systemcall dot org

Gorik was a methodical prisoner. Every morning, precisely at 6 o’clock, he’d wake up, wash his face and prepare for the morning food rations. After eating and tidying his bed, he’d go outside for the sun bath.

His schedule wasn’t particularly full, but he had some tasks he liked to do. Washing the court, preparing dinner, helping people in the library and most of all, teaching mathematics to the children. He was not a great mathematician, but among the prisoners, he was the most gifted.

Although his race was known to be violent, and many others tried to escape prison, he was a peaceful man. Not once he tried or even hinted to escape, nor he participated in the few mass escapes that happened since they’re all imprisoned. As with most prisoners of war, they weren’t criminals or had done anything more terrible than those that had imprisoned them, they just were unlucky enough to be on the loosing side of a major war.

Violent or not, their race was proud of what they achieved and were no more destructive than their enemies, nor they actually started the fight. But that doesn’t concern us now, the important matter now is that Gorik was not in his cell at 6 o’clock this morning to get his rations.

The janitor’s face had but one tear rolling down his cheek. The key in his hand opening a door that didn’t need opening. Pointless exercise but he continued, by force of habit, if nothing else. He was definitely not there.

Others were coming to see, but the sense of nothing was global. There wasn’t a single man, on either side, with his mouth closed. Some were dripping, what could be more tears, or saliva. It didn’t matter any more. He was not there at all.

No alarm was sound, no one ran. There was nothing to do. There were no broken doors, no knocked-down guards, no bribes paid (or no one said so), nor any camera caught anything convincing. He vanished.

Life continued in the prison. There was no one to help with the dinner today, or anyone to help the children in their assignments. It was not the same without him. Where did he go? And why now? There must have been something really serious to take him that sudden, and silently. He just left.

Two days later, when the janitor had the courage to enter his cell to clean it up, he noticed a letter on the bed. Nothing special, just a letter half-inserted back into the light brown envelope. The writing on the envelope was a bit wobbly, like children writing. It was addressed to him personally, and being only a letter, there was no point in not delivering it to him.

He was not there any more, and he left the letter in plain sight. That unofficially gives one the right to read it, I guess. Well, the janitor agreed, and opened the letter. It was from Gorik’s wife.

She was also a prisoner, but ever since the war was over, women and children got moved to a more decent accommodation, where the children could learn how much better was life on the other side and interact with the children on this side, and forget about their horrible and violent past.

The note said: “Dear Gorik, I’m not feeling well lately and Juma is a fine woman already. She’s left with a good boy and I’m afraid I’ll be alone for the rest of my days. I sincerely hope you are in better company than I am. Love, your wife.”

The next day, the prison manager went personally to the apartments she was living, and asking around learnt that nobody saw Gorik since the end of the war, but his wife had not showed up for a few days, also.

He took the note from his pocket, in which his secretary had written the block and apartment number. After a few minutes walking in circles, he managed to find the block and the correct door, which was half-open.

Knocked once. No answer. Twice. Nothing. The manager peered into the room by the two centimetres available, but all he could see was that the TV was on. Feeling a bit guilty for doing so, even for a prison manager, he opened the door a bit and found no one in the living room. A few steps inside, a door to the left. Empty bathroom. Another door to the right, empty room. Down the small corridor, there was a door, completely open and letting the sun, that was shining on the other side of the building, come through with all its might.

Barely visible among the flood of light, a pair of feet. No, actually, two pairs. Curiosity was not in the manager’s list of sins, but he could no longer wait. Sweating and his heart pumping, he crossed the room, just to find two people lying down on the bed. Calm as summer night.

Nothing to do with the topic of this blog, you are right, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the reality England faces regarding football.

All these years watching a mediocre football, even in the Premier League, where Cristiano Ronaldo is the top player and where Robinho can’t play football made me wondering what’s terribly wrong with the nation’s love for the sport. Not just passion, but the English people were the ones that invented the sport. Here in Cambridge its very first rules were written and the first match with those rules played in Parker’s Piece in 1848.

With more than 160 years of football history you would imagine that they’d have a bit more skills… Recently I have found a perfectly good reason why this happens.

