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. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* 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 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. 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