Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, January 7, 2003

O Big Brother, where art thou? -- Comment()
The RISKS Digest (Vol. 45, Issue 22) contains a long article about the TIA initiative. The article is titled O Big Brother, where art thou?:

In algorithmic terms, a "computer" (the US defense establishment) is examining another "computer" (al-Qaeda) to find its halt state, and, to complicate matters, the examinee knows of the monitoring. [...] Even if a data base existed with full optics and sound that replicated ALL activity in Eurasia alone, any one action could, or might not, be an encoding of terrorist intelligence and for this reason, interpretation would become the job of the same people who failed to bring in the "twentieth highjacker" for questioning. Our government would have to refute, at the level of basic science, Alonzo Church's thesis to the effect that all computers are Turing machines, and it would have to make or buy a Turing+n system that could defeat other Turing+0 systems.
The problem is that the United States is engaged (like it or not) in a dialogue with terrorists. If like Sharon in Israel and Cheney here, our statesmen play to the gallery, and "refuse" to "dialog" with "terrorists", they discover that violence becomes the language of choice.

This is a farfetched argument, and will not much help in opposing the TIA initiative. I would instead focus on the question of who is monitoring whom, and who is monitoring the monitors? What guarantees there are that the proposed monitoring tools are used for reasonable purposes?

One should remember that a positive match from these monitoring systems can be a false positive. In fact, the false positives may well be 10 or 100 times more numerous than matches of real "terrorist activity". And even if only one match in 100 would be a false positive, that one wrongly matched individual could be you. And how would you prove that you are innocent? This reminds me of Kafka's "Trial".

Search for me -- Comment()
I haven't been watching the referrer log of Universal Rule for some time. A moment ago I browsed through the log and noticed a Google search for my name. I tried the search, and to my surprise nine of the top-10 matches pointed to me, and one pointed to another Juha Haataja. My name is a bit rare, but there are probably dozens of similarly named people in Finland. Well, probably most of them are not active on the net. But the question is: Which of us was the search trying to find?

-- Comment()
I'm still keeping watch for reviews of the 1 GHz PowerBook which I reviewed in December, 2002.

Hands On With The 1GHz PowerBook: "Overall the 1GHz Titanium PowerBook has more to offer pro users and consumers than ever before. The addition of the SuperDrive and the speed boost will give many buyers cause to reflect on whether to purchase a desktop or a PowerBook the next time they upgrade their machine." (MacCentral via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]