Another English passion, maybe even more important that football, is lawn. Not cricket, not complaining, not political jokes: lawn. Mediocre football is all right, mediocre grass is a crime. But, grass and football are very much connected, probably the very reason why they loved to play it in the past, but as priorities are laid, lawn apparently comes first. In my recent visit to my son’s new school, with very impressive lawns, bigger than an official football pitch. The “football pitch”? It’s made of asphalt, which is also used as car park some times…

Baffled as I was, when I asked the children about football, they said they were allowed to play, but they had to bring their own balls. So far so good, but then it came reality: there is a recommendation to use foam or rubber balls, to avoid injury. Question is, what does more injury, proper footballs or asphalt?

In Brazil, children as young as 1 year old play football with anything. Coconuts, food cans, socks rolled into a ball, even stones. And they usually play barefoot, on dirt, or even asphalt. Health and Safety is important, but not to the point of removing completely the fun of being a child. If a child doesn’t get dirty, it won’t learn to clean itself, to avoid the situation in the future and, more importantly, to understand the pain of living and how good that feels.

European football? Never heard…

I’m not the one to normally do reviews or ads, but this is one well worth doing. Humble bundle is an initiative hosted by Wolfire studio, in which five other studios (2D Boy, Bit Blot, Cryptic Sea, Frictional Games and the recently joined Amanita Design) joined their award-winning indie games into a bundle with two charities (EFF and Child’s Play) that you can pay whatever you want, to be shared amongst them.

All games work on Linux and Mac (as well as Windows), are of excellent quality (I loved them) and separately would cost around 80 bucks. The average buy price for the bundle is around $8.50, but some people have paid $1000 already. Funny, though, that now they’re separating the average per platform, and Linux users pay, on average, $14 while Windows users pay $7, with Mac in between. A clear message to professional game studios out there, isn’t it?

About the games, they’re the type that are always fun to play and don’t try to be more than they should. There are no state-of-the-art 3D graphics, blood, bullets and zillions of details, but they’re solid, consistent and plain fun. I already had World of Goo (from 2D Boy) and loved it. All the rest I discovered with the bundle and I have to say that I was not expecting them to be that good. The only bad news is that you have only one more day to buy them, so hurry, get your bundle now while it’s still available.

The games

World of Goo: Maybe the most famous of all, it’s even available for Wii. It’s addictive and family friendly, has many tricks and very clever levels to play. It’s a very simple concept, balls stick to other balls and you have to reach the pipe to save them. But what they’ve done with that simple concept was a powerful and very clever combination of physical properties that give the game an extra challenge. What most impressed me was the way physics was embedded in the game. Things have weight and momentum, sticks break if the momentum is too great, some balls weight less than air and float, while others burn in contact with fire. A masterpiece.

Aquaria: I thought this would be the least interesting of all, but I was wrong. Very wrong. The graphics and music are very nice and the physics of the game is well built, but the way the game builds up is the best. It’s a mix of Ecco with Loom, where you’re a sea creature (mermaid?) and have to sing songs to get powers or to interact with the game. The more you play, the more you discover new things and the more powerful you become. Really clever and a bit more addictive than I was waiting for…

Gish: You are a tar ball (not the Unix tar, though) and have to go through tunnels with dangers to find your tar girl (?). The story is stupid, but the game is fun. You can be slippery or sticky to interact with the maze and some elements that have simple physics, which add some fun. There are also some enemies to make it more difficult. Sometimes it’s a bit annoying, when it depends more on luck (if you get the timing of many things right in a row) than actually logic or skill. The save style is also not the best, I was on the fourth level and asked for a reset (to restart the fourth level again), but it reset the whole thing and sent me to the first level, which I’m not playing again. The music is great, though.

Lugaru HD: A 3D Lara Croft bloody kung-fu bunny style. The background story is more for necessity of having one than actually relevant. The idea is to go on skirmishing, cutting jugulars, sneaking and knocking down characters in the game as you go along. The 3D graphics are not particularly impressive and the camera is not innovative, but the game has some charm for those that like a fight for the sake of fights. Funny.

