Liquid Explosives (by alaric)

Here's an interesting technical analysis of all this talk of taking explosives on board planes in liquid form.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00087.html

Where it really gets interesting, though, is towards the bottom. The author argues that stopping people from taking nail scissors and liquids on board planes is pretty stupid, since a clued-up terrorist could still hide plane-destroying materials in any metal object (sintered iron and aluminium = thermite, basically indetectable until it becomes a fireball), hide bombs in their body cavities, form hard plastic explosives into the shape of any object, convert a soft drinks can into a knife with just a couple of minute's work, etc.

The techniques developed by prisoners to improvise weapons from what they have to hand, or to smuggle and hide drugs, should give us some inspiration of what an organised terrorist group should be able to manage.

So should we give up and cower in fear? No. The fact that the terrorists aren't managing to make planes fall out of the sky can probably be put down to one of a few possibilities.

1. There just aren't enough people willing to die for their cause; motivating intelligent people to be suicide bombers is hard
2. Real security is provided by proper police work - identifying terrorists and tracing their networks to identify all the people involved in a plot, then arresting them - and that's working. Causing all this disruption at the airports in the name of security is pointless; once somebody's decided to down a plane, if they managed to recruit suicide bombers and get the materials and get them to the airport, the opportunity to actually stop them has already passed.

I'd like to see more money spent on actual policing - and less trivially-avoided, expensive, unpleasant, liberty-destroying measures like mass surveillance, laws against cryptography, and airport/train station/port screening. Sure, have an impressive-looking police presence at the airport to deter the weak-willed would-be bomber, but please, don't strip search me and make me spend an eight hour flight without my laptop.

Virtual machines (by alaric)

Once upon a time, computers were generally mainframes - mainly because we hadn't yet learnt to make small computers.

As technology progressed, computers became smaller, and more ubiquitous.

However, at the same time, the role of the network became more and more important. At first, the model du jour was that there'd be a PC on every desk, and as a bit of a hack, networks were designed so that you could shares files between the PCs. But each file still sat on one machine, and the others just accessed it over the network.

Read more »

WordPress upgrade (by alaric)

I've upgraded the blog to the latest WordPress at the time of writing (2.0.4).

Perhaps this will fix the problem with our RSS feeds!

Also, it's let me use some of the newer plugins, such as the creative commons one (note our nice Creative Commons licence link logo in the 'meta' section on the right - and the nice RDF licensing metadata in the HTML source!)

I've also added plugins that generate siteinfo.xml and sitemap.xml files. The more metadata, the merrier.

Libertarianism (by alaric)

I just came across this in a text file while cleaning up an old home directory prior to deletion, so thought I'd put it up here...

It occurs to me that we do live in a libertarian world. At the global level, there is no higher level of government; all nations are free, limited only by their own desire to not invoke their neighbour's wrath. Organisations like the UN are voluntary, and have to bargain or impose sanctions to get their will followed, rather than being able to impose.

What does this mean? Read more »

Learning to drive (by alaric)

It's been many months since I passed my driving test now, but as my instructors had warned me, you never stop learning to drive.

You see, in order to pass the test you have to be a super-perfect driver; you need to think carefully about everything, and follow precise procedures, because that's what the examiners want to see.

Then you start driving around "for real", with passengers talking to you, having to think about your route rather than being told to take the next left. Driving starts to happen automatically, without thought.

This is why new drivers are prone to crashing, and have to pay more for their car insurance... Read more »