Monthly Archives: July 2006

The Canadian Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, to use his formal title, spent part  of yesterday in Washington DC with the President of the United States, George Walker Bush, in a formal state meeting.  The two leaders discussed many things of interest to the two countries that share the world’s longest undefended border, over their hour and bit meeting. 

This is fine, as Canada and the US should talk to each other and talk often.  We have many things in common and are each others’ largest trading partner, aside from being buddies for centuries.  In the past, various Canadian Prime Ministers have gotten along nicely with the US Commander and Chief.  On occasion, Canada has acted as the US’s surrogate:  Blair Seaborn, a Canadian diplomat, was often the conduit for communications from Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to various North Vietnamese rulers during the bad days of the Viet Nam war. 

The Canadian PM is also a sitting, directly-elected Member of Parliament, meaning he has to vote, be in the House to respond to questions from other members and his riding, every day.  The US President is an  indirectly appointed Emperor with a phalanx of retainers to cater to his every whim.  Sort of the difference between a Bank CEO and a Bank Branch Manager.  One dirties his hands with clients and the other rules from the lofty, insulated heights of the 44^th floor.  This is just the difference between our two systems.  We both get to the same place, democracy, but with slightly different paths.

Our current incumbent, Stephen Harper, is a fiscal and social conservative.  Although Harper is in his 40’s he looks like he’s 14 years old.  Dubya is also a conservative and to his credit, just turned 60.  He looks not a day over 50, despite being in the meanest, toughest, most soul-destroying job there is.

Dubya, I have written about extensively, but our American readers don’t know much about Stephen Harper.  To sum him up concisely is hard, but here goes:  In high school, he was the kid who was so weird that even the ubergeeks in the Tech Club, the projector freaks, stayed away from him.  Harper was the kid who brought a black Samsonite attaché case to school in Grade 11. 

Pull out your old high school yearbooks:  Turn to the pages with the clubs.  I’m fourth from the left, back row in the Tech Club.  Harper? His photo is with the teacher advisor and one other student in the German Ham Radio Club.

Politically, he’s a light-brownshirt.  After getting into office, he cancelled all our Kyoto Accord environmental programs on barely 24-hours notice.  He cancelled the long gun registry about ten minutes later.  He has reduced our value-added tax, the GST and given a broad enough spectrum of Canadians a Federal Tax cut.  He just tossed $4.7 Billion at our military for new gear.  I don’t think that’s an entirely bad thing, as we’ve ignored our Military for so long, they’ve had to improvise.  Yelling “bang bang, you’re dead!” at the Taliban in Afghanistan does not cut the nut in 2006. 

Cabinet Ministers are not allowed to talk to the media.  Members of his party are not allowed to talk to the media.  The media is not allowed to talk to the media.  It is all under excruciating control, which describes Stephen Harper:  Control Freak.

He isn’t jocular, familiar or even particularly friendly.  I’m certain he’s had sex twice.  He has two children.

Which made the wrap-up press conference between Stephen Harper and George Bush even more entertaining.  Dubya was all Texas gee-whiz and said “My buddy Steve and I are gettin’ along swell!” You could hear the Canadian reporters stop dead in their tracks.  Nobody has called Stephen Harper, Steve.  Ever.  If there ever was a Stephen, it was standing up next to Dubya turning nine shade of red. 

Harper though, did not respond in kind:  “Thanks there GeeDub, eh?”

Not that I mind the informal:  I don’t mind being called Dave, but given a choice, prefer David.  I think Queen Elizabeth II would have gone farther with the colonies if she had gone for Queen Betty the Deuce as a handle.

As a public Service, I’ll Dubya-ize various leaders for you:

“Andy” Sadat from Egypt.  “Red” Putin from Russia.  AC from the UK (Anthony Charles Lynton Blair) Vinnie Fox from Mexico.  Dago Rudy and Sheeny Jewberg the former and current mayors of New York City.  SlickB from Ital-lee. (Sylvio Berlusconi)  Gerry “Herm” Schroeder and Yertle Merkle (Andrea Merkle) from Germany. Mike “Spot” Gorbachev. Rummy.  NoSafety Cheney.  Elvis Koipond (Junichiro Koizumi) Condi Fried Rice (as Condoleeza, based on Con Dolce is Texas-impossible) K-Man Annan from the UN.  Daddy, Momma and His Royal Excellency Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud.

