The Lone Wolf and the Enemy Within - 11 Dec 15 by gins

HACKERS now pose more of a threat to world security than nuclear weapons - 

Dr Sally Leivesley, UK Home Office Scientific Adviser

Recent attacks and daily coverage of cyber-threats got me wanting to watch one of my all-time favorite movies, ‘Die-Hard 4.’  Almost nine years ago, it introduced the term ‘fire-sale’ to the masses.  More on this later….

Coverage of the ‘lone-wolf’, with expected focus on traditional terror vectors, underplays the potential damage from cyberterrorism.  Here, I’m not talking about state-sponsored, direct or indirect, but from the individual.  But the attack won’t come through the front door, the area of most focus.  It will come from the inside, and traditional perimeter security tools won’t offer protection.   Even newer tools offering interior protection will be hard pressed to combat a radicalized individual who has slowly moved up through the organization and now has the keys to the kingdom.   How to combat?

Segment It to Save It

At the Gartner Data Center I&O Management Conference this week, Theresa Payton, former White House CIO, did an excellent job of describing current threats and some harrowing statistics. 

• 78% of cyber attacks start with tricking the user
• Almost 100% will click on a phishing email
• 50% will open attachments if they look relevant, such as:

1. Create target list from attendees
2. Select source of email from agenda, and attribute to someone important
3. Use known phrasing and lingo.  Add urgency.
4. Package trojan within and name ‘Notes from Meeting’ or some other relevant topic.
5. Send.

The first step is therefore awareness, and a change in behavior that won’t happen overnight (and I’m the first to admit that many times I’ve come close to hitting ‘open’), but as I mention above, this won’t protect against a trusted insider.  The same tools used to radicalize individuals can also be used in the opposite way, helping them build expertise in gaining trust.

This requires more sophisticated ways to protecting data from the inside, not simple and implying an even greater level of control.  The days of ‘superusers’ may need to come to an end, with two-party control the rule.  True role-based access will need to filter down from the Fortune 500 into the smallest of enterprises.  Her suggestion was to start slow, selecting the few critical pieces of data that can’t be compromised at any cost.  She used the example of the presidential calendar, now split between five databases, and only aggregated within the Oval Office. 

The watchword was ‘segment it to save it,’ while including controls that will identify any out of the ordinary behavior.  The natural extension of this is a background process that checks all actions against known per-user heuristics, a curve of sort, flagging anything that looks wrong.  A new security abstraction layer.  Of course this begs the question ‘who watches the watchmen?’   Not insurmountable, but something else to worry about. 

Back to Die-Hard.   

I’m always amazed by how Hollywood portrays government IT infrastructure.   The National Data Administration.  Nice.   The Homeland Security NOC.  I want one.  Right out of Terminator.   When I was in the military, a primary backup site for the US Government looked like a school room, and for those who remember Desert Storm, it was laptops in trailers.  

To the industry’s credit, we’re getting better at portraying IT and hacking, as detailed in a recent Atlantic article, Hollywood is Finally Starting to Get Hacking Right.

And something I had forgotten.   The baddie was Maggie Q.   From the movie, and from a dinner a few years back just north of Toronto.

BMW Demand-Response - My i3 and Me (4 Sep 15 by gins)

A while ago i had tweeted about the BMW demand-response program.  Well, its now live and seems to be working as planned.  The app is quite simple to use, the opt-in/opt-out has not interfered with anything (yet), and the grey box BMW installed in my garage has not exploded.  From Whisker Labs, but not much on their website.

As background, take a look at this recent article from Bloomberg. 

"PG&E estimates that there are 65,000 electric vehicles in its vast northern California service territory, more than any other utility in the U.S."

And another from CityLab.

A decade from now, we'll see this as norm vs the exception.

The map below isn't great, but shows the distribution of the 100 or so participants.  Red - approx Los Gatos and Saratoga - is heaviest.  I'd expect a high Tesla correlation to this map as well ;)

A Tale of Two Passes and a Century of the Ridge Route (13 Jun 15 by gins)

A few years back, in the post ‘Broadband: Lifeblood, not Luxury,’ I wrote about the roles the Lincoln Highway and the Donner Pass played in connecting California to the rest of the nation.  Indians, traders, covered wagons, the railroad, the highway, not to mention cables and fibers all wound their way from east to west.   But there is another in California with an equally storied history, this time connecting the north and the south.

Separating the two parts of the state are the Tehachapi and San Emigdio Mountains, bisected by the Tejon Pass, and the role this pass plays today is possibly more important than the Donner.  Heading south from Bakersfield, the terrain rises thousands of feet before dropping into the San Fernando Valley.  Oil and gas pipelines, power lines, the California Aqueduct, fiber cables, and of course roads all traverse the pass.  It is the roads that are the most interesting, an open history book spanning the last century of the automobile.  The Lincoln Highway, then US 40, and now I-80 all lay claim to the Donner Pass.  In the same way, the Pacific Highway, US 99, and I-5 have all shared the Tejon at various times. 

