more rewarding.

The captain dismissed the crew and for the first time in 20 hours parents and children could speak to each other. The kids of the Tall Sailors gave us each a “Hi” or a even a hug, and then went back to gathering their duffel bags--everything back to normal, but with a bit more spry in their steps, and a newfound respect for them in our eyes.

An Epic Search for Truth, with a Connection in Frankfurt

Normally I’d wait until I finish reading a book before I write my review. But LogiComix is – er, unusual, and not just because it’s a graphic novel about a dead logician. Three chapters into it, I’m captivated and enchanted by the playful, clever, innovative use of self-reference. For example, the prologue opens with co-author Apostolos Doxiadis reading a draft of his story. As we intrude upon his thoughts, he invites us to meet Berkeley computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou, whom Apostolos must recruit to help him with the book. When Apostolos tells Christos the story he’d like to craft, we, the readers, get to hear it too!

Along the way, Christos asks questions, points out problems, and makes suggestions to Apostolos as well as to his illustrators Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna. As the story unfolds, the creative team debate how to best move it forward. By the end Christos and we together come to understand that LogiComix is deliberately not LOGIC FOR DUMMIES, but rather a true story about passion, family, war, love, tragedy and hope.

So if the LogiComix creative team can be characters writing their story as it goes, then I can do the same in this review. If that violates some rule, I wouldn’t know because I am of course not a professional book reviewer. Here are my only qualifications for writing this review:

(i) I have a fancy degree in theoretical computer science centered mainly on the works of those logicians portrayed in this story.

(ii) As a practiced blogger, I can emulate authority on any subject.

(iii) My dear friend Vivian Leal of Kepler’s Bookstore asked me to review this book.

(iv) As I type, I am on a Lufthansa flight from St. Petersburg heading home to San Francisco, so I have some time.

When Vivian asked me to review LogiComix, I readily agreed. Not only do I love both Vivian and Kepler’s, but I can also say that I love Christos Papadimitriou. I’ve never met him, but he did also happen to co-author my favorite college textbook Elements of the Theory of Computation, a beautifully elegant introduction to Turing machines and recursion that even I could understand. His co-author back then was Harry Lewis, my CS121 professor and also my undergraduate advisor. (Still, like Papadimitriou, Lewis never knew who I was, though once he passed me by in Harvard Yard and raised his eyebrows at me in an acknowledging way that made me feel a real connection.) Coincidentally, I would have never met Vivian had I not befriended her husband Daniel 23 years ago back in CS121 – another debt I owe Christos Papadimitriou.

So far, the graphic novel format of LogiComix (now popularized by the Wimpy Kid and Maus series, as well as The Invention of Hugo Cabret) is working well for me. The throwback to comic books promises to make even Boolean Algebra an accessible topic to all, just as Scott McCloud recently did with a comic book about Google’s new Chrome browser architecture. But more importantly, Apostolos draws us into the story with visuals that not only support the narrative but also relay sub-plots and emotional texture. Often we see a human side to the characters that they otherwise don’t acknowledge, such as a jealous look from a wife, or a 12-year-old boy subtly covering his lap while his beautiful French nanny reads him a love sonnet. (I’m reminded of the beautiful French nanny who charmed me as well – so much so that I married her. Hmm, can’t this plane fly any faster?)

The excited 12-year-old is our hero – the great mathematician Bertrand Russell who devoted not only his career but his life to the pursuit of a provably logical foundation for mathematics, as Euclid had purportedly done for geometry (at least before Lobachewski and Riemann each had his way with Euclid’s assumptions). Embedding yet another layer of recursion into LogiComix, Russell tells his own story in the form of a lecture delivered at an American university on Sept 4, 1939, the day the UK joined World War II. The lecture, titled “The Role of Logic in Human Affairs” promises an answer to the question hurled at him by isolationists as to whether Russell, as a World War I conscientious objector, supports the war this time around.

Russell’s own account of his childhood is a contrasting story of privilege and borderline abuse. Orphaned as an infant, “Bertie” lived with his grandfather – a former British prime minister – and a domineering grandmother who imprisoned Bertie in rules and superstitions. Eventually Bertie discovered the family secret that madness had taken his father’s life and disabled his uncle. So when he learned geometry – constructed proof by proof upon common sense and reason – Bertrand embraced logic and science as tools to not only understand the world, but to preserve his own sanity.

