Category Archives: Technology

Technology focused posts.

Phone Encryption

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It’s been announced that both iOS and Android are going to have fully encryptable phones which will be a huge boon for our 4th amendment rights. As well as to protect us from more mundane things like theft or simply losing your phone. Our phones these days contain as much or more personal information as our computers do these days. The average person doesn’t have any sort of two step authentication on their personal accounts on their phones. In most case people do have some sort of password protection to get into the phone, but once in it’s fairly easy to get into many applications.

For end users there’s nothing better than having a stronger security measures as in many cases companies poorly manage their security. This can be highlighted from the past week of exploits and those celebrity pictures. Encrypting phones might not prevented the celebrity leak, but in many cases it could. It’s believed that some of the hacks of Paris Hilton years ago came from hacking her phone through a BlueTooth connection, so a fully encrypted phone may have protected her from that hack.

All these things are good, however, the Washington Post has decided that this encryption is a risk to public safety because it will help criminals. This is the exact same argument that people make against BitCoin and full disk encryption. BitCoin ended up spawning SilkRoad, which has been shut down and it’s more likely that more crime is committed with dollars rather than Bitcoin. Full Disk Encryption has been used by both criminals and the more technical savvy. With the recent changes where the government can simply take your laptop at boarder crossings without any sort of warrant. Which means anyone at anytime that could have been flagged by the NSA could have their computer searched at will.

It’s more likely that encryption will protect an average person from an arbitrary search than protect a criminal. It’s likely that without everyone being encrypted, having your computer or phone encrypted would have been a huge red flag, however, with these recent changes that can’t happen. Meaning the average person will be safer as well as the fully legal with nothing to hide security conscious individuals.

The Washington Post, FBI, and other agencies are wrong. Fully encryption on our phones protects our privacy, improves our fourth amendment, and give us more control over our own devices. If the FBI and the US government is successful in creating a backdoor the encryption will be worthless and the put us more at risk as we’ll have a false sense of security.

Retail and payment intermediaries

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In recent months there have been multiple instances where a major retailer has had their data infrastructure breached. This has resulted in millions of customer’s credit card information being compromised and stolen by some variety of criminal organization. It’s likely that the organization used skilled computer experts to hack into the system in some fashion. I also would not be surprised if some type of social engineering was used to ease their access to the data systems. Furthermore, if their Point of Sales devices were not fully secure that information could be gathered using a credit card that could also read information from the system.

This is the problem that applications like Google Wallet and Paypal are trying to solve. They are trying to position themselves as an intermediary between the customer and the retailer to protect the consumer and provide a common transaction method for many platforms including in person point of sales. I think the fact that I’m just now thinking about this has really shown that companies like Google and Starbucks have failed at showing where the true value in their product is.

I didn’t come to this conclusion without help though. Truthfully, it’s because of PalPal ads that I’ve been seeing on Huluplus. This ad walks through how unsafe we are using our credit cards with online retailers and that they protect your creditcard and bank account information from ever being seen by the retailer. Which, is a really powerful argument to use their services. Of course, that’s if you trust PayPal as an organization.

Personally, I’m concerned about using PayPal as they’ve had their own networks hacked with some account information stolen. They aren’t perfect, and honestly it’s likely going to be impossible to maintain and prevent any data breaches, but a company like PayPal should have that as their goal.

With that in mind, it’s kind of helped me think of the true value of both cash and a BitCoin like solution. At this point, it’s pretty clear that BitCoin has been compromised at least on some level. It’s not truly anonymous any more. Cash is still though. It’s the best way to buy anything from a store. It also reduces the rate that you spend your money compared to buying everything with a card. As you actually see the money disappear. Although, some times it doesn’t feel that way, especially when you’re out drinking at a bar.

I’m not sure I truly trust any of the large companies that offer these intermediary services. PayPal, Google, Apple, Samsung, Starbucks, and etc… all have their own version and all of these companies make money by locking you into their services. Google, Apple, and Samsung have the most incentive and potentially access, as they are selling you the only other thing you’ll have with you besides your cards, your phone. Locking you into not just their device but payment methodology is powerful. Not because it keeps you on their network, but also because it provides them with a huge amount of information about the rest of your life. Google likely will already have a lot of it based on your search history, but they don’t know what you’re actually buying. At this point they don’t have the full data to connect search results to purchases. Using Google Wallet closed that gap and provides a really valuable set of data for their customers.

Intermediaries are going to be really important moving forward because they will help reduce customer risk. It’s going to be important to figure out how to balance the risk of not using an intermediary with using one and providing them with massive amounts of data as well as extremely personal data that if all your eggs in one basket could be devastating.

Grants to build out networks rules change

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Recently there have been a serious debate between the FCC and major telecoms about the minimum rate for broadband. It’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong disagreement between most customers and their ISPs. For the most part rural ISPs are pretty terrible. If you live outside of a major city it’s unlikely that you’ll have a very fast internet service. For a country of our size and population, we have an extremely large portion of our population that does have access to the internet, however we don’t have the deepest penetration of the internet in the world. Which for a country of our wealth that is something of a shame. We’ve been investing, through governmental grants since the middle of the 90’s and we haven’t seen the expected return on investment that we’d expected as investors. We paid for companies like Verizon and Comcast to invest in our network, and I mean we, as in the tax payers. We’re paying for them to get rich off of grants.