Maybe we should get George Walker Bush a new nickname.  Any suggestions beyond ‘Dubya’ and ‘Dolt’ are welcome.

This is Today’s Bummer from the Washington Post:  “A government consultant, using computer programs easily found on the Internet, managed to crack the FBI’s classified computer system and gain the passwords of 38,000 employees, including that of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.

The break-ins, which occurred four times in 2004, gave the consultant access to records in the Witness Protection Program.”   

Would you like some rudimentary datapoints from a professional computer guy?  Fair enough, but remember I work for one of the big computer companies, so ensure you have your jaundiced cynic filters in place. 

David’s Four Rules of Computer Security

1) There is no way to keep something secret if more than one person knows about it.

2) There is no secure computer if the computer has a keyboard or a hard drive, or a monitor or a network card. 

3) It is easier to steal things than to decrypt things.

4) Human engineering always wins if humans are involved.

Let’s start at the top of that list.  I have a secret word.  If I tell someone that secret word then I no longer have a secret word that is secure.  I have to spend the rest of my life wondering if that second person will tell my secret word in a moment of passion, blackmail, greed or stupidity.  That compromises the security of my secret word. 

Security is also compromised by a sticky note on my keyboard, or using my Mother’s maiden name as a password.  I’ll let you in on a secret:  My secret word is Altoids.  There.  I feel better now.

Any electronic or electromechanical device can be surveiled remotely.  Using changes in magnetic fields you can derive what is being typed.  Using a telescope and a window you can see what is being read on the screen.  Using simple software, readily available on the Internet, you can trap keystrokes and communications sessions. 

You can tickle the magnetic particles on a hard drive that has been erased to make them show the erased data.  It is the same concept as reading the impressions left on a pad of paper.  We used to use a liquid solution called Edit-Vue to find the sync marks on videotape to physically cut and edit 2” video tape.  The same concept in software and hardware can help forensic technicians make a hard drive give it up.

You can add a device to a network to make it send you the full stream of data, from which you can derive what is being written.  You can listen in to phone calls, be it a cell phone or a land line using simple electronics. 

Odds are your employer either is, or is strongly considering, reading all your work email.  The government is reading the rest of it, looking for terrorists.  Your Internet Service Provider probably is too, either for the government, or just trying to keep the spam down to a dull roar.  A spam filter, by definition, reads your email. 

Encryption involves higher math, transposing letters in a word in a pattern that is hard to detect and at first, very hard to read.  Unfortunately every language has a string of letters that recur with greater frequency than others.  There are also letters that don’t show up very much. 

In English, the most common letters, in order, are ETOANIRSH.  Knowing that and knowing that XQZ don’t show up much, you can start to work encryption backwards, testing potential letter combinations.  Software can do this for you, as computers can do the higher math faster and better than human brains. 

Stealing secrets is easier than trying to tap into wires, exposing magnetic particles, or doing the math on encryption.  If I was a bad person and wanted the laptop of an executive who has, oh, the Secret Coke Formula on a file, I could spend hundreds of hours trying to find it surreptitiously.  Or, I could wallop him over the head with a brick and steal his laptop.  Which is easier to do? 

The principal reason the British were able to decrypt the Enigma cipher early in WWII was two pieces of technology:  One, was Alan Turing’s computational bombe machine.  Second, they stole a working Enigma machine from a German Navy U-Boat.  The rest of it was brilliant people, working the math and knowing how humans think. 

Human engineering is, by far, the easiest.  Aldrich Ames, the biggest Soviet spy captured in recent memory, sold thousands of secrets over two decades of the cold war, to the Soviets for one thing:  Money.  Greed works and so does sex, blackmail and, with lesser efficacy, appeals to logic or loyalty.

The classic Internet human engineering hack is the Nigerian (now Saudi/Iraqi) bank scam.  I still get those emails and still shake my head that people fall for it.  If people didn’t fall for it, the scammers wouldn’t be sending them out. 

Phishing is another human engineering trick.  If it looks like my bank, smells like my bank and behaves like my bank, it must be my bank, right?  I keep getting requests from Bank One, MBNA, Bank of America and PayPal asking me to confirm all my information.  One problem:  I don’t bank with those folks and I don’t have a PayPal account.  I have received one phish ‘from’ my bank.  I turned it over to their security people.