Penumbra: If you like being scared, this is your game. It’s rated 16+ and you can see very little while playing. But you can hear things growling, your own heart beating and the best part is when you see something that scares the hell out of you and you despair and give away your hide out. The graphics are good, simple but well cared for. The effects (blurs, fades, night vision, fear) are very well done and in sync with the game and story. The interface is pretty simple and impressively easy, making the game much more fun than the traditional FPS I’ve played so far. The best part is, you don’t fight, you hide and run. It remembers me Thief, where fighting is the last thing you want to do, but with the difference is that in Thief, you could, in this one, you’re a puss. If you fight, you’ll most likely die.

Samorost 2: It’s a flash game, that’s all I know. Flash is not particularly stable on any platform and Linux is especially unstable, so I couldn’t make it run in the first attempt. For me, and most gamers I know, a game has to work. This is why it’s so hard to play early open source games, because you’re looking for a few minutes of fun and not actually fiddling with your system. I have spent more time writing this paragraph than trying to play Samorost and I will only try it again if I upgrade my Linux (in hoping the Flash problem will go away by itself). Pity.

Well, that’s it. Go and get your humble bundle that it’s well worth, plus you help some other people in the process. Helping indie studios is very important for me. First, it levels the play-field and help them grow. Second, they tend to be much more platform independent, and decent games for Linux are scarce. Last, they tend to have the best ideas. Most game studios license one or two game engines and create dozens of similar games with that, in hope to get more value for their money. Also, they tend to stick with the current ideas that sell, instead of innovating.

By buying the bundle you are, at the very least, helping to have better games in the future.

First time we went back to Brazil, besides the 40 degrees heat at nights and family discussions about how much more time we spent at the other aunt’s, it was no big deal. So the idea the second time we not to plan better and not to spoil the family any more. That time, there was little discussion, but we forgot to check for the little one’s passport and spent two weeks on queues at the federal police to get it, involving sending his documents over from UK via Fedex (thanks Guto!).

A lot of time (and planning) later, we decided to go, our style, and check all documents before flying. It was wonderful! Besides the usual family fight, all went well. We went to the beach and it was sunny and fantastic. On our way back from the beach I said: “We did it! Nothing went wrong this time, eh?”. It came out as a relief, but turned out to be a curse! At the exact moment I said that, a giant pool of lava decided to come out into existence, as if feeling my moment of joy, just to spoil it. It was a masterpiece, from a Norse god or something.

Wednesday, 14th April 2010

All flights stopped, and on Wednesday itself I knew ours (on Sunday) would be included. As business continuity planning (BCP), I coordinated with my company, my family and KLM to get the most out of the zillions of different news flashing on Twitter, Facebook and BBC.

I have to say that we were a bit disappointed with Eurocontrol. They stopped all flights for safety reason (quite reasonable) but they sat and waited until the volcano would stop spilling lava. As if that would solve anything, even after all geologists said it could take months, or even years, to stop.

Friday, 16th April 2010

Feeling the pressure of $200mi a day each, all airlines got their planes flying with no passengers. Some flew at lower altitudes, most at regular and some even got right into the ash, just for fun (and results). And even with all results negative, Eurocontrol delayed days to slowly restart flights.

Monday, 19th April 2010

We were still stranded in Brazil, with two hyper-active boys, mum without her medicines and dad without his nerves in the right place. We were offered a flight back, but KLM warned it was only to Amsterdam, so we didn’t take it. I said to the advisor to only book us if the flight was all the way to London.

Tuesday, 19th April 2010

We were booked on the same flight as before, but, according to KLM, all the way to London. I was amazed. KLM had done some flights to London already and I thought we were going home, much easier than I had foreseen… how naive.

At the Guarulhos airport, KLM said they couldn’t guarantee both flights, which came as a surprise. But with all the chaos, I thought it was only fair to accept their apologies and proceed with our travel back.

Wednesday, 20th April 2010

But it was only when we got to Schipol that I really understood what chaos really meant. There were a few thousands of passengers queueing for no apparent reason, going in random directions, being directed by random people in random uniforms, working for random companies, pointing to nowhere in particular.

One guy, dressed with a KLM suit, said I should get information directly from KLM (I didn’t ask). Another said that, in order to get info, I should take the queue that would take approximately 2 hours. When I finally got to the electronic ticket machine and had difficulties, the helping person told me she could not help because the machine was not helping.

