The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia threw out an entire raft of regulation, regarding CO2 emmission. Either as planned or unplanned incompetence, the Bush administration’s protection of the environment has simply been incompetent. Or worse. The Wall Street Journal reports today that President Bush is renewing his ridiculous calls for more drilling in sensitive areas.
Author: Eliot Lear
The Do Nothing Presidency
Yesterday, the Bush Administration released a long awaited report by the Environmental Protection Agency, that says that Carbon Dioxide can and should be regulated. One would think this a remarkable departure for an administration that has done everything within its power to destroy the environment, through drilling in fragile environmental areas, unmitigated logging, and the failure to protect endangered species. There’s a catch: the Supreme Court ordered the EPA to develop the report, and in releasing it, in the same breath, the administration argued that regulation by the EPA to protect our children will hurt business and industrial growth.
Let’s review our tally for this administration:
- Housing — Failure to properly regulate the housing market has led to a massive series of bank failures.
- The Energy Market — we are suffering from inflation due to a massive increase in oil prices, which itself is in part due to an inability of Americans to conserve. The administration has done absolutely nothing to reduce consumption, or for that matter offer fuel alternatives. Instead, they’ve argued that drilling in wilderness refuges will offer some form of relief, a claim that is disputed by every expert in the field, because it will offer no short term relief, while medium and long term relief are by no means at all assured.
- Security— having gone to war twice and wasted billions of dollars on meaningless programs, the administration has managed to alienate America from the rest of the world, reducing people’s desires to visit, impacting tourism, and reducing our national credibility. At the same time the Taliban has rebuilt itself, and we’ve lost our allies in Pakistan and now, seemingly Iraq (not that Prime Minister Maliki was every clearly an ally).
- Education— No Child Left Behind has meant that our children haven’t gone forward as a group. Our public education system remains in a shambles due to lack of incentives for good teachers, buildings that are falling apart, and a general willingness by this administration to divert funds to religious programs.
- Public Transportation— our skies are more dangerous than they have been since the creation of the FAA. More runway incursions, more close calls in the air, disgruntled workforces, and disgruntled passengers have left our air transportation system in a mess, while we’ve invested nearly nothing in ground public transport.
- Public Welfare— with a remarkably lame response to Hurricane Katrina, the administration demonstrated that they could not be trusted with emergency crisis management.
In short, they did nothing except collect pay checks. Perhaps Americans will pay more attention to our civic responsibilities the next time we hand someone the keys.
iPhone Day: Observe the Tortured Believers
Well, today is the day the iPhone goes on sale. The 2nd generation sleek phone from Apple looks to be quite a bit nicer than the first, starting with improved Internet performance, and considerably better 3G battery lifetime than on any other telephone yet produced, and an open application interface for more applications. Combined with a great user interface, a friendliness toward the enterprise, and a nice feature set, it will probably make a really good PDA.
If you want to be the first on your block with one of these gadgets, you’re going to have to get up early and wait in a long line. Otherwise, stores will run out. In some cases, stores have been allocated less than 20 phones. Why is that? It’s not that this device is a surprise, or anything. And surely Apple could manufacture enough so that people needn’t have to bother with all of that hassle.
But for those few who buy hook line and sinker into the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, it’s a ritual, and they love it. Surely Steve Jobs wouldn’t want to deprive his followers of that “Joy”. The Believers get to brag to the rest of us for a few days or weeks about their new gadget, and how everyone is going to copy them. They are the trend setters for the day. Of course they spent that day waiting in line. They’ll spend the next few days figuring out all of the little bugs that Apple has assuredly left lying around. And then they’ll realize, “Oh dear. GPS doesn’t work in my home,” as if they didn’t know where home was. And they’ll read their mail at the restaurant, and even off of their new toys right next to their old Apple monitors that are connected to a recent Apple of some variety.
What’s more, this phone isn’t really cheaper than the previous version. According to the Wall Street Journal, AT&T in particular has jacked up rates in order to recoup their costs (and, they hope, more).
Still the iPhone is an important innovation, if for no other reason that they have brought to the cellphone market a refreshing jolt of competition that seemed absent. Sure, LG was interesting, but aside from a few geeks, the rest of us bought Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones, both of which have had the same capabilities for what seem like eons.