There are too many stories in the IT biz about an unidentified voice on the phone asking for access to certain files or shares and saying they forgot their password.  The hapless tech then resets the password for the voice on the phone.  One of the funniest I saw was when Allan LeMongelo called to get his password reset.  Lemon Jello was a hacker.  It worked:  The Human was engineered.

So how do you keep secrets?  It takes a combination of all four rules and knowing that all four can be breached.  The trick is to have a combination that controls things, but doesn’t get in the way of people doing their work.  Get that mix right and you are closer to being secure.

Plus, you must have obvious, well understood and visibly applied punishments for breaking security.  Summary execution in the office lunch room is a touch excessive, but it does work as a negative incentive.

What this means for you is easy enough:  Believe nothing you read, see or hear on the Internet, especially if it is from your bank, credit card company, ISP or government.  If they want information, call them directly with a call that you have dialed to a number you looked up somewhere else.  Figure out if you feel like complying, or telling them to pound sand into a bodily orifice.

Assume anything you write, send or look at is being read by someone who hates your guts and is looking to screw you any way they can.  The best way to stop a blackmailer is to state:  “Yeah I like rough sex with pelicans.  Here’s my boss’s phone number, you want me to dial it for you?”

A little paranoia goes a long way. 

This one just in from Reuters:  Oil has hit $75 a barrel for Brent Sweet Crude because of fears over Iran and their nuclear industry.  Unstated as the Oil pimps haven’t quite got the press release done yet, is North Korea and their missile-based temper tantrum.

Considering it takes close to a month for crude bought today to get to your neighbourhood gas station, expect the prices to jump this afternoon, if they haven’t already.  Yes, I know two hours is less than 30 days.  We’re talking Oil Price Logic here, where the usual laws of physics, time and even gravity do not apply. 

Oil Price Logic says that if there is a butterfly in Nigeria that is sitting on a tree, then that will affect Oil Prices, as the refinery worker will be distracted and the whole perfectly balanced Oil Price Logic, will suddenly fall out of step.  Tankers will run around in circles in the Gulf of Mexico.  Drillers will find petunias in the well heads.  A staple puller in Mobile, Alabama will fall off a desk, causing a safety issue that will mean a refinery is off-line for six months and then, well, you know, supply and demand. 

It’s funny how every little blip and fart on the planet drives oil prices up, but there are no events that that make oil prices go down.  I’m certain that there is an oil price analyst right now trying to draw a link between Germany being semi-finaled out of the World Cup and a rationale for raising the price of oil.

I think I’ve got it:  “More Germans will be driving home from the World Cup now that Germany is out of the finals.  Therefore we have had to increase our refinery capacity, which mean the cost of delivering the product must reflect the increased demand for oil for Germany and England, as their soccer hooligans are now traveling back home.”

I think it works.         

Dead at the age of 64, after a massive heart attack, Ken Lay was one of the “Smartest Guys In The Room”.  The Enron trial and his eventual conviction probably didn’t help any health problems he might have had. 

The rest of his life in prison was to be his sentence.  Enron summarized the rapacious uncontrollable greed that is a hallmark of global business these days. 

I’m sorry he’s dead, as 64 is young.  I’m sorry for his family too, as death is inevitable, but still sorrowful.  But he still deserved jail time.  That doesn’t change:  He was a crook.

The Big Three US automakers are posting lower than average sales today.  General Motors is down 26 pecent, Ford 7 percent and Daimler-Chrysler is off 13 percent.  There is a simple reason for this:  Customers are voting with their wallets.

I’m going to put some myths to rest here:  There really is no “American” auto industry anymore.  I can remember going on a tour of the River Rouge steel plant in Detroit in 1967.  Henry had a fleet of Seaway bulk-carrier ships that brought the iron ore and coking coal to the Rouge plant to make the steel to make the Fords that people drove.  Henry owned the whole production chain from top to bottom.  Very little was farmed out.

My little Nissan Sentra is made of a powertrain that came from Japan, seats from Louisville, KY, wiring harness from Mississauga, CD player and radio from Taiwan, steel stampings from Korea, tires from Singapore, then assembled by Mexicans and painted with colour and primer from Dusseldorf, Germany or Bloomington, Delaware.  It was sold by Canadians and is owned by, well, Nissan Canada Finance and I are going halvsies on it for the time being.