In the end, we found out that our flight to London (KL1017) never existed. There were other flights to London (KL1019), but they were all full, and there were no confirmed flights in the next day. I had to queue to know that, too. Nowhere to go and no flight to take, we decided to rent a car and head to Calais to get the ferry. We got a big car, put all the bags in and headed south.

Holland, Belgium and finally France, we got first to Dunkirk to check for ferries. There was only a very stupid lady that refused to answer me if there was a passenger ticket, just because I was not in the queue. Of course I would get the queue if there was, but what would be the point to get the whole queue if there wasn’t? Well, there wasn’t. Another fine lady answered me in 3 seconds, and it didn’t even hurt.

We headed to Calais, broken, hungry and without a single Euro, we could only find MacDonalds in Belgium and Holland. But we made it. After several U-turns along the way (the car got no satnav nor AVIS had any), we eventually got there. Now, it was just a matter of dropping the key back and get the 4 hours queue to buy our tickets to cross the channel…

As the sunset began, the cold that was already there began to show its face. The temperature dropped quickly, my hands froze and Renata and the kids went inside. No panic, as it was just a matter of waiting… how naive.

Reaching the tickets office, I checked passports, bags and wallet… wait, where’s my wallet?! Desperately looking in all bags, I called Renata, who kindly reminded me it was in the car’s arm pocket… But I had already gave the car keys already back, in the night safe.

When I got inside the building (3.5hours later), I ask them to stay in the queue and we decided to look for a way to get the wallet back. A French staff wanted to break in with a rock, but I reminded him there were hundreds of policemen around, British and French. It’d be harder to explain than to come home without the documents.

After almost an hour looking for a way to retrieve the key, with no avail, they decided to call the AVIS guy, who arrived after half hour, and he also wasn’t in his best mood… Well, who would? Finally, we made it to the boat, with all bags and children and documents… But our car was still parked on the Long Stay at Heathrow airport, 3 days due.

Thursday, 21st April 2010

When we finally reached Dover, we found that there were no cars to rent, buses were full and the next train would be only hours from then. To make matters worse, the only taxi big enough to carry us didn’t know where Cambridge was…

The Travel Centre in Dover was the key. Not only I could withdraw money (using my credit card, as my account was blocked), but someone gave me a list of telephones to call for a taxi. After a few attempts, one of them got the call and had a car big enough. We agreed on the price and he came to pick us up.

It took around 2 hours to get home, all of us (including the driver) trying to stay awake, but we finally got home around 3am, and after firing the usual emails (family, work, friends) to signal our arrival, we went to sleep.

After 2 days without sleeping (yes, I didn’t sleep a second), it was a miracle I could wake up at noon. We had a minimalistic breakfast (there was no food at all at home) and, without so much of a shower, I headed south, to Heathrow airport, via train.

The train was fine, but the underground train decided it didn’t want to go all the way to terminal 4, so it stopped at Northfields and spat everyone out. I got the next train, which also didn’t go to terminal 4, and politely asked us to leave to get the next train yet, which finally took us to terminal 4.

3 hours after I left home, I was inside our car. All working, I just forgot the ticket, which was easy to work around since I had the booking confirmation and they opened the gates for me. I was expecting some traffic on the M25, which came as sure as rain in England, but my tiredness was so great that I couldn’t stay awake for too long.

I stopped at the A1 services, and had a light meal and a quadruple-espresso that I mixed with a heavy-chocolate milkshake and swallowed in a few gulps. It was yet another hour or so, almost falling asleep, that I finally got home… after 7pm.

All of us, safe and sound, and I had all the time in the world to sleep comfortably in a nice bed. There was only one detail.. During all that adventure, both kids slept like angels through the long boring parts, so they weren’t tired at all!

It is only now, three days after we arrived, that I feel I’m getting back my energy.

A while ago I wrote an article about Agile and Scrum and wanted to write another one following my recent experience with Agile. However, somehow I couldn’t add anything of that great value to my original post that would be worth a new one.

And now I know I don’t have to. In this fantastic post, Gwaredd takes a deep look into all failures and successes of Agile, with the common misconceptions of believers and decision-makers. In the end, the so called “Post Agile”, is just plain common sense.