Internet Population and Penetration

Smaller countries like the Netherlands and the UK have significantly greater penetration. Sure they have smaller populations than we do, but they also have significantly faster internet speeds than we do across the board including rural areas. Korea has speeds an order of magnitude higher than we do, despite the fact that we’re a significantly richer country than South Korea.

One of the first moves in a long time that the FCC has done that is a positive move in a really long time. As of today, the FCC has decided that the minimum speed for broadband must be 10mbps which is a huge step in the right direction. This will change the minimum threshold for any investment by a company to earn a grant to increase from 4mbps to 10mbps. This is the right direction for our country and I’m really excited about the possibilities. It means that the FCC is starting to really understand that the telecoms don’t fully have our best interests in mind when they make their arguments. We’ll see what happens in the upcoming months.

Time Travel could it work?

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Apparently some folks thinks they figured out how you could go back in time kill your dear old grampappy and everything would work out alright. It’s a highly convoluted thing and I’m not really sure I understand any of it. But that’s ok, because it’s quantum physics. Quantum physics is one of the complicated types of physics we have discovered (discovered because it was always there, but never applied or understood).

The general idea is that because of gravity, something called a “Closed Time-like Curve” can exist. From what I understand these represent a likelihood of something occurring in like and/or particles. These are the likely ways that light might split into multiple particles (only to recombine later in most cases) or be consumed and re-emitted by another particle. Effectively, it creates a probability distribution that says one of these options might happen. In the case about your granddad surviving, you have to have a 50% chance of survival for everything to work as expected. If the likelihood of an event falls below that, then it wouldn’t happen. Essentially, you would need to create a scenario where your grandfather would survive as often as he died. That sounds like you’d have to do some pretty elaborate planning to be sure he might survive or he might die.

Feynman Diagram

This would work because of that recombination effect that I mentioned earlier. When light moves from point A to B it doesn’t have to go directly there. Richard Feynman created his famous (for math people) diagrams that were able to explain how these particles moved and emitted particles.

In some cases the light would move around and eventually recombine, but it would always end up at the point it was expected to based on the other attributes of that light. Because of these features, the physicist was able to do some experiments with light to actually create a “killing your own grand dad” situation. This allowed them to offer empirical evidence not just theoretical.

That being said, it’s really unclear if anything at that size would ever work in actuality at sizes we can actually interact with on a daily basis. We can stop light and we can teleport light too. That doesn’t mean we’ll be having Scotty beaming us up soon though. Likely this discovery will find it’s way into quantum computing or cryptography as mentioned in the article. Unfortunately it’s not really practical and will probably be discredited in a few years like the whole faster than light fiasco from a few years ago.

Methodology, managers, and projects

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When working on a project there are a few different ways to manage those projects. One is the traditional waterfall approach, which is your top down project where you have to use Gantt charts to figure out how long you think it’s going to take up front, where you’re given a set date that can’t change without a lot of effort to do a certain amount of poorly defined requirements, and a set amount of money to do the project. This approach has been how Windows and many video games have been produced in the past. It’s not really extremely effective and really no one really likes working a project conducted using Waterfall methodologies. There are risks, projects get cancelled and the project management can seem to be capricious and opaque. This leads to lack of trust and belief that management has the best interest in mind for both the project and the employees on the project.

To address these concerns a group of people created the Agile project management methodology. The goal was to value working software over documentation. Which means that each bit of software is broken down into the minimum viable feature, or the smallest piece of working software that could be packaged and used by a customer. The goal is to manage the project through adjusting how many of these features are going to be finished by the go live date. Effectively you build small bits of work instead of finishing one giant massive piece of software.

This approach is effective for other types of technology that have a modular architecture. There’s some minimum viable product, where you need a minimum set of features for the product to actually work. For example a cell phone needs to have a combination of features to function properly. Things like bendable screens would not be in the minimum viable product, but an excellent touch screen would be. These minimum viable features can be modulated based on the Kano model – which is useful for determining if a specific feature is basic, a pleaser, or a delighter. If the feature falls into basic, you must include that feature if you’d like it to be a success. However, those minimum features don’t guarantee a successful product, you’ll need to include pleasers as well as delighters. Those are the pieces of scope that you will be able to eliminate to make sure you actually launch the product on time.

Issues with these projects come whenever there is a mixture of methodologies. When management believes projects must be managed through waterfall through a central project results office while the development team believes the project is being managed through the agile methodology. This creates serious issues whenever there is miscommunication, lack of information, or lack of understanding the real status of the agile team’s approach. This is exacerbated by the required openness in the agile approach (where you are supposed to continually learn from your mistakes and have a conversation about all the problems you’ve had – to fix them) while in waterfall it is better for people to hide and place blame elsewhere whenever things are not going well. Not because people are bad, but the incentives are in place to behave this way. With a single option of go/no go, it’s better to minimize the known risks as if things are misunderstood as going poorly it will drive management to take action. While in an Agile team, discussing the true status of the project is vital through self policing and partnering with other agile teams to address the problem. The greater the likelihood of success of the projects.

This conflict and a switch from governance in the agile methodology can and will destroy the trust the various agile teams have developed. An organization needs to fully commit to a single project management methodology or it will struggle to complete any project within scope and budget and will demoralize the leaders of projects being worked in agile, as waterfall would likely be the methodology that management selects. Leaders of Agile projects should leave organizations that undercut the agile teams, as it will not stop and will have dramatic impacts on their careers in the long run.