The same could be said of your car, unless it is a Maybach or a Porsche.  Even Rolls-Royce farms out certain components. Honda makes Accords and Civics in Brampton, Ontario.  Toyota makes the Camry here too.  Corollas and the Matrix are built in Freemont, California in an old GM plant.  VW has a big plant in Westmoreland, PA.  Nissan has one in Smyrna, TN.  Ford owns Volvo, which is where a lot of parts for the Ford 500 and the Fusion came from, not Dearborn.  Ford is also kissin’ cousins with Mazda.  GM owns Saab, Opel, Vauxhall, Holden and a chunk of Daewoo.  Daimler-Chrysler is a division of Mercedes Benz and has also been know to play kissy-face-feely-bum with Mitsubishi.  Nissan and Renault do each other’s laundry.  There’s more incest in the industry than on any Saturday night in Smith’s Falls Ontario.

The Big Three’s problems are the products:  They suck.  Honda makes cars of essential goodness.  Same with Toyota and Nissan.  I’ve rented any number GM products in the past four years.  Uniformly, they rattled, shook and felt cheap, even the upscale Buick and Oldsmobile models. Ford?  I loved my 5.0 liter 1987 Mustang, despite its personality disorders.  The rest of the Ford family since, has been tacky, poorly made, poorly engineered and sold by pathological liars. 

Daimler-Chrysler’s offerings at least feel better than bargain-basement, but looking at the engineering, I see short lives ahead for engines, drive trains and electrical systems.  BMW is wonderous.  Even VW has a bank-vault feel to it.  I was impressed by the Hyundai Tiburon, except I didn’t fit in the car.

Root problem?  Accountants building cars.  GM is perhaps the most notorious of the lot when it comes to having the adding machine brigade tell the engineers what they can or cannot have in the vehicle.  Not that I’m against accountants, but engineers and stylists are the ones who design and fabricate cars.  Assemblers do as good a job as they are allowed to do.  There are always tradeoffs, but a good design and good engineering will give you a good car just about every time.

An example:  For years the Big Three built police cruisers and taxi cabs.  The Plymouth Regal, the Chevy Caprice, the Ford Crown Victoria Interceptor come to mind.  Each car was a heavy-duty version of the civilian big sedan.  Each company went to their respective parts bins and pulled out the heavy duty alternator, batteries, suspension pieces, steering gear, brakes and big engines that would bolt into the standard sedan. 

For taxi duty, they put in a basic vinyl interior and left the big engines out, but kept all the heavy-duty suspension parts.  The engineers knew that police cars and cabs lead a life of hard, sweaty duty, then get put away wet.  If you could buy a used police car, you knew you were getting the best parts the manufacturer could make. 

Today, none of the Big Three make police or taxi duty cars.  You can’t order them:  They don’t make them.  The heavy-duty parts don’t exist.  Accountants rationalized them out of existence with complex formulas that tied lifespan to cost to replacement cycles and presto!  No more police or taxi duty parts. 

The occasional freak sliped by:  The Mercury Marauder is one from a few years ago.  Available only in black, it was a Crown Vic with a huge (5.8 liter/351 cubic inch) engine and one-off suspension parts that would have been right at home on a State Police cruiser.  The Marauder lasted two model years.

Now cops use the ubiquitous Ford Taurus grocery getter for one reason:  They’re cheap.  I’ve seen Chrysler Intrepids as cabs, but when you ask the cabbie, the answer is the same:  Two, maybe three years, then scrap it.  The car is worn out from top to bottom, even the door hinges are shot.  A few under-medicated cabbies have tried the Camry and Accord as cabs.  Too expensive to fix, but they do last. 

Now small trucks and SUV’s?  The Big Three have you covered five ways to tea time.  GM produces literally thousands of variations on the GM Suburban chassis, which started life as a full-size pickup truck.  Towing kits, which mean heavy duty parts, abound.  Luxed up (Escalades are a GMC Suburban with bling) or stripped down (the Savanah 12 passenger shuttle van) they all have the same heritage of a pickup truck.  Ford is no better and Daimler-Chrysler is the same.

Yet Toyota, Honda and Nissan can build cars that last and work well.  I think it is because in the initial design phase the engineers said “It has to this strong to last long enough for us to sell it with a straight face.”  The accountants said “Your call.  Do it.  We’ll find a way to get the price down.” 