A long time ago I read an article about some dangerous psychological studies in the 70′s. It’s funny to think that, at that time, things that we don’t even consider doing, were acceptable.

Can you imagine yourself with a periscope counting the seconds some truck drivers take to piss in a public toilet? Or pretending to rape a girl and risk getting shot (especially in the US)? It’s not just ethically incorrect, it’s dangerous!

Recently, I read an article about some students monitoring 350 million mobile calls just to figure out if the callee’d call you back. Not only in the 70′s that would be nonsense, but people would explode in rage, as it’d be just enough to prove all conspiracy theories at that time (not to mention the cold war).

This is not the first research using “unnamed” data from carriers or websites, nor will be the last. I myself proposed something similar to Yahoo! when I worked there to get the trends and act on the average (rather than tag individuals), and I see now that it’s becoming acceptable to allow research groups to openly read entire databases that before was considered private.

I don’t particularly dislike such type of research, especially when they’re done by universities, but the slight paranoia feeling creep up my spine sometimes. I guess that’s one of the issues that is dividing people into two very distinctive groups: those that ignore completely the privacy for the sake of comfort, and those that ignore comfort for the sake of privacy.

I am in between the two groups, but I can’t say I’m exactly average. I think I’m an extremist on both sides. I don’t mind storing my private emails on Google but I disable all Facebook add-ons and restrict access to all my personal data. I pay everything on the internet with my credit-card but I’ll refuse to the end of my days to use the biometric passport or iris recognition at airports.

There is no logic, really, it’s just the kind of thing you stick with. It is true that governments have more power to dig your data when they want, while Amazon will probably only have my credit-card number. But it’s also true that no government in the world can dig everyone’s data all the time, so it’s pretty improbable that someone is monitoring how many times I cross the Heathrow border.

In the end, only one thing makes out as logic in the whole scene: during the recent years, it was far more likely the government loosing all banking details of everyone in the country than some hacker invading Amazon to get my credit-card. Maybe that’s what’s keeping me from accepting IDs and biometric passports… or maybe I never will…

Ever since 1995 I hear the same phrase, and ever since 2000 I stopped listening. It was already the year of Linux in 95 for me, so why bother?

But this year is different, and Linux is not the only revolution in town… By the end of last year, the first tera-electronvolt collisions were recorded in the LHC, getting closer to see (or not) the infamous Higgs boson. Now, the NIF reports a massive 700 kilojoules in a 10 billionth of a second laser, that, if it continues on schedule, could lead us to cold fusion!!

The human race is about to finally put the full stop on the standard model and achieve cold fusion by the end of this year, who cares about Linux?!

Well, for one thing, Linux is running all the clusters being used to compute and maintain all those facilities. So, if it were for Microsoft, we’d still be in the stone age…

UPDATE: More news on cold fusion…

There was a time when the gods were bored to death, but because they couldn’t actually die, they started writing down all their knowledge to pass the time. Virtually everything known to them was written on the ancient manuscripts and organized by topic, cross-linked with other topics, in a very simple yet complete language that described everything to the last detail.

Time passed, universes were created and in some of them, creatures developed critical thinking. With that, came science and with science, the logical conclusion that gods didn’t actually have to exist was inevitable. So inevitable that finally, without delay, the gods actually died. For the curious minds, that fact is based on the quantum principle that, if no one sees it, it doesn’t actually exist.

Yet, for the great benevolence of the Universe, the manuscripts were kept and for billions of (Earth) years (relativistically speaking, of course), they were forgotten. But everything that is lost is waiting to be found, and in a very small speck of dust, in a completely irrelevant galaxy on the (multi-dimensional) margins of one of the universes, a yet-to-be intelligent race found a way to the manuscripts. However, their intelligence was not enough to uncover the whole truth. They could only gather hints and pieces of what once was the complete knowledge of everything.

It was much more of a coincidence, really, that so many of those beings would channel the truth through their fingers and type them, guided by the manuscripts themselves, on a remote system that all the other beings would go and search for knowledge. Some would misguide them, of course, and others would fight over the truth, for no one really know how to interpret such manuscripts. Seeing such confusion and regress, the Universe decided to create a game, on which such frivolous beings could channel their good side instead, even if not consciously knowing so.

The Game

The game is very simple and is meant to beings with very limited mental and social capacity.

