Silicon Soapware #233

[bubbleblower]

Silicon Soapware #233 is out. Look in

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                            SILICON SOAPWARE
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                                Issue #233
                       New Moon of December 2, 2013


Contents copyright 2013 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative 
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.  See the Creative 
Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details.

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                          *********************

Thanksgiving is over.  Christmas shopping season has "officially" 
started.  So now we can talk about Santa Claus.

One thing I've noticed is that there has been a lot of fuss lately about 
various agencies, governmental and corporate, spying on people.  But 
despite all that, nobody seems to be complaining about Santa's list of 
good and bad children.  And nobody seems to be concerned about the 
possibility of various spies getting hold of that list.  Why?

I suspect the main reason is that Santa deals mostly with young children.  
His interaction cross-section with anyone past about grade-school age is 
practically nil.  The spy agencies are more interested in people old 
enough to be out working or doing other adult-type things.

The spies want to know who you associate with and what you do together, 
where and how you spend your money, who you're likely to vote for, and 
other adult stuff.  Santa, on the other hand, will be filling his list 
with notes about kids refusing to eat their vegetables, or picking fights 
with siblings, or arguing with their parents about whether or not it's 
bed time yet.  Although some of these things may overlap, as in bad table 
manners being a liability for people in jobs whose duties include dining 
with potential customers, they're largely separate.

In other words, most adult spies would find the signal-to-noise ratio on 
Santa's list to be rather low.

That's not to say that they haven't tried to get Santa's list.  They 
probably have made some attempts at it, even if it's not a top priority.  
But getting to it isn't that easy, even if there doesn't appear to be 
much in the way of what we would normally think of as "security".

First comes the question of whether the list is stored in digital form at 
all, or is a collection of handwritten entries on paper.  That's the way 
it had been done for decades, maybe even centuries, before computers came 
along.  Some Christmas cards and other recent images still show it being 
done that way.

If it's done by hand we don't really know the details of how it's done.  
Do agents in the main office at the North Pole have some kind of magic 
viewers or remote spy cameras?  Or do field agents send in reports on 
paper or by telephone or some other medium?  Do legions of scribes then 
hand-copy the pertinent portions onto file cards or something?  The 
cartoons often show Santa looking at a list of "Good" and "Bad" names in 
a book or sometimes just on a piece of paper.  How often does the copy he 
uses get updated?  Who else has access to it?  We don't know.

Other cartoons show him using a computer.  Details vary, but it's usually 
a fairly recent model.  Is it really the exact model it appears to be at 
first glance, or is it something specially built by Santa's elves?  Do 
they write their own software, or do they use the same spreadsheets and 
database software everybody else uses?  And, most relevant to our 
concerns, is the system on the Internet?  If it is, who has access?

Field surveillance personnel should be able to upload reports, but 
probably can't do much else.  Hacking one of these accounts may let you 
harass someone by manipulating their "Good" or "Bad" status, but probably 
won't do you much good beyond that.

If you can get in as a higher-ranking "Santa's Helper" or "Christmas 
Angel" or some such you may be able to look at specific people's records.  
But any attempt to do wholesale downloads will probably trigger alarms, 
at least if their security people are on the ball.

Your best bet might be to try to get in as one of the core developers.  
This may be difficult since most of the system is likely to be on a LAN 
at the North Pole.  Attempts at physical infiltration to connect to this 
LAN are likely to be noticed, especially if the legitimate staff is 
mainly elves and the would-be infiltrators are human.

Thus even if you have Santa's login credentials (rumored to be "sc" with 
a password of "HoHoHo") you won't get very far.

There may, however, be a way in.  Anonymous sources say that some system 
maintenance is being done by individuals working as contractors from 
remote locations.  These would have some form of remote access, although 
it may not be via the standard Internet.

If they are using the standard Internet, the problem reduces to the same 
kinds of problems one encounters when breaking into any large enterprise.  
One possibly unusual difficulty will be finding out who these people with 
remote access are.  Since most software professionals look askance at 
anyone claiming to be working for Santa Claus, these people probably 
won't exactly be bragging about it.  This situation, however, may not be 
too different from a typical Silicon Valley startup in stealth mode.  
Solutions may exist, even if I don't know what they are.

On the other hand, they may be working with special hardware over a 
private network.  This would require not only identifying these people, 
but gaining physical access to their hardware.  Major-league 
cloak-and-dagger hilarity may well ensue.

Let's assume you do get in.  Then what?

Say the US is engaged in tense diplomatic negotiations with some country 
few of us have heard of, and someone in the White House believes that 
getting some of their top officials embroiled in a scandal will give our 
side an advantage.  So we break into Santa's list and look up their high 
muckity-mucks.  And what do we find?  One cabinet member has a preschool 
child who won't eat his vegetables.

Sometimes it just doesn't seem worth the trouble.


                          *********************

During one online discussion of encrypting stuff and breaking into it, I 
got to thinking about the old bit about monkeys at typewriters writing 
Shakespeare.  I got to wondering if there were ways monkeys could type 
random stuff and put it through various encryption and decryption systems 
and have it come out as Shakespeare even if it went in as gibberish.  
There may be, but I don't think most systems are set up to allow that.  
But I could be wrong.

