Three virtual posts

Amazon link

I was going to review Richard Morgan's latest tech-thriller "Thin Air" which I enjoyed a lot. But Steven Poole of The Guardian expressed my thoughts so much more clearly. Really, it's easier just to point you to his review.

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Like everyone else I had plenty of thoughts about the alleged Gatwick Airport drone incursion. The problem seems to be in two parts: first to identify the team launching/retrieving the drone; second to deal with the drone itself. The first part seems harder.

My idea was to run a real time video-acquisition platform (a satellite, police drones or arrays of ground-based CCTV) covering the operational radius of the hostile drone around the airport - I believe this is 2-3 miles. This would generate a great deal of video which would need to be searched very rapidly for hostile drone-team activity. Precisely what Project Maven was designed to address. Google may have gone pacifist but no reason for Qinetiq not to do the project.

But I read so many interesting ideas that it seemed pointless and redundant to add any more.

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I was going to write about this paper with the unpromising title: "Mapping morality with a compass: Testing the theory of ‘morality-as cooperation’ with a new questionnaire" by Oliver Scott Curry, Matthew Jones Chesters and Caspar J. Van Lissa.

What they've done is rethink Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory on the basis of evolutionary plausibility. Instead of Haidt's five dimensions, they have seven and in their field trials it all seems to make sense. Here are their seven moral dimensions. Click on image to make readable.

This is what they say in their abstract.

"Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC) is the theory that morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. MAC uses game theory to identify distinct types of cooperation, and predicts that each will be considered morally relevant, and each will give rise to a distinct moral domain.

Here we test MAC’s predictions by developing a new self-report measure of morality, the Morality-as-Cooperation Questionnaire (MAC-Q), and comparing its psychometric properties to those of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ). Over four studies, the results support the MAC-Q’s seven-factor model of morality, but not the MFQ’s five-factor model.

Thus MAC emerges as the best available compass with which to explore the moral landscape."

I have been quite enthused here by Moral Foundations Theory, while being aware that it, like the five-factor model of personality theory, floats unanchored, crying out for a deeper evolutionary embedding. So this latest work is potentially quite exciting.

Unfortunately, the paper itself is dry and technical and does not excite. I hope the research community builds on it to progress Jonathan Haidt's work - particularly on the psychological/moral differences between liberals, conservatives and libertarians. Then I will feel motivated to comment.

"Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible"

Dominic Cummings said that no-one should 'pontificate on Putin’s mafia government' before reading this book.

Amazon link

Here are some excerpts from The Guardian's review.

"Pomerantsev, born in the UK to Russian émigré parents, spent almost a decade in Moscow working as a TV producer, making documentaries and reality shows for Russian audiences. He arrived in the early 2000s, in the midst of an oil boom that brought a measure of prosperity to many and huge wealth to a select few, creating a tidal wave of glitz and extravagance, especially in the capital.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an entertaining if at times bleak chronicle of these years, depicting a world “where gangsters become artists, gold‑diggers quote Pushkin, Hells Angels hallucinate themselves as saints”.

...

"We also meet Vitali Dyomochka, a Siberian hoodlum turned cineaste. Dissatisfied with the quality of crime dramas on Russian TV – “it was all fake” – he took to making his own series, giving starring roles to several of his henchmen. There were no scripts, stuntmen or makeup: “all the blood you saw on the screen was real”, Pomerantsev writes, adding that “the guns and bullets were all real, too; when they filmed a shoot-’em-up in a bar the place was wasted”.

Djomochka allegedly got the series broadcast by getting his goons to threaten local TV stations; needless to say, it was a huge hit."

...

"Putinism itself is built on an ideology of all ideologies at once: liberalism; nationalism; conservatism; Orthodox tradition; an “anti-hegemonic” foreign policy.

As Pomerantsev points out, one key to the success of this new authoritarianism is that “instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting them and rendering them absurd”.

The clearest example of this is the creation of a political system that has the appearance of democracy – regular elections, multiple parties, a free media – without any of the substance: the elections are rigged; the parties are all under the president’s control; the media do what their owners tell them, and the owners obey the Kremlin.