Bertrand Russell’s Epic Search for Truth

Russell studies mathematics at Cambridge University, and proceeds to seek out the great minds of his time, to find some articulation and validation of the basic tenets underlying mathematics. Russell overcomes his shyness to engage the greatest professors of his time with his questions (a thrill I remember well from studying the Sacks Theorem of recursion theory from Professor Gerald Sacks himself).

Russell’s travels take him to Germany just 10 minutes before my Lufthansa pilot announces our imminent arrival in Frankfurt, where I’ll make my connection to San Francisco. Russell’s account of those days in Germany evokes that nation’s unique capacity for both logic and madness. There he meets his future best friend, housemate and collaborator Alfred Whitehead, who had created the first formal system for algebra. He meets Gottlob Frege, who had founded modern logic studies by introducing the concept of Boolean variables, though eventually Frege becomes paranoid, and as early as 1925 starts ranting about a Final Solution for the” Jewish problem.” Finally Russell meets Georg Cantor, inventor of Set Theory, who was already then living in a mental asylum. The interplay of logic and madness is a recurring theme of LogiComix, as Russell struggles to stave off madness himself (with only partial success, as readers will learn).

Another recurring theme of the story is Russell’s failures at love, as he depends solely on logic to master courtship, marriage and child-rearing, even as everyone around him succumbs to irrationality. His memoirs – humble and candid –recount his nerdy fumbles followed by his inconsiderate prioritization of work over family. (That reminds me – I’ll use my layover in Frankfurt to call my family. Today is the kids’ first day of school, and they should know how proud I am.)

As Russell strives to formalize the logic behind math, he gravitates toward set theory, until he himself has an epiphany now known as Russell’s Paradox, which can be simplified to this question: Does The Book Review Of All Book Reviews That Are NOT Self-Referential include a review of itself? Either answer leads to a logical contradiction. Russell’s Paradox deflates everyone who has been working on Set Theory. Russell was surprised that Cantor himself takes the paradox as a sign from God.

As Russell embarks on his epic search for truth, he continues to engage the greatest minds of the century, but along the way he must navigate wars, women (enticing but difficult) and the madness that often accompanies logical genius. At one point he mentors the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, the renowned philosopher and father of cognitive psychology. Ultimately, poor mental health ravages Wittgenstein’s family, and Wittgenstein dismisses Russell’s call for formalizing mathematics as irrelevant to the real world.

Having made my connection out of Frankfurt, I’m now traversing the Continent just as Russell recounts his own travel through France, where he engages Klein, Dedekind, Poincare and Hilbert. I must confess that I didn’t learn (or remember) Hilbert’s work, and LogiComix fails to impart an intuitive understanding of his philosophy. Now that I think of it, the story fails to explain the work of any of the great logicians, so unless you already know the ideas, you’re somewhat in the dark as to how they relate to Russell’s search. (For example, the characters don’t explain how an infinite set can be countable.) Having said that, I can’t protest too much because Papadimitrious himself complains about this in the story. Apostos insists that the story should trump the math.

[What I learned only upon finishing the book is that it does come with a terrific glossary that expounds upon the thinkers and their work. I wish I had known about it while I was reading the story. You’re now duly notified. ]

Russell spends many years working and living with Whitehead trying to adapt Set Theory to overcome his paradox, but Volume II of their Principia Mathematica is interrupted by Russell’s greatest professional setback -- Kurt Godel’s delivery of the Incompleteness Theorem. Essentially Godel proves the futility of developing a formal system of logic rich enough to represent arithmetic by showing how one can formulate a paradox for any such system. Although Apostos and Papadimitriou mention this in the glossary, I wish the story itself explained how Godel himself used recursion to prove his theorem. It is really the most beautiful proof I have ever seen, and to this day I remember that moment in Math 141 when we reached the end of this proof. For weeks we had been learning Godel’s scheme for symbolically representing arithmetic concepts and applying obscure theorems (e.g. the “Pigeonhole Principle”) that took us in bizarre directions. But on that last day, the bits and pieces all magically converged into an inescapable conclusion. I got those goosebumps you get when you witness someone redefine the limits of human ability.

But in a way Godel’s Theorem liberates Russell, who redirects his logical faculties to more worldly affairs. Apostos brings it all home when Russell shares his life’s lessons with the American audience. (Judging from the view, I believe that I’m now back in the States as well!)