Anyway, the details would probably be too dull and technical to make good 
reading here, even if I knew the relevant math.

Related, if monkeys tasked with trying to type Shakespeare were to come 
up with some other text instead, and that text happened to be under 
copyright, would "They're just monkeys who don't know what they're 
typing," be a useful defense if they were sued for copyright 
infringement?

What if they didn't get the infringing text exactly right, but made a 
number of mistakes typing it (something that by the original rules is 
probably more likely than a perfect copy)?  How different would their 
text need to be from the original for it not to be a violation?  You 
could eventually end up with samples ranging from almost perfect to 
pretty much unrecognizable, so where would the line be drawn?

You could ask analogous questions if the monkeys happened to produce Top 
Secret government documents that the people in charge of the experiment 
might want to leak to the media.

According to one report I read when some researchers actually tried 
setting up a computer keyboard in an enclosure full of apes, they didn't 
get much in the way of random text.  The apes urinated and defecated on 
the keyboard, hit it with rocks, and maybe pressed a few keys now and 
then, mostly the same few letters, but did hardly any actual typing.

I don't recall exactly what species of ape they used.  Would other 
animals give different results?  From what I've seen when a cat gets on a 
keyboard I suspect different species would produce different patterns of 
"text".

But I kind of doubt any of them would produce Shakespeare any time soon.


                          *********************

Something got me to thinking of that poem that starts out "I wandered 
lonely as a cloud", so I looked it up in Wikipedia.  If you don't know it 
(I didn't, beyond the first line) the article has the whole piece.

One thing I found interesting was that it was written around 1804.  That 
means it's almost exactly half as old as Shakespeare's plays and the King 
James Bible.

The writing style didn't seem that old when I first read it, or at least 
the first half didn't.  There's one instance of the contraction "o'er" 
and some words are capitalized that wouldn't be capitalized in ordinary 
modern English prose, but I'd sort of ignored that as "poetic tradition".  
Once I started looking at it with its age in mind I did notice some 
differences from modern usage in the second half.

So has the English language changed less in the past two hundred years 
than in the two hundred years before that?  Or are people today just more 
used to text that's 200 years old than they are to 400-year-old material?


                          *********************

The article also said the poem is widely taught in school.  I'd heard of 
it, but I don't recall studying it in detail or even having it as 
assigned reading.  That leads to the thought that there are probably a 
whole bunch of other well-known poems that I'm not personally acquainted 
with.  Are they gathering in dark alleys, waiting to pounce on me?


                          *********************

The lady in one of the downstairs apartments moved out a couple of months 
ago, and since then they've been working on plumbing and painting and 
other stuff.  I don't know exactly what they're doing, but it seems to 
involve a lot of hammering.  Maybe new carpet?  Or maybe something else?

Maybe they've found a bunch of dimensional gateways and are sealing them 
up so monsters won't come through them into our world.  To the 
uninitiated it looks like all they're doing is putting in new carpet, but 
this is special monster-proof stuff.  And it takes special magic nails to 
keep the monsters from just pushing it aside from below.

Monster-fighters all over the world know about that apartment.  And as 
soon as it's ready, they'll move another master magic-user in to help 
keep the monsters down.  The last one got sick or maybe just got too old 
and frail to keep it up, so she moved out.  Now they're debating which 
one of the younger monster-fighters will get the post.

UPDATE: Someone has moved in.  I haven't talked with him yet, but I saw 
him carrying weights into the apartment.  So is he keeping his muscles 
all toned up, the better to wrestle with the monsters?

Presumably the owner and managers are in on this.  If they're not they 
might conceivably rent the apartment to some ordinary mortals, in which 
case there would be nothing to prevent the monsters from gradually 
weakening the barriers until they're able to burst through into our 
world.

That might make a good movie, perhaps from the viewpoint of a newly hired 
manager who doesn't believe any of the stuff about monsters that the 
tenants keep trying to tell him.  So when that apartment becomes vacant 
he rents it to the "wrong" people, and all hell breaks loose.  Well, 
maybe not all hell, but that portion of Hell for which that apartment is 
the most convenient portal into our world.  Then the monster-fighters 
spend the rest of the movie getting rid of the monsters so they can seal 
the portal again.

As you can imagine, this can involve lots of special effects.

Something like this has probably been done, but there may be room for 
more.


                          *********************

Speaking of science fictional stuff (which we may or may not have been 
doing), how might Christmas look to humans who have lived on some far-off 
world for several generations?


                     Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra


Oh, Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra,
Carols 'round a real organic tree.
Someone's face aglow
Beneath the Mistletoe
Because you're someone they had hoped to see.

Yes, Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra,
Moonlight on the newly fallen snow.
Cold December night,
Candles burning bright
Give the room a warm romantic glow.

But Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra,
Walking down a busy street alone.
Over there's a tree
Like you had come to see
But somehow it just doesn't seem like home.

And Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra,
Carols on a jukebox in a bar.
All the folks you know
Who'd make your season glow
Are waiting on some far-off Christmas star.

So Let's Imagine Christmas on Terra,
That's the song that's really big this year.
Sing it if you will,
But please remember still,
If you go there you will dream of Christmas here.



                            Tom Digby
                            written 1215hr  12-28-86
                            entered 2200hr   1-30-90



                          *********************

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