Obligatory science-fiction link: in Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge, the main character poses as a representative of an intergalactic weapons manufacturer to infiltrate the militant world of Cliaand:

I unlocked the case and flipped back the lid. The armament specialist glared down at the various components in their padded niches. I explained.

“My firm is the originator and sole manufacturer of the memory line of proximity fuses. No other line is as compact as ours, none as versatile.” I used tweezers to take a fuse from a holder. It was no larger than a pinhead. “This is the most minuscule, designed to be used in a weapon as small as a handgun. Firing activates the fuse which will then detonate the charge in the slug when it comes near a target or predetermined size. This other fuse is the most intelligent, designed for use in heavy weapons or missiles.” They all leaned forward eagerly when I held up the wafer of the Mem-IV and pointed out its singular merits.

“All solid-state construction, capable of resisting incredible pressures, thousands of G’s, massive shocks. It can be preset to detonate only when approaching a specific target, or can be programmed externally and electronically at any time up to the moment of firing. It contains discrimination circuits that will prevent explosion in the vicinity of friendly equipment. It is indeed unique.”

There was no talk of his wares guiding the explosive bullet/warhead/whatever, simply adding some intelligence to when, where, and whether it detonates, but I can foresee this real-world example adding such capabilities in the future as well.

They’re also exploring other possibilities, including other ideas from science-fiction movies.

In any case, I’m happy to see that we’re taking steps to ensure that what happened to the dinosaurs won’t also happen to us. It’s a remote possibility, but even remote possibilities can happen regularly over a long enough period of time.

Between this and the SOPA uprising, my flagging hope for the US has been renewed.

The Internet has been compared to “the wild west” many times, and for essentially the same reason: with very little effort, those who scoff at laws can put virtual bandannas over their faces and hold up any bank that opens a branch in their neck of the woods, or any honest folk that dare to venture into the area, and fade away into the badlands until the heat is off them.

But like the wild west, the Internet is becoming civilized. It’s getting easier to enforce the law, and the bad guys are finding those bandannas a lot harder to come by. If the same sort of timing holds, the next decade will see the end of the digital frontier, and Internet black-hats will fade away like those of yesteryear.

It will be the end of an era. and many will eventually look back on it with longing, but the Internet will also be a much safer place to travel through, and that can’t be a bad thing.

EDIT, same day: Another example.

[...] I remember reading a science fiction story about a computer worm that searched for people this way: going from computer to computer, trying to identify a specific individual.

I immediately thought of The Adolescence of P-1, one of my teenage favorites, and I was tickled to see that someone else had the same thought in the comments.

I’ve said it before, in all-caps and bold italics: DO NOT USE AN INSECURE FREAKIN’ CONSUMER OS LIKE WINDOWS ON VITAL CONTROL SYSTEMS!

At least a few of the higher-ups in the military seem to have learned to listen to what their technical people have likely been saying for years. With any luck it’ll filter out to the private sector too, and sooner rather than later.

EDIT, three hours later: in an ironic twist, it turns out that today is the tenth anniversary of the Bill Gates’ “trustworthy computing” memo. While the change in focus has been welcome, it hasn’t really hardened Windows, just elminiated the most blatant insecurities. Windows remains basically a single-user consumer OS, and still tries to be consumer-friendly at the expense of security. So long as Microsoft refuses to require people to learn anything in order to use Windows, it will never be secure.

This may sound strange, but that isn’t necessarily problem. A consumer OS should be easy to use, and shouldn’t require the user to learn any more than he could pick up by sitting at the keyboard and playing with it. At the same time, such an OS should never be used for anything vital — leave it to what it’s good for, which doesn’t include anything that requires security.

I can’t imagine how Marconi could have thought any clear-text wireless signal was secure against eavesdroppers. Even if his patented tuning system worked to keep the signal on a very narrow band, all it would take to listen in to it would be someone else creating one and scanning the airwaves — something that could easily be done by any eight-year-old with a radio experimentation kit today, and which I doubt would have been that much harder to do even without pre-made components. And if it was patented, the schematics for it would have to be available, if the patent system was anything like today’s.

But then, I can’t see a security system without trying to figure out its flaws. Maybe Marconi really couldn’t imagine such a thing.

(Via Schneier on Security)

I don’t know how common that was elsewhere, or is today even in that backward community, but with that background it makes perfect sense to me that you keep anything the least bit different about you hidden, and only reveal it to the handful of close friends that you know you can trust. That’s why I find today’s kids so baffling, and I suspect why many others of my generation and older do too. And the kids apparently find us just as strange.

Kids, when you hear your elders making ridiculous noises about privacy, please re-read the above paragraphs and understand that the world was a much harsher and less accepting place when some of us were growing up. I’m glad you can be so much more open with your lives today, even if I don’t really grasp how you can do it.