The younger member starts by clicking on the “Random Article” link on any Wikipedia page, or by choosing a subject from the main page. After that, the following rules must be repeated until the players are tired or bored to death:

1. The current player must explain (out loud) what the article is about and think of a related subject. The relation can be of any kind.
2. The other players would then decide if the relation is valid and the player should then go to the related page.
3. If the relationship is valid and approved, the points are counted on the following manner:
   • 1 point if the article exists, +3 points if the player enhances it.
   • 3 points if the article doesn’t exist, +9 points if the player creates it with a stub.
4. The player on the right goes next.

Of course, at least one access to Wikipedia is necessary, but many can be used simultaneously. It is considered foul play to tamper with the contents of the pages just to get extra points (remember, the gods won’t be pleased at all!).

In between games, there is a way to get extra points for the next round. If the player proves that he/she enhanced Wikipedia pages quoted from a previous game (change logs suffice), he/she gets +3 points at the start of the next game for every considerable change (10 or more words) in a single page. Multiple changes in the same page counts as one change and the points can only be counted if the change happened between the last game and current, so the same change cannot be considered twice. Creation of new pages related to the subjects mentioned also count as change.

The Winner

The winner of the game is obviously the one that gets most points, but the real winner is the society. Knowledge has no owner, no boundaries, no limits. The more you share, the more society benefits. Knowledge is power, and you can give it for free, as easy as writing an email… to the world.

Most game-changing scientific discoveries had a lot of logic and critical thinking, but also a bit of luck involved. As most scientists, I don’t believe in luck, so the definition of luck here is being the right person in the right place at the right time. As most (good) scientists, I don’t believe, I state, hypothesise, prove, refute, so the definition of belief here is also obvious.

My point is that evolution wouldn’t have been formulated if Darwin hadn’t gone with the Beagle, genetics wouldn’t be so solid if Mendel hadn’t believed the contrary so fiercely, Plank wouldn’t have found the quantum if there wasn’t a major argument about the black-body spectrum and Einstein would have won the Nobel prize for any other thing if he hadn’t been so drawn by God playing dice.

My story today starts in a similar way, but in a much more mundane problem… I lost my keys.

There is nothing I hate more than loosing my keys, especially in the 25th of December when we’re going to hit the road in the 27th. I lost all my keys, car, house, even my USB key. These modern car keys are not easy to replicate, I’d have to buy the whole thing again and loosing your front door key is not the kind of thing you let pass with a simple copy, you have to change the whole set, especially when you’re going away for a week.

Well, after despair came fear. After fear, despair again. We searched the whole house, inside, outside and in between. Nothing. Brute force wasn’t helping, but that hadn’t stopped me to do it once in a while again, just in case. In between the despair brute-force moments, we decided to be logical about the situation and think, rather than search for the answer.

First point, we had a spare of either car and house, so at least we could still travel and come back home. My worries were, in fact, what would we find when we came back home… If I had lot my keys outside or had left them hanging off the front door’s key hole (happened more than once), it’d be just too easy for someone to clean the house while we were away.

So we tracked down every place we went, every thing we did. By logic, I couldn’t have lost them in the city or anywhere I would have gone by car. Nor I could have lost it inside the car, so at least we knew that it’d be either inside the house or around it (including the key hole, unfortunately). I almost cancelled our trip because of the key hole probability, but Renata, very logically, convinced me that everything we did could not have caused me to leave it there. It was very, very unlikely. So we went…

However very unlikely, that still bugged me the whole week and I felt a bit of panic when we got home. But to my comfort, the house was exactly the way we left. That was, in a twisted way, another indication that the key was not left in the key hole. It had to be inside the house. I went back to work, still using the spare keys, but always thinking about it, wondering wherever it was. Sometimes, just in case, I’d imagine that I would look somewhere and see the key there, and be very surprised I haven’t seen it there before. That feeling never came.

This week I thought enough was enough. I had to continue with my life, change the front door keys and buy the very expensive key set from the car’s manufacturers. I put a to-do in my mobile: “call toyota, landlord wrt keys”. It was then that luck stroke with an impeccable logic. I felt like Darwin finding the platypus or Mendel smashing peas.