The most interesting is the ‘Old’ Ridge Route, the first planned and paved link crossing the pass, completed a hundred years ago.  At the time it was considered an engineering marvel, but it was soon obsolete due to faster and better-designed cars.  Unfortunately, today it is no longer possible to follow it in its entirety due to washouts and abandonment, and we had to turn back after a few miles due to slides, even with an SUV.  No other cars were to be seen.  Another road built at about the same time, the Old Santa Cruz Highway, which was the first paved route across the Santa Cruz Mountains, suffers the same curves and narrow pavement.  And speaking of pavement, an interesting note - the Pacific Highway was once the longest paved auto road in the world.  This was probably a real improvement over the much older Siskiyou Trail, whose path it followed from Oregon to California.

History aside, one mode of transportation notably absent from the Tejon Pass is rail, due to the steepness of the terrain.  Here the two passes differ.   In ‘The Ties That Bind’ I wrote about high-speed rail.   Assuming all goes as planned, the train will in eventually link San Francisco with Los Angeles, but after Bakersfield the line will run east to Palmdale before heading into the LA Basin.   A tunnel, though technically feasible, just doesn’t make financial sense – we’re not the Swiss!

Make Room! Make Room! (2 Jun 15 by gins)

A recent Washington Post article entitled 'The amazing, surprising, Africa-driven demographic future of Earth, in 9 charts" (whew!) had me thinking about the implications of some of the conclusions and potential scenarios.  At a high-level, it concludes that the Earth must support over 10B people by the end of the century, of which greater than 4B will be in Africa alone.  7B of the world's population will be in developing or least developed countries, most developed countries with the exception of the United States will age and in fact see a population decline, and we still need to traverse a near-term bubble in the dependency ratio in Africa.  Surprisingly, Nigeria alone will host close to a billion by 2100, with China declining to about 1.2B.  But those 1B in Nigeria will be in a less diverse and environmentally rich space less than 1/10 that of China or just over 2x that of California.  So draw a comparison - imagine 500M people here!  And you think the commute on 85 or the I-10 is bad today.

The above projections in fact match those of another UN study that outlines just how much the world will change of the next decades due to urbanization.

What came to mind were two books that had an impact on me.   The first, Make Room! Make Room!, first published in 1966 and better known by the film adaption, Soylent Green, painted a picture of overcrowded cities and environmental ruin.   Timing - 2022, just 7 years from today.  A more impactful follow-up is The Population Bomb, published 47 years ago, predicting mass starvation and effectively throwing in the towel.   At least it helped catalyze the environmental movement.   Fast forward to Elysium, 2013, painting the same dismal picture but at least providing the 'haves' with a way out.   This is one scenario, probably top-of-mind for most looking from the outside in.

But there is another, and this is where are article left off, if we plan for and innovate to lift these 4B people into the middle class.   It goes without saying that political stability is a must, but there is a bit of a Catch-22 in what comes first - empowerment or stability.   One first step is knowledge, and the combination of cellphone coverage (and data, though not tied to a smartphone) and satellite TV (even if a single downlink is shared by a community)  is a major step.  Broadband is on the horizon, and access to big-data is already making an impact in planning based on the more recent availability of Africa-based fiber landings.

With continual declines in solar panel pricing (figure below), community-driven power becomes viable, a catalyst for lighting (and education), health, clean water, and agriculture.   I believe much of this will be at the grass-roots level, and with some international aid, growing foreign investment (from China, the Middle East, and elsewhere) the total energy mix by 2100 will be very different from what was predicted only a decade ago.   A chart by China Research, below, captures this best.   At the same time, we're in a new age of mechanical innovation focused on power efficiency, low-cost, and low-maintenance.  Basically, any electricity generated, water captured, or crops harvested are utilized that much more efficiently.

So yes, I'm optimistic that the 'African Century' won't only lead to 3B new heads to cover and minds and mouths to feed, but it will also provide us with the means to accomplish this.

Game of Streaming (11 Apr 15 by gins)

Like me, you're probably a GOT fan.  Problem is, I don't have cable HBO , and though I now credit them with their $15/month over-the-top plan, it doesn't go far enough.  At the house, we have Netflix, Amazon Prime streaming, and more recently, Sling, and would gladly pay for the series one-off.  Note that this is the case for many others via iTunes and Amazon.   But $180/year for effectively 10 episodes. or $18/hour, however juicy, just doesn't make sense.   This is probably 5x what is reasonable, say, $3.60/hour, or equivalent to what you'd pay in the cinema.  I understand the economics that HBO must play into with the cable operators and bundling, and the fact that GOT probably helps fund other productions, but moving the needle even further to the right could help avoid some of the piracy they can expect beginning in just over 24 hours.  Just a thought.

(Stop) Fanning the Flames... Religion and Social Media (15 Feb 15 by gins)

We read that today's cartoonists and communists state that religion is free game... that the Pope and Muhammad are open to the same level of satire as Obama and Putin. I can't agree, and just to level-set, I'm Jewish by birth, my wife is Catholic, and our family is what most would consider are non-religious... no bonds to any church or synagogue.  

Religion transcends politics and economics. It is with us at birth, through marriage, and at death.  It is unique, intertwined with the earliest of civilizations.  It cuts across the rich and the poor, the left and the right.  

So this is my litmus test... If a visual or commentary is offensive to those who believe, why pursue it?  I'm not by any means saying that those who take offensive should go on a rampage, but with all the hurt in the world, why go down a path that is guaranteed to create grief and inflame emotions?  And we've seen that social media, Twitter, Facebook, and whatnot, only amplifies this effect.  

Think!