Influential and Similar Works

LogiComix marries the elements of many great works. Obviously, Apostos explores and uses self-reference in much the same way as Houfstadter’s masterpiece Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Another clear influence is Kurt Vonnegut, whose book SlaughterHouse Five featured the author’s voice in a similar lament of the madness behind World War II. At one point, Papadimitriou even mentions Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions to exemplify a self-referential novel.

Milton Steinberg’s As A Driven Leaf, about the Talmudic rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah who actually lived around the turn of the second century, tells a similar tale of an epic search for truth. Elisha rejects Judaism in favor of Greek logic, only to regret it in the end. But while Russell must ultimately concede the limitations of logic, he would never return to his grandmother’s superstitions. In fact when Whitehead’s son was killed in the war, Russell couldn’t even attend the funeral.

Although surely not an influence here, Caveh Zahedi’s hilarious, racy film I Am A Sex Addict would, I believe, also appeal to many LogiComix fans. Like LogiComix, it liberally uses real time self-reference to document the hero’s lusty mishaps with women, and the lessons he learns about love.

So LogiComix is part Godel-Escher-Bach, part As a Driven Leaf, part I Am a Sex Addict, and of course part Tintin.

The Fundamental Question: What Makes A Good Book?

Must it be engaging, provocative, emotional, beautiful, instructional, or right? Or some combination of the above? There is no universal answer. But acknowledging this incompleteness allows us to take the next step – to use the tools we have to assess each book independently (which gives you a hint as to what Russell’s told his audience of pacifists in 1941). So if I learned anything from LogiComix, I learned that I needn’t answer the fundamental question in order to recommend it. This is a story that engages, provokes and instructs the reader. But more importantly, I liked it.

So now that the flight attendant is insisting that I stow--

Blogged with the Flock Browser

I Am T-PAIN!!

Today Smule launched a new app called I-Am-T-Pain. It's a karaoke app that auto tunes your voice using the same AnTares DSP technology T-Pain uses, so you sing in key and you sound like T-Pain. The app also lets you share your recordings with your Facebook and MySpace friends.

I'd say it's an overnight success, but it hasn't taken that long. On its first day out in the Apple store, I-Am-T-Pain is already the #2 seller. The tweeters are loving it, and so do the early reviewers...

"Get Ready for the Next Big App" - MobileCrunch

"Auto-Tune Isn’t Dead" - The New York Times

"Auto-Tuning Genius" - Gizmodo

"Sounds Just Like the Radio" - VatorNews

Here's how T-Pain himself (along with Soulja Boy, Keri Hilson and others) showing what you can do with I-Am-T-Pain.



And here are two Smulers being T-Pain...




Be T-Pain yourself and email me your songs so I can share them right here on WhoHasTimeForThis?

Lifelock to Experian: Thank You!

I've been asked recently about Friday's court ruling in favor of Experian's claim that Lifelock's practice of setting fraud alerts on behalf of its subscribers is an unfair competitive practice in California.

In 2003 Congress legislated that credit bureaus must apply fraud alerts at the consumer's request, so that creditors would take extra steps to validate the identity of a credit applicant. So as part of its identity theft protection service, Lifelock has been requesting these alerts on behalf of subscribers. Experian has never liked the fraud alert because it requires work on their part, it makes it harder to sell consumer data to pre-approved credit card lenders and junk mailers, and it makes their credit monitoring service less competitive. So they convinced a California judge that, based on a technicality in the law, companies can serve as our attorneys of record, as trustees, and as agents of all types except when it comes to requesting fraud alerts -- that such a practice is, literally, "unfair" to Experian.

The judge will likely follow up with some kind of injunction to cease the practice, which will make fraud alerts harder to get -- at least in California -- until the ruling has been fully appealed or until Congress clarifies the language.

The development is an unfortunate setback for consumers, but not so much for Lifelock. As we perceived the rising risk of such a ruling, we accelerated our usual pace of service innovation, successfully identifying and developing a new technology that replaces and improves upon fraud alerts. Our new proactive system monitors millions of data sources often in real time to identify and obstruct fraudulent credit applications while they are in process. Unlike fraud alerts, our new system does not slow down the credit application process in any way (unless, of course, you're a thief). While fraud alerts cover the credit bureaus, Lifelock's new system covers a much broader set of lenders including retail, healthcare, mortgages and utilities.

That's why I should really thank Experian for compelling Lifelock to develop this better service mechanism!

So now you have the background for yesterday's message from CEO Todd Davis to Lifelock's subscribers:

Blogged with the Flock Browser