I looked at our bag of snow jackets, hermetically sealed for the next winter (Cambridge has only one chance of snowing each year, and that was before Christmas), and thought: “If the keys are in there, we’ll only find out next winter.” The simple logic led me to think it’d be much cheaper for me to re-open the impossible-to-close-hermetically-sealed bag now and not find the key than to wait until next winter and have spent thousands of pounds for nothing. The risk assessment was positive, and that led me to the next piece of information that closed the gap: it was snowing before Christmas! It had to be there!

I opened the bag and tapped my jacket, nothing. But the logic was impeccable, I couldn’t be wrong. I wore the jacket and trusted logic above my own despair. Gently sliding my hands inside the pockets, as I always do. The pockets are deep, and I felt nothing at start, but that didn’t stop my trust in logic. Spock would have laughed at me if I did, it’s that serious, a vulcan could actually laugh. It was not out of faith or belief, it was the ultimately trust that scientists lay on logic above all feelings, common sense and general knowledge, that kept me going until I finally felt something…

I have recently joined the IETF Smart Grid group to see what people were talking about it and to put away my fears on security and privacy. What I saw was a bunch of experts discussing the plethora of standards that could be applied (very important) but few people seemed too interested in the privacy issue.

If you see the IEEE page on Smart Grids, besides the smart generation / distribution / reception (very important) there is a paragraph on the interaction between the grid and the customers, being very careful not to mention invasive techniques to allow the grid to control customer’s appliances:

“Intelligent appliances capable of deciding when to consume power based on pre-set customer preferences.”

Here, they focus on letting the appliances decide what will be done to save power, not the grid or the provider. Later on, on the same paragraph:

“Early tests with smart grids have shown that consumers can save up to 25% on their energy usage by simply providing them with information on that usage and the tools to manage it.”

Again, enforcing that the providers will only “provide [the customer] with information”. In other words, the grid is smart up to the smart meter (that is controlled by the provider), where inside people’s houses, it’s the appliances that have to be smart. One pertinent comment from Hector Santos in the IETF group:

“Security (most privacy) issues, I believe, has been sedated over the years with the change in consumer mindset. Tomorrow (and to a large extent today) generation of consumers will not even give it a second thought. They will not even realize that it was once considered a social engineering taboo to conflict with user privacy issues.”

I hate to be pessimist, but there is a very important truth in this. Not only people are allowing systems to store their data for completely different reasons, but they don’t care if the owner of the system will distribute their information or not. I, myself, always paranoid, have signed contracts with providers knowing that they would use and sell my data to third parties. The British Telecom is one good example. He continues:

“Just look how social networking and the drive to share more, not less has changed the consumer mindset. Tomorrow engineers will be part of all this new mindset.”

There is no social engineering any more like it used to be. Who needs to steal your information when it’s already there, on your Facebook? People are sharing willingly, and a lot of them know what problems it may cause, but the benefit, for them, is greater. Moreover, millions bought music, games and films with DRM, allowing a company control what you do, see or listen. How many Kindles were bought? How many iPhones? People don’t care what’s going on if they have what they want.

That is the true meaning of sedated privacy concerns. It’s a very distorted way of selfishness, where you don’t care about yourself, as long as you are happy. If it makes no sense to you, don’t worry, it makes no sense to me too.

Recently, the Future of Privacy Forum published an excellent analysis (via Ars) on the smart grid privacy. Several concepts that are easy to understand how dangerous they can be, became commonplace to not think about it or even consider it a silly worry, given that no one cares anyway.

An evil use of a similar technology is the “Selectable Output Control“. Just like a Kindle, the media companies want to make sure you only watch what you pay for. It may seem fair, and even cheaper, as they allow “smart pricing”, like some smart-grid technologies.

But we all have seen what Amazon did to kindle users, of Apple did to its AppStore, taking down contents without warn, removing things you paid for from your device, allowing or disallowing you to run applications or contents on your device as if you hadn’t pay enough money to own the device and its contents.

In the end, “smart pricing” is like tax cut, they reduce tax A, but introduce taxes B, C and D, which double the amount of taxes you pay. Of course, you only knew about tax A and went happy about your life. All in all, nobody cares who or how much they pay, as long as they can get the newest fart app…

« Previous entries