The Swedish parliament just passed a bill that allows the Swedish military to monitor any communications over the net of anyone without a court order. It also allows building up maps of interrelationships using traffic info without any court order. It kind of beats anything the US administration did even at its worst. Except it’s actually a law, so the government here doesn’t need to break the law to do it. How convenient.

It has been said that it was created under pressure from our uncle in the west, since so much former-east-block traffic passes through Sweden. I’m inclined to believe that, but I see no reason why our government can’t decide for themselves, so the responsibility for being pussies is all on the Swedish government.

I can see only one upside to the whole thing: anonymous proxies like Relakks, new methods of hiding traffic information, message encryption, etc, will get a real boost. This is a country of contrarians and inventors, so my hopes are high. Even some regular good citizens start asking me how to make life difficult for the buggers. That’s a very good sign.

I think, or rather hope, that this was a crucial mistake by the “who needs privacy” crowd, creating some real legimate reason to start fighting government initiatives like this. Sweden has no 9/11 to use as an excuse. Sweden has no “boys in Iraq” to support. There is very little unconditional patriotism or flag waving. There’s not even any terrorism here to defend against. IOW, there is very little emotional argument to quiet the crowd with, if the crowd gets upset.

OTOH, to get Swedes visibly upset about anything is pretty hard to do, so we’ll have to wait to see if this particular leather boot does the trick or not.

See http://www.thelocal.se/12514.html (english)

Update: another excellent article about it in The Intelligence Daily.

The worst just happened. The Windows XP instance I use for development, the one with VS 2008 on it, just bluescreened, then did disk repair, then went into a bluescreen cycle. Can’t break out of it even with safe boot. This is the one instance I have my development source in, and the one instance I updated to SP3. I can hear you snicker already. I’ll try to shoot a movie of the rebooting so you can enjoy it fully. Plus it may give me a chance to see what the error code actually is. Click the image for the movie.

If you watch really closely, you’ll see the error message “the windows logon process system process terminated unexpectedly” (you also see it in the screenshot above, of course). Using “the Google”, I found an article on MS Support that seems to describe what’s happening. I really don’t want to go through the recommended steps in that article and since I presumably have a pretty good backup, I’ll try my backup first.

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My Mac Pro came with an ATI 2600 XT card, which turns out to be not so great. We’re having a heat wave in Sweden right now, and that card is definitely getting the vapors. The symptom is that the machine freezes and has to be hard booted to snap out of it. The most reproducible way of getting there is to run World of Warcraft in full screen. And you’re not going to tell me that I can’t run WoW during the summer holidays. That’s ridiculous.

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Just for once, I opened up a Windows Vista (64 bit Ultimate) to run Ikea’s planning tool (I actually used the Swedish version of it). Ikea only makes it for Windows, but since I run Parallels and Fusion, I really don’t mind which OS the app is for. I run Vista more or less in its default state, especially since I haven’t spent any time on configuring it, and I don’t even know which nooks or crannies to work through.

So I downloaded and installed the Ikea planning tool. Admirably, Vista asked for the admin credentials to do that. Great. Then I started using the Ikea tool.

After a while, I leaned back thinking about what to do next and noticed in the task bar that “Windows Update” was running. It wasn’t signalling me in any way, but I idly clicked anyway and this is what I saw:

CRIPES!!! It’s like in those movies when you hear a sweet voice over the PA system, saying “Countdown to self-destruct…. 60 seconds remaining….”. And there I was with a layout for my living room unsaved in the Ikea tool and I didn’t even know how to save, it being the first time I’ve used it. Trying to click “Postpone” or change the “Remind me in:” dropdown was futile. They’re disabled. A close button? No. Just a countdown.

I found the save and saved the file in Ikea’s app, took about ten seconds. Then intentionally left the Ikea app in the foreground just to see what kind of warning and choice I’d get from Vista when the countdown reached zero. Well, nothing. When the time expired, Vista rebooted without any information or choices being presented. This must be the most intentionally hostile action I’ve seen from an OS yet.

I run as a non-admin, of course, which may explain why Vista spits me in the face (it being in the Windows world a despicable thing to do, it seems), but still, can’t say I find it an admirable way of treating the user. It’s possible I could have terminated the update through the task manager, but since I’m running as non-admin, I doubt it.

Be warned. Be afraid. Either dig into the update settings and disable that crapola before it clobbers your work, or save every minute. Also, always keep an eye out for “Windows Update” in the taskbar. Never leave your computer unattended without saving everything first.

And this is progress?

Browsing through the people LinkedIn recommends I should link to, people it thinks I may know, I just discovered that LinkedIn not only flags what people I may enjoy contacting, but it often clearly flags what people to avoid.

There are a small number of people around that I’ve had a very bad experience with. Anyone that recommends any of these guys or is recommended by them, is automatically very suspect to me. One explanation for the recommendation is that they’re similar in character (a bad sign). Another is naivité (not a much better sign).

In other words, LinkedIn may be a valuable tool to filter out people you should avoid and not waste time on. Maybe even more so than the other way around. When someone you know and trust links to someone you know and mistrust, it has a tendency to diminish the trusted person more than it enhances the mistrusted person. Especially recommendations have this effect. Simple links may not mean that much.

So, be careful who you link to, and especially who you recommend. Or who you accept recommendations from (you can decline, you know). It may reflect badly on you.

Today I got this email from FON:

…in which I am accused of being a profiteer and someone who doesn’t care about promises made. Jeez.

