Convergences

How the Tech Surge Save Obamacare

Climate Religion

Michael Barone nails it:

The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that we must have faith (all argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and must persecute heretics (global warming skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from whatever flimsy source may be at hand.

The arguments that green energy is a producer of jobs are all somewhat weird, as if we could improve our lot by banning the use of the tractor in farming and requiring all work to be done by hand, thus returning to the days when it took 90% of the population to grow food.

Technical progress, and the tech industry, depend on making energy as cheap, not as expensive, as possible. A world in which people spend all their time working to produce or pay for inefficient energy is not a world with money to spare for the iPod.

Homeland Insecurity

[The following was posted on the AEI's Enterprise Blog today. An additional source should also be added -- Stewart Baker has a book on security issues coming out soon. See Skating on Stilts.]

The Monsters Coming Out of Your Computer

By James DeLong

January 29, 2010, 5:44 am

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and McAfee security company put on a panel this week to release their report “In the Crossfire: Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Cyber War.” A simultaneous release occurred in Davos.

The approach was a survey:

Six hundred IT and security executives from critical infrastructure enterprises across seven sectors in 14 countries all over the world anonymously answered an extensive series of detailed questions about their practices, attitudes and policies on security-the impact of regulation, their relationship with government, specific security measures employed on their networks, and the kinds of attacks they face.

If you weren’t nervous when you walked into the event, you should have been when you came out. The attacks are unrelenting, and, as one of the panelists pointed out, the bad guys are not faced with intractable problems of coordinating across large and sclerotic public and private bureaucracies and political jurisdictions, and they don’t spend all their time in meetings. In particular, governments are making inadequate use of the information and expertise that exists in the private sector.

It was a good, tough discussion, with lots of solid nuggets from people who know their business. (The audio is here.) There are some unexpected twists. Not surprisingly, the oil and gas industry is a prime target because its information is valuable. But the oil and gas industry can harden up; who hardens the water & sewer system, where the information is not valuable but the potential for disruption is very high? How do we reconcile an open and public Internet with increasing security concerns?

The report’s lead author was Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security and former general counsel of the National Security Agency. After the session, he recommended a couple of other useful reports: SecDev’s “Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network” (2009), and “Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation,” prepared by Northrop Grumman for the U.S-China Economic & Security Review Commission.

Prepare to sleep with light on. The monsters may not be in the closet, but they are coming out of your computer.

Free Association about Chrome OS

Last week, Google announced its new netbook Web-focused operating system -- Chrome OS, to match its browser. The OS will be open source, a variation on Linux, so Google will be able to tap into the strength of that community from the get-go, and of course free ride on the  work supported by IBM, HP, and the other tech companies who fund Linux.

There is a lot of cross-talk in the press and web about how this is or is not a deadly or minor threat to Microsoft's core Windows business, done with or without deliberate malice by Google, and how it is a disruptive or minor innovation that can be extended up the value chain (unless it is not), and how Microsoft must be very worried or perhaps highly amused.

The day before, I was at Google's DC office to hear Chris Anderson talk about his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. One point he made is that there is a big psychological distance between "free" and even a trivial cost and that the business models of the future must cater to this. This does indeed seem to be a pre-occupation of the tech world, which thus assumes that Google's free OS should sweep the board, except of course for the power of those Microsoft people who seem to cheat by charging for their products.

Openly Sore

Rough Type summarizes a psychological study of Israeli Wikipedeans:

Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social production. That's the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70 non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts it, Wikipedians are generally "grumpy," "disagreeable," and "closed to new ideas."

In their report on the results of the study, the scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as social maladapts who "feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than they do off-line" and who score poorly on measures of "agreeableness and openness." Noting that the findings seem in conflict with public perceptions, the researchers suggest that "the prosocial behavior apparent in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives ... which are not associated with high levels of agreeableness."

This should be good for a pretty good flame war.