It’s this mismatch between form and content that has earned the Putin regime the name “virtual” or “imitation democracy”.

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"Corruption, which affects almost every sphere of life, from major corporations to visits to the doctor, has taken root in the vast juridical twilight zone that emerged during the 1990s, and which the authorities have an active interest in maintaining.

Among the many other stories Pomerantsev follows is that of Yana Yakovleva, a businesswoman suddenly arrested for “illegally” trading in chemicals she has been selling perfectly legally for years. She’s the victim of “state raiding”, a widespread phenomenon in which government officials put the squeeze on businesses – finding owners to be in breach of fire-safety regulations, say, or in arrears with taxes they never owed; or, as in Yakovleva’s case, charging them retroactively with having broken a brand-new law.

She spends several grim months in prison before coming to trial; astoundingly, she wins and is released – but less because of her actual innocence than because her campaign has made her a useful pawn in a battle between two powerful Kremlin factions. “To make something happen in Russia,” Pomerantsev concludes, “you have to be both valiant protester and Machiavellian.”

"By the summer of 2010, when Moscow was wreathed in suffocating smoke from peat-bog fires, Pomerantsev had become increasingly frustrated by the constraints he faced in his work. His channel only wanted “positive” stories, and there were clear limits on what could be said and shown: he had to cut all the high-level politics out of Yakovleva’s story, for instance.

But on returning to the UK, he encountered the beneficiaries of the system he thought he had left behind – the oligarchs and bureaucrats turned businessmen who have siphoned wealth out of Russia and into London, the gilded post-Soviet youth who spend their time surrounded by their peers in an exclusive network of Mayfair nightclubs."

The words we use are value-loaded. In most historical societies, what we call corruption is the normal operation of 'big man' factional political economy. The Romans would have understood.

There is an economics literature on corruption, conceptualising it as rent-seeking and adding gratuitously to transaction costs. However, liberal democracies also have expensive mechanisms for arbitrating differences and setting priorities. The difference is more about stability and predictability: in a sense, liberal democracies have nationalised corruption and rebranded it.

The main thing I get from Peter Pomerantsev's book is that in today's Russia, society-wide trust does not exist and most state institutions do not work as such, being merely facades for powerful and arbitrary interest groups.

This so accords with history and natural human psychology that it jarringly reminds us again just how unlikely the relatively non-corrupt western model of bourgeois democracy actually is. The rule of law and the effectiveness of institutions requires elites to inhibit their emotions and personal drives, subordinating them to the rules.

Who knows how much of this is cultural and how much genetic? What we do know is that corrupt, clannish societies have enormous historical inertia, southern Italy being a case in point. The Russians haven't had much luck with their history in this regard, unfortunately.

As a root-and-branch picture of modern Russia, I'm with Mr Cummings. We should not be seeing Putin's state as a 'more vigorous capitalist society with more traditional values and less politically-correct nonsense'.

No, Russia is more like a capitalist version of Game of Thrones.

As a piece of writing, "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" is mostly fascinating, but could have benefited from the attentions of an editor to cut out the occasional longueur.

One small error on the Internet ...

This interesting Guardian article, "The takeover: how police ended up running a paedophile site", is discussed by Bruce Schneier.

Two high-profile, security-savvy paedophiles were taken down based on the smallest of errors.

The paedophile site

“... ran as a company or business,” Rouse says. Senior administrators took charge of individual boards, grouped around categories such as boys or girls, hardcore or non-nude. Users had to upload material at least every 30 days or risk exile. Each of its 45,000 accounts were ranked according to the quality of their output, with a “producer’s area” walled off to all but the most feted.

At the top was one man, “effectively the CEO”. He regularly started his messages with the cheery greeting “hiyas”.

The article explains how that one idiosyncrasy was enough to identify him.

The second paedophile took exhaustive steps to cleanse his uploaded material of any identifying information.

"Access to the full suite of Huckle’s material provided the breakthrough. It was not what he photographed, but what he photographed with. Embedded in some of his images, overlooked when he swept the files of metadata, was the brand and model of his Olympus camera. A tiny clue – but enough.

"Officers exhaustively swept photography sites such as Flickr and TrekEarth for photos taken in south-east Asia using the make and model."