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Medical technology is evolving and one particular area where a lot is happening is in robotic surgery. By moving the surgeon a couple of feet away from the operating table and into a comfy chair, we accomplish a few goals: relaxed surgeon, better view using keyhole techniques, filtering of movements, etc. But it’s only a step on the way to telesurgery and that is where the real benefits reside. Imagine, for instance, to be able to get the best surgeon for a procedure independent of the location, any time of the day or the night. Or to get any surgeon at all, for that matter, to operate at the scene of an accident or in a little village somewhere. All you need is the robot on the spot and a good network connection. And that’s where we run into trouble.

The requirements on the network we need for telesurgery are pretty horrific and no current network, as far as I know, is designed to fulfill any such requirements. The network needs to be absolutely secure, and by that I mean it needs to be very resistant to breakage, to delays, and that it must ensure data integrity at all times. It also needs to protect privacy, of course, but that’s almost an after-thought.

For us security people, the telemedicine networks is a new challenge and one I think we should spend more effort specifying and creating. For instance, we need to find a way to ensure the following characteristics:

Max latency

For instance, we know that turnaround delays above a hundred milliseconds or so make telesurgery very difficult and dangerous.

Redundancy and resilience

Obviously, we don’t want the network to go AWOL during an operation. And if it does, we need to fail safe. Both the surgical instruments and the procedure as such need to fail in a safe manner.

Integrity

The data integrity is of utmost importance. When we want a 3 mm incision, we don’t want that to turn into 3 meters by accident.

Authentication

We want to make sure only the right surgeon is on the line.

Discussion

The above is just a few issues I could think of right off the bat. Internet protocol, for instance, is well suited to the resilience requirement, but its lack of guaranteed time of delivery is a problem. I do think we need a separate network that has the desired functionality and characteristics, and that may in part be based on current protocols and infrastructure. I do think, however, that the problem hasn’t yet been attacked on a holistic level. I’m also sure that the current Internet structure will not suffice to carry telemedicine applications. In other words, it’s time we looked over these requirements and started coming up with real solutions, else the next step in the evolution of medicine will not get started.

I have this “letter to the editor” on my desk that is too good to throw away, still I don’t know what to do with it. So I’ll just translate it freely from Swedish and post it here for your enjoyment.

The letter is a response to another letter to the editor from “LS” and goes like this:

“I’ve been a pilot all my professional life, largely with SAS. The last five years I flew long distance with Boeing 767 and Airbus 340 to, among other places, Thailand. LS’s statement that a trip to Thailand corresponds to a release of two tons of carbon dioxide per passenger is an exaggeration of colossal magnitude!

“An A340 weights maximum 260 tons when it departs from Copenhagen and has 261 passengers, 11 crew. That means 272 persons on board.

“Releasing two tons of carbon dioxide per person would come to 544 tons. The fuel load is about 100 tons, of which six tons remain after landing in Bangkok.

“To ensure that the discussion on environmental impact remains credible, such absurd statements as those of LS must be avoided.”

Now, I must admit that such incredibly unscientific remarks from a professional airline pilot scares me more than a little bit. I never saw a response to the above letter to the editor, so I assume a lot of readers swallowed it whole.

With the numbers above, two tons of carbon dioxide per passenger is entirely possible. If you don’t see how, go back to your high school chemistry, or ask any high school kid, and they’ll tell you how this works out.

To be entirely fair, the number comes to almost 1.3 tons per passenger so LS exaggerated a bit, but I think the pilot who wrote the letter thought it came to 94 tons divided by 272, that is 0.35 tons per passenger. It sure looks like that from his letter.

And, no, I’m not going to publish the pilot’s name, even though he signed his letter to the editor in full. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

PS: this isn’t an april fools joke either.

I’m getting more and more convinced that MS will start over with a Unix based OS (I’d call it Windex). If they’d include a virtualization system allowing them to run Windows apps on it, similar to what Fusion and Parallels are doing on the Mac, they would be able to transition, gradually replacing old Windows apps with new Windex apps. If they’d integrate the virtual Windows apps more tightly to the new OS than what Parallels or VMWare can do, they’d come out ahead.

It’s the only way out and it would put them ahead of Linux and OSX again. I’m sure they’re working on it. They’d be crazy not to.

PS: not an april fools joke, I mean it.

New machines come with multicore processors. Mine has eight, ought to be plenty fast. Unless the apps only use one of them, of course. Since the number of cores go up pretty quickly with each generation, while the speed of each core remains more or less the same, and the workload of the apps goes up, the net effect of a singlethreaded app is that its performance goes down with each new generation of hardware. So, please, fellow developers, get a grip and go multithreaded now.

For the last half hour I’ve been watching grass grow, or rather the Mac OSX Stuffit Expander unpack excercise files from Lynda.com. These excercise files are for Final Cut Express HD and consists of 12 sitx files, each around 240 Mb. …ah, it just finished. Looking at how the CPUs are loaded during the execution of the Expander, it’s no mystery why it’s so slow:

As you can see, there’s a 100% CPU hogger walking from core to core. It’s even clearer just as the walking ends and the process is done:

Interestingly, during this half hour, Safari hung (which in itself isn’t too unusual) and Parallels that was running two XP instances in the background that were doing nothing and I did nothing with, crashed. Normally, this machine is stability itself, except for occasional Safari hangups and I’ve never before seen Parallels crash like this, so I think there’s a connection.

Now, if you look at how a righteous app like iMovie ‘08 works, you’ll see something like this (while creating movies):

I could run WoW with totally normal performance even while iMovie was going full blast. No crashes or hangs either. I wouldn’t be surprised if the system is most stable when all cores have some headroom left, while 100% load of any core is destabilizing. I’m just guessing here.