So it’s iPhone Day. Perhaps celebrate by watching your Believer friends suffer. Don’t worry, Google Believers: you’re next.
For the Umpteenth Time, IPv6 doesn’t do much for Security
If you read the wrong books or the wrong articles, some will claim that IPv6 has improved security over IPv4. While this may be true in an extremely limited sense, for practical purposes there is no difference. The only way in which IPv6 is really more secure that IPv4 is that one cannot easily port scan a subnet. In some other ways, IPv4 might be more secure than certain implementations of IPv6, where the EUI-64 address is used as the lower 64 bits of the IP address, and thus enabling violation of privacy (e.g., tracking). The most absurd statement I just recently read was that NAT causes Spam. Where do these people get this stuff???
Let’s Get Simple
In the summer of 2004 I gave an invited talk at the USENIX Technical Symposium entitled “How Do I Manage All Of This?” It was a plea to the academics that they ease off of new features and figure out how to manage old ones. Just about anything can be managed if you spend enough time. But if you have enough of those things you won’t have enough time. It’s a simple care and feeding argument. When you have enough pets you need to be efficient about both. Computers, applications, and people all require care and feeding. The more care and feeding, the more chance for a mistake. And that mistake can be costly. According to one Yankee Group study in 2003, between thirty and fifty percent of all outages are due to configuration errors. When asked by a reporter what I believed the answer was to dealing with complexity in the network, I replyed simply, “Don’t introduce complexity in the first place.”
It’s always fun to play with new toys. New toys sometimes require new network features. And sometimes those features are worth it. For instance, the ability to consolidate voice over data has brought a reduction in the amount of required physical infrastructure. The introduction of wireless has meant an even more drastic reduction. In those two cases, additional configuration complexity was likely warranted. In particular you’d want to have some limited amount of quality-of-service capability in your network.
Franciscan friar William of Ockham first articulated a principle in the 14th century that all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. We balance that principle with a quote from Einstein who said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Over the next year I will attempt to highlight examples of where we have violated both of these statements, because they become visible in the public press.
Until then, ask yourself this: what functionality is running on your computer right now that you neither need nor want? That very same functionality is a potential vulnerability. And what tools reduce complexity? For instance, here is some netstat output:
% netstat -an|more Active Internet connections (servers and established) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:993 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:995 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:3306 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:587 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:110 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:111 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:2544 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:817 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:32768 0.0.0.0:* udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:53 0.0.0.0:* udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:69 0.0.0.0:* udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:111 0.0.0.0:* udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:631 0.0.0.0:* udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:123 0.0.0.0:* udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:123 0.0.0.0:* udp 0 0 :::32769 :::* udp 0 0 fe80::219:dbff:fe31:123 :::* udp 0 0 ::1:123 :::* udp 0 0 :::123 :::*
It’s difficult for an expert all of this stuff. Heaven help all of us who aren’t experts. So what do we do? We end up running more programs to identify what we were running. In other words? That’s right. Additional complexity. What would have happened if we simply had the name of the program output with that line? This is what lsof does, and why it is an example of reducing complexity through innovation. Here’s a sample:
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME xinetd 3837 root 5u IPv4 10622 TCP *:pop3 (LISTEN) xinetd 3837 root 8u IPv4 10623 TCP *:pop3s (LISTEN) xinetd 3837 root 9u IPv4 10624 UDP *:tftp named 3943 named 20u IPv4 10695 UDP localhost:domain named 3943 named 21u IPv4 10696 TCP localhost:domain (LISTEN) named 3943 named 24u IPv4 10699 UDP *:filenet-tms named 3943 named 25u IPv6 10700 UDP *:filenet-rpc named 3943 named 26u IPv4 10701 TCP localhost:953 (LISTEN) named 3943 named 27u IPv6 10702 TCP localhost:953 (LISTEN) ntpd 4026 ntp 16u IPv4 10928 UDP *:ntp ntpd 4026 ntp 17u IPv6 10929 UDP *:ntp ntpd 4026 ntp 18u IPv6 10930 UDP localhost:ntp