Nissan I know well and their V-6 engine that started life in the Maxima in the 80’s is also in the Pathfinder, Xterra, Frontier, 350Z, Maxima, V-6 Altima and Nissan Pilot in various states of performance.  The 2.4 liter four cylinder can be had in just about every Nissan as the racy 2.0 liter Sentra R, the Altima and all the small pickup trucks. 

Even some of the go-fast 300ZX technology is in my little Sentra:  The Variable Valve Timing is right off the 300ZX Turbo, scaled down to fit a small four cylinder.  The engineers worked wisely, reusing parts and technology while the accountants stayed out of the way. 

The same Big Three Bean Counter Madness is showing up in new technology vehicles.  You can’t buy a Ford Hybrid unless you want a hulking SUV.  Almost ten years ago, GM, which had a pure electric passenger car, the EV-1, decided that being green was bad for the oil business.  They scrapped thousands of EV-1s in Arizona, pulling the car off the market due to lack of demand because they didn’t advertise the car for sale. 

Honda and Toyota stuck to their hybrid guns.  You go on a waiting list to get one.  Which means the market is there and the engineering is solid enough that two of largest car companies in the world feel they can sell them with a straight face.  Why can’t the Big Three, the Might American Auto Industry, figure it out.  Accountants won’t let them.     

Continuing the story, it would seem that there have been six missiles let off by North Korea.  Five were short range and one was the Taepodong 2, long range missile.  The Taepodong 2 stopped flying 50 seconds into the flight, or, it is posited, just before the second stage would have lit off. 

The various sausage machines that pass for news outlets in North America are wall-to-wall with coverage.  Every commentator with a pulse is being propped up in front of a camera to let their wisdom ooze out.  Fortunately, there has not been much oozing, as there is not much wisdom to be had.  Knowledge is in short supply right now, except for one obvious prediction:  Crazies should not have pointed sticks. 

The mammoth problem is China.  It is a bit like your cousin, who would come to visit for a couple of days each summer.  You would be told to take “Cousin Drooler outside to play with your friends for the afternoon.”  Your friends on the street, the centre of the universe when you are nine years old, want nothing to do with your relatives. 

Cousin Drooler is also wearing those ‘going to visit the relatives’ freak clothes that preclude all the fun things you do with your friends:  Softball, football, road hockey, hide and seek, buck-buck and going to the apartment building construction site to drop bricks off the sixth floor come to mind. 

That sums up China and North Korea.  Kim Jong-Il is Cousin Drooler.  He’s family, but damn it, he’s too weird to be seen with. 

If the US had a lick of sense, they would quietly and discreetly tell China to get their idiot cousin under control.  China provides almost al the food and fuel for North Korea as well as sharing a border.  China has a big say in the deal, like it or not.  China is also not stupid:  They know that an armed and dangerous North Korea is not a good thing for anybody.

But notice the qualifiers on that concept:  Lick of Sense.  Quietly and Discreetly.  I think we have a problem.      

North Korea went ahead and decided to fire off their Taepodong 2 missile. Initial reports looks like it failed and landed in the Sea of Japan.  Initial reports also say that Kim Jong-Il fired off three missiles, two little short-range and one big’un.  Scratch that:  Now four.

Japan is, to put it mildly, pissed.  Understandably, Japan doesn’t want anyone tossing missiles in the direction of their country, especially very oddly-motivated egomaniac dictators who might very well have nuclear capabilities. 

One pundit said that the reason Kim Jong-Il fired them off was to send a message to Pacific rim countries that North Korean is now to be taken seriously.  There is also an undertone of North Korea sending a second, more subtle message, by choosing to fire them off on July 4^th, right after the Space Shuttle launch.  That undertone message is simple enough:  “Blow Me, Dubya!”

Let us take that idea a little further.  What does ‘take North Korea seriously’ mean?  Will an Osaka businessman apply to set up a noodle bar in Pyongyang?  Will Thailand ask Kim Jong-Il if it’s OK for the temples at Angkor Wat to open on Sundays?  Will Dubya set up a six-nation meeting to listen to KJ-I sing from The Carpenters songbook?  Would that get Kim Jong-Il the ‘seriousness’ he craves?  Or, do we need another Graceland visit?

What the hell does the little dork want?  If it is food and fuel, we can get that done with a half-dozen phone calls.  The caveat is the UN comes in with the groceries and checks that North Korea is not building The Bomb. 

More on this is going to bubble out, rapidly.  Hang on.