Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • September 21, 2019 1:32 AM

I do wish people would stop using terms like “feminism” because it actually makes things worse not better when it comes to understanding issues.

The old saying “Things are not what they seem” generally applies to most human behaviours when seen by others. For instance when someone sees one person shouting at another person, what they think is happening is based on what they think the two people are. Thus they see two men they think one thing, they see two women they thing something similar but in diferent emotive words. However when it’s a man shouting at a woman they think much differently to when it’s a woman shouting at a man.

But it can be more subtle than that to the point of ludicrousness.

Back in the 1980’s the UK Times newspaper started publishing articles from what might be called a “feminist group” who where making lots of noise about the lack of women in computing. It was back then as it still is today an issue and nobody realy knows why.

The particular group in question when you cut of all the froth from their rhetoric boild down to “Women did not go into computing because they disliked terms like debugging”… Nearly four decades later I’m sure that quite a few reading this will be thinking this is ludicrous. It’s certainly what I thought back then, when as a young engineer I was actively trying to promot to the few that were about to leave school and enter higher education that engineering was a viable career path.

What I had noted was that there were very very loosely two types of people that came by the stand “individuals” and “those in groups”. Few groups irespective of if boys or girls would stop and look let alone ask questions. It was almost always individuals who stopped, and in most cases they had already decided to come to an engineering stand.

That is engineering attracted those with a certain mental outlook. Such outlooks are in part nature and in part nurture and start forming when children are very young, often you find one or both of the parents have a similar outlook, thus the old observation about “following in the footsteps” appears to have a part to play.

If you chat to teachers, many in primary schools have a fairly good idea of who will do well in STEM subjects and who will not. Likewise most teachers in high school can say of their second years who are going to do well bot just in higher education but in STEM as well.

The point is “feminism” is a view pushed onto not one that comes out of human relations.

You have a chat to a disabled person, they don’t see themselves as being “disabled” or “different” or worst of all “special” they see themselves as a person like everyone else. They also know they have some differences to others, which annoyingly might need some accommodation from an environment designed for people without their differences. Unlike those without differences who define them by their diferences, they do not define themselves by their differences.

Feminism is at the end of the day defining people not as who or what they actually are, but by their differnce to other people. It’s an outsider looking in view and mostly it misses what’s important, as such it in effect throws a blanket over issues. So at the end of the day many people outside only see the blanket not the actual issues that remain out of sight. Thus outsiders make assumptions that are often incorrect or worse lump all issues into one based around the quaint idea of people being on different sides of a blanket. Which is just as stupid as views that give rise to the discriminatory “Beyond the pail” and “From the other side of the tracks” and many similar.

Clive Robinson • September 23, 2019 1:14 AM

@ lurker, Tom Hanlin, Alyer Babtu,

According to,

http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Science/Grace%20Hooper.html

It’s the word “debug” not “bug” she invented as a sort of joke. There is a photograph of “the bug” stuck down on a logbook page and mention of which relay it was (like Doctors, physicists and engineers in general the handwrighting is well… Let’s just say “spidery” 😉

The article also indicates that a new valve/tube computer was twenty times faster than the relay computer. Which back then was probably a usable speed up unlike todays modern computers. We could if we wanted to have the electronics on a computer chip run at a 20GHz clock speed which whilst it’s not 20 times faster than the majority of modern computers would appear to be a usefull speed up…

Only it’s not, it would probably be slower… The reason being the speed of light. Which gives a wavelength at 20GHz of 3e8/2e10 or 15mm in “freespace”. However you have to divide that by around 2.5 for a register fetch signaling and silicon is not freespace so you are looking at a further reduction.

You are realistically looking at a practical maximum distance of 4mm diameter or a little over 12 square millimeters area. Whilst you could get a 16bit RISC core in there, you would not have any real RAM so no cache… So yes there are hard laws of physics limit’s on conventional computers.

Fun fact I own an Apple ][ which uses a 6502 CPU clocked at 1MHz that I purchased at the end of the 1970’s. I also have available some high end multi-core Intel chip systems with 4GByte of RAM runing Win10 that I can use that are ~6months old that inflation adjusted cost about the same as the Apple.

Using a friends high speed camera (1000fps Casio Exilim ZR200) we measured the key press to screen response time with just an editor program running. The Apple beat the Win10 systems hands down being nearly twice as fast. Whilst we are talking times in milliseconds, user wise the Apple feels very responsive whilst the Win10 systems feel like trying to push a dead snail through cold porridge/oatmeal…

I also have a 1990’s 50MHz 486DX system that runs an early version of MS-DOS and the Mirror combined terminal and editor program. It to is way more responsive than the Win10 boxes… Which might account for why I also run a striped down BSD Command line OS on another box with the same hardware as the Win10 boxes and again get a noticable increased response time…

Which caused me and my friend to dig around on the Internet. We are not the only ones to notice that for the last few decades user response times have been dropping noticeably year by year…

Clive Robinson • September 30, 2019 1:54 AM

@ Benny,

@Edward’s comment started being about “gamergate” that is “Red Rag to a Bull” territory for way to many people. Thus they may well not have read past the first six words of his post.

Also the Moderator has already removed some posts from this thread that were in effect devoid of content other than that which was inflamatory or injurious, and desiged to be so to reputation.

@ Edward,

If you are still reading this thread you said,

Reading Epictetus and other Skeptics and Stoics is useful for just about anybody who feels that words can be hurtful. They are only hurtful if you let them be.

Sadly that is not true any longer as the majority of people do not have “independent income”. The “Court of Public Opinion” not only destroys people’s reputations it also destroys their ability to find work etc. Worse that court is a ravenous beast that also attacks others, never admits mistakes, thus never apologises, never makes good on it’s harms and when it’s strident voices are challenged with the truth, they prevaricate, wriggle like worms when caught on that hook, make further false statments or slink away like thieves in the night.

If you think otherwise you have not studied history.

Clive Robinson • October 1, 2019 7:01 AM

@ Benny,

It’s sad that gamergate is “red rag to a bull” territory, not because it’s gamergate but because no territory should be. Self-censorship inevitably leads to censorship.

There is also “a time and a place” for things, that is a “social norm” or “institutional norm”. Further things have relevance with respect to other things and that unless there is sufficient relevance talking about them subtracts not adds to a conversation. This is not censorship just part of the norms that make life actually liveable.

This is at the end of the day a “technical security” blog as security has moved with broading usage some “human security” has become acceptable.

But at the end of the day “Gamergate” was in reality just a “human” issue. The fact that technology was involved is no more relevant than the fact the people involved used roads and vehicles to get from place to place.

That is, important as Gamergate was, to other areas of human endevor it was in reality at best tangential to “technical security”. Thus those tangential asspects can be just as easily discussed without tallking about Gamergate or those involved.

If you prefere Gametgate is just one point on a line in the spectrum of “Human Security” thus outside the very limited “security” specifics it’s not relevant to this blog.

Thus if people don’t engage, it does not mean by default they are “self censoring” it just means they have made a value judgment on relevance. That is they have limited resources such as their time, and it’s upto them on what they use such resources for.

Anyway I don’t wish to use any more of my resources on Gamergate, as it’s taken up enough of them already in the past.