Following that flimsy thread was, it turned out, enough.

I've long been convinced that it's essentially impossible to stay secret on the Internet if a major intelligence agency is on your case.

The article describes a fair amount of labour-intensive Internet searching by Australian police, but it's not hard to see how that could be mostly automated. And if the intelligence agency is allowed AI-based filtering of generic Internet streams, then security through obscurity doesn't really work either.

It would be interesting to know how agencies such as the NSA and GCHQ assess the Internet tradecraft of Islamic fundamentalists. Based on the levels of smartness and training we've heard about to date, I would guess that to any efficient agency with legal access to the right tools the wannabe terrorist is effectively saying, "Here's where I live. Come on in, rummage freely and stay as long as you want."

I think this explains the lack of successful attacks (touch wood) that we've seen in the UK the last few years. It's certainly not for want of attempts.

Of course, if your communications security agency is not up to speed - Hello, Belgium? - even incompetent jihadis can still make it happen.

Spatial Awareness

There's a special feeling of relaxed contentment when you're back home from the dentist.

Shards of memory: lying back, staring at fluorescent grills in the ceiling, everything yellow through the goggles; the steel hypodermic syringe, floating above my face, orienting there .. and there; the pressure of fluid building up in the gums.

The pretty, full-faced assistant asks the dentist, "Is there anything you need?"

Sotto voce I hear his reply: "Spatial awareness ... ."

I manage a contorted smile.

Later it seemed to me that he was a dead ringer, sight and sound, for Moriarty in BBC's "Sherlock".

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I'm reading "Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World" by Bruce Schneier.  It's an easy read and brimful of fascinating information about government and corporate surveillance.

I've been trying to identify the chronic, low-level irritation I'm experiencing as I turn the Kindle pages. And now it's dawned on me:  that moralising tone. It's the same feeling I get when reading The Guardian.

Mr Corbyn comes to town

The new leader of the Labour Party

In his acceptance speech at the Labour Party special conference today, Jeremy Corbyn laid out his Weltanschauung. British society, he suggested, comprises a constellation of the oppressed: those on welfare, the low-paid, trades-unionists (mostly public-sector), women, the homeless, and so on. This coalition of the dispossessed camps like a shanty town around the wealthy citadel of political-economic-military power politically identified with the Tories - a British version of Le Pouvoir: warmongering, selfish, contemptuous of the huddled masses and in essence morally evil. The job of the socialist left is to take them on, break their power and redistribute their resources.

I think that is a fair and non-biased summary of Jeremy's views. It is a slightly less nuanced version of a Manichean world view you can read any day of the week in The Guardian.

A Marxist analysis would go further and ask which social forces find such an ideology appealing. It's a good question and the answer suggests itself immediately:

• public sector workers, 


• activist intellectuals who feel excluded from the actual reins of power, 


• liberal ('nice') individuals who are not in any immediate danger of deprivation themselves, but whose empathic faculties are fully engaged by those they take to be so much worse off than themselves. 

None of these groups have any problem with spending other people's money.

So now we come to the outer limits of Corbynism. Our Corbynistas make a fine and vehement moral case - there are always problems in the world which break your heart - but they mistakenly believe that they have a monopoly of such concerns. In the end it's economic and technological development which makes the money to pay for social progress. As this is of little interest to Jeremy and his fellow-thinkers, being strategically substituted by their confiscatory tendencies, it follows that those who invest, invent, develop, create value and pay taxes are always going to be somewhat less impressed with the new Labour leadership and its shining city upon a hill.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jeremy's honesty, forthrightness and rather strident moral fervour doesn't play rather well on TV and in Parliament. Ed Miliband, after all, frequently had the better of his opponents in verbal jousts though his economics was rubbish. We may as a consequence be in for a repeat of the late sixties when demonstrations, often violent, were common as the disenfranchised youth and unions of the period showed their alienation from majority society.

Dubito ergo sum

I have this on the wall in my study.

Wimbledon - the Shrine

For some reason our living room has been converted into a shrine with a new star hanging above the hearth.

Our hearth transformed ...

She always was a Guardianista at heart.